Hello and welcome to the Scriptures A Real podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about the times that the scriptures have become real for us.

And we believe that when they're real, we draw more power into our lives and that we need that power as much as we can get.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein.

And I'm excited to have with me a friend and colleague, Joseph, although we call him Joe Spencer, who just has so much to offer and to bring

to us today. So welcome, Joe. Yeah, thanks for having me. My pleasure. Why don't you just tell us a

little bit about yourself and what you're doing, and then we can jump into the scriptures?

Sure. I'm, so I'm on the faculty in ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, and where I teach primarily, almost exclusively Book of Mormon classes, because that's my academic bread and butter. My training is in philosophy. So I hear words like real. Scriptures are real. And I go, yeah, real, what are we made by real?

That's me.

Good point.

But I bring philosophy and theology to bear on how we read scripture and what it means to read

scripture and how scriptural texts speak to us, especially the Book of Mormon.

So that's kind of what I do now.

Great stuff. And I've just loved the work that Joe has done. And especially with Book of Mormon and Isaiah and so on, it's just fun stuff. So many different perspectives that we can bring to the

scriptures and to the gospel to learn from each

other. Well, Joe, I know there are lots of times the scriptures have become very real to you,

and I hope we'll talk about other times in the future. But I know one of the times you've mentioned

to me is the story of Joseph of Egypt, which is also one of my favorite stories. So I'd love to just

hear from you about that story and how it speaks to you. Yeah, sure. I mean, I can actually sort of

mark the moment, if you will, that this story came alive for me. It was when I read Robert

Alters, the art of Biblical Narrative.

I was an undergrad.

I had been reading a fair bit in biblical criticism, right? Reading biblical scholars who most of the time analyze texts into sources.

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