Sunday, April 2, 2023

On the meaning of "Eastward" in Moses 3:8

  

eastward. To an ancient reader in the Mesopotamian milieu, the phrase “eastward in Eden” could be taken as meaning that the garden sits at the dawn horizon—the meeting place of heaven and earth. By its very nature, the horizon is not a final end point but rather a portal, a place of two-way transition between the heavens and the earth. Nibley writes: “Egyptians . . . never . .  .speak of [the land beyond the grave] as an earthly paradise; it is only to be reached by the dead.’ . . . [It] is neither heaven nor earth but lies between them. . . . In a Hebrew Enoch apocryphon, the Lord, in visiting the earth, rests in the Garden of Eden and, moving in the reverse direction, passes through ‘the Garden of the firmament.’ . . . Every transition must be provided with such a setting, not only from here to heaven, but in the reverse direction in the beginning” ([The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment], 294-95). “The passage from world to world and from horizon to horizon is dramatized in the ordinances of the temple, which itself is called the horizon” ([Teachings of the Pearl of Great Price], 199).

 

Situating this concept with respect to the story of Adam and Eve, the Book of the Bee says that the garden “was placed between heaven and earth, below the firmament [that is, below the celestial world] and above the earth [that is, above the telestial world], and that God placed it there . . . so that, if [Adam] kept [God’s] commands He might lift him up to heaven, but if he transgressed them, He might cast him down to this earth” ([Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, In God’s Image and Likeness, 1, 160, see also pp. 139-44, 161) (Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, The First Days & The Last Days: A Verse-Commentary on the Book of Moses and JS-Matthew in Light of the Temple [Orem, Utah: The Interpreter Foundation, 2021], 51)

 

Blog Archive