Three Creation Accounts

[Rivers]

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Rivers said:

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

Perhaps they are all variations on temple rituals and the differences may help further illuminate our covenant relationship with God or help us understand how others saw their relationship with God in their time.

Edited January 5, 2022 by Calm

[JustAnAustralian]

It can even be five if you split Gen1 and Gen2 apart.

3 hours ago, Calm said:

Perhaps they are all variations on temple rituals and the differences may help further illuminate our covenant relationship with God

I expect Robert has some links that can help with this.

[JLHPROF]

6 hours ago, Rivers said:

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

Calm is right.  All the accounts are temple endowment records, not creation records.

[bluebell]

7 hours ago, Rivers said:

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

Without the Fall there is no need for the Atonement. 

[rongo]

I've always found comparing the four accounts to be fascinating. Yesterday, at dinner (that's when we do our family study), we were talking about how the Book of Abraham account has the Gods waiting to be obeyed during the different creative periods. We wondered what this means as far as agency, automatic obedience, etc. among matter and intelligence, and this led to discussing other things. 

[CA Steve]

11 hours ago, Rivers said:

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

Maybe we  are looking at a book that was compiled over centuries that included several different accounts of the same myth from writers who had different agendas.  See Authoring the Old Testament by David Bokovoy.

[Ginger Snaps]

Wait, don't we have 5, counting the temple? 2 in Genesis, 1 in Moses, 1 in Abraham? I just started reading the book mentioned above by @CA Steve.  I'm not very far in, but he mentions a discussion in D&C 77 (I think?) about how the different accounts in Genesis point to a spiritual creation and then a physical creation.  

[Dan McClellan]

This is a really interesting question, and particularly in light of scholarly approaches to the two independent creation accounts in the first three chapters of Genesis. Instead of thinking of the accounts of Genesis 1 and 2–3 as representing a single view of creation, most scholars now think of their collocation of a function of the archival nature of their textual transmission in antiquity. They were not initially intended to be consumed together, but as liturgies associated with ceremonies or rituals. But scribes put them together within a text in order not to lose either of them and we now treat them as one. Similarly, the creation accounts that developed within early Mormonism in the books of Moses and Abraham and in the temple are products of distinct and independent works of literary and liturgical production that did not exist side-by-side canonically until well after the Prophet's death. What may have originated in efforts to supersede, elaborate on, or somehow fix these accounts were gathered together and are now presented as in some sense univocal and canonical. 

[rongo]

1 hour ago, Ginger Snaps said:

Wait, don't we have 5, counting the temple? 2 in Genesis, 1 in Moses, 1 in Abraham? I just started reading the book mentioned above by @CA Steve.  I'm not very far in, but he mentions a discussion in D&C 77 (I think?) about how the different accounts in Genesis point to a spiritual creation and then a physical creation.  

I count Genesis as one account, even though it (through the lens of the Pearl of Great Price) has the spirit creation, and the physical (Genesis itself also points to this, but the PoGP makes it more explicitly clear). Genesis 2:5 says, "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground."

[Robert F. Smith]

13 hours ago, Rivers said:

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

Because it is liturgy, and liturgy is designed to be repeated.

Besides, you are only counting canonical Scripture.  There are many other such accounts, not the least of which is Enuma elish, the Assyrian and Babylonian account of Creation.  It was a liturgical account, enacted annually in the main temples of Asshur and Babylon.  That Assyro-Babylonian account had everything created in exactly the same order as in Genesis 1, and from pre-existing materials.

[Robert F. Smith]

5 hours ago, rongo said:

I've always found comparing the four accounts to be fascinating. Yesterday, at dinner (that's when we do our family study), we were talking about how the Book of Abraham account has the Gods waiting to be obeyed during the different creative periods. We wondered what this means as far as agency, automatic obedience, etc. among matter and intelligence, and this led to discussing other things. 

Yes, and you may have noticed that the book of Moses has everything created spiritually first, and then physically, as if following a blueprint.

[Rivers]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Because it is liturgy, and liturgy is designed to be repeated.

Besides, you are only counting canonical Scripture.  There are many other such accounts, not the least of which is Enuma elish, the Assyrian and Babylonian account of Creation.  It was a liturgical account, enacted annually in the main temples of Asshur and Babylon.  That Assyro-Babylonian account had everything created in exactly the same order as in Genesis 1, and from pre-existing materials.

Interesting. I never heard the creation account referred to as liturgy.

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, Rivers said:

Interesting. I never heard the creation account referred to as liturgy.

The late Professor John Kselman, a Roman Catholic priest teaching at the Catholic Univ of America in Washington DC, viewed Gen 1 as a symmetrical 6 days of creation in iterative poetry.  See his analysis at John S. Kselman, “The Recovery of Poetic Fragments from the Pentateuchal Priestly Source,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 97/2 (June 1978): 161-173, online at https://doi.org/10.2307/3265615, or https://www.jstor.org/stable/i364559. 

Of course Mormons never use the word "liturgy."

[MacGyver]

20 hours ago, Rivers said:

Why do we need to read the creation account three times?  We have four accounts if you count the temple.  Why is the creation account so important that we need to have it repeated so much?

There are really only two recorded creation accounts. The one in Genesis is the corrupted version of what God revealed to Moses. The Book of Moses (JST of Genesis) is the uncorrupted version. 

Then there's the one in Abraham.

The accounts in Abraham and Moses are very similar, but they give us a slightly different perspective and some information is exclusive to each account. 

When we read the account revealed to Moses and the account revealed to Abraham we get a more complete picture of what happened. 

The account in the temple also provides us with addional information. Probably the most significant being the identity of Michael/Adam as one of the Gods (from Abraham's account) who formed the earth. This tells us that one of the Gods who created the earth also became the first man upon the earth and the Father of the entire human family (every human who has lived or will live upon the earth). 

Edited January 6, 2022 by MacGyver