Hebrew Voices #78 - Chinese Origin of the Sukkot Etrog

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: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today with Dr. David Moster. He is the director and founder of the Institute of Biblical Culture at biblicalculture.org. He has a PhD in Bible from Bar Ilan University, a masters in Ancient Israel from NYU, and Rabbinical Ordination from Yeshiva University. He’s the author of a book called, Etrog: How a Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol, published this year. It just came out a few months ago.

Dr. Moster, or Rabbi Moster, tell us about the etrog. The etrog, of course, for many of my listeners… some will be familiar because they grew up going to Jewish synagogues, but many will only be familiar with it because they saw the movie Ushpizin, which has that big lemon-looking thing. You wrote a whole book, a whole PhD on it. Tell us about the etrog.

David: Thank you for having me, Nehemia. It’s a real pleasure. The etrog… it’s good that you mentioned the lemon. The etrog is a cousin of the lemon. It’s very lemony, it’s a citrus fruit. It’s actually one of the most ancient citrus fruits, and it’s characterized by its pungent smell, and also has a lot of bumps, usually. It’s called in scientific parlance, Citrus Medica, or a lot of people call it, citron. Not to be confused with… in France, they call the lemon “citron,” which gets confusing. So people think, “Oh, the citron,” they found it. No, that’s the lemon in France.

The etrog is a lemon-like fruit that is easy to hold in your hand - most of them – and it’s one of the many types of Citrus Medica. There are many, many types of Citrus Medica, and a lot of them are really interesting. One of the most interesting is called the “Buddha’s Hand citron” which looks like if you took a hand and you stuck out your fingers. It’s one of the most fascinating fruits on earth.

Nehemia: Did you say Buddha?

David: Buddha’s Hand, yeah.

Nehemia: Like the Buddhist person, Buddha. Before you get to all that, I want you to talk about that, but I want you to tie it in directly to the Bible. This is Hebrew Voices. We love the Bible here. Let’s start with Leviticus 23:40, and actually even before Leviticus 23:40. For someone who’s never been to a Jewish synagogue before, what does the etrog do? What is the function? Some people might know it as “esrog,” you Jews in the Diaspora.

David: I grew up with calling it “esrog.” The etrog, you’ll see it any time a person goes to a synagogue in the month of September or October, which is the holiday of Sukkot, Tabernacles. The holiday of Tabernacles has two mitzvot, two commandments, according to the Jewish interpretation. The first commandment is the sukkah, the booth, and so a lot of Jews eat and some even sleep in the booth. The second mitzva, the second commandment, is to take the four species, often called the “lulav bundle”, or even, “lulav and etrog”. It’s four different types of plants. One of them is a date palm, the spine of the date palm. Another one are willows, which are common here in North America. Another one is hadass, myrtle, and the last one, the most interesting one for me, is the etrog. Jews on the holiday of Sukkot are going to be praying with this bouquet, almost, or bundle of four different species. One of them is this yellow fruit, the etrog.

Nehemia: Tell them what they do with the bundle. Because if you haven’t seen it, it’s totally not intuitive. For someone who read Leviticus 23:40 with no context, who had never have seen this, I think there’s no way that you would get to what is then done with the lulav and etrog. Tell us more.

David: Right. From the inside, what is done is praying, and by holding it, what’s often done is to pray from all four corners of the earth and up and down. I don’t know if everyone’s watching on the video here, so I’ll try and describe it. What’s done is the taking of the bundle, pushing it forwards like this, shaking it forwards, shaking it behind you, shaking it to the side, shaking it to the side, up and then down.

It’s a very ritualistic dance, almost, but it’s not really a dance, it’s more of a shake. It’s a ritualistic shake that is done with these four species.

Nehemia: You make a blessing, a benediction as you’re holding the lulav and etrog, and you shake it forward, and you shake it back. The action of shaking it back is almost like in Western culture somebody throwing salt over their shoulder. It’s like, over your shoulder.

David: Yeah, almost. [laughing]

Nehemia: It’s not, obviously, right?

David: Right.

Nehemia: Do you do it right first, or left first? I haven’t done it in years, so I don’t remember.

David: I think every group might have minor traditional variations.

Nehemia: You do it one way to the right and then the left, or vice-versa. Then you do up and down. Okay. So you’ve shaken it to the different directions, and the key part of understanding this for the biblical context is Leviticus 23:40. Can we read that? Leviticus 23:40, let me pull it up here. Can I have you read it in Hebrew and then translate it?

David: Mm-hmm. This is what it says in Leviticus 23:40. It says, “U’lekachtem lachem beyom harishon,” “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day,” “pri eitz hadar.” We’re going to speak a lot about that.

Nehemia: Don’t translate right now pri eitz hadar, let’s leave that untranslated.

David: It says you should take this “pri eitz hadar, kapot temarim,” the fronds of palms, palm fronds, “ve’anaf eitz avot,” and bushy trees, “ve’arvei nakhal,” and willows of the brook. “U’samachtem lifnei Adonai Elocheichem shiv’at yamim,” and you shall be happy before your God, the Lord, for seven days.

Nehemia: What’s not clear immediately from this verse is you take these four types of vegetation and what do you do with them? We’ll get to some of the interpretations later, but the standard Rabbinical interpretation that you would see in an Orthodox synagogue or a Reform temple… would you see it in a Reform temple? I actually don’t know the answer to that question.

David: More and more, you would. Yes, more and more in Reform temples.

Nehemia: If you start at the Reform Temple you would see it in the guise of, you have this bundle. The Lulav, it’s the heart of a palm branch, meaning it hasn’t spread out its leaves yet. It’s really interesting, it’s woven pieces of the palm branch that holds together the myrtle and the willow. Myrtle and willow are extremely common in Israel. Myrtle, I have literally 10 feet from here outside my window, here in Jerusalem, it’s giving me horrible allergies. I wake up with my eyes all encrusted from the willow, because it’s now in bloom, or it’s giving off some kind of pollen, anyway.

Those three are one unit, the lulav with the palm, with the myrtle and the willow, and then you have the etrog, which is held together, the citron, this lemon-like thing. Is that indigenous to the Land of Israel is the $64,000 question, because the first three are. Palm branches, you could throw a stone and hit a palm branch. Willows, you really have to go into the nachal, into the brook, so you’ve got to walk a little. But date palms – man, we’ve got those just about everywhere. What about the citron?

David: Before we get to the $64,000 question, this verse is the Rabbinic interpretation which became the Jewish interpretation.

Nehemia: I would challenge you on that. I would say it’s still the Rabbinical interpretation.

David: The Rabbinic-Jewish interpretation, right?

Nehemia: Because there are other Jewish interpretations…

David: Right. This was the Rabbinic one. What happened was, these four species became the four species of the lulav bundle. The pri eitz hadar, which either means “the fruit of the beautiful tree”, or “the beautiful fruit of the tree” - there’s some nuance there – that was referred to as the “etrog.” The etrog was the fourth of the four species. Now you ask, did this come from Israel? It’s just really one of the…

Nehemia: From the name of your book, I’m guessing it didn’t come from Israel. [laughing]

David: Right. And we all kind of know this; it’s one of the core issues in my book, but we all kind of know this. It’s never mentioned in Tanakh, in the Bible. We know this…

Nehemia: I’ve got to stop you there. The etrog is never mentioned in the Tanakh, but you could argue it is – meaning if pri eitz hadar, the fruit of the splendorous tree, or the glorious tree, if that refers to etrog, you could say that’s the Biblical name of etrog, right? In other words, it’s a catch-22. Other than that, there’s no reference to this as a fruit, is what you’re saying.

David: As a name. The name “etrog” doesn’t appear in the Bible, and this makes sense. We know the seven fruits of the Land, we know the pomegranate, the fig, the grape, the dates, the wheat, the barley…I hope I got the seven there, maybe I missed one.

Nehemia: The verse in Deuteronomy, the seven produces of the Land, that doesn’t mean that’s all that grew in the Land.

David: Not all, but fruit…

Nehemia: We have this wonderful mosaic, it’s on display at the Israel Museum, and it’s about the Sabbatical year. It talks about in the area of Beit Shean, what produce is subject to the Sabbatical year prohibition and which isn’t. It lists all these different types of plants that we don’t find in the Bible, some of them. I can’t tell you off the top of my heat, but it lists dozens of different types of things.

What’s interesting is, some of them are the modern names. Lentils and things like this are mentioned, so it’s possible things grew in Israel that aren’t in Tanakh, right?

David: It’s possible. I think the carob tree is not mentioned either, so it’s possible. But on the other hand, the thing about the etrog is that it’s so unique, it’s so beautiful, it’s so pungent. It’s used on Sukkot. It’s kind of glaring in its glaring absence, that’s the problem with it.

Nehemia: What’s really interesting to me is that we have this word “etrog;” what language is the word etrog in?

David: Etrog is actually an Aramaic word which comes from the Persian dialect, wadrang, and from wadrang…

Nehemia: Aha. Persian, is it?

David: Yeah, it was called different things before it got to Persia, which is now answering your question, where did it come from. Let’s start from the beginning and we’ll get to it.

Nehemia: Let me stop you for a second. I’m looking at Leviticus 23:40 in the Targum, and it has the word “atrogin”. In other words, this word is not a modern word for it, this is the ancient word for this fruit, at least in Aramaic in the Targum, and if that was the word in Biblical Hebrew, you’d wonder why doesn’t it use that word - although like we said, that doesn’t really prove definitively.

For example, some people argue that the word “tarnegol” which is way off-topic, guys – but tarnegol’s the word for chicken, or rooster, and there’s an animal mentioned in the Book of Job, “sechvie”, which some people interpret as referring to the rooster. We could debate whether that’s correct or not.

But it’s possible that there was a Biblical Hebrew name that was then replaced with some later Hebrew word. So maybe pri eitz hadar, fruit of the splendorous tree, is the Biblical... Meaning, maybe Moses was holding one in his hand, and what everybody called that at the fruit market in the desert was pri eitz hadar. How do we know that’s not correct? I’m going to play the Rabbinical advocate here. [laughing]

David: That’s fine, that’s fine. I’ve heard this argument a lot. The first thing is, Moses did not have an etrog, and I’m going to explain why. The reason I’m going to explain this is, we’re going to start with the historical aspect of the etrog, and in the next one we’re going to talk about the historical aspect of the Biblical text. Let’s start with the history of the etrog.

It’s really interesting, in the last century, botanists started asking the question of where do fruits and plants come from? A basic question, where do fruits and plants come from? They started asking, “Where’s the most genetic diversity?” Another question they asked is, “Where on earth were parasites evolving just for that fruit alone?” Because if this plant was in there for so long, then the parasites would evolve to make use of that plant.

Finally, in the last 50 or so years, or even more, we started looking at DNA. You can actually trace the family tree of fruits and see way back, where the ancestors come from. The etrog, like all citrus fruits, comes from the region of southern China, northeastern India, and the region there, a lot of countries in that area, and it comes from that area. So all lemons, limes, kumquats, grapefruits, everything, you name it.

Nehemia: Now you’re just making up words. No, I’m kidding.

David: No, no, no. The kumquat is a delicious fruit.

Nehemia: My sister here in Jerusalem has a kumquat tree, or it might be a loquat, actually, but it’s one of those quat trees in her yard. So they do grow in Israel - we’re known for our citrus fruit here in Israel.

David: Yes, it grows very well in Israel, especially if you water it – especially. All these fruits actually come from the region of China. When I say China, I mean this general region, Indo-China, and so on and so forth, not referring to any modern borders.

Nehemia: East Asia, basically.

David: East Asia, but in that region. The region is actually called “Yunnan,” and it’s famous because - have you ever heard of the…?

Nehemia: I’ve visited Yunnan. I went there during the Chinese New Year in 2014.

David: Oh my goodness!

Nehemia: I was in Kunming and Xishuangbanna, and the last surviving rain forest in China is just outside of Banna.

David: Did you see the large valleys, the steep hills?

Nehemia: Oh, yeah. I climbed some of those steep hills. It was incredible, because today what they were doing is cutting down the rain forest and replacing it with tea plantations, because they get more money for tea. I would watch these people go to work and they would climb a hill like that was their morning. I mean, that wasn’t their morning, right? The first part of their morning was just walking up this hill. That would be my hike for the day, and that was just the morning to prune some tree up there, then they’d go to another hill. It’s really incredible how they do that. I guess they have mountain legs, which I don’t.

David: This area, because it has so much steep mountain hills and valleys, it’s a really great place for genetic… for evolutionary purposes. What would happen is, the fruit in one valley would be completely cut off from the next valley. So in one valley you might have, let’s say, a kumquat, but in the next valley you’re going to get a lime, because the mountains are so high. This was also a famous place, because it was the inspiration for Shangri-La in the book Lost Horizon because it was this beautiful place just off the Himalayas.

This is where, in the region of the worlds, citrus fruits come from. We know other fruits come from different places. Did you ever hear of avocados from Mexico? They actually come from Mexico.

Nehemia: Are they really native there?

David: Yeah, they’re native there.

Nehemia: Can I bring an analogy here?

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: You have potatoes all over the world. Ireland is known for potatoes, Russia’s known for potatoes. But where did the potato come from? I believe it comes from South America, and in South America you have dozens of types of potato, whereas essentially in Russia it’s more or less a monoculture of maybe one type, or two or three types. You have dozens of types, so that’s the biodiversity you’re talking about.

One of the things I know from the field of studying wheat and barley – and I don’t know if this is the same, correct me here if this is different – but one of the things they looked for was the wild wheat and the wild barley. In other words, they said the place where it was domesticated, there must still exist the wild wheat.

It was, I believe, in 1909 that Israel Aharonson (actually Aaron Aharonson) who won some kind of international acclaim for this – he discovered the wild wheat on the terraces outside Rosh Pina in Northern Israel. Up until then, nobody knew where wheat was really domesticated. Nobody really knew. They had theories of the wheat, but until they found the wild wheat, he couldn’t say, “Okay. How did it get domesticated in this area? Because this is where the wild cousin still lives.” Do we have something like that with the etrog?

David: Meaning, a place where it’s still growing in the wild?

Nehemia: No, from what I understand, etrog doesn’t grow in the wild anywhere. But are there wild citruses? Oh, there’s wild etrog?

David: Oh, yeah. There are many types. It seems almost every time a botanist goes into Yunnan really looking, they find another type of Citrus Medica, of etrog.

Nehemia: You’re saying there are wild etrogs?

David: Yes.

Nehemia: That’s as clear proof as one could hope for, from my perspective.

David: And not just one kind, there are actually about 20 that we know of, different types. There are different types of Citrus Medica. Basically, it’s more complicated…

Nehemia: Why is it called “Medica?” I mean, that sounds like medicine, obviously, right?

David: Right. It actually does have medicinal properties, but “Medica” comes from Medes, Madai. It’s the Medes, because the etrog was making its way over to the west, yeah. Basically, one of the things you were asking about the Bible was, “Hey, it’s not mentioned, but maybe it was there,” and I would just like to point out two points. The first point is that the Bible mentions fruits hundreds of times – hundreds. Grapes are mentioned hundreds of times, olives, dozens, easily. Figs, dates, everything.

Nehemia: Can I tell you what I can’t figure out, is the pomegranate? We have seven species which are the main produce of the Land of Israel. One of them is the rimon, the pomegranate? Really?

David: Well, it’s delicious.

Nehemia: It’s delicious, so you make wine out of it, I guess.

David: You eat it.

Nehemia: Or you eat it fresh, and if you eat it fresh, it’s ruined in a few weeks or months, maybe. So you make wine to preserve it, but was it really that important of a product?

David: Well, a lot of things are ruined quickly. You slaughtered a goat, you had about 24 hours to eat it.

Nehemia: But wheat, you can preserve for years.

David: Right. Some things you’d preserve, others are more special.

Nehemia: Dates, which aren’t mentioned in the seven, probably are the honey-mentioned.

David: No, dates are mentioned. Yeah, dates are part of the seven. Yes.

Nehemia: Let’s read what’s the list of the seven produces of the Land of Israel…

David: There are a few different lists. Make sure you get the seven one.

Nehemia: The one with seven is Deuteronomy 8:8. It says, “Eretz khitah u’se’orah ve’gefen u’te’ena, ve’rimon, eretz zeit shemen u’dvash.” The land of wheat, and barley, and vine, and fig, and pomegranate, a land of olive oil and honey.” Many people say that honey refers to date honey, or what we call “silan”, because once again, you could dry out the dates. But one of the best ways to preserve these dates and get them past a few weeks of being eaten by bugs is you turned it into a syrup, and then you can do almost anything with that syrup, it lasts almost forever if you keep it inside…

David: Right, so that’s the general interpretation of that verse.

Nehemia: Maybe you have a different interpretation, which we’d love to hear.

David: Yeah, that it’s the date.

Nehemia: The point is, pomegranate is mentioned there, but there’s no citron. There were other fruits in the Land of Israel. One of the native plants to Israel is scallions, also known as “green onions”, and they’re named after the city of Ashkelon. We have stuff in Israel that isn’t necessarily mentioned, although I think it’s mentioned in the Tanakh under “batzal”.

David: This is the point that I’d like to make. When you get to citrus fruits in China, there are many names for citrus fruits in China in their most ancient texts, because this is where it comes from. Nehemia, not to push too hard, but it’s an uphill battle to say that this fruit which was so important to the people of the Land, it wasn’t mentioned by accident, the etrog. If it’s so beautiful and so important, how many fruits were there? There were five.

The tapuach, the apple, was kind of bitter at that time, at least as far as we know. Fruits were mentioned everywhere in the Bible, in laws, in proverbs, in stories, in names – the name “Tamar,” the name “Rimon”…

Nehemia: Beyond the list of seven, we have other verses, and I’ll give you a great example. That list doesn’t mention almonds, but almonds are central in one of the stories of the Torah, with the almond branch with Aaron and then later in a prophecy with Jeremiah. The point is, somewhere it would have been mentioned, is what you’re saying.

David: Somewhere, yeah. What I’m pointing out with China is that it’s mentioned in ancient Chinese texts. It was mentioned as a medicinal. It was used really, in certain respects, to help you with your digestion, which is interesting because when it made its next step on its journey, to India – and you can argue that it was already in India at the same time – because remember, like I said, Indo-China...

Nehemia: What period are we talking about here? Give me a ballpark of when we’re talking.

David: It’s before texts. The etrog was in India before texts.

Nehemia: What does it mean, “before texts?” I don’t know what that means.

David: When you’re talking about the etrog…

Nehemia: In China we have the bone texts… By the way, I was at the tomb of one of the first empresses of China, and they had these scrolls there that were uncovered in her tomb, and they were perfectly intact. I was there with my Chinese teacher in Xiang Sha, China, and I asked her, “What does it talk about?” She started translating. She could read it, it was incredible. It talked about two main subjects, one is how to predict the weather, and how to use astrology to predict the future. Those were the two central things they were concerned about.

What was really interesting is these scrolls from this empress were roughly the same period as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I think it’s interesting that the Dead Sea Scrolls, they do have some astrological information, but the focus there is things like the war of the sons of light and the sons of darkness, meaning end times predictions, and the rule of the community, osecha yachad. So the focus there was so different, I thought that was really interesting.

David: I’m glad you brought that up, because we teach the Dead Sea Scrolls and the calendrical texts there, not…

Nehemia: Tell us about that. Where do you teach the Dead Sea Scrolls? Remind the people what you’re… You have the Institute of Biblical Studies at biblicalculture.org. Do you have to be a grad student to sign up for that, or even have done college? What are the requirements to come and study at your Institute?

David: There are no requirements. Anybody who wants to study can come study. We have every text. We read it in the original language with the translation. So anybody who wants to really delve deep into the Hebrew, into the Greek, into the Aramaic, can come study with us and really learn and sharpen their skills. But people who don’t necessarily know those languages can come and read the texts in translation, because we do everything at the same time. For example, with our Dead Sea Scrolls…

Nehemia: So this is open to everybody, biblicalculture.org. People, go check it out.

David: Thank you.

Nehemia: Let’s get back to the citron…

David: Let’s get back to the citron.

Nehemia: …that’s the etrog.

David: Once we get to India, and it was already in India from time immemorial, from the beginnings of time according to the text.

Nehemia: Are we talking 4,000 years ago? Because the earliest Vedic texts are supposedly from like… I don’t know if they were written, but they go back something like 4,000 years, don’t they?

David: Once we get to the earliest texts from India, the first time the etrog appears is something called the “Samhitas”, and one of them is called “Charaka Samhita”, and Charaka is most famous for being the first eye surgeon on earth. He was a medicinal person, and he had a materia medica to explain which fruit helps with which malady, and so on and so forth. In his description he mentions the etrog a number of times.

Another doctor – they didn’t necessarily have titles back then – but another doctor, or healer, at that time, was “Sushruta”, and this is in the first millennium before the Common Era. Sushruta and Charaka mention the etrog about 40 times.

Nehemia: You say the first millennium, that could be any time between let’s say roughly 900 BC to 100 BC. So where within that realm are we talking? Because that’s important for the Torah context, isn’t it?

David: Yeah. The Samhitas are dated different periods in that time. I can’t say this one’s 600 and this one’s 200, or this one’s 900. Charaka usually is viewed almost like a number of texts from the traditions in Israel that would grow over time and be passed down. It wasn’t necessarily like Charaka invented these, but he may have been more of a compiler or an editor and then added in his own.

So this is really ancient stuff, and they’re mentioning the etrog 40 times. It had a name like “mutu lungaca, mutu lungaca”.

Nehemia: That was the name of the etrog?

David: Yeah. I forgot to say…

Nehemia: What does mutu lungaca translate as? It doesn’t translate as “fruit of a beautiful tree”, does it?

David: [laughing] No, it’s etrog.

Nehemia: That would be nice if it did. [laughing]

David: Right, and there were names for it in China, and there were names for it in India. Finally, we’re tracking this fruit from its homeland to India, and one of the things that’s most interesting to me is viewing it as like a migrant, because it starts out in China where all these citrus fruits are around, and it’s not important. Then it gets to India and there are only a handful of citrus fruits. There’s the lemon, there’s the lime, there’s the etrog and maybe a few more.

But the orange, for example, would really take off in China, not in India. So the etrog is now going up in status, and it’s still used for gastro issues. The peel is used, the fruit is used, the rind is used. But also, this is what we were talking about in Israel, fruits often occur in different places and in different contexts and culture.

So for example, there’s a statue of Shiva sitting with an etrog. He also has a weasel in his other hand, and he’s pointing…

Nehemia: That’s the Indian God? I thought it was a Goddess, for some reason.

David: Well, there’s Shiva and then there’s Brahmanic deities that also hold the etrog, and there are different forms of the Shiva. But one form is holding an etrog, and a mongoose vomiting jewels in the other hand.

Nehemia: A mongoose?

David: A mongoose vomiting jewels.

Nehemia: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is vomiting jewels.

David: What?

Nehemia: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, it’s from…

David: I don’t know what that is.

Nehemia: Before your time. It was a story about a mongoose that killed snakes, I guess in India.

David: The mongoose is vomiting jewels, a symbol of wealth, and the etrog is a symbol of fertility. One of the main reasons they’d eat it was a symbol of…

Nehemia: Oh, wow! The etrog was a symbol of fertility in India?

David: Right. We’re going to get to why. The main reason why is this is something that most people don’t realize... Remember, Jews are the main people who use the etrog, and most of them haven’t…

Nehemia: You mean today?

David: Yeah, today. Many, not most, but a lot of Jews have never sliced it open, just never sliced it open. Once you slice it open, you’ll see there’s not a lot of fruit. Today’s etrogim, by the way, the ones that are for the mass market, are very lemony, so they have a lot more fruit. But most of the other etrogim, the ones we were talking about in China you pick off the tree, they have very little fruit to no fruit. It’s all peel. It’s one of the most fascinating things – you take a giant fruit, you slice it open, so if you cut the etrog open, you see it has nothing but peel and seeds.

Now, that’s interesting because the seeds - it doesn’t have a million seeds, but it’s just seeds, and if it’s just seeds, it’s a sign of fertility because the seed will cause…

Nehemia: By the way, in Jerusalem at the shuk at the Machane Yehuda Market, you can buy candied etrog, which is something that until I got to Israel I’d never even heard of, and in fact, if you would have asked me growing up, most people would have thought it was not something that you would want to do, is eat an etrog. Now that I’m thinking about it, we used it for besamim, to smell it as a spice at the end of Shabbat, but I’d never heard of anybody eating it until I got to Israel.

David: Yeah, you can eat it in two forms. You can make it like a candy, or you can make it into a jam, like a marmalade. Another way people eat it is that candy form, it’s often not known, actually, it’s a nice cross-cultural between Jews and Christians, is that the etrog is one of the ingredients in many Christmas cakes.

Nehemia: Are you serious?

David: Yes, it’s that little yellow… it’s… the only food market really, is Christmas cakes. The reason why is because one more time…I see you’re laughing, but this…

Nehemia: [laughing] Wait a minute. Are they using the leftover Jewish etrogs from after Sukkot?

David: No, no. Listen, once Sukkot is over, the etrog is worth next to nothing. Before, we’ll talk about…

Nehemia: An interesting example of markets, right? Because if you go to buy an etrog the day before, it’s worth a lot. But if you buy it the day after, even the day after the first day of the holiday, the price has dropped dramatically, and by the end of the holiday it’s worth nothing.

David: Yeah. It’s like how they say, “The car loses half its value when you leave the lot,” did you ever hear that?

Nehemia: I haven’t heard that.

David: The etrog loses all of its value when Sukkot arrives. It would have to be after Sukkot.

Nehemia: That’s interesting. You mentioned Christians… you’re a Rabbi, ordained Rabbi from Yeshiva University. You’ve got the Institute of Biblical Culture, biblicalculture.org. Is that only open for Jews, or can non-Jews go?

David: No, not at all. Actually right now we have more Christians than Jews studying. It fluctuates between each class, but we’re very welcoming for anyone from anything whatsoever. We have Jewish and Christian professors.

Nehemia: You have some New Testament classes as well, don’t you?

David: We have classes on the New Testament. I think in November we’re going to have a class on Philippeans. We have classes on the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. We’re going to have Genesis, Exodus, Proverbs, things like that. Then we have things that are of general interest for everyone, archaeology, ancient inscriptions, things like that. That’s all at biblicalculture.org.

Back to the Christmas cake, the reason why it appears in Christmas cakes and not a lemon is because it’s all peel. When you have a peel, you can put it into the… and you can make it hard, like orange becomes marmalade. Orange peel is important for marmalade. And when you have so much peel for the etrog, it’s like a lemon jelly, the hard piece of rind. That’s that. We’re making our way in this nice conversation…

Nehemia: You heard it here, guys, the history of the Christmas cake. [laughing]

David: That’s true. I don’t know who first thought of this, but that would be interesting, if somebody…

Nehemia: Do you know what a Christmas cake is called in modern Hebrew?

David: No, I don’t.

Nehemia: I just learned this the other day. The modern Hebrew term for Christmas cake is “English cake”.

David: English.

Nehemia: And it’s not “ooga Anglit”, it’s “English cake”.

David: Maybe that reflects the history, and maybe we should look at the British.

Nehemia: Right. In other words, to the Jews it’s not a Christmas cake, it’s just cake that English conquerors eat. And it tastes good, so we eat it too, we called it “English cake”.

David: Right. And I’ve heard that the Christmas lights in America, when they’re sold in Israel, they’re called sukkah…

Nehemia: Oh, they’re sukkah lights, absolutely. They’re not even Christmas lights, they’re…

David: So there’s a lot of cross. Moving on, we get…

Nehemia: In China, they’re New Year’s lights. It’s the same lights. They’re used in the Chinese New Year. So back to this thing that came from China, went to…

David: India.

Nehemia: How do we get it to Media?

David: Then it gets to Media, and we’re not sure if it’s either naturally, or if it came through the conquest of Cyrus and Darius. “Me Hodu ad Kush,” the Persian Empire was from India into Ethiopia. So once they conquered that – and we’ll talk about that in a minute – but what happened was, it made its way into Persia and Media, contemporary Iran, and even to this day, the etrog is an important part of that culture’s food. It’s called the “Bergamot Lemon” there, and it’s in a lot of different recipes.

Nehemia: In Iran, you mean?

David: In Iran, yeah. I once saw on a website, you can even buy that etrog jelly we were just talking about. It began as an Iranian recipe. You can even buy it straight up in the supermarket, kind of like we buy strawberry jam. They just buy etrog jam. That’s where the name wadrang came in the Avestan literature, which is ancient Iranian literature.

Nehemia: Which then became etrog.

David: Right, and then wadrang became Etrog, and so then the $64,000 question is, how did it get to Israel? Here we have one of the most fascinating stories of archaeology that I know of. There’s a Professor from Tel Aviv University, Dr. Dafna Langgut, she’s an archaeobotanist. She studies plants in ancient sites. I’ve been to her lab in Tel Aviv University, it’s really cool. She’s the real deal.

When archaeologists were digging in a place called Ramat Rachel on the outskirts of Jerusalem, today…

Nehemia: It’s a 5-minute drive from here.

David: Okay, very good. They were digging at Ramat Rachel, and what they found was a Persian garden. Now, the ancient Persians were very into plants. They had these paradise gardens, which became the name “paradise” for us. In these gardens, they planted everything that was in their empire, all the beautiful plants, fruits and trees in their empire. If it was in Greece, which they hadn’t yet conquered, they wouldn’t plant it. It was only their own stuff. So Dafna Langgut sees…

Nehemia: Wait, I don’t understand. What do you mean, in Greece they would only plant…?

David: The kings of Persia would only plant in their gardens things from their own empire.

Nehemia: Oh, so if it was some plant from Greece, they wouldn’t plant it in the garden?

David: No, but they would say, “When we conquer Greece, we’ll plant it in our garden.”

Nehemia: They’re almost like The Borg, right? Every place they conquer, they add, in this case the biodiversity, unique…

David: Biodiversity, yeah.

Nehemia: …to their garden, they add it to their collective. The word “pardes” is the Hebrew word for an orchard.

David: Paradise.

Nehemia: Also, it’s sort of from the word “paradise.” In other words, pardes really is a translation of the word “gan”, as in Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden. Garden wasn’t like they had tomatoes out in the back yard - the Garden of Eden was an orchard with fruit trees of some sorts.

David: Right. The orchard, but really the paradise, because it was something unique at that time, would have been more like a well-cared for garden, almost like a botanical garden that we would go to today, where everything is nice and in order. Actually, we think that this style, it was a rectangular style, was called “chahar bagh”. It lives on today in the Iranian gardens, but it even lives on in the Taj Mahal, where you have that long, rectangular pool when you walk up to the Taj Mahal. That actually was a chahar bagh – I hope I’m pronouncing this right – garden.

Moving back, so Dafna Langgut, this archeobotanist, sees that there are two pools in this garden. She sees pool number two and she says, “Think about this. If this pool was plastered on a random day in the ancient world,” when the Persians were already in the Land of Israel, “On the day that they plastered it, there was probably pollen in the air that got stuck in the wet plaster, and got stuck there for 2,400 years.” So she flakes off the plaster, she puts it in her machines, and she finds all the pollen in there, and she finds etrog pollen. It’s fascinating. And this makes perfect sense. It’s the luckiest find, but it also makes all the perfect sense. This is how it got from Persia, from India, to Israel. The Persian overlords would bring it, and then all of a sudden, so now how does it become a Jewish fruit? How does that happen?

In my book, what I try and argue is that the etrog was so different. It was really different. It smelled different, it looked different. It had to be grown with a lot of water. It didn’t have any real food to it. It was an unheard-of fruit, and it was the first foreign fruit to ever make its way to the west – and the west, by that I mean Israel. It was the first foreign fruit. This all of a sudden comes, and in the Second Temple period, when did it arrive? It arrived let’s say around… we can’t know the exact date, but let’s say it’s something about 400, 450, around that, before the Common Era, which is the Persian period before the Greek. That period is exactly when Biblical interpretation was on the rise. It’s when Jeremiah says, “Salvation’s going to come in 70 years.” Daniel says, “Oh, no. It’s not 70, it’s seven 70s.” He goes on and he comes out to something like 490 years. This is an interpretation. People are interpreting the Bible.

What’s happening in the Second Temple period is they see, “Wait. It says you should take the pri eitz hadar, the fruit of the beautiful tree, or the beautiful fruit of a tree, that must be the etrog.” Once that became the etrog, after Leviticus 23:40 was written, and you were talking about criticism, I think Vayikra was written much earlier than the others do. After this was written, it became the etrog.

Nehemia: Wait, so what did it mean when Leviticus 23:40 was written, as far as you understand it?

David: This actually has a lot to do with something you had mentioned to me before we spoke. In the Book of Nehemia, chapter 8…

Nehemia: Let’s read that. Chapter 8:8 of the book that I wrote, the Book of Nehemia.

David: Okay, Nehemia’s book, yeah.

Nehemia: Can you read us that? Nehemia 8:8. To give the background here of what happened, they had gathered all the people and they read from the Torah. When they read from the Torah they were like, “Uh oh, there’s some stuff here that we haven’t been doing. How do we do this? What do we do?”

David: It’s 8:15.

Nehemia: What’s that? 8:15 you said?

David: 8:15, yeah.

Nehemia: I’ll just read quickly from verse 8. It says, “And they read in the Book of the Torah of God, meforash…” which means – good question what it means. “Ve’som sechel vayavinu b’mikra.” I won’t translate those words, because they’re a whole podcast unto themselves. But basically, it means something like they not only read it, clearly they gave an explanation of what they meant. That’s often how it’s understood.

Nehemia, who is the “trashata,” which apparently means governor said, “And Ezra the Priest,” et cetera “and all these people are saying, ‘Don’t cry,’” because these people are crying. Why are they crying? Because they realized, “We haven’t been keeping the Torah. We’re going to mourn today.” He says, “Don’t cry,” for all the people were crying when they heard the words of the Torah.

He says to them, “Go and eat fat foods and drink sweet things, and send portions to those who don’t have, for today is holy to our Lord, and do not be sad, for it is a joy of Yehovah, which is your strength,” et cetera. Now, skip ahead to verse 15. We’ve got to start in verse 13, can we do that?

David: Yeah, go right ahead.

Nehemia: “And in the second day, they gathered all the heads of the fathers of all the people, the Kohanim and the Leviim to Ezra the Scribe, u’lehaskil et divrei haTorah,’” which means something like, “To give understanding, wisdom in the words of the Torah.” “And they found written in the Torah, which Yehovah had commanded by the hands of Moses, that the Children of Israel would dwell in Sukkot,” in booths, “on the feast in the seventh month.” And now, verse 15.

David: Verse 15 is really important, because they go out and they say, “Let it be known the following that we learned in the Torah. Let it be known the following, tze’u hahar ve’heviyu alei zayit ve’alei eitz, shemen, ve’alei hadass, ve’alei tamarim, ve’alei eitz avot, la’asot Sukkot kakatuv.” “Go out to the mountains and bring olive branches, and oil branches…it’s unclear what that means. “Alei hadass, and myrtle branches, and date palm branches, and leafy branches that make Sukkot as it is written.”

What it says in Nehemia here is that all those species, those plants that we saw in Leviticus, what do you do with them? You build your sukkah. This is really important, and I’d like to explain why it’s so important. Not everyone necessarily appreciates this. Right after the turn of the century in the 1900s, in the early 1900s, there was an ethnographer who was really there for also Christian purposes, to build up a settlement there, and so on and so forth. There was an ethnographer named Gustaf Dalman. What he did is he went around and he observed what all the farmers, the Palestinian farmers of the time, were doing in around the years 1902 to 1913, right up until the First World War.

What he found was that in the month of September, at the end of the grape-growing, you’d go out into the field for your harvest. You go into your harvest and you build a sukkah, and that sukkah’s made of lots of leaves. The reason you need so many leaves is because it’s hot. It’s so hot, so you need to go and rest. There are no trees, like in North America, there aren’t so many trees in your fields. And so, you rest. You rest there, and then you go out, you take in all the grapes, and then you celebrate by singing songs. You celebrate by eating the best fruits.

At this time of year, right around Sukkot time, is the fruit harvest. What pri eitz hadar means is the beautiful fruits from your trees. You go and you get your grapes from the vine. You go and you get your olives from the tree, and you get your pomegranates, which are really amazing fruits, and your dates, and so on and so forth, and you celebrate. And so that’s pri eitz hadar, that’s what Leviticus was originally talking about, was that at this time of year you celebrate all the fruits, all the work of your… the produce of your work.

Nehemia: That’s definitely reflected in the Torah, because Sukkot’s also called “Chag haAssif”, the feast of ingathering, and you’re definitely gathering in some of the fruits. One of the purposes of this Arab sukkah that you’re describing, it’s mentioned in the Prophets, “Ka’sukkah bamelunah,” it’s talked about in Isaiah. And it’s functional. What’s the purpose here? “I’ve got a bunch of grapes out in the field, or whatever the specific crop is, and I worked really hard pruning the tree and caring for it, and somebody’s going to come in from the nachal and steal all my fruit in the middle of the night, if I don’t keep an eye on it.”

David: Right, and not only people. Not only people - animals.

Nehemia: Oh, and the animals too, sure, sure.

David: Animals. You were more concerned about the animal theft than the human theft. It’s interesting, some of the parallels to that verse, it actually says a “migdal”, an actual tower. It was the same thing in the early 1900s, you can still see them today when you go hiking in Israel. There are these towers. I remember hiking in a place called Sataf, right outside Jerusalem.

Nehemia: I just took a video from there. The Danish coin video was filmed at Sataf.

David: Oh, great! So probably in the background of your video…

Nehemia: Yes, you see the guard tower. There are guard towers there.

David: The towers, right.

Nehemia: To make sure that people don’t come and steal the produce. You’re not there all year round, you’re there when the crop is ready to be harvested and you haven’t finished harvesting it yet. That’s the purpose of the sukkah in its agricultural context. I did a video about that.

David: All the holidays in ancient Israel, all the festivals in Israel, the chagim, the three chagim, were harvest festivals. The Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, for that you would harvest your wheat. Pesach, Passover, you would harvest your barley, and Sukkot, you would harvest all your fruits. That’s basically what it originally meant. Then, in the Second Temple period, we have this new fruit, what I like to call the “Lamborghini of fruits” arrives, because there’s nothing else. This citrusy-special fruit, that’s now interpreted by the Jews to be the etrog.

Now, other people didn’t interpret it that way, and this is something that’s very interesting. The Samaritans, to this day, even though they have etrogim in their sukkah, it’s not so important. It’s like one of the many fruits. The Samaritans, for their booths, you put the fruit on the ceiling. It’s the schach.

Nehemia: I want to give an analogy here. Back to Leviticus 23:40, it says on the first day to take these four types of vegetation, and it’s not exactly clear what to do with them. The way it was interpreted in Nehemia 8:14 and 15 – and I think 14’s important as well in this context – but the way it was interpreted there is that these are building materials for this booth. Now, how can that be? Here’s the best analogy I can give, or I’ve given it before. If I were to say this to an American in Texas, “Take a bunch of two-by-fours and nails, and go out into your back yard and celebrate the Feast of Booths,” he’s not going to take the nails and the two-by-fours and shake them around, he’s going to build a booth out of them. Maybe he’ll build a deck, right? But he’s going to build some kind of structure out of them.

I think in the context, at least that’s how it’s understood in the Book of Nehemia, let’s put it that way. They read Leviticus 23 and they said, “Okay, you want us to build something out of this. That’s what you mean.” And it makes sense.

David: But to be fair, there was a reason why this verse required interpretation.

Nehemia: I think they had come back from Babylon after decades, and they haven’t been doing this, and they’re like, “Okay, what does this mean, exactly? Oh, okay. We figure it out,” right?

David: Right. The first one you had just mentioned, “You should figure it out,” that means it’s not explicit. That’s the first one. The second point is that the three words…

Nehemia: I’m going to challenge you on that. I think it’s explicit, but there had been a cultural shift in time between when Leviticus was written and when the people gathered to hear this in the time of Nehemia. They said, “Okay, it’s been centuries. What did this mean?” In its original context, I don’t think anybody who heard Leviticus 23:40 had any doubt what it meant. We might not know what that is. But there’s no question in this context in my mind they understood what it meant.

David: We’re in agreement here. We’re in agreement here. We’re in 100 percent agreement. But the second thing is that these three words, “pri eitz hadar”, and I’m not sure how deep we want to go into this, because you know very well, we could go very deep into these three words. In my book, I actually talk about 20 different interpretations. I mean that, literally different interpretations of these three words.

Nehemia: That people have offered over the centuries…

David: Over the centuries.

Nehemia: …or that you’re offering?

David: Yeah, so the earliest…

Nehemia: Actually brought in Jewish sources or other sources?

David: All sources, yeah. We have Jewish sources as early as Onkelos and Akilas and the Septuagint. Then we have Christian sources like Jerome, Wycliffe…

Nehemia: What does Jerome say, for example? I have no idea, how does he interpret this?

David: I have my little chart here…

Nehemia: What’s the name of your book, it’s called, Etrog – How a Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol, 2018. Can people get this on Amazon.com?

David: They can. They can.

Nehemia: Can they also get it at biblicalculture.org, on your website?

David: No, but they can come and study with me at biblicalculture.org.

Nehemia: That’s wonderful, even better.

David: I’d recommend me over my book, any day. [laughing] It’s more personal than the book.

Nehemia: The book’s like the written Torah, and you’re like the Talmud here. You’re giving much more in-depth information.

David: Exactly, yeah. Jerome takes an approach. What Jerome does is he says, “First, you need to explain the major ambiguity. The question is, what is meant to be beautiful?” In Hebrew here, it’s basically three nouns, one after the other, after the other, and that causes an ambiguity, kind of like in English where we have a big shoe sale. If you say, “Nehemia, you’re going to go to a big shoe sale,” that’s one of two things. You can either go to a huge sale of shoes… I don’t know what size shoe you are, but you can go…

Nehemia: [laughing] I’m size 15. In European measurement it’s 52. I was sure you meant it’s a sale for big shoes. There was no question in my mind, that’s what you meant.

David: Exactly.

Nehemia: Otherwise, why are you telling me about it?

David: Is the shoe big, or is the sale big? That’s the same thing here with pri eitz hadar, what is meant to be beautiful? Is the fruit beautiful, or is the tree beautiful? So what Jerome says is that it’s the tree. But Jerome does something even more interesting. What he does is he interprets it as a superlative, meaning “the most”, which isn’t apparent in the Hebrew text, but it’s a legitimate interpretation.

He says it’s the fruit of the most beautiful tree, that’s how Jerome translates it. If you want to understand the Bible according to Jerome, you need to go find the most beautiful tree you could find, maybe a palm tree, something like that, and you would take that tree. That’s how Jerome would interpret it.

Nehemia: You could argue today that in modern culture, the date tree is considered the most beautiful tree. What’s the proof of that? That date trees are planted as decorative trees more than any other tree on planet earth.

David: There you go. There you go.

Nehemia: But that’s a modern cultural value. In Biblical culture, as at biblicalculture.org, what would it have been in the time of Jerome? What was his solution to that as the most beautiful tree?

David: This is a great question, because for Jerome it wasn’t necessarily important. If I recall it, maybe it was in one of Jerome’s texts. I think he’s referred to a tradition of the Jews that it’s an etrog. Maybe it was Aquinas, I don’t know exactly. But in different cultures, different things are important. For the Jews of the time, this verse was incredibly important. For Romans it was just, “Okay, some beautiful tree.” I’m not saying it’s not important, but it didn’t need to be identified.

Nehemia: I want to bring a modern analogy. A couple of nights ago, I went to my sister’s house for the Rosh Hashana meal, and she’s an Orthodox Jew. Her husband brought out the new fruit so that he can make the Shechehiyanu blessing. In other words, the blessing you say over some fruit that you haven’t eaten in at least 30 days, and it’s a special occasion. You don’t want it to be an apple that you haven’t eaten in 30 days, you want it to be something special.

So traditionally in Judaism, what it’s been in previous centuries, I believe it was usually a pomegranate. But today in Israel, pomegranate, yeah, there’s also a pomegranate. You go to the shuk today and you get yourself a star fruit, a carambola. Or you get yourself the dragon fruit. It doesn’t even taste that good, but it looks really cool. I wonder if that’s an analogy to what was happening in the Persian period, that people see this fruit, and it’s growing in the Imperial Gardens, and it’s impressive looking. Tell us about that.

David: That’s it, yeah. When they saw this ambiguity, what’s beautiful, the fruit or the tree, they started wondering. It must be something, right?

Nehemia: They didn’t necessarily think that was the only fruit it could be. But hey, this is a great way to honor God. If I want to honor God, I’m not bringing an apple to Rosh Hashana, I’m bringing a carambola.

David: That’s how it started, right.

Nehemia: We don’t know, right, but it’s reasonable to think that it could have started that way.

David: Yeah, that’s reasonable, yes. These things aren’t linear. These things aren’t linear, and maybe some people who used it didn’t, and others did, and some people used it. You have some cases like in Maccabees there’s a case of…

Nehemia: Maccabees, I’m holding it open right here. 2 Maccabees Chapter 10, I think it starts in verse 5. “It happened that on the same day on which the same tree had been profaned by the foreigners, the purification of the same tree took place. It is on the 25th day of the same month which was Kislev. They celebrated for eight days with rejoicing in the manner of the Festival of Booths.”

Maybe I’ll bring you back to do an episode on Chanukah, and I’ve actually talked about this in my studies on nechemiaswall.com, that one of the original functions of Chanukah was like a Pesach Sheini, like a second Sukkot. We had missed Sukkot, and now we’re making up for it. “They celebrated for eight days with rejoicing in the manner of the Festival of Booths, remembering how not long before during the Festival of Booths, they had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals.”

“Therefore, carrying ivy wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to Him, who had given success to the purifying of His own place.” Talk to us about verse 7. That has to somehow be related to the lulav, to this bundle which consists of this palm branch and the etrog. It’s hard to believe there’s not some connection there.

David: Yeah. There are two things to understand. This is what I meant by non-linear - things were developing, but they didn’t necessarily develop all at once. The first thing we see here is that they’re carrying a wand, the term used is a “thyrsus”. It’s almost a Greek pagan idolatrous wand, which is interesting.

Nehemia: Which is a symbol. That’s like some of the Gods hold it, and you have in your book pictures of that…

David: Yeah, Dionysus, which is not the best parallel maybe the Maccabees wanted to draw. But what we see here is the beginning of holding things on Sukkot. Remember, there are two mitzvot, there are two laws in the Rabbinic way. The first one is the sukkah, the booth, and the second one is waving the four species. Right here we start seeing the waving. We have other texts, I think from Pseudo-Philo and so on and so forth, about waving. It doesn’t mention the etrog yet. What it has is this concept of waving.

Why isn’t the etrog mentioned here? Some people want to say, “Oh, it’s because they were just in the caves, in the forests. They didn’t have all the tools that they needed to make the proper bundle.” I think maybe it wasn’t yet part of the normal way of doing things. Or maybe it was for some, but not others, and so on and so forth.

Nehemia: This is essentially the pre-history of what became the lulav and etrog, the familiar symbols that you’ll see in the movie “Ushpizin”. And you were telling me that these became Jewish nationalist symbols in the 2nd and 3rd century CE…

David: Right.

Nehemia: Meaning 300 or 400 years after Maccabees, that became a characteristic symbol of Judaism, of the Jewish nation, was the lulav and etrog. We see it on mosaics and we see on the coins of Bar Kochba, but here’s the pre-history where it hadn’t been fully formulated yet, and they’re carrying some kind of vegetation related to branches, and fronds of palms is interesting, because the Christians – and I know nothing about this, I’ll be honest – the Christians have the ceremony at Easter where they’re carrying the palm branches. I guess it heralds back to the New Testament passage, when…

David: There’s a lot of crossover.

Nehemia: …you see that they had the palm branches, and they were saying, “Hoshana, please save.” Why are they described in the New Testament as doing that? In other words, what was it about the palm branch that was the symbol of salvation? What’s going on there?

David: I’m not of the opinion that things are chosen because they’re symbols. Once they are used, then we can see them as symbols. A lot of different explanations have been used for these four species. A lot of different ways. One is that the lulav represents the back, the spine, and the etrog is the heart. The willow is the lips, and the myrtle are the eyes. These are all very meaningful explanations, but I’m not sure if we could explain…

Nehemia: In a sense, those are secondary explanations that somebody came up with after the fact.

David: I think so, yeah.

Nehemia: So what was the original explanation? There had to be some original explanation. In other words, the Jews in the 1st century who are carrying the palm fronds and saying, “Hosana to the most high,” what did it mean to them? What was the symbolism there of the palm? Because we don’t do that today in Judaism in that sense, but something’s going on there.

David: Remember when we were talking about the shaking of the lulavs, and I said it’s like a dance? What I was thinking about is at that time period, this Sukkot was very associated with water.

Nehemia: Aha. Here we go.

David: And so this may have actually been what we would consider a kind of water dance, something like that. It could have been part of that.

Nehemia: Can we say it has a magical quality to it? In the sense that in many ancient cultures, if you wanted something to happen - and that’s the idea of the water dance, you want water to come down, so you do a certain type of dance, maybe making noise, hoping it’ll cause thunder. Maybe here the up and down thing - I mean we’re guessing here, right? – but could that have been the pre-history of it?

David: Yeah, it’s important not to judge a culture as magical. But from that perspective, it was a prayer. It was a prayer for rain at this time of year. Because remember, the rain that would come at this time would last for the entire crops of the year. There would be the early rains and the late rains, the yoreh and the malkosh, but the rain was incredibly important. Without rain there was famine.

Nehemia: Well, you don’t want it to rain on Sukkot. It’s actually considered a curse to rain on Sukkot.

David: Right, because you’re sitting in your sukkah, right.

Nehemia: Especially because you don’t want it to rain until you’re ready to start plowing the field, and so you want it to rain two or three weeks after Sukkot. You do your first plow of the field and then you plant the first grains. But if it rains on Sukkot… we just had a rain here. We’re recording this just after the festival of what I celebrated as Yom Teruah, the first day of the seventh month. A few days ago we had rain, which is extremely unusual, and it definitely wouldn’t have helped the ancient farmer. He actually wants it about a month later than when it’s happening. But we don’t control the rain, the Creator of the universe does, and it’s a part of what happens.

David: Right, you need the rains at the right time, exactly.

Nehemia: That’s part of the blessing of the Shema is, it is the rain “be’ito”, in its time, which tells you sometimes it doesn’t happen in its time. It’s out of it its time, which is an inconvenient weather pattern.

We have these thyrsus… the ivy leaves wand, and I’m going to throw this out there. 2 Maccabees was translated from Hebrew by Jason of Cyrene, according to the introduction, and I have to wonder if in the original Hebrew – I don’t know, because we don’t have the original Hebrew – but maybe in the original Hebrew it had something that was closer to lulav, and he’s translating this for his Greek audience. He doesn’t know how to translate this, so he translates it as something that they’re familiar with, which is the thyrsus, which this pagan symbol… could be.

David: Yeah, if we had more texts we’d know more. [laughing]

Nehemia: So now let’s go to the first unambiguous reference to etrog in Jewish sources.

David: Right, it’s Josephus. Josephus mentions from about 100 before the Common Era, that Alexander Jannaeus was pelted with etrogim in the Temple, and the people were so upset at him that they threw their etrogim. This story also appears in a different form in the Mishna, which doesn’t mention him by name, but it says, “A priest was pouring the libation on his feet,” which was a really disrespectful act.

So the question is, is Josephus retrojecting the etrog back and therefore the first time we know about the etrog is Josephus’ time in the 1st century of the Common Era? Or is this a real tradition? If it’s a real tradition, that means that we already know for the first time definitively that etrog was a popular religious practice on Sukkot in about the year 100. That could be later, but yeah.

Nehemia: I’m going to offer my interpretation of that story, which I mentioned to you before we spoke. So we have this story which appears in both Josephus and the Mishna. It’s hard to believe it didn’t really happen, meaning, you have two sources giving different details. It’s echoing some event in history that they’re remembering, and if you take the two stories and combine them, so Alexander Yannai or Jannaeus was the Hasmonean High Priest, and from Josephus’ description, it appears that he was a Sadducee. We don’t know that much about the Sadducees, it’s a bit of a problem, but one thing we think we know is that they followed just what’s written in the Tanakh, that appears in some of the sources – meaning without what’s called the “Oral Law”, and it could be that this etrog was a symbol of Pharisees, or at the very least the Pharisees, the “proto-Pharisees”, if you want to call them…

David: Early rabbis, that’s right.

Nehemia: …in the time of Alexander Jannaeus, that these early Pharisees, proto-Pharisees, were using the etrog, and it was a symbol that was something that distinguished them from the Sadducees. Now, another thing that distinguished them from the Sadducees was undoubtedly the water libation. Specifically, what’s the source of the water libation? I remember learning this in fourth grade. I went to an ultra-Orthodox school, and we read through… it was one of the passages in the Torah, I believe it was Numbers 29, where it describes the different sacrifices, and there’s an extra Mem-Yud-Mem, it’s not really extra, it’s a question of in Hebrew you can spell things in different ways. And whenever the Rabbis see something spelled in what’s called a full way, they say, “That’s an extra letter,” it’s extraneous, and therefore it comes to teach us something extra that you wouldn’t get from the plain text.

This was brought as an example where we have this ritual which goes back to Moses on Mount Sinai, which is pouring the water on the altar. That’s the Pharisee explanation. It’s not mentioned anywhere explicitly in the Torah, but it’s hinted at in the Torah in these extra three letters, Mem-Yud-Mem, the letters that spell water.

So if I were a Sadducee in the 1st century BC, I would hear that and I’d say, “Come on, guys. This isn’t commanded anywhere in the Torah. The Torah only has wine libations, not water libations.” But we had this political situation where the Sadducee High Priest was sometimes forced to observe the rituals as mandated by the Pharisees. That’s the tractate of Horayot or Horayos is in the Talmud, which is instructions. It’s an entire tractate in the Talmud. I think it’s the shortest tractate. It’s a series of instructions the High Priest is given, in that case specifically on Yom Kippur, and he’s made to swear, to make an oath in the name of God, that he’ll do it according to the Pharisee ritual.

They ask the question, “Why do we make him take an oath?” The Rabbis are saying this hundreds of years later. They don’t understand, why does the High Priest need to be made to take an oath? They explain, “Because he’s suspected of being a Sadducee.”

In the days of Alexander Yannai, I think we have a much stronger case of saying he was a Sadducee, that plays out in Josephus. He had a civil war, which I’ll have you talk about if you want to, with the Pharisees. But it makes perfect sense to me. The High Priest is being bullied into taking the water from the Gichon Spring, bringing it up to the Temple on the altar, to pour it on the altar. At the last minute, “I just can’t do it,” and he pours it on his feet, and the people respond with outrage, pelting him with their Pharisee symbol, the etrog. It makes perfect sense to me.

David: Perfect sense.

Nehemia: Now, Is that what happened? Who knows, right?

David: Who knows. [laughing]

Nechemia: But it makes perfect sense. All the pieces fit together, that we have here what may be one of the first conflicts between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, at least where it breaks out. We have something with John Hyrcanus too, who came before Alexander Yannai, but we basically had this breakout into a civil war. Can you talk a little bit about the civil war?

David: We could, but maybe we could go a little further.

Nehemia: Maybe that’s another discussion…

David: Right, because that’s a lot there.

Nehemia: Let’s jump forward, that’s our first explicit reference to the fruit. And I think it’s interesting that there’s an implication in that story, at least the way I read it, that the etrog was disputed. That’s why it would be the perfect thing to pelt the Sadducee High Priest with. Or it’s just something they have in their hand, right? That’s the other explanation. They’re both probably true from my perspective. Now, where do we see the etrog show up after that? After the 1st century BC and after Josephus?

David: Here’s an interesting thing. After Josephus, the etrog appears everywhere in Jewish art, every single place you could look. It’s on mosaics. If you want to go on a hike in Israel, on a tiyul, if you have the right eye you’ll see anything that’s Jewish, there’s a good chance it’s going to be an etrog, either next to the menorah or by itself. It starts appearing on coins in the Bar Kochba coins. It starts appearing on pendants. It starts appearing in glass. It starts appearing really anywhere you look.

The question is, why did this start appearing everywhere? There are a lot of things that could be symbols for Judaism. The etrog, why are the etrog and the lulav important? One of the things that was really interesting to me, there was an article - I’m forgetting who wrote it – but what she pointed out was that in Samaritan synagogues, which there were a lot of Samaritan synagogues at that time… Christian churches, they were clearly not Jewish. The Jews had nothing to distinguish from the Christians. They didn’t have to worry about getting one mixed up from the other.

But the Samaritan synagogues were so similar to the Jewish synagogues, Samaritan oil lamps were so similar to the Jewish ones, so how do you distinguish between them? The Samaritans didn’t have the etrog interpretation, but the Jews did. So in a certain way, the etrog was a defining feature that made the synagogue, the oil lamps, the coin, et cetera, it made them Jewish, and this was a really interesting thing.

So for a few hundred years, if you wanted to make something Jewish you would stamp it with the etrog. It wasn’t just enough to do the menorah, because the menorah, the Samaritans had tons of menorahs on their items. It wasn’t just enough to use the shofar. The Samaritans had tons of shofars on their items. It wasn’t just enough to show the Temple. The Samaritans showed their Temple. What you needed was something that was different, and that was the etrog.

And so in a certain sense, we’ve gone full circle. Whereas at first the etrog was this foreign, non-Jewish concept, by the end, this is the most Jewish thing that the Jews could find out in that time period. As time went on and the Samaritan threat, so to speak – not a physical threat, but say, in terms of identity – as that ceased to be, the etrog got less and less important. By today, the etrog is really the symbol of Sukkot, of the Feast of Tabernacles. If you go into a synagogue, you’ll only see an etrog if you see something for every other holiday. You won’t just see an etrog. If there’s something from Passover, and there’s something for Shabbat, and there’s something for Shavuot, then you’ll have something from Sukkot and you’ll get the etrog. That’s where we’re at today.

Nehemia: I want to unpack that a little bit. That’s really interesting. So the etrog becomes this distinctively Jewish symbol specifically to distinguish Jews from the Samaritans. We’re talking in a period the 2nd, 3rd, 4th century, there are no Sadducees, right? That’s not on the table anymore. Who were they distinguishing themselves from? It’s from the Samaritans.

It’s really interesting. There’s this concept in psychology that Freud came up with called “the narcissism of small differences”. What it means is, somebody who’s really different from me, I don’t need to do anything to distinguish myself from somebody who’s different than me, but it’s the people who are really similar to me that are, in a sense, a threat to my identity. There I need to make something that shows I’m different. I’m not saying that’s me; I’m saying that’s something Freud identified, and it’s really interesting in religion, in culture, in politics. Look today at the division in American politics, the narcissism of small differences.

Go to communist China, where I lived for a year, and you tell them the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, they have no idea what you’re talking about. But in the American context this is, “What do you mean?” It’s a really big deal, right? This is the narcissism of small differences. So what you’re saying, essentially, is that for the Jews to proclaim and express their identify in a distinctive way, they used the etrog as a symbol to distinguish themselves from the Samaritans, and they didn’t need that to distinguish themselves from the Christians because there were bigger things.

David: Right, there were bigger things, the Jews and the Christians at this time…

Nehemia: If you don’t have a cross or a crucifix, it’s quite clear that you’re not a Christian. But if you have a menorah, who knows who… And it’s true - you go to the Israel Museum and you see a synagogue there, and there’s the menorah, and it’s a part of the Temple, and there’s the curtain, and then you see they’re Samaritans, and you’re like, “What’s going on here? That’s actually a Samaritan synagogue.”

David: I’m glad you brought up the small things, because one of the interesting things in Jewish synagogues and Christian churches is this mosaic motif of a bird in a cage. But the Samaritans, at least at that time, didn’t want to depict animals or humans, or even some beings, in light of the Second Commandment. What they had was the cage, but no bird.

Nehemia: What’s the symbolism of the bird in the cage? Is that exile? What is the symbolism there?

David: I don’t know if there’s symbolism. I never heard that there is symbolism, I actually just thought it was one of the beautiful motifs. There are a lot of beautiful things in these mosaics that may not have a meaning. I could be wrong, I never studied it. I never asked that question, I think it’s a fascinating question.

Nehemia: When I studied archaeology for my undergraduate degree, for my BA, we studied about mosaics, and one of the things the professor explained is you would have an artist that would come with a book. The book would have chalk-drawn pictures, and when you commissioned a mosaic, you’d point at the book and you’d say, “I want one of these, and I want one of those,” different decorations. It was part of the repertoire of the artist, and that’s why you see some of the same elements in Christian and Jewish and Samaritan synagogues.

David: The same mosaicist.

Nehemia: It’s the same artists, right? It would be done by the same people. What’s interesting is, sometimes when they portray exotic animals, you’re like, “Clearly, this person never saw a giraffe,” but they’re often portraying it the same way. So that’s where they get the idea that they have a sketch book. Someone saw a giraffe, but by 10 generations later of copying the sketch book, it doesn’t like we’ve seen… I can go to Instagram right now and see 100 giraffes. It was not so easy for them, right? It was being copied hand to hand.

I want to unpack this just a little bit more, this idea of the etrog as the distinctive Jewish symbol to distinguish Jews from the Samaritans, because we have this really interesting passage in the Mishna where it talks about how the ancient Jewish practice was to greet a fellow in the name of God. For a man to greet his fellow in the name. It says, “hitkinu”, they established this as a takana, as a practice. Then they say, “Why did they do that?”

Graetz, who was this Jewish historian in the 19th century, explained, “Why did the Jews establish the practice of greeting a fellow in the name?” In other words, you have it in the Tanakh that people would greet each other in the name of God, of Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. It was something people did, but it wasn’t something they were required to do. It was like I say, “Hey, how are you doing?” But one day I might say, “What’s going on?” There’s not a set formula.

So Graetz asked the question, “Why did the Jews establish this practice?” He comes up with the explanation, which I find extremely intriguing - I don’t know if it’s correct, but it’s very intriguing - which is that the Samaritans at that time didn’t use the name of God, Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, they called God “Shema” or “Ashem”, In later times it was “Shema” and back then it was probably just “Ashem”, which is Hashem.

And so the Jews, to distinguish themselves from the Samaritans, would greet their fellows using the actual name of God, rather than Hashem. Now, jump forward 300, 400 years. The Temple’s been destroyed, the Jews are no longer speaking God’s name, there’s a different Mishna that says, “If you speak the name the way it’s written you have no portion in the World to Come.” Now, how do we distinguish ourselves from the Samaritans, because in that sense, we’re not any different? Now we use the symbol of the etrog. And as you’re describing this, I’m realizing in a sense – I’m going to go out on a limb here – in a sense, the etrog has replaced uttering the name of God, at least as the distinctive symbol of the Jews when distinguishing themselves from the Samaritans. There, I’m done.

David: I wasn’t going to go that far. I would say in art. I would only go in art, because language is a different ballgame. But in art, I would go that far.

Nehemia: Okay, but you definitely have Samaritans keep the Sabbath, that doesn’t distinguish us. Jerusalem, obviously, but how do you depict that in art? And Jerusalem had been destroyed, the Jews weren’t in Jerusalem anymore.

David: The two Temples, the Temple on Mount Gerizim for the Samaritans and the Temple in Jerusalem for the Jews, the artists depicted them in such similar ways, it was...

Nehemia: A building with four columns in front. Right.

David: Yeah, or sometimes two. You know what? I’m not an expert. I don’t claim to be an expert on the Temples, but from what I see, it’s hard to see differences. They’re very similar. If one of your readers does know the differences, please let me know. That would be cool.

Nehemia: Hey, guys. Post it in the comments there. I think we know virtually nothing about the Samaritan Temple, other than its depiction in art. We don’t know exactly what our Temple looked like. In other words, we know certain features of it, but we have the Bar Kochba coins where there’s the pillars in front. Other than that, we wouldn’t know there were pillars in front. It’s not that clear. The pillars in the First Temple, that’s a different thing.

Last thing, and then we’re going to close this out, last thing is you mentioned the Rabbinical interpretation, and we’ve got to bring up the Karaite interpretation.

David: Let’s bring up the Karaites, right.

Nehemia: You have a chapter in your book where you bring two Karaite interpretations. I’m going to let you bring those in a minute, but before that, people can go to my website, nehemiaswall.com.

I sent you a passage from Levi ben Yefet, who is much earlier. He’s around the 10th century, and he brings lots of different interpretations.

David: I’m glad you brought one. I’m glad you sent me that, because Levi, he actually had an interpretation that a modern scholar had. I have to go back to that article to see if he mentions it.

Nehemia: He might not have known about it, it’s not a very accessible source. In any event, one of the opinions he mentions is the opinion of his father, Yefet ben Eli, and Yefet ben Eli’s interpretation was to take Leviticus 23:40 and equate it with Nehemia 8 verse 15 and say, “These are talking about the same thing. In one of them I have four types of vegetation, the other I have five. Those four are the same as the five.”

For example, pri eitz hadar, fruit of the beautiful tree, was understood as the beautiful fruit tree, which then was interpreted based on comparing with Nehemia 8:15, and you might call this the “broad context”. Meaning, if you take it as a given that Nehemia 8:15 got it right in interpreting Leviticus 22:40, then one way to read it is that the olive tree and the oil tree – and the oil tree may be another type of olive tree – that they are equivalent to this pri eitz hadar, and that actually makes a lot of sense to me personally, because when I build my sukkah here in Jerusalem I go out and I cut off branches from the olive tree. And what do I have on those branches? I have olives, because the olives actually come to full ripening around November. But right now, they’re on the tree and they’re beautiful. It’s also a good idea to prune them.

So you’re ruining the tree by cutting off these branches and putting them into your sukkah, and literally on my sukkah I’ll have a branch covering, keeping the sun off on the top, and you’ll see olives hanging down, and it’s completely natural. It’s not like something I set up. If you take those branches, you’ll end up with this beautiful fruit tree branches as part of your sukkah.

David: First of all, I’m glad you sent me this, because I’ve been trying to track down Yefet ben Eli’s commentary on this, and I was having some trouble, so thank you. That was really good.

Nehemia: Yefet ben Eli’s commentary is written in Judeo-Arabic, and it’s not published, so you would have to go read a manuscript in Judeo-Arabic. There are lots of different manuscripts that don’t agree necessarily. Good luck with that.

David: I found the manuscript, but I was having trouble with the Judeo-Arabic.

Nehemia: Bear in mind, there’s probably more than one manuscript of this section. I haven’t checked this specific section. Then they say you want to look for the ones in Arabic script, because those are more accurate. In any event, his son, Levi ben Yefet, brings many different interpretations, and one of them he mentions by name is his father, Yefet. Pretty cool stuff.

David: Yeah, so that’s one interpretation, is that pri eitz hadar means the olive tree. This interpretation went under the radar until 1972, when Irving Kohler, a Bible scholar I’d never heard of before and never heard of again, just wrote this fantastic article. What he tried to do was first of all, this is the assumption that these early Karaites are doing is the same thing that Irving Kohler was doing, was saying, “These two verses, Leviticus and Nehemia, they can’t contradict. There needs to be some answer.”

What he actually pointed out was that a lot of times there’s a parallel between the word “hadar”, it’s like “beauty” and “majesty” in Leviticus, and a word such as “hod,” which is glory, honor. The olive tree is in a few places called “hod”, the honorable tree. So in a certain sense, that’s what Kohler was saying, and I think in the past you showed me that’s what…

Nehemia: Absolutely. Why would the olive tree be a symbol of majesty? This is for our Christian audience. Come on, guys. We’re not going to even answer it. Post it in the comments. Why would the olive tree be a symbol of Israelite kingship? Guys, post it in the comments. It should be obvious. Certainly, in a Tanakh context, to me it’s obvious. It’s the kind of thing that you probably would learn at the Institute of Biblical Culture at biblicalculture.org in their courses that talk about Biblical culture.

One of the interesting interpretations, I don’t remember if you bring this in your book, but you mention Aderet Eliyahu, and I want to talk and read through his passage. One of the interpretations he brings is he said, “Hey, the two passages don’t need to fit Leviticus 23:40 and Nehemia 8:8. These are just types of vegetation. It’s just giving you examples, and it’s not specific to plants or species.” That’s why when we look in Nehemia 8:15 it gives different plants. It could be any kind of plant. It’s the point of what you’re covering your sukkah with.

David: You were talking about what we study at the Institute - Christianity, Judaism, and so forth - is that interpretation was very similar to the interpretation of the King James Bible.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

David: Yeah. The King James Bible, instead of saying, “Fruit of beautiful trees,” the translation is, “boughs”. What it means is the branch. So technically, for those who are interested in the Hebrew, that basically interprets the word “pri” as “poari,” a very similar word but it has an extra letter. But that’s the interpretation. That’s the Karaite interpretation in Aderet Eliyahu, is that it’s just saying, “pri eitz hadar”, it just means “all the nice trees”.

Nehemia: That’s one of the interpretations he brings. He attributes that to Aharon ben Yosef. In any event, what’s interesting is he has his opinion, but he brings all these different interpretations and lets you decide for yourself. It’s one of the things I like about that type of Karaite literature, is that they’re giving you an inventory, and sometimes it’s a little bit overwhelming. They’ll give you a certain word and they’ll give you nine interpretations. Like, “Okay, guys. Help me out here.” “No, you’re on your own.” “Search through all the Scripture and do not rely on anyone’s opinion,” is the Karaite motto.

We talked about different interpretations over time. Fascinating topic, guys. We can’t get to everything today. I just want to throw out one reference here, and maybe you have something to add to this. There’s an amazing book, one of the most important books written in recent decades. It’s a book called, Guns, Germs and Steel. In that book he talks about the reason that Eurasia became so powerful and North and South America, which should have been just as powerful in the ancient world, weren’t. He says it’s because you would develop a certain crop and it could disseminate across a single latitude. That’s what you’re describing in that phenomenon, that we have the domestication of the citron, of the etrog and other citrus trees, and they could perfectly flourish in the Land of Israel, because they’re more or less in the same latitude.

David: I never thought of that, yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah, so it’s exactly the phenomena he describes in Guns, Germs and Steel. Of course, what we gave India was the wheat and barley.

One last thing related to that is, Israel today – and I’d say up until 20, 30 years ago – Israel was known for the Jaffa orange. Israel was known as an international powerhouse of citrus fruit. Now we’ve replaced the citrus fruit with high tech, with high technology. Literally, one of our highest industries 30 years ago was diamond cutting… I think it was diamond cutting, tourism and Jaffa oranges. They would compete for which was the highest in different years. Now it’s blown away by high tech. That’s the highest industry.

But citrus is still really important. Most people don’t know why Israel’s such a big citrus producer. I know your study only went up to the ancient times, so I don’t know if you studied this. But the reason Israel’s such a big citrus producer is when the Jews came to Israel in the 19th century, all the good land was controlled by Arab farmers, and they wouldn’t sell the Jews a single square centimeter. Finally, the Jews got a hold of these absentee landlords in Beirut and offered them money for their swamp land, which was worthless. They said, “You can’t grow wheat there, you can’t grow barley there, what would you want this for?”

The truth is, the first generation of farmers went bankrupt. Then they sent in experts from Europe to try to figure out, “What can we grow here?” I believe it was the Baron Rothschild sent in people from Europe who said, “Look, this has got to be productive land. I’m spending a lot of money to buy this.” They paid these absentee landlords many times what it was worth to buy the land from these Lebanese landlords in Israel. They figured out, “Oh, if we dig really, really deep we can find water in the aquifer, and if we pump up that water from the aquifer with electric pumps…” I don’t think it was electric back then, but with some kind of mechanical pump, “then we can produce the perfect area to grow citrus fruit.” That’s why Israel became an international powerhouse of citrus fruit, because the Arabs sold us swamp land and we caused it to flourish and make it bloom. So actually, this whole image of citrus is to this day, I’m going to say, a Jewish symbol, a symbol of Zionism in a sense.

Look, I want to end with that. I’m going to end my part with that, and I’m going to ask you, Rabbi Dr. Moster, who’s also an ordained Rabbi, I’m going to ask him to end this with a prayer. But remember, go to his website. It’s biblicalculture.org. Whether you’re a Jew or a Christian, or you don’t even know what to call yourself, you can study at the Institute of Biblical Culture with these trained scholars and get some different perspectives, and really get some deeper understanding. Rabbi Dr. Moster, would you please end with a prayer?

David: Thank you, Nehemia. It would be an honor. The Festival of Sukkot, Tabernacles, has a few themes to it – joy, happiness, plenty, bounty. These, I think, even though they’re applied to the holiday, these are important just for life itself.

And so to each of your listeners, and really to anybody, I wish them joy in life, bounty in life, happiness, song and the stability of a sukkah itself. And the beauty – this will be fitting – the beauty of the pri eitz hadar, of the etrog, that beauty we should have in our life in whatever fashion it takes us. Thank you, Nehemia, for having me. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Nehemia: It’s been a pleasure. Shalom, Amen.

David: Amen.

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!