Fulfill

To fulfill is to fill something to its full measure: to keep a promise, carry out a duty, complete an appointed span of time, or bring a prophecy to pass. Old English fullfyllan meant “to fill full.” The Greek plēroō, from plērēs, “full,” ranges from cramming a net with fish to finishing a task or coinciding with a prediction. Its Hebrew counterpart, male’, is the ordinary verb for filling a jar or a house. Read quickly, a fulfilled law or prophecy is one that is finished and can be set aside. Yet Jesus set the word against its opposite: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17). Whatever ended when he fulfilled the law, he described the act as one of filling.

Prophecy Filled Out

Of the holy family’s return from Egypt, Matthew wrote that it happened “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Matthew 2:15). The line comes from Hosea, where it looks back to the exodus, when God called Israel, his “son,” out of bondage. Interpreters of Matthew read the passage as a deliberate pattern: Jesus goes down into Egypt as Israel did, passes through water at his baptism, and spends forty days in the wilderness, and where Israel faltered, he carries the story to completion. Said differently, a prophecy in Matthew’s sense can be fulfilled the way a mold is filled, by a later life taking the shape an earlier one outlined. The Hebrew Bible’s most striking use of the verb concerns whose hands do the filling.

Filling the Hand

When the Lord instructed Moses to “consecrate” Aaron and his sons (Exodus 28:41), the Hebrew reads literally “fill their hand.” The rite acted out the phrase: portions of the offering were laid on the priests’ palms, then burned on the altar. It was Moses, acting at God’s command, who filled the priests’ hands. It is significant that the same verb appears in the first blessing spoken to the man and the woman: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28), where “replenish” renders male’, “fill.” The verb is common, and the link may be no more than the language itself. Yet for readers who saw Eden as the first sanctuary, the thought that the garden’s commission anticipated the tabernacle’s cannot be ruled out.

Mormon transhumanists count science and technology among the means God has ordained for realizing prophetic visions of resurrection and the renewal of the world, and they read prophecy as conditional: Jonah’s announced overthrow of Nineveh went unfulfilled because Nineveh repented. On this view, the filling of prophecy, like the filling of the earth, is work placed in human hands. Of course, scripture also records hands filled without a commission. King Jeroboam of Israel “made again of the lowest of the people priests of the high places: whosoever would, he consecrated him” (1 Kings 13:33), literally, “whoever wished, he filled his hand,” and the narrator counts it the sin that cut off his house. Capacities such as gene editing and advanced artificial intelligence are passing into more and more hands, which reopens the question the tabernacle settled by ritual: who has filled those hands, and for what service.

The Law Fulfilled and the Covenant Not Yet

At the temple in Bountiful, when some wondered what he intended concerning the law of Moses, Jesus answered that “the law in me is fulfilled,” and then drew a distinction easy to pass over: “the covenant which I have made with my people is not all fulfilled; but the law which was given unto Moses hath an end in me” (3 Nephi 15:5, 8). The sacrificial law had reached its end and goal, while the covenant was still taking in people and promises. The sermon he had just given, the Nephite counterpart of the Sermon on the Mount, shows where fulfillment leads. In Matthew, the passage that opens with Jesus fulfilling the law closes with a command to be “perfect,” and the Greek teleios means “complete” or “full-grown.” Latter-day Saint scholars have noted what the Nephite version adds: “I would that ye should be perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect” (3 Nephi 12:48). Spoken after the Resurrection, “even as I” places a body of flesh and bone within the measure of completeness. The fullness he offered includes the body, and by his own account, the covenant that carries it is still being filled.