Problems with the Book of Abraham
I’ve never understood how Mormons can read the Book of Abraham and simply accept the idea that God told Abraham He lives on another planet orbiting a star called Kolob, which supposedly has a governing relationship to the other stars and worlds in the universe.
That is such a massive departure from the way Abraham and the ancient Israelites actually understood the cosmos.
The ancient Israelites didn’t have physics, astronomy, geometry, or any of the scientific framework we have today to understand the universe. Their worldview was fundamentally different. They generally understood the Earth as a flat, stationary place supported by pillars, with a solid dome (the “firmament”) overhead separating the Earth from the cosmic waters above. The sun and moon were not understood as distant celestial bodies like we understand them today. They were essentially the two great lamps placed in the firmament to govern the day, night, seasons, and appointed times.
The stars were part of the “heavenly host,” and planets were essentially understood as wandering stars. The Earth was the center of the physical and spiritual world, sitting beneath God’s heavenly realm. Heaven was not some distant galaxy millions of light-years away. It was literally understood as the realm beyond the firmament.
That was their entire reference point for understanding the cosmos.
They had no concept of the Earth as a sphere orbiting the Sun, the Moon as a satellite orbiting the Earth, or the Sun as one star among billions. They certainly had no concept of gravity, planetary motion, nuclear fusion, the physical composition of stars, or the enormous scale of the universe.
The Book of Abraham asks us to believe that Abraham looks through an ancient instrument (the Urim and Thummim) and receives an explanation of the universe that is radically different from the cosmology surrounding him. Instead of the Earth being the physical center beneath a nearby heavenly dome, Abraham is supposedly shown a vast cosmic hierarchy centered around a star called Kolob.
Kolob is presented as being so close to the throne of God that it becomes, in effect, the closest thing to a literal cosmic center of God’s presence. The Book of Abraham describes governing stars, planets, times, and relationships between celestial bodies in a way that sounds much more like a later cosmological framework than anything resembling the ancient Israelite worldview.
How was Abraham supposed to understand any of this, and what reference point did he have? How could he suddenly comprehend a completely different model involving governing stars, planetary relationships, celestial time, and a cosmic hierarchy?
It would be like trying to explain nuclear physics to someone who has never even conceived of an atom. You could give them the words, but the words wouldn't give them the underlying concepts. Abraham would have had no reference point for what he was supposedly seeing. Charlie Brown's teacher explaining it to him (“Wah Wah Wah”) would be about as meaningful. He wouldn't even have had the mental framework to process it; it is so radically different!
If God miracously gave Abraham this revolutionary understanding of the cosmos, where did it go?
Why didn't this knowledge transform the ancient Israelite understanding of the universe?
Look at the story of Joshua stopping the sun. The sun is described as standing still in the sky. The imagery fits perfectly within the ancient conception of the sun moving across the heavens as a lamp. If Abraham had already been taught that the universe was structured around Kolob, that celestial bodies existed in a hierarchy, and that there was an entirely different understanding of planetary motion and celestial time, why doesn't any of that knowledge appear to have survived in ancient Israelite literature?
Why does the ancient worldview continue to look exactly like the worldview we would expect from the ancient Near East?
Where is the influence of Abraham's supposed cosmic revelation?
Why did nobody else seem to know about it?
And then, thousands of years later, the Book of Abraham appears with a cosmology that sounds completely foreign to the worldview that Abraham lived in.
The problem isn't simply that ancient people didn't understand modern astronomy. Of course they didn't. The problem is that the Book of Abraham asks to believe that Abraham somehow received and understood concepts that were completely outside his cultural, scientific, and conceptual framework and then somehow none of that knowledge meaningfully entered the Israelite tradition.
Galileo and others eventually dismantle the old Earth-centered model in the 17th century, and astronomy eventually revealed a universe governed by physical laws, gravity, planetary motion, and enormous distances. The sun became a star, planets became physical worlds orbiting stars, and the Earth became one planet among many rather than the literal center of creation.
The scientific revolution fundamentally dismantled the mythological architecture through which ancient people understood the heavens. The universe went from being a human-centered spiritual theater beneath a heavenly dome to an enormous physical system governed by mathematical laws.
And yet the Book of Abraham presents itself as an ancient revelation to Abraham, but its description of the cosmos doesn't fit comfortably within the cosmology of the ancient Israelites surrounding him.
So, If God really showed Abraham a radically different understanding of the universe, why does Abraham's world show virtually no evidence that he had the conceptual framework to understand it? Why does the ancient Israelite tradition show virtually no evidence that this knowledge was ever passed down?
Abraham was missing the entire language necessary to understand what he was supposedly being shown!