Yes, the mark of anointing points to the temple, yes, in a way that distinguishes the First Temple view from that of the reformers. Notice that earlier in Jacob 4, Jacob speaks about “things as they really are, and of things as they really will be; wherefore, these things are manifested unto us plainly” and it happens that the anointing that Terry discusses here and that Margaret discusses in the Temple Studies link also relate to the notion that the Holy of Holies, the visionary high priests “history depicted on the veil, on the other side, so to speak, of matter and time. This probably explains the experience of Habakkuk, centuries earlier, who stood on the tower, a common designation for the holy of holies
, and saw there ‘a vision of the future, it awaits its time, it hastens to the end, … it will surely come it, will not delay’ (Hab .2.2-3).” (http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers/BeyondtheVeil.pdf ) So Jacob has seen and Sherem does not believe anyone can see.

The story of Sherem in Jacob 7 illustrates the blindness of the Deuteronomists, that no one can know the future or see God face to face, there is no anointed Christ, and the Law of Moses is an end in itself. Margaret’s recent commentary on the Gospel of John makes the point that Nicodemus, for instance, was a master in Israel, but did not understand temple symbolism. Subsequent stories of the living bread, living waters, and the healing of the blind man re-emphasize the same issue. What Jesus says and does makes sense in the Temple tradition, but not in the tradition that saw the law as an end in itself. And in talking to the disciples about the parable of the Sower as the key to everything, that the same word can convey vastly different meanings depending on soil and nurture (contextualization), Jesus also relates that parable to the kind of blindness that Isaiah 6 talked about, and that Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jacob and Nephi also describe.

Another view (although probably more Christian) with regard to the anointing is contained in Strecker, Georg, trans., Maloney, Linda M., The Johannine Letters: A Commentary on 1, 2 and 3 John, Hermeneia, Fortress Press, (1996), electronic CD version. This is summarized as follows: This anointing can be viewed in two ways: the first is simply the revelation of knowledge by the Holy Spirit and the second is an actual anointing by God or Jesus. The second is actually the favored usage and v. 20 and 27 are the only place where the Greek word for anointing is used in the New Testament. The underlying Greek verb which anointing is the root of apparently is used in 2 Cor. 2:21 “who has sealed us”. There is a grammatical distinction which supports the view of the anointing being from God and/or Christ rather than the Holy Spirit, although the commentator says there is really no distinction [something I disagree with]. The exact Greek word in 1 John 2: 20, 27 is used 9 times in the LXX (Greek version of the Old Testament), particularly where the “oil of anointing” is used. See Ex. 29:7; 30:25, 35:14, 19,;38:25; 40:9, 15 Sirach 38:30 and Dan. 9:26. Its is interpreted as the “oil of life that flows from the tree of life in paradise [see 2 Enoch 22:8-9; Apocalypse of Moses 9:3; Life of Adam and Eve (Vita) 36. There is a report of early Christians anointing with oil after baptism “After this, when we have issued form the font, we are thoroughly anointed with blessed oil.” Tertullian Bapt. (PL 1.1206-7).

I would say that this practice comes from somewhere in the Second Temple (and likely first) but I’ll have to do some more digging.

Jacob 4:14

they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall;

The words of plaineness are not a generic style of speaking, but specifically what Lehi spoke “plainly,” having experienced a counsel vision (the sod), and testified concerning the Messiah (anointed, represented by the High Priest who bore the name) and the Redemption of the World (ritually enacted by the anointed High Priest on the Day of Atonement). This happens to be what Barker talked about in 2005 as “the very heart of the temple” targeted by violent reformers.

What kind of blindness is it? Literal, or conceptual?

Jeremiah also talks about the blindness of the time.

“Hear now this, O foolish people, without understanding, which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not” (Jeremiah 5:21).

So it’s not a literal blindness where the eyes don’t work, but conceptual where people don’t understand what they see and even what they should be looking at. Jeremiah here alludes back to Isaiah 6, where the problem is a lack of Wisdom.

The Reformers claimed that the Law would be their Wisdom in a key passage from the preface to Deuteronomy: “Keep therefore and do them [that is, the statutes and judgments of the law] for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Deuteronomy. 4:6).

The claim is that they have something (wisdom and understanding) that Jeremiah says they don’t have.

Barker points out that the Law here is put forward as a substitute for wisdom. She points out several places where poems in praise of wisdom have been changed to become praises of the law. She discusses how often the texts that refer to this period lament the loss of Wisdom in terms of characteristic teachings as well as the female personification of Wisdom, whose great symbol was the tree of life, something that Lehi valued considerably more than Josiah, who had it removed from the temple and burned.

Jeremiah 8:8-9 seems to me be commenting on this very Deuteronomy passage, and Friedman and Bright both offer a stronger translation than the KJV. “How can you say, ‘Why we are the wise, For we have the law of Yahweh’? Now do but see—the deception it’s wrought, the deceiving pen of the scribes.”

With respect to the law and those who had charge of it, Jeremiah comments that “they that handle the law knew me not” (Jeremiah 2:8). “…ye have perverted the words of the living God, of the LORD of hosts our God” (Jeremiah 23:36).

For me, this is a matter of the inter-related web of images, themes, people, arguments, and issues, all directly tied to the heart of the temple, all woven through everything about Jacob as a child of a particular time and place, raised as a Temple priest looking back to the First Temple by people who had personally seen and heard. But Sherem and Jacob can agree that keeping the law is a good and necessary thing. Sherem looks beyond the mark and all it could signify and sees all needful wisdom in the Law of Moses. He’s sophic, rather than mantic.

http://www.templestudiesgroup.com/Papers/31Oct09_HolyAnointingOil.pdf

“The person anointed with the perfumed oil received the gift of the Spirit that
gave wisdom and transformed his way of knowing. This is why, when the oil was hidden away,
people said that the priests could no longer see.”

So the anointing with the Name opens a person’s eyes, and the change to the priesthood during the time of Josiah changed the role of the high priest so that he was no longer the anointed, but the priest of the many colored robes. (See Barker, The Great Angel, p 15).

And my own Interpreter essay emphasizes how 1 Enoch, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Lehi, Nephi and Jacob all discuss the blindness and consequent loss of wisdom. That sort of thing, in the right time and place for a consecrated temple priest like Jacob, who demonstrates links to the Wisdom Tradition, has an adversarial relationship with the Deuteronomist views of Sherem, and who, like Jeremiah has seen and heard for himself, ought to be considered as potentially illuminating context, “after the manner of the Jews” as 2 Nephi 25:5 has it , ought to count for something in approaching Jacob 4:14.

But again my main concern is with the sentence in question. It seems to make some requirements regarding the mark. 1. that you can look beyond it and that 2. looking this way blinds you. Given the archery metaphor explains this formulation as a visual metaphor I just don’t see the tau anointing metaphor working for a variety of reasons. (Not the least of which that it’s not clear the Nephites would be familiar with this practice of anointing in order for his sermon to function)

When I read Hoskisson’s detailed essay on “Looking Beyond the Mark” and his settling on an archery metaphor, without even mentioning Ezekiel’s mark, and Barker’s work, I think of Mark Twain’s comment that the difference between the right word, and almost the right word, is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning. It seems to me, at least, that Ezekiel’s reference to the mark as the Name, a protection, and also the anointing with the Name that actually made the High Priest the Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ, and that in considering Barker’s case that the reformers changed the role of the High Priest so that he was no longer the anointed, that such a reading casts considerably more light than does archery. It fits with the controversies of the time and place and explains why Lehi got into trouble for saying what he did. Lehi’s first public discourse, testified “plainly” concerning a “Messiah” [which means the anointed] and the redemption of the world, which was ritually enacted by the anointed high priest in the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. And Deuteronomy 16 presents a sacred calendar with no Day of Atonement. Concerning what Lehi spoke of “plainly” and the blinded Jews in Jerusalem circa 600 BCE despised and looked beyond, according to Jacob 4, I think it fits remarkably well with Barker’s 2005 assessment that “Josiah’s changes concerned the High Priests, and were thus changes at the heart of the temple.” Jacob is a consecrated High Priest, whose discourse starting in 2 Nephi 6, Professor Hamblin has occasionally argued is packed with the themes of the Day of Atonement. Lehi, Nephi, and Jacob are all prophets who have “seen and heard” and thus were not blind and deaf. And Lehi, Nephi and Jacob all show ties to the Wisdom tradition (See especially Alyson Von Feldt’s essays at the Maxwell Institute, which take it further than I did). Sherem, Laman and Lemuel, sound like Deuteronomists.

I don’t see a need to compare the tau with the later Christian cross when Ezekiel’s protective High Priestly Anointing with the Name is a powerful use of the symbol contemporary with Jacob, who like Ezekiel, was a temple priest.

She brought this up again in a 2014 talk in Ireland: “This seal of the Name was a diagonal X, and it was used in the first temple. Ezekiel described it as the letter tau, which in the palaeo Hebrew alphabet was written as X, but after the alphabet had been changed, later writers had to describe it as Greek chi. Ezekiel also knew that the seal of the Name protected the faithful against the imminent judgement. He heard the Lord say to the angels of judgement: ‘Pass through the city… and smite… but touch no one on whom is the mark’ (Ezek.9.5, 6). This means that the faithful were sealed by the Name within the protecting bond of the everlasting covenant, and so they were safe from the imminent wrath. …
The sign of the Name was marked on the forehead of a sacral king or high priest when he was anointed, and Isaiah recorded what this meant.”

http://ecocongregationireland.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Everlasting-Covenant-Margaret-Barker-DD.pdf

A subtle theme in Mosiah happens to be a comparison of the Amulon’s priests with the fallen angels. “Barker remarks, “It has been suggested that the fallen angel themes of 1 Enoch were in fact an attack upon the corrupt priesthood of the second temple period.” Similarly, the account of Amulon’s wicked priests shows the use of allusions to the fallen angel myth to interpret that story. The arch sin of the fallen angels in the Enoch accounts was pride, and in consequence of their fall, they spread a corrupt form of wisdom. In the Enoch accounts, the fallen angels intermarried with human women, and their offspring were destroyed in the time of Noah. In the Book of Mormon, Amulon’s priests are described from the beginning as proud (Mosiah 11:5–13); they also pervert sacred knowledge for gain (Mosiah 11:5–6; 12:28–29) and take wives they should not have (Mosiah 20:1–5). Amulon’s priests teach the Lamanites to be cunning and wise “as to the wisdom of the world” (Mosiah 24:7; see 23:31–35; 24:1–7). Finally, their descendants from the union with the stolen wives become “hardened” and meet with destruction (Alma 25:4, 7–9).” (From my essay in Glimpses of Lehis Jerusalem.)

And it’s also worth noticing Joseph Spencer’s An Other Testament, which structures Nephi’s books as Creation, Covenant and Fall, Atonement, and Veil, and his discovery after three years of working out the notion, that Barker’s Temple Theology has the same structure.

While that’s one of those things one might wish to be true – especially if the tau is seen as a Christian cross – I confess I’m pretty skeptical. If only because I can’t quite understand what “looking beyond” means in that context. Whereas in archery that makes perfect sense. The metaphor is simply the traditional reading that the Jews got so caught up in the forms that they missed the meaning. (More or less the same criticism Jesus makes of the Pharisees and Sadducees in the NT)

The tau reading not only complicates the “looking beyond” modifier of “mark” but makes the metaphor a bit odd. You read it as corrupting the anointing and high priests. That is there was a literal change in priesthood under Josiah at least as significant as what the later Hasmonean dynasty does to the priesthood. While this might explain why Nephite priesthood doesn’t quite line up with OT descriptions, again it seems problematic. If only because Nephi never really attacks the corruption of the priesthood as a problem in his sermons. There are priesthood corruptions (King Noah being the most obvious) but we don’t really see the priesthood attacked the way scribes are or the missing books. Priests are only mentioned in 2 Nephi 28:4 but that’s a prophecy of the last days (presumably more a summary of his earlier vision) We don’t really hear about priests again until well into Mosiah.

I also think the other problem is that of course the deuteronomist position doesn’t appear wholesale with Josiah. So it may well be that elements Barker brings up come from later deuteronomist development in Babylon or during the post-exilic era. While the deuteronimists seem to be more distrustful of visions, they limit their critique primarily to those who teach one to worship a different God. Which is why Jeremiah seems fine. So I confess I find that element as an issue for Lehi and Nephi’s visions seems questionable.

This becomes very important when applying issues of the deuteronomists to the Book of Mormon since the histories divide not long after Josiah. Almost certainly most of the deuteronomist development in terms of text redaction and editing took place after Lehi left Jerusalem. (Ignoring the major issue of whether the lost book of Law actually was Deuteronomy since that is itself controversial but also avoids the question of where this book in the temple came from)

The main distinction between a direct relation with God, following God’s Law, and Wisdom seems a bit questionable too. After all we today (and most of the Book of Mormon) sees all three as important. So putting them in a strong opposition seems a bit more questionable. Especially since all three elements are found in the OT as compiled in the post-exilic period. It’s a bit like scholars opposing apocalyptic literature with wisdom literature in the NT.