“Hearken O Ye My People”
This episode dives into the first Come Follow Me Lesson for Doctrine and Covenants and explores how the Lord signed the book using a rare form of Hebrew Poetry discovered in 1978 called the Janus Parallel.
Trnascript:
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Welcome to the weekly Deep Dive podcast on the Add On Education Network. The podcast where we explore the weekly Come follow me discussion and try and add a little insight and unique perspective. I’m your host, Jason Lloyd, here with my friend and this show’s producer, Nate Pyfer.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: What’s up?
[00:00:26] Speaker A: This year we’re going to be focusing on the Doctrine and Covenants and just give a little bit context to the Doctrine and Covenants. In the early days of the Church, Joseph Smith had been receiving all sorts of revelations, and he had a collection of the Revelations, and there was discussion on whether or not these revelations should be revealed to the members of the church.
They wanted to publish them so the church members could have them, so they could review them, so they could see what was going on and see that the Lord really is speaking to a prophet in modern times. But they were also worried that their enemies would use it for bad, that they would be using it kind of digging in and accusing them or seeing what the Lord is doing here. A little bit of discussion and debate as to what they should do. And ultimately they decided to publish it. And originally they decided to publish it as the Book of Commandments. And as this thing evolves and the revelations get built up into it, they turn it into what we see today as our Doctrine and Covenants. And at the start, when they’re writing this book and they’re compiling all these Revelations, they wanted a preface for it. So they got this committee of elders together to write a preface for the Book of Commandments, which would become, as we know it today, the Doctrine and Covenants. They got together, they hammered this thing out, and they had a special conference. So here you have this conference of elders in the Church. They present their preface to the Doctrine and Covenants.
Everybody hated it. They thought it was terrible.
No love, no joy. They didn’t like it. They said, throw it out. And as they were discussing this and trying to figure out what to do, they said, well, we’ve got a prophet right here. Maybe he could ask God and have God write the preface, give him a revelation to introduce the Book of Commandments. And really that’s what section one turns into, is the revelation that the Lord gave Joseph Smith and the special counsel as an answer to what should we preface this book with that we’re going to be publishing out to the saints.
So this episode, we get to dive right into that. Just see how the Lord is introducing Doctrine and Covenants to the world. It does a pretty neat and unique way in how he signs this Book of Commandments. And puts his voice right into it. And what I’m talking about is, in verse one, the Lord starts using a form of poetry that we don’t really use in English today. And the first one to notice this poetry was Cyrus Gordon. He published a paper in 1978. And trying to explain it, identify it, name it, he called it a Janus parallel. Janus. The reason why he used Janus for the name of the parallel is because Janus was the Roman God who had two faces, right? One face looked to the future, one face looked to the past. And in a Janus parallel, you have three lines, and the first line states something. The second line agrees with the first line, and then you have the third line, but the second line also matches and goes with the third line to where it just ties the three lines together in a real unique way. And I think the best way to illustrate this is to just probably show you an example of this in the scriptures.
So Song of Solomon’s my favorite book. I was going to say this. This is right up your...
