Hank Smith: 00:00:04 Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name’s Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with my co-host, the brother of David, John Bytheway. John, we are in The Book of Ether today. First you can tell me about David and then tell me what you’re looking forward to in The Book of Ether.

John Bytheway: 00:00:22 David the Elder, he’s the eldest of the family of six children that I come from. There’s a part of me that’s always with David. He’s got my left kidney. He won’t give it back. No. I’ve told him if he needs another one, I’m fresh out. That’s a good title, I’m the brother of David.

Hank Smith: 00:00:40 Tell me about The Book of Ether.

John Bytheway: 00:00:42 Ether is like a second little mini-Book of Mormon with the same pride cycle that, I’m so glad that Moroni decided to put this in here. Today, I’m just looking forward to this whole process of preparing the barges, I think scholars called it the Bargification. This should be fun.

Hank Smith: 00:01:01 We have a special episode this week, John. We have two doctors with us and they kind of like each other. This is Dr. Krystal Pierce and Dr. George Pierce. Now, before we introduce you both, Krystal and George, tell us what we’re looking forward to today, what are we going to walk through?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:01:21 I’m really excited to talk about the book of Ether. There are some of my favorite things in here. I think I’m most excited to talk about the Tower of Babel, which actually sounds strange to say that, that’s one of my favorite things to talk about. I love being able to link it to Genesis and talk about the Jaredites and their experience at the Tower.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:01:42 I am excited to talk about three B’s, bricks, bees and boats. That way, all of us, Krystal, John, we’ve got everything covered. We’ve got boats for John. We’ve got bricks for Krystal. We’ll talk about some bees because they’re in there buzzing away doing their thing, so let’s just make it alliterative.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:02:02 I want to have the bees.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:02:03 I mean, I’m eager to hear what you have to say about bees, so there we go.

Hank Smith: 00:02:06 I can already tell this is going to be a good time. This is kind of a sequel for you because if we go back to our, I think it was our Old Testament year, didn’t you teach the Tower of Babel with us? In fact, you taught me that it’s the Tower of Babel, not Babel.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:02:22 Yeah. I’m really excited to tie it back to that because my love of the Tower of Babel, which again sounds really strange to say, began with the Jaredites. That’s really where I dove into it and started getting interested in it to really try to understand the Jaredites better and this culture that they’re coming from.

Hank Smith: 00:02:41 We’ll link Krystal’s previous episodes in our show notes, along with George. He’s done some episodes with us as well. John, before we move any further, let’s introduce these two and why they’ve come as a pair.

John Bytheway: 00:02:55 This is awesome. Dr. George Pierce, I am so excited to say this Hank, was born and reared in Okahumpka, Florida. A BA in history from Clearwater Christian College, a master’s in Archaeological Information Systems from the University of York, an MA in Biblical studies with an archaeology concentration from Wheaton College and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA. Prior to commencing his doctoral work, Dr. Pierce served as research faculty at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev in Beersheba Israel. He’s currently the lead architect and supervisor of the Geographic Information Systems team for the Tel Shimron Excavations in the Jezreel Valley.

  00:03:44 And now I’d like to introduce Krystal. Krystal V. L. Pierce was born in Logan, Utah, but has also lived in California, Idaho, Egypt and Israel. She received a Ph.D. in Egyptian Archaeology in near Eastern languages and cultures from UCLA and an MA and BA in near Eastern studies from UC Berkeley. She’s currently the head registrar for the Tel Shimron Excavations in the Galilee region of Israel. Krystal and her husband, Professor George Pierce, have two children and live in Vineyard, Utah. Krystal and George, I suddenly feel very uneducated. And with that I’d like to say, welcome to FollowHIM.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:04:27 Thank you.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:04:28 Thank you.

Hank Smith: 00:04:30 I’m going to read from the Come, Follow Me manual, Ether 1-5, “Rend that veil of unbelief.” And then I’m interested to see what we’re going to be taught today.

  00:04:40 Here’s how it starts. It says, “While it is true that God’s ways are higher than ours and we should always submit to his will, he also encourages us to think and act for ourselves. That’s one lesson Jared and his brother learned. For example, the idea of traveling to a new land that was choice above all the Earth seemed to start with Jared and the Lord granted the request saying to the brother of Jared, ” Thus, I will do unto thee because this long time you have cried unto me.” And when the brother of Jared needed light inside the barges that would carry them to their promised land, the Lord asked a question that we usually ask him, “What will ye that I should do?” He wants to hear our thoughts and ideas and he will listen and give confirmation or counsel us otherwise. Sometimes the only thing separating us from the blessings we seek is our own veil of unbelief, and if we can rend that veil, we may be surprised by what the Lord is willing to do for us.” Man, I love it.

  00:05:34 So with that Krystal and George, how do you want to start?

Dr. George Pierce: 00:05:37 Here in The Book of Mormon, we’ve obviously been from 1 Nephi all the way through, and then we get the death of Mormon and passing the baton to Moroni. We’ve been discussing the Nephite civilization and by the time that Moroni is done inviting us to come unto Christ in Chapter 10, we’re looking at something that spans from about, rough years here, 600 BC all the way down to about 420 or so, all these books covering about 1,020 years from the time that Lehi and his family leave Jerusalem to the time that Moroni closes out Chapter 10.

  00:06:09 What’s interesting then is that we get this transition from the Nephite civilization back to a Jaredite civilization in The Book of Ether. That’s actually going to span from the time of the tower all the way through, including when the Mulekites leave Jerusalem and they’re going to be the ones that find the last Jaredite. We’re looking at somewhere around 2,000 years or so. So the rest of The Book of Mormon covers about a thousand, and then Moroni is going to squeeze about 2,000 years into one book with 15 chapters.

  00:06:39 Moroni, as I said, has inherited the status of record keeper from his father. He’s already said his goodbyes in Mormon. We can read that, and he thinks it’s done. I always picture that Moroni is like, “Well, I’m still alive, so I guess I might as well communicate something.” Right?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:06:56 Keep going.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:06:57 He has the record of Ether and the record of the Jaredites, he’s going to do his best then to give us what is important. And there are several really great editorial comments from Moroni in the book. Then we can think about the source then of The Book of Ether as Moroni gives it to us.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:07:14 That’s a great setup to think about The Book of Mormon as covering about a thousand years, now we’re probably going to cover a couple of thousand years. It’s nice because right at the beginning in Chapter One Verse One, Moroni tells us what he’s doing because he’s doing something very different than what he’s done before. Now he’s going to give an account of those ancient inhabitants who were destroyed by the hand of the Lord upon the face of this north country.

  00:07:37 It’s great because he actually tells us, here’s the source of my information about the Jaredites. He says, “I take mine account from the twenty and four plates, which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called The Book of Ether.” And then he tells us a little bit further down in Verse Six, “It’s called that because it is Ether’s record. He’s the one that wrote it.” So then when you’re reading this, you kind of think, “Wait, who are the people of Limhi? How would they find this record that belongs to this entirely other civilization located in a different area?” For that, we have to go back to The Book of Mosiah, then we can set up who the people of Limhi were and how they ended up finding these plates. I actually like to call them some archeologists because they actually ended up coming across this ancient, to them, even, an ancient civilization finding these things and bringing the plates back.

Hank Smith: 00:08:33 They think they found Zarahemla. They come back to Limhi and say, “Good news and bad news. The Bad news is Zarahemla’s been destroyed. We’re never getting out of slavery. The good news is, we brought souvenirs. We brought these plates back.”

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:08:49 If you remember, King Limhi is the son of the infamous King Noah. Like you said, right now at this time they’re down in the south in the Land of Nephi and they’re in bondage to the Lamanites, and King Limhi is trying to figure out how can they escape. So he says, “Okay, I’m going to send this group of people to find Zarahemla.” Somehow they completely bypass Zarahemla. I don’t think it was an accident, honestly.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:09:11 They missed that exit on the freeway, to be quite honest.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:09:12 They were led to go to this northern land and they find the bones of people and animals and the ruins of buildings. They want to know what happened to this civilization. They bring these plates back hoping that information is found there. Then on the way back, they completely bypass Zarahemla again and get all the way down to the south and show them these plates, these 24 gold plates that they found.

Hank Smith: 00:09:39 And then if I remember right, Ammon, not the son of Mosiah, Ammon, the other Ammon shows up the next day or right there close to it and says, “I’m from Zarahemla.” They’re like, “No, you’re not. We found it. It’s been destroyed.” And Ammon’s got to be thinking, “No, I was there just recently.” So now, they’re, “Well, what are these plates about?”

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:10:04 Yeah. “Do you know anyone who can translate these plates?” Because of course, this is in a language that’s been lost for so long. Ammon’s like, “Well, I can’t, but I know somebody who can.”

Dr. George Pierce: 00:10:13 I know a guy.I know a guy. We get that great discussion from Ammon about what it means to be a seer and a Revelator.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:10:19 Yeah, he defines it.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:10:21 And we have that with King Mosiah.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:10:23 Yeah, so Mosiah is able to translate the record and it says, and this is in Mosiah 28, that he uses the interpreters, the two stones, the Urim and Thummim to be able to do it. I love that we have this long history of the Urim and Thummim being used over and over and over again to help translate this record for us to get it to us.

John Bytheway: 00:10:45 Moroni is abridging the book of Ether, and yet it sounds like they found 24 gold plates and he covers all this history. I’ve heard people speculate, I just wonder what you guys think, maybe 24 sets of plates, or maybe they were really huge plates or maybe the language was super efficient or something. Have you ever heard any scholarship on that? Like you said, he shortens this quite a bit, 24 plates, but all we’ve got is 15 chapters.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:11:16 I always thought of it as 24 sets of plates because we’re covering several millennia of history, Ether edits that. So it’s interesting to think of how many people these plates and this record goes through to actually get to us because we have the original Jaredite authors. We have Ether who takes it all and edits it, and I’m sure redacts it. “Mosiah gives us a translation,” it says. Moroni gives a translation for the gold plates, and then Joseph Smith gives a translation. It’s incredible to think how much work and time and effort so many people had to go through to get the record to us. Sometimes we don’t necessarily appreciate that. By the time we get to this point in the Book of Mormon, we’re like, “I’m almost done. I just got to get through a couple of chapters and I’m going to speed read through this.” This is an entire civilization, the rise and the fall. I love this idea of giving it honor and respect to all of these people who gave it to us. What can we learn from them?

Dr. George Pierce: 00:12:19 I’ve always thought of it too, as possibly either 24 sets or when we look at historical annals, those tablets tend to be bigger than a standard Mesopotamian tablet. The annals and myths tend to be on bigger tablets, nothing huge, so they’re not lugging home like a four by eight sheet of plywood, but they tend to be physically bigger than what we’d normally think about as a plate. It could be that as well. I don’t know. I’ve never really come down on anything, and I’m glad that my salvation doesn’t depend on it. That’s a good thing, right? As we think about that. Maybe Ether will tell us one day.

Hank Smith: 00:12:59 I’ve always found this interesting, and I don’t know if it actually says it directly. King Mosiah translates these plates and reads them and then says, “We’re doing away with Kings.” He says, “Oh, look at King Noah. Oh, my sons don’t want to be king, but also I just read this book and I don’t think this works out very well, so we’re going to get rid of kings.” Do you think that’s there?

Dr. George Pierce: 00:13:22 I would hesitate to a correlation equals causation type of a situation, but man, it’s really close in time to where King Mosiah, as you said, reads this. I think that’s part of the beauty of these records because Krystal’s talked about how it’s gone from Jaredites to Ether to Mosiah to Moroni to Joseph Smith to us. I think as we read them, we get different lessons depending on our circumstances, and that’s the beauty of scripture to begin with, is the fact that we could all read the same Psalm or the same section of the Doctrine and Covenants. It may mean something to you, Hank, or to you, John, or even to Krystal and myself, it may mean something different to all four of us in this conversation based on where we’re at in life. I think later on, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Alma instructs Helaman not to teach out of the gold plates of Ether, “Don’t teach the people from this kind of stuff.” I like that idea. I mean, it’s very close in time.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:14:21 Yeah, I definitely think so. For some reason, every time people reach a promised land or there’s a new beginning, they want some sort of king for some reason, this keeps happening. And even with the Jaredites, they’re like, “I don’t want to be king. I don’t want to be king.” Finally, they find somebody. Yeah, I like that idea that Mosiah is like, “Maybe this idea of a monarchy is not working so well, we have some patterns here that we need to avoid.”

John Bytheway: 00:14:48 Well, this is speculation too, but King Mosiah just sent four of his princes back to the land of Nephi to be missionaries, so he’s like, “Okay, not only have I got nobody to give the kingdom to, but I just read about Kings. Let’s try a new form of government-

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:15:03 That’s right.

John Bytheway: 00:15:04 … let’s see, reign of the Judges, I love that.”

Hank Smith: 00:15:07 One thing I think you’ve both taught us here, just already, is when we read this, the record of the Jaredites taken from the 24 plates found by the people of Limhi in the days of King Mosiah, there’s a bit of scriptural literacy here where you can say, “I know that story. I know where these plates are from. I know how I got them, and how Moroni got them.” You might read that and go, “Oh, I don’t know what that’s about,” but there’s something to be said for knowing this book, knowing the ins and outs, the travels, where we got things.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:15:36 Absolutely. And I think there’s something to be said for it too as it continues on, and I know there’s a lot of names here, but starting in Verse Six, Moroni relates then Ether’s genealogy, he says, “On this wise do I give the account, he that wrote this record was Ether.” And then he talks about, “He’s the descendant of Coriantor,” and Coriantor is the son of this and the son of… And it goes all the way down to Verse 33, down to Jared.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:16:01 I like your point, Hank, about there’s a scriptural literacy involved to be like, “Oh, I know the story and I recognize that, oh, this goes back to the Book of Mormon and how they found it,” but Moroni also gives the genealogy and part of that is not only encouraging scripture literacy in terms of Mosiah and finding it, but it’s also telling us that Ether’s legit because that’s what the genealogies convey. We read it and we go, “Man, that’s a lot of verses and a lot of names,” and we see Lib and Kish and Levi and Kim. The reason why it’s there and the reason why any genealogies are there in scripture is because number one, it tells us one, what people could inherit. These are the people who are in this line of inheritance and people who are outside, is inclusive and who’s excluded.

  00:16:45 It also talks about legitimacy. So when we see examples in Genesis and Chronicles, it’s about, “Here’s who’s related to who and who’s legitimately inheriting property usually,” or in certain cases, the kingship. We see in Ezra chapter seven, Ezra gives his genealogy and he traces it back to Aaron, the high priest, which is what then gives his book legitimacy. He is a legitimate high priest, descended from Aaron. Here then Moroni relates Ether’s genealogy and says, “This is what gives this book and this record legitimacy because Ether is descended directly from Jared.” The ultimate genealogies that we’re all familiar with, Matthew 1 and Luke chapter 3, it’s about Jesus’s genealogy, tracing him in Matthew back to Abraham and being part of that Abrahamic covenant, being a descendant of David. He’s the legitimate inheritor of the Kings. We should appreciate what the genealogy is there and what it’s doing, so it’s making Ether legitimate and his story legitimate.

Hank Smith: 00:17:45 I love that. One thing I’ve learned in Ether chapter one from our friends over at Scripture Central is that Moroni lists from Ether all the way back to Jared and then over the next 11 chapters he reverses the entire thing and gives him the narrative. John, I’m not a huge fan of Book of Mormon evidence, “Let’s look at the evidence,” but can you imagine Joseph Smith giving this list of names and then reversing the order one at a time and telling the story all the way from Jared back to Ether?

John Bytheway: 00:18:22 Hank, that was legit.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:18:23 Everyone’s like, “That was so legit, I am stunned into silence.” I think that’s an interesting way to structure it and a good observation in terms of Moroni, and I wonder if for him, it was a checklist. He already had the genealogy. As he goes through, make sure that he tells the story of this person and the story of this person. That’s a good way to see it because he’s preparing the audience for, “These are the stories, these are the people,” and he’s going to reverse that order as he starts off with Jared in verse 33 and then continues on.

Hank Smith: 00:18:55 Yeah, I’m not going to be the one checking in on him, but someone did the work there and said, “Yeah. He goes all the way in reverse, all the way back to the top of the list.”

John Bytheway: 00:19:04 In my own notes, I’ve got this idea that the first six chapters of Ether speak of only of that first generation of the Jaredites, and then it kind of fast-forwarded seven through 11 of 28 generations, and then Ether 12 through 15 are the last Jaredites, so they spend most of the time on the first Jaredites and the last Jaredites and fast-forward in between. We get most of it first generation, last generation where we get Ether.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:19:35 Well, this takes us to verse 33. Verse 33 is packed with information about the Jaredites. I always think it’s good to pause here. This sets up the entire story. This is the foundation of who they are as a people, what ends up happening to them, who Jared is, who his brother is. It mentions three facts in verse 33. “They came from the Great Tower. At the time, the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth.” We have the tower, we have the language confounding, and we have the scattering. Of course, this takes us to the Tower of Babel. The story of the Tower of Babel is found in Genesis 11. We really don’t have very many verses about it in Genesis.

  00:20:26 We are so thankful that we have this extra record. The tower is mentioned several times throughout the Book of Mormon. Every time the Jaredites are mentioned, they mention this tower. The reason why the tower was built is the culture that they’re coming from. It really tells us about why they act the way they do. If we can study this tower and figure out what was wrong with it, then we can maybe understand how the Jaredites were able to escape and get to a better place and not have their language confounded and learn some things from them.

Hank Smith: 00:21:00 Yeah. We’re going way back here, right, Krystal? Genesis 11.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:21:05 I always like to say this is post-flood, pre-everything else pretty much is where we’re at.

Hank Smith: 00:21:13 Yeah. There’s still water on the ground when we get back to Genesis 11.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:21:18 That’s right. The story of Noah and the ark and the flood and everything is still fresh in everybody’s minds. I think at this point when we get to talking about the boats and things, we’ll see that there are some connections between the building of the ark and the building of the barges by the Jaredites. Like you said, we’re going way back. If we’re talking about the Tower of Babel, we turn to Genesis 11 and we look at verse four. We’re introduced to this… There’s a group of people and they say, “Let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach into heaven. Let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” This is really all we’re told about why they build the tower. They want to reach into heaven, make a name, and not be scattered.

  00:22:05 We have some idea about what this tower was, where it was located, and why they were building it from archeological excavations, and texts that have been found. This can really help us understand a little bit more about how did the Jaredites escape the tower and these things. We get a hint in verse nine. It mentions, “The name of it is called Babel.” Of course, Babel is related to Babylon. Babylon is a city, an area in Mesopotamia, which is about equal to modern-day Iraq. Starting around 3000 BC, they started finding these towers that were built during that time, these enormous structures.

Hank Smith: 00:22:54 I am going to bring back something you taught me. It just hit me. John, do you remember? I think it was called Ziggurats.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:23:00 Yes. Ziggurat. Yes. It’s Akkadian. So you know Akkadian now.

John Bytheway: 00:23:08 Isn’t Babel an Akkadian word too?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:23:10 Yes. It means gate or door of God, gate to God, door to God. We know these structures. They’re these stepped platforms. What’s really weird about them is that they’re solid inside and some of these are huge, so some of them are up to 300 feet long and 200 feet tall. Why would you spend all that time using baked mud bricks that have to be made by hand to build this structure and then fill it with rubble and sand and bricks and stone except for one little room on the very top? They do have names like that, Gate of God or Leading to God, but we know that they weren’t temples for worshiping God, and we know this because of the texts and archeology and because there was a little temple next to these ziggurats where the priests would go and worship God. So then we have this question, “What is the purpose of these towers, these ziggurats?”

  00:24:07 The texts and archeology, they tell us there are kind of two purposes. The first is to build a stairway or a ramp so that God can come down to earth, which sounds a little silly, that we would need to build some stairway for God to be able to walk down to earth. Why? Why are they trying to bring God down to earth? There’s some misunderstanding here of who God is, and the second reason is that little room on top of the ziggurat that was empty, actually they called it the bedroom of God. Their idea was they’re going to bring God down and he is going to live in that bedroom permanently, forever, and there was a bed in there and a table and a chair, and they put food in there and drinks and clothing and make it super comfortable, but this idea of, “We’re going to convince God to come and live in our tower…” Because we know these ziggurats are spread all through Mesopotamia. There are at least 30 of them.

  00:25:06 The idea was if you could get God to come and live in your tower, then… This ties back to Genesis 11. You’ll be famous. You’ll make a name for yourself and you won’t be scattered because if God’s living in your tower and he’s quite comfortable and wanting to stay there, he’s not going to make you leave. He’s probably going to keep out famine and war. It’s crazy, this idea of controlling or manipulating God. It’s a misunderstanding of who God is, what he is, what he does, where he can go, who he loves, who he gives blessings to. That’s the real problem with the tower. That’s why God says, “We need to stop this from happening.”

Dr. George Pierce: 00:25:46 So maybe not so much forcing themselves into heaven, but forcing heaven to come down, reverse the idea. Because we usually think about it, “It’s top in the heavens so we can reach up there.” So we’re like, “Oh, that’s the main problem. They’re trying to go up.” As we look at it, it’s a way to force the deity down to their spot through various means as we look at that. This is what we get then, and the problem isn’t the fact that people are together and they need to be scattered, and the problem isn’t that they have the same language. The problem is fundamentally a misunderstanding of God’s nature. The great thing about the Book of Ether is that we see solutions to that in a much more condensed way than what we see in the Old Testament.

Hank Smith: 00:26:32 Do you think that perhaps in the sections we’re reading here, we have the wrong way to connect with God, this tower, and then we have the Brother of Jared who actually does connect with God?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:26:44 Yeah. It’s fascinating to see the exact things that the tower stands for are the opposite of what Jared and the Brother of Jared and the Jaredites end up doing, and that’s why they’re able to escape the tower. Sometimes when we think about this, we’re like, “I can’t control God. I can’t manipulate God. I can’t bring him down and live in a bedroom,” and things like that. In a way, we sometimes limit the divinity of God or misunderstand Heavenly Father’s nature and Jesus Christ’s nature. We’ll share some examples of that, how we might do that, but I like to think of the Tower of Babel because I think of this a lot, as anything that obstructs your view of the Savior or Heavenly Father, anything that gets in the way of your relationship, that’s your tower of Babel. If you can figure out what your towers are, and especially using how the Brother of Jared gets away from his tower and incredible things happen to him because of that, there are sort of three main categories that the tower represents a misunderstanding of. The first of these is really is leadership.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:27:56 It’s misunderstanding God’s leadership. As we really want to think about it, God is our leader. He’s our king, and he can rule over humanity according to his will. He also then has all knowledge and understanding then and understands what’s best for us. So in terms of something like the tower back in Genesis, we can think that the misunderstanding is that they would build a tower so that God could live there and they could then manipulate him into doing what they want and that’s not scattering them.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:28:31 I mentioned figuring out what your towers are. With this first one, misunderstanding leadership and knowledge, this is definitely a tower that I have, this idea of control and trust. So for example, when I was trying to decide where I wanted to go to college, I knew I wanted to do Egyptology, so the study of Ancient Egypt. I knew that from a very young age. Actually, fifth grade is when I decided that’s what I wanted to do.

Hank Smith: 00:28:56 Wow. Did you watch Indiana Jones?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:28:59 I took a summer school class on Ancient Egypt, and I just became obsessed, and then once I figured out you could actually do that and make money, I was like, “Oh, this is good stuff. I’m going to do this.” There aren’t very many schools where you can get an undergraduate degree in Egyptology. Two of these schools are UCLA and UC Berkeley. So I applied to these two schools, but I knew from the very beginning that UCLA was the right place for me. I knew the area. I was comfortable with Los Angeles. I had a lot of family there, some friends there, so I decided this was the right place. I prayed about it a lot. I got an answer that UCLA was the right place for me to go. I would receive many blessings and have a good experience there.

  00:29:41 Of course, what ends up happening? I didn’t get into UCLA. Of course. I remember thinking, “Now, Heavenly Father, we decided on this. We had a plan. We know what’s best for me.” It was hard for me to try and figure out, “Wait, but I got this answer…” I was so focused on the wrong things and my friend said, “Well, what about UC Berkeley?” And I said, “Well, it’s way harder to get in there. I’m not going to get in there if I didn’t get into UCLA.” And I check and I got into UC Berkeley. I loved my time there. It really has made up a huge part of who I am today. I think Heavenly Father knew if I got into both places, I would have gone to the wrong place first because after I finished at Berkeley and I was ready to go to grad school, I applied to UCLA and got into UCLA and ended up going there. So Heavenly Father was right the entire time I was meant to go to UCLA. And of course, while I was at UCLA, I met this person right here.

Hank Smith: 00:30:50 We’ll play some romantic music right now. There we go.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:30:54 Yes, yes. He wasn’t a member at the time. Long story short, he joins the church. We end up getting married. We have our daughter there, and if I had gone to UCLA first when I thought I was supposed to go there, our paths might not have crossed in the same way. It forced me to think about… A Tower of Babel of mine is control and trust. Not doubting when Heavenly Father says, “You’re meant to do something or you’re going to receive blessings from things,” to think about his time, might be a little bit different than my time. This is something that has ended up being a really amazing thing. Heavenly Father, of course, was right the entire time. I needed to get on board.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:31:41 So it wasn’t my tower of sorts because I went to UCLA as one of the graduate schools that I was accepted to, and I was going because my friend and now colleague and co-author, co-editor was going there and we’d known each other, and so I was going down the road happy as anything. “Yeah, sure. Los Angeles sounds great!

Dr. George Pierce: 00:32:00 Not knowing what was in store and that I would be a convert and that life would end up the way that it did.

Hank Smith: 00:32:10 Krystal and George, this first misunderstanding is the way God works, is that right? The way He works with us, that we’re assisting Him, He’s not assisting us, right?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:32:21 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:32:22 I don’t put Him in this box and say, “This is what you’re supposed to be.”

Dr. George Pierce: 00:32:27 He’s the leader, not us.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:32:29 Yeah.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:32:29 And He knows what’s best. So it’s about trust and faith and trusting that He does know what’s best for us, even though sometimes we like to think that we know what’s best because we’re in the middle of the situation. That’s one of the first areas of misunderstanding at the tower. We’ll see how the Jaredites deal with that. The second area really deals with the divinity of God, the fact that He’s on this higher plane than us. He’s on a perfected level higher than humanity. We can all think about He’s probably operating in a different plane of physics altogether, although physics was not my strong suit in graduate school.

Hank Smith: 00:33:06 You’re so good at physics you became an archeologist, right?

Dr. George Pierce: 00:33:10 That’s right, and that’s how good at physics I was. But He is divine. He’s at a higher level than us. And yet, He cares for us and He loves us. God is both above the system, but yet He’s close to us and He cares for all humanity no matter who, what, where, when we are in time and space. For the people of the tower, the real problem is we’re going to try to build this tower and we’re going to get God on our level, if that makes sense, to get Him to stay near humanity so that He will favor them. And it’s kind of the problem that they’re having there. We can see how that’s even a problem in our time as well.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:33:47 Yeah. It’s this idea that God cares about some people more than other people. They’re trying to say, “Well, if we build all this stuff, then God’s going to love us more.”

Dr. George Pierce: 00:33:58 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:33:59 We can put him in our little prison up on top of our tower and keep him there. He’s ours.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:34:03 Yeah, exactly. For us today trying to translate this, it could be the tower is pride. I mean, of course, this isn’t my tower at all. I’ve never-

Hank Smith: 00:34:13 Yeah.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:34:13 … had any problems with that.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:34:13 I don’t struggle with this either.

Hank Smith: 00:34:14 Right.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:34:16 This idea that everything I have in my life that’s great came from myself as opposed to acknowledging that God’s given me these blessings, this career, this family, have everything I need. It’s interesting because President Benson in his famous talk on pride, he said, “Pride is you’re competing with God,” basically. We would never want to do that. He is on such a high level, but yet He cares about us too. The tower isn’t always pride. Sometimes it can be the opposite of that and thinking God doesn’t care about me or He loves somebody else more than me because I have so many hardships or because my life isn’t going the way I want it to. And so self-doubt can be just as destructive of a tower as pride can be.

John Bytheway: 00:35:06 One of the things, the Restoration, all these different stories helping us believe in God. But then it becomes this lifelong effort to understand what kind of being God is. Satan will relentlessly try to mess that up. When you work with young people, oh, God’s mad at me. God won’t forgive me. I messed this up. I feel like, okay, they believed in God, but what kind of being is God? The Restoration was not just, yay, God is real. He’s revealed himself again, but then, wow, go through the Doctrine and Covenants. What kind of being is He. That He really does care about us. He really is very forgiving.

  00:35:48 I love all those lessons that come later, not just that there is a God, but what kind of being is he? Just today my son-in-law’s brother, who’s on a mission in Greece, was going to Mars Hill, Acts chapter 17. And I was trying to send him some stuff about look what Paul is doing there. Paul is telling the Greeks who had such different ideas of Gods and deity, “No, actually, we are His offspring and God is our father. And He is accessible and He’s not far from us.” He wasn’t just telling him that there’s a God, but what kind of being is God? I think Satan will relentlessly try to mess that up with us. That’s why I love anything that can tell us not just that there is a God, but what kind of being he is.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:36:36 When we have those moments of self-doubt that does God really love me, and I think this may be one of my towers, we’re reminded in Isaiah 53, Isaiah tells us that he saw each one of us individually during his atoning work. Abinadi reminds us in the Book of Mormon that he will see his seed. It reminds me of there’s a Christian music song, but it says, “While he was on the cross, I was on His mind.” And that’s very humbling to think about that. And part of that song talks about the fact that He knew me, and yet, He loved me. For all my imperfections and for everything else that goes on, He still loved me and loved me enough to go sacrifice his life for that. I’m reminded of that quote by Elder Uchtdorf that this is the paradox of man. Compared to God, man is nothing, yet we are everything to God.

Hank Smith: 00:37:29 Yeah. We talked about three. We’ve done one where I misunderstand God’s leadership, how He’s going to function in my life. And then two, I misunderstand God’s love, that I can swing to one side. God loves only me, only my church, right? He only loves me. And then we can swing far to the other side, which George told us, which is God doesn’t love me, He loves other people. And all of those are misunderstandings of God.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:37:57 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:37:58 The tower is a representation of these misunderstanding.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:38:01 When we get to the brother of Jared, he’s the opposite of these things. That’s what we can learn from him is how do we combat these towers in the same way he does? But there is one more misunderstanding, and that’s misunderstanding the power of God, the mercy of God.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:38:17 Looking at this, we can see that, when we think about the power of God, we know that He has the divine power to do anything and everything for humanity. Nothing is out of His reach. We’re told several times throughout scripture that nothing is too hard for God. Nothing is impossible. He has unlimited power without any sort of mortal needs. When we look at the tower in its context, what they’re trying to do is build a tower so that they can, number one, use God’s power to help themselves. We go back to the idea about controlling God. But they’re also building the tower in a way to satisfy His needs so that he’s obligated to help us. If they can just satisfy the needs, if they can get him a nice, comfy bed, if they can get him something to eat, get some water, some other Babylonian swag, then He’s going to be obligated to help them.

  00:39:11 He has to help them, and then they’re able to use His power to help themselves. We have this misunderstanding about God’s power in that sense, which also then translates to our day as well.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:39:23 We don’t ever think of, oh, I’m going to have to give food or whatever. That sounds so pagan to us. Sometimes we too think that there’s a trade-off program. If I do this thing for God, then He owes me something back. And yet, it’s a misunderstanding of covenants because a covenant is I promise to do this, He promises to do that. But sometimes we have these expectations that, wow, if I’m following the commandments, I get married in the temple, I went on a mission, that my life should be perfect. I shouldn’t have any hardships or burdens. And we have these expectations and when our life doesn’t go according to that plan, it can be a tower for us. It can obstruct our relationship with Heavenly Father. So how do we understand the difference between I’m doing this and I’m getting blessings versus I’m doing this and God owes me now? It can be hard.

Hank Smith: 00:40:19 I’m sure your thoughts, John, went to Elder Christofferson. I have a short quote here. “Some misunderstand,” Nice that he started that way, “the promises of God to mean that obedience yields specific outcomes on a fixed schedule. You might think if I diligently serve a mission, God will bless me with a happy marriage and children. Or if I refrain from doing schoolwork on Sunday, God will bless me with good grades. Or if I pay tithing, God will bless me with the job I want. If life doesn’t fall out precisely this way or according to our expected timetable, we feel betrayed by God. But things are not so mechanical in the divine economy.” And then this is what you mentioned, John. “We ought not to think of God’s plan as a cosmic vending machine where we select a desired blessing, insert the required good works, and the order is promptly delivered.” Is that what they were seeing there?

Dr. George Pierce: 00:41:17 I think that’s what they were expecting there. If we build this tower, we can bring Him down to our level. We know what’s best for us. And if we can satisfy His needs, then we can use His power as we see fit because that’s their understanding of deity. Then in Genesis, Jehovah has to step in and say, “That’s not how this works.” And fortunately, we have then in Ether a fairly compact but very instructive here’s how you combat the tower both in your own life and how the Jaredites did it in their reality.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:41:51 Before we get to this story, we have to talk a little bit about the brother of Jared. Why does it say, “Brother of Jared?” And why does Jared keep turning to his brother to pray to the Lord? There’s some ideas about this. It seems like in their culture right now, Jared is their leader. He’s the head of the family. During this time, they have patriarchs. He’s the political leader. And it sounds like the brother of Jared is the more spiritual or the religious leader. It says in verse 34 that he’s highly favored of the Lord. It sounds like this is sort of his role in their family and in their position.

  00:42:31 But once again, if he’s so important, why are we just calling him the brother of Jared? Because we know he had a name and we actually know his full name. This goes back to 1834 in Kirtland. There was a man named Reynolds Cahoon who had a son. I love the way it’s said in the story. “One day, when President Joseph Smith was passing his door, he called the prophet in and asked him to bless and name the baby.” I love how casual it is. The prophet’s walking by and you say, “Hey, can you come in and name and bless my baby?” So then it says, “Joseph did so and gave the boy the name of Mahonri Moriancumer.” I cannot imagine being the parents that child and saying-

John Bytheway: 00:43:22 Could you spell that for us?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:43:24 Can we write that down? Mahonri Moriancumer. Just thinking, ” What does that mean?” And then the prophet tells them, “Well, this is the name of the brother of Jared. This is his actual name, Mahonri Moriancumer.” I love this story, like I said, because I love doing genealogy and family history. I feel like it’s solving ancient mysteries, just like archeology. A couple years ago I was researching my fourth great grandmother, and she had an interesting life. She got married young, had some children, and then her husband died. So she got remarried to a man who had already had children, and he also had been widowed. They both had children, so when they got married, they had this blended family. And I was looking at the first census of this blended family, looking through all the children’s names, and I came across the name Mahonri Moriancumer.

  00:44:20 So sure enough, I go and I look at the man she married and it’s Reynolds Cahoon. I love this story. I like to tell people that I’m actually related through marriage to the brother of Jared. A different brother of Jared, but it’s so touching to me to hear that these are real people from the past that we’re learning about. Then you think, “Why did Moroni not write Mahonri Moriancumer?” Or whoever this translation the first time is coming through, or Joseph Smith? I actually like to think of it being an Egyptologist and knowing that Moroni is writing in Reformed Egyptian, this version of Egyptian.

  00:45:03 I sat down one day and thought, “How would I write Mahonri Moriancumer in Egyptian?” I already knew how to write son of Jared. It would only take two signs, maybe three signs to be able to spell that out. To write out Mahonri Moriancumer, which would’ve been written out phonetically, it would’ve taken at least 11 or 12 signs to write that out. Just in Mormon nine, Moroni told us, “We’re writing in Egyptian to save space. Otherwise, we would’ve written in Hebrew.” And so sometimes I like to think that Moroni’s, this is the way that we’re going to save space because I’m going to be writing Mahonri Moriancumer over and over and over again. We’ll write brother of Jared.

Hank Smith: 00:45:49 Brother of Jared.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:45:51 A couple of hieroglyphs and we’ll save some space here.

Hank Smith: 00:45:57 That’s so great. Almost like, you got to forgive me here, I’m going to save myself a couple thousand hours of time if I just write brother of Jared. That’s so great.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:46:09 He was just trying to avoid some carpal tunnel.

Hank Smith: 00:46:11 Yeah.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:46:12 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:46:12 Mahonri Moriancumer.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:46:13 It’s such a great name. And oh, I just love that he’s one of my ancestors. This is how we get, we know the brother of Jared’s name. This brings us to their first crisis. They have a huge crisis, this idea of the confounding of language. As we see the different crises that they keep running into, we’ll see that the way they respond to each crisis, the confounding of language, the scattering of people, the problem with the boats, the brother of Jared shows this understanding that’s opposite of the tower.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:46:47 We see in verse 34 the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man, a man highly favored of the Lord. “Jared, his brother, said unto him, ‘Cry unto the Lord that He will not confound us that we may not understand our words.’ It came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord and the Lord had compassion upon Jared. Therefore, He did not confound the language of Jared, and Jared and his brother were not confounded.” We see later on they cried about those who were their friends that their language would not be confounded. In verse 37, “It came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord and the Lord had compassion,” and that’s a word we should sort of note again, “had compassion upon their friends and their families also. They were not confounded.”

  00:47:25 The first crisis that they really had to deal with is a confounding of language thing. And so how do they respond? And the response is very interesting because when we think about their understanding, or at least the brother of Jared and Jared’s understanding of God and how that counters what we see at the tower, their response simply was to ask God for help. They ask God not to confound their language. No, it doesn’t have any sort of, there’s no manipulation, there’s no sacrifice. There’s no we’ll pay the extra tithing or we’ll go on a mission or we’ll do anything you’ll say. It’s just a straightforward request. Please don’t confound our language. And then it gets

Dr. George Pierce: 00:48:00 And then it gets added onto a cell phone plan. It’s like a friends and family, not confounding language plan. They add that on. It shows that they understand the nature of God in terms of his leadership, the fact that God can choose whether or not to confound their language and he knows what’s best for them. Maybe what’s best for them is to confound their language, but they’re asking him, in a very simple request, not to do it. They trust in his leadership. We also see there’s a good acknowledgement of his divinity, the fact that he has divine compassion for them, and we see that then reflected twice in the text. It talks about how God, the Lord had compassion on them, so they understand his love and his divinity, and they also obviously understand his power, that he has the power not to confound them.

  00:48:41 The results we get is obvious. The Lord doesn’t confound their language between the family members, between their friends and family. When we think about, “Okay, so what do we get out of that?” We’re not building a tower. I haven’t seen John making any mud bricks in the background while we’ve been talking, just in case. I don’t know. Maybe he is. I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s doing, right? They’re all back there.

Hank Smith: 00:49:02 They’re in the kiln.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:49:03 Yeah. Sorry. They’re being fired right now as we speak. No, we’re not physically building a tower, and we’re not in danger of the Lord stepping into Provo or anywhere where we’re at, and then our wards and stakes and all of a sudden confounding our languages. The application for us is to take a page from the brother of Jared. Sometimes we just need to ask a simple request. This is what we’d like, with the understanding that God knows what’s best for us.

  00:49:35 We know the Savior loves us. We have to trust him and that he’s going to advocate for what’s best for us, because he’s been here and he’s experienced mortality, and he knows what it’s like to have these requests. Even though he never went to grad school, he knows what it’s like to have that experience of anxiety and applying for it. He knows each one of these responses is going to be different that we’ll see from the Jaredites, but we’ll see how they grow in faith. The first step, then, is to have the faith that God is going to answer their prayer and to trust that he’s going to do what’s best for them.

Hank Smith: 00:50:07 I see a bit of a pattern here. Verse 34 through 40, there’s often, “Cry unto the Lord. I’ll cry unto the Lord, and the Lord has compassion.” It happens again, verse 36, “Cry unto the Lord.” Verse 37, “The Lord had compassion.” Over to verse 39, “Cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion.” Well, Moroni, I think you want me to see that if I cry unto the Lord, he’s going to have compassion. George, you said, let’s take note of that word, compassion. That seems to be the opposite of what you told us about the tower. I don’t see a compassionate God in the building of the tower that you talked to us about.

Dr. George Pierce: 00:50:45 When we think about the building of the tower and their concept of God, what we get is God in a box, God on their terms. That compassion, then, is missing, because they want to use him for their own benefits, and that’s the reason why these various cities in Mesopotamia had these ziggurats and these towers, is because they had their local deities, and they wanted their city to be the most important one. They wanted their deity to smite the other cities and the other deities. The compassion isn’t there in their sort of understanding of God. I think what Moroni is trying to tell us as well is, “Hey guys, get on board with a right understanding of God,” and one of those fundamental things that he has is compassion.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:51:30 All right? We talked about the first crisis, the confounding of language, and how they respond is just to ask God not to confound their language, and he has compassion on them for that. Now, their second crisis, they respond differently, and I think they respond in a way that shows they’re growing even more in their understanding of God. The second crisis is the scattering of people. Now, they could go to God and say, “Please don’t scatter us. We want to stay in our home. We want to stay all together,” but instead, if you look at verse 38, Jared spake again unto his brother, saying, “Go and inquire of the Lord whether he will drive us out of the land,” so instead of saying, “Please don’t drive us out of the land,” they say, “Will we be driven out of the land?” Then, he follows up and he says, “And if he will drive us out of the land, cry into him whither we shall go.”

  00:52:23 So he says, “If we are going to be scattered and have to go through this hardship, help us to know where to go.” It’s incredible the way that Jared follows this up even more with his understanding of God because he says, “Who knoweth, but the Lord, will carry us forth into a land which is choice above all the earth.” So he says, “First of all, are we going to be scattered? If we are, help us know where to go, because we believe you could take us to a much better place than we are now?” And it’s this idea of, “Are we going to have this burden? Yes. Okay. If we’re going to have this burden, we trust that you will help us get through it. We’re going to get through this hardship, because we trust you and we love you.”

  00:53:11 Then, Jared ends with saying, “Let us be faithful so that we can get this inheritance.” I love how this shows a growth from, “Please take the burden away,” to, “Help us survive the burden. In fact, help us thrive through the burden with the hope there’s something better on the other side, because we know sometimes those burdens, those hardships aren’t taken away for us, and we’re praying, help us get through it. Help us have trust and faith and hope that we also will come out on the other side in a promised land or a better place, because we trust God, because we trust in his leadership to guide us. We trust in his divinity and love, that he cares about us, and we trust in his power that he is going to help us in any way that we need.”

Hank Smith: 00:54:03 I love that. That’s verse 38. Wow, Krystal. That was wonderful.

John Bytheway: 00:54:08 Do you know what I love about, “Let us be Faithful, faithful unto the Lord”? The first principle of the gospel is not faith in what we want or faith in the way we want things to turn out, but faith in the Lord, just as you taught us, Krystal, that he’s got a micro plan within the macro plan of salvation. That’s an Elder Maxwell’s statement. He’s going to order all things for our good, to use a Doctrine and Covenants phrase. I’m so glad you pointed out, let us be faithful unto the Lord. It’s not the vending machine, “If we do this, he’ll do that.” It’s let’s, “Believe and have faith in him that he is a compassionate God and he’s going to guide us where he wants in a compassionate way.”

Hank Smith: 00:54:47 I have a question for all three of you. Our friend at BYU, Joe Spencer, who’s been on the podcast, talks about how Moroni, as he’s taken over the plates, realizes that the Book of Mormon is for, John, help me with the title page. It’s to the remnant of this people.

John Bytheway: 00:55:08 Three audiences.

Hank Smith: 00:55:09 But it’s also to the Gentiles. Is that right, from the title page?

John Bytheway: 00:55:14 The Jews and the Gentiles, yeah. Three audiences.

Hank Smith: 00:55:18 If you read through the Book of Mormon, you realize pretty quickly that, for the Book of Mormon to go to who it needs to go to, it’s got to go through the Gentiles. That’s Nephi’s vision. The book is given to the Gentiles. What Joe said is look at the book of Ether from that lens, as in this is not an Israelite. This is before Abraham. Here is God, working with non-Israel. He’s opening himself up to that. Perhaps, I think what Joe said, and I’d love for you all to comment on this, that this book is not just a summary of the Book of Mormon.

  00:55:56 It is that, that John talked about, but it also is a message to Gentiles, of how God can work with you and I, because we’re the Gentiles he has in mind, at least from my understanding. When Nephi sees us, he thinks we’re Gentiles, which I’m like, “Hey, I’m not a Gentile,” but he sees us getting the book, and he says, “The book is with the Gentiles.” They take it to the Jews, and they take it to the remnant of this people. What do you think about that, this Gentile book in the middle of this Israelite book or right here at the end?

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 00:56:27 I think it’s great, because in just a few chapters, Moroni actually says, “Oh, ye Gentiles, here’s the point of me telling you this.” It’s like he’s setting up these Jaredites, and then he jumps. I love when he jumps in and he says, “Oh. By the way, Gentiles, this is actually about you too, and this is meant to teach you something, and I’m setting it up so that you can understand it for yourselves too.”

Dr. George Pierce: 00:56:51 I think it’s good, because it shows that, even though we think about God’s real covenant relationship with the House of Israel and everything, time and again in scripture, he’s shown that he’s the God of all humanity. When we think about the book of Jonah, the point of the book of Jonah is that he cares about Israel’s archenemies, the Assyrians, just as much as he cares about Israel, and he wants to be compassionate to them. In fact, when we look at something, and I saw this the other day, the tail end of Isaiah, chapter 19, it’s this chapter about this burden of Egypt and his judgment on Egypt, but he has this flip at the end of it, in which he says that one day there’s going to be this highway, if you will, or exchange between Egypt and Assyria, and between Assyria and Egypt.

  00:57:36 He says in verse 24 of Isaiah 19, “In that day, shall Israel be the third with Egypt and Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land, whom the Lord of hosts shall bless saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.'” Even then, in the days of Isaiah, he’s trying to teach them the people that you may not like, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, other people, the Gentiles, guess what? They’re just as important in the plan of salvation and just as important to me as anybody else. I like the fact that Krystal brought up. Moroni says, “Hey, Gentiles. This is for you,” right? And we have this book by Gentiles here at the tail end of the Book of Mormon to reinforce some of these teachings. I think it’s great that it happens to people who are not from the house of Israel, because there is no House of Israel yet as we look at Jared and his brother, which I think is a great thing, but I think that’s part of God’s love for all humanity.

Hank Smith: 00:58:32 Yeah. Kind of the point. I would add that if you read the Savior’s message of his second day, it’s, “Gentiles, you can be part of this work. Gentiles, if you’ll repent, you can be part of this work,” and I wonder if Moroni is reading the words of Christ in that second day, what? 3 Nephi 20, 21, 22, 23, saying, “I’ve got to speak to these Gentiles to teach them how they can come to the Lord.” Joseph Smith does kind of the same thing. Here’s all these people around him, teaching him creed’s about God, and he decides, as a Gentile, he’s going to go cry to the Lord, and the Lord has compassion on him.

John Bytheway: 00:59:15 Hank, you changed my life. Anyway, I’m actually part Egyptian, because I descended from Joseph, and Joseph married an Egyptian.

Hank Smith: 00:59:27 Yeah. When you fly into Egypt, you’re like, “Do you know who I am?”

John Bytheway: 00:59:34 Right off the plane, “I look handsome. I look smart. You recognize me?”

Hank Smith: 00:59:42 Please do that. You guys go to Egypt more than us. Will you please get off the plane and sing?

John Bytheway: 00:59:46 And start dancing with a coat? Yeah. I love the last line in Ether chapter one, “And thus I will do unto thee, because this long time ye have cried unto me.” I don’t want to read that and say, “Oh, therefore, if you pray for a long time, you get stuff,” because that sounds transactional. I love what you said about the leadership of God. It’s this idea that this long time you’ve learned about my compassion, you’ve learned, you can have faith in me. Maybe that’s more what it means. We all know James 1:5. James 4:2 says, “Ye have not because ye ask not.” What do you think that means, this, “I will do because this long time you’ve cried unto me”?

Hank Smith: 01:00:28 Yeah. I wonder if it’s the idea of staying power. You didn’t ask once or twice. You stayed with it.

John Bytheway: 01:00:34 Or you’re relying on me.

Dr. George Pierce: 01:00:36 Sometimes it’s not just like a one-off, so we’ve seen that they ask simple requests and trust that he knows what’s best. We’ve seen that they ask to survive and thrive in a situation with hope for the future, but I don’t think it’s just a one-off like, “Well, I prayed once, and that’s that,” and “Well, done and dusted. The Lord knows what’s best for me, so now I’m just going to continue on.” It’s a continual type of action. It’s a fervent prayer, and though we know from scripture that that’s effectual, very much.

Hank Smith: 01:01:06 I’ll just never forget verse 38, “If I have to go through this trial, please, what do we do to get through it?” instead of, “Please no, please no, please no.” So many of our listeners will appreciate verse 38. Instead of, “Why me?” Jared says, “Ask the Lord what we’re supposed to do when this trial comes,” and that is beautiful.

Hank Smith: 01:01:40 Krystal, George, you have walked us through chapter one, and I have notes up and down here. I’m so excited to take a look at chapter two and chapter three. Let’s keep going.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 01:01:45 Chapter two, they start preparing for the big journey. Part of this is gathering different supplies and resources to take with them. When we look at verses two and three, we see that they’re taking some interesting things on these boats. In verse two, it talks about they’re catching fowl. So they’re taking live birds with them in these vessels, in these boats. They’re taking fish, but live fish, so they’re actually, it says they’re making a vessel for the fish, an aquarium or a fish tank to take these live fish with them. They’re also bringing live bees in these boats, in these confined spaces, and seeds of every kind. Now, the first time I read this, I thought, “Oh, this makes a hundred percent sense to me.” Now, I remember my students asking, “But why are they taking these things?” These are the foundations of life in the ancient Near East.

  01:02:40 These things, especially the birds, the fish, and the bees, are what they got everything from. If you think about seeds, of course, plants, everything that comes from plants, food and clothing, and architecture. Think about birds, meat, the eggs, the feathers, the bones. They were using every single part of those animals. Fish as well, the meat, the oil, fish oil, bones. These three things were so incredibly important to the people in the ancient Near East. For the Egyptians, for example, they would put in their tombs what they wanted to take to the afterlife. These three things are in every tomb in Egypt; we even have a name for them. We call them fishing and fowling scenes, because if you went to the afterlife, what did you want to take? You wanted to take birds, you wanted to take fish, you wanted to take plants, and then you would have a great afterlife.

  01:03:35 I love the idea that the Jaredites, they fit perfectly into the ancient Near East. What are they going to take? What do they want to start? I mean, they’re basically starting life over again. They’re going to take what they know is the foundation of life, and then we get the bees. Then we have the bees, which is fascinating. Of course, the most important role of bees is pollination; if they’re bringing these seeds and things, and these bees… But also they use bees, the honey and the wax for food, to make tablets to write on, cosmetics, adhesive, medicine, waterproofing, paint. They were using bees and beeswax for so many different things. Now, it’s great because Moroni tells us; he gives us a little bit of a glimpse into their language. He says they carried with them deseret. He gives us this word, and he says, “This means honeybee.”

  01:04:23 Some people have tied this to the Egyptian word deshret. This word in Egypt, it refers to several different things, but a specific part of Egypt symbolized by a certain crown and symbolized by a bee; the word deshret is related to this. The Lower Egypt, the crown that goes with it, that’s called the deshret, has a stinger on it and also has a proboscis, which is that little straw to get the nectar out of the plants. We know at this period of time, people in Mesopotamia were not keeping bees. They weren’t beekeepers, but the people in Egypt were. I love this idea that the Jaredites came into contact with the Egyptians, got beekeeping technology from them, and maybe even borrowed a word from Egyptian to talk about what they were doing with these bees and this idea of deseret and deshret so that they could take these because they knew the importance of bees. Even if, at that point, they weren’t keeping them themselves. It fits so perfectly into the ancient Near East.

Hank Smith: 01:05:31 Krystal. That’s kind of a combining of your two worlds, your love for Egyptian stuff, and then here you love the Book of Mormon, and when I bet those two slimed together in Ether chapter two, tell me how you felt when you’re, “Wow, this all fits.”

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 01:05:44 It’s funny because I’m reading this, and I’m like, “Yeah, makes sense, makes sense, makes sense.” And it’s not until I’m trying to teach it to somebody else, and they go, “Well, that makes no sense at all,” and I say, “Oh, okay, well, let’s step back. And why does it make sense to me?” So then I get super excited. I find Egyptianisms all through the Book of Mormon and these stories because it being written in Reformed Egyptian. I love it. I get so excited.

Hank Smith: That’s cool.

John Bytheway: I wanted to ask you, because I’ve heard the word there, deseret, why didn’t he just say honeybee? He didn’t say that for the fish. He just said fish or fowls, but with deseret, he says the word, and I’ve heard this is arguably the oldest word in the entire book because it’s not a translation. It is the actual sound of whatever they said when they meant honeybee.

Dr. Krystal Pierce: 01:06:38 I think it makes sense. Possibly he includes this word because it may have been borrowed from another language. That’s why all of a sudden he’s going to say, “Oh, by the way, deseret,” maybe they borrowed it from Egyptian, “Here, I’m going to tell you what it means.” Because it is a different type of word. The word for bee in Egyptian is just bee, because it’s onomatopoeic. It’s the sound that they make. Like in English, it’s bee bee. I like this idea that they took the crown and Lower Egypt and all of these things that represent the bee and said, “You know what? This is the word we’re going to borrow.” Lower Egypt is called the land of the bee. Its sign is the bee, and then this crown that I’ve been talking about, the crown of Lower Egypt, looks like a bee. It’s interesting connection.

Hank Smith: 01:07:30 Thanks for showing us that, Krystal. It’s really cool how those two worlds came together there.