Genesis 6-11, Moses 8

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Genesis 12-17, Abraham 1-2

MICVAH

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PGfvqBl-3Ao

PERSPECTIVE

“It's interesting because I do think that in the past, we've taken a very literal approach to the Bible. And that was considered the only faith-based approach. And now today, we've started to realize that there are many faith-based approaches to the Bible. Just even talking about the Flood, for example, you can believe in a global universal Flood that was a miracle, and that's fine. You can believe that it was more of a regional Flood.

So when they talk about the world or the earth, they're talking about their world, the world that they knew. And there's evidence of flood deposits in Mesopotamia and other places. And that's also a faith-based approach. And this is going back to this idea of being open minded about things.

I love that we can accept different points of view, even though I think we struggle with that. We want a nice tidy package. We want, ‘This means this and it can mean nothing else.’ But that's not how scripture works, that's not necessarily how these things work.

Dr. Krystal L. Pierce, Follow Him Podcast

SONS OF GOD

“[Moses gives a] little more information. Noah was considered a son of God because he listened to God, and his daughters were daughters of God because they listened to God. But the problem was they married those who weren't listening to God, the sons of men. And so once they married them their behavior changed. They were influenced by them. They were affected by them. And then they changed from daughters of God to daughters of men at that point. So it's just a way of talking about somebody's being, really honestly, righteous or wicked.”

Dr. Krystal L. Pierce, Follow Him Podcast

“REPENTED”

“There's something a little bit different going on here, and this word that's translated as repent here is the Hebrew word nacham.

Naham is such a great word because it appears all over the Old Testament. And every time it appears, it's translated in a different way. So people struggle with its meaning. And actually what's great is this word shows up in the Book of Mormon too as the place where Ishmael was buried on the way to the promised land, he was buried at Naham. Half of this word means grieving, sadness, mourning, being in pain. But the other side of nachum, and this is why people struggle with it because it almost seems like the opposite, it also means to be comforted. It also means to be consoled. It also means to feel content. I think people struggle because they say, "How can you feel sadness and comfort at the same time? How can you be mourning, but also feel consoled?"

Dr. Krystal L. Pierce, Follow Him Podcast

 TSOHAR

“There's this Jewish rabbinical tradition that, when God created Adam, one of the things he did was he put his light; God's light in a stone, so that Adam would always have the light of God with him. And Adam passed this stone down. He passed it down until it got to Noah. And the tradition goes that Noah used it to light the Ark. And so the tsohar was actually this lighted stone that Noah had. And then the tradition continues. He passed it down. It eventually went to Moses, who used it to light the tabernacle, so that there was always this light of God with the prophets and being passed down.”

Dr. Krystal L. Pierce, Follow Him Podcast

 NOAH AND THE ARK

“If we fancy Noah riding the sunny seas high, dry and snug in the Ark, we have not read the record—the long, hopeless struggle against entrenched mass resistance to his preaching, the deepening gloom and desperation of the year leading up to the final debacle, then the unleashed forces of nature, with the family absolutely terrified, weeping and praying ‘because they were at the gates of death’ as the Ark was thrown about with the greatest violence by terrible winds and titanic seas...Finally, Noah went forth into a world of utter desolation, as Adam did, to build his altar, call upon God, and try to make a go of it all over again, only to see some his progeny on short order prefer Satan to God and lose all the rewards that his toil and sufferings had put in their reach.”

Hugh Nibley, Scriptures Plus Instagram

 ZIGGURATS

“We actually have about 25 examples of enormous towers in Mesopotamia, and these are called ziggurats. Most biblical scholars believe that the tower of Babel was a ziggurat. They were made out of burnt bricks. That's a good connection. They're basically these towers of narrowing platforms. A big platform on the bottom and it gets narrower to another platform, and another one and another one, all the way up to the top. And these things could be huge, as big as 300 feet on one side, and as tall as 200 feet up in the air.

They were completely filled with rubble, and dirt and sand and things like that. They had this ramp or stairs going up to the top. So we find out in archeology texts, that the reason they build these is first, to make it so that God could come down to earth. If they build it up into heaven it makes it possible for God to be able to use the ramp and the staircase, and come down and visit earth, and go to the temple and be worshiped.

The other purpose was to make it so that God would stay on earth, that he wouldn't go back to heaven. And so on the very top of these ziggurats, there was a bedroom, an empty room, that they built for God. And inside the room was a bed and a table, and the priest would go up and they'd make the bed all nice, and they'd set the table with food and drink. And there was a chair. So their hope was that God would come down. He would live in this tower, so they would reach into heaven, be able to access God, bring him down. They would make a name for themselves, because if God's living in your city, on your ziggurat, then you're going to be famous. This kind of idea, if we can get God to live in our tower, in the ziggurat, then we won't be scattered. We can convince him this is where we need to stay.”

Dr. Krystal L. Pierce, Follow Him Podcast

INSIGHTS FROM THE STORY OF NOAH

What do we learn about the nature of God from the story of Noah and the story of the Tower of Babel?

How did the understanding of God’s nature inform their behaviors and how does it inform ours?`````