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Episode: Ether 1-5 Part 1 • Dr. George Pierce & Dr. Krystal Pierce • November 11-17 • Come Follow Me

Author: Hank Smith & John Bytheway
Duration: 01:08:00

Episode Shownotes

How does the Jaredite journey parallel ours? Dr. Krystal Pierce and Dr. George Pierce explore the Jaredites' experience at the Tower of Babel and the Mesopotamian and Egyptian Symbology as the Jaredites learn to call upon the Lord.SHOW NOTES/TRANSCRIPTSEnglish: https://tinyurl.com/podcastBM46ENFrench: https://tinyurl.com/podcastBM46FRGerman: https://tinyurl.com/podcastBM46DEPortuguese: https://tinyurl.com/podcastBM46PTSpanish: https://tinyurl.com/podcastBM46ESYOUTUBEhttps://youtu.be/0ACsRgkhT78ALL EPISODES/SHOW NOTESfollowHIM website: https://www.followHIMpodcast.comFREE PDF DOWNLOADS

OF followHIM QUOTE BOOKSNew Testament: https://tinyurl.com/PodcastNTBookOld Testament: https://tinyurl.com/PodcastOTBookWEEKLY NEWSLETTERhttps://tinyurl.com/followHIMnewsletterSOCIAL MEDIAInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followHIMpodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastTIMECODE00:00 Part I - Dr. Krystal Pierces and Dr. George Pierce02:55 Bios04:30 Come, Follow Me Manual Ether 1-505:30 Mormon passes the record to Moroni07:37 Moroni explains the Book of Ether10:23 Discussion of translation and the 24 plates14:21 Did Mosiah change governing body due to Jaredite record?15:36 Ether’s genealogy and scriptural literacy19:04 The Tower of Babel22:54 Ziggurats and why they build towers26:44 Jaredite understanding of the nature of God28:31 Dr. Krystal Pierce shares a story about trusting God34:03 Pride and the tower38:01 Misunderstanding the power and mercy of God41:51 Why “brother of Jared?”43:24 Mahonri Moricancumer47:25 First crisis-counfounding language50:07 A lack of compassion51:30 Second crisis: scattering of the people54:47 Dr. Joseph Spencer and the 3 Audiences 56:51 God is God of the entire world (not just Jews)1:01:40 Ether 1-2 - Bees, fish, birds, and plants1:05:44 Egyptianisms in the Book of Ether1:07:48 - Dr. Krystal Pierce and Dr. George PierceThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Cofounder, Executive Producer, SponsorDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

Summary

In this episode of 'followHIM,' hosts Hank Smith and John Bytheway are joined by Dr. Krystal and Dr. George Pierce to explore chapters 1-5 of the Book of Ether. They discuss the Jaredite civilization's themes, including pride, humility, and divine guidance, paralleling ancient narratives with modern faith journeys. Moroni's insights into the Jaredites' history and the significance of scriptural literacy are examined, alongside the critical implications of the Tower of Babel. The episode emphasizes the necessity of understanding God's true nature and compassion in overcoming personal struggles and encourages listeners to engage deeply with scripture.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Ether 1-5 Part 1 • Dr. George Pierce & Dr. Krystal Pierce • November 11-17 • Come Follow Me) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_04
Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name's Hank Smith. I'm your host. I'm here with my co-host, the brother of David. John, by the way. John, we are in the Book of Ether today.

00:00:18 Speaker_04
First, you can tell me about David and then tell me what you're looking forward to in the Book of Ether.

00:00:22 Speaker_03
David the Elder. He's the eldest of the family of six children that I come from. There's a part of me that's always with David. He's got my left kidney. He won't give it back. I've told him if he needs another one, I'm fresh out. That's a good title.

00:00:39 Speaker_03
I'm the brother of David. Tell me about the Book of Ether. Ether is like a second little mini Book of Mormon with the same pride cycle. I'm so glad that Moreau and I decided to put this in here.

00:00:51 Speaker_03
Today, I'm just looking forward to this whole process of preparing the barges. I think scholars call it the bargification. This should be fun.

00:01:01 Speaker_04
We have a special episode this week, John. We have two doctors with us and they kind of like each other. This is Dr. Crystal Pierce and Dr. George Pierce.

00:01:13 Speaker_04
Now, before we introduce you both, Crystal and George, tell us what we're looking forward to today. What are we going to walk through?

00:01:21 Speaker_00
I'm really excited to talk about the Book of Ether. There are some of my favorite things in here. I think I'm most excited to talk about the Tower of Babel, which actually sounds strange to say that. That's one of my favorite things to talk about.

00:01:35 Speaker_00
I love being able to link it to Genesis and talk about the Jaredites and their experience at the Tower.

00:01:42 Speaker_01
I am excited to talk about three Bs. Bricks, bees, and boats. That way all of us, Crystal, John, we've got everything covered. We've got boats for John. We've got bricks for Crystal.

00:01:56 Speaker_01
We'll talk about some bees because they're in there buzzing away, doing their thing. So let's just make it alliterative. I mean, I'm eager to hear what you have to say about bees. So there we go.

00:02:08 Speaker_04
I can already tell this is going to be a good time. This is kind of a sequel for you because we're back to our, I think it was our Old Testament year. Didn't you teach the Tower of Babel with us?

00:02:18 Speaker_04
In fact, you taught me that it's the Tower of Babel, not Babel.

00:02:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'm really excited to tie it back to that because my love of the Tower of Babel, which again sounds really strange to say, began with the Jaredites.

00:02:31 Speaker_00
That's really where I dove into it and started getting interested in it to really try to understand the Jaredites better and this culture that they're coming from.

00:02:41 Speaker_04
We'll link Crystal's previous episodes in our show notes, along with George. He's done some episodes with us as well. John, before we move any further, let's introduce these two and why they've come as a pair.

00:02:55 Speaker_03
This is awesome. Dr. George Pierce, I am so excited to say this, Hank, was born and reared in Ocahumka, Florida.

00:03:04 Speaker_03
A BA in History from Clearwater Christian College, Masters in Archaeological Information Systems from the University of York, an MA in Biblical Studies with an Archaeology concentration from Wheaton College, and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA.

00:03:24 Speaker_03
Prior to commencing his doctoral work, Dr. Pierce served as research faculty at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev in Beersheba, Israel.

00:03:33 Speaker_03
He's currently the lead architect and supervisor of the Geographic Information Systems team for the Tel Shimron excavations in the Jezreel Valley. And now I'd like to introduce Crystal.

00:03:46 Speaker_03
Crystal V. L. Pierce was born in Logan, Utah, but has also lived in California, Idaho, Egypt, and Israel. She received a PhD in Egyptian archaeology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA,

00:04:02 Speaker_03
and an MA and BA in Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley. She's currently the head registrar for the Tel Shimron excavations in the Galilee region of Israel.

00:04:12 Speaker_03
Crystal and her husband, Professor George Pierce, have two children and live in Vineyard, Utah. Crystal and George, I suddenly feel very uneducated. And with that, I'd like to say welcome to Follow Him.

00:04:27 Speaker_00
Thank you.

00:04:28 Speaker_04
Thank you. I'm going to read from the Come Follow Me manual. Ether 1 through 5, rend that veil of unbelief. And then I'm interested to see what we're going to be taught today. Here's how it starts.

00:04:40 Speaker_04
It says, while it is true that God's ways are higher than ours and we should always submit to his will, he also encourages us to think and act for ourselves. That's one lesson Jared and his brother learned.

00:04:50 Speaker_04
For example, the idea of traveling to a new land that was choice above all the earth.

00:04:55 Speaker_04
seemed to start with Jared, and the Lord granted the request, saying to the brother of Jared, Thus I will do unto thee, because this long time you have cried unto me.

00:05:04 Speaker_04
And when the brother of Jared needed light inside the barges that would carry them to their promised land, the Lord asked a question that we usually ask Him, What will ye that I should do?

00:05:14 Speaker_04
He wants to hear our thoughts and ideas, and He will listen and give confirmation or counsel us otherwise. Sometimes the only thing separating us from the blessings we seek is our own veil of unbelief.

00:05:27 Speaker_04
And if we can rend that veil, we may be surprised by what the Lord is willing to do for us.

00:05:36 Speaker_01
Here in the Book of Mormon, we've obviously been from first Nephi all the way through, and then we get the death of Mormon and passing the baton to Moroni.

00:05:46 Speaker_01
We've been discussing the Nephite civilization, and by the time that Moroni is done inviting us to come unto Christ in chapter 10, We're looking at something that spans from about rough years here, 600 BC, all the way down to about 420 or so.

00:06:00 Speaker_01
All these books covering about 1,020 years from the time that Lehi and his family leave Jerusalem to the time that Moroni closes out chapter 10.

00:06:08 Speaker_01
What's interesting then is that we get this transition from the Nephite civilization back to a Jaredite civilization in the book of Ether. That's actually going to span from the time of the tower

00:06:20 Speaker_01
all the way through, including when the Mule Kites leave Jerusalem, and they're going to be the ones that find the last Jaredite, we're looking at somewhere around 2,000 years or so.

00:06:30 Speaker_01
So the rest of the Book of Mormon comes about 1,000, and then Moroni is going to squeeze about 2,000 years into one book with 15 chapters. Moroni, as I said, has inherited the status of record keeper from his father.

00:06:44 Speaker_01
He's already said his goodbyes in Mormon. We can read that, and he thinks it's done. I always picture that Moroni is like, well, still alive, so I guess I might as well communicate something, right?

00:06:56 Speaker_01
He has the record of Ether and the record of the Jaredites. He's going to do his best then to give us what is important. And there are several really great editorial comments from Moroni in the book.

00:07:08 Speaker_01
Then we can think about the source then of the book of Ether as Moroni gives it to us.

00:07:13 Speaker_00
That's a great setup to think about. The Book of Mormon is covering about a thousand years. Now we're probably going to cover a couple of thousand years.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
It's nice because right at the beginning in chapter 1, verse 1, Moroni tells us what he's doing because he's doing something very different than what he's done before.

00:07:30 Speaker_00
Now he's going to give an account of those ancient inhabitants who were destroyed by the hand of the Lord upon the face of this north country. It's great because he actually tells us, here's the source of my information about the Jaredites.

00:07:42 Speaker_00
He says, I take mine account from the 20 and four plates, which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called the book of Ether. And then he tells us a little bit further down in verse six, it's called that because it is Ether's record.

00:07:54 Speaker_00
He's the one that wrote it. Then when you're reading this, you kind of think, wait, who are the people of Limhi? How would they find this record that belonged to this entirely other civilization located in a different area?

00:08:09 Speaker_00
For that, we have to go back to the Book of Mosiah. Then we can set up who the people of Limhi were and how they ended up finding these plates. I actually like to call them

00:08:20 Speaker_00
some archaeologists because they actually end up coming across this ancient, to them even, an ancient civilization finding these things and bringing the plates back.

00:08:32 Speaker_04
They think they've found Zarahemla. They come back to Limhi and say, good news and bad news.

00:08:38 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:08:38 Speaker_04
Bad news is Zarahemla's been destroyed. We're never getting out of slavery, right? The good news is we brought souvenirs. We brought these plates back.

00:08:46 Speaker_00
Yeah. If you remember, King Limhi is the son of the infamous King Noah.

00:08:52 Speaker_00
Like you said, right now this time they're down in the south in the land of Nephi and they're in bondage to the Lamanites and King Limhi is trying to figure out how can they escape.

00:09:01 Speaker_00
So he says, okay, I'm going to send this group of people to find Zarahemla. Somehow they completely bypass Zarahemla. I don't think it was an accident, honestly.

00:09:11 Speaker_00
They were led to go to this northern land and they find the bones of people and animals and the ruins of buildings. They want to know what happened to this civilization. They bring these plates back, hoping that information is found there.

00:09:25 Speaker_00
Then on the way back, they completely bypass Zarahemla again and get all the way down to the south and show them these plates, these 24 gold plates that they found.

00:09:38 Speaker_04
And then if I remember right, Ammon, not the son of Mosiah, Ammon, the other Ammon shows up the next day or right there close to it and says, I'm from Zarahemla. They're like, no, you're not. We found it. It's been destroyed.

00:09:53 Speaker_04
And Ammon's gotta be thinking, no, I was there just recently. So now they're, well, what are these plates about?

00:10:02 Speaker_00
Yeah. Do you know anyone who can translate these plates? Because, of course, this is in a language that's been lost for so long. Ammon's like, well, I can't, but I know somebody who can.

00:10:11 Speaker_01
I know a guy. I know a guy. We get that great discussion from Ammon about what it means to be a seer and a revelator.

00:10:18 Speaker_00
Yeah. He defines it.

00:10:19 Speaker_01
And we have that with King Mosiah.

00:10:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, so Mosiah is able to translate the record and it says, and this is in Mosiah 28, that he uses the interpreters, the two stones, the Urim and Thummim, to be able to do it.

00:10:32 Speaker_00
I love that we have this long history of the Urim and Thummim being used over and over and over again to help translate this record for us, to get it to us.

00:10:44 Speaker_03
Moroni is abridging the Book of Ether, and yet it sounds like they found 24 gold plates, and he covers all this history. I've heard people speculate. I just wonder what you guys think.

00:10:56 Speaker_03
Maybe 24 sets of plates, or maybe they were really huge plates, or maybe the language was super efficient. Have you ever heard any scholarship on that? Like you said, he shortens this quite a bit, 24 plates, but all we've got is 15 chapters.

00:11:14 Speaker_00
I always thought of it as 24 sets of plates because we're covering several millennia of history.

00:11:21 Speaker_00
Ether edits that, so it's interesting to think of how many people these plates and this record goes through to actually get to us because we have the original Jaredai authors We have Ether who takes it all and edits it, and I'm sure redacts it.

00:11:36 Speaker_00
Mosiah gives us a translation, it says. Moroni gives a translation for the gold plates. And then Joseph Smith gives a translation. It's incredible to think how much work and time and effort so many people had to go through to get the record to us.

00:11:54 Speaker_00
Sometimes we don't necessarily appreciate that. By the time we get to this point in the Book of Mormon, we're like, I'm almost done. I just got to get through a couple of chapters and I'm going to speed read through this.

00:12:06 Speaker_00
This is an entire civilization, the rise and the fall. I love this idea of giving it honor and respect to all of these people who gave it to us. What can we learn from them?

00:12:17 Speaker_01
I've always thought of it too as possibly either 24 sets or when we look at historical annals, those tablets tend to be bigger than like a standard Mesopotamian tablet. The annals and myths tend to be on bigger tablets, nothing huge, right?

00:12:35 Speaker_01
So they're not lugging home like a four by eight sheet of plywood, but they tend to be physically bigger than what we'd normally think about as like a sort of plate. Could be that as well. I don't know.

00:12:46 Speaker_01
I've never really come down on anything and I'm glad that my salvation doesn't depend on it. That's a good thing, right? As we think about that.

00:12:55 Speaker_04
Maybe Ether will tell us one day. I've always found this interesting and I don't know if it actually says it directly. King Mosiah translates these plates and reads them and then says, we're doing away with kings. He says, oh, look at King Noah.

00:13:11 Speaker_04
Oh, my sons don't want to be king. But also I just read this book and I don't think this works out very well. So we're going to get rid of kings.

00:13:19 Speaker_01
You think that's there? I would hesitate to sort of correlation equals causation type of a situation, but man, it's really close in time to where King Mosiah, as you said, reads this. I think that's part of the beauty of these records.

00:13:35 Speaker_01
because Crystal's talked about how it's gone from Jaredites to Ether to Mosiah to Moroni to Joseph Smith to us. I think as we read them, we get different lessons depending on our circumstances.

00:13:47 Speaker_01
And that's the beauty of Scripture to begin with, is the fact that we could all read the same psalm or the same section of the Doctrine and Covenants, It may mean something to you, Hank, or to you, John, or even to Crystal and myself.

00:14:02 Speaker_01
It may mean something different to all four of us in this conversation based on where we're at in life. I think later on, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Alma instructs Helaman not to teach out of the gold plates of ether.

00:14:14 Speaker_01
Don't teach the people from this kind of stuff. I like that idea. I mean, it's very close in time.

00:14:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, I definitely think so. For some reason, every time people reach a promised land or there's a new beginning, they want some sort of king for some reason. This keeps happening. And even with the Jaredites, they're like, I don't want to be king.

00:14:32 Speaker_00
I don't want to be king. Finally, they find somebody. Yeah, I like that idea that Mosiah is like, maybe this idea of a monarchy is not working so well. We have some patterns here that we need to avoid.

00:14:47 Speaker_03
Well, this is speculation too, but King Mosiah just sent four of his princes back to the land of Nephi to be missionaries, so he's like, okay, not only have I got nobody to give the kingdom to, but I just read about kings.

00:15:00 Speaker_03
Let's try a new form of government. Let's see, reign of the judges. I love that.

00:15:06 Speaker_04
One thing I think you've both taught us here just already is when we read this, The Record of the Jaredites, taken from the 24 plates found by the people of Imhi in the days of King Mosiah, there's a bit of scriptural literacy here where you can say, I know that story.

00:15:19 Speaker_04
I know where these plates are from. I know how I got them and how Moroni got them. You might read that and go, oh, I don't know what that's about.

00:15:27 Speaker_04
But there's something to be said for knowing this book, knowing the ins and outs, the travels, where we got things.

00:15:35 Speaker_01
Absolutely. And I think there's something to be said for it too, as it continues on. And I know there's a lot of names here, but starting in verse six, Moroni relates then Ether's genealogy.

00:15:46 Speaker_01
He says, on this wise, do I give the account, he that wrote this record was Ether. And then he talks about, he's the descendant of Coriantor and Coriantor is the son of this and the son of that. And it goes all the way down to verse 33. down to Jared.

00:15:59 Speaker_01
I like your point, Hank, about there's like a scriptural literacy involved and be like, oh, I know the story and I recognize that, oh, this goes back to the Book of Mormon and how they found it.

00:16:08 Speaker_01
But Moroni also gives the genealogy and part of that is not only encouraging scripture literacy in terms of Mosiah and finding it, but it's also telling us that Ether's legit. Because that's what the genealogies convey.

00:16:21 Speaker_01
We read it and we go, man, that's a lot of verses and a lot of leaves. And we see Lib and Kish and Levi and Kim.

00:16:28 Speaker_01
The reason why it's there and the reason why any genealogies are there in scripture is because, number one, it tells us what people could inherit. These are the people who are in this line of inheritance and people who are outside.

00:16:40 Speaker_01
This is inclusive and who's excluded. It also talks about legitimacy. So when we see examples in Genesis and Chronicles, it's about here's who's related to who and who's legitimately inheriting property usually. Or in certain cases, the kingship.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
We see in Ezra chapter 7, Ezra gives his genealogy and he traces it back to Aaron the high priest, which is what then gives his book legitimacy. He is a legitimate high priest descended from Aaron.

00:17:11 Speaker_01
Here then Moroni relates Ether's genealogy and says this is what gives this book and this record legitimacy is because Ether is descended directly from Jared.

00:17:19 Speaker_01
The ultimate genealogies that we're all familiar with, Matthew 1 and Luke chapter 3, it's about Jesus' genealogy tracing him in Matthew back to Abraham and being part of that Abrahamic covenant, being a descendant of David.

00:17:32 Speaker_01
He's the legitimate inheritor of the kings. we should appreciate what the genealogy is there and what it's doing. So it's making Ether legitimate and his story legitimate. I love that.

00:17:45 Speaker_04
One thing I've learned in Ether chapter 1 from our friends over at Scripture Central is that Moroni lists from Ether all the way back to Jared. And then over the next 11 chapters, he reverses the entire thing and gives them the narrative.

00:18:04 Speaker_04
John, you know I'm not a huge fan of Book of Mormon evidence. Let's look at the evidence. But can you imagine Joseph Smith giving this list of names and then reversing the order one at a time and telling the story all the way from Jared back to Ether?

00:18:19 Speaker_01
Hank, that was legit. I'm stunned into silence. I was like, that was so legit. I'm stunned into silence. I think that's an interesting way to structure it and a good observation in terms of Moroni. And I wonder if for him it was a checklist.

00:18:34 Speaker_01
He already had the genealogy as he goes through, make sure that he tells the story of this person, the story of this person. That's a good way to see it because he's preparing the audience for these are the stories, these are the people.

00:18:48 Speaker_01
Then he's going to reverse that order as he starts off with Jared in verse 33 and then continues on.

00:18:54 Speaker_04
Yeah. I'm not going to be the one checking in on him, but someone did the work there and said, yeah, he goes all the way in reverse, all the way back to the top of the list.

00:19:03 Speaker_03
In my own notes, I've got the first six chapters of Ether speak of only of that first generation of the Jaredites. And then it kind of fast forward in seven through 11 of 28 generations. And then Ether 12 through 15 are the last Jaredite.

00:19:19 Speaker_03
They spend most of the time on the first Jaredites and the last Jaredites and fast forward in between. We get most of it, first generation, last generation, where we get Ether.

00:19:33 Speaker_00
Well, this takes us to verse 33. Verse 33 is packed with information about the Jaredites. I always think it's good to pause here. This sets up the entire story.

00:19:46 Speaker_00
This is the foundation of who they are as a people, what ends up happening to them, who Jared is, who his brother is. It mentions three facts in verse 33. They came from the Great Tower.

00:19:59 Speaker_00
At the time, the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth. We have the tower, we have the language confounding, and we have the scattering.

00:20:10 Speaker_00
Of course, this takes us to the Tower of Babel. The story of the Tower of Babel is found in Genesis 11. We really don't have very many verses about it. In Genesis, we are so thankful that we have this extra record.

00:20:27 Speaker_00
The tower is mentioned several times throughout the Book of Mormon. Every time the Jaredites are mentioned, they mention this tower. The reason why the tower was built is the culture that they're coming from.

00:20:39 Speaker_00
that really tells us about why they act the way they do.

00:20:43 Speaker_00
If we can study this tower and figure out what was wrong with it, then we can maybe understand how the Jaredites were able to escape and get to a better place and not have their language confounded and learn some things from them.

00:20:58 Speaker_04
We're going way back here, right, Crystal? Genesis 11.

00:21:02 Speaker_00
I always like to say this is post-Flood, pre-everything else.

00:21:10 Speaker_04
Yeah, there's still water on the ground when we get back into Genesis 11.

00:21:15 Speaker_00
That's right. The story of Noah and the ark and the flood and everything is still fresh in everybody's minds, I think, at this point.

00:21:23 Speaker_00
When we get to talking about the boats and things, we'll see that there are some connections between the building of the ark and the building of the barges by the Jaredites. Like you said, we're going way back.

00:21:34 Speaker_00
If we're talking about the Tower of Babel, we turn to Genesis 11, and we look at verse 4, we're introduced to this, there's a group of people. And they say, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach into heaven.

00:21:47 Speaker_00
Let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. This is really all we're told about why they build the tower. They want to reach into heaven, make a name, and not be scattered.

00:22:02 Speaker_00
We have some idea about what this tower was, where it was located, and why they were building it from archaeological excavations and texts that have been found.

00:22:15 Speaker_00
This can really help us understand a little bit more about how did the Jaredites escape the tower and these things. We get a hint in verse 9. It mentions the name of it is called Babel. Of course, Babel is related to Babylon.

00:22:31 Speaker_00
Babylon is a city, an area in Mesopotamia, which is about equal to modern-day Iraq. Starting around 3000 BC, they started finding these towers that were built during that time, these enormous structures.

00:22:52 Speaker_04
I am going to bring back something you taught me. It just hit me, John, do you remember? I think it was called ziggurats.

00:22:59 Speaker_00
Yes, ziggurat, yes. It's Akkadian, so you know Akkadian now.

00:23:05 Speaker_03
Isn't Babylon Akkadian word too?

00:23:08 Speaker_00
Yes, it means gate or door of God, gate to God, door to God. We know these structures, they're these stepped platforms. What's really weird about them is that they're solid inside. And some of these are huge.

00:23:24 Speaker_00
So some of them are up to 300 feet long and 200 feet tall.

00:23:28 Speaker_00
Why would you spend all that time using baked mud bricks that have to be made by hand to build this structure and then fill it with rubble and sand and bricks and stone, except for one little room on the very top?

00:23:42 Speaker_00
They do have names like that, gate of God or leading to God, but we know that they weren't temples for worshiping God.

00:23:51 Speaker_00
And we know this because of the texts in archeology and because there was a little temple next to these ziggurats where the priests would go and worship God. So then we have this question, what is the purpose of these towers, these ziggurats?

00:24:05 Speaker_00
The texts in archeology, they tell us there are kind of two purposes. The first is to build a stairway or a ramp so that God can come down to earth.

00:24:17 Speaker_00
which sounds a little silly that we would need to build some stairway for God to be able to walk down to earth. Why? Why are they trying to bring God down to earth? There's some misunderstanding here of who God is.

00:24:32 Speaker_00
The second reason is that little room on top of the ziggurat that was empty was actually, they called it the bedroom of God. Their idea was they're going to bring God down And he's going to live in that bedroom permanently, forever.

00:24:48 Speaker_00
And there was a bed in there, and a table, and a chair. And they'd put food in there, and drinks, and clothing, and make it super comfortable with this idea of, we're going to convince God to come and live in our tower.

00:24:59 Speaker_00
Because we know these ziggurats are spread all through Mesopotamia. There are at least 30 of them. The idea was, if you could get God to come and live in your tower, then this ties back to Genesis 11. You'll be famous. You'll make a name for yourself.

00:25:13 Speaker_00
and you won't be scattered. Because if God's living in your tower and he's quite comfortable in wanting to stay there, he's not going to make you leave. He's probably going to keep out famine and war.

00:25:23 Speaker_00
It's crazy this idea of controlling or manipulating God. It's a misunderstanding of who God is, what he is, what he does, where he can go, who he loves, who he gives blessings to. That's the real problem with the tower.

00:25:41 Speaker_00
That's why God says we need to stop this from happening.

00:25:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, so maybe not so much of forcing themselves into heaven, but forcing heaven to come down. Reverse idea. Because we usually think about it, it's top in the heavens, so we can reach up there. So we're like, oh, that's the main problem.

00:25:57 Speaker_01
They're trying to go up. As we look at it, it's a way to force the deity down to their spot. through various means as we look at that. This is what we get then, and the problem isn't the fact that people are together and they need to be scattered.

00:26:14 Speaker_01
The problem isn't that they have the same language. The problem is fundamentally a misunderstanding of God's nature.

00:26:21 Speaker_01
The great thing about the book of Ether is that we see solutions to that in a much more condensed way than what we see in the Old Testament.

00:26:30 Speaker_04
Do you think that perhaps in the sections we're reading here, we have the wrong way to connect with God, this tower, and then we have the brother of Jared who actually does connect with God?

00:26:42 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's fascinating to see the exact things that the tower stands for are the opposite of what Jared and the brother of Jared and the Jaredites end up doing. And that's why they're able to escape the tower.

00:26:56 Speaker_00
Sometimes when we think about this, we're like, I can't control God. I can't manipulate God. I can't bring him down, live in a bedroom and things like that.

00:27:04 Speaker_00
In a way, we sometimes limit the divinity of God or misunderstand Heavenly Father's nature and Jesus Christ's nature. We'll share some examples of that, how we might do that.

00:27:17 Speaker_00
But I like to think of the Tower of Babel, because I think of this a lot, as anything that obstructs your view of the Savior or Heavenly Father. Anything that gets in the way of your relationship, that's your Tower of Babel.

00:27:32 Speaker_00
If you can figure out what your towers are, especially using how the brother of Jared gets away from his tower, incredible things happen to him because of that.

00:27:42 Speaker_00
It really, there are sort of three main categories that the tower represents a misunderstanding of. Yeah, the first of these is really is what, leadership?

00:27:53 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's misunderstanding God's leadership. As we really want to think about it, God is our leader, he's our king, and he can rule over humanity according to his will.

00:28:07 Speaker_01
He also then has all knowledge and understanding then and understands what's best for us.

00:28:12 Speaker_01
In terms of something like the tower back in Genesis, we can think that the misunderstanding is that they would build a tower so that God could live there and they could then manipulate him into doing what they want and that's not scattering them.

00:28:29 Speaker_00
I mentioned figuring out what your towers are. With this first one, misunderstanding leadership and knowledge, this is definitely a tower that I have, this idea of control and trust.

00:28:40 Speaker_00
For example, when I was trying to decide where I wanted to go to college, I knew I wanted to do Egyptology, so the study of ancient Egypt. I knew that from a very young age. Actually, fifth grade is when I decided that's what I wanted to do.

00:28:53 Speaker_04
Wow. Did you watch Indiana Jones?

00:28:56 Speaker_00
I took a summer school class on ancient Egypt, and I just became obsessed. And then once I figured out you could actually do that as some sort of make money, I was like, oh, this is good stuff. I'm going to do this.

00:29:08 Speaker_00
There aren't very many schools where you can get an undergraduate degree in Egyptology. Two of these schools are UCLA and UC Berkeley. So I applied to these two schools, but I knew from the very beginning that UCLA was the right place for me.

00:29:21 Speaker_00
I knew the area. I was comfortable with Los Angeles. I had a lot of family there, some friends there. I decided this was the right place. I prayed about it a lot. I got an answer that UCLA was the right place for me to go.

00:29:33 Speaker_00
I would receive many blessings and have a good experience there. Of course, what ends up happening? I didn't get into UCLA. I remember thinking, now, Heavenly Father, we decided on this. We had a plan. We know what's best for me.

00:29:57 Speaker_00
It was hard for me to try and figure out, wait, but I got this answer. I was so focused on the wrong things. And my friend said, well, what about UC Berkeley? And I said, well, it's way harder to get in there.

00:30:07 Speaker_00
I'm not going to get in there if I didn't get into UCLA. And I check, and I got into UC Berkeley. I loved my time there. It really has made up a huge part of who I am today.

00:30:17 Speaker_00
I think Heavenly Father knew if I got into both places, I would have gone to the wrong place first. Because after I finished at Berkeley and I was ready to go to grad school, I applied to UCLA and got into UCLA and ended up going there.

00:30:36 Speaker_00
Heavenly Father was right the entire time. I was meant to go to UCLA. And of course, while I was at UCLA, I met this person.

00:30:48 Speaker_04
We'll play some romantic music right now.

00:30:50 Speaker_00
Yes, yes. He wasn't a member at the time. Long story short, he joins the church. We end up getting married. We have our daughter there.

00:30:58 Speaker_00
And if I had gone to UCLA first, when I thought I was supposed to go there, our paths might not have crossed in the same way. It forced me to think about a tower of Babel of mine is control and trust.

00:31:14 Speaker_00
not doubting when Heavenly Father says you're meant to do something or you're going to receive blessings from things. To think about His time might be a little bit different than my time.

00:31:26 Speaker_00
This is something that has ended up being a really amazing thing. Heavenly Father, of course, was right the entire time. I needed to get on board.

00:31:38 Speaker_01
So it wasn't my tower of sorts because I went to UCLA as one of the graduate schools that I was accepted to. And I was going because my friend and now colleague and co-author, co-editor was going there and we'd known each other.

00:31:53 Speaker_01
And so I was going down the road happy as anything. Yeah, sure. Los Angeles sounds great. Not knowing what was in store and that I would be a convert. and that life would end up the way that it did.

00:32:08 Speaker_04
Crystal and George, this first misunderstanding is the way God works. Is that right? The way He works with us. We're assisting Him. He's not assisting us. I don't put Him in this box and say, this is what you're supposed to be.

00:32:25 Speaker_01
He's the leader, not us, and he knows what's best. So it's about trust and faith and trusting that he does know what's best for us, even though sometimes we like to think that we know what's best because we're in the middle of the situation.

00:32:40 Speaker_01
That's one of the first areas of misunderstanding at the tower. We'll see how the Jaredites deal with that. The second area really deals with the divinity of God. The fact that he's on this higher plane than us.

00:32:53 Speaker_01
He's on a perfected level higher than humanity. We can all think about he's probably operating in a different plane of physics altogether. Although physics was not my strong suit in graduate school.

00:33:04 Speaker_04
You're so good at physics, you became an archeologist, right?

00:33:07 Speaker_01
That's right. And that's how good at physics I was, but he is divine. He's at a higher level than us. And yet he cares for us and he loves us.

00:33:16 Speaker_01
God is both above the system, but yet he's close to us and he cares for all humanity, no matter who, what, where, when we are in time and space.

00:33:26 Speaker_01
For the people of the tower, the real problem is we're going to try to build this tower and we're going to get God on our level, if that makes sense. sense, to get him to stay near humanity so that he will favor them.

00:33:39 Speaker_01
And it's kind of the problem that they're having there. We can see how that's even a problem in our time as well.

00:33:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's this idea that God cares about some people more than other people. They're trying to say like, well, if we build all this stuff, then God's going to love us more.

00:33:56 Speaker_04
We can put him in our little prison up on top of our tower and keep him there. He's ours.

00:34:01 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. For us today, trying to translate this, it could be a tower is pride. I mean, of course, this isn't my tower at all. I've never had any.

00:34:11 Speaker_04
I don't struggle with this either.

00:34:14 Speaker_00
This idea that everything I have in my life that's great came from myself, as opposed to acknowledging that God's given me these blessings, this career, this family, have everything I need.

00:34:27 Speaker_00
It's interesting because President Benson, in his famous talk on pride, he said, pride is you're competing with God, basically. We would never want to do that. He is on such a high level, but yet he cares about us too. The tower isn't always pride.

00:34:45 Speaker_00
Sometimes it can be the opposite of that and thinking, God doesn't care about me or he loves somebody else more than me because I have so many hardships or because my life isn't going the way I want it to.

00:34:57 Speaker_00
And so self-doubt can be just as destructive of a tower as pride can be.

00:35:04 Speaker_03
One of the things that the restoration, all these different stories helping us believe in God, but then it becomes this lifelong effort to understand what kind of being God is. Satan will relentlessly try to mess that up.

00:35:21 Speaker_03
when you work with young people, God's mad at me, God won't forgive me, I mess this up, I feel like, okay, they believed in God, but what kind of being is God?

00:35:31 Speaker_03
The restoration was not just, yay, God is real, He's revealed Himself again, but then, wow, go through the Doctrine and Covenants. What kind of being is He? He really does care about us. He really is very forgiving.

00:35:45 Speaker_03
I love all those lessons that come later, not just that there is a God, but what kind of being is he?

00:35:52 Speaker_03
Just today, my son-in-law's brother, who's on a mission in Greece, was going to Mars Hill, Acts chapter 17, and I was trying to send him some stuff about, look what Paul is doing there.

00:36:05 Speaker_03
Paul is telling the Greeks, who had such different ideas of gods and deity, no, actually, We are his offspring, and God is our Father, and he is accessible, and he's not far from us.

00:36:17 Speaker_03
He wasn't just telling him that there's a God, but what kind of being is God? I think Satan will relentlessly try to mess that up with us. That's why I love anything that can tell us not just that there is a God, but what kind of being he is.

00:36:33 Speaker_01
When we have those moments of self-doubt, that does God really love me? And I think this may be one of my towers. We're reminded in Isaiah 53, Isaiah tells us that he saw each one of us individually during his atoning work.

00:36:50 Speaker_01
Abinadi reminds us in the Book of Mormon that he will see his seed. It reminds me of a Christian music song, but it says, while he was on the cross, I was on his mind. That's very humbling to think about. Part of that song talks about the fact that

00:37:07 Speaker_01
He knew me, and yet He loved me. For all my imperfections and for everything else that goes on, He still loved me. He loved me enough to go sacrifice His life for that. I'm reminded of that quote by Elder Uchtdorf, that this is the paradox of man.

00:37:22 Speaker_01
Compared to God, man is nothing, yet we are everything to God.

00:37:27 Speaker_04
We talked about three. We've done one where I misunderstand God's leadership, how he's going to function in my life. And then two, I misunderstand God's love that I can swing to one side. God loves only me, only my church, only me. He only loves me.

00:37:46 Speaker_04
And then we can swing far to the other side, which George told us, which is God doesn't love me. He loves other people. All of those are misunderstandings of God.

00:37:55 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:37:56 Speaker_04
The tower is a representation of these misunderstandings.

00:37:59 Speaker_00
When we get to the brother Jared, he's the opposite of these things. That's what we can learn from him is how do we combat these towers in the same way he does.

00:38:07 Speaker_00
But there is one more misunderstanding and that's misunderstanding the power of God, the mercy of God.

00:38:15 Speaker_01
Looking at this, we can see that when we think about the power of God, we know that He has the divine power to do anything and everything for humanity. Nothing is out of His reach.

00:38:25 Speaker_01
We're told several times throughout Scripture that nothing is too hard for God. Nothing is impossible. He has unlimited power without any sort of mortal needs.

00:38:34 Speaker_01
When we look at the tower in its context, what they're trying to do is build a tower so that they can, number one, use God's power to help themselves.

00:38:45 Speaker_01
We go back to the idea about controlling God, but they're also building the tower in a way to satisfy his needs so that he's obligated to help us.

00:38:55 Speaker_01
If they can just satisfy the needs, if they can get him a nice comfy bed, if they can get him something to eat, get some water, some other Babylonian swag, then he's going to be obligated to help them.

00:39:08 Speaker_01
He has to help them, and then they're able to use his power to help themselves. We have this misunderstanding about God's power in that sense, which also then translates to our day as well.

00:39:20 Speaker_00
We don't ever think of, oh, I'm going to have to give food or whatever. That sounds so pagan to us. But sometimes we, too, think that there's like a trade-off program. If I do this thing for God, then he owes me something back.

00:39:38 Speaker_00
And yeah, it's a misunderstanding of covenants. Because a covenant is, I promise to do this, he promises to do that.

00:39:43 Speaker_00
But sometimes we have these expectations that, wow, if I'm following the commandments, I get married in the temple, I went on a mission, that my life should be perfect. I shouldn't have any hardships or burdens. And we have these expectations.

00:39:57 Speaker_00
And when our life doesn't go according to that plan, it can be a tower for us. It can obstruct our relationship with Heavenly Father.

00:40:07 Speaker_00
So how do we understand the difference between I'm doing this and I'm getting blessings versus I'm doing this and God owes me now? It can be hard.

00:40:17 Speaker_04
I'm sure your thoughts, John, went to Elder Christofferson. I have a short quote here. Some misunderstand. Nice that he started that way. the promises of God to mean that obedience yields specific outcomes on a fixed schedule.

00:40:34 Speaker_04
You might think, if I diligently serve a mission, God will bless me with a happy marriage and children. Or if I refrain from doing schoolwork on Sunday, God will bless me with good grades. Or if I pay tithing, God will bless me with the job I want.

00:40:48 Speaker_04
If life doesn't fall out precisely this way or according to our expected timetable, we feel betrayed by God. things are not so mechanical in the divine economy.

00:40:58 Speaker_04
And then this is what you mentioned, John, we ought not to think of God's plan as a cosmic vending machine where we select a desired blessing, insert the required good works, and the order is promptly delivered. Is that what they were seeing there?

00:41:15 Speaker_01
I think that's what they were expecting there. If we build this tower, we can bring him down to our level, we know what's best for us, and if we can satisfy his needs, then we can use his power as we see fit.

00:41:28 Speaker_01
Because that's their understanding of deity. Then in Genesis, Jehovah has to step in and say, that's not how this works.

00:41:36 Speaker_01
And fortunately, we have then in Aether, a fairly compact but very instructive, here's how you combat the tower, both in your own life and how the Jaredites did it in their reality.

00:41:49 Speaker_00
Before we get to this story, we have to talk a little bit about the brother of Jared. Why does it say brother of Jared? And why does Jared keep turning to his brother to pray to the Lord? There's some ideas about this.

00:42:04 Speaker_00
It seems like in their culture right now, Jared is their leader. He's the head of the family. During this time, they have patriarchs. He's the political leader, and it sounds like the brother of Jared is the more spiritual or the religious leader.

00:42:19 Speaker_00
It says in verse 34 that he's highly favored of the Lord. It sounds like this is sort of his role in their family and in their position. But once again, if he's so important, why are we just calling him the brother of Jared?

00:42:34 Speaker_00
Because we know he had a name, and we actually know his full name. This goes back to 1834 in Kirtland. There was a man named Reynolds Cahoon who had a son. I love the way it's said in the story.

00:42:51 Speaker_00
One day, when President Joseph Smith was passing his door, he called the prophet in and asked him to bless and name the baby. I love how casual it is. The prophet's walking by and you say, hey, can you come in and, you know, name and bless my baby?

00:43:07 Speaker_00
So then it says, Joseph did so and gave the boy the name of Mahanri Moriankumar. I cannot imagine being the parents of that child. Could you spell that for us? Can we write that down? Mahanri Moriankumar. just thinking, what does that mean?

00:43:28 Speaker_00
And then the prophet tells them, well, this is the name of the brother of Jared. This is his actual name, Mahanrei Moriankumar. I love this story, like I said, because I love doing genealogy and family history.

00:43:43 Speaker_00
I feel like it's solving ancient mysteries, just like archaeology. A couple years ago, I was researching my fourth great-grandmother, and she had an interesting life. She got married young, had some children, and then her husband died.

00:43:56 Speaker_00
So she got remarried to a man who had already had children, and he also had been widowed. They both had children, so when they got married, they had this blended family.

00:44:07 Speaker_00
And I was looking at the first census of this blended family, looking through all the children's names, and I came across the name Mahanrai Moriankumar. So sure enough, I go and I look at the man she married, and it's Reynolds Cahoon.

00:44:24 Speaker_00
I love this story. I like to tell people that I'm actually related through marriage to the brother of Jared. A different brother of Jared, but it's so touching to me to hear that these are real people from the past that we're learning about.

00:44:41 Speaker_00
Then you think, Why did Moroni not write Mahanrai Moriankumar, or whoever this translation, the first time it's coming through, or Joseph Smith?

00:44:53 Speaker_00
I actually like to think of it, being an Egyptologist and knowing that Moroni's writing in Reformed Egyptian, right, this version of Egyptian, I sat down one day and thought, how would I write Mahanri Moriakumar in Egyptian?

00:45:07 Speaker_00
I already knew how to write Son of Jared. It would only take two signs, maybe three signs, to be able to spell that out.

00:45:15 Speaker_00
To write out Mahanraya Moryankumar, which would have been written out phonetically, it would have taken at least 11 or 12 signs to write that out. Just in Mormon 9, Moroni told us, we're writing in Egyptian to save space.

00:45:31 Speaker_00
Otherwise, we would have written in Hebrew. And so sometimes I like to think that Moroni's, this is the way that we're going to save space, because I'm going to be writing Mahonrai Moriankumar over and over and over again.

00:45:46 Speaker_00
We'll write Brother of Jared, a couple of hieroglyphs, and we'll save some space here.

00:45:54 Speaker_04
That's so great. Almost like, you gotta forgive me here. I'm gonna save myself a couple thousand hours of time if I just write Brother of Jared.

00:46:05 Speaker_01
That's so great. He's just trying to avoid some carpal tunnel.

00:46:11 Speaker_00
It's such a great name and I just love that it's one of my ancestors. Like this is how we get, we know the Brother of Jared's name. This brings us to their first crisis. They have a huge crisis, this idea of the confounding of language.

00:46:26 Speaker_00
As we see the different crises that they keep running into, we'll see that the way they respond to each crisis, the confounding of language, the scattering of people, the problem with the boats, the brother of Jared shows this understanding that's opposite of the tower.

00:46:45 Speaker_01
We see in verse 34, the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man, a man highly favored of the Lord, Jared his brother said unto him, cry unto the Lord that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words.

00:46:57 Speaker_01
It came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord and the Lord had compassion upon Jared. Therefore, he did not confound the language of Jared, and Jared and his brother were not confounded.

00:47:06 Speaker_01
We see later on they cried about those who were their friends, that their language would not be confounded.

00:47:11 Speaker_01
Verse 37, it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion, and that's a word we should sort of note again, had compassion upon their friends and their families also, they were not confounded.

00:47:23 Speaker_01
The first crisis they really have to deal with is a confounding of language thing, and so how do they respond?

00:47:29 Speaker_01
The response is very interesting because when we think about their understanding, or at least the brother Jared and Jared's understanding of God and how that counters what we see at the tower, their response simply was to ask God for help.

00:47:43 Speaker_01
They asked God not to confound their language. No, it doesn't have any sort of like, there's no manipulation, there's no sacrifice, there's no, we'll pay the extra tithing or we'll go on a mission or we'll do anything else.

00:47:52 Speaker_01
It's just a straightforward request. please don't confound our language. And then it gets added on to like a cell phone plan. It's like a friends and family not confounding language plan. They add that on.

00:48:03 Speaker_01
It shows that they understand the nature of God in terms of his leadership, the fact God can choose whether or not to confound their language, and he knows what's best for them.

00:48:12 Speaker_01
Maybe what's best for them is to confound their language, but they're asking him in a very simple request not to do it. They trust in his leadership.

00:48:20 Speaker_01
We also see there's a good acknowledgement of his divinity, the fact that he has divine compassion for them. And we see that then reflected twice in the text. It talks about how God, the Lord, had compassion on them.

00:48:32 Speaker_01
So they understand his love and his divinity. And they also obviously understand his power, that he has the power not to confound them.

00:48:39 Speaker_01
The results we get, obvious, the Lord doesn't confound their language between the family members, between their friends and family. when we think about like what, okay, so what do we get out of that? We're not building a tower.

00:48:51 Speaker_01
I haven't seen John making any mud bricks in the background while we've been talking just in case. Maybe he is, I don't know. I don't know what he's doing. They're all back there. They're in the kiln. Yeah. Sorry, they're being fired right now as we speak.

00:49:03 Speaker_01
No, we're not physically building a tower and we're not in danger of the Lord stepping into Provo or anywhere where we're at and then our wards and stakes and all of a sudden confounding our languages.

00:49:16 Speaker_01
The application for us is to take a page from the Brother of Jared. Sometimes we just need to ask a simple request. This is what we'd like, with the understanding that God knows what's best for us. We know the Savior loves us.

00:49:34 Speaker_01
We have to trust him and that he's going to advocate for what's best for us because he's been here and he's experienced mortality and he knows what it's like to have these requests.

00:49:44 Speaker_01
Even though he never went to grad school, he knows what it's like to have that experience of anxiety and applying for it.

00:49:51 Speaker_01
He knows in each one of these responses is going to be different that we'll see from the Jaredites, but we'll see how they grow in faith. And the first step then is to have the faith that God is going to answer

00:50:01 Speaker_01
their prayer and to trust that he's going to do what's best for them.

00:50:05 Speaker_04
I see a bit of a pattern here. Verse 34 through 40, there's often crying to the Lord. I'll cry unto the Lord, and the Lord has compassion. It happens again. Verse 36, cry unto the Lord. Verse 37, the Lord had compassion.

00:50:19 Speaker_04
Over to verse 39, cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion. I think you want me to see that if I cry to the Lord, He's going to have compassion. George, you said, let's take note of that word, compassion.

00:50:32 Speaker_04
That seems to be the opposite of what you told us about the tower. I don't see a compassionate God in the building of the tower that you talked to us about.

00:50:42 Speaker_01
When we think about the building of the tower and their concept of God, what we get is God in a box, God on their terms. That compassion then is missing because they want to use him for their own benefits.

00:50:57 Speaker_01
And that's the reason why these various cities in Mesopotamia had these ziggurats and these towers, is because they had their local deities and they wanted their city to be the most important one.

00:51:07 Speaker_01
They wanted their deity to smite the other cities and the other deities. the compassion isn't there in their sort of understanding of God.

00:51:17 Speaker_01
I think what Moroni is trying to tell us as well is, hey guys, get on board with like a right understanding of God. And one of those fundamental things that he has is compassion.

00:51:27 Speaker_00
Alright, we talked about the first crisis, the confounding of language, and how they respond is just to ask God not to confound their language, and He has compassion on them for that.

00:51:37 Speaker_00
Now, their second crisis, they respond differently, and I think they respond in a way that shows they're growing even more in their understanding of God. The second crisis is the scattering of people.

00:51:50 Speaker_00
Now, they could go to God and say, please don't scatter us. We want to stay in our home. We want to stay all together.

00:51:58 Speaker_00
But instead, if you look at verse 38, Jared spake again unto his brother, saying, Go and inquire of the Lord whether he will drive us out of the land.

00:52:08 Speaker_00
Instead of saying, please don't drive us out of the land, they say, will we be driven out of the land? And then he follows up and he says, and if he will drive us out of the land, cry unto him whither we shall go.

00:52:21 Speaker_00
He says, if we are going to be scattered and have to go through this hardship, help us to know where to go. It's incredible the way that Jared follows this up even more with his understanding of God, because he says,

00:52:37 Speaker_00
Who knoweth but the Lord will carry us forth into a land which is choice above all the earth. He says first of all, are we going to be scattered?

00:52:46 Speaker_00
If we are, help us know where to go because we believe you could take us to a much better place than we are now. It's this idea of, are we gonna have this burden? Yes.

00:52:59 Speaker_00
Okay, if we're gonna have this burden, we trust that you will help us get through it. We're gonna get through this hardship because we trust you and we love you. And then Jared ends with saying, let us be faithful. so that we can get this inheritance.

00:53:16 Speaker_00
I love how this shows a growth from, please take the burden away, to help us survive the burden. In fact, help us thrive through the burden with the hope there's something better on the other side.

00:53:29 Speaker_00
Because we know sometimes those burdens, those hardships aren't taken away for us. And we're praying, help us get through it. Help us have trust and faith and hope that we also will come out on the other side in a promised land or a better place.

00:53:44 Speaker_00
Because we trust God. Because we trust in His leadership. to guide us, we trust in His divinity and love that He cares about us, and we trust in His power that He is going to help us in any way that we need.

00:54:01 Speaker_04
I love that. That's verse 38. Wow, Crystal, that was wonderful.

00:54:06 Speaker_03
Do you know what I love about let us be faithful? Faithful unto the Lord. The first principle of the gospel is not faith in what we want or faith in the way we want things to turn out, but faith in the Lord.

00:54:18 Speaker_03
Just as you taught us, Crystal, that He's got a micro plan within the macro plan of salvation. That's in Elder Maxwell's statement. He's going to order all things for our good, to use a Doctrine and Covenants phrase. I'm so glad you pointed that out.

00:54:31 Speaker_03
Let us be faithful unto the Lord. It's not the vending machine. If we do this, He'll do that. It's let's believe and have faith in Him that He is a compassionate God and He's going to guide us where He wants in a compassionate way.

00:54:45 Speaker_04
I have a question for all three of you. Our friend at BYU, Joe Spencer, who's been on the podcast, talks about how Moroni, as he's taken over the plates, realizes that the Book of Mormon is for, John, help me with the title page.

00:55:03 Speaker_04
It's to the remnant of this people. Three audiences. But it's also to the Gentiles. Is that right from the title page?

00:55:12 Speaker_03
The Jews and the Gentiles. Yeah. Three audiences.

00:55:15 Speaker_04
If you read through the Book of Mormon, you realize pretty quickly that for the Book of Mormon to go to who it needs to go to, it's got to go through the Gentiles. That's Nephi's vision. The book is given to the Gentiles.

00:55:28 Speaker_04
What Joe said is, look at the book of Ether from that lens, as in, this is not an Israelite. This is before Abraham. Here is God working with non-Israel. He's opening himself up to that.

00:55:46 Speaker_04
Perhaps I think what Joe said, and I'd love for you to all to comment on this, that this book is not just a summary of the Book of Mormon.

00:55:53 Speaker_04
It is that that John talked about, but it also is a message to Gentiles of how God can work with you and I, because we're the Gentiles he has in mind.

00:56:04 Speaker_04
At least from my understanding, when Nephi sees us, he thinks we're Gentiles, which I'm not a Gentile, but he sees us getting the book and he says, the book is with the Gentiles. They take it to the Jews. They take it to the remnant of this people.

00:56:17 Speaker_04
What do you think about that? This Gentile book in the middle of this Israelite book or right here at the end?

00:56:24 Speaker_00
I think it's great because in just a few chapters, Moroni actually says, oh ye Gentiles, here's the point of me telling you this.

00:56:34 Speaker_00
It's like he's setting up these Jaredites and then he jumps, I love when he jumps in and he says, oh by the way Gentiles, this is actually about you too.

00:56:42 Speaker_00
And this is meant to teach you something and I'm setting it up so that you can understand it for yourselves too.

00:56:49 Speaker_01
I think it's good because it shows that even though we think about God's real covenantal relationship with the house of Israel and everything, time and again in scripture, he's shown that he's the God of all humanity.

00:57:01 Speaker_01
When we think about the book of Jonah, the point of the book of Jonah is that he cares about Israel's arch enemies, the Assyrians, just as much as he cares about Israel, and he wants to be compassionate to them.

00:57:13 Speaker_01
In fact, when we look at something, and I taught this the other day, the tail end of Isaiah chapter 19.

00:57:18 Speaker_01
It's this chapter about this burden of Egypt and his judgment on Egypt, but he has this flip at the end of it in which he says that one day there's going to be this highway, if you will, or exchange between Egypt and Assyria and between Assyria and Egypt.

00:57:34 Speaker_01
And he says in verse 24 of Isaiah 19, In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land, whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt, my people.

00:57:47 Speaker_01
Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, my inheritance." Even then in the days of Isaiah, he's trying to teach them that the people that you may not like, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, other people, the Gentiles, guess what?

00:58:01 Speaker_01
They're just as important in the plan of salvation and just as important to me as anybody else. I like the fact that Crystal brought up Moroni says, hey Gentiles, this is for you, right?

00:58:11 Speaker_01
And we have this book by Gentiles here at the tail end of the Book of Mormon to reinforce some of these teachings.

00:58:18 Speaker_01
I think it's great that it happens to people who are not from the house of Israel because there is no house of Israel yet, as we look at Jared and his brother, which I think is a great thing, but I think that's part of God's love for all humanity.

00:58:30 Speaker_01
Kind of the point.

00:58:33 Speaker_04
I would add that if you read the Savior's message of his second day, it's Gentiles, you can be part of this work. Gentiles, if you'll repent, you can be part of this work.

00:58:45 Speaker_04
And I wonder if Moroni is reading the words of Christ in that second day, what, 35, 20, 21, 22, 23, saying, I've got to speak to these Gentiles to teach them how they can come to the Lord. Joseph Smith does kind of the same thing.

00:58:59 Speaker_04
Here's all these people around him teaching him. creeds about God, and he decides, as a Gentile, he's going to go cry to the Lord, and the Lord has compassion on him.

00:59:13 Speaker_03
Hank, you changed my life. Anyway, I'm actually part Egyptian because I descended from Joseph, and Joseph married an Egyptian.

00:59:24 Speaker_04
Yeah, when you're flying to Egypt, you're like, do you know who I am?

00:59:31 Speaker_03
Right off the plane, I look handsome, I look smart. Do you recognize me?

00:59:40 Speaker_04
Please do that. You guys go to Egypt more than us. Will you please get off the plane and sing Joseph?

00:59:44 Speaker_03
And start dancing with a coat, yeah. I love the last line in Ether chapter one. And thus I will do unto thee, because this long time ye have cried unto me.

00:59:55 Speaker_03
I don't want to read that and say, oh, therefore, if you pray for a long time, you get stuff, because that sounds transactional. I love what you said about the leadership of God. It's this idea that this long time you've learned about my compassion.

01:00:08 Speaker_03
You've learned you can have faith in me. Maybe that's more what it means. We all know James 1.5. James 4.2 says, you have not because you ask not. What do you think that means? This I will do because this long time you've cried unto me.

01:00:25 Speaker_04
I wonder if it's the idea of staying power. You didn't ask once or twice, you stayed with it.

01:00:32 Speaker_03
Or you're relying on me.

01:00:33 Speaker_01
Sometimes it's not just like a one-off, right? So you've seen that they ask. simple request and trust that he knows what's best.

01:00:41 Speaker_01
We've seen that they ask to survive and thrive in a situation with hope for the future, but I don't think it's just a one-off like, well, I prayed once and that's that, and well, done and dusted.

01:00:52 Speaker_01
The Lord knows what's best for me, so now I'm just going to continue on. It's a continual type of action. It's a fervent prayer, and so we know from Scripture that that's effectual very much.

01:01:04 Speaker_04
I'll just never forget verse 38. If I have to go through this trial, please, what do we do to get through it? Instead of, please, no, please, no, please, no. So many of our listeners will appreciate verse 38. Instead of, why me?

01:01:22 Speaker_04
Jared says, ask the Lord what we're supposed to do when this trial comes. And that is beautiful. Crystal, George, you have walked us through chapter 1, and I have notes up and down here. I am so excited to take a look at chapter 2 and chapter 3.

01:01:41 Speaker_04
Let's keep going.

01:01:43 Speaker_00
Chapter two, they start preparing for the big journey. Part of this is gathering different supplies and resources to take with them. When we look at verses two and three, we see that they're taking some interesting things on these boats.

01:01:58 Speaker_00
In verse two, it talks about they're catching fowls. So they're taking live birds with them in these vessels, in these boats. They're taking fish, but live fish.

01:02:08 Speaker_00
So they're actually, it says they're making a vessel for the fish, an aquarium or a fish tank to take these live fish with them. They're also bringing live bees in these boats, in these confined spaces, and seeds of every kind.

01:02:24 Speaker_00
Now, the first time I read this, I thought, oh, this makes 100% sense to me. Now, I remember my students asking, but why are they taking these things? These are the foundations of life in the ancient Near East.

01:02:38 Speaker_00
These things, especially the birds, the fish, and the bees, are what they got everything from. If you think about seeds, of course, plants, everything that comes from plants, food, and clothing, and architecture.

01:02:51 Speaker_00
Think about birds, meat, the eggs, the feathers, the bones. They were using every single part of those animals. Fish as well, the meat, the oil, fish oil, bones. These three things were so incredibly important to the people in the Ancient Near East.

01:03:08 Speaker_00
For the Egyptians, for example, they would put in their tombs what they wanted to take to the afterlife. These three things are in every tomb in Egypt. We even have a name for them. We call them fishing and fowling scenes.

01:03:23 Speaker_00
Because if you went to the afterlife, what did you want to take? You wanted to take birds, you wanted to take fish, you wanted to take plants. and then you would have a great afterlife.

01:03:33 Speaker_00
I love the idea that the Jaredites, they fit perfectly into the ancient Near East. What are they going to take? What do they want to start? I mean, they're basically starting life over again.

01:03:42 Speaker_00
They're going to take what they know is the foundation of life. And then we get the bees. We have the bees, which is fascinating. Of course, the most important role of bees is pollination. if they're bringing these seeds and things and these beads.

01:03:56 Speaker_00
But also, they used bees, the honey and the wax for food, to make tablets to write on, cosmetics, adhesive, medicine, waterproofing, paint. They were using bees and beeswax for so many different things.

01:04:10 Speaker_00
Now it's great because Moroni tells us, he gives us a little bit of a glimpse into their language. He says they carried with them deseret. He gives us this word and he says this means honeybee. Some people have tied this to the Egyptian word deshret.

01:04:26 Speaker_00
This word in Egypt, it refers to several different things, but a specific part of Egypt symbolized by a certain crown and symbolized by a bee. The word deshret is related to this.

01:04:40 Speaker_00
Lower Egypt, the crown that goes with it, that's called the deshret, has a stinger on it and also has a proboscis, which is that little straw to get the nectar out of the plants.

01:04:52 Speaker_00
We know at this period of time, people in Mesopotamia were not keeping bees. They weren't beekeepers, but the people in Egypt were.

01:04:59 Speaker_00
I love this idea that the Jaredites came into contact with the Egyptians, got beekeeping technology from them, and maybe even borrowed

01:05:09 Speaker_00
a word from Egyptian to talk about what they were doing with these bees and this idea of Deseret and Deshret so that they could take these because they knew the importance of bees, even if at that point they weren't keeping them themselves.

01:05:25 Speaker_00
It fits so perfectly into the ancient Near East.

01:05:28 Speaker_04
Crystal, that's kind of a combining of your two worlds. your love for Egyptian stuff, and then here you love the Book of Mormon. And when I bet those two slime together in Ether chapter 2, tell me how you felt when you're, wow, this all fits.

01:05:42 Speaker_00
It's funny because I'm reading this and I'm like, yeah, makes sense, makes sense, makes sense. And it's not until I'm trying to teach it to somebody else and they go, well, that makes no sense at all.

01:05:52 Speaker_00
And I say, oh, okay, well, let's step back and why does it make sense to me? So then I get super excited. I find Egyptianisms all through the Book of Mormon and these stories because it being written in Reformed Egyptian, I love it. I get so excited.

01:06:11 Speaker_03
That's cool. I wanted to ask you, because I've heard the word there, deseret, why didn't he just say honeybee? He didn't say that for the fish, he just said fish, or fowls.

01:06:21 Speaker_03
But with deseret, he says the word, and I've heard this is arguably the oldest word in the entire book, because it's not a translation, it is the actual sound of whatever they said when they meant honeybee.

01:06:36 Speaker_00
I think it makes sense. Possibly he includes this word because it may have been borrowed from another language. That's why all of a sudden he's going to say, oh, by the way, Deseret, maybe they borrowed it from Egyptian.

01:06:51 Speaker_00
Here, I'm going to tell you what it means because it is a different type of word. The word for bee in Egyptian is just B because it's onomatopoeic. It's the sound that they make.

01:07:03 Speaker_00
Like in English, it's B, B. I like this idea that they took the crown and lower Egypt and all of these things that represent the B and said, you know what, this is the word we're going to borrow.

01:07:15 Speaker_00
Lower Egypt is called the land of the B. That's its sign is the B. And then this crown that I've been talking about, the crown of lower Egypt looks like a B. It's interesting connection.

01:07:27 Speaker_04
Thanks for showing us that, Crystal. It's really cool how those two worlds came together there. Coming up in part two of this episode.

01:07:35 Speaker_00
He used to dig in Israel and I used to dig in Egypt and so we'd separate. And I remember coming back from Egypt one year and he said to me, I read the Book of Mormon out of nowhere. I mean, it shocked me. And I remember I said, why? Why?

01:07:50 Speaker_00
Because it was so shocking to me.