Presented at
2025 Abraham and His Family Conference
Saturday, May 3 and Saturday, May 10, 2025
Sponsored by The Interpreter Foundation, Brigham Young University Religious Education,
Scripture Central, and FAIR Latter-day Saints
This paper addresses what I have long felt to be a gap in studies on the Book of Abraham. Scholarship on the book has tended to focus on the issue of its historicity—or, more precisely, whether it is best understood in an ancient context as an example of Joseph Smith’s divine gift of translating ancient records, as many scholars within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintain, or in a modern context as an example of a bungled attempt at translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, as the critics maintain. To be sure, this issue is of great importance, both for those attempting to historically contextualize the book’s message and for Latter-day Saints who struggle with the question of historicity as a test of Joseph Smith’s seership. However, in the widespread scholarly preoccupation with this issue, there has not emerged, to my knowledge, a focused treatment of what I see as an equally important issue, namely the book’s narrative art: how the narrative itself is crafted in a way designed to powerfully inspire readers. In this study, I examine how the Book of Abraham’s narrative interacts with the biblical account of Abraham (Genesis 12-22).
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David Calabro
David Calabro is a visiting assistant professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern languages and literatures from the University of Chicago. His research deals with issues of culture and religion, including topics such as nonverbal communication, apocryphal literature, and magic. David lives in Provo, Utah. He and his wife Ruth have seven children.
