Hello and welcome to the Scriptures A Real podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about times where something that we read or did or experienced or thought about or understood just made the scriptures

really come to life for us and we believe that the scriptures are powerful and the more real they

become the more we can draw on that power and apply them to our lives. I'm your host, Carrie

Mielstein and I'm so excited for my guest today, a friend of mine that I've known for years,

we first met in Jerusalem.

And you can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but we first met in Jerusalem and kind of

followed him through grad school. And now he's been a colleague of mine at BYU and my same

department for a number of years. Avram Shanen. Thank you, Auburn, and welcome for being with us.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here, Kerry. Thanks so much. So Avram Shahnan. Thank you, Avram, and welcome for being with us. Thanks. I'm glad to be here,

Carrie. Thanks so much. So, Avram, why don't you tell us just a little bit about yourself,

whatever you'd like for the audience to know? And we're going to talk about Avram or Abraham today,

so it seems fitting that we have you on. But why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Okay, thanks. So yeah, so I did my, I started my education, I did my undergraduate in Hebrew here at BYU, and then I did a degree in Jewish studies at Oxford, and then a degree, my PhD

was at Ohio State, and there I did, I did Hebrew broadly,

but especially sort of rabbinic literature and how the sages read scripture and things like that.

And of course, again, and so most of my work since then has been on,

kind of how religious communities understand and read scripture and things like that. Wonderful. And you spent a little time at Hebrew, you didn't you? Am I remembering wrong? Didn't I meet you in church? I did, yeah, I did Oupon. Oh, yeah, O'Pon. I did the modern Hebrew O'Opon. That's where we met in Jerusalem. I was there doing the O'Pon for a summer when I was at Ohio State. Yeah, and for our listening audience, O'Pon is the Israeli program for, it's really just a crash course in modern Hebrew where you just get, it's, I guess we should say, immersion and crash course, where you spend a few months where everything you do about everything is in Hebrew, and by the time you come out, you may go in speaking nothing, but you come out speaking in Hebrew.

So, yeah, we met in Jerusalem there.

So wonderful.

And Avram is also particularly good.

I think he probably, well, I hate to make comparisons.

So I might get in trouble that way but one of the

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