John Bytheway:               00:00:00             Welcome back to part two of Genesis one to two, Moses two to three, and Abraham four to five with Dr. Rebekah Call.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:08             John, Rebekah, I’d like to bring up something else and hear what you both think. I spend a lot of time with young people. We all do. I’ve noticed that when I say, “Hey, can we talk about pornography?” I wanna discuss this with you. There’s a feeling of shame that comes into the room. You can almost feel it and sense it. This heavy weight comes into the room and I talk about, “Hey, look, you’re a young person, you’re alive, you’re human. Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about what you’re seeing and what you can do to protect yourself.” That shame, I think, is partly, and I wanna be careful here, but it’s partly our fault. I think we have bought into Satan’s idea of hide. Hide. Hide from God. I’d like to hear both of you comment on that. How do we help our young people that this is so accessible to our youth? How as adults do we not attach so much shame? Rebekah, what do you think?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:01:15             I remember when I was in Young Women’s being told, you need to have candid conversations when you’re dating and getting ready to be married. And if someone were to view pornography, you probably shouldn’t date or marry that person. I think that as a society, culturally, as an LDS society, we have attached so much stigma, so much shame, almost as though we think that if we shame the practice enough, we’ll shame people out of doing it. That’s not how it works. It will only lead to people hiding it more, and actually it’s the hiding that gives the dopamine rush. It leads, it’s this sort of addictive tendency that you can get if you’re hiding in order to watch. It only exacerbates the problem. I think what we need is more transparency and talking about it and talking about recovery. That recovery for most people includes relapse for any type of addiction.

                                           00:02:09             But what matters is that we’re on the road and Christ is there. He’s there in the relapse. He’s there to lift us up again and again and again, because I don’t think when we talk about Christ and what he can be for us, I don’t see Christ being up there counting and saying, well, this is the 497th time you’ve done this. You’ve maxed out. No more grace for you. No more Atonement for you. I think instead you have Christ who is there saying, you fell and I’m here. Let’s be better. You fell again. I’m here. Let’s be better. You fell again and I’m still here and I’m still wanting to lift with you. I’m still in the trenches with you. Whether you fall 10 times or 20 times or 500,000 times. That’s what the Atonement is about, that we fall and Christ is still there with us and Christ is not ashamed of us.

                                           00:03:07             If he were ashamed of us, he wouldn’t make covenants with us. He would not bind himself to us. We, as a society, can do better with taking the shame off and realizing that regardless of what sin we have, we are, there is that eternal gulf that separates us from God. And it doesn’t matter whether that sin is pornography or it’s sexual indiscretion or it’s a word of wisdom issue or it’s that I didn’t pay my tithing or that I have a short temper and I yell. These are all things that take us from God and they’re all things that are part of this eternal gulf. I cannot bridge the gulf to God over having a quick temper any more easily than I could bridge pornography or infidelity or whatever. Sometimes there’s this mistake that we look at some sins as being so big and other sins as being so much littler.

                                           00:03:59             Yes, there can be more transformation from some sins that needs to happen, but the separation from God is no bigger or no littler than it is if I snap at my sister because there’s still an eternal gulf that the Atonement needs to cover. Christ is just as capable of redeeming us from a quick temper or from road rage as he is from drug usage or pornography or infidelity. So I think we would do well to de-stigmatize it and be more open about it because the more open we are, the more healing we allow.

John Bytheway:               00:04:36             Yeah. I’m thinking of the conference talk about the slope, the trajectory, because some might feel I’m making progress, I’m making progress, oh, I slipped, and they think they go all the way down to sea level again. And no, that’s not necessarily true. Yeah, you fell, but keep going, keep fighting that. You’re gonna make progress. Your trend line, your trajectory, we don’t wanna say,don’t worry about it. We do wanna say, keep trying and keep trying with the Savior. And Hank, either last year or four years ago, Section 46, suiting his mercies according to the conditions of the children of men. This is so funny to me. I don’t know if I’ve already included this on the show before. I wrote an article about encountering a bad magazine in the gutter coming home from school as a 16-year-old. So we’re talking 1979, okay?

Hank Smith:                      00:05:38             There was no Rebekah Call on the Earth at 1979.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:05:42             I was not yet here.

John Bytheway:               00:05:44             And I wrote a New Era article about it, and now I think, okay, you don’t have to read that, that issue does not make sense anymore, because that was my one encounter with pornography as a teenager.

Hank Smith:                      00:05:57             The conditions have changed.

John Bytheway:               00:05:59             That doesn’t make any sense today. We love that our Savior suits his mercies according to the conditions of the children of men, because my 1979 world for a teenager was not the same as a 2025 world for a teenager. It’s not the same. And the Lord knows exactly the world he sent us to and suits his mercies accordingly.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:20             The other day, I sat in front of a group of 200 young people and I said, look at me. You are not disgusting. You are not awful. You’re not gross. God loves you. And you could see that, you know, the tears welling up in some of their eyes. Who told you that? Who told you you were disgusting? Who told you that God doesn’t love you? Rebekah, you’ve, I love what you’ve done with this story. It helps us see who our friends are and who our enemies are.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:06:58             One other thing that I think ties in really well with what both of you have been saying is if we turn to Ether 12:27, where it says, “If men come unto me, I will show unto them their weakness” and not weaknesses. It’s weakness. It is the state of being weak. And it’s not that we need to see that we’re weak and fallen. No, it’s that we need to let Christ show us because that means we get to see ourselves the way Christ sees us, which is as beings of infinite potential that are so worthy of second and third and hundredth chances, right, of trying again. I also think it’s interesting that if we humble ourselves and have faith in Christ, then he will make weak things become strong unto them. Note, he does not say I’ll take their weakness, the state of being weak away, but weak things will become strong, which means who we are.

                                           00:07:45             Some of the weak elements about ourselves get to be stronger. And I have a friend who has been pretty open with me, who’s struggled with pornography for several years, and as I’ve gotten to know this friend better, I’ve realized part of my friend’s strength of character comes because of never giving up. It’s not about perfection, perfection meaning never making a mistake. It’s about being in the trenches and doing what we can and having a relationship with Christ, and that relationship transforms us, that relationship makes us into stronger and better people. It’s not that this friend never has relapses, but it’s that this friend continually turns back to Christ, continually goes back and takes the sacrament and goes to the temple and re-engages in this process of becoming virtuous.

Hank Smith:                      00:08:42             I met a good bishop the other day, Bishop Bean, Chris Bean. I love Bishop Bean. He told me, he said, when he meets with young people and even not so young people, he doesn’t ask, are you seeing pornography? He says, what are you doing to protect yourself? What are you doing to stay out of those areas and places? I like that. It’s the transparency. Look, we all live in this world, so what are you doing? And here’s what I’m doing to protect myself. What are you doing to protect yourself instead of pretending that it might not be there.

John Bytheway:               00:09:19             Yeah, and why not go get a bishop who has discernment to give you a blessing and fight it together? I have somebody that’s gonna … How you doing?

Hank Smith:                      00:09:30             Who loves you. Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:09:32             I’m on your side, I love you. What a blessing to have that.

Hank Smith:                      00:09:36             Yeah. Rebekah, you’ve really done so well here and shown us so much. We’re ready to keep going. What do you wanna do next?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:09:43             At this point, I would like to look a little bit more at Eve in particular. So we’re looking at the woman in the garden. This is what I wrote my dissertation on. I wrote my dissertation just on two words, help meet. Except I looked at the Hebrew, so I wrote 200 some pages on two words. There’s more than I … I can’t cover it all here. When I was growing up, we talked about Adam, and we talked about Eve almost as an afterthought. The Adam was created and he named all the animals and then Eve ate the fruit and we’re really, really thankful and let’s move on. Sometimes, as believers of Christ who are engaging in a larger Christian worldview, sometimes there are elements of Christian thought that are not actually our doctrine that sort of seep in. While we say we do not condemn, I mean, we have overt general authority statements saying, we are grateful for our glorious Mother Eve for partaking the fruit because this means we get to have this mortal experience. Sometimes I think we’ve inherited some things that sort of quietly slipped under the surface.

                                           00:10:50             These are not necessarily things that might be taught overtly, sometimes they might be. I remember when I was growing up, I’m saying this is my experience. I’m not saying that this is what everyone has experienced. But I remember I was a little more of a tomboy growing up. I didn’t always love young women’s activities. I didn’t care about painting beautiful love makes a house a home things to put … I would much rather go off and go do the high adventure and go whitewater rafting and do the high rope, the high ropes course and things like that. I was often jealous of the young men. And I remember multiple conversations that I would have where I asked a person in authority and said, can we do more of this as young women? Can we join the young men? They get to go to scout camp and they get to go to young men’s camp and they get their high adventure trip and they get to do all these things that I would also love to do.

                                           00:11:39             And I remember being told more than once, the young men have the priesthood. That means they need to learn how to lead because Adam was given the priesthood in the garden. Eve doesn’t need the priesthood because she took the fruit first. You need to learn how to make a house a home. And that was what I was told. Obviously, this did not go across well for me because there were other things that I was interested in doing. So it’s experiences like this, and again, I am not saying this is everyone’s experience. This was my particular experience. As I started studying on my dissertation, it was things like this that had happened that I thought, no, there’s got to be more than this in the text. Justifying why women shouldn’t be leading, whether it’s because Eve ate the fruit first, and so even though we’re thankful for it, she still transgressed first and therefore Adam needs to lead.

                                           00:12:27             Or the flip side of the coin, which is to say Eve was so spiritual that Adam needed more chances to get in the trenches and this is why women really don’t need to have leadership opportunities. The effect is the same. So there are two sides of the coin. Whether we villainize Eve or whether we lift her up to some unattainable standard of perfection, the effect is the same. As I was writing my dissertation on help meet, this was sort of in the background. I was sort of looking for there’s got to be more here. I want to find more. I will circle back to some of these ideas in what I’m going to talk about later, but now I’ll move into talking a bit more about what I actually did with my research. I’ll just sort of skim over the surface you have the basic idea.

                                           00:13:10             I looked at the phrase help meet, which even now, help meet in English doesn’t really make sense to me. What is help meet supposed to mean? I couldn’t figure … I actually wrote a paper on this during my undergrad when I was at BYU, trying to figure out what help meet meant, and really didn’t come up with a good answer. That was just looking at English. When I got into my PhD studies, I decided to look at this phrase again, but I looked at the Hebrew because by this point I had several years of Hebrew experience. It turns out help meet doesn’t actually make that much sense in Hebrew either. You have the first word that gets translated as help, and this is a proper Hebrew word. The second word though, neged, it’s behaving like a kind of Hebrew word. It’s looking almost like Hebrew, but Hebrew, the way Hebrew works is there are very specific ways that vowels change in words, and it’s not following that.

                                           00:14:07             So it’s not really looking Hebrew. It’s looking almost Hebrew. For my dissertation, I looked at four related languages to Hebrew to see if maybe this is a borrowing that it looks almost Hebrew because it’s from a related language, but it’s not quite. And so I looked at Arabic, Aramaic, which is Aramaic is the language that Jesus likely spoke. Also, Acadian, which was the language of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian empires and Ugaritic, which is a language that there was an archeology dig in what is modern day Syria, Ugarit. It was destroyed around 1200 BC. They found a wealth of records in a language that is very close to Hebrew. If you know Hebrew, you can nearly read Ugaritic. So very, very close. And a lot of words from Ugaritic that ended up helping us understand words that we didn’t know exactly what they meant in the Hebrew Bible because they’re so closely related.

                                           00:14:59             Those are the four languages I looked at and I looked at both ezer, which is help, and neged, which is meet in the King James, and looked to see, are there other potential ways that we could translate these words? And I got dozens, dozens of potential translations, but then I needed to see which ones of these should we actually pay attention to. I put them into larger categories, words that were similar. So we had things like warrior, champion, hero. They’re all similar, so I sort of put them under an umbrella together. I put them into larger categories, and then I analyzed those against the Genesis one through three account. When I say that, I was not looking to see which of these make a nice reading. I was looking to see which of these does the Genesis account itself support, that there are other linguistic elements or narrative elements or contextual elements that actually support this translation or that don’t support this potential translation.

                                           00:16:02             I ended up with about eight new translations for help and 12 new potential translations for meet. There are a whole bunch that didn’t fit. What I ended up finding, I did not set out to do this, but there came a point when I’d finished all my analysis and I thought, okay, I’m gonna make a chart. You know, I’m gonna put down all the ones that made it. So I put together the chart and that left me with a whole pile of ones that didn’t make it. And I realized there were a whole bunch that happened to align with the last 2,500 years of theology, things that look at Eve, like things that aligned, harmonized quite well with theological writings that say that the woman is inherently evil or morally inferior to the man or that she was a seductress, these sorts of things that they happen to align.

                                           00:16:52             What I found is that linguistically, the Genesis text does not support any of those. Any of the ones that give justification, because there were ones that had to do with sexual indiscretion, there were ones that had to do with abuse, so could it be justifying male abuse of women because Eve was lesser? It’s not in the text. Likewise, there were some that would sort of lift Eve up as being like somehow superior. Those are also not in the text. When people read the text, when they read Genesis and say, well, in the Bible it says this, therefore women should fill in the blank. If they’re engaging with any of those sorts of things, here’s why women shouldn’t be leaders. Here’s why women shouldn’t have a voice. They’re engaging with tradition, but they are not actually engaging with the Bible. That’s the overarching view of what I found in my dissertation.

                                           00:17:39             Now, these are potential translations. I did a religious studies dissertations rather than linguistics, so I did not go through to say which ones of these are cognates, that’s a place for future research, so I’ll say these are potential translations. What this allowed me to do with these potential translations that narratively and contextually and linguistically fit the text, it enabled me to look at Eve and there by extension women, because she’s sort of the prototype for women. It allowed me to look at them in a really different way and say, can we expand how we’re viewing Eve in the garden and what can we learn from that and how does that apply to us? In this portion, I would like to talk a little bit more about a couple of these potential translations and how that changes the way we view women. We look at men and women as being this, these complimentary men and women that were then separated, they were one and then separated and need to come back together again.

                                           00:18:40             What this means is we cannot understand the man if we do not fully understand the woman and vice versa. We cannot understand the woman if we do not fully understand the man. In my research, I look more at women in the text, not just Eve. I look at Rachel and Michal and Tamar and other women in the scriptures because historically they haven’t been talked about as much. I’m choosing to look more on women, but we can learn about everyone by understanding women more just as we can learn about everyone by understanding men more. We don’t get to understand just one part and call it good if we want a full understanding.

John Bytheway:               00:19:19             I’m excited to learn more. Hank, people are gonna wanna read about this. Rebekah has a book. I think at the time of this recording, it’s not out yet, but it’s called Rediscovering Eve: The Woman, the Garden and the Plan of Salvation. I really wanna read that. Loved what you said. 2,500 years of tradition, not of what the Old Testament actually says. Oh, man.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:19:47             It’s pretty amazing.

Hank Smith:                      00:19:49             Let’s keep going here. I wanna hear- Okay. … what else you found.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:19:53             I’m going to take one or two of the potential translations and go into a little bit more depth, especially as to how this can influence the way we view women, how this can change the way that we see our potential and our divine nature and our ability to really bring about change in the world.

John Bytheway:               00:20:14             It wasn’t just Eve, you’re saying that the perception of Eve changed the way that women were perceived.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:20:22             Absolutely.

John Bytheway:               00:20:23             That’s why this is so important. Who, again, would wanna do that?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:20:27             Right. Who told you that women were lesser? That’s something that Satan really, really wants to get at. If he can find a way to split us from each other in any way possible, to sow that mistrust, to sow that disunity, and one way of doing that is by saying, well, we can’t understand each other. Or, women are just so irrational, why would I listen to what they’ve got to say? Women may think differently than men, but it doesn’t mean that women should not be listened to any more than saying, men think differently from women. Why would we listen to them? That’s also absurd. The first one I’d like to start with is looking at Eve as a shepherd. The word neged, which gets translated as meet, there is an Aramaic cognate for shepherd that could potentially … Scholars are not decided on this, some agree, some disagree, but it could be a related word.

                                           00:21:21             How does this change what we understand about the woman in the garden? Now, first of all, in looking at Eve as a shepherd, it’s worth keeping in mind looking at Eve as a leader because the shepherd is the leader of the sheep and the caretaker of the sheep. We see in Genesis chapter one, the humans are created together and they are jointly commanded to rule. It is not men rule and women support. It is you rule together, you rule over the earth, you have dominion. But people might also say, well, what about Genesis three where it says that you’re gonna bear children and your life will be full of sorrow and your husband will rule over you. Like, isn’t that a command that the man should rule over the woman because there have been people who’ve said this? I would say, no, that’s not necessarily what is happening there.

                                           00:22:13             It’s very clear in Genesis one that the man and woman are commanded to rule. There’s a grammatical structure in Hebrew where you can command, like in English, we can directly command, you do this. We, in modern English, don’t have a good way to say, she do this. Okay? Like to command for a third person, but Hebrew has this. And when the man and woman are commanded to rule, Elohim is saying he’s commanding the man and woman rule. Let’s turn to chapter three. Genesis chapter three, verse 16. This is my translation when he says, the man will dominate you. Your desire will be to your husband and your husband will rule over you. Another way you could say that is your- actually, it’s vague in Hebrew. You could either say your desire will be for your man. It could also be your desire will be against your man and he will dominate over you.

                                           00:23:07             So there’s a vagueness here. Is this a command or is this a prophecy? And how do we understand prophecy? God is saying something that will happen in the future. Because this word, it’s vague, the form. It could be a command form. It also could just be a general future tense form, and we’re gonna come back to that in a second. Sorry, this one does have a bit of grammar in it. If he’s just saying a future tense form, then it’s saying this will happen. So is that a prophecy? If that’s the case, does that mean God wants it to happen? Okay, because there’s been a lot of centuries of people who have said it’s okay for men to mistreat women because God said man would rule over you that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Let’s look a little more closely at prophecy throughout scripture, and there’s two types of prophecy that happen.

                                           00:23:51             There’s descriptive prophecy. And this is when a prophet describes what’s coming, but the prophet doesn’t say whether these are morally right or whether God even wants this to happen. Nephi prophesies the destruction of his entire people. It doesn’t mean that God wants all of Nephi’s descendants to be destroyed. It’s almost more like a warning, like, if you don’t change, this can happen. Very frequently, these are warning prophecies. Like when Isaiah comes and says, You’re gonna get taken into exile if you don’t shape up. It’s not that God is like, Oh yeah, I really, really want the tribes to be taken into exile. No. It’s a warning. You need to change or consequences are coming, and that is descriptive prophecy. Now, there is also prescriptive prophecy where prophets are prescribing what will happen. That is what God is commanding. That is what God wants. We have descriptive prophecy, which is very frequently a warning.

                                           00:24:45             We have prescriptive prophecy, which is when God says, this is what needs to be. We’re going to look at this statement that the man will dominate over the woman from Genesis 3:16. It’s worth questioning, is this a descriptive prophecy or is it a prescriptive prophecy or is it a command? Okay, because it can be any one of the three. Let’s first look and see, can this be a command? Is it prophecy? Is it just a regular future tense this will happen, or is it a command for it to happen? So let’s look and see, can it be a command? Order to see is it valid to read this as a command it’s useful to look at all the other statements that God makes in this sort of consequence section. God says to the serpent, you will go on your belly. You’ll eat the dust all the days of your life.

                                           00:25:29             I will put enmity between you and between the woman and he will bruise your head and you’ll bruise his heel. Those are all future tense, definitely not commands because they have a clearly separate form in Hebrew from the command form. Now, if we look at the man, what God says to the man, this is Genesis chapter three, verses 17 to 19. God also, these are no command forms. These are only future tense forms because they have separate, clearly separate forms. So to the man, God says, this is a little bit of a retranslation. You will eat of the ground in pain all the days of your life. It will sprout thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the herb of the field. You’ll eat by the sweat of your face until you return to the ground. Now, if we look at what he says to the woman, there’s most of them that are not commands and there’s a couple that are vague.

                                           00:26:21             The form is not different between command and future. So he says, I will increase your pain and your conception, that this one is ambiguous. You will bear children in pain. That one is definitely just future tense. Your desire will either be toward or against your husband. It’s vague in the Hebrew. Okay, that one is vague. It could be a command or not. And he will rule over you. This one is ambiguous as well. Now, if we take these in context, at least 10 of them, all the ones directed to the serpent and man and two of the four who are directed at the woman are definitely not commands. Grammatically, there’s no way you can look at that word and say it’s a command form. It’s not. This is how God’s informing the serpent and the man and the woman. Here’s how things are gonna be.

                                           00:27:05             Just so you’re aware. The serpent’s gonna go on its belly because that’s how things are gonna work in this world. Adam, just so you know, you’re gonna have to work hard. That’s how things work in this world. You should be aware. And some of the things he says to the woman are that same way. It’s gonna be painful. You should be aware. In that context, this is not a clincher argument, but I think there’s a reason to say, does it make sense to take two out of 12 statements and say, well, these ones definitely are commands. Nothing else is a command, but this one is. Even though it, all the others grammatically line up. I don’t think that that makes sense. It makes about as much sense, I would say as to say, all right, well, let’s look at the man’s statement and say, well, if it’s a command for a woman, is it not equally reasonable to say it’s a command for the man to only do agriculture and that he has to sweat while he works.

Hank Smith:                      00:27:58             Yeah.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:27:58             Because that’s what God said. And if he doesn’t, then architecture, engineering, art, information, technology, medicine, legal work, that would all be woman’s work because that’s not being in the field and it’s not sweating by the- it’s not sweating or brow work. And that’s just absurd. It doesn’t make sense. And the grammar appears to be the same. Based on the grammar of the other 10 statements, in my opinion, like I’m not going to overstate my argument, but in my opinion, I think it is ridiculous to read that as being a command that the man is meant to dominate over the woman and that somehow this negates the command for the man and woman to jointly rule over the earth. When we look at our sealing covenants, we have the man and the woman sealed together. We have a triangle. You have God on top and the man and then the woman, and we form an equal-sided triangle where everyone is working together.

                                           00:28:51             Now, I have had people ask, what about the statement in the proclamation to the family where it says the men should preside? Doesn’t that mean that men are supposed to rule and men are, women are meant to support? It occurred to me that to preside is to behave in the way that the Savior has behaved. And if you look at what the Savior did, the Savior served and the Savior washed his disciples’ feet and the Savior was willing to take the lowly role in order to make unity. There is something to be said as we look at gender roles and marriage roles that if the man is meant to preside, and that means to be as the Savior, the man has the opportunity to look and see what are ways where historically or culturally women have been mistreated, and how do I make sure that doesn’t happen?

                                           00:29:47             How do I step in and maybe take some of that on myself and bear this burden? And I think that that’s a way that we can look at presiding, that they serve the way the savior served. I think that God is warning them and saying, this will be a tendency in human history. It will be a huge flaw in what people are likely to do in the fallen human condition. And it is up to you to try to counteract that, to try to move beyond this, to try to remedy this part of the fallen world. This is one of the things you actually can have some control over. So I think it’s really important that it’s included there as a warning.

Hank Smith:                      00:30:29             Yeah. And part of overcoming the Fall will be correcting that and starts in our own homes.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:30:36             It does.

Hank Smith:                      00:30:37             And in the church.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:30:38             And if you think about it, how do we build a truly trusting relationship between each other, which is one of the effects of the Fall? And that is to honor each other, to fully honor each other and to encourage each other to reach potential. It makes sense in that sort of also in that context of trust and unity that this is a big pitfall, because that is one way to very quickly undermine trust and unity. We looked at how the woman can be the leader, and actually that I would say that the scripture supports the idea of the woman and the man leading and ruling together. Now let’s turn to looking at the woman as a shepherd. This is what is really, really beautiful, because if we take this potential translation of the woman as being a divine help like his shepherd, this means that the woman is actually the first shepherd leader of scriptural tradition.

                                           00:31:30             And one of the really cool things we see through throughout the scriptures is it’s almost a trope where you have the ideal leader is actually the shepherd. It’s not the military trained guy. It’s not the person who is born into a kingly lineage because we have Cain and Abel. Abel is a shepherd and his offering is acceptable, Cain’s offering is not. Abraham is a shepherd. Isaac is a shepherd. Jacob, Rachel, and Leah are all shepherds. David, who becomes the king of the golden age of Israel, is a shepherd. And then of course, the most obvious one is that Jesus Christ is said to be the Good Shepherd. We have this whole line of the ideal leaders, the rulers who are leading and ruling in the way that God wants them to are shepherds. If we look at that, then suddenly you have Eve, who is the first of a shepherd leader trope.

                                           00:32:28             If we see Eve as being this prototypical shepherd and also a woman, we can maybe look at Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ as being another shepherd figure. Because Christ is the Lamb of God, so it makes sense for him to be raised by a shepherd. Watching your son have a shooting star trajectory and then seeing him be killed, she had a hard life too. We see these commonalities in these shepherds, also with Christ, who is the greatest of the shepherds, who came on this journey to wander through the earth and bless people and have the hardest existence of anyone in eternity. We see these patterns in shepherds. Every single one, Eve fits. That she was willing to say, I will go on the mortal journey. I see this and I will take that step and I will invite my husband to come with me.

                                           00:33:17             He’s gonna come and we’re gonna walk it together. So it’s not to say that Adam is also not leading. Adam does have leadership, but I think that we miss out sometimes looking at Eve’s leadership in doing this that she is, in a lot of ways, the first shepherd.

Hank Smith:                      00:33:33             That’s beautiful. It really is. I’ve read almost that she becomes a, like a sanctuary.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:33:42             Yes, she does. And actually, this is another one of the potential translations that she could be translated as a building of some sort, and most frequently the buildings that they’re being talked about are temples or shrines. There’s a bunch of construction. Also, Eve is built. Other things get done, or made, or created, or formed. There’s multiple creation words happening in Hebrew. Adam and all the animals get shaped like clay, and Adam is made of the earth. So it’s like, oh, we’re taking clay and we’re putting it together and shaping Adam like a pot.

                                           00:34:14             But Eve is built, and she is built, and here’s where we’re gonna come to rib a little bit, the word that gets translated as rib never reads rib anywhere else in Hebrew. This is like a plank. It’s a beam. It’s a chunk of wood that gets used in construction, most frequently temple construction. Everything else gets shaped or formed or made or done, and she gets built using building materials like a building. In some sense, she is like a sanctuary, like a temple. There’s also some really strong connections with trees. Like if she’s built out of wood, that wood came from somewhere. What trees are she built from? And the only trees that are named in the garden are trees of life and trees of knowledge. You can look at Eve, she is the mother of living and she is the first person to embrace knowledge.

                                           00:35:03             She is a mother or a tree, a source of life and knowledge. You could almost say she’s built from the tree of life and knowledge. So there’s a lot of different ways we can take this, and I’m skimming the surface. It’s really powerful, and you can look also at women as being these initiators, these instigators of bringing life and knowledge of shepherding that forth into the world. And I think where this really applies is that not only is it, I don’t know, good sociological practice to listen to half the population, but also this is good practice given by God. If we’re looking at Eve and Adam as being leaders and Eve as being the first shepherd, or Eve being as this tree, the usherer of life and knowledge, then we also need to realize that if we only listen to men, we only get half of the inspiration that God is giving to us.

                                           00:36:00             And I love that we have Elder Uchtdorf and President Nelson who’ve talked about this ongoing restoration, that the restoration is not done, which means we’re not perfect. Yes, we have a continuous restoration, and I think that God is pouring forth light and knowledge through more sources than we are aware of. Pouring forth through men, and through women, and through Latter-day Saints, and through our church leaders, and through our children, our primary children, we need to pay attention. Otherwise, we’re missing out.

Hank Smith:                      00:36:32             That’s wonderful. Two halves of a revelation.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:36:37             Yes.

Hank Smith:                      00:36:37             That’s why you have to counsel. The same idea. You have half the revelation, I have half the revelation, we put them together. Rebekah, I didn’t write my dissertation on this, but I’ve read enough to know that that word rib, if we go back to Genesis 2:21, the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept and he took one of his ribs. That Hebrew there, that’s a pretty loose translation. Am I right that taking one of his ribs could mean something else entirely?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:37:13             Yes. In fact, all of the Hebrew descriptions we have, this word that’s translated as rib never means rib. It’s not an anatomical word. It’s a construction term. Often it refers to a plank or a beam. Also, it can refer to a side or an entire side or flank of a mountain. So it’s like this whole half of the mountain. This, as I mentioned before, can be a construction terminology, but also it just means Adam’s side. So is this Adam sort of being split into half? You’ve got, as we talked before, the sort of the two and we’re just cutting in half. So your two halves meant to come back together to be one, but this is not an anatomical term.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:52             Yeah, the interesting word rib, you’ll hear people say, oh, well, it’s a rib. She’s not above him. She’s not below him. She’s to the side of him or you have to lose something in order to gain something. The idea, I know it’s a little bit odd, but a lot of the Bible is odd. For it to say the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he cut him in half. And with one half, he made Eve. That would make sense. She is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. If he just took a rib, why would he say, flesh of my flesh. Now they’re two sides of the same being. And that makes sense for verse 24, doesn’t it? Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they’re one, two halves of a whole come back together. That’s beautiful.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:38:41             It is beautiful. I think that there is so much imagery throughout our scriptures and also from this first book of scripture that we have, organizationally speaking, like, you know, it’s the first book of the Bible that has to do with unity. When it says that the city of Enoch was only translated when the people became so unified. They were one heart and one mind and there were no poor among them. No one fell through the cracks. That is the prerequisite it appears for translation. For being taken up into the presence of God, we get to have this opportunity that we get to try to be unified and it’s yes as a society, yes as ward units, yes as stakes, but also yes as families and yes as spouses, that it sort of begins there. How do you learn to be so unified with one person that you love each other despite foibles and differences of opinion or differences in background or whatever, that we love each other anyway.

                                           00:39:42             That’s really one of the big things that church is about. Why do we go to church? Well, we go to church to partake of the sacrament and renew our covenants, but why else do we go to church? You go to chemistry class to learn principles of chemistry and you go to chemistry lab to practice using them. You go to anatomy and physiology to learn how the body works and you go to anatomy lab to actually practice. We get to learn. We have the opportunity to learn the hows, the nuts and bolts of how do we follow Jesus. And then we get to go to church. Church is gospel lab. We get to go to church and intermingle with a whole bunch of people who might be hard to get along with and who can be annoying and who can be offensive and who say things that we wish we didn’t have to hear or who smell because they don’t shower or whatever reason.

                                           00:40:34             And we get to actually practice, are we real disciples of Jesus? That’s the lab because if we think about it, Christ, his entire existence is a manifestation of charity. Charity is not the easy kind of love. Charity suffers long, that means there’s something to be suffered. Envys not. You can’t tell if a person’s not envious unless they’ve got a reason that they could be envious and is not puffed up like a person is only humble if there’s a reason for them to be proud. It’s when you’ve got that contrast and you choose to be good or humble or long suffering or patient anyway. So charity is not the easy kind of love. Charity is the hard kind of love when there’s every reason to not, every justification to not do it. We get to go to church to learn to be charitable. We get to do that in our families. There’s a lot of reasons we go to church, but I think one of the reasons is that that’s gospel lab. We get to actually go practice. It really ties in well with Elder Holland’s talk from a few years ago when he talked about if we get frustrated working with imperfect people in this church, but imperfect people is the only thing that Jesus ever got to work with.

Hank Smith:                      00:41:43             Must be incredibly frustrating to him. Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:41:45             But he deals with it.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:41:47             And he deals with it. Yes.

John Bytheway:               00:41:48             And so should we. I like that part.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:41:51             That’s exactly what Elder Holland is talking about, that it can be hard to be around people, but I think if we’re serious disciples of Christ, then having an annoying ward is not a reason to walk away from the church, in my opinion.

Hank Smith:                      00:42:08             John, we’ve said this before. The Lord told us he wants us to love our enemies, so he put them in our ward and in our neighborhood.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:42:17             Yep. He’ll make sure we come in contact.

Hank Smith:                      00:42:19             Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:42:20             Lots of enemies. One convenient location.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:42:25             That’s good.

Hank Smith:                      00:42:26             I have a question for you, Rebekah. John, I know this is a topic that you enjoy. In your research about Eve, can you speak to what you saw the general population says about Eve versus what the Latter-day Saints say about Eve? Did you have any experiences there where you went, wow, I see this differently.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:42:49             Yes. There is the obvious thing that a lot of mainstream Christian dialogue historically has centered on seeing Eve as being somehow lesser than Adam. Now, in more recent years, there are theological moves to say, actually, here’s why, let’s not say that women are just as a whole, less than men. And Latter-day Saint thought during my lifetime has not said that, that we do have these beautiful things like the statement in Moses, you know, were it not for our transgression, we never would have known-

John Bytheway:               00:43:20             Good and evil and-

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:43:22             Thank you. I’m paraphrasing. It’s that we get to have that joy because we made these choices. And so we have this in our scriptures and we were able to talk about this, and that is different, that we talk about it in a different way from mainstream Christians. So it really opens the door for some types of exploration that mainstream Christians might not have as available to them. Having said that, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, I do, I have also seen that sometimes there are threads, threads that slipped under the wire of the way that women get talked about or the way that Eve gets talked about that even though she took the fruit and we’re thankful for that, but da, da, da, da, you know, fill in the blank. That’s why I would say yes and no. There are ways that we talk, and I think the majority of how we talk about Eve is quite different from mainstream Christianity in this sense, but there are subliminal threads that have woven through that are similar to how other faiths might talk about her. That’s where we have this opportunity to look carefully and to carefully tease apart the wheat from the tares. We live in a cultural context, so it’s a natural thing that we might take on some of those things and we need to let them grow and then separate them so that we can have more concentrated truth.

Hank Smith:                      00:44:41             Yeah. And practice them in the lab.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:44:45             And practice them in the lab.

Hank Smith:                      00:44:47             It’s one thing to talk about unity and equality. It’s another to practice it.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:44:53             And to take a good, hard look and to see where am I not doing that and for each person to do that, because as human beings, of course, there are times when I do and there are times when I don’t. Can we be honest enough to really see when we’re not in making a change and to make a change?

Hank Smith:                      00:45:13             Rebekah, I have another question for you. Sometimes I’ve seen this happen. Like you said, we’re all human. Making mistakes is part of being alive. A man would say, yes, we are equal. In fact, we’re not just equal. She’s better than me. She’s my better half instead of she’s my other half, it’s my better half. And that seems that, I get it. It’s supposed to be a compliment, but again, we’re getting away from what the Lord intended.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:45:43             And I think this one is, in some senses, even sneakier. I think it’s just as bad. We live in a society now where more people … I mean, we’ve got social media and public platforms, so people can say what they want. And so we are having more of a highlight on saying, okay, let’s listen to women’s voices and let’s pull them in and we’re finding the church is finding more ways to have women have leadership and be more visible and listen to women’s voices. We see that. So it’s easy to say, okay, well, we have this history. Most history has been written by men. We’ve gotten men’s voices and most world leaders for written history have been men, so we’ve had men, male leaders. So it’s easy to look and say, well, women are the underdog, so let’s just give them their chance in the limelight and lift them up even higher. But that is exactly the same thing that has been done to women for the last, however long, recorded history, just turned around.

                                           00:46:38             It doesn’t solve the problem to say that because women or any other marginalized group has been repressed, that we should repress the people, the descendants of the people who’ve repressed them. It’s the same problem. It’s the same sin just turned around. And the reason why it’s sneakier is because it’s like, oh, well, don’t they have it coming? They get to have a chance to be on top. Except we believe that man would be punished for his own sin and not for Adam’s transgression or the transgression of any other parent, any other forefather or mother. Yes, maybe someone has ancestors who have done horrible things or has a father or a mother who has done horrible things, but that doesn’t mean that the later generation should be paying for that. So it does not bring justice or righteousness in the world to elevate women higher than men.

                                           00:47:34             That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing is that, ironically, when you find this extreme elevation of women, the end result is still the same, is that it becomes a reduction of agency for women and it becomes a reduction of agency for men. And it’s the same effect if you lower women or raise women, because either way, women ended up with fewer opportunities, less ability to use their voice because either they’re not good enough so they shouldn’t use their voice, or because they’re so good, men need the practice. You get this rhetoric. And what that leads to is a reduction in agency where women have a lesser ability to take responsibility for their own potential. And it’s also a reduction in agency for men because it gives them the ability to make excuses and say, well, here’s why I’m doing this, or here’s why I’m not doing this. It’s a reduction of agency for both people. It is dangerous. Everyone loses. Whereas when both people can be here together, working together in the trenches together, equally yoked, that is when both have the greatest potential for expression of agency and development and progression toward their eternal potential.

Hank Smith:                      00:48:54             Happy wife, happy life is probably not the way to go. It’s more happy God, happy life.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:49:00             Yeah. I would say happy God and happy spouses.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:04             Happy each other.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:49:05             Right. We look to the other to make sure the other is taken care of. And if both sides are taken care of, then there will be flourishing, there will be life, there will be joy.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:16             Yeah, that’s wonderful. And I can see how understanding the text, letting it speak for itself helps you make important corrections.

John Bytheway:               00:49:27             Quick question. Are there some who completely discount that there was even an Adam and Eve, oh, that’s just a fable. And Noah’s Ark, that’s just a fable. In your research, did most people believe there really was an Adam and really wasn’t Eve in the Christian traditions you studied?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:49:46             When you say most people, it depends on which demographic you’re talking about. If you say most academics, most scholars would say there was likely not an Adam and Eve. For some people that can become problematic, sometimes in the church, we become attached to the framework through which we’re viewing things rather than being firmly affixed to the principles themselves. The principles themselves are Jesus Christ and his atonement and having faith in him and turning to become closer to him, this is repenting all the time, and having a vibrant relationship that is transforming us. That’s the way I approach it. Other people have different ways. For me, I just say at the end of the day, I don’t think, for me, that’s an important enough question for me to lose sleep over.

Hank Smith:                      00:50:37             Yeah. Or maybe they’ll come over to you in your sleep. Don’t lose sleep over it because they’ll never say hi. Rebekah, John and I have been richly blessed walking through this with you. It really is so fun to just sit with scripture, especially with someone who spent so much time in a particular place and just glean from your years of work. How do you wanna finish our time together?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:51:06             I’d actually like to finish with a little music, if that’s all right.

Hank Smith:                      00:51:10             Okay.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:51:13             I come from a musical family and I love to sing. During my PhD program, my first semester, I was in a class, it was called Women in the Book of Genesis. All we did was look at the female characters in the Book of Genesis, and each one of the students got to choose one of the characters that they wrote their final paper on. It was an academic paper. We were given the flexibility if we wanted. It had to be based in scholarship, but we could do any sort of project that integrated different disciplines. If you wanted to paint something or make something from clay and whatever you wanted to do. It was interesting. I was in class, the signup sheet went around, and I initially wanted to sign up for Rebekah because my name is Rebekah. Rebekah was already taken, so I thought, well, I’m also interested in Eve, maybe I’ll do Eve. So I was sitting, I wrote my name on it, and I was sitting there and my teacher was explaining how we could do a transdisciplinary project, and that could include poetry or music.

                                           00:52:12             All of a sudden, I had, like, a tune come into my mind, and I’m writing it down, and I thought, I think I need to do a poem. I write a poem to this music. So I ended up reading a whole bunch of research, looking at Eve in the Garden of Eden, and then I wrote a poem that is from her perspective. After Abel has already been killed, in my mind, she has Seth as a baby, and she’s holding and sort of singing this song to Seth. I’m gonna briefly walk you through the lyrics because they’re all grounded in different research or different traditions. Like I’ve got some things here from Hebrew tradition and Jewish tradition, and I’ve got a couple Hebrew words, so I’ll explain that, and then I’ll sing the song for you.

Hank Smith:                      00:52:56             Wow.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:52:58             I’ll read the entire poem, and then I’ll explain each line, and then I’ll sing it. This is called The Burden of Imbalance. “Oh, my child, you cannot remember the glory that clothed us like embers. Ish Isha,” that means man and woman. “Together in Eden, no questions weighed on us. We walked hand in hand. You cannot know the pain of discovery, the searing of conscience that came with uncovering. As side by side we left from the Garden, our sorrows upon us, our innocence gone. See my child the burden of balance that never before was a burden. We paid the price, we bought of the Lord, but life is like breath, now founded in death. Else, how to see the secret things hidden or know the unknown while fruit lay unbitten. Fear not my child. Set this past before you. Step into the darkness and rest in my arms.” That’s the poem.

                                           00:53:56             “Oh my child, you cannot remember the glory that clothed us like embers.” There are different traditions that hold that Adam and Eve were clothed in various ways prior to partaking of the forbidden fruit. There are traditions like Jewish traditions of them being clothed in glory, of being clothed in light, or of being clothed in serpent skin. I chose to go for the one of them being clothed in light, the glory that clothed us like embers that’s burning and full of light. Isha, Ish means man. Isha means woman, and they’re used in the Eden account. “Together in Eden, no questions weighed on us, we walked hand in hand.” I liked that because there’s some temple imagery hand in hand. There is this idea of being together, the togetherness, the equality that existed.

                                           00:54:42             “You cannot know the pain of discovery, the searing of conscience that came with uncovering.” This is referring to that moral awareness that comes. I think it was a painful process of being uncovered, of seeing the shame of realizing choice and consequences at the same time that it was beautiful. I think it was also painful because a lot of times when we learn and we grow and we learn to see new things, that is a painful process, but it’s a beautiful pain, if that makes sense. “As side by side we left from the Garden, our sorrows upon us, our innocence gone.” Some of these don’t need as much explanation. For this, I really wanted to emphasize that they were together because a lot of times when we talk about the text, it’s like, oh, Eve did this thing and then Adam did this thing and they were not together. But if you just look at the words of the Genesis account itself, they do almost everything together.

                                           00:55:36             And the only thing that the woman does alone is she eats the fruit, but in the next breath says she ate the fruit and she gave to her husband who ate with her. So it’s not even entirely sure that she ate the fruit alone. Like they do everything together. That’s really beautiful. “See my child the burden of balance that never before was a burden.” When you look at sort of this order, the vast order that, that Elohim puts into the creation of this garden, there’s this balance where the man and woman are together and then separated and then that they’re side by side and they’re doing everything together and then all of a sudden they’re in this fallen world and they’ve been warned by God, just so you know, gender imbalance is gonna be a thing. Men are gonna dominate women. This is a warning. This is a descriptive prophecy that you need to watch out for. This is one of the great pitfalls of human society.

                                           00:56:31             It wasn’t a burden before, but now there’s this burden of balance you have to deal with. “We paid the price.” Now, these next two lines, we paid the price. The root of the word Cain is to buy, to purchase, to pay a price for. And when Eve bears Cain, she says, I have bought a man of the Lord. So we paid the price, we bought of the Lord, but life is like breath. The word Abel means breath or nothingness because that’s what happens to his line. It’s a symbolic name. I don’t think they really named him nothingness or breath because his line becomes nothing because he dies. We paid a price, we bought of the Lord, that’s Cain, but life is like breath, that’s Abel passing away. Now founded, Seth, their next son, means basis or foundation. Now founded in death and it’s recognizing that from the moment we’re born, we’re dying already because death is a thing in a fallen world.

                                           00:57:24             “Else how to see the secret things hidden or know the unknown while fruit lay unbitten.” And this is her saying, but I took all this on. “Fear not my child. Set this past before you.” And now this is referring to an ancient near eastern concept of time. In the Western world, we view past, present and future. We look to the future because that’s where we’re going and the past is behind us, but in the ancient near east and in actually in modern day, like the way Asians view time is that you’re going backwards into the future because you can’t see it. You don’t know what the future’s gonna bring, but you look back at the past because that’s what you can actually see. Fear not my child, set this past before you, you can see it, step into the darkness of what you can’t see in the future and rest in my arms. So, that’s the poem.

                                           00:58:42             “Oh my child, you cannot remember the glory that clothed us like embers. Ish isha together in Eden. No questions wait on us, we walked hand in hand. You cannot know the pain of discovery, the searing of conscience that came with uncovering as side by side we left from the garden, our sorrows upon us, our innocence gone. See my child, the burden of balance that never before was a burden. We paid the price we bought of the Lord, but life is like breath. Now founded in death. Else how to see the secret things hidden or know the unknown while fruit lay unbitten. Fear not my child. Set this past before you. Step into the darkness and rest in my arms. Fear not my child. Set this past before you. Step into the darkness and rest in my arms.

Hank Smith:                      01:01:19             Beautiful. So wonderful.

John Bytheway:               01:01:23             So beautiful. Yeah. Beautifully performed.

Hank Smith:                      01:01:28             Wonderful. Yeah. I can see how you’re sitting there and that tune comes into your head like, I gotta get this, I gotta get this written down, this revelation.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:01:36             Yeah, it just sort of came. So I was like, okay.

John Bytheway:               01:01:40             It sounds kind of-

Hank Smith:                      01:01:42             Ancient.

John Bytheway:               01:01:44             Yeah, it sounds kind of ancient. Good word. The melody. Beautiful. Thank you.

Hank Smith:                      01:01:48             As I was listening, John, I, that, that title from the Doctrine and Covenants.

John Bytheway:               01:01:54             Glorious Mother Eve. I saw our glorious Mother Eve and find that exact phrase anywhere else in the world.

Hank Smith:                      01:02:03             Anywhere else. Yeah. Rebekah, it has been a joy to have you here and to introduce you to the followHIM family.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:02:14             Well, it has been a privilege for me to come. I feel very honored and grateful to be a part of this.

Hank Smith:                      01:02:19             Yeah. One way I know when I feel the Holy Ghost is that I have more motivation to be good and to do good and to align myself with what I’ve been taught. That’s happened to me today.

John Bytheway:               01:02:35             And I wanna bring unity in my family and in my marriage and you put unity back in my mind again.

Hank Smith:                      01:02:43             Thank you, Rebekah, for being with us and, please thank your wonderful fiance, Joe, for us. Let him know we’re grateful that we were able to take you for a little while. With that, we want to thank Dr. Rebekah Call for being with us. It has been a joy. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. And every episode, we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week. We have more Genesis, Moses and Abraham coming up on followHIM. As a thank you to our wonderful listeners, we’d love to gift you the digital version of our book, Finding Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. It offers short, meaningful insights drawn from our past Old Testament episodes. Visit followhim.co, that’s followhim.co to download your free copy today, and you’ll also find the link to purchase the print edition.

                                           01:03:41             Thank you for being part of our followHIM family. Of course, none of this could happen without our incredible production crew. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, Ariel Cuadra, Heather Barlow, Amelia Kabwika, Sydney Smith, and Annabelle Sorensen.