t of Kokob. Olea, a name for the moon, may be an invented variant for a Hebrew word for "moon," yau-ra-akh, the same as the vowels of Adonai were transposed into the word Jehovah. The more poetical word for "moon," le-vanah, the White One, turns into the name Libnah for one of the idolatrous gods. The name Jah-oh-eh for the earth ("Explanation," Facsimile 2), which applies literally the time-idea of Psalm 90:4, could be an inversion of the vowels of Ye-ho-vau (Jehovah) in Seixas' translation (p.15). This inversion has theological significance. One word remains: gnolaum (3:18) - "Yet these two spirits. . . shall have no beginning. . . no end, for they are gnolaum, or eternal." This, again, is an exact Seixas transliteration; however, the Hebrew word is not an adjective but a noun, which in the plural may act as an adverb. The phrase "an everlasting covenant" (Doctrine and Covenants 45:9) is taken from Genesis 17:13, where gnolaum, in the English idiom "everlasting," is, in the Hebrew idiom, a noun, "eternity."
How does Joseph use the Hebrew term-name Elohim or Eloheem, God? In translating "Elohim" in Exodus 22:28, he changed the King James "the gods" to "God." The Revised Version (R. V.), followed by the standard Jewish translation of 1917, changed "the gods" to "the judges." Joseph was a strict monotheist then. Likewise, in the Book of Moses, he positively, militantly makes "god" singular in recounting the creation of the universe and does not at all depart from monotheism in the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham nor in the Explanations of the three Facsimiles. But, in the fourth and fifth chapters of this later book, Joseph is triumphantly positive that Eloheem means "the Gods." "The Gods organized the lights in the expanse of the heaven"; "the Gods took counsel among themselves and said, Let us go down and form man in our image." Now, in the Hebrew we find: "And God said [singular], Let us make man in our image, after our likeness... And God created [singular], man in His image." With the exception of "let us make," the verbs which go with "God" (Eloheem) are singular throughout Genesis 1. The same is the situation in Genesis 3:22: "And the Lord God said [singular], Behold the man is become as one of us.." and in Genesis 11.6-8. "Go to, let us go down," says the Lord (singular). "The gods" (plural) in Genesis 35:7 (R. V. "God") are the same as "the angels of God" (so A. V.) in 28:12. Seixas' Manual invariably treats the Eloheem of the Israelites as singular, although the word is plural in form; and he explains the plural form as "a pluralis excellentiae, used by way of eminence" (pp.85,94). Professor Seixas was not to blame if, on learning that Eloheem is plural, Joseph "concluded that the Bible had been carelessly translated," even though Parley Pratt thought so. It is also doubtful that the Professor led Joseph to "conclude that God must have made the heavens and the earth out of materials He had on hand." (See Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, p.171.)
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