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

My name is Rosalind Welch.

I'm the host of the podcast and I have a wonderful guest with me here today.

I am joined by Dr. Sean Hopkin.

Dr. Hopkins is a professor of ancient scripture in the department of ancient scripture here

at Brigham Young University. His area of expertise is the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old

Testament. And he also has a very fascinating kind of secondary

area of study, and that is medieval Iberian literature, which I find fascinating because my PhD

was an early modern English literature, and I served my mission in Portugal. So we're delighted to

have you on the podcast with us today, Dr. Hopkins.

It's so good to be with you. And yeah, I served my mission in northern Spain. So we were next

door neighbors. And that area of emphasis of academic focus is one that I love and that it's hard for me to find time to do research

with these days. But we'll call it a love that tries to bubble up, and I'm constantly looking

for ways to bubble up. The Hebrew Bible emphasis helps more in, as we're talking about,

Book of Mormon and religious topics. Absolutely.

Well, it doesn't hurt to think about the Book of Mormon through the lens of literature as well.

We've talked about that a lot over the course of this podcast series is the way that the Book

of Mormon as a text lends itself to all sorts of types of analyses, including literary analysis. So maybe we will

touch on that today. Today, our topic is the book of Mormon. That is the internal book of Mormon,

written by Mormon, coming right after Fourth Nephi and right before the Book of Ether.

We're moving right on through the Book of Mormon.

Here in this book, we're going to see a conclusion and an end to the primary narrative arc of the Book of Mormon.

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