Tag Archives: holy of holies

The Altar of Incense as an Altar of Prayer

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Some of our critics have been quick to contend that our modern temples and practices have no relationship whatever to the temples of ancient Israel. This is a quick judgment indeed. [...]

John Welch on Margaret Barker’s Temple Studies

There is an interesting post at The T&T Clark Blog with a transcription of an address that BYU’s John Welch gave on March 5th in London at a conference about Margaret Barker’s latest book, Temple Themes in Christian Worship, and her scholarly work on temple subjects in ancient Christianity and Judaism. FARMS lists Welch as [...]

Priestly Initiations in the Testament of Levi

The Testament of Levi is one of the books in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and is an apocryphal and pseudopigraphal work so we do not know its original author or source. The Testament of Levi, as we have it today, was composed in its final form in the second century B.C. [...]

Early Byzantine Veil with Gammadia

Last night a reader referenced me to what appears to be a new blog by Bill Hamblin, a well-known LDS scholar and Associate Professor of History at BYU, and particularly about a post of his of a couple week ago. Dr. Hamblin talks about early Byzantine veils, and especially one that he has photographs of [...]

Sacrifice Continues in the Temple

One of the criticisms leveled at the LDS (Mormon) practice of temple worship is the seemingly dissimilar forms of the ordinances when compared with those found practiced by ancient Israelites in the Bible. It is true that the forms of the ordinances and sacrifices are different, but their meaning and symbolism remain the same. [...]

Temple as a Scale-Model of the Universe

Several scholars, both LDS and members of other faiths, have noted that the temple is a model of the universe:

The temple is a scale model of the universe…
…the temple represents the principle of ordering the universe.
[The temple is] for the purpose of taking our bearings on the universe…
…the temple reflects things as they exist [...]

Iconostasis - An Eastern Orthodox Veil

On my tour through Ukraine a couple years ago I became familiar with what is known as the iconostasis (plural iconostases) that is found in almost every Eastern Orthodox Church. This is a thin wall or partition that separates the nave, where the lay worshipers reside, from the sanctuary in the church, where the [...]

Temple Imagery in the Book of Mormon

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship website has shared a quote from Hugh Nibley on their homepage today:
The word atonement appears only once in the New Testament, but 127 times in the Old Testament. . . . In the other Standard Works of the Church, atonement (including related terms atone, atoned, atoneth, atoning) [...]