Hello and welcome to the Scriptures are Real podcast.

This is the podcast where we talk about things in the scriptures that made them become real for us and that

allows us to have greater impact in our lives and to draw more power out of the scriptures.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and today is one of those few times where I'm not joined by

anyone else. It's just me. And I'm doing this

because it seems to me that the fall is a very, very important topic and one that we need to talk

about and that will help understand, people understand not only the scriptures, but the gospel

in general. And there's some elements of studying the fall that have really made the scriptures and the people

and the scriptures become very real to me. And so I wanted to share that with us today. I'd also

recommend that you listen to the interview that I did with Rebecca Call about the term help meet.

I think that's a really useful one as we're going to talk about

understanding the fall and Adam and Eve. And those are some people who have become very real to

me as we'll talk about as we go along. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time introducing or anything.

Let's just jump right into this podcast and talk about the fall. And it's something that as members of the Church of Jesus Christ

of Latter-day Saints, we seem to have a different understanding. Well, we don't seem to. We definitely

have a different understanding of the fall than most of our Jewish and our other Christian friends.

And so it's worth making sure we understand this to some degree. And I want to be very clear

that there are a number of things that we do understand and a number of things that we don't

understand. But the things we do understand really have an impact on the way we view life. So the two

questions that I find my students most often have are these two questions. Was there a need for the fall and

did it have to happen that way? So we will start with the first question, was there a need for the

fall? And if I were to do this and I've done this a whole bunch of times in classes and in other

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