“How lonely sits the city
    that once was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1; NRSVUE used throughout)

A ruined cityscape is a desolating sight. Its razed buildings and its vacant, mangled thoroughfares summon the ghosts of a vanished human commerce. How wasted and barren, how bereft the streets.

Our collective memory holds grim pictures of ruined cities: London and Dresden in black-and-white rubble, Hiroshima silent and leveled, Chernobyl abandoned to a poisoned forest. NYC on 9/11, littered with the paper remains of Wall Street. Gaza, buried in concrete and twisted rebar.

Lamentations belongs to this fearsome company as the Bible’s primary literature of destruction and grief. It speaks from the point of view of Jerusalem itself in the wake of the Babylonian conquest, a wrecked city mourning for its kidnapped and murdered inhabitants. Over five highly structured poems, Lamentations memorializes the catastrophe of the temple’s desecration in shocking scenes of violence and violation. Where the faithful once moved in procession toward the temple with festive psalms, the implacable nations now march with fierce clamor (Lamentations 2:7). With caustic irony, the poem imagines an anti-worship that un-dedicates the temple.

By the time a reader of the Christian Bible reaches the famous opening line of Lamentations (“How lonely sits the city”), they have encountered the destruction of Jerusalem in three historical narratives (2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Jeremiah 52), two major prophets (Isaiah and Jeremiah), at least three psalms of lament (Psalms 74, 79, and 137), and the overarching framework of covenantal blessings and curses that warns of Judah’s punishment from Deuteronomy onward (Deuteronomy 28 and 31). When we arrive at Lamentations, the destruction of 587 BC is hardly breaking news. But reading the grief and outrage that throbs in these ancient poems is like looking into an open wound that still weeps blood.

In spite of its despair, the poetry of Lamentations is so arresting that it has become a universal vehicle for the sorrows of the world. Ironically, its bitter parody of worship has been reincorporated into genuine worship. In Judaism, Lamentations is read from the floor of a darkened synagogue on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day of the year, to commemorate the destruction of both temples. After the Holocaust, and again after October 7, 2023, its words took on a terrible new poignancy:

The Lord has rejected
    all my warriors in the midst of me;
he proclaimed a time against me
    to crush my young men;
the Lord has trodden as in a winepress
    the virgin daughter Judah.

For these things I weep;
    my eyes flow with tears;
for a comforter is far from me,
    one to revive my courage;
my children are desolate,
    for the enemy has prevailed. (Lamentations 1:15–16)

Christians, for their part, have found in Lamentations a text equal to the grief of Golgotha. In traditional tenebrae services of Holy Week, selections from Lamentations are recited to evoke the suffering of Christ and the grief of the Church. Lamentations 1:12 is read as the words of Jesus on the cross:

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
    Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
    which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
    on the day of his fierce anger.

Our own faith community recently marked one year since four of our own were killed on a Sunday morning in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Latter-day Saint leaders no longer commonly offer public lament; they wisely focus on resilience and consolation in Christ. But I can imagine a private gathering in which the bereaved ward family might read together Jerusalem’s words of baffled devastation:

The elders of daughter Zion
    sit on the ground in silence;
they have thrown dust on their heads;
    they put on sackcloth;
the young women of Jerusalem
    have bowed their heads to the ground. . . .

You invited my enemies from all around
    as if for a day of festival;
and on the day of the anger of the Lord,
    no one escaped or survived;
those whom I bore and reared,
    my enemy has destroyed. (Lamentations 2: 10, 22)

Communal lament helps survivors come to terms with the catastrophes of history and the tragedies of their individual lives. Weeping together helps a community purge and process the despair of loss. The raw grief of Lamentations, which over the course of its five chapters stubbornly refuses to countenance any settled comfort, can nevertheless be a source of healing for wounded readers. Among the several ironies of Lamentations, this at last is a gracious one.

One way literature gentles grief is by submitting overwhelming emotion to the discipline of literary form. Its five poems are Hebrew acrostics, each line beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as if to express the comprehensiveness of the people’s grief from beginning to end, aleph to tav. Beyond this formal device, the poet of Lamentations creates three unforgettable characters who speak for Israel. In chapter 1, Daughter Zion appears as an abandoned mother whose children were killed and kidnapped before her eyes; she herself was sexually violated and left exposed and discarded in the street. Despite her shame, she does not hide or crawl away to die alone. On the contrary, she stridently importunes the Lord to witness her suffering and to respond with aid. In the floods of horror that surround her, she wants to live, and she will not cease to seek life from God. Daughter Zion’s desperate thirst for life moves me deeply.

Lamentations 3 introduces a second character, a shattered Man whose once-powerful body was broken by enemies. He expresses Israel’s pain in a masculine voice, offering a song of lament in the shape we recognize from Psalms and Jeremiah. He begins with vivid description of his body’s ruin, bones crushed and teeth ground into gravel, and then turns from lament to praise in the famous lines:

Yet this I call to mind
    and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
    for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:21–23)

The Man is resolute and firm of mind. His patience and self-discipline, his submission and silence in the face of God’s chastisement—so different from the importunate Daughter Zion—also move me deeply:

Let him sit alone in silence,
    for the Lord has laid it on him.
Let him bury his face in the dust—
    there may yet be hope.
Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
    and let him be filled with disgrace. (Lamentations 3:28–30)

But there is a third character who moves me most of all, the Child. The children of Zion appear throughout the five poems as figures of absolute innocence, emaciated and defenseless. Lamentations 2 is the most harrowing treatment, showing starving children collapsing in the street and perishing in their mothers’ arms:

My eyes are spent with weeping;
    my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground
    because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint
    in the streets of the city.
They cry to their mothers,
    “Where is bread and wine?”
as they faint like the wounded
    in the streets of the city,
as their life is poured out
    on their mothers’ bosoms. (Lamentations 2:11–12)

Though it is almost too painful to read, the image itself is carefully constructed. The Child cries out weakly for nourishment and collapses into her mother’s lap. But her mother cannot provide. Instead, where milk should pour from the mother’s breast, the child pours out the last of her sole and precious life. The Child does not deserve chastisement and cannot be culpable for covenant betrayal. Unlike Daughter Zion and the stoic Man, the child does not know how to importune or submit to God. She has no part in the clash of empires that piles wreckage on the shores of history.

I think it is natural for collective memory to personify a devastated city. I see London after the Blitz, and New York City on 9/11, as heroic wounded rescuers pushing through smoking debris, risking their own lives to recover the wounded and dead. I see Hiroshima as a young woman cruelly scarred and desperately shielding her unborn child from radiation. I see Gaza as a child pulled from the rubble of a hospital, wrapped in a torn sheet.

I turn away from these thoughts. But Lamentations is beyond denial and beyond avoidance. Its poet is stronger than I am, forced by their people’s suffering to confront the universal suffering of Woman, Man, and Child. They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We tremble to know that they knew it.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945).

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Chalk this one up to something like a scriptural version of the frequency illusion.

Here’s what happened. I was recently reading a book that quoted Matthew 16:13–16, and I’m sure because Jeremiah was on my mind for the purposes of this blog post, something in that Matthew passage caught my attention like never before.

“Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” Jesus asked his disciples.

“Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some Elijah; and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”1

I realized that, as far as I could remember, I had never asked myself, Why would the people who were hearing Jesus—and hearing of Jesus—associate him with Jeremiah? Think he might even be Jeremiah returned? I could remember in the past thinking, Why John the Baptist? Or why Elijah? But not that I could recall, Why Jeremiah?

It didn’t take long to discover that I had read books that had treated that very question,2 but nothing about those previous encounters had stuck with me until now. It dawned on me that the very fact that Jeremiah had been on my mind made me notice something that had always been there. It was the scriptural equivalent of learning a new word and suddenly hearing it everywhere or buying a new car and suddenly noticing that every fourth driver on the freeway seemed to own the same car.

That’s the frequency illusion, and it has given me some things to think about this week.

For one thing, it was yet another reminder in general of the value of a close reading of scripture. I need constantly to be asking myself, What other details and rich avenues for exploration are right here, right now—and have always been there?

But for these past few days specifically, it has been an interesting exercise to think about this connection between Jesus and Jeremiah. What was it about Jesus’ ministry that reminded his hearers and associates of Jeremiah? What can this tell us about early reactions to Jesus’ work and words?

It doesn’t take long to see that the thematic parallels in their ministries seem everywhere.

Here are just a few very initial thoughts:

• The gospels’ chronology of this is not easy to pin down with any definitiveness, but the Gospel of John suggests (differently than the synoptic gospels) that Jesus also drove out the moneychangers and merchants from the temple early in his ministry (see John 2). If that timing were the case, what Jewish witness of Jesus’ actions and words would not have heard echoes of Jeremiah’s indictment of what was happening in the temple in his day? The synoptic gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple even have Jesus paraphrasing Jeremiah: “Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?” (Jeremiah 7:11) As word spread of Jesus’ actions at the temple, would the connection with Jeremiah’s indignation have seemed almost unavoidable?

• The connections to the temple go even further. One of the most sobering of Jeremiah’s prophecies asked Judah to look at what had happened to Israel just a century before, and to Shiloh specifically: “But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. . . . Therefore will I do unto this house [in Jerusalem], which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh” (Jeremiah 7:12, 14). And we remember that one of the chief accusations brought against Jesus was that he had predicted, or even called for, the destruction of the temple (see Matthew 26:61). Even though his accusers had missed the deeper meaning of Jesus’ words, it would make sense that his listeners might have thought, “This sounds a lot like Jeremiah.”

• Jeremiah 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” At a tense season in Jesus’ ministry—at the very time when “there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people”—Jesus spoke these words in the temple: “Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me?”; and “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:12, 19, 38).

• Jeremiah’s strong rebuke of the religious leaders of his day made him unpopular on all sides. Pashur, the “chief governor in the house of the Lord,” even “smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin” (Jeremiah 20:1–2). But that painful humiliation didn’t cow Jeremiah. He came out of the stocks with a “thus saith the Lord” message for Pashur: Judah would be conquered by Babylon, “and thou, Pashur, and all that dwell in thine house shall go into captivity: and thou shalt come to Babylon, and there thou shalt die, and shalt be buried there, thou, and all thy friends, to whom thou hast prophesied lies” (Jeremiah 20:6). And then we remember moments when “all they in the synagogue, when they heard” what Jesus said, “were filled with wrath” and tried to “[lead] him unto the brow of the hill whereon the city was built, that they might cast him down headlong” (Luke 4:28–29). Or moments when they “took . . . up stones to cast at [Jesus]” (John 8:59).

There is a lot more to say here, but maybe this is enough of a start, because what strikes me overall in this exercise is something more impressionistic than anything. Matthew 16’s reference to Jeremiah could reveal something about a general attitude toward (and appreciation of) the fearlessness that observers associated with Jeremiah—and likewise saw in Jesus. It’s the spirit of Matthew 15:12–14: “Then came [Jesus’] disciples, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?” Jesus seemed undisturbed. “But he answered and said, Every plant that my Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” When Jeremiah was first confronting the implications of his prophetic calling (and confronting his own self-doubt), he accounted for his subsequent and unflinching resolve this way: “Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:9–10).

All of this was not without a cost, for Jeremiah or for Jesus. In Jeremiah 20, Jeremiah lamented the day he was born: “Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?” (Jeremiah 20:18). It was a heavy burden to speak the word of the Lord. Jesus, too, was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

It’s easy to imagine the way society’s underdogs might have cheered for Jesus as they saw him doing what they understood Jeremiah to have also done so many centuries earlier: dishing out a plate of comeuppance to the powerful. It would have been easy to admire that kind of courage to call out the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of those who tithed mint and cumin but ignored the weightier matters of the law. But what Jesus was about was much more than that—and so, too, was Jeremiah.

No, of course Jesus was not Jeremiah returned, but they were motivated by very similar concerns.

The Bible Dictionary entry for Jeremiah has this beautiful line: “After Josiah’s death he tried to stem . . . the tide of idolatry and immorality, of self-deception founded on superficial reforms . . . , and of fanatical confidence in the Lord’s protection, in which all classes were carried away” (emphasis added). I’m struck by the notion that Jeremiah was worried about self-deception and superficial reforms that seemed so universally problematic. It was more than just boldness for boldness’s sake, more than being a disrupter for disruption’s sake. It was about getting past the surface.

“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time,” Jesus told everyone who would listen, as he reviewed points of the law. “But I say unto you,” what about anger, lust, contention, revenge, integrity, humility? Superficial reforms were not good enough, could never be good enough. “Hypocrites! For ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. . . . cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, then the outside of them may be clean also” (Matthew 23:25–26).

Knowing that truth, it’s no wonder that Jeremiah felt the “word . . . in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, . . . and I could not stay” (Jeremiah 20:9).

That was true for Jeremiah, and it was true for Jesus—and all the better for us. That kind of boldness might be just the thing we all need to prompt us to confront our own tendencies toward self-deception.

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J. B. Haws is the Executive Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and a professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. He is the author of The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, 2013) and holds a PhD in American History from the University of Utah. His research centers on the place of Mormonism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, including public perceptions of Latter-day Saints, trends in contemporary Mormon historical scholarship, and interfaith engagement.

Art by Barthélemy d’Eyck (c. 1420–1470).

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Adapted from Seven Songs: Signs of Christ in the Old Testament (Deseret Book, 2025). Shared by permission from the publisher.

Isaiah 60 is a song of homecoming. After the catastrophe of the scattering, which saw Israel’s children and household flung in disarray among the nations, this poem, one of the finest in the Hebrew Bible, depicts Israel’s restoration as a great flow of creation—camels and ships, gold and silver, rams and doves, juniper and fir and cypress, and wave after wave of human peoples stretching as far as the eye can see—streaming “in triumphal procession” back to the holy city of Zion (Isaiah 60:11, NIV).

For all its epic sweep, this poem is rooted in the story of a family reunion. Strip out the extravagant imagery, and its core is surprisingly intimate. After years wandering in faraway lands, a family of lost children is finally brought home. They arrive at dawn. Their steps quicken as they near the city gates, and they begin to run at the sight of their mother just beyond. Lady Zion has not forgotten her children. She rises, straining to make out their faces, dark against the rising sun. They come to her now, their arms heavy with gifts. Her years of poverty are over, and their years of wandering, too. They are reunited and home: “Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee” (Isaiah 60:4, KJV and hereafter).

Homecoming is an all-purpose archetype for the (re)turning points in every life shared with Christ. Repentance is homecoming: The prodigal son who “was lost, and is found” returns from a distant country to the arms of his loving father (Luke 15:32). Conversion is homecoming: As Paul put it, “Now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. . . . Now therefore ye are . . . of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:13, 19). Death is homecoming: Alma taught his own prodigal son, Corianton, that “the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body . . . are taken home to that God who gave them life” (Alma 40:11). Salvation is homecoming: King Benjamin turns the mind of the people to the happiness of those who “are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness” (Mosiah 2:41).

The lost are found. The far are brought near. The estranged are taken home. The pilgrims are received. Again and again, prophets turn to the biblical promise of the gathering of Israel to express the hopes of those who follow Christ. And no Hebrew prophet wrote more powerfully of the gathering than Isaiah. Isaiah managed to create, not just here but across the entire collection of poems contained in the book named for him, an incredibly compelling religious template for love, loss, and reunion. Who can fail to be moved by the story of a mother who loses and then finds her children? Who can resist the promise that “thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side” (Isaiah 60:4)? The gathering of Israel is, for both Jews and Christians, the central emotional and theological framework for understanding the Messiah’s redemptive work in drawing all people to himself.

But who is going home? In the book of Exodus, we see that God’s aim is not only to bring us home to him but also to build a home for himself among us: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel . . . . And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:1, 8). God’s purpose for creation is to make it possible for us to return, wiser and better, to our true home in the presence of God, yes. But God also desires to, himself, come home to us.

And so the homecoming in Isaiah 60, we can now see, is a two-way homecoming: God receives creation to himself, and creation receives God to itself. The children of Israel stream to Zion, trailing in their wake the abundance of creation to lay at the altar of the temple. And when they arrive there, they find that the Lord, too, has come home to meet them in the sanctuary: “All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory” (Isaiah 60:7). The presence of the Lord in his house is signaled by glory, the brilliant light that radiates from his habitation. We see the relationship between light, glory, and divine presence laid out in the parallel structure of verse 19: “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory” (Isaiah 60:19). Where glory is, there God is also—and glory is everywhere in Isaiah 60. The poem begins with the light of the Lord dawning over Zion: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” (Isaiah 60:1). By the end of the poem, the light of the Lord has taken up its place in the sanctuary of the temple and Zion is illuminated from within by a light so brilliant that it eclipses the sun and the moon: “Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light” (Isaiah 60:20). In Zion, God is no absentee landlord, but the on-site, on-call, hands-on resident Lord of creation.

Isaiah paints a masterful word picture of the future homecoming of Christ and humanity, when they will at last receive one another fully in the temple of renewed creation. As Latter-day Saints, we look forward to the Savior’s second coming—his homecoming, as Isaiah has taught us to see it—in the fulness of his glory. But when we focus exclusively on the comings of Christ that still remain in the future, we risk missing his many homecomings in the past and present. Indeed, we may miss the reality that the entire history of Christ’s dealings with humanity is one long series of homecomings.

Consider these seven snapshots from scripture. Each is a homecoming of God.

“And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8): God visited Adam and Eve in the garden at the beginning of time.

“And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord” (Ether 3:6): God came to a Jaredite prophet when the world of men was new.

“And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8): God traveled in a tent through an ancient wilderness.

“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14): God indwelt a tabernacle of flesh as a first-century Judean artisan.

“And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering” (Luke 9:29): God uncovered his glory on a mountaintop at the meridian of time.

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16): God came again into the world at the birth of his church.

“We saw the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit, before us” (Doctrine and Covenants 110:2): God moved into the home lovingly erected as a modern witness to his presence in the world.

String together these snapshots of seven homecomings into a moving picture. Now splice this film montage-style into Isaiah’s poem: Picture, in quick succession, the Lord coming home in glory to his garden, his mountain, his tent, his body, his Church, his temple, his city. Picture all of creation, all of history, every dispensation and every visitation, as the occasion of God’s homecoming celebrated in Isaiah 60: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” Now dissolve these flashing scenes slowly into a single image of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The world is God’s home, and Christ is God’s homecoming.

To my mind, there is no greater modern witness of divine homecoming than the Restoration. The revelations of our founding prophet, the sacred cosmos and loving Father that become visible in them, the beauty of our temple practices, and the consecrated efforts of our community straining toward Zion—all of these testify to me that what John the Baptist announced has come to pass: The kingdom of heaven has come near (see Matthew 3:2). The realized hope of Israel’s prophets is underway; God’s home of justice, peace, and joy is coming into being; and the New Jerusalem as the temple-world of God is rising in our midst.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

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Who told thee that thou wast naked? (Genesis 3:11; see also Moses 4:17)

Have you ever wondered why Adam and Eve hid when they realized that God was about to see them naked? I have. Because this wasn’t a new situation. To that point, Adam and Eve had only ever been naked before God. God knew their nakedness—he created their nakedness! Whether speaking to them face to face or just aware of them as their all-knowing Creator, God surely was not bothered by their nakedness. What changed when Eve, then Adam, chose to partake of the forbidden fruit?

The difference was that they became aware of their nakedness. I imagine that this was not the first time they had shared a walk with God in the cool evening breeze. But this time, for the first time, when they heard that familiar voice in the garden, they “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8; see also Moses 4:14).

In Isaiah 50, God wonders where we have gone. “When I came, was there no man? When I called, was there none to answer?” (Isaiah 50:2). What causes us to hide when we hear God’s voice? What causes us to believe that we have been “put away” by God; that we have no option but to sell ourselves “for [our] iniquities?” (Isaiah 50:1).

[W]e hid as it were our faces from him . . . (Isaiah 53:3)

As I read Isaiah 50–55 this week, I was struck that these chapters can function as an answer to the experience of shame—an experience that too often causes us to “[hide] as it were our faces from” our God (Isaiah 53:3).

Like in the Garden of Eden, our “nakedness”—the things which cause us to feel shame—do not actually require us to withdraw from God. God has always stood aware of our shortcomings and our needs. He knew them long before we came to recognize them. But that experience of recognizing our nakedness can be one of intense vulnerability and shame. Many of us respond by separating ourselves from God. We “sell ourselves” to cover the debts we take ourselves to have accrued (Isaiah 50:1). We feel darkness surrounding us, and instead of asking God for light, we burn from the inside, trying to light our way on our own, until we inevitably burn ourselves out and “lie down in sorrow” (Isaiah 50:11).

God watches us withdraw from him in sorrow of his own. Isaiah presents his anguished call to us, asking why we don’t believe he can help us: “Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver? behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness . . .” (Isaiah 50:2). He begs us to “[l]ook unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you” (Isaiah 51:2). We belong to the human family that he seeks to tie together through covenant; without us his family is incomplete and there is a gaping hole in “the rock whence [we] are hewn” (Isaiah 51:1).

Nevertheless, we often are utterly convinced that our shortcomings mean we are condemned to “divorcement” from God (Isaiah 50:1). But God wonders, who do we take to be calling for this condemnation (Isaiah 50:9)? God calls to us not to condemn us, but to offer deliverance. And as for those who would condemn us, he promises that when we heed his voice, “[n]o weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn” (Isaiah 54:17). The Lord seeks to give us relief from the voices that would keep us feeling the need to hide our faces. I can’t help but hear in this verse the Savior’s exchange with the woman taken in adultery:

“Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?”

“No man, Lord.”

“Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:10–11).

God does not want us to cower in condemnation. He wants to redeem us.

But what about the moments when I don’t hear God’s call? Or when I feel his disappointment?

In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee. (Isaiah 54:8)

Why does the Lord sometimes hide his face from us, even for “a small moment”? (Isaiah 54:7). As a parent, I know that how I react to my children matters a lot. Even when they are actively resisting what I am asking of them, I know they are tracking how I respond. My reactions to them shape their world—their sense of self, of worth, of belonging. With such high stakes, I sometimes worry about doing anything that risks alienating them from my approval.

But I don’t only want my children to feel loved. I also want them to learn how to be active participants in loving relationships, where the care flows both ways. And that means sometimes letting them see that I am hurt. I respect their growing agency when I allow them to see that their actions impact me—for a moment, letting them understand that they have the power to put distance between us.

But the moment I see that my child has understood this, I usually have an overwhelming need to reassure them. To connect more deeply, to close any space that they feel between us. When I read Isaiah 54, I see our God feels that way too. He promises that his “everlasting kindness” will never “depart from [me],” ensuring an overflowing of mercy and a perfect commitment to “the covenant of peace” he offers me (Isaiah 54:8, 10).

I think of the way my little girl will fall into my arms when she knows she did something wrong but sees my outstretched hands and knows that I want to hold her in that hurt, not condemn her for it.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him . . . (Isaiah 53:3)

What allows us to accept such an expression of care when we feel ourselves drowning in shame? There is incredible power in knowing who Christ is. The sacred heart of this sequence of scripture is surely the description of Christ in Isaiah 53.

Abinadi quoted this chapter in its entirety when he stood bound before King Noah and his priests. Among those priests is Alma, who “knew concerning the iniquity which Abinadi had testified against them” (Mosiah 17:2). I imagine that in that moment, Alma had cause to feel great shame. Abinadi had spoken plainly and publicly of the priests’ failure to teach the people what they knew was in the scriptures, instead indulging in destructive vices that then spread through their people (Mosiah 12:29). When Alma recognized the truth of Abinadi’s words, he surely felt his own “nakedness.” How did he stop from hiding his face, instead finding the strength to stand up to King Noah, and ultimately record and teach Abinadi’s words?

I suspect that the time Abinadi took to quote all of Isaiah 53 had something to do with it. Alma was reminded that his God understands the experience of shame: to be despised and rejected, to have others turn their faces from you in disgust and judgment, to be oppressed and afflicted (Isaiah 53:3, 7). He also was reminded of the willingness of the Savior to undergo such suffering out of a love for us, because “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground . . . (Isaiah 53:2)

Having recently spent time with my family trying to make things grow during the scorching Utah summer, the image of Christ as a tender plant with a root in dry ground caught my attention. We removed the lawn in the yard beside our house to plant things we could harvest, but we quickly realized that only a few inches down the dirt turned into rocky, nutrient-poor ground fill. If our garden dreams were going to come true, we needed to learn how to help tender plants grow in dry ground.

My husband suggested planting comfrey to enrich the soil. Comfrey has a long tap root that reaches deep into the earth as it grows. This makes the mature plant drought-tolerant. Comfrey is able to seek out the water and nutrients that plants with shallow roots cannot access. It then grows robust, abundant green leaves that can be cut down and left on the ground, providing a nutrient-rich mulch. Over time, the quality of the dry soil improves, and more plants are able to grow.

Perhaps Christ, the tender plant in dry ground, is able to work something like the comfrey. Seeking out the hidden goods around him that others struggle to access. Willing to give of the richness he produces to feed the ground in which we strive to grow. He knows what it is like to feel the sorrow of dry ground, but promises that if we stay near him, we will receive relief and nourishment.

[P]ut on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem . . . (Isaiah 52:1)

The experience of shame is so well captured in the sudden realization of nakedness; is it any surprise that Isaiah presents God’s ability to soothe this vulnerability as the offer to clothe us in beautiful garments? Or to build us of “stones with fair colours,” foundations laid with sapphires, “windows of agates,” and “gates of carbuncles” (Isaiah 54:11–12)? We are offered beautiful comfort, homes of safety from which we are encouraged to “[e]nlarge the place of thy tent . . . spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). Isaiah’s message of comfort to the ashamed is that if we answer the call of our Savior, not only will we “forget the shame of [our] youth” (Isaiah 54:4), but we will find ourselves able to open up our homes and hearts to other members of God’s family.

Isaiah teaches that the isolation of shame and loss can be replaced with the security of knowing a God who works tirelessly to “[gather] the outcasts of Israel” (Isaiah 56:8). He begs us to “[take] hold of my covenant” (Isaiah 56:6), so that he may “revive the heart of the contrite ones” (Isaiah 57:15). The language and emotion that runs through these sections of Isaiah’s poetry is rich—it’s no wonder that so much of this material is quoted in other books of scripture.

He is near that justifieth me . . . (Isaiah 50:8)

If God wants us to know anything, it is that we don’t need to hide from his voice. He has provided a way for us to be reconciled to him: a Savior, who knows how we feel and how to succor us in our pain. I love the image of confidence Isaiah provides: I will “set my face like flint, and know that I shall not be ashamed” (Isaiah 50:7).

That is the confidence that can come when we know that “[h]e is near that justifieth me” (Isaiah 50:8). There is no distance he cannot overcome, no debt we accrue that he cannot resolve for us. He wants nothing more than for us to reach out in our moments of nakedness, so that his outstretched arm can offer comfort and safety. And once we know his care, he asks that we join him in reaching out to those who still feel the need to hide.

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Katie Paxman is an associate professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and a Visiting Campus Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A Canadian philosopher specializing in early modern philosophy, she focuses particularly on David Hume’s theory of the passions, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of emotion. She is a founding member of the Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project and has published in Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Res Philosophica, and several anthologies of Hume scholarship.

Art by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

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There is a lot going on in these middle chapters of the book of Isaiah. Prior to them, the first 39 chapters deal with the immediate crisis of the Assyrian menace and the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. Now, this section addresses the kingdom of Judah as they cope with their own exile in Babylon, seeking to comfort them and fortify their hope of return. In the very first lines, God commands an unnamed plurality of agents to comfort the people and let them know that their sentence is fulfilled and their return from exile is being prepared through the instrumentality of an unlikely helper—Cyrus, King of Persia, who will defeat Babylon and make the return of the exiles possible.

In all of the movement and thematic weavings of these chapters, it can be easy to miss one of the most evocative subtexts with which the prophet-poet is playing. Before giving it away outright, let me line up a few of its traits.

The first is one I have already noted: God addresses a plural assembly of some kind, giving them commands to act on behalf of God’s people. “Comfort, ye” says the Lord, and “prepare ye the way” (Isaiah 40:1, 3).1 Since the text doesn’t tell us directly who is being given these commands, we have to infer, and one candidate scholars have favored relies on the similarity between this section and other places in the Hebrew Bible where God addresses a heavenly assembly. A notable example of this occurs earlier in the book of Isaiah as God, enthroned, addresses an assemblage of Seraphim, and asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:1–8, and see a further example in 1 Kings 22:19–23 and 2 Chronicles 18:18–22). There are references to heavenly pluralities in the Psalms and Job, as well (for example, Psalm 29:1; 82:1; 89:5–8; 103:20–21; 148:1–2; and Job 38:7); but it is in Genesis, most particularly, where the divine voice sometimes speaks from within a heavenly plurality of some kind, creating and ordering the world: “Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26); “The human is become as one of us” (3:22); “Let us go down” (11:7). Here, God speaks from within a heavenly council at the dawn of creation.

Another trait of the subtext is the notion of emptiness, vanity, or insignificance—all glosses of the pregnant Hebrew term tohu. The nations are “counted as nothing . . . and vanity” (Isaiah 40:17), princes are brought “to nothing” (40:23), idol-worshippers “are all vanity, their works are nothing” (41:29), idol-makers are “all of them vanity” (44:9). In Isaiah, the positive sense of countering this emptiness is also expressed when the prophet writes that God “created it not in vain [tohu]” and “said not . . . Seek ye me in vain [tohu]” (45:18–19). Significantly, this is the same term that is translated as “without form” to describe the world “in the beginning,” before God begins to create, in Genesis 1:2.

In another refrain from these chapters of Isaiah, God “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain” (Isaiah 40:22), “created the heavens, and stretched them out . . . spread forth the earth” (42:5), “stretcheth forth the heavens . . . spreadeth abroad the earth” (44:24), and “stretched out the heavens” (45:12). This is the same language as we find in Psalm 104:2, 5, which famously invokes images of a God who “stretchest out the heavens as a curtain” and “laid the foundations of the earth,” much like the image of pitching a tent and setting down carpets for its floor.

Yet another motif, related to that of insignificance here, is that God “comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure” (Isaiah 40:12), the nations are as “small dust of the balance” (40:15), and Cyrus is given nations “as the dust to his sword” (41:2). These dusty images recall the formation of the human from the moistened dust of the ground in Genesis 2:6–7.

As I hope is becoming obvious, the subtextual theme that Isaiah is sounding throughout these chapters is that of creation—specifically, the sovereign and gracious power of God, who presides over a heavenly council, spreading out the heavens and the earth after finding the world empty and void, and then forming humans from the dust of the ground. And lest we suppose this is all coincidence, the language of creation continues to multiply in these chapters. The same words for creating or forming that occur in Genesis (bara/yatsar) recur in such Isaiah passages as “The Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel” (Isaiah 43:1); “I have created him for my glory, I have formed him” (43:7); “formed thee from the womb” (44:2, 24); “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (45:7); and “Thus said the LORD, Israel’s Holy One and its Fashioner . . . I made the earth and the humans upon it I created. It is I, My hands stretched out the heavens, and all their array I commanded” (45:11–12, Alter).2

These references to creation in Isaiah have a clear purpose: to highlight the ironic contrast between the true creation undertaken by the living God and the false creation undertaken by idol makers and idol worshipers. The ironsmith forges and hammers and works over his images (Isaiah 44:12), and the woodworker measures and marks, cuts and planes to fashion idols from material that is utterly subject to human craftsmanship. From the same tree that he takes firewood for dinner, notes Isaiah with obvious disgust, the carpenter makes an artificial deity. In these chapters of Isaiah, then, the contrasts between true and false creation are multiplied.

Where idols must be fashioned by humans, the true God is the fashioner of humans themselves. Where dumb idols must be “loaded as burdens on weary animals,” the creator God says the remnant of Israel “have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, even when you turn grey I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (46:1b–5). Where humans conserve and carry around the idols of their making to no purpose, God bears and saves humans with salvific purpose. Where idols afford no life or habitat to humans, God has made all from the dust of the earth and spread the heavens and the earth as a habitation for them. And where vain idols are crudely shaped in the fashioner’s likeness, humans are actually created in the supernal image of the divine.

The use of these echoes and reminders of the divine creation in these chapters of Isaiah, then, serves to heighten our awareness of the perversity of laboring to supplant the living God—who ordered and still upholds all things—with empty, vain, and impotent mirages of our own devising. To fashion idols is to turn the act of creation against itself, thwarting the sacred purpose for which humans were formed by God from the dust of the earth in the first place.

Often, in our considerations of the persistent struggle with idolatry that is chronicled in the Old Testament, we note that while Israel was enamored of false deities, we today have different temptations to idolatry. Rather than images of supposed gods, we are tempted by status, wealth, and leisure. It is good to reflect in this way, for it is all too true of us that such temptations abound. But more than just passively falling into vain and profitless cultural patterns, are there ways that we actively participate in their creation?

This has been a challenging question for me to ponder. The act of creation in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we are encouraged to become more like our heavenly parents by learning to create as they create. But might there be a dark side to creation, as well? There are probably as many answers to this question as there are readers willing to ponder it. As I have done so, I’ve reflected on the stories and metaphors that I have adopted, and sometimes, indeed, created, to make sense of myself to myself and to others. If I am very honest, I have to admit that some of these stories serve less to deepen understanding and more to cover my sins and to gratify my pride, and my vain ambition (see Doctrine and Covenants 121:37). In today’s degraded cultural, political, and spiritual moment, abundant with those who “loveth and maketh a lie” (Revelation 22:15), it can be painful and sobering to examine the ways that we, too, participate in that lie-telling and idol-making. We curate an image of ourselves on social media or at church that we know in our hearts is a facade. We ascribe noble intentions to our support of flawed candidates while condemning the moral defects of those who vote differently. Someone who loves us asks how we’re doing, and we give a shallow “fine” or “great” instead of something closer to reality that might invite a courageous conversation. We naturally want to be the heroes of our own stories, so it takes a determined kind of love of truth to allow the deep introspection that reveals ourselves as we truly are before divine reality. But in the depths of such humbling visions, Isaiah goes on to surprise and assure Zion—and by extension, us—that if we are willing to have our vain and fruitless self-deceptions uncovered to him, the Lord says, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions” (Isaiah 43:25); “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions” (44:22). And then comes the most potent promise of all:

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:15–16)

As the vanity of the graven images we have made of and for ourselves is exposed, we find that our Creator has been making inscriptions of his own, indelible reminders of us within his own fashioning hands. We realize that he bears us not as a load that can be externalized to a beast of burden, but as a plan traced upon his own body. We are the marks in the palms of his hands of which he seeks no erasure. We are the confines—the “walls”—of relation from which he desires no escape. He is with us and for us always, unforgetting and unrelenting, until we tire of all our illusions and self-justifications, throw them down at last like so many idols, and step again into his living, loving embrace.

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Rico Lebrun (1900–1964).

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Elder Maxwell has been on our minds even more than usual this year at the Maxwell Institute. 2026 marks the 100^th anniversary of his birth (July 1926), and the 20^th anniversary of the creation of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU. It has been—and will be for the rest of the year—an important time to remember, reflect, and celebrate.

But what has been on my mind most recently is Elder Maxwell’s funeral—and especially what President Gordon B. Hinckley said at that funeral. It was late July 2004, and it was only three months after Marjorie Hinckley’s death. President Hinckley almost couldn’t help wearing on his sleeve the deep anguish that he was still feeling over the recent death of his wife, and that all came through in the funeral remarks that he directed specifically to Elder Maxwell’s widow, Colleen. There is something striking to me about just how raw and real President Hinckley’s comments were—maybe unusually so in what we’ve come to expect in our funeral services:

“At funerals we speak words intended to give comfort. But in reality, they afford but little comfort. Only those who have passed through this dark valley know its utter desolation. To lose one’s much-loved partner with whom one has long walked through sunshine and shadow is absolutely devastating. There is a consuming loneliness which increases in intensity. It painfully gnaws at one’s very soul.”

It’s President Hinckley’s honest admission that words of intended comfort “in reality . . . afford little comfort” that I can’t stop thinking about. I’m grateful that he gave expression to what all of us have likely felt in a time of deep mourning: Words, so often, fall flat.

And that’s why I want to offer a resounding second to the motion that Phil Barlow raised in his Maxwell Institute blog post on Ecclesiastes just two weeks ago. Phil’s essay is so good that I recommend everyone go back and read it again. And then I want to offer another cheer for the power of poetry in the scriptures—and a special “hooray!” for the chapters in Isaiah we’re reading this week.

Here’s one of Phil’s great lines: “In its authentic expression, poetry is not mere verbal decoration. Instead, it transforms the emotional and aesthetic character of diverse scriptural passages, revealing their power, awakening minds and hearts to the good and the true, the powerful and the beautiful.” And “poetry,” Phil reminded us, “can partake of the sublime, conveying the taste, feel, pleasure, and idea of the sublime.”

What has struck me as I’ve been thinking about Isaiah 35 and Elder Maxwell’s funeral at the same time is that poetry can also somehow accomplish what President Hinckley admitted most of our words of intended comfort cannot.

Poetry can rise above ordinary speech in its power to console.

I’ll readily admit that I need to think much more about why that is so, but to me, right now, it’s sufficient to say that it’s somehow self-evident. It’s something that we just intuitively seem to know.

At least one part of that power has to be the way poetry transcends triteness. No matter how well-intended our expressions of consolation might be, we all feel just how trite those expressions taste in our mouths as we’re mumbling them. We want to say so much more than we feel like we have the ability to convey—and often we end up wishing we would have said less than we did.

But poetry—in its extra-ordinariness, in its unexpectedness, in its metaphors and similes and images that detach it from everyday-ness—leaps over that “trite” barrier and carries us to a different place. Poetry seems to be “the consecration of language”—that’s how my colleague Kristian Heal captured it so well in a recent conversation—in the way it uses “everyday language in arresting and unexpected settings.” And heaven-inspired poetry seems to speak spirit to spirit, to communicate truths that are too big to merely explain or analyze.

Poetry in the scriptures is simply alive in a different way, and what it breathes is hope.

I’ve been thinking of lines like these from Isaiah 35 in the context of a setting like Elder Maxwell’s funeral:

“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (v. 1, KJV).

“Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees” (v. 3, NRSV).

“Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’” (v. 4, NRSV).

“Here is your God” (v. 4, NRSV).

“He will come and save you” (v. 4, KJV).

“Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing” (v. 6, KJV).

“And the burning sand shall become a pool” (v. 7, NRSV).

“No lion shall be there” (v. 9, KJV).

“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads” (v. 10, KJV).

“Sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (v. 10, KJV).

I’m also struck that President Hinckley himself made a poetic turn in the direction of that same kind of hope in his funeral remarks, right after admitting how much the devastating loneliness he was feeling “gnaws at one’s very soul.” This is where he went next:

“But in the quiet of the night a silent whisper is heard that says, ‘All is well. All is well.’ And that voice from out of the unknown brings peace, certainty, and unwavering assurance that death is not the end, that life goes on, with work to do and victories to be won. That voice quietly, even unheard with mortal ears, brings the assurance that as surely as there has been separation, there will be a joyful reuniting.”

I’m more and more convinced that what that quiet voice whispers to us—reminds us of—really is, when it comes down to it, poetry. And I’m more and more convinced that when we really immerse ourselves in the poetic passages in scripture and let them wash over us, we feel a lift, a buoyancy, that comes from being understood—and from understanding the world—in ways that we can’t put into ordinary words.

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J. B. Haws is the Executive Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and a professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. He is the author of The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, 2013) and holds a PhD in American History from the University of Utah. His research centers on the place of Mormonism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, including public perceptions of Latter-day Saints, trends in contemporary Mormon historical scholarship, and interfaith engagement.

Art by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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As the Bible has come down to us—in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions—the book of Isaiah serves as the gateway to the reading of the prophets. We’re intended, it seems, to make sense of this prophetic book before feeling fully prepared to make sense of the other prophetic books. And that can seem a daunting task! The book of Isaiah is long, its historical setting is complex, and its language and imagery are foreign to modern readers. Add to that the fact that scholarship on the book of Isaiah has raised more questions than provided answers for Latter-day Saints, and one might feel especially at sea here. What can be done?

My approach to reading scripture—not in hopes of taming it, but with the aim of making it possible to begin exploring its depths—is always to ask about its shape and structure. If we know how what we’re reading is organized, we might begin to find our way. And this proves to be a good way to get started with the book of Isaiah. Of course, there’s much to say about the shape of the whole, and of all the various parts, of Isaiah. But what I’ll offer here is just a few short reflections on the shape of just the first part of the book: Isaiah 1–12.

Perhaps the very first thing to reflect on in these twelve opening chapters is that Isaiah’s commission to prophesy—his famous encounter with the Lord and the seraphim in the temple—appears some six chapters into the book. It’s perfectly apparent that the prophecies and oracles that believers attributed to Isaiah were assembled into a book only after his death. Why didn’t those editors and scribes put Isaiah’s story of his commission first in the book? What effect does this belated introduction to the prophet’s call have on a careful reader?

For my part, I’d suggest at least this: that the delay in introducing Isaiah’s commission forces readers to reflect on the problems in Judah and Israel in Isaiah’s day before learning anything about how the Lord plans to intervene. Isaiah 2–5, in particular, paints a bleak picture of Israel and Judah’s worldly aspirations, the suffering of the poor among the Lord’s people, and the corruption of justice that prevails among the covenant people. Thus, when readers come to Isaiah 6 and learn of Isaiah’s vision in the temple, they’re better prepared to learn with the newly commissioned prophet that, although he must preach, his divinely appointed words will largely fall on deaf ears, with devastating consequences.

As for Isaiah 2–5, the preliminary picture of how bad things are in Judah and Israel, they might be best read as a single block of text. This is something the early editions of the Book of Mormon suggest to us. Beginning with the very first edition in 1830 and continuing for half a century, the Book of Mormon presented these four biblical chapters as just one chapter in 2 Nephi (the original Chapter VIII, today’s 2 Nephi 11–15). And when we see the scathing portrait of oppressions in Judah and Israel as one total picture, we’re less inclined to fret over whether we’ve understood any one image and more inclined to receive the full assessment. Things were bad, and something had to be done.

Further, when we read Isaiah 2–5 as a single unit, we might notice an alternating pattern in it. The long tirades against wickedness in Judah and Israel are regularly punctuated by brief words of promise (as in Isaiah 2:2–4 and Isaiah 4:2–6) about a time to come when the covenant people will be cleansed and prepared to fulfill their responsibilities. Although goings-on among the Lord’s people are clearly problematic at the time of Isaiah’s call and commission, and although destruction and exile loom on the horizon, there’s always the promise of God’s graceful purposes. Consequently, when readers come to Isaiah 6, they’re meant to be aware not only of the problem the prophet is sent to address, but also of the promise that such problems can ultimately be solved by a faithful, covenant-keeping God.

By the way, exactly this double message appears with stark clarity in Isaiah 1, which serves as a straightforward introduction to the larger book of Isaiah. It was apparently written after Isaiah’s death and assumes the perspective of someone who has witnessed all the events prophesied of in the book. It explains that although things have indeed gone as badly as Isaiah said they would, God has also fulfilled Isaiah’s words of promise and retained a remnant of the covenant people. There’s always healing and possibility, despite human sinfulness.

At any rate, the question readers are provoked into having, by the time they come to the story of Isaiah’s commission in the temple in Isaiah 6, is just how God might go about fulfilling his promises when things in Israel are so obviously off track. The answer to that question appears in Isaiah 6–12, which can also be read as a single unit. Here again, the Book of Mormon is an excellent guide. For the first fifty years of its circulation, it also presented these seven biblical chapters as one (the original Chapter IX, today’s 2 Nephi 16–22). And they really do tell a single, coherent story. If read as a unit, Isaiah 6–12 clearly moves from the point when Isaiah receives his commission from the Lord (Isaiah 6) through a series of challenges and disasters shot through with glimpses of hope and promise (Isaiah 7–9) to the final redemption of Israel despite everything (Isaiah 10–11), all of this capped off by a hymn of praise for the God who has seen his promises through to fulfillment (Isaiah 12). What begins with a prophet’s call concludes eventually with gathering, peace, and redemption.

Of course, making one’s way through the story of Isaiah 6–12 is difficult for many readers. It’s thick with historical and geographical references, characterized by twists and turns, loaded down with challenging imagery, and interlaced with passages that have been overinterpreted by the larger Christian tradition. Getting the basic shape of the text—seeing that it’s a continuous story from God’s first intervention among a rebellious people to his final recovery of his covenant servants—is only a first step, and I lack the space here to provide a detailed guide to what each part of the story contributes.

Perhaps, however, even a simple table of contents might be useful. Here’s an attempt:

6:1–13 – Isaiah’s Commission: A Call to Preach to People Who Won’t Receive the Message

7:1–25 – A First Illustration of the People’s Failure to Receive, with Consequences

8:1–15 – A Second Illustration of the People’s Failure to Receive, with Consequences

8:16–22 – Looking Past His Wicked Day, Isaiah Seals His Prophecies for a Remnant to Come

9:1–7 – A Twist in the Story: A New King in Judah Makes for Deliverance for a Remnant

9:8–10:5 – In the Meanwhile, Northern Israel Falls Because of Its Continued Wickedness

10:6–34 – Assyria, Having Conquered and Scattered Israel, Can’t Conquer Judah

11:1–16 – On the Other Side of Disaster, Then, the Remnant of Judah Is Redeemed

12:1–6 – A Concluding Hymn of Praise for the God who Keeps Covenant

This table of contents might serve as a starting point for readers hoping to find a coherent story in Isaiah’s prophecies. The prophet’s compilers and editors gave his stories and oracles a theologically significant shape as they put them together, one clearly glimpsed by at least Nephi in the Book of Mormon. With a sense for the shape, we might begin to explore how the book of Isaiah guides us through the pattern of God’s handling of a wayward people to whom he has bound himself by covenant. And we might come to see better that all the glory, in the end, is God’s.

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Joseph Spencer​ is Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University​ whose academic profile can be found here.

Art by Samuel Bak.

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals;
    the same fate awaits them both:
As one dies, so dies the other
   . . . humans have no advantage over animals.
Everything is meaningless.   
(Ecclesiastes 3:19, NIV)

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen
   to them all.
As fish are caught in a cruel net,                                                                                                               or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.  
(Ecclesiastes 9:11–12, NIV)

What to Do with Ecclesiastes?

The book of Ecclesiastes has a problem. In truth, it has several,1 but let us focus on its “public relations” problem, which has two aspects.

First, the book is a poem. More precisely, it is a collection of poems and aphorisms, glued together by strands of prose and shaped into a single treatise. And because half of us are allergic to poetry, we are handicapped in discerning poetry’s relationship to faith. This alienation constrains both scriptural literacy and spiritual nourishment. One-third of the Bible comes to us in verse. It is worth asking: Why?

The other half of its public relations problem is that Ecclesiastes is dour. Its tone splices sober and bleak. It declares everything “under the sun” (the achievement of wisdom and all lesser striving) to be futile. This, of course, seems at odds with the Restoration’s thrust. We aspiring Saints seek joy and relish purpose. We are an optimistic people, building Zion, whose gospel is Good News. We see God’s project as a “plan of happiness,” and we wish to encourage one another in its pursuit.

The poetic pessimism of Ecclesiastes thus contributes to the book’s neglect. Although we may have heard the quip “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2), and though we may recognize the scriptural source of periodically popular song lyrics (“To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under . . . heaven” [Ecclesiastes 3:1]) or book titles (The Sun Also Rises, Ecclesiastes 1:5), still Ecclesiastes is not etched in our sensibilities. As a church community, we might sample a few chapters from the book on a single Sunday (if we are in attendance on the right one of 208 Sabbaths in our four-year curricular cycle and have read along with the Church’s Come, Follow Me calendar). But rarely do we encounter the bulk of the book or probe its poetic wealth. We might go decades without hearing this scripture substantively engaged from a pulpit.

This near-absence of Ecclesiastes in our shared thought is arguably a deficit, for despite the book’s pessimism—in part because of its particular pessimism—it brims with insight, beauty, and a perspective that could contribute to our spiritual maturity. The great Latter-day Saint teacher Lowell Bennion, who was also our church’s approximation of Mother Teresa during the second half of the twentieth century, held that Ecclesiastes was “the most realistic book in the Bible.” We could grapple with this assertion, but the book does in fact lend bracing perspectives that could complement other scripture and deepen our lives in the gospel amidst our vale of tears. The ancients, it is true, found reasons to exclude Ecclesiastes from the canon; it was among the last books to secure its place. At length, however, the devout found stronger reasons to include it. Again: why is that so?

How then shall we approach the somber, poetical pith of Ecclesiastes? How might we hold it together with our optimistic view of a purposeful life, a loving and redeeming Lord, and an exalted eternal horizon? Let us first revisit poetry’s connection to faith, then conclude by posing a prompt or two toward renewed thought about an old book.

I: Poetry as Obstacle

What is the source of our indifference to poetry?2 For some, it lies in the effort required of reading unfamiliar forms. Poetry can seem dense or cryptic, demanding attention amidst our busyness. The obstacle of obscurity can feel all the larger if, as with the King James Bible, the language of the baseline text is antique quite before we tangle with its poetic portions.

Others discount poetic expression as inessential verbal tinsel. Why not say things plainly for all to understand? Why gild the lily of the pure and simple gospel? Surely clever or pretty words are less important than correct doctrine, unvarnished truth, and moral clarity. Viewed this way, poetry becomes luxury or distraction. A similar perspective helps explain why some Christian groups ban singing or the use of musical instruments during Sunday services. They fear that such frippery draws attention from worship and toward performance. For related reasons, we often insist that our visual gospel art be simple, illustrative, and didactic.

These are not vacuous concerns. As Nephi insisted, “plainness” can be precious. When we apply these notions unthoughtfully, however, we may diminish Zion and, ironically, thicken the veil twixt us and heaven. We do that by confusing the dangers of the distortion of art (self-aggrandizement, for example) with art itself. Preening may of course glom onto an expression of verbal or visual beauty, just as it can accompany the display of strength, wealth, intelligence, or authority. But the problem is not innate to beauty, authority, or intelligence. The problem is rooted in pride and unrighteous dominion.

While there is a spiritual cost wherever pride infringes, there is also a spiritual cost to bland or rote representations of our gospel. How is it possible to comprehend the gospel’s full splendor without engaging its fruits, including the art it naturally spawns?

In its authentic expression, poetry is not mere verbal decoration. Instead, it transforms the emotional and aesthetic character of diverse scriptural passages, revealing their power, awakening minds and hearts to the good and the true, the powerful and the beautiful. When the newly widowed (Moabite) Ruth pleads to remain with her (Israelite) mother-in-law Naomi, for example, the form and quality of her reported and translated speech (“Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; / Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”) is intrinsic to why the story lodges in our hearts across the centuries. So is it also with the Beatitudes in Matthew’s rendition of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12). And with the Magnificat spoken by Mary of Jesus’ coming birth, as portrayed by Luke (Luke 1:46–55). So it is with the Bible’s prophetic books. And so it is with its “wisdom literature,” including, especially, Ecclesiastes.

The music, imagery, metaphor, and compression that characterizes poetry, then, need not be in competition with the divine. To the contrary, poetry can partake of the sublime, conveying the taste, feel, pleasure, and idea of the sublime. Most of us would not wish for less graceful, less tasteful temples in which to worship and to enact our most sacred devotions. Neither ought we, by sloth or obliviousness, disdain inspiration in its poetic guise. However humble, varied, and surprising its forms may be, holiness warrants beautiful expression.

II: Hearing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Tune

But though we may acknowledge the place of poetry and the aesthetic of Ecclesiastes, how shall we hear the Lord’s song in a strange tune? That is, what shall we do with the eloquent book’s pessimistic outlook on the world?

Rather than presuming to de-canonize the book by spurning or ignoring it, we might consider coming to it in humility and with imagination—without which any scriptural work might end up on our de facto personal scrapheaps. What follows are a pair of sample prompts for reflection as we generate our own response to the question in the preceding paragraph.

Vapor, Not Vanity

The thought of the “Teacher” or “Preacher” that constitutes the book of Ecclesiastes begins and ends with a lament about human aspirations and human affairs: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 12:8).3 What is intended by “vanity” in this context has naturally attracted attention over the centuries. Modern English translations incline toward “futility,” “useless,” and “meaningless.” These provocative concepts do pick up on strands in the wider text of Ecclesiastes. However, the Hebrew word (hebel) behind them means something more like “mist” or “vapor,” “a puff of air.” Vanity, futility, meaningless, or emptiness are English-cast metaphorical extensions of the word’s Hebrew meaning: a vapor, which may imply “evanescence.” Taken this way, the thought that opens and closes Ecclesiastes may carry the sense of “Life is as a fleeting vapor, which cannot be grasped.”

How would this rendition shade our reading of Ecclesiastes as a whole? Might this sense, crafted by the weary, poetic Teacher, be put in fruitful conversation with Jacob’s striking lament in the Book of Mormon?

And . . . I, Jacob, began to be old; . . . wherefore, I conclude this record . . . saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days. (Jacob 7:26)

A Role for Uncertainty

We Latter-day Saints prize faith. We oft bear testimony of things we “know”: that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the Lord has restored his Church, answers prayer, and will resurrect every person. Many additional things.

Ecclesiastes, by contrast, heaves with life’s uncertainties. The author doubts the world’s fairness, for ofttimes “the righteous . . . get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked . . . get what the righteous deserve” (Ecclesiastes 8:14, NIV; cf. 9:11–12). God “has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NIV), which seems to mourn that God has implanted a sense of the eternal and the divine inside human consciousness, but left us yearning, orphaned, and ignorant. For example, says our author, “Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” (Ecclesiastes 3:21, NIV). Death is certain; little else. Not the fruits of one’s toil; not the endurance of wisdom; not the hope of being remembered; not the triumph of justice.

Ecclesiastes sings in a melancholy key. (This fact is not dissolved by our citing the second author who later appended his or her summary judgment to the body of the book, saying “here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments.”4) With its this-worldly focus and its disdain toward much of our human striving, Ecclesiastes cannot stand on its own as a sufficient expression of our hopeful, radiant gospel. But then neither can any other isolated scriptural book, including the canonized gospels or the books of the Book of Mormon. Therefore, might the skepticism, realism, and uncertainty of Ecclesiastes be a useful, though not sufficient, seasoning within our wider faith and canon?

Might it, for instance, like the book of Job, serve as a balancing corrective to the widely held assurance, in both ancient and modern times, that God will dependably prosper the righteous and punish the wicked in visible, material ways in mortality? (See common interpretations of such passages as Proverbs 11:31; 2:21–22; Mosiah 2:24; and Malachi 3:10–11.) Against this thought, and like Ecclesiastes, Jesus noticed that God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good [alike], and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45). If we are certain that it is otherwise, are we not too certain? And therefore, is not uncertainty (“I don’t know”) an adoptable principle within our wider faith? All of us who live long enough will collide, or will know someone valiant and dear to us who collides, with undeserved calamity bearing life-altering or life-ending results. Uncertainty and acceptance toward such contingencies are not spiritual weaknesses. In such circumstances, embracing uncertainty may be the most trusting, faithful thing we can do. Moreover, excessive certainty can breed arrogance, sometimes at the expense of others. “When we know we don’t know fully, we are . . . more concerned about practical, loving behavior. . . . Those who know God are always humble; those who don’t are invariably far too sure of themselves (which is different than grace-filled self-confidence).”5

Conclusion

For thirty years and more I have worked to calm unease among college freshmen and sophomores (and their parents) when they don’t know in what field they wish to “major.” I have tried to persuade them that “not knowing yet” can be crucial, creative space.

Similarly, there is a place for uncertainty in our gospel. Were it not so, we might have arrived on earth unveiled—or we might not have bothered to come to a shrouded world at all. Uncertainty, though not always comfortable, may be mixed with curiosity, hope, and honesty, making for excellent soil from which trust or faith may sprout. Perhaps uncertainty in such a context is another term for openness.

Ecclesiastes is uncertain. In some respects, it is more: skeptical and contrary. It cannot be the last word for us. But let us make room for it in our real—that is, used—canon, like an antiphonal surprise in a symphony. Perhaps we may rediscover in it a functional, intentional, and dissonant chord in God’s wider hymn to us.

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Philip Barlow served as the Maxwell Institute’s associate director and is a Neal A. Maxwell Research Associate. Having previously served as the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University, his teaching engages religion and human suffering, religion and the concept of “time,” American religious history, and Restoration movements.

Art by Frans van Kuyck (1852–1915).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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For thousands of years, the book of Psalms has been a prayer book for the faithful. Which makes me sheepish to admit that I don’t enjoy many of the psalms. Some I love. Who doesn’t love Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd . . . . “) or 51 (“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love according to your abundant mercy . . . .”) or 84 (“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!”) or 150 (“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”)? The psalms of introspection give voice to the deepest yearnings of our heart to draw near to the Lord. The psalms of praise give voice to those moments of exultation when we are in awe of the beauty of God’s creation and his steadfast love toward people.

But there are many psalms of a different nature that seem to contradict the Second Great Commandment. Some of them simply complain about others, and those are bad enough. But some go further and ask God to curse, destroy, or punish his children. This week’s reading in Come, Follow Me includes Psalm 69, which contains some of the most violent language imaginable: “Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see . . . . Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents . . . . Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” Is that a prayer that a follower of Jesus should offer?

Prayers of complaint and vengeance make up about a third of the psalms, and they don’t do much for me. In fact, they repel me. They seem at odds with the command of Jesus that we are to relate to others—even our enemies—in ways that are marked by love, mercy, forgiveness, humility, and service. What happened to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6: 27–28, NRSV)?

What are we to do with these psalms? Ignore them and pretend they don’t exist? Surely they can’t be part of a canon whose purpose is to bring us to Christ and imitate his life, can they?

As is so often the case, the problem isn’t with the scriptures, but with my understanding. With the help of those trained in the close reading of scripture, two insights have helped me to see that the psalms that repel me are actually an integral and redemptive part of the canon that help us participate in Jesus’ work of at-one-ment. Strike them from the whole book of Psalms, and I will be missing something transformative. And therein lies a profound lesson about the cost of discipleship. It’s not about finding a path that “works for me,” that always appeals to my tastes. The covenant path takes us on a journey already marked by those who have preceded us, who have learned from their own experience how best to experience the steadfast love of God and seek the well-being of his children.

The first insight comes from Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School. In her classic book, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (2001), Davis points out that the psalms that are so off-putting to me reflect an honesty and intimacy with God that should be part of a vibrant prayer life in which we bring to God our fears, our anxieties, every part of our fallen selves. “Crying out to God, screaming to God in the darkness,” Davis argues, “there is room for that in the life of faithful prayer.”

The psalms contain a full expression of our fallen humanity, and when we pray all of them, we are not always dressed in our Sunday best, with arms crossed and heads bowed. Such prayers are informed by a faith that “the God who made heaven and earth should care that I am hurting.” According to Davis, that is “a style of prayer without parallel in the ancient world.” Davis points out that the pleas for vengeance that trouble me are not answered by God’s pouring out destruction. Instead, they work a subtle but profound change in the psalmist. “Even while we are still in our anger,” Davis notes, “the cursing psalms are the vehicle whereby we yield to God our own claim to vengeance, and that is the crucial first step to the healing of the entire community.” That first step involves change, not of the psalmist’s circumstances—the Lord doesn’t do vengeance—but of “the psalmist’s experience of suffering.” “And perhaps that has changed,” Davis suggests, “only because she has dared to break the isolation of silence and knows that God has heard.” In other words, the psalms exhibit the power of prayer C. S. Lewis thought its highest value. Prayer doesn’t change God, Lewis taught. It changes us.

More important still, the psalms are prayers that have helped form the spiritual lives of millions of earnest followers of the Lord. They are a prayer book that was used by the children of Israel, the New Testament church, Jesus himself, and his followers for more than two millennia. Using these prayers in our own devotions is not only an act of solidarity with those who have gone before us, but it’s a humble acknowledgment that we need help in our spiritual formation. Just as they have done for disciples of Jesus over the years, the psalms teach us how to pray and what to pray for. To think that we can create a prayer life without their benefit is an act of hubris.

This insight works at cross-purposes with a reluctance among some to use set prayers in our devotionals instead of using only spontaneous expressions. Even though set prayers are used for blessing the sacrament and for temple dedications, there is a common criticism among our people that they are the “vain repetitions” Jesus warned against. Certainly, they can be vain, as can be any prayer not thoughtfully offered. But, as N. T. Wright notes, when his disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he didn’t merely encourage sincerity; he gave them words to say. Henry B. Eyring has called the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught us to pray, “a perfect example of what we should ask Heavenly Father for.”

Prayer is about much more than asking God for the blessings we desire. The greater work of prayer may be that it forms us spiritually. As Brian Zahnd explains, “The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want him to do—but to be properly formed.” And using set prayers like the psalms can help form us in ways that we might not have chosen if left to our own devices. In her book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren tells how the fixed prayers in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer gave her words to pray when grief had left her speechless.

Using the prayers that followers of Jesus have prayed over the years, like the psalms, in addition to our own spontaneous expressions, helps train us how to think, desire, and love as have his disciples through the years. When we rely solely on spontaneous prayer, we can become captive to our own limited concerns. Praying the psalms and other liturgical prayers will reshape our hearts and minds in ways that will stretch us.

In the final period of his apostolic ministry, after he had miraculously survived a serious brush with death, President Jeffrey R. Holland believed that his time on earth had been extended so that he could teach that we need to find ways to improve the quality of our prayer life. Speaking to his fellow General Authorities gathered for the October 2024 general conference, he said with remarkable candor, “We can’t pray as we’ve always prayed because nothing that we are going to do from here to the end is going to be what has always been done. So we can’t be who we’ve always been or pray how we’ve always prayed.”1 A year later, he implored all of us, “However much you’ve prayed, pray more. However many places you’ve prayed, pray in more places. However many times during the day you pray, pray more times in the day.”

One way we can respond to that apostolic charge might be to allow the psalms—all of them—to become a part of our prayer life so that they can do in us what they have done for so many for so long.

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Thomas B. Griffith is a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Virginia School of Law. He previously served as Senate Legal Counsel of the United States and as general counsel at BYU. Today, he is a fellow at BYU’s Wheatley Institute and remains active in constitutional scholarship, civic engagement, and rule-of-law initiatives.

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) and Michel Simonidy (1870–1933).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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In my essay on Exodus 15 earlier this year, I looked at one basic religious practice: praising God. I argued that to praise God is both to recall his divine glory and to call it into being in the present. At root, the act of praise is simple but powerful: in his act of creation, God infused the world with his glory, or light; in our act of praise, we look for that glory, gather it into speech or song, and reflect it to its source. Like the mirrors in a sealing room, praise concentrates and amplifies divine light by reflecting it.

In that essay, I also gave readers an IOU. Exodus 15, for all its poetic power, only gives us an introduction to praise: It isn’t difficult to worship on the far side of the Red Sea, with your feet on dry land and your enemies defeated. But just as God made fertile pastures and dry wilderness, he included joy and suffering in the created order. And so, if my theology is right, suffering must also be offered up to God as praise. I promised that I would tackle this more advanced version of praise when we arrived at the Psalms. The praise of suffering is praise for experts. And the Psalms are the canon’s unsurpassed teachers.

The Psalter is not a random collection of poems; it is arranged into five books, traditionally understood to mirror the five books of Moses, and this week’s reading crosses from Book IV to Book V. The first three books are full of sorrow and lament, while Book IV (Psalms 90–106) begins a turn toward praise, and Book V (Psalms 107–150) completes the turn into joyous celebration. As a whole, the book of Psalms demonstrates how to use lament as material for praise. And this week’s chapters, which straddle books IV and V, zoom in on the turning point. In what follows, I’ll pay special attention to Psalm 102.

Certain psalms are classified, based on their form and content, as “psalms of lament,” and Psalm 102 is a great example. The German scholar Claus Westermann noticed that psalms of lament display a distinctive emotional arc: They move from a cry of distress to a petition for help, and finally to an exultant expression of praise. Building on the work of an earlier scholar, Hermann Gunkel, who first classified the psalms into types, Westermann noted that the transitions between these phases usually happen with no explanation: The psalmist begs for rescue from the jaws of death and then, in the next breath, praises God as if the rescue has already occurred. But the rescue itself is unseen.

Yet another German scholar, Joachim Begrich, had proposed an explanation for this puzzle. If the psalms were the liturgy, or prayer book, for ancient temple rites, perhaps the abrupt transition from petition to praise marks a gap in the performance. At the unlabeled turn from misery to joy, perhaps the temple priest, speaking for God, spoke an “oracle” or promise of salvation to the petitioner, who then responded with praise. Imagine the interaction between Hannah and the priest Eli at the temple in 1 Samuel 1:16–18, if only Hannah’s words survived: It would look something like the curiously abrupt shifts of tone in the psalms of lament. The hypothesis of the missing oracle is speculative, of course, but it offers an explanation for the sudden left-turns in these psalms.1

Let us pause for a moment to praise German biblical scholarship, which has flooded such light on the literary jewel of our canon, the Old Testament!

Psalm 102 illustrates the pattern worked out by these scholars. The first eleven verses are an acid bath of suffering. The Psalmist expresses his grief in a series of metaphorical images: His days vanish like smoke, his bones smolder, he eats ashes like bread, he sits like a lone bird on a rooftop (see vv. 3, 7, 9). Then, at verse 12, with no preparation, he bursts into praise: “But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations.” If Begrich is right, the priest would have uttered God’s promise of salvation in the gap between verses 11 and 12. The text we have is the petitioner’s side of the exchange, with silence where God’s promise used to be.

This is a compelling reading, especially for Latter-day Saints who know the powerful rhythms of a performed temple liturgy. But Westermann was after something more than a historical reconstruction. He wanted to understand the biblical text as present-day readers encounter it, unexplained gaps and all. Does the psalm as a written text, rather than an incomplete historical performance guide, have an implicit salvation theology of its own?

Taking the received text of the psalms of lament at face value and reading them as literary wholes, Westermann argued that these ancient poems transfigure the emotional registers of lament and praise by means of juxtaposition. With no buffering transition, it’s as if praise seeps into lament, and lament into praise. He wrote:

In the Psalms of the Old Testament there is no, or almost no, such thing as “mere” lament and petition, . . . By nature it cannot be mere petition or lament, but is always underway from supplication to praise. . . . no longer mere petition, but petition that has been heard. . . . no longer mere lament, but lament that has been turned to praise.2

The formal interpenetration of lament and praise in the psalms creates an emotional register in which grief can, always and already, imply praise, like a waning moon on its way to waxing. Conversely, praising God at the moment of deepest despair can paradoxically imply, not deny, the extremity of one’s pain.

Building on Westermann’s insight, I’d suggest that the psalms of lament are a training ground for the would-be praise expert looking to level up. They’re the perfect texts to practice an interpretive skill I think of as a kind of textual train-hopping; the ability to run alongside a scripture, pull myself into it, and then ride along to its destination.

Because the threshold between lament and praise remains unlabeled in Psalm 102 and the divine promise remains unspoken, the exact nature of the rescue remains unspecified. Was it God’s promise of safety, of healing, of comfort, of faithful accompaniment? A psalm of lament makes itself available for application to any of those needs. The poem can bear almost any interpretive burden a reader lays on it.

The superscription to Psalm 102 shows how this works. The superscription is the short line printed above the first verse of some psalms, indicating the type of psalm, the attributed author, a performance instruction, or occasionally a narrative setting. When a superscription names an attributed author, it most often gives a specific name—for instance, David, Asaph, or the sons of Korah. But the superscription to Psalm 102 reads: “A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the LORD.” Psalm 102 is not put in the mouth of a particular historical figure but instead leaves the identity of the sufferer open to anybody in the position it describes. The superscription to Psalm 102, in other words, invites anyone who is afflicted and overwhelmed to borrow its words free of charge.

Moreover, the psalm’s unlabeled blank space between verses 11 and 12, the exact moment of rescue, is a kind of entrance sign for readers: “Enter here to catch the train from affliction to praise.” I step into the poem at the space left empty for God’s promise; because that promise remains unspoken, it can apply to any present need. Then, gratefully sinking into the language of the psalm, I allow its emotional momentum to carry me up the mountain from misery to praise. The psalmist does the hard work of finding adequate words and offers his posture of consecration as my own.

The psalm itself seems to anticipate that this is how its language will be used; in fact, it seems that this kind of scriptural train-hopping is what it was designed for. Verse 18 reads, “This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.” The poem here states outright that it exists for readers who do not yet exist, readers like you and me. This is a text that I can climb aboard in 2026, load up with my twenty-first-century heartaches, and ride from desolation to praise, especially as a beginner. The psalms of lament help a prayer novice like me utter expert-level praise.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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A few months ago, I began reading a psalm with my husband every night as part of our evening prayers. We would take turns reciting verses while the other person clutched their chest at a poignant metaphor, raised their eyebrows at the more violent imagery, or smirked at some unexpectedly funny line. It was the first time I’d read the Psalms as an adult and certainly the first time I’d immersed myself in them with any regularity. I admit: they were better than I’d remembered. They were urgent and moving; the metaphors were exquisite, and at least once a week we’d encounter a chapter that somehow gave voice to the frustrations we felt about the kids or to our anxiety about a situation in our ward. The Psalms were far from the stuffy, repetitive things that I’d remembered from my youth. And as I read through these ancient poems in preparation for my own devotions every night, I learned something else: My own prayers are pretty boring, by comparison.

There is nothing boring about the Psalms. They are some of ancient Israel’s most vibrant poetry, and they capture a wide array of human experience in their short stanzas. There are psalms for when you’re in the hospital (Psalm 6; 38; 102) and psalms for when you leave (Psalm 30), psalms for attending the temple (Psalm 24; 84) and being an outlaw on the run (Psalm 3; 7; 17; 59; 64). The Psalms show what it looks like to pray in an election year (Psalm 72), on your wedding day (Psalm 45), before you enter the bishop’s office (Psalm 51) and when you walk out (Psalm 32), when a friend betrays you (Psalm 55), on the front lines of battle (Psalm 60), when your garden produces well (Psalm 65), at ward choir practice (Psalm 95), when you are blindingly angry (Psalm 58), or confused in a courtroom (Psalm 35), in turbulent social times (Psalm 12), or when you feel abandoned by God (Psalm 13; 22; 42). There’s even a psalm for praying during a thunderstorm (Psalm 29)!

But through all that variety, there is one thing that the Psalms hold constant: They praise. They praise constantly. I can see why I found them repetitive as a teenager. No matter the setting, no matter the attitude of the speaker, no matter how long or short each psalm happens to be, nearly every one of them includes some element of praise. In a poem expressing fright at the prospect of death, we also hear “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations” (Psalm 90:1). In the same breath that another laments being surrounded by enemies, it also says with confidence, “The Lord is my light and my salvation. . . . The Lord is the stronghold of my life” (Psalm 27:1). Even as the psalmist describes “eat[ing] ashes like bread, and mingl[ing] tears with my drink,” he can also testify that “You, O Lord, are enthroned forever. . . . You will rise up and have compassion on Zion” (Psalm 102:9, 12–13). If there’s one thing the Psalms teach us better than any other scripture, it’s that prayer is meant for every moment of our lives—and that, somehow, praise can be found through it all.

The pastor Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “The Psalms show praise as . . . the goal at which all the psalm-prayers arrive after their long travels through the unmapped back countries of pain, doubt, and trouble. . . . The verb ‘praise’ (halel) in its noun form (tehillim) furnishes the title to our prayer book. ‘Book of Praises’ (sepher tehillim) is the Hebrew title to the 150 prayers that we commonly name ‘The Psalms.’” But as he also says, this title is counterintuitive: “This title, ‘Praises,’ catches our attention because it is inaccurate. Most psalms are complaints. They are calls of help by helpless and hurting men and women. They are wrung out of desperate conditions. . . . How can it be appropriate, then, to name these prayers ‘Praises’?”

How indeed! Why does a book dedicated to the troubles and griefs of God’s people also foreground so much adoration? How can they lament in so many different voices and from so many different contexts and share such a unified commitment to praise?

The answer, I believe, is found in Psalm 1:

Blessed is the one . . . whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. (Psalm 1:1–3)

Notice the image: a tree planted by a stream. It’s easy to imagine, really—it’s the kind of thing you see in a Thomas Kinkade painting or a nice bit of landscaping. But the point is agricultural, not aesthetic. Because this tree is “planted by streams of water,” its leaves are always green, its branches never shrivel, it bears fruit like clockwork every spring. This is a tree that flourishes independent of the weather. Even in times of drought, it survives where other trees cannot. It doesn’t rely on rainfall or snowfall or morning dew or any form of weather-dependent precipitation because it is nourished by something much steadier, and much more abundant.

And the implicit promise to the reader is that if they learn to pray in the way modeled by the Psalms, they will become like that tree. It is this image that the following 150 chapters illustrate. The voices across the Psalms sometimes rejoice and sometimes sorrow. They are illustratively subject to the gamut of mortal weather conditions. But they also insist on unfailing adoration. It runs through this book like water running down a hillside.

This well-watered tree reminds me of Christ’s promise of peace not as the world giveth (John 14:27) or Paul’s serenity that passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7). It’s the kind of steadiness that I’ve seen in the lives of friends and loved ones who, no matter the circumstances of their life, hold faithful and hopeful. The Psalms reissue the promise that that sort of peace is possible, and then they set about—for 150 chapters—showing it to be true. Here, in these pages, are avatars of the entire human condition, a whole congregation of sorrowing and rejoicing and frightened and ecstatic and bitter and romantic characters, all brought together in a single book of worship. Prayer sustains every speaker. It is the way each of these voices negotiates their situation, whatever it may be. And then these prayers are collected into a single book, bound by the promise that God hears his people, with the image of a flourishing broadleaf on its cover.

The Psalms don’t depict the variety of human emotion simply for accuracy’s sake; rather, they are showing us the height and breadth of what prayer will help us endure. They are showing us the weather conditions through which we might have always-green leaves, the depths through which God’s word will sustain us. And, most importantly, they sample the songs of those who have learned to drink from that stream. Listen closely. Can you hear the burble of lively waters in the background? Can you see the sparkle that glints in its eddies? This is the current that flows through the Psalms; this, more than anything, is what they channel.

God is our refuge and our strength,
An ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear.
(Psalm 46:1–2)

Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous.
. . . The earth is full of his unfailing love.
(Psalm 33:1, 5)

Sing the praises of the Lord,
you his faithful people;
praise his holy name.
. . . Weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.
(Psalm 30:4–5)

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
. . . Lord my God, I will praise you forever.
(Psalm 30:11–12)

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Kimberly Matheson is the Laura F. Willes Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research centers on Book of Mormon theology, Christian contemplative practice, and the continental philosophy of religion. Kimberly holds a PhD in theology from Loyola University Chicago, an MTS in philosophy of religion from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in ancient near east studies from Brigham Young University. She is the author of Helaman: A Brief Theological Introduction (Maxwell, 2020) and sits on the boards of the Book of Mormon Studies Association and the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar.

Art by John Hafen (1856–1910).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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The book of Job has become a touchstone for me. Like all great scripture, it’s not so much the answers it provides as the questions it raises for our consideration. As a scientist, as a writer, as a teacher, all, it’s always been questions that open new worlds and present promising vistas that help me navigate the complexities this earth life confronts us with. Job is all about questions.

Job opens with an imaginary frame-story signaled by, “And one day . . .” the ancient Middle Eastern equivalent of “Once upon a time . . .” in which hassatan, the satan, the adversary, is visiting the divine court (don’t equate the satan here with the Satan we are familiar with later in the scripture; in this story he is the divine prosecutor). God opens with a question, “From where do you come?” and he answers, “From roaming the earth and walking about in it.” Then God asks the ominous question, “Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil?” And we are off to the races. The adversary points out that it’s no wonder that he’s so righteous; you’ve blessed him with everything. If you take that away, he will curse you post haste. God says something like, “Have at him. Do your worst.”

And that the satan does. In short order, he strikes Job’s livelihood and kills his livestock, then his children, then, noting that Job still hasn’t cursed God, he is sent a plague of skin sores that leave him suffering immensely. His suffering is so egregious he wishes he had never been born. A group of Job’s friends gathers to “comfort” him. They all “know” that suffering does not come willy-nilly into life. Suffering comes from unrighteousness, so they enjoin Job to figure out what he’s done wrong. He must have acted badly because everyone knows God blesses the righteous and curses the sinners. Job is angry and confused. He knows he did nothing to deserve this, and yet he is suffering (Job’s legendary patience is not in the canonical book; it comes from later responses to the book). God seems to have been lying down on the job. Job demands redress and decides to take God to court and demands he appear to answer Job’s accusation of neglect of earned blessings. His wife mourns the loss of all that she had worked for, as the canonical text says in Job 2:9, “Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die.” A cold statement, yet what is often unacknowledged is that she, too, has just lost all she loves and has worked for.

However, in a variant in the Greek translation of the text called the Septuagint, we see her suffering a little more clearly: “How long will you persist and say, ‘Look, I will hang on a little longer, while I wait for the hope of my deliverance?’ For look, your legacy has vanished from the earth—sons and daughters, my womb’s birth pains and labors, for whom I wearied myself with hardships in vain. And you? You sit in the refuse of worms as you spend the night in the open air. As for me, I am one that wanders about as a hired servant—from place to place and house to house, waiting for when the sun will set, so I can rest from the distresses and cries that have now beset me. Now say some word to the Lord and die!” (Job 2:9–9e).

She is essentially a slave forced to watch the loss of all her offspring and all she has hoped for. She wants it to end. Her suffering is so profound she wants her husband to do the hard work of accepting his fate, cursing God, and ending all their suffering.

The rest of the chapter, in beautiful poetry, depicts his friends trying to admit that all of his and his wife’s suffering is because of something he’s done or not done. Job insists God has wronged him. God needs to give an account of his failure to keep his promises.

Suffering is one of the most profound and heartrending aspects of existence. We all know this. We all have suffered. I find it strange that as I get to know anyone in any depth, it becomes apparent to me that they have suffered. They have faced darkness. A place empty of joy that creates agony, terror, pain, and hurt of the deepest kind. And so often it seems pointless. And the “why” is rarely answered.

And in Job, sort of unexpectedly, God answers the summons to stand trial for his crimes, or at least to explain himself for this mess. And what does the Lord do? Does he offer a treatise on suffering? Its whys and wherefores? Send comforting messages enjoining patience and hope? No, he arrives as an ancient Middle Eastern storm god, addresses Job from a whirlwind, is dressed for battle, and offers a detailed tour of his creation.

He first asks Job some questions to show that he is not going to give an account of himself to the likes of Job:

“Gird your loins like a man, 
	that I may ask you, and you can inform Me,
Where were you when I founded earth?
	Tell me if you have understanding.” (Job 38:3–4)

The chapter continues with God’s questions. God then shows him his ignorance and how little Job understands of his ways:

• Have you ever commanded the morning, / appointed dawn to its place . . . ?

• Have you come into the springs of the sea / in the bottommost deep walked about?

• Did you take in the breadth of the earth?

• By what way does the west wind fan out?

• Who split the channel for the torrent, . . . to rain on a land without man?

• Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades / or loose Orion’s reigns?

Then, in chapter 39, God gives Job a test over his knowledge of the animal world, questioning Job, like a seasoned Biology 100 professor at BYU:

• Do you know the birthing times of mountain goats?

• How long are they pregnant?

• How did onager asses get free agency?

• Can you get a cord around a wild ox?

• What do you know about the way ostriches lay eggs?

• Can you explain the power of the warhorse?

• How does a hawk fly?

• How does an eagle build its high nest?

Then God introduces two monsters, beasts of such power and magnificence that only God can confront their might: Behemoth and Leviathan. (I’ve got another essay coming on these strange and fantastic creatures—a couple of the most interesting aspects of creation in all of scripture, but for now, let’s think about how Job wants God to address suffering.) However, God says nothing on the subject. He just doesn’t. Not directly. He puts Job on the back foot. The message the Lord delivers is, “You are not ready for that question. You are incapable of understanding. The creation is beyond you—how much more so when you consider the deeper reasons for the universe’s existence.” I’ve felt that message in my own life. Like you, suffering has been a part of my life. As it has been for God. In Doctrine and Covenants 19:15–18, we read:

Therefore I command you to repent—repent, lest I smite you by the rod of my mouth, and by my wrath, and by my anger, and your sufferings be sore—how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not.

For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent;

But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I;

Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—

Back to Job. I’ve seen hints of what Job may have learned as he considered God’s menagerie and the details of his diverse and beautiful creation. Moses seems to capture something in the Pearl of Great Price:

And it came to pass that Moses looked, and beheld the world upon which he was created; and Moses beheld the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created; of the same he greatly marveled and wondered.

And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. And as he was left unto himself, he fell unto the earth.

And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed. (Moses 1:8–10)

Recently, I visited some of the oldest living things on Earth. The bristlecone pines are found high in the desert mountains of the Great Basin. Seeing them has been on my bucket list for a long time. In 1963, a graduate student was doing tree-ring studies of these trees, whose age was known to be old, but exactly how old had not been ascertained. He suspected that they might be old enough to help him reconstruct ancient climates. Not knowing quite what he was doing, he tried to take a core sample and broke the metal increment borer on the tree’s hard heartwood, so he decided just to cut it down. The sad ending for a 5,100-year-old tree that had survived so much before meeting the saw of an errant graduate student—including drought, storms, lightning, insect, and fire. It turned out to be one of the oldest trees of this species ever found.

I have wanted to visit these for a long time. A population of these Malthusian pines in Great Basin National Park is now struggling due to the rapid pace of anthropogenic climate change in ways they have never encountered in their thousands-of-years history. However, my encounter was different than anticipated. I recorded this as I set up field recorders designed to capture the high-altitude ecological soundscapes.

I think I expected to find a sense of holiness in this place, a place of wonder and enchantment, being among the oldest living things on the planet.

But I find here a sense that all of my life and the life of humanity is but a passing moment. There’s no concern about me at all. There’s no sense that something knows me or feels me.

These trees are beyond me in ways that I don’t really understand, that I can’t even comprehend. And I feel like I’m staring at the vast sea of being and haven’t yet been able to capture even a drop in that ocean.

This is an amazing place. I am so happy to be here, so happy to experience the wonder of this place, the magic at my level. Not at the level I expected. I expected to somehow partake of the ancientness of the trees or the feeling of grandeur and holiness, but all I can feel is a sense of inadequacy and a sense of a kind of loneliness—that these beings are beyond me and far beyond whatever I am.

On the same trip, I encountered ants ranching mealybugs. At the tips of young pines, ants were protecting them from predators and harvesting the sweet honeydew they exude to rid themselves of excess sugars, which the ants then use to feed their colony.

And there on the edge of the Great Basin’s dry frontier, I had an inkling of Job’s confrontation with the divine. Yes, there is suffering. None escape it. Not even our heavenly parents, who at the very least lost a third of their children, and who must have suffered in ways I cannot comprehend. I can, however, sense the depth and importance of this creation, and despite the pain and suffering, and the groaning of creation, as the Apostle Paul calls it, there is something at its heart. Something that goes beyond, or through, or above, or below, or within existence that grounds all the reasons that so easily escape us in our walk through a landscape that neither Job nor we can scarcely comprehend. Yet somehow, as the Lord so vividly describes, this “something” depends mightily on mountain goats, ostriches, and bristlecone pines.

Sources

Robert Alter, trans. The Hebrew Bible. Vol. 3, Ketuvim: A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Michael P. Cohen. A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin. University of Nevada Press, 1998.

Mark Larrimore. The Book of Job: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2013.

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Steven L. Peck is an associate professor in the Biology Department of Brigham Young University and has published over fifty scientific articles in evolutionary ecology, ecological mathematics, and the philosophy of biology. He is currently a fellow of the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, working on the interface between faith and science. As a writer, he was awarded the 2021 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters for his award-winning novels, short stories, and nonfiction books on faith and science.

Art by Abraham Rattner (1895–1978). Photos courtesy of Steven L. Peck.

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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It was 1985. I was ten years old, growing up Mormon in southern California. My mother walked onto the cultural hall stage wearing a tapestry robe with a length of silky polyester draped around her head and shoulders. She was exquisitely beautiful, a queen. She stepped into a spotlight and began: “My name is Esther—at least that is what I am called in Persia.”

It was the annual Relief Society birthday celebration, and Marilyn Bayles, the impresario whose roadshows were the stuff of stake legend, had done it again: devised and directed an ambitious theatrical worthy of that venerable sisterhood. Three characters were portrayed: Eliza R. Snow, acted by the regal Lenore Cornwall, every inch the spiritual heir of our dear presidentess; a modern-day Relief Society sister facing the dislocations of late twentieth-century Mormonism; and the scriptural Esther, acted by my own mother, Christie Frandsen, the stake’s acknowledged scriptorian.

Marilyn invited my mother to write her own part, and she took on the project with her usual ambition. A serious student of the Old Testament during her BYU days, she looked up Esther in the Anchor Bible commentary on our bookshelf and infused the script with biblical context. She worked for weeks on memorizing the monologue, stressed about her costume, worried at the dress rehearsal, and then nailed it on performance night. Her ten-year-old daughter took it all in.

This kind of theatrical presentation was ubiquitous in the religious culture of my childhood in the ’70s and ’80s. The great heyday of the MIA, with its encompassing package of activities to develop every aspect of the human person over a lifespan, was already past.1 (If you haven’t yet, check out Claudia Bushman’s self-published autobiography I, Claudia, and the recent volume from the Church Historian’s Press Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024 for indelible accounts of what this lifeworld was like.) But through the last decades of the century, church activities still frequently featured the performing arts in the wholesome, homespun, unabashedly didactic cultural idiom of North American Latter-day Saints.

Make no mistake, these were ambitious community efforts, and they reached for the stars in the seriousness of their religious themes. In those decades my mother portrayed, in similar productions, Mary the mother of Christ, Mary the sister of Martha (in a two-woman show she wrote and performed with my grandmother, which they then took on the road to both of their stakes), and Emma Smith (long before her cultural rehabilitation in the 2000s, it should be noted). These projects gave her opportunities to exercise skills as a writer, scholar, performer, and administrator in ways that garnered the respect of her community as she edified them in return. And they gave her daughter opportunities to see her mother “expound scriptures” authoritatively and gain status for doing so (Doctrine and Covenants 25:7).

Revisiting her 1985 representation of Esther, my mother is the first to say that it reflects the context of its times. She offered her sisters a tragic reading of Esther’s relevance to modern Saints: “It is our job to stand valiant and true to our principles, to uphold the law, to keep our covenants, no matter what circumstances of opposition we may face,” she said in Esther’s voice. “I failed in this responsibility, and no matter what other good I might have been able to do in my life, I will have to suffer the consequences of my choices. Did I eventually leave the luxurious life in the palace and rejoin the covenant people? Did I abandon my adopted Gentile lifestyle and become an observant, practicing Jew once more? I will leave these questions for you to ponder, and the admonition to look into your own heart and learn from me.”

In my mother’s portrayal, Esther here is a shadow-Eve, a woman who chose sin by choosing not to live out the readily observable behavioral code of the Mosaic law that would have marked her as a Jew. The fact that her religious identity was anonymous to those in the royal court was the problem. She chose sin to serve the greater good, to be sure, but she nevertheless remains accountable for abandoning the covenant. She must repent and return to her people. In 2026, I still find this to be a compelling affirmation of Esther’s moral agency and a bracing impetus to recognize my own power within the larger political and technological forces that shape my life. My mother’s critical lens on Esther calls me to repentance in the way that faithful readings of scripture must.

At the same time, my mother’s interpretation is a period piece that reflects its decade’s anxiety about the Saints’ assimilation to Gentile ways. In the era of mid-twentieth-century retrenchment, Esther could serve as a cautionary tale for Relief Society sisters about the cost of failing to resist the world, maintain our distinctiveness, and be a “living specimen” of a peculiar people. (Janeen Jacobs Brady’s wonderful tune “I’m a Mormon” was a favorite in our home.) The reading is legible as an artifact of its moment and it remains alive to mine, which is what it means to receive a text as scripture.

Rereading my mother’s forty-year-old portrayal of Esther is a way of doing reception history of the Old Testament. Reception history is the study of a text’s afterlives, the changing ways readers across time and place have interpreted, performed, and pressed it into service. Reception history takes the interpreters and their circumstances as seriously as the text itself. Its purview is not what a text originally meant but what its readers have made of it. Reception history understands that the biblical text, when it is received as scripture by a religious community, is always “come to the kingdom for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). Like Esther summoned to her particular moment, scripture is forever arriving at some new “such a time as this,” forever readdressed to each community that takes it up. The text does not change, but the “kingdom” it comes to constantly changes. Mordecai’s question is perennial for readers of scripture: For what time, and for what purpose, has this scripture arrived among us?

This essay is dedicated to my mother, Christie Hansen Frandsen, who generously allowed me to use her writing in this essay and who developed these ideas in conversation with me. She was my first and remains my paramount teacher of how to read the Bible as living scripture and how to live as a Saint.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by John Everett Millais (1829–1896).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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I think it’s fair to say that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are not well known to Latter-day Saints. They’re rarely quoted in Restoration scripture; their narratives are not as memorable as nearby stories like Esther’s; and they belong to the postexilic period, where many of us lose the thread of Old Testament history. But there is much of interest in these short books for anybody looking to understand how the Hebrew Bible took its present form, how it influenced the culture into which Jesus of Nazareth was born, and how scripture became such a powerful source of authority for Jewish people—and, later, for the Protestant culture into which Joseph Smith was born.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which may at one point have been combined in a single scroll, are the most important biblical sources for understanding the immediate aftermath of the Jews’ return to their homeland after seven decades of exile in Babylon. The story picks up from the end of 2 Chronicles, when the Persian empire, which supplanted the Babylonian, introduced a pragmatic, tolerant approach to governance, and King Cyrus decreed that the Jews return to Jerusalem to worship their god.

The narrative focuses on three key Jewish figures: Zerubbabel, who led the first group of exiles back to Jerusalem and commenced the rebuilding of the temple; Ezra, a priest and scribe who arrived decades later and reintroduced the people to the Torah; and Nehemiah, a former cupbearer to the Persian king who came still later to Jerusalem to rebuild the city walls. Ezra–Nehemiah are notable among the historical books of the Old Testament for the way in which they incorporate first-person memoir into anonymous third-person historiographical reports, royal correspondence, and official documents in Aramaic and Hebrew. (Look for Ezra’s memoir in Ezra 7–10 and Nehemiah’s principally in Nehemiah 1–7.) Using these mixed narrative strategies, Ezra–Nehemiah tells the story of how the Jews reclaimed their scripture, renewed their covenant, and reestablished worship in the temple.

Underlying these spiritual and physical reconstructions, a more central task faced the Jewish people: rebuilding religious authority, which I understand as the socially recognized right to define doctrine, regulate practice, and interpret tradition within a religious community. Well-calibrated authority allows a religious community to avoid contention and coercion because members accept the legitimacy of its requests. The exile demolished the traditional center of Jewish authority, the temple, which anchored religious life as the dwelling place of God’s presence and the institutional seat of the priesthood. Without an accepted locus of authority, the returning exiles lacked the shared framework necessary to organize their collective religious life.

As Latter-day Saints, we understand religious authority to be granted by God, conferred by revelation, and ordered through the priesthood. But even though priesthood authority is granted by God, it must also be grounded in our collective acceptance of its legitimacy; if it is not, history suggests that schism, decay, or authoritarianism awaits. This principle is canonized in Latter-day Saint scripture: “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:41). We can read Ezra–Nehemiah as the efforts of Jewish leaders to reestablish religious authority after the exile by means of persuasion and instruction.

(It’s worth noting that, on one point, Ezra employs a means that is decidedly coercive: He instructs Jewish men who have married foreign women to divorce their wives and send them away with their children. It appears that this decree is only partially carried out, but it remains a troubling anomaly in the otherwise effective and inspiring ministry of Ezra [see Ezra 9–10].)

We can find in Ezra–Nehemiah three strategies for establishing religious authority through instruction and persuasion. The first and most urgent task in the postexilic period is to rebuild the people’s trust in the Lord by showing them that the calamity they just experienced had been foreseen by the Lord—and that the deliverance they were now experiencing was his merciful doing. The very first verse of Ezra 1 announces that Cyrus’s decree was instigated by the Lord: “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia” (Ezra 1:1, KJV). Readers are taught that God’s protective hand is behind Cyrus’s proclamation.

Moreover, the writer offers an interpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecies in which the exile and return both unfold as fulfillments of a divine plan. The phrase “the hand of the Lord” appears throughout the record (Ezra 7:6, 7:28, 8:18, 8:22, 8:31; Nehemiah 2:8, 2:18), interpreting postexilic history as the benevolent hand of God working behind the scenes. The fullest version of this view is the Levites’ long historical prayer in Nehemiah 9, which rehearses the entire sweep of Israelite history and frames the exile as divine judgment for disobedience, followed by divine mercy (see Nehemiah 9:31). Ezra–Nehemiah sets the stage for a rebuilt religious authority with a theology of God’s faithfulness despite human failure.

Within this overarching frame, Ezra–Nehemiah validates the legitimacy of the reestablished priesthood by showing how temple worship has been resumed in continuity with the preexilic past. This is the second strategy. The altar is rebuilt according to the law of Moses (Ezra 3:2). The temple is constructed in the likeness of Solomon’s (Ezra 5:11). Ezra himself is identified as a scribe skilled in the law of Moses (Ezra 7:6). The climactic scene in Nehemiah 8, wherein Ezra conducts a public Torah reading and covenant renewal, is shaped to remind readers of the ancient covenant given on Sinai: the gathered assembly, Ezra’s role as mediator, his elevated platform, and, most importantly, the people’s affirmative response and communal covenant all echo Moses descending Sinai to stand before the children of Israel. Moses is the legitimating forerunner for the entire postexilic project. The writers are careful to show that every act in the reestablishment of temple worship is a recovery of past practices, not solely an invention of their own.

Finally, Ezra–Nehemiah teaches its readers to understand and revere ancient Jewish scripture and to identify with the history it narrates. The climactic chapters of Nehemiah 8–10 bring all three strategies together, but the primary emphasis falls on the people’s reencounter with their own textual tradition. On that morning, Ezra reads from the Torah for hours as Levites circulate among the people, translating the Hebrew scripture into Aramaic and helping them understand its meaning. In the course of reading, the people discover the commandment to observe Sukkot, a religious holiday commemorating the Exodus, with booths made of branches, and they immediately act on what they’ve found. The reading provokes a strong emotional response: “all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law” (Nehemiah 8:9). Whether they wept out of contrition, grief, or joy, the people evidently experience a deep and tender attachment to the words of scripture. Its authority has become personal and devotional, not merely historical or institutional. The entire scene dramatizes the process of scripture presenting new meanings to—and then requiring new obligations from—attentive readers.

The model of communal life centered on the reading and observance of Torah dramatized in Ezra–Nehemiah became the foundation for Second Temple Judaism and, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, made possible the survival of Judaism as a tradition grounded in scriptural interpretation. More, it indelibly marked the Christian communities that grew out of Judaism. The significance of these events can hardly be overstated.

It is the work of a different essay to consider how these three strategies were employed in the early Restoration to seal the Saints’ acceptance of restored scriptural and priesthood authority. Today, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faces a related but distinct challenge: shoring up religious authority in places where the Church is growing quickly without deep connection to its roots—and among younger generations who distrust all institutional authority. What will that process look like? I don’t know if it should be modeled after the approach taken by Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. I will gratefully leave those questions to the Lord’s anointed. As for me, I fervently hope that scripture will always remain the living heart of the religious authority that binds our community.

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Rosalynde Frandsen Welch is Associate Director and a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research focuses on Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in English from Brigham Young University. She is the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction, published by the Maxwell Institute, as well as numerous articles, book chapters and reviews on Latter-day Saint thought. Dr. Welch serves as associate director of the Institute, where she coordinates faculty engagement and co-leads a special research initiative.

Art by Masters of Zweder van Culemborg (active 1420–1440).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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My eye was drawn in this week’s reading to a series of episodes in which the mandates of the law of Moses are bent or broken with varying effects, and I found myself pondering again what it means to honor the spirit of the law when circumstances make perfect observance difficult or impossible. Consider the following cases from the reading:

Case 1

In 2 Chronicles 26, we see the rise of a righteous young king, Uzziah, who appears in some way to have been appointed by the people when he was sixteen years old (v. 1). He is a successful military commander whom the chronicler portrays as receiving help from God in his military endeavors (v. 7). But then, in a pattern familiar from the Book of Mormon, pride sets in (v. 16), and in his pride, Uzziah commits an offense against the same God who had been helping him. He attempts to enter the temple and offer a sacrifice there, something that, as a non-Levite, he was not authorized to do under the law of Moses. Only the strenuous intervention of the priests of the temple prevents him from carrying out his intention, after which, as punishment, the Lord smites him with leprosy.1 Despite all the good he is credited with doing over his five decades as king, his attempt to enter into the sacred place and perform the functions reserved for the priests cost him dearly. He died with his leprosy. Like other kings before him, Uzziah found out the hard way that the order of the Lord’s house is not to be trifled with.

Case 2

In the next assigned chapter, 2 Chronicles 30, we find King Hezekiah, another righteous king after a series of idolatrous ones, uniting the tribes around the proper worship of Jehovah again. Via couriers with letters, he invites all members of any tribe to come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. And then the chronicler notes that Hezekiah and his court “had taken counsel to keep the passover in the second month (for they could not keep it at its proper time because the priests had not sanctified themselves in sufficient number, nor had the people assembled in Jerusalem)” (vv. 2–3).2 So, the timing of the observance of Passover is altered from what is legally prescribed. Then, in a further departure from the ideal, as the Passover is underway we read that “a multitude of the people . . . had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the passover otherwise than as prescribed” (v. 18) due to the short amount of time they had, even with the later date of the celebration, to get ready. “But,” we read, “Hezekiah prayed for them, saying ‘The good Lord pardon all who set their hearts to seek God, the Lord the God of their ancestors, even though not in accordance with the sanctuary’s rules of cleanness.’ The Lord heard Hezekiah, and healed the people” (v. 20).

These two legal anomalies are handled differently by Hezekiah than Uzziah did when he tried to enter the temple and offer a sacrifice. Rather than acting unilaterally and precipitously, we read that the king counseled with his assembly as to how to proceed regarding the timing, and when the people turned up in large numbers ritually unprepared, the king took intercessory action: The difference between the case of Uzziah and the case of Hezekiah and his people is one of disposition rather than perfectly orthodox action. Hezekiah and his people are doing their best to effect a national repentance from idolatry, and while they make every effort in that direction, some allowances must be made for the change to take place in a timely way. They show they are cognizant of the exceptions they are making, and do so with humble consultation and prayer.

As a result, the Lord looks with favor and forbearance on them. I love the word used as the chronicle describes the result of the king’s prayer: “The Lord heard Hezekiah, and healed the people” (v. 20). In other words, in response to their ritual uncleanness—a state of outward, performative impurity—the Lord addresses the deeper need, the more enduring concern, which was that years of estrangement from true faith and true worship had left not just outward, ritual impurity, but spiritual wounds—most of them no doubt known only to God. In the language of healing, we hear the chronicler signal that more was set right than the formal preparation of the people for covenant renewal; their hearts, too, were touched and healed.

Case 3

That circumstance of repair and healing between the people and their God leads to the final exceptional action we read about in this lesson: “Then the whole assembly agreed together to keep the festival for another seven days; so they kept it for another seven days with gladness” (v. 23). This time the rules are bent not out of necessity for lack of time or preparation, but in gratitude for the abundant mercy of God. The people give freely another week of their lives to honoring and worshiping the Lord.

It is common in some theological traditions to think of the God of the Old Testament as the legalistic, punitive Lord who is quick to smite and slow to salve. The examples before us in this reading do include an instance of the rigorous discipline for which the Old Testament’s God is renowned. But if we are discerning, there are factors here that shift the temperature of that example. God was dealing with a king, the man who held the power of life and death over his people, the man who stood in the line of David and could bring about suffering and calamity—as many before him had done—through hubris and vanity. The Lord’s intervention here was little different than the rebukes he would offer the dignitaries of Jerusalem in his ministry among them as Jesus of Nazareth. And at the same time, the grace and mercy with which he treats Hezekiah and the celebrants of that unorthodox Passover is of a piece with the way Jesus healed on the Sabbath and countenanced his disciples “harvesting” grain as they walked along with him through the fields on that day. In every dispensation, it seems, the God of creation is quick to distinguish between the pride that bends rules for self-aggrandizement and the humility that bends them in service of genuine return and holy relationship. Perhaps this reading is an opportunity for us to likewise reflect on our relationship to pride and to gratitude and sincere devotion when it comes to how we “observe to keep” the Lord’s commandments.

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Solomon Alexander Hart (1806–1881).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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“As we become more aware of the complexity and the internal contradictions in so-called orthodox Christian history, I see less and less room on any legitimate scholarly grounds for not taking Mormonism as really the most important innovation in Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.” -Samuel Loncar

Samuel Loncar is a scholar who works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, science, technology, and art. Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis sat down with Loncar and Terryl Givens for a wide-ranging conversation about the meaning of the Latter-day Saint movement and why it should receive more serious engagement from theologians and scholars of religion.

You can listen to or read the conversation below.

Zachary Davis: Sam, Mormonism is new, but in your reading, it’s also recovering something much older.

Samuel Loncar: I’m somewhat heretical as a philosopher, in the sense that I take history much more seriously than is conventional in current academic philosophy.

Terryl Givens: Heresy is a positive term in our culture, you know.

Samuel Loncar This is great for me—I’m finally finding my people.

I’d had a background interest in Mormonism, partly out of respect for the people I’d met from the community. But as I did more work, I began to realize—somehow, in a way that’s really difficult to explain, just through coincidences—that Joseph Smith seemed to have uncovered aspects of what I came to see, on my own as a scholar, as essentially important parts of what we would call ancient Christianity, which I think of as essentially a philosophical school.

And there’s no way he could have had access to the materials I’ve had access to, which is basically the last hundred, hundred-fifty years of scholarship on ancient Christianity and its historical milieu.

Zachary Davis: Now, Terryl, you said heresy is not a curse word in our tradition. Maybe you could talk a little about some of the early heresies in the early centuries of Christian development. There are interesting linkages with some of our theology.

Terryl Givens: I think of three heresies in particular—well, you could actually go to four—that reemerge in altered form in Mormonism.

First of all, I’d point to Marcion, one of the earliest and most important of the heretics—important in the sense of how seriously the threat was taken by the rest of Christianity. One scholar, Adolf von Harnack, actually says Christianity is essentially just an extended response to Marcion.

Marcion was, according to some accounts, at one time a mainstream Christian who found it impossible to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with this new Christian message embodied in Jesus Christ. He came to believe that the Old Testament represented a creator God who was evil, whose character was completely at odds—the vindictiveness, the wrathfulness, the vengeful, retributive kind of justice he embodied could not be reconciled. So he believed that God had to be love in the sense that John said, “God is love.” It’s not just one of his attributes. In some ways, I think Mormonism recaptures that belief when Joseph Smith moves increasingly in the direction of a much more inclusive, universalistic faith.

So that’s one way in which the Marcionite tendency is recuperated by Joseph Smith. And of course, there’s the Origenist heresy, condemned by Justinian in the sixth or seventh century. Two principal aspects of that heresy: one was the eternal preexistence of the human soul, and the other was the apokatastasis—the belief that eventually God would find a way to recover the entirety of the human race into his kingdom.

Joseph Smith, of course, teaches very early on the doctrine of the eternal nature of the human soul—its premortal existence—which seems to be, again, a modern reenactment of that Origenist heresy. One could also point to Pelagius. As recently as—well, I think even since Pope John Paul II, Pelagianism has been invoked as a kind of modern threat to the church. Pelagianism is generally construed as the belief that denies original sin and affirms free will. In some interpretations of Pelagius—though I don’t think they’re fully accurate—Christ is not necessary, because we can simply choose to do good and effectively redeem ourselves.

Joseph Smith’s emphasis on the freedom of the will, and his absolute denial of original sin and depravity, seem to move in that direction. And then you could also talk about Arianism—the great debate of the first church councils: is Christ subordinate to the Father? Mormonism quite clearly and emphatically indicates that yes, there is a kind of hierarchy: Christ is subordinate to the Father within a priesthood hierarchy.

So all of those heresies find a comfortable place within Mormonism in one form or another.

Zachary Davis: Maybe another historical question for you, Sam: where is Christianity now?

Samuel Loncar: Well, that’s such a difficult question. I’m tempted to just comment on what Terryl was just saying, but I’ll try to get at it indirectly.

One thing that’s interesting to note is that Origen was originally, in many ways, the founder of Christian orthodoxy. It’s over the evolution of the Orthodox Church—by the fourth and fifth century, as you were saying, and by the time of Justinian—that, I think, the Council of Orange condemns a form of semi-Pelagianism, in a period that’s really post-Augustinian.

So the Western Latin Church after Augustine ends up with a kind of internal tension about its own history, which is truthfully connected to a long-simmering split between the Latin Christian Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church—which has always been more directly influenced by the Platonic tradition because of its Greek-speaking heritage.

Origen, in one sense, really was representative of something very mainstream. And this, again, is part of what I find very interesting about Mormonism: if you read the Gospels, they all seem to assume the possibility of Elijah coming back—which is a very strange thing that no one mentions, but it’s assumed in every Gospel that there’s a debate over whether John the Baptist is Elijah.

If you ask how that could have been possible—what was even the thought-world of the first-century Gospel writers?—it’s actually in direct continuity with Origen and what we’d call broadly Platonism. It seems Philo believed in the pre-existence of the soul, and it’s very likely, depending on how you interpret the Essenes, that they may have as well.

So there’s a very deep connection here, and it’s linked to a strong view of moral agency. In Plato’s Republic, part of the picture of the soul’s pre-existent state is that it’s the freedom which the soul misuses, or learns to use well, that results in aspects of its embodied condition.

Of course, Mormonism has a much more pro-material view of that. But I do think that’s a remarkable disconnection—that there’s something at the origin of Christianity itself that, in a way, is never really reconciled. There are deep internal contradictions, and I think that’s part of why Mormonism today, or Christianity today, needs to become more self-conscious.

After two centuries of what people would call critical scholarship, I think scholarship hasn’t been critical enough. If you think of Christianity as what’s possible using the best methods of all available scholarship—not just any given dogmatic teaching of a communion—then I think Christianity is in a space where it doesn’t know how to draw its own boundaries.

And that issue is deeply connected to the inclusion or exclusion of Mormonism from the self-understanding of Christianity by non-Mormon Christians. There are good reasons, from the standpoint of what we’d call lower or orthodox Christianity, that Mormons have been excluded—because they are indeed radically, self-consciously in contradiction to orthodox Christianity as articulated in the Nicene Creed and subsequent councils.

But we also know—as the Catholic Church has had to reckon with—that there are Eastern churches, like the Monophysite churches, which are technically heretical by those exact same creedal standards, and which the Catholic Church is now in communion with. So I think the truth is, as we become more aware of the complexity and the internal contradictions in so-called orthodox Christian history, I see less and less room, on any legitimate scholarly grounds, for not taking Mormonism as really the most important innovation in Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.

Terryl Givens: I’m really happy to hear that diagnosis, because I think it’s accurate. In some ways, Latter-day Saints have been deluded about the amount of progress that’s been made in the last generation. The growth and success of Mormon studies—both as an intellectual phenomenon and as a publishing micro-industry—has led many people to believe, “Oh, that means Latter-day Saints finally have a place at the table. They’re being taken seriously. They’re being published by academic presses like Oxford, Chapel Hill, Illinois.” In reality, I think that’s a misperception of what’s happening. It’s clear to me—in part based on my own personal experience with Oxford—that they found a ready market, mostly among Latter-day Saints themselves, for these books, and so it was a financial decision.

It doesn’t represent, I don’t think, any significant academic legitimacy that’s been achieved. If you look, for example, at Black studies or women’s studies, there was a time when it was clear their voices were being excluded from the canon, so demands were made for women’s studies and Black studies departments, and those demands were met.

But we’re now at a point where one would expect to find women and minorities represented in the canon—in general literature classes, general history courses. It seems to me that Mormon studies may be stuck, in some ways, because we’ve been content to have our own corner of the sandbox, where we talk to each other and present at conferences and publish.

But, as Sam indicates, we’re not yet actually part of the more general Christian conversation—we’re always kind of red-flagged as, “Well, that’s a Latter-day Saint voice participating in this more general dialogue.”

Zachary Davis: Sam—you’re an unusually creative and gifted scholar, and you’ve come to recognize there’s more to Mormonism than meets the eye, that there’s substance there that rewards attention. Do you believe other scholars in your field and beyond will rediscover the interesting aspects of our theology the way you have?

Samuel Loncar: If you think about it from a sociological standpoint, if you look at all the other Christian communions, you see phenomena that historians would point to as similar to Mormonism—just as you point out in much of your work.

But none of them create anything like the Mormon Church. Nothing like it. Methodism—none of these things create something so analogous to what we’d think of as more like an Orthodox Jewish community: so incredibly cohesive. It’s obviously very rocky and complicated in one deep sense, I’m sure, but it creates, to this day, an amazingly well-ordered social way of life.

Whether people like it or dislike it, there’s something quite distinct about it. And the ability to have done that under the crosswinds and pressures of what people call modernity, and to have done it as a modern phenomenon with these very unusual combinations of theological and philosophical commitments—that’s an extraordinary phenomenon historically, one that I think requires much more explanation.

There should be a kind of head-scratching wonderment at what this phenomenon is. And it’s complicated enough that there’s room for people of many different interests, as we see. But I do think the lack of sustained interest in intellectual history, and the lack of a deep connection between the history of ideas and the history of theology motivating social and cultural history, makes it harder for mainstream scholarship to recognize how significant Mormonism is.

Zachary Davis: Mormonism was born in modernity. It’s democratic in a quite modern way, and yet it still maintains a strict hierarchical structure that creates order. But there’s an interesting balance—a priesthood of all believers, and yet a way of ensuring you don’t get mass splintering into theological individualism. Do you think, Terryl, that this makes it more suited to the problems of modernity?

Terryl Givens: Yeah—I’m just thinking out loud here, but it seems to me that it’s modernist and postmodernist at the same time, in very different ways. On the one hand, Joseph Smith works from the presupposition that there’s a kind of master narrative, an ur-text, which he is recuperating.

And we get all these bits and pieces of that originary vision manifesting—he has visions of parchments, revelation is given to him, he recovers writings of Abraham and of Moses. But I think we’ve crippled ourselves, to some extent, intellectually and theologically, by thinking there was a totality of Christianity that flowered in the first two centuries, and that we’re just working in a kind of nostalgic way to recuperate and recover that.

I think David Bentley Hart is right that we have to divest ourselves of that nostalgia and realize that a growing tradition has to keep evolving new ways of engaging modern challenges and dilemmas. So yes, it’s true—the Articles of Faith say, “In the same organization that existed in the primitive church.”

But I hope Mormonism has a broader, more exciting vision than just recuperating a kind of ecclesiology that was present in the second-century Roman Empire.

Samuel Loncar: Yeah, I’d add that the primitivism so characteristic of Protestantism—all the reformers see themselves as returning to a pristine condition.

That’s a huge part, of course, of the nineteenth-century democratic primitivist movements—Campbell, the Churches of Christ, and other movements analogous to Mormonism from that broader cultural and religious-historical standpoint. And the problem with primitivism, historically, is that it always ends up being false.

Once you actually study the first- and second-century church—this is why church history in the German tradition ended up being so subversive of orthodox categories—no one finds their church there. The famous accusation, in question form, that Cajetan put to Luther was, “Where has your church been for a thousand years?”

So I think the Mormon emphasis, at least in its theological structures—as I understand it from your work on ongoing revelation—allows, at least in principle, an adaptability that’s very hard to achieve when you’re in a communion theologically tied to its own shoelaces.

If it stands on that point, it’s going to trip. It’s very difficult if you say, “This is exactly what this was.” Then you have to protect people from knowledge, because if they just study history, they’ll realize that’s not true. What’s striking to me is that Mormonism—the more we know about the complexity of ancient Christianity, the more we realize that “Christianity” itself is a kind of belated category.

So the ancient phenomenon of these messianic movements centered on Jesus—Mormonism increasingly looks like it fits uncannily well, not with one version of them, but with a strange, emerging composite of traditions we didn’t really recover until the recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Gnostic corpus.

These are quite recent—the last seventy years or so—recoveries of these texts. And my assumption is that, in that sense, Mormonism is still ahead—it may even be ahead of its own tradition, because there’s an integration of scholarship that I think is possible. That’s something I’m interested in, in my own work—like Joseph Smith’s interest in Enoch.

The Enoch Seminar in modern academia is maybe thirty years old. So the scholarly study of Enoch and the Enochic texts in the modern academy is very recent. But what it shows unquestionably—even to a person of zero interest or knowledge about Mormonism—is that the Enochic tradition, and these traditions of celestial revelation and revelations of knowledge about preexistent states, were very important in the milieu of what we’d call Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.

And somehow, from a scholarly standpoint, Joseph Smith’s interest in that, and his production of texts related to it, is an extraordinary phenomenon that requires—I think that’s a very direct example where it’s almost as if—maybe part of this is romantic imagination, but even then, I don’t think that knowledge was available.

So the very intuition—a kind of radical Protestant intuition, you might say—that there’s something very deep that isn’t present in any form of Christianity, as he told it in the original revelation, that the church isn’t yet in its full form... You could say there’s nothing more unoriginal than that; every new church basically thinks, “The true church isn’t here. I’m going to start the true church.” Well, then the question is: what happens in two hundred years to those traditions? Most of them don’t look anything like what Mormonism has achieved.

Zachary Davis: So are you saying that when it comes to Enoch or temple theology, Joseph Smith really couldn’t have known these were ancient practices, at least not in the way he articulated them?

Sam Loncar: Well, he could have known in the sense that he read the Bible and other texts, but in the way I mean as a scholar—this is something I’m actively researching. I’m trying to figure out what he could possibly have read, just to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

But it’s uncanny. Let me put it this way: the recovery of the importance of the temple in biblical theology is basically a generation old. That’s how recent it is. One of the leading scholars on that, for example, is Jon Levenson, who wrote an article in the Journal of Religion in the 1970s. Levenson is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School and a brilliant biblical commentator and theologian who knows the rabbinic Jewish commentary tradition as well as critical scholarship, inside and out.

His work is brilliant, but there aren’t a lot of people taking it up. Of course, there’s also Margaret Barker, who I think is well known in the Mormon community, and Crispin Fletcher-Louis. It’s still very nascent. From the standpoint of the modern academic phenomenon, I think it’s simply the case that if someone wants to say Christians have always taken the temple seriously, that’s just false.

It’s just not true. Protestantism in general did not take the temple seriously as a phenomenon, and it was very hard to know much about the temple. But over the past two hundred years of historical scholarship—since Jewish scholars, since what’s called the science of the study of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, founded in the nineteenth century by Abraham Geiger—there’s been more than a century of rigorous historical scholarship on the Second Temple, which is part of what people like Barker are able to build on.

Barker builds on the whole tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical scholarship to present what she’s presenting, and yet it turns out to be of extraordinary relevance to Mormons, because Mormonism seems to do something, sociologically, that no Protestant communion has ever done—and, to my knowledge, no communion has done, except arguably the early church: it combines what you could call a sectarian emphasis, in the way the sociologist of religion Ernst Troeltsch means it, as opposed to a state church.

So you have a kind of communal assembly that’s voluntary—people opt into it—but there’s also a very strong familial authority, with the priesthood of the male head of the home, which you could say is somewhat analogous to Jewish practice, where much Jewish ritual is observed in the family and in the home, and then you go to synagogue.

But then, of course, there’s no Jewish temple since the destruction of the Second Temple. So Smith recovers all three elements of something that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t really existed—certainly not in Protestantism: there’s a churchly element, in the sense of a voluntary sectarian community one freely chooses or is born into and stays in.

But then there’s also an essentially secret or esoteric ritual dimension, which isn’t just the church—it’s an actual temple. That’s so radical that I think, basically because of all the prejudice against Mormonism since its founding, it hasn’t been appreciated. I don’t think academics are even going to be able to appreciate it until they can appreciate the significance of the work on the temple in their own fields, like biblical studies and the history of theology.

So that’s a second dimension to the challenge of why Mormonism hasn’t been more justly received in the academic community—besides the issue I mentioned earlier. This is a very complex issue that’s at the heart of my own work: I think the temple was at the heart of what we call Christianity.

The temple is the literal body of the human being as a microcosm. The temple is the actual dwelling place of the God of Israel at the time Paul is writing. And the temple is, in some sense, the cosmos itself. But that seems to basically vanish, without much apparent trace. Then suddenly, since this revolution in scholarship in biblical studies and the history of theology, we now have the resources to actually look at Mormonism and say, “I don’t know how they did this, but this is somehow almost in conversation with the scholarship that’s happening now.”

Terryl Givens: What Sam is saying reminds me that Patrick Mason has pointed out that Joseph Smith never used the expression “restoration of the church.” In some ways, we’re never going to stop using that expression, but it serves us poorly, because the restorationist model was strip away, strip away, strip away—get back to the skeletal framework.

Joseph Smith is all about amplification, amplification, eclecticism, and syncretism. The expression he encounters, apparently sometime in 1833 or 1834—he gloms onto this expression: the coming of the church out of the wilderness. And suddenly that starts—

He re-edits some of the revelations, like what’s now section five of the Doctrine and Covenants. He’s captivated by this notion of a kind of inspired eclecticism, where he’s assimilating, gathering, harvesting all the best elements of these “voices in the wilderness” referred to in Revelation chapter 12.

I think that’s a much more productive and accurate model for understanding how Joseph Smith’s mind was working, and how the project was unfolding in absolutely unpredictable ways that weren’t constrained by a fixation on a primitive model.

Zachary Davis: Could you say a little, Terryl, about why the LDS Church has traditionally been hesitant to draw on theology as a mode of teaching and exploring? And do you see any changes recently?

Terryl Givens: Here’s just one symptomatic anecdote about the need. When Prop 8 was the most controversial topic in the Church—and in the country—I received a phone call from a beloved family member who said, “Dad, I’m being murdered out here in my graduate program, because all my colleagues want to know how on earth I can possibly defend or support the Church’s position.”

She said, “If I were Catholic, I’d have two thousand years of theology to draw on.” She said, “All I’ve got are pronouncements from the pulpit. There has to be some kind of reasoned basis for these theological and doctrinal positions we espouse.” And there was really nothing I could say.

Theology has had a very contentious, seesawing history in the Church. Few members realize that when Joseph Smith approved the Lectures on Faith for teaching and publication, they were originally called the Lectures on Theology. Joseph Smith said theology was the most important pursuit to which one could devote oneself.

But by the time we get to Wilford Woodruff, he’s calling theology the greatest tomfoolery in the world. Theology comes to be associated with an apostate tradition that no longer has revelation, and so relies on human reason to replace, rather than supplement, revelation. By the 1930s, suddenly, we have a golden age again, where intellect is valued and prized, and the Church deliberately chooses its leading intellects to write Church manuals and curricula.

Then we get to 1939, 1940, and it reverses in the other direction. We get to a point where, as recently as the 1980s, Eugene England is called on the carpet for publishing works he called speculative theology. He made no claims to doctrinal authority, yet he was still told to cease and desist publishing in the area of speculative theology.

So it’s still a term fraught with suspicion. Even Hugh Nibley—maybe the greatest Mormon intellectual of the twentieth century, or one of them—himself said, “Theology is what happens when revelation fails.” Which was a terrible thing to say. I think if more Latter-day Saints could understand the Catholic respect for and appraisal of theology—

They understand that theology works in service of authority. If you believe in an inspired leadership, an inspired tradition, then it’s the task of theology to explicate, expand, and enlarge the domain of critical thought about God and his revelations. So, yes, I’d like to see less suspicion in several quarters, because I think theology can provide an invaluable service.

There’s another kind of resistance—and this is probably just pop-cultural, not unique to Latter-day Saints—the assumption that discipleship is lived religion, and theology is just abstract speculation. Even people like Peter Enns—a great writer on faith, who erects a hard-and-fast distinction between doctrine and practice, and says one of the failings of Christianity is that it’s been so obsessed with doctrine when it’s really about practice—I’d say no, the danger is in separating those two.

Christ, by virtue of the kind of life he lived, embodied important principles and truths and ideals. I think Christianity goes astray precisely in not recognizing the overlap and congruence of those terms. Once you render the love of God into an abstract idea you can speculate about, separate and apart from lived religion, that’s where you get into trouble.

So that’s a long way of saying: I think our young people are hungering for theological investigations that enrich and supplement religious commitment—but don’t substitute for personal experience of the sacred.

One reason I think theology has lost its place of respect in the modern epistemic hierarchy is the rise of science as a counter-authority that generally receives more respect from modern subjects.

Sam, you’ve given a great deal of thought to the relationship between religion and science, and yet you still think theology is a critical field to engage with and study. So I wonder if you could share how you think about the terms “religion” and “science,” and why you believe anyone interested in the truth should engage with theology.

Samuel Loncar: Yeah. I recently published an article—I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, since it’s quite academic—called “Science and Religion: An Origin Story,” in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, which makes a more complex version of the argument I’ll summarize here. There’s a very basic question, strangely not often asked by historians of theology and philosophy: where does theology come from?

The answer is Plato’s Republic. The first occurrence of the term theologia is in the Republic, when Plato is discussing the poets and the importance of theology as the foundation of any true state. So, first of all, the theological tradition isn’t separate from the philosophical tradition—this is one of the biggest myths that characterizes Christian theology in general, including academic Christian theology.

My work challenges this. It’s simply not true: theology is part of philosophy. Philosophy, in the ancient world, was the closest thing to what we now call religion. That word—”religion”—didn’t originate in its modern sense until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, or maybe even as late as the nineteenth.

This is well known to people who specialize in the origin and concept of religion, like Peter Harrison. So, first of all, if we want to use the word “religion” for antiquity, we’re actually better off using the word “philosophy.”

Philosophia—philosophy, the love of wisdom. Think of Proverbs: “Get wisdom.” It’s the most important thing. What’s a sign of wisdom? That you love knowledge more than silver and gold. So the love of wisdom, and the fruit of wisdom, is the tree of life—wisdom is the tree; she’s the woman who yields eternal life to those who seek her.

So that’s at the foundation of a single source that we’ve split into what we now call philosophy and theology, or perhaps lived practice and theology within a tradition. I think all these splits have their reasons, but first of all, we should recognize theology has always been seen as inseparable from exactly what Terryl is saying—a way of life ordered toward truth and wisdom.

The idea that you could separate them is like saying science itself is a practice, not an intellectual activity—which would mean a person didn’t really know anything about what the word “science” means. The word “science” used to just mean rigorous knowledge.

And again, the word we used to use for science was philosophy. Look at Harvard—it still has chairs like the Chair of Moral Philosophy. Why? Because they thought moral philosophy was a science. The founder of economics in our sense—the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment sense—called it political economy, which is part of philosophy.

So we’ve used the word “science” in this narrow way in English only since roughly the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the Victorian period. But really, according to Stephen Gaukroger, in his recent four-volume work with Oxford, not until the beginning of the twentieth century. So part of what we have to do is demystify our categories.

Science is knowledge. And if you want it to mean something very specific—like “science and religion are in conflict”—that’s just a story we’ve made up, for complicated reasons, in secular culture over the past hundred and fifty years or so.

Zachary Davis: So in ancient times, if you met someone from a different religion, how would you even talk about that? Would you say, “What god do you worship? What philosophy do you follow?”

Samuel Loncar: It’s a great question. But truthfully, one thing we know is, for example, if you look at the Jewish context—Philo and Josephus, the two greatest writers in Greek from the Jewish community, writing about the Jewish community at roughly the time of Christianity, both in the first century.

Josephus a little after Philo, after the destruction of the temple, in particular. They both refer to “the Jewish philosophy,” and describe it as having three major sects. The early Christian communities called themselves “the true philosophy.” So if they were going to call themselves anything, people would be interested in them as philosophers, like Plato.

Plato talks about the philosophy of the Egyptians. Pythagoras says he learned all their rituals and philosophy from the Egyptian priests when he was in Egypt. So if you look at the ancient Greek sources, they present the wisdom traditions of other cultures as those cultures’ “philosophies,” if they’re going to use a word at all.

But more generally, most people didn’t have a word for religion, and, like you said, Zach, they’d be interested in people’s gods. As scholars have shown, people were very respectful of one another’s gods in the polytheistic world. Gods essentially functioned as a kind of diplomacy. We know this partly because there are many inscriptions by non-Jewish people at Jewish synagogues we’ve discovered—synagogues thanking some Roman benefactor who gave a significant offering to the God of Israel worshiped in that place.

So, yes, if you were an intellectual, you’d basically call it philosophy—but most people wouldn’t have even thought of it as a separate thing. It was just an everyday part of life. Gods were everywhere. You couldn’t walk anywhere in the Roman Empire, as the Yale historian Ramsay MacMullen says, without practically knocking into an image of a god. They were just everywhere.

Zachary Davis: My whole life I’ve heard people say, “I don’t believe in religion, I believe in science.” Why is that a wrong way of thinking?

Samuel Loncar: Well, obviously, for that person, I’d want to respectfully help them clarify what they mean by that.

It’s understandable—we’ve obviously come to oppose science and religion. There’s a lot of work on that. But I think the sticking point—and here I’ll give ground to the people who attack religion—is revelation.

Theology, in the Christian tradition, was normed on the idea that it has infallible revelation. Once that became culturally incredible—basically around the nineteenth century, in the university system—the idea that theology itself is a science became incredible too.

But science, I think, is respected now because it seems more empirical, more open, more successful. Theology doesn’t have the equivalent of the technology science has produced. So I’d give every concession to the fact that, if you have to trust something as a word, people are in a way wise to trust science, because it means knowledge.

The question is: does trust in science mean you exclude religious considerations, or does it justify excluding you, as a human being, from taking religious considerations seriously? Many people think the former, and I’d just try to gently help them understand, based on the best historical and academic knowledge we have, that that’s not the case.

Your actual faith in science is part of the history of a religion you don’t understand, because science now functions for many people as a religion—and this isn’t something I’m making up, it’s very well known. The great French sociologist Auguste Comte thought science would replace religion; he was in the French positivist tradition. And many contemporary new atheists, like Dawkins, are unselfconsciously religious in their commitment—not to science as we’d all agree we should practice it, as an empirical, open-minded investigation of the natural world, but to something much more like a religious worldview that permits you to simply screen out certain questions you don’t want to deal with.

I think there could be nothing more unscientific than that. So as long as a person is open-minded, and science can include religion, then maybe they’re fine to think that way. But I think we’ve felt embattled because of an internal tension in our culture about whether our claims about revelation make sense.

If they don’t make sense, maybe we can replace revelation as an authority with science. That’s kind of been the big experiment Western culture has been running for the past hundred, hundred-fifty years.

Zachary Davis: Is Mormonism friendlier to science than other Christian religions?

Terryl Givens: I think it is—or certainly has the potential to be—in part because it has never embraced the kind of radical discontinuity between the material and spiritual worlds that, according to Coleridge, is the ground of all miracle: the heterogeneity of matter and spirit.

By not buying into that bifurcation, we don’t have to see them as in tension or opposed. Joseph Smith was a kind of naturalist theologian. The King Follett discourse is, in a sense, the ultimate naturalization of theology, where the whole border between the human and the divine just dissolves.

Natural law and moral law seem to function in similar, analogous ways. There’s never been a real conflict between science and religion in the Mormon past, except on the part of some individuals who were biblical fundamentalists within the Church and found Darwin problematic.

But there was never any official resistance to Darwinian developments, for example. I think there are all kinds of exciting things happening in consciousness studies today that posit consciousness as the ground of reality. And then you think of Doctrine and Covenants section 93, with its reference to the fact that, without agency—without an agential intelligence—there’s no existence.

So I think there are beautiful potential harmonies to be found between cutting-edge physics and cosmology and Latter-day Saint theology.

Zachary Davis: Should Latter-day Saints try to become more closely bound with the rest of the Christian tradition, or should we embrace our distinctiveness—stay that unusual church out in Utah?

Terryl Givens: That’s a great question. I think there’s been a shift in signaling, if I’m reading it correctly, from Church leadership on this topic.

As I’ve indicated before, it seems to me that the very architecture of the Utah temples reflects an attitude of aloofness and isolation—a kind of fortress mentality. I’ve been doing a study, in recent weeks, of how the language of the Book of Mormon describing “two churches only”—the church of the Lamb and the church of the devil—has been interpreted historically.

There’s been a historical reading that Latter-day Saints, as the one and only true church, means there’s no real bridge we can build to the rest of an apostate Christendom. All that language has shifted in the last generation. Zion now comes to be addressed from the pulpit as a multicultural, multi-religious project.

There’s a recognition that we have to engage diverse traditions and cultures, not condescendingly, but with an attitude of actual mutual appreciation. I personally think Zion is inconceivable as a project apart from the mutual participation of all people of goodwill and intent.

My own research over the past couple of decades has convinced me there’s a vast wealth of genuinely inspired prophetic utterance that has occurred in the so-called wilderness—one we would benefit from, individually, in our discipleship, by appropriating and appreciating. From Julian of Norwich to George MacDonald to Thomas Traherne, you name it.

So I think it’s not just possible but necessary for us to engage our fellow Christians more directly, and both sides would be bettered by the process.

Samuel Loncar: What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding the broader Christian community has of Mormonism?

Terryl Givens: I’m not sure the problem is really so much misperception as it is frustrated expectation. In my very first book, I was trying to answer this question: why did Mormonism elicit such a furious response, one totally disproportionate to any real threat it represented?

Polygamy is episodic—that’s one phase of it. But it seemed to me that the continuous thread running from 1820 to the present day is a kind of unabashed—some would say atavistic—impulse that refuses to modernize or allegorize the fundamentals of the Christian story, and their recapitulation in Mormonism’s foundations.

It’s the tangible facticity of gold plates and resurrected beings—what I call the collapse of sacred distance. And let me close with an anecdote that I think captures this for me. When I was at the beginning of my career, just beginning my work in Mormon studies and exploring these questions in depth, I had a colleague who had a visceral hatred of Mormonism.

It was tangible, and real, and we were friends in spite of it. One day, he reacted as if a snake had bitten him because I’d handed him a Mormon text and suggested he take a look at it. I finally said, “So what is it? What is it that creates this antipathy in you?”

He said, “All right, I’ll answer that.” He said, “Do you really believe that a million years from today, you’re going to be in heaven creating new worlds, new posterity?” And I said, “Let me ask you a question first. What are you going to be doing one million years from today?” He said, “Growing in the grace of Christ.”

I said, “No—11:30 a.m., the afternoon of November 3rd, one million years from today, I knock on your door. What will you be doing?” He thought a minute, and then all the air went out of his sails, and he said, “I see your point. Anything I could say would sound absurd.” And that, for me, captured it perfectly.

It’s that quintessential collapse of sacred distance—that Joseph Smith had the audacity to describe what the angels visiting him were wearing, the nature of a celestial sociality, and the project of engendering some kind of eternal posterity. Any definition of theology you’ll find in any handbook will tell you theology is the story of God’s dealings with man from the Garden of Eden to the final resurrection.

And Mormonism says, “No, we can go way beyond that in both directions.” It’s this audacity—it’s a reenactment, it seems to me, of what Christianity itself did in lifting the veil from God’s face. But we don’t have two thousand years of the mists of history to make that more palatable.

So I think it’s a kind of affront to a Christianity that has tried to render itself more respectable in the modern age.

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Samuel Loncar earned his Ph.D. at Yale University. He is a philosopher, scholar, and consultant who works at the intersection of philsophy, religion, science, technology, and art. His book Philosophy as Science and Relgion is forthcoming with Columbia University Press, and his scholarship has appeared in publications like Kant Studien, Religious Studie, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religions Philosophie, Metaphilosophy, and Zygon: A Journal of Religion & Science. Loncar is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, where he directs the Institute for the Meanings of Science.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare Magazine.

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This week’s reading marks five pivotal moments in the history of the house of Israel. Several of these moments are well known, but the central one is almost always passed over in silence or with scant mention. In this post, I propose to linger without apology over the consequential ministry of one of the Bible’s most unheralded figures, the prophet Huldah.

Of the five pivotal moments that structure our story, the first two and the last two are relatively well-known:

Moment 1: Israel (the northern kingdom) is conquered by Assyria and depopulated, its inhabitants either killed or taken into cities of exile (2 Kings 17:5–6).

Moment 2: The book of the law is rediscovered in the temple at Jerusalem and presented to Josiah, the penultimate king of the remaining southern kingdom of Judah (2 Kings 22:8–11).

Moment 3: To be addressed below.

Moment 4: In accordance with the law reiterated in the scroll, Josiah institutes earnest reforms in the worship of Jehovah throughout the kingdom of Judah (2 Kings 23:1–27).

Moment 5: Under Josiah’s rebellious successors, culminating with King Zedekiah, Babylon besieges and destroys Jerusalem and carries the remaining population away into captivity (2 Kings 24).

To appreciate the significance of the third and central moment, we return to the reaction that King Josiah had to the law being discovered and read to him (moment 2): “When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes,” a sign of extreme distress and mourning (2 Kings 22:11, NRSV). The reason, of course, is that, as recorded in the book, Jehovah had offered blessings for obedience to the law but also dire curses for disobedience, and Josiah immediately recognized that if this book was correct, Judah was in very serious trouble.

Shaken by the yawning gap between their current practices and what God prescribed in the law of Moses, King Josiah wanted to make sure there wasn’t a mistake in what he was hearing. So, “the king commanded the priest Hilkiah [and others], saying, ‘Go, inquire of the LORD for me, for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found; for great is the wrath of the LORD that is kindled against us, because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us” (2 Kings 22:13).

Obediently, the king’s delegation sought out a prophet with recognized authority to speak in the name of Jehovah. They had a number of options here: Jeremiah was well known in Jerusalem for his dire warnings to the people, and the prophet Zephaniah was also active during this period. But on this occasion, they “went to the prophetess Huldah, the wife of Shallum,” who “resided in Jerusalem in the Second Quarter, where they consulted her” (2 Kings 22:14). What the prophet Huldah had to say was as blunt and powerful as anything her well-known contemporary prophets may have uttered. It was couched in a fourfold use of the oracular formula “thus says the LORD,” and should be quoted in full:

She declared to them, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Tell the man who sent you to me, Thus says the LORD, I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on its inhabitants—all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read. Because they have abandoned me and have made offerings to other gods, so that they have provoked me to anger with all the work of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched. But as to the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the LORD, thus shall you say to him, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Regarding the words that you have heard, because your heart was penitent, and you humbled yourself before the LORD, when you heard how I spoke against this place, and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and because you have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, says the LORD. Therefore, I will gather you to your ancestors, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace; your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring on this place.” (2 Kings 22:15–20; see also 2 Chronicles 34:22–28)

The king’s messengers brought this very sobering oracle back to him from Huldah, and over time, it all happened as she said it would. The chroniclers report that Josiah did his best to show Judah’s repentance. He abolished idolatrous equipment and practices from the temple and other sites and instituted an observance of Passover such as had not been seen “since the days of the judges who judged Israel” (2 Kings 23:22). Though he died in battle with Egypt, Josiah died a free man before he or his people could be brought under the violent oppression of Babylon. During his life, his people remained settled at Jerusalem, and he died “in peace,” having left his kingdom more in harmony with the Lord than it had been when he came to the throne. Nevertheless, though the Lord, through Huldah, had conceded to delay Judah’s fate until after the righteous king was dead, the doom of the nation as a whole was certain because of decades of unrepentant idolatry and neglect of the law of the Lord.

Huldah is referred to as “the prophetess” (emphasis added), suggesting that, in the author’s mind, she was a well-known figure with a stable reputation as a spokesperson for the Lord. As Jewish commentators have long recognized, she not only reiterated the consequences for idolatry spelled out in the law but, in doing so, she “authenticated the divine source of its teaching.”1 Robert Alter has pointed out that she apparently did all of this without even reading the text of the book in question,2 a seeric function that recalls how Joseph Smith himself operated when establishing scripture (for example, translating the Book of Mormon without reading directly from the plates, and delivering the contents of the lost revelation of John the Beloved in Doctrine and Covenants 7 without recourse to any textual artifact at all).

Perhaps most significantly, according to multiple scholars, Huldah’s confirmation of the validity of the book of the law of the Lord makes her “the first figure in Scripture, male or female, whose contribution to biblical history centered on verifying a written document as sacred and holy writ.” In other words, Huldah’s prophetic witness was a significant milestone in the formation of the Bible itself and in the emergence of a Jewish culture of respect for and diligent attention to the words of Torah that persists to this day. The practical reforms that took place under Josiah as a result of Huldah’s confirmation also sharpened the focus on the temple at Jerusalem as the exclusive ritual site for the worship of Jehovah, another defining element of Jewish belief and practice.

The female prophets of scripture seem too often to draw only the fleeting focus of modern commentators, but their presence in the ancient world was regarded as expected. Women as prophets are common in the archaeological record of the Ancient Near East generally, and the Israelite example is no exception.3 The Bible names four women who unambiguously acted or spoke with prophetic authority: Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Deborah (Judges 4:4), Huldah, and Anna (Luke 2:36–38). As Rabbi Neal Gold has written of these figures, “The Bible does not doubt their authenticity nor find their presence remarkable; it seems clear that female as well as male prophets abounded in Israel.” It is the modern era that appears to be more ill at ease with the idea of female prophets.4 But her contribution to the sacred history of the Bible is nevertheless well-documented in both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.

Today, Huldah is most visibly remembered by a pair of gates—of double and triple arches, respectively—in the southern wall of the second temple complex at Jerusalem. These were the portals through which most worshippers passed into and out of the sacred site during the time of Jesus. The Lord himself would have used them on some of the most significant occasions of his mortal ministry. Tradition came to call them after her name to reflect that she had lived and prophesied in Jerusalem. Today, both gates have been partially obscured by later additions to the wall, and their arches sealed up with stone so that, to the eyes of the casual observer, the presence of Huldah’s gates, like her impact on sacred history itself, can be easy to miss. But for those with eyes to see, Huldah’s aperture onto the sacred can still be discerned. Just as the gates are structurally part of the edifice of the sacred precinct, Huldah’s prophetic legacy remains precious for the authoritative place it holds in the establishment of the word of the Lord and the building up of the kingdom of God.

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Christen Dalsgaard (1824–1907).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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How shall we construe the reports of Elisha’s dramatic miracles?

How might such accounts figure into our faith and our lives before God?

Our English term “prophet” descends from an old Greek translation, centuries before the time of Christ, of a yet older Hebrew term. We might take these Hebrew origins for granted, but they are worth noting. Most ancient cultures have produced seers, soothsayers, oracles, or shamans, some of whom may have been God’s messengers, for God sends out his word to all the nations of the earth (2 Nephi 29:7). However, it is specifically the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who serve as the prototype for God’s subsequent spokespeople in western civilization’s predominant religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. They were also the prototype for the founding prophet of the Restoration, Joseph Smith.

Scripture portrays these biblical prophets as sometimes foretelling the future or working other wonders, but their primary role was to translate God’s mind, heart, and will to a people—wonder enough by itself. According to one celebrated analyst, a Hebrew prophet’s fundamental experience was “a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos.”

If a prophet’s central task is to proclaim God’s mind and heart, our portrait of the prophet Elisha is striking by contrast, for it includes little of his teachings. Instead, the record of his days reads as a collection of miracle stories attributed to the prophet—more than two dozen such stories, in rapid sequence, in just chapters 2–7. Some of these miracles echo those performed by his predecessor, Elijah, such as Elisha striking the river Jordan with Elijah’s inherited cloak, causing the waters to part so he can cross (2 Kings 2:14). Others prefigure miracles later attributed to Jesus: feeding a multitude with little food (2 Kings 4:42–44), healing a leper (2 Kings 5:1–14), even raising a child from the dead (2 Kings 4:18–37).

Some of Elisha’s wonders are well-known among Latter-day Saints because of our attraction to simple lessons learned (the cure of Naaman’s leprosy by washing seven times in the Jordan River; 2 Kings 5:1–14). Others are remote to us and seem almost as either the practice of magic (Elisha causes a borrowed iron axe head to float to the water’s surface so it can be retrieved; 2 Kings 6:1–7) or similar to medieval faith in the healing power of relics (as when, even after Elisha’s death, a dead man is restored to life the moment his body touches Elisha’s bones in the tomb; 2 Kings 13:20–21). One miracle in particular is infamous among some audiences, who complain of the depiction of the prophet as petty, or his God as merciless, when Elisha, in the name of God, curses youths who mock his bald head, resulting in two bears emerging from the woods to maul dozens of the young people (2 Kings 2:23–24). As a cluster, the miracles establish Elisha as empowered to see into the future, to curse or heal and resurrect, to control nature, and to determine the fate of armies, among other matters. That is a lot of power.

How are we to assess these stories? And what place ought such accounts hold in our own faith and religious lives?

Depending on what we mean by “miracles,” Latter-day Saints are apt to make room for them in some form, as they are presented profusely in all four standard scriptural works. Christianity itself, of course, presents itself as based in part on Christ’s Resurrection. And the Restoration emerged as “a marvelous work and a wonder” through revelation, which is to say: the extraordinary, the miraculous.

We do well, nonetheless, not to approach miracles blithely. Jesus told (doubting) Thomas to “be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27). However, I do not imagine the Lord was praising gullibility. It would seem more likely he was counseling Thomas to be open-minded and -hearted toward awe, toward divine action, to trust principles and people who had shown themselves trustworthy, perhaps by a process like that sketched in Alma 32. There is nothing worthy to be gained, and something precious to be lost, by investing uncritically in superstition and error. Healthy and life-sustaining faith can be damaged, for example, when trust in a friend or a tenet proves misplaced. People are inclined to resentment, a sense of betrayal, or humiliation at having invested, often deeply, in something later shown to be errant. And if one thing is shown to be hollow, we may naturally be led to suspect related things. Overconfidence in everyday miracles can be dangerous for another reason too. One person’s exuberance over prompt divine help in recovering lost keys sometimes leaves neighbors at a loss when their prayers have gone unanswered for their sibling’s relief from cancer.

Our immediate topic—miracles and Elisha’s miracles in particular—is, of course, too large for our interests. In another setting, we might enter a long conversation with philosopher David Hume1 about the plausibility of miracles. Or we might consider all that the prophets have pronounced on the topic. Given our modest space and purposes here, however, let us be content to pose to ourselves a few questions (in italics), in eight areas below, that might promote reflection and discussion.

1.

What is a miracle? The skeptical Hume thought of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature—and believed any report of a miracle was more likely to be error or deceit on the part of a witness than a genuine breach of such laws. But what are these “laws of nature”? Who gets to define them? Do they change across time?

President Spencer W. Kimball wrote of “the miracle of forgiveness.” Asked in 2012 by the press if young women might sometime join young men in leaving on their missions by age 18, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland replied, “One miracle at a time.” President Russell M. Nelson urged us “to expect miracles.” Orson Pratt and other early leaders held that “miracles” did not break natural law but were merely divine control over laws we do not yet understand (and current notions in quantum physics might be put in conversation with the assertion). Finally, again, the author of 2 Kings writes forthrightly of Elisha’s many startling supernatural acts.

In light of these varying usages of the term and of your own experience, what does “miracle” mean to you? How might your understanding bear on how you strive to live gospel precepts? How might it bear on how we read 2 Kings 2–7?

2.

Laman and Lemuel famously witnessed supernatural beings and events which did not change their hearts and behavior in the long term. So also with the Hebrews released from bondage under Moses’ leadership. What do these instances imply about the role of miracles here on earth? Are they important for faith?

3.

Have you personally ever witnessed a miracle? If so, what effect has that had on your spiritual life and your lived experience? Has that effect changed over time? Has it affected anyone with whom you have shared the story?

4.

Might miracles ever backfire, prompting us to think of God as “a vending machine of blessings” rather than prompting us to learn or to experience God’s love or more actively to help build Zion?

5.

Are some miracles better discerned over time and in hindsight rather than instantly as they occur?

6.

Might there be a key for us in John 6 to discern the ultimate purpose of miracles? In this chapter, Jesus fed a multitude with a pair of fish and a few small barley loaves, but declined to repeat the feat the following day, offering instead his bread of life sermon, which caused many disciples to turn away from him.

7.

Might there be an additional key in Mark 2? In this chapter, Jesus is shown challenging those religious authorities who accused him of blasphemy by saying to them: “Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?” (Mark 2:9)

8.

My own experience will vary from yours, but I personally have not witnessed a miracle resembling the dramatic ones associated with Elisha. I have participated in blessing those who were ill, but I do not know whether to ascribe their recovery—where there was recovery—to the blessing, to medical care, or to natural processes.

On the other hand, I have experienced prompts to action, while listening in meditation and prayer, that later proved important.

I have over decades felt beckoned by the divine: to “Come, follow me”; to respond to the implicit invitation of life; to love; to relieve suffering; to follow the Light.

I have found myself or others in difficult straits, followed by a sense of inconvenient obligation by way of scripture that has come to my mind: “Who knows but that you have come to your position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)

Only weeks ago, I prayed one morning while weeping and reading and listening to the lyrics of “Bring Him Home”2 (from the musical stage play, “Les Miserables”):

he’s like the son I might have known
if God had granted me a son

. . . then found myself not thirty minutes later—still moist-eyed, still humming and murmuring these lyrics while I drove to the car wash—only to enter the lot, begin to vacuum my floormats, be tapped on the shoulder, and look around and up into the soulful eyes of a new friend in need: a previously friendless young graduate student from Kenya. Like the son I might have known—and do.

Did these things occur by happenstance? Are they products of my own imagination? Or do they carry the scent of providence and miracle?

Does it matter that I do not know? Does it matter that I am comfortable in not knowing? Is it enough that I simply make room for the possibilities, carrying on in faith?

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Philip Barlow served as the Maxwell Institute’s associate director and is a Neal A. Maxwell Research Associate. Having previously served as the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University, his teaching engages religion and human suffering, religion and the concept of “time,” American religious history, and Restoration movements.

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) and Michel Simonidy (1870–1933).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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And after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)

Like many, I love the dynamic example of revelation Elijah experiences in his oft-cited encounter with the divine in 1 Kings 19. The contrast of that quiet voice with the tempest, earthquake, and fire that precede it is striking, especially in light of the way it inverts the pattern of theophany that has been established already in the record. At Sinai, for example, when the mountain shook, and thunder and smoke came upon it, there was to be no mistake that God was there. The cloudy pillar by day and the pillar of fire by night were constant signals of God’s presence among the people of Moses. But in Elijah’s experience, he is told specifically that God was not in any of the showy or violent displays.

The sense of difference with the Moses stories is all the more remarkable when we recall that 1 Kings narrates details of Elijah’s ministry in ways that leave little doubt that in the narrator’s mind he was the prophet like Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15. Like Moses, Elijah provides food and water by miraculous means, demonstrates miraculous control over the elements, flees for his life, fasts forty days in the wilderness, and is summoned to a divine encounter at Horeb (Exodus 33:21, 1 Kings 19:11). And yet here, suddenly, is a very dramatic difference. God is not in the awesome displays; instead, there is a still small voice. What is going on?

Elijah was no stranger to displays of divine fearsomeness. In the chapter right before this one, we see him call down fire from heaven to consume his sacrificial offering in his contest with the priests of Baal, whose god fails them in their own attempt to have their sacrifice acknowledged. Elijah’s God memorably consumes not only Elijah’s sacrifice but the altar of stones on which it lies and even the ditch full of water that Elijah had poured all over it. After winning the contest over whose God was real, Elijah ordered the execution of the 450 priests of Baal.

And yet the show of force doesn’t work. Ahab, the wicked king of Israel, and Jezebel, his just-as-awful queen, are still unrepentant in their idolatry, just like Pharaoh, who continued to resist Moses’s demand to let Israel go after Moses had called down ten terrible plagues. Threatened by them, Elijah flees for his life. It is at this point that the similarities between the stories of Moses and Elijah begin to be inverted in significant ways.

In Exodus, Pharaoh’s intransigence is met with a divine command to Moses to prepare the first Passover, as the destroyer is about to go through, killing the firstborn child of anyone not under the protection of the blood of a firstborn lamb on their doorposts. Note that no Israelite lifts a sword here. But in Elijah’s story, without divine command, the prophet orders the slaughter of the priests of Baal.

Ahab, Jezebel, and their idolatrous priests are not characters with whom anyone is meant to sympathize in this story. And yet in the ensuing events, there may be a gentle divine rebuke of some of Elijah’s tactics, too. Had he pressed his advantage too far in taking up the prerogative of divine judgment and capital punishment upon the priests of Baal? That is a question that attentive readers might carry with them into this chapter.

The theme of Moses inverted plays out further as Elijah, fortified by an angel’s food for the road, journeys forty days back to Horeb, mirroring in reverse, as it were, the exodus of the children of Israel through the wilderness of Sinai over the space of forty years. There in the cave that recalls the “cleft of a rock” in which Moses was hidden, “the word of the Lord” comes to Elijah, asking, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” He answers defensively. “I have been very [zealous] for the Lord God of hosts:1 for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Here is some irony, since Elijah himself has just presided over the killing of hundreds of prophets—albeit false ones. God hears his explanation—rooted firmly enough in defending the first and second of the Ten Commandments—and responds with the famous object lesson:

And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11–13)2

While God is explicitly not in the dramatic phenomena that precede the stillness, and the text is ambiguous as to what there was to be heard—a sound? a voice?—it is clear that its quietness was the point and that Elijah was meant to detect something divine in it. He clearly does, for upon hearing it, Elijah “wrapped his face in his mantle.” Then, in a gesture of both fear and attraction, he moves to the entrance of the cave.

What was Elijah supposed to learn from his encounter with the voice of perfect mildness? There are various ways to read this story. Drawing on the deep wells of the Jewish commentary tradition, a modern interpreter of the Hebrew scriptures, Jonathan Sacks, observes that the Lord approaches the issue obliquely yet knowingly, asking just as before, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” Such a pointed question, asked in the exact same words as before, but now after a potent object lesson, suggests that God was trying to convey a message. But Elijah responds with the same answer he gave before: “I have been very [zealous] for the Lord God of hosts. . . .” The zeal is still there, and so some Jewish commentators have suggested that he may have missed the point.

“Elijah, by giving the same answer after the vision as he had done before it, showed that he had not understood that God was telling him to adopt the way of the ‘still small voice’ in the future. As a result, God then told him that someone else must take his place. Elijah must hand his mantle on to Elisha.” And, almost as an aside, God lets Elijah know that, in fact, there are seven thousand others in Israel who have never bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:18)—a quietly devastating unlacing of the prophet’s fantasy of being the last righteous person standing.

If this seems a harsh reading of Elijah, note that it, too, has a Mosaic parallel, since Elisha’s name is etymologically related to Joshua, Moses’s successor after Moses’s own rash act at Meribah cost him the right to enter the promised land (Numbers 20:12).3

God’s remonstrance with Elijah is not because there was no legal warrant for putting the priests of Baal to the sword. The law of Moses was clear that he could have been justified in doing so (see Deuteronomy 13 and 17). That is perhaps why God is not more severe than he might have been with Elijah. The issue being quietly explored in this story, however, is whether zeal is the path of wisdom. Specifically, is extrajudicial violence—even as punishment for an offense against the law—not itself a perpetuation of lawlessness? As Jonathan Sacks writes, “It is exceptionally dangerous to believe you have privileged access to the mind of God and that you have the right to act on His behalf. God is God, and humans are all too human. That is why legal and political processes exist, and why the zealot, who circumvents both, is often more of a danger than the danger he claims to avert.”

There is a wisdom higher than zeal in restraint, in the measured response, in due process, and in truth spoken with the potency of a lowered voice.

Our modern culture is saturated with zealotry. Think of the burgeoning genres of vigilante fiction or revenge thrillers in literature, television, and film; think of the polarized rhetoric of social media; think of the scorched-earth partisanship we see in today’s political theater, and the grotesque displays of bravado with actual weapons, real armed forces, and lives at stake. If we suppose God is pleased with such behavior, with such zealotry, then we may expect soon to find that we have no more need of the still small voice at all. Perhaps it has already ceased to strive with us, having found even less it could teach us than it taught Elijah.

In the Book of Mormon, we read of peoples like ourselves in need of repentance who experience fearsome manifestations of fires, earthquakes, and clouds of darkness, and after these “a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper” that “did pierce even to the very soul” (Helaman 5:30; and compare 3 Nephi 11:3–5). The voice, of course, is the voice of Christ, and at first it can be hard to understand. Why? Is it because Christ mumbles? Or is it because his is “not a harsh voice, neither . . . a loud voice”—the only kind of voice we now have ears to hear? Perhaps his voice will remain unintelligible or even unheard until we finally settle down and listen with renewed humility—with hearts and ears and eyes pointed “steadfastly towards heaven, from whence the sound [comes]” rather than in whatever other direction our polarized environment has dragged the needle of our inner compass.

President Dallin H. Oaks, in his first extended remarks after becoming the president of the Church, focused on the pointed message of his predecessor, Russell M. Nelson, becoming a second prophetic witness that “in coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost.” President Oaks added his own warning: “You live in a season in which the adversary has become so effective at disguising truth that if you don’t have the Holy Ghost, you will be deceived. Many obstacles lie ahead. The distractions will be many.”

If the still small voice—the quiet “voice of perfect mildness”—is a sound we can only hear when we are listening, are we listening?

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Max Beckmann (1884–1950).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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The Old Testament is full of stories. There are wonderful stories like Jehovah’s making of a covenant with his people on Mt. Sinai or Ruth’s care and compassion for her mother-in-law. There are dramatic stories like Jael’s rescue of Israel through the judicious application of a tent stake. There are tragic stories like the destruction of Jerusalem or the daughter of Jephthah. Often as we talk about the Old Testament, it is the stories that we focus on.

However, there is a danger in a focus on stories, because that can sometimes cause us to oversimplify the experiences of real people in our quest for meaning and understanding. We can absolutely derive meaning and life lessons from the experiences of others. Nephi positively encourages us to “liken the scriptures” (1 Nephi 19:23) to ourselves in order to deepen and enhance their meaning. The process of looking for moral truth in scripture is an important one, but it is one that carries with it certain considerations.

The story of David is a great example of this. It is one of the most complex in the entire Old Testament. But part of why it is so complex is because of the simple reality of it. Like everyone, David makes good decisions and bad decisions. Both the good actions and the bad actions have reverberations This is especially true as we think about his life before and after the murder of Uriah the Hittite. On the one hand, we need to be clear here. David’s adultery with Bath-sheba and the subsequent murder of her husband to cover up his crime are heinous sins. On the other hand, it is a mistake for us to say that David was a good man before the crime and a bad one after. As described in the Bible, David’s life after these sins is one of continuous penitence. All of this serves as a reminder that human beings are difficult to put into categories.

The individuals in this story were all closely connected to one another. Bath-sheba is described in 2 Samuel 11:3 as the daughter of Eliam. This is almost certainly the same Eliam who was a member of David’s elite warband of thirty “mighty men” described in 2 Samuel 23. Uriah the Hittite, Bath-sheba’s husband, was also a member of this elite warband.

This brings up another thorny issue for modern readers of the biblical text. The Old Testament is largely written from a male perspective and is, generally speaking, unconcerned with exploring motivations. It largely leaves that to the reader. Because of this, the motivations of individuals like Bath-sheba have been guessed at in numerous different ways. Was she bathing on the roof to entice David, and thus was complicit in the adultery? Or did she have no say in the matter and was effectively raped? These are the most extreme positions, and biblical interpreters have staked out positions on a spectrum between them. Unfortunately for any of these interpretations, the text does not give us enough information to definitively say anything.

We can make some observations. David was king, and this means that there was a power differential between him and Bath-sheba, which must nuance any discussion of consent. From a modern perspective, that power differential means that it could have been difficult for her to say no. David’s position as king would have put her in a precarious situation, because women simply did not have as many rights in ancient society as in current Western society. For example, King Saul was able to take David’s first wife, Michal, and give her as a wife to someone else. The biblical authors do not use any of their words for rape (this can fruitfully be compared with the story of Amnon and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, which describes Amnon’s act in the strongest possible language). It is perhaps worth noting that the biblical authors place the blame for the murder of Uriah squarely on the shoulders of David.

There are consequences for Bath-sheba, both positive and negative. She and David both lose the baby conceived in their adulterous encounter. Their second son, Solomon, becomes king over Israel and builds Jehovah’s house on the earth. Solomon’s kingship elevates Bath-sheba to the status of the most powerful woman in ancient Israel. Once again, as we read this story, instead of simple morals, we find complex individuals.

This then brings us around full circle. None of this conversation is to suggest that we cannot draw out moral or ethical lessons from the scriptures. Indeed, we ought to do so. However, we should recognize that these stories are not made-up fables designed primarily to teach lessons. These are the stories of real people who led real lives. As we read things in the scriptures that are difficult or cause concern, we can use those lessons to be “more wise” than they had been (Mormon 9:31). Yet when these stories do not yield to easy lessons, we can also remember that life itself does not always yield to easy lessons. There is value in working out lessons from complex life circumstances, whether in the scriptures or in our own lives.

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Avram R. Shannon earned a BA in ancient Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University (2007), a master of studies in Jewish studies from the University of Oxford (2008), and a PhD in Near Eastern languages and cultures with a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in religions of the ancient Mediterranean from The Ohio State University (2015).

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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