Friday, July 26, 2019

D. Charles Pyle on Egyptian Terms for "Eternity"


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 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)

I have added the following information provided by Bro. Pyle to my essay