Summary: The texts that Latter-day Saints and other Christians call the Old Testament (differing from scholars, who use Hebrew Bible or Tanakh) is both wonderfully rich and very problematic scripture. Its richness derives from its status as an account of how ancient persons saw the world, the nature of God, and the human condition. These venerable writings contain great wisdom and insight, as well as wonderful plays on words and intricate literary forms. They also contain differing viewpoints from different sources that redactors (editors) placed side by side, unafraid that readers would encounter diverse accounts of everything from the Creation to Hebrew law and God’s actions among human beings. Through the centuries, however, because we in the western world encounter them through translation rather than in their original languages, and because we are largely unfamiliar with the wider traditions of the ancient Near East upon which many of the accounts draw for elements of the stories they tell, we have allowed layers and layers of interpretation to build up, and these additions and attempts to systematize or harmonize with our preferred views have become the dominant forces driving how we read these texts. And most often, we just don’t realize that this is what we are doing. This has led, in some cases, to extremely problematic renderings that lead people to reject important truths discovered by science, to blame women for the negative conditions of this world, or to beliefs about black skin being a curse from God, etc. Or, even if not quite so harmful, it has led to quite tortured attempts to make the books seem inerrant and without disagreement with other parts of the texts, or leading some into numerology or other searches for hidden patterns within the writings that unlocks for them some types of secret knowledge. If these later overlays were removed as much as is humanly possible, what would we find that the texts reveal about themselves and the worldviews and intentions of the original writers? Would we still find these scriptures as meaningful as we do now due to the assumptions we bring and interpretations we add? Could our relationship to these scriptures change in a positive way if we were to let them speak for themselves and allow the genuine distance between us and these ancient writers to truly become clear to us, giving us breathing room to see that these writings are not "history" in the sense we use that term today, that these are not (nor were they intended to be) scientific texts describing cosmos, earth, nature, or human origins? In this four-part podcast, two wonderful guides to the Hebrew Bible, David Bokovoy and Tom Roberts, join Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon for the first of an occasional series approaching these important texts, concentrating in the early episodes on Genesis and its key (and most problematic) stories. Episode 197 continues with the J account, covering the curses God places on the humans, on the ground, and on Cain following his murder of his brother, Abel.
