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Abraham

Standing disclosure — KJV-overlap material. This page reports verbal correspondence with the King James text as textual fact, including where the correspondence follows the KJV’s English translation. What that correspondence implies about the origin of the text — in any direction — is an external question outside this wiki’s scope. Both the book of Abraham and Genesis are hosted corpus texts and legal reference points; the wiki maps their internal world, states the divergences exactly, and leaves the origin of the parallel to the reader (per the wiki’s standing editorial position on Book-of-Mormon ↔ KJV overlap).

Scope of this page. The Book of Abraham is a five-chapter first-person record (“I, Abraham”) of the patriarch’s deliverance from sacrifice, his covenant and journey, and two revelations given him — one of the heavens (ch. 3) and one of the creation (chs. 4–5). This page maps the text’s internal world only. The published editions carry facsimiles: the record itself refers to “the representation at the commencement of this record” (Abraham 1:12) and to “the figures at the beginning, which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans Rahleenos, which signifies hieroglyphics” (Abraham 1:14). Those figures are not part of the frozen verse corpus and are not described here, and the external, real-world questions about them (Egyptology, translation, provenance) are outside this wiki’s scope entirely. This page treats Abraham as this corpus presents him and cross-links to the Book of Mormon, which invokes Abraham constantly but records none of the book of Abraham’s distinctive material.

The father of the covenant, told here in his own voice. Marked for sacrifice on an idol’s altar in Chaldea, he cries to the Lord and is delivered by “the angel of his presence”; Jehovah names himself, promises him a great nation and a priesthood to “bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations”, and leads him out. Given the Urim and Thummim, he is shown the governing stars, “the great one” Kolob, “set nigh unto the throne of God,” and the reckoning of the Lord’s time; shown, too, the pre-mortal “intelligences that were organized before the world was” and “the noble and great ones”, and told “thou wast chosen before thou wast born.” The record closes with a creation account voiced in the plural — “the Gods” who organized and ordered the heavens and the earth.

Account

The priest of Elkenah, and the deliverance (Abraham 1)

Abraham opens in “the land of the Chaldeans, at the residence of my fathers” (Abraham 1:1), seeking “the blessings of the fathers, and the right whereunto I should be ordained” (Abraham 1:2). His own fathers, however, have “turned from their righteousness… unto the worshiping of the gods of the heathen” (Abraham 1:5) — a roster of named idols: “the god of Elkenah, and the god of Libnah, and the god of Mahmackrah, and the god of Korash, and the god of Pharaoh, king of Egypt” (Abraham 1:6). The worship includes child sacrifice (Abraham 1:7–8), and it turns on Abraham himself: they “endeavored to take away my life by the hand of the priest of Elkenah. The priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh” (Abraham 1:7). The text records a prior instance — “three virgins at one time, who were the daughters of Onitah” (Abraham 1:11), killed on the altar “because of their virtue” for refusing to “bow down to worship gods of wood or of stone” (Abraham 1:11).

Bound on that altar — “the priests laid violence upon me, that they might slay me also” (Abraham 1:12) — Abraham “lifted up my voice unto the Lord my God, and the Lord hearkened and heard, and he filled me with the vision of the Almighty, and the angel of his presence stood by me, and immediately unloosed my bands” (Abraham 1:15). The delivering voice names itself: “Abraham, Abraham, behold, my name is Jehovah, and I have heard thee, and have come down to deliver thee” (Abraham 1:16). The Lord then “broke down the altar of Elkenah… and smote the priest that he died” (Abraham 1:20), and a promised famine follows (Abraham 1:29–30).

Priesthood, lineage, and the Pharaoh exclusion (Abraham 1)

The chapter’s second thread is genealogical authority. Abraham claims “the right belonging to the fathers” (Abraham 1:2) — a right that “came down from the fathers, from the beginning of time… even the right of the firstborn, or the first man, who is Adam” (Abraham 1:3). The deliverance is tied to it: the Lord will “put upon thee my name, even the Priesthood of thy father” (Abraham 1:18). Against this the text sets the house of Pharaoh, descended “from the loins of Ham” (Abraham 1:21): Pharaoh is called “a righteous man” who “established his kingdom and judged his people wisely” (Abraham 1:26), yet was “cursed… as pertaining to the Priesthood” (Abraham 1:26) — “of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood” (Abraham 1:27). The record’s own stated internal warrant is documentary: Abraham holds “the records of the fathers, even the patriarchs, concerning the right of Priesthood” (Abraham 1:31), from which he draws “a knowledge of the beginning of the creation, and also of the planets, and of the stars” — the two revelations the later chapters supply.

The covenant and the journey (Abraham 2)

Commanded out — “Abraham, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee” (Abraham 2:3) — Abraham receives the covenant proper. Jehovah, who says “I know the end from the beginning” (Abraham 2:8), promises: “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee above measure, and make thy name great among all nations… that in their hands they shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations” (Abraham 2:9). The covenant is expressly gospel-and-priesthood: “as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed” (Abraham 2:10), and through his seed “shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal” (Abraham 2:11). He journeys to Canaan, builds altars, and at Egypt’s border receives the instruction that his wife say “she is thy sister” (Abraham 2:24–25) — the record breaking off there.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. The seed-blessing formula the Book of Mormon repeatedly attributes to Abraham is here recorded as spoken to him, first-person, by Jehovah:

  • Abraham 2:11: “…and in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel…”
  • 1 Nephi 22:9 (Book of Mormon): “…the covenants of the Father of heaven unto Abraham, saying: In thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed.”

The distinctive frame — in thy seed … shall all the [families / kindreds] of the earth be blessed — is shared; the one substantive divergence is the noun (“families” in Abraham, “kindreds” in the Nephite citations at 1 Nephi 15:18, 1 Nephi 22:9, 3 Nephi 20:25, 20:27). Reported as a textual fact: the Nephite writers cite the covenant as one already “made… unto Abraham,” while this record purports to give the occasion of its speaking. The Book-of-Mormon side of this covenant network is hosted on The Covenant of Israel; only the Abraham-side pairing is registered here.

The heavens: Kolob and the reckoning of times (Abraham 3)

Given “the Urim and Thummim… in Ur of the Chaldees” (Abraham 3:1), Abraham is shown a hierarchy of stars, “the governing ones” (Abraham 3:3), of which “the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God” (Abraham 3:3). Kolob’s single revolution “was a day unto the Lord… it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest” (Abraham 3:4), and it is “set nigh unto the throne of God” (Abraham 3:9), “the greatest of all the Kokaubeam” (Abraham 3:16). The revelation gives a small lexicon in a named language: “Shinehah, which is the sun… Kokob, which is star… Olea, which is the moon… Kokaubeam, which signifies stars” (Abraham 3:13). The scene is one of direct converse:

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. The mode of Abraham’s theophany is described in an idiom the Book of Mormon uses once, for another prophet who saw the Lord:

  • Abraham 3:11: “Thus I, Abraham, talked with the Lord, face to face, as one man talketh with another; and he told me of the works which his hands had made…”
  • Ether 12:39 (Book of Mormon): “And then shall ye know that I have seen Jesus, and that he hath talked with me face to face, and that he told me in plain humility, even as a man telleth another in mine own language…”

The binding contact is the paired formula face to face + as/even as a man talketh/telleth another. “Face to face” alone is common in this corpus (e.g. Alma 38:7, 2 Nephi 33:11, and in a martial sense Alma 2:29, Mosiah 10:19); the fuller as-a-man-talketh clause joins it, across the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price, at three theophany verses: Abraham 3:11; Moses 7:4 (“even as a man talketh one with another, face to face” — Enoch’s account of the same converse); and Ether 12:39 (“telleth”). The Old Testament carries the formula’s landmark instance: “And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33:11). 1 Nephi 11:11’s “as a man speaketh with another” is a near-variant without “face to face” in the verse. Divergence: “talketh with another” (Abraham) vs. “telleth another in mine own language” (Ether 12:39, Moroni’s testimony of the Lord’s face-to-face converse with him). Reported as a shared-phrasing fact, not a claim that either text depends on the other.

Intelligences, the noble and great, and the council (Abraham 3)

The star-vision opens onto a doctrine of pre-mortal beings. The Lord reasons from greater-and-lesser lights to greater-and-lesser spirits: “if there be two spirits, and one shall be more intelligent than the other… these two spirits, notwithstanding one is more intelligent than the other, have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end… for they are gnolaum, or eternal” (Abraham 3:18); “I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all” (Abraham 3:19). Abraham is then “shown… the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones” (Abraham 3:22), and is placed among them: “Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born” (Abraham 3:23).

There follows a council. “One among them that was like unto God” proposes, “We will go down… and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell” (Abraham 3:24); the earth is a probation — “we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them” (Abraham 3:25) — with graded outcomes tied to “their first estate” and “their second estate” (Abraham 3:26). The commissioning exchange and its aftermath: “the Lord said: Whom shall I send? And one answered like unto the Son of Man: Here am I, send me. And another answered and said: Here am I, send me. And the Lord said: I will send the first” (Abraham 3:27); “the second was angry, and kept not his first estate; and, at that day, many followed after him” (Abraham 3:28). The phrases first estate, second estate, noble and great ones, gnolaum, and intelligences … organized before the world was are, across the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price, distinctive to this chapter; the Book of Mormon carries no counterpart to the council scene itself. Of these, first estate also stands in the frozen New Testament — of the angels “which kept not their first estate” (Jude 1:6) — disclosed here as a textual fact; the other four remain without counterpart elsewhere in the frozen corpus.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. Abraham 3’s pre-mortal foreordination can be read alongside the Book of Mormon’s one sustained statement of a priesthood prepared before this life — Alma 13. The textual facts are two. Abraham is told he was among “the noble and great ones” (Abraham 3:22) and “chosen before thou wast born” (Abraham 3:23); Alma teaches that certain priests were “called and prepared from the foundation of the world according to the foreknowledge of God, on account of their exceeding faith and good works; in the first place being left to choose good or evil; therefore they having chosen good” (Alma 13:3). Both texts locate a selection to holy office before mortal life and ground it in prior righteousness. But the contact is thematic, not verbal: they share no distinctive phrase — Abraham’s “chosen before thou wast born” and “noble and great ones” find no echo in Alma’s “prepared from the foundation of the world” and “foreknowledge of God” (a clause the corpus uses broadly for the plan of redemption — Benjamin at Mosiah 4:7, Alma at Alma 12:30). That these two passages describe the same doctrine is a reading offered for the reader to weigh; the shared idea of pre-mortal foreordination to the priesthood is real in the text, a shared source or phrasing is not claimed.

”The Gods” and the creation (Abraham 4–5)

The creation account is the book’s most distinctive textual feature: it is voiced in the plural throughout. “They went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth” (Abraham 4:1). Two verbs recur where a reader might expect “created” — the Gods organize and order: “the Gods ordered the expanse” (Abraham 4:7); “the Gods organized the earth to bring forth grass” (Abraham 4:12); “the Gods saw that they were obeyed” (Abraham 4:10, and repeatedly). The counsel is explicit and corporate: “Let us go down and form man in our image, after our likeness” (Abraham 4:26); “in the image of the Gods to form they him, male and female to form they them” (Abraham 4:27). The days are numbered as “times” — “they numbered the sixth time” (Abraham 4:31) — and the seventh is a counseled rest: “On the seventh time we will end our work, which we have counseled; and we will rest on the seventh time” (Abraham 5:2). Man is formed “from the dust of the ground,” and the Gods “took his spirit… and put it into him… and man became a living soul” (Abraham 5:7). The reckoning-of-times motif from chapter 3 closes the account: “I, Abraham, saw that it was after the Lord’s time, which was after the time of Kolob; for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning” (Abraham 5:13). This plural-Gods, organize-and-order rendering is presented here strictly as a textual fact about this book’s account; the Book of Mormon’s own creation references do not share its distinctive vocabulary, and no Book-of-Mormon cross-link is claimed. The Genesis side of the account is treated below, in Beside Genesis.

Beside Genesis

The book of Abraham is largely its own record — the Ur-altar deliverance, the Pharaoh-priesthood exclusion, Kolob and the reckoning of times, the intelligences and the council have no counterpart in Genesis. But at two stretches it runs closely parallel to Genesis: the covenant and journey of Abraham 2 beside Genesis 12, and the creation account of Abraham 4–5 beside Genesis 1–2. The correspondence and every divergence are reported here as textual facts; the two texts are one narrative rendered twice, and the wiki gives no account of the origin of that rendering (see the standing disclosure above).

The covenant and the journey (Abraham 2 ∥ Genesis 12)

Abraham 2 tells in the first person (“I, Abraham”) the journey Genesis 12 tells in the third. The call is near-verbatim:

[Textual] — the call of Abram.

  • Abraham 2:3: “Abraham, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.”
  • Genesis 12:1: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee”.

Four divergences, each reported as a fact: Abraham’s added vocative “Abraham,”; the spelling “show” for the King James “shew”; the sentence-initial capital (Genesis “Get,” Abraham mid-sentence “get”); and the terminal mark — Genesis points the clause with a colon and continues into 12:2, Abraham closes the verse.

The covenant follows the same frame — “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee … make thy name great” (Abraham 2:9 ∥ Genesis 12:2, ), and “I will bless them that bless thee,” with Abraham cursing them that curse and Genesis him that curseth, closing on the families of the earth blessed (Abraham 2:11 ∥ Genesis 12:3, ) — with Abraham expanding it into the gospel-priesthood-seed language the Covenant of Israel page hosts. The migration inventory — the substance gathered and the souls in Haran, Abraham’s “won” for Genesis’s “gotten” (Abraham 2:15 ∥ Genesis 12:5, ) — the Sechem/Sichem station (where Genesis’s Abram builds an altar, 12:7, Abraham offers sacrifice in the plains of Moreh, 2:18 — his altars stand at Jershon, 2:17, and by Bethel), the altar between Bethel and Hai (Abraham 2:19–20 ∥ Genesis 12:8, ), and the southward journey all track closely.

One divergence is worth stating precisely. In the sister-wife instruction at Egypt’s border, Genesis has Abram devise the plan and tell Sarai to say she is his sister (“Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister”, Genesis 12:11–13); Abraham has the Lord instruct Abraham to have her say it (“Let her say unto the Egyptians, she is thy sister,” Abraham 2:22–24, ). Same event, a different agent of the instruction — reported as a textual fact.

The creation (Abraham 4–5 ∥ Genesis 1–2)

Abraham 4 follows the six days of Genesis 1 clause by clause, and Abraham 5 follows Genesis 2. Two pervasive differences run through the whole account, reported as textual facts: Abraham reads “the Gods” (plural) where Genesis reads “God,” and Abraham’s characteristic verbs are organize / order / form where Genesis reads create / make.

[Textual] — the opening.

  • Abraham 4:1: “And then the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth.”
  • Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

[Textual] — the first command.

  • Abraham 4:3: “And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light; and there was light.”
  • Genesis 1:3: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

The counsel to make man is plural in both texts — Genesis 1:26 already reads “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”; the divergence is the verb, “Let us go down and form man” (Abraham 4:26) for “Let us make man” (Genesis 1:26, ). The seventh unit is a counseled rest — “we will rest on the seventh time” (Abraham 5:2) for “he rested on the seventh day” (Genesis 2:2, ) — the day-as-”time” idiom carried from Abraham 3’s reckoning of Kolob. And where Genesis forms man of the dust and breathes the breath of life (Genesis 2:7), Abraham adds a clause with no Genesis counterpart:

[Textual] — man and his spirit.

  • Abraham 5:7: “And the Gods formed man from the dust of the ground, and took his spirit (that is, the man’s spirit), and put it into him; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”
  • Genesis 2:7: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

Significance

The Book of Abraham does two things the rest of this corpus does not. First, it records the covenant of Israel from the inside — not as a promise later prophets cite (the “covenant the Lord made to our father Abraham,” 1 Nephi 15:18), but as words Jehovah speaks directly to the man, binding gospel, priesthood, and seed into a single grant (Abraham 2:9–11). The Book of Mormon says of Abraham that the covenant was made; this book stages its making. Second, it opens two vistas — the ordered heavens governed from Kolob (Abraham 3:2–16) and the pre-mortal council of “the noble and great ones” (Abraham 3:22–28) — for which the Book of Mormon offers, at most, a thematic neighbor in Alma 13’s fore-prepared priesthood, and no verbal parallel at all. The honest register of this page is therefore short on connections by design: of the book’s most striking material (Kolob, gnolaum, first and second estate, “the Gods” who organize), almost none reaches across to the Nephite record, and the one place it plainly does — the seed-blessing covenant — is a citation the Book of Mormon makes of Abraham, hosted on its own page and cross-linked here.

Key references

The Covenant of Israel · Messiah · Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Abraham (chapters 1–5). Cross-linked Book of Mormon verses (1 Nephi 15:18; 1 Nephi 22:9; 3 Nephi 20:25, 20:27; Alma 13:3; Ether 12:39; and the distribution comparanda Mosiah 4:7, Alma 12:30, Alma 38:7, 2 Nephi 33:11, Alma 2:29, Mosiah 10:19) were read from the frozen source corpus and quoted verbatim, as were the Genesis verses of the Beside-Genesis section (a hosted corpus book since the Old-Testament freeze). No facsimile material was used or cited; external historicity and Egyptology are out of scope.

Every quote on this page is taken verbatim from the frozen source (Abraham 1–5 and the cited Book of Mormon verses), each checked character-for-character against the frozen source. This page registers fourteen connection records: eleven Abraham–Genesis [Textual] side-by-side records (the Beside-Genesis section), two [textual] Book-of-Mormon pairs (the seed-blessing covenant, Abraham 2:11 ↔ 1 Nephi 22:9; and the theophany idiom, Abraham 3:11 ↔ Ether 12:39) and one [interpretive] (pre-mortal foreordination, Abraham 3:23 ↔ Alma 13:3, offered for weighing). The distinctive Abraham-only vocabulary — Kolob, gnolaum, “the noble and great ones”, “first/second estate,” “the Gods” who organize — was checked across the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price and found without Book-of-Mormon counterpart; it is therefore reported as textual fact, not connection. The seed-blessing network’s Book-of-Mormon side is hosted on covenant-of-israel.md, not re-registered here; only the Abraham-side pairing carries page “abraham.md.” Facsimiles are noted only insofar as the verse text itself refers to figures “at the beginning” (Abraham 1:12, 1:14); the figures are not in the frozen corpus and are not described. External, real-world historicity is out of scope.