Hebrew Voices #132 - Boiling a Kid in its Mother’s Milk

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: One of those pieces of pushback I get from Orthodox Jews is, “Well, if it doesn’t mean ‘don’t eat chicken and cheese together,’ then what a weird commandment, ‘Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’ Why would God command us such a thing?”

Announcement: Welcome to the Be One Radio Show. Here are your hosts, Jeff and Sherry Friedlander.

Jeff: We have a biblical scholar with us, our friend, Nehemia Gordon is with us this morning, and we’re so thankful for him. Nehemia holds a master’s degree in Biblical Studies and has a bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also worked as a translator as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls project, and has been researching and deciphering ancient Hebrew manuscripts for what must be decades now. And he’s not only incredibly wise and well-studied, but just a great all-round fellow, and we are thankful, and Nehemia, are you there?

Nehemia: I’m here, Jeff. How are you doing? Good morning.

Jeff: Good morning. Welcome, welcome. Thanks for taking time this morning to be with us. Our audience certainly appreciates that, and we’re grateful. I love your work. I’m on your Support Team of your website. For those of you that want to join, you can go to nehemiaswall.com, and he has a Support Team. There are tons of free resources there, lots of teaching, lots of information. You can learn so much from the website. But if you join the Support Team, there’s all kinds of other stuff beyond the scenes that gets in-depth, and it’s wonderful information, so I want to encourage all our listeners to go out to nehemiaswall.com and research it for yourself, and take a look at it.

Now Nehemia, for our audience that is new and that doesn’t know who you are, kind of give them a little background of you. You are a practicing Karaite Jew. Kind of describe a little bit about that, of who you are, for our audience.

Nehemia: Well, my father was an Orthodox rabbi, and I was raised, essentially, as a modern-day Pharisee. Orthodox Judaism is a continuation of the ancient movement of the Pharisees, and they have a core doctrine which I was taught as a young boy, which is that when Moses went up to Mount Sinai, he received two separate and distinct revelations. One was the written Torah, that is the Five Books of Moses, and the other was what they call the Oral Torah, and everything in the written Torah has to be interpreted through the Oral Torah. I was taught this, sitting on my father’s knee, when I was three years old.

When I got a little bit older, I started studying the written Torah and I found in it words or statements that said, “And the Lord spoke to Moses saying…” And in the prophets, “Thus sayeth the Lord.” Then I would get to the Oral Torah, and it would say, “Rabbi Meir says this, but Rabbi Akiva disagrees and says something else.”

I went to my rabbis, to my teachers and I said, “These sound like they’re just the words of men. They never quote God. They’re always quoting rabbis, and telling us, ‘The rabbis disagree.’” I was told, “When two rabbis disagree, ‘elu v’elu divrei Elohim khayim,’ ‘both these and those are the words of the living God.’”

I said, “That doesn’t make sense. Why would God contradict himself by giving two different messages?” I was told there were deep spiritual reasons for it that I could understand one day, when I had studied the entire Talmud, reached the age of 40, and went through several other different rituals. I said, “I’m not waiting for that. This just doesn’t make any sense to me. We should all embrace the word of God and give up the words of men.”

I thought that I would be praised for coming up with such a great revelation. Instead, I was rebuked and told that that was the heresy of the Karaites, that there had always been this movement in Judaism, Karaite Jews, that is scriptualist. The Hebrew word for Scripture is “Mikrah”, or “Kara”. And Karaim, Karaites, were Jews who only followed the Scriptures. I realized, that’s what I was. And at the time, I didn’t know there were any others in the world. I thought I was the only one.

Jeff: Wow.

Nehemia: I was told I was the only one. I was told, “If you follow this path then you’ll cease to exist, just like the others in history.” I said, “I don’t care, it’s the truth. I have to follow it.” And that really set the stage for the rest of my life. One of the things I was told, “Who do you think you are, to interpret the Scripture differently than these great rabbis? Generations of rabbis who knew the Bible better than you, who knew Hebrew better than you… You’re reading their translations, and you think you can interpret it better?” So one of my objectives was to be able to know Hebrew better than the people who translated it.

Jeff: You were like, “Hey, I’m not gonna take it, man. I’m gonna find out Hebrew like them. They’re not gonna have that on me.”

Nehemia: That’s absolutely what my objective was. So I ended up moving to Israel, lived there for 20 years, and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied Bible. I actually did my bachelor’s degree, I did a double-major in Bible and Archaeology. Then the master’s, I did Bible. And when I got to the point where I actually knew Hebrew better than the rabbis whose writings I was reading, it was kind of a profound revelation.

I remember when I was very, very young, even before I started questioning, reading Rashi. Rashi was a great 12th century Bible commentator. The way we studied the Scripture was, we would read a verse of the Bible, and then we’d read Rashi’s commentary. Read another verse, read Rashi’s commentary. And I was warned as a very young child, “Don’t ever read the Bible…” that is the Old Testament, “Don’t ever read the Bible without the running commentary of Rashi, or some other rabbi, or it will lead to heresy.” And I like to say, I’m living proof that that’s true. I decided to read the Bible without Rashi’s commentary, and I was shocked, because I saw in the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament, that there was no evidence of an Oral Law.

My Bible in Hebrew, the one I grew up reading, was 1,000 pages long, based on the size of the print and everything. And in those 1,000 pages, there wasn’t one direct reference to the Oral Law, the alleged fact that God had given a second revelation. I went to my rabbis and I said, “Where’s the verse that… God mentions the Ten Commandments, that He wrote with His own finger on the tablets of stone. Where does he mention that He’s giving an oral revelation that was forbidden to write down, that would give the true meaning of the verses of the Torah?”

And just to give you an example, where it says, “Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” three times. “Lo tivashel gedi bekhalav imoh.” “Do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” And the rabbis explain that what that really means is you must not eat meat and milk together. Well, wait a minute. It didn’t say anything about eating, it says about boiling. And why would it be forbidden to eat a chicken wrapped up in a piece of cow cheese? What does that have to do with boiling a kid in its mother’s milk? A “kid” in Hebrew is a “young goat”. And the answer is, “Well, that’s the true meaning that you wouldn’t know if you didn’t have the Oral Law. That’s why the Oral Law is so important.”

So, the realization I came up to when I was a very young child reading Rashi, I said, “Wow. One day, I want to be as smart as him, so I could understand how he came to these explanations. Because when I read the verse, I just don’t see it.” I would state that to my rabbis. “I don’t see how he got to his conclusion.” And they’d say, “Well, you just don’t know enough. One day, you’ll know enough like Rashi did, and you’ll understand that.”

And when I did know enough, that one day, years later, I realized he was just making a lot of it up. And what he was doing was, we have this term in English which comes from Greek, “exegesis”. “Ex” in Greek means “from”, and “gesis” means to interpret, to read. So, exegesis, that is the fancy word for interpretation, is you’re reading the meaning from the text.

But what I realized what Rashi and many of the rabbis were usually was eisegesis. “Eisegesis” is when you read into the text. In other words, you come to the text with an objective. You say, “Okay, I’ve got to find proof that it’s forbidden to eat meat and milk together.” And the rabbis even have a term for this. They say, “We want to hang it on a verse. Where’s the verse I can hang my doctrine on, my religious practice on? I already know this is what God told me. How do I know that? Because my father did that, and his grandfather did it.” So what they would do is take tradition and they would look for some justification for that tradition in the Biblical text, because the way God wired my brain, I said, “No, that’s not the word of God.”

And to understand the significance that was for me, I came from a long line of rabbis. I had somebody once say, “Nehemia came from a line of 33 rabbis.” And I went to him afterwards and I said, “Look, you can’t say that. I only know about three or four rabbis.” Well, in 2017 I went down the rabbit hole of genealogy…

Jeff: And it is a rabbit hole.

Nehemia: It is, it’s pretty cool. They have all these databases now, where you can look up documents. I was able to find the Russian tax census of… I think it was 1814, or something. And I found all these ancestors of mine listed there. I found that I’m descended from more than 50 rabbis.

Jeff: Wow.

Sherry: Wow.

Nehemia: So, the 33, there’s a lot more than that.

Sherry: That’s awesome.

Nehemia: It is, and it isn’t. But I was told that… I mean, it doesn’t change who I am, right? But I was told, “How can you defy the statements of all of the rabbis of your ancestry?” At the time, I only thought it was three or four. Now I know it’s over 50, “…who knew so much.” And my answer was, “I have to follow the word of God. I read these words that I believe God revealed to mankind, and I have to follow those, not the words of men.”

Jeff: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s what it means that I’m a Karaite Jew. I’m an Old Testament Jew. A lot of Judaism today is all about tradition; tradition that they’ve tried to justify, in many cases, by finding some verse that alludes to it in the Old Testament. Like boiling a kid in its mother’s milk means don’t eat meat and milk together.

But growing up with this background, every moment of my day was legislated by Rabbinical law. If I woke up and wanted to go to the toilet, I had to put a kippa on, the skullcap, because it’s forbidden to walk four cubits without your head covered. I would ask, “Where are we commanded in the Torah to cover our head when we go to the toilet, when we get up from our bed and just walk to the toilet?” And I was told, “Well, it’s a tradition, and we’re commanded by the rabbis to follow these traditions that have been established…”

Jeff: What happens if you don’t obey what the rabbi tradition is? What is the consequence?

Nehemia: In the Talmud it says that if you violate the commandments of the written Torah, the punishment is lashes, but if you brazenly violate the commandments of the rabbis, then the punishment is death. And nobody implements that punishment, I don’t know that they ever did, but it’s sending you a message: “You’d better take these things seriously.”

When you light the Sabbath candles, you say the blessing, “Blessed art Thou Lord, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandment, commanding us to light the candles of the Sabbath.” I asked my rabbis, my mother used to do this every week with my sisters. It’s a woman’s practice, in Orthodox Judaism. I said, “Where are we commanded to light the Sabbath candles?” “We’re not. We’re commanded to obey the rabbis, and the rabbis commanded us to light the Sabbath candles.”

Wow. So, by saying these words, “Blessed art Thou Lord, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandment to light the Sabbath candles,” what we really mean is, “Blessed art Thou, God, for commanding us to obey the rabbis and allowing us to show we’re obedient.”

I said, “This is adding to the Torah. Deuteronomy 4:2 says, “Don’t add to His word and don’t take away from it.” In Deuteronomy 12:32 in the Hebrew… or 13:1 in the Hebrew, 12:32 in the English, it says, “Don’t add or take away from His word.” So, we’re actually told in Deuteronomy, “Okay, up until now I’ve given you this gradual revelation of commandments.” Noah had a certain set of commandments that weren’t known to Adam. And then, Abraham had a certain set of commandments that weren’t known to Noah. We don’t know what that whole set is. The commandments, or the statutes, or the judgments. What were those that Abraham did? I don’t know.

And then, the Israelites in Exodus 12, they get the first commandment to Israel as a people, which is, “This month for you is the beginning of months.” That is the Hebrew calendar was given to them. But at that point, they knew about the Hebrew calendar but didn’t know about Yom Kippur. They didn’t know about a lot of commandments, because it hadn’t been given to them. So, it was a 40-year period where there’s a gradual revelation for the Israelites as a people, and then finally at the end, when Moses is giving his farewell speech as he’s dying, like this is the last day of his life. And he says to them… Let me read it to you in Hebrew…

Jeff: Yeah, please.

Nehemia: This is Deuteronomy 13:1 in Hebrew, 12:32 in the English. And that’s actually significant, that in the Hebrew… now the chapters were made up later, but the fact that it’s separated from Deuteronomy 13 in the English is significant. It was on purpose, I think. He says, “All the matters that I command you, you shall diligently do. Don’t add to it and don’t diminish from it.” So if somebody were to come along later and add or take away from the Torah, well, “Maybe God decided to abolish this commandment.” That’s what the Muslims say, right?

Jeff: Right.

Nehemia: The Muslims say that Allah sent Mohammed, and Mohammed said, “Yeah, there were things in the Torah that I did command, but some of those don’t apply anymore. Like, you’re not allowed to eat pig, but you can eat rabbit now.” Why? Because Allah changed his mind, or that revelation was only for a certain time.

So, here’s what it says in verse 2 in the Hebrew, verse 1 in the English. It says, “And there shall arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and he shall give you signs and miracles. And those signs and miracles shall come to pass, that he spoke to you saying, ‘Let us go after other gods that you did not know, and let us serve them,’ do not listen to that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For Yehovah, your God, is testing you to know if you love Yehovah, your God, with all your heart and all your soul.”

We’re told here, the prophet, or the dreamer of dreams, who will tell you to go astray after other Gods, even if they perform genuine signs and miracles, you’re not to obey them. And the juxtaposition here, as Jews have understood to be important, he just said, “Don’t add and don’t take away from anything that I command you.” And then He says, “And even if somebody rises up who’s a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, who could perform genuine signs and miracles.” These aren’t fake. It’s not sleight of hand, or trickery. The prophet has genuine power to perform miracles here. Don’t listen to him, because he’s telling you a message that’s different from what’s in this book.

So, if somebody adds to the Torah or takes away from the Torah, even if they can perform miracles, you’re not to obey them, according to Deuteronomy 13. And so, I had these rabbis coming to me and saying, “Well, we’ve put a fence around the Torah.” What is a “fence around the Torah?” “We’ve added all these commandments, all these rules and regulations that aren’t in the Torah, but they make the Torah better.” It’s like today in modern speech, we’d say, “This is Torah 2.0.” And I’m like, “No, no, no.”

It’s interesting, because Internet 2.0 means that the users provide the content, not the websites. So really, in a sense it is Torah 2.0. That is, the rabbis are providing the actual daily rituals and observance of the Torah. It has very little to do with God commanding, and that’s where my, I suppose, rebellion came from as a child was, God didn’t command me not to turn on and off a light on the Sabbath. That’s something that you guys have invented. There was no electricity in the time of Moses. God wasn’t commanding us to do that.

Jeff: How do you respond - and I’m sure you’ve had to face this many times over the years - when the argument is made about Oral Torah, and this Oral tradition, that there are “hints” in the Torah of there must have been an Oral tradition. For example, there’s a passage that says… and I don’t remember the reference, I think it’s in Numbers…

Nehemia: It’s Deuteronomy 12:21. It’s the only passage. Deuteronomy 12:21…

Sherry: He is well-studied.

Nehemia: This is their proof text. They’ve got two or three proof texts. But this really is the only one that’s even worth responding to, because the others are like, “Come on, guys. Any sane person reading this in context would say, ‘You’re reading into the text, not reading out of the text.’” So, here it says in Deuteronomy 12, and I’ll just give the background. Leviticus 17, God had commanded us that if you want to eat meat of a domesticated animal, of a domesticated land animal… I mean, there are three domesticated land animals that are considered food in the Torah. A pig is not considered food. Maybe food you could feed to a dog after you’ve slaughtered it, but not fit for human consumption.

So, those three domesticated land animals are a bull, a goat, and a sheep. So if you want to eat cow, goat, or sheep - I’m a city slicker, I say “cow”. If you want to eat cow, goat or sheep, you have to slaughter them as a sacrifice at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. That was Leviticus 17.

Now, on the final day of his death, the final day as he is about to die, Moses comes and he says in verse 20 in Exodus 12, “When Yehovah your God will expand your border as He spoke to you and you shall say, ‘I will eat meat…’” This was a scenario that hadn’t existed for 40 years in the desert. Everybody was walking distance from the Tabernacle, and if you wanted to eat a goat, you had to bring it as a sacrifice. You couldn’t just slaughter it. And that was significant, because if you brought it as a sacrifice, maybe your wife couldn’t eat it. If your wife was during her monthly time, she actually couldn’t eat the meat of the sacrifice.

Maybe your son was a grave digger, and he went and he buried somebody in the ground, which is a wonderful, righteous act, to provide someone with a burial, but it also means that you’re ritually unclean for seven days, and you have to go through a seven-day period of ritual purification. It’s actually mentioned in Acts 21 that Paul went through that ritual…

Jeff: Yeah.

Nehemia: …before he went to the Temple. So, you bring this goat to the Tabernacle in the desert during the 40 years and you slaughter it as a sacrifice. Well, now your wife and your son can’t eat it, because they’re not ritually clean. So there’s all kinds of baggage that goes with bringing it as a sacrifice. And we’re told there, the reason that they were commanded to bring it as a sacrifice in the desert is so that they don’t sacrifice to the goat deities that they were worshipping. They would slaughter a goat and then there were some goat spirits that they believed that they were spilling out the blood to, or sprinkling the blood to. They had some idolatry they brought with them from Egypt.

So, back to Deuteronomy 12:20, it says, “When your sole desire is to eat flesh, according to all the desire of your soul, you may eat flesh.” And then it says in verse 21, “When the place that Yehovah, your God, chooses to place His name is too far from you, it shall become distant from you.” Well, that couldn’t have happened in the desert, because everybody was walking distance from the Tabernacle. Now, we’re about to enter the land and in the land, there are new realities. The new reality is, if I want to eat a goat and I live in the Galilee, I can’t bring him all the way to Jerusalem or to Shiloh, it’s not practical. Well, maybe I will only eat meat once a year. Well, okay. He’s saying, “When the place that Yehovah chooses to put His name…” that is, the Tabernacle and in the Temple, “becomes far for you, then you shall slaughter of your cattle and your sheep as Yehovah has given you, as I have commanded you.”

Jeff: That’s the argument right there. There’s the argument.

Nehemia: Ah. “As I have commanded you. And you shall eat in your gates according to all that your soul desires.” So, where did God command us to slaughter the animal? And so, here’s what they do. It’s actually kind of a bait and switch. You say, “Oh, let’s take just this verse. Let’s just read verse 21. God commanded us somewhere to slaughter the animal. And we know…” Say, “We know,” everybody in the audience. “We know.”

Jeff: We know.

Sherry: We know.

Nehemia: We know that the way we slaughter an animal is with a certain type of knife, and the knife can’t be serrated. It has to be a sharp knife. It can’t be dull. When you slaughter, you have to make a certain motion with your hand. You can’t do a chopping motion. It has to be a sawing motion. There are certain rules that we know that God commanded us in the Oral Law of how to slaughter an animal, and those laws are being referred here in verse 21 of Deuteronomy 12, “As I have commanded you,” i.e., in the Oral Law.

Except, what happens if we start and read in verse 14? If we read in verse 14, we realize, “Oh, He commanded us this five verses earlier.” Verse 14, it’s talking about if you want to eat an animal. First actually, it says, if you want to bring a sacrifice, it says only to do it at the place where Yehovah, our God chooses, etc. In verse 15, “Only according to all the desire of your soul you shall slaughter and eat flesh according to the blessing of Yehovah, your God, that He is giving you, in all your gates.”

What does that mean, “All your gates?” That means, not just in Jerusalem or Shiloh where the Tabernacle and later the Temple is. In any of your cities - when in Deuteronomy it says, “All your gates,” it means “any of your cities,” because every city had a large gate, which was the gathering place like you see in the Book of Ruth, where Boaz gathers the elders at the gate in Bethlehem.

So you may eat it at any of your gates. And he says, “The clean and the unclean shall eat it.” It doesn’t mean eating an unclean animal. If means “If you’re unclean,” right? What does it mean, “You’re unclean?” It means your son just buried somebody in the ground. Your wife is during her monthly time. So that means you’re unclean. That means in Leviticus 17, in that system during the 40 years, I couldn’t eat the goat. “My dad gets to eat it, but I can’t eat it because I just buried somebody. I’m ritually unclean.”

So in Deuteronomy 12:15 it says, “Well, now that you’re going to be in the land, you’ll eat according to all the desire of your soul.” But it says that “the unclean and the clean may eat of it like the gazelle and the deer.” What does that mean? Go back to Leviticus 17. If it was a wild animal, you’re not allowed to bring a wild animal as a sacrifice to the Tabernacle, so you have to understand the whole context here, right? You can’t just read Deuteronomy 12 by itself, because it doesn’t make any sense. You have to read the context of what they were told 40 years earlier in Leviticus 17.

And so the way you eat a gazelle and a deer is, you eat it as a non-sacrifice. What are some of the characteristics of a non-sacrifice? Both the clean and the unclean can eat of it, and you don’t eat the blood. Instead of putting it on the altar, we read in verse 16 of Deuteronomy 12, “Only the blood you shall not eat. Upon the earth shall you spill it, like water.”

So, what Deuteronomy 12:21 is saying, “As I’ve commanded you,” it means in verses 15 and 16, how did God command us to eat these animals like the deer and the gazelle? “To spill the blood on the ground like water.” Now, how do I know I’m right? Maybe the rabbis are right, and “As I’ve commanded you” is the Oral Law, and it doesn’t mean verses 15 and 16. Well, just read on.

So He says, “As I’ve commanded you, you shall eat in your gates…” meaning not just at the chosen place, “according to all the desire of your soul,” in verse 22. But “as shall be eaten the gazelle and the deer, so you shall eat it, the unclean and the clean together shall eat it,” right? So He reiterates, He says, “As I’ve commanded you,” and then he reiterates the three things. There are three things here, right?

You can do it not just in the chosen place at any of your gates, the clean and the unclean can eat it, like the deer and the gazelle, and in verse 23, “But be strong to not eat the blood, for the blood is the soul, and you shall not eat the blood with the flesh. You shall not eat it, you shall spill it like water.” That’s the third thing, not to eat the blood. So what does “As I’ve commanded you” mean? It means these three things.

Sherry: Yeah.

Nehemia: Now, why are these three things significant? As soon as the Israelites went into the land and God foretells that they’ll do this in Deuteronomy, they start worshipping on the high places. Back in this very chapter, he mentions that at the beginning of the chapter. He says, “The Canaanites do this.” And he says, “Don’t worship Yehovah the way that the Canaanites worship their Gods.” That’s up in verse 4. He says, “Do not do so to Yehovah, your God.” That is, on top of every hill and under leafy tree they would set up an altar, and that’s what the Canaanites would do, and they would offer sacrifices to Baal.

So the Israelites come into the land and they’re supposed to wipe out the Canaanites, so they don’t learn their ways. Instead, what do they do? They say, “Well, why put all these good Canaanites to waste? Some good pagans among us, so let’s just tax them.” And that’s what they do, and they end up learning their ways, and the result is, Jeremiah comes along and he says, “The number of your cities is the number of your Gods, O Israel.” Every city has a gate, and in every city gate there is a statue to a god. Some people would call that god Baal, some of the Israelites actually called that God “Yehovah”, that is, the name of the true God, the God of Israel, but they’re worshipping Him through a statue or through an altar that is outside of the Tabernacle and later in the Temple.

So, Deuteronomy 12 is a very important passage. The Israelites were very diligent of ignoring it.

Jeff: Yeah, no question.

Nehemia: Without Deuteronomy 12, you cannot understand half of what Isaiah and Jeremiah are complaining about.

Jeff: That’s exactly right.

Nehemia: And Ezekiel to some extent, as well. They’re talking about on every hill and under leafy tree you’re sacrificing; what’s wrong with that? So, I’m sacrificing an animal. And here was the thought process of some of the Israelites, I’m sure. They said, “The Canaanites love their gods, and they sacrifice. I’m going to sacrifice a sheep and not offered some of it to my God? Well, you’ve got to go all the way to Jerusalem. I’m not going to go all the way to Jerusalem. On top of the hill there, somebody’s set up an altar. Let me use that altar. That altar? Isn’t God everywhere?” And in the desert, they weren’t in Jerusalem. Wherever the Tabernacle stopped. “Can’t we have a little altar anywhere that we want?” Well, no. He specifically says, “Don’t do that.”

Sherry: Doesn’t that sound like cultural compromise today?

Nehemia: Well, if you look at the beginning of Deuteronomy 12, one could make a very good argument that it has to do with cultural compromise. I’m going to read this to you, it’s Deuteronomy 12 verse 2, “You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations which you shall possess serve their gods, upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every green tree. And you shall overthrow their altars and break their pillars and burn their growths with fire. And you shall hew down their graven images of their gods and destroy the names of them out of that place, of their deities.”

And it says in verse 4, “You shall not do so unto Yehovah, your God.” So what it’s telling us here is, this is the way the Canaanites worshipped their god, and we should not worship our God the way they worshipped their god.

Jeff: And I say amen to that, by the way.

Nehemia: Yeah. And so, here we have these pagan practices, and we talked before about “Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” And one of those pieces of pushback I get from Orthodox Jews is, “Well, if it doesn’t mean don’t eat chicken and cheese together, then what a weird commandment, ‘Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’ Why would God command us such a thing? It seems so random, and God is not illogical.” That’s what they say, anyway.

So we know the answer today; it was actually speculated in the Middle Ages, but it was proven in the 1930s or so, where they excavated at a place called Ras Shamra in Syria, and they found what is essentially the Canaanite Bible. We’ve got our Bible with the story of how our God created the universe. Well, the Canaanites had their bible, which was their stories of how Baal and the other gods created the universe, or were involved in the ruling of the universe.

And one of the things it says in their documents is that boiling a kid in the milk of its mother was a fertility rite to the goddess Ashtoreth, which of course today is Easter, from the same word, “Ish Ashtoreth”, “Ishtar”, “Easter”. So boiling a kid in the milk of its mother was a fertility ritual, and to this very day in Lebanon - because in Lebanon the Canaanites survived. They were up in the mountains and it was difficult to root them out and so, their culture survived in the mountains of Lebanon. And in Lebanon to this day there’s a delicacy - boiling the kid in the milk of its mother. They don’t remember it as a fertility rite, they remember it as, “This is a wonderful way to eat goat.”

Jeff: Yeah, and I think that what you’re bringing up is that we would find, if we go through all of these different commands that seem to have to have some other explanation, we would find that the bulk of them are all in that category of, this was a worship of a pagan idol. This was the way in which they practiced that, and I’m commanding you, don’t do what they do. You’re gonna worship God the way I tell you to do it.

Nehemia: If you ask the question, what is the practical application today, how does that play into my life? I’m not a Canaanite. I don’t live among Canaanites. What is the application today of “don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk”? And my takeaway from that is, don’t partake in pagan rituals.

Jeff: That’s mine as well. That’s exactly it.

Nehemia: This is actually a message in the New Testament. Now, I’m an Old Testament Jew, but I studied the New Testament. One of the messages in the New Testament, which carries over from the Tanakh, is this exact message, where it talks about not eating food offered to idols. Now, they’re not talking about going to the pagan temple and you’re standing there and they slaughter the animal to Zeus, and you’re splashed with the blood, and then you eat the meat. What they’re talking about is, you go to the marketplace and they say, “Hey, this meat is 50 percent off.” “Why is it so cheap?” “Well, it was sacrificed to Zeus, and since he can’t eat it, the priests want to make some money, so now they’re selling it.” Whoa. I don’t want any of that. I don’t want anything to do with that.

Jeff: Zeus is losing his shirt on the deal. It’s just not good.

Nehemia: Well, no, it’s a great deal for him because somebody brought this meat to the Temple, and by you buying the meat and consuming it, you’re doing Zeus a favor. It’s actually a ritual act, you consuming it. When I was a teenager, I was invited to a free vegetarian meal, and I’m like, “Wow. The food’s free, and it’s exotic food. Why would it be free?” And the guy said, “Well, it’s at the Temple of Krishna” in Chicago – I grew up in Chicago. “It’s the Temple of Krishna, and since Krishna can’t eat it, everyone’s invited to come and eat the food, and by consuming it, the sacrifice goes to Krishna.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not allowed to do that. That’s against my bible.”

Jeff: Right. Let me ask you…

Nehemia: I actually encountered that exact thing in the 20th century.

Jeff: Let me get us on a little bit of a different… Years ago, you wrote a book called The Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus. I’m gonna give a quick summary of one point here, and then let you kind of just explain some of this, which gets into your current work, which I want people to go and listen to. They can go to nehemiaswall.com to pull up the Hebrew Matthew Pearls, if you will, the series of teachings that are going on, and discussions.

Nehemia: It’s called the Hebrew Gospel Pearls.

Jeff: Hebrew Gospel Pearls, excuse me, yeah, that’s going on with you and Keith. And you guys are discussing each verse by verse from the Hebrew Gospel. But years ago, you started down that journey, because if I understand the story correctly, correct me if I’m wrong, a pastor friend of yours or a Christian friend of yours had asked you a question about what seemed to be a contradiction of Matthew chapter 23 and Matthew chapter 15, where it appeared that Yeshua was telling him on one hand to disobey the Pharisees, and on the other hand, to obey the Pharisees. And he was asking you to help him get some clarification on what those passages were saying, is that about right?

Nehemia: That’s pretty right, yeah. There was what appeared to be a contradiction between the stand towards the Pharisees in Matthew 15, which was, “Hey, the Pharisees are replacing the commandment of God with their own commandments.” And that seemed to contradict what it said in Matthew 23, where it says, “the scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore, all that they bid you observe, that they command you to observe, that observe and do.”

Jeff: Isn’t this exactly what were just talking about in Deuteronomy, essentially, the concept, not the specific, but the concept?

Nehemia: There is definitely a parallel there. And no doubt, this is one of the reasons he came to me… well, I’m sure he asked other people first. But one of the reasons he came to me is you knew I was raised as a modern-day Pharisee, and so maybe I would have some insight on this. And my first response was, “Well, it looks like Yeshua, Jesus, is contradicting Himself.” That was my first response. Then he said, “Could you try to use the tools that you learned at Hebrew University of Jerusalem to look at textual manuscripts and other possibilities to find some possible solution?”

I ended up coming upon this Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew. It was copied by a Jewish rabbi around the year 1380, and it’s been preserved, we know today, in at least 28 manuscripts that we know of. Some of them are fragments, or many of them are fragmentary, but we have 28 manuscripts, 28 copies of this Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew.

And at the time, I was studying a few specific passages that I was asked about. Then later, I wrote a book called A Prayer to Our Father, together with Keith Johnson. And there, we looked at what Christians in English know as the Lord’s Prayer, or Christians around the world know as the Our Father Prayer. We looked at that specifically in the Hebrew version of Matthew. What we’re doing now… and maybe you can say it was the COVID that put us in lockdown and limited what we were able to do.

So, finally we said, “Okay, let’s look at the rest of Matthew starting from the beginning, and if God wills it, all the way to the end, as much as we can. We can’t get to everything in it.” You’d think we could, but sometimes we’ll spend an hour just on the first verse of a section.

Jeff: I’ve noticed, by the way.

Sherry: We love listening to your podcasts.

Nehemia: Well, thank you. So, we’re now reading it verse by verse, the entire thing, as far as we get, right? And Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew, the version preserved by these rabbis in the Middle Ages, it’s broken up into 115 sections.

Jeff: Why did the rabbis preserve that version of Hebrew Matthew, Shem Tov’s?

Nehemia: Well, the reason they say they preserved it is, they were being forced into these debates with the Catholics. And if the Jews won the debate, they would be persecuted by the Catholics. If they lost the debate, they could be forcibly converted to Catholicism. And they said, “Okay, if we’re going to do anything, we’re going to do it to win.” And one rabbi said, “You know, what would be a really good thing to do…” because a lot of the debate up to that point was Jews were on the defense. Catholics would say, “But it says this in the Old Testament. It says that in the Old Testament. It says this in the Talmud.” And the Jews were always on the defensive.

So this one rabbi said, “Why should we be on the defensive? If we read their book, we could be on the offense. We have to read their Gospels.”

Well, the Gospels at the time were in Latin, in Greek, and they might have been translated into a language called Catalan at that time, or they were a little bit later, in Spain. And this one rabbi said, “We should read the Gospel in order to understand what they’re even talking about.” And it’s interesting, some of the arguments he makes.

So, this rabbi copies the Gospel, and where does he copy it from? That’s the big question. We don’t know the answer to that. He has this Gospel available to him, and he copies it. So he intersperses the Gospel with his own what are called “critical remarks”, and the critical remarks are for the purpose of these debates with the Catholics.

Sherry: Interesting.

Nehemia: And he always introduces the critical remark as “amar hama’atik”, “the copyist says,” which is how we know he copied it and didn’t translate it. So, “The copyist says” is the introduction, and he’ll bring arguments. He’ll bring like 10 verses of Matthew, and then he’ll say, “The copyist says.”

And one of his arguments, interestingly, is he says, “Wait a minute. Here, Jesus is saying that the Sabbath hasn’t been done away with. But the people were debating, the Catholics, they don’t follow the Sabbath. They say the Sabbath has been replaced with Sunday.” So he actually brings the words of Yeshua, of Jesus, as an argument against the Catholics, in many instances. So sometimes, he’s arguing against Jesus, but often, he’s just arguing against the Catholics.

Jeff: Yeah.

Sherry: Interesting.

Nehemia: And look, he’s using the material he has. He says, “Okay, let me copy this book. I’m a smart guy. I can read this, and I can punch some holes in their arguments, in their beliefs. Why do I want to do this? Because I don’t wanna be forcibly converted to Catholicism.” That’s really why they copied it. Why they preserved it in the first place - because he copied something that was available - that is an interesting question we don’t have the answer to.

It’s possible this was just lying in a synagogue somewhere. We have something called the “genizah” in every synagogue that, it if was an old book, you’d stick it into this room at the back of the synagogue, and they’ve found very, very old books in these rooms. There’s a famous genizah in Cairo, where they found books that were from the Second Temple period. There were copies of books from the Second Temple period, and the copies themselves were 1,000 years old.

So, books that were believed to have been lost, like The Wisdom of Sirach or Ben Sira, that we only had the Greek translation, they’ve found several copies, in fact, of the Hebrew original in one of these archives. Maybe he just found it in an archive. What was it doing there? So, now we’ve got to speculate. Now I don’t know.

My speculation is – and there’s some evidence to support this – is that there were Jews who believed in Yeshua who were living among the other Jews. And why were they doing that? Because early on in the church, they began to write books, like for example, the famous book, I believe it was by Irenaeus, called Against All Heresy. Well, being a Jew who practiced the Torah and believing in Yeshua was considered a heresy.

And so, if the Catholics believed you were under their authority, then you couldn’t follow the Torah. You couldn’t practice any form of Judaism. So they had to hide, and they lived among the other Jews. That was the easiest place to hide. They maybe hid in other places too, but they would live among the other Jews, and over the generations, maybe they’d forget. “Oh, yeah. Our ancestors believed in Yeshua.”

There’s a very interesting study by a professor at Hebrew University who brings evidence for this. He shows how in Jewish writings from the 12th century and on, he says it must go back to a much earlier time, there’s reference to how there are three angels of the presence - that is, the angels that stand in the presence of the Father in the throne room. One of those is Elijah, the other one is Enoch, and the third one, according to these Jewish writings of the Middle Ages, is named Yeshua.

Jeff: Wow.

Nehemia: And he says, “How is this possible? We have this in Jewish writings from Jews who lived in Christian countries, Jews who were persecuted daily in the name of Yeshua, how could they have written about how there are three angels of the presence? And what do Elijah and Enoch have in common? That they’re people who were flesh and blood people on earth who went up alive to heaven. And for Yeshua to be the third angel of the presence, according to these sources in the Middle Ages, there has to be some explanation there. And his explanation is that there Jews who believed in Yeshua who were hiding among the other Jews, and they wrote these books.

Jeff: Wow. How interesting.

Nehemia: Yeah, the idea is that they preserved, and traditions that they transmitted ended up being reflected in these books, because that can’t be a coincidence that there’s an angel of heaven, one of the three main angels standing in the throne room - or sitting in the throne room, I don’t know - is named Yeshua. So there is some evidence that this actually took place, that there were Jewish Christians, if you will, who believed in Yeshua, who practiced the Torah, and because of persecution by the mainstream church, by the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches, they had to live among the Jews, under some peril as well, right? Because if they were found out, they would be turned over to the Catholics. And if they didn’t turn them over, the Jews would be in a lot of trouble, because they’d had to.

Jeff: Now, that is absolutely fascinating. I want to dig into that. Back to the fact that all these Hebrew manuscripts have come out and you’ve dug into this, you conclude in your book, Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus, you conclude that at least there, and I don’t know if you’ve advanced this conclusion beyond this now as you’ve studied more and read more of the Hebrew narratives, that Yeshua did not contradict or tell people to actually go against Torah, he actually supported Torah with his teachings. Is that still…

Nehemia: He states that explicitly. It’s Matthew 5:17. Matthew 5:17 to me, is the most interesting verse in the New Testament. Matthew 5:17, he says, “I do not come to do away with one jot or one tittle of the Torah.” I’m paraphrasing the Torah. “Or the prophets until all is fulfilled.” The reason it’s so interesting to me is, first of all, he tells you right there what his game plan is. “Hey, I didn’t come to do away with even one of the minutest points of this book.”

Okay. Wow, all right. So, that’s contrary to what Christianity teaches, and when I say Christianity, let me be more precise. It’s contrary to what the Catholic church, the Greek Orthodox church, and mainline Protestant denominations have taught. And there’s actually something really profound… I don’t know, did you ever study the Nicene Creed?

Jeff: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: The Nicene Creed is a statement of faith, and somebody pointed this out to me years ago, that in the Nicene Creed, they’re saying what they believe, and they say, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,” etc. And then they say, “He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.” This is the core belief of most Christian denominations. And what is missing from this statement of belief? Everything between “He was born of a virgin” and “He was crucified.”

So if you look at Matthew, everything from Matthew chapter 2 through Matthew, I believe it’s chapter 26, is not part of the Creed. It might be important, it might be something they study and do sermons on. But it’s not part of the Creed. I think it was Billy Graham or one of those guys who said that “Christ came to the earth to do three days’ work.” Really? That might be true. I’m not going argue with your theology. But why is it that the bulk of the Gospels don’t deal with what you call the “three days’ work?” Meaning, he came to earth, to die, and be resurrected, according to that.

Okay, if that’s the case, then why is it that… And it might be true, right? That’s a theology, I’m not going to argue with that. But there must be some reason that the bulk of the Gospels deal with the things that Yeshua taught here on earth, and that seems to be ignored by most Christian denominations. What I’m trying to do in this Hebrew Gospel Pearls is say, “Okay, you have your theology, you have your doctrine. That’s fine, I’m not going to go near that. What I want to ask is, what is it that this Jewish man who lived 2,000 years ago, who I believe taught the Torah, what is it that he taught and did while he was here on earth? And what was its significance? That’s what Hebrew Gospel Pearls is about. Can I just share one quick pearl?

Jeff: Yeah, I do want you to share a pearl with us.

Nehemia: So it says in the Gospel of Matthew that the Spirit alighted upon Jesus. That’s in the Greek, meaning it rested upon him, or something like that. And reading in the Hebrew version of Matthew, it says that the Spirit “sharta alav”. And I translated that as “It rested upon Him,” because that’s how any child in Israel would translate it.

Keith, who is my partner in this program, he asked a simple question, “What’s the source of that word?” And I’m like, “What do you mean? It just means ‘rest’.” “Okay, but how does it come to mean that?” And I look it up, and I realize - and it’s one of those things that you know but you have to put two and two together - I realize that it literally means, “to soak”.

And so, what the Greek says the Spirit rested upon him. So he comes up from the baptism in Matthew 3, and in Hebrew it says, “The Spirit soaked him,” it soaked upon him. It poured over him and soaked him. And so, wow, think how profound that is - how much more color and texture, in a sense, it gives you to what happened there.

Jeff: Yeah.

Nehemia: I think, a deeper perspective. He comes up from the physical water in the Jordan, and then he’s soaked in the Holy Spirit of God.

Jeff: Wow, that is so profound. So you guys are doing a project of line-by-line, verse-by-verse as much as possible on the Hebrew Gospel. You’re calling it Hebrew Gospel Pearls, and you’re trying to extract, looking at… And one of the things that I found fascinating was, you discovered a cousin that you didn’t know you had, who had apparently done what you’re doing now in the 1800s. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Nehemia: Right. Well, it’s actually, we were talking about doing this during the lockdown, and somebody wrote to me, one of the people who follows the program, he said, “I’m an Orthodox Jew and I’m following what you’re doing, and I think it’s wonderful that you’re talking about the Gospel from a Hebrew perspective.” He said, “You know, you’re not the first person to do this.” I’m like, “Okay, what do you mean?” I know I’m not the first person to do this from a Jewish perspective, right?

There’s a book called The Jewish Annotated New Testament, where a bunch of Jewish scholars got together about 10, 15 years ago, and they put their perspective on the New Testament. He said, “No, there was an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in the 1800s who wrote a commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke.” I said, “Well, that can’t possibly be true. An ultra-Orthodox rabbi? I would’ve heard of this.”

Jeff: Absolutely.

Nehemia: So I looked it up, and I actually bought the book. It was just translated into English in 2019, meaning a year ago.

Sherry: That is so amazing.

Nehemia: Yeah, and then I actually went to look for the Hebrew original. There’s one surviving copy in the world. It’s in Paris at the National Library of France, and they have a photocopy at the National Library of Israel. So, there are two copies, one’s a photocopy of the other, of the Hebrew original. So somebody got a hold of this, a scholar at Yale University, and he translated it into English. So I get this book, and I immediately recognize the name of the author, that is who wrote the original Hebrew commentary, and I realize he’s a cousin of mine from the name, and I looked up the genealogy, and I see he’s my second cousin five times removed. And he wrote a commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke in around 1879.

Jeff: That’s amazing.

Nehemia: And it was published in Hebrew, and then from Hebrew it was translated into French, and into German, and so we have also the French and the German versions. I thought, “How is this possible? I’ve never heard of this.” And so I’m reading the introduction and the scholar who translated and published this tells the story of how he went… this is a very famous family of rabbis, my cousins. One of the rabbis was the leading rabbi of the United States in the 20th century. He’s considered, in a sense, the founder of what’s called Modern Orthodox Judaism in the 20th century. Not the one who wrote the commentary, but this other rabbi who has the same last name, Soloveitchik.

And so they went to the family historian and they were asking stories about different rabbis, a lot of rabbis in this particular group of people with the same last name. And then they come to this one rabbi, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, and the family historian says, “We don’t talk about him.”

Jeff: Black sheep, black sheep!

Nehemia: He definitely was the black sheep of the family, because he had spent so much energy and time studying the New Testament, which was not considered acceptable in that community. There are Jews who have written commentaries going back for centuries, but those were always Jews who had converted to Christianity - Catholicism usually, or occasionally Protestantism in later centuries. And this rabbi, according to this scholar who wrote the book a year ago, he says, “This is actually the first Jew who didn’t convert, who remained part of the mainstream Jewish movement, who wrote a commentary on the New Testament.”

And I mentioned before how there was this rabbi in 1380 who wrote his critical remarks. You could say, “Well, isn’t that a commentary?” Well, it wasn’t really a commentary. What that rabbi was trying to do is say, “Hey, this is what we can argue when we debate with the Catholics.” It wasn’t really a commentary; it was a criticism.

This rabbi, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, wrote an actual commentary around 1878, 1879 on the Gospel of Matthew. You don’t have to agree with everything he says. He had interesting perspectives sometimes. He was really writing from a perspective of his own time, meaning he assumes that John the Baptist was an Essene. Well, the Essenes were the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. So in 1879 the Dead Sea Scrolls hadn’t been discovered yet. So he’s working within the world that he knows, but he’s coming from this perspective of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and he remains an ultra-Orthodox Jew until he dies.

Jeff: Were the Essenes considered, even in the 1800s or prior to that… would the Orthodox look at the Essenes as part of their sect, or just the Pharisees?

Nehemia: No, absolutely not. Only the Pharisees.

Jeff: Only the Pharisees.

Nehemia: What you could do with the Essenes is, you could project any belief and practice you wanted onto them, because we didn’t have their own writings that tell us what they believed. All we had was the short excerpts from Josephus about what they believed and who they were. And so, there were a lot of things assigned to them that they had nothing to do with. When we actually got their writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls, we got a much better understanding of who they were.

Let me read a passage that he writes. This is the rabbi, his name is Elijah, or Eliyahu Zvi Soloveitchik, writing around 1879, and he’s just written this commentary on Matthew; he also later wrote a commentary on Mark and Luke.

He says, “I know that I will not escape from the criticism from both sides, both the Jews and the Christians, for writing this commentary. My Hebrew brethren will say, ‘What happened to Rabbi Eliyahu? Yesterday, he was one of us, and today, he is filled with a new spirit.’” And “New spirit” here is meant derogatorily, as sarcasm, right?

Jeff: Right.

Nehemia: “And my Christian brethren will say, ‘This one who is a Jew, comes to reveal to us the secrets of the Gospel? How can we accept that he speaks correctly, and that a true spirit dwells within him?’” He says, “These two extremes are really saying one thing, that is, it cannot be that what he is speaking with his mouth is what he believes with his heart. On this criticism,” he says, “my soul weeps uncontrollably. Only God knows, and God is my witness, that in this I am free of sin.”

And when I read that, it really struck me because for years, I’ve been studying the New Testament and being criticized by both sides - the Jews and the Christians. The Jews say, “He must secretly be a Christian. He’s converted, and he’s filled with a new spirit.” It’s almost the same things they say. And then, the Christians say, “Well, he must have a secret agenda; he wants to convert us to Judaism, or destroy our faith.” And they’re both wrong.

What I want to do is understand the Gospels in their Hebrew context. And why do I want to do that? One is, I think it’s actually an important question in and of itself. The New Testament is one of the foundation documents of Western civilization. We live in a time - and I mean not just a century - we live in a year where people are out to destroy Western civilization.

Jeff: Yes.

Sherry: Yeah.

Nehemia: Their stated objective is the destruction of Western civilization. And I say, “Hey, Western civilization is actually pretty good.” I follow this fiction writer who writes about the Middle Ages, and I asked him, “Which of the periods that you write about would you like to live in?” He said, “I think we have a much better dental program here in the 21st century than the Middle Ages.” So, the benefits of Western civilization are paramount to all, and those who want to destroy it, I suggest they go and live in the Third World that they think is so wonderful.

I mean, look. We had that in Seattle, where they created an enclave of the Third World and it lasted a couple of weeks, and it was a nightmare.

So, I think it’s one of the foundational documents of Western civilization, so it’s important in and of itself. Also I’m a strong believer in, if you believe something, you should know what it is you believe, what the foundational sources of it are. And so the motto of my ministry, which you can find at nehemiaswall.com, is to empower people with information about the ancient Hebrew sources of their faith. Even if you don’t agree with me, even if we have a different faith, I think it’s important to empower people with that information. I’ve been blessed. Here, I want to state my Jewish privilege. No, really.

I grew up with a father who was a rabbi who taught me on his knee about the ancient Hebrew sources of my faith. And I studied in kindergarten the Hebrew Aleph-Bet, along with the English alphabet. In second grade, I started reading the Torah and translating it verse by verse, and in third grade the Mishna, fourth grade, the Talmud. So, it wasn’t anything I did. I was thrust into that situation by the Creator of the universe, and when I encountered people who yearned and desired to have information, and they don’t have access to that information, I feel I should be sharing that information with those who want to know that information.

And I meet Christians all the time who say, “Nehemia, help us understand, at least from your perspective. We might not agree with you. We might not in the end accept what you’re saying, but give us your Jewish perspective on Yeshua, who was a Jew, and what he taught.” And I feel I should share that with people who want to know that.

I would want people to share with me information that I needed, and people do share with me information that I need. And so I feel compelled, I feel called to share that information with those who want to know it.

Jeff: Amen. Well, we are of one mind in that. Our ministry’s name is Be One Ministries, and we connect to both the church world, the Jewish world, multiple different denominational worlds, from Baptist to Pentecostal to Catholic. We connect to those in Orthodox Judaism, and Conservative, Reform, and Karaite. We try to find, like you, places where there is an understanding of common ground, but not just in the natural. One of my foundational principles is, and I love what you’re saying, because I really want to, and always have wanted to take in the proverb that says, “Buy the truth and sell it not.” That I don’t want to buy into fake news. I want to hear the Scriptures. I want to understand the Scriptures to the best of my abilities, and that comes from us finding some form of conversations with each other.

And John chapter 17, Yeshua’s having a prayer, and that prayer that he’s having with his Father is recorded. It’s the last prayer before he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane and then to crucifixion. And in that prayer, he makes a statement, starting in verse 20 and 21, and he says, “I pray, Father, that they…” and he’s speaking of his disciples - the Jewish disciples that were following him, “and then, of those that will hear the words that they speak,” so that would be the Jews who believe in him as the Messiah, and the ones who are gentile who are going to come to faith and believe in him. He says, “I pray that they,” the Jews and the gentiles, “may be one as You, Father, and I are one, that the world may know that I am from You.”

And so one of his great prayers at the end of his life was a prayer of unity. Not uniformity, not that we agree on everything, because we never will, but that there be some form of unity for the credibility. And I think one of the things that has happened from a Gospel perspective, I’m a Jewish man who does believe in Yeshua as Messiah, but from my perspective, one of the things that has discredited Yeshua is this division that is so prevalent throughout Christianity today. The arguments and the division and not finding a place where there can be, “let’s seek truth”.

And I think what you’re doing, and what we try to do, is to bring the whole book into value, the Genesis part forward, to say that this book is the foundation. It is the truth, and so the Hebraic understanding of Yeshua, of Matthew, of the Tanakh and the Torah, it’s critical to understanding God’s truth as He revealed it to us.

And so, I really appreciate you, Nehemia. I appreciate what you’ve done, I appreciate the work you’re doing, and thank you so much.

Nehemia: Thank you.

Jeff: We’re visiting with Nehemia Gordon. You can find him at nehemiaswall.com. Just go there, and you can learn tons of great information. As you already realized, he’s a wealth of wisdom and knowledge and great discussion. And you can join… You can get tons of the great information that’s available there, lots of resources, but you can also be part of his Support Team and get even more in-depth. We are a member of his Support Team, and we value the friendship and relationship so much.

But Nehemia, thank you so much for giving us for giving us so much valuable time today.

Nehemia: My pleasure.

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