A Covenant Defense
Scripture, covenant, and the religion of the fathers — why the authenticity of Abraham's record matters for salvation itself
The Book of Abraham is not merely an academic curiosity or a battleground for Egyptologists. According to a careful 2021 analysis by Denver C. Snuffer Jr., it stands at the intersection of everything that matters for salvation: the covenant made with Abraham, the patriarchal Holy Order, and God's plan to gather a covenant people before the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
The fight over the Book of Abraham, Snuffer argues, "is now aimed at the entire restoration and Joseph's Divine calling." To dismiss the book is to sever the connecting thread between modern believers and the promises God made to the patriarchal fathers — promises that, per the prophecy of Malachi, must be renewed before the Lord's return.
"It is the Book of Abraham that is on trial, not Joseph Smith as an Egyptologist, nor the claims and counterclaims to scholarly recognition by squabbling publicity seekers."
— Hugh Nibley, quoted in Snuffer, "The Religion of the Fathers" (2021)The critical insight driving this defense is theological rather than Egyptological: the text of the Book of Abraham reveals Abraham's own account of seeking and receiving the covenantal blessings of the patriarchal fathers. That covenant — not the accuracy of hieroglyphic translation — is the measure of the book's worth.
Before addressing any apologetic argument, one must grasp the theological architecture that makes the Book of Abraham indispensable. The paper presents God's dealings with mankind as a single, unbroken covenant chain — not a collection of separate dispensations, but one eternal religion first given to Adam and renewed through each successive patriarchal head.
The patriarchal fathers — Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem/Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph — each stood as God's Patriarchal Father and High Priest on earth, holding what is called the Holy Order after the Order of the Son of God. This order was not merely a priesthood office. It was a covenantal family government.
I sought for the blessings of the Fathers and the right whereunto I should be ordained to administer the same… I became a rightful heir, a high priest, holding the right belonging to the Fathers. It was conferred upon me from the Fathers: it came down from the Fathers, from the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning… through the Fathers unto me.
— Abraham 1:1 (Book of Abraham)This opening verse of the Book of Abraham, Snuffer argues, identifies Abraham — not Joseph Smith — as the author of the book. The specific covenantal language, describing the sought-for "blessings of the Fathers," mirrors exactly what Malachi prophesied would return before the Lord's second coming. No New England farm boy inventing a religious text in 1835 would have articulated the precise theological concept that lies at the heart of the patriarchal religion.
The covenant with Abraham was not a new covenant. It was a restoration of the original covenant God made with Adam, renewed through Noah and Melchizedek, and now reconstituted with Abraham as the new head of God's family on earth. All who receive the gospel thereafter are "called after [Abraham's] name and shall be accounted [his] seed." Salvation, in this framework, is inseparable from being sealed into the Abrahamic covenant line.
Scholars and believers have offered several distinct responses to Egyptological challenges against the Book of Abraham. Snuffer's paper surveys each with precision — acknowledging their strengths and limits — before proposing a framework that transcends the debate entirely.
Associated most closely with Hugh Nibley, this position holds that the surviving Joseph Smith Papyri fragments are not the actual text Joseph translated. The actual source, it is argued, was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The existing fragments — portions of an Egyptian Book of Breathings — were present in the collection but were not the papyrus from which the Book of Abraham was derived.
This approach accepts the Willard Richards introduction in the Times & Seasons that describes the text as translated from a papyrus "written by the hand of Abraham." It takes seriously the historical record that Joseph acquired multiple scrolls and that only fragments survived.
Nibley himself used this position as a foundation for his extensive parallel research: even without a surviving source document, the content of the Book of Abraham aligns remarkably with ancient Near Eastern traditions unknown in Joseph Smith's day.
A second approach, which the LDS Church has increasingly embraced, holds that there never was a papyrus source for the Book of Abraham in any direct translational sense. The text came entirely by revelation from heaven, the papyri serving only as a catalyst that prompted prophetic inspiration rather than as a linguistic source document.
This position deliberately sets aside the Richards introduction, treating its claim of a papyrus source as inaccurate or metaphorical. The "translation" is understood entirely in the prophetic sense — as a recovered heavenly record made available through inspired vision.
This view explains the discrepancy between the facsimile explanations and Egyptological readings by arguing that Joseph was not functioning as a linguistic translator at all, but as a seer receiving divine revelation in proximity to ancient sacred objects.
A third group of apologists argues that the existing Joseph Smith Papyri are the actual source for the Book of Abraham, and that the text can legitimately be recovered from them. These defenders maintain that the hieroglyphs contained hidden, esoteric meanings encoded in their pictographic form — meanings accessible to a prophet-seer but not to conventional Egyptologists.
Advocates like Edwin Goble have proposed that the Book of Abraham was divined or revealed through metadata deliberately embedded in the Hor Sensen Papyrus — that the text functions as a kind of sacred mnemonic or ritual key rather than a straightforward linguistic document. The "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language" documents produced by Joseph's scribes are treated as evidence of a complex, ongoing translational process.
Snuffer notes this was historically the "overwhelming position" of those who accepted the Book of Abraham as scripture before Egyptological challenges arose.
Snuffer's paper proposes a fourth framework that reframes the entire debate. Rather than asking "can Egyptologists verify this translation?", it asks the prior and more fundamental question: "does the text contain authentic ancient content that bears the marks of genuine patriarchal religion?"
The paper argues that Egyptology is largely irrelevant to judging the Book of Abraham because nothing in the text actually takes place in Egypt. Abraham's account reckons from "Ur of the Chaldeans" — an uncertain Mesopotamian location whose residents were imitating Egyptian religious practice without being Egyptian. The Chaldean names for the four idols under the lion-couch (Elkenah, Zibnah, Mahmackrah, Koash) are not Egyptian names; the terminology used to describe the facsimile scene is Chaldean, not Egyptian.
Furthermore, the paper introduces a powerful reinterpretation of the word "translation" as Joseph used it. When a John the Beloved revelation was described as "translated from parchment written and hid up by himself" — yet Joseph had no such parchment — "translated" clearly meant recovering a heavenly record and returning it to earth. The Book of Abraham, on this reading, was heavenly content restored to mortality, whether or not a surviving papyrus fragment was the instrumental vehicle.
God does not make isolated covenants. Each patriarchal covenant is a renewal of the one before — one eternal religion, one family of God.
Abraham marks the pivotal moment in this chain. After generations of apostasy following Melchizedek, Abraham was not a direct lineal descendant of the previous Holy Order holder — he was adopted into the line, sealed into it by Melchizedek. This precedent is of immense significance: it demonstrates that the Holy Order is not exclusively dynastic. Any worthy soul can be sealed into the patriarchal line. This is precisely why the Book of Abraham matters for those who have accepted God's new covenant.
As many as receive this gospel shall be called after your name and shall be accounted your seed, and shall rise up and bless you, as unto their Father.
— Abraham 3:1 (Book of Abraham)The prophecy of Malachi — recorded in the Old Covenants, New Covenants, Book of Mormon, and Teachings and Commandments — promises that before the great and dreadful day of the Lord, the hearts of the children shall turn to the fathers. The "fathers" of Malachi are not recent genealogical ancestors. They are these patriarchal covenant heads. The Book of Abraham is the primary scriptural window into who those fathers were and what they received from God. To lose it is to lose one's covenantal address.
The paper does not simply repeat existing apologetic arguments. It offers a cluster of genuinely novel contributions that reframe what it means to authenticate ancient scripture.
Snuffer conducts a meticulous literary analysis and demonstrates that the Book of Abraham explicitly states thirty-two times that its events do not take place in Egypt. The facsimile explanations reference Chaldean idols, Chaldean terminology, and Chaldean religious practices — not Egyptian ones. The four figures under the lion-couch are not the Egyptian canopic jars Egyptologists identify; Abraham understood them as Chaldean idols. This observation — that Egyptological critiques are aimed at the wrong geographical and cultural target — is largely absent from prior apologetic literature and constitutes a significant original contribution.
The paper carefully documents that Joseph Smith used the word "translation" in a consistent but non-standard sense throughout his ministry. The Bible revision was called a "translation" in fourteen separate revelations, yet it was an inspired revision from the King James text with no recourse to Greek or Hebrew manuscripts. The John revelation was called a "translation from parchment" when no parchment existed. The translation of Enoch's city meant a bodily transfer from earth to heaven. On this evidence, "translated from papyrus" need not mean "linguistically decoded from hieroglyphs." It means truth was recovered from its heavenly repository and restored to earth — a meaning that leaves Egyptological objections structurally beside the point.
Snuffer introduces a pointed linguistic-historical argument: the Rosetta Stone dates from 196 BC — approximately two millennia after Abraham's lifetime. Scholarly reconstruction of Egyptian hieroglyphics relies on this late-Ptolemaic document as its foundational key. He illustrates, with a vivid thought experiment about English language drift from Chaucer backward to Alfred the Great, why it is unreasonable to assume Ptolemaic-era language is a reliable cipher for Old Kingdom or Middle Kingdom Egyptian. If the scholars' own baseline is culturally and linguistically distorted by two thousand years of drift, their confident dismissals of the Book of Abraham rest on a shakier foundation than their academic tone suggests.
Drawing on a significant body of scholarship — particularly the FARMS volume Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham — Snuffer marshals the striking convergence between the Book of Abraham's details and ancient non-Biblical sources unknown in Joseph's day. Terah's idolatry, an angel rescuing Abraham from sacrifice, Abraham making converts in Haran, Abraham as an astronomer who taught Egyptian rulers — these details appear so consistently across independent ancient traditions that their presence in the Book of Abraham is extremely unlikely to be coincidence. The argument: if the text is historically accurate in details no 19th-century author could have known, the burden of proof shifts to those who deny its authenticity.
The Book of Abraham's account of human sacrifice at Ur of the Chaldeans was long cited by Egyptologists as evidence of inauthenticity, since such practices are not typical of Egyptian religious rites. Snuffer cites recent archaeological discoveries — including CT scans of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur revealing violent death consistent with ritualistic sacrifice — that vindicate the text's setting. The account is not about Egyptian religion; it is about Chaldean religion, and archaeology now confirms Chaldean human sacrifice was indeed practiced in the precise era of Abraham's life. The critics have been arguing about the wrong religion in the wrong geography.
Snuffer draws on Hugh Nibley's insight that the Book of Abraham is properly understood as a ritual text — a "discourse on divine authority" rather than a mere historical account. The facsimile explanations function as "diagrammatic or formulaic aids to an understanding of the subject of priesthood on earth." Within this frame, the demand that the facsimiles precisely match Ptolemaic-era funerary conventions is a category error. The text encodes knowledge of the Holy Order, the pre-earth existence, the creation, and the covenantal relationship between God and Abraham. Its content is initiatory — designed to convey sacred truths through symbol and ceremony — not to pass an Egyptological peer review.
The paper's most profound and original contribution is this: the authentic test of the Book of Abraham is not linguistic but covenantal. Does the text advance the plan by which God gathers His covenant people, seals them to the patriarchal fathers, and prepares a Zion society before the Lord's return? The paper argues the answer is unambiguously yes. The opening verse of the Book of Abraham articulates precisely the covenantal quest that Malachi prophesied would characterize the last days. No forger or fantasist working in 1835 could have crafted a text that so precisely encodes the theological architecture of the patriarchal covenant religion — including concepts about the pre-earth existence, celestial government, and adoptive sealing — that only became clear through the broader unfolding of the restoration.
A critical thread in Snuffer's argument concerns the linguistic assumptions underlying Egyptological criticism. The entire scholarly apparatus for reading Egyptian hieroglyphics rests on the Rosetta Stone — a decree from Ptolemy V dating to 196 BC. Yet Abraham lived approximately 2,100 BC. The language gap between these two points is wider than the gap between Shakespeare's English and modern English.
The paper further notes that Egyptian hieroglyphics were abandoned entirely after the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I closed religious temples in approximately 390 AD. For 1,500 years the language was lost. Its recovery via the Rosetta Stone represents a partial and imperfect reconstruction — and that reconstruction was of Ptolemaic Egyptian, not the far older language of the patriarchal era.
The ancient scribes who produced these documents were often unable to read what they were writing. By the Twenty-first Dynasty, the 'ignorance of the scribes' reached the point of complete miscomprehension of their own texts, betrayed by the 'common habit of copying entire sections backwards.'
— Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham, cited in Snuffer (2021)The timeline below illustrates the magnitude of the linguistic and temporal problem facing Egyptological critics of the Book of Abraham:
The events of the Book of Abraham. Egyptian hieroglyphics fully functional but still ~1,900 years from the Pyramid Texts era. Chaldean Ur uses Egyptian religious symbols with local modifications.
The oldest surviving written Egyptian texts — already recording a religion at least 1,000 years old. Old Kingdom theology differs substantially from later New Kingdom religion.
Greeks control Egypt. The Ptolemaic dynasty begins. Syncretism of Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian religious practices accelerates. The language begins its final evolution.
A decree of Ptolemy V — the entire basis for modern Egyptology's ability to read hieroglyphics. Written in a dying language two millennia after Abraham.
French soldiers rebuild a fort near Rosetta and find the trilingual stele. Modern Egyptology begins — working backwards from a late, corrupt linguistic artifact.
Joseph Smith produces the Book of Abraham from the Michael Chandler papyri. Egyptology is in its infancy; critics who use modern Egyptology against the text are applying a tool that didn't exist when the translation was made.
The paper concludes this section with a pointed choice: trust the scholarly attempt to reconstruct antiquity using a partial record from 196 BC, or trust a man who claimed to be a prophet, seer, and translator — and who demonstrated the latter gift in over 500 pages of the Book of Mormon, itself derived from what Snuffer argues was likely hieratic Egyptian on metal plates. The credibility question is not merely academic; it is covenantal.
Snuffer catalogues more than a dozen details in the Book of Abraham that supplement the Genesis account and have since been found in ancient non-Biblical traditions unavailable to Joseph Smith. These details include:
Genesis does not mention a famine at the time of Abraham's departure from his homeland. The Book of Abraham does. Ancient non-Biblical traditions confirm it.
Abraham's brother Haran died in the famine — a detail absent from Genesis but present in the Book of Abraham and confirmed in ancient Jewish tradition.
That Abraham's father Terah repented of idolatry but later relapsed appears in the Book of Abraham and is "so well attested" in non-Biblical sources that scholars find it odd Genesis omits it.
Josephus — writing in the first century AD, well before Joseph's day — records that Abraham taught the Egyptians astronomy. The Book of Abraham depicts this scene in Facsimile No. 3.
The miraculous angelic rescue of Abraham from the sacrificial altar is attested across a large cross-section of ancient traditions and is confirmed by the Book of Abraham.
The Book of Abraham states Abraham was 62 when he left Haran; Genesis says 75. Ancient sources corroborate the earlier departure age — a detail a 19th-century fabricator could not have known.
The FARMS volume Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham documents that all of the elements in this list are attested in non-Biblical traditions to one degree or another — and several elements found only in the Book of Abraham (not in Genesis) appear so regularly in ancient sources that their absence from the biblical text strikes scholars as anomalous. As the volume concludes: "There are far too many references to Terah as an idolator, Abraham as a sacrificial victim, Abraham as an astronomer, and Abraham as a missionary to lightly dismiss their antiquity."
Snuffer's paper arrives at a conclusion that is simultaneously humble and sweeping. The question of whether the surviving papyrus fragments match the Book of Abraham is, in the final analysis, a secondary question. The primary question is whether the text contains what it claims to contain: authentic knowledge of the covenantal religion of the patriarchal fathers, capable of connecting modern believers to the Abrahamic covenant and preparing them for the Lord's return.
On that measure — the covenantal measure — the Book of Abraham stands alone among documents produced in the 19th century. No other text of that era articulates with such precision the theology of the Holy Order, the pre-earth existence, the adoptive sealing of non-lineal descendants into the patriarchal line, the cosmic significance of the Abrahamic covenant, and the role of Abraham as the new head of God's family on earth.
The book opens with Abraham's declaration that he sought "the blessings of the Fathers" — the very blessings that Malachi promised would return before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. The book closes before Abraham enters Egypt, with a revelation about the stars, the pre-earth life, and the creation. This is not the work of a frontier forger. This is the voice of a patriarch who knew what the religion of the fathers was, and preserved it for those in the last days who would need it most.
God is a covenant-making and covenant-keeping God. His word does not pass away. The promises made to Abraham were not made to one man in one moment — they were made to all of his seed in all generations. We are either connected to that covenant or we are not. The Book of Abraham is the scriptural record through which that connection can be understood, sought, and obtained.
Based on Denver C. Snuffer Jr., "The Religion of the Fathers" © March 2021. All scriptural citations from the Restoration Edition. This site presents the apologetic and theological arguments of the source paper; readers are encouraged to consult the full text and primary sources cited therein.
The covenant, the Holy Order, the religion of the fathers — these subjects reward patient, careful study alongside others who are asking the same questions. You are welcome to bring yours.
Whether you are new to these ideas, a long-time student of the restoration, or someone with pointed skepticism to work through — the conversation is open to you. We discuss the Book of Abraham, the covenants of the fathers, and the broader themes of the restoration in a spirit of inquiry rather than instruction.