Book of Abraham — Cosmology

Kolob, the Sun, and the Cosmology the CES Letter Never Actually Read

The CES Letter argues that the Book of Abraham teaches an outdated, geocentric, Newtonian cosmology — the sun powered by the revolutions of Kolob, roughly 86% of certain chapters copied from King James Genesis, and anachronistic names that could not have belonged to Abraham’s world. On each of these, Jeremy took the flattest available reading of a text that, in its own words, refuses it.

What the CES Letter Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

The Book of Abraham reflects an obsolete astronomy: Facsimile 2, Figure 5 explains that the sun (Enish-go-on-dosh) “borrow[s] its light from Kolob,” a picture the Letter reads as incompatible with what modern science understands about how the sun generates its own energy.

The CES Letter’s Argument

A large share of Book of Abraham chapters 2, 4, and 5 closely parallels the King James wording of Genesis chapters 1, 2, 11, and 12 — which the Letter treats as suspicious for a supposedly ancient record carrying 17th-century English phrasing.

The CES Letter’s Argument

Names such as Chaldeans, Egyptus, and Pharaoh read as anachronistic for Abraham’s era, and Abraham’s own references to the facsimiles in Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 are problematic because the surviving documents are later Egyptian copies rather than artifacts of Abraham’s own day.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Every cosmology objection in the CES Letter turns on a single interpretive decision Jeremy made at the outset and never revisited: he chose to read the Book of Abraham’s astronomy as a mechanical claim about how the physical universe operates — Kolob as a power plant beaming energy to a sun that would otherwise go dark. That is the simplistic path. It lets a critic wave a physics textbook and declare victory.

The other path — the one the text itself marks out — is that the passage is (1) explicitly attributed to Egyptian belief, and (2) explicitly framed as a matter of reckoning and government, an observer-anchored hierarchy of time and dominion, not a wiring diagram of the solar system. The fork is not subtle. It is written into the very sentences Jeremy quoted. He simply declined to quote the qualifiers.

Read the CES Letter’s own citation again: Facsimile 2, Figure 5, describing the body the Egyptians called Enish-go-on-dosh, states that it “is said by the Egyptians to be the Sun, and to borrow its light from Kolob.” The clause “said by the Egyptians” is doing decisive work. The explanation is not asserting an optical mechanism as revealed truth; it is cataloguing what the Egyptians who drew the hypocephalus believed about the figure. A facsimile is, by definition, an Egyptian artifact being interpreted in Egyptian terms. Jeremy silently dropped “said by the Egyptians” and then charged the text with bad physics it never claimed. That is the lesser choice in miniature: strip the qualifier, then refute the strawman that remains.

“Govern” Means Dominion and Reckoning — Not Photons

When Abraham 3 and Facsimile 2 call Kolob a “governing” body, the text tells you exactly what it means by the word. Facsimile 2, Figure 1 defines Kolob as “nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time.” Government here is nearness to the throne of God and priority in the ordering of time — a theological and temporal hierarchy, not a claim that one star physically supplies energy to another.

Abraham 3 makes the point word by word. The whole revelation is cast in the language of reckoning: “one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning” (Abraham 3:4); one body is greater than another “in point of reckoning” (Abraham 3:5); “it is given unto thee to know the times of reckoning… the set time of the earth upon which thou standest” (Abraham 3:6). Every comparison is anchored to the observer — “that whereon thou standest” — and expressed as a ratio of time, culminating in Kolob being “set nigh unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets which belong to the same order” (Abraham 3:9).

This is not the absolute, universal-clock cosmos of Newton that Jeremy imputes to the text. It is a cosmos in which the measurement of time is explicitly relative to where the observer stands and to which sphere governs it. The idea that a “day” in one location equals a thousand years in another is, at minimum, not naive 19th-century physics — and it resonates strikingly with the frame-dependent time that Einstein would formalize in 1905, sixty-three years after the Book of Abraham was published. We treat that resonance carefully and at length in a companion study of Joseph Smith and Einsteinian relativity; here it is enough to note that a text supposedly guilty of outdated absolutism instead insists, over and over, that time is reckoned relative to the observer.

Nor is “a day is as a thousand years” some fingerprint of frontier astronomy. It is biblical: “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8; compare Psalm 90:4). What the Book of Abraham adds is a systematized hierarchy of such reckonings. That is a theological cosmology of dominion and time, and reading it as a busted physics equation is a choice — the weaker one. For the fuller picture of what Kolob is and is not, see the treatment of Kolob as the governing star nearest the throne of God.

The Strongest Form of the Objection: Thomas Dick

A careful critic will say the CES Letter’s phrasing is clumsy but the underlying point survives: the Book of Abraham’s graded cosmos — nested spheres of increasing dominion rising toward the dwelling of God — is exactly the picture that was “in the air” in Joseph Smith’s religious world. The strongest version names a specific book: Thomas Dick’s The Philosophy of a Future State (1830 London ed.; first pub. Glasgow 1829), a work sold in Kirtland and excerpted (by editor Oliver Cowdery) in the Church’s own Messenger and Advocate in 1836. Dick describes a magnificent hierarchy of worlds and systems ascending toward a central divine throne. Fawn Brodie and later critics proposed it as the quarry from which the Kolob cosmology was cut. This — not the garbled “fusion” complaint — is the argument that deserves an answer.

Grant the parallel its full strength and it still falls short of the specifics. Dick offers a general Enlightenment vision of graduated worlds; he does not offer Kolob, does not offer a body whose single revolution equals a thousand earth-years, does not frame the whole system as observer-relative “reckoning,” does not tie the hierarchy to a premortal council of intelligences, and does not present any of it as the recovered astronomy of a named patriarch catalogued alongside Egyptian figure-explanations. The shared element is the least distinctive one — a cosmos with more than one inhabited order and a God at its center — a notion already available in scripture Joseph possessed. The load-bearing, peculiar features of Abraham 3 have no home in Dick. The most a fair reading grants is that Joseph’s milieu made a grand cosmos thinkable; it does not account for the text he actually produced. Jeremy’s version does not even engage this; it trades the serious source-critical case for a physics gotcha that the facsimile’s own words disarm.

The 86% Overlap: The Wrong 86%

The overlap statistic sounds devastating until you ask what it actually measures. Abraham chapters 4 and 5 are a creation account, and chapter 2 recounts Abraham’s call and journey — the very events Genesis 1, 2, 11, and 12 also record. Two records of the same events, rendered by the same prophet-translator in the scriptural English his readers knew, will of course converge. Overlap is precisely what a restored parallel account should produce. The Prophet was openly re-treating the same ground; the shared wording is a feature of that project, not a smoking gun.

The choice Jeremy made was to spotlight the shared 86% and pass over the divergent remainder — which is where the evidential weight actually sits. Where Genesis says God “created,” Abraham 4 says “the Gods organized” — a plural divine council and creation from pre-existing matter, motifs now well documented in ancient Near Eastern literature that was untranslated in 1842. Abraham 3 adds a premortal existence of “intelligences” and a council before the creation, absent from Genesis entirely. A forger cribbing the King James Bible produces the 86% that matches; he does not, from that same King James Bible, produce the roughly 14% that quietly lines up with an ancient world scholars had not yet recovered. Jeremy measured the overlap that any translation of the same events guarantees and ignored the divergence a 19th-century copyist could not manufacture. That is the wrong 86%.

Anachronisms: The Argument That Indicts Genesis Too

The anachronism charge quietly assumes the Book of Abraham claims to be a word-for-word transcript in Abraham’s own vocabulary. It does not. Latter-day Saints hold that inspired translation renders ancient content in the idiom the modern reader recognizes — which is why the Book of Mormon can speak of “Christ” before the Nativity and quote Isaiah in King James cadence. “Pharaoh” in an 1842 English text is simply the word Joseph’s readers used for an Egyptian king.

But here the objection does more than assume its conclusion — it self-destructs. The exact terms Jeremy calls impossible in Abraham’s era appear in the Genesis account of Abraham that he treats as the authentic control. Genesis places Abram in “Ur of the Chaldees” (Genesis 11:28, 11:31) and sends him down to “Pharaoh” in Egypt (Genesis 12:15). If “Chaldeans” and “Pharaoh” disqualify the Book of Abraham, they disqualify the Bible’s own Abraham narrative on identical grounds. An argument that proves the Book of Genesis is a forgery has proved too much, and can be set down.

The facsimile-reference objection misreads the text as well. Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 have Abraham pointing his reader to figures he himself supplied — “I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record” and “I have given you the fashion of them.” The surviving papyri are later Egyptian copies within a long transmission of such temple and funerary imagery, not the autograph of Abraham. How the received facsimiles relate to that original tradition is a real and interesting question — and one we take up directly, with the Egyptologists’ own findings, on the sibling study The Papyri — What the Egyptologists Actually Say. For the wider case that the Book of Abraham is an authentic restoration rather than a misread scroll, see the overview of the Book of Abraham.

This Was Answered Before 2013

A doubter sometimes hears that the Church only addressed these questions after the CES Letter forced the issue. That is not the record. The observer-relative reading of Abraham 3, the ancient-Near-Eastern parallels to the council-of-Gods creation, and the transmission history of the facsimiles were all in print in faithful scholarship long before Jeremy Runnells wrote in April 2013 — in Hugh Nibley’s The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (1975) and Abraham in Egypt (1981), and in the published work of Egyptologists such as John Gee and Kerry Muhlestein in the years preceding the letter. The answers did not have to be invented after the objection; they predate it. The CES Letter presents long-discussed questions as fresh knockout blows.

Verdict

Resolved. The “sun powered by Kolob” charge is answered by the citation itself: the facsimile explicitly records what “the Egyptians” said, and Abraham 3 defines “govern” as dominion and time-reckoning, anchored to “that whereon thou standest” — the opposite of the absolute Newtonian clock Jeremy assigned it. The anachronism argument collapses because its own terms sit in the Genesis Abraham it trusts. The 86% overlap is the expected signature of two accounts of the same events, while the non-overlapping material — the divine council, creation from organized matter, premortal intelligences — is exactly what a 19th-century copyist of the King James Bible could not have produced. Even the strongest naturalistic source, Thomas Dick, supplies only a generic graded cosmos and none of the text’s load-bearing peculiarities.

Genuinely (and only mildly) open. The precise line of transmission from Abraham’s original figures to the surviving first-century papyri, and how much of the Prophet’s facsimile interpretation restores meaning versus preserves the Egyptians’ own, remain matters of active, faithful study — pursued in detail on our papyri page. What is not open is the cosmology verdict Jeremy staked his case on. Faced with a text that qualifies itself in every clause, he chose the reading that ignored the qualifiers. It made for a sharper accusation and a weaker argument.

Further Study