Stars, Kolob, the Moon, and Abraham 3.

[MrShorty]

I was reading Abraham 3 last night.

First thing I noticed was in verse 5. At the risk of making light of scripture, is there a more verbose way of referring to Earth's moon than " The planet which is the lesser light, lesser than that which is to rule the day, even the night ". Of course, that assumes that I am reading this right that it is referring to Earth's moon and not something even more obscure. I also thought that this could be an interesting challenge to the creative writers out there (who dare to risk making fun of scripture). Can you come up with a more verbose reference to the moon without using "moon" or "satellite" or other synonym for the moon?

More serious question. The text seems to claim that Kolob rotates on its axis once in a thousand years. A quick look at my limited knowledge, and I know that earth rotates in 1 day, the moon rotates once in a month. Jupiter rotates about 1/2 of our days, and so on. The longest planet is Venus at about 2/3 years. Our sun rotates about once a month, and a quick search for what we think other stars' rotation periods are puts almost all of them less than 100 days (those I could find. I doubt my search was complete). It seems quite remarkable, and extremely unusual for a star to have a rotation period of a thousand years (hundreds of thousands of days).

Questions that come to mind: Is Kolob a real star/object? If it is real and it does have such a long rotation period, what are the implications for the kind of star/object that it is? What are the physics behind rotational period that determine how fast a star rotates (I see mass and temperature and age mentioned as possible correlating variables)? The main point of (or one of the main points) the whole chapter is about the supremacy of God. Is it possible that Kolob is a literary device used to illustrate how vastly superior God is to man?

Certainly none of this is "important" or "central" to the gospel message. It just intrigued me, and thought some here might have something about astrophysics or cosmology to teach me.

[Vort]

On 10/13/2017 at 1:14 PM, MrShorty said:

First thing I noticed was in verse 5. At the risk of making light of scripture, is there a more verbose way of referring to Earth's moon than " The planet which is the lesser light, lesser than that which is to rule the day, even the night ".

My guess: This is a translation of a piece of poetry, an extremely common way of writing in ancient times. I would not be surprised if the entire book of Abraham -- and of Moses, for that matter -- were originally poetic works. For example, almost all Greek texts from archaic times are poetic; "prose" as a style is almost unknown in Greek until the classical period.

On 10/13/2017 at 1:14 PM, MrShorty said:

More serious question. The text seems to claim that Kolob rotates on its axis once in a thousand years. A quick look at my limited knowledge, and I know that earth rotates in 1 day, the moon rotates once in a month. Jupiter rotates about 1/2 of our days, and so on. The longest planet is Venus at about 2/3 years. Our sun rotates about once a month, and a quick search for what we think other stars' rotation periods are puts almost all of them less than 100 days (those I could find. I doubt my search was complete). It seems quite remarkable, and extremely unusual for a star to have a rotation period of a thousand years (hundreds of thousands of days).

I think you are misinterpreting this. Kolob's "revolution" might well refer to its orbit around another, much larger (or not) star, or (if it's near the center of a galaxy) its rotation around the galactic core, or whatever else.

In any case, please note that all of the Abrahamic descriptions of astronomical ideas appear to be based on Egyptian astronomy, which is in some ways unlike our modern ideas of astronomy. Applying modern ideas into ancient models usually results in confusion and frustration.

On 10/13/2017 at 1:14 PM, MrShorty said:

Questions that come to mind: Is Kolob a real star/object? If it is real and it does have such a long rotation period, what are the implications for the kind of star/object that it is? What are the physics behind rotational period that determine how fast a star rotates (I see mass and temperature and age mentioned as possible correlating variables)? The main point of (or one of the main points) the whole chapter is about the supremacy of God. Is it possible that Kolob is a literary device used to illustrate how vastly superior God is to man?

I personally believe that Kolob is absolutely, undoubtedly a real, honest-to-goodness star.

A star rotates at the speed it does based on the rotational momentum of the gas cloud that formed the star around its center of gravity, plus the rotational momenta of any large objects that fall into it. It is no mere coincidence that the ecliptic (plane on which a planet orbits the sun) is almost the same for all the planets in our solar system; or that the sun's plane of rotation is pretty much identical to the ecliptic; or that all the planets orbit the sun in the same direction, which is the direction of the sun's rotation. This is the natural result of the condensation of a massive gas cloud made up of the primordial elements of creation mixed in with the detritus of a couple of generations of exploding stars into a star and planetary system.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the larger a star is, the shorter its life. I understand that some supermassive stars have a lifetime of only several million years, perhaps less. What does this mean in relation to Kolob? Nothing at all. While I fully believe that Kolob is an actual, literal star, I don't know anything else about it that would be relevant in a scientific discussion.

There are some people who believe that "Kolob" is nothing more than a representation of Christ. I disagree with the "nothing more" part, but I absolutely agree that Kolob is used as a literary device to represent Jesus Christ. Kolob is basically mentioned only in Abraham 3 (and a couple of references in the papyri Facsimiles), and its mention there is clearly as a metaphor or representation of Christ. I think that's really where the relevance of Kolob lies. There are all sorts of mechanistic things about how God creates and orders the universe that will doubtless require many, many lifetimes worth of time to understand. I see no reason why God would reveal one out-of-context piece of that to us unless it were meant to be something important and relevant -- that is, unless it helps us to understand Christ, his place in our salvation, and how we must approach him.

On 10/13/2017 at 1:14 PM, MrShorty said:

Certainly none of this is "important" or "central" to the gospel message. It just intrigued me, and thought some here might have something about astrophysics or cosmology to teach me.

Again, my own opinion is that trying to understand Kolob in light of 21st-century astrophysics is an exercise in futility. Even if it's a real star, as I believe it is, that's not why we're told about it. We might as well try to use the Biblical account to define the exact properties and alcohol content of the wine that Jesus made from water.

Edited October 17, 2017 by Vort

[MrShorty]

42 minutes ago, Vort said:

This is a translation of a piece of poetry

I had forgotten the possibility of poetry. Still think it would make an interesting creative writing task -- though now you can choose to complete the assignment in poetry or prose (or maybe they are each separate assignments).

48 minutes ago, Vort said:

please note that all of the Abrahamic descriptions of astronomical ideas appear to be based on Egyptian astronomy, which is in some ways unlike our modern ideas of astronomy. Applying modern ideas into ancient models usually results in confusion and frustration.

Yes, I had forgotten to consider that Abraham's cosmology would be different than mine. Perhaps a perusal through Wikipedia's entry on Egyptian astronomy will be educational (I enjoyed my short trip through Navajo astronomy and cosmology last spring). You are correct, I need to be careful about reading scripture too much through my own lens (though I sometimes wish we could get a completely new account of these events and the creation story based on modern cosmology).

[Vort]

4 minutes ago, MrShorty said:

though I sometimes wish we could get a completely new account of these events and the creation story based on modern cosmology

I doubt it would add anything substantive to our understanding. God seems not to care whether we understand his mechanisms for creation. I think of the new endowment presentations, and how in some ways the new fancy-pants graphics are a distraction rather than an enhancement of the experience -- especially when you have beautiful high-pixel-count graphics showing physics as it most definitely does not exist. Better to keep things more vague and undefined, and so better to focus on the important aspects rather than be distracted by silly, incorrect images which have nothing whatsoever to do with the importance of what is being presented.

[zil]

3 hours ago, MrShorty said:

I also thought that this could be an interesting challenge to the creative writers out there (who dare to risk making fun of scripture). Can you come up with a more verbose reference to the moon without using "moon" or "satellite" or other synonym for the moon?

As I understand it, if one knew Basque, one could simply do a literal translation, word for word back into English, and it would come out much like you describe.  This is not the only place in scripture where we get this kind of drawn-out language, but I haven't made particular note of such places, and it's Friday, so I don't think I'm going to go hunting.

[MrShorty]

God seems not to care whether we understand his mechanisms for creation.

An interesting thought, and one I would agree with (at least as it applies to "bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of man". It sometimes seems, though, that these kinds of debates (YEC vs. OEC. Pre-Adamites vs. No Death Before the Fall, Global Flood vs. not global flood) are some of the more contentious among Mormons (and broader Christianity, too. I made the mistake this week of checking out one of Ken Ham's articles on dinosaurs.)

Personally I hope that God does not mind if we try to understand His mechanisms for creation, recognizing that we will get some of it wrong (as you say, it will likely take a lot of time and effort before we really understand it).

[JohnsonJones]

Kolob? How vast is the planet?  I do not know the answer to all things.

In regards to Abraham's translation, we do not know exactly how it was translated.  It could be that a single symbol in the manuscript has double or triple meanings.  One that the world understands, and another which may be far more lengthy in regards to what prophets understand.

[mordorbund]

 

[MrShorty]

Something interesting in John Gee's statements that stood out to me.

Here we have, quite clearly described, a hierarchy of celestial bodies, one above another, with the higher celestial bodies moving more slowly than the lower. This is, of course, precisely how many ancient geocentric models described the movement of the heavens.

Perhaps this is the key to understanding something like this -- to remember that ancient Old World scripture was written under geocentric cosmologies. Under a geocentric model, where slower moving objects are farther away, it makes some sense that God's place in such a cosmology would be the farthest out, the highest up, the outside most object.

Perhaps an interesting thought that occurred to me -- assuming Ancient, old world scripture is written with a geocentric cosmology in mind, my 21st century "enlightened" cosmology (with billions of "island universes" and vast distances where we are not even confident that we can see the entire universe from the earth and objects orbiting objects which orbit larger objects with no discernible "center" and so on) seems superior (or at least more accurate) than what is presented in scripture. And, yet, I see many in Mormondom and broader Christianity who want to hold the Biblical cosmology as not only superior in a theistic way but more accurate in a scientific way (and SS teachers like one this last Sunday who take backhanded stabs at the Big Bang theory). What I see myself going through here is a bit of a re-evaluation of exactly what scripture is and exactly what it is useful for. It becomes less and less a scientific text (trending towards a strictly spiritual/religious text??)

[person0]

Given the popular nature of outer space speculation (especially about the moon), is it not a testament to the veracity of the Book of Abraham that it does not include the incorrect scientific 'knowledge' of Joseph Smith's day?

[Traveler]

 

@MrShorty -  @Vort is correct in recognizing ancient text as poetic.  A short explanation of why.  Anciently it was difficult to copy and publish texts so they were written in a poetic style which included vast amounts of symbolism.  The poetic style was utilized so that the text could be memorized as an oral rendition or tradition.  This ancient style was changed by a historian we know as Homer and his creation of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”.  All things that precedes Homer are called “Pre-Historic” all records and associated events after Homer are referred to as “Historic” and are divided into fiction and non-fiction. 

The Book of Abraham comes to us from Abraham in ancient Egypt at the same time a very advanced mathematically cult appeared in Egypt.  This mathematical cult believed their mathematical knowledge was divine and therefore sacred and only shared within their religious cult’s priesthood.  We do not know a lot about the cult because of it secret-ness.  But because of their particular mathematics we do know that they believed that the entire universe was “linked” or ordered by ratios.  Using mathematic ratios, they developed the harmonic triad in music and established the ordered ratios of colors.  This cult was very advanced but the point is that their science was based around ratios and the way to describe something and prove it to be real or true was to establish the ratio of it to a known ratio. 

I would add in all the debates I have seen concerning the Book of Abraham – this bit of history is overlooked but for me the fact that this piece of history was missing at the time of Joseph Smith and would not be unlocked until long after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.  Definitely proving Joseph to be a prophet.

But we do have another document to help us understand the Book of Abraham – in particular, chapter 3 – that is written in the style of modern Newtonian physics in mind.  This is Doctrine and Covenants section 88 which serves as a second witness and a possible means to help unlock divine mysteries.   I would also point out that only by the power of the Holy Ghost and obedience to covenant are the mysteries made manifested.  I have learned by sad experience that trying to explain my understanding of such mysteries will cause unwarranted debate over what scriptures are communicating – obviously, a case of casting pearls before swine.  But hopefully this understanding of the Book of Abraham will assist anyone seeking better understanding.

 

The Traveler

[omegaseamaster75]

Kolob may or may not be a real place. It may be symbolic.  I fall into the camp of thinking it is not a real place.

 

 

[Anddenex]

On 10/13/2017 at 2:14 PM, MrShorty said:

I was reading Abraham 3 last night.

First thing I noticed was in verse 5. At the risk of making light of scripture, is there a more verbose way of referring to Earth's moon than " The planet which is the lesser light, lesser than that which is to rule the day, even the night ". Of course, that assumes that I am reading this right that it is referring to Earth's moon and not something even more obscure. I also thought that this could be an interesting challenge to the creative writers out there (who dare to risk making fun of scripture). Can you come up with a more verbose reference to the moon without using "moon" or "satellite" or other synonym for the moon?

1) "The sphere closest to the earth maintains a lesser light that does not rule the day, but rules the night."
2) "The earth's companion orb/sphere of lesser light rules the night, while the sun rules the day."
 

 

On 10/13/2017 at 2:14 PM, MrShorty said:

More serious question. The text seems to claim that Kolob rotates on its axis once in a thousand years. A quick look at my limited knowledge, and I know that earth rotates in 1 day, the moon rotates once in a month. Jupiter rotates about 1/2 of our days, and so on. The longest planet is Venus at about 2/3 years. Our sun rotates about once a month, and a quick search for what we think other stars' rotation periods are puts almost all of them less than 100 days (those I could find. I doubt my search was complete). It seems quite remarkable, and extremely unusual for a star to have a rotation period of a thousand years (hundreds of thousands of days).

Questions that come to mind: Is Kolob a real star/object? If it is real and it does have such a long rotation period, what are the implications for the kind of star/object that it is? What are the physics behind rotational period that determine how fast a star rotates (I see mass and temperature and age mentioned as possible correlating variables)? The main point of (or one of the main points) the whole chapter is about the supremacy of God. Is it possible that Kolob is a literary device used to illustrate how vastly superior God is to man?

Certainly none of this is "important" or "central" to the gospel message. It just intrigued me, and thought some here might have something about astrophysics or cosmology to teach me.

Is Kolob a real star/object? Will Celestial beings inhabit a "planet"? Yes, the earth will be renewed and receives its paradisiacal glory, and will be inhabited by Celestial beings, "President Joseph Fielding Smith explained that after the Millennium “will come the death of the earth, its resurrection, its glorification, as the abode of the righteous or they who belong to the celestial kingdom, and they only shall dwell upon the face of it” (Doctrines of Salvation,3:282)." (Source) I am under the thought and belief it is real.

If it is real and it does have such a long rotation period, what are the implications for the kind of star/object that it is? Yes, it is real. I don't know, but at this moment I would assume similar to what our earth will become as that is the only thing that I can ascertain from scripture and prophetic words.

What are the physics behind rotational period that determine how fast a star rotates (I see mass and temperature and age mentioned as possible correlating variables)? It will be the same physics of Celestial reckonings. The same physics the earth will have once glorified. Yes, I know, very profound.

The main point of (or one of the main points) the whole chapter is about the supremacy of God. Is it possible that Kolob is a literary device used to illustrate how vastly superior God is to man? Yes. As once was pointed out to me, there is always someone greater until you reach Christ, and once you reach Christ you have the Father, which even the Son worships. And then you have this from the chapter, "If two things exist, and there be one above the other, there shall be greater things above them; therefore Kolob is the greatest of all the Kokaubeam that thou hast seen, because it is nearest unto me," which brings up the statement (I am paraphrasing), "It is turtles all the way down."

 

[MrShorty]

@person0: Perhaps, though I think it is also interesting, if it is based on a geocentric model, that it does not seem to include any of the correct science of the 19th century. Also interesting, as far as that goes, is that Mormon (from one of Joseph Smith's previous major translation projects) expressed heliocentric tendencies (Hel 12). If Joseph Smith had been faking the whole thing, he might have preferred to have Abraham express a clearly heliocentric model rather than express a cosmology more consistent with a geocentric model.

[MrShorty]

@Anddenex: Good attempts at the writing assignment.

I find a certain irony in appealing to Joseph Fielding Smith. I find myself mostly disagreeing with his cosmology of the beginning of the earth, so I find myself wondering why I should be persuaded to accept his end of the world cosmology. I don't know what it means for the earth to be celestialized. I don't know if that means "become a star" or get transported to another realm. If the physics of a celestialized world are so very different from the physics that we are familiar with, perhaps Kolob, like so much of God, is not readily observed from within our mortal universe.

More and more, I find myself simply going with the symbolic reading here.

 

[Jamie123]

On 10/13/2017 at 9:14 PM, MrShorty said:

Can you come up with a more verbose reference to the moon without using "moon" or "satellite" or other synonym for the moon?

The big shiny thing in the sky like a banana sometimes and sometimes not that becomes more and less bananary every month and American astronauts went to a long time ago but not any more though some people think its a conspiracy theory because you can't see starlight in any of their pictures even though there's no reason you should see starlight in daylight because if you could everything else would have been overexposed and there's supposed to be a man in it though it looks more like a rabbit and it makes people into werewolves. 

[Anddenex]

10 hours ago, MrShorty said:

@Anddenex: Good attempts at the writing assignment.

I find a certain irony in appealing to Joseph Fielding Smith. I find myself mostly disagreeing with his cosmology of the beginning of the earth, so I find myself wondering why I should be persuaded to accept his end of the world cosmology. I don't know what it means for the earth to be celestialized. I don't know if that means "become a star" or get transported to another realm. If the physics of a celestialized world are so very different from the physics that we are familiar with, perhaps Kolob, like so much of God, is not readily observed from within our mortal universe.

More and more, I find myself simply going with the symbolic reading here.

 

@Anddenex: Good attempts at the writing assignment. (couldn't find a bowing emoji, so I chose a ninja instead, I would change the "good" to excellent though  )

I find a certain irony in appealing to Joseph Fielding Smith. That is OK, as we would see this differently. His quote was referencing known doctrine regarding the state of the earth and this question, "Is Kolob a real star/object?" The known doctrine being this below, (source), "The earth will be transfigured, or changed, when Jesus Christ returns to reign (see D&C 63:20–21). It will return to the “paradisiacal,” or terrestrial, state that it was in before the Fall of Adam and Eve (Articles of Faith 1:10). At the end of the Millennium, the earth, and the heavens around it, will once again be changed—this time to become a celestial kingdom for those who have also received celestial glory (see D&C 88:19–20)." So I find no irony in truth.

The earth "changes" again, upon receiving its Celestial state and becomes the Celestial kingdom. I am only referencing the question pertaining to "Kolob" being real. We know Celestial beings will inhabit a "real" place, a real object. As the earth is real, I would say Kolob is a place and is real also. This however doesn't diminish the symbolism of Kolob either. It can be real and symbolic at the same time, as the "treel of life" and the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" are both real and symbolic.

Now, regarding the cosmology of the earth in relation to celestial bodies that have been "changed," well, very little is known, if nothing at all. We know they exist, as the earth will exist as one, and Celestial beings will inhabit it. If all things were spiritual before temporal, and the temporal is patterned after the spiritual then I would feel safe to say that there is a rotation of celestial bodies also. Kolob being one of them. But, until revealed, and seeing earthly temporal science will never be able to accurately "study" or "investigate" spiritual bodies and its cosmology (if this is what we are looking for), then we will wait until we get there.

 

[MrShorty]

On 10/18/2017 at 9:03 AM, Anddenex said:

I would change the "good" to excellent though 

Perhaps. Whatever adjective you choose, I hope you would agree that Jamie123's long run-on sentence is a step above that adjective.

On 10/18/2017 at 9:03 AM, Anddenex said:

Now, regarding the cosmology of the earth in relation to celestial bodies that have been "changed," well, very little is known, if nothing at all. We know they exist, as the earth will exist as one, and Celestial beings will inhabit it.

I think that, again, we are up against a scripturally literal reading and figurative and how that conflicts with science. I am not an expert, but it seems that we have a reasonably workable theory of stellar lifecycles with observable examples of young stars in stellar nurseries (like the Orion Nebula) and dying stars (like the Ring Nebula) and others. The expected life cycle of a star like ours includes the current phase, an expansion into a Red giant as it nears the end of its life (destroying the earth), then collapses into a white dwarf. None of this has a place for "celestialization" or "transporting the earth to another location within this universe or another dimension" or anything like that.

As you indicate, these kind of effects, if they exist, are unobserved and probably unobservalbe, making them unfalsifiable as well. Perhaps another reason I find myself leaning away from the literal interpretations and focusing solely on the spiritually symbolic readings.

Like with the creation, are we required to believe that these doctrines are literally, physically true, or is there room in our theology for a figurative reading of these things? "Celestialization" could end up with a social meaning, and earth "be[ing] renewed and receiv[ing] its paradisiacal glory" might have more to do with us as a people than some physical change to the planet, its climate, or other physical change.

(Parenthetical note: I still remember as a K to 1st grader visiting the Hansen planetarium in SLC and watching a movie about stellar life cycles and having nightmares afterwards about the sun destroying the earth -- including the scene from the movie where the Salt Lake Valley is completely filled with cartoonish molten rock).

[MrShorty]

This is probably more of a physics question relating to my OP here. I came across someone who suggested to me that this "1 day to us is a 1000 years to God" is a pre-Einstein expression of relativity. Personally not convinced, but it made me ask myself what kind of object Kolob would have to be to have a 500k time dilation factor. Naturally, I thought of the superior minds here on mormonhub and thought that you could help me get some idea.

For example, in searching, I found the article on Wikipedia for a neutron star (if memory serves, the most dense stars that are not black holes) may exhibit a time dilation on the order of 25% (10 years on Earth to 8 years on the star). Some descriptions I find of black holes suggest that, to an outside observer, the time dilation goes to infinity as an object approaches the event horizon (for black holes with an event horizon, because I saw some mention of black holes without event horizons???).

Anyone who kind of sort of understands this stuff (because I recognize that some of it is difficult in general) give some idea of what a time dilation of a half million might suggest about the hypothetical star/black hole that could be Kolob?

[Guest]

On 10/13/2017 at 3:14 PM, MrShorty said:

I was reading Abraham 3 last night.

First thing I noticed was in verse 5. At the risk of making light of scripture, is there a more verbose way of referring to Earth's moon than " The planet which is the lesser light, lesser than that which is to rule the day, even the night ". Of course, that assumes that I am reading this right that it is referring to Earth's moon and not something even more obscure. I also thought that this could be an interesting challenge to the creative writers out there (who dare to risk making fun of scripture). Can you come up with a more verbose reference to the moon without using "moon" or "satellite" or other synonym for the moon?

On 10/13/2017 at 4:07 PM, Vort said:

My guess: This is a translation of a piece of poetry, an extremely common way of writing in ancient times. I would not be surprised if the entire book of Abraham -- and of Moses, for that matter -- were originally poetic works. For example, almost all Greek texts from archaic times are poetic; "prose" as a style is almost unknown in Greek until the classical period.

In that vein...

Quote

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
This other Eden, demi-paradise, 
This fortress built by Nature for herself 
Against infection and the hand of war, 
This happy breed of men, this little world, 
This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
Which serves it in the office of a wall 
Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
Against the envy of less happier lands,-- 
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

"King Richard II", Act 2 scene 1