Of Joseph Smith’s many revelations, his vision of the three degrees of glory recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 76 was surely among the most significant and spectacular.
It restored the ancient concept of a multitiered heaven. In the Greek New Testament, the plural term “heavens” occurs far more commonly than the singular “heaven” — as it does, for that matter, in the seventh-century Arabic Quran. In biblical Hebrew, a singular form of the word scarcely exists. And many non-biblical texts from the ancient Near East and early Christianity also speak of multiple heavens.