Hebrew Gospel Pearls #28 – Have You Not Heard?

You are 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.

Nehemia: In my version, when I looked it up preparing, in Accordance, it was Exodus 20:13. You might open your Bible and say, “Nehemia’s lying to you, it’s not verse 13! It’s verse 15! Deceiver!” But yeah, you’ve just got a different printing of the Bible… I don’t know.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls. Is this episode 28?

Keith: Episode 28.

Nehemia: This is exciting.

Keith: Season 4.

Nehemia: Season 4, we made it all the way to season 4. Today we’re going to talk about Matthew chapter 5 verses 21 to 22 in Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. I’m going to read the verses.

Keith: I’ll read it in English first.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: Okay. In the NASB, “You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder, and whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court, and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Keith: That’s what it says in English.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: We’ll let you do a translation.

Nehemia: “Ha’lo sh’matem ma sh’ne’emar le’kadmonim, lo tirtzach ve’asher irtzach chayav hu mishpat mavet.” “Have you not heard what was said to the ancients,” or the “kadmonim”, we’ll talk about what that means, “thou shalt not murder, and he that murders is obliged,” or “is subject to the judgment of death.” “Ve’ani omer lachem,” “And I say to you,” “she’ha’mach’iss le’chaveroh chayav hu le’mishpat.” “He who angers his fellow, is subject to judgment”, “ve’asher ikra le’achiv ‘pachot,’ ihiyeh chayav be’mishpat beha’kahal.” “And he who calls his brother ‘pachot’, or ‘less than’, will be subject to judgment in the congregation.” “Ve’asher ikra’ehu shoteh chayav le’esh gehenom.” “And he who calls him ‘fool’ will be subject to the fire of hell.”

Keith: Yes, okay. Here we go!

Nehemia: Boy, there’s a lot to talk about here.

Keith: Are we finally going to get to that last statement?

Nehemia: About hell?

Keith: Yes!

Nehemia: I hope so, but I don’t know. Let’s see, where do we start here? So, I think the place I want to start here is, are we dealing with a new section here? Or is this a continuation of the previous passage?

Keith: Oh, that’s a great question.

Nehemia: So, we have a new episode, right? But that just means I spoke too much on verse 20 and didn’t get to 21! Let’s start with this; there’s this myth that the text was originally written without spaces between the letters and spaces between the words and any kind of spaces and punctuation. That’s partially true, and I want to show here an image from the Codex Sinaiticus.

Keith: Wonderful.

Nehemia: The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important manuscripts of the New Testament. There’s three nearly complete, or complete manuscripts of the New Testament from the 4th century, Codex Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus. You could throw into that Washingtonianus, and Bezae, those are maybe the five most important. There are ones you could say are more important that are fragments that are earlier, but I mean large manuscripts of the New Testament that have all or almost all of the New Testament.

And here you can see here there are no spaces. This is in Greek, of course, and it’s written in all capital letters, what’s called the majuscule script. So, there are no spaces between words, that’s true, and there’s no spaces – well, you wouldn’t have a space in the middle of word – and there’s no spaces between sentences, but there are spaces between paragraphs. And here you can see, I’ve marked it out here…

Keith: Excellent.

Nehemia: …that there is some kind of a space after Matthew – it even has a symbol there – after Matthew, or the beginning of Matthew 20, and then in 21 you have a very large space, it’s almost half a line before Matthew 21. So, between Matthew 20 and 21 there actually is a division. That’s in the Codex Sinaiticus.

Let’s now look at the Vatican manuscript, Codex Vaticanus, and here again, you can see there is clearly a space between verses 19 and 20.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: And in between 20 and 21 there’s what’s called a paragrafo symbol, that’s a symbol that says, ‘this is a new paragraph’. You have that at the beginning of 20 as well, but at the beginning of 21 you have the paragrafo symbol. They didn’t have room for this space, because verse 20 ended at the end of a line, so the paragrafo symbol is even more important here. That tells you that this is a new thought, this is a new section. And so that’s how it is in the Greek, and it makes sense that Matthew 21 would be a new section.

And why does that make sense? So, let’s look at this, what we have here. So, we have in Matthew 20… now, it’s interesting, we didn’t have time to talk about it in the last episode. Matthew 20 begins “At that time, Yeshua said to his disciples.” Now, what’s Greek the equivalent of that in Matthew 20? What do you have in Matthew 5:20?

Keith: 5:20, it just says, “For I say to you.”

Nehemia: Right, so that whole thing, “At that time, Yeshua said to his disciples,” it’s introducing a new paragraph.

Keith: It’s gone.

Nehemia: It’s not even in the Greek. So where did the Hebrew get it? And I guess there’s two possibilities; one is that’s originally what Matthew said, and two is that it was added for some reason to the Hebrew. Why would somebody add that to the Hebrew? I don’t know. But in Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew there’s sections, and section 15 begins in Matthew verse 20 and goes all the way to 24, so 20 is connected to 21 in the Hebrew, but in the Greek, you saw there’s a paragrafo symbol that marks a new paragraph, or there’s an actual large space in one of the manuscripts. So, 20 and 21 is… this is a really important point, because where you begin a thought and end a thought can affect the interpretation.

We talked in a previous episode about rightly dividing the word, and that comes from the Hebrew word lefaresh. It has the same origin of the word, lefaresh, as Pharisee, but lefaresh means to interpret, and part of interpreting is to rightly divide the text. Rightly dividing it within a verse and also the paragraph. And so, when we look in Hebrew manuscripts of the Tanakh, we have these spaces, and you also have them in Greek manuscripts.

Now, did the original manuscript written by Matthew – or some people would say it wasn’t written by Matthew, whoever wrote it – did that have the spaces? I don’t know. But our earliest manuscripts… at least these manuscripts we looked at, I didn’t look at all of them; Vaticanus and Sinaiticus do have these spaces or these symbols separating out the text. There’s a famous example of this where changing where the chapter ends, or the section ends, completely changes the meaning or the emphasis.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And it’s the example we’ve gave years ago, at this point 10 years ago. Ten years ago!

Keith: Wow!

Nehemia: Ten years ago, we did Torah Pearls, and we started off… and in the first Torah portion, I assume, because it’s been so long, I don’t remember, but I assume we talked about how Genesis chapter 1 ends in the middle of creation.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: It ends after the sixth day of creation, even though the culmination of creation is Shabbat, God resting on the seventh day.

Keith: You mean in English version of the Bible it ends with the sixth day…

Nehemia: Yeah, well in the Hebrew text as well, because the Hebrew got the chapters from… I mean, the earliest manuscripts of the Tanakh in Hebrew don’t have any chapters. They have spaces between sections and between thoughts, but our modern chapter divisions come from Bishop Stephen Langton. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury… we’ve told this story, it’s something like the 13th century. I think he was traveling to Paris or something or some story about that.

Keith: On a horse!

Nehemia: Yeah! So, he made up these chapter divisions, not all chapter divisions. For example, Lamentations actually clearly has five sections, so all he did was number them. Psalms has 149 or 150 or 151 Psalms, we can argue about that, but Psalms is clearly broken up within the Hebrew text itself. But most of the chapters we get in both the Old and New Testament, they come from Stephen Langton or sometime in the Middle Ages; some of them might be of some books a little bit earlier.

In any event, if we look at the Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, they break 20 and 21, but in the Hebrew Matthew they’re together. And the question I want to ask – and this may be Plus material, I don’t know, but I’m going to share it now – what are the ramifications of breaking the verse, of breaking the paragraph after 20? We didn’t have time in our episode; that doesn’t mean it was the end of a thought. If 21 is the continuation of the same thought as 20, how is that different than if it’s not? And to me the answer is – and let’s also mention this – so we have a series of statements where Yeshua says, “You have heard it said, but I say, you have heard it said, but I say,” there’s a series of these statements in the Sermon on the Mount; this is the first of them. Now, I think verse 20… what are your thoughts on that?

Keith: Well, first of all, right away when I hear him say, “You have heard,” and I know we’re going to do… promise me that in this section we’ll at least look at one word, which is the word “the ancients.” We’ll at least look at who He’s talking about here.

Nehemia: I’ll do my best.

Keith: You’ll do your best!

Nehemia: Voice-permitting!

Keith: Definitely when he says, “you’ve heard,” whatever, I want to say, “the ancients” in the English, “you shall not commit murder,” immediately I ask, where does that phrase come from? It’s an obvious one.

Nehemia: It’s from the Ten Commandments.

Keith: It’s from the Ten Commandments, so he’s referring back to that. So, I mean, saying that “you heard that it was said,” or “the ancients heard,” or “the people of old,” Nehemia you’re going to have to get me clearer on this.

Nehemia: We’ll get to that. But first I want to talk about… maybe we’ll save it for the Plus section, I feel like we’ve already introduced it. So, here’s the point that I’m trying to make – if 21 is its own thought… okay we don’t even to look need to look at 20. But in the Hebrew, 21 is connected to 20, and what that means is that 21 through 24 are an explanation of how to be more righteous than the Pharisees and Sages.

Keith: Amen! But to start with, the Ten Commandments, that’s a pretty important section to be referring to.

Nehemia: Yeah, for sure. But the context is set by verse 20 in the Hebrew, by connecting it in a single section, is “You should be more righteous, your righteousness should grow more than that of the Pharisees and the Sages. Now I’m going to tell you how to do that.”

Keith: So, here’s an example in other words.

Nehemia: Exactly.

Keith: Got it!

Nehemia: Right, beautiful. Alright so now I’ll talk to you about “the ancients”, the “kadmonim“.

Keith: Now can we do it the old way? Can we do it in the old way, folks?

Nehemia: Sure.

Keith: This is the kind of thing you’re going to get when you get to the Plus section at Nehemia’s Wall. We’re going to get a chance to look at the words and where these words come from, and so, Nehemia, this is a fascinating one to me. If I were to ask you how you would translate that word, it says in English, “You heard that the ancients were told.” In Hebrew, Howard says, “Have you not heard what was said to those of old.” How would you translate the word? Give us the word and tell us what you would do with it.

Nehemia: So, it says “la’kadmonim”, and I would ask the question, what does the word kadmonim mean in general? And then, what does it specifically mean in this context?

Keith: I’m going to push you; would you also try to find out what the root of the word is?

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Keith: Okay, tell the people about that.

Nehemia: I’ve got to start with the root.

Keith: Let them know about that.

Nehemia: There’s this principle in Semitic languages in general, and Hebrew in particular, that every noun, adjective, and verb derives from a three-letter root.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: It’s called the triliteral root theory. It was debated, actually, in the early Middle Ages; there were Jewish scholars who said, “No. There are actually words that have a one-letter root or a two-letter root.” What’s an example of a two-letter root? Well, I don’t know. The word ben, ‘son.’ What’s the three-letter root of the word ben? Okay, fair point, and that’s a very common word, ben. What’s the third letter?

So, this was debated back and forth, and it’s very interesting because if you study Rashi, who’s a rabbinical commentator from the 12th century, he comes along 150 or 200 years after the debate was settled, and that it was determined without any question that every noun, adjective, and verb has a three-letter root. Now some words don’t, like, there’s particles of speech, there are prepositions, “The prepositions!” So, we’ve got the preposition mi, ‘from’, well that’s a two-letter word, et, Alef-Tav, which marks the direct object, or can mean ‘with’ in some cases.

Keith: Zeh.

Nehemia: Two letters, zeh is an interesting example. And ben is an interesting question. Let’s ask the question – what is the root of the word ben if there’s a three-letter root? Let’s look in HALOT, and here, remember how I talked about in a previous episode how dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive? So, what they’re telling me for ben when they’re giving you the three-letter root is what they think it is. It’s not obvious. If it was obvious, I would know what it was. And this is a problem; there are some roots where we don’t always know exactly what the root is. So, ben in the dictionary doesn’t actually give me a three-letter root when I look in HALOT or BDB; it’s interesting.

Now, you could argue the three-letter root is eben like it is Arabic, Alef-Beit-Nun, but we don’t really have evidence of that. So maybe ben is an exception to the rule, or we see been sometimes, Beit-Nun, or I suppose it could be spelled Beit-Yud-Nun. Long story short, most words derive from a three-letter root – adjectives, nouns, and verbs.

Keith: So, kedem.

Nehemia: So kedem, Kuf-Dalet-Mem, it has two meanings, and that’s why kadmonim could mean potentially two different things.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: And which of those does it mean? Well, that you have to determine from the context. Since we know where “lo tir’tzach” was said, we have a good way of determining what the answer is. But let’s look and see how it’s used in the Tanakh.

Alright, I Samuel 24:14 says, “K’asher yomar mashal ha’kadmoni,” “As the proverbs of the kadmoni says,” “mi’resha’im yetzeh resha,” “evil goes forth from the evil doers,” and then he says, “ve’yadi lo tihiyeh bach,” “but my hand will not be against you.”

So, what is the proverb of the kadmoni? I Samuel 24:14, let’s look it up and see how people translate this. No, this was 24:13 in English, that’s why. Okay. We talked about the chapters, so the Hebrew adopted the chapters from the Greeks, but they didn’t always implement it in the same way, sometimes it’s one or two verses off. In the case of Malachi, there’s Malachi 4 in the English, Hebrew only has Malachi 3. So, it’s taken from the English, or the Latin, or the Greek, but it’s not always implemented in the exact same way. Alright, so it’s 24:13, I Samuel 24:13 in the English, in The Standard English. “And the old saying goes,” is NIV. New Living Translation, “and the old proverb says.”

Keith: Are you going to pass over that that quick? “And the old saying goes?” That’s the NIV?

Nehemia: Yeah, what’s wrong with that?

Keith: No, I’m saying, “the old saying”?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Okay, alright.

Nehemia: Because its “mashal ha’kadmoni”. The “mashal”, “the parable of the” “kadmonim”.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay?

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: “As the old proverb says,” the New Living is actually more accurate in this case than the NIV. English Standard Version, “As the proverb of the ancients say.” King James, “As sayeth the proverb of the ancients.” So, “kadmoni” they’re interpreting as “ancients”, and I’m looking here and I’m seeing everybody interprets it as “ancient” or “old”, and that is one of the interpretations of “kadmoni”. However, there’s a possibility that “kadmoni” doesn’t mean “ancient”, it could also mean Easterner. And why would we have a proverb of Easterners? Because the people of the East were considered very wise.

Job chapter 1 verse 3 talks about Job himself, and it says, “And he was a great man,” “mi’kol bnei kedem.” “From all the sons of the East.”

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: So kedem means East, and kadmoni hence could mean an Easterner. And the parable of the Easterner makes a lot of sense. We have this idea in many cultures of exotic proverbs, I mean, you’ve heard that I assume. Wasn’t there an expression back in the day? I’m not sure I’m still allowed to say it. But wasn’t there an expression about an ancient Chinese proverb or something like that? And then, we have in Fiddler on the Roof, where he says, “As the good book says!” And it’s not from the Good Book, it’s something he made-up or he heard from somebody else.

Keith: Right!

Nehemia: So, there’s this process. You have a parable, and you want to assign it to something exotic, to something different, maybe to give it more legitimacy. Sometimes it’s not legitimate, sometimes you’re making that up. And so “the proverb of the kadmonim” could be “the proverb of the Easterner”. And that makes sense, “It was said to those of the East, ‘you shall not murder’.” Well, nobody in Israel would say that; someone in Rome could say that.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: Someone maybe in Athens could say… like, Paul could be preaching on Mars Hill in Athens and say, “Was it not said to those of the East?” Who were those of the East? To the Jews! To the Israelites!

Speake 2: Right.

Nehemia: But to the Israelites it doesn’t make any sense. We’re not from the east, if anything we come from… it was said in the south, where Mount Sinai is, south of Israel.

Keith: So, of the two definitions, you think Yeshua’s saying, “of the old ones”, “the ancient ones”?

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: But just to show you it could be Easterners, there’s many verses where kadmoni itself… I’m going to let people look this up, because we’re kind of running out of time here! We want to get to the Plus section! Kadmoni itself can mean east, like it talks about kadmoni being the east of the Temple. But then you have Ezekiel 38:17.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: “Thus says Yehovah,” “ha’ata hu asher dibarti be’yamim kadmonim be’yad,” I want to read this, this is a beautiful verse. Ezekiel 38:17, I’m going to read this in the JPS translation here… one second… actually, let’s pull this up on Bible Hub and see what all the translations have. “Thus says the Lord GOD; Art thou he of whom I have spoken in old times by my servant, the prophets of Israel, which prophesized in those days many years, that I would bring thee against them?” So, this is some enemy that’s going to come to destroy Israel; we think of ancient prophecies about one to come as always a good thing – sometimes it’s a bad thing, in this case.

So “yamim kadmonim,” is “the time of the ancients,” “yamim kadmonim” as “time of the East” makes no sense; “days of kadmonim”, “days” has to be “ancient days.” Now, why is it they can mean both ancient and Easterner? That’s where the root is important. So kedem literally means “before.” And this is really interesting, so they’ve done these studies where languages that are written left to right, they think of time as moving left to right. And languages that are written right to left often think of languages as time moving right to left, but in this case kedem, which means ‘before’ means East. So, let’s think about that for a second if that fits; the sun rises in the east.

Keith: And sets in the west.

Nehemia: And sets in the west, so time goes right to left. I guess unless you’re standing in the north looking south! But in any event, kedem means ‘before’ and hence it can mean ‘ancient times’, but it also means the morning, that is the east – the sun rises in the morning, so it’s the before time.

Keith: It’s interesting, if he would have stopped and just said, “You’ve heard what was said to the ancients,” they don’t know if this is going to be a new saying, but then again, he continues to say, “this is what it is that you’ve heard.”

Nehemia: Right, “Do not commit murder”, “lo tir’tzach”. So, to make that long story short, kadmonim means ‘ancients’. Jastrow, who we’ve talked about in the past, looks in later Hebrew, after the Tanakh, and we have kadmoni referring to adam ha’kadmoni.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: Because adam means ‘man’, so adam ha’kadmoni is ‘the first human’, ‘the primordial human’. He talks about nachash ha’kadmoni in ancient Jewish sources, ‘the ancient serpent’, there’s serpents all the time, I go out to my field, and I see a serpent. So, we want to talk about the snake in the garden, that’s called nachash ha’kadmoni, ‘the ancient serpent’, so kadmoni means ‘ancient’. It could also mean Easterner, and something in the East, but it often means ancient, and clearly in this context we know what it’s referring to; its referring to Exodus chapter 20 verse 13 and Deuteronomy chapter 5 verse 17. By the way, here we have a beautiful example where the chapters in Hebrew come from the non-Hebrew, from Stephen Langton, but the actual verse numbers differ even within Hebrew printings when it comes to the Ten Commandments. Do you know why that is?

Keith: No, tell me.

Nehemia: So, there’s two ways of reading the Ten Commandments.

Keith: Oh!

Nehemia: And in the manuscripts, the Ten Commandments actually have two sets of accents, and sometimes two different vowels in a single word, because the vowel can change based on the accent at what’s called the pausal form. And because of that, different Hebrew printings of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 have the verses divided in two different ways, and not even in two different ways, in multiple ways.

So, in my version, when I looked it up preparing in Accordance, it was Exodus 20:13. You might open your Bible and say, “Nehemia is lying to you, it’s not verse 13! It’s verse 15! Deceiver!” But yeah, you’ve just got a different printing of the Bible… I don’t know.

Keith: Okay!

Nehemia: Alright. That’s what they call in comedy a 5-percenter, those who get it, will get it. Move on!

Keith: Alright! So, “You have heard what is said, ‘You should not commit murder.'” Now Nehemia, I don’t want to go… but the next two words are really key, the next two words… is this the Plus? Do we go to the next two words?

Nehemia: I think we have to.

Keith: Okay, because we’re keeping… now people are going to get upset, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: And they’ll say, “Why are you guys cutting us out?” What’s happening here? Why are we doing this this way?

Nehemia: Well, the reason we’re doing it this way is that we decided when we first started this project that this is going to take a lot of time and resources.

Keith: A lot of time.

Nehemia: And by resources – that’s the time to prepare, the time to edit, to put… the money to edit, the staff to edit, all kinds of different expenses. And if we’re going to actually do that, one way to do that is to make a program for everybody that… I mean look, I’ll be honest with you, 98% of the people are accessing the public episodes.

Keith: Sure.

Nehemia: And they’re happy, and they really don’t want more, need more, they don’t have time for more! And then there are people who say, “I want more.” And so, for the people who support what we’re doing and make it possible to give to the other 98%, the idea was that we’re going to do this Plus episode as a way of saying thank you.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: And that allows us to do the public episodes. I know we get people who say, “It’s not fair, I want to watch the Plus episode!”

Keith: And both of us give a lot of people access to that.

Nehemia: Oh, if I get somebody who writes to me and says, “I can’t afford to make a donation, but I need to see what’s in the Plus.” “Will you pray for the ministry?” “Oh absolutely, I’ll pray for you.”

Keith: Absolutely.

Nehemia: Okay, so we consider you a supporter, a prayer supporter. If you can afford it, we really appreciate it. if you can’t, and if you legitimately can’t, and tell us you can’t, we’re not going to deprive you of that information, if you legitimately can’t.

We get people who say, “I’m on a fixed income, Social Security,” “I live in India, we don’t even have PayPal or any kind of resources.” Okay, I’m going to give you access to that. But it’s the people who are donating that allow us to do the Plus episode.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And then we had the big controversy – well how do we do this? I’ve got my ministry, Makor Hebrew Foundation, and you’ve got BFA International.

Keith: You came up with an amazing idea to network.

Nehemia: And I said, “Well, why don’t we alternate?”

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: I know some people won’t like that, but you know… and the reason it’s odd is you weren’t sure this vision would work. I said, “Okay, you go first! BFA International, if it doesn’t work, we won’t do it.”

Keith: Yeah, you’re right!

Nehemia: And it did work, and we were able to continue now.

Keith: And now, this time, actually in this season 4 we’re going deeper, which I call it, the “role up the sleeves”, where those Plus people that have been patiently supporting us for all those previous 52 episodes, they are now getting what I call the real gold. I mean we’re going into depth in the Plus, and so that’s where we get a chance to squeeze Nehemia.

Nehemia: I would say there’s gold in both of them.

Keith: Absolutely! But I’m saying when you get into the nitty gritty of it, at least for me, it’s changed my life.

Nehemia: What really excites me, and we’re going to get to in the Plus, is we’re going to talk about how there’s a difference in the Hebrew and the Greek about mishpat mavet, the sentence of death in verse 22. It’s just a spoiler, it’s a bit different. The most exciting thing to me is, “he who calls his brother”, and in the Greek it’s “raca”. And we have sources that shed so much light on this.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s one of these things where you’re like, “Wow, talk about putting something in its historical context.”

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s amazing!

Keith: Hey Nehemia, I’m not going to ask a lot folks, I will continue to decrease, you increase. I’m not going to say a lot, because I’ve already got a chance to study with you and Nelson in the secret. I’ve had a chance to do this ahead of time, but I will tell you there’s a lot of people that are going to be blessed by just doing this, and we’ve created an app for the free people.

Nehemia: Oh!

Keith: So, go to BFA Flicks or Biblical Foundations on Android or Apple, and you get an app that has featured Hebrew Gospel Pearls, all of our public episodes from 16 on.

Nehemia: Wow.

Keith: I want to say thank you for you, again, because you’re the one that provided us the resources. Literally, Makor provided us the resources by allowing us to be in this whole process, people coming into it, your idea that you came up… I was upset about it, I said, “It’s not going to work, we shouldn’t do it.” And now here we are two years later, and not only does it work, Nehemia, that is why we’ve been able to create all of this other information, inspiration, and revelation, so thank you for that.

Nehemia: Tell people what that is. I love what Keith does – he’ll point to the screen, or he’ll point to something there, and there’s nothing on the screen. You don’t know what’s on the desk, he knows what’s on the screen five minutes before we started. So, what do you have on your desk you want to talk about?

Keith: So, this is very, very, very simple process that in season 4, what we’re asking people that want to be study partners, we’re calling it “Hebrew Gospel Pearls study with Dr. Nehemia Gordon, PhD”. We’re helping you to prepare in advance by going to the Red-Letter Series, you actually can go there, we no longer have the interlinear for Hebrew Gospel Pearls like we did for the previous episodes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: Now it’s just for our Study Partners, they go in and they can see. Not only will we have some red alert words, we’ve got the actual interlinear there, the pointed text.

Nehemia: You’ve got to show the interlinear, but that’s kind of cool. I’ve literally never seen this until just now.

Keith: No, no, no, so here’s what we’ll do, on screen, we’re going to show the interlinear on screen, this gives people a chance… I mean, I just think this is a really cool tool, but it started because…

Nehemia: Shall I throw it up here on the screen?

Keith: Throw it up here on the screen.

Nehemia: So, describe what we’re looking at it here.

Keith: What we’re looking at, is you see the Hebrew pointed text, which by the way, was a gift from you. The process that we went through, and then we’ve got an English word of what that word is, and then people get a chance to say, “Okay, this is the Hebrew word, this is the English word.” Now here’s the controversy; the English word is a result of all of the information that we have, so I’ve got to give you a secret.

Nehemia: What’s the secret?

Keith: This is the secret – going forward…

Nehemia: “Kill the mic!”

Keith: …before the study process with Nehemia Gordon, I didn’t have Jastrow, there was a lot of stuff I didn’t have. But now we’ve got you, so we get to make sure that the words are correct! And in a way, you are participating because you’re giving us access to that information, and our Study Partners get a chance to study in advance. So, they get to go to this verse before we study, and then they go into comment sections at NehemiasWall, the comment section at BFA, and we are actually going back and forth with the comments about this. That’s pretty exciting.

Nehemia: Hallelujah, that’s very cool!

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: Alright! Yehovah, Father in heaven, thank you so much for putting the people in our lives that have given us the resources that we can share this with the vast public who are listening to these teachings and watching the videos of these teachings and sharing these teachings, and taking these teachings, and processing these teachings, and putting out their own teachings, based on the journey that they have walked through with what we’ve been able to share. Father, this is such an honor and such a blessing. I thank You for putting me in this position, giving me the time and the resources and the intellectual ability to be able to do this. I pray that I grow in truth every day, in Your holy name, Father, amen.

Keith: Father, thank you that we get a chance to witness what You’re doing in ways that are really quite amazing. The different corners of the earth where people respond and say they’re studying with us, people that have decided to walk along with us, every continent on this globe, we’ve heard from people that are in this process. We thank You that we get a chance to be a part of this, bless, protect, and keep us. We thank you in advance as we continue to study the language, history, and context of the words of Yeshua. Amen.

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!