The Mormon Matters "Genesis Team"--David Bokovoy, Tom Roberts, and Brian Hauglid--discusses the Genesis and Book of Abraham texts related to the great patriarch Abraham. Where do the texts differ? Are there resources from ancient studies or the wider Judeo-Christian literature that bolster some of the Book of Abraham’s distinctive points? Why did Abraham flee Ur? What was the episode in Egypt all about when Abraham told Sarai to say she was his sister rather than his wife? The members of the team also discuss Hagar and Ishmael and help us understand their histories in more complete ways. And finally, they take on the Akedah, the "binding of Isaac," in all its difficulty. Is there a theologically satisfying way to discuss this difficult story?

In this episode, the Mormon Matters "Genesis Team"--David Bokovoy, Tom Roberts, and Brian Hauglid--share good, fair and scholarly framings of two difficult biblical stories: (1) the cursing of Canaan, Ham’s son, to become a servant to the races descending from Noah’s other two sons because of his Ham's indiscretions upon discovering Noah naked within his tent; and (2) the Tower of Babel and God’s confounding of human languages. There is so much more going on in the Genesis text than typically gets discussed in LDS devotional settings. This episode also folds in sections of the Book of Abraham and Book of Mormon in sidebar discussions of the link between the cursing of Canaan and black skin and priesthood cursing that had been in Mormon consciousness for such a long time and has only recently been formally denounced by the church, and also about the idea that there once was a pure, Adamic language toward which we are to somehow seek,

The LDS Church has recently published on its website, lds.org, a short article titled "Book of Mormon Translation" that lays out in greater detail than perhaps ever before in an official statement some of the lesser-known aspects of the Book of Mormon translation process, such as Joseph Smith’s use of (and even preference for) a "seer stone" that he had found years before receiving the plates and two clear stones set into a bow that he identified as "Urim and Thummim," and how little the actual plates were used during translation, with them instead usually covered somewhere in the room while Smith sat with his face buried in a hat (to keep out light) into which he had placed his seer stone. At the same time that it alerts readers to these details, it also asserts that even though this may not be the typical way members have thought about how Smith did the translation, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon was indeed a "translation" process in which characters of a language referred to as "Reformed Egyptian" engraved on physical metal plates were rendered into English, conveying a sense of Smith as more or less a passive figure in the process, someone who read English words as they appeared on the stone(s), words that were then written down by a scribe. In this episode, Katie Langston, John Hamer, and John-Charles Duffy join Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon in a vigorous discussion of this new document. Is it a step forward for the Church to more openly recognize what historical research has long shown even as it clashes with typical narratives about the translation process, or has whatever greater openness rendered by that acknowledgment been swallowed up by the statement’s insistence upon a very narrow view of translation--that Smith conveyed exact words provided by God--that continues to force explanations and defenses of the text that are less problematic if more "conceptual" types of translation are imagined. With only unreliable sources suggesting the process involved English words appearing on the stone(s), why might those behind this statement still chosen to insist upon this revelatory model?