The Egyptian papyri, their antebellum American context, Smith’s translations, and the debates about their nature and significance have generated many decades of controversy within and around the early Church. These stories—and the cultural contexts and implications that the polemics on both sides have consistently missed—are the work of this chapter. For ease of exposition, I briefly review the historical context, consider the relevant documents on their own terms, and then tie Smith’s Egyptian project back to questions of his complex dance with modernity. With a special eye to its relevance to the nature of time, self, and scripture, I argue that Smith was revealing an Egyptian Bible saturated by the metaphysics of hieroglyphs. This special Bible played an important role in the elaboration of Smith’s replacement for the Chain of Being, what I call the Chain of Belonging. In this treatment, I am especially interested in understanding what the texts were for, what they did, and what they had to say about themselves.