Most Latter-day Saint readers open the Old Testament expecting something familiar. What they find stops them cold.

A God who commands armies to slaughter entire cities. Prophets who curse children. Rituals involving blood, fire, and animal carcasses. Polygamy practiced by the covenant’s celebrated heroes. A world so foreign it barely seems to belong in the same canon as the Sermon on the Mount.

And the question that follows, quietly and sometimes guiltily, is this: Do I have to make sense of all this?

Yes. And you can.