John Bytheway:  00:03  Welcome to Part 2 of this week’s podcast.

Hank Smith:  00:07  And there’s a bit of a… “Who’s the birthright son?” We actually name the tribes of Israel here. In Chapter 29 and 30, you can find them all: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  00:19  Do you know how many times in scripture history the firstborn son doesn’t wind up with the birthright? Most major stories. Most major stories.

Hank Smith:  00:30  Isaac wasn’t. It was Ishmael who was the firstborn. Then we have Jacob and Esau.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  00:34  You could run down all through the scriptures, run to the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel, mess that up.

Hank Smith:  00:39  I ask my students, “Tell me the 12 tribes of Israel.” And they often can’t name them all. So it’s kind of fun to go through these two chapters and…

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  00:47  I’m not sure there are a lot of people in the building I teach who could name them from memory, eh? Who remembers Zebulon?

Hank Smith:  00:53  Yeah. Gad. Asher.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  00:55  Yeah. And more people couldn’t point them out on a map, okay? We’re Ephraim-centric, and the reason we are is because Ephraim is the umbrella term for the whole Northern Kingdom, which became the metaphor for Lost Israel, Judah was the umbrella term for the Southern Kingdom and the name of the kingdom. Even though lots of Judah were deported, that which remained kept the title “Judah”. The Jewish people are described in our scriptures with the umbrella term “Judah”. That’s people who are Jews of all tribes, but have never forgotten… They were never Lost Israel, even though they’re scattered. And Ephraim is the umbrella term for people of all tribes in the gathering. So I had a student one time that said, “Oh, I wish my patriarchal blessing said “Ephraim”, it says…” And I said, “You’re of Ephraim as much as I am, because everybody is.” Okay? That you have Dan in your patriarchal blessing is a remarkable insight by the patriarch to let you know something about you, but you’re as Ephraim as surely as I am or everybody else on this planet.

Hank Smith:  02:02  And it seems to me, Jeff, in these two chapters, that they’re naming their children after how they feel at the time. Am I supposed to get that?

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  02:10  How they feel or some circumstance associated with their birth, but a lot of people do that, and it’s been done right up until the modern times when, basically, social culture’s been assigning names, but if you go back to the pioneer times, you have people named Thankful or people named Trial or people named Prudence or people named all kinds of unusual things. We’re not immune to unusual names except that our unusual names are different in the 21st century. But yeah, a lot of times, it’s circumstantial.

Hank Smith:  02:38  And then Joseph is born and he kind of takes center stage here eventually, but you said that Jacob is going to have a couple more experiences before we get to Joseph.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  02:47  Well, Joseph is born prior to Genesis 32 and Joseph is emphasized by the writers and editors of Genesis, which start with Moses, but it becomes very complicated later, because Joseph becomes the ultimate birthright son of Jacob, and so Joseph has to be emphasized in the narrative and Joseph is remarkable too. Come back, talk about him. How many Latter-Day Saints know that their great grandfather, which is who Joseph is, was the Prime Minister of Egypt? Now, when you look at it, what’s the function? He was the second only to the king and did everything in the name of the king. That’s the Prime Minister. That’s the executive of government. And how many know Joseph’s wife’s name? How many know their grandmother, Asenath? Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On? We should know this genealogy, because they should be as real to us as people five generations ago.

John Bytheway:  03:53  Could you talk about that a little bit? Because in some of the reading I was doing, and I love to hear you pronounce it because I wasn’t sure how to say it. Asenath?

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  04:01  “Asenath” is how you’d say it in Hebrew, or even in more Orthodox-accented Hebrew, “Asenath”, but “Asenath” is the correct pronunciation.

John Bytheway:  04:12  Can you talk about the family that she came from? I’ve read different schools of thought about, did Joseph marry outside of the covenant family or not?

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  04:21  In the teachings of Joseph Fielding Smith, he concluded that she did not, that Potiphera, the priest of On… On, by the way, is Iwun in Egyptian. Iwun was what we know in Greek as Heliopolis, and Heliopolis is a northern suburb of Cairo today and it’s where the airport is, so whenever I fly into Egypt with a group of students or tourists and we land at the airport, I say “Your grandma lived here.” Because Asenath was the daughter of Potiphera, the priest of Heliopolis, the priest of On. To get a little chuckle, I said, “You just ought to know where your ancestors are from, right? Grandma lived at the airport.”

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  04:57  In any case, when Joseph was ruling over Egypt in what we would call the second intermediate period or the Hyksos period, much of the northern population of Egypt, in the Eastern Delta, was Canaanite rather than Native Egyptian. Canaanites were the same people that Abraham ministered among and were bringing into his clan, and Abraham had a clan of perhaps 2,000 people, right? He could raise 900 men to go to battle in Genesis 14, so he had a big clan and you usually don’t think of Abraham as A, a military warrior or as being a clan leader of a clan that’s at least 2,000 people, but when you can raise 900 people to go to a battle, that means you’ve got a significant female population as well with that.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  05:46  Abraham wasn’t this wandering loner. He had a big group and a lot of those were local Canaanites whom he had brought in, so the Canaanites were a people who, the Lord told Abraham, their iniquity was not full yet and so they were ripe for conversion, they were a people that could become part of the Covenant, and it was Canaanites that had migrated to Egypt in the decades before Joseph and Joseph actually going to Egypt is part of the general movement of Canaanites into the Delta, because the king himself is one of these people. The Hyksos took over the Northern Delta.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  06:20  The priests he’s going to appoint will probably be ethnically like him, which means of Canaanite heritage, even though they live in Heliopolis, and therefore would be people who were worthy enough to receive the Covenant if they would accept it. I assume that when the king gives Joseph this woman who is the daughter of the priest of On, she is a person who either has already covenanted or would covenant as a result of becoming Joseph’s wife.

John Bytheway:  06:48  And say Potipher’s name again, the way you said it.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  06:50  Potiphera is the way it is in Genesis and then earlier, Potiphar, that Joseph deals with as the guy who puts him in prison. Genesis 41: 45, “Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphenath-Paneah and he gave him to wife Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On. And Joseph went out over the land of Egypt.”

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  07:11  “Zaphenath-Paneah”, by the way, is a Hebrew transliteration of a perfectly good Egyptian term. “Zaphenath”, which means more or less, “the overseer” or “the person who produces”. “Paneah” is the season of the flood. So Joseph is the person who heads all production from the season of the flood, which is, by the way, when all food was grown, so he essentially is put over the agriculture of Northern Egypt, which is why he’s then saving up for seven years. But that position as the Chief Minister of the king makes him essentially the Prime Minister.

Hank Smith:  07:47  Yeah, it does.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  07:48  So it’s very cool. It’s an authentic Egyptian phrase, right there, transliterated into Hebrew, that nobody sees unless they learn a little Egyptian.

Hank Smith:  07:57  Yeah. And John, you and I will have to use that. Do you know who I am? My great grandfather was the Prime Minister…

John Bytheway:  08:06  He was the Prime Minister…

Hank Smith:  08:06  … of Egypt.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  08:08  Well, he’s 20 years older, right? So you don’t recognize people immediately. And he was speaking in Egyptian to him, but using a translator, so yeah.

Hank Smith:  08:14  Yeah. They don’t know.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  08:16  Boy, what a revelation that was. Talk about the mic dropping.

Hank Smith:  08:20  Yeah. I am your brother. So Jeff, so far, what I’ve seen is Jacob is having revelatory experiences, he’s finding God in the most maybe difficult times, and he has some really serious family relationship complications that he has to deal with his entire life. He sounds a lot like us.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  08:42  Yeah. Except a little more famous.

Hank Smith:  08:44  Yeah, he’s a little more famous, his family relationship issues are going to be a little bit different.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  08:48  If you get back into Chapter 33, 34, 35, a couple of his kids are committing, today, what we would say is murder. Levi and Simeon. Jacob has to leave because his name is a stink in the land, and then he has this terrible experience in Genesis 35 where his beloved wife Rachel dies in childbirth giving birth to Benjamin, and he has to bury her on the road, he buries her outside of Bethlehem, just the way the pioneers had to bury at Martin’s Cove because you had to bury. And so he doesn’t even get to take her back to Hebron, which is why some of the most wonderful places to visit in the Holy Land today are the Tomb of Rachel, just north of Bethlehem, as well as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Sarah and Rebekah and Leah in Hebron, and then the Tomb of Joseph up in Nablus, too.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  09:34  By the way, just one last thing. Do you know, at the end of Genesis 50, what they did with Joseph when he died? Well, he made them promise that they’d take his body, later on, when Moses… back to the Holy Land, and then it says Joshua buried the bones of Joseph, which they brought out of Egypt, they buried in Shechem, which had been Jacob’s first plot of land that he bought and which then would fall as Joseph’s inheritance, but at the end of Genesis 50, how do you get a body to last 400 years? It says they embalmed him and put him in a coffin in Egypt.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  10:00  Your grandfather, Joseph, was a mummy. Think of that. What are those mummies did you see? That was Joseph. He was a mummy for 400 years before they brought him out in the Exodus.

Hank Smith:  10:14  I’m learning all sorts of family history here.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  10:16  More interesting family history. My grandfather was a mummy.

Hank Smith:  10:19  Yeah, he was the Prime Minister of Egypt, and then he was a mummy for quite some time. What I’m trying to do is just try to help people see, you can find yourself in these stories. And if these are our fathers, Jeff, we should probably expect to have similar revelatory experiences, difficult experiences, family complications. This is probably going to be our story as well.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  10:43  We use the word “fathers” so easily, our mothers as well. Remember, Rebekah has revelation. Between Abraham and Sarah, Rebekah and Isaac, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, there’s revelation. There’s discussion. There’s hardship. There’s tension. Okay. You see a little tension between Rebekah and Isaac. You see more tension between Sarah and Abraham over the issue of Ishmael and et cetera. You see tension between Jacob and Leah, and Jacob and Rachel, and you see everything we go through. It’s amazing, how if you understand the context of scripture and also the Covenant and belief that they had, how they make it work in spite of all the problems.

Hank Smith:  11:24  That’s a lesson for us, you make it work.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  11:26  Right.

John Bytheway:  11:26  Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  11:27  Okay. So let’s do Genesis 32, where Jacob’s given the name Israel, because this is really key. I’m going to just look at a couple of verses here. It’s when Jacob is getting ready to come over the Jabbok River, where in Genesis 32:24, he’s at the banks of the Jabbok River. In fact, verse 22 mentions that most of his family, his two wives Leah and Rachel and a lot of the kids and others, had passed over this forwarding point, this crossing point, and he had remained on the other side of the river. It’s the breaking of day. In verse 24, it says, “Jacob left alone, wrestled with a man at the breaking of day,” not until, but at, in terms of the Hebrew. “When he prevailed not he touched the hollow of his thigh, the hollow of Jacobs thigh, was out of joint as he wrestled with him.” This is a weird story, frankly, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to people, and it doesn’t to me, except that what I see here is the hand of an editor trying to make sense of a story that he, the editor, doesn’t understand either.

Hank Smith:  12:29  Okay.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  12:29  So, I’m going to come back to verse 25 and 26, because I’ve actually put Xs through 25 and 26, meaning don’t rely on these two verses to understand the story, go from 24 to 27. So in 26 where it says, the guy wrestling with Jacob said, “Let me go for the day breaketh, and Jacob said, I will not let you go, except you bless me.” Then in verse 27, when the guy says to him, “What is thy name? And he said, Jacob,” that’s where you pick it up with what’s really going on. Now, let me go back to the word “wrestled” in verse 24. In Hebrew, this is the word Vayeavek, which is a fine term in Hebrew for, “to grasp around and to wrestle.” It’s used to indicate wrestling in Hebrew, but what it indicates is a grasping around, a clasping. It’s also a cognate to the word “avek,” which means dust, which is why people think of it as wrestling, because you wrestle around on the ground and get dusty.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  13:29  But that’s not really what it’s saying here. What it means is that there is a grasp going on. Jacob is in the grasp of someone at daybreak and being in the grasp of someone doesn’t make sense to the editor. So he makes it out into a battle where Jacob’s thigh is injured. By the time you get to verse 32, it says, “The children of Israel don’t eat of the sinew that shrank upon the hollow of the thigh to this day because of Jacob’s thigh injury.” That’s a very strange way to end a story, but what it means is that the editor’s not sure about this, and an earlier edition mentioned that his thigh was hurt and a later editor said, “Okay, so that thigh must be the reason we don’t eat this certain cut of meat.”

Hank Smith:  14:17  Okay… so…

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  14:18  You could really see people try to figure this out. But if you skip from 24, which is this clasping around episode, down to 27 and you start the dialogue, this may seem familiar, because Jacob is asked, “What is your name?” And he gives him his given name, Jacob. Then as the exchange goes on, he says, “Well by name show no more be Jacob, but Israel.” He gets another name, Israelʾ, which means God prevails. Some people will say that this means you shall prevail with God. The idea of let God prevail is very important here, but whatever it is, it’s God prevails, and that becomes Jacob’s new name, his other name, his additional name. He doesn’t lose his given name, but this becomes the additional name by which the Covenant people become known. We don’t talk about the house of Jacob as often as we talk about the house of Israel. By the way, when you go to the house of the Lord, notice how many times we are taught today that we are royalty in Israel.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  15:23  Israel is mentioned again and again and again, in the teachings and Covenanting that we do. Ultimately, when we go into those greatest of the ordinances of the house of the Lord, which is marriage, the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob become full. So this whole idea of being Israel and having all the Covenant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is inherent again in this most important place for us. But going back to this, then, you have this interview where names are mentioned, a given name and an additional name. Then, in verse 29, Jacob says, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name,” and the person asks back, “Why do you ask?” Then, the account stops because whatever the name is that must be given back to Jacob cannot be reported.

Hank Smith:  16:14  He says, “Why do you ask?” And that was it.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  16:16  Yeah.

Hank Smith:  16:17  He blessed him there.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  16:17  Yeah, that was it. But the editor, the author, everybody there stops completely with the dialogue. After exchanging given names and additional names, the dialogue stops at that question, the name back can’t be reported. Then in verse 30, after it’s all over, Jacob gives the name to that place, just the way called his place years before Bethel, he calls this Peniel, not Penial, but Peniel. Peni means face, Peniel, the face of God. Because he said, “I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved. So the sun rose on him there at,” Panuel” is actually a corruption of Peniel here, “and he was done.” Then it says he halted on his thigh, and so you get that whole other part of the story that I don’t really think originally was there. But if you just read 24, 27, 28, 29 and 30 together, you have an idea of what’s happening to Jacob. And again, it is something we’re very familiar with as Latter Day Saints who have taken out those great Covenants.

Hank Smith:  17:21  Very familiar.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  17:23  So I just love these chapters, and what I love is that what we have in the restoration has always been had, if you knew how to look for it. If you ever wondered is the thing that the prophet Joseph Smith gave us, leaving aside the masons and leaving beside the reorganization and the rebuilding and the constant editing and rescripting of things that we do in the temple over decades, the basic things, and the basic doctrines and the important Covenants that we have today have been here since the time of Genesis. The very ancestors whose name is attached to the Covenant had them as we have them today.

Hank Smith:  18:09  You have the messengers in Jacob’s ladder, and then you have this experience, this wrestling-

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  18:15  Of being face-to-face with God and the conversation of names.

Hank Smith:  18:21  This is great.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  18:23  If you will, and we may never see this again, while there is this embrace.

Hank Smith:  18:29  Yeah. I want to hear what you think about 33 then, is this reunion with these two brothers. I’m seeing myself in this story and then not only is Jacob got a complicated marriage situation, but he’s also got a complicated situation with his brother-

John Bytheway:  18:45  With his siblings-

Hank Smith:  18:47  … and he’s told to go back home.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  18:49  Well, I love the chapter. I love the chapter. It’s one of the ultimate feel-good chapters in Genesis, because if you allow it, time heals all wounds. There’s a rift in the family. It could come to blows back in Genesis 27 and 28 [crosstalk 00:19:05]

Hank Smith:  19:04  Which is why he has to leave, right? They’re like-

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  19:06  Which is why he has to leave, and why he’s reluctant about going back. He’s worried all through Genesis 32, “What’s going to happen when I meet my brother again?” But when he does, and this is why you have to let ultimate judgment of anyone, including those who may not decide that they want to live and abide by the Covenants that we do, why you just let judgment be in the hands of the Lord, because basically there’s a lot of good people who are not where we’re at, and Esau was never where Jacobs at. But over time, Esau had matured. He had become a man of accomplishment himself. He’d gained some degree of wealth and he began to appreciate, as he grew up, the brother that was his twin and that he had driven away in his own way. There could not be a more welcoming and gracious Esau welcoming Jacob back. 

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  20:00  All of Jacob’s fears in this regard were not going to be a problem. Many other regards are a problem, because he will lose his wife Rachel in Genesis 35, but with Esau, all was well, and it just goes to show that as Jacob did, if you make every possible effort you can to overcome a perceived hurt… And Jacob, of course, was going to send a big gift of livestock to Esau. Esau said, “Ha, no problem. We’re brothers. It’s so good to see you again.” And if you will do everything you can to overcome the difficulties that you see, but then just let things work out, very often, the goodness of people comes out. And I don’t think Esau ever became really a covenant guy during his mortality, but he turns out to have been a pretty good guy once he became an adult. I can live with people like that. People don’t have to believe in covenant the way I do for me to love them and appreciate them and learn from them and consider them to be close, close friends. Even members of the church who might not be active or be where I’m at, I can be as close to them as to anyone else. And thankfully, in my life, I have a lot of those types of people.

Hank Smith:  21:25  Yeah. That’s beautiful. I saw that in Verse 1 that Jacob sees Esau coming with 400 men. He’s got to be thinking, “I’m in trouble.”

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  21:34  “Whoa, am I in trouble?” Yeah.

Hank Smith:  21:36  It’s this awesome turnaround. Esau runs to meet him, embrace him, fell on his neck. Sounds very Prodigal Son-type language. Kissed him and they wept.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  21:45  Who knows what’s gone on with Esau? Because he’s not the focus of the story, but how did he work out with those wives that he married that Rebekah was unhappy with? How did his family work out? What was his relationship like with… We don’t hear of a Rebekah again, we only hear of Isaac when we get back to Genesis 35, and then he was almost dead and he did die shortly after Jacob gets back. So we don’t know if he ever saw Rebekah again. But Esau would’ve been there with both of them. I assume he repaired that relationship the way that he went about repairing the relationship with Jacob.

Hank Smith:  22:22  And Jeff, there’s so much application for people today.

John Bytheway:  22:26  This is where the rubber hits the road. I mean, this is things that are on our minds most, our family relationships.

Hank Smith:  22:33  Sometimes there’s rifts.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  22:35  Yeah.

John Bytheway:  22:36  Yeah, I love these two brothers coming together, and even this huge gift, and Esau says, “I have enough, my brother. Keep that thou hast unto thyself,” in Verse 9. Really nice.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  22:46  Well, that’s a Middle Eastern tradition too. You don’t take from someone who’s lesser than you when you’ve got more. There’s a self-concept thing at work here. “I want to give you a gift.” “Oh, no.” You have to be very careful in the Middle East, to tell you the truth, about gifts, because if you say, “I like that pen,” you might wind up with it.

John Bytheway:  23:06  Oh, yeah.

Hank Smith:  23:08  I’ve seen that too when I go to those stores as the tour guide. I’m walking out with everything.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  23:14  Oh, yeah. Okay, so speaking of reconciliation, one of the great stories from church history that I recall is between Orson Hyde and Joseph Smith. Elder Orson Hyde, who was senior in the Twelve, had testified against Joseph Smith in Missouri, was one of the reasons Joseph Smith went to the Liberty Jail. And then later, Orson Hyde came to Illinois, begged forgiveness for having done that, and Joseph forgave him. “It was a hard thing you did to us, our brother, almost harder than we could bear, but we receive you back,” and Orson Hyde then went on, in 1840 and 1841, to do this great mission to the Holy Land. But Orson Hyde and Joseph Smith were estranged in 1839. And yet, one repented and the other was gracious, and thus we have Orson Hyde until clear out here in Utah and down in Spring City. And there was a cost for Orson in that, because when the Twelve was reorganized, Orson was not made the president. Brigham Young took that position. The relationship with Orson and Joseph Smith was restored, and Orson went to do great, great things for this dispensation and for the Holy Land.

Hank Smith:  24:32  It reminds of that, same time period as WW Phelps, who ends up coming back, begging for forgiveness and writes Praise to the Man.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  24:41  Right, exactly.

Hank Smith:  24:42  Right? That’s a beautiful story of reconciliation.

John Bytheway:  24:45  Is that the one where Joseph Smith writes the letter and says, “Come dear brother, the war is passed, and friends at first are friends again at last.” Is that the WW Phelps?

Hank Smith:  24:55  “Friends at first are friends again at last.”

John Bytheway:  24:57  Friends again at last.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  24:58  I’m glad he did, because I like that song. I’m not for these quiet, pensive, contemplative songs. I like the songs that jump out at you and say, “The restoration is great.”

Hank Smith:  25:10  I love this Genesis 33 moment of, “Let’s reconcile.”

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  25:15  Oh, yeah.

Hank Smith:  25:16  “Let’s fix this,” and I wonder, just to have this thought, that later on in this same book, you’re going to have Joseph and his brothers reconcile very similarly.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  25:25  You know, Genesis is a family story. Once you get to Exodus, its’ a national story.

John Bytheway:  25:30  Hm, yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  25:31  And that’s what, probably, people don’t see in the Old Testament. Jewish people see this a little differently. For them, they understand Genesis is the prequel to the story that begins in Exodus, because from the Jewish point of view, it’s the nation of Israel that really begins with Moses, and coming out of Egypt, and the exodus through the Red Sea, et cetera, that is the beginning of the nation of Israel with these tribes. Genesis is the prequel, and it’s an important prequel, because there you get to meet the family that becomes Israel and you get the covenant. And you’ve got to know about the family and the covenant before you can talk about the nation. But it’s Exodus that becomes the big kahuna, if you will, that Genesis is a necessary prequel to.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  26:16  The Law of Moses and Jews today still celebrate the national holiday of the beginning of the nation of Israel, Passover. In fact, all of the holidays of the Law of Moses celebrated that event, the beginning of the nation of Israel. And we’re told in Jeremiah, that beginning of the nation of Israel with the exodus was the biggest event that people could think about, except that in the latter days, there’d be a bigger one that would eclipse it. Jeremiah 16:14 says, “The day’s come when it will no longer be said the Lord liveth that brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, but the Lord liveth that brought the children of Israel from the lands of the north and all the lands whither he’d scattered them,” so that the restoration, now, becomes the culmination of the nation of Israel, the restoration of the nation of Israel. But it begins with Exodus, so that becomes the beginning of the history, and Genesis is a family prequel that’s necessary background, and what a background it is.

Hank Smith:  27:10  That’s great, yeah. What a beautiful background it is. And that makes perfect sense, because if you read the Book of Mormon, Nephi’s very much, “This is our nation, the gathering will one day occur.”

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  27:20  Right, yeah. See, Exodus and wilderness motif that’s most on Nephi’s mind. Of course, they were going through the same thing, but for them, that was the national history.

Hank Smith:  27:29  Yeah, I love it. Jeff, Dr. Chadwick, this has been just a fantastic day. I think our listeners would be interested in your story of your advanced education and your faith and what that journey’s been like for you.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  27:44  Well, this is really a fun thing. This started with me as a missionary. I had a great experience in 1975. I’d studied German in high school, I was a sterling scholar in German. So then, when they call you to a German-speaking mission, which by the way, you never understand, because I fully expected to be called to Argentina just because I spoke German. But they sent me to Germany and I get down here to the old LTM. Wasn’t called the MTC back in the mid-’70s, called the LTM, the Language Training Mission. And I had a German teacher who was a German student doing grad work at BYU. His name was Markus Wellnitz, but he called himself Markus von Wellnitz. Maybe some of your listeners will remember that name, because maybe they were German missionaries in the mid-’70s, and he was a delightful guy.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  28:31  And he was a grad student, and because me and my companion who’d also had six years of German, they made us the zone leaders of the LTM to get us out of the way of the language classes. But there were these hours where we weren’t going to the language classes because they were teaching in basic German and we were way beyond that and we were just a problem, so von Wellnitz took us with him to class on campus, and we sat in on a class with Hugh Nibley, two 19-year-olds in a class on Hebrew Bible with 12 grad students and two missionaries in white shirts with Hugh Nibley, studying Genesis.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  29:08  And I’ll never forget… This wouldn’t happen today, because first of all, you can’t take people out of the MTC, but it was loose in those days, right? The second thing is when Markus brought us to this class and said, “Listen, Brother Nibley, I’ve got these two guys we don’t know what to do with but I’m responsible for them. Can they sit in the class for us?” And the first thing that Hugh did was look straight at me and speak to me in German and ask me if I thought I understood German well to be missing the classes, and I answered him in German, and he said, “Very well, you may enter.”

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  29:38  And so, the first day, we sat down and he opened a big book from the wrong side. Hebrew Bibles read from right to left, so he opened the wrong side of the book for me and began to read Genesis in Hebrew. And then he would translate it and then he would talk about it, beginning with the creation. And I turned to my companion and said, “I have got to figure out how you do this.” This is where it started.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  30:00  I came back and got to know Hugh very well and others and got the degrees and all this stuff.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  30:08  I’ve listened to people who talk about how learning some of the facts of ancient history, some of the facts about Abraham and the world of Abraham, or Moses and the world of Moses, has destroyed the validity of scriptures in their minds, how they don’t understand how the Book of Mormon could possibly be accepted by an educated person.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  30:29  I want to be careful in what I say, but I’ve rarely met a person who is complaining about the Book of Mormon or the Bible that knows more about it in terms of its ancient origins than I do. I just say that basically just because I’m old and have accumulated experience, language, archeology, geography. It’s there. I have never found anything that was not answerable. When you approach a problem with knowledge and also with faith, rather than using knowledge to try and escape faith, you will get to the right place.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  31:13  My feeling is that a lot of times intellectual answers to the difficulties of Book of Mormon authenticity, Bible authenticity, et cetera, et cetera, are actually intellectual excuses trying to get away from something that you want to get away from anyway, but you’re looking for a reason. People who want a reason to escape from faith will always find one.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  31:42  So if I’m dealing with somebody who’s struggling with faith, my first question to them is, “Before we look at the authenticity issues of the Bible or the Book of Mormon or the book of Abraham, where are you at in your faith? Are you looking for a reason to get out, or are you looking for a reason to believe? Because if you’re looking for a reason to believe, we’re okay. If you’re looking for a reason to get out, nothing I tell you is going to matter.” But if they’re looking for reason for faith, we can go through these things and point out the authenticity of every setting, every setting from Abraham, to Jacob, to Joseph, to Moses, to the prophets of Israel, to Nephi, to Lehi, even to the ancient American setting. No problem that.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  32:27  I bear two witnesses to all my students about our scriptures, and particularly the ancient scriptures that I deal more with because of where I’m at and what I do. I bear witness that they are true. That’s a spiritual statement. I bear witness also that they are authentic, that they are what they claim to be. I especially drive that home because the Bible’s very complicated, but the Book of Mormon and how we got it today is simple. It was given to the prophet Joseph Smith by an angel who translated it by the gift and power of God, and it is a translation of real things that happened to real people in real ancient times. It either is what it says it is, or it’s a complete fake. When I’m dealing with the Book of Mormon, First Nephi, Second Nephi, Jacob, I see in it authenticity that Joseph Smith could not have provided if he were the writer of the story. Those events were told by people who really lived 600 BC or thereafter. The Book of Mormons screams authenticity to this archeologist, linguist, geographer, historian, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  33:39  So I bear witness to the Book of Mormon. It is true, and it is authentic. It is what it claims to be. I’m probably in a position to make that with a more authoritarian opinion to its authenticity than most would be. But I knew it was true long before I could speak Hebrew, and that’s always been my guide.

Hank Smith:  34:04  That’s great, Jeff. What were you going to say about the … You said the nexus of a couple of things coming together. Is that the same idea?

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  34:11  Well, for me, because I like context along with application and because I do all of these things … On a good day, I’m a pretty fair archeologist, and I am known in Israel for that. I do Hebrew Bible as well as anybody I know, quite frankly. Some of my good friends are non-LDS, world-class Biblical scholars, and I talk with them all the time about things. So I have this thing where you get factual and intellectual approaches to scriptures.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  34:41  But where I live is in that world, but where it meets at a nexus with faith and with restoration, and they blend together so that I bear this witness. It is true, and it’s authentic. It’s both. You may trust it. You may trust the Book of Abraham. My friend Kerry Muhlestein does a lot of great work with that. But before I knew Kerry, I knew Abraham was authentic and I knew why. The Book of Mormon, I know it’s authentic and I know why.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  35:11  I teach a little class from time to time at BYU called the Book of Mormon in the Land of Jerusalem, which is a evidences class. Some people would call that apologetics, and they say, “Ah, I don’t like apologetics.” I say, “Well, it’s nothing to apologize for.” I don’t even like the name apologetics. I’m talking about authenticity studies. The same with the New Testament, the same with our Hebrew Bible, with the Old Testament. But they’re true, and they’re authentic. They’re complicated, so you have to understand the complication, but they’re true and they’re authentic.

Hank Smith:  35:41  …the context. You’ve been so good to us. Thank you.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  35:45  Nah, it’s just a pleasure. I’m sorry that I talk so much and you talk so little. This is the Hank and John show and Hank and John should be in there, but I figured, well, this is my chance to be famous so I’ll give it the best shot I got.

Hank Smith:  35:56  This is what we wanted. We’ll have to do it again. We have more Old Testament lessons. We want to thank Dr. Jeff Chadwick for being here. Wow, what a fun day. These chapters are totally changed for me, and I’m sure John would-

John Bytheway:  36:10  Me, too.

Hank Smith:  36:10  … say the same thing.

John Bytheway:  36:12  Absolutely.

Hank Smith:  36:13  Yeah, just absolutely different.

Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick:  36:14  No, it’s been great to be here. Thank you.

Hank Smith:  36:16  Thank you to all of you who listened. We love you. Thank you for your support. We want to thank our executive producers, Steve and Shannon Sorenson, and our sponsors, David and Verla Sorenson. And we hope all of you will join us on our next episode of Follow Him.