So why did the church change Pay Lay Ale to the English Oh god hear the words of my mouth? Is there a reason? Only difference is that one is in Hebrew. Also, they got rid of the penalities? Is there a reason for that? Thanks.

Here's a presentation of the changes in the endowment ceremony from its inception until the date the chart was made.

http://www.ldsendowment.org/timeline.html


The 1990 changes, made after a survey was undertaken, all toned things down, made it less 'frightening'. Here's the link to the survey itself.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/76542947/1988-Temple-Survey


Isn't the internet wonderful? It's like ... a blessing!

Do you know what the oath of vengeance is? This sounds interesting.

Cursing those damn Missourians for offing Joe Smith, I believe.

The mormons used to have a lot of Old Testament style cursing before they softened up and became more Brady Bunch.

I cannot believe the stuff that was originally in the temple! It's not even the same routine as joseph had setup. So much for revelation when he originally choreographed the damn thing. Haha. So scary before the 1990s.

Essentially, there was a 30+ year gap between when the endowment ceremony was last done in Nauvoo and then first done again in Utah. There never was a written 'script' for the ceremony until 1877, when BY called a bunch of the guys to St. George, and together they hashed out a written version.

It's another example of ghawd leaving them high and dry in terms of inspiration; they had to cobble it together based on what they remembered. Of course the gullible will say that ghawd made them work at it and then confirmed to them that they got it right... Except they didn't, did they? Had they done so, there would have been no need for corrections!

That's amazing information. Do you have other suggestions of topics I should research? This is mine boggling. I've only been an exmo for a little over a year and this stuff is just crazy to me.

Two places to start with research

Mormonthink.com

CESletter.com

That will keep you busy for at least another year.

The oath of vengeance was referenced by John D. Lee in his confession of his involvement in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Lee stated, "I believed then as I do now, that it was the will of every true Mormon in Utah, at that time, that the enemies of the Church should be killed as fast as possible, and that as this lot of people had men amongst them that were supposed to have helped kill the Prophets in the Carthage jail, the killing of all of them would be keeping our oaths and avenging the blood of the Prophets." Blood atonement or oath of vengeance was a sick and twisted idea. I learn more everyday that this was truly a cult before now.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2016 01:30AM by newnamesaul.

As soon as the internet became common in most US homes and people started talking about the penalties in the temple ceremonies anonymously to others, the pre-1990 ceremony was changed to remove the penalties from the ceremony.

The internet allowed people to make the jump from lonely, isolated concealment of the terrible things they saw and mimicked in the temple, to realizing that they weren't alone in those feelings about those terrible actions and secret oaths they had made and that were sealed by threats of terrible, body-defiling penalties. From there, they felt justifiable indignation, which gave rise to the courage to file lawsuits against the church, to speak of those things publicly, and to confront the church about them. The only way the church could put an end to the lawsuits was to change the ceremony to remove the penalties from the ceremony.

The Oath of Vengence against the United States government was removed from the temple ceremony after the Reed Smoot trials. From what I remember, Smoot was challenged because in the office he was running for (a US Senator or Congressman), people saw a conflict. Smoot had been through that temple ceremony that had bound him to have an oath of vengence against the US government. How could he fill an oath of office in the US government while under such an oath of vengence against that same government? The trials made the church look bad. They changed the ceremony to remove the oath of vengence. I don't know if there is anyone still alive today, who went through that ceremony that included the oath of vengence.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2016 08:51AM by azsteve.

"As soon as the internet became common in most US homes and people started talking about the penalties in the temple ceremonies anonymously to others, the pre-1990 ceremony was changed to remove the penalties from the ceremony."


Actually, the endowment ceremony penalties were removed after the church conducted a survey among its members about temple worship:

http://www.mormonthink.com/temple.htm


The internet wasn't in wide use until a few years later.

If you were a professor, graduate student or researcher at a large private institution or fortune 500 company you had internet access and user groups were discussing mormonism and the temple. A certain apologist now at BYU was leading some of the condemning discussions of the Endowment ... life is interesting.

The Oath of Vengeance was discontinued only in Feb. 1927. It used to state: "You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children's children unto the third and fourth generation."

So, until 1927, the LDS church still swore vengeance against the US Government.

Note that in the survey, most of the questions were red herrings, inserted to make it look like the survey could have a very general purpose, when really it was to assess why many convert members only went to the temple once, many of them quitting the church shortly afterward.

newnamesaul Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Only difference is that one is in
> Hebrew.

"Pay lay ale" isn't Hebrew.

Pe le El is, and it means "mouth to god" (El being the head Caananite deity that the Hebrews later started calling Yahweh).

Smith claimed that "Pay lay ale" was "Adamic" language, not Hebrew. He also said the name of god in Adamic was "Awmen." All of which, of course, he made up...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamic_language#Latter_Day_Saint_movement

Really?

helamonster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Really?

Yes...REALLY.

"Peh l'El" means (literally) "mouth to God"...

..."El" is the specific name of the God being referred to (other commonly used names are: Adonai...YHWH..."Y"ehovah...HaShem [which means "the name," and is a substitute used instead of pronouncing YHWH, because pronouncing YHWH is prohibited for Observant Jews]...)...

...and, since intended-for-adults Hebrew in written form is unvowelled, the vowels would be mostly just guessed at by anyone who does not already speak and read fluent Hebrew.

(I do this all the time when I am reading/"sounding out" adult Hebrew, such as newspaper stories, articles, etc., and it MOSTLY works well ENOUGH...it usually gets the "spoken" sense of what is written across, at least enough so the reader knows what the probable intended word is, and it can then be looked up, if necessary, for accuracy.)

For someone who does not know at least the basics of adult Hebrew, Pay lay ale is a logical, and pretty good, "voweling" of the three Hebrew consonants.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2016 04:17PM by Tevai.

I still think it's just a happy accident that the words from the old temple endowment are that close to actual Hebrew.

helamonster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I still think it's just a happy accident that the
> words from the old temple endowment are that close
> to actual Hebrew.

You may well be right!!!

:) :) :)

You do know that JS studied Hebrew before the endowment was created, right?

lurking in Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You do know that JS studied Hebrew before the
> endowment was created, right?

I [me, personally] knew that JS studied Hebrew under the tutelage of a rabbi, but I did not know whether this was before, or after, the endowment ceremony was created.

I (again: me, personally) do not know how far JS went...anyone of any background in a proper conversion-to-Judaism class or study program learns to read and write (both block letters, and also cursive) Hebrew to the point where you can at least sound out the siddur [prayerbook] and a good part of the [OT] Bible. In the 1800s, primers-for-adults did not yet exist (there were no organized conversion-to-Judaism programs back then), so it would have been up to JS's rabbi/tutor to teach him the Aleph Bet (back then: probably just in block letters), and at least the beginnings of actual written Hebrew...

...but how far JS went in this...who knows???

Even in the very simplest Hebrew, though, the three words [mouth...to (a preposition)...God] would (probably) be logically learned by a person setting out to "learn Hebrew."

I can tell you that, today, these three Hebrew words are included in intended-for-English-speaking-children, Hebrew learning dictionaries (because I, myself, use these!! :) ).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2016 04:46PM by Tevai.

Some previous discussion of the topic here...

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,485304,485304

I did a little more research to try to pin down the precise time frame between the creation of the Mormon endowment and JS' learning of Hebrew:

1. The "endowment" actually evolved extensively from the early 1830's into the 1840's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_(Mormonism)#History


2. While I can't find a source that states when exactly the "pay lay ale" was added into the ceremony, I believe in was in 1842. That was the year JS incorporated his new knowledge of Freemasonry into the endowment ceremony and "pay lay ale" is the "Adamic" name of the "sign" that the ceremony associates with of one of the borrowings from Freemasonry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_and_Freemasonry

http://www.i4m.com/think/temples/temple_ceremony.htm


3. It's well established--and the Mormon church acknowledges--that JS studied with a Joshua Seixas (a teacher of biblical Hebrew) in the mid-1830's.

http://jur.byu.edu/?p=15384


So, I doubt there is any coincidence here; JS would have had plenty of time to craft his "Adamic" language out of the Hebrew he learned and then add the "pay lay ale" into the ceremony in 1842.

Hope that helps--thanks for your input.

: )



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/05/2016 04:06AM by lurking in.

little diacritical marks either above or below the consonants to give the learner a clue as to where the word is going? Seems to me that this would be a very merciful help.

When I learned about the "soundless" consonant years ago (I forget now which one it is) that is meant to carry the sound of stressed vowels, I was HUGELY impressed. It struck me as an extremely complex linguistic idea, and at the same time, so ancient!

I went to school with a lot of Jewish kids, so I was exposed to Hebrew texts (and as a Spanish major, I learned to get by in Ladiño, a form of Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews) and was very much drawn to the language. But As a Spanish major, a German minor, and taking Brazilian Portuguese for the heck of it, I didn't have much time or energy for Hebrew.

(I learned how to do the Hora during the Six-Day War, though! You never knew when you would be grabbed and drawn into a dance circle!)

You never know how events will "ripple" into your life, like the pebble dropped into water. I was at university from 1966 to 1969. I used Ladiño to get through a Social Security interview around 1976 or 77, with a lady who had survived one of the camps. Seeing the tattoo on her arm made the whole, terrible Holocaust even more real for me.

At the end of the interview, as we stood up, the lady reached across the desk and hugged me. She had tears running down her face. "You are the first adult woman I have been able to communicate with, in my own language, since I came to this country!" For a goyishe Presbyterian who spoke Spanish and had only been "exposed" to Ladiño a decade before, this was a profoundly moving experience.

catnip Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> little diacritical marks either above or below the
> consonants to give the learner a clue as to where
> the word is going? Seems to me that this would be
> a very merciful help.

Those marks are called "nikud" (or: nikkud...or: niqqud).

The Wikipedia article on Niqqud is good...there is a section of the Bible there (on the right-hand side), with the nikud printed in red, and (for chanting; as during a synagogue service such as a Bar or Bat Mitzvah) there are music "tones" in blue. The red marks are (mostly) vowels.

In general, nikud are printed in dictionaries...with poetry...in books, etc. intended for children...in material (such as newspapers, or relevant Israeli government publications) intended for new immigrants to Israel...and in materials used to teach Hebrew to people who want to become Jews.

The article did explain to me why what I can plainly see on a page sometimes is pronounced differently when I hear it...

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Hebrew has changed over the past couple of thousand years, and though a given word may be "spelled" a given way, the pronunciation today may vary from what was true back then.

When I am learning ANY foreign language, I get children's books, starting wherever I have to (pre-school level, first grade, etc.). When I can even limp along in books intended for teenagers, I feel that I have (at last!!) ARRIVED! :D
>
> When I learned about the "soundless" consonant
> years ago (I forget now which one it is) that is
> meant to carry the sound of stressed vowels, I was
> HUGELY impressed. It struck me as an extremely
> complex linguistic idea, and at the same time, so
> ancient!
>
> I went to school with a lot of Jewish kids, so I
> was exposed to Hebrew texts (and as a Spanish
> major, I learned to get by in Ladiño, a form of
> Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews) and was very
> much drawn to the language. But As a Spanish
> major, a German minor, and taking Brazilian
> Portuguese for the heck of it, I didn't have much
> time or energy for Hebrew.

Ladino is a beautiful language. If you're interested in some really nice Sephardic music, I highly recommend Yehoram Gaon on You Tube, particularly "Duerme, Angelico" (a lullaby), and "Rey Nimrod." Both are from the Middle Ages, but they feel SO contemporary!! :)
>
> (I learned how to do the Hora during the Six-Day
> War, though! You never knew when you would be
> grabbed and drawn into a dance circle!)

Fun times!!! :D One of the things I really like about Jews and Judaism is how important music and dancing are, and how much fun people (from infants being carried, through great-grandparents) have...so much genuine fun after Shabbat services (etc.), and how a very serious song can effortlessly segue into a joyous song, often with dancing (which CAN get pretty "athletic" sometimes), where everyone feels they belong, even if they don't even know how to do whatever dance they're dancing at that moment.

> You never know how events will "ripple" into your
> life, like the pebble dropped into water. I was at
> university from 1966 to 1969. I used Ladiño to
> get through a Social Security interview around
> 1976 or 77, with a lady who had survived one of
> the camps. Seeing the tattoo on her arm made the
> whole, terrible Holocaust even more real for me.
>
> At the end of the interview, as we stood up, the
> lady reached across the desk and hugged me. She
> had tears running down her face. "You are the
> first adult woman I have been able to communicate
> with, in my own language, since I came to this
> country!" For a goyishe Presbyterian who spoke
> Spanish and had only been "exposed" to Ladiño a
> decade before, this was a profoundly moving
> experience.

Yes...you don't see so many numbered tattoos anymore, but when you do, it is sobering.

This is a wonderful story, catnip...I am so glad you were able to talk to her in Ladino. That must have seemed like a near-miracle to her...a bit of "home" to feel "at home" again.

I don't know if you know it, but Spain, Portugal, and Germany are all offering inducements to Jews/Israelis to come to their countries for university, and also to immigrate if they wish to (with Spanish or Portuguese citizenship offered to those who want to take advantage of the offer; I don't know what the requirements are for Israelis who might want to take out German citizenship).

At least some Sephardim are "going home" to the Iberian Peninsula, and evidently, a VERY great number of Jews/Israelis are going to Germany for school, and then staying there because the financial and professional opportunities in Germany are so much more bountiful than they are in Israel. On the surface, this seems really weird, but it IS what is going on.

And although Ladino had a dip in numbers of world speakers for at least a century (and maybe more; I don't know the historical stats from the Expulsion forward), Ladino speakers may soon be able to boast of Yiddish-at-its-height population numbers.


Thanks for this, catnip...this is a REALLY good post, all the way around!!!

:) :) :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2016 11:01PM by Tevai.

For a man who was supposed to be an ignorant, backwoods boy JS was really quite intelligent. It took smarts to do what he did and convince others that his teachings came from God's mouth to his ears. You may dislike him for having fooled so many, but you have to give credit for having big cajones. He had me fooled for thirty years. Oh, I want to think you all for this very interesting thread. I have gained some useful new knowledge reading from the many links posted and further readings referenced in them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2016 08:40PM by michaelc1945.