The modern worldview conceives of the world as essentially uniform. Everything that exists is equally made up of matter, of atoms. While there exist different kinds of atoms and different states of matter (solid, liquid, gas), in essence it is all the same stuff. It is all commonplace, banal. The ancient sacral perspective, in contrast, perceived a fundamental distinction in the world between the profane and the sacred. It infused certain entities, and certain aspects of the cosmos, with special significance and meaning, setting them apart from everything else. Space itself, and even time, could be viewed as sacred.

Sacral Space

The basic idea of sacred space should be familiar to every reader of the Old Testament. When Moses first encounters the Lord on Mount Horeb, the Lord commands him, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). The concept of “holy ground” makes little sense to the modern mind. One piece of ground is like any other. Yet for the ancient Israelite, this particular spot on the mountain was qualitatively different from other land because of God’s presence there. It had become integrated, so to speak, into God’s moral order.

But the idea of sacred space was not limited to specific sites or locales. The world as a whole could be incorporated into the sacral realm by dividing it into sections and organizing it around a central point. Most commonly, the world was divided into the quadrants north, south, east, and west.[1] The four quadrants are clearly depicted surrounding a sacred center on the first page of Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, a sixteenth-century Aztec manuscript. According to Davíd Carrasco, a specialist in Mesoamerican religion, this illustration

reflects the typical Mesoamerican worldview divided into five sections. We see the four quarters, each containing a sacred tree with a celestial bird on top, surrounding the central region where Xiuhtecuhtli, the Fire God, is dressed in warrior regalia. According to scholars the body of Tezcatlipoca has been cut into pieces and divided over the four directions of the world, with his blood flowing into the center. The divine blood is flowing into the axis of the universe, which redistributes the divine energy to animals, body parts, vegetation, and the calendar, which is divided by the four quarters of the cosmos.[2]

Image from the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, 15th Century, depicting the cosmos divided into four quarters surrounding the center. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This process is known as orientation. Indeed, archaic religion as a whole can be thought of as a grand system of orientation—orientation of meaning and significance. The word orientation refers in the first instance to the “orient,” or the East (where the sun rises), and secondarily to all four cardinal directions.[3] For many cultures, particularly the ancient Near East, the east, as the place of the rising sun, was the most favored direction.

An alternative term for a sacral worldview is hierocentric. The word suggests two concepts—the sacred (hieros in Greek) and orientation around a center. Thus the sacred is at the center of things. The term has been defined as applying to “those cults, states, and philosophies that were oriented around a point believed to be the exact center and pivot of the universe.”[4] The most sacred places were considered as central—closest to the gods—while everything else was seen in relation to the center, much like the central hub and the spokes on a wheel. The following quotation from the Jewish Midrash is a clear declaration of the concept of centrality:

Just as the navel is found at the center of a human being, so the Land of Israel is found at the center of the world . . . and it is the foundation of the world. Jerusalem is at the center of the land of Israel, the Temple is at the center of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies is at the center of the Temple, the Ark is at the center of the Holy of Holies and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, which point is the foundation of the world.[5]

In other words, the center of the world—mythically and conceptually speaking, and not necessarily in objective, geographic terms—is the place of the original creation, commonly referred to as the “foundation of the world.” It is the most sacred place, and the place at which life began and from which it diffused to the rest of the world, the place around which all other places in the world are oriented. In the words of one scholar, “The center . . . is not a point in space at all, but the point in relation to which all space attains individualization and meaning.”[6] For obvious reasons, the image of the “navel of the world” was not uncommonly used to represent this central point.[7] The Greeks commonly referred to the most sacred oracle at Delphi, in central Greece, as the navel (omphalos) of the world. The Israelites also saw Mount Gerezim, at the center of Palestine, as the navel of the land (Ṭabbur ereṣ).[8] Many tribal peoples of Central Asia referred to the polestar as the “navel of the sky.”[9]

The sacral center has also been associated with what Mircea Eliade has called the “axis mundi,” the place where earth and heaven come together, the central axis of the world, a binding link between the several dimensions of the world—heaven, the terrestrial world, and the underworld.[10] These concepts of orientation and centrality have been manifest in numerous archaic civilizations. Mount Meru is a mythic mountain common to Hindu, Buddhist, and related traditions. It represents the center of the circular cosmos on a horizontal plane but is also “a vertical shaft which links macrocosm with microcosm, gods with men, timelessness with time.”[11] In an ancient document from the Chinese tradition, the axis of the universe is defined as “the place where earth and sky meet, where the four seasons merge, where wind and rain are gathered in, and where ying and yang are in harmony.”[12] This central place is often represented as a mountain, but it has also frequently been symbolized by a tree or a pillar. While it would be incorrect to assume that every example of a sacral mountain or tree in every culture had precisely the same significance, these symbols seem to have much in common throughout the archaic world.[13] Nevertheless, the concepts of orientation and hierocentricity, as a means of sacralizing the cosmos as a whole, linking the microcosmos of the human world with the macrocosmos of the gods, are extremely widespread concepts in the culture of humankind. Even today in the Muslim tradition, the Kaaba is believed to mark “the exact middle of the earth and hub of the universe,” the four corners of the shrine being oriented to the four cardinal points, and hence the place where prayer is most likely to be effective.[14]

Like Jerusalem in Israel, each ancient civilization had its own center, and sometimes more than one. For much of the earlier history of Mesopotamia, the city of Nippur, although not politically important, was considered the most sacred spot, due to the presence of Ekur, which was the holiest temple in ancient Sumer, dedicated to the supreme god Enlil and known as “Center of the Universe.”[15] Later on, political power became more significant, and Babylon with its temple Esagil, holy to Marduk, became the most sacred city, identified as “the support and connection of the apsu—the earthly horizon—with the heavens.” Finally, for Assyria it was the temple of their god Assur in the city of Assur, which claimed to be the most ancient and original location for the cosmic axis and place of creation.[16]

Even the king could be perceived as the “central pivot,” governing from the center of the cosmos and serving as the principal link between god and man.[17] He also represented the state, which in the context of the worldview of every people was the center, as each nation considered itself as the closest to and most beloved by the gods. Accordingly, kings of Mesopotamia were frequently referred to as “king of the four quarters of the world” (or alternatively “the four corners of the universe”), claiming, as it were, that they ruled the entire known world—in the name of their deity. The idea, of course, was not meant literally—they fully recognized that they did not have direct governance of all lands—but mythically; because of their semidivine status mediating the human-divine separation, it was appropriate to claim universal monarchy. This concept of universal power oriented around the four cardinal directions was portrayed dramatically in Egyptian ritual. During the so-called Sed Festival, a kind of periodic jubilee intended to effectively renew the pharaoh’s power, the king would shoot an arrow to each of the four points of the compass, after which he was enthroned—four times, each time facing in one of the four cardinal directions.[18]

The notion of conceiving the world as divided into four quarters occurs in the Book of Mormon as well. The notion of gathering in the people of God from the four quarters of the earth is found numerous times.[19] John L. Sorenson has also argued that the Nephite people divided their own lands into four quarters, with Zarahemla serving as the center or “heart” of the land.[20]

Temples as Sacral Space

Although the sacred center, as we have seen, could exist in many locations, including in the king himself, the holy of holies was most commonly and most clearly portrayed in ancient temples. A temple was an area of sacral space consciously constructed and set apart specifically for deity and consecrated for sacred activities (i.e., rituals). While the concepts of orientation and centrality were a way of perceiving the sacred in the land as a whole, the construction of a temple was a man-made means of walling off a specific sector of space that was specifically dedicated to serve as, as it were, a bit of heaven on earth. A temple served both as a place for deity to reside while in the terrestrial world and as a scale model of the cosmos, mythically speaking.[21]

“When a Kogi shaman builds a temple, he actually makes a model of his universe,” which he conceives as a spindle with three separate levels, each subdivided into its own three levels corresponding to heaven, earth, and underworld.[22] The correspondence between temple and world was symbolized most clearly and elaborately by the Egyptians. Egyptian temples were celestially oriented as a means of achieving harmony with the cosmos, but not always in terms of the cardinal directions. They were frequently built on an east-west axis, but “according to local cardinal directions as determined by the [Nile] river.” They could also be aligned with the sun or with certain stars—for example, Sothis (Sirius), which possessed multiple significances for the Egyptians,[23] and the North Star and the circumpolar stars, which held special significance.[24]

Egyptian temples were, in the words of Egyptologist Byron E. Shafer, “loci for the struggle between order and chaos.”[25] An enclosure wall separated the temple’s sacred interior from the external, profane world, thereby creating a kind of fortress against chaos. In later temples this symbolism was made explicit by designing the walls in wavelike patterns, symbolically depicting the primordial waters of Nun. As we have already noted, the common scenes on the gateways and enclosure walls showing Pharaoh defeating his enemies were intended to ward off the always-present threat of chaos and prevent it from invading the sacred interior of the temple. Like the better-known temple of Jerusalem, Egyptian temples and many others had a tripartite arrangement, whereby the outer zone was the least sacred and entrance was allowed to commoners as well as priests. Only the king and certain priests had access to the second zone of sacredness, and only after undergoing purificatory washings. The deep interior of the temple was where the presence of the principal god dwelt, in the form of a statue, and any associated gods.

Because many temples were oriented along an east-west axis, the pylons serving as a gateway to the inner sections of the temple could symbolize the mountains between which the sun rose each morning. The floor of the temple rose progressively as one proceeded along the temple’s axis so that the holy of holies was higher than the entrance. This feature represented the original mound that arose first from the chaotic waters. This mound or primordial hill—upon which the god created life and the original temple was built—was known as “the divine hill” and “the great hill of the first time [zep tepi, the “first occasion,” the time of creation].” As the floor of the temple rose, the ceiling became progressively lower, so that the holy of holies could represent the horizon—the spot where the earth and heaven came together.[26]

Other temples also were conceived as being built on a sacred hill or mountain. Several temple hymns from the neo-Sumerian period refer to certain shrines as well as a ziggurat in the city of Eridu as a “holy mound.” The names of many ziggurats refer to mountains, and likewise the names of some later temples: E-temen-an-ki, “House, Foundation Platform of Heaven and Underworld”; E-kur, “House, Mountain [of Enlil]” or “Mountain House Connecting Heaven and Earth”; Esag-ila, “House Whose Top Is High” or “The Lofty House.”[27]

The Mesopotamians constructed their temples with the four sides or four corners oriented to the four cardinal directions.[28] We know of several instances in which the king reportedly had revealed to him the exact dimensions of the temple to be built (or, in some cases, rebuilt). The best known of these is that of Gudea, king of Lagash in Sumer in [2125 BC], who received a direct command of the god Ningirsu to build him a house. Receiving a dream sent from the god, he was specifically given “signposts” as to how it should be built. The much later Babylonian king Nabopolassar was given specific measurements for the construction of a temple tower, which he kept “in his memory as a treasure.”[29]

In the book of Exodus 25–40, Moses is given explicit and detailed instructions from Yahweh on how to build the tabernacle in the desert. “Have them make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them. In accordance with all that I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle and of all its furniture, so you shall make it” (25:8–9; compare 1 Chronicles 28:19). The tabernacle was to be oriented toward the east, and the twelve tribes were instructed by God to camp on all four sides of the tabernacle, three tribes on each side, so that the temple represented the exact center (Numbers 2). Inside the temple, the twelve oxen surrounding the brazen sea were organized into four groups of three, representing the four cardinal directions.[30]

The earthly temple was often thought to be an exact copy of a corresponding model in heaven.[31] In the Wisdom of Solomon (9.8), King Solomon declares to God, “You have given command to build a temple on your holy mountain, and an altar in the city of your habitation, a copy of the holy tent that you prepared from the beginning” (compare 1 Chronicles 28:19). Yahweh could be considered to dwell “in his holy temple . . . in heaven” (Psalm 11:4). Even the holy city of Jerusalem was considered to be the reflection of a celestial Jerusalem (Ezekiel 48:30–35; Revelation 21:2–27).[32]

Although there is no clear evidence that the Nephites built any of their temples on a mountain, the notion of mountains being sacred places is present in the Book of Mormon. Nephi relates that his vision was shown to him from “an exceedingly high mountain” (1 Nephi 11:1).[33] In a similar manner, when Nephi sought revelation from the Lord in the land called Bountiful, the voice of the Lord specifically instructed him to “arise, and get thee into the mountain” (17:7). Moreover, Isaiah is quoted as referring to “the mountain of the Lord’s house” (2 Nephi 12:2–3; compare 21:9).

Sacral Time

The aspect of the sacral worldview that relates most closely to the idea of history is, of course, time. Nicolas Wyatt has called sacral time “the most characteristic feature of the mythic mind.”[34] And the most sacred time of all was the time of creation.

The Creation could by no means be considered to have taken place in normal time. Just as the space inside a temple was set apart for sacred activities, the most sacred activities took place, temporally speaking, during the period of creation. It was a time that was conceptually set apart from “normal” time—a time before all the normal things that we associate with life had come into being, before even normal time itself had existed. Thus, even though the creation account in Genesis 1 speaks in terms of God acting during a period of seven “days,” those days clearly have no direct relation to normal human days, since it is not until the fourth “day” that God creates the sun and the moon in “the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night” to serve as signs of “seasons and . . . days and years” (Genesis 1:14–15). The period of creation was primordial time—time before time.

Moreover, this was a time “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up” (see Genesis 2:4–5). Similarly, the Babylonian Enuma Elish refers to a time when “on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name, naught but primordial Apsu . . . when no gods whatever had been brought into being.” The Egyptians referred to this primordial time as zep tepi, the “first time” or “first occasion,” when the first mound or hill emerged from chaos and the sun god Re ascended the hill, causing the sun to appear for the first time.

But primordial time was not limited to the Creation itself. For the Israelites, it extended through the time of the Garden of Eden, when man and his companion lived in a paradisiacal condition. The Egyptians also conceived of a kind of golden age at the beginning of history when Re was king over all the land and maat—all that was good or efficacious, as laid down by Re—was established, an age before death, disease, or “rage or clamor or strife or uproar had come about.”[35] The Mesopotamians also had a kind of double sacral age: the time of the Creation itself, typified by the division between heaven and earth, followed by a second period described as taking place “in those (distant) days” and involving the creation of humankind and the “lowering” of the kingship from heaven for their benefit.[36]

The concept of a golden age existing in the far-distant past is of course common to many cultures of the world. The term golden age derives from an account of Hesiod, a Greek poet more or less contemporary with Homer (ca. 750 BC), that describes successive ages (Age of Gold, Age of Silver, Age of Bronze, Age of Iron), each age being less perfect, less desirable, more sinful than the one before. In many contexts, the idea of a golden age has become little more than a way of disparaging the present as having decayed from some ideal past. But for archaic civilizations, the notion of a primordial time of creation was much more than just a nostalgic longing for an imagined past age. It was a normative concept, in that it was the period in which divinity set the pattern for future human behavior. The most obvious and familiar example of this was the Jewish Sabbath: Yahweh had “rested” on his “seventh day”; as a result, his people should likewise rest from their labors on their seventh day, not merely because resting was a good idea, but specifically as a way of following the model set down by God: it was a type of worship. As Eliade has observed regarding Christ’s washing his disciples’ feet: “Humility is only a virtue; but humility practiced after the Savior’s example is a religious act and a means of salvation.”[37]

Thus, ritual reenactment of mythic acts of the gods was a means both of infusing meaning into human life and of showing devotion to deity by following the divine primordial example. This argument is made most vigorously by Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.[38]

In Egypt many of the ritual acts of the pharaoh involved a reiteration of “the god’s creative gestures, utterances, or actions.”[39] Each coronation of a new pharaoh was thought of as overcoming a period of chaos following the death of the previous king and reestablishing maat, as at the beginning of time. This was true even when, as in most instances, there was no real interregnum. Maat was established in the golden age, and each king claimed to restore it. The goal of pharaonic history, as Erik Hornung has said, was to “restore to the world something of the perfection it enjoyed at the time of its origin.”[40] According to Vincent Arieh Tobin,

The basic signification of the cult at each shrine was the celebration, representation and actual repetition of the divine creative action in the present moment. The final result of the cult was the renewal of the created universe and the renewal of the order of that universe, i.e., the order and structure of Ma’at. The temple was the setting in which the cult deity repeated and continued his defeat of the powers of chaos and non-being.[41]

Even the Egyptian mortuary rituals were closely related to creation theology: “The hope of the deceased was that he would by means of [the mortuary literature and rituals] be enabled to identify with the creator god in his repeated and ongoing creative activity.”[42]

Correspondingly, in the “house of bathing” (Bit-rimki) ritual in Assyria, the king acted as “an avatar of the sun traversing the various stations of its celestial course.”[43] The Babylonian New Year’s festival (known as Akitu), which has been described as “the most complete expression of Mesopotamian religiosity,”[44] effected the renewal of the cosmos by reciting and reenacting the Creation, reciting the entire cosmogonic myth Enuma Elish. “During the festival the gods were exalted in order to renew not only time, with the entrance into a new annual cycle, but the universe itself, as if the gods were re-creating the universe in order to launch it once again into continuing duration.”[45] In the state festivals, the state “contributed to the control of nature, to the upholding of the orderly cosmos. In the rites man secured the revival of nature in spring, won the cosmic battle against chaos, and created the orderly world each year anew out of chaos.”[46]

This concept is quite different from the oft-made claim that the peoples of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamians and Egyptians) and Greeks viewed the past in cyclical terms, while the Israelites were the first to invent the notion of linear time. A cyclical view of time suggests that time is somehow repetitive, in terms of days, years, seasons, or some longer period. According to the theory, the Israelites differed from their neighbors in viewing time and history as moving forward in a linear sense, in light of God’s plan leading his people from creation to historical culmination. This view was then passed along to and further developed by the Christian world, who saw all of human history as being guided by God from the time of creation to the coming of Christ, and onward from there to the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgment.

While there is a kernel of truth in this theory, the contrast of “cyclical” versus “linear” time has been greatly exaggerated.[47] The Egyptians and Mesopotamians did not literally see history repeating itself in cycles.[48] While they did focus much attention on cyclical patterns in nature, such as the seasons, their king lists show that they were quite capable of conceiving of time proceeding in a linear fashion, from one king to another, and nowhere did they suppose that one king was literally “repeating” the reign of his predecessor, or that a son was going to “repeat” all the acts of his father or grandfather.[49] In a similar way, we need to recognize that the Israelites “based their cultic year around the ritual observation of seasonal events” but also around the reenactment of specific historical events.[50] In other words, all cultures have both linear and cyclical concepts of time, and rather than declare one culture to be “cyclical” in its temporal outlook and another culture “linear,” it is more realistic to view time as being understood in multiple senses by all human cultures. As Jan Assmann notes, “Instead of asking whether a culture has a cyclical or linear concept of time, we should rather inquire into the sites of the linear and of the cyclical within a culture and the relations between the two.”[51]

What is clear regarding the pagan civilizations of the ancient Near East is, as already noted, that the nations conceived their kings (in particular) as deliberately repeating the primordial acts of the gods through ritual. This is something quite different from perceiving history as moving strictly in cyclical patterns. It was instead a worldview that saw the daily or yearly ritual acts carried out by kings and priests as normative for humankind, laid down by the gods. Moreover, it was not that they were unable to conceive of time itself as moving in a linear fashion, but rather that they perceived the more “cyclical,” repetitive aspects of nature (e.g., the seasons and the daily rising and setting of the sun) as sacred and therefore more significant—more meaningful—while linear time (i.e., events that happened only once) was more profane and less important.

This preference for the cyclical over the linear aspect of time was especially prominent in Egyptian culture:

Egyptians were aware of time’s passage for the same reason that we are: persons pass through consecutive phases of life—birth, puberty, aging, death—that can neither be avoided nor repeated. But this linear time, or, as we call it, “real” or concrete time, belonged to the purely secular world, the world of ordinary human affairs. The time connected with the sacred was the abstract, cyclical time associated with perpetual recurrences and repetitions. Egyptians experienced sacred, cyclical time in the succession of day and night, the phases of the moon, the rotation of the seasons, the mating behavior of animals, and the migrations of fish and birds; especially striking to them was the annual flooding of the Nile, regularly followed by the reemergence of dry land, the reappearance of vegetation, and the flowering and dying of annual plants. Egyptians marked the recurrence of these phenomena by weekly, monthly, and annual holy days. Every annual festive occasion concluded with a New Year’s celebration, and each New Year’s day represented beginning all over again. The usual word for “year,” rnpit, literally means “renewal” or “a new beginning.” (Re)birth-symbolism permeated Egyptian religion. For example, the epithet whm msiwt (literally, “repeating birth,” used to characterize a few kings’ reigns . . .) signifies “rebirth (or renaissance),” in the sense of the restoration of the originally perfect state—the immaculate world of the time of creation—and the beginning of a new age of salvation.[52]

The Mesopotamians likewise viewed their primordial history as presenting “the ideal image of society” and believed that a king had a duty to restore that original order, which had, over time, “become brittle or fragile.”[53] This attitude is clear from the practice of the ancient Mesopotamians regarding the restoration of their temples. Temples, like any buildings, decayed over time and had to be restored. In their attempts to rebuild a temple, kings frequently conducted excavations seeking to uncover the original dimensions of the earliest foundations of the temple in question. The goal was to lay the new foundation stones exactly over the original stones, with “not a finger’s breadth of deviation.” Once again, this was not merely a sign of conservative outlook, although ancient civilizations typically viewed the past much more favorably than we in the modern world do. The real intent, instead, was based on the belief that temples were “not built by human hands but were erected by the gods themselves as part of the work of creation at the beginning of time.” Thus, “restoration of the temple according to the undistorted divine plan was intended by the Babylonian kings to transport both the state and its subjects back to their original, pristine, hallowed beginnings.”[54]

Nor should it be claimed that the Israelites were oblivious to the cyclical aspects of life. The rotation of the seasons, for example, was as obvious to them as to any other ancient people.[55] What was original with the Israelites was not the idea of linear time or progress but that they developed a new concept of deity and deity’s role in their national life and, as a result, came to view certain singular events in history, in addition to repetitive and ritual occurrences, as sacred. To a degree unheard of among neighboring nations, Yahweh planned and carried out certain unrepeatable events in the life of his people, most notably the Passover and Exodus, which were in fulfillment of specific promises he had made to the Israelites’ ancestors. This view of the nature of God underpinned the Hebrew practice of sacral historiography, as will be laid out in greater detail in part II. The key to this new outlook was the extent and significance of divine intervention in the lives of God’s people, specifically the significance of certain foundational events that took place in normal (historical) time.

It was nothing new for the peoples of antiquity to believe in divine intervention in human undertakings. The activities of the pagan gods were by no means limited to the period of the Creation. All ancient peoples believed that the gods involved themselves and directly intervened at least occasionally in human affairs. Such interventions at least sometimes implied that the gods made plans and took purposeful action to put their plans into effect. It was not uncommon, for example, for Mesopotamian rulers to state or imply that their patron gods played a key role in their rise to power. Yet these divine plans are almost always quite limited in detail and scope.[56]

In contrast, the Hebrew depictions of God as implementing premeditated plans are exceptional in their scope.[57] When Yahweh directs Abraham to leave his homeland in Ur and migrate to Canaan and then promises to make of him a great nation (Genesis 12:1–3), this degree of divine planning transcends the typical Near Eastern king claiming favor from the gods in acceding to power or defeating his enemies in warfare. However, the Hebraic narrative goes far beyond this one claim and instead depicts a complex series of events under divine direction.

The story of the Exodus again portrays God as working out an intricate set of details leading to the liberation of his people from Egyptian control, followed by their being led back to the land of Canaan. This depiction of God involved in working out the details of his covenant with his people over a period of centuries presupposes a deity that is intimately involved with planning and fulfilling the destiny of his people to a degree far beyond what we find in other Near Eastern contexts. Each part of this fulfillment of God’s plan happened (a) only once and (b) in normal, historical time. Thus the Israelites, with this belief in a “historical” god, came to a worldview in which the idea of change and development within historical time over a period of centuries was prominent. Through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, the Lord declared:

Have you not heard that I determined it long ago?
I planned from days of old what I now bring to pass. (2 Kings 19:25)

Throughout the Pentateuch, and particularly with respect to the story of Moses and the Exodus, the Lord repeatedly tells his people to “remember.” Even before the Exodus, Yahweh tells his people that he “remembered” the covenant he had previously “established” (historical past) with their distant ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which would serve as the basis for his decision to liberate them now and bring them into the land that he had promised under the covenant (Exodus 6:3–8). During the event of the Passover, the Lord tells his people that the current month would from then on serve as the first month of the year for them. The day of the Passover “shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance” (12:2–3, 14). A few verses later Moses charges the people: “Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, because the Lord brought you out from there by the strength of hand” (13:3). The command is reiterated again and again throughout the book of Deuteronomy, exhorting them to remember not only the Exodus itself but also to “remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you” (Deuteronomy 32:7).[58] It was clearly expected that the great events in the life of the nation would be passed on from one generation to the next (compare Joshua 4:6, 21).

Because of these foundational events in the life of the nation of Israel, and the constant repetition of the command to remember, the people came to have a very distinctive attitude toward the past and toward history.[59] Egyptian and Mesopotamian festivals, as we have seen, celebrated the gods and acts of nature (e.g., the rising and setting of the sun, the rising of the Nile) or mythological events from primordial time, such as the Creation or the death of Osiris and the succession to the kingship by Horus. While it is true that the polytheistic peoples did not conceive a hard-and-fast division between primordial time—such events as the time of divine creation and the origin of the kingship—and normal (historical) time, they never established festivals grounded in events from the latter, such as the building of the pyramids or a grand victory over their enemies.[60]

Hebrew festivals, in contrast, while they were aligned with the seasons of the harvest, were also specifically associated with the founding historical event in Israelite history—God’s liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. The Festival of Passover was timed to be held during the first month of spring, the season of barley harvest; the Feast of Weeks coincided with the beginning of the wheat harvest (Exodus 23:16; 34:22); and the Feast of Tabernacles took place at the conclusion of the harvest. But even apart from the Passover itself, which commemorated the salvation of the firstborn, the Feast of Weeks was intended to cause the people to “remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:12), while the Feast of Tabernacles served as a reminder that “I made the people of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:43).[61] Sacral history, rather than mythic history, came to be an integral part of the Hebrew—and Nephite—worldviews.[62]

We know that the people of Nephi kept the law of Moses until the coming of Christ (Mosiah 13:27; Alma 25:15; 3 Nephi 1:24; 9:17; 15:2, 4, 8). Presumably this means that they observed, in some manner, the festivals mandated in the Pentateuch, including the Passover. What we can say for certain is that the Nephites kept the original event of the Passover in their remembrance (Alma 29:11–12; 36:28–29) and that they were indeed mindful of other past events of salvation, including the escape of Lehi from Jerusalem to the land of promise (Alma 9:9–10; 62:50). Moreover, the command to remember, specifically to remember the covenants of the Lord, is found throughout the Book of Mormon as well as the Old Testament. The verb is one of the most frequently used in the former, occurring some 200 times, while in the latter the Hebrew word (root) zakhar (zkr) appears 234 times.[63] Both the Israelites and the Nephites maintained a steady focus both on individual historical events, specifically divine events, and on linking together those sacral events to perceive the hand of the Lord in the broader historical context.

Notes

[1] B. L. Gordon describes the “practice of dividing the circle of the horizon into four cardinal directions” as “almost universal.” “Sacred Directions, Orientation, and the Top of the Map,” History of Religions 10, no. 3 (February 1971): 211–27.

[2] David Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 67–68, 71–73. See E. C. Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations (New York: New American Library, 1983), 290–92; Barbara E. Mundy, “Aztec Geography and Spatial Imagination,” in Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J.A. Talbert (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 123–24. For extensive similar ideas among the Maya, see David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 123–72, esp. 128–29; and Karen Bassie-Sweet, Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 53–83.

[3] B. L. Gordon notes that different cultures favor different directions, but the east is favored in the ancient Near East and many other cultures. The Egyptians were oriented toward the south, which was the direction from which the Nile flowed. See Georges Posener, “Sur l’orientation et l’ordre des points cardinaux chez les Égyptiens,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen 2 (1965): 69–78.

[4] Hugh Nibley, The Ancient State: The Rulers and the Ruled, ed. Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1991), 104. See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: New American Library, 1958), 380–82.

[5] Midrash Tanhuma, Kedoshim 10, translated in Arthur Hertzberg, Judaism, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 205; see Judges 9:37; Ezekiel 38:12.

[6] Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 139.

[7] The Greek temple at Delphi was known as “the navel (Gr. omphalos) of the world,” but the religious significance of this term in Greek culture is not clearly understood. Walter Burkert notes that this term did not commonly attach to Greek temples; see his study “The Meaning and Function of the Temple in Classical Greece,” in Fox, Temple in Society, 27–48. But the term attached to several other places besides Delphi—including Paphos on Cyprus, Sicily.

[8] See Judges 9:37; also Ezekiel 38:12 (referring to Jerusalem). There is a useful discussion of the idea of the navel in Israel, Greece, and elsewhere in Luis I. J. Stadelmann, The Hebrew Conception of the World: A Philological and Literary Study (Rome Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970), 147–54.

[9] Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London: Penguin, 1964), 256. The concept of the navel among the western Semitic peoples, including the Hebrews and the Arabs, is discussed thoroughly in A. J. Wensinck, The Ideas of the Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth (1916), reprinted in Studies of A. J. Wensinck (New York: Arno Press, 1978). For the Israelites and discussion of the biblical sources, see Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 115–22. The name Cuzco in Peru is commonly derived from a Quechua word meaning “navel,” but this derivation has been questioned. Even if that derivation is incorrect, E. C. Krupp notes that “Cuzco’s debt to cosmic order may be greater and more complex than that of any other sacred capital.” Echoes of the Ancient Skies, 270.

[10] See Nicolas Wyatt, Space and Time in the Religious Life of the Near East (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 147.

[11] I. W. Mabbett, “The Symbolism of Mount Meru,” History of Religions 23, no. 1 (August 1983): 64–83. See Kim Plofker, “Humans, Demons, Gods, and Their Worlds: The Sacred and Scientific Cosmologies of India,” in Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J.A. Talbert (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 35–36.

[12] Quoted in Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), 428.

[13] Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 7, notes that although some of the widespread parallels found by the phenomenologists of religion have rightly been questioned due to their assumption of the “psychic unity of mankind,” many of their assertions have been verified by a close examination of the sources, particularly for the ancient Near East. For the Japanese tradition, see Ichiro Hori, “Mountains and Their Importance for the Idea of the Other World in Japanese Folk Religion,” History of Religions 6, no. 1 (August 1966): 1–23.

[14] See Hugh Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,” in Nibley, Ancient State, 102; and Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters, 428.

[15] Samuel Noel Kramer, “The Temple in Sumerian Literature,” in Fox, Temple in Society, 7.

[16] Stefan Maul, “Die altorientalische Hauptstadt—Abbild und Nabel der Welt,” in Die altorientalische Hauptstadt: Kontinuität. Wandel. Bruch, ed. G. Wilhelm (Halle/Saale, Germany: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag, 1997), 121.

[17] See Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters, 430–31. In Daniel 4:10–11, 20, the king of Babylon is likened to “a tree at the center of the earth” whose “top reached to heaven” and “was visible to the end of the whole earth.”

[18] See Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 88.

[19] See 1 Nephi 19:16; 22:25; 3 Nephi 5:24, 26; 16:5; see also John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 145–47.

[20] See John L. Sorenson, “The Settlements of Book of Mormon People,” in Nephite Culture and Society, 136–37.

[21] See Hugh Nibley, “What Is a Temple?,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, ed. Todd M. Compton and Stephen D. Ricks (Provo, UT: FARMS; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1987), 357–58.

[22] See the detailed description and diagram in Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies, 238–41.

[23] Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt, 36–37.

[24] See Hugh Nibley, “The Meaning of the Temple,” in Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, ed. Don E. Norton (Provo, UT: FARMS; Salt Lake City: Salt Lake City: Desert Book, 1992), 18. For the widespread practices of stellar alignment of temples in many ancient civilizations, see Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies, 231–58. For the alignment of cities, see pp. 259–85. Krupp notes on p. 259 that modern Beijing is “the only world capital still laid out according to a sacred cosmological plan” and that “the cosmological motive behind the city’s layout is known and preserved.”

[25] Byron E. Shafer, ed., Temples of Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1.

[26] Shafer, Temples of Ancient Egypt, 3. On the primordial mound, see R. T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959), 37ff.

[27] See John M. Lundquist, “The Common Temple Ideology of the Ancient Near East,” in The Temple in Antiquity: Ancient Records and Modern Perspectives, ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1984); Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 322; and Martin J. Palmer, “Expressions of Sacred Space: Temple Architecture in the Ancient Near East” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 2012), 136.

[28] See Palmer, “Expressions of Sacred Space,” 144.

[29] Stephen D. Ricks and Michael A. Carter, “Temple-Building Motifs: Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Ugarit and Kirtland,” in Parry, Temples of the Ancient World, 158.

[30] See Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 139.

[31] See Jay A. Parry and Donald W. Parry, “The Temple in Heaven: Its Description and Significance,” in Parry, Temples of the Ancient World, 515–32.

[32] See Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 140–42; and Palmer, “Expressions of Sacred Space,” 85n129.

[33] On the significance of the description “exceedingly high,” see David Bokovoy “‘Thou Knowest That I Believe’: Invoking the Spirit of the Lord as Council Witness in 1 Nephi 11,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 1 (2012): 1–23.

[34] Nicolas Wyatt, “The Mythic Mind,” in The Mythic Mind: Essays on Cosmology and Religion in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature (London: Equinox, 2005), 174.

[35] Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, 263–68. See L. Kákosy, “Ideas about the Fallen State of the World in Egyptian Religion: Decline of the Golden Age,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 17, no 2 (1964): 205–16.

[36] Manfried Dietrich and Walter Dietrich, “Zwischen Gott und Volk: Einführung des Königtums und Auswahl des Königs nach mesopotamischer und israelitsicher Anschauung,” in “Und Mose schrieb dieses Lied auf”: Studien zum Alten Testament und zum Alten Orient, ed. Manfried Dietrich and Ingo Kottsieper (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1998), 215–16.

[37] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 23.

[38] See Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 17–27. It is not necessary to accept in full his argument that this practice of reenactment of divine archetypal acts was a means, so to speak, of “overcoming history.” Nonetheless, the basic point is clear from many sources that ancient peoples did see themselves as repeating primordial divine activities.

[39] Lanny Bell, “The New Kingdom ‘Divine’ Temple: The Example of Luxor,” in Shafer, Temples of Ancient Egypt, 283n6.

[40] Erik Hornung, Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought, trans. Elizabeth Bredeck (New York: Timken, 1992), 163.

[41] Tobin, Theological Principles of Egyptian Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 69.

[42] Tobin, Theological Principles, 71.

[43] Eckart Frahm, “Rising Suns and Falling Stars: Assyrian Kings and the Cosmos,” in Experiencing Power, Generating Authority: Cosmos, Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, ed. Jane A. Hill, Philip Jones, and Antonio J. Morales (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2013), 103.

[44] Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 313.

[45] Jean Bottéro, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 158.

[46] Thorkild Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” in Henri Frankfort et al., Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (1946; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 200.

[47] For a good, broad discussion of many complexities of the various notions of “cyclicality” in time and history, see G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

[48] Some Stoic philosophers had an extreme view that when the heavenly bodies had rotated in their cycles to the point at which they arrived again at the same relative positions they had at the beginning of the world, the entire cycle would start over again and everything would repeat itself exactly as before. As Nemesius, a fourth-century Christian bishop later stated, “Socrates and Plato and each individual man will live again, with the same friends and fellow citizens. They will go through the same experiences and the same activities. Every city and village and field will be restored, just as it was. And this restoration of the universe takes place not once, but over and over again—indeed to all eternity without end. Those of the gods who are not subject to destruction, having observed the course of one period, know from this everything which is going to happen it all subsequent periods. For there will never be any new thing other than that which has been before, but everything is repeated down to the minutest detail” (quoted in Edwyn Robert Bevan, ed., Later Greek Religion [London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1927], 30–31; see Whitrow, Time in History: The Evolution of Our General Awareness of Time and Temporal Perspective [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 42). The Christian theologian Origen took issue with this idea, calling it “ludicrous”—specifically that there could ever be more than one Christ (Contra Celsum, bk. 5, chap. 20). See also Alan Richardson, History Sacred and Profane (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), 59 and notes.

[49] Erik Hornung observes: “Egyptian historical records [i.e., king-lists] attest to a keen awareness that individual people and events are unique. In some cases we find admissions of failings or shortcomings on the part of pharaoh, who was usually considered infallible. Even so, the overall historical picture yielded by official inscriptions and pictures is heavily determined by recurring, typical events (Idea into Image, 152).

[50] Nicholas Campion, The Great Year: Astrology, Millenarianism and History in the Western Tradition (London: Arkana, 1994), 16.

[51] Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of Pharaohs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15. Morris Berman, in The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 306, observes that although “official Christian time” in the medieval world was linear, focusing on the biblical timeline stretching from creation to the Second Coming, time as felt on a personal basis was cyclical: the rising and setting of the sun, the annual course of seasons, planting and harvesting, and so forth; there was no sense (as there has been for the last few centuries) that time is precious and should be conserved, like money.

[52] Bell, “New Kingdom ‘Divine’ Temple,” 129–30. R. T. Rundle Clark observes that all significant aspects of civilization were related in Egyptian thinking to the “first time”: “natural phenomena, rituals, royal insignia, plans of temples, magical or medical formulae, the hieroglyphic system of writing, the calendar.” Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, 263–64.

[53] Maul, “Die altorientalische Hauptstadt,” 110.

[54] Stefan M. Maul, “Walking Backwards into the Future: The Conception of Time in the Ancient Near East,” in Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, ed. Tyrus Miller (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2008), 19. See Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 267–72.

[55] See, for example, Genesis 8:22. See also John Briggs Curtis, “A Suggested Interpretation of the Biblical Philosophy of History,” Hebrew Union College Annual 34 (1963): 115–23.

[56] See Bertil Albrektson, History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, repr. ed. (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 1967).

[57] See John J. Collins, “Cosmology: Time and History,” in Religions of the Ancient World, ed. Sarah Iles Johnston (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), 65–66.

[58] Compare 4:9–10; 5:15; 7:18; 8:2, 18; 9:7; 15:15; 16:12; 24:18, 22. See Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Dana M. Pike, and David Rolph Seely, Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009), 138.

[59] See Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 195.

[60] Levenson, in Sinai and Zion, 41, points out that Israel’s sense of identity was not “cosmic and primordial, but historical.”

[61] See Philip A. Allred, “Moses’ Charge to Remember,” in Covenants, Prophecies and Hymns of the Old Testament, 30th Annual Sidney B. Sperry Symposium (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2001), 55–73.

[62] Compare Jan Assmann’s description of the worldview of the Egyptians (and also the Mesopotamians) with respect to the “past”: “The time of the gods is the time of the great events, the time of change from which the world as we have known it for 12,000 years emerged. That is a period that can be narrated about because there is indeed something worth telling. We call these tales myths. They deal with the way the world has become what it is, as well as the mechanisms, rites and institutions which are there to make sure that the world does not disappear again, and which thus protect that world from any further change and discontinuity. We can therefore come to the following general conclusion: the entire intensive occupation with the past reflected in ancient Near Eastern time-reckoning, annals and king-lists serves to shut off history and enhance its desemiotization. In the meanwhile, we have learned enough about the Egyptian and Mesopotamian documentation media to be able to state with some certainty that we are not dealing in these cases with anything that might be called ‘internalised history.’ Memory in the sense of internalized past relates to mythical, not historical, time—because mythical time is a time of becoming, while historical time is seen as the continuation of what has already become.” See Jan Assmann, “Guilt and Remembrance: On the Theologization of History in the Ancient Near East,” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990): 5–33.

[63] See Steven L. Olsen, “Memory and Identity in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 22, no. 2 (2013): 42; and Lloyd D. Graham, “Did ancient peoples of Egypt and the Near East really imagine themselves as facing the past, with the future behind them?,” https://www.academia.edu/36840376/Did_ancient_peoples_of_Egypt_and_the_Near_East_really_imagine_themselves_as_facing­_the­_past_with_the_future_behind_them. For a thorough word study, see Brevard S. Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel (Naperville IL: A.R. Allenson, 1962).