John Bytheway: 00:03 Welcome to Part II of this week’s podcast.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 00:07 So we just talked about what that phrase the Lord and the capitals means the name of the God of Israel, Jehovah. I want to go back and clarify too, when I said that in Chapter 1 that term God comes from Hebrew Elohim. I want to make sure we understand what that means, what doesn’t mean as well. So the way we use the term Elohim as Latter-day Saints is different from how the Hebrew uses the term Elohim in the Old Testament. Here’s the basics of the story. So as Latter-day Saints, when we use Elohim, we’re using it as a personal name for God the Father. 

Hank Smith: 00:39 John, right?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 00:40 Yeah. So we will say, oh, Jesus’ premortal name was Jehovah and that the Father’s name is Elohim. And you’ll hear in temple dedications like, oh, Elohim, things like that, addressing God the Father. That’s fine but that’s a usage that we have somewhat by tradition and by deliberate decision, but it doesn’t reflect biblical usage. In Hebrew, Elohim is the word for God or Gods. So it’s not a name, that’s just what it means, God or Gods. The reason I’m saying God or gods is because there is a singular version of the word El that means God and there’s the plural form Elohim, and it can mean either Gods in the plural or a God in this singular, it has both usages right there. 

Hank Smith: 01:25 And that’s going to come up for the Book of Abraham, right? 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 01:28 Yeah. Well, Joseph Smith is going to get thinking on that, and that’s going to be one thing he’s going to use to get this idea of there were multiple divine beings involved in the creation, for sure. But it can just mean Gods generically in the plural. Like in the Ten Commandments when it says, “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” It says, “Don’t have any other Elohim before me.” That’s the term it uses, just the plural there. And by the way, since Hebrew is cognate with Arabic, you might also recognize it cognate with the word for God that they have, which is Allah. It’s from the same route, it’s the same El, Allah, it’s all the same thing meaning God. So in the Old Testament, Elohim is not a name, it simply means God or God’s right there. 

  So what happened is in early Church History, Joseph Smith used Elohim and Jehovah really interchangeably all the time. He wasn’t making the hard and fast distinction between God the Father and God the Son. And it what isn’t clear until 1916, when the First Presidency released this doctrinal statement on the Father and the Son, that they said, “Hey, to avoid confusion and to keep our terms straight and make sure we all know what we’re talking about, we are going to refer to the Father as Elohim and the Son as Jehovah right here.” So that’s something that we decided and we have a convention. And I’m not complaining about that, conventions are fine, but we just want to be careful when we’re looking at the Old Testament that we don’t read that back into there and assume that our Latter-day Saint terminology is always going to match on to what they meant by it. 

Hank Smith: 02:57 1916, John, do you remember? Do you remember the announcement? 

John Bytheway: 03:03 Well, I was only 25-years-old back then.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 03:08 On the Religious Study Center website, there is an article going over all that Latter-day Saint history, it’s called, “The Usage of the Title Elohim.” It’s by Paul Hoskisson and Ryan Davis. So you can just search for Elohim at rsc.byu.edu and it’ll give you all the rundown and all this.

Hank Smith: 03:24 I have to claim my claim to fame, Paul Hoskisson’s my cousin. So that’s cool..

John Bytheway: 03:27 Is he really? I had him for Old Testament in my college days.

Hank Smith: 03:32 My mother is Cynthia Hoskisson.

John Bytheway: 03:36 I didn’t know that. I love that guy. It’s fun to tell our brothers and sisters that you probably know more Hebrew than you think you do. And when you see I’m, that’s plural, so yeah, Elohim is plural. But what’s lights and perfections? Urim and thummim, there’s that im again that makes it plural.

Hank Smith: 04:02 I’m going to put that on my resume, I speak a little Hebrew.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 04:05 The im phrase is related to the name Jehovah. That Jehovah Yahweh name, it seems to be somehow related to the verb to be. So when he says I am that I am, it’s a wordplay off of that name right there.

John Bytheway: 04:18 One of my favorite examples to point out is in the call of Isaiah and Isaiah 6 or 2 Nephi 16. And to notice in Isaiah 6 how I think it says seraphims and it put an s–seraphims, which is like saying geeses. But in the Book of Mormon, it gets it right, it’s seraphim. But seraphims or maybe it says… Yeah, I got to go back. But it’s interesting to say, oh, it’s already plural if it hasn’t im at the end.

Hank Smith: 04:47 Yep, interesting. 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 04:49 Well, we were talking about how the Chapter 2 creation narrative has some differences with Chapter 1. So we talked about the differences in the term it uses for God, the Elohim versus Jehovah. Some other thing that I think is fun is in chapter 1, God creates by simply speaking, “let there be” and so forth and things just react. Chapter 2, I think is fun because in Chapter 2, when God is working, he gets his hands dirty, he rolls up his sleeves, he does this. 

  So here’s some of the verbs it uses in Chapter 2, it says the Lord God formed, breathed, planted, made, took, formed, brought, caused, took closed up, made, brought, he’s very physically involved in this. It’s fun to see him doing these things. He’s down with the mud that’s there forming people and it’s a fun description I think. We’ve got that going on. And, of course, the Adam and Eve story is more fully developed in this one. In Chapter 1, it just says he made male and female all together, summative right there. Whereas here, we get the more detailed story.

Hank Smith: 05:56 And I noticed Josh, it’s definitely out of order. We start with heaven and earth and then plants and man.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 06:05 It doesn’t seem to be assuming that we’ve read Chapter 1 necessarily. And this doesn’t mean that these can’t bounce off each other in a really rich way. Again, even if you go with the theory that these were written by different people, you may or not, but at least, even if you did, at some point an editor thought that these should be put side-by-side to be read together.

Hank Smith: 06:23 And they’re not meant to contradict each other, they’re meant to complement each other.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 06:27 Exactly. The only reason you would have put them together, assuming they had been separate, was to compliment each other in a really huge way. So whichever way you want to go on who wrote this, it’s very clear that these go together beautifully and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So in this version, so in verse 4, some people think that the first half of verse four would go with what came before, it’s summarizing the first account. These are the generations of heaven and the earth when they recreated. And that the second account starts more properly in the second half of verse 4. 

  So in other words, “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens…” And it’s once again doing that thing, where it’s setting up the background before you get to the action. “In the day that the Lord God made the earth in the heavens and every plant of the field before it was in the earth and every earth the field before it grew.” And give all that background. But in verse 6 then you get the action. There rose up this mist or this stream, this flow and watered the whole face of the ground.

Hank Smith: 07:28 So that’s the same idea, is there’s water underneath us.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 07:31 There’s water underneath there, yeah. Here we’re starting with this desert waste setting, but this water is flowing up from beneath and it’s a controlled amount of water here. So this is nice life giving water. When it’s controlled and channeled properly, water’s great, it’s just they’re afraid of when there’s too much.

Hank Smith: 07:47 So there’s tohu but no bohu.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 07:51 So we get the watering of the ground there in verse 7, “The Lord, God formed man of the dust of the ground.” So the sense of dust in English sounds like it’s dry stuff, but from the proceeding, in Hebrew dust doesn’t have to mean that. It seems that we’re imagining mud here from this water that’s seeping up, it’s covering the ground here, and you got this mud, this clay from which he is creating this guy. “And he breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. And he became a living soul.” So you got this divine power flowing into this, a combination of his divine breath with this physical matter that you got there. Chapter 1 was more like a big overview shot, Chapter 2 is now getting down in the trees on the ground in its worldview.

John Bytheway: 08:29 Reminds me of is it Job again, “Dust thou art, unto dust shall thou return?”

Dr. Joshua Sears: 08:34 Yep, this motif of humans comes out of the earth. In fact, it’s even a pun in Hebrew. So Adam’s name in Hebrew is Adama and it means human. And there’s a wordplay here with the ground, which is Adamah. So it sounds like the same thing. This even with the pun between his name and the word there is significant, it’s making that link. Then in verse 8, “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed.” And here you get this sense, it’s like gradations of holiness as you get closer to the temple, it’s more and more holy. You’ve got all the land and then the most sacred part of that is this place called Eden and then the most sacred part of Eden is this garden that’s somewhere in there. So we’re moving into this spot here.

Hank Smith: 09:18 So it does sound like the ancient tabernacle, what we’ll study later, this idea for moving out of the courtyard, holy place, Holy of Holies.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 09:26 And we haven’t mentioned this yet, but both Chapters 1 and Chapter 2 are saturated with temple vocabulary and imagery and everything. So Creation is really depicted as God making this giant universe temple, of which the temple in Jerusalem is going to be a microcosm of Creation right there. And you get Eden imagery in the temple there, with the cherubim and everything. So there’s definitely going to be links all over the place with temple imagery to this stuff.

Hank Smith: 09:51 So it’s the garden in Eden not necessarily the Garden of Eden.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 09:56 Yeah. It seems that the garden is a smaller part of Eden, at least the way the grammar looks. And then we’ve got to verse 9, the trees set up there. Versus 10 through 14 are interesting because it’s like a long parentheses. Grammatically, it sets it up like that, that it’s a little bit of an aside. You get away from the guy and his story and we’ll get back to that in verse 15. But you got this long side with this theological geography going on here about this river comes out of Eden to water the garden and then it splits into four different rivers. And the name that you’ve got, it even names them all. You’ve got this river the Pishon and then there’s river called Gihon, another one Hiddekel and the Euphrates. So people are often wondering, why are we talking about rivers? What’s going on?

Hank Smith: 10:47 And why are they named?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 10:49 The interesting thing is two of these rivers correspond to rivers that we know about, or at least we have rivers with the same name. You’ve got the Euphrates and the Hiddekel up there talking about the Tigris. The Tigris and the Euphrates are these two main rivers that go through Mesopotamia. We have no other way to correlate the Pishon and the Gihon, except the Gihon is also the name of the water source in Jerusalem later. 

Hank Smith: 10:49 The spring. 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 11:12 The same name.

John Bytheway: 11:13 But this brings up a question about, well, I thought the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 11:21 So Joseph Smith teaches that and I’m not going to contradict Joseph Smith. Although I don’t know if the ancient Israelite writers if that’s what they’re thinking. They seem to always relate this story to events in the ancient Near East, what they’re familiar with. Joseph can be totally right, but in their view, I think they’re connecting these to places they’re familiar with. Because look at this, so the Pishon, this river, it encompasses the whole land of Havilah, and it talks about the gold there and stuff. Havilah is on the way between Israel and Egypt. So they pass there on your way down to Egypt. Then you got the Gihon, it says that goes down to Ethiopia, that’s Kush, South of Egypt. And then, of course, the Tigris and Euphrates you know about from Mesopotamia. So they seem to be linking these to their known world, which is Israel. And then you got Egypt and Mesopotamia on either side of that right there. 

  So why are we spending all this time talking about this? And there’s different ideas people have. I think it’s interesting that these rivers are flowing out of Eden and going to these places bringing that life and blessedness from Eden out into the world. And maybe it’s not a coincidence that these are all places where the Israelites are going to end up enslaved, in captivity, Egypt and Babylon are right there. This is one of many links in these creation stories to the story of the House of Israel later. 

Hank Smith: 12:38 These four rivers are going out from Eden to the world.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 12:42 At this point, these rivers are carrying this life giving water force out into the world. But isn’t that exactly what Israel itself is supposed to be doing later? “Through thee and in my seed shall all the families and nations of the earth be blessed.” Israel’s supposed to go out later and bless these nations. And they go to Egypt and they go to Mesopotamia and they have these experiences there. So maybe that’s got something to do with the significance of this. There’s other explanations too, of course, like anything in these chapters, but…

Hank Smith: 13:09 Water for them is life-giving, is that what you said? The river is life.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 13:15 We talked before about water being chaos and stuff. But when it is controlled, when it has a purpose and a function and God has now ordained it for a purpose yeah, in small quantities, now it’s a life-giving metaphor. And this possible link to the story of Israel is an important point to mention here just in passing while we’re at it. It’s interesting to note that the creation stories here, whether you’re talking about the Chapter 1 version or the Chapter 2-3 version, they’re not mentioned directly a lot throughout the rest of the Old Testament. You don’t find discussions of Adam and Eve or the creation as described in Chapter 1. It’s just not discussed very much in the Old Testament. You do get it in the New Testament, in the Book of Mormon for sure, but not the rest there. 

  For the authors of Genesis, these stories are really written as a prologue to the main story. The one they’re really interested in, which is the story of Israel. That’s where they’re excited to get to. That’s why there are so many chapters on Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah. That’s the real story, is Israel. So all this stuff here for all the attention and the interest that we in the modern world have with these early chapters, they’re not spending a lot of time here nor do they go back and talk about it a lot. Because a lot of this, for them in terms of the overall structure of Genesis, really is a prologue to the story of Israel, which is what gets them really excited. 

Hank Smith: 14:34 Wow.

John Bytheway: 14:35 Very interesting.

Hank Smith: 14:37 That’s awesome. They’re setting us up to learn about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 14:42 A lot of the stuff here is preparing the way.

John Bytheway: 14:44 This is how we got here, but here’s the real story.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 14:48 Israel’s job is to renovate the world, to save it, to save us from the violence and the wickedness that’s all there. And that’s an important story, that’s how God saves humanity, is through the house of Israel. So all this is setting up the environment where we’re going to get that story. So at this point, the rest of Chapter 2 is basically the setup for Chapter 3, with Adam and Eve getting ready for the tree, the different tree that are there and everything. And that’s next week’s lesson. So maybe we can pause on Genesis there. And this might be a good point to jump to the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham and the Pearl of Great Price and see how that builds on this foundation of Genesis.

Hank Smith: 15:25 And Josh, could you give us… There’s no fear in repetition here. We had Kerry  last week tell us a little of the history of Moses and Abraham. But if you want to give us a review, that would not be a bad thing. Where did these books come from and how did they get at the end of my triple combination?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 15:47 So let’s take a look at the Book of Moses first. And just by way of review here then, what is the Book of Moses? Where does this come from here? The Book of Moses is basically the excerpt from the first six chapters of Joseph Smith’s new translation of the Bible, the JST. So most of the JST didn’t end up canonized, we have a lot of it in our footnotes. But for various historical reasons, these opening six chapters, since they were so awesome, basically is how this happened, they end up in the Pearl of Great Price. So we have this JST chunk right here that we got. 

Hank Smith: 16:20 This was the project he started right after the organization of the Church, right? 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 16:24 Yeah, June 1830s is when he dives into that, it’s very early and a significant part of his ministry. And so since we’ve been talking about Genesis 1 and 2, we want to note that… So Moses 1 has no parallel in Genesis, it’s our great story of Moses talking with God and then confronting Satan and all that. So that’s the prologue. And then starting in Chapter 2 of Moses, is where you get the direct parallel to Genesis 1. And then Moses 3 would be the direct parallel to Genesis 2.

  Now, it’s worth maybe talking about what’s the relationship between these texts. They read differently but they’re also much the same. So what’s the relationship? Why are they different? How are they different? When Joseph Smith was working on his new translation of the Bible, basically what he did, he didn’t have an ancient document in front of him like he did with the gold plates of the Book of Mormon. Instead he has Oliver Cowdery buy a new copy of a King James Version of the Bible in English. He sits down with it, he reads it, and he just lets that revelation start flowing and he’s pondering it in his mind. And he will just start talking and making changes. He’s got a scribe there, it’s usually Sidney Rigdon, and he writes down the stuff. 

  Recent scholarship on the Joseph Smith Translation has been stressing that the Joseph Smith Translation represents different things in different places. In some places, it’s like that pure revelation with a capital R, when Joseph gets a whole chapter or two that’s not in the Bible at all. He’s just got these words coming to him, it’s revelation, it’s just new stuff and the scribes are writing it down. So that’s a big R capital R revelation right there. So some parts of the JST are like that. Then other parts of the Joseph Smith Translation look like they’re more like a process of Joseph wrestling with the English text, applying his logic and his reasoning and his deep thinking to it. You can see him wrestling with the text and playing with the words and trying to render it more clearly, adding his own insights to it. So it’s not necessarily like every single word of every single change is all dictated from heaven. Sometimes it’s doing one thing, sometimes it’s doing a different thing. 

  The reason that the book of Moses is special is because it’s often this big capital R right, you get lots of new information here in Moses. We actually have some places where Joseph translated the same chapter twice because he forgot that he already did it. And what you see there is he’ll sometimes make… The thrust of the differences there is that he’ll often make the same basic kinds of changes, but he’ll use different words to do it. So it’s not like every word is precisely exactly revealed from God. And it has to only be this way. He’s trying to teach and he’s trying to put ideas out there but it’s not always word for word, some of it is up to him, how to do that.

Hank Smith: 19:14 And I think we need to have this, we need to have some flexibility with him because that’s how it works with all of us. Receiving revelation, sometimes you feel like you’re getting just pure inspiration, other times you’re, “I’m I figuring this out? Is the Lord helping me.” I just feel like that’s very, I don’t know, that’s natural to my experience. I don’t know about you guys, but to me.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 19:35 And our classic major scholar on the Joseph Smith Translation was Robert J. Matthews, who has now passed away. One thing that he was really great at articulating was that the Joseph Smith Translation, again, it’s doing different things in different places. So in some places, he talked about restoring text that was once in the Bible but was lost, bringing that back. In other places, it might be that what we have in the Bible really is the original version, but Joseph is revealing additional details that were never written down, but that he’s adding them now so we can get some added cool bonus insight on stuff that happened back then. In other cases, he’s adding Latter-day commentary and in other places he’s simply modernizing the English, making it easier to read, stuff like that. So different things in different places.

  So when we’re comparing Genesis 1 and 2 with Moses 2 and 3, I don’t know that the best way to read it is to understand that Moses 2 and 3 is the original version and that Genesis 1 and 2 is a degraded version that got all messed up. Now, there are Latter-day Saints scholars who see it that way, and I’m totally fine with that position. I’m just outlining options here. But I don’t think it’s required that we see the changes in Moses 2-3 to have been original and that Genesis 1 and 2 is then the messed up version. It’s also possible that Genesis 1 and 2 is pretty much the way that it came from the original ancient authors and that Moses 2 and 2, what Joseph is doing is giving a Latter-day expansion, commentary, adding cool new insights and everything. So I just want to point out that there’s two options there and we don’t need to assume one or the other dogmatically, I’m open to both.

Hank Smith: 21:15 I like that, Josh. Thank you. 

John Bytheway: 21:17 Good to know. I really appreciate that too, that description of the JST, I think it’s very helpful. In fact, sometimes I wish we called it the Joseph Smith Clarification or the Joseph Smith Illumination or something because it’s not translated the way we normally think of it.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 21:35 And I love the JST. That’s what got me into scripture study in the first place. Was just got really interested in the JST somehow. So I love going through this stuff.

Hank Smith: 21:46 So Josh, should I read them side by side? Should I get my Genesis open or should I just jump into Moses 2 and just see what’s here on its own?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 21:55 Given that Joseph is doing different things in different places and that not all of the changes represent a restoration of pristine original text, my recommendation, when you study the Joseph Smith Translation, is to always study it side by side with the King James Version. That’s the base text that Joseph is starting with. He’s looking at a King James Bible and he’s responding to the King James Bible. So when you look at the JST on the side, often the only way to get in Joseph’s head and see why he made a change is to compare it with the King James Version and ask yourself, what did Joseph notice here? Was there something that sounded off to him? Was there something that didn’t make sense? Was there a problem to be solved or figured out here? And it’s often with the comparison that you appreciate the significance of the change he made. If you just read the JST all by itself without the comparison, you’re often going to miss getting into his head a little bit and figuring out the significance of the change in wording. 

Hank Smith: 22:50 So I’ve got my scriptures on my phone, I’ve got my paper scriptures, so I can look at them side by side here.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 22:55 So rather than go through it verse by verse because we already did that in Genesis, it might be worth our time just to summarize what are the awesome things that Joseph Smith’s expanded translation here, what does it add? What does it clarify? What does it contribute to you? And you guys know this just as well as I do. So let’s all jump in here, just have fun pointing stuff out.

Hank Smith: 23:16 Show us, Josh. I’m ready.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 23:18 Well, I’ll just pick us up. I think one of the great contributions of the Book of Moses is how much it makes us understand how involved Jesus Christ was in Creation. In a way, that’s more clear than Genesis because you don’t have to do the Yahweh or Jehovah or this and that stuff there. The Book of Moses says, like Chapter 1, verse 33, to go back a little bit, “And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them, for my own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.” It’s much more clear in the Moses version here than Genesis, that this is a Christ-centered text and that Jesus was the creator acting under the direction of his Father. And that this is part of his divine role as Jehovah, was to be involved in Creation. So I think that’s a wonderful contribution here to help us appreciate the savior in an additional role.

Hank Smith: 24:07 And Josh, you talked about how Genesis 1 is elevating humankind. Look at the verse… Then you add that verse 39 of chapter 1, “This is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” Once again, elevate the role of men and women. 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 24:24 Well, one of the big changes that Moses does is it frames the story from Genesis differently. Genesis is told from the perspective of a third person narrator describing God created this, God did this. Whereas, Moses 1 sets up this stage where God is going to tell Moses about how he created the earth. And then in Moses 2-3 he says, and I, God did this and I, God did this. So it’s a very different framing for the story where God himself is telling the story, which is really cool.

Hank Smith: 24:55 That is really cool.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 24:56 And again, that doesn’t necessarily mean that originally, thousands of years ago it read, and I God and that some mischievous scribe through and changed it all to third person God, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. But Joseph is definitely in the version he’s receiving by revelation here, it’s reframing it in a powerful way that really makes it more personal right there. 

Hank Smith: 25:17 So we don’t have to see the Genesis version as a bad version and this is a good, we could say this is an addition, Genesis is inspired, Moses is inspired, it’s more.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 25:27 They’re all in our canon–scripture. So I think there certainly can be places where Genesis did get messed up somehow and Moses is restoring the original version, I’m totally fine with that. But we don’t have to see every single change that way.

Hank Smith: 25:40 Do you teach your students anything about the significance of the first person idea, that God is getting up close and personal maybe here?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 25:48 That’s Chapter 1, verse 40, “And now, Moses, my son, I will speak unto thee concerning this earth upon which thou standest; and thou shalt write the things which I shall speak.” So it is framing this with the prologue that you don’t get in Genesis, as this is the story told by God to Moses. Here’s another way that Moses 2 adds to the Genesis experience. So in verse 26 and 27, this is the classic, “Let us create man in our image,” back from Genesis 1. So it’s famously a thing in Genesis 1:26 that God speaks in the plural here, “Let us create man in our image.” Bible scholars looking at that will probably correctly see this as an illusion to the Israelite idea that there’s a Divine Council, where God is ruling with other divine beings and angels and things there. That he often speaks with them as he makes his plans.

  But I love the even more specific clarification you get here in the Book of Moses, where verse 26, “And I, God said unto my Only Begotten,” So the Father is speaking to the Son, “which was with me from the beginning: let us make man in our image.” And that reframes it so you specifically see God the Father and Jesus Christ working as a creative team here. And I think that’s just beautiful. Modern scholars will call this the Divine Council or the Divine Assembly. And you see this again, this is an idea that’s in other cultures around Israel. They’ll have this idea that there’s a council of deities that are ruling and deciding things together. And Israelites have the same thing, they imagine that you got God, but he’s not all lonely and lonesome up there in heaven, that he has other divine beings that he communes with and works with. So you see this in different prophetic places, prophets talk about this. The famous scripture we have Amos 3:7, “The Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret to his servants the prophets.” 

  That word secret there, so it means this council, God is going to reveal these council decisions and plans to the prophets. And in fact, you get a lot of places in the Old Testament where you see that of all these divine beings that are on the council deciding things, you get a moral representative, and that’s the prophet. The prophet is the human seat on the council who gets to represent the human point of view on there. So for example, later in the book of Amos 7, Israel is wicked and they’re discussing, well, we ought to destroy them because they’re wicked. And they propose sending down this fire to destroy them. Amos speaks up and he is like, “I object. Please no, don’t do that. How shall Israel stand? He is so small.” And they go, “Okay.” And they scrap that idea. And then they propose sending locusts I think is next. He again objects and then they move on to another plan. So you sometimes see prophets, they’re not just passive listeners, they get to speak up and have a role in responding to things here. There’s deliberation going on, and it’s very interesting.

Hank Smith: 28:40 That’s Jacob 5, “Let’s just tear down the vineyard.” And the servant says, “Oh, let’s spare them a little longer.”

Dr. Joshua Sears: 28:45 No, no, no, let’s wait. Exactly. And there’s this great point where Jeremiah accuses the false prophet saying that they’re not on the Divine Council, so they’re not really speaking for the Lord. And it’s funny because the subtext is like, “I go to the Divine Council meetings, I don’t see you there.” So he figures. So there’s several places where you see God discussing with angels or with others. He’ll say things like, “Shall I talk to Abraham about what I’m going to do.” And it sounds like a rhetorical question, but he is talking to people and they have these discussions about what they’re going to do on earth or who shall we send to do with this mission. Like with Isaiah 6, “Whom shall go before us and whom shall we send?” And Isaiah volunteers because he’s on the council now. “Here am I, send me, I’ll go and do the job.” So this motif appears a lot of times. 

Hank Smith: 29:31 I have another question for you. It sounds to me and Kerry talked about this last week and I’m sure some of our listeners are going to think, “This sounds a lot like God the Father speaking.” Because he’s talking to his Only Begotten, “I said to my Only Begotten.” But yet what would you tell your students, that this is still Jehovah speaking to Moses?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 29:52 There’s different ways to look at that. I think one thing with Joseph Smith and the way he’s getting the revelation, Joseph Smith lives in an era now where we’re really distinct between the Father and the Son. So that language is much more prominent that’s going to be in the Old Testament. The Old Testament does not make a big deal about God the Father verses God the Son. That’s just not a concept that a lot of the Israelites seem to have had. They worshiped Jehovah and that’s their main deal. They have an idea often that there are other deities, and that even Jehovah can have a father. But they’re not really making a deal about that. Whereas here that’s theologically more significant to us now post New Testament. You can also bring in ideas of divine investiture of authority, that Jehovah can often speak as if he is the Father. He has the authority to do that, he’s an authorized representative of the Father.

Hank Smith: 30:38 I think Kerry talked about that last week. Didn’t he, John?

John Bytheway: 30:41 Yeah. And I think it’s a really good point because we want it to be so clear cut. But even in the Doctrine and Covenants in the Dedicatory Prayer, in one place they say Jehovah addressing Jehovah and another place it is Elohim they say or is it Holy Father? 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 31:03 He didn’t use the word Elohim, he uses Father. And this is because this is pre-1916. Joseph Smith used those titles that he knew from the Bible interchangeably. So you have to figure out from context who he’s talking about. The confusion that that can potentially create is why the First Presidency eventually decided let’s just keep our terminology consistent.

John Bytheway: 31:22 So in 1916, was it Joseph F. Smith doctrinal disposition on the… What was that document called?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 31:31 It’s called “The Father and the Son: A Doctrinal Exposition” or something. It was reprinted and signed in 2002. So it is on the Church website, you can find that.

Hank Smith: 31:39 And we can put a link to it in our show notes on our website.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 31:43 Sure, yeah. So the book of Abraham, of course, now this is all coming from that Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith got access to. So a lot of the stuff in Abraham is new stuff that’s not found in Genesis. But then you get chunks of it that do parallel Genesis. And Abraham 4-5 are now based again off Genesis 1-2, but told in a different way. And this version is different from Genesis and it’s different from Moses.

John Bytheway: 32:13 So I can anticipate our listeners, why do we want or need or what do I do with three different creation stories? How might we answer that?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 32:25 I think what we don’t want to do is assume that there’s one original text, and these all have to match it or they’re not inspired. I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. I think it’s totally fine to have parallel versions of the same story where the prophet working with God gives different emphasis, teaches different things, uses a text to teach different points and you have different versions. Just like the joy of having Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John rather than just one story of Jesus. They’re different, they stress different details, they emphasize different things. Occasionally they may contradict a little bit. But the fact that we got four stories of the life of Jesus is a blessing not a problem. Ultimately it’s good we have this.

  And Latter-day Saints, we have Genesis 1-2, Moses 2-3, Abraham 4-5, and the version of this that’s presented in the temple endowment, which is different in some ways from all of these again. So Joseph is giving lots of versions of this. And I think we’re meant to learn different things from all of them without having to rack our brains and think it’s a big problem that, oh, this doesn’t match this or the days of creation are different order here than they are here. If we’re trying to teach different things in different places, then those problems go away.

John Bytheway: 33:37 That’s a great answer. Perfect.

Hank Smith: 33:40 That right there, Josh, is going to be that right there. That is, how do I say that? That right there, that is just that right there. John, it reminds me of that verse that we get so many different ways, he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers. And then a different prophet says it differently and then Jesus says it differently and then … says it differently.

John Bytheway: 34:00 –says made to the fathers.

Hank Smith: 34:03 Every time it’s different, but every time it’s inspired.

John Bytheway: 34:07 That’s again that idea, is scripture static or is it dynamic? Another prophet could come along and say, “Hey, let me give you some more insight on that.” Or teach something different as Josh just said, I like that. Learn something different from these different accounts.

Hank Smith: 34:07 Let me emphasize something different.

John Bytheway: 34:20 And let me add, you brought up Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. One of my favorite JST changes, it’s not the gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark because you’d think the gospel would be the same, it’s the testimony of Matthew and the testimony of Mark and the testimony of Luke. And that, oh, okay, well, no two testimonies sound exactly the same and that’s beautiful, that’s what we want.

Hank Smith: 34:43 That would be funny. In testimony meetings, someone bears your testimony. Someone else comes up and we’re like, “We already heard that, we already-” 

John Bytheway: 34:48 That’s true. We don’t want that.

Hank Smith: 34:50 We don’t need more testimony, we already got one. So Josh is saying, maybe we should see this as a testimony meeting of Moses, Joseph Smith, Abraham,  the temple, same testimony just different verbiage.

John Bytheway: 35:07 What can you learn from this one? What can you learn from this one? What is being taught? What’s being… Yeah, love it.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 35:10 And it’s not just one prophet giving a different take on it from an earlier prophet, the same prophet can give different meanings. So to compare to… So Joseph Smith is doing that here in one lifetime. But another example might be Jesus in 3 Nephi. You’ll see him quote Isaiah and then he’ll quote the same Isaiah passage a chapter or two later and he’ll change the words and use the same passage to make a different point. And he’s not afraid to do that. He’s willing to change the words in order to change the message and he interprets it differently. The fact that he is willing to do that within a couple of chapters of each other, I think really he’s saying scripture’s flexible, you’re not just trying to bind it to one single meaning, it’s meant to teach different things. So just being open to the same phrase being used in different ways in different places, I think he’s modeling that really well there. 

John Bytheway: 36:01 Great thing to draw from that, that’s great. 

Hank Smith: 36:04 Josh, you reminded me of my friend, Anthony Sweat, who wrote a book, Seekers Wanted. Page 70, he says, “Written revelations, scriptures, are not the revelations themselves but rather records captured in limiting human language.” He says, “The purpose of scripture is not to be a perfect record of God’s dialect or diction, but to act as a personal Urim and Thummim, a launchpad for revelation to connect us to the same divine source that revealed the truths in the first place.” He said earlier, just a couple of pages before that, let me find it, he says, “We see the task of scripture study in fresh light. Our job is to get in tune with the same spirit that revealed the concept.” So I like what you’re saying here, it’s not the idea that we want to get the correct creation story, but we have four different creation stories to get us in tune with the creator.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 37:04 That’s great.

Hank Smith: 37:06 All right. What do you want to do with Abraham then?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 37:09 Well, we don’t have time to go in detail over every little thing, so just some overview notes here. So we noted that in Genesis 1, it talks in the third person about God creating, “And God said, let there be light.” In the book of Moses, the framing is different, word’s, “And I God said let there be light.” Abraham has a third framing, a third way to tell the story here, where it is they, “The Gods said, let there be light.” So now you’ve got a group of them doing it together. God acting with these other divine beings that are helping with this here. So again, I don’t think you have to say that one’s right and the others are wrong, I think these are all ways of looking at it that are each bringing different aspects of this to the forefront. Which is really helpful.

Hank Smith: 37:52 The Gods, what do you think Joseph Smith had in mind there?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 37:56 Well, one thing that might explain some of the differences between Moses and Abraham, in addition to inspiration, I’ll just make sure I say that too, Joseph Smith is totally in tune with the Spirit here. But one thing that also might be driving some of his thinking is that he has studied Hebrew in between Moses and Abraham, the Books of Moses and the Book of Abraham. He has studied Hebrew so now he’s aware, for example, that the term Elohim is plural, and that gets his gears thinking and opens up whole new questions to ask and insights to get. So that might be one thing driving the fact that he’s so willing to go this route here. 

  And there’s other places where some of his expressions that he uses, like look at Abraham 4:2, “And the earth after it was formed was empty and desolate.” And that’s a really great description of tohu wa bohu there. And he knows what that means now from his study of Hebrew. We know he studied Genesis 1 with his Hebrew teacher. So there’s places like that now where he’s utilizing that and harnessing that here. 

  And there’s some places where a change was made in Moses, so he changed the King James Version to something. But he changed it away from the meaning of what the Hebrew means. And maybe now that he’s figured out, “Oh, I didn’t… In the King James Version that looked like a problem, but now I get what it’s doing in Hebrew.” He actually reverts back to the original King James reading here in the Book of Abraham. So he’s going all sorts of directions with this. And you can see it as a later stage in his understanding of doctrinal ideas and his mastery of the original languages and how he’s trying to put it all together, and it’s really great.

Hank Smith: 39:30 Josh, I like what you’re doing here. I often tell my students when we’re reading the Book of Mormon, “Try to get Mormon’s head as the author. Well, you’re doing this with these Joseph Smith writings. Let’s try to get into his head here and see what he’s experiencing.

John Bytheway: 39:44 Oh, just noticing a different word choice in Abraham 4:2, instead of God moving above the waters what does it say in Genesis, “He was brooding upon the face of the waters,” that’s a… Brooding, what is that, is a thinking,pondering.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 40:02 Oh no, this is him hovering. Which is a good sense of the Hebrew there too. The Spirit is just flying there over the waters entering this chaos and darkness there, getting ready to do its thing. Then you notice Joseph Smith is big here, he really taps into this idea of organizing and structuring that you get there in that Hebrew sense there. So like in verse 7, “The Gods ordered the expanse,” there in verse 15, “He organized them.” So the organizational thing that we talked a lot about back in Genesis 1-2. Joseph’s really bringing that to the forefront here right there. You see the Gods counseling together, they’re planning things, they prepare things before they actually do it. So it just adds all this nuance and richness here with this idea that there was a council working in harmony and deciding things. And it highlights that in ways you don’t get in the other versions.

Hank Smith: 40:58 You’ve got the Gods organized in verse 14. These were words you were using in Genesis, you were saying that the Hebrew was highlighting this idea. Josh, when you were in your Hebrew studies, did you want to raise your hand in class and say, “Hey, I’ve got an interesting version of Genesis from Joseph Smith?”

Dr. Joshua Sears: 41:18 I would from time to time share stuff. We’d be talking about the temple and Jerusalem and I’d be like… They’d always talk about it as a past tense thing because most of my colleagues and fellow students were Jews or Christians. And for them, the temple is a past thing. And I would bring up that we still have temples today that we see a connection with. It was always a very open, welcoming, kind environment. People were really interested in things like that. Grad school Biblical Studies, sometimes there’s this idea out there that it’s these atheists trying to knock your faith out constantly. For me, it was always a very ecumenical environment. Everyone was really fascinated by what I had shared about my own faith tradition and I loved learning from theirs. So yeah, we actually felt pretty free to share this stuff. And people always thought it was really interesting.

John Bytheway: 42:00 This was University of Texas at Austin when the…

Dr. Joshua Sears: 42:03 Yeah. And the Ohio State University. 

John Bytheway: 42:05 And the Ohio State. 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 42:06 Just great people.

Hank Smith: 42:08 Josh, where did you highlight that they’re doing things before?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 42:12 So for example look at Abraham 4:18. “And the God’s watched these things which they had ordered until they obeyed.” So there’s the sense that time is going on and this takes a while, not just instantaneous like you might assume from Genesis, right? 

Hank Smith: 42:26 Right. That made me laugh, by the way. I’m going to share that with my wife. “And the parents watched the children which they had ordered until they obeyed.”

Dr. Joshua Sears: 42:35 I can relate to that.

John Bytheway: 42:37 We’re going to be watching for a long time.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 42:40 Verse 31, “The Gods said: We will do everything we have said, and organize them; and behold, they shall be very obedient.'” That’s also what parents want to see happen.

Hank Smith: 42:49 Yeah, “They will be very obedient.” Josh, I wanted to mention something just because you said that. I think it was Elder Bednar, you guys can both probably remember, who said, “When the Lord says we’re going to create something spiritually before we create it physically.” He said, “that’s what we should do as well with our mourning prayer and our evening prayer. The morning prayer, we spiritually create our day and our evening prayer is to return and report. So we’re praying always in that way because we have that spiritual creation of our day in our minds. To me, that impacted my life. My morning prayers became a spiritual creation of my day and my evening prayers became a return and report on the creation. The bad part is, whenever they return and report in the scriptures or the temple, we did everything exactly as we said. And my return and report doesn’t sound like that. I said, “Well, I got maybe 1% or 2% of it.” 

Dr. Joshua Sears: 43:54 I remember changing my morning prayers too because otherwise you’re thinking, “Why am I praying here in the morning like the last thing I remember? It seems like five minutes ago I said my night prayer.” But when you see it as looking forward to the day and spiritually creating before it happens, that’s a powerful insight. 

John Bytheway: 44:11 It’s almost like to me, a patriarchal blessing can be like, “Here’s your capacities, your talents, your gifts, here’s a blueprint. Now, go strive to make it happen with the Lord’s help.”

Hank Smith: 44:24 John, I like that a lot. There was a time in the temple where I thought, of all the scripture stories, this one is the one we’re going to review over and over and over. And for a while I thought, “Why?” And I think part of that has to be what we’re talking about, where the Lord says, “Look, you’re the child of a creator, I want you to create. You’re going to create a happy marriage, you’re going to create a happy family, you’re going to create a career, you’re going to create whatever. Create the way I create, deliberate, planned, careful, ordered. Keep your eye on the goal, don’t rush Day 7. All of a sudden don’t rush to the end, don’t try to get it all at once. Do it, be aware that in any goal, any creation there’s a Day 1 and there’s a Day 2 and there’s a Day 3. And don’t worry.” 

  That helps me go, “Well, John is on Day 6, spiritually, I’m still back on Day 2. But I’m creating. One day I’ll get there.” So it helps me not compare. I don’t know, Is there anything else that you guys have felt or seen from just this story of the Creation in any of the accounts we have, Genesis Moses, Abraham, the temple that has helped you live?

John Bytheway: 45:38 Well, just what you said, Hank, the temple, Section 88, “Prepare a house of order, a house of faith, a house of prayer.” And he’s telling him, “Start your plan, start your spiritual creation of this.”

Hank Smith: 45:50 Josh, what do you get out of the Creation stories?

Dr. Joshua Sears: 45:53 Well, I love how in Moses and Abraham, it has a setup before the Creation story that impacts how you read it. So we talked about in Moses 1, God’s talking to Moses and that’s the setup he says, “This is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” That makes you read creation with a very different framework. And same thing here in Abraham. So Chapter 4 is our parallel account to Genesis 1. But right before that starts at the end of Chapter 3, you get this description of those spirits that Abraham sees, the noble and great ones that are in the presence of God, “These, I will make my rulers. You were chosen before are born.” 

  And it talks about verse 24, “There stood one among them that was like unto God,” I’m assuming this is Jesus Christ, “and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth wear on these, all the spirits may dwell; And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; And those who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who shall keep their first estate; and those who shall keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads forever and ever.” 

  And it’s just this amazing expansive view of this is why we’re here. And it’s not meaningless, it’s not random, we’re here for a reason, we have a creator. And even if these accounts aren’t giving us the physical scientific structure of how the earth was created, like big deal, I’d much rather know this stuff. I want to know who my creator is, why I’m here. So that even if I don’t know the details of how creation happened, I know who my creator is and I know how I can get back to him. And I think that’s really empowering. 

John Bytheway: 47:42 It’s a purposeful creation not, I think Elder Maxwell said once, “Not an accidental arrangement of atoms.” So it’s not exactly how I did it, but here’s why I did it.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 47:54 So one thing we can take away from the story of Adam and Eve– Genesis, that the story seems designed to do, is to really, for readers to see their story as in a lot of ways our story. That their story is an archetype for the story that we go through. So for example, one way that the story does this is by the names it gives these characters. So Adam, his name Adam in Hebrew means human being. That’s about as generic as you can get when you want to name a human being. Eve’s name means living or a live, life, something like that, living one. So it’s also a generic thing. And by having names that are these big categories, it invites us to put ourselves into that category with them. 

  And even in the endowment, in the temple, it’ll invite us. That’s the reason that it reviews their story so that we can see ourselves as part of the same story, and put ourselves in their place. Where Adam and Eve start off in the presence of God and they have to leave his presence and then they’re trying to figure out, how do we get back to his presence? And that’s through the temple, that’s through covenants, that’s through the Atonement. And our story is basically the same. We start off in God’s presence, we come here to this earth, and we’re trying to all figure out how we can get back there and reclaim that paradise and the presence of God there. And it’s the same journey that they took through temples, through covenants, through the atonement, and I think that’s a great contribution. So in addition to whatever the story is trying to say about the historical figures of Adam and Eve, it is at least trying to do this as set up this archetypal story that’s all of our story. 

Hank Smith: 49:23 Josh, we’ve had a fantastic day with you today, walking through these creation accounts. Honestly, this has changed a lot for me. I’m just so, so grateful. I think our listeners would be interested in your… You become a biblical scholar yet here you are, a believing faithful Latter-day Saint. I think they’d be interested in that journey.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 49:43 I guess I would say first off that the foundation for my testimony is the witness of the Holy Ghost. I’ve been experiencing that long before I went to college. Spent 13 years in college, it was a long time. And that comes from the Book of Mormon honestly. I think the Old Testament has enriched my testimony but the Book of Mormon is the foundation of it. And it’s actually my favorite book. If I could have done 13 years of college on the Book of Mormon, I would have done that. There’s just no programs for it. But the Book of Mormon and the spiritual experiences I’ve had feeling God’s love and understanding his plan for me while reading the Book of Mormon has really been foundational to my entire life. And honestly, one of the reasons I got into the Old Testament was to understand the Book of Mormon better because the Book of Mormon is so full of Old Testament things. So I just love the Book of Mormon. And I know from the Holy Ghost that it is true.

  Also I would say I had a lot of experiences in my life with God’s miracles. I used to just assume that everybody has these. I’ve talked to a lot of people, apparently that’s not everybody’s experience. But I’ve just had a lot of experiences with immediate miraculous answers to prayer, wonderful direction from my heavenly father, people who are healed in miraculous instant ways. So that’s not everybody’s experience and it doesn’t have to be, but I have had those. So when I read the scriptures about revelation and about miracles and about healing and these things, it does not sound like a foreign old timey concept to me, it’s something I’ve experienced and that I’ve seen God’s hand in my life and those that I’ve served with and people that I love. 

  As far as the academic study goes, this has only strengthened my belief in the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think the Old Testament is a great way to wrestle with some of the deep, hard issues that we have with faith and testimony. Again, the Old Testament’s not the foundation of my testimony, but it sure has helped me wrestle with things. I’ll just give some examples here. I’ve met with people who really struggle when they find examples of modern prophets who either didn’t know something or got something wrong or made a mistake. They have this idea that prophets are perfect and that they know everything and they would never mess up. And when they see Joseph Smith or Brigham Young or somebody doing that, it can be totally damaging. Well, they can’t be a prophet. 

  While I’m spending all my time going through the Old Testament, and it’s just full of stories of these imperfect prophets. So some examples, I think of Joseph in Egypt, amazing revelations. He can interpret the dreams of the butler and the baker, he knows what’s going to happen with Egypt for all these years. But then when his brothers come and he reveals himself to them, what’s the first thing he asks them? “Is my father alive?” He so desperately wants to know if his dad’s alive. Apparently I imagine he must have asked that in prayer many times and that he never got that answer. So he just desperately wants to know that. So knowing all the amazing things he had revealed it didn’t mean he’d know everything, even something he wanted to know so much. So God reveals things to prophets, that’s the miracle, but it doesn’t mean they know everything. So when I see prophets today or other places that have some blind spots or things they don’t know, that doesn’t surprise me because the Old Testament’s primed me for that.

  Another thing that I love about the Old Testament is, I’ll put it this way, the Book of Mormon has fantastic characters, but Nephi, Mormon tend to paint them as black or white, they’re all good or all bad. You don’t find a lot of morally gray in the Book of Mormon. You have good people, bad people, it’s really easy to separate them into the heroes and villains. And you have some people that are really bad and then they become really good. But there’s not a lot of people who are in that gray zone where most of the rest of us feel like we live, where sometimes we’re the villain., sometimes we’re the hero. But the Old Testament is just full of gray characters and moral ambiguity and choices where there’s not one right or wrong way to do this and things are hard and complex.

  The reason I think that’s so nice, I’m not trying to put down the Book of Mormon there, it’s great for what it does in giving us those models and the ideal to follow. But the Old Testament shows people who sometimes feel a lot more like me in the world that I live in, where things are complicated, there’s trauma people go through, you have just these really gut-wrenching choices and priorities you have to make. And the Old Testament is just full of people like that. You ask yourself, is David a hero or a villain? You can’t really do that, it’s hard. And there’s people like that all over the place. So I think it’s really good for just wrestling in that ambiguous area where you’re trying to do your best, and it sometimes doesn’t work out very well. People who are doing that, and it’s just story after story of just wrestling with that ambiguity right there.

  So I think it’s really good for just learning from these people, what did they do? How did that turn out for them? The Old Testament forces us to ask all sorts of hard questions. It brings up genocide, it brings up sexual assault, it brings up poverty, and issues of class and ethnocentrism. The Old Testament brings up family structures and family conflict and what happens when the family… It’s just full of all this stuff. So as we wrestle with all these problems in the modern world, I think this is just such a fantastic resource. And it’s, I think for me, trained me to really embrace that wrestle. And that’s only strengthened my faith to recognize there’s not always an easy, clear cut answer to everything and that’s okay, that’s the way God works with us. And the Old Testament is great for just practicing that exploration and the wrestle.

John Bytheway: 55:07 Great. 

Hank Smith: 55:10 I’m putting up where’s my number 10.

John Bytheway: 55:14 I need an emoji right now. No, it’s really great because I think you’re right. And I think the Old Testament will bless a lot of people because of that. I think we talked about this a little bit, and I can’t remember who it was, Hank. That was like, I identify more with Martin Harris because I did some good things, I made some mistakes too. And I feel like that’s more me than always doing every… And the Book of Mormon does, it’s a very this or that type of a book, and I’m glad you brought it up. I was thinking of Sampson, even Moses.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 55:45 Moses kills a guy and then he is not allowed to go to the promised land.

John Bytheway: 55:47 He’s not even allowed to go in. Oh my goodness. So beautifully said. Thank you so much.

Dr. Joshua Sears: 55:54 I’ve had people tell me, “I love the Book of Mormon, but why would I want to go through the extra effort to go to the Old Testament?” But I do think, not that it’s better or anything, but that there are some unique things it does and that it’s really good at doing that are worthwhile. If you embrace the weirdness, embrace the complexity, roll with it, don’t expect everything to line up and be great, it’s a foreign world to jump into. But my experience is that if you’re willing to pay that price of studying a little and wrestling with the text, it’s fascinating and just ultimately enriching. Even the parts that are hard and gut wrenching and all that. It just helps you wrestle with the messy reality of life.

John Bytheway: 56:34 Beautifully said. 

Hank Smith: 56:35 We want to thank Dr. Josh Sears. Wow, wow, wow. What a great day, Josh. We hope to have you back on the podcast. We want to thank our executive producers, Steve and Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen and our production crew, Lisa Spice, Jamie Nelson, David Perry, Kyle Nelson, Will Stoughton and Scott Houston. We hope that all of you will join us on our next episode of followHIM. 

  Make sure to find us on social media, you can find us on Facebook, on Instagram. We would love it if you would subscribe to, rate, and review the podcast, that would help us quite a bit. Come to followhim.co, followhim.co for transcripts, show notes. Any references Josh or John or I made today, you can find them on the website as well as transcriptions in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. And, of course, if you want to see our faces, you can go find us on YouTube.