followHIM - Genesis 1-3, Moses 2-3, Abraham 4-5 -- Part 1 : Dr. Joshua M. Sears

Episode Date: January 1, 2022

Were the creation accounts intended to be archeological, geological, or scientific texts? Dr. Joshua Sears joins the podcast and teaches us about Ancient Near Eastern Cosmology and the purpose of creation texts. We learn what "accommodation" means when discussing scripture, and what are "the terrible questions?"Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/episodesFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive ProducersDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: MarketingLisa Spice: Client Relations, Show Notes/TranscriptsJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Rough Video EditorAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsKrystal Roberts: French TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-pianoPlease rate and review the podcast.

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John, by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow him. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I'm your host. I'm here with my prolific co-host, John, by the way. Hi, John. Hi. Anytime somebody wants to describe me with the word pro, that sounds nice. I'm kind of an amateur pro. My amateur-lific co-host, John, by the way. we are ready to jump into the Old Testament with you and the Pearl of Great Price today. John, we have an expert with us, one of the most delightful people I know. Who is it?

Oh, that's great. Yes, we have Josh Sears with us. I have a little bio here. Joshua Sears grew up in Southern California, served in the Chile Osorno mission. He received a bachelor's in ancient Near Eastern Studies from BYU, where he taught at the Missionary Training Center and volunteered as an EMT. That is an EMT at the MTC at BYU. He received an MA, master's degree from Ohio State University, and a PhD in Hebrew. That is so cool, at the University of Texas at Austin.

His research interests include Israelite prophecy, marriage and families in the ancient world, the publication history of Latter-day Saint scripture. 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. His wife Alice is from Hong Kong and plays in Bells at Temple Square. And they live in Linden, Utah. They have five children from ages 12 down to 2. BYU is lucky to have Josh, and I know the students adore him. Josh, this week's Come Follow Me lesson is a lot. We have two chapters from Genesis, two chapters from Moses, two chapters

from Abraham. Let me first ask you, when you're teaching your students at BYU, how do you have them approach texts like the Old Testament, the Pearl of Great Price? How do you introduce them so they're coming at it in the right way? I guess, for me, I like to start with the biblical text, like Genesis. Look and see what that does. That's been around the longest. That's our common ground with other Christians, with Jews. So kind of start with that as a foundation. Then I would look at the Moses and Abraham text as being modern revelation coming through the prophet Joseph Smith, where he's taken that Genesis-based text and he's expanded it. He's reworked it. He's given new insights. He's given commentary. He's given us a lot of great stuff to work with for a latter-day setting. So starting

with the Genesis is kind of your first step there. And then you branch out from there into these amazing things that Joseph gave, these new spins on it. Okay. I like that idea. And then maybe even I would say you could say, okay, here's what book of Moses added. Here's what the book of Abraham added. And then you could even say, here's what prophets today maybe have even added. So you kind of give them in the order they came. Yeah. And that's a great thing about scriptural texts, right, is they're not static and frozen. They're dynamic. They can change and evolve and meet new circumstances, new needs as different prophets are interpreting, expanding, revising. So that's the kind of wonderful thing about the Word of God being living, right, is that it has this kind of flexibility to speak to people in different ways at different times. Isn't that one of the main, what's the word, tenets of textual criticism is the earliest

text is the most accurate, but when we believe in living prophets, a prophet can come along and say, hmm, let me clarify that or let me expand that. And that's another way we can say it's dynamic, isn't it? Which is a whole different way of looking at it. Yeah, President Oaks talked about that in the Ensign several years ago, that it's important to look at the meaning of what it meant back then, but a text isn't, he says, limited to just what it meant back then, but it also includes what it can mean for us today. And I like that you said we share this. The book of Genesis we share with our Jewish friends.

So they're looking at the same kind of text we are out of the Torah. And I suppose there's as many creation stories as there are cultures on earth. And these are all, I think we're looking at creation stories in Genesis and in Moses and even some in Abraham today, aren't we? Yep, we are. That's why we have stuff from Genesis, Moses, and Abraham. They're all parallel, right? They're all telling the same story in different ways. Josh, I want to squeeze a little more out of you here.

So you're a Latter-day Saint at BYU. Then you go through this massive biblical studies education. How do you look at Genesis differently than when, you know, say you were just home off a mission? That's a great question. I would say that biblical scholars in general look at Genesis very differently than we did a couple hundred years ago. And sometimes people frame this as, oh, you know, you've got what Genesis means versus new stuff like science and things that are challenges there. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that in the last couple hundred years, we have basically rediscovered Genesis's cultural environment, the ancient Near East. So these are all Israel's neighbors, right? Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Canaan. We have done a lot of

archaeology. So we've dug up these sites. We have discovered thousands of documents, texts from the ancient Near East, from inside Israel, from around Israel. We've deciphered the scripts that had been lost that we've learned to read, like we've learned to read Egyptian in the last 200 years. We've learned to read the cuneiform script, you know, the little wedge-shaped things that write in the clay tablets in Mesopotamia. And we've learned to read these languages and we can read these documents. And that's just led to this explosion of new understanding of what Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament is talking about, because the Israelites don't live in a little bubble, right? They're not in a vacuum. They participate like in a broader pop culture. And so there's inside references and frameworks and common understandings that they share with all these

people. And now that we can see all the stuff going around, we can better understand the Old Testament. We see the conversations it's participating in. I think that is a crucial understanding. Because if you don't, you're going to look at Genesis from 2021. Let's put it against evolution, right? Let's put it against biology, but that was not their world. They lived in a world of cosmologies of Babylonian cosmology, right? Egyptian cosmology. Yeah. And they, they make references to things that these other cultures believe in and think about. And you see general conference speakers doing this today, right? President Uchtdorf made a joke about Chewbacca. You remember a few years ago about your family member who wears the Chewbacca costume. He gave a talk all about Bilbo Baggins and the Hobbit. You remember President

Faust gave a talk based on that book, The Little Engine That Could. Thomas S. Monson gave a talk and talked about the movie Home Alone. So they do this, right? And we have references to prom and other things that are just modern kind of stuff. So they're always assuming that their audience understands these things because it's part of our common frame of reference. And the Israelite prophets are writing, doing the exact same thing. They're making references to stories and events and just worldviews that their neighbors have. And they're participating in all this dialogue. So now that we can see so much more of what was going on, all of a sudden, things in the Old Testament that didn't make sense

just kind of pop out and you go, oh, that's what they're talking about. One of the things we understand better now looking at the Old Testament is their cosmology, which is a fancy word for basically how you imagine the universe, how is the universe structured. So today, our cosmology is that the Earth is a sphere and we rotate around the sun in an orbit, right? We're one of nine or so planets orbiting the sun, depending on, you know, the whole Pluto thing. And then we're a solar system and the solar system is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And that's one of who knows how many galaxies, right? So that's our cosmology. That's how we understand the structure of the universe today

in the ancient world of the ancient Near East where the Israelites live, they didn't think in those terms at all. And, you know, the way they describe their cosmology has always been in the Old Testament. But we can some again, some of these references to what they're talking about pop out a little bit easier now that we can read what everybody else is saying and we see what the Israelites share with them. So this is going to sound a little weird at first, but bear with me while I describe this. Okay, I'm excited. I like how if someone introduces that that way. This is going to sound a little bit weird, but let's do it anyway. If you Google the term phrase ancient Israelite cosmology, it'll come up with pictures and things to look at. So I'll just try to describe it here. So basically for the Israelites, the earth is flat and the universe is made up not of empty space the way we tend to think of a space. There's there's water everywhere, kind of just chaos water that's not doing much.

And basically we're living in a giant air bubble. It's like an inverted snow globe. So the water's on the outside and you live inside the snow globe. And you've got a solid dome that's resting over the flat earth that keeps all that water that's up there from crashing down and destroying everything. Then you've got these pillars that are beneath our flat earth, kind of holding it in place so that the water underneath isn't gushing up to drown us that way. Then meanwhile, the sun, moon, and stars are all underneath that solid dome, and they move, you know, in rotation underneath it to give us light and things like that. So that is how people in the ancient Near East see the world. That's how the Israelites see the world.

And that's what's assumed throughout the Old Testament. Many, many references that have bits and pieces of this. And that's exactly what you see going on in Genesis 1. So, for example, in verse 6, let there be a firmament, that's the solid dome, in the midst of the waters. That's because everywhere is water. And let it divide the waters from the waters because we've got these, you know, this is where we split apart the water to make the air pocket. So the waters above and waters below Genesis one, one, six.

Yeah. And then seven says, God made the firmament and divided the waters, which were under the firmament from the waters, which were above the firmament. And it was so right. Um, so you get this there and when you know what you're looking for it's pretty obvious what it's talking about most people though the reason this is surprising is because our our cosmology is so ingrained in our brains that when we read this we tend to superimpose how we understand the universe onto this so we we we kind of make it fit our understanding of

what's going on um rather than kind of let them speak for themselves with their worldview. Yeah, that is true. Josh, I think you're giving our listeners and John and I here a skill set that is crucial going into the Old Testament, that let them speak for themselves in their world instead of superimposing your world upon it, right? Let's just make this clear, Josh. They truly believe, and these are not dumb people. These are intelligent people, but this is their worldview. I live in this inverted snow globe and the um, this, the stars, moon and sun are inside of the snow globe. And outside of that is the chaos waters, uh, below me is the chaos waters. Uh, and that's how I understand my world. And I like that you point out that they're not dumb. You know, this is based on the best that

you could understand at the time because they don't have telescopes and things like that. Right. So if you're standing out in a big field and you look around you, you're going to see the earth kind of look like a big flat circle all around you. The sky is going to look like it has a dome shape and you do see the sun, moon, and stars kind of moving all around you. So, right. So that just makes intuitive sense that that's what's going on. That's what they observe. Yeah. And I would, I would say that you don't know how the rain is falling, right? So the water is up there. Occasionally it gets through, I guess. Yeah. Well, in the solid dome, you've got these little trap doors that God can open called the windows of heaven, and he can open those and let a little water down to help you there.

So when God, like in our Malachi, our tithing passage says, I'll open for you the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing. We take that as metaphorical. They took it a little more literally. Wow. That there's actually little windows out there. And in the flood story, we usually think, oh, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, right? But what it actually says, you go to Genesis 7, you do get that coming from up there. But it also says that the foundations of the deep were broken up.

So those bounds holding the water under the land are being ripped open. So you got water coming up from below too. So you got water coming from down below. It's like holes in the snow globe getting punctured and this water is rushing in now. And that's where you get the flood coming from is both from above, but also from below. There's another spot when Abinadi in Mosiah 13 is kind of quoting the 10 commandments to King Noah and the wicked priests, he says, don't make graven images of things which are in the heaven above, which are in the earth beneath, or which are in the water under the earth. And so that sounds like their cosmology right there.

The waters under, that's in Mosiah 13, 12. They conceive of three realms. You've got that realm that's up right there. The waters under that's in Mosiah 13, 12. They conceive of three realms. You've got that realm. It's up above there. You've got the land where you are and then the water underneath the land. There's those are the kind of three layers. They always talk about. I have a quote here from James Talmadge from an address called the earth and

man, 1931, 90 years ago, James Talmadge says, let us not try to rest the scriptures in an attempt to explain away that what we cannot explain. The opening chapters of Genesis and scriptures related there too, I would think he's talking maybe about Moses and Abraham, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archeology, earth science, or man science.

Holy scripture will endure while the conceptions of men change with new discoveries, which Josh, you mentioned earlier, all the new discoveries. And then he said this, we do not show reverence for the scriptures when we miss apply them through faulty interpretation.

And I think Josh, what you're giving us here is a skill that will help us avoid faulty interpretation. And I think, Josh, what you're giving us here is a skill that will help us avoid faulty interpretation. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. What you see happen a lot today is that people think we've got this big battle between, say, on the one hand, scientists and science, right? And being true and faithful to the word of God in Genesis, and people see these as pitted against each other. And so that comes up in debates about evolution or the age of the earth and things like that. And I think the fundamental problem with doing that is that Genesis isn't speaking the same language as what the scientists are. These aren't even in conversation. So to force them into a

debate, it's just not going to work from the get-go. Right. If you're talking to someone who believes they live in an inverted snow globe, again, not stupid. I know that sounds like I'm making fun, but I'm not. And then start talking to them about evolution. Number one,

you wouldn't speak their language. And two, what are you talking about? Right. Yeah. And Elder Talmadge's quote, you see this repeated in more recent church publications too. So I got this one here.

This is from the new era, February, 2016. And it says the new era, February, 2016. And it says the details of what happened on this planet before Adam and Eve, aren't a huge doctrinal concern of ours. The accounts of the creation in the scriptures are not meant to provide a literal scientific explanation of the specific processes, time periods, or events involved. So that's from just a few years ago. So it's the same sentiment, right? That you got to be careful not to use this to make scientific claims because

that's not what it's trying to do. It really was getting into my Hebrew Bible training that gave me better tools to kind of understand this. Because even sometimes people who are trying to defend science don't really understand how scripture is working. And so they make some faulty assumptions there too. It takes a really good understanding of both. So it's not just members. It's just not believers who do this. It's scientists too. And they say, look what the Bible says. They don't understand its cosmology either. Now this brings up a problem though, that I, I hope to address here. Um, some people, and this can be Latter-day Saints. This can, this has happened for other Christians, anybody who's religious reading this text,

when you're told, and especially if you haven't heard this before and haven't really had time to process it, that scripture, you know, sacred revealed scripture that we have in our canon teaches something that sounds so wildly inaccurate as a flat earth, you know, surrounded by water and all this, that can be really challenging because people think, well, are the scriptures wrong then? And that can be a real trial. So I think this takes some stepping back to think about what is God trying to do with different scriptures and what's he not trying to do? There's a great passage in the Doctrine and Covenants, section one. So I know we just left E&C behind last year, but we're going to go back an entire year to section one here. So look at section one,

verse 24. Remember that this is the preface to the Doctrine and Covenants. So the Lord's kind of talking about the nature of this book. Verse 24, behold, I am God and have spoken it. These commandments are of me and were given unto my servants in their weakness after the manner of And I think this is such a crucial concept. He's saying here that, you know, if the language were different or the weaknesses were a little stronger, I might speak differently to these saints. But I'm making sure that this is in a way that they can understand, adapted to their weakness, because I want them to understand that's the goal right there. I'm going to speak to them in their language. Could we change that word? I'm going to speak to them in their cosmology. Yeah. And so you think about in Genesis 1, what is God trying to do?

I think the assumption is often that he's trying to explain how the earth and the universe physically came into being. And I don't think that's actually what he's trying to do here. I think what he's trying to do is explain who he is, what his nature is, explain who people are, our relationship to each other, how do we relate to God and kind of what's our purpose here on earth? Those are the doctrines that Genesis one is trying to teach and it succeeds beautifully. It does its job. Um, and there's a lot of ways in which it corrects false ideas that were in the Israelites culture and it reveals beautiful things. So why is it using this kind of what would say is a wrong cosmology to do that?

Well, I've got a friend who's a Latter-day Saint historian, Ben Spackman, and he caught me onto this word that Christian theologians have been using, and it's called accommodation. And accommodation is a concept that says that when God speaks to us, he's got to kind of dumb it down and speak from our framework so that we can understand. It's the same thing the Doctrine and Covenants is talking about. So we have this idea in our scriptures, we just don't often have like a single word to use to describe it. So that's why I think accommodation is a useful term. So we can wrap our minds around the vocabulary word. So you have other Christians talking about how accommodation is God, not just simplifying it down, but also adopting our fallen frameworks in some cases in order to communicate things. Because if he were to speak at the level he understands, it would just go over our heads. Josh, I do this as a parent all the time.

And this is good pedagogy in the Book of Mormon. Remember Ammon going to King Lamoni, and Ammon just can't start teaching everything he knows about God because he's got to start where Lamoni is at. So he says, do you understand God? And Lamoni goes, I don't know what you're talking about. And then, you know, this Ammon's like, well, you believe in a great spirit, right? And Lamoni's like, yeah. And he's like, okay, well, that's God. Now there's probably differences between the Lamanite concept of a great spirit and the Nephite concept of God, but it's, it's close enough for right now. He's like, we're going to roll with that for now. We can flesh out the details later, but for now we're going to roll with this. And I imagine God's doing much the same thing in

here, Genesis one with the cosmology. The Israelites have a cosmology already. This is how they see the world. And rather than fight that and confuse them by explaining black holes and nuclear fusion and solar systems and all these things they have no concept about he's like you know what my real priority here is teaching you about your value and your worth and your purpose in our relationship so i'm going to harness your cosmology and roll with that for the time being it's wrong but what the heck i'm teaching you know i'm priorities here i want to get at these doctrinal ideas and the cosmology works to explain that as is and it's really not going to help them to try to get into the details of how the cosmology works to explain that as is. And it's really not going to help them to try to get into the details of how the cosmology really works. Cause in the end,

how is that? That's not going to help them as much as knowing about the nature of God. Right. You know, when people say, well, is Genesis wrong then? I'm like, well, you got to stop and define what you mean by wrong. If you're talking about the scientific, you know, modern perspective of how the earth was made, then yeah, that's wrong. But if that's not what Genesis is even trying to do, it's kind of unfair just to say it's wrong. If you're talking about the scientific, you know, modern perspective of how the earth was made, then yeah, that's wrong. But if that's not what Genesis is even trying to do, it's kind of unfair just to say it's wrong, right? For what it was trying to do, it's right. Yeah, I was thinking about, I think Hugh Nibley calls them the terrible questions. And as you were describing that, Josh, I thought, yeah, God is trying to answer the questions of who is God? Who are you? Why are we here? It's not how did I create everything? It's who am I? Who are you? Why are we here? What are we

supposed to do? And the text reaches those goals without refuting the Big Bang or endorsing the Big Bang or anything. That's not the purpose of the text, you know, and maybe we can get that later, but the truths about God and about who we are is more important to God right now in that text. Yeah. Yeah. And here's another analogy. When I went to high school, I remember being in science class and learning about the nature of the atom. And we learned that there's a nucleus with the protons and neutrons, and then that the electrons orbit around the nucleus in the same way that planets orbit around the sun. So that was fine. And you can use that to do things like, okay, if you've got an atom here and an atom here with this many electrons in their outer, you know, orbit, and then that means they'll stick together and form molecules, right? So we did a

lot with that. Then I got to BYU and took Chem 105, which was for me a really hard class. And I learned that that model, the atom, it's called the Bohr model, is not only inaccurate, it's been inaccurate since the 1920s. And so I remember feeling so confused. Why did my high school science teacher teach me something that we've known was wrong since far before that teacher was born. And I asked this to the teaching assistant in class, and I'll never forget what she said. Two things is what she said. Number one, the Bohr model is a lot easier for high school students to understand than nuclear physics, which is basically the modern conception is electrons are in these probability clouds, right? And there's somewhere in there, but you can't always tell. So a modern model, the atom looks like a balloon animal right with these clouds sticking out everywhere but she said

that's that's harder for high school students for one but number two maybe more importantly that boar model is extremely useful for doing a lot of things you can make a lot of predictions in chemistry and physics using that older model. Eventually, it stops working when you get to more advanced stuff. That's why you have nuclear physics today. But it does quite a lot. You get quite a lot of traction out of it. So that's another reason why you just do that in high school, because it's, you know, it might be wrong ultimately, but it is very useful.

So I think in the similar way, you know, the Israelites cosmology might have been wrong, but it was very useful god with you know minimal messing with their paradigms here could teach them quite a bit using that um and sometimes that's just good pedagogy well this this is great i in the in the come follow me manual it says one thing that creation story teaches us is that God can make something magnificent out of something unorganized that's helpful to remember when life seems chaotic. And I think that's a big meaning we can draw without trying to get really specific about the science, but look what God can do with all of this. And maybe we've got three different books here. Should we start in Genesis and start looking at some specifics?

Let's do it. Okay. So we'll take this from the top. And so like I was saying earlier, some things in here we understand a little bit better because we can read about these texts from all the other cultures around Israel. And we can read about creation stories in Egypt, from Babylon, from the Canaanites. And so when you do that, you see some common themes kind of develop that help us put Genesis in kind of the context of their ancient understanding there. So one thing for the Israel and their neighbors is when they picture pre-creation,

what things were like before, they're not picturing nothingness in the sense of just empty space there's always going to be stuff there there's matter there but it's unorganized it's just kind of chaotic has no purpose it's just crazy and they visualize this as being like we said water kind of just primordial watery chaos so the nothingness is made up of just chaos water that's unstructured and unorganized. And that's what they're imagining. The chaos waters. Okay. Yep. And so when God or the gods, depending on your cultural story here, create, what they're doing is they've got to bring order to that chaos that's going on right there. And in a lot of these other cultures, that happens via

a big cosmic battle that happens when you've got the creator God who's in battle with the forces of chaos, often represented by a giant dragon or sea monster. And you have this big dramatic battle. And, you know, they would read these stories out loud at festivals and things. So it's supposed to be kind of, you know, exciting and entertaining, too. But you'll have a big conflict and you get this from Babylon and other places. And you're like, oh, on the edge of your seats you know being excited who's going to win here the

forces of chaos or the the god who's trying to bring order and harmony to the universe and when when the god prevails in the battle that's where creation can really happen and we can start organizing things here and structuring things so and it's it's not just a story to them right josh i mean it's not just a story to them they are they're hearing yeah they're living this they're recreating it as they tell these stories over and over. Right. And what Genesis one, what biblical scholars conclude is that it isn't, it's in dialogue

with these other stories. They're aware of these stories. Again, it's their pop culture, right? They know about this stuff. And so Genesis one is in dialogue and responding to these other stories. And in some cases it pushes back against those stories and their assumptions, you know, in a way to kind of what we'd call correcting false doctrine to say, nope, that's not how it went. It's actually like this. And then, like we said, with the cosmology thing, there's other ways in which it kind of just rolls with the assumptions.

So, again, God kind of deciding here, what am I going to roll with for now and what am I going to push back on? So Genesis 1 is kind of doing both in different ways. So let's look and see. Now we'll start at verse one and kind of just work through this here. So in the King James version, we start off in verse one, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Looking at this here in Hebrew, it seems what's going on. If I'm going to kind of like retranslate this a little bit here, the most common understanding today is that verses one and two are setting up a background scenario to get ready for where the actual main action starts in verse three. So it's not like you have the creation of the heaven and earth in verse one

and we're over and done with, and then we move on. Verses one and two are setting up the situation here. So modern translations might say something like this. When in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, dot, dot, dot, like it's still going. And verse two is kind of keeps that thought going, and at that time, again, before creation, the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And then in verse three, you get now your first moment of actual action. And then God said, let there be light. So verses one and two are setting the stage right there. So a lot of modern translations are read like that.

Yeah. So it's not God created the earth and then the earth was without form. He's trying to set up a story. So we got this word created in verse one. The Hebrew word there is bara, which even Latter-day Saints who don't know Hebrew might recognize because Joseph Smith brings it up right in Nauvoo there. He talks about the word bara. And if you look in your footnote of your scriptures down there, it says Hebrew shaped,

fashioned, created, always divine activity. And that's a good description there. This word is used about 50 times in the Old Testament, and it's always God doing it. So it's a divine thing to do. And it means to shape or fashion, to organize, to separate, to designate, things like that. So Christians several centuries ago came up with this theological idea of creation ex nihilo, right? Out of nothing, which not only Joseph Smith pushed back on that for theological reasons, you know, he said, there's no such thing as immaterial matter and all that, right? That God is organizing matter that's right there. And that's the same worldview that the ancient Israelites have, right? That it's not that there was nothing there, but what God's role in creation was, was organizing this stuff.

And that's what created is getting at here in the Hebrew. So then verse two, the earth is without form and void. So in Hebrew, that's a little rhyming phrase. Without form is tohu and void is bohu. So they rhyme. And there's a, there's a, the word and is va, so altogether it's tohu va bohu. Josh, I'm so glad you're talking about this, because I think that whenever there's a translation, we miss things like that.

Isn't that true? And that makes it so fun. I was talking with Hank about sometimes the writers, I think, are not so much architects as they are artists or something in between. And that was artful to do, though. Say the words again. That was cool. Tohu va bohu. Yeah. And it reminds me of, I want to say Proverbs 31, which is an acrostic poem, who can find a virtuous woman, she's like this. But if you saw it in Hebrew, you would see it's

going through the Hebrew alphabet in order, but you wouldn't see that in English. Yeah. These writers are poets. They love their language and they play with it all the time. And it's part of the message. I'm glad you point that out because there's things that are hidden in plain sight that we don't see because it was originally in a language where they use the language itself as art. Thank you for that. That's cool. they do this, like verse one has kind of a bookend to the end of this story, which is chapter two, verse one, right there. Um, God created the heaven and the earth chapter two, verse one, thus the heavens and the earth were finished. So you get these bookends going on right there. Oh, okay. So there's all sorts of ways they tie this together. They're subtle, but fun. So this form though, without form and void, that is a really important phrase right there because it's setting up the twin problems that Genesis 1 is going to deal with here. So that phrase without form, the tohu, the meaning of that in Hebrew, it means like wild, desert-like, or having no order to it.

So it appears other times in the Bible describing like, you know, just a desert waste kind of area. So it's just kind of this place that's uncultivated, uncultured, uncivilized, just kind of wild. That's what we're getting at the environment. And the word void there, bohu, what that means is it's like waste or empty or unpopulated. Okay. So our twin problems here of this uncreated state is that the environment is wild and waste and that it's not populated right there. So those are two things. And as we go through the days of creation, what we're going to do is create these environments that have an ordered structure and we're going to populate them.

So it's going to deal with this. I can't tell you how many times I've walked into my daughter's room and said, here is matter unorganized. This is, there you go. This is without organization and or population, right? And then we got darkness was upon the face of the deep. So the deep here in Hebrew is to home. And this is referring again to that primordial kind of watery chaos stuff right there.

Right. Even in English, the deep, you know, it's water. It's like the ocean deep water right here. And again, this is before creation has happened yet. We haven't said let there be light or any like that, right? This is what the things are like before creation gets going is you've got the darkness and the watery chaos stuff going on here, but then you get the spirit of God moving upon the face of the water. So God's presence now is going to start doing its thing right here. The word spirit there can also mean breath or wind. So you just get the sense

that he's just like sweeping over, you know, this watery chaos there and good stuff is about to happen. You know, God's presence is here. Okay. So now we've got six days of creation, right? The seventh day is kind of special, but the six days are very, very structured. Okay. And again, that's why it's problematic to use these to make scientific inferences about the physical development of the earth, because these are not a per se physical literal description. They're a literary theological presentation solving theological problems here of the wildness and the unpopulatedness of everything. So you've got six days and they're divided into sets of two days, one, two, three, and days four, five, six. And the reason that's important is because in

days one, two, three, we're dealing with the Tohu problem where we're wild and waste. It's the creation of various realms, various environments. And then in days four, five, six, it's the creation of the populations that will inhabit those environments. And they're lined up so that day one lines up with day four, day two lines up with day five, and day three lines up with day six. So it's a very structured, highly correlated sort of thing here. So we'll work you through how those all line up right here. John, I'm trying to still get Josh to show me something I haven't seen before. My word. We're two verses in.

I'm like, I thought I'd read this. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, this is great. Okay. So they line up with the form and void. Problem one is going to be solved by day one,

two, three problem to what was problem one again? No, it was the wild and waste that the, the environments are not structured. Okay. And that's going to be solved by day one, two, and three. And then the other problem was lack of inhabitants. And that's going to be days four, five, and six. Perfect. You got it. My word. And as everybody knows, I mean, these days of creation, the way they're so structured is everybody recognizes that, right? Each day starts with, and God said, and each day ends with counting off the days.

It was the first day. It was the second day. So they got this tight structure there. Okay, so diving into this, you got to talk about in the Israelite point of view, how does God create? So we talked about it being organizing things. And that's really, again, what it's about. It's not taking something from nothingness to physical manifestation. In this ancient Israelite concept, creating means that you bring order to the chaos and you structure things and give them purpose and meaning. That's what's going on. So what the way

that God does that is he separates things out, divides them. He gives them a purpose or function and he names them. And all of those are three related things and they're all interconnected. And that's what that's how you create. That's how you bring order to chaos. So you separate them out. Number one to give them a function or purpose in an ordered system. And three, part of that, you give them a name. So you see all of those constantly throughout those days. So for example, on the separating things out, look how

much that language appears here in Genesis. So in day one, God divides the light from the darkness. Day two, he divides the waters from the waters. In day three, he gathers the waters into one place. So it's separate from land. Day four, he divides the day from night. In day five, you have the animals reproducing after their kind, right? Not like the other kinds, but like their own kinds. So there's a division there. And it keeps going with that. So constantly dividing, separating, that's what he's doing. That's how things come to have a purpose and meaning is they're separated out from other things. So the other thing you see in here is he's constantly naming things, calling things, like in day one, he calls the light day. He calls the darkness night. In day two,

he calls the firmament heaven. In day three, he calls the dry land earth, and then he calls the water sea. So as he creates these environments, he separates them out. They have a function to perform and he names them. I'm writing this down. Separate it out. Me too. Given a purpose, given a purpose and a name. Yep.

And in their mind, that's, that's that, that's how God creates. We've got all this matter there, right? But you've got to give it order. It's got to be a system where everything has a purpose. It has a function. There's a role to play. And that's what God's doing here. Hey, can I throw something out that I heard once that I just thought was kind of fun?

And that is on the third day, he says twice, God saw that it was good at the end of verse 10 and at the end of verse 12. And so the third day is called good twice. And I read in the Religion 211 manual that, I think it was in there, that the Jews today like to have weddings on Tuesday because it is a twice-blessed day. And I was excited to remember that my wife and I were married on a Tuesday, which is called good twice. So just thought I'd throw that in there. Of course you were. Of course you were. Yeah. Romantic without even meaning to be romantic.

Without even knowing it. Yeah. Yeah. You picked up on the fact that day three has a bonus creation. It has two things he does on one day. And that corresponds, right? Because these days are parallel with day six also has a bonus creation. And when we get there, we'll see why they each have a bonus creation and how those are

parallel to each other, what they do. Let's see. Day six, that's Saturday. I was married on a Saturday. Also twice blessed. So day one, we've got, you you know let there be light and there was light he's dividing light from darkness right there so here again we're talking about realms and environments but if everything was just darkness before now god's light is infused there um so

what's being divided is basically the light and the dark here and in the ancient near east and the hebrew bible light is often used to represent the presence of God, right? So now we've got this environment where God is directly present. And we can, you know, that's one, that's our first most basic form of division here is the presence of God coming into this space here. Day two, then we have, like we talked about earlier, separating water from water.

So that's the division going on. We have these waters that are above and waters below. And that firmament, the solid dome is kind of holding back everything so that now we live in the air bubble, right? So we've got the realm of the sky above you now. We've got the sea as the waters below. So that's kind of our environment at day two is that sky above and the water below that we've separated out now so that they're not all crashed together. Day three there, we have the waters being gathered together and separated out from dry land. So day three is

verses nine through 13. So we get the land as our new environment in day three, but then there's a bonus act of creation in day three where we get the plants. Okay. That's our bonus. And even the plants are divided up and separated, right? So in verse 11, let the earth bring forth one grass to the herb bearing seed and three, the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind. So even plants are subdivided into the, it's all about separation, division, identifying purpose and function here. Okay. So that's our three days that have kind of our establishment of the environments. So we're solving our Tohu problem that without form part from verse two, right? Now we've got our corresponding days. We're going to fill these with, uh, you know, a population in each of these. So day four, starting in verse 14,

going through verse 19. Um, this is, God says, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night. Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years. And he talks about these two great lights, the lesser, greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night, the sun and the moon. And then you've got the stars as well. So these really are, these are the population of this kind of a realm up above everything right there, right? The inside of our inverted snow globe is now populated. And in the Hebrew Bible, stars are often considered to be like hosts. They're described as a population. So it's calling them the inhabitants of the sky here is not like kind of crazy in their

their frame of reference oh that reminds me of of job the morning star saying together it was yep good yeah the personification of the stars there you're you're exactly right man john it's like you read scripture a lot yeah okay then day five is verses 20 through 23 okay now remember back in day two we got the sky and the sea, those environments there. So now we're going to populate the sky and the sea there. So we've got, um, in verse 20, the waters are bringing forth all the water creatures, right? And we've got the foul that fly above the earth and the open firmament of heaven. So you see the mention there of the waters below and the firmament again. Um, and then we get, you know, all these different creatures creating after their kind so they're further subdivided as well

right there so now we've got our population for you know that sky above you there and the uh the waters beneath and then verse six so you know day three was the land the dry land so now as we would expect verse six has the land creatures. Day six, right, Josh? Day six. Yeah. So starting in verse 24, let the earth bring forth living creatures after his kind, cattle and creeping things and beast of the earth after his kind. So again, further subdivisions of those that are right there. And then just like verse day three had its bonus, you know, of the plants, day six gets

a bonus creation, which is humans. Right? In verse 26, let us make man after our image all there. And then, so why do we have the bonus creation of plants corresponding with the bonus creation of people? It explains that just to jump ahead down in verse 29. God said, behold, I have given you, the humans, every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of the tree yielding seed, and for you it shall be for meat, meaning food. Oh, yeah.

That matches exactly with... Yeah. The plants were there to be the food for the humans. Yep. So the bonus creations are parallel. They are, yeah. Hey, could this be a good time to talk about, is man having dominion over animals and things like that? Could we maybe define, what does it mean, verse 26, to have dominion?

Is it kind of like a stewardship as well? Yeah, I think that's how we would see it, is more of a stewardship. The word dominion sounds kind of tyrannical, but I don't think that's the intention there, right? The idea, you know, man is created in this image of God. They're reflecting him and they're supposed to be stewards over the earth, just the way he has been. Right. Okay.

So take care of it. Exactly. So, yeah, I think you'd want to use this more in terms of like protecting your environment rather than just wholesale taking advantage of it. Right. Like, yeah, just use it all up. And instead it's no, take care of it.

Be careful with it. Man, Josh, this is amazing. Genesis one is entirely different in my eyes. Do we have anything more here that you want to show me? Let's say I'm finding a new room in my own house. Every, every verse here. I love this. Well, I guess we should, we should point out again, remember I said that there's ways in which

Genesis is pushing back on the ancient Near Eastern kind of understandings of some things, correcting the false doctrine, right? So it's important to notice here in the other creation myths, a lot of them that we can find around the Israelites, humans don't come across looking all that great um like in the babylonian story the humans are created as slaves to like a lower tier of deities and they're meant to just do the menial tasks and then they get really annoying and the gods are frustrated that they created these guys and so they want to send a flood to like destroy them because they're so noisy and obnoxious and silly so humans often don't have a very good place in all this in these other stories. So Genesis is striking in how much people are like the point, right? God creates all sorts

of things and says it's good. But then with people, he steps back, you know, this is very good, right? People are the climax of the story. They're the point of creation. They're created in God's image. They're meant to have this dominion stewardship over the rest of the earth. This is a huge elevated view of humanity compared to what the Israelites would have been used to from their culture. And I think that's really, really important. That is crucial. That should be a major takeaway, don't you think, Josh, of chapter one? You come away from this feeling really good about yourself.

And, you know, other stories, stories human existence described as a lot more pointless and bleak i'm so glad you brought this up of there are parts of this that are pushing back against other creation narratives out there that is i never considered that before and this one elevates man a little bit more than some of the others yeah another example of how it's pushing back is remember i was talking about that and a lot of these other creation stories um creation has to follow a big climactic battle where you know the gods have to fight these forces of chaos you notice there's no battle here right it's very orderly god's in complete control he just says let there be, and the

universe just responds without pushback, right? And that's a different perspective too. They would have heard of God's fighting each other in order to create, and here's God. He just, his, just the breath of God. I was thinking that there, in our theology, there was a war in heaven, but that's not the same thing about a war as a part of the creation story. Well, I think you could find some connections to that. And I should make a caveat that just because there's no cosmic battle here in Genesis 1 that the author of this text is trying to say God's in complete control. The Israelites did have a tradition of God fighting these forces of chaos at the beginning. So you do find that motif elsewhere in the Old Testament, just not here.

So just as I'll show you one quick example. So Isaiah chapter 27, verse one, do you want to read that, Hank? If I can, man, if I can pronounce these words in that day, the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan, the piercing serpent, even Leviathan, that crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. Yeah. So if you're used to these, you know, stories from the other cultures about God fighting a giant serpent, you know, from those chaos waters, this sounds really familiar. And Hank, can you read the footnote down there? Footnote C in the LDS scriptures? Sure. IE, a legendary sea monster

representing the forces of chaos that oppose the creator. Yeah. So it's in there again. I'm not making this up, but, and there's places in the Psalms and Job, other places in the prophets where that motif does come in. You know, you slew Rahab, all those things. They have a concept of this and it pops up elsewhere. But it seems that the author of Genesis here is trying to not go that route, right? They're trying to make a different point. So instead, they're suggesting that this was completely orderly and that God's in complete control.

That's what they want to emphasize here. But elsewhere, it is meaningful that God can conquer those forces of chaos. That's, that's another way to talk about how powerful he is. And I think John's right in that we definitely could link this in to our motif of that conflict that happened in the premortal council there, and how, you know, God wins. Yeah. Right. That's, that's, that's a takeaway from this. This is awesome. This, this is a brand new book that just came out from the religious study center at BYU. It's called from creation to Sinai, the old Testament through the lens of the restoration edited by Dan Belknap and Aaron shade. This just came out. Um, and this is in a lot of ways, a landmark book.

It's really, really thick and big. It's got, I think, 17 chapters written by some of our best Old Testament scholars that we have. And it covers all sorts in an academic, but a restoration lens. It covers all sorts of stuff. And chapter one is by Dan Belknap. And it is all about the opening chapters of Genesis. It's titled in the beginning, Genesis one through three and its significance all about the opening chapters of Genesis. It's titled In the Beginning, Genesis 1 through 3 and its significance to the Latter-day Saints. And it goes over all this stuff there too, in a really rich way. So if people are looking to dive deep into this background stuff, this is not a good book if you're trying to, you know, quick and dirty tips with your kids for family home evening. But if you want to dive deep into some of this stuff, this book that just

came out is fantastic. Okay, cool. Before we move on, I want to ask you about what you said earlier with, okay, in the Babylonian cosmology, humans are just kind of pitiful slaves in the Egyptian cosmology. I don't know their accidents. They're just there as spectators. And here in this cosmology, humans are the purpose. To me, that could have a lot of, that could speak to our day as well. Yeah, exactly. You know, in 26, God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. And that's a big deal here. The word image here, it's selim, and it does mean a physical representation. This isn't kind of like, oh, you're ethical like God or things like that.

It's a very physical representation used here that you're created in his image, which corresponds with how Latter-day Saints see this too, right? We're created physically and literally in the image of God. And God in verse 28 blesses them, right, to be fruitful and multiply and all these things, and gives them the stewardship over the earth. So this is a very elevated view, I think, and it hits, you know, what our restoration scripture teaches, that God prepared the earth for us. We're not an afterthought. We're not just one of many creations. We are his children, and we are special in his sight. We are fundamentally different from his other creations, as wonderful as they are. You know, if I'm with my teenagers teaching Genesis 1, that might be my core lesson is you matter.

Right? You matter in this creation this plan and it reminds me of of lehi talking to to jacob second nephi too and kind of making this incredible dichotomy of all of god's creations things that act and things that are acted upon and we are the things that are supposed to be the ones that act and just about everything else is acted upon, right? And Elder Bednar gave a whole talk about that once too. Does that ring a bell? And that we don't say, he makes me this or she, no,

we're created to act and to choose God, not to just be acted upon. Well, another way to make this personal too. So we just went over, you know, how creation looks from an ancient Israelite perspective about the separating, the identifying purpose and the naming and all that. Right. So in addition to just being like, okay, well, let me think like an ancient Israelite and make sense of why the text is structured this way. If you want to make this personal and individual now and step away from ancient history, I think this has a lot to teach us. I know a lot of times when we pray, we want God to kind of poof, give us a blessing out of somewhere and just drop it on our lap or poof, make our problems disappear, right? Just go away,

become nothing. You must have heard me pray last night. Yeah. And and you know if genesis is suggesting that his creative activity isn't poofing things out of non-existence into physical reality or vice versa but his his creative act is to organize and give purpose and meaning to and name and things i think that might have some interesting things to teach us um you know there's people going through a lot of really hard stuff. You think of people that are experiencing mental illness, people that are experiencing loss, people that are going through just these really excruciating title trials. One of the things that can make those worse than anything is not being able to have any sense that there's any purpose to any of this, that it's all meaningless. It's meaningless suffering.

There's no value or purpose behind it. And if, or people even who struggle with faith, wondering if God is even there listening to them, like the, the idea that existence is pointless is terrifying. And when we're going through these hard things, I think it's so important that we turn to God, because what we see here is a God who is able to organize things into significant ways out of what looks like chaos and nonsense at the beginning there. He can take our stories, our narratives that we tell about ourselves and our lives, and out of what seems to be random events or pointlessness, he can grant us meaning and purpose and lives. And out of what seems to be random events or pointlessness, he can, he can grant us meaning and purpose and direction. And suddenly things make sense.

Or maybe there's blessings that have been there all along, but you get that insight, all of a sudden that flash of inspiration where you recognize the blessing, because now he's kind of separated out from all the noise in your life and named it as a blessing for you. You connect those dots and then that just comes to your mind. You know, so I think his ability to sift in our lives what's significant from what's not and things that are blessings and things from all the noises, that's a really significant aspect of his creative activity, which continues with us today. John mentioned this, but in the Come Follow Me manual, that's the opening paragraph for this week's lesson, right? That one thing the creation story teaches us is that God can make something magnificent out of something unorganized.

That's helpful to remember when life seems chaotic. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are creators and their creative work is with us is not finished. And I think that's so important. Remember, if we feel like we're adrift, like we have no purpose, like things are nuts. Um, he can give shape and order and meaning to our lives in a way that's just going to be beautiful. Josh, tell me again, Tohu. I'm going to write it down. The, the VA is an and yeah. So the full phrase is Tohu Vabohu. That's going to be so Josh, I think my phrase for my problems is going to be tohu vabohu. I'm going to, when I hit a problem that I don't understand, I'm going to be like, yes,

this is tohu vabohu. And now what do I need to do? I need to go to God, let him teach me how to separate it, give purpose to it, name it, that this is an important part of my life. So I don't know. I'm going to use it, John. Whenever I run into a problem, I'm going to text you. Tohu vabo. I have got a problem. And that means I'm going back to God to give me purpose behind this. Josh, I think you're so right. Someone who is struggling with mental illness needs to know that there is a purpose behind this, that this is doing something.

And often that means him not changing our circumstances, right? It's not the snapping things in and out of existence, but it is defining and giving order to and structure and meaning to these things. And that sometimes makes just all the difference. Wow. I think one of the things the gospel does is even when we don't know what it is, when we can say to ourselves, there must be a reason, that there is a loving God, he loves me. It's kind of 1 Nephi 11, 17,

I know he loveth his children, nevertheless I do not know the meaning of all things. And what's the 2 Nephi, is it 2 Nephi 9? He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world. And so we can kind of go, I don't get it, I don't get why right now, I don't get why this, but I'm going to press forward because there must be a bigger purpose

that I see. And Josh, you got to help me with this because I can't remember who it was, but somebody proposed the idea of God creating the world like a clock and then backing up and just kind of disinterested. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen. Have you heard that idea before? I think it's a d yeah yeah the whole universe is a big machine yeah and he's just gonna he's disinterested just i'll create wow wonder what's going to happen and backs off instead of wanting to bless us wanting to help us and having our ultimate good in mind which is a whole different mindset yeah that's kind of a greek conception of the universe where you get that in the Hebrew term of the universe. It's not like that because the way it describes the relationship between the creator and his

creations is it's very much a relationship and it's framed in covenantal terms. He's invested in this. He's an active dynamic part of this, and it's not like he creates and takes off. So Josh, would it be fair to say that an ancient Israelite hears what we call Genesis 1 and walks away thinking, hey, I matter. I'm important. I think that's exactly what they're supposed to hear. They're supposed to take away this elevated view of humanity, this elevated view of God that, you know, he's better than the gods of Egypt or Babylon or Canaan, wherever. This is a big picture that this God is all powerful.

Wow. Wow. You just kind of stepped us into the world of Genesis and I'm, I'm very grateful. Really? Uh, what do we do next, Josh? Well, I just want to note that this, this count of the creation. So the division between chapter one and two, like you might know, the chapter breaks are added like centuries and centuries later, and they're often not in good spots. And Josh, you're right. We kind of, when we hit a chapter break, we almost do a memory wipe. We don't even remember the previous chapter. We just kind of say, okay, brand new stuff. Go to bed that night and pick it up five days later. Right. And we don't remember anything from the last chapter when they should be connected,

right? In many places. So the chapter breaks in the wrong spot. Like if you're going to have a chapter break here, you want to put it down like in verse four, that's, that's where the division would be. Uh, like either beginning of verse four or halfway down verse four, somewhere there because chapter two verses one, two, three are continuing the same structure and story that we've had going the whole time. Um, so you, including the seventh day, right? If you don't want to forget about that. They just are like, ah, another chapter for that one. Yeah. There's literary bookends that link the beginning of chapter one with what you got at the opening

of chapter two here. So notice chapter one, verse one, you know, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Chapter two, verse one, thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the hosts of them. And notice again, that even there it's, it's getting out those two problems we talked about, the tohu vavohu, right? The earth and the heavens and the earth were finished, that's the environments, and all the hosts of them, the populations again. So we're solving those twin problems of the uncreated state.

And then verses 2 and 3 are about that seventh day, and they kind of link back to verse 1 too. And this is getting really kind of nerdy in, in, in the down in the details now, but like a chapter one, verse one in Hebrew has seven Hebrew words. And then the second verse has 14 Hebrew words. So seven times two. And then if you look at chapter two versus verses two, in the first half of verse three, it's also got a set of seven words, seven words, seven words, kind of right there. So in just even the number of words, people have seen kind of a bookend to show the beginning and the end of this structure there. So that's fun stuff.

Yeah. And seven is wholeness and completeness, right? Right. Yeah. Seven in their culture has this sense of wholeness, completeness. And so they're kind of by framing everything around that, you know, you got seven days, you've got these sets of verses where it's in seven words. You've got seven announcements that creation was good. There's just seven all over the place in here. So it's the details in here, you can tell someone really was carefully crafting this. You might even say they're inspired, right? Yeah, you might even say. What happens at verse four? Is it a brand new story? So what you see is that starting in verse four and going on, it's basically a different account of creation.

It doesn't just keep going. It kind of takes it from the top and starts all over again. And it talks about things in a different order. It talks about things in a different way. It uses different vocabulary terms. So people have spent a lot of time trying to ask why that is. Why is chapter one and basically chapter two so different? Biblical scholars often have the theory that these were written by two different people and that later an inspired editor here came together and like stitch these two accounts together side by side. So you could learn from both of them. There's other ways to explain it too. So for example, in some Latter-day Saints have looked at a passage in the book of Moses where God explains he created everything spiritually before they were physically created on the earth.

So they propose that maybe Genesis 1 is more of a spiritual creation and chapter 2 is more of that physical creation. There's other explanations too. But whatever way you want to go with those explanations for why the differences are there, it is worth noting that clearly there are differences in how chapters one and two are telling the story of this. I think maybe the footnote committee subscribed to that. You see the summary at the beginning. The prior spirit creation is explained. Yeah, so that kind of spiritual versus physical. I think when Bruce R. McConkie, that's what he went with.

And so when he writes the chapter hitting there, that's how he's dealing with that. Some of the differences that people see are, for example, in chapter one, it talks about God creating. And the Hebrew term there is Elohim. And in chapter two, it talks about the Lord creating and with the small capitals. And the Hebrew there is Jehovah so that's like chapter 2 verse 4 in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth so you're saying that's a different in Hebrew that's a different God than in the beginning God created the heaven the earth from verse from chapter 1 well or at least it's a different term that they're using okay

right so and we should stop and explain this maybe because this will be handy for people for the rest of the Old Testament about what it means with those capitals. Right. Please do. So in Hebrew, the name that the Israelites had for the God of Israel, the God that they're sacrificing to, that they're, you know, worshiping, that's talking to Moses and Isaiah. In Hebrew, they say his name Yahweh. And that's the name that we have in English as Jehovah. It's just our kind of anglicized pronunciation of that. The history is complicated, but we don't need to get in that. So basically Yahweh and Jehovah, it's just the original pronunciation versus the kind of modern English pronunciation. And you see that name Yahweh

pop up a lot in terms you are familiar with, because when they pair the name with other words, they often shorten it to an abbreviated form, Yah. So for example, you guys have heard the phrase hallelujah, right? Hallelujah means all of you praise, like in command form there. And who are you praising? Yah, right? Short for Yahweh. Or for example, Isaiah or Elijah, their names have that Yah kind of in there. So you see that shortened form pop up a lot in different names and expressions right there. So I'm watching for the small caps. Well, what happens is Jews after the Old Testament, kind of before you get to the New Testament, they develop a tradition that the name is too sacred to say out loud. So they start when they're reading their scriptures

and they come to the name, they'll say the phrase, the Lord in Hebrew, Adonai instead. So, you know, on the page in front of them, the words will say Yahweh spoke to Moses, but then out loud, they'll say the Lord spoke to Moses in order to avoid saying the name. So then when the King James Bible translators are making this English translation, they decided to keep up that Jewish tradition. So when that name Yahweh appears, they'll use the title the Lord as a euphemism. But they put the small capitals in there as a wink and a nod to let you know, hey, psst. It says Yahweh here. Yeah, it's a name here, not the title, the Lord. And so the small caps is tipping off to that.

When it really does say the Lord, because that's also a term, it'll just be in regular lowercase letters. It's just plain and simple, nothing fancy there. But those small capital letters are your little tip from the translators to let you know what's really going on. So you can see the Lord in the capitals and think to yourself, oh, that's the name Jehovah. Okay. That's what you want to be thinking. Is it always paired with Lord God? Or is it sometimes?

Not always. It is here in Genesis 2, but other places it's just the Lord all by itself, Jehovah. And that's only in your King James Version, right? I don't know if the others different languages and translations do it differently and for example the church has its own translations in spanish and portuguese right that they came out with in 2009 and 2015 so these are relatively recent the spanish translation ditches that jewish tradition it says hey ova jehovah all over the place, left and right.

Whereas the Portuguese one takes a different track and it says, you know, El Senor and, you know, the small capitals the whole way through. So it's more like the English there. And you read, yeah, different translations and different languages and cultures just have their own kind of preferences they developed with this. So it's, it just depends on what tradition you're following there. You know, I taught at the MTC and I taught Spanish. And I remember these missionaries would get their Spanish Bible and they'd flip it open and they see Heyova, Heyova, like all over the place, because that name appears over 6,000 times in the Old Testament. It's on almost every page, I think. So they see it all over and they're just, you know, dumbstruck at first. They're like,

because for them, Jehovah is a relatively rare word. They don't use it a lot. so when they see that it's all over in the old testament they go what in the world is going on it kind of takes them back at first and then that kind of teaches them that the name has been there all along it's just hiding behind that you know euphemistic title in english well that's good to know when uh hank when we have um students who have served in a spanish-speaking mission and we can kind of point that out in their scriptures. And Josh, I seem to remember in your bio, you've done some work with the publication of the scriptures. Yeah, I published an article on the church's Spanish Bible translation. I kind of analyzed it, did that. And to bring up another just point here

that's handy for people in the doctrine of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints of course who is jehovah jesus it's jesus christ right the living christ document says that clearly that he is the jehovah of the old testament right the premortal jesus christ so when you have the when you're equipped with the knowledge to know that small capitals, the Lord there means Jehovah means Jesus Christ. That opens up a whole new world for you to, you know, see Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. You have to kind of connect those dots and do that pairing. But once you do, it's amazing because we often have lessons or say, oh, you want to grow closer to Jesus in the Old Testament this year. Well, watch for the types and shadows. Watch for the symbolism, watch for the messianic prophecies,

you know, they'll pop up every so often. And I'm thinking, you don't even have to do all that hard work. I mean, that's good stuff too. But, you know, if you're in your mind, yeah, if you're, if you're, you see the Lord and you're thinking Jesus Christ right there, you don't have to go looking for all the hidden symbolism everywhere. He's everywhere. He's on Sinai talking to Moses, giving the 10 commandments. He's leading them out of Egypt. Jesus is talking to Abraham and Isaiah and Jeremiah. He's, you know, the one they're discussing in the Psalms. He's everywhere directly on the surface, not hiding. And that's just an exciting thing, you know, as a Latter-day Saint to be able to put that all together and see him there and watch how he acts in his role as the premortal God of Israel.

Please join us for part two of this podcast.