Language, Title, Territory, and Ritual: The Systematic Theological Construction of Early Mormonism
Between 1832 and 1844, Joseph Smith produced a sequence of theological claims that, when examined in aggregate, exhibit a degree of internal coherence that resists dismissal as mere improvisation. The architecture that emerged across that twelve-year period — moving from vocabulary to divine titling, from divine titling to sacred geography, and from geography to ritual institution — constitutes one of the more ambitious theological construction projects in American religious history. Each layer built upon and extended the previous one, producing a system in which the Pure Language, the identity of Adam as the Ancient of Days, the location of the Edenic valley in Missouri, and the mechanics of the temple endowment functioned as interlocking components of a single cosmological framework.
The present analysis traces that framework thematically — beginning with the linguistic system that provided its conceptual vocabulary, proceeding through the titling and administrative structure that organized its divine hierarchy, examining the geographic claims that anchored it to physical territory, and concluding with the ritual institution that enacted the entire system ceremonially. At each stage, the analysis also considers the degree to which each claim finds support in the ancient sources it invokes — biblical, Hebrew, Near Eastern, and Second Temple — and where the evidentiary record diverges from the theological assertion.
I. The Linguistic Foundation: The Pure Language of 1832
The earliest component of the system under examination is a document known as A Sample of Pure Language, produced in Joseph Smith’s circle during the Kirtland period and preserved in the Joseph Smith Papers. The document is presented in question-and-answer format and offers a partial vocabulary of what Smith identified as the original divine tongue spoken before the fall of Adam — the language corrupted at Babel and now, in part, restored. Its contents are as follows:
Q: What is the name of God in pure Language
A: Awmen. It is the being which made all things in all its parts.
Q: What is the name of the Son of God.
A: The Son Awmen. It is the greatest of all the parts of Awmen which is the Godhead the first born.
Q: What is man.
A: This signifies Sons Awmen. the human family the children of men the greatest parts of Awmen Sons.
Q: What are Angels called in pure language.
A: Awmen Angls-men. Awmen’s Ministerring servants Sanctified who are sent forth from heaven to minister for or to Sons Awmen.
Several features of this document merit close attention. Most immediately, the entire lexical system is constructed upon a single root — Awmen, rendered in later usage as Ahman. Every being within the cosmological order is identified by its relational position to that root: God is Ahman, the Son of God is Son Ahman, humanity is Sons Ahman, and angels are Ahman’s ministerial servants, defined by their service to Sons Ahman. The result is not, technically, a language in any conventional linguistic sense. There is no grammar, no syntax, no phonological system, no morphology beyond the simple additive modification of the single root. What the document provides is more precisely a classificatory hierarchy — a ranking of beings expressed through nominal variation on a shared divine title.
The theological implications of this classificatory structure are significant. In the dominant Western theological tradition — whether Augustinian, Reformed, or Catholic — the distinction between Creator and creature is treated as categorical rather than graduated. God does not occupy one end of a spectrum that humans progressively ascend; he occupies a different ontological order altogether. The Pure Language document encodes a different premise: God and humanity share a root designation, differing in modifier rather than in kind. Humans are Sons Ahman where God is Ahman — lesser expressions, as the document has it, of the same divine category. The Lorenzo Snow couplet, articulated decades later — “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become” — represents a doctrinal crystallization of what is already implicit in this 1832 linguistic schema.
It is worth pausing here to assess the document’s relationship to the sources it implicitly invokes. The prophetic basis for a restored pure language is most commonly drawn from Zephaniah 3:9, which speaks of God turning to the peoples a “pure language” (Hebrew: saphah berurah) so that they may call upon his name and serve him with one accord. In context, the verse is a prophecy of restored worship among the nations — a restoration of unified devotion, not the recovery of a secret divine vocabulary or the disclosure of shared nomenclature across a divine hierarchy. The lexical and contextual distance between Zephaniah’s usage and Smith’s document is considerable.
Similarly, the nearest phonetic cognate for Awmen/Ahman in the Hebrew tradition is the particle amen, which functions as a liturgical affirmation — “so be it” or “truly” — rather than a divine personal name. Isaiah 65:16 employs the related construction elohei amen, sometimes translated “the God of Amen” or “the God of truth,” but this usage is contextually distinct from Smith’s adoption of Awmen as the primary divine name. No ancient Semitic language attested in the scholarly record — Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian — produces Awmen or Ahman as a name for the divine being. The document’s core vocabulary, measured against the linguistic record of the ancient Near East, has no recoverable antecedent.
This is not a peripheral observation. If the document represents a genuinely recovered pre-Babel divine tongue, even partial recovery would be expected to produce some resonance with the oldest attested linguistic traditions of the biblical world. The absence of such resonance does not constitute disproof, but it does constitute an evidential gap that any serious assessment of the document’s claims must acknowledge. What is demonstrable is that the document was produced, embedded into the developing theological framework of the early church, and — as will be examined below — used to generate both sacred place-names and canonized scriptural titles.
II. The Divine Hierarchy: Adam as the Ancient of Days
If the Pure Language document established the vocabulary of Smith’s emerging cosmology, the titling of Adam as the Ancient of Days established its administrative structure. The equation appears in Doctrine and Covenants 27, where a revelation identifies “Michael, or Adam” as “the father of all, the prince of all, the ancient of days.” The significance of this identification lies in its source material. The title Ancient of Days is drawn from Daniel 7, one of the most structurally important passages in the Hebrew apocalyptic tradition.
In Daniel’s vision, the Ancient of Days is the presiding figure of a heavenly throne room: seated on a fiery throne, attended by thousands, with the books opened before him and a formal judicial proceeding underway. A figure described as “one like a son of man” approaches the throne and receives from the Ancient of Days dominion, glory, and an everlasting kingdom. Across the full breadth of Jewish and Christian interpretive tradition — spanning the Targums, the Church Fathers, the medieval commentators, and the Reformation scholars — the Ancient of Days has been identified with the supreme divine authority, not with any created being, angelic or human. The figure in Daniel 7 does not bear the characteristics of Adam as Genesis presents him: he is not a first man, not a gardener, not the father of a mortal lineage. He is a judicial sovereign of cosmic scope.
Smith’s reassignment of that title to Adam constitutes a significant reinterpretation of the source text. It is not an interpretation that finds support in any prior Jewish or Christian exegetical tradition; no commentary predating Smith treats the Ancient of Days as identical with or representative of Adam. What the identification accomplishes theologically, however, is coherent within the system being constructed: it takes the supreme governing role of Daniel’s apocalyptic vision and assigns it to the figure who, in the Pure Language framework, represents the head of the Sons Ahman — the presiding patriarchal officer of the divine council for this world.
This framework was extended in 1835 through a revelation compiled from earlier priesthood instructions, subsequently canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 107. The passage describes what it designates a grand council convened three years before Adam’s death, in which seven generations of high priests assembled in a valley. Adam blessed each of his righteous posterity, and the Lord appeared, confirmed Adam’s authority, and established him as “prince” over his dominion forever. The scene is plainly modeled on the sôd — the divine council structure attested across the Hebrew Bible and examined in greater detail below — with Adam functioning as the presiding figure of a formal deliberative and administrative body.
The historical record does not yield any antecedent for this specific event. The assembly described in D&C 107 — seven generations of high priests, a formal blessing council, three years before Adam’s death, in a named valley — appears in no biblical text, in no apocryphal or pseudepigraphical literature, in no Second Temple Jewish source, and in no early Christian writing predating 1835. The scene has no parallel in the textual record prior to its appearance in Smith’s revelations. This does not preclude its theological function within the system being assembled, but it does preclude its classification as a recovery of previously existing ancient tradition.
III. The Geographic Claim: Adam-ondi-Ahman and the Missouri Eden
On May 19, 1838, Joseph Smith visited a location in Daviess County, Missouri — known locally as Wight’s Ferry, after the apostle Lyman Wight who had established a homestead and ferry crossing there earlier that year. At this location, Smith announced by revelation that the site was to be designated Adam-ondi-Ahman. The naming was not incidental. Parsed through the Pure Language framework established six years earlier, the compound toponym resolves as follows: Adam (the man Adam), ondi (the connective particle indicating presence or belonging), and Ahman (the name of God in the Pure Language). The full designation thus signifies, within the system’s own vocabulary, Adam in the presence of God, or Adam belonging to Ahman.
The geographic significance assigned to the site in Doctrine and Covenants 116 extends the claim further: Adam-ondi-Ahman is identified as the place where Adam shall come to visit his people, or the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet. The heavenly throne-room scene of Daniel 7 — which had been mapped onto Adam’s identity in D&C 27 — is here mapped onto a specific physical location in northern Missouri. The three elements of the developing system — the linguistic root Ahman, the title Ancient of Days, and the apocalyptic throne scene of Daniel — are brought into explicit territorial conjunction.
Smith additionally identified physical remnants of Adam’s post-Edenic habitation at the site. Heber C. Kimball recorded Smith’s indication of two stone altar formations: one near Wight’s house on Tower Hill, described as the altar of prayer, and a second approximately a mile to the north on the highest ground of Spring Hill, identified as the altar of sacrifice. According to Kimball’s account, Smith told the assembled elders that Spring Hill was the place where Adam offered sacrifice after his expulsion from the garden.
The geographic claim invites scrutiny on its own terms, independent of the theological framework it extends. The Genesis account of Eden is not geographically vague. It situates the garden at the confluence of four rivers, two of which — the Tigris (Hiddekel) and Euphrates — are explicitly named and correspond to known rivers in Mesopotamia. No textual mechanism within the Genesis narrative, and no established framework within biblical geography, archaeology, or ancient Near Eastern studies, provides a basis for relocating the Edenic site from the Mesopotamian river basin to Daviess County, Missouri. The designation of Adam-ondi-Ahman was not the identification of a previously unknown location through the application of established geographic criteria. It was the unilateral assignment of sacred identity to a specific tract of land, authorized by prophetic declaration.
What can be documented with precision is the internal logic of the move. The Pure Language had established Ahman as the name of God. The titling sequence had established Adam as the presiding officer of the divine council — the Ancient of Days whose return was prophesied by Daniel. The geographic designation completed the system by providing a physical address for that prophesied return, named in the very vocabulary the system had already generated. The vocabulary, as noted at the outset, preceded the map. The name Adam-ondi-Ahman is not a recovered ancient toponym; it is a newly constructed designation built from a newly constructed lexicon.
IV. The Ancient Sôd: Biblical Background and Early Mormon Engagement
Any forensic analysis of the institutional and ritual dimensions of this theological system requires engagement with a concept that has been largely invisible to English-language readers of the Bible, though it is well attested in the Hebrew text. The word is sôd — Strong’s H5475 — and it presents a persistent translation problem. Depending on context, the King James Version renders it as “secret,” “counsel,” or “assembly,” distributing across three separate English words what the Hebrew text treats as a unified technical term.
Modern scholarship — represented most accessibly in the work of Frank Moore Cross at Harvard and Michael Heiser’s treatment in The Unseen Realm — has established that sôd is a compound concept denoting the Divine Council: simultaneously a place (the heavenly assembly chamber), a body (the members who sit in that assembly), and a process (the intimate disclosure of divine deliberation to those admitted to the chamber). To have the sôd, in the idiom of the Hebrew prophets, is to have been admitted to the governing body in which the divine will is deliberated and disclosed.
The pattern is consistent across multiple biblical texts. Psalm 25:14 states that the sôd of Yahweh is for those who honor him — a claim about access to the deliberative chamber, not merely about spiritual intimacy. First Kings 22 depicts the prophet Micaiah’s vision of Yahweh seated on his throne, surrounded by the host of heaven to his right and left, conducting a formal deliberation and commissioning a council member for a specific task. Psalm 82 presents God standing in the divine assembly and addressing its members — called elohim and sons of the Most High — in language that assigns them divine titles while holding them to account for the justice of their administration. Daniel 7, which has already appeared in this analysis as the source of the Ancient of Days title, is the sôd at its most formally elaborated: a throne, an attending council, opened books, a judicial proceeding, and a formal transfer of authority.
Within the prophetic tradition, sôd access functions as the defining credential of a genuine prophet. Jeremiah, disputing the authority of rival prophets, asks pointedly: “Who has stood in the council of Yahweh?” The test is not a private visionary experience but admission to the deliberative chamber — access to the sôd as an institutional category. Isaiah’s throne vision in chapter 6, in which he hears the divine question “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and receives his commission in response, is a sôd scene in precisely this sense: the prophet is present at the deliberation and receives his assignment from within it.
By 1836, Smith was studying Hebrew directly with Joshua Seixas in Kirtland, Ohio, and had access to the structural features of the Old Testament text in ways unavailable to English-only readers. Whether or not he had explicit knowledge of the sôd as a technical term, the theological constructions he produced during and after the Kirtland period track the sôd framework with notable precision. Doctrine and Covenants 107 places Adam at the head of a formal assembly of high priests — a council structure directly parallel to the sôd as attested in the Hebrew Bible. Moses 6:67, from Smith’s revision of Genesis, records a divine declaration over Adam following his baptism: “Behold, thou art one in me, a son of God; and thus may all become my sons.” In the sôd tradition, oneness with the presiding divine figure is the language of council membership — shared cognition and covenantal alignment with the one who presides. The declaration functions, within that framework, as Adam’s formal installation in the council.
V. The Ritual Institution: The Nauvoo Endowment and the Democratization of the Sôd
The expulsion from Missouri in 1838-1839 interrupted the physical development of the system’s geographic center but did not alter its theological trajectory. What the Saints carried into Illinois was not a framework in disarray but a substantially complete theological architecture — vocabulary, titles, geography, and administrative structure — that required only its ritual dimension to be formally instituted. That dimension was introduced in Nauvoo in 1842, in the form of the temple endowment ceremony.
The endowment’s structural relationship to the sôd framework is sufficiently direct to warrant explicit analysis. The ceremony opens with a creation council in which Elohim and Jehovah preside and deliberate, enacting the assembly structure of Psalm 82 and Daniel 7. The candidate is addressed as Michael before the fall — Smith’s identification of the archangel Michael with Adam, and Adam with the Ancient of Days, thus connects the individual initiate to the presiding figure of the divine council — and then moves through a narrative arc tracing the fall of Adam and the process of restoration to pre-mortal identity. Tokens and keywords are transmitted at each stage of the ceremony: these represent, within the sôd framework, the administrative credentials of council membership — the means by which a member of the divine assembly is recognized and granted access to the deliberative chamber.
The temple veil, through which the candidate passes at the ceremony’s conclusion, functions as a literal architectural threshold between the mortal world and the divine assembly room — the point of admission to the sôd. The candidate’s passage through it enacts, in ceremonial form, precisely what Micaiah experienced in vision and what Jeremiah claimed as the test of a true prophet: entry into the council of Yahweh.
This is where the Mormon reconstruction of the sôd framework diverges most substantially from its biblical antecedent — and where the theological innovation of the Nauvoo period is most clearly visible. In the Hebrew Bible, sôd access is extraordinary and restricted. The prophets who claim it — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micaiah — are exceptional figures making exceptional claims, and the claim itself functions as the criterion that distinguishes true prophecy from false. The divine council is not a scalable institution; it is a governing body whose membership is not distributed to the general population.
The Nauvoo endowment transformed the sôd into an initiatory procedure available to all worthy adult members of the church. The tokens and keywords — the administrative credentials of council membership — were transmitted by the hundreds in the upper room of the Nauvoo store in 1842, and subsequently in the Nauvoo Temple. The ancient prophetic criterion of sôd access, which Jeremiah had wielded as the definitive test of prophetic authority, was democratized into a ceremony through which every initiated Saint received, in principle, the same credential.
A second departure from the ancient sôd framework is equally significant. In the Hebrew texts, the dynamic of the council is descending: God convenes, God deliberates, God commissions, and the prophet receives and is sent. The prophet’s admission to the sôd is the occasion of a transmission from above — divine plans disclosed downward to the one called to act upon them. The Nauvoo endowment’s narrative arc inverts this dynamic. The candidate does not descend into the council from outside to receive a commission; he ascends through a recovery of pre-mortal identity that restores him to a council seat understood to have been occupied before mortality suspended it. The movement is from fallen to restored, from below to above, from mortal to pre-mortal divine standing.
The sôd, in this reconstruction, is not a council one is admitted to from without; it is a council one returns to from a state of temporary exile.
A third departure concerns the nature of the presiding figure’s authority. In the ancient sôd, Yahweh’s position at the head of the divine council is not a position arrived at through progressive advancement — it is a position of categorical difference. Even in the most pluralistic readings of the Hebrew Bible’s divine council texts, the distinction between Yahweh and the council members is qualitative, not merely quantitative. Psalm 82 demonstrates that council members can be elevated and can be demoted — judged and condemned to mortality if they fail in the administration of justice — but the presiding figure is not one of them who advanced further. His is a different order of existence.
The King Follett logic — articulated by Smith in April 1844 — collapses this categorical distinction. God was once as man is now; man may become as God now is. The distance between the presiding figure of the divine council and its members is reconceived as a difference of advancement rather than a difference of kind. In the ancient sôd, one is admitted to the council. In the Mormon reconstruction, one is on a trajectory toward presiding over it. These represent not refinements of the same theological framework but genuinely distinct cosmological premises regarding the nature of divine authority.
VI. Assessment: Internal Coherence and Evidentiary Limits
Examined as a whole, the system that emerged between 1832 and 1844 exhibits a degree of internal coherence that is analytically significant. The linguistic root Ahman, established in the 1832 Pure Language document, generates the divine name embedded in the canonized scriptural title Son Ahman (Doctrine and Covenants 78), the place-name Adam-ondi-Ahman, and the structural logic of a hierarchy in which humans are classified as Sons Ahman — lesser expressions of the same root identity as God. The titling of Adam as the Ancient of Days extends Daniel’s supreme judicial figure from the heavenly to the human domain, positioning Adam as the presiding officer of the divine council for this world. The geographic designation of Adam-ondi-Ahman anchors Daniel’s prophesied throne-scene to a physical location, named in the vocabulary the system had already generated. And the Nauvoo endowment enacts the entire structure ceremonially — creation council, candidate’s recovery of pre-mortal identity, transmission of council credentials, passage through the threshold into the divine assembly.
This internal coherence is worth acknowledging precisely because it is unusual. Theological systems of this scope and complexity typically develop over centuries, through the accumulation of commentary and the work of multiple systematicians. What Smith produced across twelve years was a complete cosmological architecture — with its own vocabulary, its own divine hierarchy, its own sacred geography, and its own ritual institution — in which each element reinforced and extended the others. Whether one understands this as evidence of revelatory coherence or of deliberate systematic construction, the architecture itself demands to be taken seriously as an intellectual artifact.
What the system does not provide — and what any serious assessment of its claims must reckon with — is evidentiary support in the ancient sources it invokes. The Pure Language’s vocabulary finds no cognate in any attested ancient Semitic language. The identification of Adam as the Ancient of Days has no precedent in any Jewish or Christian exegetical tradition predating Smith’s revelations. The geographic relocation of Eden to Missouri has no support in the Genesis text, in biblical geography, or in any archaeological framework. The grand council of D&C 107 has no parallel in any ancient source. And the sôd framework, which the endowment most closely approximates in structure, is reconceived in ways that depart from its biblical antecedent at the most fundamental level — treating the distance between humanity and divinity as a matter of advancement rather than of categorical difference.
The Pure Language itself is the most revealing case. Introduced in 1832, embedded in canonical scripture as the title Son Ahman, used to generate the place-name Adam-ondi-Ahman, and presupposed by the endowment’s cosmological framework, the document nonetheless disappeared from active institutional teaching relatively early. By Brigham Young’s administration, the vocabulary was no longer in regular circulation, and the Pure Language as a formal category has not appeared in official LDS curriculum in the modern period. The term Son Ahman remains in Doctrine and Covenants 78 but is not typically explained in terms of its generative linguistic system. The document sits in the historical record — accessible through the Joseph Smith Papers Project — but functionally invisible in contemporary institutional discourse.
This trajectory — from active theological deployment to institutional silence — is itself analytically informative. It suggests that the Pure Language’s vocabulary was sufficiently thin, and its derivation sufficiently visible, to become a liability rather than an asset as the movement matured and its claims were subjected to wider scrutiny. A language of fewer than ten words, built entirely on a single invented root, raised questions about its scope and provenance that the institution eventually found easier to leave unaddressed than to answer.
What the full arc of the system reveals, across the twelve years from the Pure Language document to the King Follett discourse, is a theological project of genuine ambition and internal rigor — one that engaged seriously with biblical materials (Daniel, Zephaniah, the Hebrew divine council texts), produced a coherent cosmological framework from them, and institutionalized that framework in vocabulary, title, geography, and ritual. It also reveals a project in which the claims advanced at each stage consistently exceed what the invoked sources will support, and in which the creative departures from ancient precedent are as structurally significant as the points of genuine engagement with it. The sôd was a governing council with a categorically distinct presiding deity; Smith’s reconstruction made it a scalable initiatory institution on a path toward deity. The Ancient of Days was the supreme figure of Daniel’s heavenly court; Smith’s reconstruction made him the first man in human history. Eden was in Mesopotamia; Smith’s reconstruction placed it in Missouri.
These are not minor variations. They represent a systematic reorientation of the theological materials they engage — one that produced a coherent and internally consistent cosmology, but a cosmology that is, in its essential premises, a departure from rather than a recovery of the ancient framework it claims to restore. The distinction between restoration and reconstruction is, ultimately, the analytical question that the evidence compels — and the one that any honest engagement with this period of early Mormon history must be prepared to address.
