We did not create nor do we own the elements of the earth. Thus Benjamin dramatizes our indebtedness to God by noting that even our bodies are made of borrowed materials.
“Ye Cannot Say That Ye Are Even as Much as the Dust of the Earth”
Adam, the first of all men, was formed from the “dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). It is from an extract of the writings of Enoch, as restored through Joseph Smith, that we get an explanation of this scriptural metaphor. All mankind, according to our restored text, are born into mortality “by water, and blood, and the spirit,” and so become “of dust” living souls (see Moses 6:59).
That is (as we have been told in an official statement of the First Presidency), “All who have inhabited the earth since Adam have taken bodies and become souls in like manner” (James R. Clark, Messages of the First Presidency 4:205; italics added). We were born of the dust of the earth in the same manner that our first earthly father was born of dust. Our bodies, like his, were formed from the elements of this earth and at death will return to those elements from which they were taken, until the glorious day of resurrection.