And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was
nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near
unto it; And the Lord said
unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God:
I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that
upon which thou standest. And the Lord said
unto me, by the Urim and Thummim, that Kolob was after the manner of the Lord,
according to its times and seasons in the revolutions thereof; that one
revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being
one thousand years according
to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest. This is the reckoning of
the Lord’s time, according to the reckoning of Kolob. (Abraham 3: 2-4)
During the 2012 presidential campaign, I saw an ad showing Mitt Romney wearing a clown's hat and saying, "I believe God lives on a planet named Kolob." (I was going to post the ad, but I decided I would not dignify it.) I won't get into the subject of election propaganda, but this ad displayed ignorance on a lot of levels. It certainly showed that the creators of the ad were totally ignorant as to what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches about the dwelling place of God. According to Abraham 3, Kolob is not a planet but rather a star, the greatest of all the stars God showed to Abraham. God then told him that His dwelling place was near unto Kolob. In other words, our Heavenly Father does not live on the star but near the star just as we live on the Earth and near the Sun, our governing star.
Before Abraham and Sarah went into Egypt, God showed Abraham this vision of Kolob. This is just part of the celestial astronomy that God taught him through the Urim and Thummim. Later in this chapter, we will read that God commanded Abraham to teach the Egyptians. I am confident that he did just that.
It interests me that the Egyptian Pharaohs are often portrayed holding the symbols of their royalty, the Staff and the Flail. The staff represents the shepherd's crook indicating salvation and mercy. The flail represents the whip of justice. Pharaoh himself was the purveyor of both mercy and justice. There is a hieroglyphic symbol showing the intertwined staff and flail above a foundation. The symbol means "The Home of Justice and Mercy." In Egyptian, the place of Justice and Mercy resided with Pharaoh because he was considered to be a god representing Osiris on the throne.
An interesting hypothesis is raised in the book, The Abraham Enigma by Jack Lyon, in which he separates the component parts of the Egyptian symbol which, when written out, represent the Hebrew letters of K, L, and B.
K is KAF and it represents the flail which indicates JUSTICE
L is LAMED which represents the crook or staff (notice in the diagram on the right that the Torah script on the bottom right actually looks like a shepherd's staff) which indicates MERCY
If you put the three together: KLB and pronounce it, it certainly sounds like KoLoB to me. In Hebrew "The Home of Justice and Mercy" resides with God: Kolob, the Home of Justice and Mercy.
This link will take you to YouTube and a beautiful music video of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's rendition of the W.W. Phelps hymn, If You Could Hie to Kolob.
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