Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies podcast.

My name is Rosalind Welch. I am the associate director of the Maxwell Institute.

And I am delighted today to be joined by Dr. Tyler Griffin. Dr. Griffin is an accomplished

podcaster himself and I'm sure many of our listeners know of him. He is the Associate Dean of

Religious Education here at Brigham Young University and he is a teaching professor in the

Department of Ancient Scripture. But that is not all.

He has a secret past life in electrical engineering.

And using those skills, he has created all sorts of really cool 3D renderings that kind of bring the scriptures alive.

Rendering of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, an internal

book of Mormon map. He was telling me about one he's working on on Mormon's cave. These all

sound really, really neat, and they're available to be explored at virtual scriptures.org.

What exciting projects. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Griffin. Thank you, Rutherland. It's a pleasure to join you today.

Well, today we are talking about the book of Heelman. Not a super long book, but it covers a lot of

ground at a breakneck speed. As always, on this podcast, we will not walk through every verse or

every chapter in the Book of Heeloman, but we're going to try to give you an overview,

a kind of introduction that will help you before you even start reading it to know what to look

for, to sensitize you to some of the most important themes and issues and

characters, and hopefully to enrich your reading in that way. So as we jump off here, Tyler,

give us any context that we need to know before starting in here in Heelman chapter 1.

Yeah. So this book is remarkable on so many levels. There are so many unique

things about the book of Helman. In 16 chapters, you get all of these firsts. You get the first time

that the Lamanite righteousness exceeds that of the Nephites. You get our first and only Lamanite preacher,

...