I'm John Collins, this is Bible Project Podcast and today Tim Mackie and I get to talk

with our friend and Hebrew Bible scholar Dr. Carmen Ims.

Carmen has been on the podcast before, talking about her book, Baring God's name, Wise

Sinai, still matters.

Because she's a good friend of ours and because she has an emphasis on the scroll of Exodus

in her studies, we thought how great would it be to sit down with her at the end of our

journey through Exodus and debrief a bit about the things we've been talking about.

It was wonderful to talk with Carmen, but it was also a little discombobulating actually

because Carmen presents a few alternative interpretations to stories that we've been reading.

Namely, the story in Exodus 19 where Israel comes to the base of Mount Sinai.

God asks them to become ritually pure and prepare themselves to make a covenant with

him.

As Tim and I talked through that story, Tim made a compelling case for how Israel was

meant to go up the mountain when the trumpet's blast.

And when they don't go up the mountain, they've failed a test.

They failed to trust God.

But Carmen is going to give us an alternative perspective on this story, in which Israel

was never meant to go up the mountain and they passed the test by fearing God and staying

at the base of the mountain and sending Moses up instead as an intercessor.

And so as we listen along as two Hebrew Bible scholars discuss a passage in the Bible and

come to fundamentally two different perspectives on what it means.

If you're like me, you might get a little flustered.

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