Another great video from David Tayman and David Larsen from their series of videos on the ancient temple. This one begins a discussion of the three degrees of glory, focusing first on the bronze laver.

Feel free to share with us your thoughts in the comments below.

Temple Video Series: Part 2a – Three Degrees of Glory (Bronze Laver)

Video of the Scale Model of the Salt Lake Temple. (Press play to view)

Today, the Church unveiled an 88-inch scale model of the Salt Lake Temple in the South Visitors’ Center on Temple Square in Salt Lake.  You can see an introduction of the model in the video clip above.  It is a 1:32 scale replica of the temple, with the walls cut away so visitors can see the rooms inside.  Sixteen model makers constructed the model over five months, and went to great lengths to construct the model, using thousands of photographs to make sure every intricate detail was accurate, from the murals, to the wall paintings, chairs, lighting fixtures, etc.  You can look into nearly every room.

The community regularly gets to tour new temples in a public open house before they are dedicated, but since it’s been so long since the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, they hope this model will allow visitors to get the same experience of this temple:

"This replica will show the millions of visitors who come to Temple Square the beauty and majesty of this sacred and historic building," said Elder Richard G. Hinckley, executive director of the Missionary Department. "Like all temples, once the building is dedicated it is used for sacred Church purposes and not open to the general public, but this exhibit will provide the public with a glimpse of the interior and a feeling of the Spirit that is present there."

You can read more details, and see a few photos, about the model in the Church’s news release.  They also have more details about the project, photos, audio clips, and a fact sheet at this link about the creation process.

I’m going to have to go up to Temple Square to see this fantastic new model.

Scale Model Exhibit of the Salt Lake Temple Opened on Temple Square

David Tayman from the blog Visions of the Kingdom, and David Larsen from Heavenly Ascents, have teamed up to produce a series of short YouTube videos on the ancient temple.  The focus of the presentations will be to explore the nature, function, doctrine and ritual of the ancient temple.  This is done with the purpose of providing a richer experience and understanding to our modern temple worship.  They are very well done, with great sound, video, and narration.  I will feature them here as they are produced.

Thanks to the Davids for providing these fantastic videos! Did you gain any new insights from the video above? Feel free to share with us your thoughts in the comments below.

Temple Video Series: Part 1 – Sacred Space

Celestial Room in the Gila Valley Arizona Temple

The open house has been announced for the Gila Valley Arizona Temple, which was announced in General Conference just two years ago.  The open house will start on Friday, April 23rd, and run through Saturday, May 15th.  The dedication will take place on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010. 

Because the construction of this temple was announced just in April of 2008, with groundbreaking in February 2009, this may be the fastest construction of a temple in history.  Does anyone know of a temple that was constructed in a shorter time than this one?

"All of this came together in just a marvelous way," said Mark Bryce, temple committee coordinator for the Gila Valley Temple. "During the day or at night, it's a beautiful building, a magnificent structure, and the people who will visit the temple will feel the spirit of the house dedicated to the Savior."…

The temple is constructed on the exterior with architectural pre-cast concrete. Art-glass designs accentuate its windows. Interior materials include maple and cherry wood from the United States, along with marble and limestone. Interior murals depict local river, desert and mountain landscapes.

The Gila Valley temple will be the 132nd temple of the Church.

I’ve noticed that the design of this temple’s celestial room seems more simple to that of some other recent temples, such as the Vancouver British Columbia Temple, which will have its dedication on May 2nd; the difference between architecture firms perhaps?

Celestial Room in Vancouver British Columbia Temple

The Gila Valley Arizona Temple Completed in Record Time?

Dr. Hugh Nibley lecturing

As I posted a few months ago, the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), in conjunction with Religious Education and the Harold B. Lee library, presented a weekly lecture series during the Winter Semester 2010 in honor of the 100th anniversary of Hugh Nibley’s birth, who was born on March 27, 1910.

The lecture series concluded on April 8th.  I was able to attend some of the presentations, and they were very well done.  I’m grateful to be able to get to know better the man, scholar, and saint, Hugh Nibley, and what he taught.

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute has reported that video of the lecture series presentations will be made available soon, likely on the Neal A. Maxwell website.

Transcripts of two of the lectures have already been made available:

• Marilyn Arnold – “Words, words, words’: Hugh Nibley on the Book of Mormon”
• C. Wilfred Griggs – “Hugh Nibley, Mentor to the Saints.”

The Institute also reports that an updated bibliography of Hugh Nibley’s works has been made available.

An article by Hugh Nibley has also been made available that has not been published in The Collected Works called “Beyond Politics.”  The talk was given on October 26, 1973 to the Pi Sigma Alpha honor society in the Political Science Department at BYU. It first appeared in BYU Studies 15/1 (1974): 3-28; and was reprinted in Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless.

I’m still curious if these articles available here are still unpublished elsewhere in The Collected Works.  If anyone knows, I’d be interested to find out if they have been published or will be published.

Updates about Hugh Nibley’s Centennial Commemoration

I have posted links to TempleStudy.com articles on my personal Twitter and Facebook accounts for a long time, but I thought it was about time to make their own official accounts.  Now, if you just want updates about TempleStudy.com and not from me, or vice versa, or want to filter your social network notifications in some other way, you can do that.  Here are the official account links:

• Twitter TempleStudy.com Profile – follow me here on Twitter to get the latest updates from the site in your Twitter stream.
• Facebook TempleStudy.com Page – become a fan of the TempleStudy.com page on Facebook, and see updates from the site in your Facebook News Feed, and easily share them with friends from there.

Now you don’t need to be updated about my frequent 5K runs anymore, if you don’t want to (I’m training for a half marathon in June).  But if you are interested in my personal activities, you might like to know that I just finished version 1.0 of BryceHaymond.com, my design consultancy business I call Blackpool Design.  As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m out of full-time work, and I’m looking for clients who need freelance design, whether product design, graphic design, or web design.  If you know of someone who is looking for design, I’d be very grateful for your referral.

Once I get my house in order a bit more, I’d really like to get back to studying the temple, and sharing with you what I learn.  This is truly an inexhaustible subject.

TempleStudy.com is now on Twitter and Facebook

Celestial Room in Vancouver British Columbia Temple

Today the Church announced the public open house of the Vancouver British Columbia Temple, which will be the 131st temple of the Church. It is beautiful.

If you are in the area, you might want to see if you can visit.  The tours run from April 9th through the 24th.  The Church has produced an invitation that you can give to friends or family.  The dedication will be held on May 2, 2010.

As always, the temple has been constructed of only the finest materials:

The temple's exterior is covered with Branco Siena granite from Brazil…

The interior features beautifully grained hardwood from the west coast of Africa. British Columbia's provincial flower, the Pacific dogwood, is used as a motif in the decorative painting and intricate carpet sculpting. Artwork depicting the native beauty of British Columbia graces the walls of the temple.

Here is a short video about the temple by the Church as well.

Vancouver British Columbia Temple Open House Announced

The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley

A reader asks, “Do you know if it is possible to buy the complete writings, books, etc., of Bro. Nibley in one volume or perhaps on a CD Disc? (surely there must be a demand for this).”

It’s not possible to include all of Nibley’s writings in one volume, as the binding would be several feet thick – now that would be one big book! I also don’t know of a single CD that includes all his writings. Most of Hugh Nibley’s writings are now contained in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, which has become a 19 volume series of books compiled and published by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU.  The Harold B. Lee Library website contains some other unpublished papers.  I don’t know if these will ever be published in book form. And I’m sure there are many other writings that have been left on the edit room floor. Perhaps some day they will be compiled in a series, “Hugh Nibley: The Notebooks.”

For those who don’t mind reading on a digital device, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute has made available on its website the first 14 volumes of the collected works for FREE (which is what Nibley would have preferred anyway).  These volumes are also searchable there, through the website search. The last five volumes, 15-19, are still only available in hardcover currently.

Those of you who like the feel of parchment against your fingertips, I’ve found one seller that offers the entire collected works series of books in a single package.  Their set of the first 18 volumes is available for $699.

You could also just purchase the books individually, or only those ones you need to finish your library of the collected works series. Using the tool below (only visible on the website), put a checkmark next to all the books you would like to buy, and then click on the “Purchase Selected Books” button at the bottom. If you want to purchase all of them, simply press the “Select All” button, which will add a checkmark in all the boxes. Amazon will automatically add all of the books you’ve selected to your shopping cart.

Note that purchasing these books through any of the links above will help support the work of this website, TempleStudy.com.  I will receive a small commission on each book sold, and am grateful for your donation.

Buy the Complete Set of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley

The word guile may date back as early as the 12th century, but is not very common in our vernacular today.  At first it seemed to me this might mean “lies,” but there is more to it.  Webster defines it as “deceitful cunning : duplicity.”  This doesn’t get us very far unless we understand those words too:

• deceitful – having a tendency or disposition to deceive, not honest, deceptive, misleading
• cunning – dexterous or crafty in the use of special resources (as skill or knowledge) or in attaining an end, characterized by wiliness and trickery
• duplicity – contradictory doubleness of thought, speech, or action; especially : the belying of one’s true intentions by deceptive words or action

The word comes from the Middle English gile, from Anglo-French.  It’s related to the Old English/French wigle or wigila, which refer to sorcery or witchcraft.  It’s also related to the Old English word wil or wile, meaning a trick.

Of course, one derivation of the word is beguile, which is the verb form of the word, meaning “to lead by deception, hoodwink (to deceive by false appearance)” or “to influence by trickery, flattery, etc.; mislead; delude.”

Another way to learn about the word is to see how it is used in the scriptures.  Here are a few examples:

• Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings…
  For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps:
  Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: (1 Peter 2:1, 21-22)
• Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. (Psalms 32:3)
• Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. (Psalms 34:13)
• Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! (John 1:47)
• For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile: (Thessalonians 2:3)
• For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile: (1 Peter 3:10)
• And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God. (Revelations 14:5)

One of the most predominant uses of the word is in the beguiling of Eve in the Garden of Eden.  For an excellent treatment of this subject, I would recommend Jeffrey M. Bradshaw’s recent article on Meridian Magazine, “Was Eve Beguiled?“

What is Guile?

Music is a fundamental part of worship, and was even more so anciently than it is today.  Before the printed word made the sacred word so accessible to the masses, it was passed on from generation to generation orally.  But this was not just the spoken word.  In order for the word to be remembered and said the same way over and over again, over decades and centuries, a mnemonic device was employed to facilitate the reciter.  This device was music.  The sacred word, every word, was put to music.

This can be seen in the way the Bible is written in Hebrew, one of the oldest languages in the world.  In Hebrew, particularly the Hebrew Bible, there are cantillation marks that specify how the text should be sung: 

Hebrew text, vowel points in red, cantillation in blue

Cantillation marks are described by Wikipedia:

Cantillation is the ritual chanting of readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) to complement the letters and vowel points…

A primary purpose of the cantillation signs is to guide the chanting of the sacred texts during public worship. Very roughly speaking, each word of text has a cantillation mark at its primary accent and associated with that mark is a musical phrase that tells how to sing that word…

Even the name of the symbols themselves, cantillation marks, gives us a sense of what they are and were used for, the cant- prefix meaning “to sing.”

Michael Ballam

A few weeks ago my wife heard some interesting commentary on this subject on a radio show on Classical 89 called “On Stage with Michael Ballam”¹.  Michael Ballam is the general director of the Utah Festival Opera, a professor of music at Utah State University, and a very accomplished operatic singer.  He also does some acting.

In his commentary on that program, Br. Ballam said that back in the 1990s he took a sabbatical to go to Israel, and one of the things he wanted to study was the art of cantillation, the way the scriptures are sung in the Jewish synagogue.  This is an ancient tradition, one that Br. Ballam says the Jewish tradition dates back to Moses:

How did Moses, the author of the Torah or The Law, the first five books of the Bible, convey the message to the children of Israel?  He wrote it down on stone or metallic plates of copra, gold etc; he sang the law to them. He couldn't pass around the law in those plates or in those stones. He would have to communicate orally and he did it by singing. The holy writings or scriptures were conveyed in an oral tradition from generation to generation by chanting. That tradition is called Hassan or hassanot in plural. That's why I went to Israel. I wanted to understand that tradition. Not having been brought up in that tradition I wanted to understand its derivation. Moses, Aaron and ultimately the Rabbis in the synagogues and temples would convey God's will through the means of singing his will. It is Jewish tradition that Moses was commanded of God to sing the scriptures to impress upon them their meanings, into their minds and into their hearts.

Br. Ballam wanted to be able to read, hear, and sing those scriptures the way they would have been sung by Moses, and the ancients, before they were written down:

Now, the tradition of chanting the Holy writings were passed down in an oral tradition per centuries until a group of Rabbis in Tiberius, on the Southern shore of the sea of Galilee, determined it was time to write it down, so that it could be more stable. There are a series of marking called Chantalatian markings, there is the prefix Chantalatian, are found in most credible Hebrew Bibles. They are written directly under the words and moved from right to left, remember Hebrew goes from right to left, English goes left to right. They indicate when the pitches go up, when the pitches go down, when they come to a stopping point and when they need to be embellished, given special emphasis. They are supposedly as close to what the children of Israel heard from Moses in the wilderness as possible. One of my goals in going to Israel was to find someone who could read those Chantalatian markings and tell me the authoritarian sound that went with them. I found such an expert, Israel Vault, in a Hebrew University. He began by chanting for me those first lines of the Torah, the Bible. “Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’arets.” The pitch goes up on the word Eloh-im. Why? The name of the Supreme Deity. “ve’et ha’arets”. There is a punctuation there. It comes to a conclusion. That is we hear a cadence. It comes to an end, a period there.

To hear what those first lines of Genesis 1:1 sound like sung in Hebrew, press play in this audio clip:

This is where things got interesting for Br. Ballam.  The expert, Israel Vault, told Br. Ballam an amazing story, and asked him if he could explain it:

He came to America a number of years ago and was asked to speak in a university in New Mexico. He began to chant the Torah: “Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’arets”. As he began to chant, he noticed a segment of the audience becoming very interested, even agitated by it. At the conclusion of the class was met by a group of students all of whom were Native Americans from a Tribe and they asked him a question. Where did you get that music? He said: well, I got it out of the Bible its right there; it has been there for centuries. Why do you ask? And the spokesperson for this group of Navajo students said: It's fascinating to us that, though the words are in a different, it's the same tune that our fathers used to explain the creation to our tradition. Then Israel said to me: I don't understand this. How could this group in another continent, from another separation of time have this same melody to describe creation from the same perspective that ancient Israel did? He asked me if perhaps, those Navajos could be part of the lineage of the tribes of Israel. Would they in fact be one of the lost tribes? I didn't have a definitive answer for him but it is very interesting that the same tune that described the creation of the world in ancient Israel is also the same tune that describes the same story in ancient and modern Navajo.

Hugh Nibley would probably explain the synchronicity by telling about the universality of the creation song:

The word for poetry, poiema, means “creation  of the world.”  The business of the Muses at the temple was to sing the creation song with the morning stars. Naturally, because they were dramatizing the story of the creation, too, the hymn was sung to music (some scholars derive the first writing from musical notation). The singing was performed in a sacred circle or chorus, so that poetry, music and dance go together. (Lucian’s famous essay on the ancient dance, among the earliest accounts, takes it back to the round dance in the temple, like the prayer circle that Jesus used to hold with the apostles and their wives -- Jesus standing at the altar in the arms of Adam, and the apostles’ wives standing in the circle with them. Some have referred to this as a dance; it is definitely a chorus.). So poetry, music, and dance go out to the world from the temple -- called by the Greeks the Mouseion, the shrine of the Muses.

The creation hymn was part of the great dramatic presentation that took place yearly at the temple; it dealt with the fall and redemption of man…²

I don’t have a definitive answer either for why the sung Hebrew Bible would be familiar to Navajo Native Americans, but Nibley gives us a good candidate.  Music was used in the earliest of temples to convey the ritual to the initiates.  It was one of the only modes of transmission the people had to pass the story and rites on from one generation to another.  Might the music contained in the Hebrew Bible be the same music sung by the Native Americans to describe the creation story?  Might it be the same creation song that was heard in the temple anciently?  It’s possible.

~~~~~~~~

In other more personal news, I resigned from my job today.  I am a designer by profession, and unfortunately I became overqualified for my position.  If anyone is aware of design work or open designer positions available, I would appreciate any leads.  I do all kinds of design – product design, graphic design, web design, etc.  You can contact me here.

Here’s a link to my design portfolio:

http://brycehaymond.com/Bryce_Haymond_Portfolio.pdf

Thank you!

The Universal Creation Song

1. On Stage with Michael Ballam: 2003-15 Judaic Religious Music, Broadcast Date: Sept 20, 2003, transcript.
2. H. W. Nibley, “The Meaning of the Temple,” Temple and Cosmos.