Hello and welcome to the scriptures a real podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about

elements of the scriptures that have become real to us because we think that that helps us

us draw more power out of them and we need all the power we can get. I'm your host, Carrie Milstein, and I'm so excited to have with us again,

Josh Mattson, who is a seminary teacher and has studied the Dead Sea Scrolls

and the Hebrew Bible and the minor prophets.

And also, I mean, I'm just going to let Josh tell you about himself.

You may remember him from, he talked about the Passover with this before, and his experience with the Samaritan Passover. It was a fantastic episode. If you haven't listened to that one, go back to when we did Exodus 12 and find that episode. And you'll love hearing from Josh then. So welcome, Josh. Thanks, Kerry. Great to me back. So remind us, and we have new people now

by now in the audience. So just tell us a little bit about yourself, if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely.

So I studied engineering studies at BYU. After graduating there, I went on to graduate school

where I got a master's degree in

biblical studies from Trinity Western University in Vancouver, British Columbia. When I finished my

master's degree there, I made the trek across the continent to Florida State University, where I did

my PhD there in religion, with an emphasis in religions of Western antiquity, which is a really

fancy way of saying, we studied the period from about 600 BC to about 680, and given just a broad,

general sense of the ancient Jewish practices, ancient Judaism, Second Temple Judaism,

and then early Christianity. While I was writing my dissertation on the status of the minor

prophet in the Second Temple period and predominantly among the Dead Sea Skulls community,

I had the opportunity to be able to live in Israel for a year, where I worked at the University of Pfea on the scripta, Comoronica Electronica team. We'll talk a little bit more about how that project helped this section of scripture become a little more real for me. While there, I also was a fellow and scholar with the Orion Center for Densey Scrolls

research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

After finishing my research came back and finished my dissertation and then was hired as a

full-time religious educator with seminaries and institutes of religion.

And so now I spend my days teaching high school students at Bingham High School, going

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