Yah of the Negev, the American Southwest and the Las Vegas Temple?

I agree with your points which is why I put a question mark in the title of the article and made it clear that I have no idea if there is any connection between the three symbols other than their similarity. Similarity alone does not prove anything. Many cultures have used the cross symbol but not because it had a connection to Christianity, it’s just an easy symbol to draw and to build with sticks or to carve into stone.

When I first visited the Las Vegas temple I had the same thought about that symbol looking like a circle resting inside of a V. In fact, that’s what I thought it was until I noticed it on the inside of the temple where there was some separation between the individual symbols and it became clear that it was V protruding from a circle and not a circle resting inside a V.

That said, I have seen a similar motif on other temples that have a circle resting within a V, and I agree with you that this has strong ties to the idea of a female womb. I’ve done a lot of research on the association of the womb with the tree of life as well and there are very strong fundamental shared associations. Perhaps the Las Vegas temple symbols placed that close together can convey both ideas at once.

Symbolism is meant to be loose and abstract anyway. Not only can many different people see and learn different ideas but many different ideas can come to the same person. It’s a unique way of teaching and learning; it’s how Christ taught.

The Old Negev script makes use of many ligatures that can be accurately translated. That circle with the Y shape does indeed say “Yah” or Yahweh. What we find in the American Southwest may or may not be a form of Old Negev script, but I’d suggest reading Harris’ research.

Harris’ mentions in his work the words of Professor P. Kyle McCarter who suggested an important criteria when judging the soundness of a proposed translation: “Five letters in a row seem a bit too many to attribute to an accident involving coincidental letter forms, especially when these letters produce a linguistically intelligible sequence”.

Harris responds in his book that “about 80% of the inscriptions in this volume [which features only a small fraction of the hundreds of samples he has discovered] were composed with FIVE to FIFTY plus signs in a sequence that make sense in the Old Hebrew language.”

In one particular area 19 out of 35 inscriptions were “Yah” inscriptions. Even if you toss aside Harris’ research, the association with Jehovah/Jesus and the tree of life is well-established. The use of the the arched V-like shape in LDS symbology associated with the tree of life goes all the way back to the Kirtland temple.

The fact that the name Yah as it appears in the Old Negev script and the temple symbol may both be associated with tree of life concepts is a sound association. The V-like temple symbol we see is consistently associated tree of life themes on LDS temples.

This is not removing logic from the equation, it is applying logic based on evidence. While it is certainly true that the similarity between the symbols may be coincidental, the usage of that particular V-like design to represent the tree of life is not coincidental.

There’s still a lot to think about here, like I said, this was just an observation I made based on what I already knew concerning the history and background of the elements involved. I don’t claim to know if man or God specifically put these things together with this exact intention in mind, but there’s something there and I left it open for people to speculate and explore it more rather than saying it’s an open and shut case.

I do appreciate your comment and your skepticism. I think it is always healthy to be skeptical and force theories to prove themselves in light of the best evidence.