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
One of the distinctive features of the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price is how concerned it is with priesthood. In two short chapters, the word priesthood appears 8 times—more times than it appears in the Book of Mormon or the New Testament, and only one less time than it appears in the Old Testament. However, priesthood is a word that can have different valences in different contexts, and this study proposes to explore how priesthood is being deployed in the Book of Abraham. Specifically, there is not one, but two priesthood claims in the Book of Abraham. Abraham claims priesthood through his ancestors (“fathers” in the text) and Pharaoh claims priesthood through Ham. This paper suggests that the discussion of lineage and priesthood in the Book of Abraham has nothing to do with Nineteenth Century notions of race, but instead derives from ancient competing claims of priesthood, one claiming descent through Shem and the other descent through Ham. This notion of rivalry of descent fits well ancient notions of priesthood and lineage, and especially into ancient elements of maintaining hegemony.
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Avram Shannon
Dr. Shannon was born in Quantico, Virginia, and spent most of his early life in Virginia. Dr. Shannon earned a BA in ancient Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University (2007), a master of studies in Jewish studies from the University of Oxford (2008), and a PhD in Near Eastern languages and cultures with a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in religions of the ancient Mediterranean from The Ohio State University (2015). He has taught full-time in the department of Ancient Scripture at BYU since 2017.
He and his wife, Thora, have nine children.
