
(Click to enlarge.)
I am, as I’ve often said, a skeptic about our ability to reconstruct and understand the past. And the more remote the past, the more skeptical I am.
Not a complete skeptic, of course.
I think we can and do know quite a lot.
But the odds of our having gotten the ancient past exactly right — particularly the attitudes and ideas of those who lived in it — seem to me vanishingly small.
“The past is a foreign country,” wrote L. P. Hartley in 1953. “They do things differently there.”
In response to my Deseret News column this morning, Bruce Webster, a valued contributor to numerous Interpreter Foundation scripture roundtables, has shared a very, very funny video that makes my point beautifully:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2vU8M6CYI
Posted from Park City, Utah