Hank Smith: 00:01 Welcome to followHIM. A weekly podcast, dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come, Follow Me study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:09 And I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:11 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you. As together…

John Bytheway: 00:16 We follow him.

Hank Smith: 00:20 Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with my salt of the earth co-host; John Bytheway. John, you are the salt of the earth. And the reason I bring that up is because I didn’t want to say pillar of salt. I wanted to say salt…

John Bytheway: 00:39 Hold that thought, folks.

Hank Smith: 00:40 Yes. Hold on to that. Hold on to that thought. We’re excited to be back and we’re going to be in the Book of Genesis. And John, both you and I are a little starstruck today. Tell our listeners who’s with us.

John Bytheway: 00:56 We are so happy today to have Dr. Daniel C. Peterson with us. I’ve listened to him, read his blogs and everything on Interpreter Foundation and everything. So we are so thrilled to have Dr. Daniel C. Peterson with us today. And let me give you our listeners some information. He’s Emeritus Professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University. And I think Hank I’ve told people, I think the Church’s expert on Islam would be Dr. Peterson. I don’t know who else that could possibly be. 

Hank Smith: 01:26 A hundred percent.

John Bytheway: 01:26 He was born and raised in Southern California. He received a bachelors in Classical Greek and Philosophy from BYU. Studied for four and a half years in Jerusalem and Cairo. That’s so cool. Earned a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA. Has been a professor of Islamic studies in Arabic from 1985 until retirement in just last July of 2021. The founder, and until 2012, director of BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, which published dual language additions of classical Arabic works.

John Bytheway: 02:03 He served in the Switzerland Zurich Mission where they have the finest chocolate on earth. I’m just inserting that. For nearly 10 years, a member of the Gospel Doctrine writing committee of the Church served as a YSA Bishop for a ward adjacent to Utah Valley University. He’s a former Chairman of the Board of FARMS, which you remember as the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and the Author and Editor of numerous books and articles on Islamic and Latter-day Saint topics. And since 2012, the President of the Interpreter Foundation. I hope you will find that website. He and his wife are the Executive Producers of the foundation’s Witnesses film project. Oh, I brought my DVD, because I went and saw the movie in the theater and bought the DVD. And this is part of our box of approved Sunday movies to watch.

Hank Smith: 02:53 I went to the Interpreter Foundation’s website. Wow. I did not know how much there was. I mean, this is… It’s interpreterfoundation.org. Do you want to tell us just a little bit about that before we…

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 03:06 Yeah the Interpreter Foundation was begun in 2012, August of 2012. And we have amazingly… We have published at least one article every week online and they’re free. Every Friday, since August 2012. It’s nearly 50 volumes of material and it’s all available online for free and we’ve now done this movie and the docudrama that’s about to come out. And there are things on all aspects of the scriptures and related topics. So we try to deal with issues that… Not always, we’re not always trying to defend the church against criticisms. But when there are criticisms, we try to take them on straightforwardly. We’re not afraid of any topic. And if there’s a concern, then we’ll try to address it. So it’s been a lot of fun.

Hank Smith: 03:59 I’ve been looking just at the Come, Follow Me for this week. And there are dozens of articles that if… Isn’t it amazing in our day and age, the availability of gospel resources is… I can’t imagine telling Brigham Young or telling Wilford Woodruff about this.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 04:18 Yeah, no, there’s so much in fact that I can’t keep up with it. I mean, if I want to get ready for a Come, Follow Me lesson, I think, well, look at all the relevant LDS helps. I can’t. I don’t have time. There’s no time in a week to do it.

Hank Smith: 04:30 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 04:30 But which is a good problem to have as opposed to having nothing and being totally on your own when you’re trying to deal in some cases with Isaiah or something like that.

John Bytheway: 04:41 That’s why I think this is nice to be able to talk about this because a lot of Saints are eager to look for things. But they don’t know where are these guys coming from? What’s their angle? Can I trust this? And we can say Hank, yeah, you can trust the Interpreter. And you can trust that. This is great content. Faithful scholars. We just love Brother Peterson. How, like you just said, we’re not afraid to take on a topic. And that straightforwardness is kind of characteristic I think of you and that site as well, which is awesome.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 05:14 Yeah. Well my confidence is, the Church is true. There’s no criticism out there that is going to be lethal. Maybe somewhere we don’t have a good answer yet. And maybe that’ll come in a few years, I’ve seen that happen where I didn’t have an answer for a while and then suddenly something comes along and I think my word, that’s it. That settles that issue.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 05:34 I can remember once being hit by an issue, probably when I was a teenager. And I realized, I’ll bet there’s nobody around my neighborhood, not my bishop, nobody I know who knows anything about this. And you suddenly feel all alone. This is the first time. This is totally irrational, but this is the first time that this issue has ever come up and I don’t know what to say. And then I began thinking about, it actually had to do with the Witnesses, now that I recall.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 05:59 And I began thinking about Richard Anderson’s book on the Witnesses, which I had just read. And sure enough, there was a passage of about five pages that dealt with specifically that issue. It just, when I read the book, it hadn’t meant anything to me and I kind of breezed through it. When I came back to it I thought he nailed it. There was no reason for being worried about that issue. He’d already dealt with it. But not everybody is aware of that book or the equivalent in any given issue. And so the goal is to try to help them. I don’t want people to feel like they’re out there twisting in the wind and that no one has an answer because somebody probably does.

Hank Smith: 06:40 Dan, we want to turn this over to you. Genesis 18. Where do you want to jump in? How do you want our listeners to… What might be some skills they need to approach this text? Anything like that before? Any prelude before we read? Yeah, 18 through 23.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 06:56 Well, I think one of the things that people need to appreciate about these chapters is one of their themes is hospitality. And let me give you a little background to that from a Middle Eastern perspective. Hospitality is really important in traditional Middle Eastern cultures. And by traditional I mean here, not the Babylonians, but the Bedouins, I mean the really oldest, in some ways the oldest form of Middle Eastern culture. Even today one of the greetings that you have in Arabic when people come, and I don’t even know that the Arabs think of this, they’ll say to you  ahlan wa sahlan welcome. Well, ahlan wa sahlan comes from two words,  ahlan means kinfolk and sahlan means a flat place like a good campground. So what you’re saying to people. When you say ahlan wa sahlan like welcome to my house, you’ve come to family and this is a good place to camp. You should spend the night here.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 07:49 And that’s what you see when the Lord and his two accompanying angels come to Abraham. He’s out there in the plains of Mamre or some translations say by the oaks of Mamre or the terebinths of Mamre, he is eager to have them come in. And he wants them to stay with him. And this is classic Bedouin hospitality. And it’s a really important thing.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 08:12 There’s a poem from pre-Islamic Arabia, which says, I’m not servile in any other way. But when a guest shows up, I’m his slave. Anything for the guest. And they really believed that. And he would sacrifice almost anything rather than allow harm to happen to your guest. There’s this really terrible story that comes up later in this section of Lot offering his daughters to protect the visitors.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 08:39 We’re aghast at that and it probably says something about sexism in the ancient Middle East. But it also, and I think they would’ve meant it to be read as, he is so desperate to protect his guests. He is honor bound. It will be a disgrace to his family forever if he allows harm to happen to his guests while they’re with him. He will give up anything, including his children. There’s again a Middle Eastern poet, Imru’ al-Qais from the pre-Islamic period who leaves his weapons with someone while he goes off to do something. And the enemies of that man come and besiege the castle in which Imru Al-Qais’ weapons have been stored. And the master of the castle says “He’s not here.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:22 “Where is he?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:23 “I won’t tell you.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:25 “Well, let us in.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:27 “No.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:28 “Give us his weapons so that he can’t have them back.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:30 “No.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:31 “Well, we’ve captured your son who was out here hunting. We’ve captured him. We’ll kill him if you don’t let us in.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 09:36 And he says, “Well, I don’t want you to kill my son, but you do what you have to do. I cannot allow you to violate the relationship between the host and the guest.” I mean, it’s that important to them. So I think you’re seeing that here with Abraham. He’s dwelling in a tent. He’s in that way, a classic Bedouin. And you notice he comes out, he bows, he touches his forehead to the ground, please stay with me and it’s this strong sense of honoring the guest. Especially, I think it grows out of the fact that you’re out in the desert and this really inhospitable area and when a guest comes straggling along, he may need to help. And this is mutual protection. You hope for it too, if you’re in trouble. And there’s a person out there, and even if he’s your enemy, if you come in under his roof, he will not harm you while you’re his guest. He’s honor bound and it would be disgrace forever if he did anything to you.

John Bytheway: 10:34 I’m putting that against Ben Franklin’s fish and guests stink after three days, right? . Totally different culture…

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 10:42 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 10:43 … Than what we’re used to.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 10:44 There’s a wonderful section about this in a film that was done years and years ago. And I should have looked it up. I don’t remember where it is. It’s been posted again in a cleaned up form. It’s called the Faith of an Observer about Hugh Nibley. And there’s a really moving scene toward the end of the film where he retells the story of Abraham in the desert from a Jewish apocryphal source. And Hugh gets emotional. He tears up telling the story about how Abraham is not only welcoming to the guest, he’s out there, it’s a terrible burning hot day, dusty, the wind blowing horrible.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 11:21 And he is looking for stragglers in the desert. He says, I will not eat until I’ve helped some poor soul out here in the desert. And that’s when, according to that Jewish apocrypha, that’s when the three travelers come and he’s given the gift of his son and so on. It’s not just an arbitrary thing according to that story. It’s rewarding Abraham for his faithfulness and his hospitality, his sheer goodness. But it’s striking to hear Hugh tell that story, because he just chokes up. Means so much to him.

Hank Smith: 11:57 So as we’re coming into these chapters, that’s something that definitely keeps in mind is why they’re behaving the way they are is because of how seriously they take hospitality.

John Bytheway: 12:06 Hospitality. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 12:08 Yeah. It means more than just putting out a nice party spread. It’s taking care of the guest, providing the shelter. You notice some things like he says in verse 4 of Chapter 18, “Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. …” The idea of washing the feet leaps out at me because in the ancient world especially for travelers in the desert, that’s no mere formality. That’s something you do to refresh them. They’re dusty and dirty after traveling out there. And that that was a ritual practice, but a real practice throughout the ancient world, a friend of mine did a master’s thesis, I think on the welcoming formula in Homer. And he’s looking at The Odyssey and wherever Odysseus goes, he is received into a great house, they wash his feet. They wash him, give him a bath, anoint him with oil, and give him fresh clothing. And I think that ought to ring some bells with some people, when you’re entering a great house, that this is something that is done and it goes back to very real world things.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 13:22 Two, just a small thing. He runs to Sarah and says, “Make ready quickly, three measures of fine meal, knead it and make cakes upon the hearth.” And she’s probably making pita bread. Later on, I noticed with Lot, he talks about unleavened bread. That’s probably what it is. It’s the same kind of bread that Bedouin make today. It’s kind of like modern day pita bread, or almost like a tortilla on a flat stove. When she makes cakes, I don’t think we should think of Betty Crocker.

Hank Smith: 13:57 Right.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 13:59 So, but he’s showing real honor to them. He runs and he gets a young calf. Now you don’t do this for just anybody. You’re not slaughtering your herd all the time, but when guests come, you do. And so he gets a good calf and dresses it and gives them, he takes butter, which is probably leaven, which is really more like yogurt. They still use it in the Middle East for cooking and in stew and things like that. So, there’s a lot about this that still rings true in the Middle East. If you visited a Bedouin encampment, although the Bedouins are no longer quite what they once were. I remember taking a group of BYU students out to a Bedouin camp, we were told we were going to have a Bedouin experience. And I have to admit, I got a little suspicious when I could see a TV antenna poking out of the Bedouin tent, and when the Bedouin chieftain came out in an Izod t-shirt, I thought this is not quite Abraham. But still, some of those attitudes remain.

Hank Smith: 15:01 Yeah. And these three men in verse two, what would we say? If someone were to say, “Who are these people?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 15:08 Yeah. Well, I think it’s pretty… One of them is clearly identified eventually as the Lord and two of them are angels. And at one point, then the two angels go on and the Lord seems to exit the picture, when they go to Sodom, it’s just two. We don’t know what the Lord has done. One of the things that’s striking to me is, the continuum between humans and deity, that they described as men. They’re clearly not ordinary men and at what point Abraham recognizes that, I don’t know. Eventually he’s bargaining with him about the fate of Sodom. He ought to recognize he is not just three ordinary travelers passing through the desert. This is something remarkable. I don’t know when he notices that. When he first starts in verse three, “My Lord,” he addresses one of them as my Lord. He’s not addressing as Yahweh or Jehovah. It’s just a respectful term.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 16:03 But at some point he realizes this is unusual. And one of them is clearly the Lord appearing in human form with two angels. That’s pretty good stuff, and I think for some of our fellow Christian friends, it’s a bit of a problem, and poses a bit of a challenge. How does the God of the universe, who’s without body parts or passions appear in the form of a human being? I guess He can do anything He wants, but it seems a little curious. So yeah, this is a divine visit. It’s a remarkable visit. He entertains God and two angels out there in the desert. It’s a theophany.

Speaker 1: 16:49 Yeah, I guess so. And they ate.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 16:52 Yeah. It makes me wonder, well again, this is deep doctrine, I can’t answer it. Who is the Lord in this case? He’s eating. And in Luke, he shows that he’s physical by eating.

Hank Smith: 17:07 Right.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 17:08 But he’s eating here. Yeah. And so, it’s pretty astonishing. But they’ve come for a very practical purpose, and I think this is time for Abraham’s blessing to be fulfilled. He’s to have a son. And so, one thing that I like about it is it shows how the Lord intervenes, not only on the massive cosmic scale, but also on very personal levels sometimes. This is about one man and one woman, having a baby. And the Lord and two of his angels come down. Now, Abraham is an important guy, I grant that, but still, begetting and bearing children is, it’s not all together unusual.

Hank Smith: 17:51 Right.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 17:52 It happens. And so, they’re coming down for that. The unusual thing, of course, here is the advanced age of Abraham and Sarah. So when Isaac is born, Abraham is a hundred years old. Pretty amazing. They immediately began asking about Sarah and he says, “She’s in the tent,” which fits modern Middle Eastern ideas. The woman is sort of withdrawn. We see this in the west as sexism, but in the Middle East, it’s often regarded as treating the woman as a kind of hidden treasure. She’s not to be gawked at by ordinary strangers.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 18:28 So, well, there’s a house in Cairo that I really like called the Gayer-Anderson House, which is a traditional, kind of upper class, aristocratic, Islamic home, and there’s an area where the guests would gather. And then there’s an area upstairs behind Mashrabeya screens from which the women could listen in on the conversation. They would not come out and mingle with the guests, who would be all men. And so she’s in the tent and the tent is kind of her sanctuary.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 19:01 And so he begins to talk to Abraham, knowing that Sarah can hear, says, yeah, I’ll visit you again about this time next year, I think is what he’s saying. And Sarah, your wife, will have a son by then. And she hears it and because she’s so old, she laughs within herself, it says. She didn’t laugh loudly. But this is the Lord, He knows. And she says, “After I’m waxed old.” Come on really? And the Lord says, “Why’d she laugh? “Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the time appointed, I will return unto thee.” Verse 14.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 19:38 And Sarah denied this kind of embarrassing, because she’s lying now. Well, in a way she’s telling the truth. I don’t think she laughed out loud, but she denied saying, “I laughed not.” She was afraid. And He said, “Nay, but that didst laugh.” You can’t fool me. But He’s made this promise, which will then be fulfilled. And so, that’s a remarkable thing as well. And then we shift to Sodom and Gomorrah, a very different story.

Hank Smith: 20:08 It’s interesting, in our last lesson we talked about, they knew this blessing was coming, this, this seed, but they had tried to do some different things themselves, right? With Hagar, with maybe this is what God wants me to, maybe what this is God wants me to do, and no, no. Right. That’s not it. That’s not it. This is how it’s going to happen.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 20:33 And I think that’s often the case that the Lord will tell us to do something. He doesn’t necessarily tell us how it will be accomplished.

Hank Smith: 20:40 Right.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 20:41 Sometimes he eventually will intervene because we’re dumb and we’re not doing it right and He’ll finally say, “No, no, do it this way.” But sometimes he just says, “Do this.” And then it’s up to the leaders of his church or the Bishop or whoever it is to figure a way to do that or a head of a family. You’re supposed to do it, but how you do it is kind of up to you. We’re not puppets and we’re not led at every step. So they know it’s coming, but so far it just hasn’t seemed to materialize, and I’m a hundred years old now. How’s this going to happen? I just can hardly imagine it being fulfilled.

Hank Smith: 21:18 It’s a very human story, right?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 21:20 Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Hank Smith: 21:21 Where we know we have promises. We know there are blessings, but it doesn’t seem to be playing out maybe like we thought it would.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 21:29 Well, and I think that’s one lesson I’ve learned over my life that sometimes when things have been fulfilled, I’ve thought, “Oh, so that’s how it was going to happen. It’s not how I pictured it. But now that I can see it, I get it.” And I think that happens a lot of the time, that the Lord knows what he’s going to do, but it won’t necessarily come on our schedule, or the way we imagined it.

Hank Smith: 21:54 Yeah. And this being the original little family here of the faithful, maybe you should expect this. If this happened to the original family, all of you should probably expect this type of situation. Doesn’t Isaiah say, “Look unto the rock from which you were hewn.” Look to Abraham and Sarah-

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 22:13 Yeah. Right.

Hank Smith: 22:14 … as kind of a model to…

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 22:17 They are a model, and I think that we should be constantly thinking of Abraham and Sarah as models in many regards, and they were set up to be that. So we’re regarded constantly as the children of Abraham. There’s a reason for that.

Hank Smith: 22:35 So you said, now we switch over.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 22:37 Yeah. And Abraham’s still in the picture, because the men rise up. They’re looking towards Sodom, and Abraham comes along with them to bring them on the way, it says. And then the Lord says, you know what? I’m not going to hide what I intend to do from Abraham, because Abraham’s going to be a great nation. I trust him. All the nations of the earth will be blessed in him. I’m going to tell him. I know that he’ll command his children to live my commandments. So the Lord says, I’ve been hearing complaints from Sodom and Gomorrah about oppression and wickedness.

Hank Smith: 23:10 Hearing complaints, I like that.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 23:13 And I’m going to go down. And it’s interesting because he says, I’m going to see whether they’ve done it according to the cry of it, if not, I’ll know. So it’s interesting. I don’t think it’s really the case that God doesn’t know, but He’s going to do a very serious thing. And so, he will be a personal witness against them, that God himself will be. And so the men turn from hence. Yeah.

Hank Smith: 23:39 Dan, don’t you think that’s a good principle of, I’ve heard this. I better go find out for myself.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 23:45 Yeah. Oh yeah.

Hank Smith: 23:45 Just a good human principle of, I better not just believe what I hear.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 23:50 How many cases have I seen or experienced or been involved in or frankly, probably even done myself, where I’ve trusted a report and then found out the report wasn’t true? The bad things I was hearing about somebody within 15 minutes of meeting that person, I think, none of this was true. He’s nothing like that.

Hank Smith: 24:10 Yeah. I mean maybe it’s just a good human principle here, what the Lord’s trying to give us as a good example.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 24:16 I remember an administrative decision that was made. A good friend of mine, he just committed one of the cardinal sins of an administrator. He did not seek out other accounts of that incident and he should have done that. You never make a decision, if it’s going to be a serious one, based on one report from one person or something like that, because sometimes they’re just unjust.

Hank Smith: 24:40 Yeah. There’s two sides to every story. There really is.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 24:44 Yeah. But I won’t point the finger at that person because I’ve done it myself and we maybe all have. Yeah. But the Lord says I’m going to be a witness myself. But the Lord stays there and the two men go off, the two angels, whoever they are, go off towards Sodom. And then you have this wonderful bargaining session between Abraham and the Lord. And I don’t think it’s so much that the Lord really is being bargained down, but I think he’s allowing Abraham to demonstrate his compassion. That Abraham is the father of the faithful, as he’s often called, and the friend of God, and he’s a righteous man. But he’s saying, don’t destroy this city, if you can find even a few righteous in it. How about 50? How about 45? And he finally gets it down to 10.

Hank Smith: 25:37 Down to 10.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 25:37 Yeah. And the Lord says, “Okay, I won’t destroy it for 10.” The trouble is, when he gets there or when his servants get there, they can’t find even 10, which means it’s a really bad place. But, this bargaining again is, I just get a kick out of it. It is Middle Eastern in a way. I still remember a case where I took a family that was visiting Cairo once out to a shop in the bazaar area of Cairo.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 26:02 and they found something they wanted. I don’t even remember what it was. Say, it was $100. I can’t recall. And they bargained with the guy and finally they’d decided, “No, it’s a little too expensive. No, we won’t get it.” And then I think two days later, it was a Monday, we were going to be taking them to the airport and they said, “That thing at the bazaar, we really do want it and we’ll even be willing to pay a hundred bucks for it. Is it near the airport?” And I said, “Well, it’s on the way. I mean, if you promise to be quick, we can go there.” They said, “Okay, let’s.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 26:35 So we took him there and I knew the shopkeeper just a little bit, and they said, “Okay, okay, we’ll take it. A hundred bucks.” He said, “No, no, no. You can’t do that.” I said, “What do you mean you can’t do that?” He says, “You have to bargain.” And I said, “We don’t have time.” And he said, “Okay, then I’ll do it for you. I say $100 and you say, ‘No more than 60.'” And he did the bargaining on both sides and brought them to about 80 bucks, somewhere in between, and then sold it to them. And he says, “There. Now wasn’t that better?” And I thought, man, you guys have just had a cultural experience. This shopkeeper left some money on the table because bargaining is part of it.

John Bytheway: 27:13 That’s wonderful that maybe this comes from that culture that still exists today, I’d never thought of that before.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 27:20 Yeah. So it’s this back and forth between the Lord and Abraham, “Hey, can I bring the price down a little bit? Will you spare them for this?” But at 10, he decides, I better leave off. I’ve pushed it too far. And the Lord says, “Yeah, I’ll spare them for 10.” And then ultimately he can’t spare them at all. I read this and I feel like, man, I’m in a Middle Eastern bazaar here. Only it’s not the shopkeeper with a tourist, it’s the Lord with Abraham. But the Lord, really, is he really affected by Abraham? Maybe. I don’t know exactly how that works, but I think it’s a good opportunity for Abraham to demonstrate his worthiness. His posterity is not going to bless just Israel, but all the world. So his concern is for everybody, even the city of Sodom. He wants to save them if he can, and that’s why he is who he is.

John Bytheway: 28:12 I use this when I teach the Book of Mormon about, well, if you cast out the righteous from among you, then this place is going to get leveled. And it sounds like a similar principle that even if there’s a few righteous there, the Lord says, “I won’t destroy it.” But I’ve always loved verse 25 because it sounds like Abraham is showing God how to be God.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 28:31 Yeah, Yeah.

John Bytheway: 28:32 “May that be far from me. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Do you know? Haven’t you read the Handbook? You’re supposed to be like this.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 28:39 And you can imagine, he’ll say, “Well, I’m just dust and ashes. How do I dare speak to you?” And there’s that, but he is speaking with the Lord. And I like the phrase at the end of 22, “But Abraham stood yet before the Lord.” I think the standing before the Lord may be important here, because in the traditional court of the Oriental monarch, the proper pose before the Monarch is on your knees, forehead to the ground. I mean, you look at the standard prayer postures in Islam. When they touch their forehead to the ground, that’s the time honored gesture of a Middle Easterner in the presence of a despot Oriental Lord. And Abraham is standing before the Lord. When Gabriel has asked who he is in the enunciation, he answers, “I’m Gabriel.” And when Zechariah says, “But this is impossible. I am old,” and Gabriel responds, “I am Gabriel. I don’t care if you’re old.”

John Bytheway: 29:47 I’m old. I’m Gabriel.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 29:48 “I’m Gabriel and I stand before the Lord. I stand in the presence of God.”

John Bytheway: 29:53 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 29:53 When he says, “I stand in the presence of God,” it means he’s a member of the divine court. He’s not just some slave. He has status. And Abraham here, I think Abraham in a way, with the three visitors and God, Abraham is being made a member of the Divine Council in a way, temporarily. The Divine Council is at that tent in the desert, in the Southern part of Israel. In  Amos 3:7, when it says, “Surely, the Lord God will doeth with nothing but he revealeth his secret unto his servants, the prophets,” the word secret is sôd, which is richer than just secret. It means something discussed in a secret council. It’s like the prophets are invited into the council. They at least get bits from the council that they can then reveal to people on earth. Oh, I think that’s what Abraham is getting here. He is a member of the council. He’s involved in a discussion with God about the decision of the council.

Hank Smith: 30:49 Dr. Sears, Josh Sears, told us that even once Jeremiah says to a false prophet, “You haven’t been in the council. I was at that meeting. You weren’t at that meeting.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 30:59 Exactly. So where do you get off letting out what you say are the secrets of the council? You don’t know them.

John Bytheway: 31:04 You don’t even come to the meetings.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 31:06 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 31:07 And I feel like Abraham, it sounds like he’s getting more and more humble because he’s very bold and he’s standing, but he’s, “Okay, I’m nothing but dust and ashes.” And then finally, “Okay, don’t be angry. I’m going to speak just one more time,” in verse 32, and I guess it means suppose, right? It’s a King James way of saying, “Well, suppose there’s this many?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 31:31 Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if that’ll be true, but what if?

John Bytheway: 31:34 You’re not going to destroy it for those 10 people, are you?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 31:38 Yeah. So the standard is pretty low. Sodom doesn’t have to pass a high bar. But it fails so that tells you how bad the place was. So here we get to Sodom, and here again I want to say, there’s something else going on. Again, I think it’s that hospitality issue as well. The men of Sodom want from these two visitors when the two angels go to Sodom, but they want it by force and they want to humiliate and dishonor the visitors. That’s a violation of every human rule of not only hospitality, but just general human interaction. You just don’t do that. So contrast the hospitality of Abraham in the preceding chapter with the attitude of the men have Sodom, who when these guests come what they want to do is violate them.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 32:28 Compare it even with Lot. Lot begins the chapter very much like Abraham. He’s sitting in the gate and when the strangers come, he says, “Come to the house. I’ll feed you. You can wash your feet.” I mean, it’s very much like Abraham in the preceding chapter. And then, by contrast, come the men of Sodom who say, “Where are they?” And Lot is saying, “No. No, don’t do this to these men. They’ve taken refuge in my house. Don’t do this.” It’s a violation, yes, we would say of the laws of nature. I mean, it’s wrong. It’s but it’s also a gross violation of hospitality rules that are really important and that Abraham and Lot have just illustrated.

Hank Smith: 33:08 People become objects.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 33:09 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 33:10 I want to use that.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 33:12 Yeah. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 33:12 Treat people like things and things like people.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 33:15 Yep. I think that’s one of the things that would’ve offended people in the ancient Near East. No wonder the cry of Sodom has been coming up before the Lord. This is a rotten city where the first thought they have when two strangers come into the city is, “Let’s abuse.” It was a terrible place and I would bet that it had happened to strangers before who had the misfortune of coming through Sodom and sought to put up for the night out in the middle of the desert. I mean, if you know where Sodom probably was, it’s at the South Eastern end of the Dead Sea. Pretty miserable territory. If you’re coming through there and it’s late in the day, you haven’t had any water and you need some shelter, you go into Sodom to get at those things, and then it turns out to be this violent, criminal town, a horrible place where you may not come out of it all right at all. So the Lord is sick of it and he sends his angels to take care of it.

Hank Smith: 34:13 It’s interesting that Lot lives there, isn’t it?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 34:16 Yes. I’ve always wondered, what in the world would possess you to live in a town like that? So he’s brought out of it and maybe he needed to be brought out of it before he succumbed to it. He evidently hadn’t completely, but he’s raising his kids there. I think, okay, not a good choice. One of the worst places on earth you could possibly raise them.

John Bytheway: 34:37 I think if you look at footnote 8A, there’s a Joseph Smith translation. I’m looking at a commentary here. The Joseph Smith translation explains that, “The citizens demanded both the visitors and the daughters, but Lot refused both. All of this evil,” the Joseph Smith translation adds, “was after the wickedness of Sodom.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 35:01 Yeah, much more edifying. This is a really horrifying story on a lot of levels.

Hank Smith: 35:07 Isn’t that part of the Old Testament, Dan, are they just sharing the details?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 35:13 They have a very different attitude toward these things than we do.

Hank Smith: 35:16 Where Mormon says, “I don’t want to tell you. I don’t want to tell you, I don’t want to hurt your spirit.”

John Bytheway: 35:21 Good point.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 35:22 Maybe they had a very different attitude toward a lot of these matters than we do. I can imagine. I grew up in the city. If you grew up on a farm, some things just come across differently to you. If you grow up with flocks and herds and you’re always trying to get them to multiply, well, you have a little different attitude from a young age.

Hank Smith: 35:43 That’s true.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 35:43 And I remember a Latter-day Saint woman friend of ours who was the wife of the branch president in Cairo, they lived in Yemen for a while, and she was invited sometimes to all women gatherings, sometimes on the eve of a wedding. She would just come away stunned that the conversations were quite different than you would hear among Latter-day Saints on an evening before a wedding. A little bit on the earthy side.

Hank Smith: 36:10 Earthy, I like that. Earthy.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 36:10 Maybe none of this needs to be shared with the kids.

Hank Smith: 36:13 Yes. A little bit on the earthy side.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 36:17 But this whole chapter, there’s a whole lot about this chapter that’s pretty awful, but he eventually leaves and the men have to take it into their own hands, the visiting angels. They reach out and they grab Lot and pull him back into the house, and then they smite the men outside who are staggering around trying to find the door. They no longer can. And then they tell him, “Look, you need to get out of this place right away because we’re going to destroy it.” And I don’t know if the decision had been made to destroy the place until this event. They’re there as the intelligence gatherers.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 36:52 Well, they’ve seen for themselves now so the decision has been made, “We’re going to smite this place so you need to get out and you need to get out quite a distance.” But he goes to his sons-in-law and they say, “Ah, you’re joking. You’re not serious.” So they don’t go. And then the angels take him. And then he lingers. I like verse 16. “Well, he lingered. The men laid hold upon his hand and upon the hand of his wife and upon the hand of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful under him, and they brought him forth and set him without the city.”

John Bytheway: 37:21 This is not a time to linger.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 37:26 No. I’m thinking he’s looking around, maybe, “Well, should I take this and should I pack that?” They say, “Just get out. Okay, if nothing else, we’ll take you by the collar and just the scruff of your neck and drag you outside and plant you outside the city. Get out.”

Hank Smith: 37:45 What an interesting principle. I do that with my own sins where the Lord says, “Get rid of that sin. Let me linger here for a minute. I will. I will. I’ll leave. I’ll leave. Just let me linger here for a minute.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 37:56 Yeah. And I think that’s a good moral to draw from this. When the Lord says, “Get out,” get out.

John Bytheway: 38:03 Yeah. Get out now.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 38:04 If you receive that kind of inspiration or that kind of commandment, quit. Don’t linger. The fact is, a lot of us, and there’s the famous prayer supposedly of Saint Augustine, “Oh, Lord, make me chaste but not yet.”

John Bytheway: 38:17 “But not yet.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 38:19 Give me a few weeks or months, and then I promise I’ll get my act together. But the Lord means now. And I think this is, again, a good lesson for us to learn that you shouldn’t linger. The longer you hang around, the more likely it is that you’re going to start taking on the coloration of your environment.

John Bytheway: 38:40 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hank Smith: 38:41 The Lord’s like, “We are leaving.”

John Bytheway: 38:45 “I’m going to yank you out of here.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 38:46 Yeah. I picture it, this is probably not fair, but Lot and his family suddenly just being plopped down in the middle of the desert and looking around blinking and saying, “How’d we get here?” “Now move.”

Hank Smith: 39:02 There’s a great verse in Revelation. I think it’s… I want to say Revelation 19, where the Lord looks at Satan’s kingdom and he says, “Get out of there, my people.” It’s Revelation 18:4. “Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins and receive not of her plagues.” It’s really a, “Get out now!”

Hank Smith: 39:24 Yeah, get out of Babylon right now.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 39:27 Elder Maxwell used to like to talk about people who… They want to have a house in Zion, but they like to keep a vacation home in Babylon too. You can’t do that.

Hank Smith: 39:38 That’s exactly right.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 39:38 Linger, linger.

Hank Smith: 39:41 I stay by the Tree of Life, but I weekend at the great and spacious building. And then I come back.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 39:47 Yeah. So, he used to ask the question and others have too, how many people are active and how many people are valiant? There may be a distinction there. It’s an important one. We have to ask ourselves, which group do I fall into? Yeah, I’m there on Sundays, but am I really paying attention? Am I really into this or am I just kind of there? So leave the world behind. It doesn’t mean withdrawing into a monastery, nothing like that. But really making a decision.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 40:20 There’s a line from…. I’m trying to think, C.S. Lewis, who says that the Lord has promised to speak with us face-to-face. But one of the problems is we have to decide which face is ours. A line that I’ve always loved from the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, purity of heart, he said is to will one thing. If we’re double-minded, as James says, then we’re unstable. Purity of heart is to will one thing, to really be focused.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 40:52 But it has to be focused on the right thing. I’m sorry, I’m going to go a little bit astray here, far afield, but there’s an essay by Bertrand Russell of all people, a famous atheist floss for the 20th century. You don’t hear him quoted in church very often, but I’ve quoted him. He talked about once, he had an essay on the two most impressive men he’d ever met. And one of them was Vladimir Lenin. He rode with him for his… 24 or 72 hours in a train car. And he was deeply impressed by Lenin, but not positively. He said his impression was that Lenin was totally devoted to his idea of the revolution in a way, totally incorruptible, that he said he would have, without hesitation, leaned over and cut my throat and let me bleed to death on the floor of the train car and it wouldn’t have bothered him a bit. And he said he was unnerving. And that’s a kind of purity of heart, but it’s not the kind the Lord wants. It’s got to be purity of heart focused on good things, not evil things.

Hank Smith: 41:55 On the right things. I like that. Wow.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 41:56 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 41:58 That would be a little disconcerting to sit in a train car with Lenin.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 42:01 Yes.

John Bytheway: 42:01 Nope. I think I’m not going to sleep on this train. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 42:07 They’re told not to look back. And there again, this story about Lot’s wife is an odd one. But the idea of not looking back, we can take that as a metaphor very, very clearly and easily. Leave Babylon and don’t look back. Leave Sodom and don’t look back. Don’t keep thinking, “Man, it would’ve been nice.” Oh gee, I miss…” X, Y, and Z. No, just make a clean break. She looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. Whatever that act means, I don’t know. There are sort of salt pillars around that part of the dead sea, because it’s a really salty lake and it’s gone through various periods of expansion and contraction. It’s in a deep contraction right now. And it’s left pillars of dirty salt all around the area, and it stinks really badly. But I can imagine that that’s what they’re thinking of when they think of this passage.

John Bytheway: 43:03 We had a bus driver pull over and point and say, “There’s Lot’s wife right there.” So, I think there’s maybe a spot where there’s a particular pillar they like to…

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 43:13 Yeah. Well, some of them are about the height of human beings. I mean, they almost look like people. You can see people in them.

John Bytheway: 43:22 It does sound like kind of a harsh punishment to become a geographic formation all of a sudden for just looking. I was so excited to ask Dr. Peterson this, because isn’t there a hint in the Quran that she didn’t just want to go back, but she actually went back?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 43:39 Yeah, there is, yeah, that she went back and she’s punished for that. Yeah, that’s a Muslim tradition that it wasn’t… It’s not just a glance. We think that’s too harsh. But if it’s, “My heart’s really there. I liked that place. I had a nice house. I had lots of good stuff and I’d rather be there.” Like Laman and Lemuel always saying, “Gee, wish we could be back in Jerusalem.” They never really left in their hearts and look what happened to them.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 44:10 So, I’ve always thought along the way, by the way, Lehi is warned that they might wander off and be lost or something. And I think it would have been so bad? But he’s a father, right? He cares about Laman and Lemuel, but he brings them along and looks at what they do.

John Bytheway: 44:27 Well, I’ve always wondered; couldn’t Nephi just say, “You know what? You guys are right. Lehi, I’ll take care of him. You guys go back. I’ll stay with him,” Because he sees what they’re going to do to his posterity, and that might have been a temptation for me to say, “You’re right. Dad’s off his rocker. Just go back. I’ll take care of Sariah and Lehi.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 44:48 Yeah, yeah. Or you like this area. I think that they probably were attracted to South Arabia. The Great and Spacious Building, I think, was an old South Arabian skyscraper. They still have them in Yemen. They had to go behind Yemen through the desert to get to the Old World Bountiful, because I think Lehi was afraid they might have stayed in Yemen. Well hey, would that have been so bad? Let them stay. Nice place here. You might want to just buy a house and don’t come with us to the New World.

John Bytheway: 45:24 I guess we better bring along the opposition and all things brothers and-

Hank Smith: 45:28 That one looks like it’d fit you perfectly.

John Bytheway: 45:31 That one’s great. That one’s spacious. Yeah, try that one.

Hank Smith: 45:33 Hey John, I wanted to share a story from that talk with Elder Holland. It’s  “Remember Lot’s Wife.” And if our listeners have time, I definitely would… I’d take time for Elder Holland this week. If you’ve never read that, I would listen to it as well. It’s Elder Holland. It’s just the way he speaks. And he shares this one story.

Hank Smith: 45:52 He says, “I remember one fall day. I think it was the first semester after our marriage in 1963.” So this is way back in the 1900s. I don’t know if you guys remember the 1900s. But in 1963, he said, “We were walking together up the hill, past the Maeser Building.” This is him and his wife. “On the sidewalk that led between the president’s home and the Brimhall Building. Somewhere on that path, we stopped and wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into. Life that day seemed so overwhelming and the undergraduate plus graduate years that we still anticipated before us seemed monumental, nearly insurmountable. Our love for each other and our commitment to the gospel were strong. But most of all, the other temporal things around us seemed particularly ominous.”

Hank Smith: 46:35 And then he said, “I turned to Pat and said something like this, ‘Honey, should we give up? I can get a good job, carve out a good living for us. I can do some things. I’ll be okay without a degree. Should we just stop trying to tackle what right now seems so difficult to face?'” He said, “In my best reenactment of Lot’s wife, I said in effect, ‘Let’s go back. Let’s go home. The future holds nothing for us.'” And then he quotes Pat, “Grabbed me by the lapel and said, ‘We are not going back. We are not going home. The future holds everything for us.'”

Hank Smith: 47:08 I like that idea of the past is better than the future, like Lot’s wife, right? Let’s go back. The future isn’t going to be good. Where he’s like… And that’s part of his talk here. So, I would encourage everybody to go listen.

John Bytheway: 47:24 Yeah. That’s “Remember Pat’s Husband’s Story.”

Hank Smith: 47:27 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 47:28 Well, I can imagine that Lot and his family maybe felt, look, we’d made a home in Sodom, a curious place, but we’d made a home there and we had to abandon it. And we were actually kind of forced out. These angels grabbed us and hauled us out. We’ve got nothing. And … and now what? We’re out in the middle of the desert, I mean, wow, this is real progress. And again, if people have been there, if they’ve seen pictures of it, this is a desert that makes Nevada look like a tropical rainforest. I mean, it’s a really serious desert. So you’ve got to be thinking, again, what have we gotten ourselves into? Where are we going to go from here?

Hank Smith: 48:11 Interesting that you bring up Lehi and Sariah, this, “We’re leaving?” We’re leaving what?”

John Bytheway: 48:18 What they’ve always known.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 48:19 Yeah. They had to abandon everything.

John Bytheway: 48:22 Laman and Lemuel, this is the land our fathers gave us. And I just feel like when they were uprooted from their land, they lost part of their identity. And I’ve always wondered if that’s why Jesus just keeps telling… When he finally shows up in the New World, “You are my sheep. You are the House of Israel,” because their real estate meant more than just, “Oh, we’re going to move here, we’re going to move there,” like we do today, you know?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 48:44 Right. Well, that’s a really interesting thought. And yeah, I’ve sometimes thought I’d like to rewrite 1 Nephi from the standpoint of Laman and Lemuel, just because I think I can understand their complaint. ” Come on, we’re comfortable here. We lead a pretty good life. We’re well off. I know Dad has these crazy religious notions and he wants to abandon everything.” And I think if we demonize them and just say, “Oh, they’re evil,” we aren’t learning from them, because if we were in that situation, wouldn’t we have been tempted to react the way Laman and Lemuel reacted or the way Lot and his wife reacted? I’m comfortable here. I don’t want to leave.

Hank Smith: 49:30 I’m going to linger.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 49:31 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 49:32 So what are the odds? What are the odds this is going to be destroyed? Come on, this city withstood the Assyrians.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 49:39 Yeah. And when fire and brimstone comes out of heaven, this is not something that happens regularly. They weren’t anticipating that.

John Bytheway: 49:46 That’s not on the forecast. Siri said nothing about this today.

Hank Smith: 49:50 Hey John, I’ve got one to share with your kids. Are you ready? That a primary teacher said, “The Lord commanded Lot to take his wife and flee into the wilderness and his wife looked back and became a pillar of salt. And the little student said, ‘But what happened to the flea?'”

John Bytheway: 50:06 His wife and flea.

Hank Smith: 50:09 So share that one with your kids, John. I’m sure it’ll get a good groan as we talked about earlier.

John Bytheway: 50:21 Please join us for Part II of this podcast.