In Ether 2:3 we read that among the many things the Jaredites took on their journey away from the Tower was a vessel full of fish and swarms of bees. "And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee." Whether or not they carried the honey bees with them in the barges sometime later is a question for another time.
Daniel Ludlow, a Book of Mormon scholar, notes that deseret is "one of the few Jaredite words transliterated in our present Book of Mormon; therefore it is of significance to the scholars" (Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon). He then quotes Dr. Hugh Nibley who has written extensively on the background of this word.
I will attempt to summarize Nibley--a daunting task. He said "Now it is a remarkable coincidence that the word deseret, or something very close to it, enjoyed a position of ritual prominence among the founders of the classical Egyptian civilization, who associated it very closely with the symbol of the bee."
Why is that interesting to us? Because the people who honored the bee in this way in Egypt, entereted Egypt from the northeast, as part of a great expansion which included the founders of the Babylonian civilization in Mesopotamia. All of this, including the Jaredite migration, began in the same area, at about the same time (think of the possibility here of the Tower of Babel and the migrations that occured because of the confusion of languages).
Nibley makes the following observation: "From the first, students of hieroglyphic were puzzled as to what sound value should be given to the bee-picture [the hieroglyphic that represented Egypt and her kings]. We know that the bee sign was not always written down, but in its place the picture of the Red Crown...was sometimes substituted for superstitious reasons...The name was dsrt (the vowels are not known, but we can be sure they were all short)." Dsrt. Deseret. Bees.
If you want to know more about this, read Lehi in the Deseret and the World of the Jaredites, Hugh Nibley.
1 comment:
I have read parts of Brother Nibley's writings about "Lehi in the Desert" and "The World of the Jaredites," and his comments about the differences in the migrations of the Nephites and Jaredites that seem to be true to the cultural differences in the two groups. Again, not necessary for our salvation or enough to rest a testimony on, but it's interesting to see the things in the Book of Mormon that, to scholars of ancient peoples, seem to line up.
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