For many Latter-day Saints, the annual Come, Follow Me journey through the Old Testament can feel like a daunting pilgrimage. It is a vast and often alien landscape, filled with archaic language, bewildering poetry, and troubling cultural norms that can create a significant chasm between the modern reader and the ancient text. While numerous commentaries and devotional guides exist, few have so skillfully attempted to build a bridge across that chasm as Joshua M. Sears has in his newly published book, A Modern Guide to an Old Testament. This is not another verse-by-verse commentary or a historical summary. It is something far more practical and, for its intended audience, far more valuable: a user’s manual for the Old Testament, designed to equip readers with the theological and methodological tools needed to navigate its challenges and unlock its spiritual power within the Latter-day Saint faith tradition.

What makes Sears’s approach so effective for Latter-day Saints is that he begins not with academic problems, but with a theological reorientation rooted firmly in the Restoration. Before tackling the literary and historical complexities that often trip up readers, he first establishes a distinctly Latter-day Saint lens through which the text of the Hebrew Bible can be viewed. The book’s first three “hurdles” are dedicated to “Finding Jesus,” “Understanding the Covenant,” and “Recognizing the Covenant.” Here, Sears demonstrates the practice of interpreting the Bible through the perspectives of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. Drawing on Nephi’s vision, for example, he frames the Bible’s primary “meaning” as a container for “the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel” (1 Nephi 13:23). He likewise invokes the Lord’s warning in the Doctrine and Covenants that the church is under condemnation for treating the covenant lightly, and that the remedy is to “remember … the former commandments” (D&C 84:57). This mandate explicitly includes the Old Testament. By grounding his work in this covenantal framework from the outset, Sears transforms the study of the Old Testament from a mere academic exercise or a frustrating duty into an essential component of understanding and deepening covenantal relationships with God. (By doing so, Sears also performs a theological demonstration of what Michael Austin described in his book The Testimony of Two Nations about the Book of Mormon connecting itself to the Bible and reframing and reinterpreting biblical narratives while doing so.)

With this theological foundation firmly in place, Sears masterfully guides the reader from a general level of understanding toward a more sophisticated engagement with the tools of modern biblical scholarship. He meets readers where they are, acknowledging the cultural primacy of the King James Version while gently demonstrating its limitations. His pragmatic solution—a “side-by-side” reading with a modern academic translation—is a perfect example of his approach: it honors tradition while embracing clarity and accuracy. He demystifies the concept of genre, explaining that ancient Israelite history was not written like a modern academic work but was theologically driven and comfortable preserving multiple perspectives. He provides a revelatory primer on Israelite poetry, identifying parallelism—the “rhyming of ideas”—as its core mechanic, a feature that makes its beauty accessible even in translation. Perhaps most importantly, he gives readers permission to see fiction as an inspired genre in scripture, distinguishing between a story’s “truth” and its “historicity” and thereby resolving many unnecessary conflicts for the literalist reader.

Sears does not shy away from the text’s most difficult passages. For apparent conflicts with science, he introduces the theological principle of accommodation, arguing that God “stoops” to reveal truth within the limited scientific framework of His ancient audience. In this way, he mirrors his chapter in the recently published book The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution (though it’s not a simple regurgitation or carbon copy of that chapter). For the profound ethical challenges posed by biblical violence and sexism, he offers a multi-step framework that encourages readers to think slowly, understand context, prioritize the teachings of living prophets, and channel their discomfort into positive action. This is a work of intellectual honesty and deep pastoral care, rooted in years of teaching college students about the Bible. It’s also a work that validates the reader’s concerns while providing a faithful path through them.

A Modern Guide to an Old Testament is a wonderful and much-needed reorientation to a book of scripture that is at the bedrock of our faith, yet too often neglected. Sears has produced a work of skillful mediation, threading the needle between academic insight and devotional reading, between an ancient text and a modern believer. He succeeds not by explaining away the Old Testament’s difficulties, but by reframing them as invitations to a deeper, more thoughtful, and ultimately more rewarding relationship with the scriptures and the God who speaks through them.

For more book reviews and forthcoming books, see Mormon Studies Books in 2025.