Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies podcast.

My name is Rosalind Welch.

I'm joined today by Dr. Dan Belknap.

Dr. Belknap is a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University.

He is interested in ritual behavior and ritual

studies, which means that he, in the context of the Book of Mormon, he studies the social,

political, cultural worlds of the Book of Mormon and how those interact with its doctrinal teachings.

I've read a lot of his work. He's a great scholar and great writer and a very insightful

reader of the

Book of Mormon, and I'm so happy to have him with us today. Welcome, Dr. Belknap.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Today we are jumping into the text of third and fourth Nephi.

This is going to be a deep dive into the text, although as always we won't be walking sequentially through every chapter and verse of these books.

Instead, we're going to give you, we hope, some useful paradigms, concepts and frameworks that will guide you in your own reading of the books of third and fourth Nephi.

So we'll jump in today where I always start,

Dan, and that is with any context that's helpful as we begin our reading here in Third Nephi.

What should we know about what's been happening and what's about to happen here?

So from Third Nephi,

right?

So it starts,

third Nephi starts off of the bang.

I guess all the books really kind of start off with a nice little crisis point, right?

Heelman did with, uh,

...