followHIM - Genesis 28-33 -- Part 1: Dr. Jeffrey R. Chadwick

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

How is Jacob's dream a temple experience? Dr. Jeffrey R. Chadwick joins the podcast to discuss Jacob's miraculous dream, how the Abrahamic Covenant applies to every human being, and how the scattering of Israel is a fortunate scattering. 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 Producers/SponsorsDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. 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 EditorKrystal Roberts: Transcripts/Language Team/French TranscriptsAriel Cuadra: Spanish 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 dreamy co-host, John, by the way. John, you are dreamy. We're talking about Jacob and some dreams that he has. He dreamed a dream. And I just thought, that reminds me of John. He's dreamy. Never been called that. Never been called dreamy before.

I'll take it. Hey, John, we're jumping into Genesis 28 through 33. We wanted an expert. We got an expert. One of my favorite people just to sit in a meeting with because he'll always make comments that we're all thinking, but no one is there saying. So tell our listeners who's with us today. We're very excited to have Dr. Jeffrey R. Chadwick with us. He serves at BYU as the Jerusalem Center Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies, and also as Religious Education Professor of Church History and Jewish

Studies. His teaching emphasis includes the Bible, the Old and New Testament, the Book of Mormon, Church History, Christian History, Judaism, and Islam. He has also hosted the annual BYU Passover Cedar each spring, which is one of the largest model cedar programs in the United States. And Hank, as I read this next paragraph as we were preparing, I was just thrilled with how all of our guests, so wide-ranging in their areas of study and everything, and it adds so much to what we do. Jeff Chatterwood was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, and graduated from the world-famous Ben Lomond High School. And he served his mission in West Berlin and West Germany, the old Hamburg

mission in the mid-70s. He and his wife Kim are the parents of six adult children and a dozen grandchildren. Now listen to how wide-ranging. He earned a BA from Weber State College, a major in political science and minors in German and police science. He earned a master's from Brigham Young University in international and area studies, focusing on Middle Eastern politics, ancient Near Eastern studies. He also did graduate work in Israel at Tel Aviv University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while completing his PhD at the University of Utah Middle East Center in

Archaeology and Anthropology, specializing in the archaeology of the land of Israel with a minor in Hebrew and Egyptian and Aramaic languages. He taught for the church educational system in the seminaries institutes at Weber State at Utah State. He's been affiliated with the BYU Jerusalem Center as a faculty member for 40 years since before the center was built. And he joined his wife Kim there as taught ancient scriptures and Near Eastern courses in 23 different student programs at the BYU Jerusalem Center between 1982 and 2015. And he'll be returning to teach at the Jerusalem Center again after the pandemic subsides. I love how varied that is, and I'm so excited. We are so excited to have you here, Dr. Chadwick.

Thanks for joining us. Well, it's very nice to be here. That sounds way more impressive than it is, by the way. It's impressive. I would just add one thing about that. We call our 12 grandchildren the 12 tribes of Chadwick. Okay. Nice. When BYU says the world is our campus, Jeff took that seriously. He's like, okay.

A corner of the world. Yeah. Still looking to go to Hawaii, frankly. But it all started at the world famous Ben Lomond High School in Auburn. Yes, it did. The wearers of the plaid, the proud bagpipers. Here's the funny thing about that, too. I graduated from Ben Lomond in the early 70s and never darkened the door of the seminary.

I was one of those kids like Alma the Younger that came along late in life. But I was assigned later in the 1980s to teach at the Ben Lomond Seminary. And I taught there for six years. Two years for every one year I missed in high school, that was the penance. That's great. That was the makeup work. They went back and let him graduate, yeah, after six years. You seem to have some unexcused absences here.

Could you do a few makeup packets? I remember telling my high school seminary teacher that I was a seminary teacher and I saw him visibly. He was shaken. Like, really? Yeah, I'm a seminary teacher now. What has happened? Yeah. Jeff, we're excited to have you with us. Before we jump into our lesson, which is Genesis 28 to 33, tell us how, with your students that you've taken across Israel and the Middle East, how do you teach them to approach ancient scripture maybe differently than they approach even the New Testament, the Book of Mormon? How can we approach the Old Testament and get the most out of it?

Well, there are two approaches, of course, and they're both entirely valid. I think the best way to do this is a hybrid of the two. There's context. Context is what brings enlightenment, interest, excitement out of the text. You want to know what's happening, who these people are, what's going on, not only with the individual stories we see in Genesis, but with the national stories from Moses forward, with the house of Israel, with the prophets, with the kings, with all of the great people. These are stories that are foundational to our culture, virtually everywhere from Moses

to Elijah and all the way through. And so getting to know them and to know them as accurately as we can know them in the 21st century is one of the things I've kind of made a career of. But the other thing then is that, as Nephi said, we did liken all things to ourselves. How do those things that they were experiencing, that they believed, that they taught, how do we not only learn from those directly, but spin them around and apply them to our situation in the restoration?

Those two fit together in a perfect package. And so I'm a mix of talking about the what, and also the why and how do we apply? And that's different in each part, but that's just a basic answer. I like that. And when it comes to context, I like to have someone who's studied, who knows this world, right? Who knows the world of Genesis. You can take your Bible and read it on your own and get a lot out of it. But I think it's pretty helpful when we have someone who's made a career, like you said, studying this, who can say, hey, here's what's happening. The patriarchal stories in Genesis are not only from my perspective, but the perspective of some very influential archaeologists in Israel

are best placed in the context of what we call the Middle Bronze Age, the centuries from about the 20th to the 16th century BC. When I'm teaching, say, Near Eastern Studies at the Jerusalem Center to complement my colleagues who are teaching the Old Testament there, I'm always doing context because that allows them to do other things. The last few groups there passed on from one group to another a little nickname that they had made up for me, Professor Middle Bronze Age. It's kind of where they think I live.

And in my head, I'm there a lot. That's great. We live in the last part of Genesis. A different kind of MBA then. Well, I speak of all of this as family history. I will tell you that one of the things I emphasize with Old Testament, and this is from Abraham to the very end, is that this is our family history. Every bit as much as something that's happening, say, in Nauvoo or Kirtland, okay, where I

also have ancestors, this is literally my family history. We are descended in very reality from the Israelites of the Old Testament. These are our ancestors every bit as much as they're the ancestors of the Jewish people. We also descend from people who came through the Red Sea with Moses on dry ground. And the sooner we think in these terms and regard it as our family, the better we're going to relate to it. And the better we're going to relate to what President Nelson has been teaching, which is that the gathering of Israel in the whole world is a real thing. People in the whole world are from Israel. They just don't know it the way that we do.

The Jews have a remembered heritage of their descent from the ancient Israelites. The Latter-day Saint understanding is a restored heritage, but it's just as real. And the sooner we understand this, the better we're going to be able to do our work. So this is family history. I'm actually writing a book right now, who knows if it'll ever be published,

called Israelite Family History for Latter-day Saints. And it's going to talk about ancient Israel, the scatterings, all the mechanics, and the real context of that. And then, of course, look at the gathering we're in. But President Nelson said in his famous talk in 2018, that he for 35 years has made a study of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Sarah and Rebecca and Leah and Rachel, the patriarchs, their wives, their lives, everything about them. He wanted to know about the covenant and its start and how it moved through Israel. And if President Nelson wants to do that,

we should be doing it too. The author of Genesis wants to get to the story of Abraham. Like, you start with Adam and really it's like, hey, how can I get through this so I can get to Abraham, slow down the story, talk about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You cover so much in the first, hey, how can I get through this so I can get to Abraham, slow down the story, talk about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You cover so much in the first, what, 11 chapters, and then it slows down for these three guys as if the narrator wants to get to these three. Creation and fall and atonement are very important up front. But it's like you say, they want to make a beeline to Abraham because once you get creation, fall, and atonement, you then move to covenant, which begins with Abraham. Now, another thing I'll just say, because you mentioned it and I'll forget it later, is that what we often call the covenant of Abraham is the covenant of Israel.

There's no difference. We call it two things, but it's the same thing. There isn't a different covenant with Abraham than there is with Isaac and Jacob and with the descendants of Jacob. It is the same. And the Book of Mormon emphasizes it by its Israelite name more, the covenants which the Lord God has made with the house of Israel, which is Nephi's way of saying the gospel. But there's no difference between those two, the covenant of Abraham, aka the covenant of Israel. We've talked about this before in other podcasts, John, the idea that Abraham's got the name of it, but this goes all the way back to Adam. Oh, sure. Yeah, because it's gospel. It's repackaged with Abraham for, you know, the thing about Abraham is, and my students ask me this all the time. By the way, I teach this wonderful class at BYU called Scattering a Gathering of Israel and the Latter-day Saint

Restoration. It's just as fun as it can be. But what people ask me about the time is, well, if you have this covenant with Abraham and it comes through this very narrow family, and it's kind of like, if you look at it, it's just like this funnel down through time, and it only widens out as you're going through many centuries, leaving out a lot of people on either side of the funnel. If that's the covenant family, what about all those other people? And what about a covenant anyway, a covenant people? Isn't that exclusive? Isn't that exclusivist? Do we want that today? And I try to make the point that the covenant has always been inclusive. Even at the time it was given, people could be accepted into the covenant, but it was always meant ultimately to be totally inclusive in the latter days.

What President Nelson has pointed out is that the gathering of Israel includes work in the temples for the dead, where at the bottom of that bell curve, we're circling back now to bring the covenant to those who passed on, who either had Israelite descent, but didn't live in the time of the restoration, or maybe who didn't even have it, but now will be brought into the fold. So the covenant of Abraham will be for all mankind throughout history by the time we're done with our work. Yeah, there's blessings to it, but there's also responsibilities. And that is, you're going to take this to everyone.

I want the whole, what did the Lord say? The whole earth is mine. I want everybody to be part of that. Yeah. And it's not merely that, too. It is the fact that since everyone is descended from Israel, basically, it's a matter of identifying as Israel and keeping the covenant. Because as John the Baptist said, God can of these stones raise up children under Abraham.

Being a descendant of Israel is as common as air on this earth today. So what really matters is when you have the chance to empower that descent by living the covenant, you do it. Yeah. We talk about the fortunate fall sometimes. And I like to say that the scattering was a fortunate scattering because it spread the blood of Israel all over the world. And today you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who isn't house of Israel.

And like you said, they just don't know it yet. They get a patriarchal blessing and they discover, oh, I'm part of the Abrahamic covenant too. Do you think that works to call it a fortunate scattering in a way? Well, the scattering was always God's intent. That's clear when you read what Nephi teaches Laman and Lemuel to the extent that they were picking up anything up. Nephi reads Isaiah to them, explains that this is in, of course, in 1 Nephi 21. Nephi explains, it appears that sooner or later the house of Israel will spread to all the face of the earth and unto all nations.

That's God's intent. Now, there's two ways to do this. Okay. There's the kinder and gentler way, or there's the hard way. Most of the deported tribes wound up being scattered the hard way. But the family of Lehi, who was part of the scattering, was the easy way. It wasn't easy for them, but they weren't beaten up. They left and did what the Lord, but the Lord was going to scatter Israel anyway,

because that was always the purpose that the covenant should be all inclusive. It never was an exclusive covenant. It was always envisioned as a totally inclusive covenant. In fact, doesn't Nephi say in that same spot that the more part of the tribes are already scattered? Yeah, by 600 BC, the tribes are gone. And by the way, it's the more part of all the tribes, not really 10 of the tribes. 10 tribes is a biblical idiom, which is meant to mean the super majority of Israel. But as much of Judah as a tribe was lost as Ephraim or Manasseh or Dan or anything else. And the reality is that whereas our Jewish friends correctly understand themselves

to be descended from all the tribes of Israel, not just from one or two. So are those who are descended from lost Israel, descended from all the tribes. Your patriarchal blessing will tell you a tribe, maybe. If it just said Israel, the patriarch would have done his job. If it just said Abraham, the patriarch would have done his job. But it often specifies a tribe. But what I try to have my students understand is that a patriarchal blessing does not tell you everything there is to know about you, not your potential and not your Israelite lineage. It just gives you a glimpse. But the very nature of human interaction is that those tribes were intermarried and intermixed before they were ever deported. And certainly that hidden genome, which is in all of us today, is as mixed as it can be. We're of all the tribes, and I glory in that.

And at the end of the Old Testament, the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. That's what we're doing today. We are saying, let's go back to our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let's turn our hearts towards them. And the promises made to the fathers. And today, back to Jacob, who was given the name Israel. So we're right here, you know, on ground zero plus one. Yeah.

Here we have the grandson of Abraham. Let's jump in, Jeff. Our lesson is on five chapters, 28 through 33, and a series of experiences that Israel, Jacob, has. There's a lot of humanness in these chapters that I've been reading. Even though you're part of the covenant family, life is not easy. No, life is neither easy, nor is it simple. Everything's complex. Everything is complicated. You know, it's amazing that you've invited me here, by the way, which I really appreciate that this show you do is like universe famous, right? In fact, it's known in the multiverse, I think.

Yes. All three Spider-Mans have heard of you. Probably just gave something away there. And it's just a privilege to be here and to discuss these things. But if you had asked me, what are the chapters of the Old Testament I would most like to talk about? It's exactly these. Genesis 28 is my favorite chapter in all of Genesis. And that's saying a lot because I really like chapter one. But it's just remarkable. Could I just for a moment make a comment about Genesis 27? Because I really think that Genesis 27 is taught almost

100% wrong by virtually everybody who tries it. And I haven't heard you teach it. So when I say virtually, it could leave some people out, okay? I know some pretty smart people that know what's really going on in Genesis 27. But we often have this view of Jacob as a usurper, as a supplanter, even the name Yaakov in Hebrew is supposed to mean he who supplants or who takes the place of, which actually is true because he wasn't the firstborn twin of Rebecca. He was the second, but he does take the place of the firstborn twin because that was always God's intention. But people get after Jacob and say, oh, he tricked his elderly father, Isaac, into giving him the birthright, and he shouldn't have done that. It's complicated, but he's not exactly a righteous guy in doing that.

And that is absolutely not true. Absolutely not. First of all, Jacob does not initiate it. It's Rebecca. The woman is a righteous woman who receives revelation and knew from the beginning that Jacob would be the birthright child and has gone when her good hearted husband was about to do the wrong thing and fixed it. Rebecca made sure the son that needed to receive that blessing got it. And that was God's will. Jacob did nothing wrong. Neither did Rebecca.

And those who were saying, oh, he was a little shady in the way he gets the birthright. That's not true. As many have pointed out, if Isaac had thought that really, when he stopped to think about it and opened his blurry eyes, that anything was really amiss, he could have revoked it. But instead, to start out in Genesis 28, Isaac gives and confirms the blessing of Abraham upon the head of Jacob himself. Okay. Knowing full well that it's Jacob. And he says, of course, in verse three, give thee the blessing of Abraham to thee and thy seed with thee.

Okay. And so that's where Isaac, knowing what he's doing, reconfirms that birthright and covenant blessing to Jacob. And that before you start with anything else, you got to know Jacob's a righteous guy, a good guy, and he is the one that the Lord will invest this with. So Isaac had the experience that I frequently have, which is where I find out my wife was right.

I should hope that many of us would have that experience that we realize she is way more in tune than me. And very often she will say, correct, sir. And when I do, it works. And to Isaac's credit, he did. Yeah, that's great. Where he sees, okay, Jacob's the right one for the birthright. Yeah. So in Genesis 28, they got to send Jacob away from home because his life's in a little bit of danger. Esau is unhappy.

So they say, go to Syria, Padamaram, and take a wife there rather than like Esau has done here, getting a wife that's not necessarily going to be of our family line, of our covenant line. Go to your mother, Rebecca's brother Laban and seek a wife in his family. And so Jacob goes and this then becomes the background of the great revelation with Jacob's ladder. If you had this experience when you've gotten to Israel that it's like, there's Jacob's ladder. And then 10 miles later, no, there's Jacob's ladder. Well, as a matter of fact, yeah, Jacob's ladder is everywhere in terms of, you know, imagery of it. But I'm going to show you the actual place of Bethel. There's a rocky hilltop north of Jerusalem.

It's actually northeast of Ramallah. Mala. Before 2000, we would regularly take our Jerusalem Center students to the rocky hilltop on which Jacob spent the night there in Genesis 28, 10, 11, and 12. And it's just rocks. It's like a 500-foot-high pile of rocks. When it says in verse 11, he took the stones of that place to make for his pillows, when I would take the students there, I'd say, well, look around, see if you could find any, because it's all rocks. One of the most remarkable things that happened to me ever in my life was that I was teaching on top of that hilltop to a group of students in 1983. I was 27 years old, okay?

This is how hard up they were for talent in those days at BYU. They had a 27-year-old leading a student group in Israel. And we were up there. I'll never forget my good friend Kelly Ogden was with us up there. We were teaching the Bethel story on Bethel, on the rocky hilltop between what had been the city of Bethel and the city of Ai to the east. And as I was teaching, it was out of the very Bible that I have right now. I'm going to show you this. I have this 40-year-old Bible, one of the very first of the LDS edition given out in 1979, hot off the press. And I was teaching out of this set of scriptures, which I hiked up that hill with those students. And as you will know, very often when you're teaching, the Spirit will impress you and teach more than you know.

The Spirit will teach through you and teach you at the same time that you're teaching more than you knew before you started it. You've experienced this, I know, because almost every teacher has. Well, on that occasion, as I was teaching these passages right here in Genesis 28, it suddenly opened to me as clear as if I could see it, what was really going on. And afterward, as I was coming down the hill with Kelly, I said, boy, that was powerful. And he said, what? So I explained it to him and he said, oh, wow, that's powerful. And so that's what I'd like to just spend a minute on with you today. Sounds great, Jeff. So verse 10, Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran.

It's heading north. So he's going to travel about 50 miles before he gets to Jerusalem and another 10 miles before he gets to Bethel. So that's probably, you know, three days travel, like it was for Abraham and Isaac. And it says in verse 11, he lighted upon a certain place. And this is the place, of course, is talked about in Genesis 12 and 13, the hilltop where Abraham built an altar between the city of Bethel and the city of Ai. And the sun was set, and he took out the stones of that place and put them for his pillows, because there were some there. And he laid down that place to sleep. And here comes the revelation, right? Verse 12. He dreamed and behold, a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to

heaven. Behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. 13 and behold, the Lord, L-O-R-D in capitals. so that's Jehovah, stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, the God of Isaac. And then he gives the promise of land, the land whereon thou liest will I give it to thee and thy seed. And then in verse 14, thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth. What a metaphor. There's a lot of dust. Jacob's descendants will be as numerous as the atoms.

Abraham was told as the stars of the sky, right? As the sands upon the seashore, as the dust of the earth here. Jacob, your seed will be so numerous and you'll spread abroad. Verse 14 says to the east, the north, the south, the west. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. The same thing that was said to Abraham, same as to Isaac. Nephi told us that the house of Israel would spread to all the face of the earth and to all nations. And here we've read multiple times in Genesis to every family of the earth.

There would be a time in the latter days when everyone would be of Israel as the restoration had to happen. And that abroad, you know, to all the earth is really emphasized here. Lost Israel, for example, is not coming back only from the north countries. That's a misconception we often take out of section 133. Jeremiah said that the days would come that were greater than the Exodus when God would gather Israel from the north countries and all the other lands where he had spread them, right? That's Jeremiah 60, 15. And how would he do it? I will send forth many hunters and many fishers. The instrumentality is the gathering, is the missionary work.

But here in verse 14, like many places in Isaiah, the scattering was to the southeast, north, and west, and the gathering, as in Isaiah 49, is from the south and the east and the north and the west. It's amazing. But going back for a minute to verse 12, which is the key here. And this is what I'd like to work with for just a minute. If you will do three things with this verse, with verse 12. And these are the three things that occurred to me.

Two of them occurred to me on that mountain that day in 1983. It was in July. I'll never forget it. Beautiful sunny day. These two things occurred to me because I was at the time already Hebrew Bible student. When you read verse 12, and he dreamed, I want to just show you for a minute because people will say, well, what is that about? Right? The verb there, and he dreamed, is the term yachalom.

And that's this word right here, okay? Put it up there so you can see it. It's the top word there, yachalom. And that is the word, he dreamed. It comes from the Hebrew word term chalam. But chalam and yachalom hold within them the value of vision as well as a dream. This is a visionary dream. This is a revelatory dream.

Remember, Lehi said, I have dreamed a dream. Nephi said, in other words, he had seen a vision. That's this. This is a revelation. The second word is ladder, beginning of Jacob's ladder everywhere. The Hebrew term there is sulam, and it is this word right here in the middle. It's an S and L and an M, pronounced sulam. And while it does mean ladder, and it's the modern Hebrew word for ladder,

in ancient languages, including the Mesopotamian languages, the root of this actually doesn't mean necessarily something with two poles and rungs on it, but a stairway, a stepped stairway, or even a ramp, a sloped ramp. Okay. And if you remember that, I like to call it the stairway to heaven with apologies to Robert Plant and the group, but that's what's being talked about, a stairway. And then the third thing is to look at the term angels of God who are ascending and descending on that stairway or ramp. Now, here's the last little bit of Hebrew there, Malakai Elohim, the angels of Elohim, the angels of God, from the singular term malach, which is translated as angel

about half the time you see it in the English Old Testament, right? Out of the Hebrew Bible, malach is translated maybe 50% of the time as angel, but the other 50% of the time, malach is translated as messenger, because that's what angels often are, as messengers. For example, the name malachi, Malachi, is my messenger. And it says that, right, of course, in the first chapter of Malachi, right? So Malach is messenger as well as being angelic, okay? And so you have these messengers going from heaven down a stairway to Jacob at Bethel and back up the stairway to heaven where Jehovah is.

And Jehovah is speaking to Jacob and covenanting. Now that's fun from Hebrew, right? But now I want to read something to you from the prophet Joseph Smith, if I might. Okay. Joseph Smith, if I might. Okay. Joseph Smith once said the following. And I'm old enough that I'm quoting it out of the old teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith. Of course, it's in the Joseph Smith papers, but I'm undying the story.

You're going to say I'm old enough I remember him saying it. I was there in Nauvoo at the time, right? Joseph Smith said this, quote, The three principal rounds of Jacob's ladder are the telestial, the terrestrial, and the celestial glories or kingdoms. Let me repeat that. The three principal rounds of Jacob's ladder are the telestial, the terrestrial, and the celestial glories or kingdoms. Now, if you're looking up and teaching you the prophet Joseph Smith, that's page 305, but you can find it in the modern sources too, okay? So Joseph Smith understood what happened to Jacob

while involved with the messengers going up and down on that stairway or ramp to involve the three degrees of glory. Now, after that, of course, the Lord is at the top. So the Lord's doing the instructing. They're making covenants and the covenant will include the covenant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That's key. This is the total covenant of Israel. At the end, of course, Jacob covenants it, he'll pay tithing and do all

these other things. With just that understanding right there, what Latter-day Saint who is endowed could fail to see what's happening to Jacob on that hilltop? As A, he makes covenants and receives covenants, B, in a revelatory situation, C, with the Lord, while D, angels or messengers are going up and going down from the presence of God to him. When I came down from that hilltop, Hank, I just said, this is incredible. And I thought, oh, this is so amazing. And then I got back to the United States and started to research it that year because 1983 in the fall was an Old Testament year in seminary that year. And I found out that I wasn't the first to understand this at

all. Not at all. Because it turns out that Marion G. Romney knew this before I did. As I'm reading along and researching this whole Bethel situation, I found a talk that was published in the March 1971 Ensign. Okay. Okay. 12 years before this. Right. And for those who don't know who Marion G. Romney was, this was one of the greatest servants of the Lord.

Remember the Quorum of the Twelve? Counselor in the first presidency to President Kimball. And many people thought that he was about as dry a conference speaker as there could be. But everybody in our business used to read his talks with a fine tooth comb because in those dry talks were doctrines for the ages that he explained so well. Well, he had this article in the March 1971 Ensign, which was entitled Temples, the Gates to Heaven. And in it, he said this, Jacob realized that the covenants he made with the Lord there were the rungs on the ladder that he himself would have to climb in order to obtain the promised blessings,

blessings that would entitle him to enter heaven and associate with the Lord. And he concluded that thought by saying, temples are to us all what Bethel was to Jacob. Temples are to us all what Bethel was to Jacob. And so there you had a modern general authority that made me feel even better about pointing out that as Jacob was learning of the three degrees of glory while messengers went down a stairway and back up a stairway from the presence of God to him, that Jacob was experiencing the same thing we experience in our Bethel. Because when you get down, of course, to verse 19, it says, he called the name of that place Bethel. Bethel. El is the short form of Elohim.

Beth is house. Bethel, house of the Lord. A house of the Lord experience there on that rocky hilltop. And that's really amazing. Now, I'm going to get some people in trouble here. No, I'm not. I'm just going to do something fun with you. And people will never see this again, I don't think.

So what we're doing here is really a part now. It's going to be part of our history. This is a little booklet that probably a lot of you would recognize. There have been many of them in history. The little booklet about the temples of the Lord that show you some of the beautiful things inside. There in the Salt Lake Temple, look at that room right there. And there is a stairway. Now, anybody that goes to the Salt Lake Temple or did until they've reconfigured all the rooms, because we'll never see that again, I don't think.

But there for many, many years, people went up and down that stairway. And those who've gone to the Salt Lake Temple know who goes up and down that stairway and what they're doing. And when my wife and I used to go to the temple there regularly, because I love going to Salt Lake Temple rather than any others, she'd always poke me and say, Jacob's Ladder. Jacob's Ladder, right there. Isn't that fun? It's going to be.

Now, I've said some things that are very temple related. I want you to know that I've practiced these so that I make sure I stay where I'm allowed to be. One of the famous quotes of Harold B. Lee to all of us who are a little bit older was the following. He said, when I meet with our missionaries and they ask questions about things pertaining to the temple, I say to them, as I close the discussion, I don't dare answer any of your questions unless I can find an answer in the standard works or in the authentic declarations of presidents of the church. Unquote. That, by the way, is Ensign December 1972. So all I've done is read the standard works and translate three Hebrew words. I've given two quotes from

general authorities, one from Joseph Smith, that's pretty authoritative, and another nice one from Marion G. Romney. I've let it be at that. Whatever a person in tune understands about that with regard to our experience in temples and what happened to Jacob on that rocky hilltop will be what a person should understand. But I've stayed within the bounds. I have noticed those stairs in that room. And one time when I was on a Holy Land tour, we stopped in Ephesus. And on the way there into Turkey, we stopped at a mosque. And I said to my wife, look, there's a staircase in the corner. And then another time, my brother-in-law who teaches seminary had a chance to go to the Masonic temple, and there was a stairway in the corner. And I've always wondered why in our temple, in that mosque, in the Masonic Lodge there, there's a stairway in the corner. I have no idea what the answer is.

Could that be a representation for Islam of Jacob's Ladder? I happen to have a little bit of a Masonic background. And absolutely, that's Jacob's stairway in a Masonic temple. In the mosque, it's very likely going up to the minaret from which the calls to prayer are offered. So it's functionally a little different, but it's the same thing. And yeah, there's no question about it that both mosques and Masonic temples have a mimicry or an appreciation for ancient scripture and symbolism that even

Masons will say is related to the Temple of Solomon. Now, there's a lot of baggage there, but basically the restoration, which assigns true doctrine to all symbols, is what opens up Genesis 28 for me. It's amazing that Joseph Smith understood Jacob's ladder in terms of the three degrees of glory. What Latter-day Saint can fail to see what's going on here if they know that Jacob is experiencing the three degrees of glory as taught by messengers? It reminded me too of what Joseph Fielding Smith, who talked about what happened in Matthew 17 on the Mount of Transfiguration, was a temple experience there as well. This is a mountain of sorts. You called it a rocky, what did you call it? A rocky hilltop. Rocky hilltop. But mountains are nature's temples. So, oh, I have always wondered the stairs thing.

For those who are listening to us, right, virtually most all Latter-day Saint temples don't have those stairways. We do our presentation in the temple, our teaching in a visual recording mode now. And so only places like, say, the Salt Lake Temple and the Manti Temple have had this. St. George used to have it, and so did Logan. But those are now all going away. The live endowment will be leaving us. And when the Salt Lake Temple is reconfigured, the entire way that rooms are put together and space usage will be different.

So there will be a time when no one will be talking about the steps anymore, but you have to just listen to what's going on in the conversation, the teaching part where you have messengers and others talking. And if you listen for those words, which are the equivalent of ascending and descending, going up and down, you'll still pick it up every time. And then there's promises of posterity in verse 14, which should hopefully for everyone go, oh, yeah, that's exactly my experience as well. One thing I wanted to add that the manual adds, it says, Jacob may not have expected to find the Lord in such a desolate place. And I wonder if there's a lesson there about life that we often don't expect to find the Lord in these. Well, it's interesting, right? Because verse 16, Jacob awaked out of sleep. He said,

surely the Lord, that's Jehovah, is in this place. And I knew it not because it was a revelation, right? It was visionary. It was a dream, which was a revelation. But the point is he wasn't expecting it. And that's also a great lesson. The Lord will be in places you don't expect. Always conduct yourself appropriately. Now, if I'm teaching the Bible as an archaeologist, I hasten to point out that in verse 17, after Jacob calls this place the house of God and the gate of heaven, which is what Mary and G. Romney played off of, in verse 18, he took that big rock that he had used as part of his bedding, and he stood it upright as a pillar, and he anointed it with oil and blessed it.

This is what was done by all cultures in the ancient Near East. It's a very Canaanite, very Near Eastern thing to do, to represent the presence of deity with a standing stone. So Jacob is doing something any Canaanite would do to represent the presence of deity with a standing stone. So Jacob is doing something any Canaanite would do to represent the presence of deity, but here he's representing the presence of the true deity. He's leaving a memorial there. There's times in life, Jeff, where I think people feel like they're sleeping on rocks, right? Where it's just a miserable time of life. But interesting, we find the Lord there often. You almost think of like Liberty Jail, a bed of rocks, and yet found the Lord there.

You think of the Mormon exodus, being kicked out of the United States to come out to what was Mexican territory in 1847. And Jacob actually is basically being kicked out. Isaac and Rebecca have said, you need to go north. You need to get out of here. But it was under duress. He had to leave. He was under threat. And it's at those most difficult times that sometimes the greatest things happen.

Hank, maybe we're looking at the same thing in the manual, but it says, maybe you find yourself in your own wilderness seeking a blessing from God. Maybe your wilderness is a difficult family relationship such as Jacob had. Maybe you feel distant from God or feel that you need a blessing. Sometimes the blessing comes unexpectedly. Other times it is preceded by a wrestle. Whatever your need, you can discover that even in your wilderness, the Lord is in this place. The Lord is in this place.

Yeah. And that flumps over to Genesis 32, which maybe we ought to do some of the chapter here today, right? Jacob's wrestle with the Lord. Because everything in between is interesting, but it's important to the family, but secondary to the doctrine, right? Jacob goes, he gets to Syria. He finds Rachel, is overwhelmed with her, works seven years to marry Rachel, gets Leah slipped into him instead, works another seven years for Rachel to have two wives, has 11 kids, probably 12, counting Dina, the girl. And then finally, will leave Laban after 20 years of service and make his way back to

see his aging father, Isaac, before he dies in verse 35. But in verse 32, on the way back to the land of Israel, he stops at Peniel and has another revelatory experience. And that's where he's given the name Israel in Genesis 32. How common is multiple wives in the ancient Near East? It's as common as it is today, okay? It's been a fixture of life there for time immemorial. It is still grounded in Islamic belief, which comes straight out of the medieval period.

But it's not medieval in that it's old and barbaric. It is simply the way that humans lived then. We have a different social culture and understanding today, which, by the way, I'm very supportive of. I'm very much a monogamist. My ancestors were polygamists. I don't know how they did it. I'm very grateful for the one wife that I have, and I love her only. But the fact is, it was common practice. You see it not only in the biblical text, both in the Bronze and the Iron Age and right down until the classical period, but you see it in other societies where not only kings but regular people will have multiple wives. And the Old Testament assumes that it is normative.

It's not normal for us, but you can't impose your value system backward in time on the Old Testament and insist that they live your social system or they can't be righteous. That's what you got to remember. You got to let it be what it is, and they made of it what they do. By the way, I have friends who are Muslims who are polygamists in Jerusalem and also here in the United States. And it's under the radar in the United States, and it's quite open but subtle in the countries of the Middle East and even in Jerusalem. But it exists, and remarkably remarkably within those social cultures, while there are all kinds of complications, it works for them. We have a sociality and an understanding that is different,

not only than the Old Testament, but from some cultures presently. And that's important to remember. It is complicated. As I read these chapters, you know, Leah, Billa, Zilpah, Rachel. Not only is it complicated from the point of view of plural marriage and the challenges that come about, it's complicated from the view going back to Abraham, but again, here with Leah and Rachel, of surrogate motherhood. How complicated those situations can be. Please join us for part two of this podcast.