Abish is usually seen as a minor character in the Book of Mormon, but Dr Val Larsen thinks she likely had visions of God and perhaps Heavenly Mother. He will talk more about this amazing Book of Mormon woman, and show that her name has religious significance. Check out our conversation…
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Abish
Val 00:37 Back to the story we’re telling here. Everybody else, Lamoni, Ammon, all the other servants, they’re out cold. The one exception is Abish, the only long-standing Christian in the room.
GT 00:53 She’s a Lamanite, by the way.
Val 00:54 A Lamanite woman, one of three women, or is it four? Let me think. Sariah, Mary– four, Abish and then they’ve got the one representative of an evil woman, right, Isabel?
GT 01:10 Oh, and Eve. Don’t they have Eve, too? So, there’s five.
Val 01:13 Oh, yeah. Okay, five. Yes, good, Eve. But Isabel is paradigmatic…
GT 01:19 Isabel, the harlot.
Val 01:20 The harlot, right, exactly. So, you have that. But Abish is the only long-standing Christian here. She’s been a Christian longer than Ammon, a lot longer than Ammon. So, this is the only person whose own visions and seasoning have prepared her to consciously endure a visitation of such spiritual power. So, when the spiritual power comes, it knocks everybody else out, but not Abish. I’m suggesting here, this isn’t a first encounter for her. It’s like the story of that vision that Joseph and Sidney had.
GT 01:20 I was just thinking of that.
Val 02:03 Joseph is there. He’s perfectly fine, and Sidney is wiped out. Well, I think a similar dynamic is happening here. Everybody else is wiped out by this experience of being carried into the presence of God. But not Abish, because this is not unfamiliar to her. That is my argument here. Abish knows what’s happening to the others. She knew that they were, that it was the power of God. So, when she sees this, she knows what’s going on. And how is that? Most likely, I’m arguing here, because she has previously had the same experience, a remarkable vision of her father. This phrasing is ambiguous, did Abish see her earthly father in vision? Did her earthly father have a vision he told her about? It was certainly a vision of her Heavenly Father in the sense of having been caused by God. But, in this context, where everybody else seems to be seeing God in vision, the most likely meaning is that Abish, also, had a remarkable vision of her Heavenly Father, in which she directly experienced the power of God, the same way that Lehi, Nephi and now Lamoni and the Queen and all the other servants are experiencing it. It would be odd if she, the longest-standing believer in the group, had the least impressive conversion experience. Everybody else is off in the presence of God. But Abish, the one person who is the most long-standing, faithful person, she is excluded from this? I don’t think that’s what happened.
Val 02:11 Now, this is a novel, innovative part of our analysis in the paper here. Because I’ve never seen it. I’ve heard many times, every time you discuss this, and Adam did it, too, in his reading, did she see her father in vision? Or did her father have a vision and share that with her as a way of converting her? But I think it’s something much greater than that. She had a vision, the same vision all these other people are having. So, why don’t we read it that way? If we do, that puts her in with all these other people, and actually makes her the first of them, the most seasoned of them. And we’re going to see, she’s going to take the lead in bringing them all back. So, the one thing that might undercut this interpretation, this idea that Abish had a vision…
GT 03:34 You’re undercutting your own argument?
Val 03:44 Well, you have to do that. Rosalynde did it. Rosalynde said, when you interviewed her, she said, ‘carried away the Lord.’ Now this could mean that it’s just decorous covering of the conceiving of Christ. So, that’s a concession. I’m going to deal with a counter argument that might occur to people. It certainly occurs to me. The one thing that might undercut the interpretation is Abish’s use of the singular possessive pronoun ‘her,’ when she described this vision. What it suggests is, when she described this vision, she said, “I was converted by a vision in which I saw my father.” Because it says her father. It doesn’t say Our Father. We don’t normally refer to God as my father, we say Our Father. But Abish is different than most people. Her relationship with God was singular. For many years, no one else around her shared her faith. She was all by herself. So, her relationship with God was a purely personal thing during that time. He was her Father. Her relationship with him was singular. The experience was individualistic, not communal. But given the nature of her many years long, purely personal, purely individualistic experience of God, it would not be surprising for her to think of God and refer to him as my Father. She had, maybe decades of that personal experience with God.
Val 04:43 Be that as it may, eager for others to witness this outpouring of spiritual power, Abish runs through the town, urging people to go to the palace and see what’s happening. Those who gather know that some superhuman power is operative, though they disagree sharply on what it may be. They all know that it’s working. When Abish returns and sees the gathered people contending with each other, she weeps and then goes to the Queen and takes her by the hand. “As soon as Abish touched her hand, the Queen arose and stood upon her feet, and cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Oh, blessed Jesus, who has saved me from an awful hell. Oh, blessed God,'” Elohim would be the word. “‘Have mercy on this people.'” The Queen, who has seen the Father, Son, and perhaps the Mother, now shares the mission of the Divine Council: saving others. Being a member of the Divine Council, who has the tongue of angels, that’s described there. She’s got the tongue of angels, which Pentecostals all pick up on, too. She, “Speaks many words, which were not understood. And when she had done this, she took the King Lamoni by the hand, and behold, he stood upon his feet.”
GT 07:15 And then translated?
Val 07:26 Standing side-by-side with the Queen, Lamoni, the man who rose from the dead on the third day, now begins to teach the people the Gospel of Christ and thus initiates a great spiritual awakening in their kingdom. So. let’s now ask, as Nephi did after hearing his father’s dream, what this narrative means. One thing that became apparent with Nephi was the coupling of the saving work of the Divine Son and the Divine Mother. That coupling is replicated here. It’s striking that the Lamoni and Queen salvation narratives both begin with the Christ’s surrogate, Ammon, sharing a message that his companion wholeheartedly believes. Both narratives end with a Divine Mother surrogate raising the spiritual newborn to her or his feet. Parallel phrases are used to describe the Queen and Lamoni as they arise after being touched by a woman. The text says, “She arose and stood upon her feet,” referring to the Queen, and “He arose and stood upon his feet,” referring to Lamoni. So, the only thing they changed there is the pronoun. This parallelism suggests that Queen and King stand side-by-side, emblems of Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, in who So’od Kingdom they’re now enrolled, and in whose soul-saving work, they now jointly participate.
Father Doesn’t Mean Father?
Val 08:45 Other surrogate symbolism underscores the importance of this Elohim partnership, the partnership of our God, who is actually better described and is described or named Elohim, not gods but God. And again, this is distinctive LDS theology. If we’re right about this, we are the one true church in something that is fundamentally and crucially important: the true fatherhood of God, and motherhood of God. Because that word is used only metaphorically at best when others refer to God as the Father. This being outside of time and space, who creates us out of nothing, which is the way they all come at it, that’s not a father. I mean, that’s really stretching the word father, right? I mean, it’s picking up on a few honorific aspects of father, but in a way it’s honoring fathers a lot more than God. Right? It’s like, I had a great father. You probably did too, but he would make no pretense in being God.
GT 09:53 I remember on my mission talking to a pastor and he said, “Why do you think God is our Father”? And I said,” Well, he created us.” And he laughed at me. Like, that’s the stupidest answer I’ve ever heard. {both chuckling}
Val 10:12 You said he created us? Tell me again. He said, “Why do you think God is our Father?”
GT 10:18 Yeah, And I said, “Well, he created us.” And he was like..
Val 10:22 Why did he think that? Why does he think God’s our Father?
GT 10:24 Because he created everything. My understanding, is, just like you said earlier, orthodox understanding of God is, he’s a different species. He’s not like us.
Val 10:41 Yeah, that’s not even close.
GT 10:42 He created the elephants, too. Does that make him the father of the elephants? I mean, that was his response. And so that, I mean, he totally made fun of me.
Val 10:52 So what–did he?
GT 10:54 As a 19-year-old missionary, I didn’t understand why he was picking on me.
Val 10:58 Let’s hear your account I mean, ask him, what’s your account of how God is the Father?
GT 11:01 I was just like–I don’t know.
Val 11:03 Because actually, the point I’m making here is, this is a strong suit for us, not for others. I mean, father in many, and maybe all of the senses in which we think of a father, earthly father, applies to our Father God. He created body for us.
GT 11:23 And he made fun of me for thinking that.
Val 11:25 Yeah. Well, this is your chance to let all the world know that he was wrong, and you were right, and to get your resentments out there. {both laughing} We all need to air our, have a Festivus every once in a while.
Abish, Queen, & Divine Mother
Val 11:40 The Divine Mother’s surrogates, Abish and the Queen, each reveals something essential but different about Heavenly Mother, in whose image they were created, and about other women, closely connected with the birth and most salient actions of Christ. As apostate monist theology and violence have forced Shaddai, the Divine Mother, Asherah whatever name you want to give her, Wisdom, into the wilderness and hidden her from the world, that’s what the book of Revelation tells us happened. The Book of Revelation is really good on this. It actually talks about Christ being born in heaven to this glorious woman with the crown of 12 stars and everything. Then Satan hates her more than anything else. He forces her into the wilderness where she’s hidden, it says, from the church, or from the people. The rest of the Christians have to read that as being, well, that’s the church. But the church doesn’t give birth to Christ. That’s backwards.
Val 12:41 Christ gives birth to the church, not the other way around. So, that doesn’t really make much sense. But in our theology, and on this earlier, Abrahamic theology, yes. Christ had a Divine Mother, as we all do. So, we can read that passage in Revelation in a very straightforward way. We’re seeing our mother, that’s the most explicit.
GT 13:03 I don’t read anything in Revelation, in a straightforward way. {Rick chuckling}
Val 13:07 I mean, that was about as straightforward as it gets. It’s like, there’s this glorious woman in heaven and she travails, gives birth to the Son that is caught up to the throne of God. Satan makes war against that woman and against the Son, the dragon does. So yeah, it’s the dragon but we know it’s Satan. That’s actually the clearest single place where Mother in Heaven occurs.
Val 13:36 I think N. T. Wright has just come out with a book, I’m going to have to see if I can get him on. It’s on Revelation.
Val 13:42 That would be an achievement.
GT 13:43 That would be.
Val 13:45 He’s a big guy. I haven’t read his work, and I need to, because everybody has so much respect for the quality of his New Testament readings there. Well, anyway, she’s driven, The Mother in Heaven was driven into the wilderness. It tells us there in Revelation. Well, even so, the wickedness and violence of Abish’s surrounding culture have forced her to remain hidden, her deep Christian faith and spiritual power unknown to the world. Abish, nevertheless, exists and blesses all around her. She has known Heavenly Father longer than anyone else in the narrative, she having been converted to the Lord many years earlier, on account of the remarkable paradigmatic vision of her father, in our reading, her Heavenly Father.
GT 14:31 Okay.
Val 14:34 As Abish, the surrogate Heavenly Mother was with Heavenly Father before the newer convert, Ammon and all these other people that are out cold. Before Ammon, the surrogate Son was, I’ve been arguing that Ammon is a Christ figure. So, Shaddai was with El Elyon, before their Son Yahweh was. I’m just going to give you one little passage of Old Testament. You get these Old Testament allusions, that the people, Margaret Barker and others who are sensitive to the presence of the Divine Mother in the Old Testament, pick up on. Well, this is one of them. This eternal companionship of Heavenly Father and Mother is reflected in Psalm 8, where Heavenly Mother in her wisdom guise speaks. Again, the Divine Mother, because she was suppressed on this reading, Josiah got rid of all the overt manifestations. But she was so important that she keeps showing up in a lot of different, more subtle things. This is from Psalm 8, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the mountains were settled, before the hills, was I brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields. When he prepared the heavens, I was there. Then was I by him, as one brought up with him.”
Val 15:57 Well, that works. right? A Divine Father and Mother brought up together, actually, in our view, maybe on some other world or something. That’s getting off beyond what we have direct knowledge of. “And I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, and my delights were the sons of man. Now, therefore, hearken unto me, all ye children, for blessed,” that word is ashrei, that’s a wordplay on Asherah there, “are they that keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise and refuse it not, blessed…” it repeats the ashrei thing again, “…is the man that heareth me, for whosoever findeth me, findeth life.” Well, there’s the tree of life actual connection, “and shall obtain favor of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me, wrongeth his own soul.” That’s a great Old Testament tribute to Mother in Heaven, according to people that start to see this and her longstanding companionship with the Father that’s echoed in Abish’s long acquaintance with the Father in this story. So, being a servant, Abish intrinsically symbolizes the service ethos that governs the Divine Council. As she rushes from place to place in the city, bidding all to gather to the palace where they may be born again spiritually, Abish symbolizes the Divine Mother’s desire and efforts to gather her children back to her, the tree of life, where they may be spiritually reborn and permanently return to live with her. As Abish sees those she’s gathered sharply contending with one another, she begins to weep. So, the Divine Mother sorrows when her children so often contend with each other and refuse to be saved. The nature of Heavenly Mother is then more famously symbolized by the power of Abish’s touch, to help a soul become spiritually conscious, and live a holy life that qualifies her to be part of her Heavenly Parents Divine Council. Lamoni’s wife, the Queen, like Abish signifies who Heavenly Mother is, in part, by virtue of her social role, which is prominent and powerful and reflects the fact that Heavenly Mother is the powerful Queen of Heaven. As our Heavenly Mother surely mourned and suffered at the death of her firstborn son, Jehovah, the Queen mourns the death of a symbolic Christ who’s out for two days and then rises on the third day.
Val 18:17 As previously noted, when we first encountered the human Queen, she’s mourning a dead man, who she doesn’t yet understand, will rise on the third day. Here, in addition to Heavenly Mother, she is much like the Virgin Mary, Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, faithful women who mourned Christ at his death. Each of those mourning women is the Divine Mother surrogate. The Virgin Mary, we already discussed and discussed at length, in the first interview. Mary of Bethany anoints Christ’s head and feet with the tree derived–again, the olive oil comes out of a tree. If the sacred tree signifies Mother in Heaven, what happens when we anoint someone with olive oil? Who’s touching us in that moment? That’s our Divine Mother. When you’re sick, who do you want when you’re sick, when you’re suffering? It’s like in our rituals, the Divine Mother touches us with that oil, if you read this stuff symbolically. But Mary of Bethany anoints Christ with this oil, head and feet, just prior to his death and resurrection. In doing this, she makes him the Messiah, the anointed one. I think that’s the only place in scripture where Christ is anointed. I might be wrong, maybe that happens when somebody wants to honor him or something, but that definitely happens there. Messiah means the anointed one. So, who anointed him? Mary of Bethany anointed him. One of these women anointed him and made him, literally, become a Messiah. The Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene sit with and administer to the body of Christ in the tomb, much as the Queen sits with the body of the symbolic Christ, Lamoni. But the Queen, like Abish, saliently symbolizes the nature of Heavenly Mother through the power of her touch. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were blocked from putting forth their hands to touch the Tree of Life, the Divine Mother symbol. Still unrepentant, had they done so, they would have lived forever in their sins. But while sinful human beings are blocked from putting forth their hands and touching the Tree of Life, the Tree of life, the Divine Mother, may graciously put forth her hand and touch repentant human beings, Lamoni and the Queen, raising them from spiritual death to eternal life in the Divine Council.
Val 20:43 Indeed, when at the touch of the Queen’s hand, Lamoni rises to new spiritual life, all the many life-giving roles of the Divine Mother are symbolized in her role in our birth into mortality when we partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and take leave of her and the Father. So, it’s like symbolically, Adam and Eve are leaving the presence of God, Father and Mother, when they partake of that fruit, which was what? Satan. Right? So just as the fruit of knowledge, good and evil, who gives it to them? We talked about this last time, it’s Satan. This is the mother tree, she has Satan as fruit, she has Christ as fruit. And the one sets us on our path, we enter the world, we encounter Satan, and the other takes us back into heaven. And her role in our spiritual births, as we’re born in heaven, and emerge from the amniotic baptismal waters on Earth, I think the baptismal font is another clear symbol of the Divine Mother. I mean, who are you born from? Who are you born from spiritually? I mean, in our doctrine, if you said: Who’s our spiritual mother? Everybody would say, “Well, where are we born again, spiritually, out of the baptismal font.”
GT 21:48 See, this makes me want to ask, why we don’t let women baptize. {Rick chuckling}
Val 22:03 Well, it’s better to have both the male and the female involved in that birth. Isn’t it? Think about that. Right? I mean, it’s the Father, the Son and the Mother are all present there in that birth. Her role, as we receive new life from the cross. The tree of life, where Mother and Son are jointly pierced by nails and jointly produce the sacramental fruit that redeems us from sin, and makes us members the Divine Council. Again, in our last one, this, to me, again, I’m indebted to Margaret for this, Margaret Toscano. Seeing that these marks in our garment are the marks and that they’re all the female points. Right? Where are you nourished by your mother? The breast and the navel, and you’re born at your mother’s knees. Margaret Toscano didn’t talk about this, but when you start to see this tree as a symbol of the Mother, the cross is a tree. It’s described in Scripture as being a tree. We talked earlier about one of the issues in our theology is, is God asking Christ to go off and do all the suffering, which isn’t an issue in Orthodox theology, because God and Christ are the same person.
GT 23:26 Or Paul and Margaret’s theology.
Val 23:28 Yes, we were talking about it with Paul and Margaret’s theology, because Paul’s big–I remember Paul emphatically talking about this. But at least with the Divine Mother, I think symbolically we’re seeing–and any mother knows this is true. Okay, you have a beloved son, that beloved son is going through the Atonement that Christ is having. Is the mother off on vacation? She’s not off on vacation. She’s feeling profoundly and deeply. And when the nails go through Christ’s hands and wrists into the cross, that’s telling you that it wasn’t just Christ who was suffering there. The whole Divine Council is suffering there. It’s a manifestation of the love that they have for us and that we’re being inducted into. We have to become people who feel the sins of others and suffer their sins and weep as God weeps at sin, the sin and suffering of others, because they won’t accept. They won’t come and join. They’re all inviting us freely to come and join, but some refuse for various reasons. Anyway, those symbols are really powerful. In this coupling of the Mother and Son, that is probably, of all my scholarship, that’s the thing I—shouldn’t be proud in these matters, but it’s the thing that moves me the most, this idea that Heavenly Mother is very much engaged with her Son, as the Father, and as is the Holy Ghost, in this process of salvation. She’s really there in the symbols, and that what he’s suffering, she’s suffering, along with him. These are powerful symbols.
Val 25:19 Now, in addition to all these meanings, the Queen joins Mary Magdalene as the enactor of an ancient and potent type scene in which the dyadic nature of the proper governance is signified in the presence of the Queen at the resurrection of the King, with the Queen and the King, then standing side by side as the proper rulers of the world. So, there’s all kinds of ancient rituals that have the Queen raising the King from the dead. Note that Christ came to Mary Magdalene, who may have been his wife and eternal companion, even before going to the Father. This is one of the weirdest things in the New Testament if you think about it. The very first person that Christ goes to, he says, “Touch me not. I’ve not yet ascended to my Father.”
GT 25:59 Yes, Mary Magdalene.
Val 26:00 Right. Why does he go to Mary before even going to the Father? You would think the first thing would be, straight to the Father. Right? But no, it’s to a woman and in my reading…
GT 26:12 The polygamists have an interesting answer to that.
Val 26:14 What’s their answer?
GT 26:16 Oh, you don’t know?
Val 26:19 Well, that she was his wife.
GT 26:20 That Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ.
Val 26:22 And not just not the only one, right?
GT 26:24 Correct.
Val 26:25 So you have–
GT 26:27 She was the head wife. {both chuckling}
Val 26:30 Anyway, the Queen raising Lamoni and standing before the people with him is another one of these–a connection with this ancient tradition. These narratives imply that in the Divine Council, an exalted man is fully empowered only if he has as his consort and co-ruler a divine woman. The bottom line is that we have a powerful theosis narrative in the story of Ammon, Lamoni, Abish, and the Queen.
{End of Part 4}
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