Old Testament
Week 1: Introduction & the divine council
9 September 2021
Lesson Materials
Additional reading and links
Stan Larson, “The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text,” BYU Studies 18, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 193–208. Larson’s edition of Joseph Smith’s sermon is the best version to date.
“Becoming Like God,” Gospel Topics Essays. This article on the Church’s website explores the doctrine of apotheosis (human deification).
Daniel C. Peterson, “‘Ye Are Gods’: Psalm 82 and John 10 as Witnesses to the Divine Nature of Humankind,” in The Disciple as Scholar: Essays on Scripture and the Ancient World in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, and Andrew H. Hedges (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2000), 471–594.
Stephen O. Smoot, “The Divine Council,” LDS Perspectives Podcast 42, 28 June 2017. In this interview with Laura Harris Hales, Latter-day Saint scholar Stephen Smoot discusses the role of the Divine Council in the religions of the ancient Near East and what references to the council in scripture could mean for Latter-day Saints.
William J. Hamblin, “The Sôd of Yhwh and the Endowment,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 38 (2020): 39–46. The late BYU professor Bill Hamblin argued that the temple endowment serves as a ritual and dramatic participation in the divine council of God, through which God reveals to the covenanter details of the plan of salvation, and that this is the hidden meaning and purpose of creation and the cosmos.