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Urim   Listen
noun
Urim  n.  A part or decoration of the breastplate of the high priest among the ancient Jews, by which Jehovah revealed his will on certain occasions. Its nature has been the subject of conflicting conjectures. "Thou shall put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim." "And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets." Note: Professor Plumptre supposes the Urim to have been a clear and colorless stone set in the breastplate of the high priest as a symbol of light, answering to the mystic scarab in the pectoral plate of the ancient Egyptian priests, and that the Thummim was an image corresponding to that worn by the priestly judges of Egypt as a symbol of truth and purity of motive. By gazing steadfastly on these, he may have been thrown into a mysterious, half ecstatic state, akin to hypnotism, in which he lost all personal consciousness, and received a spiritual illumination and insight.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Urim" Quotes from Famous Books



... And wings were set with eyes; with eyes the wheels Of beryl, and careering fires between; Over their heads a crystal firmament, Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure Amber, and colours of the showery arch. He, in celestial panoply all armed Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought, Ascended; at his right hand Victory Sat eagle-winged; beside him hung his bow And quiver with three-bolted thunder stored; And from about him fierce effusion rolled Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire: Attended with ten thousand thousand Saints, He ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... to the use of charms and enchantments, founded on a superstitious perversion of their own Levitical ritual, in which they endeavoured by sortilege, by Teraphim, by observation of augury, or the flight of birds, which they called Nahas, by the means of Urim and Thummim, to find as it were a byroad to the secrets of futurity. But for the same reason that withholds us from delivering any opinion upon the degree to which the devil and his angels might be allowed to countenance the impositions of the heathen priesthood, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... name!—God's own, except Ye take most vainly. Through heaven's lifted gate The priestly ephod in sole glory swept When Christ ascended, entered in, and sate (With victor face sublimely overwept) At Deity's right hand, to mediate, He alone, He for ever. On His breast The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire From the full Godhead, flicker with the unrest Of human pitiful heart-beats. Come up higher, All Christians! Levi's tribe is dispossest. That solitary alb ye shall admire, ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... the hillside; in this cave he found some gold plates, on which were inscribed strange characters, written in what Smith described as "reformed Egyptian"; they were undecipherable except by the aid of a pair of magic peep-stones named Urim and Thummim, delivered him for the purpose by the angel at Palmyra; looking through the hole in these peep-stones, he was able to interpret the gold plates. This was the skeleton of the story embellished by later ornamentation in the way of golden breastplates, ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White

... adducing, in confirmation of it, the paraphrase of the words given in the Targum of Jonathan. "The nations you are about to possess, (says the Jewish paraphrast) hearken to jugglers and diviners; but you shall not be like them; for your priests shall enquire by Urim and Thummim, and the Lord your God shall give you a true prophet." And this explication is the one adopted by ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... shows points of superiority in her intellect. It is a man who tries to apprehend God through his logic and psychology; a woman understands Him better through emotions and deeds. It is the men who are concerned about the cubits, the cedar wood, the Urim and Thummim of the Tabernacle; woman walks straight into the Holy of Holies. Men constructed the Cross; women wept for the Crucified. It was a man—a Jew defending his faith in his own supernatural revelation—who tried to ram a sponge of vinegar into the mouth of Christ, dying; it was women ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in pious awe—what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on the sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but that they may not? What is it but cowardice, very pitiable when unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to Nature ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... attempt to only describe one piece of the dress of the high priest, the breast-plate (rationale); a gorget, ten inches square, made of the same sort of cloth as the ephod, and doubled so as to form a kind of pouch or bag, in which was to be put the urim and thummim, which are also mentioned as is already known. The external part of this gorget was set with four rows of precious stones; the first row, a serdious, a topaz, and a carbuncle; the second, an ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden

... presence of the "golden plates" giving an account of the fate which attended the early inhabitants of America. With these plates would be found the only means by which they could be read, the wonderful spectacles known as the "Urim and Thummim." Joe was not averse to such a revelation, for his hazel rod and his "peek-stone" had already failed him. There had been various religious awakenings in the neighborhood, and when the various sects began to quarrel over the converts Joe arose and announced that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various



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