Unacrimonious Anachronisms: Take One

I have a fondness for apocryphal books. I hold the Old Testament apocrypha (those extra books held as genuine in the Roman Catholic Old Testament) dear, and my ardor expands to include a dozen or more books once regarded as inspired by Jewish and early medieval Christians groups.

When I find a passage or idea in an apocryphal book that expresses a view that the (first) Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, later came to believe, per divine inspiration he asserted, I view the apocryphal passage as a sort of confirmation that the belief or tenet at hand had indeed once belonged to the religion of the ancient covenant people. Joseph Smith, in my view, then seems ever more to be the "restorer" he claimed he was, that is, when the relevant apocryphal passage was rediscovered after Joseph Smith's doctrinal declaration. The question "How could Joseph Smith possibly have known that ancient Jews/Christians believed this?" lightly bemuses me.

On and off over the last few weeks I have asked myself a question: "Why do I not experience the same excitement when I find a Book of Mormon (BoM) passage that predates a Biblical passage?" Surely the same rule would apply, that is, that a supposedly earlier BoM passage that teaches what a subsequent Biblical passage does would also be a confirmation, in this case, that the Biblical writers indeed preserved a teaching that belonged to the faithful saints of days gone by. Should this putative earlier passage in the BoM, for example, not also rally in me a deeper appreciation for Joseph Smith's role as a restorer?

The truth is that I do not always get as enthused. Why? The answer is no riddle, but quite simple: If I share with anyone not of my faith or church a passage of scripture in the BoM that supposedly predates the Bible's version, their conclusion may very well be that "Smith simply plagiarized the Bible. In fact, he was so sloppy about his appropriation that he used a scripture known to date to a certain time and attributed it to a fictitious character who supposedly lived hundreds of years earlier." Yes, the double specters of plagiarism and historical anachronisms rear their hoary heads.

So it was that on this frigid but restful morn I opened the Book of Mormon to a randomly chosen passage in order to share a moment of inspiration with the family; I take pains to start and end our days this way. Maybe the audience does not appreciate this, but I find some of my greatest personal insights this way.

Anyhow, my eyes landed on Second Nephi, chapter 25, verse 13, written (we Latter-day Saints believe) between 559 and 545 B.C., by a Jew named Nephi who left Jerusalem with his family and resettled somewhere in America, possibly in Mesoamerica, soon thereafter joining forces with Native Americans who were amenable to his faith and world view:

"Behold, they will crucify him [Christ]; and after he is laid in a sepulchre for the space of three days he shall rise from the dead, with healing in his wings; and all those who shall believe on his name shall be saved in the kingdom of God..."

Though the reader who only now is exposed to this passage may be puzzled at the clear Christian reference before Christ's actual birth, what I found more interesting initially was the expression "he shall rise from the dead, with healing in his wings". The adverbial phrase "with healing in his wings", it turns out, is known to the world only through the final Old Testament book, Malachi, chapter 4, verse 2, dated perhaps to the second century B.C.:

"But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings..." (KJV)

So did Nephi's use of the expression "with healing in his wings" truly predate Malachi's usage by perhaps as much as 400 years? Well, rest assured that I cannot prove it, so I will not undertake a wild goose chase through faith texts in an attempt to do so. But a frank acknowledgement of the inability to prove an assertion does not mean I have nothing else to share.

For starters, Nephi, per the text, states that Christ shall be crucified and buried, and that after three days he will rise with healing in his wings. The rising of Christ is his resurrection, and the healing in his wings would presumably be his power of resurrection for all. Contrast Nephi's description to Malachi's assertion that the "Sun of righteousness" (the capital "S" was the King James translators' decision since Hebrew has no capital letters) shall arise with healing in his wings. Here the object at hand is the sun, only it is a solar body that represents "righteousness", presumably by emitting powerful light.

I found something interesting, and I want very much to share it. About 800 B.C., roughly 200 years before the BoM prophet Nephi would have lived (if the record is taken as genuine and not merely Joseph Smith's composition, and this decision is the reader's prerogative), the King of Israel was Hezekiah. King Hezekiah chose a royal seal, a couple royal seals in fact, and interestingly enough, he borrowed an Egyptian motif, the winged sun for one of them (and a scarab beetle for the other, also Egyptian). First fancy this image of the Egyptian winged sun that represents the sun god Re of the ancient Egyptian religion, a symbol that was also used to represent the one true God Aten (Aton or Adon) preached by the monotheistic Egyptian Pharaoh turned religious reformer, Akhenaten.

Now examine a fairly recent archeological find, Hezekiah's royal seal, one of several such found in Israel within the last 20 years.

The text is in Hebrew, but not the Assyrian (Babylonian) letters now regarded as Hebrew, rather in the ancient Hebrew letters derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. The text reads "To (the) King (of) Judah". The symbol is the sun with two long wings, and more interesting still, an "ankh" at the end of each wing. The "ankh" is the Egyptian symbol of life. Notice how the sun's wings are bent somewhat downwards implying movement upwards.

So essentially what we see in Hezekiah's seal (and this seal continued to be used for several hundred years) is the sun rising with life-force, "healing", it its wings. The idea that the solar sun represents Deity is common among world religions, and, surprisingly enough, common to religion of the ancient prophets, as we shall see shortly.

I mentioned Akhenaten, the great Pharoah who, he asserted, through personal inspiration and angelic visitation, converted from a belief in many gods, to the belief in the One True God, whom he called "Aten" (also pronounced "Aton" and possibly "Adon"). Nearly 1400 years B.C. Akhenaten wrote a hymn to Aten. Fancy this excerpt:

"Splendid thou risest in heaven's lightland, O living Aten, creator of life! When thou hast dawned in eastern highland, Thou fillest every land with thy beauty. Thou art beauteous, great, radiant, High over every land; Thy rays embrace the lands, To the limit of all that thou madest. Being Re, thou reachest their limits, Thou bendest them for the son whom thou lovest; Though thou art far, thy rays are on earth, Though one seeth thee, thy strides are unseen. When thou settest in western highland, Earth is in darkness as if in death; One sleepeth in chambers, heads covered, One eye doth not see another. Were they robbed of their goods, That are under their heads, People would not remark it. Every lion cometh from its den, All the serpents bite, Darkness hovers, earth is silent, As their maker resteth in lightland. Earth brighteneth when thou dawnest in lightland, When thou shinest as Aten of daytime; As thou dispelest the dark, As thou castest thy rays, The Two Lands are in festivity. Awake they stand on their feet, Thou hast roused them; Bodies cleansed, clothed, Their arms adore thine appearance."

If the reader's curiosity is piqued, read Psalm 104 and judge for yourself if Psalm 104 is not uncannily like the Hymn to Aten, down to the order of the noun descriptors and adverbial phrases used. But alas, Akhenaten's hymn and the psalmist is a topic for another day. Suffice the passage for the moment merely to demonstrate how the rising of the sun in Egyptian theology related to their beliefs of death and resurrection.

To touch upon a different Psalmist citation, if King David did indeed pen the Psalms, then they date to approximately one thousand years B.C. Consider this passage from Psalm 84:11:

"For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly."

In my opinion, the most intriguing aspect of ancient Hebrews using the "solar sun" as a symbol of the Lord Jehovah is that, per the Hebrew scriptures, God (Elohim) made the solar sun to shine through the earth's atmosphere and give light and regulate time at the start of the fourth day (fourth creative period), just after the third day. Inasmuch as God would be seen as the Maker of the solar sun, God would be the creative Father of the solar sun.

The Book of Mormon's extended name (in the LDS Church) is "Another Testament of Jesus Christ", in part because the book recounts Jesus Himself visiting the Nephites, His Amerindian Hebrew-esque covenant people. At one point Jesus states that the Father wanted Him to deliver Jewish scriptures to the Nephites, scriptures that the Nephites lacked. Malachi was the book Jesus chose or was commanded by His Father to deliver. He cited Malachi 4:2 (3 Nephi 25:2) the following way:

"But unto you that fear my name, shall the Son of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings..."

In the Book of Mormon the "Sun of righteousness" mentioned by Malachi is unequivocally the "Son of Righteousness", the Son of God, and His rising with healing is His power of life over death, the universal resurrection.

Well, these passages are brought together by my personal sense of inquiry and searching. I leave it to the reader to decide if these citations belong together, and whether they are relevant to the passage of Nephi 25:13, be the Nephi passage a possible early witness to the Israelite symbol of the rising sun as the bringer of healing or life in its wings, or a clever nineteenth knock-off of Malachi. Whether you see the statement attributed to Nephi ("(Christ) shall rise with healing in his wings") as genuine, historically and archeologically plausible, coincidental or just plain out of left field, the passages cited are, at least, actually textual.