Destroyer

At the first Passover, Moses told Israel that the Lord "will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you" (Exodus 12:23). The Hebrew word is mashchit, "one who ruins," from a root meaning to spoil or corrupt. Revelation gives the same office a name in two languages: the angel of the bottomless pit is called Abaddon, Hebrew for "destruction," and Apollyon, Greek for "destroyer" (Revelation 9:11). Christian readers have often identified this figure with Satan and the destroyer with pure evil set against God. The texts themselves keep the destroyer under God's authority, and they spend their detail on the lines it may not cross.

The Destroyer Under Restraint

In the Hebrew Bible, the destroyer acts under authority and within certain bounds. At the Passover the boundary was a threshold. Blood on the lintel and side posts marked the houses the destroyer could not enter. A later story shows the same power stopped in mid-course. When a plague swept Israel after David's census, "the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it," and the Lord said, "It is enough: stay now thine hand" (2 Samuel 24:16). The angel stood at the threshing floor of Araunah, where David built an altar and where Solomon's temple later stood. Interpreters have long wrestled with a God who sends a destroyer at all. The narratives place their weight on the limit, the place where destruction stops and worship begins. Modern safety engineering draws the same kind of line, in the containment levels of biological laboratories and the automatic shutdown that halts a nuclear reactor.

The Destroying Angel in Restoration Scripture

Restoration scripture renews the promise of protection and adds a reason to withhold destruction even from the wicked.

The Word of Wisdom, given in 1833, ends its counsel on food and drink with a promise that those who keep it "shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones," and that "the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel, and not slay them" (D&C 89:18-21). Some have read the promise as protection from spiritual death, since faithful Saints still die. The verses before it promise health, strength, and knowledge in bodily terms, and Mormon transhumanists read the promise as including physical protection gained through care of the body. A revelation of 1832 pictures the angels "ready and waiting to be sent forth to reap down the fields," and records the Lord's restraint: "pluck not up the tares while the blade is yet tender... lest you destroy the wheat also" (D&C 86:5-7). Destruction that cannot separate the guilty from the innocent is held back. The same reasoning counsels caution toward technologies that cannot be confined once released, such as gene drives designed to spread a trait through an entire wild population.

The Tower in a Time of Peace

A parable in the Doctrine and Covenants makes protection a matter of preparation, undertaken while no danger is visible.

A nobleman told his servants to plant olive trees, set watchmen, and build a tower. As they laid the foundation, the servants asked, "What need hath my lord of this tower, seeing this is a time of peace?" and proposed giving the money to the exchangers instead. The enemy came by night and broke down the hedge. The nobleman's rebuke is that the watchman on the tower "would have seen the enemy while he was yet afar off," and the servants could have "saved my vineyard from the hands of the destroyer" (D&C 101:44-54). Scientists have sometimes served as such watchmen. In 1974, molecular biologists called for a voluntary pause on recombinant DNA experiments until the risks could be assessed, and in 2024 a group of 38 scientists urged that "mirror bacteria," organisms built from molecules of reversed handedness, not be created unless they could be shown to be safe.

Destroying Power in Human Hands

Weapons and tools now give human beings a destroyer's reach, and transhumanist hopes rest on some of the same capacities.

Recalling the first atomic test, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Synthetic biology may now make engineered pathogens easier to produce, and AI developers have said they could not rule out that their newest models would give meaningful help to a novice attempting it. Several have added safeguards in response. Protection lags. The 1972 treaty banning biological weapons has no means of verifying compliance, and screening of synthetic DNA orders remains largely voluntary. Mormon transhumanists welcome synthetic biology and artificial intelligence as means of healing and abundance, so the destroyer's reach is their concern as well. Some transhumanists oppose moratoria as ineffective. A more promising course, often called differential technological development, speeds defensive capacities such as pathogen monitoring, rapid vaccines, and DNA screening ahead of the capacities they guard against.

The test for any technology that could destroy at scale is whether its makers build the hedge and the tower before harm arrives and stay their hand where harm cannot be confined to those who chose it, or whether they drop their guard until the enemy has broken through.

See also: Adversary, Anthropology, Immortality, Messiah, Need, Simulation Hypothesis, Singularity, Superhuman