# Knowledge

Knowledge spans fact, craft, and intimacy in scripture—explore how Hebrew and Restoration texts reveal knowing as sacred, relational, and transformative.

Knowledge names the content a mind holds and the acquaintance one person has with another, and the Hebrew of the Old Testament declines to separate the two. The verb *yada* covers the observation of a fact, the mastery of a craft, and the intimacy of husband and wife, so that the narrator of Genesis can write in a single idiom, “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived” (Genesis 4:1). The Greek *gnosis* and its intensified compound *epignosis*, “full knowledge,” carry a comparable range in the apostolic letters, where believers are promised grace multiplied through the knowledge of God. Modern usage has settled almost wholly upon the first sense, counting knowledge as information held and transferable. The passages that bear most heavily on Restoration doctrine turn upon the second.

## The Tree and the Opened Eyes

The commandment concerning the tree of knowledge of good and evil appears in the Book of Moses with a clause absent from Genesis. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but, remember that I forbid it” (Moses 3:17). God prohibits and in the same breath hands the choice over, and the Restoration has generally read the sentence as establishing the conditions of a probation. The knowledge forbidden was knowledge of a kind that could be gained only by acting, and the tree therefore stood in the garden as an instrument of the very agency the prohibition addressed.

Adam and Eve interpret the outcome in the next chapter, and their verdict is a blessing. Adam “blessed God and was filled,” declaring that “because of my transgression my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh I shall see God,” while Eve answered that without their transgression “we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption” (Moses 5:10-11). Eve’s sentence places posterity, moral knowledge, and the joy of redemption in a single series, each conditioned upon the same act. Knowledge of good and evil arrives, on this account, through the experience of both, and it arrives in the flesh.

## Added unto Faith

The Apostle Peter arranged the Christian virtues in a chain and set knowledge near its beginning: “add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity” (2 Peter 1:5-7). Knowledge occupies the third place, early enough to be indispensable and far enough from the end to require everything that follows it. Peter’s promise is that these things, abounding together, keep a believer from being “barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The chain thus begins and ends in knowledge of a Person, with the acquisition of understanding serving as an early link in a longer discipline.

Less often noticed is how sharply the Savior separated the two senses of the word at the judgment. Those who approach Him recite their credentials, asking, “have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?” and He answers, “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:22-23). The petitioners possess information about Christ, authority used in His name, and a record of effective works, and the single thing lacking is acquaintance. The Savior’s verdict falls on the relational sense of knowing, and the Hebrew idiom of the opening verse of Genesis stands behind it, where to know is to be joined.

## Knowledge Shall Be Increased

Daniel received his final vision with a charge to seal it, “even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4). Interpreters have long read the verse as a prophecy of travel and learning in the last days, and Latter-day Saints have characteristically understood the Restoration as occurring inside that increase, alongside the printing press, the steamship, and the telegraph. The Mormon Transhumanist Association has carried the reading further, holding that the pursuit of knowledge and the extension of human capability belong to the work prophecy describes, and that the Saints are obliged to take part in it with wisdom and an eye to its dangers.

Isaiah supplied the measure by which such an increase is judged. On the holy mountain, he wrote, “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). The prophet joins the cessation of harm to the fullness of knowledge in one sentence, making the second the ground of the first. Knowledge saturating a world, in Isaiah’s picture, issues in a world where nothing wounds, and the vision accordingly supplies a standard for every program of discovery. An increase of knowledge that multiplies the means of destroying has not yet reached the holy mountain.

## Knowledge That Cannot Be Recalled

Some discoveries, once published, are permanent. In 2011 two laboratories, one led by Ron Fouchier in Rotterdam and one by Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Wisconsin, produced strains of H5N1 influenza transmissible between ferrets, and the United States National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended that key details be withheld before reversing itself, after which both studies appeared in 2012. Nick Bostrom has since framed the general problem as the vulnerable world hypothesis, the possibility that some technology awaiting discovery destroys the civilization that finds it. Artificial biodesign tools have sharpened the question considerably, since the capability to design a protein and the capability to design a pathogen are substantially the same capability.

Peter’s chain places knowledge third and charity last, and the ordering states a requirement that the laboratory now inherits. Knowledge of good and evil came to Adam and Eve through experience, and the Restoration blesses the result, yet Eve’s joy lay in the redemption that followed the acquisition. Scientists and engineers extending human capability are asked, by Isaiah’s measure, to build toward a mountain where nothing hurts or destroys, which means governing the release of dual-use knowledge as carefully as its discovery, and to remember that the Savior at the judgment inquired after acquaintance. The knowledge scripture asks of its makers is the kind that joins them to what they know.

*See also*: [Adam and Eve](/topical-guide/adam-and-eve), [Charity](/topical-guide/charity), [Eden](/topical-guide/eden), [Existential Risk](/topical-guide/existential-risk), [Fall](/topical-guide/fall), [Instruct](/topical-guide/instruct), [Intelligence](/topical-guide/intelligence), [Mysteries](/topical-guide/mysteries), [Tree](/topical-guide/tree), [Wisdom](/topical-guide/wisdom), [Zion](/topical-guide/zion)