Welcome back to my Book of Mormon podcast. I'm Marie Kent, and I am excited about this one.

It has, wait for it, a narrative. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's the typical flowery prose and that off-the-chart, comma, usage, but also an actual story.

Because what are we reading today? We're reading letter seven that Oliver Cowdery wrote to his

friend, W.W. Phelps. You know what's even better? This thing gives context. Don't know who

the Jaredites and Nephites are? No problem. Oliver's got you covered. So today's open letter

gives us a description of the time after an angel came down

and talked to Joseph Smith and before he removes golden plates from beneath the hill, Comorah.

Now, there are a few things you're assumed to already be familiar with. One, the Christmas story,

the part where Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus flee to Egypt. And two, the Jaredites and

Nephites were people who lived in pre-Columbian America, and they all got wiped out. I personally

needed a bit of refresher on this on account of having never learned this when I was a child.

This is all still brand new to me. So here we are.

Book of Mormon, the book of Alma, chapter 45 versus 11 to 14.

And please recall that on this show we have a drinking game with one of the words being,

Yay.

Alma 45, verse 11.

Yay, drink.

And then they shall see wars and pestilences. Yay, drink again. Famines and bloodshed even until the people of Nephi shall become extinct. Yay, drink. And this because they shall

dwindle in unbelief and fall into the works of darkness and lasciviousness and all manners of

iniquity.

Yea, drink, I say unto you that because they shall sin against so great light and knowledge,

yea, more drinking, I say unto you that from that day even the fourth generation shall not

...