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Nehemia: And in both cases, both Rabbi Akiva and Jesus, Yeshua, were repeating something…

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: …from Leviticus 19, “Ve’ahavta le’reikha kamokha.”

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Keith: Welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls, episode 17, the Biblical Beatitudes Series. I’ve added a third B, it’s the “Buffet”. We are in a new studio, doing new things. We’ve raised the bar, and I have to say again, Nehemia, I am just so excited that we’re going to be sharing the information we have with folks. But we’ve got a controversy right off the bat. I’m calling this episode, if it’s okay, Nehemia, The Missing Verses Episode, because when we go to the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew according to George Howard – if I can, I’ve been continually going back there, to the Hebrew Gospel Pearls – George Howard doesn’t have these two verses. They don’t exist. But I thought to myself, “This is simple. We’ll just call Nehemia Gordon from the Hebrew University. He’ll find the verses. Certainly, Nehemia will tell us where they are.”

So, I called you up and I said, “Okay, Nehemia. You’ve got those manuscripts? Do you have those two verses? What happened?”

Nehemia: So, I looked through all 28 manuscripts; 20 of them I’ve preserved in this section, meaning the Beatitudes. None of them have verses 6 and 7; 6 and 7 do not exist within Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew tradition.

Keith: And that’s the end of episode 17. We’ll see you in episode 18. No way. It gets good, folks. So, what are we going to do, Nehemia? Can we do this? Can we just talk a little bit about, for those who haven’t been with us, just a little bit of text criticism here?

So, when you hear about this, when you see that those verses aren’t there, what’s something that you do? What’s a natural thing that you would do?

Nehemia: Well, first I ask the question, is there something in the text that would explain what happened to those verses…

Keith: Excellent.

Nehemia: …if they were lost? There are two possibilities, and we don’t know, we weren’t there. Either they were originally there and they were lost from the Hebrew, or they were added in the Greek. Those are the two possibilities.

Keith: Wow, okay.

Nehemia: And do we have plausible explanations why it would have gone in either direction? Well, we have a really good explanation of why it would be lost from the Hebrew, and we talked about this I think in episode 15, where we talked about the common scribal error called parablepsis, and there’s a specific type called homoeoarcton, the similar beginning, that you have a series of verses that begin, “Ashrei, ashrei, ashrei, ashrei,” and as the scribe is looking back and forth and he’s copying, he’s about to start a new verse beginning with “Ashrei,” and he copies the wrong verse. He jumps forward. That can cause, actually, if he jumps backwards, it causes a verse to be copied twice – we brought an example of that from the Tanakh, actually, or a Tanakh manuscript – and then it could also cause a verse to be lost. So it’s a perfectly good reason why a verse would be lost. That explains one side, right?

The flip side is, why would a verse be added? And in this case, we have a really good reason why it would be added. It would be added because we talked in the last episode about the Sermon on the Mount, which is in Matthew 5, 6 and 7. There’s also something New Testament scholars call the Sermon on the Plain, which is in Luke 6, and it’s possible that these verses come from Luke 6.

I know you have another hypothesis where the verses came from, and I’ll let you run with that. And it’s entirely possible.

Keith: No, I mean, one of the things that we’ve always thought about and I’ve always heard is that the Sermon on the Mount is a parallel of what happened at the mountain, the Ten Words, the Ten Matters, the Ten Commandments, and that it was important that we have 10 from Beatitudes. And so, is it possible they said, “Look, we’re missing two. We need some help here.” Who knows?

Nehemia: Okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. It could explain where this came from, and why they have these two more verses, and they weren’t re-inventing the wheel, or inventing the wheel, they had material from Luke where they could fill in some of the gaps.

Keith: Exactly. Exactly.

Nehemia: So, that’s a possibility, right? Or maybe Yeshua said these words, and they were lost in the Hebrew. That was the first possibility. Or they were originally in the Greek and they were lost from the Hebrew, right?

Keith: Before we get into the nitty-gritty, and there are a lot of people that are going to be listening this time, Nehemia, that have not listened to the first 15 that we did. Let me just stop for a second, folks. If you don’t know what’s happening, here we’ve got Hebrew Gospel Pearls. We started at the beginning of what’s called the “worldwide pandemic”, where we were stuck in our homes for a period of time. And it was you, Nehemia, who said, “Listen, we really need to take advantage of this time.” And we came into the Hebrew Gospel Pearls and we did about 30 episodes – 15 of them public, 15 of them were what we call the Plus Episodes. What are the Plus Episodes? The Plus Episodes are for those who want to go a little further. I call them the “hardhat episodes”. You want to go a little deeper and also, you’re able to support both Nehemia’s Wall, the work that you’re doing, and bfainternational.com.

Nehemia: Really, what inspired me was, I would get emails from people who said, “I can’t leave my house. I’m all alone. All I have to listen to your programs. Can you put out some…?” And we actually started with Live from Quarantine, and then, that evolved…

Keith: It morphed, it morphed.

Nehemia: It morphed into Hebrew Gospel Pearls, which we’ve been talking about for 20 years, and we finally did it.

Keith: And those who don’t know, you’re going to watch us go through the process of production. And the first production – I was embarrassed by it. I forgot to turn on the microphone. It was hilarious. It went on, and on, and on, and we got better, and better, and better, and better, all the way through episode 15.

Now, let me stop. If you didn’t watch episode 15, Nehemia changed the game for me, as far as what happened in that episode, because it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t something that we had prepared, but you went into, Nehemia, talking about how scribes are dealing with different things. It was epic, episode 15.

We go now to this particular part, and what I’m saying to you is that as a part of Hebrew Gospel Pearls, we’re doing our best because what happened is, Nehemia changed the game again. He raised the bar and gave the opportunity for us to be together in Charlotte, in this awesome studio, where we’re going to bring you the buffet of all the information that we have.

Now, we could’ve quickly gone over 6 and 7, and said, “We’re just going to do…” That’s what I did, “We’re just going to stick with Howard, with 6 and 7.” I thought for sure, Nehemia, you were going to pull a rabbit out of your hat and say, “I’ve found those verses,” but you didn’t. But we’re going to do something so cool. Can I tell them what we’re going to do?

Nehemia: Sure.

Keith: We’re actually going to give you what we think, if those verses are, whether in English or Greek, what a possibility would be for those verses in Hebrew. We have the ability to do that.

Nehemia: And what we have is an incredible resource.

Keith: Incredible resource.

Nehemia: This man in the 19th century named Franz Delitzsch was a great scholar of biblical Hebrew, of Tanakh Hebrew, and he decided to translate the New Testament into a Hebrew that was the style of the Tanakh. Now, he did it for his own reasons and agenda. Honestly, he was trying to convert Jews to Christianity, and he said, “Well, if it sounds like Mediaeval Hebrew or Modern Hebrew,” or at the time what was called ‘enlightenment Hebrew’, “the Jews will feel that it doesn’t feel ancient and authentic, so let’s present it as something that’s like Biblical Hebrew, like the Hebrew of the Tanakh, in order to make Jews feel more comfortable.” That was Delitzsch’s approach.

But we can benefit here from what he’s done, because we don’t have the Hebrew of Shem Tov, which according to some people was either a translation or it goes back to an original that Matthew wrote. Either way, we don’t have that for 5, 6 and 7. What we have is instead, Delitzsch’s back translation from the Greek into the Hebrew.

Let me read the verses from Delitzsch. “Ashrei ha’re’evim ve’hatzme’im latzdakha, ki hem yisba’u.” “Blessed are those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”

And then verse 7, “Ashrei harakhmanim, ki hem yerukhamu.” “Blessed are those who are merciful, for they will be treated with mercy,” or “they will receive mercy.” And that’s a translation from the Greek back into Hebrew, and we can deal with this without the Hebrew of Shem Tov, right? In other words, based on the Greek, what can we learn about what was said there?

Keith: Excellent. So what we’re going to do is, the verses are lost in Shem Tov. We’re actually going to go over these verses right now in this episode.

Nehemia: So, this is a book that was written by a distant cousin of mine, back in the 19th century, around the year 1880, I believe it was. It was the first commentary by a Jew who didn’t convert to Christianity, a Jew who remained Jewish, on the New Testament. And there are Jews who commented on certain parts of the New Testament, but it was only in the context of, “Well, we’ve got to prove us right, and you Christians wrong.” Here, he’s not trying to do that. He’s saying, “Okay, how would this have been understood by an audience of Jewish people 2,000 years ago?” That’s the question he asked.

Now, I don’t always agree with him, but he brings insights and he’s a trailblazer in that he wrote the first Jewish commentary. And it’s interesting, we have this other book, what is it called? Jewish Annotated New Testament, which was made by modern Jewish, mostly secular, even if they’re Orthodox scholars, they’re coming from a secular approach, from an academic approach, looking at the New Testament. And that’s kind of almost like the final stage, and here’s the first stage, right? It’s the culmination of this 100-plus, 150 years almost, of Jewish scholarship on the New Testament, not the final word. But here is the earliest phase of that, in around the late 1800s.

Keith: So what I want to do is I want to read this, but I also want to bring you guys up-to-date with what we’re doing. So, we have Howard, this is Howard’s translation. Nehemia, I hate to treat you like an encyclopedia, but you do so great as far as explaining. So we’ve got Howard’s translation of Shem Tov, I’ve got my English Bible, we’ve got Delitzsch, which took the Greek and translated it back into Hebrew and I’ve also got another little treat over there that I’ll probably talk about at the end. But then, I want to read from your cousin’s book because here’s what he says: “Oh, the gladness…” And I want to know, Nehemia, how much you would agree or disagree with what he’s saying here. “Oh, the gladness of those who hunger and thirst for…” and then he says – it doesn’t put it in English, he changes it and he italicizes it, or someone italicizes it, I should say. And it said, “Tzedakah, for they will be satisfied.”

Why did they do that? What do you think, why did he decide to kind of highlight that word in this verse?

Nehemia: So, in his commentary he’s going to talk about the word tzedakah... We have these words in every language. Let me back up. There’s this common thought that if you speak English, and then you speak Spanish, that every word in English will have a direct translation of the Spanish. And every word in German will have a direct translation in Serbian. And if you speak Russian, there’ll be a direct translation, one-to-one, for every word in Chinese. And that’s not how it works.

There’s a famous example of this, which is a tragic example. The US sent an ultimatum to Japan in 1945, and they said something to the effect of, “If you do not respond positively to this warning, we will destroy your country.” And the Japanese Foreign Minister was asked about this, and he responded with the word that was intended to translate as something like “no comment”.

Instead, the translators translated it in such a way that it meant something, I forget exactly, but something to the effect of, “this isn’t worth commenting on”. And the US said, “Okay, we’re going to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Instead of, maybe a day later, they were going to say, “Okay, now we’ve discussed it in the government of the Japanese Empire, we’re going to surrender.” Maybe they would have said that, we don’t know. We don’t have a crystal ball. But it’s accepted by many historians that this mistranslation… And it wasn’t exactly a mistranslation. The Japanese word could have been translated in multiple ways, and the translators chose a way of translating it that meant to the Americans, “Okay, you’re not taking this seriously. We’re going to make you take us seriously,” instead of what the intention probably was is, “I haven’t even seen that. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me go check. I’m just a Foreign Minister,” or whoever it was. “Let me go ask the Prime Minister and the Emperor. I can’t speak on their behalf.”

Now, would they have said something different? I don’t know, but a mistranslation there led to something tragic. And this is especially true when you have these words in Biblical Hebrew, but in this case, Hebrew’s not unique. We have words in one language that are loaded with all these meanings and connotations, and the other language doesn’t have that meaning for that word.

There’s another famous example by this Hebrew linguist. He takes the Hebrew word “kadur,” which means a ball. It also means a pill, and it also means a bullet. The story he tells is, this Israeli soldier is at the bus station, he sees this tourist, and she’s holding her head, and she clearly has a migraine, or something. He says, “What you need is a bullet for your head.” But what he meant is, “What you need is a pill.” You need an aspirin. And he’s carrying a Glilon, which is short AK-47, and he says, “You need a bullet for your head.” And she’s horrified, right?

Keith: I don’t have a headache anymore.

Nehemia: My head’s fine now. So, there you have this problem where there are words in one language that maybe have three or four meanings, and in the other language, they might have three or four meanings, and one of those overlap and the other three don’t. What we want to do is try to find out what is the word in this case in Hebrew, and what does it mean in English?

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: And in this case, the word “tzedakah” is a very hard word to translate. It’s hard to translate into English because it means many different things. Tzedakah could be righteousness, meaning “I follow the Torah.” Tzedakah could be charity. I give to poor people, that’s called “tzedakah.” It has a bunch of different meanings. It could be true judgment in a court case.

Well, which one is it here, if we’re dealing with the Hebrew word? Now, to be honest, what we need to do is we need to look at the Greek, translate it back into Hebrew using the Septuagint, and then ask what, “What does that Hebrew word mean in the Septuagint?”

Keith: Wow, can I read this?

Nehemia: Read on.

Keith: Let me read this. This is from Elijah Tzvi Soloveitchik. It’s what he says, “For they will be satisfied, the gladness of those who hunger and thirst for tzedakah, for they will be satisfied.” He says, “For they will be satisfied.” And in the Talmud, let’s say, he says Bava Batra 10A, “Come and see that the ways of God are not like the ways of flesh and blood. These are the ways of flesh and blood. A man brings a large gift to the king. Perhaps it is accepted. Perhaps it is not. Perhaps he will see the face of the king. Perhaps he will not. However, the Holy One, blessed be He, is not like this. If a man gives a coin to a poor man, he is worthy to receive divine presence, as it is said, Psalms 17:15, ‘I in righteousness, will see your face when I awake. I will be satisfied with your likeness.’ This is the meaning. Because of the charity that I gave to the poor, I will be worthy to see your face and be satisfied in the world to come, in the awakening, that is, in the immortality of the soul.”

How do you feel about that one?

Nehemia: So, here’s what he’s done, and what was the verse, Psalms 17?

Keith: Yep, yep, yep. He’s gone to 17:15.

Nehemia: So, 17:15, here’s a bit of a problem. Here’s where it gets a bit complicated. What he’s done is, he’s taken the word “tzedakah”, which in Mediaeval Hebrew… he’s actually past the Middle Ages. He’s in the Haskala, the Jewish enlightenment, but he’s taking the meaning in that period between let’s say, Second Temple Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, and in Modern Hebrew, almost exclusively meaning charity. So, when he hears the word “tzedakah” he doesn’t even think in Biblical Hebrew terms, what does it mean in the Tanakh, he says, “What does it mean in post-Biblical Hebrew? It means charity,” meaning charity given to the poor, to the point where you have a little box and it has a little slot in it, and you go to almost any supermarket in Israel, and next to the cashier, back when people used coins, you take your change and you put it in the tzedakah box. Tzedakah is charity, giving to the poor.

Keith: And you’re saying this is the context for him?

Nehemia: That’s 100 percent how he’s interpreting it. Now, is he right or wrong? We could have that conversation. But that’s what he’s doing, and that’s why they don’t translate the word “tzedakah”. Bear in mind, he’s writing this in Hebrew, and they were translating it into English. And so they decided, “Wait, if we translate this as ‘righteousness’ it makes no sense.”

Keith: Got it.

Nehemia: “If we translate it as ‘charity’, people won’t understand what we’re talking about. Let’s leave it in Hebrew so anybody who knows Hebrew will know that ‘tzedakah’ is ‘charity,’ whereas in the Tanakh, it’s not always the case.”

Now, is “tzedakah” even the correct word? So, here’s what I’ve done. In Accordance, I go to Matthew 5 verse 6, and I have the word “dikaiosunén” which is, I hover over it and I could see at the bottom here it says, “righteousness, justice”. Okay, so that’s where they’re getting the word righteousness. Okay, and then Delitzsch translates it here as “tzedakah”. But I don’t really care that much what Delitzsch translates it as, because he could be wrong. What he’s doing is exactly what I’m about to show you, although I have a computer to do it. For him, it was a lot harder.

So, I right-click on this and I do “search for lexim,” and I get that in the New Testament there are 86 places where this word “dikaiosuné” is the feminine, singular noun. And what I want to find out is not how it is used in the New Testament, that’s important. But what I really want to see is how is it used in the Tanakh? And so, now I go over to the Septuagint and I search in the Septuagint.

Keith: Folks, do you hear the tap-tap?

Nehemia: This is the tap-tap.

Keith: This is the tap-tap, folks.

Nehemia: Yeah. And I find this word is used in the Septuagint 13 times, and then I look to see what word does it translate? And I have here in the Septuagint, Judges 5:11, and it’s translated as “tzidkot”, which is plural of “tzedakah”. And this is in Tobit, which doesn’t have an Hebrew parallel. Actually, let me do this here. Did I do the wrong word here? No, there we go. I’ve done this before and I got a different result, so that sometimes happens.

Okay, here we go. So, here I did this search here and I got for the same word here, dikaiosuné, I get in the Tanakh 324 instances of this word in the Septuagint. And then I say, “Okay, what word does this translate in the Tanakh?” In other words, they translated the Septuagint very mechanically. In their head, or maybe actually on a piece of parchment or papyrus, they had a Hebrew word and the Greek equivalent, Hebrew word, Greek equivalent, Hebrew word, Greek equivalent, to the point where sometimes – Professor Emmanuel Tov shows this in a brilliant book he wrote of how the Septuagint is translated – sometimes they translate it so mechanically it doesn’t make sense in Greek. You’ve got to translate it back into Hebrew to say what they were thinking, because they’d take that word even though it doesn’t mean that in the context in the Hebrew, but that’s their mechanical translation. Not always, but sometimes.

So, here I could see dikaiosuné is Hebrew “tzedakah”. “And he believed in Yehovah and he reckoned it for Him tzedakah,” “righteousness”. Well, “righteousness” doesn’t mean “charity” there, but it is the word “tzedakah”. And there are more sophisticated ways to do it, we don’t really have time to get into it.

Here again, Genesis 18:19, same word, “tzedakah”. Here again in Genesis 19:19 we have “chessed”, which is a whole different ballgame. We don’t have time to get into it. “Chessed” is a powerful word, so packed with meaning. Here’s “nikayon”, “cleanliness of the hands.” But often, it translates the word “tzedakah”.

Keith: So, in other words, you have a number of different Hebrew words that they use.

Nehemia: Absolutely. Well, there’s a number of different Hebrew words translated by this Greek word, right? And so, that’s where things get complicated. So you can see there that we can learn a lot by this method, but then you still have to determine, “Okay, which word is it in Greek, or which word is it in Hebrew that is translated?”

So, here’s the point. Which word did Yeshua speak if he spoke in Hebrew? That’s the question. Did he speak “tzedakah”, did he speak, “chessed”? We don’t know, we weren’t there. What Delitzsch is doing is saying, “Well, in the context, it sounds like ‘tzedakah’,” and that’s often the Greek translation of the word, “tzedakah”. That’s what he’s doing.

Now, to jump from that to “tzedakah” meaning “charity” I think is a big jump. I don’t know that’s what he meant, because a lot of times, now let’s do the word “tzedakah” now that we know what the word in Hebrew probably was, then we have to ask the question, “What does ‘tzedakah’ mean in Hebrew?” And “tzedakah” in Hebrew – okay, could it mean “charity”? Possibly, in Proverbs. Not so clear. You might be kind of reading something back from later Hebrew into it. But there’s no question that most places in the Tanakh, “tzedakah” means “to faithfully follow the Torah”. It means righteousness, and what is righteousness? Righteousness is following the Torah.

Let’s look for example, and… let’s see, Psalm 119 if I had to guess off the top of my head, will tell us repeatedly, I’m guessing – I haven’t even looked at this beforehand, because I was approaching this from a different perspective – but here, Psalm 119:40, “See, I have longed for your precepts. By your righteousness preserve me.” And throughout Psalm 119, there are 10 different words for “Torah”. There’s “testimony”, there’s “Torah”, there’s “righteousness”, there’s “Your instructions”, there are all these different words. And then, Psalm 119:142, “Your righteousness, your tzedakah, is eternal. Your teaching is true,” and “Your teaching” in Hebrew is “Your Torah is true.” So the parallel of Torah there is “tzedakah”, it’s the same word, or from the same word.

So, you have this idea of “tzedakah” could be “Torah”. Can it also be “charity”? Let’s look at the meaning of charity, and we’re going to pull up here in the dictionary and they’re going to say, “Tzedakah is loyalty to the community and conduct honesty. Justice. Justness of the Divine Judge. Community loyalty.” We haven’t even gotten to “charity” yet. “Just cause, God’s deeds of justice.” These are the different definitions being given in a Biblical Hebrew dictionary. It doesn’t even give “charity” as one of them.

There are some verses in Proverbs where you could read it maybe as “charity”. But it could also be that you’re reading back a later meaning into Hebrew, and really where that’s coming from is this idea of “tzedakah” being a righteous act. So, for example, Isaiah 64 verse 5, “We have all become like an unclean thing, all of our virtues like a filthy rag.” And what’s “virtues”? It’s the plural of “tzedakah”. It’s a virtuous act, it’s a righteous act.

Keith: It certainly wouldn’t be “charities” in that situation.

Nehemia: It’s not giving charity to the poor, right? So, how did they get to “giving to the poor”? To where that becomes the predominant meaning? This word “tzedakah” often has the meaning of “righteous deeds”. I’ll give you an example, Jeremiah 33:15. “In those days and at that time, I will raise up a true branch of David’s line.” This is the Messiah. “And he shall do what is just and right in the land.” And the word there is “tzedakah”. So, he’s not giving charity to the poor, he’s doing righteousness. He’s doing righteous deeds, and we have this evolution from Biblical Hebrew into post-Biblical Hebrew where “tzedakah” originally could be “righteousness”, and hence, “righteous deeds”. And then we have this idea, well, giving to the poor is a righteous deed. Then “tzedakah” takes on the meaning of “giving to the poor”. In the Tanakh it talks about giving to the poor. It has a completely different phraseology for how to do that, it’s a whole expression, “Giving to the poor, guarding the poor,” things like that, not forgetting the Levite. But this specific term, “tzedakah” in the Tanakh generally doesn’t have that kind connotation if it has it at all, is arguable.

So what my cousin is doing is he’s taking it in the post-biblical sense, which could be. Maybe Yeshua meant it that way, in this post-biblical sense of giving charity. It’s entirely possible. And then they translated that based on this equivalence that they had found from the Tanakh to the Septuagint, where “tzedakah” is mechanically translated as “righteousness”. That’s possible. I’m a bit skeptical if that’s correct or not.

Keith: Okay. Now, I want to…

Nehemia: At least we can understand what his thought pattern is.

Keith: Excellent. Can I go to verse 7 real quick?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: …6 and 7, two verses that are missing. I want to read it from your cousin. “Oh, the gladness of the compassionate, for they will be shown compassion. For they will be shown compassion as we find in Talmud, Shabbat 151B, ‘Everyone who has compassion on all creatures will have compassion from heaven, and everyone who does not have compassion on all creatures will not have compassion from heaven.’”

I want to tell you one thing your cousin’s doing. He’s not even giving us much of a comment. He’s going right to the Talmud and saying, “This is what it says.” He’s not saying much, other than that.

Nehemia: Well, what he’s trying to do is put it in a historical context. What he’s saying is… And he says this in the introduction pretty much. Yeshua was living in this historical context in which there were many rabbis teaching many things. And Christians will often say that here Jesus had said something new that no one’s ever said in the history of mankind. He’s come to set a new doctrine, a new theology, new ideas that no one’s said before. And what my cousin, Rabbi Soloveitchik is doing is saying, “No, you know what? There are people who said very similar things, and if you want to understand it, understand it in that context.”

Keith: Excellent.

Nehemia: I don’t disagree with him on that principle. I think he has a lot of people watching this program will agree with him. You know, I once had this conversation with a Christian. I had the conversation with two different people, one was my grandmother, who was raised Jewish, she grew up in a Jewish culture, was active in the Jewish community. I once heard her singing and I was visiting her. She was singing a song about Rabbi Akiva, how he taught “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And I said, “Grandma, where does that come from?” She said, “It’s from Rabbi Akiva.” I said, “Did anybody say that before?” She said, “Not that I know of.” Even though it’s in Leviticus 19! And I’ve had the same conversation with Christians who think that Jesus is the first person ever to say, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And in both cases, both Rabbi Akiva and Jesus, Yeshua, were repeating something…

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: …from Leviticus 19, “Ve’ahavta le’reikha kamokha.”

Keith: Amen.

Keith: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And what he’s doing in the New Testament – whether it’s in Hebrew or Greek, it doesn’t matter – is a Hebrew principle where the same exact word appears in two different passages, and then you tie them together. And we have two passages with the word “ve’ahavta”, “and you shall love”. When they come and ask him, “What’s the most important commandment?” Maybe we should save this for a future episode. But basically, he ties in “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” and “Love the Lord, your God.” In Hebrew, it’s the same word, “ve’ahavta”. And he takes that word and he ties in the two passages into a single message, as a typical…

Keith: Great preaching.

Nehemia: It’s great preaching, but it’s also a typical Jewish way of interpreting the Bible, when you have a common word and then you tie the two passages together. So, what my cousin’s doing is trying to understand him in the Jewish context, and specifically in the Rabbinical context, because he believes he was a Pharisee. Whether you believe he was a Pharisee or not, clearly, he’s saying similar things to things that Pharisees of that time, and others… we don’t know what others taught, that much. We only have the teachings mostly of the Pharisees and a little bit of the Essenes, and there are parallels to the Essenes, as well. He’s putting them within a historical context, and I think that’s a correct approach. We just know a lot more about the historical context than he did, because we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have more of a critical approach to the Rabbinical literature than he did. He’s coming from an ultra-Orthodox background, and isn’t really looking critically. He’s looking at the Talmud as if it’s this one single thing written maybe even at Mount Sinai, he believes. And so, all of it is relevant, and I would say, “Well, no. It’s written at different times by different people, and we can learn different things.”

I do want to bring this, or shall we save this for the Plus episode, because we can’t read Matthew 5, 6, and 7 without looking at Luke chapter 6, 21 through 25.

Keith: And I want to put a little pressure on you, Nehemia, also, that when we go to the Plus section, I want you to give us your translation of 6 and 7 and some notes. Now, folks. Here’s what I want you to be aware of. And I say this in all sincerity, within the context that we’re sitting in right now. I wish it was that you could go to a studio like this and they would just say, “Hey, come on in and do whatever you want.” These folks have jobs, they have to be paid, we have to take care of them. They’ve taken care of us, with excellence. So when you go to the Plus episode, you’re actually supporting BFA International. And when you go to the Plus episode at Nehemia’s Wall, you’re supporting Nehemia’s Wall. And what’s happening is, we’ve got to continue. If we’re going to continue to do this, we’ve got to take care of what we’ve got to take care of. And I don’t know – the last time you checked, was anything really free anymore?

Nehemia: I mean, yeah. My editors aren’t free. So I’ve got Makor Hebrew Foundation, you have BFA, Biblical Foundation Academy International, and this episode is a Plus episode that’s going to be on your website, right?

Keith: Absolutely.

Nehemia: We’ve decided to go back and forth and alternate.

Keith: Back and forth.

Nehemia: Yeah, we’re going to be talking in the Plus section. I can’t wait to get to Luke 6.

Keith: We’re going to get to this.

Nehemia: It’s incredible, Luke 6, and how it ties into what may have happened in Matthew. Just really cool stuff.

Keith: I want to throw something else out to you, folks, that aren’t going to go to the Plus episode, both at Nehemia’s Wall and BFA International. We have so many things that are free, free, free. We want you to take advantage of those. We’ve got a Red Letter series. We’re going through these verses before we had the pointed text. There’s so much that’s going on, on both sites. I want you do that. But for those that want to go with us, you’re going to go to the Plus episode. You’ll become a Premium Content Library member. It’s $9.99 a month. It gives you access to everything that we have, including the Plus episode. So, we will see you at episode 17, BFAInternational.com, the Plus episode.

You have been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has been a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the transcript has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If this teaching has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting Nehemia's research and teachings, so he can continue to empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!