Commenting
on passages such as Moroni 8:18 in the Book of Mormon that speak of God the
Father being “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity,” LDS apologist D.
Charles Pyle wrote the following which is rather insightful:
We simply could here on this point of the
Nephites thinking in terms of Hebrew meanings when composing in Egyptian words
and sentences, but it also is of interest to note what ancient Egyptians would
have expressed if the Nephites themselves also thought similarly to the way
that the Egyptian people did while writing their own religious and other texts
in Egyptian. For instance, the Egyptian
word for “eternity,” ḥḥ, was
expressed both by the word as well as by the ideographic symbol of the same
meaning, both of which had the same range
of meaning from “a great but indefinite number” to “millions” (as in the
number of years, also seen in some writings) in their religious texts. A deity
named ḥḥ
was in their pantheon, with the tacit understanding among the ancient Egyptians
that this god thus himself also was “the god of hundreds of thousands of years.”
Another way of writing the word was nḥḥ
(meaning eternity). And in connection
with this word’s form there also was a deity named Nḥḥ (described as “the god of eternity”).
The Egyptians, much as the Hebrews so did, sometimes
also would string together word expressing long durations of time. Yet even
those usages still represented long, measurable durations of time, thus demonstrating
that even the Egyptians used various words (which frequently are translated as eternity, everlasting, and for ever and
ever) similarly to how the Hebrews also did with respect to time. For instance,
they might want to write a phrase like nḥḥ
dt (or its fuller form nḥḥ ḥnc
dt) to mean something like eternity
with everlastingness. Thus, Egyptian also used similar approaches to
meaning in which words were attached to other words, as also seen in the use of
the phrase ḥḥ nn dr, or it
fuller form ḥḥnn drc
(meaning literally millions of years
without limit, or, an eternity
without end). The mere existence of
such constructions shows us that even Egyptian ḥḥ and nḥḥ did not mean eternity as we have tended to think of the concept.
Nor did dt by itself mean everlasting as we might assume it did.
Also weighty is evidence we have seen that an Egyptian word for eternity in a phrase like ḥtr šn nḥḥ (meaning a tax fixed or ever or a
perpetual tax) also reveals to us that said word did not have inherent within
it a meaning we might want to attach to it with our Western way of looking at philosophical constructs. (D.
Charles Pyle, I
Have Said Ye are Gods: Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of
Deification in Patristic Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New
Testament (Revised and
Supplemented) [CreateSpace, 2018], 226-28, italics in original)
