Urim and Thummim

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The Urim and Thummim were sacred objects associated with the breastpiece of the Israelite high priest, used to obtain answers to questions put before God. The Hebrew Bible names them repeatedly but never describes them: what they looked like, what they were made of, and exactly how they were operated are nowhere set down, and the silence is old enough that ancient readers were already guessing.

In the priestly legislation of Exodus and Leviticus the Urim and Thummim are placed inside the ḥoshen, the jeweled breastpiece worn over the high priest’s chest, so that he carries them “before the LORD” whenever he enters the sanctuary. Elsewhere they belong to the apparatus of decision. A commander brings a matter to the priest, who inquires by Urim; the answer guides whether to march, whom to choose, where guilt lies. Several narratives imply a procedure that yielded one of a small set of outcomes — yes, no, or no reply — which has led many scholars to read the instrument as a form of sacred lot, perhaps two marked stones or tokens drawn or cast, the result counting as a verdict from God rather than from chance. One episode reports that when Saul sought such an answer, God did not respond by dreams, by prophets, or by Urim: the channel could fall silent.

The names themselves are debated. The traditional rendering “lights and perfections” reads them against the Hebrew words for light and for completeness; other proposals connect urim to a root meaning to curse and tummim to one meaning to be whole, so that the pair would mark the two poles of a binary oracle — condemnation and acquittal. The plural forms and the fixed order have themselves been taken as clues, though none of the readings is secure.

What the texts establish is chiefly the institution’s decline. The priestly oracle belongs to Israel’s earlier history; by the time of the return from exile it had lapsed, and a passage in Ezra and Nehemiah defers certain unresolved questions until a priest should arise “with Urim and Thummim” — a phrase that reads as a wish for a faculty no longer in use. Later Jewish tradition counted the Urim and Thummim among the things absent from the Second Temple, and rabbinic discussion treated the manner of their working as a matter handed down rather than observed.

The objects have had a long afterlife outside Judaism. Christian interpreters allegorized them as figures of revelation and right judgment, and the phrase entered Reformation devotional and emblematic language as a byword for divinely certified truth. In the nineteenth century Joseph Smith identified instruments of translation in the founding accounts of the Latter Day Saint movement with the biblical Urim and Thummim, giving the term a specific modern sense within that tradition. Across these uses the same unstated thing keeps drawing the imagination: a means by which a verdict was held to come from beyond the one who asked, leaving no description of how.

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