Is the Endowment Best Understood as a “Gift”? And What does Incense have to do with Anything?

We LDS often say “endowment means a gift.” Yes, but that is both incomplete and not even the main or most important part! As it turns out, “endow” has several hundred years of financial/property/donation/gift ideas behind it, so it’s not surprising to hear that kind of meaning applied to the temple ordinances. This, however, is the tip of a very large iceberg, and all the interesting stuff is below the surface.

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In Joseph Smith’s day, “endowment” primarily referred to 

The act of settling dower on a woman, or of settling a fund or permanent provision for the support of a parson or vicar, or of a professor, etc.

But Joseph Smith tended to use the verb endue/indue, a very similarly pronounced word  which Webster’s 1828 Dictionary noted “coincides nearly in signification with endow, that is, to put on, to furnish.” The OED notes historical confusion between endue and endow, with the former meaning, “to put on as a garment, to clothe or cover” and by extension, to take on the characteristics or properties of. The connection here is not hard to see; when someone is to take on the properties or characteristics of a king, you start by dressing them as the king in an investiture ceremony.

All of this ties in to the Greek word enduo, which means “to put on clothing” and by extension “to take on characteristics of.” This was mentioned in a recent Liahona article, but I want to expand on it.

For example, Gal 3:27 says

as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on [enduo] Christ

Luke 24:49 speaks of being

clothed [enduo] with power from on high.

1Co 15:53-54 speaks of

this mortal putting on [enduo] immortality.

And Ephesians 6:11ff exhorts Christians to “put on the whole armor of God.”

Note that in some of these, the KJV uses the word and spelling endue. Also please note, none of this implies that we should be reading these passages as crypto-endowment references. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. We’re exploring the symbolism and meaning behind the words here.

I’ve known this about Greek and English for a long time, thanks to some Greek word studies from John Welch I read on my mission. These appeared in the Ensign here (with endow) and here as well.

What I did not know is that this Greek usage reflects, at least in part, Hebrew. As I spend 10 minutes a day reading the NT in Greek and then the OT in Hebrew, I learned this during my daily reading. I happened to be in Judges 6:34 where “the spirit of Yahweh clothed Gideon” and the term is laḇaš (pronounced like the flatbread, lavash.) That means, “to put on clothing” but also has the same metaphorical or figurative meaning as Greek, apparently.

And as it turns out, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint or LXX) often translates Hebrew laḇaš with Greek enduo.

Job 29:14 says

I put on [laḇaš] righteous as my clothing, justice was my robe and my turban.

Isaiah 61:10 says,

I will greatly rejoice in the LORD… for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation.

Psa 104, a creation hymn, describes God thus;

O Yahweh my god, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty, wrapping yourself in light like a garment.

In Exodus 40:12-13, we find this.

Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons to the entrance of the tent of meeting, and shall wash them with water, and put on [laḇaš] Aaron the sacred vestments, and you shall anoint him and consecrate him, so that he may serve me as priest.

So the endowment is a gift, yes, but more importantly it is both the literal clothing of a person in royal and priestly vestments in a ritual intended to metaphorically clothe them in the attributes of priestliness (holiness, purity) and royalty (power, authority).

As a side note, Exodus 28:41  is similar to the Exodus 40 passage quoted above with laḇaš, though it adds something extra of LDS interest.

You shall put [the priestly garments] on your brother Aaron, and on his sons with him, and shall anoint them and ordain them and consecrate them, so that they may serve me as priests. 

Let me translate this second part quite literally. “You shall anoint them and fill their hands and make them holy so they may serve me as priests.”

The Old Testament is the best book to study to understand the ritual, mythological, and theological background of our temple ordinances, but much of the parts that would stand out to us are obscured by translation or cultural ignorance;  even in plain translation we  tend to overlook such passages or don’t instinctively grasp their significance, because we are not Israelites in any kind of cultural/linguistic sense.

My pic from a museum in Israel

Part of the priestly initiation— and regular priestly duty?— involved filling the hand(s), perhaps with sacrificial items, e.g. Exo 29:9 and 29, Lev 8:33, Lev 21:10, Judges 17:5 and 12.  It’s not entirely clear.

We know, on the other hand, that censers shaped like cupped hands were used as incense burners, associated with daily prayer per such passages as Exodus 25:29, in which the incense “spoons” are hand-shaped, kappim. They’re cupped bowls decorated like hands at the end of a pole or stick.

In good poetic parallelism, Psalm 141:1-2 associates prayer with incense (and upraised arms)

 I call upon you, O Lord; come quickly to me; 

give ear to my voice when I call to you. 

Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, 

the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice. 

The temple and tabernacle had a small incense altar before the veil of the temple, with priests offering incense on it morning and evening, presumably accompanied by prayer. This seems to be what John the Baptist’s father is chosen to do in Luke 1:9-10. Note again the association between prayer and incense there.

Drawing on this temple imagery of the incense altar,  in Revelation 8:3-4, incense ascends to heaven directly out of an angel’s hand along with the prayers of the saints.

Another angel with a golden censer came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel. 

Is the golden censer hand-shaped? Or is the angel’s hand itself the censer? Regardless, we have again the association of prayer, incense, and hands.

If you’d like to learn more about this kind of thing, I recommend several books.

• The anthology Temples of the Ancient World:Ritual and Symbolism available as a free pdf here or hardcover from Amazon (affiliate link)
• The follow-up anthology, The Temple in Time and Eternity, free PDF here (I do not like the formatting) or from Amazon (affiliate link)
• Matthew Brown’s The Gate of Heaven (be sure to read all his endnotes!) only from Amazon (affiliate link)
• The Temple and Cosmos Hugh Nibley anthology, free pdf and Amazon (affiliate link)
• Lynn M. Hilton had a paper 45 years ago called, “The Hand as a Cup in Ancient Temple Worship,” but I think it has been superseded by Stephen Smoot’s much more recent paper with images, “The Symbolism of the Cupped Hand in Ancient Egypt and Israel: Iconography, Text, and Artifact” in PDF here.

And for more on this from me, see my post on Temple preparation, and all my posts tagged “temple.”

(Image is Hugh Jackman from Tree of Life)

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