The world of the Old Testament, like our own day, is swimming in violence.

From the direct and intimate violence of person-to-person interaction,

to the structural violence that reinforces hunger, war, and inequality,

each of us is affected by others' use of force.

Despite this reality, or perhaps because of it,

the Lord commands us to proclaim peace to the world and to follow the Prince of

Peace. In choosing peace, we are rejecting our own desires for results, for others to bend to our

will in order to align our will with the Lord's. On today's episode of Abide, a Maxwell

Institute podcast, we discuss Noah, the Tower of Babel and violence, thinking broadly about what we can learn from

violence in scripture. My name is Joseph Stewart. I'm the public communication specialist at the

Neil A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Christian Heel is a

research fellow at the Institute, and each week we will be discussing the week's block of reading from

the Church of Jesus Christ's Latter-day Saints, Come Follow Me curriculum.

We aren't here to present a lesson, or rather to hit on a few key themes from the scripture

block so as to help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify

Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the

world of religious ideas.

Today we're joined by one of our research assistants, Truman Callans, an ancient Near Eastern

Studies major here at BYU from Seattle, Washington.

After he graduates, he plans to go on to grad school and study theology in ancient texts.

Welcome Truman to abide.

Thank you, it's good to be here.

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