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.

Share

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.

Learn more about the making of the Fort Collins temple stained glass windows here.

Subscribe now

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.”

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

Thank you for reading Wayfare Theology. If you no longer wish to receive these items in your inbox, click manage subscription under your profile and turn off notifications for this section.

KEEP READING

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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).

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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.

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

Thank you for reading Wayfare Theology. If you no longer wish to receive these items in your inbox, click manage subscription under your profile and turn off notifications for this section.

KEEP READING

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.

Share

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).

Subscribe now

KEEP READING

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

Share

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).

Subscribe now

“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.

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

Thank you for reading Wayfare Theology. If you no longer wish to receive these items in your inbox, click manage subscription under your profile and turn off notifications for this section.

KEEP READING

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).

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

Thank you for reading Wayfare Theology. If you no longer wish to receive these items in your inbox, click manage subscription under your profile and turn off notifications for this section.

KEEP READING

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.

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

Thank you for reading Wayfare Theology. If you no longer wish to receive these items in your inbox, click manage subscription under your profile and turn off notifications for this section.

KEEP READING

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.

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

KEEP READING

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.

Share

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).

Subscribe now

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

“All things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world . . . are the typifying of him” (2 Nephi 11:4).

Typology can be a tricky mode of biblical interpretation, since inspired Old Testament prophecies and creative modern readings are not always aligned. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews was confident of one typological reading that should have particularly powerful resonance with Latter-day Saints. In that discourse, Jewish temple practices are clearly linked to a specific fulfillment in Christ. The Holy of Holies represented the dwelling place of God, a presence imbued with such holiness that only the high priest of the Jewish people could enter the precinct, which was protected by a veil, only once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

When Christ effected his incarnation and work of reconciliation, he opened participation in the everlasting covenant to everyone by the adoptive covenant of baptism. The author (Paul by tradition) invited his audience to have the “boldness to enter into the holiest [holy of holies] by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19, KJV). He drew the typology more concretely when he added, “by a new and living way, which he has consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Hebrews 10:20). Joseph Smith, in his inspired development of Restoration temple theology, formally ritualized the equivalence of Christ’s flesh and the temple veil.

One might venture to suggest this is prefigured in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis. A few chapters earlier (Genesis 12), we find the first record of a covenant between Abraham and the Lord with the promises familiarly associated with that covenant: inheritance of the land, a great name and posterity, and the promise of ensuing blessedness to “all families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3). It is in chapter 15, however, that the promises are confirmed by an unusual sacrificial rite, found nowhere else in scripture. God commands Abraham to offer a heifer, a goat, and a ram (along with two birds). He then divides each large carcass into two halves, laying them one against the other, apparently in mirror image, leaving a space between the halves. Subsequently, after many hours, as Moses experienced before his theophany and Joseph Smith before his, Abraham suffers “an horror of great darkness” (Genesis 15:12). Only then is the covenant sealed by a divine manifestation: “a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp . . . passed between those pieces” (Genesis 15:17), following which the Lord personally affirms his covenant with Abraham.

Christians generally see blood sacrifice as typifying the death of Christ, a key moment in his “ministry of reconciliation.” In light of Paul’s reading of sacrificial precedent especially, it is hard not to see the parallel between the flesh of this offering in particular and the future body of Christ, both of which—in broken and bleeding form—provide a passage of sorts. A lamp of the Lord passes through the fleshly veil, and Christians in a dispensation to follow pass through its counterpart in a temple veil. This startling image captures the quintessence of the everlasting covenant, enacted in LDS temple theology. It signifies the passage in Christ by means of which men and women progressively move through covenantal life. The temple saga tracks human pilgrimage from incarnate spirits, through adoption into Christ’s family, to assuming greater levels of commitment and higher standards of holiness, to entering into binding covenants that reify and extend human and divine connectedness. Eventually, cleansed and sanctified by the offering of Christ’s own incarnation and Resurrection, they enter into the divine presence, part of an eternal sociality with those they love.

Share

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

Art by Pierre Soulages (1919–2022).

Subscribe now

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

KEEP READING

At ten years old, you would have found me with a kitten hidden in my bedroom closet, a pet rat perched on my shoulder, and a wounded sparrow that I was nursing back to health in a shoebox on my dresser. I spent most of my time around animals, finding everything about them to be enticing and fascinating. As a budding biologist from a very young age, the story of Noah’s ark was always my favorite. I have a beautiful hand-carved ark and set of animals from South Africa that I proudly display on my piano (and if I wasn’t embarrassed about getting caught, you might just see me acting out the epic tale with those little figurines). It is truly a magical story for someone like me, who finds joy in the fact that God thought to save the animals I love so much. But now, as a professional biologist, educator, and science communicator, the story of Noah has different meaning than what I had imagined as a child.

Before I explain, I want to discuss another important story that often comes to my mind when I discuss Noah’s Flood: the Tower of Babel. In a literal (i.e., plain reading) interpretation of this story, we would understand that due to wickedness, the Lord confounded the language of the people so that they could no longer understand each other. However, in recent years, I have watched the political divide widen in our country and have seen how language has been hijacked by one side or the other, such that the words we use on each side of the aisle no longer mean the same thing. The consequence has been that we are literally unable to communicate with one another. This has made me wonder whether there might be another meaning to this influential story. Perhaps our wickedness, our pride, and our use of language as a weapon have led to the same calamity that befell the inhabitants of Babylon, i.e., we can no longer understand each other.

Now let me translate this to my specific context. Through a series of experiences and inspiration, I have chosen to focus my academic research on reconciling science with religion. Most recently, I was a coeditor on a new book published by BYU’s College of Life Sciences, The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution. A free downloadable pdf of the book is available here. As I have tried to be a boundary spanner, opening lines of communication between my scientific colleagues and my religious friends, I have often found that our languages confound each other. This isn’t because we literally speak a different language. Rather, it is a result of pride on both sides, manifested in an unwillingness to even see a viewpoint other than our own. It is the animosity that has built up between us that has caused our language to diverge. We no longer speak the same language because we have set up a false dichotomy between disciplines, rather than seeing them as two lenses through which to look at the world, with the humility to admit that both perspectives are looking through a glass darkly (see 1 Corinthians 13:12).

Let me illustrate this with a recent experience (that I describe in more detail in a recent publication1). Long story short, I had the opportunity to tour the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. An amusement park of sorts, this attraction consists of an enormous, life-sized gopherwood ark complete with three stories of stuffed animals, bamboo cages, clay pots, ingenious (and sometimes outright ludicrous) watering and feeding apparatuses, infographics, and a host of wondrous fantasies. It was truly one of the most whimsical places I have visited, and it transported me back to my childhood, imagining what it might have been like to be on an ark with all of God’s creatures. But the glaring and plentiful scientific holes and pseudoscientific fallacies brought me back to the present with disappointing swiftness. By contrast, during that same trip, I presented research at a scientific conference in Tennessee with some of the greatest minds in evolutionary science, only to find that the science was amazing, but the misunderstanding and outright mocking of religion went well beyond—and disappointingly so—the bounds of what scientific epistemology can even claim. So, here we are, living in an era where the language of science and the language of religion are often confounded. This makes it difficult for many to understand the deep and meaningful spiritual lessons we learn from Noah’s ark without becoming preoccupied with the story’s implausibility from a scientific perspective on one hand, or insisting on the other hand that the story must be literally true for the spiritual truths to be legitimate from a religious perspective.

I will start by answering the most common question I get asked about Noah’s ark: Is it scientifically plausible for Noah to have had every creature on Earth aboard the ark and for the Flood to be a global catastrophe? I’ll briefly present the scientific evidence that leads me to answer this question in the negative.

• Evidence 1: A literal reading would put the story of the ark around 2300 BC, roughly 4000 years ago. Thus, the formation of the basic topology of Earth (e.g., the Himalayas, the Wasatch Mountains, the Rockies) and the breaking of a supercontinent (i.e., Pangea) into the seven continents we now have, would all have to fit within that 4000 years. Robust and plentiful geological evidence demonstrates that the Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago, that the continents split and drifted to their current positions roughly 200 million years ago, and that mountain ranges formed millions of years ago (for the Himalayas, it was 40 million years ago).

• Evidence 2: Animal (and plant) diversification takes a long time. While it can differ widely between different types of organisms and speciation events, it generally takes between 500,000 and 5 million years.2 To differentiate from the original “kinds” that would have been on the ark to the diversity of species we see today would take on the order of millions of years, rather than the 4000 years since Noah.

• Evidence 3: The human population has not experienced a bottleneck (i.e., down to a single family of eight) within the last ten thousand years. Multiple lines of evidence show a steady and continuous increase in the human population size from the order of a few million during the Holocene (10,000 years ago) to tens of millions around the time that biblical scholars would place the Flood (3–2000 BCE), to hundreds of millions after the Flood (around 1000 BCE), to the over 8 billion we see today.3

There are more scientific truths I could offer about animal dietary needs, animal breeding, ice ages and geological factors, the cause of human diversity and racial characteristics, etc., but that is not the point I want to make here.

Here is the point I want to make: Freeing myself of the requirement for Noah’s ark to be strictly literal or scientifically accurate, and loosening myself from “the confounding of languages” of pitting science against religion has allowed me to more fully appreciate the spiritual truths in this beautiful story. What was God trying to teach us? What are the eternal truths we should have learned? How do we apply it to our lives?

First, God loves us. I feel confident in God’s love, and this allows me to roll with everything mortality throws my way, including metaphorical catastrophic floods. Second, God speaks to us through living prophets. Thus, we had better take care to listen. Third, God rewards obedience. This life is about overcoming our mortal weaknesses and learning to bridle our passions, abandon our pride, and offer our whole hearts to God. And, lastly, God loves all his creatures and values the diversity of life on Earth. This gives me a sense of stewardship and responsibility to care for these creatures in a manner commensurate with God’s love. And with how much joy I already find in the beautiful animals and plants around me, this is an easy thing for me to do.

Share

Dr. Jensen specializes in improving biology teaching through the use of evidence-based instructional practices and overcoming barriers at the intersection of science and religion through effective science communication strategies. She is also the mother of four handsome boys and loves reading, sewing, and dissecting.

Art by Hans von Faber du Faur (1863–1940).

Subscribe now

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

KEEP READING

This is my first Come, Follow Me blog post as a two-year fellow of the Maxwell Institute! So let me introduce myself a little. I’m coming here from the Biology Department at BYU, where I am an evolutionary ecologist. I’ve taught classes in history and philosophy of biology, bioethics, ecology, population genetics, and for most of my career, I’ve used simulation models to explore complex ecological systems. I’m also a fiction writer of really weird books and stories. All of this will come into play in my work for the Maxwell Institute. My focus in these blog posts will be to learn, as I have in science, to love questions, the imagination, and experimental explorations that, while wrong, might bend our gaze in a way that allows questions to grow deeper and more complex. I’m very comfortable with ambiguity, paradox, and with not being right. I’ve been a big fan of my mentor James Faulconer (I took his philosophy class as an undergraduate, and he has been a friend and intellectual companion since), and I love his Made Harder series. I will explore things much in the spirit of his works.

Moses 7 is a wonderful chapter! It is full of curious and troubling things that can look one way from the perspective of certain theological commitments about the nature of God’s causality—but look very different from a Restoration perspective. The chapter invites us to open our hearts and minds to a richer theological understanding of God as revealed in this chapter.

Let’s open with a little debate in the science of evolutionary biology. In 1961, evolutionary biologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr wrote a paper called “Cause and Effect in Biology,” in which he looked at several ideas of causal explanation in organic evolution. He noted the heuristic distinction between ultimate causes vs. proximal causes. In short, ultimate causes are those that explain why something exists, while proximal causes are those that explain how something happens. For example, one sunny day, I suddenly find myself looking at a fish at the bottom of my riverboat. The proximal cause is that a hook, attached to a fishing line, became embedded in a fish’s mouth, and I used the line to bring the fish into the boat. The ultimate reason is based on my love of fried trout, a beautiful day, a friend who doesn’t mind the number of times I fall in the water, who invited me to do some fly fishing. Another example is found in exploring what caused my bicep to move as I worked out at the gym. The proximal cause was an electronic signal from my brain that initiated movement in my bicep. The ultimate cause was my new core-strengthening routine. Again, the first tells how the muscle moved; the other tells why it moved.

We can ask similar questions about God’s role in proximate causes and ultimate causes.

Here’s an example in the Doctrine and Covenants for a scripture that has always perplexed me, in section 117:1. “Verily thus saith the Lord . . . let them settle up their business speedily and journey from the land of Kirtland, before I, the Lord, send again the snows upon the earth” (D&C 117:1).

I have a hard time imagining the Lord as the proximate agent in the weather patterns of our planet. I have always read this as the Lord owning the things the creation set in motion, not necessarily as by direct action. Instead of “Oh, winter is here! Time to make those snows move from here to there,” it is more that he is the creator and author of the propensities and capacities that are baked into the deep structure of the cosmos.

So, too, with the following scriptures in Moses 7. God is not the proximate cause of suffering, wrath, cursing, smiting, indignation, and fierce anger. Rather, God, in this chapter, owns his role in putting in motion the capacities and propensities of this universe. That may be seen to be a place where wickedness unleashes something that very much looks like, in the rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

In Moses 7, we read some of the Lord’s unsettling responses to what was happening in Enoch’s time (emphasis in these verses is added):

1: “the wrath of God to be poured out upon them.”

8: “For behold, the Lord shall curse the land with much heat, and the barrenness thereof shall go forth forever.”

10: “Repent, lest I come out and smite them with a curse, and they die.”

15: “And the giants of the land, also, stood afar off; and there went forth a curse upon all people that fought against God.”

20: “Zion have I blessed, but the residue of the people have I cursed.”

34: “And the fire of mine indignation is kindled against them; and in my hot displeasure will I send in the floods upon them, for my fierce anger is kindled against them.”

38: “But behold, these which thine eyes are upon shall perish in the floods; and behold, I will shut them up; a prison have I prepared for them.”

43: “Wherefore Enoch saw that Noah built an ark; and that the Lord smiled upon it, and held it in his own hand; but upon the residue of the wicked the floods came and swallowed them up.”

61: “And the day shall come that the earth shall rest, but before that day the heavens shall be darkened, and a veil of darkness shall cover the earth; and the heavens shall shake, and also great tribulations shall be among the children of men, but my people will I preserve.”

66: “But before that day he saw great tribulations among the wicked; and he also saw the sea, that it was troubled, and men’s hearts failing them, looking forth with fear for the judgments of the Almighty God, which should come upon the wicked.”

These terrible things are not God’s will. They are not things in which God actively goes “a-smiting.” Rather, it is a universe in which much suffering occurs. (We’ll explore more as we study Job later in the year.)

The Lord knows that this is a place where hatred causes wars. Where greed can cause the very atmosphere of the earth to become a place where “much heat and the barrenness thereof shall go forth” (see Moses 7:8). Where when love is withheld in the name of efficiency and in the production of stuff, inequalities and injustice follow.

What is God’s actual response in this chapter? He weeps. He is heartbroken. Because in this universe of suffering, the response he wants from us is to help relieve that suffering as agents agenting on behalf of helping, succoring, mourning, and yes, weeping in the face of such cursing and suffering. Our role is the one in which goodness can, on an individual, agential, and supportive level, relieve suffering.

Otherwise, God’s weeping becomes something like the scene in the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem contained in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The poem opens with the two titular characters out for a stroll along the beach. Their first tears are shed at the inevitable, unchangeable, and fixed conditions of the universe—

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand!’

‘If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

This poem does not seem to depict godly weeping. It is a fist of rage shaken at impotent helplessness. A defeatist, nihilistic reaction to the unalterable. Hardly words that describe the Lord. But it gets worse as the poem goes on. They wander down the beach when they are followed by a gang of young oysters.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:’

They come to a rock where the Walrus says they are going to pause to chat about trivialities and nonsense:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.’

But the two characters pull out some bread and vinegar, and the proposed chat never happens. Rather, something terrifyingly cruel comes to pass, which I’m sure you can guess even if you have never read the poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
‘To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘The butter’s spread too thick!’

And the Walrus weeps about the trick they have played on the young plump oysters:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said.
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size.
Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

The poem ends on the line—“They’d eaten every one.”

In this chapter in Moses, God’s weeping is one of the most poignant scenes in scripture. God is weeping. Enoch is weeping. The Earth itself is weeping. There is much genuine mourning over the people’s refusal to repent. “Why?” Enoch asks. “How can this be?” “Thou hast taken Zion to thine own bosom, from all thy creations, from all eternity to all eternity; and naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end; how is it thou canst weep?” (Moses 7:31).

The chapter’s setup might, superficially, make it look like the Lord is doing something akin to what the Walrus did in the poem: doing a lot of smiting and cursing and then weeping about his own actions.

But we see that something much different is happening here when the Lord answers Enoch’s question in Moses 7:32–33:

32: “The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;”

33: “And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood.”

The people were given agency, an agency that should have been used for love to enact the very thing the Lord desires for them, i.e., that as Enoch says above, “naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end.”

So, for me, this chapter seems to speak of God’s acknowledgement that we live in a universe where suffering is not only possible but also a part of the fabric of creation. He takes responsibility as the ultimate cause of our being willingly thrown into such a place of woundedness. To further his aims for this earth, his children are asked to help alleviate this suffering by mourning with those who mourn. (Here enacted so beautifully by Enoch mourning with God—think about that!) Notice how this places the Atonement front and center; it is why only Jesus Christ could effect the Atonement. He, the ultimate cause of our placement here, enjoining us now to embrace others with “love, justice, and his mercy.” To be agents who bring help to our fellow sufferers. To cease hate, war, greed, and despising others who are different from us (e.g., see in the early part of the chapter that the scripture notes that the people of Canaan were despised among all people). We can ask, was this something condoned or sanctioned by the Lord? Or was it an observation of the facts on the ground that needed changing? A condemnation of a society that despised the people of Canaan because the non-Zion people were, in despising others, more wicked than any people who had ever lived?

I love this chapter in all its complexity. It shows us a vision of the eternities and the possibility of overcoming suffering through ministering to others, just as God does: suffering with others, weeping together with God and one another. Defining, indeed, a Zion people.

Share

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

Art by Linda Vance Etherington.

Subscribe now

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

To receive each new post in the Old Testament Reflections series, first subscribe to Wayfare, then adjust your account settings to turn on notifications for “Wayfare Theology.”

KEEP READING

Recently, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published new guidance for members regarding translations of the Bible to use in personal study. As has been the case from the beginning, English speakers are encouraged to use the King James Version, which sets a standard with the dignity and beauty of its language. Importantly, though, the Church also now recognizes that other translations of the Bible may be helpful to those seeking to understand its stories and teachings more deeply, and it includes suggestions of translations that will be of particular value.

An example of how these additional helps might come into play is found in this week’s Come, Follow Me reading at Genesis 3:20:

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

Have you ever wondered about that statement? The word “because” here would seem to indicate that there is a relationship between the name “Eve” and her role as “mother of all living.” But what is it? There is no obvious linguistic connection between the name “Eve” and “living” or “life.” If we look to the footnotes of the official edition, we are referred to the Topical Guide sections on “Marriage” and “Motherhood,” but no further information specific to our question is offered. Here is a case where turning to a modern translation might be worthwhile. Some of the editions in the new list of suggested translations note at this verse that the Hebrew word for Eve resembles the Hebrew word for “living” (see, for example, the New Revised Standard Version [NRSV] and the English Standard Version [ESV]), and our suspicion is confirmed that something like a play on words is involved. We can see this by turning to the Hebrew text. Following the expert (but not freely available) English translation of Robert Alter, I’ll surface the relevant Hebrew words in this verse:

And the human called his woman’s name Eve (Ḥawwah), for she was the mother of all that lives (ḥay).

By looking at the Hebrew words for “Eve” (Ḥawwah) and “lives” (ḥay) we can immediately begin to see how they resemble one another. The fuller story here is that the name Eve descends through a series of unfortunate events from a very different original in the Hebrew (for a summary of that story, see the “Extra Credit” reading at the end of this post). At the same time, the Hebrew word for “living” (ḥay) was also masked by translation so that the phonetic resemblance between ḥay and Ḥawwah was obliterated. What was once immediately obvious to any reader or hearer of the text was now invisible and inaudible. There no longer seemed to be any reason for the word “because” in the sentence.

But to see an even deeper significance here, let’s turn back a page or so to the second account of the creation of humanity found in Genesis. Again, I will add in the Hebrew words that matter.

Then the LORD God fashioned the human (ʾadam), humus (ʾadamah) from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat ḥayyîm); and the human became a living creature (nefesh ḥayyāh; Genesis 2:7, Alter).

The name Adam begins in the Bible not as a reference to a single person, but to a class of creature: ha-adam, best translated as “the human.” Only in later chapters, after the creation and naming of the woman, Eve, does it take on the specific property of an individual name for that first human (see Genesis 5:1–3). From this reading, we learn that Adam’s name, too, is meaningful. Adam’s name indicates where he comes from; Eve’s name adumbrates where she (through her posterity) is going. As representatives of all humanity, the first man and the first woman stand at the center of a timeline that points backward and forward. And it is rightly Eve who initiates that forward motion for them, and Adam understands the importance of following that course, even though it means that one day his dust will return to the dust from which he was originated.

And there is more. Notice the language about how God breathed life into Adam. In the Hebrew nishmat ḥayyîm we once again find a word for “life” that is related to Eve’s name. Ironically, it is this, more than the word for “breath” itself, that has the breathiest pronunciation, and Eve’s name (Ḥawwah) even more so. To pronounce it, there is never any stoppage—just a constant flow of air from within the lungs, up through the throat, and out the open mouth. In a story in which life is introduced by divine breathing, the name Ḥawwah functions not only semantically but also performatively, enacting, through sound, the airy vitality it denotes. Recovering the original sound of Eve’s name, then, and situating it next to the sound of “life” in the Hebrew allows us to appreciate an elegant aspect of her origin story. Not only is Eve’s original name connected semantically with the concept of life, but it also sounds like the act of giving life we find dramatized in Genesis. In her very name, the first woman bears an echo of the moment of divine quickening.

This is beautiful in its own right, but it is also significant for how it shapes our understanding of our first mother’s role in the events that led to her and Adam’s expulsion from the garden. For centuries, the dominant theological interpretation of that event has been that it was a disaster brought on by the woman and that it reverberated through her posterity. Beginning with Augustine and elaborated by those who followed him in teaching of “the Fall,” Eve’s beguilement by the serpent was seen as the start of an ongoing catastrophe from which humanity could not extricate themselves; it would require a divine sacrifice to rectify what had been set askew in Eden. Eve’s statement that she was “beguiled” by the serpent, and God’s subsequent pronouncement of painful childbirth upon her, were all the evidence anyone needed to conclude that she was culpable in bringing about a tragic state of affairs for the whole world.

But there are arrows pointing in the other direction, too, indicating that if Eve bore responsibility for her choice and its consequences, she was also worthy of honor and even gratitude for what she had done. The occasion of Adam announcing her name is the first such indication. Note that it comes after her decision to partake of the forbidden fruit and his choice to follow her in it, and after their encounter with God, in which the consequences of their choice were spelled out. Just as God’s warning, “You shall surely die,” is being recalled in their imminent expulsion from the Garden, Adam prophetically gives an honorific and hopeful name to Eve. She is not called the mother of spiritual death, the mother of catastrophe, or the mother of the Fall; she is called Ḥawwah, because she is “the mother of all living.” Here is a reminder, every time her name is pronounced, of the divine breath of life that had made their being possible in the first place; and if a reminder of divine origins, then a reminder, too, of divine hope for the renewal of life that would also come from God in the fullness of time.

Restoration scripture affords us additional indications of the esteem in which Eve is to be held. After she and Adam have begun their family, Adam, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, declares: “Blessed be the name of God, for because of my transgression my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh I shall see God” (Moses 5:10). Adam has already begun to realize the potential that his decision to follow Eve has opened up for them, and Eve confirms his understanding with her own resounding proclamation: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11). And Adam and Eve together “blessed the name of God” and began to teach their children the purpose of the plan (Moses 5:12). Because of the wisdom and courage she showed in her “recognition of the necessity of the Fall and the joys of Redemption,” Eve, Ḥawwah, the mother of all living, “will share eternal glory with [Adam]” (Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Eve”), and she serves to this day as a pattern for all of us to emulate.

Extra Credit Reading: From Ḥawwah to Eve

The journey began in the centuries before Christ when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Koine Greek—a version known as the Septuagint. Many consequential decisions were made during this translation, one of them being how the Hebrew name of the first woman, Ḥawwah, was rendered. The problem arose from a phonetic limitation. Greek has no easy way to represent breathy consonants like “h,” of which Hebrew has at least two. Nor does it have a consonant like “w.” So, when a Hebrew name with these sounds had to be rendered in Greek, the consonants were often omitted, and the surrounding vowels were left to do the work. Thus, the Hebrew Ḥawwah became Eua in Greek.

Several centuries later, we see the Bible undergoing another important translation, this time from Greek into the Latin of the emerging Christian empire. Once again, the new language had limitations that required compromise. Latin represented the Greek “u” sound with the letter “v,” which in classical pronunciation was articulated much like an English “w.” To a reader of classical Latin, the difference between Eua and Eva would have been negligible. But over the next several centuries, there was a phonetic shift in Latin during which the letter “v” stopped being pronounced like a vowel or “w” and acquired the fricative pronunciation we know today.

So, when the first translations of the Bible into Early Modern English were made, the familiar old Latin spelling with a “v” was retained, and Eva became Eve. Even translators like Tyndale, who worked directly from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, kept the already-established name Eve, and that is what she has been called in English ever since—a far cry from the original Ḥawwah.

Share

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

Art by Maureen Merrell (@maureen.merrell.art).

Subscribe now

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

To receive each new post in the Old Testament Reflections series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then adjust your account settings to turn on notifications for “Wayfare Theology.”

KEEP READING

Note: This is a choose-your-own-adventure post. If you’re in the mood for some practical application, take ending 1. If you’re game for some abstract theology, take ending 2.

To read Genesis 5 alongside Moses 6, Joseph Smith’s revelatory revision and interpretation of the same biblical text, is a study in contrast. The text from Genesis, a lineage of ten generations from Adam to Noah, is terse, formulaic, archaic, and enigmatic. The text from the book of Moses is expansive, creative, and explanatory.

This is not, of course, to say that the Genesis text isn’t rich with meaning. In the book of Genesis, genealogies like the one in chapter 5 are “carefully placed compositional units that mark off one large narrative segment from another.” Here, the genealogies signpost the period from the Flood back to the Creation, which is recapped in the first verses: “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam,” or “humankind” (Genesis 5:1–2). The ten subsequent genealogical entries follow a four-step pattern, each step echoing some aspect of the Creation story: first, the father’s begetting and naming of a son “in his own likeness, and after his image” (Genesis 5:3) recalls God’s creation and naming of humanity; second, the father’s subsequent lifespan reflects God’s first blessing on the human family; third, the note of additional “sons and daughters” (Genesis 5:4) fulfills God’s command that Adam and Eve multiply and fill the earth; and finally, the statement of death (Genesis 5:5) confirms God’s decree that humankind must “surely die” (Genesis 2:17).

It’s tempting to gloss over Genesis 5, but if we read carefully, we can find in it the ancients’ own reflection on the values imbued in the Creation. The genealogy from Adam to Noah shows that a thread of creation’s original structure persists after the Fall in the procreative powers of men and women who impart to sons and daughters their birthright as image-bearers of God. Ordered cycles of birth and death preserve across time humanity’s inheritance of the divine nature. God appears as a benevolent father who works to ensure his children’s future well-being.

It’s true, however, that the repetition can get numbing. Formulaic language makes any difference stand out starkly, so it’s no surprise that readers perk up at the anomalous—and cryptic—report that Enoch “walked with God” until the moment that “he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). The verse reads as a teasing glimpse of some lost tradition, and it has fired readerly imaginations for centuries. Jewish apocalyptic literature interpreted Enoch’s mysterious removal in elaborate narratives of heavenly ascent and cosmic visions.

Joseph Smith’s revealed expansion of the Enoch figure in Genesis 5 also elaborates on the prophet’s mysterious departure from earth. It becomes the focal point for both the Restoration’s theology of Zion, the righteous city that God preserves from a degenerate world by removing it wholesale until the building of its latter-day counterpart, and the Restoration’s concept of “translation,” which draws together textual translation with the miraculous traversal of time and space. These are among the teachings I most cherish in our religious tradition.

Still, though, we ought not pass too quickly over the other mysterious statement in Genesis 5: that Enoch “walked with God” on earth. In Moses 6, how is that phrase cashed out?

The narrative opens on Enoch journeying out of his father’s land in Cainan, when the Spirit of God descends upon him and a voice from heaven calls him to prophesy. Shocked, Enoch confesses his weakness and questions the call, but the Lord reassures him that he will be given the words he needs: “Behold my Spirit is upon you, wherefore all thy words will I justify; . . . and thou shalt abide in me, and I in you; therefore walk with me” (Moses 6:34). The Lord instructs him to anoint his eyes with clay and then wash them clean; in this way, Enoch becomes a “seer” who is able to see God’s primordial spiritual creation at work in the physical world. Thus prepared, Enoch teaches the people from their ancestral book of remembrance the truths God revealed to their earliest fathers: that Adam and Eve fell to make mortal existence possible, but that the world has turned away from God. Happily, every person can return to God’s presence through belief, repentance, and baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, receiving thereby a new life that abides in them by the Spirit. So it happened for Adam, who was buried and rose from the water a new person; and “thus may all become my sons [and daughters]” (Moses 6:68). This plan of salvation, Enoch emphasizes, must be freely taught from generation to generation.

The material in Moses 6 is packed tight with narrative and theology, but one way to unify its central message is to use the Gospel of John as a lens. Enoch’s experience has many connections to the fourth Gospel, from the Spirit that descends and abides on him as it does on Jesus at the beginning of his ministry (see John 1:32), to the anointing of his eyes with clay in the way Jesus anoints the blind man (see John 9:6), to his teachings about the new birth by the Spirit that resemble Jesus’s teachings to Nicodemus (John 3:5–8).

But perhaps the most striking connection to the Gospel of John is the promise that we can abide in Christ, and Christ in us, by means of the Spirit: “Behold my Spirit is upon you . . . and thou shalt abide in me, and I in you; therefore walk with me” (Moses 6:34). This theology of divine “indwelling” is the most distinctive—and challenging—of the fourth Gospel. It’s as if Moses 6 interprets the most mysterious phrase in Genesis 5 (“Enoch walked with God”) by way of the most mysterious concept of John 15 (“Abide in me, and I in you”).

Yet, as happens so often in scripture, iron sharpens iron. The encounter of two ideas makes both of them signify more. Here’s where you get to choose your ending:

Ending #1:

As abstruse as the idea of “indwelling” can sound, the Gospel of John explains it in a practical way. When we keep the commandments, Jesus explains, we are doing the will of God. And since God’s will is inherent in God, we might say commandment-keepers are in God and God is in them: “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love” (John 15:10, emphasis added). But “abiding in God” does not mean we are insulated or isolated from the world. Perhaps surprisingly, being in God turns us outward toward other people. Jesus explained this, too: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). When we keep Jesus’s commandment to love, we become one in him and we are turned outward toward others.

This is precisely the move that Enoch illustrates in Moses 6. Through his willing obedience to the prophetic call, Enoch abides in God, and God in him, through the mediation of the Spirit. He then immediately turns to the loving work of proclaiming the gospel to the world. His ceaseless preaching, teaching, baptizing, and Zion-building are only possible because of his sustaining, abiding relationship with God by way of the Spirit. To “walk with God,” Moses 6 teaches us, is to abide in God and then join God in his work of love.

Ending #2:

Moses 6 explains that Enoch walks with God because he abides in God and God in him—and that this is only possible by the mediation of Spirit: “Behold my Spirit is upon you . . . and thou shalt abide in me, and I in you; therefore walk with me” (Moses 6:34). The Spirit (as personage) is the agent of God’s indwelling in Enoch. But “spirit” (as quality) is Enoch’s capacity to receive the indwelling divine presence. In other words, my “spirit” is the name I give to the openness of my being to God. The Spirit dwells in me because I am spirit—that is, because I am the kind of being whose basic fabric is open to God.

This, I take it, is what’s at stake in Moses 3’s revelation that “the Lord God, created all things . . . spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth” (Moses 3:5). Spiritual creation isn’t merely a prior event in a sequence, like the blueprint for a building. Spiritual creation is the constitution of all things made with this openness to God. To be created spiritually is to be created as capable of receiving God. I was made for indwelling.

In Genesis 5, where we began, each father begets a son “in his own likeness, after his image,” passing on the birthright of divine image-bearing. Now we can see what that birthright is: our fundamental openness that makes it possible for God to dwell in us through the Spirit. What persists through the generations is spirit itself, humanity’s ability to receive the very God who made us for “immortality and eternal life” (Moses 1:39).

Share

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 from King James Bible (1611).

Subscribe now

For many years, I co-taught a course at Hanover College called “The History of Biblical Interpretation.” My colleague was a specialist in the Bible; I was trained as a historian of religion. As we were conceiving the course one summer, we met periodically to shape the syllabus. Each time we met, we saw more clearly that we needed to reduce the scriptural texts we would consider. After all, we would be tracing changes across great spans of time and cultures, not only in interpretation, but also in philosophies and methods of interpretation, as well as in notions of what scripture is and to what uses it might be put. By fall, we surprised ourselves by deciding to spend the entire semester on the history of interpretation of a single chapter: Genesis 3. This chapter was to be our case study through which history would pass. Our surprised students (some initially disappointed) soon learned that we had our hands and minds full.

This memory comes to me as I sit to sketch a blog post, limited to a few hundred words, about Moses 1 and Abraham 3: two of the richest, most provocative chapters in our comparatively large canon. These, too, are chapters on which we might fruitfully spend a semester.

So, you will pardon me for electing to focus on a single verse from these chapters.

Moses 1:39, among the most cited passages in all of Restoration discourse, may not seem a surprising choice. It orients and inspires us. It is familiar. But familiarity has its dangers, comforting us to dullness betimes, preempting further inquiry and growth if we are unwary.

1:39 is a miracle of compression, captured by the 24-year-old Prophet Joseph mere months after the Church’s organization. The passage came to us in response to the most existentially profound of questions, posed to God only a few verses earlier by Moses. Moses had, in vision, just been plunged, then exalted, to awe—through an encounter with evil and “the bitterness of hell” as well as a panoptic vision of the whole of earth and its inhabitants and God’s majesty (Moses 1:13–29). In that bipolar perch, at the precipice of eternity, Moses calls upon God: “Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so . . .” (Moses 1:30).

At first, it seems that Deity declines: “And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me” (Moses 1:31). He then speaks further to Moses of the world and its people, alluding even to other worlds of his making. At this, Moses persists, pleading, “Be merciful unto thy servant, O God, and tell me concerning this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, and also the heavens, and then thy servant will be content” (Moses 1:36). It is in this context that all eternity shook, or might have, as in Enoch’s comparable vision (see Moses 7). For here the God of creation proffers the most succinct, eloquent, and potent mission statement in all of scripture, in all of literature, and in all the cosmos: “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39).

This passage might also be the grandest extant expression of “love,” for love works, sacrifices, or suffers to elevate others. Like the wider chapter in which this passage is ensconced, however, the meaning and implications of even just these eighteen words are too abundant for my space and capacity. Perhaps we’d do better to attend here to a single word in this single verse, such as “glory.”

The problem with that proposal is that the nature of scriptural “glory” is itself diverse, sometimes complex or obscure. It is a term oft read, pronounced, imagined, or sung, but little considered, at least in print.1 It appears more than a dozen times in chapter one of Moses and diffusely, with a range of meanings, in all four standard works. As noun or verb, it can denote obvious things, good or ill, such as esteem or accomplishment or conceit. It can suggest extravagant light, ravishing beauty, or humbling majesty. Or ostentation. In other scriptural instances we lose certainty about where description or metaphor end and metaphysics begins. Glory can sometimes be palpable, as when, we are informed, “the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle” (Exodus 40:35). In Moses 1:2, the prophet enjoys protective glory—was able to endure God’s presence because “the glory of God was upon Moses.” In verse 5, we learn that no person can witness all of God’s glory and “afterwards remain in the flesh on the earth,” though we are given no explanation for why this should be so. In Doctrine & Covenants 76 and in accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision, as elsewhere, glory of varying degrees or kinds seems a property of resurrected bodies. Moses 1:39 is not the only verse in which glory is associated with work or purpose. Elsewhere, it seems connected to “power.”

So “glory’s” meaning ought not be assumed but cannot be explored adequately here in depth. Driven to humility, I shall content myself by leaving off with a single observation about this single word in a single verse of a single and singular chapter, Moses 1.

The observation touches on the distinctive quality of the beauty of God’s glory as cast in 1:39. It goes something like this:

Why did God create the world and human beings? Exotic, unrooted, and sometimes flippant answers sprinkle the internet, but among traditional Christian theologians, the understanding inclines to God creating the world “for God’s own glory.” Sometimes this perspective is rooted in biblical scripture (Isaiah 43:7, Isaiah 60:20, and Romans 11:36, for example). Always it is informed by a sense of God’s unreachable “godness,” in contrast to human limitations or sinfulness.

The notion of God creating for the purpose of God’s own glory may strike Latter-day Saints as a false god, one who is vain, needy, or self-serving. However, we ought not caricature others’ perspectives. In many instances, theologians detect no divine conceit. When he asserted that God made the world and its human inhabitants “for His own glory,” the influential Puritan thinker Jonathan Edwards held that God created the world as an arena in which to display his infinite beauty, power, fullness, love, grace, and goodness. His creatures were designed to receive him, praise him, and find their ultimate joy in him. Edwards did not construe God acting selfishly, but rather as offering a benevolent outpouring just where humanity’s highest happiness is found: mainly delighting in God’s glory. God naturally manifests his own glorious traits for his own satisfaction and praise, which perfectly suits his perfect judgment and human needs.2 Edwards’s diaries report his having visions of this divine glory and experiencing joy in contemplating Christ’s excellent grace.

This perspective of our Christian neighbors has depth and appeal. Nonetheless, I experience God’s self-profession, cast in Moses 1:39, as striking and elevated. It is lovely, integrated, persuasive, and transformatively motivating. If God created the world for his and her own glory, it is because that glory—that goodness, beauty, power, light, and purpose—consists precisely of the loving act of raising and bonding with the intelligent souls to whom they give, and with whom they share, the universe.

We are invited not merely to bask in such glory—glorious as such basking may be—we are invited, rather, to partake of it.

Share

Philip L. Barlow is a scholar at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University.

Gloria (1884) by Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938).

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

To receive each new post in the Old Testament Reflections series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then adjust your account settings to turn on notifications for “Wayfare Theology.”

Subscribe now

Imagine that your Sunday School class starts a new year with Genesis 1:1. Your prayerful and prepared teacher wants to communicate exactly what the Bible says, but communication is challenging and the Bible is noisy. In any communication, an encoder (in this case, your teacher and the Bible) sends a signal. A decoder (you) receives the signal. Noise between the encoder and decoder inevitably hinders transmission and reception of the signal. If the fire alarm rang just as a class member began reading, “In the beginning . . . ,” that physical noise would obviously disrupt the communication. But less obvious kinds of noise do too.

If you were fasting and worried about a loved one, you might find it hard to concentrate on the words of Genesis 1:1. That would be physiological noise. If you heard the words, “God created the heaven,” and you thought of heaven as outer space or the place where God lives, that would be cultural or semantic noise, because in Genesis, heaven includes a dome that holds back the rain, or the water above the earth. Cultural or semantic noise occurs when the encoder intends one meaning and the decoder’s culture or cognition does not include that meaning. All kinds of communication noise make it challenging to decode from the Bible what God did, and when, and how, and why.

Take the, for instance. There is no equivalent to the in the Hebrew version of Genesis 1:1. It doesn’t say “in the beginning God created.” Avram Shannon, professor of ancient scripture at BYU, translated it as “in a beginning,” adding “even this does not quite explain what is happening grammatically.” Hebrew scholar Robert Alter rendered that line as “When God began to create heaven and earth.” That phrase “heaven and earth” is culturally noisy, too. We are likely to hear it as outer space and planet earth but Professor Shannon says the original Israelite audience would have heard it as “sky and land.”

Decades ago, I was so excited to learn the Old Testament, but I became discouraged when I learned how complex it was. This post is not intended to discourage your hopes and plans for studying the Old Testament. It is intended to share the hope and the help that I have discovered over the years. The best help, and best hope, is a Restoration-based hermeneutic. What, you may be asking, is a hermeneutic? It is the tools and tactics used to interpret scripture. If the Old Testament is what you will read for Come, Follow Me this year, your hermeneutic is how you will read it.

Now you may be asking, must we use big words? Can’t we just read the Old Testament and understand its obvious meaning without using a hermeneutic? We do not have to use big words or know what a hermeneutic is, but we will use a hermeneutic for a couple of reasons. First, reading the Old Testament and understanding the meaning that seems most obvious is itself a hermeneutic—the naive one I had decades ago. Second, every Bible reader is confined by language, a culture, a physiology, a psychology, a finite set of understandings. We can only exceed these limits to the degree that we recognize them and extend them by education and revelation. So we can either intentionally choose the tools and tactics we will use to read the Old Testament, or they will be chosen for us.

Choosing a Restoration-based hermeneutic means learning to read the Bible the way Joseph Smith did. It means using the knowledge and resources the Lord restored through Joseph Smith. Joseph learned to revere the Bible early in his life. He called it a “sacred depository.” He searched it, believing that it “contained the word of God.” But he also discovered that the Bible and its ancient and modern interpreters were noisy. Joseph’s history says, “I believe the bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers; ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors.” Joseph’s history also says that Bible teachers “understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.” Yet Joseph successfully acted on the Bible’s frequent invitation to ask and receive, seek and find (Joseph Smith—History 1:12). Having learned these lessons in his youth, Joseph spent the rest of his life working hard to decode the Bible. He read carefully, asked many questions, and sought answers through the complementary means of intellectual and spiritual work. This process produced the creation accounts in the Books of Moses and Abraham that expand our understanding of Genesis.

A Restoration-based hermeneutic respects the Bible as a sacred depository and remains aware of its humanness and limits. Even with all the tools the Restoration provides, we will often not be sure what has been mistranscribed, mistranslated, or otherwise corrupted. We can, however, be confident in the scholarship that has shown that the Bible is a complex compilation of various sources, each of which has been redacted—meaning edited or changed—over time by people whose identities and agendas are not precisely known, but scholars have made informed observations about. This means that Genesis and the other “Books of Moses” have not come down to us in Moses’s own handwriting, and we should not assume that Moses wrote them.

Let’s show how a Restoration-based hermeneutic can help us understand what “Books of Moses” could mean. The Book of Mormon is vital to a Restoration-based hermeneutic because it was translated and transmitted to us more transparently and directly than the Bible. The Book of Mormon is an anchor point for what we know and how we know. Nephi said that the plates of brass included “the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve” (1 Nephi 5:11). So we can be confident in that. But we should also not stretch it to mean more than it says.

For example, we might assume that the Book of Mormon says that “the five books of Moses” were written by Moses, but it does not say that. The Book of Mormon shows how ancient, sacred texts were selected, edited, composed, and adapted by less ancient authors, compilers, and editors. Mormon compiled and wrote the books of Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, and others based largely on writings of those people. So sacred books can be of a person without being by that person. Further to this point, the Lord revealed to Joseph Smith the Book of Moses that is now in the Pearl of Great Price. It makes no claim to have been written by Moses. It is the premier example of being the book of Moses, not by Moses.

At some point (or points) much later than when God began creating, unknown writers and editors included two separate creation accounts in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. In the first one, Genesis 1–2:3, God created man and woman together at the end of the process of organizing the planet for them. In the second one, Genesis 2:4–25, the Lord God formed the earth and heavens, then formed man, then planted a garden in Eden, and finally formed woman as the culmination of creation.

The Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price adds much to these accounts. First, it provides a context for the knowledge it conveys. Unlike Genesis, which begins out of the blue, the Book of Moses begins with the Lord speaking to Moses face to face, explaining the why of creation as means to the end of immortality and eternal life for God’s children (Moses 1:39). Further, God showed Moses the vastness of creation, “worlds without number” at least to mortals, but known to God. Moses wanted to know why and how God created, and the Lord explained the why, as noted above, but when it came to how, all God revealed is that he did it “by the word of my power have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth” (Moses 1:32). Finally, the Book of Moses includes both of the versions of creation in Genesis 1–2, but between them it adds, “I, the Lord God, created all things of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth” (Moses 3:5).

The Book of Abraham also adds to our understanding of creation. Like Moses, Abraham’s account tells us how Abraham learned of creation. The Lord revealed it to him, showing Abraham how he himself participated pre-mortally in a divine council. There, the gods planned creation of the world as means to the end of exalting pre-mortal children, “intelligences that were organized before the world was” (Abraham 3:22). In Abraham’s version, “the Gods took counsel among themselves,” planning every aspect of this planet as means to the end of creating in their image. “So the Gods went down to organize man[kind] in their own image, in the image of the Gods to form they him, male and female to form they them” (Abraham 4:26–27).

If we include the teachings of Joseph Smith and President Dallin H. Oaks in our tools and tactics for reading the Old Testament, we could imagine Abraham’s references to Gods counseling together as a divine family council. President Oaks taught, for instance, “Our theology begins with heavenly parents. Our highest aspiration is to be like them.” Scholars have gained exciting insights into the divine counsel by studying the Bible and other ancient sources, but the Lord’s revelations to Joseph Smith remain our best sources of knowledge about it. Choosing to read the Bible the way Joseph Smith did—and informed by the restored scriptures the Lord revealed through Joseph Smith—does not answer all questions about the nature of creation by divine counsel, but it provides knowledge that we would otherwise not have so clearly or completely, including:

• Gods purposefully created this earth and others so we could progress to become exalted like them

• Creation was accomplished under the direction of Jesus Christ, by organizing and ordering existing materials, not making something out of nothing

• Our sources of knowledge about creation have come to us through revelators and redactors, and the restored scriptures are much more transparent about that process than the Bible is, so the restored scriptures help us understand the process by which the Bible was composed

• The scriptures do not reveal exactly how the Gods created; the Lord has only revealed why he created, so we might miss the mark if we focus on how rather than why

Imagine that your Sunday School class starts a new year with Genesis 1:1. No matter how prayerful and prepared you and your teacher may be, the Old Testament will remain challenging. But the Restoration provides tools and tactics. One of these is to revere the Bible without regarding it as flawless. Another is to realize that Joseph Smith worked hard to read the Bible and he received much revelation in the process. He worked hard to learn Hebrew and Greek but never mastered either.

Joseph Smith showed that if we work hard with our minds and our spirits, we can decrease the noise that makes the Old Testament so difficult to decode. The Lord revealed through Joseph the restored scriptures that can inform our reading of the Old Testament. Engaging these sacred texts as Joseph did is worth the work even if, like Joseph, we do it imperfectly, and even if all we discover is that Gods formed this planet and us on purpose, from pre-existing materials and intelligence, through the ministry of Jesus Christ, as means to the end of us becoming like our Heavenly Parents.

Share

Steven C. Harper is a covenant son of God who strives to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. His primary work is to teach the restored gospel of Jesus Christ in ways that help students develop resilient faith in, and become lifelong disciples of, the Savior.

Chaos. The Genesis. by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900).

Subscribe now

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

To receive each new post in the Old Testament Reflections series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then adjust your account settings to turn on notifications for “Wayfare Theology.”

Every month, Latter-day Saint congregations participate in a fast and testimony meeting in which “there are no assigned speakers or special musical numbers. Instead, the person conducting . . . invites members of the congregation to bear their testimonies,” which are supposed to “be brief so that many people can participate.”

I find these less-structured meetings fascinating. The pulpit is open to anyone who wants to step up—young or old, man or woman, member or visitor. You never know from one speaker to the next which way things will go. Children may walk up, lose their nerve, and require parental assistance. Some people express faith while others share their struggles. Someone might break down in tears or perhaps tell a meandering story. People might bear witness to truths or express gratitude for blessings. I once saw a bearded, disheveled man stand up, confess that he was addicted to drugs, and then, seemingly unsure of what else to say, stumble back to his seat.

Although the beliefs, content, and delivery of the speakers vary, Latter-day Saint practice sacralizes each of their expressions by including them in our sacrament worship service, which President Dallin H. Oaks called “the most sacred and important meeting in the Church.” While individual congregants may be distracted by children or technology, as a group we give each and every speaker our time and consideration. Fast and testimony meeting honors each person’s unique journey and their right to explain it in their own way—whether their conclusions are correct or not.

What I love about this tradition is that it forces me to engage with people whose experiences are not my own. They share how they have encountered God and what they have come to understand through those experiences. Although these expressions may not always square with how I experience God, my own sense of God expands as I see him through the eyes of others.

I think about fast and testimony meetings as I study the Old Testament. This collection of thirty-nine books, written and edited by dozens of ancient Israelites over several centuries, is the most diverse body of texts in our scriptural canon. While some Christian traditions emphasize the Bible’s perceived doctrinal uniformity as a tenet of their faith, Latter-day Saints are more comfortable acknowledging what seems apparent from even a surface reading: Biblical authors understood the divine and made sense of the world in different ways.

Come, Follow Me invites Church members to remember how “inevitable” it is that different parts of the Old Testament “will reflect the perspective of the person or group of people writing it. This perspective includes the writers’ national or ethnic ties and their cultural norms and beliefs. Knowing this can help us understand that the writers and compilers . . . focused on certain details while leaving out others. They made assumptions that others would not have made. And they came to conclusions based on these details and assumptions. We can even see different perspectives across the books of the Bible (and sometimes within the same book).”

Thus, we find that one book calls upon Jewish men to divorce their non-Jewish wives (see Ezra 9–10), while another book highlights the blessings that came from marrying a foreign woman (see Ruth).

In one account of Creation, God simply speaks “Let there be!” and the universe obediently responds (see Genesis 1). Other depictions of Creation draw upon ancient Near Eastern images of God defeating a primordial sea monster representing the forces of chaos (see Psalm 74:12–17, Job 26:10–13, or Isaiah 27:1).

The Assyrian Empire was a hated military power that left death wherever its armies went. Was it appropriate to celebrate the Assyrians’ fall (see Nahum), or should the Israelites have remembered that God’s loving concern extends even to them (see Jonah)? Would the Assyrians be destroyed (see Isaiah 14:24–27), or would they one day be gathered to God along with the house of Israel (see Isaiah 19:24–25)?

As we read the Psalms, do we identify with poets declaring that God “is good: because his mercy [ḥesed] endureth for ever” (Psalm 118:1)? Or do we relate more to those questioning, “Is his mercy [ḥesed] clean gone for ever?” (Psalm 77:8).

As with the diverse individuals we listen to in fast and testimony meetings, the variety of perspectives in the Old Testament is an opportunity. Some may reaffirm our faith in God as we have come to understand him, while others may challenge us in uncomfortable ways. In both these meetings and in the scriptures, it may take some soul-searching and soul-stretching for us to decide how to react to a perspective we disagree with. Are they wrong? Or do they know something we need to learn?

We might look at the Old Testament, for example, and conclude that the allowance for slavery found in their legal codes was immoral—something the ancients practiced because they did not understand some truths that we know better.1 On the other hand, we might decide a self-critique is in order when we see the many laws and prophetic texts insisting that Israel take care of orphans, widows, the poor, and refugees. Are modern notions of individualism or nationalism blinding us to some truths the ancients better understood?2

As we study the Old Testament, let’s rejoice in the diversity we find and recognize that it is a sacred experience to give so many voices—even ones with different perspectives—their turn at the pulpit.

Share

Joshua Sears grew up in Southern California and served in the Chile Osorno Mission. He received a BA in ancient Near Eastern studies from BYU, followed by an MA from The Ohio State University and a PhD in Hebrew Bible from The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include biblical polygamy, the book of Isaiah, and Latter-day Saint translations and editions of the Bible. He has presented at regional and national meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, BYU Education Week, the Sidney B. Sperry Symposium, and the Leonardo Museum Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the author of A Modern Guide to an Old Testament (Deseret Book, 2025). His wife, Alice, is from Hong Kong and plays in Bells at Temple Square; they live in Lindon, Utah, with their five children.

Choir Stalls in the Salvator Church in Bruges by Emile Vloors (1871–1952).

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

Subscribe now

In 2 Nephi 29, some folks claimed “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible.” Not only do followers of the restored Gospel take comfort that these Gentiles were wrong (the Book of Mormon is precisely such additional scripture), but there are indeed many plural Bible translations. We already have many Bibles, as it were. Let’s figure out how to make better use of them.

Which translations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament are we using?

• The NRSV for accuracy of translation

  • The HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible offers the full text of the New Revised Standard Version as well as in-depth articles, introductions, and comprehensive notes by today’s leading biblical scholars, and the New Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV with the Apocrypha offers even more scholarly depth, commentary, and appendices.

• The NIV for bright language and moving interpretation

• The Hebrew Bible, a three-volume translation with commentary by Robert Alter, for literary power and intellectually fun footnotes

• The English-Hebrew Tanakh from the Jewish Publication Society

  • The Jewish Study Bible combines the entire Hebrew Bible—in the celebrated Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation—with explanatory notes, introductory materials, and essays by leading biblical scholars on virtually every aspect of the text, the world in which it was written, its interpretation, and its role in Jewish life.

How does one determine the best translation?

“Let that question occupy us over a lifetime of study! If you have only the KJV now, enjoy that: it’s a classic translation that formed modern English and the canon as we know it today. If we can save up to purchase whatever our carefully checked favorite translation is (remember that not all translations bring value), we will enrich our study and our bookshelves over time: maybe add and use a new translation every four years? LDS scholar Ben Spackman’s blog has many smart recommendations.” —BP

“You can use a website like BibleGateway or BibleHub to look at a single verse in every English translation, or to read different translations side by side. Anne and Roger Pimentel did an episode of their podcast “And Yet We Believe” all about different translations of the Bible called “Other Bible Translations: We’ve Got Options,” and they also have an instagram post that gives a helpful overview of some popular choices.” —CP

What resources can help make the Old Testament more accessible to children?

“The Bible Storybook by Josh and Sarah Sabey (For Little Saints), also available as a podcast from Faith Matters called Scripture Stories for Little Saints, is a beautiful way to tell these stories to children (and bring fresh insights to adults!)

Other Bible Storybooks we use in our house include:

• Read Wonder Listen

• God’s Stories as told by God’s Children

• Shine On

• The Book of Belonging

• The Peace Table

• The Just Love Story Bible

• The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories

My preference is for gender-neutral language for God, culturally appropriate illustrations (melanated skin tones), stories that are inclusive of women and girls, and no penal substitution atonement theory, so that’s reflected in my choices here. You can often read a sample story or two online, or check them out from a public library before ordering, so you can see if a particular book will be a good fit for your family.

I also like following Meredith Miller on Instagram and Substack, and I’m looking forward to her new book coming out in March called Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture. The description says it combines “creative Bible storytelling for kids, fun and engaging conversation prompts for families, and key contextual information for adults. … Each story is accompanied by historical, literary, and cultural background to help parents understand the original form, audience, and intention for the story. Meredith frames each story to help grown-ups talk with kids about how the story’s original audience would have understood it, so kids can understand the life-giving story the Bible invites us all into.” —CP

“Scholar Ben Spackman, whose excellent recommendations have been shaping my study for over a decade, recommends The Bible Story Handbook for Primary-age teaching.” —BP

What resources can help us focus on doctrines and principles with children and youth?

“In Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From, Pastor Meredith Miller writes about how to use the Bible to primarily help children develop a trusting relationship with God (rather than to primarily teach children to obey.) She writes, “I think God, not humans, should be at the center of any story we tell to kids, the one around whom every other event or human action revolves. Every story includes a cast of characters made up of humans, God, and sometimes other aspects of creation, but when we tell a story, we should first look at how God feels, how God responds, and what attribute of God we see highlighted in this particular encounter.” You can read a short excerpt about this here, and find the book online or at your local public library.” —CP

What resources will help us center women and women’s stories? Where can I find a feminist approach to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament?

“Check out Womanist Midrash by Wilda Gafney. ‘Gafney uses her own translations and offers midrashic interpretations of the biblical text rooted in the African American preaching and rabbinic traditions to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Grounded in rigorous scholarship, this volume employs solid womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Afro-Asiatic world, expanding conversations of and about biblical interpretation.’

I also like to follow comefollowme_women on Instagram—they recommend Seeing Women in the Old Testament.” —CP

“Seeing Women in the Old Testament by Carli Anderson, Rebekah Call, Lori L. Denning, Amy Easton, Amy H. Fisher, and Catherine Gines Taylor is terrific.” —KH

“For the more scholarly inclined, start with Lynn Matthews Anderson’s Dialogue classic (1994) article “Toward a Feminist Interpretation of Latter-day Scripture.” For a broader feminist reclamation of the stories of women in the Old Testament, consider Womanist Midrash. For a useful and beautiful Deseret Books resource, check out Women of the Old Testament. In no particular order, a few scholars include Janice Merrill Allred, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Claudia Bushman, Rebekah Call, Amy Easton-Flake, Maxine Hanks, Janiece Johnson, Jennifer C. Lane, Carol Lynn Pearson, Julie Smith, Margaret Merrill Toscano, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and, of course, the Church also offers its own course outline for studying women in the scriptures.” —BP

What resources will help us understand the historical context of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament?

“There are whole shelves devoted to this question: of course the commentary from the NRSV will more than satisfy most readers. But if you want more, why not start with a book that puts the context right next to the text? Consider (another Spackman recommendation) the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, a modern translation of the Bible that outlines at length the context behind each story.

Another excellent introduction comes from Deseret Book: Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament.” —BP

“The World of the Old Testament: A Curious Kid’s Guide to the Bible’s Most Ancient Stories by Marc Olson is aimed at middle grade readers (ages 9-13) but has tons of helpful information for adults, too. You can look at the first few pages (including the table of contents) here.” —CP

What additional resources can help make Bible scholarship more accessible?

“Hope and Healing in the Hebrew Bible offers a gentle introduction to “Gentile” scholarship on the Old Testament for Latter-day Saints. While writing with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints clearly in mind, and frequently referencing sermons and writings by General Authorities, Michael Huston introduces readers to important scholars like Walter Brueggeman, Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, Michael Coogan, and Kate Bowler. This beautifully balanced approach succeeds in its aim of showing that reading the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/Tanakh through multiple interpretive traditions deepens and enriches the ways that Latter-day Saint Christians can understand these writings. He reads some familiar sections—creation, exodus, David and Bathsheba—and some that we tend to skip over—Leviticus, the story of Huldah, the Psalms—in ways that both honor and challenge conventional LDS readings. This book will reinvigorate your Sunday School preparation or perhaps even teach you how to love the Old Testament for the first time!” —KH

“I love Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans – ‘Drawing upon recent scholarship and literary analysis, Evans creatively retells our favorite Bible stories, explaining their contexts and possible interpretations, and then connects these ancient stories to our present-day ones. … Readers are invited to fall in love with Scripture all over again without checking their intellect—or their imaginations—at the door.’

The Bible For Normal People podcast and books aim to bring the best in Biblical scholarship to everyday people. They have an “adult version” of their children’s storybook God’s Stories as told by God’s Children—it’s the same content, minus the illustrations. If you’re interested in scholarship around the composition of the Bible, you can listen to (or read a transcript of) The Bible For Normal People podcast Episode 125: Pete Enns – Big Ideas that Shaped Biblical Scholarship: Julius Wellhausen and the Pentateuch for a crash course in the documentary hypothesis/source criticism/literary criticism, and check the show notes for links to even more resources.

The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler also offers some helpful insights and context; I borrowed my copy from my public library.” —CP

“I love the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary series.” —SMG

“I've found the YouTube videos at BibleProject quite good, especially as a starting place (billed as nondenominational, the content has an evangelical Christian leaning, which can be great for sparking reflection—’Do I agree with that statement?’) Having accessible (animated) content as a discussion starter is very helpful. For starters, they have a YouTube playlist of short videos on ‘How to Read the Bible.’” —LF

“Bible scholar Dan McClellan’s videos have often done a wonderful job catching Latter-day Saints up on the leaps made in biblical scholarship over the past 50 years.” —JO

“How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel offers more scholarly/academic commentary. Blair Hodges’ Maxwell Institute interview with Kugel is also wonderful.

Deseret Book recently published BYU Professor Joshua Sear’s short, accessible LDS faithful reorientation, A Modern Guide to the Old Testament. (Don’t let the title fool you: it, like much of Ben Spackman’s work, helps reorient us to read the Old Testament through nonmodern eyes.)

There are many titles that promise to make the Old Testament simpler, and I understand the instinct here but consider the opposite for a second: what if, instead of looking for simpler, we could make our approach to the Old Testament harder and healthier, more plain and more reflective? What if, instead of seeking simple answers from experts, we prayerfully asked ourselves plain and simple questions and then let our own study provide the drip-drip-drip of insights, even revelation? For that, in my opinion, we have exactly the right book, one that has probably shaped my study of the Old Testament more than any other than the text itself, BYU philosopher James Faulconer’s The Old Testament Made Harder. Its conceit is rather brilliant: it only asks questions (well informed and framed questions) and it gives no answers. Published in 2014 (before the Come Follow Me manuals), this book may be, yes, the simplest shortcut to deepening and more reflective scripture study. Recommending especially for teachers looking to prompt inspiring questions and more reflective discussion.” —BP

The Maxwell Institute is also starting a weekly series where scholars reflect on the Old Testament as Latter-day Saints study it in Come, Follow Me called Old Testament Reflections.

Where can I find a timeline or graphic showing when everything happened and where to find it?

“The Church has issued several resources: here’s a linear overview (without dates) for the Old Testament at the start of Come Follow Me; here’s an at-a-glance timeline as well as a more detailed chronology. All dates should be understood as approximate (especially around the mythological stories).” —BP

What resources can help me understand Isaiah?

“The LDS tradition offers a distinct approach to Isaiah and its relationship to restored scripture: namely, BYU religion professor and LDS philosopher Joseph Spencer has helped renew and restore understanding of Isaiah through two (of his many) scholarly books A Word in Season and The Vision of All, both of which reinterpret the words of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. How does the Book of Mormon read Isaiah? Start with a YouTube interview with the author.” —BP

How to read the Bible: The Changing Cosmos and Tuesday Afternoon Tests

Beyond what to read, there is also how to read—and Wayfare editors recommend reading the actual text and then finding inspiration in it.

A good study of scripture slowly stretches us in two directions simultaneously. Our study should both (1) estrange (or defamiliarize) and (2) connect (or refamiliarize) ourselves with the meanings in scripture text.

In other words, a next-step understanding of scripture should, first, involve reading the actual text. That means not knowing all the Sunday School answers (especially in Sunday School!), actually letting the text challenge our understanding, and taking a bit more risk, curiosity, and awe in interpreting the text as our understanding of the gap animating past and present grows.

Whatever else we conclude, a close reading of the Old Testament will remind us again and again that ancient Hebrews lived remarkably differently than Latter-day Saints do (and should). (How many Semitic-speaking Canaanite nomadic pastoralists originally from Mesopotamia enduring enslavement, conquest, and exile have you met at Cafe Rio recently?) Call this first test “the changing cosmos test”: does our study of scripture help us understand their experiences on their terms and thus experience a secondary salutary vertigo at the differences between ancient and modern worlds? Does our scripture study help us at first understand, without leaping to bridge, the ways the cosmos changes over time, and how the worlds that produced ancient scriptures and our own are different?

And, then, just as importantly, our study aims, second, to reconnect us back more firmly to the present world. We do this by applying insight from the text, without collapsing the differences between ancient and our worlds. Our study succeeds when it passes what we might call “the Tuesday afternoon test”: how does our study of scripture reanimate or color how we live, say, the coming Tuesday afternoon? (We might just meet folks suffering discrimination at Cafe Rio!)

These two tests stretch us in both directions on purpose: the changing cosmos test defamiliarizes (or estranges) us from the world that produced the text because we are actually reading and understanding the text in its context, on its terms, and the Tuesday afternoon test refamiliarizes (or connects) the insights from reading the text to our everyday lives here and now. The two together let us live better with difference.

No less than heaven on earth can be found and rebuilt in the spaces opened up in such soul-stretching saving readings.

Please enjoy the following essays by Wayfare contributors demonstrating creative and inspiring ways to read scripture.

For even more from Wayfare this coming year on the Old Testament, be sure you are subscribed, then go to manage your subscription (wayfaremagazine.org/account) and turn on notifications for “Wayfare Theology.”

To receive Come Follow Me resource roundups from Faith Matters in your inbox, first be sure you are subscribed to the Faith Matters Substack, then go to manage your subscription (faithmatters.org/account) and turn on notifications for “Come Follow Me”.

Subscribe now

Share

I am grateful for the artists of the past who shared the message of the gospel of Christ. Every work of art matters—even those that might not resonate with contemporary beliefs or practices—because they ask us to consider the eternal expanse of the gospel and how we might live it more fully. They inspire the next generation to continue making, thinking, and living their faith.

However, as an artist and an educator, I believe arguing for one image that represents the full theology of the faith places us on a terrifying path. The image that best represents our theology is what I’ll call “the next one.”

We have excellent examples of art made with high levels of faith and skill, but they are stepping stones to “the next one.” The “next one” is any art currently being created by the worldwide community of faith, as they bring together their life experience, culture, tools, skills, and discipleship.

Every artist’s voice paired with their vision of gospel theology is vital—for themselves, for the viewers, and for the world.

Share

David "HABBENINK" Habben is an illustrator, artist, and educator based in Utah. He's currently Area Head and Associate Professor in the Illustration program at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah.

Art by Raoul Dufy (1877-1953).

Subscribe now

This essay concludes Wayfare’s Visual Theology series.