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.” 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.4

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.5

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.6

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,7 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.8 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.9 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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Judges was not meant to be a subtle book. At least that’s the impression you get on a first read. The book’s editor/compiler seems to say as much right from the get-go. It’s as if the compiler said, in the first two chapters of the book, “If you’re wondering why I’ve invited you here, dear reader, it’s to make one thing clear: When you forget what the Lord has done for you and go worshipping after false gods instead, misery ensues. Remarkably, though, the Lord is merciful when you cry unto him in your misery, and he can offer miraculous deliverance. But take note: this cycle is hard to break! And you’re about to see story after story that proves this point . . .”

Then come the stories—and they really are unforgettable. The characters and the action in Judges stand out for good reason. The heroes are bold, the means of deliverance spectacular, and the climactic moments of comeuppance leave the oppressors vanquished in dramatic—and often graphic—ways.

But for all that seeming straightforwardness, there are subtleties to be found here—ambivalences, unanswered questions, narrative elements that don’t neatly fit the book’s stated aims—or at least elements that don’t come with clear moralizing attached. These characters in Judges are complicated characters who make complicated choices, and that certainly makes them feel all the more real and authentic. It also makes these stories worth a careful reread to see what might be just below the surface.

Gideon’s story is like that. Who hasn’t delighted in all of the wonder and thrill of Gideon’s triumph? It is gripping reading on so many levels. It starts with a reluctant hero. Gideon is like Enoch, or Moses, or even Barak, just two chapters earlier in Judges.1 Gideon protests his own weakness and incredulity that he has been chosen in the first place—chosen of the Lord to do something almost inconceivable. And in the face of that hesitation, the Lord provides compelling (and repeated) evidence that Gideon need not fear.

Then the Lord instructs Gideon to make the task at hand almost exponentially harder: Reduce your army of 32,000 to 300. There would be—could be—no question under those odds that this victory would belong to the Lord. And the brilliance of the strategy to use those 300 soldiers to incite panic in their encamped and sleeping enemies with a sudden bursting forth of light from 300 torches and sound from 300 trumpet blasts in the middle of the night never gets old in the retelling. The consequent scattering of the Midianites, who flee in fright and confusion, seems on par with the memory of Egyptian forces caught by surprise by collapsing sea walls or the more recent memory of what might have been a sudden flash flood that sent Sisera and his men falling over themselves before Deborah and Barak.2 Gideon’s victory is just that wondrous.

That’s Judges chapters 6 and 7. But then we come to Judges 8, and it’s all a bit more morally ambiguous. How are we supposed to feel about Gideon’s next moves? His anger at the town elders of Succoth and Penuel, who refuse to offer provisions to Gideon’s tired and hungry band, for instance? Their (Succoth’s and Penuel’s) cool, wait-and-see attitude toward Gideon’s exploits would have been insulting and infuriating, but would that justify Gideon’s return-for-revenge mission, when we learn that he trampled the people of Succoth and destroyed Penuel’s tower and then killed the men of that city?

Or what about the way he approached the captured Midianite kings, Zebah and Zalmunna? We learn that a memory of an even earlier offense may have been festering in Gideon—may have been driving a desire for revenge in this case. He interrogated the prisoners and learned that they were responsible for the deaths of his brothers. He told them that he would have spared their lives if they had not been guilty of that act, but now he would exact his revenge. In a very dramatic (and traumatic) turn, he ordered his oldest son to kill the prisoners. The frightened boy shrank back, and Gideon finished the deed himself. How might this have affected his son? Others in his family who saw this unfold?

And what about the ephod Gideon made from the looted earrings? Gideon, this man who started down his path to become a deliverer of Israel by tearing down a shrine dedicated to false gods (Judges 6:27–32), now became the creator of an object that would prove to be some kind of idol itself—“a snare unto Gideon, and to his house” (Judges 8:27).

That house—that family—was destined for heartache and tragedy. Judges 9 is painful to read. We have a son of Gideon—Abimelech—killing his brothers to consolidate power; a surviving youngest brother—Jotham—issuing a forceful rebuke of Abimelech’s allies and prophesying their downfall; and finally, in fulfillment of Jotham’s prediction, a region engulfed in violence and treachery until Abimelech is killed.

This is why the subtleties of Judges make this book worth returning to again and again. What we are certainly left with is more questions than answers, but that may be the point. That may be what this book really has to offer us: introspection.

Is there something cautionary in the way that Gideon asked for so many signs to confirm the Lord’s call to action and confidence? Certainly, we all have felt, at one time or another, the need for some helpful nudging; who hasn’t been, at one time or another, a Barak who benefited from a Deborah’s encouragement? And who hasn’t been a Barak who has said to a Deborah, “I’ll go if you’ll come with me.” But what might it say to us to contemplate that Gideon still teetered on inaction, and still needed to hear the dream of the Midianite on guard duty, before he put the Lord’s plan into motion, even after the fleece had been found to be first miraculously dew-covered and then miraculously dry (and all of that was even after fire had consumed the goat kid and the cakes!)? But then again, maybe the point is that I’m more often like Gideon than I want to admit. Is the point, when I stop to think about it, that the Lord really is this generous with his reassurances even when we are hesitant and unsure—when we say, “Are you really, really sure you want me to do this?” Am I prone to remember past assurances, those nights when I’ve cried out unto the Lord and he spoke peace unto my mind (like in Doctrine and Covenants 6:22–23), or am I all too forgetful of those past moments (à la Helaman 12:2)? Can this Gideon story be a prompt to get me thinking about truly living out Doctrine and Covenants 58:26–29? Not being compelled in all things, not receiving commandments with a doubtful heart, being anxiously engaged in a good cause, doing many things of my own free will, etc.

And then there’s this on-the-other-hand point: Astute commentators have noticed that the Lord—as agent, as driver, as commander—is absent in Judges 8. The narrator does not ascribe any of the events that follow to the Lord’s guidance or volition. Gideon seems to do so, though—seems to imply (unilaterally so—and that’s important) that the Lord would give Gideon what he wants, in terms of the victory, as in Judges 8:7: “When the Lord hath delivered Zebah and Zalmunna into mine hand,” he says by way of a threat to the princes of Succoth, “then I will tear your flesh with the thorns of the wilderness and with briers.” Is there a danger when we are called to do one thing of becoming over-confident that the Lord justifies our going further than he wants us to go? Could this be why many are called but few are chosen? Is this an example of getting a little authority and then covering a multitude of sins due to a false or inflated sense of divine commission? (D&C 121:34–40) In a sad twist of irony, was this moment actually the time for Gideon to exercise some hesitation and self-doubt and pause and ask for the Lord’s confirmation that he was still on the right path?

It’s interesting that the tactic that discomfited the Midianites did not involve direct violence on the part of Gideon and his men. Would pursuit and capture of their leaders have been enough to secure victory—and peace? What would have been different if Gideon had spared the lives of his enemies? What if he had absorbed the slight at Succoth and Penuel and chosen to forgive? Was his initial impulse to spare Zebah and Zalmunna one that he ignored at a severe cost in the way this example of deadly retribution would reverberate through the next generation? What did his descendants, his comrades, come to understand about violence?

And did Gideon blur lines between faithful worship of the Lord and a semblance of the very thing he had initially sought to root out from his people? Could he have been clearer on where he stood?

What are the patterns we are transmitting to those who are watching us most closely?

Stories of warfare in the scriptures can be tricky. We often assume that the stories make it clear who is in the right and who is in the wrong—especially when we ourselves feel oppressed or beaten down and we hope for liberation and justice. But Judges 8 seems to come to us with more neutrality about how this played out.

This all leaves me with one image in mind.

Imagine having grown up on these stories (and that would be all of us), and imagine feeling the satisfaction of knowing what they mean—that oppressors would get what’s coming to them (and who can’t relate to that?). And then imagine sitting in a crowd and hearing a new teacher say, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them . . . which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44). And the unexpectedness of this new interpretation of scripture just washes over the crowd—and it just feels right.

No wonder Peter would say to Jesus, “Thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

The subtleties and ambivalences and unanswered questions of Judges can leave us longing for just such a better way.

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

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) from The Jewish Museum.

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

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Imagine the pressure Joshua felt to succeed Moses, the deliverer of Israel, the great lawgiver. The book of Numbers called Moses “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3, KJV), while Deuteronomy concluded, “There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10).

In both of these tributes to Moses, the biblical author introduces a comparison, first between Moses and mankind, and later between others with the prophetic mantle. And yet, comparison can be “the thief of joy,” as former US President Theodore Roosevelt reportedly warned. So, how did Joshua avoid the debilitating effects of comparison? How might we do the same when tempted to think we can’t possibly fill the large shoes left by a predecessor?

Possibly sensing the succession challenge ahead, Moses wisely called Joshua to him, counseling, “Be strong and of a good courage. . . . And the Lord, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:7–8). Since relying on the Lord with unshaken faith allowed Moses to successfully lead the children of Israel, he was anxious to convey this guidance to his successor.

Years earlier, the children of Israel learned that failure by a leader could lead to failure of a people. In that instance, Jethro wisely counseled his son-in-law Moses regarding effective leadership (see Exodus 18:17–18). As if to allay any uncertainty in their new leader, the children of Israel likewise encouraged Joshua after he succeeded Moses. Seeking to sustain him, they pledged, “All that thou commandest us we will do, and whithersoever thou sendest us, we will go. According as we hearkened unto Moses in all things, so will we hearken unto thee: only the Lord thy God be with thee, as he was with Moses . . . only be strong and of a good courage” (Joshua 1:16–18).

In the beginning of the book of Joshua, the Lord gave the same counsel to his new prophet. “As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee,” he promised. “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee” (Joshua 1:5). He further reemphasized Moses’s direction to Joshua, “Be strong and of a good courage . . . . Only be thou strong and very courageous . . . . Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest” (Joshua 1:6–7, 9).

The traits of strength and courage, coupled with unwavering faith in God’s aid, guided Joshua to conquer any fear and dismay that could have derailed both him and Israel as they entered the promised land. Indeed, the book of Joshua is a record of God keeping his promise to be with his prophet and people. Repeatedly, the book of Joshua emphasizes parallels between Moses and his successor, demonstrating God’s guiding both men. Early in the text, God repeated the miraculous parting of water he performed for Moses by causing the river Jordan to “[rise] up upon an heap” until “all the Israelites passed over on dry ground” (Joshua 3:16–17). In doing so, God magnified Joshua “in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee” (Joshua 3:7). Later, when visited by the captain of the Lord’s host, Joshua was commanded, like Moses before him, to “loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy.” And Joshua, like Moses before him, “did so” (Joshua 5:15). For both men, God was instrumental in providing miraculous military victories (see Exodus 17 and Joshua 6), and through both men, God demonstrated power over the sun (see Exodus 10 and Joshua 10). God kept his promise to be with Joshua, just as he had been with Moses.

Parallels like these, demonstrating God’s consistency, may be different from imperfect human comparisons. Whereas parallels help us recognize God’s hand, comparisons between us and others can be debilitating. In a BYU devotional, Professor J.B. Haws observed that “comparisons . . . can fuel envying and coveting or self-loathing and the paralysis of inaction.” President Dieter F. Uchtdorf likewise cautioned, “We spend so much time and energy comparing ourselves to others—usually comparing our weaknesses to their strengths. This drives us to create expectations for ourselves that are impossible to meet. As a result, we never celebrate our good efforts because they seem to be less than what someone else does.”

Scriptural records preserve accounts of what God has done for his children, with the promise that because He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, He can do the same for us. This lesson strengthened Joshua in his role in God’s plan, just as it can strengthen us in ours, helping every one of us succeed. The application of eternal truth and divine aid made available to all of God’s children may be at the heart of the difference between parallels and comparisons. President Jeffrey R. Holland concluded, “[God] cheers on every runner, calling out that the race is against sin, not against each other. I know that if we will be faithful, there is a perfectly tailored robe of righteousness ready and waiting for everyone, ‘robes . . . made . . . white in the blood of the Lamb’” (emphasis in original).

While God’s power was with both Moses and Joshua, as the Bible records, they also each had unique strengths and ultimately different missions. And so, too, do each of us whenever we are called to succeed someone in God’s service. With faith in God, we bring our individual strengths to our assigned missions.

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Scott C. Esplin is the dean of Religious Education and a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. A native of southern Utah, he earned both a doctoral degree (2006) and master’s degree (2001) in Educational Leadership and Foundations from Brigham Young University. He is the author of numerous publications, including an award-winning book on the restoration of Nauvoo.

Art by Marc Chagall (1887–1985).

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The travails of Israel culminate in Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of Moses. The book records his last instructions to the children of God’s covenant, which emerge over the course of three sermons (chapters 1–4; 4–28; and 28–30). The book also marks the end of Moses’s mortal journey with his people. The story of Moses in Deuteronomy is an important contribution to our understanding of how God works through prophetic figures to lead his community. We can easily imagine that those who heard Moses’s instruction at the time may have felt challenged to make sense of divine revelation, the prophetic interpretation they received, and the personal responsibility placed upon them within their covenant with God; modern readers may feel some of those same things. A willingness to follow prophetic guidance is not always comfortable and demands great faith. Fulfilling our covenantal responsibilities toward God and one another opens up greater access to God and his blessings and protection, a fact evidenced throughout Deuteronomy.

Moses ended his first sermon by reminding his listeners of the promises given to earlier generations, which would be, for them, fulfilled in the very near future.

Now, therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statues and unto the judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the Lord God of your fathers giveth you. (Deuteronomy 4:1)

Moses connected his hearers to their forebears’ promises received from God and helped them see that they would be the ones to realize their fulfillment.

In his second exhortation, Moses invited those same listeners to keep the commandments (Deuteronomy 5) and then provided one of the most profound instructions in all of scripture. After repeating the injunction to observe and “do” the commands as they entered the promised land, Moses helped them see that, in doing what is required by God, we cannot dismiss the necessary step of getting the words into our hearts. This part of Deuteronomy 6 has come to be known as the Shema in Judaism, and it remains an essential part of weekly synagogue services even today. The words “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” lay out what God requires of those who covenant with him (Deuteronomy 6:4–5, KJV). The injunction to love God fully means that, as Moses instructed, those words must become part of our daily life. There is always the risk that those who love God will become distracted or forgetful of God’s mercy, love, protection, and care as we go about our day-to-day activities. Wisely, Moses offered his people a pattern of remembrance through ritual and symbol. The use of tefillin (ritual objects of prayer) and of a mezuzah attached to a door frame, among other physical items, provided ready-at-hand objects that would draw his people’s minds, hearts, and actions toward remembering the promises of the blessings that he and his people hoped for and (at least at this point in the scriptural narrative) were ready to receive (Deuteronomy 6:7–9).

The people of Israel were to love God with their heart, soul, and might—and they were to be holy (kodesh). Holiness was both an intrinsic element within Israel and a condition they actively sought after. As a people, Israel was deemed holy because God’s covenant provided them a special relation to him and a unique purpose in the world (Isaiah 41:8–10; Isaiah 49:5–8). They were commanded, likewise, to be holy through obedience to and maintenance of their covenant with God. The promise of becoming “my treasured possession” (Exodus 19:5, NRSV) was both intended to be realized in that moment and even more completely in the future. God, in reminding Moses and Israel about their covenantal status, reminded them of his continued guidance: among the Egyptians, through the Red Sea, and through the wilderness. The book of Deuteronomy expands the priestly responsibility of holiness outward to all of Israel, making holiness a characteristic of the nation. This expansion of holiness as an inclusive condition to be both appreciated and developed required that the people adhere to certain rules or commands that enabled such a community to exist.

Here is one such rule: the eradication of poverty was institutionalized for Israel. Deuteronomy 15 commands people to forgive debts of the poor every seven years and to fully free slaves as a way of signaling that the people are willing to both recognize the source of blessings and sacrifice for the health of the community. This act, previously reserved largely as a monarchical gesture from the king to his subjects and servants, now applied to all of Israel. Moses, like Brigham Young and the early Latter-day Saints preparing to head west, offered sage advice on how to keep the community together during difficult times in the wilderness and as they prepared to establish their homes in a promised land (compare Doctrine and Covenants 136:10–11, 18–26). In both instances, people were asked to look after one another as part of their covenant. Isaiah reminded his people that their complementary role in the covenant would be accomplished in part if “they helped every one his neighbor; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage” (Isaiah 41:6, KJV). Like the people of Enoch (Moses 7:18) and those described in 4 Nephi, the desire to eradicate poverty, suffering, and jealousy blessed those who were within God’s covenantal bond.

Moses received a remarkable gift of grace from the Lord as he neared the end of his life. From atop the hills in the plain of Moab, Moses glimpsed the promised land, and could thereby know that God could and would fulfill the promises that reached back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Deuteronomy 32:49; 34:4). This moment may feel odd: God tells an aged Moses to go to the mountain of Nebo and see Canaan, the promised land, yet Moses would never step into that promised land. This leaves room to wonder. Why, we might ask, did God not let Moses enjoy the fruits of a long-sought-after reward and promise? Being close enough to gaze upon the land across the Dead Sea, did God intend to teach the Israelites something from the seemingly untimely departure of Moses? Moses had been their guide, their teacher, and their prophet for many years. He was great and inspiring. According to Deuteronomy 34:10, “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” The death of Moses here occupies a unique transition to later portions of scripture for Latter-day Saint readers. Moses is said to have died in Deuteronomy 34. Importantly, it is God who fulfills the familial responsibility to care for the dead by burying Moses himself. This fulfillment speaks to the greatness and holiness of Moses in God’s eyes. Christians note that Moses appeared at the Transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:3; Mark 4:4), and the Book of Mormon draws parallels between Alma’s fate and that of Moses (Alma 45:19). Moses, of course, was instrumental in restoring priesthood keys to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in 1836 in the Kirtland Temple (Doctrine and Covenants 110:11). His relevance for the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ issues forward from that moment when God took Moses into his own care.

It may have been that the people stood to learn something significant from Moses’s departure before they entered Canaan. When Joshua was called upon to lead the people after Moses laid his hands on him (Deuteronomy 34:8 and Joshua 1:1–3), they could recognize in this call of a new leader the continued guidance that God channeled through his chosen prophet. It was almost immediately after the end of Moses’s mortal life that the people were told to go and obtain the land. The absence of Moses may have helped them see that the Lord, not Moses, was the giver of covenantal promise and blessing. Their work to prepare themselves was overseen by Moses during his lifetime and during their exodus. Their wanderings in the wilderness were managed by Moses, but it was God who beckoned them toward the gift he intended for them.

The final moments of Moses’s life show us how to trust God and focus on the transformation of our hearts and minds to better see God’s hand in our lives and to trust the prophetic figures that bring us to him.

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Dr. Andrew Reed is the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding and an Associate Professor of Church History. He studied Russian, Ukrainian, and European history at Arizona State University and holds master’s degrees from both the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

Art by Carl Haag (1820–1915).

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

The Hebrew name for the book of Numbers, bamidbar, literally means “in the wilderness.” This seems a fitting title; the book contains tales of desolate places and desperate situations. The wandering Israelites find themselves hungry for cucumbers and leeks and meat, dying of thirst in the desert, surrounded by towering antagonists and fiery serpents, and in danger of being cursed by a professional pagan soothsayer. Death lurks around every turn. But abundance and anguish walk hand-in-hand through this wilderness. Miracles blossom wherever these weary souls turn. The wilderness is a place of great suffering and great love.

Sometimes the grace of the desert is merely sufficient. God rains down daily bread—enough to sustain us when we put in the unremitting work of gathering. At some point, every disciple will know the weariness of daily seeking, the feeling of hungering for a meager sufficiency of grace—enough patience or love or strength or hope or peace—to sustain us through one more moment of the exhausting spiritual, physical, and relational wildernesses of our lives. So it makes sense when the Israelites begin to murmur, “Who shall give us flesh to eat? . . . Now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes” (Numbers 11:4, 6, KJV). They ask God, in essence, “Can’t you offer anything better than this honey-flavored miracle bread from heaven? Where are the fish, the melons, and the garlic we loved when we were slaves in Egypt? Can’t we catch a break from the dailiness and ordinariness of seeking sustenance?” (see v. 5). Even Moses gets so weary of the complaints of his people and the arduous relentlessness of leading them, that he asks God to let him die (vv. 11–15). We will all experience such moments of despair, hunger, and lament.

But God responds with abundant generosity. Quail drop from the sky in heaps three feet high as far as the eye can see (Numbers 11:31). The guy who gathers least—let’s call him Levi—gathers ten homers-worth of the meat (v. 32). This is over fifty bushels-full—about 3,000 pounds of quail—for the loser of the meat-gathering contest. Who could carry such a burden of blessings? It turns out God’s hand is not shortened at all (vv. 21–23). The God who walks with us through the wilderness overspills with open-handedness. When the dust-throated people complain of thirst, Moses smites the rock “and the water came out abundantly” (Numbers 20:11, emphasis added). We could imagine a mere trickle, but that wouldn’t account for the use of that word, “abundantly.” This was more than enough to quench the thirst of the dirt-encrusted Israelites. The Psalmist remembers how God “brought streams . . . out of the rock, and caused waters to run down like rivers” (Psalm 78:16). One can envisage the young Israelites splashing in this life-giving liquid, the desert sand turning to mud. This was grace you could wade in, swim in, drown in. Sometimes we receive grace sufficient for the day; other times abundance overflows our nostrils (see Numbers 11:20).

Granted, the abundance that meets the Israelites’ need also meets their greed in the story of the quail, and a plague breaks out among the people. The text says that by this plague, “the Lord smote the people” (Numbers 11:33). It’s easy to delight in the God of profuse mercy in these stories, but perhaps the most difficult parts of the narratives for modern readers are the relentless assertions of God’s destructive wrath which kindles like a devouring fire in response to the people’s rebellion. Of course, as Elder Renlund has asserted, ascribing these actions to God may be merely a matter of rhetoric. He teaches, “In the scriptures, getting off the path [to God and joy] is referred to as sin, and the resultant decrease in happiness and forfeited blessings is called punishment. In this sense, God is not punishing us; punishment is a consequence of our own choices, not His” (emphasis added). Perhaps God is acknowledged as the cause of this suffering because God oversees the mortal experience, allowing us to navigate a world that can be both harsh and holy, where our dance is always accompanied by darkness.

And it feels important to keep in mind what these stories were doing for the people who told and retold them, who passed them down to their children and gave them space inside their lives. The narratives sought to shape the souls of listeners, to articulate the ways of holiness, gladness, and peace, and alternately to expose the paths that lead to devastation and destruction. For the ancient Israelites, it seems, murmuring amid the miraculous proves especially deadening to the life of the soul. A certain leprosy of the spirit accompanies my complaining. This can only be healed by God’s generous responsiveness (see Numbers chapter 12). One translator renders the words of the Persian mystical poet Hafiz thus: “Complaint is only possible while living in the suburbs of God.” When I sense that my life with all its tragedies and trials is simultaneously the habitation of the divine, the place where I can meet and praise God, I can perceive and delight in the radiance of this mortal experience.

The story of the twelve spies highlights the significance of what we choose to emphasize in a world where mysterious beauty mingles with mystifying brutality. A man from each tribe enters Canaan to assess the promised land. Despite the fact that the scouts return with a single cluster of grapes so extravagantly large that it takes two men together to carry it on a staff—manifesting the lavish goodness of the land—ten of the men return with “an evil report” (Numbers 13:32). They don’t seem to care that the place flows with milk and honey; they are terrified of the gigantic inhabitants who make them seem like grasshoppers in comparison (vv. 27, 33). Fear eclipses hope. Their report causes grief, lament, and the kind of terrified and violent response that often accompanies the despair that comes from blindness to the numinous realities of existence. The people want to take up stones to kill Caleb and Joshua because they assert that the land “is an exceeding[ly] good land” and affirm, “the Lord is with us: fear . . . not” (Numbers 14:7, 9). Because of this experience, this band of recently emancipated slaves will wander the wilderness for forty years before their children will inherit the promised land. They did not wander because they could not find Canaan. They had been on its borders but could not perceive its beauties. Unless we can recognize the miraculous nature of the world right in front of us, we will never inherit the promised land we already inhabit. As Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault notes, “The Kingdom of Heaven [or, for our purposes, the promised land] is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.” Will we praise the world we have and inherit our souls, or will we wander in fearful blindness to the ever-present effulgence of existence?

We will be bitten by the poisonous serpents of mortality, but the Christ who suffers with us offers us healing through a glance (Numbers 21:5–9). Where we fix our gaze will determine our thriving. If we are blind to the angels in our path, we will be tempted to curse this life and the people that God has placed before us (Numbers 22:21–35). But when we see with open eyes that “it please[s] the Lord to bless Israel” (Numbers 24:1), we can sing songs of hope, can live in wondrous awe, can shout praises to the God who is light and shadow in the wilderness. I believe that “the Lord [does] delight in us” and has brought us “into this land” and that it is indeed “a land which floweth with milk and honey” (Numbers 14:8).

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Robbie Taggart is a teacher and poet who delights in the holiness of the everyday.

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

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One of my treasured Christmas ornaments is a small lead eight-petaled flower. It was made by an artist who helped create the windows for the Fort Collins temple, and she added a hook to this leftover rosette for me. The eight-petaled flower is a motif in that temple, evoking Colorado’s wildflowers. For me, it also references the eight-pointed star that is a symbol of Christ.

The number eight is associated with the Atonement of Jesus Christ throughout the Bible.1 In Exodus and Leviticus, among the Lord’s detailed instructions for his tabernacle, the rituals performed there, and the conduct of his people, the eighth day is consistently important. In the Bible, the number seven often symbolizes completeness or fullness. In Genesis, for example, God completed the work of creation and rested on the seventh day. An eighth day, then, is something extra—unexpected, even. If seven days make a whole week, then Day #8 is not simply the first day of the second week, but also a new first day. It is not just a beginning, but a beginning again.

Israelite ritual practice in the Old Testament points to this kind of new beginning in Christ. The sweeping saga of Israelite foundations, captivity, and escape ends triumphantly in Exodus with the setting up of the tabernacle. Christ instructed Moses that this ultimate emblem of God’s covenant with and abiding presence among Israel should be set up “on the first day of the first month” (Exodus 40:2, KJV). In other words, at the start of the second year of their wanderings—not just the first day of the year but the first day of a new year.2 Setting up the tabernacle on this day symbolized the new life redeemed Israel could find in Christ.

Scriptures in Leviticus, too, point to the necessity of new beginnings, as sin and uncleanness are presented as inevitabilities of human life. But, as is spelled out in remarkable detail, this restoration—or new life—comes at a cost. It requires purification, sacrifice and atonement, and obedience. This was true in the days of Moses, and it is true today.

First, purification. Among the ancient Israelites, purification occurred on the eighth day. Individuals recovering from bodily afflictions, for instance, went through seven days of cleansing before being restored to new life in the community on the eighth day (Leviticus 14:8–10; 15:13–14, 28–29). Similarly, Aaron and his sons began their new life as priests in the tabernacle on the eighth day, after a seven-day consecration ritual (Leviticus 8:35; 9:1). The process included washing, anointing, and dressing in sacred clothing (Exodus 40:12–13). Followers of Christ’s restored gospel today are also symbolically purified in his holy temple, with washing, anointing, and sacred clothing. Undertaking these steps expresses our desire for a new, holier life in Christ. As God told Moses, he wants to make us into “a kingdom of priests” and priestesses, “and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).

Second, sacrifice and atonement. Leviticus contains an exhaustive description of ritual sacrifice, including how to sprinkle blood, cleave offerings, and burn animal flesh. Sacrifice in the ancient tabernacle was a hands-on, messy business. In a very real way, it pointed to the incredible sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son, who was the “great and last sacrifice” and “an infinite and eternal sacrifice” (Alma 34:10). On the annual Day of Atonement, the Israelite priest made a special sacrifice so that all the people might “be clean from all [their] sins before the Lord” (Leviticus 16:30). Today, we are called to a different kind of sacrifice. The resurrected Jesus Christ declared to the Nephites, “Your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away . . . . And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit” (3 Nephi 9:19–20). When we have a broken heart and a contrite spirit, we want to be something different. We recognize our sin and weakness, and we long for repentance. Wanting to sacrifice our old life and begin again, we turn to Christ.

Third, obedience. Leviticus details the laws and regulations for maintaining the Abrahamic covenant. For example, male babies were circumcised on their eighth day of life, initiating a new life as a member of God’s covenant people (Leviticus 12:3). With exactness in their ritual, conduct, and diet, the Israelites showed their desire for God’s presence to remain with them. For us, too, obedience means committing to a new way of living in the world that allows us to find God in ordinary, everyday things. Obedience to the laws of purification and sacrifice didn’t take the Israelites out of the world. Just the opposite: Obedience to these laws highlighted their embodied existence in the material world. And it helped them find God right there in the wilderness with them. In both the Old Testament tabernacle and in the Lord’s temples today, the faithful make covenants with God and promise obedience. Making and keeping covenants manifests our desire to enter the presence of God.

Finally, rebirth is possible. Jesus Christ was resurrected on “the first day of the week” (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:2, Luke 24:1, John 20:1)—the morning of the eighth day. Christ’s Atonement and Resurrection make rebirth possible for each of us. Speaking of Jesus’s mortal ministry, Elder Patrick Kearon recently taught, “Everything He said and did provided a new beginning for each of those He healed, blessed, taught and relieved of sin. . . . All of us can have a new beginning through, and because of, Jesus Christ. Even you. New beginnings are at the heart of the Father’s plan for His children.” This Jesus that went about doing good is the same Lord that appeared in the Old Testament, offering new beginnings there too. And he offers them still today.

My eight-petaled flower ornament is meaningful to me at Christmas, when it reminds me of the new life, light, and hope ushered into the world by the birth of Jesus. But Christ offers us new beginnings every day of the year. His Atonement, death, and Resurrection, which we celebrate during Easter and springtime, provide the ultimate new beginning. Things can be different from what they have been. I can be different from who I have been. “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). At this verdant and abundant time of year, the earth itself reminds us of the miracle of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, which gives each of us the possibility of fresh starts, healing, and new life.

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Jennifer Champoux lives in Colorado with her husband and three children. She is an independent scholar with a primary research interest in the visual culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is a co-author of Picturing Christ: Understanding Depictions of Jesus in History and Art and the creator and director of the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. Previously, she taught art history as adjunct faculty at colleges in Boston and Colorado. She holds a BA in international politics from Brigham Young University and an MA in art history from Boston University.

Images of the Fort Collins Colorado Temple from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we spend a lot of time talking about covenants. We speak of the covenant with our first parents, with Enoch, and especially the covenant with Abraham and Sarah. In the book of Exodus, we find a record of the first covenant that God made with Israel as a whole people. Occasionally overlooked and often misunderstood, the Sinai Covenant is the covenant that the biblical authors are most concerned with. We usually call this covenant the law of Moses. Although the law of Moses can sometimes have a negative reputation among members of the Church (and broader Christianity), this is an unfortunate characterization of the primary way in which Jehovah interacted with his children for centuries.

Back in Exodus 6, as the Lord began the process that would culminate at Mount Sinai, he told Moses what he wanted for Israel: “And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7, KJV). Fundamentally, this is the Old Testament idea of God’s relationship with Israel. Israel is to be Jehovah’s people, and he is their God. All of the commandments, regulations, and covenants that the Lord gave to his people in the scriptures were in service to this bond. When Deuteronomy commands Israel to “love God” (see Deuteronomy 6:5), this love is essentially an expression of the deep relationship that God is forging with Israel.

Thus, when Jehovah brings the people to Mount Sinai and offers them a covenant relationship with him, he elaborates on his purpose behind giving Israel a covenant: “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:4–6). This, then, is the vision of the law of Moses and the Sinai Covenant: “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” The law of Moses should not be understood as a bad law, given to bad people, but was instead a way for the Lord to help Israel, then and now, to become the kind of people that he wants them to be.

Even before Jehovah gives Israel a single commandment, the Israelites affirm, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Rather than describing a people who are wicked and rebellious, Exodus begins with the depiction of a people who are willing to do anything God asks them, even before they know what that is going to be. This is an act of tremendous faith on the part of the Israelites, as they choose to put their trust in a covenant relationship with Jehovah even before they know what the parameters of that bond are going to look like. A covenant with the Lord is not intended to be transactional, where we keep God’s commandments in order to get what we want. It is instead based on our trust in a divine Heavenly Father who wants us to be like him and has prepared a plan to that end. The covenants we make today are part of the plan, and so were the covenants in ancient Israel.

This perspective invites questions on what it means to be a “holy people” and a “kingdom of priests.” The laws in the law of Moses give a clue about this. As it is currently organized in our Bible, the first commandments in Jehovah’s covenant path are what we call the Ten Commandments. These commandments involve regulations about the proper ways to interact with God and proper ways to interact with other human beings. Note that Exodus puts the connection with God first and foremost: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). This is followed by a command against images and idols. These commandments indicate that one of the most important aspects of humanity’s part in the covenant is our faithfulness to God.

This kind of enduring faithfulness is not something that we only feel for God when things are going the way we want them to go. Our covenant with the Lord and his relationship with us is not something we enter into simply to get blessings. God is trying to make his people into something holy, and sometimes that process can be painful. Because of our covenant trust in Jehovah we understand that his cosmic perspective is superior to our own mortal views. The ancient Jewish midrash on Exodus, Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, contains a beautiful expression of the kind of trust enjoined by our covenant connection. This text is a commentary on Exodus 20:20 by Rabbi Akiva, one of the most famous Jewish sages.

R. [Akiva] says: Ye Shall Not Do with Me [Ex. 20:20]. Ye shall not behave towards Me in the manner in which others behave toward their deities. When good comes to them they honor their gods. . . . But when evil comes to them they curse their gods. . . . But ye, if I bring good upon you, give ye thanks, and when I bring suffering upon you, give ye thanks.1

This is not always easy to do, but it is no mistake that trust in God is at the foundation of the covenant path and the beginning of the doctrine of Christ. Sometimes we try to turn something else into Jehovah, like ancient Israel did with the golden calf, but one of the lessons of the revelation on Mt. Sinai is for us to let God be who he really is, rather than who we want or imagine God to be.

Thus, one of the primary purposes of the scriptures is to show us that God is a being in whom we can trust. For the ancient Israelites, the primary saving event was the rescue from Egyptian bondage. We see in Exodus 19 and 20 Jehovah pointing to bringing Israel out with a mighty hand. For us, the primary saving event is the redemption and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We participate weekly in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper so that we can “always remember” what God has done for us. Remembering and focusing on these events and the covenants associated with them help us to appreciate the ways in which God is helping his children become a “kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.”

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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 Isidor Kaufmann (1853–1921).

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We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it.”
—Robert Hass, epigraph to Praise

Imagine a sea captain surveying the southern horizon when a great monster of the deep appears at the ship’s starboard flank. The beast dwarfs his vessel, makes toys of his guns and his instruments. The sight eclipses comprehension. What to do? Before that which utterly exceeds human control, the awestruck captain decides one can only sing its praise.

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Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord, and spake, saying, 
   I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: 
      the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.
   The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: 
      he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; 
      my father’s God, and I will exalt him. (Exodus 15:1–3)

Now imagine Moses and Miriam rejoicing on high ground at the far side of the Red Sea, shouting to be heard above the gale that hurls mighty waves at the shore. Women dance to the rhythm of drums. Their enemy drowns at sea, and their euphoria rises to match the flood. The ocean, awesome and fearful to a landfaring people, has been mastered by a force still more awesome and fearful: the God of Israel. They will praise him.

In the face of staggering power, the sea captain hesitates while Miriam and Moses celebrate. What they agree on, however, is this: Praise is the human response to transcendence.

The poem recorded in Exodus 15, known traditionally as the Song of the Sea, is among the most ancient texts in the Hebrew Bible. In line after line of exultant praise to Jehovah, the song recounts God’s victory over Egypt, his freeing of Israel, and his building of a holy sanctuary where he will plant them and make them flourish. Its three-part story reiterates a core pattern of divine action in the Old Testament: 1) creation, through mastering the ocean’s chaos (see Genesis 1:2 and Psalm 74:13); 2) redemption, as an expression of God’s loving kindness; and 3) restoration of God’s people to his presence in the temple. Each time this pattern appears, it provokes the same response: hymns, dances, songs, poems, and prayers of praise. Just as Miriam dances at the seaside, David dances before the ark (see 2 Samuel 6). Isaiah punctuates the story of a new exodus with hymns of exultation (see Isaiah 51). And the Psalms, Israel’s prayer book, conclude with a great crescendo of unabated praise (see Psalms 145–150).

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O tell us, poet, what you do. –I praise.
Yes, but the deadly and the monstrous phase,
how do you take it, how resist? –I praise.
But the anonymous, the nameless maze,
how summon it, how call it, poet? –I praise.
What right is yours, in all these varied ways,
under a thousand masks yet true? –I praise.
And why do stillness and the roaring blaze,
both star and storm acknowledge you? –because I praise.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “O tell us, poet, what you do,” translated by Walter Arndt

Rilke here announces something else on which the sea captain agrees with the Israelite prophet and prophetess: Praise is the essential work of a poem. The song that Moses and Miriam sing on the banks of the Red Sea is one of the great poems of the Bible. Its enthusiasm is unrestrained:

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Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders? (Exodus 15:11, NRSV henceforth)

It is a model of poetic hyperbole:

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The enemy said, ‘I will pursue; I will overtake;
    I will divide the spoil; my desire shall have its fill of them.
    I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’
You blew with your wind; the sea covered them;
    they sank like lead in the mighty waters. (Exodus 11:9–10)

Its imagery is vivid and fresh, even for readers who encounter it many millennia after its composition. Notice how this passage describes the Lord’s power in terms of the elements earth, fire, wind, and ice:

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Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—
    your right hand [stone or metal], O Lord, shattered the enemy.
In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries;
    you sent out your fury [fire]; it consumed them like stubble.
At the blast of your nostrils [wind] the waters piled up;
    the floods stood up in a heap;
    the deeps congealed [ice] in the heart of the sea. (Exodus 15:6–8)

Good poetry, however, does more than create certain effects with language. Its Greek root poiesis means “making” or “creating.” Poetry aims, through the power of invention in the medium of language, to create something—an idea, an image, a mood, or an experience—that did not exist before. It is because poetry claims the power of creation that its essential work is praise. For praise is simply creation itself gathered from the world and reflected heavenward in the form of speech.

Praise is the basic stuff of religious worship—as ubiquitous at church, it can seem, as ambient noise. It is the substance of communal prayer and hymn. Exodus 15 stages its song of praise in the most dramatic possible setting, but song and prayer are often relegated to transitional formalities in Latter-day Saint sacrament meetings. Compared to the sacred choreography of ordinances or the content richness of sermons, expressions of praise, spoken or sung, can fade into the background.

But praise as a category of worship rewards deeper consideration. Scratch the surface, and questions appear. Why would a self-sufficient, self-existent God desire or command praise from his creatures? What possible purpose could it serve? The Restoration reframes God as a relational being, not a self-existent one, but this is little help on the question of praise: What kind of relationship requires one party to constantly extol the other? Wouldn’t such a dynamic be troubling between parent and child, or husband and wife?

These questions assume that praise is one among God’s several commandments, one act of worship alongside the many that fill our creaturely existence. But praise, according to the Old Testament, is not a way to fill our existence; it is instead the best way to experience our existence. Praise is intrinsic to being a creature.

As best I understand the biblical theology, its logic runs like this: In creating and upholding the world, God imbues all of creation with his glory. Think of this glory as an inner light, or as the logos of reality, or as a divine essence in all things. This light is the creatureliness of creation: the quality of created things as divine ends in themselves. In praise, I notice the creatureliness of the world, and I gather its light together in speech. This is what makes it poetry. Then I reflect that light, as praise, back to God. This is what makes it prayer.

Even in a routine sacrament meeting, this logic is quietly at work. Our hymns and prayers notice and gather the radiance of the created world. In well-worn language, we call on all creatures to lift voice, we name the beauty of the earth, we sing of high mountaintops, we acknowledge the beautiful day. We concentrate in language the glory gathered from creation, and together we reflect it back to the heavens. Like the mirrors in a sealing room, praise is the way we focus, amplify, and reflect divine light. In just this way, I believe, praise is the concrete practice by which the glory of God is made present among us in worship.

The same basic practice structures Exodus 15. Creation is the great archetype of the Song of the Sea, which tells the story of the Israelites’ crossing to safety as a replay of Genesis 1: God subdues the chaos of the Egyptian chariots, divides the waters, and makes dry land appear. The poem notices and names horse and rider as they charge forward, sea and depths as they cover and congeal, wind and floods as they swallow the earth. The created order passes through the song in the act of simply being itself. Miriam and her dancing women, together with Moses and the Israelite elders, then gather and offer creation’s light up to God in their song of praise: “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11).

There’s much more that should be said about praise. In particular, much remains to be said about suffering and praise. Suffering is baked into the created world, and so it, too, must be returned to God, somehow, as praise. The Psalms specialize in this kind of faithful lament, and I’ll pick up this theme in a Reflections essay later in the year. For now, suffice it to say that the sea captain with whom I started this essay is wiser than he knew. The created world is often, indeed, “large, terrifying, and unpredictable.” His hesitation is warranted: The beast does not become less terrifying for being praised. But praise is the only response adequate to the confrontation with transcendent glory. Praise is the spontaneous music of all creatures, great and small, in the presence of their creator’s glory.

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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 Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880).

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There is something prophetically audacious about the Exodus story. Nor is this the only prophetically audacious story in the Old Testament. Just think of David and Goliath, Joshua and Jericho, and Jonah and Nineveh. The message is the same in all of them: God is mightier! God is mightier than Pharaoh. God is mightier than Jericho. God is mightier than Goliath. And God is mightier than Jonah could even imagine.

What do I mean by prophetic audacity? Firstly, there is the sheer scale of the events described in these stories. Exodus tells of millions leaving Egypt (Exodus 12:37), Goliath is impossibly large (1 Samuel 17:4), Jericho seemed impenetrable (Joshua 6:1), and Nineveh was a vast and wicked city (Jonah 1:2). And God’s instruments in such work? A stammerer with a staff, a boy, some wind instruments, and a reluctant prophet.

I mean prophetic, in part, because these accounts are not just about God’s work in the past, but more about looking forward to future fulfillment and future hope. Nephi captures the essence of the kind of hope inspired by the prophetic audacity of the Exodus story:

And it came to pass that I spake unto my brethren, saying: Let us go up again unto Jerusalem, and let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; for behold he is mightier than all the earth, then why not mightier than Laban and his fifty, yea, or even than his tens of thousands?

Therefore let us go up; let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through, out of captivity, on dry ground, and the armies of Pharaoh did follow and were drowned in the waters of the Red Sea.

Now behold ye know that this is true. (1 Nephi 4:1–3)

When believers find themselves in extremis, pushed to their limits, to the edge of reason and beyond, it is often the hope found in the stories of prophetic audacity that carries them through, sustaining the life of faith. But for that sustenance to persist, the stories need to remain present and real. This real presence is maintained through ritual and narrative.

There has been scholarly debate over the priority of ancient Jewish narrative and ritual.1 [1] What we find in the book of Exodus is the two woven together and reinforcing each other. But they are woven together in such a way that scholars have been able to detect the seams. One indicator of a narrative seam in the book of Exodus is a shift in genre. This happens several times, as in Exodus 15, which incorporates a long and beautiful Hebrew poem that describes the Exodus in distinct and compelling ways (Exodus 15:1–18).2 [2]

In the case of Exodus 12, the genre shift is from narrative to law. But it is not a complete shift; rather, it is a weaving of narrative and law, as a comparison with Deuteronomy 16:1–8 shows. Thematically, the chapter introduces ritual instruction into the narrative in a way that almost breaks the fourth wall. This is no longer a simple narration of the Exodus story, nor is it the kind of strict presentation of Jewish law and ritual that we find later in the Pentateuch. It is as though the narrator is looking beyond Moses and Aaron, and even beyond the “the whole congregation of Israel” (Exodus 12:3), to the author’s own community and their posterity (Exodus 12:24–25). But even to say “author” is problematic, because scholars see this chapter developing over time rather than being the product of a single author. But we can imagine an editor like Mormon, who is writing long after the events he narrates.

The chapter begins with the Lord telling Moses and Aaron that the Exodus from Egypt is an event of such significance that it resets time (Exodus 12:2). The month of the Exodus is to become the first month and each month was simply numbered after that, as a constant reminder of their redemption (e.g., Exodus 16:1). This chapter thus reintroduces the idea of sacred time first found in creation. The year will now be marked by liturgical celebrations linked to the salvation history of Israel, beginning with the Exodus. Elsewhere in the Pentateuch, we are told that the Exodus is commemorated by the Feast of Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Deuteronomy 16:1–8; Leviticus 23:5–6). But here is the origin story, a story that will be recalled at the annual celebration of the Passover and Unleavened Bread festivals and reinforced by these festivals being embodied and reenacted. This chapter weaves together story and ritual to create the earliest memories of the “congregation of Israel.”

Story and ritual are also reinforced by memory and remembering. And generational remembering is promoted through a culture of questions. And those questions produced a culture of answers that give reasons for the hope of Israel. This culture of questions is enacted in Exodus 12 where it says, “And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this observance?’ you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses’” (Exodus 12:26–27, NRSV). This is no longer a direct narrative or an indirect narrative, but imagined future narratives. Now we understand more of what was meant in the previous verse, which states, “You shall observe this rite as a perpetual ordinance for you and your children” (Exodus 12:24). The ordinance is establishing intergenerational links through recursive liturgical practices.

The culture of answers and the integrity of narrative and ritual are exemplified in Exodus 12, but also elsewhere. Consider, for example, Deuteronomy 26:5–8, where the narrative of the Exodus is woven into a different liturgical setting, the bringing of the first fruits of the harvest to the temple:

Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.

But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor.

Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression.

So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders.

He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Deuteronomy 26:5–9, NIV)

The Jewish liturgical year reinforced the memory of narratives of prophetic audacity that gave the community hope and resilience.

Prophetic audacity is similarly kept alive in the Christian tradition through narrative and ritual. And it is this context that we tell the most prophetically audacious story of all—the story of the life, suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. This story is our Good News, and it describes another once-and-future event, like Passover and the Exodus. For Latter-day Saints, this Good News, this gospel (3 Nephi 27:13–16), is the reason we give for the hope that is within us.

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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 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882).

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According to British theologian J. G. Davies, the development of Holy Week in the Christian tradition was all about a reconceptualization of time. This change coincided with the conversion of Constantine (d. 337) and the first Council of Nicaea (325).1 In the three centuries before Nicaea, the Christian attitude to time was shaped by their conviction that they were living “in the last times” (1 Peter 1:20). This belief was pervasive in the early Christian sources, fueled by persistent persecution and the minority status of Christians within the Roman Empire.2 Early Christians lived outside of time and in a state of love and fear. So says Ignatius of Antioch: “These are the last times. Henceforth let us have reverence; let us fear the long-suffering of God, lest it turn into a judgment against us. For either let us fear the wrath which is to come or let us love the grace which now is—the one or the other; provided only that we be found in Christ Jesus unto true life.”

After the conversion of Constantine, Christians began to live in time. Christianity was now in the world, and the story of Christianity quickly began to sacralize history, as seen in the Life of Constantine and Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339). Christians not only made history sacred, but time itself. The year became a memorial of the life of Christ, divided into several seasons: Advent (the season leading up to Christmas); Christmas (beginning with the nativity of Christ); Epiphany (the appearance of Christ to the world, represented by the visit of the Magi); Lent (the preparation for Easter); Holy Week (from Palm Sunday to Easter Saturday); and Easter (from the Sunday of Resurrection to Pentecost). The year became a temporal temple, a school for learning of Christ, with Holy Week as the Holy of Holies. But Holy Week and the liturgical year were about more than remembering. “The purpose of Holy Week,” says Professor Davies, “was identical with that of the whole liturgical year: it was to enable the worshippers to live with Christ.”3

The liturgical year involves fasting and feasting, mourning and rejoicing, songs of joy and laments of sorrow. The scriptures are read and preached throughout the year, both the Old and the New Testaments, because the Old Testament was understood to be an extended prophecy of Christ. So, for example, during Holy Week, congregations might read the story of the Binding of Isaac and the story of Joseph because they were both understood to foreshadow the life of Christ: Gen. 22:1–19 (Good Friday or Holy Saturday); Gen. 37:1–36 (Maundy Thursday); Gen. 40:1–23 (Good Friday); Gen. 42:3–43:14 (Holy Saturday); Gen. 43:15–45:13 (Easter Day). Time was now sacred, oriented around the life and atoning mission of Jesus.

Latter-day Saints, like the earliest Christians, long remembered Christ’s atonement weekly through the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.4 Easter, however, has recently become more central to our own liturgical year. What began as recognizing a holy week has now become the celebration of Holy Week.5 We Latter-day Saints now talk about, study, and commemorate “the events of Holy Week.”6 This is part of the ongoing restoration, as Elder Stevenson taught just last year:

Now let us contemplate the significance of Easter. In recent First Presidency messages concerning Easter, we have been challenged to “celebrate the Resurrection of our living Savior by studying His teachings and helping to establish Easter traditions in our society as a whole, especially within our own families.” In short, we have been encouraged to move to a higher and holier celebration of Easter.

I love continuing revelation concerning Easter and am gratified for your many efforts to make Easter a sacred and holy occasion. In addition to holding a one-hour sacrament meeting on Easter Sunday, other examples of worthy activities include ward and stake devotionals and activities on Palm Sunday as well as during Holy Week.7

We are, however, not simply adopting the Christian liturgical year. Elder Gong reminds us that the sacred time of the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ coincides with the sacred timing of the Restoration:

Each Easter spring season testifies that spiritual sequence and convergence are both part of the divine pattern of atonement, resurrection, and restoration through Jesus Christ. This sacred and symbolic convergence comes not by accident or coincidence. Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter celebrate Christ’s Atonement and Resurrection. As today, every April 6 we commemorate the establishment and organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Thus, embracing Holy Week is part of a distinctly Latter-day Saint theology of sacred time. Christ is still at the center, and his saving work is the object of our highest celebration. But that work continued when the Father and the Son appeared to the boy prophet in 1820 and again when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established in 1830. The restoration adds to sacred time, rather than subtracting from it. So, we can certainly benefit from following and learning about the liturgical year celebrated by our Christian brothers and sisters. But the yearly celebration of the work of salvation will surely continue to expand so long as we “believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” (Articles of Faith 1:9).

Holy Week Study Resources

Holy Week Study Experience: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/easter-plan?lang=eng

Invitation to Holy Week: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/welcome/easter?lang=eng

Come Unto Christ during Holy Week: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/easter/holy-week

HearHim this Holy Week: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/ph/holy-week

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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 from the Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch (c. 1490).

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“Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8, KJV).

In one short sentence, the Hebrew Bible sets the stage for what is arguably the most influential story in human history. Many ages after its ancient roots were committed to writing, the Exodus continues to hold a central role in the three major Abrahamic faiths, and it is as vital and active today as it ever was. If there is a story that has moved more bodies, traveled more places, lifted more hearts, inspired more retellings, spawned more meanings, or changed more worlds, I don’t know what it is.

Our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:1–4).

With these words, Paul sets the stage for one of the most consequential narrative adaptations in human history. Paul’s account of Christ’s death and Resurrection, an account that would shape all subsequent Christian theology, is, in essence, a retelling of the Exodus. The world presently groans under slavery, the Apostle explains, but Christ has come to liberate us and lead us into a new world of freedom. Slaves no longer, we are, in Christ, adopted heirs of God. The Exodus was the first—and remains the foremost—metaphor for Christian salvation.

(In the Restoration’s expanded canon, the award for first explicitly Christian theological adaptation of the Exodus probably goes to Lehi’s son Jacob. In an important sermon interpreting Isaiah in light of his father’s messianic prophecies, Jacob alludes to the Israelites’ captivity and deliverance in Egypt when he says that “death and hell must deliver up their dead, and hell must deliver up its captive spirits, and the grave must deliver up its captive bodies, and the bodies and the spirits of men will be restored one to the other; and it is by the power of the resurrection of the Holy One of Israel” [2 Nephi 9:12].)

Long before it was theology, though, the Exodus was the story of a people’s suffering. With spare, penetrating detail, the Hebrew Bible conveys the depth of Israelite humiliation and anguish. Pharaoh presses the people into hard labor in the construction of the royal cities of Pithom and Rameses. He adds irony to cruelty by making them raise monuments to his own oppression. They break their backs to make bricks, set mortar, and labor in the fields. The slave masters work them ruthlessly—that is, without “ruth,” or compassion, regardless of any human cost. Whips and quotas are the tools of exploitation: Production quotas drive their feverish labor even when the necessary materials are denied, and whips beat their exhausted bodies when they fail to produce. Their hearts and minds suffer no less: The text observes the Israelites’ initial apathy at the prospect of liberation “because of their discouragement and harsh labor” (Exodus 6:9, NIV).

It’s no wonder, then, that “the Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out” (Exodus 2:23, NIV). And it’s no wonder that Exodus 1–6 has spoken with a plain and powerful indignation to oppressed peoples in all times and places. Enslaved African Americans sang:

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land

Tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go. . . .

O let us all from bondage flee: let my people go

And let us all in Christ be free: let my people go.

In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass rebukes those who cite these songs “as evidence of [enslaved peoples’] contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

The epic story of Israelite slavery contained in the opening chapters of Exodus provided some measure of dignity and accompaniment to enslaved Americans in conditions of unthinkable injustice—and it has done the same for more downtrodden souls, in more circumstances of suffering and cruelty, than any archive could ever recover.

Now I add a second brief observation to my first point about the Israelites’ enslavement. It will seem unrelated at first, but I’ll bring the two points together in the end.

In these chapters, a large cast of women ensures Moses’s physical survival. Time after time, we see women go to extraordinary lengths to save a life that, as of yet, is just one of a teeming Hebrew cohort. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah cannily defy Pharaoh’s infanticide decree and preserve the entire generation of which Moses is a part. Jochebed, Moses’s mother, risks her life for months to conceal her infant—and then, with perfect faith, entrusts her child to the waters meant to drown him. Miriam intervenes with bold wit at precisely the right moment to return the baby to his mother’s arms. Pharaoh’s daughter, for her part, recognizes that the child is Hebrew and saves him in defiance of her father’s decree. She goes so far as to memorialize her act of salvation in the name she gives the baby: “I drew him out of the water.” Finally, Zipporah, Moses’s Midianite wife, saves his life yet again in the cryptic episode of chapter 4, when she performs the priestly rite of covenantal circumcision that Moses himself seems to have left undone. Without these women, there is no Moses; without Moses, there is no Exodus.

I draw a simple lesson from the story of Moses’s early life: Women and men need each other for the survival of their mutual society. The first chapters of Exodus seem to suggest that, with the cooperation of the sexes, a people can thrive even against the headwinds of extreme political or economic adversity—as the Israelites’ demographic vigor in Egypt illustrates. And the amity of the sexes is needed not just for sexual procreation and the formation of families, though that is foundational. Men and women must further cooperate as friends and fellow laborers to serve and preserve human life in all circumstances. Men and women must offer their comparative strengths in service to one another and also, when called upon, must act beyond their wont to do what is needed. This is the lesson of Shiphrah and Puah, Jochebed and Miriam, the princess and the priestess, who, together with Amram, Jethro, and Aaron, saved the life of a slave’s infant child. All unknown to them, that child would one day stand before a burning bush and ask the name of God.

This, too, is the lesson of Frederick and Harriet, heroes of Black liberation in our own history. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were acquainted through their abolitionist work and regarded one another with respect. Both were born into slavery on Maryland’s eastern shore. Douglass became the orator, writer, and statesman, while Tubman acted directly to save individuals and lead them to freedom. In 1868, Douglass wrote to Tubman and assured her that

You ask for what you do not need when you call upon me for a word of commendation. I need such words from you far more than you can need them from me . . . . The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You on the other hand have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. . . . The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.1

God is our first and final liberator. The Savior whom Moses knew as “I Am,” Paul introduced to the world under the name of Jesus Christ. But, as revealed by a modern prophet who wielded a rod like Moses (2 Nephi 3:17), the saving work of God proceeds by means of small-s saviors, men and women who labor as fellows in the day and in the night: in the temple, in the fields, in the clinic and the classroom and the council room. Among the lives we save and serve may well be those who, when it is most needful, lead us out from bondage into freedom.

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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 Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937).

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I am a middle child, so I know a little about being overlooked. Even the Bible overlooks middle children! Well, mostly. Judah is a famous exception, as is Miriam. But that’s beside the point. The Bible, especially the book of Genesis, is much more concerned about the older-younger dynamic, and mostly about the younger subverting the place of the older. There is also a lot of favoritism. A middle child notices these things too, because it’s always happening to someone else. I’m over it. I’m just saying that I notice it.

I have been thinking about the question of favoritism in the book of Genesis. Favoritism is tricky, mostly because it seems that God is complicit (see Romans 9:13, quoting Malachi 1:2–3). Well, complicit is perhaps too loaded a term. Let’s just say that there is a theology of chosenness present in the book of Genesis that sets the stage for the rest of the Bible, including the New Testament. Being chosen by God is wonderful, naturally, but it’s sort of a package deal, and the package always has some surprises. Realizing this has been the key to me finding peace with being a middle child! But this isn’t about me. It’s about Joseph, Benjamin, and Jacob (and his other sons), and the persistence of favoritism, and the role of recognition, and reconciliation in Genesis 42–50.

Let’s start with Benjamin, who has an outsized role in the story for someone who says nothing. Firstly, Jacob refuses to send him down to Egypt with his ten other sons, “since he feared that he might meet with disaster” (Genesis 42:4; all quotations from the revised JPS version). Then he refuses to send him on the second journey, referring to Benjamin as “my son” and Joseph as “his brother” (Genesis 42:38), as though Benjamin was his lone surviving son. Only when Jacob’s entire household faces extinction does he let Benjamin go to Egypt, saying, with an air of resignation, “As for me, if I am to be bereaved, I shall be bereaved” (Genesis 43:13–14). Joseph continues the pattern by giving Benjamin a larger portion than his brothers (Genesis 43:34). So, favoritism is still in play even after all the trouble it caused in the first half of the story! What changes is the brothers’ reaction to Joseph and Benjamin and their attitude towards their father, and recognizing this change is ultimately what triggers Joseph to reveal his true identity.

Several kinds of recognition happen in this part of the Joseph story, all essential to its tension and pathos. Joseph recognizes his brothers, but they don’t recognize him (Genesis 42:8). Joseph recognizes that the dreams have not yet been fulfilled (Genesis 42:9) and so orchestrates a way to get all the brothers in his presence at once to fulfill his first dream (see Genesis 37:5–8). Joseph also recognizes that the brothers are contrite or at least feel culpable (Genesis 42:21–24). But notice how it takes the brothers’ contrition to move him to tears, while just seeing Benjamin is enough (Genesis 43:29–30). Finally, though, it is when Joseph recognizes Judah’s compassion towards Benjamin and Jacob (Genesis 44:18–34), that he makes himself known to his brothers (Genesis 45:1). He seems to be waiting for this transformation and not just the fulfillment of the first dream, which already happened earlier (Genesis 43:26; 44:14).

Finally, Joseph recognized God’s hand in his life journey, and so could comfort and reconcile with his brothers, even after all they had done (Genesis 45:3–8). Implicit in this last recognition is a deep understanding that chosenness is not about favoritism. There is certainly blatant favoritism in the book of Genesis (see Genesis 25:27–28). But chosenness is not just about having a special relationship or being preferred, but more about performing a special, life-giving work. Joseph recognized this: “God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance” (Genesis 45:7). It took another seventeen years, though, before his brothers recognized that Joseph had genuinely been transformed by understanding this principle of chosenness (Genesis 50:15–21).

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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 Marc Chagall (1887–1985).

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I’m trying to think more carefully about how I encounter the Bible. I am by nature an intellectual magpie. I’m always on the lookout for some beautiful thing that I can pick up and take back to my nest of a brain. When it comes to the Bible, this eclectic approach is built into my biography. I was raised as a Latter-day Saint. I have an undergraduate degree in Jewish History, a master’s in Syriac studies, and a PhD in theology. My spiritual worldview is informed by this intellectual journey. What’s more, I feel like I belong to a religious tradition that is intrinsically additive. As Joseph Smith wrote from Liberty Jail in 1839, “the first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation.” This approach has merits. My mind is filled with lovely things!

But I’ve started to think more about the integrity of these lovely things, and how interconnected they are with their historical context and the intellectual and spiritual worlds that produced them. If I am to pursue truth without limitation, I also need to consider the next step that Joseph Smith suggested and embrace the truth of something “when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.” The approach that I’m adopting involves reading the Bible less eclectically and more deliberately. I still want to benefit from the insights of a variety of readers inside and outside my Latter-day Saint tradition, but I want to try to understand ideas that I find compelling within the worlds that produced them. For me, this increasingly looks like reading four different Bibles. Let me try and show you, however imperfectly and provisionally, what I mean by this.

I. The Bible of Ancient Jews

Ancient Jews accepted the traditional Mosaic authorship of Genesis (and the rest of the Pentateuch). Scripture was inspired, but it also invited interpretation. Ancient Jews often interpreted the Bible by retelling its stories, but with additions. These additions, called narrative expansions, have an exegetical core. They start from a desire to resolve a specific problem in, or a question raised by, a close reading of the text of the Bible.

An engaging entry point into the world of ancient Jewish reading practices is James Kugel’s In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (Harvard, 1990). In this book, Kugel reverse engineers the exegetical processes at play in several Jewish narrative expansions. A compelling example is “The Assembly of Ladies” motif discussed in chapter 2. This motif describes a gathering of Egyptian ladies at the home of Mrs. Potiphar. The ladies are given food (citrus or bread) and knives to eat with, and as they begin to use the knives, Mrs. Potiphar invites Joseph into the room, and when the ladies see him, they cut themselves because they are so stunned by his good looks.

This evocative motif is introduced by later rabbinic exegetes to explain two subtle textual problems in Genesis 39. Some used it to resolve a tension in the opening words of Genesis 39:7, “And it came to pass after these things . . . .” The rabbis asked what “things” were being referred to. The contents of the preceding verse did not offer an answer to that question. So, they inserted a narrative expansion showing that this meeting of ladies was the “things” being referred to in verse 7. The addition of this motif solves the textual problem and moves the narrative forward—now that Mrs. Potiphar’s friends have acknowledged the irresistibility of her new slave, she was free to pursue him without shame. In other sources, however, the assembly of ladies is used to reinterpret Genesis 39:14. In this verse, Mrs. Potiphar calls out to her servants and says, “Look, he had to bring us a Hebrew to dally with us!” (Revised JPS). This seems to be a non sequitur, so in a clever move, the rabbis added temporal space between verse 13 and verse 14, and in that space, Mrs. Potiphar shows her friends just how dangerous it was to have such a man in the household. It is when they see Joseph and cut their hands that Mrs. Potiphar speaks the words of verse 14. Notice in both examples how the rabbis read the Bible carefully and creatively. They noticed narrative gaps and expanded the narrative to fill them.

II. The Bible of Ancient Christians

The Hebrew Bible was sacred scripture for ancient Jewish readers, including Jesus and his earliest followers. It eventually (in translation) became the Old Testament of the Christians, with the New Testament writings providing the key to understanding the Old. That key is Jesus, as Jesus himself taught on the road to Emmaus: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:25, NIV). This key transformed the text for Christian readers. Over centuries, they developed an intricate matrix of typological connections between Jesus and Old Testament figures and stories, a process evident already in the Gospel of Matthew.

Early Christians celebrated Joseph as a glorious type of Christ, especially those Christians writing in Syriac (the subject of my first published article). The life of Joseph typified the persecution, death, resurrection, and return of Jesus. Joseph’s brothers and Potiphar’s wife typify those who wrongly persecuted Joseph. The pit in the desert and the prison in Egypt typify the grave, and Joseph’s ascension to the position of regent typifies the resurrection of Jesus and his glorious return. The judgment is typified by the brothers coming before Joseph. The typology is much more granular than I’ve suggested here, with dozens of connections being made between the life of Joseph and the life and mission of Jesus. Early Syriac Christians reveled in this kind of exegetical work. The Old Testament thus becomes for Christians an extended prophecy of Christ, with careful reading over centuries being devoted to elucidating those prophetic foreshadowings.

III. The Bible of the Latter-day Saints

Early Christians read the Old Testament through the lens of the New. Similarly, Latter-day Saints read the Old and New Testaments through the lens of Restoration scripture and the words of living prophets. Thus, when Latter-day Saints read the story of Joseph in Genesis, they think both of Jesus and Joseph Smith; Jesus because of the New Testament and Joseph Smith because of the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Mormon, we learn that Joseph in Egypt was not simply a dreamer and interpreter of dreams, but a great prophet who prophesied concerning his posterity. And this posterity included both Lehi and Joseph Smith Jr. (2 Nephi 3). Thus, the Book of Mormon is both written and translated by and for the posterity of Joseph in Egypt (2 Nephi 3:11–12).

When I read Genesis 39 through this restoration lens, I get a richer sense of what was at stake in Joseph’s sojourn in Egypt, including his encounter with Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:9. What kept him from that “great wickedness”? In Jewish tradition, Joseph is fortified by a vision of his father Jacob. For Christians, Joseph resisted and overcame Potiphar’s wife, like Jesus resisted and overcame death and Hades. For Latter-day Saints, the stakes are generational: Joseph was being true to the “great” covenants that God made with him and his posterity (2 Nephi 3:4), and he was strengthened by the revelations that he had of his posterity and their role in the salvation history of the world. For Latter-day Saints, the story of Joseph in Genesis is not simply an account of the salvation of Jacob’s family, or a foreshadowing of Christ, though it is both of those things—it is also the story of the great progenitor of the Restoration, who foresaw the “marvelous work and a wonder” that is the Latter-day restored gospel.

IV. The Bible of the Scholars

Biblical studies is a scientific discipline that has developed over the last three centuries. Certain assumptions are accepted as axiomatic. For example, the Hebrew Bible is an Ancient Near Eastern text that is best understood in conversation with its literary and material context. The books of the Hebrew Bible, as we now have them, are also recognized to be the product of a complex literary and redactional process that extended from the late second millennium BC into the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Biblical scholars read the biblical text with every bit as much detail as their ancient Christian and Jewish predecessors, but the questions they ask, the answers they find, and the stakes of the project are quite different. Biblical studies is a thrilling intellectual endeavor, in no small part because of how it informs or challenges traditional ways of reading the Bible among Jews, Christians, and Latter-day Saints.

Though there is disagreement about the literary formation of the Joseph story, all scholars consider it a beautiful, sophisticated, and poignant work of ancient literature. But readers of the story can’t help wondering about chapter 38. Why would an editor interrupt such a compelling and coherent narrative with a tale that seems to be unrelated either temporally or thematically? Scholars are on high alert in the presence of such disruptions in the biblical narrative. Many have simply concluded that it is an odd interpolation. The tenor of this scholarship is captured in a much-quoted passage by Walter Brueggemann: “This peculiar chapter stands alone, without connection to its context. It is isolated in every way and is most enigmatic.”

But scholars constantly circle back to such textual problems, bringing new tools and insights. Of note is the application of a literary approach to the text, best seen in the opening chapter of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 2011). Through this lens, Alter shows that rather than being an odd interpolation, Genesis 38 is a sophisticated interlocutor with the story of Joseph, with thematic parallels, contrasts, and verbal links to the rest of the story. The clearest link is in the act of recognition, using the same Hebrew verb, in Genesis 38:25–26 and Genesis 37:32–33, and then again later in Genesis 42:7–8. The disruptions have not been erased; through careful reading of the text, scholars have also shown the splendid complexity and coherence of the narrative.

I feel so grateful to share the experience of studying the Bible with ancient Jews, early Christians, my fellow Latter-day Saints, and modern biblical scholars. I feel part of a common quest to slow down, read carefully, and seek understanding about the Bible, which for so many readers is really a quest to recognize God at work anciently and today. I find so much beauty and insight there. And I am excited to continue my quiet quest to understand my fellow readers in their own contexts and traditions of reading, hoping in the process to add to my store of truth and understanding.

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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 Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911).

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Jacob is exactly the kind of morally ambiguous smart-aleck that audiences love to cheer for. He’s a fast thinker who knows when his brother will be most susceptible to aromas from the kitchen (Genesis 25). He’s a shrewd impersonator who hoodwinks his aging father just as the estate is being settled (Genesis 27). And he hatches a get-rich-quick scheme that wasn’t a lie, per se, but also wasn’t a forthright explanation of what exactly he was doing out in those fields with his father-in-law’s cattle (Genesis 30). It’s not for nothing that Jacob is sometimes nicknamed the “trickster.”

But my favorite story in the Jacob cycle (and my favorite story in scripture) is the moment when Jacob comes clean—when all the scheming comes to an end and Jacob confronts the one person he can’t trick or hoodwink or dodge or outwit. In Genesis 32, Jacob comes face to face with God when he least expects it.

At this point in the story, we readers are hardly expecting to find God either; when the chapter opens, we’re preparing for a very different confrontation. We find Jacob on the borders of his brother’s territory, about to see Esau for the first time in over a decade. And he’s clearly worried that the intervening years have done little to cool Esau’s rage (see Genesis 27:42). Most of the chapter is occupied with precautions and bribes and carefully worded messages—a whole pageantry of conciliation. Jacob’s opening bid is a letter about how much has changed and how much might now be water under the bridge (Genesis 32:4–5)—only to learn, in return, that Esau is coming to meet him with what looks like an army: four hundred men who will arrive the next day (Genesis 32:6). And so Jacob starts planning for contingencies. He divides his family into two groups, ensuring that even if Esau’s army kills one, at least the other will have time to flee (Genesis 32:7–8). His prayers start to take on an edge of desperation as he begs God for deliverance (Genesis 32:9–12). And he makes a series of “presents” for Esau—an absurd number of cattle delivered in successive stages (Genesis 32:13–20), each designed to ease tensions and soften hearts before the final face-to-face reunion.

Jacob, you see, is trying to do what he has always done: to game the situation, to use his wits to come out on top. Although his desire for reconciliation is genuine, his methods still tend toward the theatrical. He composes and arranges, packages and stages, gives and flatters and then, finally, the whole day spent in planning and pageantry, Jacob sends his family across a nearby river for safety and lies down to rest.

Hoping, surely, for a good night’s sleep, he gets the opposite. Jacob is jumped by “a man” who starts “wrestl[ing] with him” (Genesis 32:24, NRSV). Lone sleepers in the desert naturally attract bandits, but Jacob soon learns that this is no ordinary thug. This “man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Genesis 32:24, NRSV). When Jacob puts up a fight, the stranger sticks around. For hours. Instead of eight hours of shut-eye, Jacob gets eight hours in the ring. Anticipating that his soonest strenuous activity would be wrangling with his estranged brother in broad daylight, Jacob finds himself sizing up a complete stranger in total darkness instead.

But make no mistake—this was no dream, nor metaphor, nor even a spiritually symbolic visionary encounter. The text tells us that it was emphatically physical. Physical enough, at least, that when Jacob puts up a prize-winning fight and day starts to dawn and the stranger wants to break away, he has to blow Jacob’s thigh out of joint to do it (Genesis 32:25). For all the ambiguity around this story and the identity of the wrestler, we can at least say this much: spiritual metaphors don’t leave you limping.

Injury notwithstanding, Jacob holds enough ground to demand a blessing from this stranger. “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me,” he says (Genesis 32:26, KJV). “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob,” the stranger replies, “but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (Genesis 32:28).

It’s at this point that the story’s ambiguities really start to spiral out of control. For instance: who won? Jacob certainly managed to prevent the stranger from escaping (Genesis 32:25–26), but the text goes on to show that the stranger isn’t actually as cowed as he seems; Jacob cannot force him to reveal his name (Genesis 32:29). Speaking of names, how should we understand Jacob’s new title? “Israel” can be translated “let God prevail.” But another translation—the one the stranger points to in verse 28—is “he who prevails with God.” So who, exactly, has done the “prevailing” here? Did God prevail with Jacob, or did Jacob prevail with God? And, while we’re at it, who was this mysterious wrestler, in the end? Tradition likes to assign the role to an angel, but Jacob insists that he’s seen God in this event: “Jacob called the name of the place Peniel [or: ‘face of God’], for I have seen God face to face” (Genesis 32:30). Did Jacob wrestle with a man? An angel? God himself?

Personally, I like that the passage backs off here, refusing to give us answers. It’s wonderfully rich, this private moment when Jacob is embraced through the veil, sees the face of God, receives a new name, and leaves from the encounter a fundamentally different person. It’s appropriate, I think, that so much of the scene remains shrouded in mystery.

But as the story emerges out of its nighttime ambiguity, I am just as taken by its ordinary, mundane, breathlessly beautiful final moment.

“As [Jacob] passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh” (Genesis 32:31). Jacob limps into the dawn of his reconciliation with Esau. When he faces his brother he will do so not as the mighty tribe-leader he had projected, but as a cripple. And yet, precisely because of his wrestle, he will have a deeper source of confidence than he could have won for himself with all of his quick thinking and smooth talking. Jacob no longer has to fear Esau, because he’s prevailed with God. He doesn’t have to keep up the theatrics, because he’s had an encounter with something that really matters, that outstrips the pageantry of this world. He may bear the marks of that encounter for the rest of his life, but because he can confront his brother in weakness—and with a God-given confidence in that weakness—he is far more ready for the reconciliation to come than he had been eight hours before.

We have all had our shares of nighttime wrestles. God has a way of meeting us there, alone and sad on kitchen linoleum, or hiding despondently under bedcovers, or pacing back and forth on quiet city streets under streetlamps and stars—nighttime struggles that threaten to break you, where you are so evenly matched that you must strain to the very edge of your capacity. Wrestling with God: I know of no better analogy for what my hardest moments have been like. I also know of no better analogy for the tenacity that calls down heaven’s greatest blessings.

God did not give Jacob confidence in the shape of a triumphant win, a clear victory in the middle of the night to boost his ego. God gave Jacob a limp and sent him hobbling off to face his brother in uncoverable weakness, bearing the new wisdom that, in God and his grace, there is nothing to fear, and that weakness is not something to be covered or gamed. Jacob was prevented from meeting his brother in the strength he had hoped to project. Esau will meet a version of Jacob that is older and feebler, less dazzlingly witty, certainly less rested. There will be bags under his eyes and a hobble to his step. But maybe, too, there will be a strange expression, dazed and far-off, but also—for the first time?—unguarded.

Jacob’s story gives us no promise that our encounters with God will be safe, or tame, or tidy. You might well walk away with a limp. You might hobble for the rest of your life. But the promise of Jacob’s story is that you can know even these marks as a grace, because God reached down and swept your stories aside and brought you right up to the brink of what really mattered. A wrestle? To be sure: you strained and sweat and hated every second of it. But like Jacob, if you managed to keep your eyes open, in it you saw the face of God. More importantly: it left you ready to finally see the face of your brother.

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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 Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).

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What do you do when reading the scriptures makes you uncomfortable? Genesis 18–23 includes narratives that feel foreign to me, sometimes hard to engage. I sense they are heavily loaded with meaning, but I struggle to access it. It’s particularly uncomfortable to read about suffering and not fully understand it.

Often these stories become more approachable when I seek additional context—cultural, historical, literary, etc. As a Visiting Fellow at the Maxwell Institute, I am currently blessed with colleagues just down the hall who can help me gain some of that context. My home department is Philosophy, where I mostly engage analytic texts and arguments that aim for clarity and specificity of meaning. I can approach them like complicated math problems: systematically, step by step, with confidence that all the information needed to understand the argument is there. By contrast, ancient scripture feels at least as dense with meaning between the lines as in the text itself! I appreciate the expertise of my colleagues as I try to learn some of what God offers in the rich scriptural traditions of the Old Testament.

But I also believe that God intends to speak to us through the scriptures whether we have access to expertise or not. There is one story in this week’s Come, Follow Me that I do find fairly straightforward. The thing is, this story also makes me uncomfortable. It is the Akedah, the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

I am grateful for the interpretive tools I’ve been taught to apply to this story. God never intended harm to come to Isaac; rather, Abraham needed this test of faith and obedience.1 Additionally, the Book of Mormon teaches that the story is one of many types of Christ found in the Old Testament. The narrative is “a similitude of God and his Only Begotten Son”; like the law of Moses, it builds faith by “pointing our souls to [Christ]” (Jacob 4:5).

Thinking of the event as a test or considering it allegorically helps me extract theological value from the text. But I’ve also noticed that reading through these interpretive lenses allows me to put distance between my heart and the uncomfortable parts of the story. I wonder if I use these interpretive lenses to sidestep reading the story from the perspective that feels most natural to me: that of a parent.

When I think of Abraham placing wood for a burnt offering on Isaac, seeing the trust in his son’s eyes, I think of my own son’s eyes. But then my stomach turns and my chest tightens. I don’t want to stay in that moment, or the moments that follow. Abraham binds his son, lays him on the altar, takes the knife in his hand. I want a reason to look away from that experience, replace it with some grander purpose. I want meaning to soften the edges of the story of a parent accepting the necessity of killing his own child.

Do I miss something when I rush past that discomfort?

When Mary came to Jesus mourning her brother’s death, Jesus knew that he would raise Lazarus. He had understanding that could have allowed him to avoid discomfort. But Jesus did not rush past the feelings of that moment. He wept with Mary and the other mourners (John 11:32–36).

I think of the moment in Moses 7, when Enoch sees God weep over the pain his children cause one another. Enoch is initially surprised, asking God three times, “How canst thou weep?” (see Moses 7:28–31). Even though Enoch is in the midst of a vision that lays bare the great tragedies of the human family, he trusts that God can make it all right. He seems to assume that God has too much power and knowledge to be hurt by the suffering they witness together.

Imagine seeing a friend cry because their children are hurting one another. It would be strange if we responded to their tears with surprise. Even if this friend was very wise and able to see things from an eternal perspective, we would understand their deep sorrow at their children’s suffering. And we would understand that our role as their friend would be to mourn with them—to witness their pain, validate it, and share in it.

As Moses 7 proceeds, Enoch’s surprise is replaced with this kind of shared mourning. He listens to God explain the reasons for his emotional response (Moses 7:32–41). Through the remainder of the vision, we see Enoch emotionally in tune with God, mirroring his feelings. Remarkably, God invites and empowers Enoch to empathize with him.

Is it possible that Genesis 22 is another instance of God inviting one of his children to empathize with him? James 2:23 teaches us that “Abraham believed God . . . and he was called the Friend of God.”2 True friendship surely involves reciprocal empathy. Abraham’s ability to reciprocate God’s love for him increased when he better understood what it was like for his friend to choose to sacrifice a child.

I want to be a friend to God. How does he invite me to reciprocate the empathic love he has for me? Abraham’s story offers insight into part of God’s felt experience. I think all of scripture can function that way. God wants us to look at one another as he looks at us. His children, in every time and circumstance, are his work and his glory (Moses 1:39). I want my efforts to engage scripture to show God that I am striving to understand him and share in his love for his children.

God has always used feeling to teach us.3 Perhaps this is why Joseph Smith warned against the “contraction of feeling.” As I continue to study the Old Testament, I will still ask questions about context and meaning. I will seek the eternal perspective that we all need to make sense of the suffering in the world. But I hope I will resist any impulse to avoid discomfort by “contracting” my feelings as I read. Opening my heart to feeling, both comfort and discomfort, makes room for the Spirit to teach me about God and his children. And possibly, like Abraham, how to be a better friend.

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Katharina Paxman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University. A Canadian philosopher, she specializes in early modern philosophy, particularly David Hume’s theory of the passions and moral psychology. She earned her PhD in 2011 through a joint program at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Antwerp, where she also held a postdoctoral appointment with the Centre for Ethics. Before joining BYU in 2015, she taught philosophy in Canada. Her research has appeared in Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Res Philosophica, and several anthologies of Hume scholarship. Her teaching interests include philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of religion, and the history of women in philosophy.

Art by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989).

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