Hey everyone. Welcome to the Scripture Study Project, our podcast where we give you a fresh and faithful study of the scriptures that we hope will renew your excitement for your own

personal study and help you passionately teach what you're learning to others. I'm Zach and I am

without my amazing wife, Krista, this week. And so I'm going to podcast on my own. But I am really

excited about this block. This is one of my favorite blocks.

This is episode 14, and this is Jacob Chapter 5.

It's Jacob chapters 5 and 6, but this is the longest chapter in the Book of Mormon.

And if you're familiar with it, this is the story or the allegory of the olive tree.

There is a lot in this. It's jam-packed with incredible truths that I think will make a big difference for you this week. So I'm really excited to get

to that. But before we get there, of course, our study slash teaching tip, this one, you get a

fancy word or two that goes with

your study tip. The words, I feel like Sesame Street, the word of the day, or the words of the day,

is isegesis and exegesis. Those are two words used to describe common approaches to biblical study or scripture study generally.

And they mean similar things, but kind of in contrast to each other.

So isegesis means that you are taking a text and reading something into the text that maybe isn't necessarily

inherent to the original text or inherent to the author, but it's something that you're using

the text for. So we actually are really good at this without knowing it. This is where we have a topic we want to teach

and we do a quick search of LDS.org and we find a scripture or two that has the words or the

phrases in it that we like in that verse and we grab those verses and we use them to teach our topic.

Now, of course, that's not bad at all, but there is another way to

approach the scriptures that is exegesis. And exegesis is where you take what the scriptures

are actually saying to see what the author actually intended to say. And this one's a little

bit trickier, because it requires of us to read

...