A Deeper Look at the Creation Story: an episode of Sanctuary with Jared Lambert

Hi, this is Sarah Perkins Sabie, one of the authors of the Bible Storybook. We're so excited to have partnered with Faith Matters to bring you beautifully told scripture stories as a podcast that you can listen to with your kids and share with your friends and family. We're making half of the stories available completely free as a podcast called scripture stories for little saints, and the other half are available to donors and friends of Faith Matters, as a thank you for your financial support that makes this collaboration possible. If you have trouble accessing them, you can email FaithMatters at [email protected], and they'll be happy to help. Thank you so much for your generous and ongoing support. We're so excited to share these stories with you and can't wait for you to hear them. Now on to the podcast. Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Tavis from Faith Matters. Today we want to introduce you to another podcast in the Faith Matters Podcast Network called Sanctuary, Discovering the Temple, hosted by Larkin Swain. Larkin brings a candid, curious and thoughtful approach to conversations about the temple. And this episode was so fascinating and felt especially timely as we begin a new year studying the Old Testament. In this episode, Larkin speaks with historical linguist Jared Lambert, whose work focuses on language development, temple theology, and how translation and symbolism have shaped biblical traditions. Jared brings a linguistic lens to the Genesis creation story, uncovering rich meanings that have evolved over time, and even been lost in translation. These perspectives are both mind-expanding and spiritually moving. He reexamines the portrayal of God and Genesis, unpacks the symbolism of the temple endowment, and offers what feels like a powerful missing piece in our traditional telling of Adam and Eve's story. We hope that this conversation sparks fresh insights and deep reflection as you revisit these foundational stories. And with that, here's Larkin Swain with Jared Lambert. Jared, welcome to Sanctuary. Thanks so much for coming down here and taking the time to have this conversation. You're stoked for it. I know you have a lot prepared and I'm really, really excited to dive in. But before we do, let's just start with having you share your background, how you came to this point of being a historical linguist. Anything you want to share at that brought you to this point to give people some context for where you're coming from. Okay, yeah. So yeah, thank you for having me. This is really fun. So who am I? I am Jared Lambert. I'm a historical linguist. What does that mean? I study diachronic linguistics, which is the study of kind of you look at the oldest rendition or the anthropological roots of a word. And then you trace that single word throughout history in order to better find the meaning and understanding the morphology of that word over time. And you kind of trace that throughout time. So how did I come to do that? I honestly, I don't think anyone wakes up and is like, I want to be a historical linguist. Like nobody knows what that is. I fell into it and I really did. I grew up in the church here in Salt Lake City, Utah, ran off to Africa. I served my mission on the islands of West, the islands of Cape Verde, which is West Africa. There's a new small islands off the coast of West Africa. Absolutely loved it there. The most incredible people in the world are there. Love to my experiences there and fell in love with language because there are a lot of different languages on those islands, a lot of proto-languages and creoles. And so I fell in love with language and loved my mission so much. I stayed there. I bought a house on the island of Fogo and I would live and work going in between college studies and working in humanitarian aid and then learned a lot of different languages and loved studying linguistics. And then I was recruited in the United States Army, so served as a military linguist there. And that was really interesting because then I just met a lot of different amazing people, all different branches, who had a lot of different perspectives on faith and understanding of a gospel. And it became very clear to me with my linguistic understanding that we're all speaking the same language. We're just not understanding what that language is. So it was a linguistic problem that I noticed. And it also gave me a lot more questions as to how to define that in the gospel. So I left the military with this goal, which is I'm going to study until I have answered my questions for what the gospel is and how to best linguistically lay that out for everyone. So that is a horrible idea. Most people go to college because they're like, I want to have this job, and I didn't do that. I went to school being like, I need to answer all these questions that are about the gospel. So hence, I have been going to school for 20 years. I'm still a student. I have seven degrees, I speak eight languages, and I don't think I'm ever going to be able to stop going to school. I have way too much debt if I stop, I'm in trouble. So I will just go forever is the new plan. When I was working in my PhD, I was very, very focused on temple, iconography of ancient texts and like the temple evolution, really focusing on the age of the first temple, transitioning to the age of the second temple. I was studying that. I wrote a long paper on that, and I sent that to a few people, and they forwarded on to the church, which got my name into the church's system somehow. And so I got a random call one day, and they offered me a job as the linguist over sacred materials, the department of the church, I think it was called. And I would help implement the linguistic changes you're seeing in the temple today, and the ones that are coming. And then I left, and it was awesome. I love that experience. It was super cool, enjoyed that, and love everybody there. And then I left there, and I am now finishing my PhD in historical linguistics. Just the study of dichronically linguistics on the scripture text, right, ancient scripture. And yeah. So that's me in a nutshell, that's what I do. And my main goal here is I try to show everybody, if you study the linguistics of the Bible, you get a completely different narrative of the Bible, because people don't get it. The Bible is this traditional kind of group understanding of what has been interpreted as the gospel, and that has been influenced for geopolitical reasons that have been influenced for just, you know, it's political reasons. It's a million different issues that we've seen projected onto this text that gives us the narrative that we have today. And so what I like to do for people is I like to take them through the scriptures, and I like to show them just how different the linguistics are from that traditional narrative that you've seen, because it really opens up a whole new world for you. I would say what has been the most helpful in my study of the scriptures is like looking up words and Hebrew specifically. When I get stuck on something and I push up against something and it has opened up a whole new world for me and has deepened my testimony so much and helped, I feel like it's helped me to almost experience the message more instead of staying more in the cerebral space, like the deeper I've not that I've done much, but that I've delved into the etymology and some of these ancient, somatic languages, I feel like I'm starting to encounter more the experience of the message if that makes sense as it's expanded my understanding of it. No, that's great. That's great. I love to point out everybody that you don't need to be a linguist, you don't need to go study, you don't need to go get the degrees I have or take on the debt that I have to be able to figure that out. There are so many resources that you can, and like you said, you can go to Bible Hub, you can go and dive into the Hebrew there, and there's been a lot of studies of that done so that it makes it accessible to anyone to be able to do that. Now there is a caveat that I love to point out to everybody that you can't rely on that scholarship, because the issue we have with the Bible is that the Bible itself, especially the Old Testament, is written in, it's not Hebrew, I mean, that's the problem we have, Hebrew that we understand today versus the Hebrew that it was written in back then is a completely different language. And realistically, if you wanted to actually understand that, the best you would study more like Aramaic today, because it's more associated to that ancient proto-Heber that it was written in, and that proto-Hebrew, and the reason I emphasize that is because, and what I think you're honing in on, which is awesome that you're doing that, is that proto-Hebrew is what we call linguistics, a soft language, versus our English language, which is a hard language, and what that means is hard languages are these kind of one-to-one ratio rigid languages and meaning. So I say dog, it always means dog, it's not going to mean anything else. Let's see, these proto-languages are conceptual and soft in the fact that they have so many different meanings, like when you go to your Hebrew Bible and you look up this one word, you'll see their seven or eight different definitions for that one word, and you have to ask yourself, okay, which definition applies, because they're not always, you know, close to each other, but what you don't realize is those different definitions create a concept together, and that is how you're supposed to read your scriptures. It's in this concept of what it is, so it's much more fluid. We hate it as English speakers, because we want that rigidity. We want that, we want to feel that it's grounded in this one definition, but you have to break out of that if you want to understand the language of God, because it's these soft languages that these concepts that are conveying the message, not in this rigidity of our modern understanding. And I feel like that fluidity again draws us into the experience of the message and embodied experience, which I feel, I want so much more for us, we're really good at the cerebral, and like you're saying, we feel really comfortable in this rigidity and this singular understanding. But I just feel this continuous invitation to drop deeper into the experience of God and the message that's being conveyed to us, because I feel like that's where the real transformation happens. Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you for sharing. I know that you've prepared so much on specifically the creation story, in the first, is it the first three chapters of Genesis that we're going to be exploring, which is super relevant to the temple experience, as that's shared in the endowment ceremony. So yeah, I'm excited to look at this with some fresh new eyes and extract some new, greater understanding from it. That's great. Yeah. No, I have a lot. So what I've done actually is I've developed like 27, 28 lessons, depending on how long they take, but that kind of helped people understand the temple better, right? And it is surrounded around the temple. And what I do is I take people from the very beginning, I go through Genesis and I walk them through the temple experiment of the old experience of the old testament. And then I bring them through the temple experience of the new testament. I bring them through our modern temples and the evolution that that is in there to kind of show how this message of the temple has evolved over time. And how God uses different narratives of the time. He really showcases different narratives that people understand, right? We know this is Dr. and Covenants 124. He speaks to us according to our understanding. And so the way he showcases that is the temple narrative changes from dispensation to dispensation and dispensation. And changes kind of venue or narrative, but the message is always the same. And it's those similarities that help us understand it the best. You know, that of an even narrative is not unique to the hebraic nation. There are many. I mean, frankly, the creation narrative of the time that we have that predates the hebraic interpretation, like the Gilgamesh epic or the Numa Elish. They tell the same story of this in a garden is where everything begins. And here's Adam and here's Eve or here these two first humans. And the gods are here discussing over it. God just took that narrative that everybody understood at the time. And then he applied his own message to it that meant to teach us very specific lessons. And this is what God does. We see that same pattern that we have in our modern times. Him doing the same thing and you see the evolution of the temple in our modern times. And you see how it evolved in that same way. God uses narratives of the time and he, and then he applies his message to it. And I know this is not what we're talking about, but I like talking about it. So I'm just going to diverge for a second where, you know, when Joseph's trying to put in his, his revelation of the endowment into the temple, we see it evolve. In different stages, right? His first stage of the Jackson plan was that he was going to have these 24 different buildings that would teach you all the different elements of the temple, because there is this polysemic level to it, which means poly, many stomach meanings. There's many meanings that you find in this text and you find in this narrative that it's hard to express that it's hard to get that out there. So Joseph had in Jackson the plan for 24 temples. When we got to Kirtland, he abandoned the 24 temples. They couldn't build one temple, let alone 24. So he abandoned that plan in Kirtland. You notice he just has pews and then the main place. And so he wasn't planning on acting anything out. He wasn't planning on having different levels in Kirtland. He was really hoping everyone would just share in his revelation. He was hoping we'd all receive that witness. And if you notice today, we're still told that. We're still told that you receive this by revelation. This is how it's supposed to be received. We go through the temple and we go through that experience to try to get us prepared to receive that revelation. But the end goal is always the same. Joseph wants you to have the vision of the endowment that he had, because otherwise, it's ineffable. Otherwise, you can't get every aspect of it. But then when you get to Na'avu, Joseph takes a new tactic. And in this tactic, he borrows the ritual drama of free masonry. And he uses that as the vehicle to teach it, this form of lipene, right? We're going to act this out. We're going to go through this narrative. So it's not that he steals the content of the free mason. They don't talk about any of the meaning behind what we talk about is nothing like that. But he uses, he speaks to us according to our understanding. So he uses a narrative at the time that everybody understands this ritual drama that is in free masonry at the time. And then he hijacks that, he takes that and teaches these incredible truths in it. This is really where our narrative starts. And he noticed they do the same thing in the beginning, in the Hebrew text. They steal this Anuma Elish doctrine, this notion of how the world began. And they hijack that. They don't teach it the same way. God's not evil. He's not trying to get you like they talk to you know, the mean God's punishing their children. They switch that narrative up. And they make it now about a loving God. The gods, the, the, the, the Elohim, which is the gods, right, who are trying to help their children. And, and, and then this is how this narrative builds out, right, which is so interesting. So fascinating. So this larking that you speak of. So how much of this creation story, this Adam and Eve in the garden, is literal versus a vehicle to convey the message, because I, I think that a lot of us, I think the narrative is that we perceive the story as very literal. And that's probably what makes it so confusing. Yeah. Yeah. But is it just the same situation as what Joseph did with the Freemasonry rituals as there was this great vehicle made available to him that the people could, could understand through. And so that vehicle became what God used to convey a much deeper message that you can only understand through revelation. So what's happening with the creation story? That is what's happening. That's, that's what happens. Now, the problem is you're getting very parasitical on me because you're like, where's the line? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. If you could answer that, geez, you, you'd be very, very wealthy because the whole world would like to know that we can, we can decipher quite a bit linguistically. I can show the parallels between the new and the new and the new, the Gilgamesh epic that show it. And it is marginal, right? You only have this much, not all this is new content. We can do it that way. But in reality, I think that's the whole point. I use this word a lot and you're going to hear it a lot. It's this word polysomy, which is many meanings. And it's a very fluid concept, right? This conceptuality of God's language is polysmic. There's all these different meanings in that because you have to very fluidly take that, right? And you have to approach that in a very fluid narrative of, okay, I generally understand what the script is saying to me. Now, as you keep going, as you learn more and more about this gospel, slowly that conceptual language gets such incredible depth and it does become clear, you know, when we talk about these soft languages as being conceptual, it makes you think that it's fuzzy, that it's inefficient. It's not true. They were able to do everything that we were able to do, that we're able to do today. We're able to barter, they're able to get down to specifics. It just requires a little bit more to be able to define those things. So as you read the scriptures, as you come to know the gospel or Jesus Christ more, that message becomes clearer and clearer in clarity with the problem is your clarity and my clarity are always going to differ because my understanding, your understanding are always going to differ. There's always going to be date, your interpretation is going to be different. My interpretation. Who's right? Well, frankly, we're all wrong until we get that pure revelation, until we get that pure knowledge. So yeah. Fascinating. Sorry. That was great. I love that tangent. I'm so sorry. I love that tangent. So if we go straight into the Genesis narrative, right, we can see this very different, like we have this traditional interpretation that's been passed down to us, right? And that traditional interpretation is awful. It has all these different influences on it. But most of all, it's telling us that while women are dumb, Eve is bad, right? She made a mistake, she screwed up, and that Adam is incredible. And so right off the bat, if you believe in a drug, just God, and you believe in a God who's you know there's something wrong here. You can go, "Jesus, from a perspective of a woman, this doesn't feel right." And that's good because it's there. But more so, I believe in a God, I believe, I'm a concordist. And what a concordist is is somebody that believes that when God gives revelation, he gives it with absolute truth. He is revealing pure knowledge to his prophets. The problem we have is that the prophets are being accommodated because we as Latter-day Saints also believe in free agency. So we believe that this life is a test. We believe that you've come to this earth and you are going to be tested not A, B, C, D, scan trontest, but rather push to your limit and tested and tried in your faith, meaning you're going through the fire, right? And so we believe that's the purpose of this life. And if God's greatest gift is this agency, he has to let us use that agency, right? And that results in a lot of big issues that we have, right? So when he reveals revelations of the prophet, it is pure knowledge, pure understanding, absolute truth. The problem is the prophet receives that knowledge according to his understanding at the time. And so what I like to show in the scriptures, like right from the beginning, is that we have a narrative that lines up very, very nicely with our understanding today, but you can also see how they're not understanding it back then. So for example, the traditional narrative we hear is that God created the earth, ex nihilo, out of nothing. And it's this magical God theory, right, where God is snapping his fingers and now there's the world. And then here's man be made, but that's not what the linguistics tell us, right? And this is one what in the beginning, God created the heaven and earth, okay? So that does sound like a magical God. He just created it from the beginning, right? But that's not what the linguistics say. The word here for beginning is better sheet, better sheet, which is, it does mean the beginning, but it's not indicating in any way that this is the beginning of all things. This is more like, this is the beginning of our narrative or once upon a time, or you know, this is the word used to be able to set up the story. It is letting us know the beginning of this narrative, God created, well Jared, it says created. So that means God made it. So ex nihilo seems pretty corroborated here, but what is this word for created? Well, it's barah, barah does not mean created snap my finger and now it's made. It is to form to put together, right? So if you're putting something together, what does that indicate? That indicates there is stuff there, right? And right from the get go, we see Joseph when he gives us our version of this in the perlegate price. We see this notion of matter unorganized and corroborates so perfectly with this that there's already things in existence that then come together. But then we also have this interesting notion of God at the beginning of this. Because what is God? Well, the trinitarian perspective of God is that God is this one God. It's this kind of male blob God and the problem with that is the word for God here is Elohim. So Elohim, everybody understands is the name of God. What does Elohim really mean? So what I love is Joseph hires a Hebrew, Josiah's sexist to come and teach him Hebrew. And right from the get go, they start in Genesis one and Joseph stops him right at the beginning and says, so the word there is not God, the word there is God's. It's plural. That's why it's Elohim. And he's right. It is plural and Josiah's sexist. No, I'm sorry. You're incorrect. Sure. It's plural, but it's kind of a royal we like God is so royal. He's so amazing. He's speaking to himself in the third person. And this was the reply. And Joseph said, you know, I think you're wrong there. And it's because Joseph is doing the translation of the book of Abraham and it makes it very clear, the gods went down and said, here is matter organized. We will form together a world, right? And so he's already on to this clue. And Joseph's exactly right because if, first of all, the concept of a Trinitarian God doesn't exist in Hebrew, like they had no concept of it that was invented at the ecumenical councils. So they're not writing about a Trinitarian God, right? This Trin concept doesn't exist. What are they talking about? What is this Elohim that they're referring to? Well, Elohim is interesting because etymologically speaking, the more themes of the word Elohim themselves indicate that it's referencing more than one God because it's comprised of different elements because if you wanted to make L, the male God, plural, you wouldn't say Elohim. The plural for L is Elm. So why, even if you're trying to indicate the royal we of God, as Josiah Sacks has said, why did you say it that way? Why did you say Elohim? That makes no sense. Well, the Elohim is a much older tradition in the Hebrew egg faith. It is this council, right? We see this laid out again and again in the scriptures. Psalms talks about the Elohim, the council where God resides amongst the gods. And again, I'd love to point out to people is when they reference God there, it's still in the plural separated from the lower gods. So this old Hebrew belief system is very similar to us. In the fact that we are not monotheistic. We are, we believe it in a monolatrous system. What we believe in Latter-day Saints is there's a heavenly father and a heavenly mother. And then below them are their divine children. And that's us. What's so cool about that is in the age of the first temple, in the Temple of Solomon, the first one that was built, you have the notion of a mother, a father, and their children or these lower deities. And this is what they worshiped as God. This is the word Elohim. And so they worship the whole relational unity of that as God. Now why is that so cool? Well, as Latter-day Saints, how do we become, where are the God-makers, right? So how do you become God in the Latter-day Saints' faith? Well, you go, you find a spouse. You go on our seal together, and now you can become God. It is the union of the masculine and the feminine, these two opposing traits that make you whole to be able to be God, right? There is no God and then it never will be except they may be made of these two component parts. Male and female united. This is what Joseph taught, right? So this is our notion of God. And what I love about that is the etymological roots of that word, the more themes of that word is L, the male God. Now what is this O? Or does that come from? That's not the plural for it. And then there's the Illum at the end, which is the council. So we're missing, what is this O factor? Well, it's L, the male God, a lot, the female God, and the Illum, their children. And this is the word for God in the Hebrew understanding at the time. Now what's so funny is they become monotheistic and they ultimately ditch this concept of multiple gods, the way we understand it as Latter-day Saints. And they now believe in just one God where they merged the two male gods together, Yahweh and L into one God. And then they completely erase the mother from their text, even though she exists throughout it. But I love this so much, is this notion that this word Elohim is this, we call it a polimpsis. It's this archaic notion of a previous tradition. It's kind of like, you know, we always, there's so many different ways we do this. I used the example last time of, you know, we say hang up the phone, but none of us, you know, we all have cell phones. We don't hang up. You don't physically hang it up. We just say that because the old tradition was you literally take this old rotary phone and you put it on top of the receiver and that's how you hang it up, that's who you ended. So that's a polimpsis. It's a fossil of a previous time where you believe something different or you did something different. That's what the word Elohim is. It's a previous dinosaur fossilized form of God. They always said God that way, but it's the combination of the male and the female together as one with their children. So right from the get-go, this narrative changes drastically. It is not the singular male God. He is not forming it out of nothing. He is creating it from the substances that exist at the time. And then we can keep going down the text because it keeps going, but we just don't have the time to go through everything, but we could go word for word here and we'd have a difference verse two and the earth was without form. Again, it's not saying there's nothing there. It's saying it doesn't have form yet. It's floating and then it comes together slowly. And so when I say that I'm a concordist, what I love is we know today, at least most of us know today, that the earth was created through this very natural means, this process of evolution where there's this big bang or whatever initiated this, our sun ignites. Our sun spews allavine, this special mineral into the crust of the earth. And then the earth is formed through the gravitational pull and it forms into this earth as we know it today. And then we know asteroids hit it and it causes water that's inside of the material that is the earth the rise, while also spewing water out so that the earth then gets covered with water. And then it slowly rescins and islands are formed and then these geothermic vents heat up the water to this perfect temperature where those that allavine is then heated up to a point where a single cell organism is formed in a multicell and this process of evolution is formed. And so what I love showing people in the scriptures is that I believe as a concordist, God is revealing that truth to them. They just don't have the vocabulary to be able to say it because when you read the text, you'll see this lines up, point by point. It's now there's, you know, the earth is then formed and then it says that all the creatures of the earth come out from the waters and all life is formed in Genesis 20. Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that half life, right? Joseph does such a better job within Abraham because in Abraham it tells you that Abraham 420, it says, and the gods plural, let us prepare the waters to bring forth abundantly the moving creatures. So it's not even the gods being like, I'm creating the animals in the ocean. It is the gods. We will prepare the waters and the waters will bring forth the life that is on the earth. And so if you just read this linguistically, you're like, oh, yeah, that's exactly what we believe. But do they have, I mean, do they have the language when gods revealing this to Abraham? Does he have the language to be able to say the olivine that was spewed from the, no, he doesn't know these scientific terms, he has no idea how to say. So the best he can do is I saw this image of the earth being formed out of matter and then like God prepared waters and then out of waters came life, this is, this is concordism, right? This is how we should be reading our scriptures, right? Science and religion are not at odds for each other. That's the same language just from different perspectives, from different angles. And I love being able to highlight that while I would love to go through all of it because there's so much more there that that I love that is corroborated. I don't think we have the time. So we get down into verse 26, this is where we get our first misunderstanding that gets everyone in trouble because in verse 26, it says, and the god said, let us make man in our image after the likeness, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea of the cattle, the earth, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it says in Genesis 127, so God created man, male and female created, he, them. So this is so interesting because Adam and Eve aren't created yet. That doesn't have until verse two, chapter two. So what is God talking about? Well, and this is what I love. Now there's different narrations happening, right? Genesis one is more of a zoomed out narration of this and we have different theories here. So what I love to point out to everybody is this isn't the creation of Adam. This is the creation of ha-adama. Now the Hebrew word for ha-adama is the multiple Adams. And it's not referring just to one individual man. Clearly, it says right here, male and female created, he, them. And then we can corroborate this, right? By looking just a little bit farther because in Genesis 5, 2, it tells us it reiterates this scripture, but it does it better linguistically. It emphasizes male and female created, he, them and blessed them and called their name, Adam. So again, this title is actually for humanity. God has created humanity in Genesis 1, 27, male and female and then he gave them the name of man. And so this isn't the individual Adam that we're talking about. So you're probably asking yourself, well, that doesn't make sense because how are Adam and Eve the first parents of us? How are they the first if God created humanity in Genesis 1? Well, it tells us pretty clearly because if we jump down now, we go into Genesis 2. We see Genesis 2.1 tells us here's the, here's when the earth is finished and the host of them that are on it, the seventh day ended and God did all this on the seventh day he rests and the generations of heaven come, verse 5, every planet of the field and verse 6. So cool. Here went up a mist. What is this mist? We should all be asking that question, but we don't have time to talk about it. And the Lord God then in verse 7, right, now we're creating Adam. And the Lord God formed man, this is now individual man, singular man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. Okay. So we need to break this down because here God forms man singular, this is Adam now. And how does he form him? Well, he, he forms them of the dust of the ground, of course. So this is where like I talk about having a linguistic spidey sense because this is a conceptual language. So it's super bizarre to sit here as a conceptual language to say dust of the ground where the Hebrew term for dust and the Hebrew term for ground are conceptually one and the same. So why would you reiterate that? Why would you say the earth of the earth or the dust of the dust or the ground or the ground? Doesn't make any sense, but when you look at the linguistics of this, you see it's actually telling you and the Lord God formed Adam of the, and the word for ground here is, or the word for dust here is ha-damah. What is ha-damah? Well, in Genesis 1, it just told us it's humanity. And I formed Adam of the humanity of the earth. And so how did you do this? How did you form Adam of the humanity of the earth, says, and breathe into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul? Well, first of all, and breathe, the word for breathe here is Nismat. Nismat ha-damah is the term for the breath of life. Nismat is interesting because Nismat is this feminine singular construct where it means yes to breathe, but it also is in the Hebrew conceptual terms is this because as you breathe to your nostrils, right? You take an air and you can feel it, it goes to your brain, it invigorates you, it gives you this energy, right? And so it's the term for, it's this term for invigoration, enlightenment, right? As you feel that in your brain, they connect this term to your intelligence. So it is to imbue into his and then the nostril part, right? The nostrils, which is the gateway to your soul, right? It is, it's as we take that breath in, we take it through our nostrils and it goes straight to our brain, it goes straight to our essence of who we are. So it was the gateway to your soul, but more so it was the great way to your mind. You could literally feel it as you breathe in. And so he imbued into his nostrils or his brain a breath of life, right? Now, this is the interesting part, the nesmat haim, that breath of life. The word for here for life and breath, which is associated in every single instance of that term in the Hebrew Bible and reiterated through Joseph's writings of or translations of the Hebrew text is that your life is connected to this term of light or enlightenment, right? We know this as later saints as like, you all first existed, right? You were never created. You have always existed first as intelligence or light. This concept of light and intelligence being unified is the key in this. Because when he talks about the breath, this nesmat, it's this imbument of light or intelligence. So if we were to reread this understanding these notions, it would be in the Lord God formed a man of the humanity of the earth and imbued into his mind or his soul or his essence, a imbument or breath of light and man became an enlightened soul. Now what is it telling us? Adam is not the first human in the sense that he is the very first person on the earth. Now he is the first individual on earth to be enlightened or to be under covenant by God, to be to be given knowledge of this something more that exists. So he is the first enlightened and this isn't the only indication, right? If you're like, well, GRG, you're throwing a lot on these few terms that you've defined. There's so much more all throughout the Genesis text, it talks about the others. It talks about Adam, you must guard and keep the word for keep there is to guard or maintain away from someone. Who's this someone he's guarding the garden from, right? Or where you have cane, right? And the curse of cane, it says they're going to banish him and he's going to leave. And he runs over to another village and he marries a woman there and they create a family. So it's so funny. You're like, well, who are these other people? I thought you were like the only family on earth. Who's this woman that he goes and marries and who's so that all of these others exist at the time? Joseph was very aware of this. I mean, he incorporates into his temple context all the time, right? He talks about a money system that exists at the time, right? He talks about, oh, there's a whole bunch of people who are accepting the doctrine of the devil, except for these two, right? All of this is indicated in the temple and Joseph is very aware of that. He talks about it often, actually. But anyway, so as we proceed, we see how perfectly this aligns with our own understanding. Yes, there's people prior to Adam, yes, the evolutionary process existed. We see how they come from the waters and they form into everything. And then what's so nice about this is seeing how that aligns with even the deeper understanding that we're gaining now scientifically. And I love pointing out to everybody just how cool it is that just in 2023, we had these seven different because we have this problem in science where you can trace the evolutionary pattern of humanity from a single cell organism all the way up to homo erectus. And then at homo erectus, it stops. And it's because there's this jump between homo erectus and homo sapien. And homo sapien is us. We have these big brains. Homo erectus was like a smaller brained, hairier version of humans. They were still smart. They had money systems. They had housing, they had they had cool families and cool traditions. They just weren't as smart as us or as enlightened as us. And what's so interesting is that the latest scientific articles tell us that while evolution cannot account for the jump from homo erectus to homo sapiens, because we found their bones within like a hundred years of each other, which means evolution can account for that takes thousands of years to evolve. So this is that missing link that everybody kind of points out that's like that's impossible. Like God created him. What I love is that Neil deGrasse Tyson, along with these seven other scholars, have emphasized that there was a solar wind, a solar flare, if you will, that broke through our atmosphere. And this photon hit directly into our homo erectus ancestors and this beam of light mutated their DNA to the point where they their children grew much larger brains and they were less hairy and they looked just like us. So I love taking this from this concordist perspective where you take it from all these different angles where you go, okay, I see it from a very religious perspective that God is enlightening them with the gospel, but I also see it from a scientific perspective where we see that it was a beam of light that broke through our atmosphere that then mutated the cells of homo erectus that then made homo sapiens. So what is Abraham seeing is he seeing the plysomic message of the scientific? Is he seeing the gospel version? What is it? Or is he seeing all of it? And he's trying to express everything. I love from that cordicordist perspective to think, oh, yeah, no, he's smart enough. He's seeing it all. He's trying to do it scientifically. He's trying to do it to the gospel. He's trying to convey it all. You call it a solar wind. Yeah. I like that the spirit is also liking to the wind. The wind. That's interesting. I know, it's so great. So there's so many parallels that and I get it. We have this, you know, there's this term that's epiphany on our brain loves to make a million different connections that aren't really there. And so yes, this could be this epiphany connection, but I think the coincidences are just too much. I think there's just too much there. And I agree that it's not as concrete as we want it to be. So it could just be this epiphany tendency that I have to be able to see these parallels, but I truthfully believe there's something there. I think when we die, God's going to be like, you have no idea. Let me show you. You know, it'll be impressive. So now we get down into this narrative of Eve, right? We're now into Genesis 2.18. And what I love to point out to people is we have this problem with our modern interpretation of this text. We like to believe Adam and Eve were commanded both not to partake the fruit. Eve is the dumb woman who's like, oh, I'm going to do it anyway and lose for trickster. And she makes the mistake, thus woman is cursed to be the worst for the rest of eternity. And this is the traditional narrative to be taught. But is that what is said linguistically? No, not at all. So what I've done as a linguist is I've found a, I've written a paper that's being published at the Journal of Hebraic Studies. And it was nominated for a lingua Pax laureate. And what it is is it's a linguistic pattern in the Bible that nobody's found before. And I have labeled it the epithanic arc. And what it is is I use a maserotic plantation indicators, which are all throughout our text. This is one of them right here. You know, it looks like this paragraph symbol, but that's actually these indicators for us to know this in the sing songy way back when this was an oral tradition. They would kind of sing these narratives. And that is the stopping point, right? And we don't need to go into all the different linguistic details of it. But it's a very important marker here because what it's telling us is, when you would go to your old church, right? So here I am. I'm back in the ancient Hebrew nation. I go, it's an oral tradition. There's no written scripture, right? There is this as a doke who is like my pastor, right? He's like a stake president to us today, but he would memorize all the scriptures, right? And we would show up on Saturday and he would sing song this narrative to us. And he would build it up in such a way where he goes, Adam's introduced the garden. And he's supposed to partake all this fruit. He's supposed to find joy and procreation. He's supposed to be able to do all these things that God commanded him. And yet he cannot because he does not have the authority to partake of the fruit. God has commanded that he cannot do that. And then it ends right there. That's what that diacritic marker right there means, right? It means that it stops at that point. You would go home. That whole week would be like, what is he supposed to do? Like Adam's stuck, he's in stasis, he is in so much trouble. Like he's doomed, this is awful. And then when you come back the next week, he starts with a solution to that problem. The cliffhangers over. Now let me tell you how it ends. And that what's the very next verse? And the Lord God said, it is not good. The word for good here is better understood as sufficient. So it is not sufficient that man should be alone. I will make for him a help meat for him. No, I hate this. I hate that term so much. Help me. It's such a bad translation because here you did, you translated all, first of all, the English translation of the Bible is just the worst, truly horrible. But here it is, you've done a good job mostly at translating this text in what we call in linguistics a dynamic equivalence, right? You're trying to convey what each word really means. So you're picking this perfect word that conveys it all. And all of a sudden you get to this, the introduction of Eve, but not her name Eve. She's never introduced as Eve. She's introduced as a Zer canendu. And you chose the most debased, like simplified version of what that means. And I guarantee it was pure sexism. I guarantee it because that's not what a Zer can do means. Yes, a Zer means help. That is true. But a Zer, there are a hundred different words you could use for help. You chose, you chose to translate this as just plain old, simple help. A Zer is only used 21 times in the Hebrew Bible. That's it. There are other words for help that are used thousands of times. A Zer is the root of the word Ebenezer. Here I raise my Ebenezer and it means salvation. Means the stone of help. It means Eve is introduced as Adam's savior, first and foremost a Zer. Well, sorry, Eve is Adam's salvation to this problem. And I love that. It's so sweet. Sorry, I'm choking up. As she is introduced as first and foremost, Adam's savior. Next is this word meat. It's super weird because it's actually the word canendu, which means to stand face to face. Okay, this is important and I need people to follow this. At the very least, we should be able to read canendu and say, oh, it means face to face. Well, that describes equality. That describes like facing each other and it does mean that it means like, here's this force that's that's unstoppable and immutable and here is the supposing force that can match it. And that's what meat means. That's what this canendu means, something that can match it, right? But here's where it gets even better canendu is actually this term, this idiomatic phrase that is used every time in scripture to indicate priesthood, idiomatic means. It's just a, it's a what any time like here's an example, Moses goes and talks to God and he uses the phrase before he becomes a prophet, he's the phrase and I spoke with God face to face, right? God calls the Levites to go preach for him and what does he do? You must come and speak to me face to face before you go, right? This is just two of probably 50 different examples of this where you, where God is indicating standing face to face is indicative of priesthood. I mean, first we needed to find priesthood. What is priesthood? We see it as like power, right? And it is, it is power. But we have a better definition in the elvious faith, which is it is the authority of God to do something that someone else is not authorized to do and look at what is being described in this text. You can not partake of the fruit. But now I will make for you, Eve, your savior, who will stand face to face and is your equal increased to power and authority. She can do this. This is what the linguistics are telling you. So what does Eve do? She comes down. What we see in this narrative is that Lucifer enters the scene, right? And there's this issue with Lucifer entering the scene because, one, there is no concept of when this is written down of Lucifer. He doesn't exist in the Hebrew nation, like they don't know a Lucifer. That's not a concept or they actually get this word Satanas, right? From a, from a Persian influence. It's a Persian word actually that they use to describe ill will. So you can be Satan or you can have someone do Satan to you, but it is not an embodiment of evil that they understand as Lucifer, this person who is a bad guy. So when they talk about the influence of Lucifer in the garden, it doesn't mean what we think it means. Now, this gets hairy and it gets kind of tangled up because Latter-day Saints have a problem, I've noticed, Latter-day Saints have a real issue with this because Joseph revealed to us that this is the role of Lucifer. Lucifer was there. This happened. And I don't mean to push back on that in any way. What, what I want people to understand is that when Lucifer is introduced into the text, he's introduced more as a concept than actual Lucifer because it says that he comes in the form of a snake and it says the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, which the Lord God had made. And he said it to the woman, "Yay, hath God said ye shall not eat of the tree of every garden." So when it says he comes in the form of a snake, what does the snake, what does that mean to them? Why did you do that? Like, why did you put them in the form of a snake, you old Hebrews, what is the purpose of that? Well, the snake in Hebrew culture was the symbol of their Messiah. We see this all throughout the text, right? Moses goes and talks to God. God says, "Go talk to the Pharaoh." He says, "Well, how is the Pharaoh going to know I came from you? Give me your staff." What does he turn it into? A snake. A serpent. Yeah. Now you know you're coming from me. Oh, okay. Moses is in the desert, right? Everybody's getting sick, which when I do God, oh, I know, put the symbol of a snake on the cross, lift it up. Anyone who looks at that will live. This is the role of Jesus Christ. This is because they saw the serpent as A, the most humblest, the major ash teaches us. The serpent is the most humble of all creatures. That's actually the better interpretation. It's not the serpent was most subtle. It's that the serpent was most humble. They would say, "The serpent has no legs to stand on. It's the humblest of all creatures. It slithers on its bellies, it's the lowliest of them all." But at the same time, here you are in this Near Eastern culture where you're surrounded by deserts and a single snake bite will kill you. It is a powerful creature. So their interpretation is, it is the most humble creature, but it is also the most powerful creature. This is the symbol of Armasaya. This is where this symbol comes from. When it talks about Lucifer coming in the form of a snake, it's not saying we don't show him in the temple film, it's like a snake slithering on stage. No, no, no. We're saying he comes in the form of the Savior. This is why he comes in our temple film out in robes. There used to be this line in the older versions where he would say they would say, "What are these robes that you wear?" And he would say, "Oh, this is the form of my priesthood." He's mimicking the Savior. He's trying to dope Eve. And so what I think is so funny about all of this is that we have this issue of Eve being trekked, Eve being deceived and thus causing all these problems. What I like to point out to members of the church is that our text says something different. You have your Book of Mormon, Dr. and Covenant, and Pearl of Great Price. All three of them tell you, "Eve made this choice in wisdom." It was a wise choice of Eve. So I also ask, "How can you be trekked and be wise at the same time?" It's impossible. Both cannot be true. It is either she is wise or she is trekked. So then you have to be like, "Okay, Jared. So if that's true, why does Eve admit it herself?" In Genesis 3, she says, "I partook of the serpent but guiled me so I partook." And so what I love to point out is, "Hey, if something feels wrong, if something feels off, if you read that and you're like, "You, I don't like that." It's typically because the Spirit's trying to tell you like, "This isn't right. This isn't correct. That's a bad notion." So that always was the case for me when I hear this admission from Eve. I always hated that. I was like, "What is going on here?" "My religion teaches me. She's wise." So why here in this text is she saying she was duped, jeez, that bothers me. So then I got a bunch of linguistic degrees and here we are. And I think I figured out the answer. When it says, "The serpent but guiled me." It uses this term. It's a very archaic term to use there. You could have said a lot of different terms in Hebrew and proto-Hibru to indicate trickery, to indicate like fooled. But you chose this one term and this term is an accounting term. That means when you're doing your accounting, you're balancing a checkbook. It's like it's a tax season in the Hebrew nation. What you're doing is you're all the income and all the outcome and you're deciding that final, the finality of that, where it lands. And what's so funny is traditional interpretations of this text said, well, clearly this isn't the accounting term version of this word. It must mean the guile. Because that makes so much more sense, Lucifer is tricking them. And then they alter the text accordingly, right? Both forward and backwards. They alter it so that she really is duped in the text. What I think is so funny is it wasn't a mistake. It indicates in the text that Eve says, "The serpent but guiled me," thus I partook. Well, the word for serpent there is the term nahaas. The word nahaas is a super strange word to use because yes, it does mean serpent. But it is completely unaltered. It is the based form of the word serpent, which you don't do. There are over 1,000 different words for snake. It's kind of like Eskimos with snow. There's so much snow. They now have like 1,000 words for the word snow. Well, in the Middle East, there's so many snakes. They have a word for every type of snake. Here's the word for the snake with the diamond on its back. Here's the one with the, you know, and they go through all the different variations. So all throughout the Bible, they use these different terms for snakes very specifically. It is not a coincidence that they decided to write the base root word nahaas. And it's because the term there, noon, heterchessine, right, that, sorry, I'm just, I just threw some Persian out there. Because the root of that indicates the foreshadowed is, it is what the root of the Messiah is. So what she's saying is, it's not that the serpent beguiled me. It's that she says, I foresaw the Savior and I weighed it. I balanced it. This is what she said. Now, that is wisdom. That is wisdom. She weighed the consequence of partaking that fruit, right, and I love it because President Oaks loves to emphasize to us in his talk that he gave once, and I can't remember right now, but he gave it. We can look it up. He loves to emphasize that Eve was not committing a sin, but rather a transgression. Now, it's very lawyerly of him to be able to define the two here, which good for him, so because he's spot on linguistically, because Eve was not commanded not to partake fruit, just Adam was, but there's still consequence, right? There's still a, if you partake of this fruit, whatever the fruit may be, which I think people very incorrectly attribute this to like motherhood, right, it's not the case. It is indicating priesthood. It is indicating different aspects of the feminine nature. But whatever that may be, and I don't think we have time to dive in that today, she, she is yes transgressing something and a consequence is coming. And that consequence is this life, this celestial state, this rough world where you're going to, and it makes it clear in Genesis three, it tells you she understands that there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering. You're going to work by the sweat of your brow and only thorns, thistles, bryers, and noxious weeds will grow. It's going to be horrible, but it is the wisdom. It's the wisdom of Eve that she weighed that. She saw the Savior as this text indicates, and she knew this is the way. This is how we leave stasis. This is the pattern that we need to follow to become better. This some growth works. And that's the beauty of this narrative. Now where you ask, where does it line up? Where does, where does all of this align? How literal or how figurative is the text being in this? Honestly, it doesn't matter because if you look at it conceptually, the concept is clear. You can only have, it's the plan of salvation, like it's the plan of salvation in this notion. You can do everything you write in this life, right? And we talk about how the experience of the temple mimics our life and it is, it's supposed to mimic it. We are supposed to see ourselves as Adam, men, women as Eve, and we're supposed to put ourselves in the shoes, right? In the original version of Joseph, you would literally play the role of Adam and Eve. You would walk up on stage and you would use the lines, right? As if you were them, you are supposed to apply this to your life in a conceptual way. So what is that concept? Well, the concept is, I mean, honestly, it's the prodigal sun. You can try to be the sun that stays at home. You can try to be the one that does everything perfect. There's no growth in that. You are just there. You're stuck in stasis or you leave, oh, it's going to suck. You're going to live right as Lee. You're going to do stupid things. You're going to make mistakes. Oh, and you will suffer. You will suffer life and life will hit you hard, but only through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. And only through that experience of pain, suffering, and agony will you have growth. It is the only way. This is the plan, a salvation summed up, right? In our temple text. And so I love that. I love this notion of the true role of Eve as shown in our own scriptures, shown in our own text, as the Savior of not just Adam, not just their situation, but the Savior of all mankind. And what I love so, so much, because I tell everybody the traditional text, the problem with that and that narrative is it oversimplifies everything. If you would not oversimplify it, but instead lay out the text linguistically, as it says, it is so much more beautiful, so much more point, especially in the role of Eve. Because when Eve is introduced, she is not introduced as Eve, as I showed you. She is introduced as a Zarek and Endu. As she is introduced as a Zarek and Endu, she is never referred to as Eve, not once in the text. Well, she fulfills her job because we have a concept of new names in our religion. It is very unique to us and you think, wow, these Mormons are so weird, like you are just pulling anything out of the hat. What you don't understand is I study enomastic studies, which means I study the roots of proper names, right, proper nouns in the Hebrew Bible, well, just in the Bible in general, because you can go through the New Testament as well. If you notice, there is a pattern in the Bible. Nobody ever has their real name. Everyone is given a new name in the Bible. Paul becomes, you know, Saul becomes Paul, Simon is Peter, right, as Zarek and Endu becomes Eve. Joseph tells us that Adam receives a new name after he leaves the garden, a new name that he then receives after the fulfillment of the garden. And at each point, at each juncture of these narratives, every narrative where you receive this new name, it tells the same story. You are known by this. And then when you hit this pivotal moment where either you fulfill your role or you think you fail in your role, God, God at that point meets you and gives you a new name in this narrative, Eve is introduced, a Zarek and Endu. She is brought before Adam, and there's this kind of sexist notion where they go and Adam names Eve. And I love it. I love that our temple text has been updated to emphasize this. Adam does not name Eve, Adam in this beautiful expression. Where she is only referred to as the salvation with a priesthood equal unto his own. After she partakes the fruit, God shows up and says, Eve, Hava, life, and only then does he emphasize her real name. Then he turns to Adam and says, Adam, and the problem with this narrative is it says, what will you name her? This is a rhetorical question. God is saying, Adam, do you know the name of this person next to you now that you have partake in the fruit? At that point, Adam turns and says, ideal, this is Hava, this is Eve, why? What does this word Hava mean? Well, it is the word for life. It is the root word of your heavenly mother, life. At this point, Eve is then given. She's not punished. She didn't make a mistake as the traditional narrative. There is no punishment whatsoever. God does not issue one decree of punishment or malice or negative connotation towards Eve. He only says to Eve, Hava, you are life. I love in the temple now. It says, that is right, Adam. She is called Hava, she is called Eve, for thus is the name of the first of all women, who is the first of all women, mother Eve, mother Eve, our mother, our heavenly mother. She is given the name, the title of our heavenly mother. I love it so much. Can I ask just a question, do you think that Adam is Eve transforming and becoming something new and therefore her name is Eve or because they took the fruit, is Adam able to see her more clearly for who she already was? Does that make sense? Which is. I know, that's tough. That's so tough to answer because I want to say yes to both of them because you're actually pulling from two perspectives there, is Eve, from Eve's perspective, becoming what she should be. Yes, free agency is always there. She had the choice, 100% to do whatever she wanted. God is not going to mess with that, but she did what's right and she took that bitter cup. Again, mimicking linguistically, paralleling the role of the Savior, thus giving her the title of that adzerre, that Evanezer, but then from perspective of Adam, he's so unaware of it. The text indicates that. He's unaware of this. He sees it as bad. He's like, "He what are you doing?" You're not supposed to do that. He doesn't quite get it and it's God who requires Adam to go, "Hey, Adam, do you get it now? Do you understand?" And I feel bad because people point out to me again and again, "Hey, Jared, you're kind of a, you're a bad feminist in the sense that like in the olden days, the feminist was a negative term because it was like anti-man." Right, right. And they're like, "You're narrative of this is like anti-Adam." And I'm like, "I'm so sorry, it's not. It is not. It is not anti-Adam." The fact of the matter is, is the linguistic text emphasizes this point, which is, Adam didn't see it yet. He did not have the eyes to see it. When God points that out to them, Adam then sees, "I see who this is. This is Eve, the mother of all living. It's so beautiful." Now, that shouldn't be seen as a negative Adam. He has so many incredible traits. His name himself indicates that he is the, he is the standard. He is the stationary thing by which all begins, right? There's so many positives to his name. So, I don't see it as this anti-Adam narrative. I think I emphasize the feminine because it's the feminine that has been pushed down for all of these years. So, it's not trying to be anti-the masculine in this narrative. It's just, I think we've harped on the masculine enough and lifted that up, that I think it's time that we lift up the women where it's supposed to be, where it was originally indicated to be. So, yeah. So, that's it. That's Genesis 1 through 3 that I take you through. There's so much more in there. I love, you know, we always have this issue of the creation of you as well, where she's made from Adam's rib, and I want to so badly be able to show how that's completely misinterpreted. And I know it is. I think we all do as linguists know that it's wrong. Problem is we can't show how. We don't know. It's such a strange idiom to be pulled from his rib. It's not the word rib. It's side. And there's so many different, like, here we go, this apathetic realization again and again, your mind can grow a million different things and be like, right, it's because she's equal, she's being made just like him. And the one thing that I can show everybody is that in Genesis 3, or sorry, Genesis 2 20, it tells us, and Adam gave names to all the cattle into the fall of the air, into every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a help meat for him. And we read that it's such a strange location for that to be because you're indicating you were searching for a woman again, for all everybody thinks they're the first people on the earth. They're looking for other ease, like why would you look if there's only Adam? So you're looking for this woman, for Adam, and you can't find anyone for him. So what a bizarre sentence to put in there right before the creation of Eve, right? But what I love, and again, this would be such a goldmine, mind to be able to find linguistically, if this text was wrong, like if it could just say, like, and for Adam, there was found Eve, it would, it would bury so much sexism because people have used this notion that like Eve was made from Adam, thus Eve is subject to Adam, right? And she is lesser than Adam. Eve is made from so he is her master. And it's, it's caused so much strife for women, this one notion. But what I love is once again, Joseph didn't fail us because when you look at the Abrahamic version that Joseph brought in, how does the narrative of Abraham guard a narrative end? The very last verse should be the most groundbreaking discovery of all time because it says so clearly. And Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the fowl of the air, to every beast of the field. And for Adam, there was found a help mean for him. Joseph changed one word, one word in that entire chapter. There's only one thing that he modifies in his, the rendition of it. Adam what Eve was found for Adam. She was not made for Adam or from Adam or under Adam or subject to Adam. Eve was found for Adam. She exists completely separate, created in the same way as Adam. And I love that so, so much. We should be hard, like we need to be preaching this and our, where are our missionaries? We need to have our missionaries like read Abraham 5 instead of the Genesis 2 version. So yes, if we would just read our scriptures from a more linguistically dynamic perspective instead of relying on the traditional interpretation that we've placed on the text, it's so much more beautiful. It connects things in such a better way. And there's just so much more there, I wish we had the time to dive into, but maybe another time. That was amazing. Thank you so much. I, yeah, so many, thought, so many questions. I hope we can hear more from you because there's a lot here, just, just to close out. You shared, you know, you mentioned the power of studying the scriptures from a linguistical perspective and how I can open up understanding and I feel like there's a lot of people in our community who are wrestling with this creation story and with just wanting to understand the temple experience more, what have you, what have you learned about how to prepare yourself to better understand what's being given here in the story and the temple experience. Yeah, you know, I, it's tough, it is really, really tough because if you're unprepared and you just go straight to the temple, you're like, what is this? Yeah, I'm so convinced. Yeah. Like, this is strange. This is a weird experience. And so there's a couple things at play and I think it's really important that we A, understand the history of our modern temple evolution, like, why, why did Joseph use what he did? You know, I tell, I tell everybody this because I love this so much as a linguist. So great. Joseph would often start his, his discourses, his lectures with a prayer of his own. He'd let whoever say a prayer. Maybe like, I'd like to offer another prayer. And then he would say, Oh, Lord God, please free us of the prison that is our language and let the spirit convey the message that I have prepared for them. And I love that because yes, English is a prison. We are stuck in Joseph's biggest issue with the temple was he had no idea how to express what he experienced in his revelation. Into words. Yeah. What a horrible feat. He is not, it's not like God's just whispering the endowment so that he can be like, let me write this down word for word is got that's not what's happening. This is this polisemic revelation. How do you take this visual, this emotional, the spiritual interpretation and put it into the confines of words, yeah, or Joseph, poor sucker. And that's why I love it. I love that he's like, Hey, guys, I need you all to get this revelation. Like this is the point. And I love that we've maintained that in our temple experience because that's the problem. If you're going to walk into the temple without any history behind it, it's going to feel weird. Walking into the temple without understanding the real linguistics of the Bible. It's going to feel patriarchal. It's going to feel, I mean, I feel bad for all women because it doesn't look great. What I love is notice, I mean, if again, notice the changes that are happening in the temple. Notice it's all about what and it's all about restoring this message that women are equal in every way. So I love that. Cavia, if you're going to the temple for a time, do not try to learn lessons that aren't there. Okay. The temple is trying to teach very specific lessons and it is not a replacement of scripture. It's not trying to do that. It's not trying to say like, this is the true narrative. So anything you read in Genesis or anything you read in Abraham is not true. That's not what it's trying to do. So that's the beauty of our temple experience. We're not trying to say, Hey, this is the lesson you have to take from it. We have you come. There is no instructor. We don't have the words of the prophet up there saying, this is what the temple means. No one is going to say that to you. Why? Because it is for you and the Holy Spirit to then say, Oh, my goodness, I just learned this. This aspect is so beautiful. This is what I learned. This is the concept of the temple. This is what you're supposed to take from it. But for all those first time goers, please study before you go, that's all I have to say. It's like, yeah, study a little bit at least at the very least understand this is a symbolic interpretation of what God is trying to express to you in a very conceptual way. Not literal. It is not literal. Please don't take it literally. Right. Well, like what you said earlier about how it just wasn't tasting right or there is something about the Eve narrative that just was not sitting right for you. And I feel like those moments are an invitation when we're pushing up against something and if it tastes bitter, it's not tasting like the fruits of the spirit, then maybe that's where you begin and that's invitation to start digging into it so that you can understand it better. Absolutely. A great example of how we flatten things is this word Shema in Hebrew, which we have translated as a word for call that God calls you, but we flattened it, our rigid, our rigid language has made it just singular as call, but in reality that conceptual term is and they understood it this way and it's showed linguistically through over and over again. It's used many times in the scriptures, this call, this beckoning from God. What it actually indicates is God is calling you. You have heard the call, understood the call and are now coming towards that call, responding to that call. All of that is contained in the word Shema and the reason that's important, you might be like, well, that's that is the concept of being called and responding. So this is stupid. No, it's not because what's missing in our flattened version is this notion that God is only calling those that can perceive, understand, know what the call is and then respond to it. If you feel like something is off, that is not the Shema, that is not the call and you have honed into that. You have heard that, right? You're perceiving that. Now you just have to figure out what is the call, like what is the meaning, what is the notion that I need to figure out for this. And so that's what I love about that, the proto Hebrew, that conceptual understanding of the text because it's so much more deep, so much more layered and has the different aspects to it. I love that. And I think what I found is when we truly perceive the call, it's delicious, it really. Oh, and perfect. And yeah, and so perfect that it will not leave any of those crumbs on the side where you go, ugh, I don't know that. That bothers me. No, no. The gospel is pure. The gospel is true. The word is true. And perfect if you have the eyes to see it. Thank you, Jared. That was beautiful. I really appreciate everything you shared. Thank you for coming. I'm excited to now go dig in and do my historical linguistic studies and hopefully come to a class. Yeah. I would love that. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right. Thanks so much for listening. We really hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Jared Lambert and Larkin Swain. You can hear more conversations like this on the Sanctuary podcast wherever you like to listen.