Darryl: Hi, I’m Darryl Alder. Welcome to SearchIsaiah.org. Today we’re here with Victor Ludlow and Victor wrote a book many years ago, called ‘Isaiah, Prophet, Seer and Poet.1‘ But the question that I have is prophet, seer, and poet? So, Jewish poetry doesn’t rhyme Victor. Can you give us an idea a little bit more, I know you recently did an interview with us where you talked about synonymous parallelism, antithetic parallelism and emblematic parallels? But there’s seven kinds, right?
Victor: Right. Those are the three easy ones.
Darryl: Oh, we only covered the easy ones before. Well, then let’s get into all of them today and help us see in. I’ll put up some slides as you do, to help us understand the verses you chose to illustrate okay.
Oral Traditions in Hebrew Worship
Victor: Okay. Well, first of all, there are a few terms we ought to make sure we’re clear about before we get into these seven types. First, oral. Oral was the primary means of transmission of the prophet’s words to the people.
Darryl: So, let’s just talk about that for a minute. So, you go to church on Sunday and there isn’t like everyone’s got a copy of the scriptures. So, what does that mean by oral? Help us understand how that might work in a synagogue?
Victor: Well, there would be maybe one scroll up on the front and one would read from it, a person wouldn’t have their own individually out in the congregation, but they would hear the words and they would probably, if that was a familiar passage, just follow along in their mind.
Darryl: You suggested something, and I tried it on Sunday. You said, well, think about a hymn, and you might not have the hymnbook with you. See if you can follow along and sing, and I was surprised. I’ve been hearing the hymns obviously for a long time because I’m 68. The words I didn’t think I knew them, but I was able to sing. So, it kind of works like that for the congregation.
Victor: Exactly. So, they would receive them orally, they would share them with each other orally, maybe even while they’re out working in their fields, or walking to and from their fields, from their home. They could go over these in their mind and they wouldn’t have an earbud listening to it, but they would review it, and that leads to a second key term and that is repetition. We tend to be rather weak in what we hear and remembering it, because we’re not really trained. I told my students in my Isaiah class one of the first times, what if for the rest of the semester, and this would be after the drop deadline, you could not bring any written or recording material with you at all, nothing to take notes with, nothing to record with, nothing written in your hand, but from what we talked about in class, your entire grade would depend upon it and it would also depend upon whether you would ever graduate from BYU or not. And maybe even whether you could ever renew your temple recommend or not. Would you pay a little more attention? I think they would.
Darryl: I think they would too. I think that gives us some clear insight into what their worship services were like.
Victor: And repetition as President Hinckley often said in his leadership training sessions, repetition is a key to learning. And so, they would teach us the same things, little different perspective, a different speaker maybe with their highlights or examples, but we were getting the same basic principles and practices emphasized repeatedly. Then the third term that we need to remember, and this is the primary means by which the Hebrews did their poetry. It wasn’t a rhyme scheme…
Darryl: But why do we call it poetry then?
Victor: Because it’s an idea scheme, it is a pattern. It’s a structured pattern.
Darryl: So, poetry can just be a pattern?
Victor: Free verse can be nothing with a rhyme to it, but it is a pattern of ideas, not of sounds. Now when you’re translating from another language, even an ancient Semitic one and into a modern English one, the translator is not trying to get the sounds, or the number of syllables, and which ones are stressed and their patterns, what we usually think of as poetry, he’s trying to get the messages, the ideas, the meaning of the passages. So, maybe in the Hebrew, it is 20 words, but maybe in English, it’s 30 and has completely different sounds. But if the message is getting across, he’s done a good translation process. So, this pattern of Hebrew poetry comes through in the English tongue because it’s a pattern of ideas.
Darryl: So, let me ask you an example here. I don’t know if you’ll be able to finish it because I can’t right now, but the ox knoweth its master and then he kind of says it again, another way?
|The ox knows his owner
the ass his master’s crib
but Israel doth not know,
my people doth not consider.
|Darryl: His master’s crib. So that’s two ways of saying the same thing.
Victor: Right, which is what?
Darryl: Repetition, but it’s also something parallelistic right?
Semantic parallelism is the particular style of Hebrew poetry. Semantic deals with the meaning of something. What’s the semantics of that or what’s the meaning of that? And so, this meaning comes through.
Victor: Now, let’s say we take two objects, stand them up side by side in front of us with our eyes closed, and we open our eyes and here are these two objects in front of us. What do you see? Say it’s two people, you naturally will probably look at one of two relationships between these two parallel items. Parallel means to stand side by side. Think of two columns. Now if there are two people there, we first notice similarities and/or contrast. Well, they’re both people, they’re both wearing blue, but he is wearing that, and she is wearing this, and he’s much taller than she, but they both have a BYU Cougars’ shirt on and maybe they’re going to the football game tonight. So, we start processing these two things we see standing side by side, but the first natural comparisons are similarities and then differences or contrasts, and those are the two most common types of parallelism. Synonymous like a synonym, car – automobile. Two different words, one short, one long, but they’ve brought the same mental image to mind. Antithetic, good – evil, happy – sad.
Darryl: So, in this case, male and female? Is that antithetic?
Victor: Well, Venus and Mars, they come from different planets.
Darryl: Ok, that’s very true. You nailed that one.
Victor: But there can be some other subtleties in these other types of parallelisms.
Darryl: So, when we’re talking antithetic. When you are describing this as thinking of a woman with long blonde hair and a guy that was sort of short, butch, brown. Is that antithetic or is that something else
Victor: Well, it’s probably a little bit something else. Let’s go back to your first example, an ox knows his owner, an ass his master’s crib. Then here’s another example of a synonymous parallelism. This is the Lord speaking, Israel does not know. My people take no thought.
Darryl: Israel and my people are the same things.
Victor: No, not, thought, talk. They’re all parallel. But what’s interesting in this verse in the first chapter of Isaiah, those two synonymous parallelisms follow each other. So, let me repeat the whole thing.
|An ox knows its owner,
an ass his master’s crib,
but Israel does not know,
my people take no thought.
Darryl: So, now we’re looking at people being an ox that doesn’t know its master and an ass, which is also my people that don’t know where they’re being fed. The crib is its trough, right?
Victor: Yes, you could take that as a put-down. But, take the literal meaning of each of the verses. Domesticated animals know the voice of their master and they know he will feed them. In fact, this master and this domestic animal, it’s not a wild animal, neither of them, they’re domesticated ones, and they have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Human is dependent upon the animal to help, and the animal is dependent on the human to feed it and to protect it from predators. So, what should the relationship to us and our master be? We should hear his voice. We should appreciate what he provides us and how he protects us. So, a dumb ox and a stubborn ass, in some ways they’re smarter than we who are of the house of Israel.
Darryl: So, there are some simple insights when you stop to really ponder and look at that set of parallelism. I appreciate that.
Victor: Yes, now, Psalms has all kinds of synonymous parallelisms. Proverbs, if you want to find some quick examples, has all kinds of antithetical parallelism. A wiseman does this, the foolish does that, the righteous behave this way, the wicked behave that way. So, those are easy to pick up. Now let’s move on to some others that are a little richer in the potential meaning.
Victor: Look for the word ‘like’ or ‘as’.
Darryl: So, this is like that or this is as that.
Victor: So, they’re comparing two things. And so, these two things aren’t exactly the same, but they’re going to be used analogously to each other. For example, here, like clouds and wind without rain. We get this here in the summer all the time.
Darryl: We get all these clouds and we wished they’d rain, and they don’t give us anything.
Victor: Is the man who boasts of a gift, he does not give.
Darryl: So, someone who has the talent and he never uses it or shares it, is like a cloud going over that gives no shade and never rains.
Darryl: Oh, I like that.
Victor: That’s from Proverbs. Now here’s one back from chapter 1 of Isaiah again:
|Though your sins be red as scarlet,
they can become as white as snow.
Though they’d be red as died wool,
they can become as white as fleece.
So, for emblematic phrases or couplets, this is like that, this is like that, this is like that, this is like that. But they are in two sets, though they’d be red as, they can become white as. So that’s antithetic. And then another set that says the same thing over in this snonymous pattern, though they’d be red as this, they can become as white as that. So, in one verse in Isaiah, we have all three of these parallelisms. Four emblematic parallelisms in two, if I can get my fingers separated, two antithetic sets, but each set is saying the same thing over again. That’s a classic passage of scripture. Those four lines and they help you remember, and you carry them around with you, and you’re getting a message at the same time about forgiveness and repentance.
Darryl: It’s interesting you said that, so I’m preparing a Gospel Doctrine lesson that I’m going to give tomorrow and I have a white fleece and I’ve been trying to find the courage to dip half of it into red dye, but then what will I do with it forever because I don’t think I could ever get it white again. Which is really powerful because I don’t know if we talked about this last time, I think we might have. I have been so tutored by Isaiah’s call. So, I received a significant church call I wasn’t worthy of some many years ago, and I told that to the person interviewing me and they said, just repent. I was like, just repent, that’s what you do. Well, so Isaiah is there in the temple when he saw God in Isaiah 6 and the Seraphim flew and put a hot coal on his lips and his sins were purged. That’s the atonement. It seems like this is a message for him a lot, and now hearing how this emblematic parallelism helps us see that red was a new kind of a new dye color, wasn’t it for Isaiah’s time or had it been around a while.
Victor: It had been around for quite a while, and a very persistent kind of color.
Darryl: So, when you’d say that, if you took it to a fuller and used some kind of bleaching agent to get it clean, it would probably still be pink. Isaiah’s saying, no it would be white. I think that’s a good emblem, thank you for sharing that one. So, another kind of parallelism. Now they’re going to get complicated right?
Victor: Well, a little more, but first of all, let’s review these three: synonymous, antithetic, and emblematic. And some of us are more visual oriented and so I’d like to give you a symbol on each one of them that you can represent. Synonymous parallelism is saying the same thing twice but in similar but slightly different phraseology. So, they’re like two rails of a train track that are parallel to each other, stretching off to the far horizon on the landscape.
Darryl: So, but in that far horizon way up there at the end it looks like they come together.
Victor: It looks like they come to a point. If they hadn’t been, the train’s going to have a hard time getting through that part.
Darryl: But these run parallel to infinity as far we know.
Victor: And point us to the same message.
Darryl: I like that. They point us at the same message at the end.
Victor: Antithetic are opposite contrasts. Probably seeing children put their shadow up on a piece of white paper and they’ll outline it and cut it out and then put it against the big black piece of poster paper or maybe reverse the others, where you get this sharp contrast between black and white, that’s antithetic parallelism. Like an antonym.
Darryl: And both those help me. They may not help everyone but synonym and antonym, when you use those, help me understand both of those much better.
Victor: Then, emblematic is like a shadow. If you’re coming up in the morning on a mountain peak and the sun’s behind you, you can see the shadow out there. You don’t really see the sunlight in the valley, but you can see the shadow of what the sun outlines. Sometimes from behind the building, you can see the shadow of something behind the building if the sun’s coming from the side. You still can’t see that object, a tree, a car, a person, or whatever behind the building, but you see their shadow extending out there. And sometimes shadows are quite sharp and focused. Sometimes they’re fuzzy depending on the time of day and the pollution in the air.
Darryl: We don’t have a scene here with mountains, but lately because it’s been so smoky here, the mountains up close are a whole different color than the very next row and the very next row. And sometimes to me it almost looks fake, like someone was trying to make an odd painting. But that kind of contrast then?
Victor: Right. And so, these emblematic parallelisms, that you can recognize the object, but whether it’s sharp or fuzzy and how it fits in with its landscape, well, that’s what emblematic parallelisms are. You kind of have to wrestle with them and mentally kind of refigure them and try to see what the message might be of an emblematic parallelism. So those are the three easiest ones. Now the next one is going to be a little bit harder. I’m going to quote a line from the famous 24th Psalm of David and pretend like you do not know what is coming up. But this is David speaking. And when I stop, just ask yourself a question and tell me what that question is. This is David speaking, a little, skinny teenage guy out in the wilderness tending his father’s flocks and he says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.”
Darryl: Why don’t I fear any evil? That’s my question, isn’t it?
Victor: Well, if the first line of a parallelism grabs you, pulls you to the edge of your seat, leaves you wondering, you want the answer?
Darryl: Ok, I like that. That helps me understand that.
Victor: “Yea, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” He’s going to give us the answer, but he wants to grab our attention first by making this bold statement, or maybe it might be a question, or maybe he’ll make a statement and then need to support it. This is called synthetic parallelism.
It’s a merging kind of a question and an answer, a statement and an explanation, a problem and a resolution. Where the first part leaves us hanging, the symbol I use for is a belt with a buckle. The leather strap and the buckle individually, alone can’t hold up their pants. You may have to get a pair of suspenders. A big, beautiful $300 silver buckle isn’t going to do it by itself. A handcrafted nice leather strap isn’t going to…you have to have both of them together. So synthetic parallelism is a statement.
Darryl: That helps me because I did not understand the synthetic form. I think that the idea of blending, answering the question gave me some insights.
Victor: Here’s some from the second verse of chapter 1 of Isaiah. The Lord’s speaking, “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.” You’re talking about my neighbors.
Darryl: No, he’s talking about us. It’s sad, but true.
Victor: This is right here, really the way he introduces this grand poem here at the beginning of chapter 1. The Lord’s speaking, I have raised up children, but then he makes this statement and then he goes on to describe it. That’s a synthetic parallelism.
Darryl: Ok, that helps.
Victor: Now, the next two types have similar names and similar compositions.
Darryl: I’m trying to follow along here for a minute, because I know this is going to get very complex now.
Victor: Hopefully not. But they’re going to be composite and climactic, two ‘C’ words.
Think of a picture, like a landscape of a country meadow or a city of Jerusalem or any big beach at sunset and there are different elements that will compose, make the composition of this painting in our mind. Water, clouds, sand, logs, maybe people, all kinds of elements that put this picture together. Composite parallelism is not just a couplet, but it’s three or more elements that together start to put this picture together in our mind. For example, nation of sin, people laden with iniquity, a brood of evil doers, children that are corruptors. So, he’s describing a whole variety of society. The whole nation, people, groups, children. And so, we’re getting this picture of wickedness and that’s a composite parallelism.
Darryl: So, I’m looking at this…go ahead.
Victor: Well, another example, my favorite one is the introduction to the book of Psalms. It starts off like a synthetic parallelism. The psalmist says, “Blessed is the man who, well, come on, tell me…
Darryl: Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly. I had to look, sorry I don’t know…
Victor: I just wanted to get your attention. You could put any number of answers…
Darryl: Right, so we want to know how we’re going to be blessed.
Victor: Yes, and if we were on an open stage where we could walk around a little bit, I would do that while I would read the next few lines. So, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful.” Did you see what I said?
Darryl: I did. I saw you walk and stand, and I saw you sit.
Victor: And you’re a rare one to do that. Well, now of course in the classroom they see me walking and standing and sitting all the time.
Darryl: Sure, but I think I was primed for this because I have it in front of me.
Victor: But any rate, that’s such a natural sequence, to walk, but before you sit, because you can’t sit from a walking action, you have to stop and stand, maybe pivot and then sit down. Now think of repetition and learning, that’s a natural sequence. Walking, standing, sitting. Now, I could expand this from three elements to five or six. Blessed is the man who races not with the wild crowd, who runs not with the gangs, walks not with the ungodly, stands not with the sinners, sits not with a scornful, lies not with the harlots. You can stretch this out and it’s very natural, logical, easy to remember. And that’s a composite parallelism – three or more elements. And so, I compare it again to like a composition of paintings, something like this where we get these different elements in the picture that show us the whole picture as it develops, and we put it into our mind, that’s a composite parallelism. And there are examples of that throughout the poetic books and the prophetic books of the Old Testament.
Darryl: And Isaiah isn’t afraid to be a poetic book while he’s being a prophet, is he?
Darryl: Sometimes it’s like he won’t do it, he won’t put it down if it isn’t both prophetic and poetic.
Victor: That’s right. The next type is called climactic. Again, this is three or more elements, but here we do get some literal repetition. A word or a phrase that’s repeated, and it’s not only in the Old Testament. There was a classic example at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount by the Savior.
Darryl: The beatitudes?
Victor: How many of them are there?
Victor: Eight. How do you know? Blessed, blessed, blessed. Eight steps. And that’s the symbol I use for, is like steps. And climactic parallelism as its name implies, it leads up to a climax.
Darryl: So, in the beatitudes, I can’t think of what the last one is. Is that the climax?
Victor: Well, each one of them has a little mini climax, but it’s blessed is the man who has this characteristic for he will receive this and he will receive this, and he will receive this. And so, each one of them is kind of its own little landing and gives us a blessing. A promise that’s there. But I liked this one too, from Psalms 29, the beginning of Psalms 29,
Ascribe to the Lord heavenly beings,
ascribe to the Lord, glory and strength,
ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name.
So, this, ascribe to the Lord, or recognize the Lord for, or appreciate the Lord for, or however you want to translate ascribe. Heavenly beings in the Hebrew, it’s actually children of God—of Elohim. Recognize that he has given his children life, his spirit children. Recognize the Lord for his glory and strength and his intelligence and goodness, and all of these things. Ascribe to the Lord the glory of His name. The name by which we are saved, who’s plan we are following. But then the climax, “Worship the Lord in holy array.”
Darryl: And that word, array, is just so rich.
Victor: What is it? It’s clothing.
Victor: What kind of holy clothing do we put on to worship the Lord?
Darryl: Our temple clothing.
Victor: Yeah, so, recognize God for what He’s done for us in the primordial realms, creating this world, His strength, His power, His glory, His plan, His son. Where do we you worship Him, we put on our holy clothing and go to the temple.
Darryl: So, that one is so positive. Look how sad Isaiah in 1:7.
Victor: Sometimes it seems like we’re tumbling down the steps, instead of walking up it.
|Your country is desolate,
your cities are burned down,
your land is devoured.
It is desolate as overthrown by strangers or the other descriptive, which almost seems to be like a composite anticlimactic.
|8 And daughter Zion is left
like a booth in a vineyard,
like a shelter in a cucumber field,
like a besieged city.
And just think of this empty old shack out in a field where they used to come in the summer to live and work there, but now it’s just an empty desolate shack and the vineyard has probably gone to weed.
Darryl: The minute I read that, I thought about the Kleinegarten in Germany. Remember how people outside of town would have a little garden and every garden had a little shack and I suddenly pictured that shack falling apart and no one gardening any other gardens.
Victor: Right, they’re all just a patch of weeds and wildlife.
Darryl: And visually, that just jumped at me.
Victor: Yeah, but it’s fair Zion, that is left like this. The potential is there, the land is fertile. We know it’s had productivity, but why have they become so empty and desolate? Now that poetry helps get that message impress. He’s not just saying, you’re going to be punished because you’re wicked. But he paints this picture, it’s a lot stronger, and it’s easier to carry around, that picture in your mind.
Darryl: In the last episode we talked about breaking Isaiah maybe into paragraphs. It seems like now that would make sense, if we’re just looking at the paragraph, this might come together better. I struggle when I just read Isaiah and try to connect it, I get lost sometimes. So, I think this is helpful. Thank you.
Victor: Alright. Our last example here, is really using a combination of one or two or more of the earlier ones into a form called introverted parallelism. Sometimes scholars use a more silly term, inside out parallelism. Kind of like if you’ve got a t-shirt that’s got a bold print on it and you turn it inside out, you can still see it, but you have to learn how to read it backwards and inside out.
Darryl: So, I had graduated, and you were in the early days of your teaching and this firestorm swept the church about chiasm. Is this the same thing?
Victor: It’s exactly the same thing. It’s a Greek word from a letter chai of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s like our letter X.
Darryl: So, I always laugh at this because it’s only part of the letter x. There’re four legs to an x, so we’re going down one leg and then coming back the other.
Victor: No, think of both of them coming down to a point.
Darryl: Oh, to a point. Now that makes sense. I see it as a funnel suddenly. That’s the first time I’ve understood that.
Victor: It’s a funnel and then it spreads out, like an hourglass.
Darryl: Yes, that makes very good sense.
Victor: And the hourglass is where the action is. So, if you take an hour glass behind your back, reverse it and bring it out and put it in front of the person in front of you, their eyes are going to automatically go to that center point, because that’s where the action is.
Darryl: Right, it’s where everything is moving.
Victor: And then you ask them, is this a three-minute egg timer, or a twenty-minute muffin timer? Well they’re soon calculating how much sand, how fast… This is going to be gone in three minutes. Well, the pivot point is where the action is, that’s the main message. We’re used to hearing public speaking where the main idea is sometimes presented upfront.
Darryl: So, tell them what we’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them what we told them. That was from my speech class.
Victor: Yeah. So, it’s the beginning and the end. But here they’ll lead into it. Hit it, sometimes twice and then come back out of it.
Darryl: So, it might be more gradual to come down a little more slowly, depending on what they’re trying to drive home. So, are these very long or some of them multiple lines – ten, fifteen lines.
Victor: Multiple lines, a whole chapter.
Darryl: Could multiple chapters be?
Victor: Even the Saviors third sermon in 3rd Nephi is 3 chapters long and it’s one big chiastic pattern.
Victor: It is. And so, it can be very short, like in Isaiah 11:13
Ephraim shall not envy Judah,
Judah shall not vex Ephraim.
So, it’s AB, BA, that’s just one verse. But again, it can be verses, chapter, chapters, long.
Darryl: So, the classic one is this heart, ears and eyes one. Do you want to outline that for us?
Victor: Okay, this is as part of this instruction that Isaiah received in his calling in Isaiah 6.
Darryl: When he’s called to be a prophet, what I talked about earlier. The coal has been pressed to his lips and God asks something like, who can I call? And Isaiah says me.
Victor: And so, the Lord gives him some instructions. This is the Lord speaking to Isaiah, the young prophet,
Make the heart of this people fat,
make their ears heavy,
shut their eyes,
lest seen with her eyes
and hearing with their ears
they understand with their heart
and convert or return and heal themselves.
Sometimes when we see, hear, and seem to understand things, we think we know them, but if we’re not really sensitive to the promptings, we cannot heal ourselves. We cannot correct ourselves. We need help. So, he’s told here, not just to be difficult, so they can see and hear, but not really, so they’d be open to the promptings of the spirit. So, Isaiah had to be a difficult prophet, deliberately difficult. Not impossible, but he speaks at this higher spiritual plain and challenges us to come up to that plain. The Savior faced a similar, very complex audience, among both Isaiah’s audience and Jesus, were devout apostles. Now, if you’re teaching Gospel Doctrine before you get to Isaiah, you spend about three weeks with Hosea and Micah and Amos.
Darryl: That’s where we are right now, with the lessor prophets.
Victor: These are all contemporary with Isaiah. They overlap with him. And so here he’s teaching them as well, but there are some people, at least one of whom will eventually take his life. So, this whole range of righteousness and wickedness, how do you talk to them once and speak to them all at the same time? That’s a challenge. Isaiah speaks at this level and challenges us to come up to his level of understanding. If you don’t, you’re just not going to be held as accountable.
Darryl: But something that’s interesting as you’re talking about this, I can remember the first time I learned about chiasm in the Book of Mormon and I tried outlining something. And I did okay, it wasn’t great. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but any of these poetic styles, if you find the first one, it’s like I’m reading Isaiah, and this is like being on a treasure hunt. You get to find these little things. I think that would excite me in my study. So, I hadn’t been particularly interested in the concept of poetry, but what you’re sharing here is making me think, oh I could go back and try this just to look for these cool things.
Victor: And as you do so, they’ll jump out at you. Now the Savior, he started on a very simple parable level and we talk about the moral of the story and then what’s the spiritual level. But sometimes people fall short of really getting the full insight of the parable because of, I’ve heard this parable, I’ve heard it so many times, here’s the story, there’s the story line, there’s a message, I’ve got it. Do you really? Have you stopped to look at it from this perspective, or maybe you might see something there that you didn’t see two years ago the last time you read this parable.
Darryl: So, the parable that’s always struck me that was more rich that I had missed in multiple readings, is the parable of the lost coin. Ok, she dropped her coin, she looks around the house and she find her coin. No, she didn’t look around, she cleaned her whole house, then she found the coin and she was happy. So now she has a clean house. She got this whole side benefit that had nothing to do in that first reading of, oh the coin was lost, it was found, big deal. So, that was a simple lesson I learned, so you’re right.
Victor: Yeah, well, with these parallelisms, in just the first chapter of Isaiah, you can find at least five or six of them fairly easily.
Darryl: You’ve pulled so many examples out in the first chapter and because it’s not included in the Book of Mormon, I sometimes just think it’s just sort of extra, it’s the preamble. It doesn’t look like it’s one you should skip.
Victor: No. Plus, as we mentioned in the beginning of our discussion, the four basic principles and ordinances are there, and different phraseologies. So, he’s not just calling into repentance, he’s also going through the basic plan, the foundation of the plan of salvation.
Darryl: Well, we really appreciate the time you’ve taken with us today. Victor, I hope it will benefit all of our readers in Sunday school in the coming weeks. Thank you again for your participation.
Victor: Glad to.
1 Ludlow, Isaiah, Prophet, Seer, and Poet, Deseret Book