This is the Bay-Maw Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we are joined by our next new host, Elle Grover Fricks. Elle has undergraduate degrees in psychology and music from Washington State University.

Spent four years in mental health as a state certified behavioral therapist, has a master's in the Bible and the ancient and near east from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is the pastor of Refuge Church, both in an online dimension and in Pullman, Washington.

Elle, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Before we even get rolling, Brent, and Elle, I feel like we need to stop for a moment because a lot of people have joined us on this journey, whether it was because of the chosen commentary or whatever.

Like we're two hundred and some odd episodes into this thing, and most people when they get into a podcast don't necessarily think about going back, but Brent,

do you suppose it's wise to instruct people about what Bay-Maw, what is this podcast and how is it designed to function? Do you want to talk to us about that?

I suppose that would be helpful.

So Bay-Maw is just kind of this overview of the entire Bible. We covered that in the first, about 200 episodes of the podcast.

And so that is kind of our foundational material where we establish terms. We talk about how we look at the Bible, we talk about the context of the Bible, the historical features, everything.

So that's our foundational material. We're in session six now from about episode 206 and up, and that's just kind of bonus material. So if you're starting here, there's a lot of assumptions that we're making about the things that you know.

And so it's really good to go back and listen to everything. Start from episode zero, actually.

Yeah, and it's kind of like locked at a particular time in history like we made it not in a vacuum, but we made it at a particular, so it's dated, but it is designed to be like a body of work. So no matter like we started back in 2016,

like I was a while ago, lots of things happened in the world, but nevertheless, like it's like, yeah, there's a ton of assumptions being made in session six about what's already been discussed that may be missed.

So we have like we have this digital resource that we created in the form of a podcast is designed to interact with it. And it's first five sessions these first five seasons. So if you want to, if you want to go back and and they're designed to work in order.

So they're really designed to go from episode zero to episode 206. And they're really not designed to skip chunks. Like we have a lot of listeners that like skip the profits. And there are parts of the city that are more of a slog than others.

But even in those moments, we're very intentionally giving you tools, trying to teach you enough backstory, trying to build different foundations so that when you get to later parts of the study, those things make sense. And they take root and they you have handles to hang that stuff on.

So just a reminder, if anybody's started, you know, listening to Bama late, really are, are we highly recommend our strong recommendation is, and we know it's a ton of material. It's designed to be a ton of material.

It's designed to be more of a relatively comprehensive is that a noxymoran? I don't know, relatively comprehensive study is designed to go from Genesis revelation and church history. That is the body of work that we designed this for.

And my personal recommendation would be to go through that first set of episodes. Basically as fast as possible. Yes.

Some people like to take notes and I'm all about that. But if you try to slow down and take notes on every episode, you'll never catch up.

So my recommendation is to go through all of the episodes as quickly as possible, get the big picture. And then you can go back to specific episodes that seemed particularly compelling to you or interesting or whatever.

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