Old Testament

Week 8: Abraham

Abraham 1–2; Genesis 12–23

4 November 2021

• Kerry Muhlestein and John Gee, “An Egyptian Context for the Sacrifice of Abraham,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 20, no. 2 (2011): 70–77.

• Stephen O. Smoot, “‘In the Land of the Chaldeans’: The Search for Abraham’s Homeland Revisited,” BYU Studies Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2017): 6–37. Smoot, a Latter-day Saint doctoral student in Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literature at the Catholic University of America, examines the evidence for the location of Abraham’s city of Ur in northern Mesopotamia.

• ⸻, “Abraham and the Stranger at Sodom and Gomorrah,” Public Square Magazine, 5 August 2021. Smoot reviews Abraham’s hospitality to the three strangers (Genesis 18:1–8) and contrasts it with Lot’s treatment of the two messengers from God, the violence the men of Sodom wished to do to them, and God’s resulting destruction of Sodom and its sister city, Gomorrah (Genesis 19:1–26). With this context in mind, he argues for an alternative to the common explanation that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because its inhabitants practiced homosexuality.

• Paul Sanders, “So May God Do To Me!,” Biblica 85, no. 1 (2004): 91–98. Sanders explores the importance of swearing and penalties in ancient oath-taking.

• Alma E. Gygi looks at the evidence that Melchizedek and Shem, the son of Noah, were the same person in “I Have a Question,” Ensign (November 1973): 15–16.