Abraham, Facsimile 1: Abraham on the Altar

About this facsimile

Abraham sends the reader to this picture twice in his first chapter. Of the altar on which the priests meant to kill him he writes, “that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record” (Abr. 1:12), and that representation is Facsimile 1. Of the gods the altar stood before, he says he has given “the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning” (Abr. 1:14). The explanation below names the altar (figure 4) and the five gods (figures 5 to 9).

The three facsimiles were first printed with the book in 1842, each with Joseph Smith’s explanation of its figures. Most of those explanations do not agree with what Egyptologists now say of the same figures, though scholars have noted some parallels. On how the pictures belong to Abraham’s text the Church’s statement is brief: “We don’t know how the facsimiles relate to the text.” The notes below give what studies of the plate have found or proposed, each with the strength its study gives it.

A line drawing with numbered figures: a man lies on a couch shaped like a lion, a standing figure holds a knife over him, a bird hovers at the right, and four jars with animal heads stand beneath the couch. — The plate as printed in *The Pearl of Great Price*, 1921 edition (1929 printing; public domain), scanned at the Internet Archive.

Tap any highlighted phrase to open a note beneath its figurein the margin.

Joseph Smith’s explanation, by figure

Explanation of the Above Cut

1 The Angel of the Lord.

2 Abraham fastened upon an altar.

Context #

Egyptologists read the scene as a lion couch scene

Egyptologists have read this picture as a scene of embalming or resurrection, and Joseph Smith’s reading of it as a sacrifice has clashed with theirs.

Egyptologists have read this picture as a scene of embalming or resurrection, and Joseph Smith’s reading of it as a sacrifice has clashed with theirs. It is sometimes called a lion couch scene, for the couch at its center. In 1860 a French Egyptologist took it for the resurrection of the god Osiris. In 1912 others took it for the god Anubis preparing a dead man’s body, for an embalmer at work, or for a dead man on a bier being made ready for mummification, and similar readings have been given in more recent years. The second note on figure 3 gives the case that has been made for a sacrificial side to such scenes.

Sources: Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “Facsimile 1 as a Sacrifice Scene”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 221.

3 The idolatrous priest of Elkenah attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice.

Context #

The figure of the priest, with restored head, knife, and jackal mask

Whether figure 3 is a priest has been argued from the damaged papyrus, from people who saw it, and from Egyptian practice.

Whether figure 3 is a priest has been argued from the damaged papyrus, from people who saw it, and from Egyptian practice. In the surviving fragment the areas of the bald head and the knife are missing, and at some unknown time someone tried to fill in the head. Two people who saw the papyri in the nineteenth century reported a priest, or a man, with a knife in his hand, and they have been counted as two independent witnesses that a knife was drawn there. The knife’s crescent shape is consistent with Egyptian flint knives, which were used, among other things, for ritual slaughter and for execration rites, rites directed against enemies.

The head is harder. It seems likely that the figure first had a jackal’s head, since traces of the headdress can be made out over its left shoulder, and Egyptologists have called the figure both a priest and the god Anubis. With no hieroglyphic caption, the name Anubis is to be accepted cautiously. And the choice between priest and god appears to be a false one: a text of the embalming ritual speaks of a priest who wears the head of the god, and so names the wearer of the mask a priest. The leopard-skin robe, not clear on the plate but undoubtedly on the papyrus, would also suit a priest. The argument claims no more than this: “the identification of this figure as a priest is not outside the realm of possibility from an Egyptological perspective.”

Sources: Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “The Idolatrous Priest (Facsimile 1, Figure 3)”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 227.

Context #

The case that a lion couch scene could include a sacrifice

It has been argued that Egyptian scenes of embalming and resurrection could carry an element of sacred violence.

It has been argued that Egyptian scenes of embalming and resurrection could carry an element of sacred violence. The evidence offered comes from the roof chapels of the temple at Dendara, where the mummification and resurrection of Osiris are joined to rites against his enemies. In Egyptian the word for “lion couch” is the same in sound, or nearly so, as the words for “slaughterhouse” and for “offerings,” which could plausibly have helped join the ideas in the minds of some Egyptians. In the same chapel Anubis and the sons of Horus, presumably the figures under the couch in Facsimile 1, are shown holding knives, and Anubis is described as striking down adversaries with his. From such evidence it is concluded that at least some ancient Egyptians associated scenes of the resurrection of Osiris with the slaughter of enemies.

The limits are stated as plainly. Embalming was only ever done after death and was never meant to kill the person on the couch, and the knives of Anubis and his companions were for the enemies of Osiris, not for Osiris. “Nor is it to suggest that these parallels are perfect matches for how Joseph Smith interpreted this scene.” The claim is that to leave any sacrificial side out of lion couch scenes would be untrue to Egyptian thought, even though no one definitive reading of the plate is at hand.

Sources: Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “Facsimile 1 as a Sacrifice Scene”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 221.

4 The altar for sacrifice by the idolatrous priests, standing before the gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh.

Context #

Hor, the Theban priest whose papyrus supplied the picture

The papyrus this picture came from belonged to an Egyptian priest, and what is known of his offices has been set beside the use of his pictures for Abraham’s story.

The papyrus this picture came from belonged to an Egyptian priest, and what is known of his offices has been set beside the use of his pictures for Abraham’s story. Facsimiles 1 and 3 were taken from vignettes on one of the Joseph Smith Papyri, whose owner was a man named Hor (Horos in Greek). He lived around 200 BC and was a prophet, or priest, of three gods at Thebes. As prophet of Amun-Re he would have taken part in a daily rite in which a wax figure of an enemy was spat on, trampled, speared, bound and put on the fire. Another of his gods was Min-Who-Massacres-His-Enemies, a combined deity drawn from the Egyptian Min and the Canaanite warrior-god Resheph and worshipped with human sacrifice in effigy. Two of that god’s rites are known, one of binding sinners and one of slaying enemies and burning them on an altar, and these seem to have been part of the same rite against enemies. Stories about Abraham are also reported to have circulated in Egypt in Hor’s time.

What follows from this is put tentatively: knowing these things, something might be said about whether a text like the Book of Abraham could have drawn such a man’s interest or come into his hands, or at the least about why the pictures from his papyrus were used by Joseph Smith to illustrate the book. For the altar in the book, see the note on Abr. 1:12.

Sources: Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “The Ancient Owners of the Joseph Smith Papyri”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 201.

5 The idolatrous god of Elkenah.

6 The idolatrous god of Libnah.

7 The idolatrous god of Mahmackrah.

8 The idolatrous god of Korash.

9 The idolatrous god of Pharaoh.

10 Abraham in Egypt.

Context #

How Latter-day Saint scholars approach the facsimiles

How a picture from an Egyptian papyrus comes to show Abraham has been approached in a number of ways by Latter-day Saint scholars, and it appears that no one explanation can…

How a picture from an Egyptian papyrus comes to show Abraham has been approached in a number of ways by Latter-day Saint scholars, and it appears that no one explanation can account for all the evidence. Some hold that the pictures were Abraham’s own, to be read as Egyptians of his day, or Abraham himself, would have understood them. Others hold that they were Abraham’s but were modified over time for Egyptian use. Others hold that they were joined to the book when the papyri were made, in the Ptolemaic period (about 330–30 BC), and are to be read as Egyptians of that time in general, or Egyptian priests who were taking Jewish, Greek and Mesopotamian practices into their own, or Jews of that era would have understood them. The first is the most straightforward and is severely undermined by the date of the papyri, many centuries after Abraham. Further approaches hold that the pictures were never part of the Book of Abraham; they are not taken up here.

One proposal is that the facsimiles may not have been drawn by Abraham’s hand but may have been Egyptian religious pictures that an Egyptian Jewish editor adopted or adapted as illustrations for the book. In support it points to ancient writings about Abraham that appear to do the same with Egyptian material: the Testament of Abraham, probably composed in Egypt in the first century AD, whose judgment scene appears to draw directly on that of chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead; and the Apocalypse of Abraham (see the note on figure 6 of Facsimile 2). On this proposal Abraham stands in Facsimiles 1 and 3 as a Jewish substitute for the god Osiris (see the notes on figure 1 of Facsimile 3). The proposal is offered as perhaps not definitive. It asks Latter-day Saints to set aside the assumption that Abraham himself drew the figures and supposes a more complex transmission of the text than has traditionally been recognized; neither, it is judged, is fatal to the book’s inspiration.

Sources: Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “Approaching the Facsimiles”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 209. Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “A Semitic View of the Facsimiles”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 215.

11 Designed to represent the pillars of heaven, as understood by the Egyptians.

12 Raukeeyang, signifying expanse, or the firmament over our heads; but in this case, in relation to this subject, the Egyptians meant it to signify Shaumau, to be high, or the heavens, answering to the Hebrew word, Shaumahyeem.

Sources & further reading

The Holy Scriptures (Latter-day Saint editions), text and chapter headings, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Origins of the Book of Abraham”, Topics and Questions, Gospel Library.
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “Approaching the Facsimiles”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 209.
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “A Semitic View of the Facsimiles”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 215.
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “Facsimile 1 as a Sacrifice Scene”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 221.
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “The Idolatrous Priest (Facsimile 1, Figure 3)”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 227.
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “The Ancient Owners of the Joseph Smith Papyri”, BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022): 201.