John Bytheway:               00:00:02              Welcome to part two with Dr. Avram Shannon, Exodus, and Leviticus.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:00:07             One of the hardest things for us as Latter-day Saints, and I think it’s a problem with broader Christianity anyway, to see and do was recognize the sacrificial system is a complete religious system. It brought them closer to Jehovah. They don’t just say, now I know who Jesus is and I have to do something with these sacrifices. The sacrifices are how they met with God. Back to the sacrament for a second. We think about Jesus, we remember Jesus. The bishop stands up there and says, okay. Now, for 15 minutes, we’re going to think about Jesus. Remember what he did for us. You sit there and you think. No, the priest kneels down, breaks bread, blesses bread, we eat it. There’s more than just a mental thing happening with sacrifices. We talk about how they all point to the Savior. They absolutely do, but they don’t necessarily all point to the mortal ministry and the resurrection, if that makes sense.

                                           00:01:06             I.e., remembering what President Oaks and President Nelson both repeatedly taught. Jehovah is the God of the Old Testament. And the purpose of sacrifices was to reconcile Israel with Jehovah. It was to make that relationship right. There’s a whole burnt offering that we read in one. There’s a trespass offering, peace offering, and then sin offering. That’s the five main offerings. They do different things. You do a trespass offering for different reasons than you do a peace offering. This was their sacrament. This was their baptism. This was their endowment. This was how they interacted with God was through these animal sacrifices. The whole burnt offering. That’s one we see described in nine. This one’s unique because almost every sacrifice you ate. The priest ate a portion, the sacrifice ate a portion, the whole burnt offering, you burned the whole thing. You took the animal, you flayed it, you cut it in pieces, and you burned it. Just for the fun of it, I did a little bit of math. The going rate of a cow for, you know, a male cow for food is about $2,000. The whole burnt offering is equivalent of taking a stack of $50 bills, setting them on fire and saying, that’s yours, God. I don’t want it. This is for you.

Hank Smith:                      00:02:35             Can you imagine taking cash to the bishop and he’s like, thank you.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:02:39             And then putting, setting it on fire. That’s literally what the whole burnt offering does. By the way, we have texts from other people around the ancient Israelites and especially around the Jews later on, and they’re flabbergasted by this. Why are you wasting all this food? To Belnap’s point, it’s not a waste. We’re giving it to God. We’re making it holy. And so part of the intriguing things about Israelite religion is we see that seeing things, seeing holiness does not require you to get anything out of it. A whole burnt offering is 100% that kind of offering.

Hank Smith:                      00:03:20             Avram, what is it about sacrifice that creates holiness? Why can’t it be sit in a hammock and you will become holy? This lesson today is sacrifice brings forth holiness. Why?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:03:36             If we go back to Leviticus 10, Leviticus 19, be therefore holy, because I am holy. When we’re talking about holiness, we’re not talking about some kind of ineffable characteristic. We’re talking about being like God. That straight to this idea is holiness is being like God. I think about our dearly beloved President Holland. He gave this talk, you’re probably familiar with it years ago, Missionary Work and the Atonement. In this talk, it’s to missionaries. It’s an MTC talk. It was given, we’re talking like 25 years ago. I was a missionary when he gave it, so it was a long time ago here. In it, he asked this question of these missionaries. It’s like, look, guys, we have the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have the truth. We have the Holy Ghost. Why isn’t missionary work easy? Why is the only problem of missionary work getting hypothermia from being in the font so often? He says, because salvation is not a cheap experience.

                                           00:04:47             At a certain point, those of us who claim to follow and emulate Jesus have to feel a little bit about what Jesus felt. It wasn’t easy for him, President Holland says, “How could we ever think it’s going to be easy for us?” Talk about the ultimate act of sacrifice. Our Lord and Savior, God himself, nailed to a cross. We have this great Old Testament background for Christians. When it comes down to what it means to sacrifice, it means letting yourself being tortured to death because you love the whole rest of humanity. I talked with you a few years ago about Moses seven and about how God weeps. Our heavenly Father loves us enough to still be vulnerable with us. I think the reason that sitting on a beach and sipping pina coladas is never, ever going to work because that is not how you be like God, because that is not what God does. Sacrifice makes us holy because sacrifice makes us like God.

John Bytheway:               00:06:00             There’s also that common saying that God is more interested in our growth than he is in our comfort. Sitting on a beach with a pina colada.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:12             Sounds like growth to me, you guys.

John Bytheway:               00:06:16             It’s my kind of growth.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:06:19             It’s worth remembering for these Israelites, they’re in the wilderness. You get a little bit of Mosiah here and all these things in wisdom and order. We talk about symbolism, and one of the things about symbolism to always remember, A, which is that X always equals Y. Sometimes you say, oh, it’s symbolic but what you mean, I don’t know what it means. But then with that also, one of the cool things about what God does with the sacrifices and with you and I, is they all have pragmatic purposes. Think about an agricultural environment. You think about these animals. How many male animals do you need in a herd? One or two. Just a few. So what do you do with the rest? You sacrifice them. There’s a preference for male animals because of the symbolism of Jesus, you know, the first one, things like that. There’s a preference for male animals for pragmatic reasons.

                                           00:07:10             And in the same way, the altar of incense in the holy place. The smoke represents, you know, the prayers going up to God. It represents another veil of protection for humanity, but also any of you have ever been to a stockyard and have ever been to a slaughterhouse? Our former colleague, Byron Merrill, used to actually take his students when BYU used to have a slaughterhouse. He would take them there when teaching these chapters and have them witness a…

John Bytheway:               00:07:39             Oh my goodness.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:07:42             It was just slaughtering. And I, actually, when he told me about that, I’m like, that’s experiential learning before it’s time, Byron. But this notion that it smells. Blood smells, animals smell. You and I are used to a temple experience that’s very, very antiseptic.

John Bytheway:               00:08:00             Mm-hmm. Smells like beautiful clean carpet.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:08:04             The ancient temple would have been an assault to the senses in that sense. The incense covers that and makes it sweet. That’s why you add salt, because it transforms burning flesh into meat. This idea that they’re transforming this, that’s part of this beautiful thing about consecration. The sacrifices transform something like burning flesh and turn it into meat. They turn it into something wonderful. I’ve had callings that I’ve loved, callings I’m not very good at. I was a ward mission leader once. I was awful at it. Just the worst. But you know what? I kept trying. I kept doing it. God took that sacrifice and made something of it. He took what I was doing and did more with it than I could do. The other key part of this, I think, is that according to Leviticus, one of the primary purpose of sacrifice is to make atonement.

                                           00:09:10             That’s what they do. They set right the relationship between God and him and what does that, and this is actually really fun, is blood. Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” So the ancient Israelite notion is, is that what makes the thing alive is that it has blood. And I have given it upon you the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that make an atonement for your soul. And this is the important thing about sacrifice. You are taking a living thing’s life. You are pouring that life on an altar so that you can live, so that you can be right with God. Sacrifice always asks the question what or who has died so that I can live? It’s so important in thinking through what Leviticus is doing and it undergirds basically the core of Christian doctrine is in Leviticus.

                                           00:10:15             Jesus Christ poured out his life blood so that we could live. That’s why with the sacrament, we eat the bread, but we drink the blood so that we can live. And Leviticus, it says this is why this is working. There’s a reason why we do this. It’s not because God thinks killing animals is fun. There’s an actual reason and doctrine why this works and how this works. And that actually feeds into a little bit less profoundly in some ways, but I think about the dietary laws. A funny story about that, my mother was meeting with the missionaries. They asked her about the word of wisdom, like no tea, no coffee. No smoking. Do you think you can do that, Sister Shannon? She said, Elders, I keep kosher. This is nothing. Kosher is this idea of you can’t eat these animals, you can’t eat these animals.

                                           00:11:14             But the thing about that is there’s actually a logic there as well. There’s a reason behind it. It’s actually easy to see with fish because the kinds of fish that are appropriate to be eaten are fish that have scales and fish that have fins. Sharks are out. Sharks have fins, but no scales. Catfish are out. Catfish have fins, but no scales. Shellfish, totally out. Shellfish have neither fins nor scales. Because what Leviticus is saying is it’s all about this notion of putting things in order, putting things in their proper categories. And it’s not making a statement, by the way, that these are evil or bad. The statement it’s making is, these are things that are in the categories that I want you to be looking for. Land animals, chew cud, have cloven hooves. Pigs have cloven hooves, according to Leviticus we can get there, whatever for that, but they don’t chew cud.

                                           00:12:15             They’re outside the categories. As Leviticus frames it, actually in Leviticus 10, it was before the food laws. It says, the priest’s job is to make a difference, it says, between clean and unclean, between holy and unholy, and to teach the people how to do that. This process of making a difference, learning how to differentiate between these things is, again, this is divine behavior. The verb that that verse in Leviticus 10 uses to separate is identical to the verb that God uses when he divides light from darkness, when he divides waters from waters, when he divides land from land. When we make these kinds of distinctions, we are engaging in divine behavior. I was talking to one of my Jewish friends the other day, I just got off teaching an evening class and he was joking about, well, at least you can have a cup of coffee to do it.

                                           00:13:13             And I said, I’ll drink coffee the day you eat bacon, Rabbi. Part of the purpose of our food laws is the same thing. It’s to make distinctions. It’s to make difference. In some ways, do these things matter? Sure. I mean, if you eat too much bacon, yes, you’ll die. That’s fine. But if you’re too much of anything, in some ways, yes, you’ll die. But the experience of saying, oh no, I can’t drink that. I don’t drink coffee. The experience of saying, oh no, I can’t drink that. I don’t drink tea. That makes distinction. That makes division.

John Bytheway:               00:13:54             So it might not be that there’s some scientific reason, some chemical reason, some physical reason necessarily. It’s just that we are setting ourselves apart even in diet. Is that fair?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:14:07             That is fair. Even though all the ancients drink wine, although it is worth remembering that the primary table beverage is wine mixed with water, and it’s usually like one part to six parts, or one part to 10 parts. When we’re talking about them drinking wine, they’re not drinking a lot of wine in that sense, but they’re drinking enough wine to kill all the bugs that are in their water. But that’s in some ways irrelevant to what God is saying, which is you’re mine. And because you’re mine, you do something different.

Hank Smith:                      00:14:42             I think so too. At least in our day, might cause some conversations. I had a student just come up to me this week. He said, well, my brother says that wine’s okay because Jesus drank wine and how is that a problem? And I said, well, let’s just talk about in Jesus’ day, they had different dietary laws, but in our day, the Lord probably saw, what’s everybody going to drink? One of three things at least, alcohol, tea, or coffee, and that’s going to create a lot of conversations for you, right? When someone offers you this, you’re going to go, I don’t drink that. Really? Why not? I could just see the Lord going, what should we choose? No, those will be good. That’ll create a lot of conversation, a chance for my distinct people to tell people why they are.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:15:38             And not always negative. For example, I was in graduate school, I was in a class, it was on Jerusalem, it was mostly Jews in the class because of the nature of the program I was in there at Ohio State, and this girl had just come back from a study abroad in Turkey. She had bought a Turkish coffee maker. She was going to bring coffee for the whole class. It was really exciting, whatever, this whole coffee set. And I said, oh, well, I don’t drink coffee. And she said, why? I said, well, it’s against my religion. And she was so excited to meet a Christian with dietary laws.

John Bytheway:               00:16:14             Interesting.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:16:16             Her entire life she said, no, I can’t eat that I’m Jewish. I can’t do that because I’m Jewish. And people say, I can’t do that. I’m a Latter-day Saint. She actually ended up bringing me orange juice separately because she was so excited about this notion of dietary law. So it’s not even always just this mission thing, but sometimes there’s a connection can be made there by saying, no, I don’t do that.

John Bytheway:               00:16:33             Can I sing you guys a song that I heard on a bus in Israel? And I can’t remember who it was, Hank, just singing about how an Islam, they don’t eat pork and the Jews don’t eat pork, so it was like a song being sung by a Jew to a Muslim or a Muslim to a Jew. You don’t eat pigs, we don’t eat pigs, seems it’s been that way forever, and since you don’t eat pigs and we don’t eat pigs, why not not eat pigs together?

Hank Smith:                      00:17:09             You just fixed all the Middle East problems.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:17:11             You did right there. Right there. Whatever happened, the wars, whatever, it’s all done. I love how Leviticus teaches in these very embodied ways. Even something that seems really weird, just like purity laws. We do this in the New Testament, we do it really badly, actually. The first thing we do is we associate ritual impurity with sin, and that’s ridiculous. Basically, every ancient Israelite, and therefore the New Testament, every Jew could expect to contract some kind of ritual impurity all the time. Frankly, since women contract ritual impurity every month, this is not sin, but even you have sexual relations with your wife, you’re both ritually impure. This is a normal part of life. Two things with this I want to talk about. One, this is why it’s worth reading Leviticus, by the way, again, because you may have heard things sometimes in the New Testament, Jesus and Jairus’ daughter, and he touched her even though she was a dead body, therefore he was ritually impure. If they’d read Leviticus, they would know that dead bodies can transmit ritual impurity by overshadowing, which means that everybody in the room was already ritually impure.

Hank Smith:                      00:18:20             Oh, really?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:18:21             You don’t have to touch the body to get to ritual impurity. It’s a different kind of it. So all the mourners, Peter, James and John, they already had ritual impurity. It’s a different kind of thing, and it’s important to be able to, this is independent of what is spiritually, provisional, purely pragmatic level when we understand Leviticus better, makes us better readers of the New Testament. But even with that, when you have ritual impurity, you wash with water, you’re unclean until evening, and then you’re done. But there’s a logic there too. This is God teaching them something. I want you to imagine, this is for Hank, okay? You’re going to be our guinea pig this time.

Hank Smith:                      00:18:58             Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:18:58             You look at your shoes right now, they’re not so dirty. You go to your kitchen table, you take your shoe off and you put it on the table, and your wife says, what are you doing? Get that dirty thing off the table.

Hank Smith:                      00:19:14             Yeah. Are you 12?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:19:17             It wasn’t dirty when it was on your foot. It became dirty when you put it in the wrong place. One of the primary ideas of purity laws is matter out of place. You’ve got to put things in their right places. This is why some kinds of things are by blood, why other bodily substances can cause a ritual impurity, because they belong inside your body. This is why touching certain things is because it’s in the wrong place.

Hank Smith:                      00:19:52             Avram, is it that word impurity? We think, oh, sin.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:19:55             I think part of it is because it actually is a useful category for sin. The Book of Mormon does this all the time, which is unfortunate in some ways. The Book of Mormon uses it as a metaphor for sin, but then we take it back and forget that it’s being used as a metaphor rather than this is what’s actually happening.

Hank Smith:                      00:20:13             I’ve had students say that, why can’t a woman who’s just given birth go to the temple? She didn’t do anything wrong.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:20:20             This has nothing to do with her personal state and righteousness. This only has to do with and actually in some ways, and this is one of those pragmatic things, there’s probably a hygienic aspect that’s important there as well. And again, I can’t read God’s mind, but there may be something going on with that. One of the things that’s so great about this whole thing with Leviticus is that there’s logic there. There’s logic in how God is doing things. There’s a theory, God’s laws aren’t arbitrary. Even if we don’t always understand the logic, there’s something there that’s teaching us something. And the whole point of that always is to make us like God.

Hank Smith:                      00:21:02             I can’t imagine bringing that much money or just of my stuff and then just burn it. At least the bishop takes it and it’s going to go to something. It’s going to go to a building. It’s going to go to a publishing something, missionaries. This is I’m making it holy by destroying it or burning the whole thing.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:21:22             On that point, right? We talk a little bit about atone. One of our readings for this Come, Follow Me, is the day of atonement in Leviticus 16. We love it because of Jesus and atonement and the priest and all this imagery for that. Let’s ignore the fact that actually it’s really kind of weird. There’s logic there too, but it’s weird because part of it is the scapegoat. It’s actually for a demon who lives in the desert named Azazel. But that’s what the Hebrew says, is that there’s a demon out there. You put some sins on this, others on that, and then you go and it goes and eats it, and it eats him out in the desert. So it’s actually kind of a strange conception of sin. It’s useful as a symbol in that it reminds us that there are things that we can’t take care of ourselves.

Hank Smith:                      00:22:13             Speaking of Day of Atonement, we haven’t talked much about this. Isn’t this the most important day to them?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:22:20             It’s the most holy day. The most important day is probably Passover, because that’s when God makes Israel. And you see this actually in scripture where Day of Atonement doesn’t actually get a lot of truck in scripture. You don’t see much references to the Day of Atonement in the prophets. You don’t see them referenced in other places. Passover’s everywhere because Passover is the primary saving story. In fact, actually, even in the Book of Mormon, they’ll talk about the Passover event the way that we talk about Jesus Christ’s redemption, resurrection. What’s interesting about that is actually we then conflate, put together both Passover and atonement, but it is the holiest day of the year, and that’s because this is when God is looking at us.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:05             This is the day the high priest does not dress in his …

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:23:10             That’s right. He wears just like every other priest. He wears white. This is when God opens his books and he looks at us and he says how are we doing? How are things going? And we look and we say, well, we’re doing okay, or we’re doing badly, we’re doing whatever. And he writes our name down in the book of life and says, you guys are doing okay. But then the book’s closed. Well, actually, there’s a kind of a fun connection, Doctrine and Covenants 128 here, where Joseph Smith talks about the book that God is writing and that our records actually help go into the book that God writes. Suddenly we’re thinking, oh, these books are open. What have I done? What do I need to make right? How do I fix this? That act of atonement, the act of reconciliation happens as we turn to God.

                                           00:24:08             As we turn, and for Latter-day Saints, as we turn to Jesus and say, oh, you’re right, this book is open. Please inscribe me for good in it, and here’s how I’m changing to be inscribed for good, because then suddenly you’re watching. And again, he’s always watching, but we act like it. And the Day of Atonement is symbolically looking and the door is open, we got to do this, we’ve got to fast, we’ve got to be prepared. It’s important in Judaism. You reconcile things in the past year. Back to the temple recommend. Any unrepented, unconfessed sins, anything you need to take care of. Day of Atonement, you have to do it before that, because if the book’s open and they’re not repented of, they’re going to be there when the books close. Got to get everything fixed. There’s a really nice connection between our own notions of approaching God and saying, okay, am I right? How does this work? Because again, we repent all the time, but the sacrament’s a little bit different. In the same way, Jews repent all the time, but the Day of Atonement’s a little bit different.

Hank Smith:                      00:25:12             I’ve always wondered that. I have a friend in Israel, can I say his name’s Ya’ir. He said, I don’t go to synagogue much. And I said, when do you go? And he said, Yom Kippur. I want all my sins forgiven. Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:25:26             God’s watching.

Hank Smith:                      00:25:27             Yeah. I don’t know if Ya’ir will ever hear this, John. Yeah, if he texts me, he’s like, I heard you on the show. Avram, so that’s chapters one through seven, this sacrificial system.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:25:44             On that I want to add into the sacrificial system, the whole burnt offering with that teaches, each one does teach you something different. So in chapter four, you have the sin offering, terrible translation, I’m sorry. But the reason they do that is because the word for sin is chata, and the word for this offering is hatta’t. It’s an offering. I translated this purification offering because this is the sacrifice, it’s placed on the altar to purify the altar. This is the offering you do for inadvertent sin. There’s stuff we do that’s an act of open rebellion, where we say, you know what? I know that’s wrong. I’m going to do that anyway God. The hatta’t is not for that. The purification offering is not for that. This is the offering for what if you’ve done something wrong and you could become aware of it? How do you work?

                                           00:26:39             What do you do with that? Well, I think that’s really interesting for us in terms of thinking through things, is if you go to the Book of Mormon, and King Benjamin is one of those places I mentioned earlier that atonement appears in the Book of Mormon in temple contexts. One of those contexts is in Benjamin’s speech there in the book of Mosiah, and especially when the angel is revealing to Benjamin.

Hank Smith:                      00:27:04             Chapter 3

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:27:06             In 3:11, he started talking about this, and he says, “For behold, and also his blood” Jesus, “atoneth for the sins of those who have fallen by the transgression of Adam, who have died not knowing the will of God concerning them, or who have ignorantly sinned.” This is a direct reference to the purification offering. You read back in Mosiah two, they’ve been offering sacrifices at the temple, everybody in Benjamin’s audience would have known that. They said, oh, that’s what this is. Then what he says is, is that the reason then this works is because Jesus Christ has already covered it. So this purification offering then is a specific pointing to what Jesus has already done or will do for them. It’s this really fun connection and really important connection. I’ll sometimes joke that there’s no Jesus shaped hole in the law of Moses.

                                           00:28:09             By which I mean, it was designed to point them to Jehovah and not always to point them to the redemption per se, the incarnation, the mortal ministry. Part of what Benjamin, and Abinadi do is say, yes, but let me make one for you and show you where that fits. Let me plug Jesus right into that hole. A lot of ways that you see there in Mosiah three is the angel saying, here’s this, and here’s how Jesus fits into it. It’s powerful stuff. The Book of Mormon presumes and understands a law of Moses background in it.

Hank Smith:                      00:28:43             That’s fantastic. Avram, I never thought I would say that I found the first seven chapters of Leviticus pretty interesting. I’m excited about this. Now you said the next section, it starts with chapter eight.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:28:58             That’s right. This is eight through 10. It’s kind of a mini section where it’s about Aaron and his family. This is where we get the kosher laws. This is where we get him being set apart. It’s also where we get this weird story in chapter 10, where this is the one narrative in Leviticus, and it’s a weird narrative. Two of Aaron’s sons take their fire pans, I think censer is what KJV has, and they offer strange fire before God, and they get killed. Nadab and Abihu are their names. Aaron has four sons, and the dad, Abihu, Ithamar, and Eleazer. They get killed for this. It’s this interesting story, because part of it is one of the things that’s intriguing about Leviticus, we saw this a little bit next to this 35, it’s this notion of priesthood, but as Latter-day Saints, we have a very specific idea of what priesthood is.

                                           00:30:01             We’re not wrong. God’s power, all this stuff, but that’s not always what’s operative in the ancient world. We trace ourselves back to Aaron as Aaronic priests. We talked about the priests at the altar. We’ve talked to the priests at the sacrament table. There is absolutely continuity, but there’s also a difference there in that priests are primarily, of course, going to be associated with the temple, which is, I think, still something we could actually talk about more in this church. This idea that the temple is fundamentally a priestly place, I mean, that it’s a place for priesthood. And of course, President Nelson and President Oaks, that actually men and women both receive priesthood in the temple and receive priesthood power. Thinking about that, but also this recognition that part of what the story teaches, it’s very keeping with Leviticus, but maybe a little trickier for us in the modern age is a reminder that nobody is insulated.

                                           00:31:03             By which I mean, being Aaron’s sons, being Moses’ nephews do not protect Nadab and Abihu from breaking the commandments and from the consequences. And that’s a hard lesson. It’s not a nice lesson. It’s an important one. We talked about this idea of temple recommends, cherubim, this idea of being part of the truth of God’s kingdom is we come in at God’s permission. Because he loves us so much, he says, yeah, come on in. But the fact is, we don’t get to force our way into God’s kingdom. With that, we don’t get to tell God what to do.

                                           00:31:54             You and I, you and I broadly, I don’t know you and I specifically, but certainly me specifically, always wants to tell God what to do. To say, this is how I think my life should go. This is what I think is the best part of what we can do. Actually, one of my favorite verses in Doctrine and Covenants is Doctrine and Covenants one. He says, “what I have spoken, I have spoken. I excuse not myself, whether my voice is of my voice or my voice of my servants, it is the same.” And we do that verse, we always focus on the latter half. Oh, this is about prophets and prophetic teachings. That’s great. That is absolutely part of this. But I love the first part where God says, “What I have spoken, I have spoken and I excuse not myself.” I don’t have to explain myself to you.

                                           00:32:50             Sometimes I will, because I love you, but frankly, I’m in charge here. In some ways, these two sons had decided that they knew better to do it than God had done it. It’s a weird story within that, but I think the principle here of, oh, okay God, you’re right. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. You are in charge of this. I had an experience once, actually it was many years ago, actually now at this point, I’m getting old. It was when I first went up for hire at BYU, when I first put my application in, and I did not get hired that year, and again, it’s fine. Right, you know, these things happen. And I had a friend, we were in grad school together, he got a job, and I remember sitting in a stake conference and saying, God, this isn’t fair.

                                           00:33:41             Why? This isn’t fair. This is one of the strongest spiritual revelations I’ve ever had in some ways. And God said, you’re right, Avram. It’s not fair. And I’m like, oh, oh, okay. Sure. And then it was funny because in the stake conference and the stake president started talking about the things that were happening in the stake about a mother with, like, three kids under four who had cancer and was going to die in the next three months about poverty, about sickness, about accidents. Then after the stake president finished, I got, again, God said, do you really want it to be fair, Avram? And I said, no God, I’m good. We’re fine. This is great. I’m okay with this. My trials are just great, Father. The story about the family, again, Leviticus cares deeply about Aaron and his family, Aaron and his children. But part of the story teaches us is that doesn’t insulate you from, A, needing to keep the commandments and B, from any kind of hardship. That story, even though it’s weird, it fits into this whole broad narrative about Leviticus and about holiness in some ways is kind of the hard side of holiness in that sense.

Hank Smith:                      00:35:04             I wrote, don’t play with fire next to my… This is where that came from. So it sounds like it was something unauthorized. They didn’t respect Jehovah. It-

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:35:14             The word strange there actually means foreign.

Hank Smith:                      00:35:17             Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:35:18             Everywhere the KJV says strange, it means foreign. It doesn’t mean strange like weird, whether that’s an Egyptian style, whether that’s something from the Midian, a strange fire, a foreign fire, and not properly Israelite. And so they did something wrong. The other part of this, by the way, and this is intriguing in terms of internally, it also teaches that priests are held to a higher standard. That priesthood here is that there’s more that they’re required to do than other people. Aaron’s not allowed to mourn his sons. He’s not allowed to tear his clothes.

Hank Smith:                      00:35:52             He held his peace, right?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:35:54             He held his peace.

Hank Smith:                      00:35:56             For God will not be mocked is what that sounds like.

John Bytheway:               00:35:59             I know. It really does. I saw that too.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:36:02             Very much so. For our modern age, certainly for me and for my children even, it’s a harder lesson for us to listen to God’s authority. We love the loving God who holds us, but the loving God who corrects us is a lot harder for me, personally.

Hank Smith:                      00:36:19             That’s a sobering lesson.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:36:22             This is how we learn to enter into the presence of God. God uses a teaching moment.

Hank Smith:                      00:36:31             That’s verse 10.

John Bytheway:               00:36:32             This is not the point, but it’s similar. They’re not insulated from having to follow the letter of the law, but it’s similar that some of the most, in my view, righteous people have amazing trials. President Oaks losing his father when he was young. President Oaks losing his wife, President Nelson, losing his first wife. They’re not insulated from the trials.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:37:01             I had somebody in one of my wards once. They were very well meaning, like, you know, the gospel of Jesus Christ makes things easy. Makes our lives easy. I’m like, does it? Makes some things easier to deal with, but actually easier? I don’t know that it does.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:19             You can say sin makes life hard.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:37:21             Okay, in that sense, yes.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:23             Yeah, none of this is easy.

John Bytheway:               00:37:25             It’s maybe easier, but life is just hard all the way around.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:37:31             My kids make fun of me because, and probably correctly, but from, when they’re very small, they’re babies, I’ll comfort them. I’m like, you know, I know, guys. I know. Life’s hard and then you die.

John Bytheway:               00:37:44             It’s like a bumper sticker. Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:45             Dad!

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:37:46             Yeah, exactly. But I actually find that to honestly be incredibly, incredibly comforting. That sometimes you just need to sit out and say, you know what? This is just hard and then it’s over and it’s whatever, right? That we don’t have to imagine that somehow there’s some kind of special thing in life that makes everything easier for us.

Hank Smith:                      00:38:04             Yeah. My mother-in-law used to say when we had twin babies, which you’ve done, Avram, she said, sometimes when you can’t take it anymore, go out on the porch, sit down and tell the Lord you’re done and then get up and go back in and keep going. Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:38:25             We have some examples of scripture of that. Even this, you see, after this whole thing in Leviticus 10, Moses is like, what are you doing to my brother? And God’s like, look here. And then it says, Moses was content, that God says, no, he can still do this. Moses says, okay God, that’s enough. But-

Hank Smith:                      00:38:45             He was content. That’s verse 20. Then there’s more dietary laws.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:38:50             12 through about 16 is mostly purity laws. It’s leprosy laws, laws after childbirth. One thing I do want to say, in Leviticus, actually in the entire Old Testament and most of the New Testament, leprosy never refers to what you think of as leprosy. It is not Hansen’s disease. The Hebrew word is tzaraat. It’s a wide variety of skin diseases, psoriasis, really bad eczema, and you know it’s not Hansen’s disease because it can be healed. And there are rules for what you do when it goes away. And of course, Hansen’s disease never goes away. It just kills you because as a Jewish concept, as a biblical concept, tzaraat, it’s this whole panoply of diseases. It could be one of those.

Hank Smith:                      00:39:40             Yeah, because you read this and you think, wow, leprosy is super common. The Lord really wants to talk about it, but it’s any sort of skin disease, wide variety.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:39:48             It’s stuff that causes ritual impurity.

Hank Smith:                      00:39:51             The shoes on the counter.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:39:52             Exactly. It’s a kind of skin disease that makes things difficult. That’s why he looks at it and he says, okay, is it this kind of skin disease, that kind of skin disease? Which are these that actually qualify in these categories? These purity laws, they have different ways of transmitting, and there’s a logic to it, and it’s very much God’s way of putting things in their proper places.

John Bytheway:               00:40:11             Interesting.

Hank Smith:                      00:40:12             I love that example of putting your shoes on the table. That makes sense. Don’t bring that in here.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:40:18             They’re animals, they’re called like mice and lizards and stuff. They’re impure, again, because there’s a little bit of ickiness that then feeds into how this works in terms of what God is teaching us about ourselves. Again, it’s a symbol in terms of, yes, that’s gross, and here’s what you can mean with that for some of this stuff. Some of it’s broad purity things. And for most things, the solution is just washing with water.

John Bytheway:               00:40:41             There’s hygiene things in the law of Moses that were very practical and should have-

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:40:47             Yes. 100%.

John Bytheway:               00:40:47             If people had done them, really would have helped with infection and everything else.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:40:52             This, I think, is part of the genius of God’s laws. Because God sees and knows and does more than we do, even the purpose, something like the word of wisdom, something like the diet laws. Even if the primary purpose is to teach us to separate ourselves, the primary purpose to do that doesn’t mean it’s not good for you to not do these things.

John Bytheway:               00:41:16             There’s a good consequence in there perhaps, yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:41:19             Same with washing your hands. Same thing with, like, again, the woman who separated because of after giving birth, ritually impure. We used to have this thing where women would with babies, there’s a recovery time that we, in the modern age, don’t talk about. We expect women to just bounce back right afterwards. Giving birth is hard on the body, and there’s stuff that happens afterwards that needs to be taken care of. Even though it’s for ritual purity, it actually provides a useful benefit there. There’s this intriguing thing within that, that teaches something about separation, but also says, maybe take some time and rest a little bit, and let the woman recover. There’s some misogyny in the law too, because it’s an ancient law code, but God, of course, is not, and he’s there saying, let me find ways to help you guys help each other.

Hank Smith:                      00:42:11             I like that. Let me help you help each other. Avram, what do you want to do next?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:42:17             17-26 is called the Holiness Code. It’s an entire self-contained law code. One of the things we see actually in the Old Testament broadly is we have this broad law of Moses. Within it, there are sort of these subcollections. There’s a covenant code, an Exodus, there’s a [inaudible] code, and here this is the holiness code. The whole thing is about how do we be holy. In some ways, I like to think of it as a handbook of instructions. The basis for Latter-day Saint religion and practice is the Doctrine and Covenants. Doctrine and Covenants 20, the constitution of the church. We say where are we getting this from? We’re getting from the Doctrine and Covenants. But of course, the church in 2026 doesn’t look like the church in 1830. In terms of priest organization, in terms of hierarchies, Joseph Smith never went to a sacrament meeting because there weren’t any in his entire lifetime, right?

                                           00:43:22             But we can say our church is built on Doctrine and Covenants. That is the basis of revelation for our religion, even though what we’re doing is building off of extrapolating from … And we see that happening with the law. Moses received the law from Mount Sinai, but we see places where they’re building from, extrapolating from. It looks like we see different people of different times extrapolating that an editor like Mormon has put together for us. It’s kind of like having instructions from 1969 and from 2013 and from 2026 all together in the same volume. This explains, for example, Exodus 20 has a slavery law that says if you have an Israelite slave, after seven years, you let them go free. Deuteronomy has a slavery law that says if you have an Israelite slave, after seven years, let them go free, and you give them stuff. You give them gifts to set them up in life after you’ve freed them.

                                           00:44:29             Leviticus 25, our holiness code here has a slavery law that says you can’t make Israelite slaves. All three of those are clearly built around the same idea, but they’re building it in different ways because they appear to be different instantiations of God’s law in different times and different places. Because of course, there are two reasons to make laws. One reason to make a law is because somebody’s doing it and you want it to stop. That’s one reason to make a law. The other reason to make a law is to say, this is something that we believe in that matters to us. And you see that in some of our commandments, you see that in some things where, in Doctrine and Covenants, especially, right? You guys are doing this bad and you do better at this. And there are clearly commandments from God is like this is what the kind of people I want you to be. So don’t do that. That’s never, it’s never actually been a problem. Just don’t do that so it never becomes a problem.

Hank Smith:                      00:45:26             Because that’s important.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:45:28             And in some ways, a lot of the laws and holiness code feel like that to me, demarcating what it means to be an Israelite. So it’s certain behaviors, certain foreign practices are forbidden, magical practices, divination practices, don’t eat blood because blood is where life is. This is why Jews, by the way, don’t eat blood in their meat. Kosher meat, you slaughter it, but you slit their throat as quickly as you possibly can, and you hang it till all the blood drains out. Because if you eat something’s blood, you’re eating its life. And it says, we don’t need to eat the life. It’s respect for the life.

Hank Smith:                      00:46:04             This has been very, like, enlightening, and it does help me think of the New Testament, which I teach more often than the Old. I’m like, oh, that makes sense. That plays into a story about Jesus.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:46:16             I go into the very beginning of this, Leviticus is the book. When they’re talking about the law of Moses, they mean all of it, but they start with Leviticus. Leviticus is the single most important book in Jewish thinking.

Hank Smith:                      00:46:33             Okay. So this is the book Jesus read.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:46:35             This is the book Jesus read. This is the book he thought from, and it’s the book his opponents read. And of course, to our famous verse, part of being like God is being good to other people, being willing to treat people the way that God treats them, which of course is why he says, look, guys, don’t avenge or bear a grudge and love your neighbor like you. Leviticus 19:18, when Jesus is looking for places to teach, I always bring this up when we talk about in this church, we talk about, you know, oh, we don’t live the law of Moses anymore. And I’m like, well, we don’t offer certain animal sacrifices anymore, and we don’t live certain purity laws anymore, but there are absolutely parts of the law of Moses that we still 100% absolutely live. I don’t even like the distinction between higher and lower law.

                                           00:47:30             I don’t think it’s useful because if we talk about, well, what’s the higher law? Well, the higher law is to love God with all your heart straight out of Deuteronomy. And the higher law is to love your neighbor like yourself straight out of Leviticus. This idea that somehow we’re dividing up. Now we can talk about higher, more knowledge of Jesus about ordinances. Maybe there’s something higher law, lower law in terms of ordinances, because of course, the tabernacle and therefore the temple was basically exclusively Aaronic ordinances. In our temples, we perform both Aaronic and Melchisedek ordinances. So there may be something in that. But in terms of what God actually wants to do and what the law’s purpose is, the law of Moses, it’s God’s highest law in the sense of love God, love your neighbor, is straight out of the law of Moses. It’s straight out of Deuteronomy, it’s straight out of Leviticus.

John Bytheway:               00:48:39             That’s a great insight. I like that.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:48:42             Something I encourage our listeners, ask yourself, if I were to do this, would I be a better person? Would this help me to be a better follower of Jesus? And if the answer is yes, then do it.

John Bytheway:               00:48:59             Then it’s a good idea.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:49:02             Leviticus 19:11, don’t steal, don’t lie. This is, Leviticus version of ten commandments. 19:13, don’t steal from people. Don’t rob. Don’t take the wages of somebody that’s hired. Even says, don’t even wait to pay them. If you hired them to a job and they finished your job, don’t sit on that money, that’s their money, right? So even how you treat employees, don’t curse the disabled or differently-abled. Those who have difficulties, they’re not there for you to make fun of. Don’t gossip. All these things we read in Leviticus 19 are really, really important behaviors for us to being like how God wants us to be.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:44             A talebearer.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:49:46             Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:48             I was going to ask you how you feel about the myth that, oh, the Old Testament God, he’s angry and the New Testament God, oh, he’s so kind. And then you read Leviticus 19, love thy neighbor as thyself. Don’t steal, don’t lie. Don’t gossip.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:50:08             Couple of things. On some levels, the myth is rooted in occasionally antisemitic ways of talking about things. The Old Testament’s the Jewish book, the New Testament’s, the Christian. Sometimes it falls into that and this breaks to previous things, so we need to be always very careful about that. Oh, the Old Testament’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and it does say that, but as I’ve argued before, and I’ll continue to argue, it’s a law about limits. It’s only an eye for an eye, only a tooth for a tooth. If I get in a fight with John and John punches out my tooth, I can’t then gouge out his eye.

Hank Smith:                      00:50:46             Yeah, that’s not the way it works.

John Bytheway:               00:50:47             It needs to be the same one too, right?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:50:50             Even in my Jesus Christ and the Everlasting Gospel class, I’ll do this. I’ll say, okay, give me some words to describe the God of the Old Testament. And they’ll say harsh and unforgiving. I’ll say, okay. Now give me some words to describe Jesus. And they’ll say loving and forgiving and approachable. And then I’ll, because I’m that kind of guy, put up a quote from President Nelson or President Oaks where they say, we need to recognize that Jesus is Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. And I said, so how do we reconcile the fact that according to our doctrine, these are not, not just the whatever, these are actually the exact same person. They get taken aback a little bit here for this. I said some of this, of course, is we’re not, as you point out, we’re not good enough readers of the Old Testament.

                                           00:51:39             We don’t read closely enough because again, the Old Testament insists Jehovah’s mercy. The idea that justice and mercy are competing categories is a Book of Mormon notion. Now, I love the Book of Mormon, and I’m not going to say this is not to rant on the Book of Mormon, but in the Old Testament, God’s justice and God’s mercy are the exact same thing. God is merciful because he is just, and he cannot be merciful unless he is just. There’s a great quote from President Holland where he said at a BYU devotional many years ago now, where he said, “As scary as it is to imagine a just God, imagine how much scarier an unjust God would be to imagine.” But this myth comes from focusing on something like Leviticus 10 and not Leviticus 19 or on something like Exodus 32 and not on Exodus 35. And it also comes, of course, on focusing on some parts of the gospel, but not other parts of the gospel. Jesus says to people who abuse children, it’s better for them to have a giant rock tied around their neck and be drowned.

Hank Smith:                      00:52:51             Yeah, and you haven’t read Matthew 23. Woe unto you scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites. You’re like a cup that’s dirty on the inside and clean on the outside.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:53:02             And by the way, that’s reference of purity laws in Leviticus incidentally.

Hank Smith:                      00:53:05             Hey.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:53:06             Cups of insides and outsides comes from Leviticus.

Hank Smith:                      00:53:09             I’m going to write that down.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:53:10             Well it’s back to this idea we talked about sort of earlier here in Leviticus 10, this idea of telling God what he can do and who he can be. It’s the idea of saying, well, obviously what makes God good is being nice to me.

John Bytheway:               00:53:26             Answering all my prayers and fixing all my problems.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:53:32             Even though we understand doctrinally, we understand whatever that that’s not the case, each and every one of us feels that inherently. Inherently, we all feel that what makes God good is being good to me. We need to recognize that God is good, and God is kind, and God is just. So whatever God does will be good and kind and just, but good and kind and just is not the same thing as nice. That’s hard. I’m not suggesting that we who are less good and less kind and less just should not be nice. Let’s be nice. Right.

                                           00:54:18             The phrase in the Old Testament, he talks about this about how he is slow to anger, it says. It says he’s a jealous God. It says, “For God is a jealous God, visiting iniquity on the sins of the third and fourth.” And then we stop there and it says, “But showing mercy unto thousands of generations of those who love him and keep his commandments”. He’s slow to anger, quick to forgive. The Old Testament continuously insists on God’s mercy. That is the chief characteristic they see in Jehovah is how much he follows them and loves them. So I think you’re absolutely right, Hank. It’s a myth. It’s a myth rooted in misunderstanding ancient culture. It’s a myth rooted in trying to compare Jesus to whatever. It’s a myth rooted in our own desire to want God to be nice to us. Let’s go to our discussion earlier about trials.

                                           00:55:17             There’s a great midrash in a Jewish text called [Hebrew]. It’s a midrash and Exodus. One of the rabbis, he says, we are not like other nations. He says, other nations, they praise their gods when things go good and they curse them when things go bad. But we, we praise our God when things go good and we praise our God when things go bad. In many ways, it’s that perspective that we need to have to see how merciful really God is.

John Bytheway:               00:55:55             Sounds like Job.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:55:57             Yeah, it’s very much like Job.

John Bytheway:               00:55:58             The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:56:01             Blessed be the name of my Lord.

John Bytheway:               00:56:03             Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:56:04             When I’ve had moments where I’ve, I felt like that, where I’m like, there’s been a lot more taken away than given right now, God.

Hank Smith:                      00:56:13             But hallelujah anyway.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:56:15             Exactly. Hallelujah anyway. You are my God, and I’m not going to leave you just because things feel difficult.

John Bytheway:               00:56:24             Otherwise, it’s just a, it’s a transaction. It’s the vending machine. If you give me what I want, then I really like you.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:56:31             And covenants are about relationships. When God talks about being a holy people, he’s not talking about jumping you through hoops so you could be a certain kind of whatever. He’s talking about you enterned a relationship with me. Of course, President Nelson a blessed name and memory introduced the church broadly to this Hesed. You do your Hesed. You do what I ask. I’ll do my Hesed and whatever, but we’re bound together. Sometimes that means that you think about your own relationships. Sometimes that means I’ll give more. Of course, God always does more than we can possibly can. This is not an equal relationship, but covenants are about relationships and what the law of Moses is trying to do in Leviticus and everywhere else is say, this is what I want you to do in my relationship. This is what we’re doing together because we’re in this together.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:27             We’re in this together.

John Bytheway:               00:57:29             Avram, I have noticed the law of Moses being addressed so much in the Book of Mormon. I’m excited to tell our audience that you have recently written about the law of Moses in the Book of Mormon. Can you tell us more about that?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:57:45             Yeah, sure. Thank you. It’s been a long time project I’ve been working on for, in some ways far too long, but I’m publishing a book with Greg Kofford books. It’s forthcoming. We’re hoping to have it out this year. And really in this book, I work through everywhere I can see where the law of Moses is hitting on the ground, sometimes in places that are more usual, that they’re easy to see. Other times where like, this is not something we think is law of Moses, but they absolutely would have been seeing a law of Moses basis for this. Places where sacrifice, places where they’re talking about making oaths. I walk through the Book of Mormon, sort of analyzing where these are coming from. The idea is if you’re ever interested in, is there anything about, anything about the law in 2 Nephi 5? Here’s at least what one guy saw about it.

John Bytheway:               00:58:37             I bet this increased your testimony of the antiquity of the Book of Mormon. Because what? Did Joseph Smith just make that up, put that in there?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:58:45             In terms of making space for Holy Ghost to testify, there’s a lot there where suddenly the Book of Mormon is incredibly rooted, not just in the Bible, in the law of Moses.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:00             I love it. John, today has been so helpful.

John Bytheway:               00:59:05             Yeah. Really good information.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:08             Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:59:08             I feel more curious and interested about Leviticus.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:13             Yeah, me too. I can see what Avram said when he said there’s beauty in order, and that’s a lot of what this is. Clear boundaries. I want two rings here. I want two chains of gold here. There’s beauty in that.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:59:30             Things in their proper places.

John Bytheway:               00:59:32             Yeah, I like the idea of a place for everything and everything in its place. It sounds like a Leviticus idea.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:59:38             It does, yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:40             John, I’m sad I saw this at the end. Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head. I should have described you that way.

John Bytheway:               00:59:48             The hoary head?

Hank Smith:                      00:59:49             The hoary head. It means old age. It means rise up. Stand up when an old age is-

John Bytheway:               00:59:55             Sorry, I can’t hear you. What?

Dr. Avram Shannon:       00:59:57             Hoary is white, so the hoary head is the white hairs.

Hank Smith:                      01:00:01             Yes. Go find someone with white hair and say, hey, you’re a hoary head. See how that goes over. Avram, this has been a really good day. It’s so fun.

Dr. Avram Shannon:       01:00:11             Honestly, at the very beginning, you know, why do I love Leviticus? Because I find God there. That’s why I love Leviticus. I find God. More importantly, he finds me. I appreciate you letting me talk about it a little bit.

John Bytheway:               01:00:24             Yeah. You know, going back to Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye wanted to be a rich man, but why? So he could talk about the holy books with the rabbis. I love that that was the whole why that he had. I would just love to sit and talk about the holy books, and that’s what we got to do.

Hank Smith:                      01:00:43             With that, we want to thank Dr. Avram Shannon for being with us today. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. In every episode, we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week. We’re continuing in the five books of Moses on followHIM. As a thank you to our wonderful listeners, we’d love to gift you the digital version of our book, Finding Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. It offers short, meaningful insights drawn from our past Old Testament episodes. Visit followhim.co, that’s followhim.co to download your free copy today, and you’ll also find the link to purchase the print edition. Thank you for being part of our followHIM family. Of course, none of this could happen without our incredible production crew. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, Ariel Cuadra, Heather Barlow, Amelia Kabwika, Sydney Smith, and Annabelle Sorensen.