From Brigham Young University's Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute podcast, Faith, Illuminating Scholarship.

In 2026, we are releasing a series called Old Testament Reflections.

Each week, a scholar offers a short reflection on the Come Follow Me reading.

Today's piece, four readings from Genesis chapters 37 through 41, is written and read by Christian Heel.

I'm trying to think more carefully about how I encounter the Bible.

I am by nature and intellectual magpie. I'm always on the lookout for some beautiful thing that I can pick up and take back to my

nest of a brain. When it comes to the Bible, this eclectic approach is built into my biography.

I was raised as a Lassidy Saint. I have an undergraduate degree in Jewish history,

a masters in Syriac studies, and a PhD in theology. My spiritual worldview is informed by this

intellectual journey. What's more, I feel like I belong to a religious tradition that is intrinsically

additive. As Joseph Smith wrote from Liberty Jail in 1839, the first and fundamental principle of our

holy religion is that we believe that we have a

right to embrace all and every item of truth without limitation. This approach has merits. My mind is

filled with lovely things. But I've started to think more about the integrity of these lovely things

and how interconnected they are with their historical context and the intellectual and spiritual worlds that produce them.

If I am to pursue truth without limitation, I also need to consider the next step that Joseph Smith suggested and embrace the truth of something when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds,

and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.

The approach that I'm adopting involves reading the Bible less eclectically and more deliberately.

I still want to benefit from the insights of a variety of readers inside and outside my Lassaday Saint tradition,

but I want to try to understand ideas that I find compelling within the worlds that produce them.

For me, this increasingly looks like reading four different Bibles.

Let me try and show you, however imperfectly and provisionally, what I mean by this.

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