Abstract: It’s almost always better to be right than to be wrong, to be exact than to be sloppy. In scholarship generally and serious scriptural study specifically, it’s important to work toward precision in both interpretation and explanation. However, the Lord is fully capable of reaching us where we are, despite our imperfect languages and our limited capacities. “These commandments are of me,” he says at D&C 1:24, “and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.”

Some of you are no doubt familiar with the venerable joke about the monk who, after decades of anticipation, finally has an opportunity to examine the document that has governed much of his long life. When at last he emerges from the archive in which he’s been permitted to study the original manuscript, tears of regret and sorrow are coursing down his face. When his waiting friends ask him why he’s so sad, he responds: “The word was celebrate!”1

In such cases, it’s important to be precise, and to get the words right.

Many years ago, a friend who was a fellow classics major told me of a Sunday School class that he had just attended. It was apparently focused on the apocalyptic prophecies in Matthew 24.

To illustrate Matthew 24:12 (which, in the King James Version, reads, “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold”), the dedicated teacher had come equipped with a wax candle and a box of matches. Several times, he lit the candle and, after a short interval, blew it out each time, [Page viii]inviting members of the class to contemplate the significance of cooling wax.

But the verb to wax that is used in KJV Matthew 24:12 has absolutely nothing to do with the cooling of wax. It means, simply, “to grow,” and is an English cognate of the German verb wachsen, which carries exactly the same meaning. We say of the moon that it “waxes” and “wanes,” by which we mean that the size of the visible moon appears to cyclically increase (grow) and then decrease (shrink) in the sky. When some of us say that Senator Bunkum “waxed eloquent” or that a prose author suddenly “waxed poetic,” we’re not talking at all about beeswax or candle wax.

The verb and the noun are quite distinct in meaning and largely, if not wholly, distinct in their etymological histories. Our modern noun wax comes from Old English weax (which referred to a substance made by bees), which in turn comes from proto-Germanic wahsam and ultimately from the proto-Indo-European root wokso- (“wax”). By contrast, our modern verb to wax (in the sense of “to grow”) derives from Old English weaxan, “to increase, grow,” and, before that, from proto-Germanic wahsan and proto-Indo-European weg-.2

Thus, if staring at cooling candle wax delivered any actual insights into Matthew 24:12, such insights would occur only by sheer coincidence.

But the teacher wasn’t done yet. He or she then turned to Matthew 24:28, which, in the King James Version, reads, “For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.”

What was the significance of eagles gathering around a carcass? As I recall, the class didn’t immediately see it,