Category: belief

Joseph Smith, Jr. (December 23, 1805 – June 27, 1844) was the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, a group of churches whose adherents regard him as a prophet.

In the late 1820s, Smith announced that an angel had given him a book of golden plates, containing a religious history of ancient American peoples. Smith claimed the book was written in an unknown language, which he translated by use of seer stones given with the plates. In 1830, Smith published this translation as the Book of Mormon and organized what he claimed was a restoration of the early Christian church.

Moving the church in 1831 from western New York to Kirtland, Ohio, Smith attracted hundreds of converts, who came to be called Latter Day Saints. Some of these he sent to establish a holy city of “Zion” in Jackson County, Missouri. In 1833, Missouri settlers expelled the Saints from Zion, and Smith led an unsuccessful paramilitary expedition to recover the land. Fleeing an arrest warrant in the aftermath of a Kirtland financial crisis, Smith joined the remaining Saints in Far West, Missouri. However, tensions escalated into a violent conflict in 1838 with some hostile Missourians. Believing the Saints to be in insurrection, the governor ordered their expulsion from Missouri, and Smith was imprisoned on capital charges.

After escaping state custody in 1839, Smith led the Saints to build Nauvoo, Illinois on Mississippi River swampland, where he became mayor and commanded a large militia. In early 1844, he announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That summer, after the Nauvoo Expositor criticized Smith’s teachings, the Nauvoo city council, headed by Smith, ordered the paper’s destruction. In a futile attempt to check public outrage, Smith first declared martial law, then surrendered to the governor of Illinois. He was killed by a mob while awaiting trial in Carthage, Illinois.

Smith’s followers believe he saw God and regard his revelations as scripture. His teachings include unique views on the nature of godhood, cosmology, family structures, political organization, and religious collectivism. His legacy includes a number of religious denominations, which collectively claim a growing membership of nearly 14 million worldwide.

Elohim (אֱלהִים) is a plural formation of eloah, an expanded form of the Northwest Semitic noun il (אֱל, ēl). It is the usual word for “god” in the Hebrew Bible, referring both to pagan deities and to the God of Israel, usually with a singular meaning despite its plural form, but is also used as a true plural with the meanings “spirits, angels, demons,” and the like. The singular forms eloah (אלוה) and el (אֱל) are used as proper names or as generics, in which case they are interchangeable with elohim. Gods can be referred to collectively as bene elim, bene elyon, or bene elohim.

The notion of divinity underwent radical changes throughout the period of early Israelite identity. The ambiguity of the term Elohim is the result of such changes, cast in terms of “vertical translatability” by Smith (2008), i.e. the re-interpretation of the gods of the earliest recalled period as the national god of the monolatrism as it emerged in the 7th to 6th century BC in the Kingdom of Judah and during the Babylonian captivity, and further in terms of monotheism by the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism in the 2nd century AD.

In the Levantine pantheon, the Elohim are the 70 sons of El the Ancient of Days (Olam) assembled on the divine holy place, Mount Zephon (Jebel Aqra). This mountain, which lies in Syria, was regarded as a portal to its heavenly counterpart. The Elohim were originally ruled by El Elyon (God Most High), but He later hands His rule down to the god called Hadad who was known among the common people as “the master” (“Baal”). Assembled on the holy mountain of heaven and ruled by one, the pantheon (Elohim) acts as one. The enemy of the Elohim is Yam (“the sea”), a chaos monster slain by Baal. Each son was allocated to a specific people (e.g. Yahweh to Israel, Milcom to Moab etc.).

The word occurs more than 2500 times in the Hebrew bible, with meanings ranging from “god” in a general sense (as in Exodus 12:12, where it describes “the gods of Egypt”), to a specific god (e.g., 1 Kings 11:33, where it describes Chemosh “the god of Moab”, or the frequent references to Yahweh as the “elohim” of Israel), to demons, seraphim and other supernatural beings, to the spirits of the dead brought up by the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:13, and even to kings and prophets (e.g., Exodus 4:16) The phrase bene elohim, usually translated “sons of God”, has an exact parallel in Ugaritic and Phoenician texts, referring to the council of the gods.