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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I find it hard to forgive. I hold grudges and harbor unkind feelings for far too long. I even do this vicariously. If I think someone has harmed a member of my family or someone I love, they are moved onto the proverbial naughty list. No presents for them. I am easily offended. You don’t even need to do anything. I might be offended by how someone votes or by what they believe. Even as I write this, I find myself thinking of the alarmingly long list of people whom I tend to avoid because of some offense, real or imagined. Now, because I am English, these grudges and resentments are kept locked up inside, stewing and simmering away. I am inherently conflict-averse. I am outwardly polite. I will shake your hand and smile, while chuntering on the inside. Yes, I chunter. I am a major chunterer.1

I think it is part of the reason I find David to be so compelling. He was a champion chunterer. He chuntered to God about Saul (1 Samuel 20:1). He chuntered at Achish (1 Samuel 29:8). And, to come to the text at hand, he chuntered about the way he was treated by Nabal (1 Samuel 25:21–22). David disliked injustice. It offended him. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Nabal, David, and Abigail in Between

As 1 Samuel 25 opens, we find David, a fugitive leader of some six hundred men, on the run from King Saul. David has been living among the flocks and shepherds of a very wealthy man called Nabal during the winter, offering protection to both sheep and shepherds. When David hears that Nabal has started shearing the sheep, he sends some of his men to receive a gift from Nabal during this festive season for protecting his abundant flocks (did I mention that Nabal is very, very wealthy?). Instead of honoring this service with a generous gift, Nabal calls David a runaway slave, failing to recognize him as the anointed future king. He dismisses the young men whom David sent as unknown and undeserving beggars. David is offended. No, he is incensed. But, unlike me, David is not conflict-averse. He calls four hundred of his company to take up their swords, and they head towards Nabal’s household to exact revenge.

At this point, the narrative perspective shifts to Abigail, Nabal’s wife. To say that Nabal married up would be an understatement. This “woman was intelligent and beautiful,” while Nabal, “a Calebite, was a hard man and an evildoer” (1 Samuel 25:3, JPS). Even Nabal’s household didn’t like him. When one of them rushes to Abigail to report what Nabal has done, he cannot help but add that Nabal “is such a nasty fellow that no one can speak to him” (1 Samuel 25:17). Abigail acts quickly. She knows who David is and what he is capable of. So, she gathers up a generous gift for David and his men and rushes off to place herself between David and the certain destruction of everyone in her household.

And it’s lucky she did, because David had been marching, and chuntering, and working himself up: “Now David had been saying, ‘It was all for nothing that I protected that fellow’s possessions in the wilderness, and that nothing he owned is missing. He has paid me back evil for good. May God do thus and more to the enemies of David if, by the light of morning, I leave a single male of his’” (1 Samuel 25:21–22). No English reserve here.

Abigail reaches David and throws herself to the ground, pleading for peace. She does not seek to deflect or gaslight. She does not offer empty promises. She does not offer feigned empathy or say “your cause is just but I can do nothing for you.” Instead, Abigail makes things right. She provides the demands of justice. And in doing so, she is the protector and wise governess of her entire household. Had she met David’s emissaries, she says, things would have been different: “Please, my lord, pay no attention to that wretched fellow Nabal. For he is just what his name says: His name means ‘boor’ and he is a boor. Your handmaid did not see the young men whom my lord sent” (1 Samuel 25:25).

Abigail successfully sues for peace. She is every bit as intelligent as we were told, with that intelligence that is full of grace, good sense, and quick wit. She realizes that immediate action is necessary if she is to negotiate a peaceful détente. Abigail is also fearless, trusting in both David’s good character and her ability to appeal to it. Importantly, she also makes amends, presenting David and his men with a generous gift from the bounty of her household. Ultimately, she trusts in the Lord and that David is the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 28–31). Even David finds himself grateful for her intercession. He praises God for sending her, and to her he says, “And blessed be your prudence, and blessed be you yourself for restraining me from seeking redress in blood by my own hands” (1 Samuel 25:33).

When Abigail returns home and eventually tells her husband how she had saved their household, he is mortified. And “about ten days later the Lord struck Nabal and he died” (1 Samuel 25:37–38). David praises the Lord and immediately proposes to Abigail (1 Samuel 25:39–42).

I have a sense that buried within this marvelous story is the balm to cure my grudge- and offense-ridden heart. And I think the source of this balm has something to do with Abigail and the way she threw herself into the task of making peace. And I think it might also have something to do with the way that the Lord struck down Nabal. David, both protecting and chuntering, might also have a role to play.

Recent Scholarship on 1 Samuel 25

But first, let’s turn to the scholars and find out what the story may have meant in its ancient context.

The modern interpretative trajectory, in English at least, was set by Henry Preserved Smith, an avowed higher critic and Professor of Biblical History and Interpretation at Amherst College. He wrote his commentary on the Books of Samuel at the end of the nineteenth century. For him, the explanation of the story is primarily source critical. “The story,” he says, “seems to be drawn from the source from which, in subsequent chapters, we have David’s family history. The interest of the author is not in David’s method with the wealthy sheep owners, but in the way that he got a wife, and in the kind of wife he got.”2 From this view, Nabal, the servants, and even David’s actions serve to set the actions, and therefore the character, of Abigail in greater relief.

More recent scholars recognize, with Professor Smith, that Abigail is the hero of the story.3 But they are less interested in the source-critical method, tending to follow Brevard Childs and Robert Alter in reading the final form of the text rather than trying to distinguish and exposit possible preexisting sources. This canonical reading has further resulted in identifying intertextual resonances with the marriage of Rebekah (Genesis 24), and the Exodus narrative, with Nabal playing Pharaoh, the story of Ruth,4 and with the story of Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11).

Also, rather than seeing 1 Samuel 25 as an awkward interlude between two chapters dealing with David and Saul, chapters that Henry Smith thought were from different sources, scholars now consider 1 Samuel 24–26 to be a coherent unit. These three chapters wrestle with the relationship between Saul and David, with the middle chapter using narrative analogy to talk about Saul through the figure of Nabal.5 The overarching theme is avoiding blood-guilt from either slaying the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 24:11; 26:9) or shedding innocent blood (1 Samuel 25:30–31).

Scholars also see 1 Samuel 25 as a proleptic narrative, pointing forward to a future event but with two quite different events in mind—either the death of Saul in 1 Samuel 31, or the death of Uriah instigated by David to facilitate the marriage with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11.6

Beyond literary connections, scholars have also tried to discern the realpolitik at play in the narrative. Was David innocently protecting Nabal’s flocks and shepherd, or was this some kind of protection racket? Did the death of Nabal and the marriage to Abigail advance David’s path to kingship?7 What honor codes were at play in Abigail’s behavior?8 These questions have helped scholars place this story in its sociological setting and led them to see 1 Samuel 25 as a pivotal moment in David’s ascent to the throne, aided by significant wealth and a brilliant, strategically minded wife.

A Pastoral Reading of 1 Samuel 25

I leave this review of the scholarship with a greater sense of the richness of this chapter, its context, and intertexts. I understand better the complexity of the narrative and the developing figure of David. And I have a better sense of how this story might have been understood in its historical setting. The figure of Abigail has taken on even greater importance, even if that importance was intended primarily to accrue to David. I also have a growing sense of how the work of scholars can contribute the balm I need to cure my grudge- and offense-ridden heart. To put it all together, however, I need to venture out on my own. So here goes.

First, I realize that I am not David, despite the chuntering. He had much greater reason to be offended and hold grudges than I do. I am not on the run. No one, let alone God’s anointed leader, is trying to kill me. No one has even returned me evil for good. I’m not in the business of freely taking care of the sheep and the shepherds.

I am, however, frequently Nabal. Nabal is both a character and a caricature. “The characterization of Nabal begins with his very name,” says the Harvard Bible scholar Jon Levenson, a name “which is, in fact, a form of character assassination.” Imagine me squirming as I continue with this quotation. “The Hebrew word nābāl, often translated as ‘fool,’ designates not a harmless simpleton, but rather a vicious, materialistic, and egocentric misfit.” Bit harsh. But I’m too far in to go back now. Levenson continues:

Other passages present the nābāl as an embarrassment to his father (Prov 17:21), a glutton (Prov 30:22), a hoarder (Jer 17:11), and even an atheist (Psalm 14:1). Most significant for our purposes is Isa 32:6, in which the refusal to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, precisely the sin of Nabal in 1 Samuel 25, is listed among the characteristic of the nābāl.

Now, that passage from Levenson was hard reading, but this Isaiah passage really gets the point home:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

No longer will the fool be called noble;
nor the villain be termed honorable.
For the fool utters foolishness,
and his mind plots evil, 
to do foul things,
to utter error about the Lord,
to keep empty the throat of the hungry man,
to deprive the thirsty of drink.
As for the villain, his actions are vile,
he counsels deviousness,
to deprive men of their rights through lies,
even when the claim of the poor man is just.
But the noble man counsels only noble things,
and stands his ground in his nobility. 

(Isaiah 32:5–8, Levenson’s translation)9

Levenson goes on with his description of the nābāl as rendered in 1 Samuel 25. But I’m going to stop there and just sit with that for a moment.

Could it be that I am entirely self-deceived? Am I a fool uttering foolishness when I convince myself that my grudges are justified, that my unkind feelings are warranted, that my judgments are in any way just? Am I depriving my brothers and sisters of their rights through lies—that is, am I imagining lies about people, and thus depriving them of the right to be seen for who they are?

It turns out that the balm that I thought I needed is actually a bitter draft. And the bitterest part is still to come, because Nabal’s chief fault in this story is failing to recognize David. Now, it is difficult not to think that from a pastoral perspective, David stands in this story for the Son of David, Jesus. And the greatest tragedy of the fool is failing to recognize Jesus. This is the message of so much of the New Testament, especially those poignant verses in Matthew 25:3–40 that inspired “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.”

Now, the judgment day has not yet come, and there is still time to repent. There is still time for renewal and reconciliation. There is still time to become a new creature. “And the Lord said unto me: Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming sons and daughters; and thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God” (Mosiah 27:25–26).

I suspect the model of this new creature is Abigail. The name Abigail means “The Father is rejoicing.” Imagine that. Imagine becoming the kind of person who makes the Father rejoice. And what is it that makes the Father rejoice? I think the answer is found in Abigail’s actions in 1 Samuel 25, which can be encapsulated by the idea of peacemaking. Abigail made peace. When justice was due, Abigail made peace. When bad was given for good, Abigail made peace. When the food was withheld, Abigail made peace. When her household was in peril, Abigail stepped in between and made peace.

When I think of this wonderful chapter now, I see myself differently. I thought I was David, but all the while I have actually been Nabal. Though, even as I see myself in Nabal, even as I recognize the depths of my own foolishness, I find hope. I realize that I could become Abigail. I was a fool, but through Christ, I can become wise. I can become a peacemaker. I can be someone who stands in between. I can make the Father rejoice. That’s the balm that I was seeking.

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Kristian S. Heal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His research focuses on the reception of the Hebrew Bible in early Christian literature and worship. He received a BA in Jewish History from University College London, an MSt in Syriac studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Theology from the University of Birmingham.

Art by Antonio Cortina Farinós (1841–1890).

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

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Please find the original Spanish-language version of this essay here.

This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. (Ephesians 4:17–18, KJV)

There are seasons in which one ceases to feel. One does not cease to believe, at least not entirely, but the chest stops burning. Prayers become monologues; the scriptures, merely a text. What was once presence becomes silence. And in the midst of that silence, a question can arise that few dare to voice aloud: What if what I felt before was not real either?

Many of us who have served a mission know that question, even if we have not always lived it firsthand. We recognize it in the faces of companions with whom we faithfully served, companions with whom we felt that burning in the chest (that sign of which the Lord speaks in Doctrine and Covenants 9:8) and who no longer walk with us. Some drifted away upon discovering something in Church history; others grew angry with a leader; still others simply stopped believing, without visible scandal, without any decisive argument. John records it with a sobriety that stings: “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (John 6:66, KJV).

What happened? What was missing?

I do not presume to answer those questions, at least not directly. What I offer here are thoughts, disordered reflections like those of the seventeenth-century French thinker Blaise Pascal, on how we know God, on what happens when our faculties for knowing him fail, and on why we need both the heart and reason so as not to lose our way.

Blaise Pascal was, first and foremost, a man of science; he was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor of one of the first mechanical calculators—he was one of the sharpest minds of the seventeenth century. But on the night of November ‌‌23, 1654, between half past ten and half past midnight, something happened. Pascal wrote on a piece of paper what he experienced that night and sewed it into the lining of his doublet, where he carried it until he died. No one knew of the paper until it was found on his body. The first line reads: “Fire. ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars.”1 From that night on, Pascal dedicated the remaining years of his life to writing what would become his great apologetic work: the Pensées. He never finished it. What we have are fragments, scattered notes, sketches that his friends compiled after his death in 1662. Despite their unfinished nature, or perhaps precisely because of it, in those pages one can perceive with clarity the depth and perspicacity of his thoughts. They are, above all, an attempt to lead the reader from the concrete reality of the human being, with all its greatness and misery, to an encounter with the living God.

What is clear from reading these fragments is that Pascal did not intend to demonstrate God’s existence through geometric proofs or metaphysical reasoning. His wager is something else: moral arguments that seek to incline the heart, not to convince the intellect, toward God. It is a different approach from what we are accustomed to seeing in Christian apologetics, and it is all the more surprising coming from the seventeenth century. The emphasis Pascal places on the heart2 occupies a central place in his anthropology as that human faculty where feelings, intuitions, and the first principles of knowledge converge. Unlike discursive reason, the heart operates through immediate and affective channels, which makes it a dimension especially vulnerable to external influences. This vulnerability is, in fact, the very reason behind Pascal’s severe warning against the theater: By representing human passions in so natural and convincing a manner, theatrical performance has the power to awaken in the heart feelings that, once awakened, escape the control of reason. For Pascal, even a love represented as chaste and virtuous onstage is dangerous precisely because of its innocence—it disarms the soul before it can defend itself:3

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Heart, instinct, principles.

While I think that the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob”4 (to use his words) must be felt, must be experienced, I sense that rarely—if not almost never—do we arrive at the knowledge or idea of God through the intellect alone but rather after having experienced or felt an external presence, or after being overwhelmed by thoughts that seem to come from outside ourselves. I believe it is only at that point, after feeling, that we employ the intellect. After all, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”5

So on this point, I agree with Pascal that God must be felt, must be experienced, rather than approached with metaphysical puzzles to try to justify our belief, our feeling. It is reason that demonstrates theorems, but it assumes the axioms that the heart gives it:

We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. ‌‌. ‌‌. ‌‌. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways[.] And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them.

But, on the other hand, what happens with those persons whose heart (whose feelings and intuition) is not entirely well? What happens with those who suffer from depression or anxiety, with those who endure some mental illness or live affected by an emotional disorder? Can these persons trust in their feelings or intuition, which depend so much on their heart? How can they know if they are correctly interpreting divine communication? How can they distinguish their own disturbed feelings from what is genuinely divine, especially in their worst moments?

If Pascal distrusts even the theater for its capacity to awaken dangerous passions, one would think that a person with advanced depression could scarcely recognize or interpret their feelings, much less use reason fully. And this raises further questions: Can those who suffer from depression or anxiety still feel God or experience communion with the divine? Certainly, if God so wills, he can dispel and even heal persons in that condition, without any doubt. But what happens in the meantime? Must that person remain in total darkness?

This presents a problem, at least in conventional Christianity, because while God may manifest himself through signs, we can read in the scriptures that his modus operandi is gentler, more still: “And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. 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 19:11–12). Similar descriptions are given in the New Testament: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23).

So, as I have mentioned, in such cases the heart would be an impediment to holding on to this belief in God, even though we have already seen that the heart lays the foundations on which reason builds. What is to be done if our heart does not function correctly and cannot provide us with those foundations? Can this order be reversed? Can we trust in reason (insofar as possible, since some of these illnesses can cloud judgment)? Is it possible to place our trust in reason so that afterward the heart may corroborate these reasonings? My proposal, modest but firm, is yes, the order can be reversed, reason may sustain the structure while the heart heals, and when the heart returns to its normal function, it will corroborate what reason kept standing.

Pascal seems to propose something similar, although without mentioning mental illness—which is unsurprising, as that concept probably did not exist in his era. Nevertheless, he recognizes that not all of us can arrive at that knowledge and not everyone is granted the gift of knowing through the heart. It would have been interesting to know his complete proposal on whether it is possible for the heart to fail and to see whether he would agree with what I suggest here. “Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced,” he wrote. “But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.”

But this proposal carries a risk. If reason could sustain faith in the absence of the heart, it could also, when poorly employed, impose dogmas that the heart would reject. Pascal himself fell into that trap.

The only criticism I can make of Pascal is that there must be a balance and a mutual cooperation between the role of reason and that of the heart. My current reading of Pascal suggests that he grants primacy to knowledge acquired through the heart and seems to deny reason thereafter, or to actively limit it:

For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.

Pascal renounced reason in favor of mystery, and he set reason against it. This belief in original sin caused much suffering and pain to millions of people (i.e., the condemnation of unbaptized children), and he chose to accept it as mystery. This is the danger when we relegate our reason and accept dogmas. When there is a dissonance between the heart and reason, this should serve as an indicator that something is wrong with one of the two faculties. We must not submit to dogmas without first having achieved a harmony between both.6

Dostoevsky spoke to us about this danger in “The Grand Inquisitor,” contained within his novel The Brothers Karamazov:

We too have a right to preach a mystery, and to teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their hearts, not love that matters, but a mystery which they must follow blindly, even against their conscience. So we have done. We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts.7

If we do not use the heart and reason together, we can become victims of inquisitors.

And here I return to those who have left the Church. How many of them stood before a dogma that their reason rejected and their heart could not sustain? How many asked genuine questions and received as an answer the “authority of the Church”? How many were told that they lacked faith, that they should not doubt, that they should simply obey? How many learned that asking questions was synonymous with apostasy?

But it would be unjust to point only outward. Perhaps we, and perhaps they as well, have failed to give reason to our faith. The heart gave us the foundation, a genuine knowledge, but we did not build on it. And when that knowledge grew dark, nothing remained to sustain us. To build with reason is not to doubt; it is to give foundations to what the heart has given us.

And perhaps, even after having done all this and having built our metaphysical castles, God may come to meet us and tear them down and through the heart teach us that in reality, we know far less than we think we know, that we have made a God in our own likeness. It is one of the essential beliefs of Christianity: We believe in a God who reveals Himself, who makes Himself known to man and allows us to know Him. Hence the word “revelation”: to remove the veil. And at moments when we are allowed to see (to feel with the heart) through that veil, only our human nature prevents us from comprehending it all at once, and we will probably spend a lifetime trying to make sense of what we experience.

And what if we had the opportunity to see beyond the veil or if we beheld some miracle? Think of Julian of Norwich, who received numerous revelations and spent an entire lifetime, as an anchoress, trying to understand those revelations. These experiences of the mystics show us that an element of reason that tries to intervene, to help us translate, to capture something of the divine—something that allows us to hold on to that manifestation, to that knowledge we acquired through the heart.

I believe in a God who has revealed Himself in history and has made Himself known among men, who has become man. I believe that God desires that we all seek communion with Him. I believe it is important to accept revelation, but I also recognize that this revelation, whether given through a prophet or contained in the scriptures, is not exempt from error. The men who have written and prophesied are as human as we are: They have had fears, desires, and interests, and they have been victims of their era, their time, and their culture.

Those of us who have received our faith through the testimony of others should exercise reason while seeking that direct experience with the divine that can speak to our hearts. And if we have not had such an experience, we must use reason with even greater rigor. If we begin from the principle that God has given us reason, it is reasonable (if you will forgive the redundancy) to think that God expects us to use it. History has shown us, painfully, what happens when faith is left unexamined—when entire communities accept as divine mandate what reason would have exposed as human prejudice.

I believe that revelation is iterative, that God gives it to us little by little because we cannot withstand its fullness all at once. If even now it seems to bother some that God is love and that His message is so inclusive and broad,8 how much more difficult would it be if He gave us all His fullness at once. By iterative, I mean that it can be corrected along the way. I believe that at times even the prophets may have misinterpreted their experiences and needed correction. That is why I say iterative, not merely additive.9 Nor am I against organized religion, for other broad reasons that exceed the purpose of this reflection. Suffice it to say that we can believe in organized religion as well as in God’s individual communication with us, so long as we remain open to the heart and submit what God gives us to reason, doing the best we can.

I think again of those who have left. Perhaps what was missing, for them and maybe for us as well, was learning that the heart and reason are not enemies but companions on the road.10 That to doubt is not to lose faith, but to give it a foundation. That to question is not to apostatize, but to honor the reason that God gave us. After all, Pascal spent an entire night in fire, and he devoted the rest of his life to thinking and writing his incomplete apologia. And perhaps it is fitting that it remained incomplete, for no single generation can exhaust that labor on its own. Future generations will have the duty not to perpetuate and engrave in stone our beliefs or dogmas but to correct them in the light of new revelation. This will allow us to unveil God ever more, until we no longer see “through a glass, darkly,” but rather we will see “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

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Javier Fuentes Mora is a computer systems engineer with studies in Catholic theology and a master’s in Philosophy, Culture, and Religion. He is passionate about theology and runs a YouTube channel discussing faith, history, and philosophy from a Latter-day Saint perspective.

Art by Georges de La Tour (1593–1692).

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Please find the English-language translation of this essay here.

Esto, pues, digo y testifico en el Señor, que no andéis más como los otros gentiles, que andan en la vanidad de su mente, teniendo el entendimiento entenebrecido, ajenos de la vida de Dios por la ignorancia que en ellos hay, por la dureza de su corazón. (Efesios 4:17-18)

Hay temporadas en las que uno deja de sentir. No se deja de creer, al menos no del todo, pero el pecho deja de arder. Las oraciones se vuelven monólogo; las escrituras solo un texto. Lo que antes era presencia se convierte en silencio. Y en medio de ese silencio puede surgir una pregunta que pocos se atreven a decir en voz alta: ¿y si lo que sentí antes tampoco era real?

Muchos de nosotros que hemos servido una misión conocemos esa pregunta, aunque no siempre la hayamos vivido en carne propia. La reconocemos en los rostros de compañeros con quienes fielmente servimos y con quienes sentimos arder el pecho, esa señal de la que habla el Señor en Doctrina y Convenios 9:8, y que hoy ya no caminan con nosotros. Algunos se alejaron al descubrir algo de la historia de la Iglesia; otros se enojaron con algún líder; otros simplemente dejaron de creer, sin escándalo visible, sin argumento decisivo. Juan lo registra con una sobriedad que duele: “Desde entonces, muchos de sus discípulos volvieron atrás y ya no andaban con él” (Juan 6:66).

¿Qué ocurrió? ¿Qué faltó?

No pretendo responder esas preguntas, al menos no directamente. Lo que ofrezco aquí son pensamientos, reflexiones desordenadas, como las del pensador francés del siglo XVII Blaise Pascal, sobre cómo conocemos a Dios, sobre qué pasa cuando nuestras facultades para conocerlo fallan, y sobre por qué necesitamos tanto del corazón como de la razón para no perdernos en el camino.

Blaise Pascal fue, antes que nada, un hombre de ciencia. Matemático, físico, inventor de una de las primeras calculadoras mecánicas, uno de los espíritus más agudos del siglo XVII. Pero el 23 de noviembre de 1654, entre las diez y media de la noche y las doce y media de la madrugada, algo sucedió. Pascal escribió en un papel lo que experimentó esa noche y lo cosió al forro de su jubón, donde lo cargó hasta morir. Nadie supo del papel hasta que lo encontraron en su cuerpo. La primera línea dice: “Fuego. Dios de Abraham, Dios de Isaac, Dios de Jacob, no el de los filósofos y los sabios.”1 Desde esa noche, Pascal dedicó los años que le quedaban a escribir lo que sería su gran obra apologética: los Pensamientos. Nunca la terminó. Lo que tenemos son fragmentos, notas dispersas, bocetos que sus amigos compilaron después de su muerte en 1662. A pesar de su naturaleza inacabada, o quizás precisamente por ella, en esas páginas es posible percibir con claridad la profundidad y perspicacia de su pensamiento. Son, ante todo, un intento de conducir al lector desde la realidad concreta del ser humano, con toda su grandeza y su miseria, hasta el encuentro con el Dios vivo.

Lo que queda claro al leer estos fragmentos es que Pascal no pretendía demostrar a Dios mediante pruebas geométricas ni razonamientos metafísicos. Su apuesta es otra: argumentos morales que buscan inclinar el corazón, no convencer al intelecto, hacia Dios. Es un enfoque distinto al que estamos acostumbrados en la apologética cristiana, y aún más sorprendente viniendo del siglo XVII. El énfasis que Pascal le da al corazón2 ocupa un lugar central en su antropología como esa facultad humana donde convergen sentimientos, intuiciones y los primeros principios del conocimiento. A diferencia de la razón discursiva, el corazón opera por vías inmediatas y afectivas, lo que lo convierte en una dimensión especialmente vulnerable a influencias externas. Es, de hecho, precisamente esta vulnerabilidad la razón detrás de la severa advertencia de Pascal contra el teatro: al representar las pasiones humanas de forma tan natural y convincente, el teatro tiene el poder de despertar en el corazón sentimientos que, una vez despertados, escapan al control de la razón. Para Pascal, incluso un amor representado como casto y virtuoso en el escenario es peligroso precisamente por su inocencia—desarma el alma antes de que pueda defenderse3:

El corazón siente a Dios, no la razón. En esto consiste la fe: Dios sensible al corazón, no a la razón.

El corazón tiene sus razones, que la razón no conoce;

Corazón, instinto, principios.

Si bien pienso que el Dios de Abraham, de Isaac, y de Jacob (usando sus palabras) debe sentirse, debe experimentarse, creo que pocas veces—si no es que casi nunca—llegamos al conocimiento o a la idea de Dios solo a través del intelecto, sino después de haber experimentado; de haber sentido una presencia externa, o de ser abrumados por pensamientos que parecen venir de fuera de nosotros. Creo que es hasta ese punto, después de sentir, cuando usamos el intelecto; después de todo “La razón es, y sólo debe ser, esclava de las pasiones, y no puede pretender otro oficio que el de servirlas y obedecerlas.”4 Así que en este punto estoy de acuerdo con Pascal en que Dios debe sentirse, de experimentarse, más que solo crearnos acertijos metafísicos para tratar de justificar nuestra creencia, nuestro sentimiento, es la razón la que demuestra teoremas, pero asume los axiomas que el corazón le da:

Conocemos la verdad no sólo por la razón, sino también por el corazón; de esta segunda manera conocemos los primeros principios, y en vano el razonamiento, que no participa en ella, trata de combatirlos. . . . Los principios se sienten, las proporciones se infieren; y todo esto con certeza, aunque por vías diferentes. Y es tan inútil y tan ridículo que la razón exija al corazón pruebas de sus principios para querer consentir en ellos, como sería ridículo que el corazón exigiera a la razón un sentimiento de todas las proposiciones que ella demuestra para querer aceptarlas.

Pero, por otro lado, ¿qué ocurre con aquellas personas cuyo corazón (cuyos sentimientos e intuición) no está del todo bien? ¿Qué sucede con quienes sufren depresión o ansiedad, con quienes padecen alguna enfermedad mental o viven afectados por un trastorno emocional? ¿Pueden estas personas confiar en sus sentimientos o intuición que tanto dependen de su corazón? ¿Cómo saber si están interpretando correctamente la comunicación divina? ¿Cómo distinguir sus propios sentimientos perturbados de lo que es genuinamente divino, especialmente en los peores momentos?

Si Pascal desconfía incluso del teatro por su capacidad de despertar pasiones peligrosas, habría que pensar que una persona con depresión avanzada difícilmente puede reconocer o interpretar sus sentimientos, mucho menos usar la razón completamente. Y esto plantea más interrogantes: ¿Pueden quienes sufren depresión o ansiedad aún sentir a Dios o experimentar comunión con lo divino? Ciertamente, si Dios así lo desea, puede disipar e incluso sanar a personas en esa condición, sin duda alguna. Pero ¿qué sucede en el ínterin? ¿Esa persona debe de permanecer en oscuridad total?

Esto representa un problema, al menos en el cristianismo convencional, pues si bien Dios se puede llegar a manifestar por medio de señales, podemos leer en las escrituras que su modus operandi es más suave, más apacible:

Y él le dijo: Sal fuera, y ponte en el monte delante de Jehová. Y he aquí que Jehová pasaba, y un grande y poderoso viento rompía los montes y quebraba las peñas delante de Jehová, pero Jehová no estaba en el viento. Y tras el viento, un terremoto, pero Jehová no estaba en el terremoto. Y tras el terremoto, un fuego, pero Jehová no estaba en el fuego. Y tras el fuego, una voz apacible y delicada. (1 Reyes 19:11-12)

Descripciones similares aparecen en el Nuevo Testamento: “Pero el fruto del Espíritu es: amor, gozo, paz, longanimidad, benignidad, bondad, fe, mansedumbre, templanza; contra tales cosas no hay ley” (Gálatas 5:22-23).

Entonces como he mencionado en semejantes casos, el “corazón” sería un impedimento para aferrarse a esta creencia en Dios, aunque ya vimos que el corazón pone los fundamentos sobre los cuales la razón edifica. ¿Qué hacer si nuestro corazón no funciona correctamente y no nos puede proveer de esos fundamentos? ¿Se puede invertir este orden? ¿Confiar en la razón (en la medida de lo posible, ya que algunas de estas enfermedades pueden nublar el juicio)? ¿Es posible colocar nuestra confianza en la razón para que después el corazón corrobore estos razonamientos? Mi propuesta, modesta pero firme, es que sí: que el orden puede invertirse, que la razón sostenga la estructura mientras el corazón sana, y que cuando este vuelva a funcionar, corrobore lo que la razón mantuvo en pie.

Pascal parece proponer algo similar, aunque sin mencionar las enfermedades mentales, lo cual no es de sorprender, pues probablemente dicho concepto no existía en su época. Sin embargo, reconoce que no todos podemos llegar a ese conocimiento o que no a todos se nos concede ese don de conocer por medio del corazón. Hubiera sido interesante conocer su propuesta completa considerando si es posible que el “corazón” falle y ver si estaría de acuerdo con lo que aquí sugiero:

Por lo cual, aquellos a los que Dios ha concedido la religión por sentimiento del corazón son bienaventurados y están muy legítimamente persuadidos. Pero a aquellos que no la tienen, no (se) la podemos dar sino por razonamiento, en la espera de que Dios se la dé por sentimiento de corazón, sin lo cual la fe no es más que humana, e inútil para la salvación.

Pero esta propuesta trae consigo un riesgo. Si la razón puede sostener la fe en ausencia del corazón, también puede, mal empleada, imponer dogmas que el corazón rechazaría. Pascal mismo cayó en esa trampa.

La única crítica que le puedo hacer a Pascal es que debe haber un equilibrio y una mutua cooperación entre el papel de la razón y el del corazón. Al menos en mi lectura actual, me parece que Pascal da primacía a un conocimiento adquirido por medio del corazón y parece negar la razón en adelante o limitarla de manera activa:

Pues, nada, sin duda, hiere más nuestra razón que decir que el pecado del primer hombre haya tornado culpables a quienes, por estar tan lejos de esa fuente, parecen incapaces de participar en él. Tal deslizamiento no sólo nos parece imposible, sino también muy injusto; en efecto, ¿hay algo más contrario a las reglas de nuestra miserable justicia que condenar eternamente a un niño, incapaz de voluntad a causa de un pecado en el que parece participar tan poco, que ha sido cometido seis mil años antes de su nacimiento? Ciertamente, no hay nada que nos choque más que esa doctrina; y sin embargo, sin ese misterio, el más incomprensible de todos, somos incomprensibles para nosotros mismos.5

Pascal renunció a la razón en favor del misterio, y contrapuso la razón al mismo. Esta creencia en el pecado original, que causó mucho sufrimiento y dolor a millones de personas (la condenación de niños sin bautismo), él la aceptó como misterio. Este es el peligro cuando relegamos nuestra razón y aceptamos “dogmas.” Cuando existe una disonancia entre el corazón y la razón, esto debe de servir como indicador de que algo no está bien con alguna de las dos facultades. No debemos someternos a dogmas sin haber logrado primero una armonía entre ambas.6

Sobre este peligro ya nos habló Dostoievski en “El gran inquisidor” situado dentro de su novela Los hermanos Karamazov:

Y nosotros tenemos derecho a predicarles a los hombres que deben someterse a él sin razonar, aun contra los dictados de su conciencia. Y eso es lo que hemos hecho. Hemos corregido tu obra; la hemos basado en el “milagro,” el “misterio,” y la “autoridad.” Y los hombres se han congratulado de verse de nuevo conducidos como un rebaño y libres, por fin, del don funesto que tantos sufrimientos les ha causado.7

Si no usamos en conjunto el corazón y la razón, podemos ser víctimas de inquisidores.

Y aquí vuelvo a los que se fueron de la Iglesia. ¿Cuántos de ellos se encontraron frente a un dogma que su razón rechazaba y su corazón no podía sostener? ¿Cuántos se hicieron preguntas genuinas y recibieron como respuesta la “autoridad” de la Iglesia? ¿A cuántos se les dijo que les faltaba fe, que no dudaran, que simplemente obedecieran? ¿Cuántos aprendieron que preguntar era sinónimo de apostatar?

Pero sería injusto señalar solo hacia afuera. Quizás nosotros, y quizás también ellos, hemos fracasado en darle una razón a nuestra fe. El corazón nos dio los fundamentos, un conocimiento genuino, pero no edificamos sobre ellos. Y cuando ese conocimiento se oscureció, no quedó nada que nos sostuviera. Construir con la razón no es dudar; es darle cimientos a lo que el corazón nos ha dado.

Y aun así, aun después de haber hecho todo esto y de haber edificado nuestros castillos metafísicos, puede que Dios nos salga al encuentro y los derrumbe, y por medio del corazón nos enseñe que en realidad desconocemos más de lo que creemos saber, que nos hemos hecho un Dios a nuestra semejanza. Es una de las creencias esenciales del cristianismo: creemos en un Dios que se autorrevela, que se da a conocer al hombre y que nos permite conocerle. De ahí la palabra revelación: remover el velo. Y por momentos se nos deja ver (sentir con el corazón) a través de dicho velo, solo que nuestra naturaleza humana nos impide comprenderlo todo a la vez, y probablemente pasemos una vida tratando de darle sentido a lo que experimentamos.

¿Y si tuvimos la oportunidad de ver más allá del velo o si contemplamos algún milagro? Pensemos en Juliana de Norwich, quien recibió numerosas revelaciones y pasó toda una vida, como anacoreta, tratando de comprender dichas revelaciones. Estas experiencias de los místicos nos muestran que hay un elemento de razón que trata de intervenir para ayudarnos a traducir, a capturar algo de la divinidad, algo que nos permita aferrarnos a esa manifestación, a ese conocimiento que adquirimos mediante el corazón.

Creo en un Dios que se ha revelado en la historia y se ha dado a conocer entre los hombres, que se ha hecho hombre. Creo que Dios desea que todos busquemos comunión con Él. Creo que es importante aceptar la revelación, pero también reconozco que esta revelación, ya sea dada por un profeta o contenida en las escrituras, no está exenta de error. Los hombres que escribieron y profetizaron eran tan humanos como nosotros: tenían miedos, deseos, intereses, y fueron víctimas de su época, su tiempo y su cultura.

Aquellos que hemos recibido nuestra fe por el testimonio de otros deberíamos siempre ejercitar la razón mientras buscamos esa experiencia directa con lo divino que pueda hablarnos al corazón. Y si no hemos tenido tal experiencia, debemos usar la razón con mayor rigor todavía. Si partimos del principio de que Dios nos ha dado la razón, es razonable (valga la redundancia) pensar que Dios espera que la usemos. La historia nos lo ha mostrado, dolorosamente, cuando comunidades enteras aceptan como mandato divino lo que la razón habría desenmascarado como prejuicio humano.

Creo que la revelación es iterativa, que Dios nos la va dando poco a poco porque no podemos resistir su plenitud de una sola vez. Si incluso ahora parece que a algunos les molesta que Dios sea amor y que su mensaje sea tan inclusivo y amplio,8 cuánto más difícil sería de sobrellevar si nos diese toda su plenitud de golpe. Al decir iterativa, me refiero a que puede irse corrigiendo. Creo que a veces incluso los profetas pueden haber interpretado mal sus experiencias y necesitar corrección. Por ello digo iterativa, no solo aditiva.9 Tampoco estoy en contra de la religión organizada, por otras razones amplias que exceden el propósito de esta reflexión. Basta decir que podemos creer tanto en la religión organizada como en la comunicación individual de Dios con nosotros, siempre y cuando estemos abiertos al corazón y sometamos lo que Dios nos da a la razón, haciendo lo mejor que podamos.

Pienso de nuevo en los que se fueron. Quizás lo que faltó, para ellos y quizás también para nosotros, fue aprender que el corazón y la razón no son enemigos, sino compañeros de camino.10 Que dudar no es perder la fe, sino darle cimientos. Que preguntar no es apostatar, sino honrar la razón que Dios nos dio. Después de todo, Pascal pasó una noche entera en fuego, y dedicó el resto de su vida a pensar y escribir esta apología incompleta. Y quizás es propio que haya quedado incompleta, pues ninguna generación puede agotar esa labor por sí misma. Las generaciones futuras tendrán el deber no de perpetuar y grabar en piedra nuestras creencias o dogmas, sino de corregirlas a la luz de nueva revelación. Esto nos permitirá ir develando a Dios cada vez más, hasta que ya no veamos “por espejo, oscuramente,” más veremos “cara a cara” (1 Corintios 13:12).

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Javier Fuentes Mora es ingeniero en Sistemas Computacionales, con estudios en teología católica y una maestría en Filosofía, Cultura y Religión. Apasionado por la teología, dirige un canal de YouTube donde explora temas de fe, historia y filosofía desde una perspectiva de los Santos de los Últimos Días.

Art by Georges de La Tour (1593-1692).

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As a woman who had to wait much longer than most to be a mother, I have always been fascinated by the number of Old Testament matriarchs whose situation was parallel to mine. When I found out I was pregnant, I, like Rachel, felt remembered by the Lord (Genesis 30:22–23, KJV). And like Sarah, I also felt cause to “laugh” or rejoice (Genesis 18:12). But of all these women who waited upon the Lord for the privilege of bearing a child, Hannah’s story of enduring prolonged infertility—only to give up a long-awaited son for temple service—is perhaps the most unique account. And it is probably my favorite one to explore as well.

Part of what makes Hannah’s story so compelling is her motivation to become a mother. In an age when childlessness often resulted in a depleted socioeconomic currency for women, Hannah was actually in an enviable position. Her husband, Elkenah, clearly loved her and demonstrated his devotion by giving her a double portion of the sacrificial meat prepared each year—twice as much as the portion given to his other wife, Peninnah, and her children. Sacrificial food was associated with prestige, and so Hannah’s place in society does not appear to be in jeopardy.1 For some women, having a husband who is “better to [her] than ten sons” would have been sufficient (1 Samuel 1:8).

So, when Hannah weeps and prays earnestly in the temple for a child, she does not do so to please her husband or raise her social status. Nor is she seeking to cease Peninnah’s tauntings, as Peninnah delights in “provok[ing] her sore” for her childlessness (1 Samuel 1:6). Rather, when Hannah vows to “give [a son] unto the Lord all the days of his life,” she sees motherhood beyond companionship, economic security, and even personal happiness (1 Samuel 1:11). Child-rearing, in her mind, is an opportunity to contribute to God’s higher purposes. When Samuel is born, she reaffirms her pledge: that she “lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:28). The word “lent” in the King James Version may seem an odd word choice, as it could imply that she is allowing the Lord to “borrow” her son. But in later biblical translations, the word “lent” is replaced with “give” and “dedicate.” With these translations in mind, Hannah’s entrusting her son to God was intended to be a permanent arrangement.

As a mother, I feel particular pangs reading Hannah’s account; I wonder how she must have felt when she gave her small son to Eli. But Hannah seems to be at peace and even rejoices in the choice she has made, as depicted by her psalm in the subsequent chapter. As psalms are rarely credited to women in the Bible, Hannah’s lengthy song of praise after surrendering her child to temple service is a distinctive read, as she exultantly states: “My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, mine horn is exalted in the Lord” (1 Samuel 2:1). According to the LDS KJV footnote, “horn” is meant to reflect one’s capacity or power. Perhaps she felt the Lord’s endowment of additional strength, as she freely gave her child to the Lord for his purposes. Interestingly, she was given the experience of raising children in her home, as we learn that by the end of the story she had five more children.

Through a modern lens, Hannah’s account ostensibly feels out of touch: My covenant-keeping today is unlikely to require me to surrender custody of my child. But I want to believe that, like Hannah, I, too, may develop an attitude of trusting my child to God’s will and his higher purposes. But what does dedicating a child to the Lord look like now? And how do I achieve the same type of courageous attitude that this mother had many centuries ago?

Like Hannah preparing her child to serve God, I muse how I can demonstrate my desire to have God’s presence and guidance in my daughter’s life. In a few years, I will have the uncommon privilege of walking with my daughter to a temple that is just outside our neighborhood—a blessing that no doubt Hannah could not have imagined. But according to Doctrine and Covenants 93, the idea of worship is more than just the location itself—it is understanding who God is and believing that we, too, can actually become all that he is. The crux of the section occurs in D&C 93:19, stating that we “may know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father in my name, and in due time, receive of his fullness.” Suddenly, mortality is more than Plato’s cave, where we are only able to glimpse the shadows and flickers of a life beyond this one. Rather, worship is an act of unalloyed submission toward God because we know that he can thrust us to heights that our finite minds cannot imagine.

Hannah also has a firm grasp of God’s character and his transformative power. From her psalm, she clearly sees him as a being of knowledge, strength, and dependability (1 Samuel 2). While it is unclear whether she believed that we can become all that God is, she nonetheless views him as someone whose capacities in assisting his children are limitless, as she confidently states: “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory” (1 Samuel 2:8). After all, she has personally received God’s miraculous intervention, as seen by her transition from childlessness to motherhood. Her astonishing ability to give her son to the temple, then, is rooted in her knowledge of who God is and all that he can do for his children. If he has the power to give beggars and the poor a throne of glory—as well as miraculously giving her a long-awaited son—surely, he could give Samuel a marvelous future ahead. Lending one’s child to the Lord, then, appears to be a surrendering attitude, and an acknowledgement that God himself can make more out of our children’s lives than even the most loving parent can. While at first read, Hannah’s story appears to be rooted in the temple, much of her narrative centers on this psalm of faith in God’s capacity, demonstrating the endowment of power that comes when one understands who God is and what he can do.

That appears to be my task in hand: cultivating the courage to believe that God is the ultimate designer of my daughter’s life, rather than myself. Knowing that God finds joy in preparing her for a glorious future should certainly act as a source of comfort for me (D&C 1:39). But as I look into my daughter’s pure little eyes, I also wonder what it truly means to surrender her future to God. She has already experienced two goose eggs on her head as part of her determination to walk, and, at times, I shudder to think of those “goose eggs” that mortality will clap on her as part of her quest for godhood. And am I sufficiently prepared to help her navigate bullying, depression, unrequited love, or any of the other thorny elements of this life that she may face?

Again, my mind turns to Hannah, as she turns over her child to the Lord. She may have felt a measure of trepidation as well. Perhaps, as she made the annual visit to the temple, she heard of or even witnessed Eli’s sons’ reprehensible misconduct. Perhaps she wondered if she had actually made the right choice. Perhaps she second-guessed her decision and worried how her son would fare growing up alongside these men and with their high priest father, who did little to prevent their heinous acts. But she also probably finds solace in the sanctity of her pledge to the Lord, as she confidently states in her psalm, “There is none holy as the Lord/for there is none beside me/neither is there any rock like our God” (1 Samuel 2:2).

In Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, is in a position similar to Hannah’s: he recognizes his looming death and, consequently, must trust God to take care of his young son. To prepare for his end of mortality, the narrator writes a series of letters containing advice, family heritage, and wisdom gathered throughout the years for his son’s reference. In one of his letters, he recounts a past sermon he gave on Abraham:

I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he believes. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. . . . I think . . . any father . . . must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. . . . Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

There is something unspeakably precious about knowing that God can send angels to my child in those pivotal, urgent moments. Ames notes that it is not until Abraham is fully willing to sacrifice his two sons that the angels appear to make the necessary intervention. And after Hannah leaves Samuel with Eli, God’s voice is manifest to protect the child from corrupt influences that had seeped into his temple upbringing. The efficacy of this divine ministration is illustrated when Samuel is described as a God-fearing child, who did let none of [the Lord’s] words fall to the ground” (1 Samuel 3:19).

Similarly, I wonder if fully surrendering my will for my children to the Lord may further enable them to have those much needed divine interventions. Perhaps part of entrusting God with my daughter is to trust his timing and methods for her, allowing him and his angels, on either side of the veil, to work wonders on her behalf.

Still, I will not pretend that cultivating this attitude is always easy. I wish that I could wipe away any future tears and sorrows as easily as I clean her food-stained face. But fortunately, it appears that parents like me can receive that “horn” or added measure of power that Hannah sings about in the beginning of her psalm through taking comfort that God can fashion the life that my daughter most needs. And in her most harrowing experiences in the mortal wilderness, I can trust that angels will be close by when I cannot be.

As I seek to develop faith like Hannah’s, I also take comfort in Kahlil Gabran’s words, as he creates a stirring image of God’s role in parenting to that of an archer, and the parent to the bow:

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
 The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
 Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
 For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Certainly, the act of lending a child to the Lord requires a significant bend, or yielding on our part, as we cannot see the “mark of the infinite” as God does. But it gives me hope that just as God molded Samuel for his greater purposes, my child too, can go “swift and far” to the bullseye of her eternal destiny.

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Sarah Shumway Day has an MA in English literature from Boston College and an MBA from Brigham Young University. She lives in Lehi, Utah with her husband and daughter.

Art by Paul César Helleu (1859–1927).

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The story of Saul and the rise of the united monarchy needs to be read in a larger context to understand the theological and ideological stakes. There are continuities in the books of Deuteronomy through Kings that have led scholars to consider them to be a coherent Deuteronomistic History. The theory, first advanced by Martin Noth in 1943, posits that these books were an extended history of Israel, written by a single author or compiler during the Babylonian Exile.1 Later scholars identified additional themes and complex structures in these books, leading them to argue for layers of composition. Most recently, a synthesis by Thomas Römer, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Collège de France, proposed that the Deuteronomistic History was the product of a scribal school active from before King Josiah down through the Persian period.2

In concrete terms, the continuities within the so-called Deuteronomistic History can be seen in the theology of kingship. The claim of the scriptures from Deuteronomy onwards is that righteous kingship works as a political system, as exemplified in David and Josiah. The book of Judges, for example, anticipates the rise of the monarchy when it twice states, including as the last line of the book, that, “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did as he pleased” (Judges 17:6; 21:25). However, there is clearly a debate within the text of scripture that problematized the inevitability, or at least the desirability, of the rise of the monarchy. This ideological tension is enacted through warnings and stories in 1 Samuel 8–12, with alternating arguments for and against the rule of monarchs. Scholars think these alternating texts may represent different sources (an early pro-monarchic source and a later anti-monarchic source):

Anti: 1 Samuel 8; 1 Samuel 10:17–27; 1 Samuel 12:1–25

Pro: 1 Samuel 9:1–10:16; 1 Samuel 11:1–15

And this debate is enacted in the lives and reigns of the kings, from Saul onwards. Ultimately, the history of the kings of Israel and Judah confirms the suspicions of the anti-monarchists. In the four centuries of monarchic rule, the children of Israel only experienced six entirely good kings, and none of these were in the northern kingdom (though this may represent the bias of the author of Kings).

That this is an overarching theme in the Deuteronomistic History is seen in the fact that before there were even kings in Israel, there was a theology of ideal kingship. This is described in Deuteronomy 17:14–16 (emphasis added):

Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your own people; you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kin. Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses, since the Lord has warned you, “You must not go back that way again.” And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess. When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the levitical priests. Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws. Thus he will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long in the midst of Israel.

Notice how the king is subject to the law rather than being a source of law, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi (d. 1750 BC) was. Notice, too, how the warnings against royal excesses are echoed in 1 Samuel 8:10–18 and seem to have David and Solomon in mind. Knowing the Deuteronomist, the warning is doubtless against the marriage to foreign wives who lead kings astray, something that is well illustrated in the story of Solomon and other kings and epitomized in the figure of Jezebel.3 The ideal king imagined by these verses is probably Josiah (2 Kings 22–23).

The embrace of kingship was not only a rejection of God as king but a rejection of a covenant relationship with God that relied on the righteousness of the people. What Israel wanted was for Samuel to “appoint a king for [them], to govern [them] like all other nations” (1 Samuel 8:6). Naturally, Samuel was offended—he ruled as judge and wanted his sons to succeed him. But God reminded Samuel that “It is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected as their king” (1 Samuel 8:7). Instead of being loyal to God, the people sought a political system in which the burden of righteousness was placed upon the king. The king was loyal to God, and the people in turn showed loyalty to the king (we see many instances of how a king or future king punished those who were not loyal to the Lord’s anointed king). The people seemed to want to abdicate their own responsibility, their individual duty to be loyal to their heavenly king, and place that duty upon an earthly king. But Samuel disturbs the people’s hopes of escaping from their moral responsibility by telling them that “If you will revere the Lord, worship Him, and obey Him, and will not flout the Lord’s command, if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, [well and good]. But if you do not obey the Lord and you flout the Lord’s command, the hand of the Lord will strike you as it did your fathers” (1 Samuel 12:15).

Saul Among the Prophets

The first argument for kingship is Saul himself. Not the jealous, vengeful Saul that we meet later in his story, but the modest and handsome Benjaminite, who stands above his fellows not only in height but also in faithfulness, seeking guidance at the hand of the seer as he takes care of his father’s flocks. When Samuel suggests that Saul is the leader that all Israel are seeking (1 Samuel 9:20), Saul demurs, objecting that “I am only a Benjaminite, from the smallest of the tribes of Israel, and my clan is the least of all the clans of the tribe of Benjamin! Why do you say such things to me?” (1 Samuel 9:21).

As a sign that Saul has been chosen, Samuel tells him what he is to do next: “When you leave today.” The first part of this prophetic itinerary concerns recovering the lost asses and obtaining provisions. But then Samuel tells Saul that he will have a transformative encounter with the Spirit of the Lord. “After that,” Samuel tells him, “You are to go on to the Hill of God, where the Philistine prefects reside. There, as you enter the town, you will encounter a band of prophets coming down from the shrine, preceded by lyres, timbrels, flutes, and harps, and they will be speaking in ecstasy. The spirit of the Lord will grip you, and you will speak in ecstasy along with them; you will become another man” (1 Samuel 10:5–6, emphasis added). And then, “As [Saul] turned around to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart; and all those signs were fulfilled that same day” (1 Samuel 10:9, emphasis added). All of these things happened as Samuel foresaw, and when people saw Saul speaking in ecstasy among the prophets, they asked, “Is Saul too among the prophets? (1 Samuel 10:11).

Saul was not only anointed, but he was transformed by “the spirit of the Lord.” For readers of the Book of Judges, this all sounds familiar. The “spirit of the Lord” was involved in the call of four of the “judges” (“chieftains” in the Jewish Publication Society translation). “The spirit of the Lord descended upon [Othniel] and he became Israel’s chieftain” (Judges 3:10); “The spirit of the Lord enveloped Gideon” (Judges 6:34); “The spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah” (Judges 11:29); and “The spirit of the Lord moved [Samson]” (Judges 13:25). In each case, the chieftain is moved to action and achieves victory for Israel. In Samson’s case, the spirit of the Lord forcefully intervenes three additional times (Judges 14:6, 19; 15:14). In each call, the spirit of the Lord has a transformative and enabling effect. Saul’s experience with the spirit of the Lord is sufficiently similar to reassure us of the continuities, but there are subtle differences; to see these, it is important to pay close attention to the language used and the results produced.

Firstly, the effect of the spirit of the Lord is enacted in the book of Judges, usually in a quelling of Israel’s enemies in a significant victory, or, more unusually, in tearing apart a lion (Judges 14:6). The chieftain, newly galvanized, empowered by, or gripped with the spirit, rallies the troops and goes on to victory. Using the same verb as Judges 14:6, the spirit of the Lord “gripped Saul” in 1 Samuel 11:6, and he goes on to rally Israel and win a great battle against the Ammonites. But in the case of Saul, the effects of the spirit are described in greater detail, as when we learn that when the spirit of the Lord gripped him, “his anger blazed.” This rage will reappear in Saul’s decline and fall. The story of Saul is one in which a peculiar sensitivity to spiritual affect can have both glorious and catastrophic consequences.

Before we return to the rage, note how the effect of the spirit of the Lord in Saul’s first encounter with Samuel and the band of prophets was ecstatic, personally transformative, and conditional. When Saul met this band of prophets, “he spoke in ecstasy among them” (1 Samuel 10:10, Jewish Publication Society version). In the NIV and ESV, the meaning is more surprising: “he prophesied among them.” Saul is not simply ecstatically praising God among the prophets but prophesying among them. This whole experience was transformative. “You will become another man,” Samuel prophesied, and indeed, Saul was changed by this encounter: “God gave him another heart” (1 Samuel 10:6, 9). The subtle subtext of this anointing and transformation of Saul is the need to continue to hearken to the prophet’s voice, and failing to do this is at the root of Saul’s undoing.4

So far so good. There are, however, other passages relating to the “spirit of the Lord” or the “spirit of God” in the story of Saul that raise questions. What does it mean, for example, when we are told, “Now the spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord began to terrify him” (1 Samuel 16:14, JPS)? Immediately before this, David had been anointed by Samuel, “and the spirit of the Lord gripped David from that day on” (1 Samuel 16:13). David is now the anointed king, enjoying the favor of God and the power of his spirit. What is interesting is that the spirit of the Lord did not simply depart from Saul, but that he was now terrified by “an evil spirit from the Lord” (1 Samuel 16:14, 15), or “an evil spirit of God” (1 Samuel 16:15, 16). This spirit produced a rage that could only be quelled by a well-played lyre. The reader may have some qualms at this point.

The diligent Latter-day Saint reader will consult the footnotes and be comforted that the JST reads “an evil spirit which was not of the Lord” in the first instances, and “an evil spirit which is not of God” in the latter. This is an elegant solution. Modern scholars who also find the phrase perplexing have offered other solutions—linguistic rather than theological or textual. One scholar, for example, points out that the collocation “evil spirit” in Hebrew is not a noun-adjective combination, but rather “a construct chain” which is better translated as “the spirit which brings forth disaster.”5 Another scholar unpacks the phrase as “a spirit that is sent from Yahweh to carry out a negative mission.”6 Perhaps a useful analogue is the “angel of the Lord” sent to destroy Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 24:15–16. Or the destroying angel sent among the murmuring desert-wandering Israelites (Numbers 14:37), as described in 1 Corinthians 10:10.

This solution may not be entirely satisfactory. As Walter Brueggemann notes, such a solution may “trouble our positivistic minds.” But “we must remember that the world of the biblical perspective is a world without secondary cause. All causes are finally traced back to God, who causes all . . . . This narrative simply assumes that the world is ordered by the direct sovereign rule of God. All the spirits that beset human persons are dispatched from this single source.”7

We could also extend the intertextual context further. The author(s) of Samuel may have had the book of Exodus in mind when crafting the Saul–David dynamic, connecting the Deuteronomistic History with the Pentateuchal narrative. In this schema, David is a new Moses under threat by Saul, who plays the role of Pharaoh. My suggestion is that the “injurious spirit from the Lord” in 1 Samuel 16:14–16 might function the same way as God hardening Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus 7:3–4, 13, 14, 22; 8:15, 19, etc. (compare Romans 9:17–18). In both instances, it is this unexpected divine intervention that drives the story forward and produces a dynamic and taut narrative. In both instances, Joseph Smith intervenes, and it is precisely this which made me think they might be connected. What seems to us a problem to be fixed is perhaps the splendid peculiarity and power of the Bible—and the worldview it reveals—shining through. After all, the God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart also brought about the Exodus, just as the God who troubled Saul gave David the confidence to slay Goliath. Embracing the miraculous stories of the Hebrew Bible may sometimes require us to wrestle with an unfamiliar theological worldview.

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Kristian S. Heal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His research focuses on the reception of the Hebrew Bible in early Christian literature and worship. He received a BA in Jewish History from University College London, an MSt in Syriac studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Theology from the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Genesis 37 and 39 in the Early Syriac Tradition (Brill, 2023) and co-editor of Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, published by the Maxwell Institute. Kristian was also the resident scholar for the Maxwell Institute’s Abide podcast on the Old Testament (50 episodes).

Art by 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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The book of Ruth, no more than a short story in length and scope, packs its few pages with a volume’s worth of moral reflection on love, self-sacrifice, and redemption. The narrative is familiar: Naomi is bereaved, Ruth is loyal, Boaz is generous, and the mutual devotion that develops between the three protagonists restores a lost lineage with the birth of Obed.

The story traces a hopeful arc from emptiness to fullness. Naomi’s lament that “the Lord hath brought me home again empty” (Ruth 1:21, KJV) has, by the end, become joy in the chosen grandchild she clasps to her breast, a “restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age” (Ruth 4:15). Beyond the marriage plot, the story’s portrayal of Naomi and Ruth represents the Bible’s most sensitive (and positive) exploration of women’s relationships. And Boaz’s role as go’el, or “redeeming kinsman,” is, for Christian readers, a powerful type of Christ our Redeemer, Bridegroom, and generous Friend.

The brisk plot reads as variations on the theme of “costly love.” The idea that love comes with a price tag of vulnerability, responsibility, and suffering gained prominence in Christian thought during the twentieth century in the work of, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (Costly love is the subject of my colleague Terryl Givens’s current study of Christian theology.) Christ’s suffering in the events of the Atonement was one staggering cost of his perfect love. Such love, Jesus taught, must be the foundation of the friendship that characterizes his disciples (John 13:34–35) and his church (1 Corinthians 13:4–8).

To be sure, recognition of love’s cost long preceded the ministry and passion of Jesus Christ. It is central to hesed, the divine lovingkindness at the center of the Hebrew Bible’s covenant theology and ethics—and a concept President Nelson taught Latter-day Saints to cherish. Hesed is a kind of loving faithfulness that exceeds the bounds of law or custom: It gives whatever is needful for the well being of the beloved regardless of conventional duty. In this way, hesed entails a certain overflow or excess.1 The book of Ruth portrays Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz as models of such costly love.

After the deaths of her husband and sons, Naomi frees her daughters-in-law from the expectation that they return with her to her native Bethlehem. She understands that the rupture would rip them from the only community they know and likely deprive them of the chance for remarriage. Better for them, she knows, to return to their mothers and build a new life. This will leave Naomi bereft of family, aged and defenseless, to make her new life alone. She could pressure the young women to stay with her, as custom demands. But she refuses to afflict Ruth and Orpah with her own misfortune, and so she urges them three times to return home with her blessing (Ruth 1:8, 11, 12). From Naomi, we learn that costly love doesn’t always require tightening a relationship. Sometimes it may require loosening.

Orpah indeed elects to return home. She is often reproached for this decision, but I’ll speak up on her behalf. The fact that love is costly does not mean that every costly action taken on behalf of another is necessary or necessarily loving. Tremendous acts of self-sacrifice can be misguided, unhelpful, harmful—or even, paradoxically, selfish, when they are undertaken to serve the emotional needs of the one who sacrifices. Given that Naomi freely and sincerely relieves her daughters-in-law of their obligation, I find Orpah’s decision to return home to be an honorable one.

Ruth’s devotion to Naomi, of course, reveals a deeply-felt attachment to her mother-in-law and a genuine desire to make her life at Naomi’s side: The word used in 1:14 for Ruth’s “cleaving” to Naomi is the same used in Genesis 2:24 to describe the two-as-one relationship of husband and wife. Ruth’s declaration of hesed is justly famous:

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16–17)

And she is as good as her word. She indeed cleaves to Naomi and makes their two lives one. Ruth works tirelessly for their mutual welfare as she labors in the fields (Ruth 2:7), shares provisions (2:18), obeys Naomi’s instruction (3:6), and risks her life and standing to secure their future with Boaz (3:9). Ruth’s loyalty goes well beyond the requirements of law and convention to bless Naomi’s life at real personal cost to herself. Ruth the Moabite is a paragon of hesed worthy of the God of Israel.

Boaz, for his part, displays steadfast generosity to the refugee women. He is called to act with higher love at each narrative turn, and he rises to the call every time. First he shares food and water with Ruth (2:14), and then he allows her to gather full stalks of wheat rather than the meager field leavings (2:15). After their nighttime encounter at the threshing floor, Boaz gives Ruth an immensely, even hyperbolically, generous gift of six measures of barley (3:15). Finally, Boaz, in contrast to the unnamed kinsman who acts as a miserly narrative foil, promises to marry Ruth—and thus to divide his estate and diminish the inheritance of his existing children. In this, he secures the women’s future and redeems his kindred.

As bridegroom, Boaz takes on the role of go’el, a family member who bears the right and responsibility to step in when a relative requires aid. Beyond its social utility, the go’el has theological significance: The Hebrew Bible uses go’el for God, Israel’s redeeming kinsman who reclaims them from slavery and restores them from exile. The book of Ruth directly likens Boaz’s generosity and the Lord’s hesed: In Ruth 2:12, Boaz blesses Ruth for taking refuge under the “wings” of “the LORD God of Israel.” Then at the threshing floor, Ruth asks Boaz to spread his “wing” over her (3:9; “skirt” in KJV). Boaz grants her request and becomes the human instrument of the divine shelter he earlier invokes. His costly love is the means by which God’s hesed arrives for Ruth and Naomi.

I’m deeply moved by the various expressions of costly love explored in the book of Ruth. I am the variety of sinner who suffers from an excess of self-absorption and self-regard. I regularly need admonitions to act generously, to give freely of my resources and my time, and to look outside my own projects and interests.

Nevertheless, valorizing costly love can pose problems. Some people, often but not always women, suffer from too little self-regard, not from too much. For them, emphasis on godly selflessness can feed extreme acts of self-sacrifice, bordering on self-erasure. In the most troubling scenarios, the call to “die to self” may feed unequal, unfree relationships in which one party is left voiceless, unable to assert her boundaries and needs. The self-giving party is instrumentalized as a means to somebody else’s ends; her sacrifice is made to serve external purposes in which she has no share. Though it may be demanded in the name of love, such “selflessness” is actually exploitation, and it is no part of the pure love of Christ.

In other cases, costly love can be weaponized as a form of moral high ground: C. S. Lewis memorably describes the dynamic wherein one person “surrender[s] benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them.” Under the banner of “unselfishness,” a person may, at best, engage in unnecessary and unhelpful self-sacrifice, or, at worst, manipulate those around her.

Feminist theologians have long recognized these difficulties. Some have argued that Christlike self-giving, freely chosen from a position of spiritual agency, is fundamentally different from coerced submission, and that only the former describes genuine discipleship. Others have questioned whether the costly love of the cross should be a model of redemptive suffering at all for those whose experience has been one of forced self-sacrifice. Still others have proposed that the highest vision of Christian love is the flourishing of both parties, not the dissolution of one into the other. The Latter-day Saint theologian who has explored these difficult questions most fully is Deidre Green, and her work deserves wide consideration.2

The book of Ruth suggests covenant as a solution to the problem of costly love. Ruth’s famous declaration to Naomi—“your people shall be my people, and your God my God”—is a covenant utterance, complete with a sealing oath (Ruth 1:16–17). Ruth’s covenant with Naomi accomplishes the work that all covenants undertake: namely, to create a new unity of purposes where there was division. More than a promise of care and provision, Ruth’s covenant hesed to Naomi fuses their purposes. Where Naomi goes, Ruth goes, because the two women now share the same goals and plans.

Seen in the light of covenant, Ruth’s love is costly indeed, but it is not self-erasure. True, she gives up a past life, but she enters a newly-formed joint life in which her flourishing and Naomi’s are no longer in competition. “Costly love” absent covenant would have made Ruth a self-sacrificial means to Naomi’s ends; the introduction of covenant transforms the moral situation by making their purposes mutual. Covenant ensures that Ruth, the one who bears the cost, has a share in the ends her sacrifice serves. Naomi’s redemption is Ruth’s redemption: Ruth’s child is laid on Naomi’s breast. Their covenant creates a common life in which the category of “whose ends” partially dissolves.

In the end, I remain unsettled. It’s clear that costly love is a powerful but risky idea. I confess that it poses a conundrum that I don’t yet know how to solve. I worry about any solution that dilutes the costly demands of Christian discipleship: “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). At the same time, Jesus commanded his disciples to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). Any interpretation of Christian love that erases the self cannot fulfill the commandment, because it eliminates one of its terms. Perhaps Naomi and Ruth’s covenant-bound relationship gives us a model of costly love in which the mutual flourishing of lover and beloved is achieved.

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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 Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842–1942).

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

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