Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Latter Day Saints are studying the Old Testament right now and the church has recently updated their policy allowing for additional translations of the Bible to be used in a variety of settings, which is a pretty big deal because for a long time Latter Day Saints relied heavily on the King James Version. So we've brought in today Professor Joshua Sears, who has written a book, A Modern Guide to an Old Testament. And you are a professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. You've got a background in Biblical studies in a variety of degrees. Can you just give us a little bit of background of who you are and what you do?
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I teach in ancient scripture at BYU and it's my dream job. So I just absolutely love that. I was an undergraduate student at byu. Like I think.
[00:00:43] Speaker C: Well, except for someone.
[00:00:44] Speaker D: Here, the odd man, Al, I'm the.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Don't talk to him. The rest of the ugly, the red.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: Headed stepchild here, he went to uvu. No, I'm just kidding.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Well, yeah, Ancient New Eastern Studies major in the Hebrew Bible. And then I went and got a Hebrew Bible master's degree at the Ohio State university, then a PhD and the same thing at University Texas at Austin. So that's three Old Testament PhDs. And I'd like to check with people that's two more than most people should have.
Everyone needs a little Old Testament.
[00:01:12] Speaker C: On the contrary, it's not enough. Josh, you should get more Old Testament PhDs.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think like most Latter Day Saints have the hardest time with the Old Testament hands down. I mean, people love the New Testament because it's got Jesus. People love the Book of Mormon. It's the key of our religion, church history, sites you can go to. But the Old Testament is so intangible for so many people. I've come to really love it. But I'm really excited to learn more from you about how we can overcome some hurdles when it comes to our study of the Old Testament. But first, I want to ask you about Bible translations because the church recently did make an announcement when they were like, okay, now they updated their handbook where they said you may now use other translations of the Bible may be helpful for personal study for a variety of reasons. I don't know if someone has the handbook policy pulled up right here.
[00:01:55] Speaker D: Let's go ahead and read it right here. There is still.
The church identifies editions of the Bible that align well with the Lord's doctrine in the Book of Mormon and modern Revelation. And a preferred edition of the Bible is then chosen from many languages spoken by members of the Church and of Course in English, the preferred edition is the King James Version, and it always has been. But then they do go on to say so. Generally, members should use a preferred or church published edition of the Bible in church classes and meetings. This helps maintain clarity in discussions and consistent understanding of doctrine. And that's all pretty similar to what it was before. But then it also says other Bible translations may be used.
Some individuals may benefit from translations that are doctrinally clear and also easier to understand. Examples of such translations can be found in the church's Holy Bible list. And then you can go to their list. It lists like a bunch in different languages. A bunch in different languages.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: But even in English, they have for different reading levels, like, hey, for 9th to 12th grade, here are some options of editions of the Bible that are at that reading level, which I've never seen before.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: Ages 14 and above, they recommend the English Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version. Shout out to both of those. Those are both of my. Go to English translations. I think those are both very good English translations. For ages 11 through 13, the New International Version, the New Living Translation, and the new King James Version, which I think is just the King James Version, but they got rid of all the archaic vows and the.
[00:03:18] Speaker D: They added the language. And I think there's a few places where basically where they were like, well, we can't, we can't justify this translation so anymore.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: So, yeah, they revise it, fix a.
[00:03:28] Speaker D: Few things, but for the most part.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: They try to stick to King James. And then ages 8 and above, the New International Readers Version, which I've never heard of that one before. Josh, have you heard of the New International Readers versions, like for kids, Kids.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Bible, Basically, it's for people who don't speak English as a native language, don't have advanced literacy.
[00:03:44] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Et cetera. It's helpful for that. And it's important to know in the Church's newsroom and press releases that went along with this, they clarified. This list isn't meant to be prescriptive or exhausted, exhaustive. It's just a list of examples.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Right?
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Sure. So, Josh, why is this an important shift? I mean, what do you think of this announcement?
[00:04:02] Speaker B: I'm thrilled. I've been recommending for a long time that we keep the King James Version because I love it for many reasons, but that we supplement by comparing with other translations. And I find a lot of benefits of doing that.
For example, people complain often about how difficult Isaiah is. Isaiah is just so hard. And I've told people for years, if you simply Compare Isaiah to a modern translation like the nrsv and just compare it back and forth as you go. It reduces the difficulty of Isaiah by say half.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Oh yeah, that's pretty big.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Because immediately you can get the modern English instead of the old stuff. There are some little fixes. It presents it in poetic stanzas. You can tell when it's poetry. There's all sorts of just instant benefits.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: I feel like that was the biggest thing for me when I first started using other translations is seeing the poetry laid out like poetry. I'm like, oh, I'm not supposed to read it like a story. Like I actually could see the verse. I could see how like it's supposed to be almost melodic and it just. It was more beautiful instantly.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And even just telling you that it is poetry switches a little button in our brains because we instinctively read poetry differently than we do just straightforward prose. So a modern translation just telling you, hey, the following is a poem. We switch gears and we now read it differently and in most cases better just from that id.
[00:05:18] Speaker D: Well, and I feel like in a lot of cases. Cause that's a formatting issue in a lot of ways. But the King James Version also like the language in poetry in particular, sometimes their translation is a little stilted because they didn't maybe quite understand Hebrew poetry as well at the time, or I don't know what the case may be, but they would get too many syllables in there. And it just. If you try to read the King James, the poetic parts in poetry, not all, there's something like Psalm 23 is beautiful in the King James version, Isaiah 53 beautiful in the King James Version. But there's some poems where the phrasing just is a little stilted because they put too many syllables in the translation or whatever. Translators today I think are a little more sensitive to, okay, it's poetry. And so they're trying to be consistent in their meter and things like that that I think help with you as a reader when you're reading that.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah. The King James Version is based on translations efforts begun by Tyndale 100 years before the King James Version. So people often say, well, it's a little over 400 year old English. It's actually closer to almost 500 years old. And things have just changed a lot since then.
[00:06:21] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: So you mentioned that you love the King James for a variety of reasons. Like what are some of those. What's so beautiful about the King James? And then what do we get some from some of these other translations?
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Well, like we mentioned there's chapters where it just sings. And because I've grown up with it, every other translation sounds wrong for some of those famous passages. And I freely admit that that's just my conditioning of my childhood and my faith tradition. And I'm okay with that.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: No one I can't imagine, like not saying, thou shalt not kill. Like the Ten Commandments are just like vows ingrained in my head.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Or the Lord, my shepherd, I shall not want. You could render that in plainer English, but it just doesn't feel right in your gut.
[00:06:55] Speaker C: The artistic register of that language is definitely elevated with the King James, which as I understand that was kind of the intention with the King James Bible. Right. This Bible, as I understand, was meant to be read in churches. So it was meant to be sort of an oral experience where you're listening to it being read over the pulpit and to sort of heighten the sacred experience of.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: That's one reason why it's over punctuated. If you've ever wondered why there's so many commas, it's because you're supposed to read this out loud in church. And you pause at every comma for dramatic effect as you're doing your reading. So it has way more punctuation than we're used today. But that's because it's intended for this out loud reading. It wasn't supposed to be a quiet in your head experience.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: I did not realize that. I mean, I'd always heard that especially in the ancient world, a lot of these texts were meant to be received orally. But I, I kind of assumed by the time we got to the King James era that we were reading books. But the fact that it still was a very much of a performance experience, that's 1611.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: People aren't buying cheap Bibles from the.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Books they're reading at home.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: These are large books, they're meant for pulpit reading. And that is what it is.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Okay. Hey, that's pretty cool.
[00:07:57] Speaker C: So the language definitely is an advantage from the King James Bible, at least for the aesthetic experience of listening or reading a Bible. And it is undeniably beautiful English. As Latter Day Saints, of course, we're sort of attached to the hip, at least English speaking Latter Day Saints, we are attached to the hip to the King James Bible because Restoration Scripture is rendered in the idiom of Jacobean English. Right. Most noticeably, of course, the Book of Mormon. But Doctrine and covenants, Pearl of great price, all of them. Not just the archaic thee and thou and saith, but like specific renderings of Specific phrases are clearly derived from the King James rendering of it. Right. Makes sense if that's the go to Bible for Joseph Smith and other early Latter Day Saints.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: And the Joseph Smith translation too, of course.
[00:08:39] Speaker C: Absolutely. Derived from the Kingdom.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: As you know, Book of Mormon scholars, some have made the case that it's not just borrowing the language as a register that the Book of Mormon in its English translation is in some way engaging with the King James Bible, settling theological debates that are playing out in the pages of King James language and making a claim on what's the right answer. So there's a lot of connection there that maybe goes even beyond language that this is meant to. They're meant to go hand in hand.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: So we've mentioned how the King James Version doesn't format poetry as a separate genre. Are there any other challenges that, that the King James Version has that maybe we don't see in other editions of the Bible?
[00:09:16] Speaker B: I guess one thing would be that we have additional centuries of studying biblical manuscripts. That's right. Like you guys know Dead Sea Scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient documents where now scholars are able to identify more accurately than ever before what were the original words of the apostles and prophets. At least as close as we can get via scholarly tools. King James version, by being 400 years old, predates all this new scholarship. So there are places where modern translations will render verses, I would say, more accurately just based on that manuscript evidence. And the Church uses this research already in foreign translations. I published an article a few years back on the Church's Spanish translation that it made. And the Church took an old Spanish translation that was in the public domain, and they modernized it and updated it as they wanted to. And in my article, I document a lot of cases where the Spanish verse is originally read like the King James Version does, but based on the results of modern scholarly textual criticism, the Church changed those verses to read like a modern English translation would and that it means something different.
And so you see there the Church utilizing this research, it's not afraid of it. This can be a helpful thing.
But that's a place where sometimes a Spanish or a Portuguese speaker reading the Church's Spanish or Portuguese translations might be reading a rendering of a verse that is actually more accurate than what we get in the kjv.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: I would also add on these older manuscripts that we now have after the translation of the King James Bible.
You mentioned Dead Sea Scrolls in the press release. And another instruction the Church gave, one thing they addressed was people who may have concerns over sort of doctrinal differences that you'll find in other translations. Right. And the statement from the church is reassuring readers that modern translations, at least English translations, are fine. Of course I need to be careful about doctrinal conversations, but we shouldn't be inherently worried about are we going to be losing doctrinal purity without using the King James Bible, that kind of thing. I would actually flip the table and I would say if you flip open like the NRSV To Deuteronomy chapter 32, there is a famous variant in the Dead Sea Scrolls that actually aligns better with our doctrine than what you get from the King James Bible. I'm of course talking about this is the song of Moses, the famous line at the day when the Most High divided the nations, he allotted the nations according to the number of the sons of God, the Bene Elim, right into Israel. He appointed Jehovah as his inheritance, or Yahweh. That vibes a lot more with our theology of a divine council. Right in a divine plurality, a Most.
[00:11:46] Speaker D: High Elohim Father and one of the sons of God being Yahweh or Jehovah, Jehovah.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: You're not gonna get that in King James Bible. Cause that variant is not in the.
Is not in the Westminster or the Leningrad Codex. It's not in the received text from later Jewish antiquity. It's from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so, just so you know, if you're kind of wondering about that, there are actually cases where, as Latter Day Saints, we have a better, stronger doctrinal position to take with the biblical reading by using a modern translation like the NRSV that we would lack in the King James.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: Yeah. When people have come to me and they've said, well, I think the King James is stronger doctrinally than these modern translations. I often do things like that, point out passage after passage after passage, where the rendering in modern translations is actually closer to our doctrinal belief in the King James. Another famous example is from the New Testament, the Johannan Kama.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: Oh yeah.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: From 1 John, chapter 5, verses 7 and 8, where scholars have documented that there's a passage in there that was written to defend the Trinity. And it's not in the earliest manuscripts. And we're pretty sure we know where in history people stuck that in there because they needed a passage that taught the Trinity. So it ended up there. And it's in the King James Version. But it's not included in modern Bible translations, even the ones that are prepared by Christians that believe in the Trinity because they universally recognize that this is an insertion into the biblical text and was not originally part of First John.
[00:13:03] Speaker D: Right.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: But it's. So we have this trinitarian passage in our kingdom, King James Version there, and it's not there in modern translations and in this case would say, yeah, doctrinally and textually the modern translations have it. Right.
[00:13:14] Speaker D: So that's actually, that opens the door to something I wanted to also bring up is in addition to, you know, maybe correcting some translation problems, there are cases like that one where verses have just been omitted in some modern editions because our earliest manuscripts don't support their presence. And I've seen, I've seen people online, people who don't understand the scholarship and the work that's been, that's gone on to do that, to figure that sort of stuff out. I've seen people kind of freak out like, oh my gosh, like they're taking stuff out of the Bible and you know, and that's maybe create some reservations about modern translation. So I think it's important for it to understand there like when there's an, when there's a verse omitted in, in a more modern edition of the Bible, it's because the manuscript evidence at present suggests that that was not original to the text. Right.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: So how does Article of faith number eight kind of play into this discussion? How would you interpret as far as the Bible is translated correctly and navigating how to use different Bible translations.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: So in the Church's new handbook entry it says when members encounter doctrinal discrepancies between Bible translations, they should refer to the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price and Teachings of Latter Day Prophets.
So I like that we're not in this position that many of our Christian friends would find themselves in, where when translations agree or manuscripts disagree at any stage, then you've got a problem. If this is your sole source of authority, your sole arbitrary of what is true, we have lots of other points of reference. So we can cross reference any sort of manuscript disagreement in the Bible with all these other works of Scripture and modern prophets. So for me it's a very thing where we don't need to get upset, we don't need to feel the pressure rise because ultimately our doctrine is going to be given and affirmed by the teachings of living prophets. So when we do have questions arise, it's usually just something trying to figure out what a particular passage means. But our entire theology is not writing on which manuscript reading is correct or.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: Which translation is correct. Right. So if the NIV renders it one way or the NRC or the King James Version. We don't need to fret too much. And so to pick, oh, I guess I have to go learn Greek before I know which one is the true translation. Right. I mean, that's a helpful tool.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: And then you learn Greek and you figure out not all Greek manuscripts are great. And it goes on and on, and then you spiral.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: It becomes like this.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: This black hole that you could get into of sort of textual criticism. So I think that's a helpful strategy for us.
[00:15:39] Speaker D: One of the things I think, honestly, I think Latter Day Saints we are, or at least we should be better equipped to deal with this kind of thing of comparing translations. Because, look, especially with the Old Testament, like, how many different versions of the creation account do we have in our canon? Right? We have Genesis 1, we have Moses 2, and then we have Abraham 4. Right.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: And then we've got an account in.
[00:15:59] Speaker D: The temple, and then we've got the temple. And these are. If you, if you spend time studying those together, there are differences not just in that, like, they add, you know, Moses adds some stuff and Abraham adds some stuff, but there are some. Some clear instances where there are differences in wordings. I was actually just looking at Abraham 4 earlier today, and it uses expanse instead of firmament. Right. And that's actually, if you go to the niv, for instance, they'll use expanse instead of firmament. That's part of. That's one of the translational issues that scholars debate today. And some. Some translations will render it differently. And so we actually have, like, already in our canon, we have variant translations, if you will, variant versions of the same material.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: And they're all in the canon and they're all authoritative, and they're all true.
[00:16:45] Speaker D: And so I actually kind of feel like, hey, we actually have a leg up here. We have some experience, or we should. If we've been reading our scriptures well up to this point, we have some experience in actually engaging different translations of similar texts.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Yeah, this is exactly why I think we don't need to panic about these minor differences that pop up in this verse versus the another translation, this verse, because we have so many more resources to triangulate our understanding of the plan of salvation and the role of the Savior. We really don't need to get hung up on tiny differences and think, oh, no, the entire gospel plan is coming crashing down because I can't reconcile these two verses. It's okay, Right?
[00:17:19] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Well, one thing I do want to maybe go into a little bit More on that is when you have these different translations, these different variants, and then you learn Hebrew or you learn Greek and you realize, oh, the manuscripts are different too. Yes, we have these other sources to, to triangulate from. With understanding the reliability of the Old Testament. Like, I think you can get into a spot where you say, well, the Book of Mormon's true and the Doctrine Covenants is true, but because there's just. We, we just can't know what really is true in the Old Testament. Therefore, like, you know, be a little bit more dismissive about this Scripture or not really, like, hold as much authority on this scripture because we've got restored Scripture and we've got like, authoritative things that we believe are true. How do you deal with that kind of issue when Latter Day Saints encounter that?
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's. We've got to balance two somewhat competing ideas. One is that the Scriptures are the revealed Word of God and that he's communicating. And that means we have to take these very, very, very seriously. And on the other hand, as many church resources have recently stressed, we recognize that the Word of God is mediated through human beings and as the Doctrine and Covenants puts it, after the manner of their language that they might come to understanding, it's filtered through human culture and understanding.
So we've got to learn to see the humanity in the text as well as the divinity. And there's extremes you can go to in either side. You can say, well, if it's mediated through humans, we don't know what's true. And I'm not going to give this any attention. I think that would be a mistake. Or you go to the extreme of saying, this is dictated straight from the mouth of God and there is no culture involved, it's just straight from heaven. And we got to take it at face, at face value in every case. And that also leads you into problems. So as Latter Day Saints, I think we're in this great space where we get to kind of be in the middle of the. And recognize that both aspects are at play.
And we see this. I love the Book of Mormon being the model for this. How the authors are so transparent about the fact that Jesus is in some sense directing them in what to write. Like Mormon will say, I was going to include this and then Jesus told me not to, or I didn't think I was going to include this, and then he told me to include it. So he's directing that. But at the same time, they lament their weaknesses in writing. They lament that there might be Mistakes of men in there, you really see both aspects coming together.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: Sometimes Jesus chews them out because they forgot to put something in there, like Samuel's prophecies that he wanted them to.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: I remember as a student, like kind of grappling with like, oh, the Bible went through all of this editing and redaction and that's really like, concerning and confusing. But then, yeah, like realizing, like, wait, the Book of Mormon does that? Except even more transparently saying, yeah, this was redacted from that. And we got this source from here and we kind of cobbled them together. And it's the word of God.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: And this idea that everything has to harmonize and perfectly line up really is a development from later in history. You look at the Old Testament, there's lots of places where it's clear the authors don't agree with each other. Whoever set Chronicles right back to back with Kings had a sense of humor. Or they value the inclusion of multiple perspectives because Chronicles and Kings don't see things the same way. They recognize that things don't have to agree to both be valuable.
[00:20:07] Speaker C: Or heck, there's two creation accounts in Genesis back to back with each other and in some details they contradict. Right.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Or elsewhere in the Old Testament, you throw those out completely and you draw on ancient Near Eastern. Oh yeah, Combat myth, slaying a primordial sea monster.
[00:20:21] Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: They thought that was.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: Or creating out of wisdom. Right. He discovers wisdom and he just. Yeah, it's really interesting. The, the last thing, I think it's maybe worth mentioning on this point for Latter Day Saints who may still feel a little off. I don't know, can I do other translations besides King James?
Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you we have very good precedent, both anciently and today, of prophets using translations in their prophetic work. Anciently.
Let's look at the apostles who wrote and composed the books of the New Testament. Right.
Paul and the Gospel authors and so forth.
So they are predominantly. Well, they're in a Greek speaking world. They're probably not native Greek speakers. They're speaking some version of, you know. Right. Palestinian Aramaic or something like that. Right. Judean Aramaic. But they are utilizing a Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, routinely in their teachings and in how they interact with the Hebrew Scriptures. Right. And so we have these quotations of the Septuagint all over in the Gospels and Paul is using it. Okay. So there you have an example of ancient prophets using a translation of the Bible. And today, who do we have? Who do we know and love that's using a German Bible. He loves it all the time. He learns Hebrew from Joshua Satius, a guy named Joseph Smith. We have Joseph Smith himself we can look to as the example of as Latter Day Saints. We can effectively utilize both original resources and translations. In the King Follett sermon, Joseph Smith famously pulls open a German Bible and reads from it, right. And says, I'm going to give you a new translation of this passage and gives commentary on it. So it's okay. That's what I'm here to say. Right. It's okay to use. And now, ta da. We have it in black and white. We have instructions from the church saying as much. It's okay to consult other translations effectively for study and for teaching and so forth forth.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Yeah, at the end of the day we want to say we're grateful. We have more of the Word of God in varieties that can speak to different people. We want to just gather together all that truth and truth and bring it together.
[00:22:17] Speaker D: Yeah, okay, so I want to actually maybe pivot a little bit here.
Maybe let's start talking Old Testament.
We've been talking Bible translation, we've laid the groundwork and stuff like that, but let's start talking Old Testament. And one of the questions I want to put out there here is just to start off is like, why should we value the Old Testament?
Because as we're, we've got a lot of other scripture like Jasmine was talking about. We've got, we've got. It's really easy as Latter Day Saints, I think, to be like, well, we've got the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and I know those are reliable because, you know, they came through Joseph Smith and their modern revelation.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: And the Old Testament is talking donkeys and God smiting people and it's just.
[00:22:55] Speaker C: Like pillars of salt and all that good stuff.
[00:22:57] Speaker D: And then like on top of that, we have the Book of Mormon itself in like 1 Nephi 13 and stuff saying plain and precious things have been removed from the Book. And so the book being the Bible. And so why should we value the Old Testament as we have it and why should we study it? Why do we dedicate a whole year, every four years to studying the Old Testament and what's the value there?
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Yes, I can just give one take on that. So I, when I was in graduate school, I spent two years in a master's program, six years in a PhD program, and this was after five years as an undergrad. So it was a long slog to get through college for me.
And before going to grad school, I did have some well meaning people tell me, you gotta be really careful. You're going into, you know, biblical religious studies. You could lose your faith, they're gonna pull your testimony apart. And I thought, oh no, are they right? Is this gonna be the ride of my life?
And nothing like that really happened to me. And I credit that to a couple things. One is that for a lot of years of grad school, the Lord called me to be ward mission leader. So whatever I was learning in the daytime, by night I was out with the missionaries testifying of faith in Jesus Christ and repentance and baptism. So that keeps you grounded.
[00:24:02] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: But the other thing was I just, I think the subject matter, the Old Testament, I think, is one of our hugely untapped resources for having a robust, resilient faith today with so many of the things we're dealing with. So I was in graduate school in the 2010s mostly, and gospel topics essays are coming out. And there's new information about church history that I'm absorbing as I go along too. And when people are getting upset over certain modern sorts or things that seem modern to them, my reading and rereading and rereading of the Old Testament, I think really helped me deal with those things.
So, for example, when we have figures in church history who are imperfect and make mistakes and say stupid things, well, there's. The Old Testament is great on its gray characters. Nobody's black or white, they're all gray and they all do stupid things, even the righteous heroes that we love. So I was used to that. From the Old Testament or when people struggle with polygamy. Well, polygamy is all over the Old Testament. I was used to it there. In fact, my doctoral dissertation was on Jewish polygamy.
So I'm just immersed in that. And you get very used to it. And then when people. And then when concerns come up more recently, I'm like, well, these are the challenges we've always had.
Or you can look at prophet, prophetic fallibility, or just all sorts of issues, people struggling to understand what God's telling them. All these things that we thought are new things we're dealing with in church history. They've just been there all along. And so I think just recognizing the stories in the Old Testament and seeing the wrestle there really helped me.
Another one is that the Old Testament, you see things changing over centuries as they have to adapt to new circumstances. They're not doing things in Moses's day, the Same way they are in Lehi's day, or the same way in Malachi's day. So when the church changes policies or we have an updated understanding, or the church makes some kind of move that's different than the direction we've gone in the past, I'm like, yeah, that's just how this works. When you have that broad perspective, it really helps.
So again, I just feel like there is so many tools in here that we can use to help people understand their covenants today, understand a life of faith today, that the tools are in there and it's untapped.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: So clearly, like, translation can help us overcome some hurdles when it comes to approaching the Old Testament, Understanding its value can help us overcome some hurdles. But one hurdle I encounter sometimes is people's experience with the Temple, because the temple does draw its inspiration in a lot of ways from biblical temple stuff.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: Stuff.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: But I see two things happening. One, on the one hand, you've got people saying, well, I don't see the temple in the scriptures anywhere. Jesus didn't talk about the idiosyncratic Latter Day Saint temple rituals. I'm not seeing that in Scripture. And then on the other hand, people saying, oh, the temple's everywhere in scripture. This is a temple text, and that's a temple text. And like, the endowment is just all over, and all of these characters received the endowment at some point. So I see those two extremes. The temple is nowhere in the Old Testament, and it's everywhere in the Old Testament. So from your experience, where does Latter Day Saint covenant theology really show up? And how can we use the Old Testament to understand our own temple experience better?
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's crucial we do this. In fact, in the Come Follow me manual for 2026 in the opening lesson suggests that one of the main ways we can use the Old Testament this year is to learn about our own covenant relationship with God. So clearly they're seeing something in there that we can pick up on as we go.
And I think as we look to the Abrahamic covenant and recognize that we are Abraham's seed today and that we are participating, participate in the same covenant blessings, gives us a good connection point with the house of Israel. I think part of how people aren't able to make that jump to back then is that when we think of our own covenant path, we think of our individual journey of baptism and confirmation and going to the temple and some texts, that's a little harder to see.
But if we recognize that we're also part of a covenant people and a Covenant family who are bound to God in this intimate, binding relationship, then you see that same relationship with the house of Israel as a whole. It just takes a little bit of mental work, but we can do it and see how God relates to the house of Israel as a whole is directly parallel to how he relates to us as individuals. And then as you watch the house of Israel go through hard times and he gets them out of their mess and they have to repent and do all these things, you can see what the, the journey of the people as a whole is parallel with what we each go through. And that opens up tremendous opportunities to say, I see my story in here and I see how God relates to them because of his covenant relationship is very instructive to how he relates to me and my covenant relationship.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: So like in Latter Day Saint temples and through baptism and through the sealing ceremony and all these, we're making these individual covenants like, I promise to do this, I promise to do that, I promise to do that. And so sometimes we tend to think of our covenant journey in those more micro points in our journey. But you're saying that in the Old Testament, it's this larger picture, but nonetheless we can connect those two things and see how God works through both paths.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, church leaders, President Nelson and others recently have stressed that covenants are not primarily contractual, that they're about relationship.
And so when we look for relational language in the Old Testament, we'll see that a lot more.
So, for example, when Jehovah's pained that people have turned from him, well, why is that? It's not because they, they broke the rules of the contract and therefore the penalties come due. It's because he's hurt. Because they're supposed to be in a relationship and they love each other and now they're going after other gods.
It just hurts him.
When you start to recognize that aspect of relationship between Israel and Jehovah, then you see a lot more about what's going on.
[00:29:19] Speaker C: Maybe that's a good opportunity. Maybe you should have started like this. But since you mentioned it, maybe now is a good opportunity, Josh, to tell us, take us to the very basics on what is a covenant, a berit in the Hebrew Bible, and how does that inform our understanding and our definitions of covenants today? Because when I'm in primary or, you know, you're talking with primary kids, you say a covenant is a promise that we make with God. Right. And that's true, but that's also a little insufficient. Right. There's more complexity. So do you want to walk us through what the heck is a covenant to begin with in the biblical sense? Why are people making covenants? Who cares about covenants, right? And then how does that foundation from the Old Testament inform our modern covenant? Making gospel ordinances and sort of orientation we have as Latter Day Saints? Would you like to walk us through that for just a minute?
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Yeah. I think you're right that when I was in primary and I was getting ready to get baptized at age 8, the definition I memorized was a covenant is a two way promise, right? And that's not incorrect. So I think it's fine. No one needs to feel like they taught their kids wrong. But it may be incomplete because when you say it's a two way promise or that it's a promise where God sets the terms and we obey or anything like that, that just focuses on the mechanics of making covenant, but falls short of describing, well, what's the purpose of this? And in scriptural terms, going back to ancient times, covenants were fundamentally about either creating a relationship or strengthening a relationship or fixing a relationship. But it's everything to do with relationships.
So what I've tried to do with my kids is I explain this is say, hey, whenever you hear that word covenant, you gotta be thinking about who's the relationship with and what relationship is this, and think in relational terms or we're missing the picture. And it's easy to fall back into these kind of contractual models of what covenant is, I do this and now.
[00:31:05] Speaker C: You owe me this, like you're signing a lease with a landlord or something, right? It's much deeper than that.
[00:31:09] Speaker D: I think it's worth noting, it maybe doesn't feel very relational. But a contract is about defining a relationship, right? You're establishing what the relationship and what the expectations of a relationship are going to be in, in the case of a contract, a business. And in the ancient near east, right? The model for covenants, right? Is usually it's the treaty model, right? It's the model for which nations would establish relationships between each other.
And you know, they had these treaty forms that they used. And. But that's what it's all, that's what it's ultimately about, right? A treaty is about establishing a relationship between one nation and another. A covenant was about God establishing his relationship with his people. And sometimes that's with a specific individual, like with Abraham. But ultimately even the relationship with Abraham has been established to ultimately be a relationship with Israel. Right? And the whole. And we have the Sinai covenant where the whole people are in view there. Right. But yeah, even though maybe a contract feels a little, I don't know, clinical sterile, it's still like, it actually is still a relational sort of document. And that's still. Its purpose is to establish and bring people into a relationship. Right?
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Healthy relationships will have boundaries and they'll have expectations.
I can't expect to do things to my wife constantly that are making her very sad and expect this to be a healthy relationship. And when God gives those commandments, it's him saying, if we want to be close, you know, you're going to have to be holy. Like, I am holy. And these are the things that will keep us in a close, intimate relationship. And when we rebel against his commandments and say, well, what I want to do now is more important than my relationship with you, that hurts him and it creates a wedge in the relationship when we're a little further. And we need that repentance process to say, I'm sorry, how do I make this better? Can we become close again? It's very much like a relationship in that dynamic we're used to.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: I do love that the Old Testament frequently uses that as a metaphor of Jehovah being a spouse to Israel, because that really is one of the best ways to describe how you make that covenant work, because it is very relational. When you have a marriage, it's not just about the contractual, you're going to do this and I'm going to do that. It's much more about how we're going to grow closer, how we're going to build a family, how we're going to, like, become love each other. And that is exactly what God is trying to do with us. It's about growing the relationship, growing the family, and growing love.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that comparison to a marriage, President Nelson used it in his really important Liahona article, the Everlasting Covenant, from the October 2022 Liahona. And he used the marriage analogy to explain something that does disturb people sometimes, where they're like, well, you sang that if we're in a covenant relationship with God, that he loves you guys more than he loves us or whatever. And the thing I think President Nelson was trying to bring out was that God loves all his children, but what a covenant does is it brings those two people together in a way that allows that relationship to deepen in ways that aren't otherwise possible. And so with a marriage, by way of comparison to something we understand better, we should love all our brothers and sisters on Earth. We can agree on that. We should Love everybody.
But when I married my wife, Alice, that covenant that we made with each other allows that love to deepen and blossom and flourish in ways that wouldn't be possible outside of the marriage covenant. So my relationship with her is fundamentally different than it is than with Stephen, as much as I'll let you.
And that's appropriate. We all recognize that. And so with a covenant relationship with God, we're not saying God loves these people, not these people. He loves all his kids. But what covenants allow him to do is bring his kids even closer to him so that the love they already have can deepen in ways that otherwise not possible.
[00:34:40] Speaker D: And an important distinction. I will let Stephen go in a minute. Is that God is not so exclusive in his covenant as we are in our marriages. Right. So just because he's in a covenant relationship with you or with me or whoever else. Right. And not with somebody else, doesn't mean that person cannot have a covenant relationship with God. God loves all his children, and he wants to have that close covenantal relationship with every single one of us. And it's really our own individual choice. Right. Whether we're going to enter into that covenant and bring ourselves closer to him or not.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: And the whole point of the house of Israel was, in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth.
[00:35:18] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: The point of Israel is to live the covenant and then invite everybody on earth to come experience the blessings of covenant belonging.
[00:35:24] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: This is really meant for everybody.
[00:35:26] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: Well, all these. All this language and metaphors of love and so forth, that's one of the technical terms used in covenant language to describe God loves Israel. I like to tell my students, because they'll sometimes encounter passages. There's one famously, I think it's Malachi, but it's. You can correct me, Josh, but it's Israel or Jacob have I loved. And Esau I have hated. Right. And people say, wait a second, does. Does God hate people? And I have to assure them, no, no, no. This is technical language being used in this context.
So look out for things like that when you read it in the context of. And this is why understand the Old Testament is important. You read it in its cultural context, you'll know. I don't think God actually hates people in the sense of like, he, like, has, you know, hard, derogatory feelings towards them. This is technical language, another technical term maybe you could help us define for us. And President Nelson has talked about it. You mention it in your book here. Hesed.
Right. Loving kindness, that nice King James rendering of hesed, there's really no one direct word for it and you'll get different renderings. I think loving kindness is actually pretty good. Right. In terms of trying to get the sense of it. What is hesed in the context of the covenant in the biblical sense. Right. President Nelson has even, I think called it covenantal love at one point. Right. Do you want to walk us through that? And we don't need to get all the technical language. Maybe that's a big one. That would be helpful for us as people are reading the Old Testament this year as Latter Day Saints are looking at like God has loving kindness towards me or towards Israel. What does that hesed mean exactly?
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Yeah, and there's a lot that's been said about this and there's several good articles at the Religious Study center website, rsc, byu, Edu, if people want to get into this further. So Latter Day Saints have laid a lot of groundwork. But yeah, it's translated a bunch of different ways in the Old Testament. So love, mercy, goodness, kindness, loving kindness. So part of the problem that we difficulty we have in translation is when it's translated half a dozen different ways, we don't recognize the connection between all of them and the relationship between all the verses because it's one word in Hebrew. And we tend to focus on the emotional, like you said, aspects of it, of love or mercy and that it's just an emotion that's being expressed. Whereas in its context, hesed is referring to kind of like a loyalty and an obligation that exists between two people in some kind of relationship that I am obligated because of this pre existing relationship to be loyal, to be loving, to extend mercy. So that dynamic is at play in there. And I think that's why President Nelson was invoking it, because he was trying to express the idea of once we're bound to God and covenant, he is obligated to show us mercy when we repent. And he is bound himself to be loving and to stick with us through thick and thin and all those things. And in English we just don't have a good term for that. You can say covenant, loyalty, covenant. You're adding on hyphens and things like that now. So he thought, oh, there's a good Hebrew word that captures his concepts. And so that's when you want to bring in a foreign word to describe something, is when your own language just doesn't quite have something that works. And so he brought that in. I think it's been a helpful term to help us wrap our minds around this big concept and have a word for it.
[00:38:27] Speaker D: I've actually seen it gain some traction within Latter Day Saint discourse to use said we actually just this last Sunday.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Oh yeah, that surprised me.
[00:38:38] Speaker D: A sister, a girl who's about who's going out on her mission and was giving her farewell address, dropped the word hesed in her in her talk and I was like, oh, all right.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Becoming mainstream.
[00:38:49] Speaker D: So that was kind of fun.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: Are there any other, like, thematic signals about covenant in the Old Testament that Latter Day Saint readers should look out for? Right. Specific phrases or gestures, actions.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Right.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: Things that come with covenants from in the Hebrew Bible that as you're reading along and Abraham does this weird thing like why is Abraham splitting a goat in half? And you know, and weird things like that. And why are they doing this, this way, that way, or using certain phrases. Any anything else you'd recommend that Latter Day Saint readers look out for as they're reading the Old Testament? Say, hey, look, this is a covenant context or a sort of covenant imagery being evoked here in some sense.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say. If you want more than the short answer, Kerry Muhlstein has a great free article on the Internet called How to Recognize the Everlasting Covenant in the Scriptures. It's again at rsc, byu Edu, and he goes through a bunch of covenant language that we don't always intuitively recognize because it's not using the word covenant always. That's a dead giveaway when it does. But there's all sorts of other context and ways in which covenant is invoked that don't have the word covenant. So Kerry's article is. Dr. Muelstein's article is very, very helpful. There's.
And just to summarize a few points from this thing, there's certain terms that are more technical relationship terms. And when you look in closer inspection, like whenever God refers to my people, 99% of the time that's referring to people he's covenanted with. Or people refer to Jehovah as my God or your God, that's invoking that relationship there. Or when we recognize blessings of the covenant, like being close to God or obligations of the covenant, like repenting or keeping commandments or helping others. Then when it brings up repenting or keeping commandments or helping others, we can recognize that set in the framework of this larger covenant understanding they're not just isolated concepts that are unrelated. So some of picking up on some of those things can help us track that a little more easily. And then we'll see how frequent this is.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well, making it personal a little bit. How have you seen God's covenants improve your own life?
[00:40:45] Speaker B: I guess studying the Old Testament, it impresses me that Jehovah doesn't give up on people. And President Nelson said this in that article, right? That when he's bound to himself, to us, by covenant, President Nelson says we will never exhaust his merciful patience with us. And that's just impressed me as I read the history of the House of Israel or like say the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon. It's just his long term plans to bring them back when they have willfully strayed from him.
It gives me a lot of hope both for myself when I struggle to be my best self and when I have friends and family I care about who have left the covenant path to think, yeah, God's not just blowing off steam. He's like for, well, you forgot me, I'm going to forget you now. He doesn't do that.
Just seeing how determined he is to bring people back, no matter how long it takes or how much effort he's got to put in the gathering of the House of Israel is something that he's talking about before they've even left him.
And I, I'm just so impressed by his willingness and his desire to bring everyone home to get all his kids back.
And it both humbles me and makes me think I really ought to be more patient with people in my life that I'm, I'm trying to help out and just recognize on the Internet, yes, God's playing such a long game and he can see past the hurt of the immediate moment to the, the importance of the relationship in the long term. I think that's been very helpful for me in my life.
[00:42:13] Speaker A: Very cool. Well, thank you so much for being willing to share all these insights with us. I'm very excited to study the Old Testament this year. It is epic, it is adventurous and it is clearly full of chesed. It's full of a lot of God's love if we're looking out for it. And so if you guys want to have a more in depth understanding of the Old Testament this year, A Modern Guide to an Old Testament by Joshua Sears is one book that we would recommend. Remember, you can believe in the restoration boldly still, study deeply and we'll see you next time.
