Mormon hidden belief: Kolob, the governing planet

Elder Bruce R. McConkie taught:

Kolob means "the first creation." It is the name of the planet "nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God." It is "first in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. . . . One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth." (Book of Abraham, pp. 34-35; Abra. 3:3-9.) ( Mormon Doctrine, p.428)

Kolob governs all the planets which belong to the same order as the earth and is after the reckoning of the Lord's times, seasons and revolutions thereof. One revolution of Kolob is a day unto the Lord and one day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years on earth.

Mormon Hymn:

If You Could Hie to KOLOB

If you could hie to Kolob in the twinkling of an eye,
And then continue onward with the speed of light to fly**,
D'ye think that you could ever, through all eternity,
Find out the generation where Gods began to be?

Or see the grand beginning, where space did not extend?
Or view the last creation where Gods and matter end?
Methinks the Spirit whispers, "No man has found 'pure space',"
Nor seen the outside curtains, where nothing has a place.

The works of God continue, and worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter; there is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit; there is no end to race.


We learn of Kolob from Abraham's account found in The Pearl of Great Price, one of the Standard Works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

AND I, Abraham, had the Urim and Thummim, which the Lord my God had given unto me, in Ur of the Chaldees; And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it; And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest.



The Mormon Translation is as follows:

Fig. 1. Kolob [pic], signifying the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth, which is called by the Egyptians Jah-oh-eh.

Fig. 2. Stands next to Kolob, called by the Egyptians Oliblish, which is the next grand governing creation near to the celestial or the place where God resides; holding the key of power also, pertaining to other planets; as revealed from God to Abraham, as he offered sacrifice upon an altar, which he had built unto the Lord.

Fig. 3. Is made to represent God, sitting upon his throne, clothed with power and authority; with a crown of eternal light upon his head; representing also the grand Key-words of the Holy Priesthood, as revealed to Adam in the Garden of Eden, as also to Seth, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, and all to whom the Priesthood was revealed.


Fig. 4. Answers to the Hebrew word Raukeeyang, signifying expanse, or the firmament of the heavens; also a numerical figure, in Egyptian signifying one thousand; answering to the measuring of the time of Oliblish, which is equal with Kolob in its revolution and in its measuring of time.

Fig. 5. Is called in Egyptian Enish-go-on-dosh; this is one of the governing planets also, and is said by the Egyptians to be the Sun, and to borrow its light from Kolob through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash, which is the grand Key, or, in other words, the governing power, which governs fifteen other fixed planets or stars, as also Floeese or the Moon, the Earth and the Sun in their annual revolutions. This planet receives its power through the medium of Kli-flos-is-es, or Hah-ko-kau-beam, the stars represented by numbers 22 and 23, receiving light from the revolutions of Kolob.

Fig. 6. Represents this earth in its four quarters.

Fig. 7. Represents God sitting upon his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand Key-words of the Priesthood; as, also, the sign of the Holy Ghost unto Abraham, in the form of a dove.

Fig. 8. Contains writings that cannot be revealed unto the world; but is to be had in the Holy Temple of God. [Correct translation: "grant that the soul of the Osiris Sheshonk may live"]

Fig. 9. Ought not to be revealed at the present time. [Correct translation:"the netherworld (below the earth) and his great waters"]

Fig. 10. Also. [Correct translation:"0 mighty god, lord of heaven and earth"]

Fig. 11. Also. If the world can find out these numbers, so let it be. Amen. [Drumroll please.....the correct translations are as follows:

"0 god of the sleeping ones from the time of creation"
(A single message, in this order: 11, 10, 9, 8.)]

Figures 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21, will be given in the own due time of the Lord. The above translation is given as far as we have any right to give at the present time.

[So, here in the year 2007, let us now reveal the meanings of these figures:

A trace of the original hieroglyphic writing from this hypocephalus is visible on the left edge of Figs. 12, 13, 14 and 15 but only the phrase "his words" can be made out at the end of the line in Fig. 15. The remainder of these lines are filled with hieratic writing taken from another source (Papyrus Joseph Smith XI).

Fig. 12 (upside down) "near" and "wrap"
Fig. 13 (upside down) "which made by"
Fig. 14 (upside down) "breathings"
Fig. 15 (upside down) "this book"
Fig. 16 "and may this soul and its possessor never be desecrated in the netherworld"
Fig. 17 "May this tomb never be desecrated"
Fig. 18 Three-fourths of the original hieroglyphic inscription has survived. Counterclockwise it reads: "I am Djabty in the house of Benben in Heliopolis, so exalted and glorious. [I am] copulating bull without equal. [I am] that mighty god in the house of Benben in Heliopolis ... that mighty god..."
Fig. 19-21 "You shall be as that god, the Busirian"
Fig. 22 "The name of this mighty god".]


It is easy to see where the missing portions existed and what Joseph drew in their place. In these locations, we find that Joseph copied from the Book of Breathings and the Book of the Dead scrolls, showing a complete lack of understanding of the Egyptian language. As with Facsimile No. 1, none of the reconstructions drawn in by Joseph are vindicated by the study of Egyptology.


For example, the upside-down creature in Figure 7 was drawn in by Joseph to represent the "form of a dove". This creature should actually have been an ithyphallic serpent with legs. The central figure of the Facsimile ordinarily has four ram heads in an authentic hypocephalus, but Joseph appears to have simply copied the two-headed Egyptian god Par directly above it in Figure 2. For the boat depicted in Figure 3 to the upper right, this should actually be two boats, a small one above a larger one. What Joseph did, however, was to copy a boat figure from the Book of Joseph papyrus instead. This copy is in fact a drawing of the sun-god in his solar bark, and is improper for a hypocephalus. (Charles Larson, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus, p. 105-9).


[For a picture of a real Egyptian Hypocephalus, (about midway down the page) click here]


With the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, it finally became possible for scholars to decipher the Egyptian language. This in turn enabled the experts to objectively evaluate Joseph's translation of the papyri. The papyri themselves were thought to have been destroyed in the "Great Chicago Fire" in 1871. However, Egyptologists could still study the three Facsimiles included in the Book of Abraham as well as Joseph's translation of these Facsimiles.


The first such study was performed by M. Theodule Deveria of the Louvre in Paris. Deveria was able to decipher the names and titles of various Egyptian gods and goddesses, as well as the name of the deceased Egyptian for whom the scroll had originally been prepared. Regarding Facsimile No. 3 he wrote:


"The deceased led by Ma into the presence of Osiris. His name is Horus, as may be seen in the prayer which is at the bottom of the picture, and which is addressed to the divinities of the four cardinal points." (Voyage au Pays des Mormons (Paris, 1860).


Deveria recognized the three Facsimiles as common Egyptian funerary documents and concluded that Joseph's interpretations of the Facsimiles was nonsense.


In 1912, Reverend Franklin S. Spalding sent copies of the three Facsimiles from the Book of Abraham to some of the world's leading scholars of Egyptology. All eight of the scholars that responded were unanimous in their condemnation of Joseph's translations as being incorrect.


For example, Dr. Arthur Mace, Assistant Curator for the Department of Egyptian Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York explained:


"The Book of Abraham, it is hardly necessary to say, is a pure fabrication. Cuts 1 and 3 are inaccurate copies of well known scenes on funeral papyri, and cut 2 is a copy of one of the magical discs which in the late Egyptian period were placed under the heads of mummies. There were about forty of these latter known in museums and they are all very similar in character. Joseph Smith's interpretation of these cuts is a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end. Egyptian characters can now be read almost as easily as Greek, and five minutes' study in an Egyptian gallery of any museum should be enough to convince any educated man of the clumsiness of the imposture." (F.S. Spalding, Joseph Smith Jr., As a Translator, 1912, p. 27)


Dr. A. H. Sayce from Oxford, England concurred:


"It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith's impudent fraud. The fac simile from the Book of Abraham No. 2 is an ordinary hypocephalus, but the hieroglyphics upon it have been copied so ignorantly that hardly one of them is correct. I need scarcely say that Kolob, &c., are unknown to the Egyptian language. Smith has turned the goddess into a king and Osiris into Abraham." (Ibid., p. 23)


Dr. Flinders Petrie of London University wrote:


"They are copies of Egyptian subjects of which I have seen dozens of examples. They are centuries later than Abraham. The attempts to guess a meaning for them in the professed explanations are too absurd to be noticed. It may be safely said that there is not one single word that is true in these explanations." (Ibid., p. 24)


Dr. James H. Breasted of the Haskell Oriental Museum, University of Chicago, declared:


"It will be seen, then, that if Joseph Smith could read ancient Egyptian writing, his ability to do so had no connection with the decipherment of hieroglyphics by European scholars...The three fac-similes in question represent equipment which will be and has been found in unnumbered thousands of Egyptian graves...The point, then, is that in publishing these fac-similes of Egyptian documents as part of an unique revelation to Abraham, Joseph Smith was attributing to Abraham not three unique documents of which no other copies exist, but was attributing to Abraham a series of documents which were the common property of a whole nation of people who employed them in every human burial, which they prepared...”


Fac-simile Number 2 represents a little disc...commonly called among Egyptologists a hypocephalus...These did not come into use until the late centuries just before the Christian era. They did not appear in any Egyptian burials until over a thousand years after the time of Abraham. They were unknown in Egypt in Abraham's day.


Fac-simile Number 3...This scene again is depicted innumerable times in the funeral papyri, coffins and tomb and temple walls of Egypt. No representation of it thus far found in Egypt, though we have thousands of them, dates earlier than 500 years after Abraham's age; and it may be stated as certain that the scene was unknown until about 500 years after Abraham's day." (Ibid., pp. 24-27)


Thus, based on the evidence provided by the Facsimiles alone, scholars overwhelmingly concurred that Joseph's translation of these Facsimiles was incorrect. Further, it was determined that Abraham could not have possessed these Facsimiles because at least in the case of Nos. 2 and 3, they did not exist until long after Abraham's day.

Smith's translation of the newly added missing parts (at approx. 1 - 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock and 9 o'clock) have to do with the idea that Black people cannot hold the Mormon priesthood because they are descendants of Cain.

It seems that the church can make only one of two possible choices: They can offer up increasingly improbable explanations for this embarrassing book of scripture...or they can completely ignore the problem and hope that it goes away. It would seem that the church, as an official institution, has chosen the latter path. They have recognized the Book of Abraham as a tar-baby of sorts and have decided to ignore the controversy. They've learned that the more they handle the issues, the dirtier their hands get. It appears that they are currently content to ignore the issues, and pray that their members ignore the issues as well. If the members remain ignorant of this gross deception, perhaps they will remain active in Mormonism, and continue to contribute their time, talents, and money "...for the building up of the Kingdom of God on the earth and for the establishment of Zion."


Another group, F.A.R.M.S. (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) is trying to take the first approach. This Brigham Young University-backed organization has produced many complicated and tortured defenses for the Book of Abraham. The opinions of Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley feature prominently in their defense of the Book of Abraham. It would seem that these apologetics do more damage to the credibility of the Book of Abraham than insults from the book's critics. Their success lies in "muddying the waters" enough so that inquiring minds may not see what in reality is embarrassingly clear. Indeed, the issues surrounding the Book Of Abraham can seem quite complicated if you are determined to believe in it's authenticity.


***My Thoughts***


So, who would you side with? Are you seriously going to take the word of Joseph Smith over EVERY SCIENTIST and EGYPTOLOGIST on the Earth? Is it really plausible that Joseph could have translated his particular papyrus script correctly? When it is presented to learned scholars armed to the teeth with similar script and years of dedicated service to the study of Egyptian culture----and they all simultaneously and unanimously conclude that Joseph wasn't even CLOSE to getting it right, are we REALLY expected to just toss out all logic and reason and side with whatever the LDS church claims it says? Are they also willing to use their powers of "seeing" and "revelating" to go about correcting ALL EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS?


Think of the wealth of scripture the world is missing out on, because the LDS church has not taken it upon themselves to 'translate correctly' all of the Egyptian documents and papyrus found with every mummy and every pharoah ever dug up since Joseph's day....If the LDS church is SO KNOWLEDGABLE in regards to correct translations of Egyptian text, then why haven't they claimed this power to translate them all, give the world the TRUE scripture that the 'Lord' would have revealed to his TRUE church?


Somebody is wrong here. Either Egyptologists using the Rosetta Stone as their foundation for translation of papyrus are absolutely wrong and WAY off base with their understanding, OR Joseph Smith had no clue what he was reading and translating.....AND MADE IT UP.


Which one sounds more plausible to you?


Why is something so COMPLETELY OBVIOUS to me such a widely accepted belief by millions of LDS people? What has happened to the admonishon of the apostles, to expose the truth, show them where they have erred, give them the truth they so desperately seek?

What do Mormon Church Apostles and Prophets tell their members?

"If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed."
-J. Reuben Clark, D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983, p. 24.


"If faith will not bear to be investigated; if its preachers and professors are afraid to have it examined, their foundation must be very weak."
-George A. Smith, 1871, Journal of Discourses, Vol 14, pg 216.


". . . convince us of our errors of doctrine, if we have any, by reason, by logical arguments, or by the word of God, and we will be ever grateful for the information, and you will ever have the pleasing reflection that you have been instruments in the hands of God of redeeming your fellow beings from the darkness which you may see enveloping their minds."
-Orson Pratt, from The Seer, pp 15-16, (1853).


"Each of us has to face the matter-either the Church is true, or it is a fraud. There is no middle ground. It is the Church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing."
-President Gordon B. Hinckley. "Loyalty," April Conference, 2003.