Kolob is one of the more startling claims to come out of the Book of Abraham: a named, locatable body in the heavens, closest of all the great governing stars to the throne of God, its own single day equal to a thousand years by earthly reckoning. Latter-day Saints have sung about it since 1842, when William W. Phelps set the mystery to verse in what became the hymn “If You Could Hie to Kolob.” But the hymn only asks a rhetorical question about eternity—it was never meant to locate the star. So which one, in the actual night sky, is it?
This page lays out a case—drawn substantially from an essay by the blog The Science of Theology, credited throughout—that Kolob is Sirius, the single brightest star visible from Earth. It also surfaces something the essay doesn't mention at all: Phelps himself, fifteen years after writing the Kolob hymn, wrote a second poem that asks this exact question directly. And it lays out, plainly and with the caveats it deserves, what this site's own search tools turn up when the days of Adam, Christ, and Joseph Smith are checked against Sirius's own calendar of risings, settings, and alignments.
The Father's Throne
The case starts, oddly enough, not with Kolob but with Orion. Across a striking number of unconnected ancient cultures, this constellation was read as a person rather than an object: a hunter to the Greeks, a great king to the Sumerians, a heavenly shepherd to the Babylonians. To the Egyptians—whose astronomy the Book of Abraham says was taught to them directly by Abraham himself (Abraham 3:15)—Orion was Sah, identified with Osiris, and carried the title translated into English as “Lord God”: literally, in Egyptian, something close to “the Creator of the Gods.” He represented not a distant deity but a resurrected, exalted man—the very shape of the doctrine Joseph Smith would later teach about the destiny of the faithful.
Abraham describes his own observation of the night sky in strikingly plain, unmystical terms: “I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it” (Abraham 3:2). Ancient Arab astronomers preserved the name of an asterism—part of the modern constellation Lepus, just below Orion's feet—called “the Throne of Jawza’,” Jawza’ being their own name for Orion, “the Central One.” If Orion was read anciently as the Father, his throne sits precisely where the asterism's name says it should.
And of the ten brightest stars visible from Earth, five sit within some 35 degrees of that asterism—among them Sirius, brightest of all by a factor of two. The Lord's own words to Abraham continue directly from the description of the throne: “the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me” (Abraham 3:3). A star that is both the single brightest in the sky and sits near the Father's throne and constellation is, on this reading, exactly the candidate the text is pointing toward.
Fifteen Governing Stars
Joseph Smith's own explanatory notes on facsimile 2 of the Book of Abraham—the hypocephalus—describe “fifteen…fixed…stars” governing this local system, with Kolob named as the first, nearest the celestial realm. Less widely known is that during the School of the Prophets in Kirtland, Joseph Smith actually wrote out all fifteen names. Kolob, intriguingly, is not first on that list—three other names (Oliblish, Enish-go-on-dosh, and Kae-e-vanrash) are described as senior to it, with Kolob heading the remaining twelve.
A separate, unrelated tradition supplies a second list of exactly fifteen fixed stars: the Behenian Fixed Stars, first published in the West in 1531 by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and said in that tradition to descend from Enoch himself. Sirius appears on that list too, under the name Canis Major. Whatever else can or can't be reconciled between the two lists—their orderings don't map cleanly onto each other—both independently settle on the number fifteen, and both include Sirius. Whether that's a genuine thread running from Enoch through Abraham to the Egyptians and on to medieval Europe, or simply an old, appealing number, is left for the reader to weigh.
The Dog Star
Sirius carries the nickname “the Dog Star” across an unusually wide span of unrelated traditions. The Greeks called it Κύων Σείριος (kyōn seirios), “dog star”—a name still fossilized in Procyon, “before the dog,” since that star's own heliacal rising precedes Sirius's own each year. The Egyptians linked Sirius to Anubis, the jackal-headed guide of souls to judgment, and taught that the spirits of the justified dead were carried first to Sirius before being united with Osiris.
The linguistic thread is what makes this more than a coincidence of imagery. The word for “dog” across nearly every major Semitic language—Hebrew, Akkadian, Phoenician, Arabic, Aramaic among them—is built from the consonants כלב (klb). Because ancient Hebrew, like Egyptian, was written without vowels, those same three consonants could historically have been voiced any number of ways—including, plausibly, kolob. On this reading, Kolob may simply be an ancient name meaning “dog,” applied to the same star the Egyptians already associated with a dog-headed god.
Practically, Sirius's heliacal rising—its brief reappearance in the pre-dawn sky each year after months lost in the sun's glare—coincided for the Egyptians with the annual Nile flood, making it central to their calendar and their temple alignments alike. It's this same heliacal cycle, along with Sirius's opposition and its yearly conjunction with the sun, that this site's own Sirius track calculates and displays on the disc and in the calendar view for any date.
A Voice From 1857
William W. Phelps wrote “If You Could Hie to Kolob” in 1842, and it remains one of the most enduring hymns of the Restoration. What's far less known is that fifteen years later, in January 1857, Phelps published a second poem in the Deseret News titled “Here We Are.” Unlike the Kolob hymn, this one names a candidate directly:
Shine you with the stars to-night—
Where the ‘Dog-stars’ ever eye us,
As the upper sons of light?
What if Kolob is Si-ri-us?
God, who's Adam, with a madam,
Brought our garden seeds from there,—
Nightly singing—“Here we are.”
The question—what if Kolob is Sirius?—is asked plainly, in print, by the same man who wrote the Church's most famous hymn about Kolob, over 160 years before any modern essay revisited the idea. However Phelps arrived at the thought, he arrived at it early, and he arrived at it in the same breath as a reference to Adam and Eve's own origins—a pairing this site's own search tools turn out to have something to say about.
Poem text and citation: W. W. Phelps, “Here We Are,” Deseret News, January 28, 1857, p. 373, as quoted and cited in Jeff Lindsay and Neal Rappleye, “Kolob, the Governing One,” BYU Studies.
Synchronicities on This Site
None of the above depends on this site's own calculations—it's a case that stands or falls on its own historical and scriptural merits. But once Sirius is tracked here as a calendar in its own right, alongside Enoch, the Sacred Round, Venus, the Moon, the Priestly Courses, and the Holy Star Wheel, it becomes possible to simply ask: on the days this project already treats as significant, where does Sirius happen to be? A few answers stood out enough to be worth reporting plainly, with their honest caveats attached.
Adam
Two of the earliest dates in this site's historical database—the marriage of Adam and Eve (8 April 4006 BC) and the beginning of Adam's mortal life five years later, on the same calendar day (8 April 4001 BC)—both land exactly on the day of Sirius's yearly alignment with the sun. Not near it: the search tools on this site return zero days' offset for both.
Jesus Christ
The Jupiter–Saturn triple conjunction of 27 May 7 BC—one of the standing candidates for the Star of Bethlehem—sits a single day from Sirius alignment, the closest match of any event in this site's database apart from Adam's own two dates. That said, in the interest of the same honesty this site tries to hold to elsewhere: Christ's own recorded birth, baptism, crucifixion, and resurrection dates do not show this same closeness to Sirius. That absence is worth stating plainly rather than explaining away.
Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith's birth (23 December 1805) lands one day from Sirius's opposition to the sun—the single closest match to any Sirius event found anywhere in this site's entire database. His martyrdom (27 June 1844) lands one day from Sirius alignment, the same event type found exactly on Adam's two dates above.
A statistical caveat belongs here as much as anywhere on this site: checked across the whole 528-event database, the overall rate of close Sirius matches lands almost exactly where random chance alone would predict it. This is not, on the whole, a database secretly saturated with Sirius coincidences. What's reported above are the specific, standout dates that surfaced when the question was actually asked—not a claim that every date on this site aligns this way, and not, on its own, a proof of anything. As with everything else here: a mirror, not a verdict.
Curious to check other dates for yourself? The calculator's Events tab now includes a filter that searches this site's entire historic database for Sirius alignment, opposition, heliacal rising, or heliacal setting—alongside every other calendar this site tracks—instantly, against every catalogued event at once.