Second hour in LDS Sunday meetings for 2026 Come Follow Me covers the Old Testament or, as scholars generally refer to it, the Hebrew Bible. Between the sparse material in the manual, a teacher that often doesn’t know that much about the OT, and class members who know even less — well, the signal to noise ratio in class discussion is often distressingly low. The best advice one can give to an LDS teacher or class member is to buy and read a NRSV study bible.

And if you want a commentary to go with it, try the recently published The Old Testament for Latter-day Saints (Signature Books, 2023) by Alex Douglas, who has a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Harvard. The book is full of good context and commentary, the material is directed to LDS readers, and it’s less than 200 pages, so you’ll actually read it. Highly recommended.

So, based on the first couple of chapters, let’s pull a few observations about Genesis from the book.

First (not from the book) notice that the manual doesn’t get done with Genesis until the last week of March. So roughly one quarter of the class is devoted to Genesis! The Book of Genesis is the most important book in the OT in the view of LDS leadership. It’s practically the only OT book that matters. You could summarize the LDS OT curriculum as just Genesis, Exodus 20 (the 10 Commandments), Isaiah, and Malachi, and put everything else in a short appendix or something.

Second (again, not from the book) the curriculum doesn’t just cover Genesis. It throws in the LDS books of Moses and Abraham as well. Depending on the teacher and how they cover the material, some class members who think they are learning about Genesis are actually learning the LDS re-write of Genesis or, if you prefer, Joseph Smith’s (inspired?) commentary on Genesis, expressed via a re-write of the narratives. If you want a commentary, read the Douglas book or one of the dozens of good introductions to the Old Testament, such as the John Collins books, instead. I just think that when an Old Testament class studies Genesis, it should focus on Genesis.

Third, from the book. (1) The early Genesis narratives are foundational myths (“myth” used here in the positive sense of the word). “The opening books of the Old Testament certainly contain sections that read like history. But if we look at the function these stories serve, … it is hard to escape the conclusion that these stories work in much the same way that America’s founding myth does. If we read these chapters only as histories, we miss the primary purpose for which they were written” (p. 2).

Fourth, contra the hyper-literalist approach to Genesis narratives that is standard in current LDS discourse and teaching: “Despite this literalist bent in LDS tradition, there is nevertheless some room for understanding these stories as non-historical, even among orthodox believers. Bruce R. McConkie, for example, cites multiple pieces of the Garden of Eden story as being figurative, including the very existence of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” (p. 19, emphasis added).

Fifth, let’s add one paragraph on some specific content, namely the word “firmament” in KJV Gen 1:6-8. What the heck is firmament, you might ask. Here’s a slightly edited (because I can’t do Hebrew characters here) version of footnote 1 on page 2: “The Hebrew word here is raqia, which translates to ‘dome,’ but the word is rare in Hebrew. Ancient Greek translators were not quite sure what to make of this word, so they translated it as stereoma, which literally means ‘a firm thing.’ [KJV translators] appear to have been equally perplexed, which is why they render the Hebrew as ‘firmament'” (p. 2). If you understand that the Bible view of the cosmos is just a big dome spread out above the land here below (the Earth) with God on his throne hovering somewhere above and beyond the dome, many biblical verses and narratives will make a lot more sense. The image at the top of this post is a rendering of the Hebrew view of the cosmos.

So I’ll do an Old Testament post maybe once a month.

  • Share a good or bad experience as a teacher or student in an LDS Gospel Doctrine class.
  • Do you find a mythic (in the positive sense) reading of Genesis enlightening or threatening?
  • What’s your favorite OT translation?
  • What OT commentary do you like and use?
  • How old were you when you learned that the Hebrew view of the cosmos in Genesis 1, used throughout the OT and the NT, was just a big dome over the land of the Earth, plus a bunch of water under the Earth?