***IMPORTANT NOTE: The feedback we have received on this episode has pointed out that we failed to properly acknowledge the systems of patriarchy and oppression that hurt the women in this episode before moving on to try to liberate them in the text. In so doing, we caused more harm than help. We have plans to re-record this episode in the future.***
- The Power of Anger in the Work of Love by Beverly Wildung Harrison (Found in "Feminist Theology: A Reader by Ann Loades)
- "The Stealing of the Daughters of the Lamanites" by Alan Goff
- Nephite Feminism Revisited: Thoughts on Carol Lynn Pearson's View of Women in the Book of Mormon by Kevin & Shauna Christensen
- "On Religion" by John Caputo
- Mosiah 19:9-14
- Mosiah 23:31-34
- Mosiah 21&24
- Mosiah 21: 2-3
- Mosiah 24:13-15
- Mosiah 21:14-15
- Ezekiel 36:28
Transcribed by Maddie Daetwyler of @lightenprint
C: Hi, I’m Channing
E: And I’m Elise.
C: And this is the Faithful Feminists podcast.
E: But this is not just any Come Follow Me podcast. We do things a little differently here. We offer approachable feminist interpretations of the Come Follow Me manual for those who want to study and understand the scriptures in a framework of equality, social justice, and sisterhood. We are here to show you all the really good ways that faith and feminism work together to illuminate and deepen the gospel experience.
C: We’ve saved you a seat on the soft chairs. So join us today for a conversation about Mosiah chapters 18 through 24 for the dates May 11th through the 17th. We're so glad you're here today.
C: Welcome back friends. So in last week's episode, we talked about King Noah, and the really sad death of Abinadi. And we were so honored to talk about and discuss this very well-loved story. But today we get to continue on, and find out what happens to King Noah's people, and to King Noah himself. So, essentially what happens, right in the very first chapters of this section is King Noah is still being a naughty boy. And the people have kind of started to notice that he's really not a great leader. And so they kind of talk amongst themselves, and there comes to be a revolution, and it's led by a man named Gideon. And Gideon goes to kill the King and King Noah realizes that the Lamanites are soon to be upon them. So he tells everyone to run away, save your lives. And so seriously in the texts, King Noah is like “Abandon your wives and children, and run for your lives.” And some people do decide to do that, but the large majority of the people decide that if their wives and children are going to perish, then they'll perish with them. The men who didn't decide to do that end up lost in the wilderness with King Noah and his priests. And they get so mad at King Noah that they burn him on the stake.
E: Also in this block of texts, these chapters are a tale of two groups of people. We have the people of Alma and the people of Limhi, who is King Noah's son. And both of these groups of people experience bondage and oppression by the Lamanites, but also both groups experience the blessing of being set free by the hand of God. So first the people who followed Alma into the wilderness, those are the people who believed in God and repented and were baptized, and they lived in what honestly sounds like the true promised land. It sounds like the land of milk and honey, everyone is repenting and being baptized and taking on baptismal covenants to mourn with those that mourn and comfort those that need comfort. And there's no King, there's no contention. Everyone's just keeping the commandments and thriving out there. However, the Lamanites eventually take them into bondage. And during the same period of history, the people of Limhi, which is again, Noah's son, these people continue to live under Lamanite domination, and they try many, many times to free themselves before they're finally delivered by God.
E: So today we're going to be talking about something very special because we see women in the text. So we're going to spend time talking about different groups of daughters and what they do for their people. And then we're also going to spend a portion of the episode talking about what to do with our questions about scripture.
C: So like Elise said, we're super, super excited because anytime women show up in the Book of Mormon, Elise and I are always like, we have to take every opportunity, because, quite frankly, there's not a lot of opportunity. When we opened to these chapters and realize that their stories were right here, ready for us to explore and find the treasures in, we were just thrilled. So today we'll like Elise said, we'll be talking about two different sets of daughters. So the first group that we'll be talking about today is the daughters of Limhi’s people. And to set up the background and context of the story, when King Noah realizes that the Lamanites are coming to destroy his people, he basically just says to everyone, “All right, run away, fend for yourselves.” And so everyone scatters into the wilderness, but because, in a real life community, not everyone can run as fast as the fastest runners, the slower people started being left behind and King Noah said, “Men, leave your wives and children, and save yourselves.” And a small portion of men decided that this was a good idea, but the rest of them said, “If our wives and children are going to perish, then I'm going to perish with them.” And so they decided to stay back and just meet the same fate, and the Lamanites came upon the people who stayed, and I'm thinking in a moment of desperation for their lives, the scriptures say in Mosiah chapter 19, you can find this story in verses 9 through 14, it says, “And it came to pass that those who tarried with their wives and children caused that their fair daughters should stand forth and plead with the Lamanites that they would not slay them. And it came to pass that the Lamanites had compassion on them, for they were charmed with the beauty of their women.” The story is fascinating to me. And I kind of went through my own growth process as I started reading it. Originally, I wanted to be angry about the fact that these women were required to face the Lamanites in a violent situation and plead for their families. And I was having such a hard time getting past that, that I had to talk it over. That's just how I process things. So I was asking my husband one night, what do I do with this story? And I gave him all the details. And as he laid down for bed, he was like, what if they decided to do that? What if it was the daughter's choice to go out and plead for their lives and save their people? And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, you are so right. What if?” And it actually reminded me of Beverly Weldon Harrison's essay that we talked about last week. She’s the one who talked about anger. She talks about, in the same essay, how women have been the primary driving force of life and humanity throughout history. She says that historically, even though women have gone largely unnamed and unnoticed, it's their unnoticed acts of courage that save and propel human life and community. Scriptural examples of this include Pua and Shifra, those are the midwives who saved baby Moses during Pharaoh's rule. I also think of Esther and I think of Hagar. And so as we think about these scriptural examples, including the daughters of Limhi’s people, I wanted to share this quote that Harrison writes. She says, “The deepest danger to our cause is to portray ourselves and other women chiefly as victims, rather than those who have struggled for the gift of life against incredible odds. The revolution will come sooner if we celebrate the strength that shines forth in women's lives.” So even though at first I was tempted to view these fair daughters of Limhi’s people as victims, I was so grateful to be given an opportunity to think of them in a different light. And so while we may mourn in the silencing of women's voices, I think there is a path out of grief. These women's stories are waiting to be reclaimed. I think that historical and scriptural silence of women is not anything to be celebrated, but a feminist reader can offer her own blessing by reading positive qualities into the silence of the text. Lived experience matters. And though the details of our modern-day lives look different from those of women in sacred texts, we share more than we think. We share love and courage, we share faith and advocacy and resilience and ultimately strength. And so I think a question worth considering is, how does thinking of these fair women as heroes change their story for you? In what ways have you shown courage when you were afraid, faced with terror or insurmountable odds? How have you advocated for the gift of community and love?
E: These are such great questions. And to answer the first one, how does thinking of these fair women as heroes change their story for me? I think like you Channing, at first read, it's easy to fall into the, these women are victims and they've been forced to take on this role to save their whole people. But what was helpful as we were preparing for this episode is I began to see these women as both, perhaps they were the victim, and yet maybe they were stepping into their own power and their own voice. So in a way, they're their own heroes and they're their own saviors. They are their own way of moving toward liberation and redemption, and it comes from within and it takes courage and the effect of that courage and strength blesses an entire people.
E: Elise, you should just do a mic drop now. Because that was amazing. When I think of the question, in what ways have you shown courage when you were afraid? For me actually, an experience that comes to mind is kind of a more inner struggle that I've had. After the birth of my son, I really struggled hard with postpartum depression, and there came a point after not getting help for a really, really long time that I got to a place of serious difficulty as far as mental illness goes, and without like needing to put a trigger warning on this episode, just really dark. I was struggling with thoughts of suicidal ideation, and just really struggling with the guilt of not being good enough. And there came a point where I just realized, like, if I don't get help, I don't know if I'm going to make it. And it took serious courage for me to make a phone call, to get into a counseling office, and to be brave and vulnerable with what I was struggling with so that I could get help and figure out how to make it through. Even if we're not talking about being a feminist advocate or, you know, big things that seem to be outside of us, these women's stories can also show us how we can show strength and resilience, even in our own inner landscape of our lives.
C: And I think going along with that too, like that same question of how does viewing these women as heroes rather than victims, I think can translate really well to mental illness. Because I think a lot of times when we talk about mental illness, even myself, as a survivor and as someone who does have a mental illness, a lot of times, I think of myself as a victim, or I think of other people like, “Oh, that sucks that she's struggling with that,” instead of reframing it and realizing how much courage and willpower and determination it takes to make a choice every day to still live your happiest and best life. And so, yeah, there's a lot of implications in the story and they're all really good.
E: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And to me, it also reminds me that there were people watching these women, too, probably their children were watching. And as a child to see my mother go up in the face of danger and probably share some really strong words and be very passionate and, and beg to save the life of their people, what an inspiring and impactful moment that would shape how I understood my mother for generations and generations to come. These mothers and these wives and these women would be at the heart of their generation’s story.
C: So something that I thought was super fascinating about this block of text is that this same theme of daughters showing up to save their people doesn't show up just once, it shows up twice. And I feel like when something shows up in sacred texts more than once, when it's repeated, then we really ought to pay attention to it. So something that, as I was studying into these stories a little bit more, that I found that I thought was interesting is that these stories are actually used to argue the truthfulness of the entire Book of Mormon based on similarity shared with stories in the Old Testament book of Judges. And the other story that we're alluding to is that a little bit later on, I think in chapter 20, after Limhi’s people have been saved, they're now in bondage to the Lamanites, they're paying something 50% of everything that they have. I said 50% of their happiness earlier, and I think that's pretty accurate. They're in bondage to the Lamanites. And then in the same story, 24 Lamanite daughters go out dancing at the edges of the forest. And it just so happens that the priests of Noah who had run away earlier in the story were there, and they laid in wait and watched these 24 Lamanite daughters, and eventually ended up kidnapping them. And this one event, the disappearance of these 24 laminate daughters, caused a ton of wars and discontent between the Lamanites and Limhi’s people, because originally the Lamanites thought that Limhi’s people had stolen them. And then it turned out that that was a misunderstanding. And anyway, it all got figured out that it was the priests, but it took the Lamanites a long time to find these missing daughters. And by the time that they did, they had discovered that these wicked priests of Noah had married these women. And the leader of these priests, his name was Amulon, and when the Lamanites discovered Amulon and his people, Amulon was, rightly so, pretty afraid that Lamanites would just kill everybody. And the scriptures say in Mosiah chapter 3, verses 31 through 34, “It came to pass that Amulon did plead with the Lamanites. And he also sent forth their wives who were the daughters of the Lamanites, to plead with their brethren, that they should not destroy their husbands. And the Lamanites had compassion on Amulon and his brethren, and did not destroy them, because of their wives.” In my studies about these stories, I came across an article titled The Stealing of the Daughters of Lamanites, and it was written by a man named Alan Goff. And even though the essay was fascinating and made a lot of great points, something that kind of turned me off that was right in the introduction paragraph was this sentence. Alan says, “The story can be read as an adventure tale.” And I kind of had this experience where all at once I was like, well, yeah, of course this is an adventure tale -- if you're a man. Because this is a text that's written by men. And I feel like for women, we have a different experience reading the story of the 24 kidnapped Lamanite daughters. Because even though the text omits the particular details of what happens during a kidnapping and subsequent taking to wife, I don't think that it's too much of a stretch of a woman's imagination to fill in the blanks. And I think sometimes it's easier to just gloss over what actually happens here in the text, because the phrasing of it makes it easy to do, but imagining just for a moment and finding ourselves in the shoes of these 24 Lamanite daughters can bring a lot of compassion and sorrow and anger, and all of the feelings that are totally acceptable to have. And so whatever you're feeling when you come to this story is welcome here.
E: Yeah, you make a great point because the text just says that they were carried off or carried away by these priests that were watching them. But it's so much more than that. It's not some type of kitschy high school play where you just kind of rush off stage and then get to go back to your own homes. These women's entire lives were disrupted in ways that were horrendous and torturous and heartbreaking. They left their culture and their family and their friends and their children. And they were taken into a new place and forced to become wives.
C: And so thinking about their experiences, I think sometimes when we look at the parallels of the story and we think about what happens later on in the text and realize that these women are actually sticking up for their husbands, who really aren't great people. I think sometimes we can ask why, why would they do that? Because, they live with them, don't they know that they're terrible people? And another essay that I came across with that exact question in my heart, it's titled Nephite Feminism Revisited written by Kevin and Shauna Christensen. And they say this, “24 Lamanite maidens are abducted by the runaway priests of King Noah. One thing that the complex and richly elusive narrative omits is how we are to judge the maidens themselves. Why do these Lamanite daughters plea that their husbands might be spared? This isn't quite same situation as in King Noah's flight from the Lamanites, when those left behind ‘caused that their fair daughters should stand forth and plead with the Lamanites, that they would not slay them.’ We don't know enough about what real hard choices these women had to face. Was escape at any point, really ever an option after being taken back into Lamanites society, what would have been their economic and social status had they managed to escape or separate themselves from their husbands? Is Amulon the type to leave anything to chance when the Lamanite army finally found him? Where were their children at this moment? Thinking about the issues confronting these women can be sobering and enlightening. Then, as now, to the extent that women have been denied choice and agency, they cannot be judged for the hard choices they make.” And I think what this quote is really demonstrating is exactly what we're trying to point out, that these women really did face some difficult and harrowing circumstances, and something that these authors pointed out is that the text does not provide a judgment call for these women. And so I think then what the text is really asking us to do is not make a judgment call either, but to listen and witness their stories.
E: I appreciate this perspective because it shines a light on the complexity, not only of the situation, but also the complexity of the choices that these women had to make and the complex lives that they were living. And so when we approach the scriptures with a feminist lens and we look for the women, and we try and understand their stories, and we ask a lot of questions, it's okay if we can't come up with the best answers, and it's okay that we don't make judgment calls, but what's happening to us as we read these stories with a feminist lens is that we're able to gain a different understanding of the text and of the people who experienced these things.
C: Something that's sticking out to me, even as we're literally talking about this right now, that I hadn't thought of before, is that this is maybe one of the only scriptures that I can remember right now that doesn't make a judgment call about these women. There’s no saying, like in the daughters of Zion, how they were all dressed up in their fine linens and it made it like there was a judgment call made there that they were prideful and vain. And there's also not any other defining characteristics that they were chaste or pure or good or whatever. There's no judgment call being made here. It's just, these are the facts. This is a story, the end. And so the fact that the text doesn't make a judgment call, I think in this particular way, makes it kind of a treasure, because it does seem to be one of a kind in that there are no defining qualities of these women other than the acts that speak for themselves.
E: Another thing that comes to mind for me, too, when we think about these 24 Lamanite daughters in comparison with the fair daughters of Limhi’s people, I think we're trying to offer the reading here that these women are active agents of their own salvation. And in this way, I think it helps them twist free and it helps us as readers let them twist free of a really simple and easy understanding of them as victims. And it helps reframe them as liberators of themselves and their people.
C: Which is a generous and lovely reading of a story that would otherwise, that could otherwise, bring a lot of pain and heartache.
E: Yeah. Because it could bring pain and heartache in two ways, 1) reading them as victims and sitting in the sorrow and not seeing the ways that they might have moved intentionally to take action. But another way, is that we could just skim over the stories and forget them altogether, and erase them.
C: Because their stories are hard. And this is one of the benefits of sitting with the text, slowing down, and looking at the details, because it is easy to just skim off the experience by saying, ”Oh, they were carried away,” and forget the details. But by sitting with a difficult story and listening to what it has to tell us, It does end up giving us a blessing.
C: So moving into the next portion of our discussion, talking about questions that spring up from the text, in the Come Follow Me manual, talking about Mosiah chapters 21 and 24, the manual asks us, What did we learn by comparing the captivity of Alma’s people and Limhi’s people? And so essentially what the manual is asking us to do is take the two parallel stories, which are very, very similar and do a compare and contrast. And as we did this, Elise and I actually ended up finding more similarities than we did find differences. And I feel like this is in kind of striking opposition to what we would typically find in a pretty typical Sunday School class. And it definitely brought up a lot of questions for us. And instead of coming to the episode today with answers that we're certain about and confident in, instead, today we bring you our vulnerability. And we kind of wanted to share and talk about how sometimes when we come to the scriptures with a feminist lens, we don't always walk away with the answers. Sometimes we will walk away with more questions, and it's okay to have those, and it's okay to wrestle with them, and to not have an answer all of the time, because sometimes these answers need to be worked through.
E: So when we were looking to try and compare and contrast the stories of oppression and liberation for Alma’s people and Limhi’s people, we were kind of like, wait, what? What are we supposed to be contrasting? Both of these groups of people are trying to do everything they can to stay free and to stay happy and to get away from the Lamanites. So then we thought about, Okay, well, can we imagine what it would have been like to be Alma’s people or to be Limhi’s people during this place and time? And when I was doing that, it did bring up a lot of questions to me about the nature of God. Because if I'm Alma’s people, Alma’s people are painted as the ones that are righteous from the get-go. They're the painted as the ones who rely on God, more than Limhi’s people, and they're repenting. And they're getting baptized in this water fountain, and still they come under bondage by the Lamanites. And so if I was Alma’s people, I'd be like, what in the heck, how can I do everything that I'm supposed to be doing, and why do bad things still happen? Right? And I think that's the question of what's called theodicy, why do bad things happen to good people? And I think even now in this time of pandemic, a lot of us find ourselves asking those same questions. And when that happens for me, when my physical lived world questions that I have align with the text and the questions that I ask of the text, it makes me really confused, because I'm like, wait, what is this time warp that's happening between my real life and the scriptures?
C: Well, it’s because you're a human reading the text. We like to think of ourselves as, and I'm not saying just Elise and I, but as human beings, we like to think of ourselves as coming to the text with some kind of benefit of knowledge of things that happen or something that we're supposed to learn. But the truth is that when we come to the text, we bring our own biases. We bring our own human emotions. We bring our own experiences from the day, from the week, from the month. So, that makes the time warp not that weird.
E: I mean, these are questions that I'm going to be asking again and again for my entire life. There's a book that I really love. It's called On Religion by John Caputo, and he writes about how God and Jesus are the place of the question. Because we'll never fully know for certain, the nature of God or the nature of Jesus or the nature of love or hatred. We can never box them into finite answers that are black and white and sure and certain, and that's one of the things that I've grown to love about God, is that God invites me to question again and again and again, and as I do that, it's okay that I don't have the right answer. It's okay that my faith doesn't look like a puzzle, that I'm just missing a few pieces and then it'll all come together in perfect clarity for me. And I was reminded of those things during this imaginative practice of reading myself into Alma’s people and Limhi’s people, because with Limhi’s people, they come together as a people and try and work out their own salvation and liberation, and they try and fight against the Lamanites time and time again, and nothing is working and they still come into bondage. And so if I was that people, I would feel exhausted and I would say, wait a second, am I -- the way that the text frames it is that Limhi’s people “had forgotten God and they were sinning.” And so God wasn't helping them. And with that question, I asked myself like, wait, do I believe in a God who punishes people with bondage and oppression for sinning? And those are big questions to ask, and everything I know about my God says no. So what do we do when we have these questions in the text?
C: And I, too, came away from the text with very similar questions as Elise. Do I believe in a God who allows people to be oppressed because of their sins? And part of my struggle with this portion of the text is because I believe one thing, and the text says something else. If we read in chapter 21 verses 2 and 3, this is talking about the people of Limhi and their experience in bondage to the Lamanites. It says, “And it came to pass that after many days, the Lamanites began again to be stirred up in anger against the Nephites. And they began to come into the borders of the land roundabout. Now they durst not slay them because of the oath which their King made unto Limhi, but they would smite them on their cheeks and exercise authority over them, and began to put heavy burdens on their backs and drive them as they would a dumb ass. Yea, and all of this was done that the word of the Lord might be fulfilled.” And that final sentence is in reference to the prophecies that Abinadi had made, when he essentially said, “If you guys don't repent, then your people will be put into bondage.” And the question that I had coming upon these verses was, do I believe in a God who would allow people who maybe didn't have a choice or say to be oppressed, just to fulfill a prophecy? And these are big questions, especially when you're talking in an LDS context, because we hold prophecy and prophets in such high regard that when we questioned those, it can feel really, really scary, but the text essentially drops these questions into our lap, and I feel that it's right and appropriate to struggle with these questions. And like Elise said, we may not walk away with a black and white understanding because I think forever, or at least for a while, I will come to these verses and say, “Well, this is what my experience is with God, and this is what the text says, how do I reconcile the two?”
E: And what I love about the scriptures too, is that these people are asking the same questions. I think one of the ways we try and understand our own suffering is by trying to recognize God there with us, because that's what makes it meaningful. That's what makes it seem like it's worth something as opposed to just an endless suffering. But I think what's difficult about that is there's a temptation for us, especially when we read the scriptures, to assign God's hand in oppression, as if God allows people to be oppressed or burden or taxed or abused because they are sinning. An example of this is from the Institute student manual on these chapters. And it says, “Even though the people who followed Alma had repented and been faithful, the Lord allowed them to be temporarily oppressed by the Lamanites in fulfillment of Abinadi’s prophecy, and as a trial of their patience and faith.” And I don't know how to make sense of that because everything I hope for and have faith in and believe about God actually falls more in line with a God that shows up in history to sit with us in our suffering, not a God that assigns us suffering because of some eternal allotment. So if we do good things, we get these blessings and if we're sinning, we get oppression. That's just wild to me. And so some of the verses that provide me comfort in these unanswerable questions come from Mosiah 24 verses 13 to 15. It says, “And it came to pass that the voice of the Lord came to them in their affliction saying, lift up your heads and be of good comfort for I know of the covenant which ye have made unto me, and I will covenant with my people and deliver them out of bondage. And I will also ease the burdens, which are put upon your shoulders, that even you cannot feel them upon your backs, even while you are in bondage. And this will I do that you may stand as witnesses for me hereafter, and that ye may know of a surety that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions.” That's the God that I'm leaning into.
C: Elise, I love those verses that you brought up. And I think that they do a really good job demonstrating the kind of compassion and empathy and ultimately assistance and freedom that we hope that God would offer us in our afflictions. And as I'm listening and thinking about these verses something that strikes me as important, remember when we talked about apocalyptic thought in a couple of episodes back, I think it was episode two, maybe. And how Rosemary Radford Ruether, who's basically my favorite person ever, talked about how when we're living in apocalyptic thought, we have a hard time conjuring up any kind of compassion or empathy, or even action. I wonder if viewing oppression as divinely appointed, for whatever reason, as punishment or for our growth or whatever, is actually kind of similar to apocalyptic thinking because, same thing, it's hard to find compassion or empathy, or even a want for these people to be freed if we think that God wants them to be there. And so what do we do with it? That’s seriously the question that when I read these examples in the scripture, that's the question that I walk away with. I don't walk away with, “Oh, I have all the answers and everything is right in the world of Mosiah chapters 18 through 24.” Like no, all is not right in the world of Channing.
E: So we challenge you that when you read these chapters to sit and wrestle with them, because God gets painted as both the person who doles out oppression for people who sin, and also God gets painted as the person that shows up in history with people who eases their burdens and comforts them in their afflictions. And so, which are you willing to lean into? For me, God looks like a liberator, and will always look like a liberator. And thank goodness that there's a God in my eyes, even if I don't completely understand this God, I still believe it's a God who shows up for people. I think I still think it's the God of Exodus that says “you shall be my people and I shall be your God.”
C: A verse that I take a lot of comfort in, in the chapter talking about Limhi’s people, is in chapter 21, verses 14 and 15. It says, “And they (Limhi’s people) did humble themselves, even in the depths of humility. And they did cry mightily to God. Yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their afflictions.” And now here's the important part. “Now the Lord was slow to hear their cry because of their iniquities, nevertheless (nevertheless) the Lord did hear their cries, and began to soften the hearts of the Lamanites that they began to ease their burdens.” And I think the nevertheless is the most redeeming part of this set of scriptures, because to me that verse still offers a glimmer of hope of the God that I want to lean into, and the one that I want to worship, and that I want to give my heart to. And that's the God who will listen to my cries, and show up for me.
E: I love that so much. Because amidst all of our questions and our doubts and the things that feel shaky and scary and in our suffering, sometimes the surest thing that we can hold onto and hope for is that God will offer us a nevertheless
C: When Elise and I first started this podcast, something that was really important to us was that we wanted to make it absolutely clear that we aren't experts. And that even though we come to the text with a different perspective and different understandings, and we encourage different readings, it doesn't mean that we have the definitive answer for what the scriptures are trying to tell us. In fact, in our introduction episode, one of the things that we said was we want to present one way to read the text, not the way to read the text. And so sometimes this means that we can't offer you a resolution at the end of every episode, sometimes the end of an episode has to finish with a question, and that's just the nature of coming to scriptures, and it would be disingenuous of us to pretend to be anything else. And something that we're really passionate about here is engaging in the practice of reading scripture through a feminist lens as just that, a practice. And it's something that we hope to do as a community. And so part of what we wanted to offer you today in the vulnerable talking through the questions that we had that came out of these chapters, was we wanted to involve you and kind of a behind the scenes look of what it looks like to actually wrestle with the text as a feminist. And so even though this episode does end on a question, don't let that turn you away. Instead, we hope to offer it as an invitation for you to do your work with the text and then come to the conversation, so that we can all benefit from each other. This is what it means to be a sisterhood.
E; Thank you so, so much for joining us for today's episode, as we got to spend time with the daughters and the women that show up in this text. And thank you for letting us wrestle with questions, and we hope that you do the same.
C: Absolutely. And we're so glad that you joined us this week and we can't wait to see you next week. Bye!
