Source: LDS scholar: We get this WRONG about ancient temples Channel: Keystone Published: April 27, 2026 | Archived: May 30, 2026

Video: LDS scholar: We get this WRONG about ancient temples
Channel: Keystone
Published: April 27, 2026
Duration: 29:13
Views: 27,004
Category: Education
Video ID: nugULeNAhUw

Description

How ancient are “modern” LDS temples, really? Is it worrisome that we find Masonry in our own ordinances? What is at the heart of temple worship? Ben Spackman is back and he’s here to set the record straight!

Ben Spackman is a Latter-day Saint Bible scholar. He’s got a bachelor’s in Near Eastern studies, a Master’s in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, and a PhD in the history of Christianity. Latter-day Saints around the world are studying the Old Testament in 2026, and in this episode we’re going to be talking about ancient temples versus modern temples: what we get right when we compare them, what we get wrong, and what we may be misunderstanding.

0:00 - Intro 0:51 - Looking for the wrong thing 2:49 - Adaptation and accommodation 6:17 - Are temple rituals stolen? 10:02 - Returning to the Garden of Eden 13:35 - Holy hearts in holy places 17:16 - Did Joseph Smith know? 19:00 - Blessings, curses, and penalties 23:59 - Blood of the (new) covenant 26:58 - Do we even need temples?

Video editor: Rustin Van Katwyk rustinv@gmail.com

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Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:00 A lot of times Latter-day Saints have looked to support the idea of the restoration of the temple by hunting for it in early Christianity or the Old Testament or the ancient near east. And I think sometimes we’ve gone looking for the wrong thing. Wow. Ben Spackman is a Latter-day Saint Bible scholar. He’s got a bachelor’s degree in Neareastern studies, a master’s in Neareastern languages and civilizations, and a PhD in the history of Christianity. Do we need to be more careful with how we use the word restoration?

0:27 Yeah, I think we do. I think we tend to think of it as like a onetoone thing. That wouldn’t be very useful. But there might be a lot of non-Latter-day Saint viewers who see this and say, “Well, this is all fine and good, all this Old Testament stuff, but it really doesn’t matter because God does not dwell in temples made with human hands, right? How do you approach that kind of a question? Um, we’re going to focus on temples in the Old Testament, modern-day temples, how they overlap. Yeah. Parallels that we can make. Yeah.

1:01 I’m going to let you take the reigns on this one. So, a lot of times Latter-day Saints have looked to support the idea of the restoration of the temple by hunting for it in early Christianity or the Old Testament or the ancient Near East, which is fine. But if you’re looking to match a pattern, you have to make sure that the pattern you’re trying to match is actually there. And there have been some people who have said, you know, I can’t find I can’t find this.

1:27 Mhm. And I think sometimes we’ve gone looking for the wrong thing. So for example, if we are looking for one coherent ceremony, I think we’re not going to find it. M but I don’t think that’s what we should be looking for because if you go back and read the words of the brethren in the 1800s as they’re kind of standardizing the temple after Joseph Smith told them to one of the things that they say is well the endowment obviously has both ironic and melazdic portions.

1:56 We could split it in half and that would be the ideal way to do it. And we would have people covenant to the lower ironic half first and see if they’re faithful to those covenants and then we would put them through the mazes half if they were faithful. But it’s okay. Yeah. And so there’s obviously some flexibility in how this can be done and in what we should be looking for. So, I’ve mostly gone looking for uh parts that we find together for analoges for um for things that seem to correspond well in context. Now, there are a couple other reasons why I don’t think we should just take the current status quo and go hunting for it. And those have to do with principles of revelation that we’ve talked about before and that the church is talking about right now in a number of public materials. Um there’s the idea of progressive revelation and change. If you go onto the church website and find the finding answers to gospel questions, there are five principles and subprinciples. And one of those is called work to understand the past.

3:02 And it says expect change. When we study the past, we sometimes find that practices, teachings, and ideas we thought were unchanging have actually changed quite a bit. And I think anyone who’s over the age of 23 or 24 will be aware of more recent changes in the temple. Yeah. Right. We have this principle of uh adaptation where God or the prophet takes something and the cultural mill gives it new meaning, adapts it, brings it in. And um there are dozens of examples, but I think one of the most obvious is circumcision, which pre-existed outside Israel as a Egyptian thing, as a Babylonian thing. Everyone was doing except the Philistines.

3:49 Um those dirty Philistines. I know. So uncircumcised. But when the Israelites start doing it, they start doing it as the sign of the covenant. M so it’s not it’s not this completely new thing. It’s something that’s out there in the culture and it gets adapted. It gets transformed. It gets given new meaning. And the the phrase I like with this so much is uh at the wedding at Kaa in John 4, Jesus did not make wine out of nothing. He transformed water into wine. He took what was there and changed it. Made it new. Made it different. Gave it new meaning. This is also something that the church has recognized. I’m quoting from another church thing here.

4:33 God spoke to the ancient Israelites according to their ancient neareastern understanding. He spoke to Joseph Smith using symbols and language from his 1800s American culture. And God communicates to us today according to our own limited capacity and ways we can understand. So there’s that adaptation principle where something there is transformed. But we also have this principle called accommodation.

4:55 And there was an article on this in the Leona not too long ago, which is that God speaks according to our understanding. He comes down and meets us where we are. Which means sometimes even direct revelation will not be eternally ideal. God gives us what we can handle. Won’t give us commandments we can’t keep. Won’t speak to us in ways that we don’t that we can’t grasp at all. Right? And so earlier versions of the temple, whether modern or ancient, probably accommodated to understandings in some way that were not ideal um and have been refined as time goes on with progressive revelation to meet changing needs and so on. Uh there’s another great thing that the church has put out about these principles about recognizing that revelation is a process, which is kind of what I was just getting at. Revelation is not God dropping a 900page book of this is eternal truth with no accommodation.

5:54 Rather, it comes piece by piece, line upon line over time with increasing understanding. When we’ve got we’ve got Doctrine of Covenant section 138 from 1917 where Joseph F. Smith kind of explains DNC76 and baptism for the dead and things which had not been understand understood before that point even by the prophet of the restoration. I love that the church says this. There are different ways of understanding the relationship between masonry and the temple. Some Latter-day Saints point to similarities between the format and symbols. Others note that the ideas and institutions in the culture that surrounded Joseph Smith frequently contributed to the process by which he obtained revelation. That is this is both adaptation and accommodation here.

6:37 In any event, the endowment did not simply imitate the rituals of Freemasonry. Joseph’s encounter with masonry evidently served as a catalyst for revelation. So here is outside culture generating, oh, how should we be doing this? Perhaps providing structures or symbols that could be accommodated and adapted to do this new thing. I mean, even if you want to argue that the temple is 100% taken from Freemasonry, it’s still quite a different thing. And I would argue first that it’s not 100% just taken from Freemasonry. Second, Freemasonry adapted a number of things from the Bible. Uh, and third, as I said, this ancient modern dichotomy doesn’t account for those things that have kind of come through and been modified over time. Um, where they’re not entirely ancient or modern. The Israelite tabernacle, some of the words for the items in it are Egyptian. Part of the idea for this golden thing representing the presence of God that you carry around is a lot like the Egyptian solar boat. who’ve been in Egypt for 40 years before having this revelation on the tabernacle.

7:46 Moses, we should maybe expect some Egyptian symbolism in it. If something is totally unfamiliar to you, how do you understand what it means? And that’s that’s one reason why God may choose to use things that are vaguely familiar, even if they get transformed a little, right? It’s like why in in Genesis 1, God doesn’t say, “Well, actually, the Earth is a sphere.” Yeah. and floating through space, rotating through space. He says he he he he deals with what knowledge they already have. Yeah. Or or what beliefs they already have.

8:20 He he accommodates by using their cosmology, their understanding of the the physical nature of the universe, cuz that’s not the point he’s making. We have a lot of other places where the Old Testament adapts to make points like a number of Psalms. Um, Psalm 29 seems to be taken pretty directly from Canaanite stuff, but readapted to be about the God of Israel instead of some of the polytheistic gods of Canaan.

8:45 The law of Moses, yeah, comes a lot of it is based on the law of what? Hammurabi. Uh, it it has a lot in common with pre-existing law codes and uh Assyrian vassel treaties. Mh. Um, in fact, all of the book of Deuteronomy is structured like an Assyrian vassel treaty. So, to summarize all this stuff, the temple is a restoration, but it’s a restoration that has a lot of adaptation and accommodation and progressive revelation and flexibility in it.

9:18 Do we need to be more careful with how we use the word restoration? Yeah, I think we do. I I I think we tend to think of it as like a onetoone thing. like, yeah, here it is over here and we’re going to pick it up from, you know, the year 30 and we’re going to dump it into here in 1830. Mhm. That wouldn’t be very useful simply because the cultural meaning in 30 of an element is not the same as it would be understood in 1830. So accommodation, you know, meeting people where they are, speaking the language and the cultural language they understand is a sign of God’s mercy, right? And some of these things there are remnants and hints about them in the temple today. I think now this is not my stuff. There is so much good LDS scholarship on this that is widely available that most people don’t know about. There’s a great article by BYU professor Don Perry called Garden of Eden as prototype sanctuary. That is how does Genesis 2 through3 reflect temple themes.

10:22 and he connects it to the sanctuary of the Israelite tabernacle and temple and he says on the day of atonement um which people may or may not know about. It’s in Leviticus 16. This is the one day a year when the high priest can go into the holy of holies. He is outside and he offers special sacrifices to atone for creation. And then he goes and spreads blood on the the horns of the uh of the altar and then goes into the holy of holies with some of this blood. Now phrased that way, it’s just weird, but culty. It’s a cult.

11:02 Exactly. But Perry goes through and he says, “Here are some things where this connects to the Garden of Eden.” So, Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are driven out from west to east. How do we know this? Because God puts cherubim, cherubs, guardian figures, and a flaming sword on the east. There’s apparently an entrance to Eden on the east. And this entrance is now guarded by divine figures. M and then he says, “Let’s lay the tabernacle over top of this.”

11:35 The Holy of Holies is actually decorated like a garden. Both parts of the the door into the holy place and the Holy of Holies have cherubam on them. They’re decorated with those guardian figures. And then there are doorkeepers to the outer part who make sure that no non-Israelites come in. Well, on the day of atonement, the high priest does these sacrifices not merely for sin, but for all of creation to cleanse it and start it over. And with this sacrificial blood, he walks into the garden from east to west past the guardian figures and ritually re-enters God’s presence through atonement.

12:21 Wow. So, it is a ritual undoing of the fall on the day of atonement. Wow. And it’s sitting there in plain sight, but you need someone to come along and draw some pictures and connect things explicitly. Right now, I don’t want to underplay all of the elements that don’t match up because again, nothing’s ever really onetoone and the Israelite temple itself undergoes changes and shifts at various times, right? But in our temple, we are all essentially doing what the high priest does. We are fallen and through atonement, we walk back past guardian figures and ritually re-enter God’s presence.

13:04 That’s wild. I need to digest that for a few years. Read the article and look at the pictures. Yeah. So I guess that’s just an example of um you know maybe the things that we do in our modern temples don’t look exactly the same way but the concept of healing that relationship with God that is what we can say is restored in in a sense yeah I don’t I don’t think there is a genetic relationship here as much as a symbolic analog relationship so there there are so many things we could go into here that this scholarship talks about uh the nature of Israelite ritual, what it meant to be a priest or a king. Uh temple typology like concentric gradations of holiness where the closer you come to the holy of holies, the holier you have to be and the more restricted it is and the more requirements there are. Herod builds the temple up massively.

13:58 And our Bibles don’t do a good job making this clear, but there are two words that get translated as temple in the New Testament. One of them means like the entire temple complex and this includes the porches of Solomon, the places where all the Gentiles could be, the places where they were selling the animals and the doves and things for sacrifices. That’s the temple complex writ large. To go into the actual holy temple, that’s a different word. M and the wall blocking that off at the entrances actually had a plaque in Greek that said any Gentile that crosses this line shall be responsible for his own death. Wow.

14:35 And uh that is a gentile can come so close but you’re not an Israelite. You haven’t made covenants let alone purity stuff. So if you cross this line you are violating our holy place and you will die. Those gradations of holiness were taken pretty seriously. If you go back to Exodus and the law of Moses, Moses goes up the mountain. Mountain is symbolic of the temple. It’s the meeting place between heaven and earth where humans ascend and gods descend.

15:02 Moses says to the new priests, he says, “Make a line and warn people that if they cross that line, they will die because priests can cross that line, but regular Israelites can’t.” This is what gradations of holiness mean. The closer you come to God’s presence, the holier you have to be or you simply can’t handle it. The higher the standard is. Yeah. So, it’s kind of um I mean, I’m just thinking about modern temples and um a lot of people have have problems with temple recommend interviews.

15:35 Yeah. Or just the idea of them that like somebody is going to judge you and Yeah. you know, give you permission or or not uh deny you entry potentially to the blessings of the temple, right? But it sounds like there’s a really strong parallel in ancient temples. I I don’t draw and I don’t program, but I’ve wanted to make like an animated video where we’ve got these guardian figures of, you know, the cherubim and the Israelite priests or doorkeepers with the Sphinx in Egypt is a guardian figure. We have guardian figures in Assyrian Babylon. and then fade out to your bishop is the first line as a guardian figure. Is your holiness sufficient? You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be sinless.

16:20 But is your holiness and commitment sufficient to get you in the door? And then the ones at the door, the actual guardian figures checking the tokens of your worthiness. I’m not claiming that the, you know, the old people checking your recommend are like sheram or whatnot, but no flame. There’s an analogy here. There’s a functional equivalence. This is a holy place. You have to be sure to not let in unholy things into holy places. That’s what it’s for. Yeah.

16:48 Right. And I like that imagery of vulnerability. Yeah. U because I feel like um you know, I don’t want to disparrage people that struggle with um you know, Temple Recommend interviews. Um but there’s a lot of vulnerability involved in that Temple Recommend interview. Yeah, it’s a legitimate time for self-reflection and checking on yourself. Yeah. And and stifling of pride. Yeah. I feel like Yeah.

17:16 Well, one question I have is um this sounds like a lot of stuff that has been discovered as um Latter-day Saint, you know, as our our temple has um developed. Yeah. Temple liturgy has developed. Um, do you think that as the temple was being initially established and the rituals were being established that leaders were aware of this stuff or is this like this is what they came up with and wow looking back we can see that this is very inspired?

17:50 That’s a good question. Um, probably a mix. I think you can go back and you can look in sections of Doctrine and Covenants. You can look in the JST and you can see distinct elements there early, you know, 1830, 1831, 1832. DNC76 has all of this stuff in it about queens and priests and temple language and temple concepts that have a lot to do with the book of Revelation. As it turns out, the book of Revelation has a lot to do with the early chapters of Genesis. M so DNC76 is this tip of an iceberg with so much underneath it. And my own personal take that I have kind of been working on privately is Joseph Smith is getting all of these pieces of the temple very early and he has no idea what he has.

18:41 It’s not until later on, maybe with the catalyst of masonry, maybe with some other revelation, maybe with the book of Abraham, that this gets put together. Um, so I I think they’re completely unaware of most of this stuff. So there is an Old Testament covenant pattern that draws heavily on ancient Neareastern covenant patterns. And this can be between God and his people. This can be between two kings or two neighbors. This can be between a king and his people or between a king and lesser kings. That’s what the Assyrian vassel treaties are. Mhm.

19:18 But this pattern mostly holds most of the time which is um the two parties are established. Who who is at play here? Who is binding themselves? The stipulations are put in place. What is being required? What do you have to do? We would consider these the commandments. You know, these are the the ten commandments that Moses brings down. Then there is the blessings for keeping those commandments. That is what in this relationship that you’re entering into, what is the other side of keeping these?

19:52 You’re doing this. What’s the other guy doing? We know blessings really thoroughly. We talk about them all the time. But the Old Testament covenant pattern also provides for the opposite. Those are called cursings. Just as a contract’s not valid until you sign your name, there’s usually a ratification ceremony of some kind. There’s a lot of variation in this ratification ceremony uh of the more formal covenants typically involved the death of an animal. And this is why in Hebrew the idiom is not to make a covenant but to cut a covenant.

20:26 Uh and the death of that animal or other thing was a simile curse. That is, you were enacting physically what would happen to that person or people if they violated the covenant severely enough. Now, let’s do this with the law of Moses. Exodus 24, Moses comes down from the mountain. He reads to them the commandments. That is, there’s a record kept. That’s one I didn’t say. The people agree verbally. They say, “Amen.

20:54 All that the Lord has said, we will do.“ They sacrifice a bunch of animals and the blood is collected. And after they say amen, all that the Lord has said we will do, half of the blood is splashed on the people. And that is representative or analogical of the cutting of the throat of the animals that were sacrificed to ratify the covenant. And scholars say this is the blood on the people as if their own throats had been cut. And so the question is, well, why aren’t Israelites being killed left and right? Yeah, the Israelites are not smitten by God for violating the covenant left and right because they are also trying to repent and making those sacrifices that reconcile and bring atonement.

21:38 The covenant itself presumes that you will be crummy at keeping it, but also assumes that you want to keep it, that you are trying to keep it, that you are doing your best to keep it, and therefore when you violate it, you will do your best to repair that breach. So, we really don’t have any examples. I mean the example you gave is God bringing down retribution or punishment but we don’t have you know the high priest of the temple going out and saying you did you broke your covenants and now you know your throat is going to be cut like this animal.

22:11 Yeah. And there so and here I want to tie us back into that idea that we shouldn’t think in terms of a really strong ancient modern dichotomy because the Masons had their penalties. Yeah. and those seem to have been brought into the temple. Um, and Masonic historians will tell you masons aren’t really killing each other. These are just to emphasize the seriousness of what they’re doing.

22:40 And so it’s not an exact analogy, but I point back to the ancient covenant pattern and you know, cutting a cow’s neck and splattering the blood on you as the basis for having the beginning of the law of Moses. And I go, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s definitely saying how serious things were. Well, I think it’s so interesting when people kind of point to, you know, obviously the modern day symbolic penalties are no longer part of our temple ordinances, but people point to how we used to have them. Yeah. And say, “Oh my gosh, this is such a culty thing.” Yeah.

23:20 Without realizing at the same time the much more graphic nature of ancient penalties that they believe in with melting wax and tearing off the head of the lamb and, you know, splattering the blood on you and things like that. Yeah. Even just in the scriptures themselves. Yeah. I always I always have to kind of laugh and roll my eyes when Protestant critics are like the Bible has nothing to do with blood oaths like this and I think have you read it carefully because it’s pretty built in there and I I want to piggyback on that to show just how built in it is. So when Moses has those animals slaughtered and the blood collected for this ritual ratifying the covenant and beginning the law of Moses, that blood is called the blood of the covenant.

24:10 That phrase shows up somewhere very very important to all Christians. When Jesus institutes at the last supper the what we would call the sacrament, you know, the Lord’s supper, the the meal of bread and wine that is supposed to symbolize him. He is both adapting from the Passover meal which has symbolism. You know, you do this so that the destroying angel passes you by and you live. But he is also going back directly to the enactment of the law of Moses for the new covenant. When he distributes the wine, he says, “Take this in remembrance of me.

24:44 Take this in remembrance of me.“ And we skip the other phrase, “This is my blood of the new covenant.” The wine is the blood of the covenant, but it’s the new covenant. Jesus is the sacrificial animal that enacts the new covenant that we make with him and that is built into the sacrament liquid. It is the blood of the new covenant. So it it’s something that we touch on every week without knowing where that phrase goes back to or the symbolism and ritual that it goes back to.

25:16 We talk about how in modern temples it modern temples aren’t like ancient temples because we’re not sacrificing animals in our we don’t have animals. We don’t have incense. I mean, think about I don’t know how many animals they’re doing a day, but given how many there were by the New Testament period, have you ever smelt burnt animal, leather, meat, you know, and they’re they’re splattering the blood. That’s part of the ritual. It was messy.

25:43 What we would not think of as a holy place. Yeah. What we would not imagine as a holy place. It had strong odors. There’s blood splattered all over there. animals being killed, which I’m sure add noise. Yeah. But but we we don’t think about the animal sacrifice in our modern temples. Um and that’s true. We’re not sacrificing animals, but I I think we don’t think enough about how that’s just been replaced with Jesus. Latter-day Saints who are college educated and serve missions and study, you know, the Bible two years out of every four can go through the temple for 20 years and not see any of this stuff, then what about the new convert from Japan or, you know, the the non-Christian from Africa or, you know, and so I appreciate in that sense the more explicit handholding that has helped us to see more of atonement in Jesus in the temple. Yeah. Now, a lot of this stuff is still there. Mhm.

26:49 Um we just don’t have the background to see it and so we end up looking for the wrong thing again in the Old Testament. But so you touched on this a little bit earlier, but there might be a lot of non-Latterday Saint viewers who see this and say, “Well, this is all fine and good, all this Old Testament stuff, but it really doesn’t matter because as the New Testament says, you know, God doesn’t dwell in in human houses or whatever.

27:16 God does not dwell in temples made with human hands.“ Right. Right. And and so just this idea that like we don’t need temples anymore. They’re a thing of the Old Testament. Jesus took care of it. It’s done now. The the veil was rent, right? Yeah. How do you approach that kind of a question? Um well, first of all, this is this is pretty common. I mean, I remember a tract written by James White called uh Temples Made Without Hands.

27:42 Mhm. And William Hamlin, who was a BYU history professor with quite a strong sense of humor, wrote a response called a tract made without evidence. and went through and pointed out the importance of temples even to early Christians and things like that as well as Protestant bias in assuming we don’t do ordinances. It’s all just an individual, you know, I just have to believe and confess Jesus and then anyway, so it’s this isn’t really about individual scriptures. It’s more about frameworks. And to the extent that the Christian abandonment of the temple, which is something Hibi wrote about, is the sense of we don’t need to do sacrifices anymore because Jesus is our sacrifice. I absolutely agree with that and I would say that’s not what we’re doing in our temples and that’s not what we think they’re for.

28:32 On the other hand, to the extent that temples were a place of using ritual to enact uh covenant and atonement, that is certainly something we still need. I think it’s a tragedy when people go to the temple and they don’t want to ever go back because their experience is so foreign or so so other or even negative. Yeah. Right. And I think we’ve made great strides on that front. Always a pleasure, Ben.

29:01 Thanks. Thanks for being here. And guys, if you have not seen our other interview we did about changes in the church, it’s our most popular video on the channel. It’s right here. Go check it out and I’ll see you