Book Review: One Eternal Round by Nibley and Rhodes

For my next blog I thought I would write a review of Hugh Nibley's final book "One Eternal Round." I bought the book for $48 at Deseret Book, and did not mind paying that since the book was over 600 pages long and was Nibley's final work on the Book of Abraham that many said would finally silence the critics. So, I went into this book with high expectations. However, I also approached the book knowing that it was an unfinished work that was edited and finished by posthumous author Michael D. Rhodes. That, coupled with Nibley's already difficult writing style that tends to go off on tangents before tying together several topics in what some have termed "parallelomania," I knew I was in for an unusual apologetic work.

The chapters do a good job presenting the evidence, but I found them very lacking in terms of a conclusion. It was obvious Nibley intended on editing this before publishing and that much of the material would have been different had Nibley lived. So, what you basically have is a smattering of evidence promoting Joseph Smith's interpretation of the Book of Abraham, but the reader is left to tie them together to a conclusion. Now, for a breakdown of the chapters:

The first chapter is a 28 page introduction giving the reader some background on the Book of Abraham controversy and the various attacks against it, such as the Tanners. The chapter only skims the surface of the attacks so I strongly recommend reading FAIR-wiki to get the history of this issue, but you are left with a sufficient background to the objections against Joseph Smith's translations.

Chapters 2 through 5 offer a very technical background of Egyptology and Abraham, showing paralells with the Book of Abraham with other ancient works and archaeology. It attempts to show that the Book of Abraham is an ancient document by showing us evidence of similar works throughout history. While interesting, it can be some very tedious reading.

Chapters 6 through 8 interpret the hypocephalus (Facsimile 2 in the Book of Abraham) in light of what the Egyptologists say it means and it compares the interpretation with Joseph Smith's. Some of the parallels drawn here will only make sense to those that have read the Book of Abraham and been through the Temple Endowment, and the book is very careful where the temple is concerned to only mention the paralell but not tell you where or if its found in the Endowment. So, if you're preparing for the temple you may want to re-read these chapters after going through the Endowment because you will notice a few "ah-ha" moments when you read the interpretations, particularly the items in Facsimile 2 that are "had only in the temple of the Lord" or "not to be revealed at this time." In this respect, the book takes the risk of losing its audience here, and it doesn't really leave you with a conclusion about the interpretations. So, you will have to do a lot of thinking after reading these chapters to sort out the paralells, since most aren't that apparent.

Chapter 9 provides us with a comparison of the Book of Abraham with other ascension documents throughout history. Nibley has done this well in the past, and its nice to have them all right here in one chapter. These ascension texts do a good job validating both the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses.

Chapters 10 and 11 go into hermeticism, the foundation of masonic doctrine. Hermeticism was mostly in fashion in the middle ages, but its sources stretch back in time to the ancient Egyptians. The paralells between Mormonism and Hermeticism will become apparent after reading these chapters and Nibley does a good job of presenting the evidence here.

Chapter 12 gives an introduction to the Kabbalah with a discussions of similarities between the Book of Abraham and Sefer Yetzirah, as well as similarities between the Hypocephalus and the Tree of Life. This was probably my favorite chapter since I have learned much about the Kabbalah in the Scottish Rite and this chapter does a good job tying in the Book of Abraham with ancient Judaism. While one could argue that Joseph Smith got the parallels from his own masonic background, it is still fun to consider the ancient parallels. Also, much of this kabbalistic material was not available to Smith during the 1800s and the highest masonic degree he could have received was the Royal Arch, so the probability he could have known many of these concepts is very slim.

Chapters 13 and 14 were in my opinion disappointing. They attempted to tie in a paralell between Sheshanq, the owner of the Hypocephalus, and Alexander the Great and Nimrod. The book itself says that these conclusions can't be proven. I think Nibley's intention here was to open up the way for future research, and I hope something comes out of it.

Chapter 15 was very fascinating and appealed to the math teacher in me. It is called "Geometry" and uses the ancient mathamatical constructions to show relationships in the Hypocephalus, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, Golden Ratio, etc. I think it will open the way to much research on Facsimile 2 of the Book of Abraham.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book, but only if a person already has a good background on the Book of Abraham issues. I don't think it will convince a person either way. If you are LDS it will confirm your testimony, while if you are non-LDS it may seem the paralells stretch different directions without a conclusion. For someone that is both Mormon and Mason you will definitely find things to confirm the ancient origin of both, and I think in the proper hands this book could help equip the person to argue that what we follow has an ancient origin and wasn't dreamed up in the 1800s. I highly recommend putting this book, Nibley's other works on this topic, and Hidden Treasures of Knowledge by Stephen Morgan together and see what you can come up with for each drawing on Facsimile 2. You will see "One Eternal Round" does its job adding to the plethora of evidence. Will it shut-up the critics permanently? I don't think so, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.