Evidence #12 | September 19, 2020
Shining Stones
Post contributed by
Scripture Central
Abstract
The shining stones reported in the book of Ether have parallels with several ancient accounts of stones that emit light, especially those believed to have been used in Noah’s ark.After the Jaredites constructed ocean-faring barges, the brother of Jared expressed his concern to the Lord about their lack of light. The Lord replied, “What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?” (Ether 2:23). In response, the brother of Jared “did molten out of a rock sixteen small stones; and they were white and clear, even as transparent glass” (Ether 3:1).1 He then asked the Lord to “touch these stones … with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness” (v. 4). As petitioned, the Lord touched them “one by one” (v. 6), which caused them to “shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness” (Ether 6:3).
Hugh Nibley asked, “But who gave the brother of Jared the idea about stones in the first place? It was not the Lord, who left him entirely on his own; and yet the man went right to work as if he knew exactly what he was doing. Who put him on to it?”2 While stones that emit light may seem like an absurdity to modern readers, legends of their existence and importance were widely spread throughout the ancient world.3 Drawing upon a substantial body of ancient texts, John A. Tvedtnes has connected the shining stones in Ether to such items as the Urim and Thummim, glowing idols, teraphim, sanctuary stones, and medieval glowing stones.4 Tvedtnes concluded, “The account of the stones used to provide light in the Jaredite barges fits rather well into a larger corpus of ancient and medieval literature.”5
Of particular relevance is the way that shining stones were directly linked to Noah’s ark. In the Bablyonian Talmud, for example, one Jewish commentator reported that the Lord instructed Noah to “Set therein precious stones and jewels, so that they may give thee light, bright as the noon.”6 Another ancient rabbi explained, “During the whole twelve months that Noah was in the Ark he did not require the light of the sun by day or the light of the moon by night, but he had a polished gem which he hung up.”7
These explanations are notable when considering that the text in Ether 6:7 explicitly draws a parallel between the Jaredite vessels and Noah’s ark: “there was no water that could hurt them, their vessels being tight like unto a dish, and also they were tight like unto the ark of Noah” (emphasis added).8 Considering that his people were already constructing barges after the manner of Noah’s ark, it is reasonable to assume that the brother of Jared may have known something of the stones which, according to tradition, illuminated Noah’s vessel.9 Nibley thus argued that the brother of Jared was simply “following the pattern of Noah’s ark, for in the oldest records of the human race the ark seems to have been illuminated by just such shining stones.”10
John A. Tvedtnes, “Glowing Stones in Ancient and Medieval Lore,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6, no. 2 (1997): 99–123.
Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert/The World of the Jaredites/There Were Jaredites, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 5 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 358–379.
Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 6 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 337–358.
Ether 3:1–6Ether 6:1–7- 1 For a discussion of the ancient transparent stones formed through intensive heat, see Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert/The World of the Jaredites/There Were Jaredites, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 5 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 370–371. For analysis of the term “molten,” see Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon: Part 6, 3 Nephi 19–Moroni 10 (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2006), 3754. For a discussion of glass in the ancient world, see Nibley, The World of the Jaredites, 216–218.
- 2 Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 6 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 352.
- 3 For a treatment of criticisms regarding the shining stones in the Jaredite barges, see Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 337–339. For the scientific plausibility of shining stones, see Nicholas Read, Jae R. Ballif, John W. Welch, Bill Evenson, Kathleen Reynolds Gee, and Matthew Roper, “New Light on the Shining Stones of the Jaredites,” in Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon: The FARMS Updates of the 1990s, ed. John W. Welch and Melvin J. Thorne (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1999), 253–255.
- 4 John A. Tvedtnes, “Glowing Stones in Ancient and Medieval Lore,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6, no. 2 (1997): 99–123.
- 5 Tvedtnes, “Glowing Stones,” 122–123. See also, Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 358: “The few sources that might have been available to the prophet were obscure and garbled accounts in texts that not half a dozen men in the world could read, eked out by classical sources that were entirely meaningless until the discovery of the key—the great Gilgamesh Epic—long after the appearance of the Book of Mormon. That key ties the pyrophilus stone, the Alexander Cycle, the Syrian rites, the Babylonian Flood stories and the Urim and Thummim together in a common tradition of immense antiquity and makes the story of the Jaredite stones not only plausible but actually typical.”
- 6 Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin 108b, trans. H. Freedman, ed. Isidore Epstein (London, UK: Soncino Press, 1935, reprinted 1952, 1956, and 1961), online at come-and-hear.com.
- 7 Midrash Rabbah, trans. H. Freedman, ed. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (London, UK: Soncino Press, 1939, reprinted 1951 and 1961), 244, online at archive.org. This glowing stone is referred to as the “tzohar” in Jewish mysticism and is present in the stories of Noah and Abraham. See Rashi on Genesis 16:66:16, B. Sanhedrin 108b, B. Bava Batra 16b, Zohar 1:11a–11b. See also Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85–88; 332, for traditions on this glowing stone.
- 8 Hugh Nibley explained, “The description of the ships suggests nothing in the Bible, where aside from its general dimensions (which are symbolic) nothing is said as to how the ark actually looked; but it exactly matches the description of those sacred magur boats in which, according to the oldest Babylonian stories, the hero of the Flood was saved from destruction.” See Hugh Nibley, Since Cumorah, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 7 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 209–210. Since Cumorah originally ran as a series in the Improvement Era from 1964–1967. For parallels between the Jaredite barges and the ship in the Babylonian flood story, see Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 343–348.
- 9 The story of Noah and the flood would have been relatively recent history for the Jaredites, who had departed from the, “great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people” (Ether 1:33). For information about the Tower of Babel, see Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and David J. Larsen, In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel (Salt Lake City, UT: Eborn Books and The Interpreter Foundation, 2014), 379–434.
- 10 Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 352.
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