How Do Genealogies Shape What It Means to Be Religious?

Thanks, Morgan. And thank you all for your time and your attention. A warning before I start. I was diagnosed with pneumonia a week ago today. I'm feeling much better now, but I might start coughing violently and suddenly at any point. And if I do, please bear with me. I'm hoping for a glass of water before too long.

Our Usual View of Religion

So, this is a story about how families end and then begin again. And it's also a story about how we might imagine what religion is. Often, we Latter-day Saints think of religion or what it means to be religious in terms of following a set of instructions. Bless you. Just in case.

In terms of following a set of instructions that God has given us for how to live with the promise that following these instructions will result in rewards. God has restored his gospel. That gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ's life and death and sacrifice and teachings. And it comes to us in phrases like qualify for exaltation or access the atonement.

And I want to point out that these phrases bear with them the intuitive sense that religion is something that we do.

But I think scripture, and in particular the Bible and Book of Mormon, give us another angle for thinking about this. Consistently in these texts, humanity's relationship with God is something that God initiates. God instigates. God reaches out. God seeks us. In scripture, we might say religion is something that God does.

The main character of the Bible is not Adam or Moses or Paul, it is God. The main character of the Book of Mormon is not Nephi or Alma or Moroni, it is God. The main character of Christianity is not me, it is God. And to show this clearly, I want to look at a genre of passage that we often dismiss as mere procedure or appendix and therefore often skip, the genealogies.

These are all over the Bible, of course, especially Genesis. They're at the beginning of the two gospels in the New Testament, and I think we have a version of the genealogies in the Book of Mormon, too. I'm thinking of the short book of Omni, where the accelerated narrative of the passing of the plates becomes a form of family history. And my purpose here is twofold, to discuss one of the most famous genealogies of the Bible and then compare it to Omni. And then use both of these to reveal a way of reading scripture that can help us understand a new angle on what it means to be a religious person.

First, two bits of housekeeping. One, our Christian Bible has with it two collections of books. We call them the Old Testament and the New Testament. The books that Christians call the Old Testament are for the most part the same books that Jewish people just call the Bible or the Hebrew Bible because most of them are overwhelmingly in Hebrew.

But Christians tend to rearrange the order of these books and to read them as pointing to Jesus. And read in that way, I think it's right to call this kind of remixed version the Old Testament, something that Christians make. So I'll be doing that throughout. Secondly, in December of 2025, the first presidency put out a statement authorizing the use of multiple translations of the Bible. And I think that's deeply important.

Because, to be frank, I think the biggest reason many members of our church get lost in the Bible is because the 400-year-old English of the King James Version is hard to understand. There are a number of other translations of the Bible. The First Presidency is authorized. One of them is the New Revised Standard Version. That is the version most academics use, and it is the one I will be using today. So those two points aside,

How might the genealogies reveal a new way of thinking about religion?

Why Genealogies

Marshall Johnson's definitive book, The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies, has a deceptive title because he says there's more than one purpose of the genealogies. I want to zoom in on just a couple. The first of these is that the genealogies are a literary device and let's say a bit about that. We don't often think about scripture as a form of literature but that is obviously what it is and all that means is that the authors of scripture made choices about what words to use and what to write about and how to organize their stories and we should pay attention to those choices. Latter-day Saints tend to use scripture like an instruction manual.

We read verses like encyclopedia entries defining faith or testimony, but we might ask questions like this, does it make a difference who was speaking in the text? Might we expect Moses to have a different definition of faith than Alma does based on their radically different life experiences and backgrounds? Why wouldn't we? Why might one book of scripture use different words than another?

Why does Genesis linger so long over the story of Joseph sent into Egypt and move so quickly through the life of Isaac? These are all choices that the authors of scripture made. And we can learn a lot by thinking about them. I think as much as we might learn by simply looking at the words themselves.

So Marshall Johnson wants us to ask these kinds of questions when it comes to the genealogies. Why are they where they are? Why do some genealogies give us ages and other ones don't? Or to cite a specific example, why does the author of Genesis spend so much time giving us so much detail about the life of Noah, the sort of bird he sent out from the ark, the long and frankly embarrassing story of his sons covering him when he becomes drunk, and then simply cut suddenly into a chapter long discussion of all of Noah's grandchildren. What's the point of this?

I want to suggest that the Bible uses his genealogies to change how we read the stories that come between these long lists of names. We modern readers expect scripture to move at the pace of individuals. We assume that the driving force in stories, just like the driving force in the world that we live in today, is individual people. Individual people's choices and decisions.

So we want to see in scripture the archetypical narratives of most of the media we consume, from Harry Potter novels to Disney movies. The hero's journey, an active character like Abish or Moses who's confronted by challenges, makes hard choices, and finally accomplishes what God wants him or her to do. So when we tell stories about the Book of Mormon, we emphasize the Nephi had faith, Abinadi is brave, Moroni endured to the end. And when we read the Bible, we skip around. Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Daniel. We just flip past the long descriptions of buildings in Ezekiel and Kings. We ignore the Bible's careful attention to the precise delineation of what territories were controlled by what tribes of Israel.

We don't spend time with the extensive material in scripture that doesn't deal with stories of individuals.

And this is critical. Reading the Bible in this way means that we're not reading it in the way the authors intended us to read it. Reading it in this way tempts us to think that it is humans, not God, who are the main character. And that religion is about what humans do, not about what God does. It focuses on these characters, on their choices, and avoids the much larger perspectives that the parts of the text we skip.

But scripture has a way of escaping this trap. And that is one of the purposes of the genealogies. They zoom the story of scripture out, pulling us away from individuals and reframing the story of scripture as one that takes place over generations. A scale far beyond any individual action. They direct us to read scripture as a story of God bending history beyond the lives of any individual person.

They show us that God acts at a pace and a scale far vaster than individual lives. And if we read scripture like this, we learn to read it less as a morality story about individual people making good choices and more as a way to understand how the world works in a way differently than we are accustomed to. To paraphrase Theodore Parker, scripture is teaching us that there is an arc to history. And therefore we should understand our particular personal lives in terms of that arc. The literary critic Terry Eagleton put it this way, being religious in essence is a choice to see the world as a gift rather than as an accident. And once you decided that, you start seeing your life in a different context.

In her book on Genesis, Marilyn Robinson cites this remarkable passage. Chapter 50, verse 20. This is Joseph of Egypt speaking to his brothers. After they've come to him in fear and hunger, seeking a relief from famine and finding to their shock the brother they had sold into slavery is now in a position of power. Joseph has reassured them that he means them no harm, but then their father dies and the brothers begin to worry again, worried that Joseph might now seek vengeance. And then in verse 20, Joseph tells them this, even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good in order to preserve numerous people as he is doing today. Again, that's the New Revised Standard translation. This is the point. If the preservation of the covenant was dependent on the good behavior of Abraham's descendants, it would have perished a dozen times before Joseph. When Jacob lies to his father and abuses the trust of his brother, and then when his own children lie to him so they can abuse their brother, when he favors one of his sons over the others, and when the rest then collude to sell Joseph into slavery and eventually to slaughter an entire village, which they do in Genesis 34.

And we might say the same about any of us. When you or I repeatedly fail and hurt each other and make mistakes that would void any covenant we had with God if that covenant were the equivalent of a legal contract. But what Joseph is telling us is that the covenant is not like that. Rather, as Robinson puts it, God lets human beings be human beings. His will is accomplished through or despite them, but is never dependent on them. God finds ways to fulfill his covenant regardless of what any single one of us might do. So when Joseph's brothers cast him into the pit and sell him to slavery, two things are happening. In the immediate particular moment, human beings are being cruel and flawed and petty as we so often are. And at that point, God might seem far away. It's boggling to imagine this is what God would have happen to Joseph.

But the abuse that Joseph is suffering is part of a much bigger story too. At the same time Joseph is suffering, God is finding ways to use that brutality to accomplish a greater purpose of healing and preservation. And it is that long, meticulous work of God, rather than the virtues or foibles of any individual human, that Genesis wants us to pay attention to. And trusting in that long, meticulous work of God is the best definition I know of what it means to be a Christian. Now this does not mean everything will work out or everything happens for a reason. It's pretty clear that things don't work out for a lot of people in Genesis and for a lot of people alive today. Similarly, that God bends Joseph's suffering to a larger purpose doesn't mean that God made Joseph suffer.

But it does mean we're called to hope that ultimately God is pushing humanity toward the good. That's what the apostle Paul means when he says in the epistle to the Romans that to have faith means to trust that God is righteous, that ultimately God keeps his promises.

The Genealogy of Abraham

So with that in mind, let's turn to a genealogy.

Boom, that's a lot. This is Genesis chapter 11 and the first little bit of chapter 12. And I want to acknowledge my debt here to the great commentator on the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann, who calls this section, the break between Genesis 11 and 12, the most important chapter break in the Bible.

Now two points about this passage. First, note that this is where Genesis introduces Abraham to us. Latter-day Saints might say, have Abraham's story before this point. But to my earlier point about literary choices, this is where Genesis wants us to meet Abraham. This is how Genesis wants to introduce him to make a point. He is presented to us here, as you see on the top, right there as the son of a long line of people descended from Shem. He is the husband of Sarai. They have no children. His family leaves their home and his father dies. And that's the end of chapter 11. This feels like a roller coaster, declining, declining, declining until a sudden surge back up in chapter 12, but I want to stay for a moment in chapter 11 and see what the genealogy is doing to us. Note some of these details that I've highlighted here. The ages of Abraham's ancestors. 500 years, 400 years, 200 years, 200, 100.

Now, note subtle story there. Set aside whether or not these people actually live this long. That's less relevant than the fact that the genealogy is telling us that slowly, slowly, slowly, the descendants of Shem are living less and less.

That is entropy. This genealogy is showing us a world in which collapse is inevitable. Our lives left to themselves will eventually simply unwind.

You've all heard reporting, I am sure, that tech companies like Microsoft and Apple build products to eventually break down. I had to stop playing basketball in my mid-30s because my knees wouldn't take it anymore. And even more seriously, we confront a world that often seems to be folding into decay.

The natural world is struggling with pollution. Our politics are hostile and cynical. And even that reality aside, it is obvious that on social media, optimism is considered naive. Study after study has shown that it is negativism and pessimism and what is called doomerism that gets people to watch your video or read your post.

So not only are we grappling with knees that wear down and institutions that seem dysfunctional, we are told incessantly that to believe the possibility that things might be different, that the world can improve, is naive and gullible.

We expect the world to fail. We expect our lives to be like the family of Shem, slowly, slowly collapsing into barrenness and death. No new birth, no new future, no new hope.

But the marvel of the Bible is that barrenness is God's playground.

And suddenly and abruptly, God speaks and everything is different. Genesis chapter 12, and now the Lord said to Abram, this is clearly intentionally echoing Genesis chapter one, when God creates the world by speaking it. There and here, God speaks into a space that is empty and futile and disordered and brings into it rebirth.

In Romans four, Paul says that God calls into existence things that do not exist. And when God speaks to Abraham here, he is calling into existence something new, a new people, a new family, a new promise to Abraham that he and his family will be changed and remade and reborn.

For Abraham and for the author of the book of Genesis, Abraham's story begins with God's call. And then we are told that God went, or I'm sorry, that Abraham went as the Lord had told him. Genesis wants to see, wants us to see this stark distinction between the empty wasting away of the world on one hand and the sudden rebirth that God's speech can bring.

The most important characteristic of Abraham here is his trust in the possibility that God promised him. The possibility that the future might not be like the past. Abraham could now imagine something new. He could imagine a different world, and he could imagine that because God spoke to him.

This is not to say that in the book of Genesis, pain and injustice can simply be waved away. Genesis says nothing as simple as everything happens for a reason. But what the book does say is that God's plans extend beyond our own and that the possibility of rebirth and renewal exists even within whatever pain we are suffering and our ability to believe in that possibility, to imagine something different. That brings new life.

The central question of being religious then is how we respond to that. Can you imagine that possibility of renewal?

How can you respond to that possibility?

The Genealogy of Omni

Let's compare this to Omni. This is another book that we often rush over because it seems on the face of it simply to be providing a lot of genealogical data that connects Nephi to Mosiah. But I think that as with Genesis, there's a lot of artistry here. Of course, the BYU professor Sharon Harris has written most profoundly about Omni, and I want to point out some observations that she's made that can parallel these two passages.

First, we see in Omni that same slow entropy that afflicted the ancestors of Abraham. The same decay, the same collapse. In particular, we can see an evolution in what the plates themselves are for. Note that Omni himself says up there that he is writing to preserve genealogy.

But his sons seem to forget that. By the time we get to Chemesh over there, he simply says, I'm writing because I'm told to. That's why I'm writing. He sees no larger reason or purpose here.

Now this matters to them, right? The plates for Omni is a way to foreground family identity and connectedness. But even his son seemed to forget that. And of course, this is not why Nephi wanted to write the plates. Nephi actually explicitly says he is not writing his genealogy. It is interesting to watch then this transformation, this forgetting of purpose. But something else is going on below this.

Nephi says, I want to write to persuade men to remember God. I'm going to tell my story to persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham. But by the time we get to Jerim, it's about genealogy. By the time we get to Omni, it's genealogy. By the time we get to Chemish, it’s simply this is what our family does. So we're seeing here not simply a change in the purpose of keeping these records, but a forgetting of the activity of God in these people's lives.

Here's two cases of that. Amaron over on the right there attributes the destruction of a wicked part of the Nephites to the will of God. He says that the Lord visited them in great judgment. He doesn't say what that means if there was a battle or a famine or whatever, but he also says, this destruction is according to the words God spoke to our fathers. Not to him, not to his generation, but to his ancestors. And then, as Harris points out, he quotes this memory of something God once said, except that it is not something God once said.

God spoke to our fathers saying that inasmuch as you will not keep my commandments, you shall not prosper in the land. That quotation appears nowhere in the Bible.

He is reversing what Lehi actually said, which is, you do keep my commandments, then you will prosper in the land.

Amaron is interpreting his life and his world through this distorted memory of Lehi's statement that he's trying to quote but doesn't get quite right. The voice of God here is distorted. It's something of memory, not something that is present.

And then Amaron's nephew, Abinadom.

Well, while Amoron gestures at the voice of God, Abinadom doesn't even try to do that. He simply states outright, I know of no revelation save that which has been written, neither prophecy. Wherefore that is sufficient is written.

How to read Abinadom? On the one hand, we might see in that first clause, I know of no revelation, as an expression of unhappiness, of sadness, of wistfulness, and maybe the second clause, an attempt to make up for that. This is the voice of someone, I think, who is sadly overconfident, who is comfortable in stasis, who simply looks around him and says, nothing's gonna change.

What does that clause mean, that which is sufficient is written?

Maybe something like all the important things have already been written about. All the important things have already happened. Things are not going to change from here on out. This is just the way things are.

And we're back. We are back at the end of Genesis 11. In barrenness, in death, in stasis, in that kind of paralysis that you experience when you are depressed. Nothing will change.

And again, God bursts into this stasis and turns it upside down.

Amaleki, Abinadom's son, who suddenly, bogglingly, incredibly, says that one day God called out to the king Mosiah and told him to go into the wilderness and to take all those who would hearken unto the word of the Lord. This, a couple of verses after, Abinadom tells us, I know of no revelation or prophecy. What we have up here is an echo of Lehi being called out of Jerusalem, which itself is an echo of the Exodus from Egypt, which itself is an echo of that great, great moment at the beginning of Genesis 12. God is calling Mosiah out of Abinadom's paralysis, of this perhaps unchosen and yet still paralyzing state of sameness.

That numb certainty that things are bad and nothing will ever change.

And again, as with Abraham, God simply breaks that stasis. He brings rebirth and renewal where human action can't. And the chief question that these people confront is not what they have to do to deserve God doing this, because of course none of them deserve it, none of us deserve it. Rather, the question is, what do we do when it happens?

This call can be dangerous. It can destabilize. It can cause tumult. Mosiah and his people, as they went into the wilderness and needed sustaining, they leaned on the power of God's arm.

And perhaps just as daunting, this call requires a stunning transformation of a sort that can often be uncomfortable. God leads Mosiah and his people to another people, not of Zarahemla, a foreign people whose language was different.

And these two people had to merge and find ways to live together. And the impact of that was hard, very hard on the Nephites. But by the end of all of this, Amaleki leaves a message far different than that of his father.

Amaleki says, believe. Believe in prophecy, believe in revelation. And that might mean to believe in the possibility, the theoretical possibility that these things can happen. But it also means to imagine them. To be brave when they come, to believe in the possibility that God might surprise you. Believe in the power of hope. Believe in the possibility of rebirth. In the reality of renewal and of restoration. Believe that those things can overcome those days when the world feels numb and frozen and paralyzed and broken.

When the world feels like it cannot be fixed, when nothing can ever possibly be changed. Instead, imagine that your life, that all of our lives can be, and perhaps will be, called to be radically different, and that that difference will bring mercy and freedom.

Believe in that possibility because I think that belief is really what it means to be religious.

We'll leave that with the name of Jesus Christ, amen.