Hebrew Voices #161 – The Moses Scroll

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Ross: But what’s fascinating is, here is an inscription in stone, dated. No scholar of any reputation says that it’s fake, and it mentions in line 31 the name Yehovah.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I am here today with Ross Nichols, who is an author, explorer, researcher, and teacher in Saint Francisville, Louisiana. And he is one of the people who is investigating the Shapira Scrolls, one of the most exciting archeological and manuscript conundrums, issues, of the 21st century, going back to the 19th century. Maybe one of the most controversial in the study of Hebrew manuscripts. Shalom Ross.

Ross: Hey Nehemia, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Nehemia: I’m good, I’m glad to have you on today, Ross. This is an exciting topic, the Shapira Scrolls. It’s a controversial topic. Talk to us. Who is Shapira? What are the Shapira Scrolls? And why is it so controversial?

Ross: First of all, let me say, Nehemia, I’m excited that a manuscript man like yourself is talking to me about the Shapira Manuscript. Because I would agree; I think it is, first of all, the most controversial case in all of Biblical history. And the reason I can say that is because it had laid dormant for quite some time, and then it just arrived back on the scene here a couple of years ago. So, it’s been there all along but… Do you want me to tell you the story about how it was discovered?

Nehemia: Let me start with what really… And I’ve known you for years. I’ve known you for probably almost 20 years at this point.

Ross: Wow.

Nehemia: Maybe more than 20 years, actually. I knew you in a completely different context, which I’ll share in a minute, and I knew you were working on the Shapira Scrolls. But what really jogged my memory and got me to reach out and contact you was, I was listening to a lecture. They have these online lectures at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and someone was giving a lecture about the Shapira Scrolls. And he mentioned that there are all these scholars who are now working on this. He mentioned Professor James Tabor, he mentioned Idan Dershowitz, and within that group of very prestigious scholars, he mentioned an independent scholar, Ross Nichols, and I’m like, “Ross! I know Ross!”

Ross: Yeah!

Nehemia: And I’m like, “Alright, I’ve got to find out.” And I found out that you have a book about it, which I think I knew. I think I even have the book; I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve read it, but I’m pretty sure I already have that book. And I want to tell the people how I know you from way back when, which is kind of a cool story. My audience will appreciate this.

I wrote a book called The Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus, and I talk about a controversial verse in Matthew chapter 23 verses 2 to 3. And I won’t rehash all of that, but I had a discovery there about the difference of a single letter. And when I went to investigate it, I found out that somebody had seen this before me and had observed the same thing and wrote an online article about it. And I decided, even though I had discovered it myself, I’m going to give him credit in a footnote because he discovered it first. And that’s what you do; that’s the mensch thing to do in academia, in scholarship. And that’s you; I mentioned you in the footnote having observed that it says, “All therefore whatsoever he says to do that observe and do.”

And before I published my book, if I remember correctly, I spoke to you on the phone, and you told me the story of how you actually engaged with George Howard. George Howard is the scholar who originally published Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew, first in 1987, and then again in 1995, the second edition. I've got the softcover here. So, tell us the story about how you had this interaction with George Howard over this.

Ross: It really was a fun story! And let me publicly say thank you Nehemia. For a long time that was the biggest claim to fame for Ross K. Nichols, that I made it in one of your books!

Nehemia: Well, it is still an important claim to fame; not that you made it in my book, but that you had this really important… you, as far as I know, are the first one to realize the significance. Obviously, Howard saw it before you did because he put it in his book...

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: … but he didn’t translate it!

Ross: That’s right! That’s what I noticed! That’s exactly…

Nehemia: So, let me rehash for the audience.

Ross: Okay.

Nehemia: So, in the Greek, Jesus says, “Whatever the Pharisees tell you to do, that observe and do because they sit in the seat of Moses.”

Ross: That’s right.

Nehemia: And in the Hebrew Matthew it says, “All therefore whatever…”

Ross: “All therefore whatever he will say unto you, do and keep.”

Nehemia: There you go!

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s yomar, that’s right. It’s been so long since I wrote the book.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: “All there whatsoever he bids you observe and do,” meaning Moses, “that observe and do.” They sit in the seat of Moses, therefore whatever he, Moses, tells you to do, that do. And some people have tried to say, “Oh no, it’s the chair that’s telling you what to do.” Well, “chair” is feminine so it would be “she”.

Ross: Right!

Nehemia: Meaning, in Hebrew “chair” is feminine. Alright, so tell us about how you observed this before I did, maybe even 10 years, it sounds like, from what we talked about before.

Ross: I know that in 1995, it’s when I first got this copy of the book that you just held up, George Howard’s Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. I had heard about it, I was fascinated because at the time I had just begun to study Hebrew, Nehemia, and I thought, “I love the Gospel of Matthew. Here we have a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew,” and so I got the book. I began to read, and I was really looking at… I was pathetic at reading Hebrew at the time, particularly without nekudot, but I remember when I was reading through, I got to 23, chapter 23 and I see, “Ve’atah kol asher yomer.” And I remember looking at that and I thought… I had just begun to learn Hebrew grammar, and I said, “I know in the English translation it says, ‘they will say’, ‘all that they will say’ but that’s not what that means. It means ‘he.’”

And all of a sudden, my mind began to think, “This is the only way this makes sense. Because if you don’t see this as ‘he will say’, Matthew 23 is sort of an anomaly.” Because, think about it, Matthew 15, Matthew 23, all that Jesus is saying is, “Look, those scribes and Pharisees.” And then all of a sudden, he goes, “Yeah, whatever they say to you, do and keep,” and I’m thinking, that doesn’t…

So, I remember I called James Tabor. He told me that there was a conference coming up in several months, this was in 1995 when I found it.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. And James Tabor is currently a professor, if I’m not mistaken, at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Ross: He’s retired.

Nehemia: Okay, emeritus, a retired professor. What was he in 1995? Was he at Charlotte already?

Ross: Not only was he at Charlotte, but I believe at the time he was the Chair of Religious Studies at UNC-Charlotte.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Ross: He held that position for more than 10 years, I believe. We had become friends for quite some time, and so we went to the conference together. And I remember we were seated in the back. Dr. Howard gave his lecture, and I could not wait. I was a young kid then. I remember I raised my hand and Dr. Howard called on me and I said, “Dr. Howard, in your book the Hebrew says this, but in the English, you put ‘they’.” Now Nehemia, he puts it in parenthesis, if you remember.

Nehemia: Right. So, the parenthesis are whenever his English doesn’t match what’s on the opposite page, which is the Hebrew, he puts the English in parenthesis. And his argument was, “Well, sometimes the Hebrew doesn’t make any sense, so I’m just going to translate what makes sense.”

Ross: That’s right.

Nehemia: And I guess this didn’t make sense to him.

Ross: Yeah, that’s right. But as soon as I said that he looked at it and he let me continue. And I went on to explain how contextually it made more sense. After the meeting, he came up, we met, and he said, “You really need to write this up.”

Nehemia: Oh, wow. ’95.

Ross: He said, “I’m willing to help you.” Because quickly we talked and I said, “Look, I’m an independent. I don’t have a degree at school,” whatever. So, he was very kind and gracious, and I wrote a note to both James and Dr. Howard, and we worked through this. It took a little while. They encouraged me, George Howard encouraged me to submit it to the Journal of Biblical Literature. And what was interesting, Nehemia, was I was playing off… There was an article by Mark Powell in 1995 called Do and Keep What Moses Says, so they thought, “This is perfect. You could kind of piggyback off of that.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ross: Long story short, I submitted it to the editor-in-chief at the time, Jouette Bassler. She wrote me back a note and said, “Your article isn’t appropriate for this publication.”

Nehemia: Okay. By the way, that’s not a bad rejection.

Ross: No, it’s very nice!

Nehemia: That’s what they call a desk rejection. That means they didn’t read it, they read the abstract. And more importantly, they didn’t send it to peer review. They just decided, for whatever reason of their own, “Hey, this isn’t something we want.” And it very well could be, “Hey, we already had an article on this, we don’t want another article on the same subject.” That happens sometimes.

Ross: It could be.

Nehemia: I just had a desk rejection like that on an article I sent to a journal, and in the article, I used methodologies. They said, “Look, you’re using X-ray fluorescence. We don’t know how to evaluate that.”

Ross: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: And it’s an article where there’s an interdisciplinary approach. I’m coming as the scholar, we have someone who’s a physicist, and another who’s a person who is an archaeomotrist, meaning they use scientific measurements to deal with artifacts. And they said, “Look, we’re a philology journal. We literally don’t have a peer review where we can even look at this and evaluate it.”

Ross: Oh, wow.

Nehemia: So that’s actually good. If they had sent it to a peer review, where they said, “This isn’t scholarly.” Well, that’s kind of a bad rejection. That happens too. That’s not a big deal, but...

Ross: Well, in a way, I was crushed though. I thought…

Nehemia: You shouldn't be. Not for that.

Ross: Well, now I feel better about it. It’s been a while, I’ve gotten over it a little bit, but…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ross: But I tell you, both scholars, James and George, I have a stack of… you remember what a fax machine is, Nehemia?

Nehemia: I do!

Ross: Listen, this is funny. I’m going to read you one line.

Nehemia: Wait, this is a fax?

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: Who’s this fax to?

Ross: It’s from George Howard to me.

Nehemia: What? Okay.

Ross: He typed a letter…

Nehemia: What’s the date?

Ross: January 9th, 1997. Now, this is ancient. This is like a manuscript that you’d study almost. George Howard says, “Ross, I received your fax. Although a few lines were difficult to read, I got most of it. It’s a very good article that should be published as a critical note in some journal.” So, this is the beginning of it, and then I write him. He tells me to send it to Jouette Bassler. I write to both scholars and say it was rejected.

Ultimately, he says, “Look, don’t be disappointed. Do whatever you can to get your name attached to this.” And that’s what I did. I remember that at the time I uploaded it on the web, and I sort of had this hope that somebody would find it. And that somebody was the scholar Nehemia Gordon, and then you published your notes.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ross: But it really is, I think, a significant reading. And I didn’t find… George Howard wrote to me and said, “You might not know this, but now that you’ve brought this subject, and I started thinking about it…” He found in the old Latin that the reading there is diceret, I think is the proper pronunciation, which also reflects this “he will say”, as opposed to “they will say”.

Nehemia: Right. And I actually looked that up last year sometime, or recently, relatively, because now we have really good, easily available critical editions of the Latin. I think you mentioned two manuscripts. There’s actually a bunch of them according to the critical editions that have diceret. I’m not a Latin expert.

Ross: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Didn’t you eventually publish this somewhere other than online on your own website?

Ross: I did. It was in Bible Interp, I believe it was.

Nehemia: The Bible Interpreter?

Ross: Yeah. Bible Interpretation or bibleinterp.com I believe, at the time. I wanted it out there, and James Tabor recommended this academic online publication. So, I put it there and I put it on the shelf, and since then I’ve been involved in other things.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ross: But I do still think it’s a remarkable discovery, and I’m glad you guys… I’m certainly glad it made it in your book.

Nehemia: Alright. So, that’s how I know you from almost 20 years ago. Next thing, now. You’re working on something completely different now, which is the Shapira Scrolls. Tell us what that controversy is, the Shapira Scrolls.

Ross: Let me lead into this, Nehemia, because every time I make some discovery, the one guy who’s always there, like over my shoulder watching, is you.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ross: Let me tell you what I mean by that. So, in 2019, I gave a talk at a United Israel Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had never heard the name Shapira, but I was pleased that you came to that conference. And I taught a class, gave a lecture called Finding the Hand of Moses, the Torah Within Our Torah. This is what kind of got me into this. And it was all about the mysterious reference, as I understood it, in Deuteronomy 31 verse 9 and Deuteronomy 31 verses 24 thru 26, where it says that Moses wrote “this” Torah, ha’Torah ha’zot, until the very end. He gave it to the Levites and so forth.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ross: So, I began to look at that and think about… and I’ve heard you mention this before too. What is this little scroll that Moses wrote that’s described in the Torah? So that kind of had me thinking; is there a scroll that’s mentioned in the Torah that I need to be looking for?

And so, long story short, James Tabor sent me an email in December of 2019, and he said, “You might be interested in this.” And the article was an online review of a book by Chanan Tigay, and the book was called The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible. Well, that’s right up my alley! It fit within my thinking at the time. I said, “What is this?”

So, James and I both read through the book. I devoured it, and it is the story of a Jerusalem shopkeeper and antiquarian, an agent for the British Museum. He discovered some of the greatest manuscripts, and that’s how you and I have just recently reconnected. You’re chasing down some of these old manuscripts, and Shapira’s name is attached to a lot of them. He would go into Yemen and into Egypt…

Nehemia: And there are other ones that he brought them that his name is not attached to.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: Maybe because they didn’t keep good records or there were some issue of… we’ll get to some of the issues. But I want to go back to the issue of the scroll within a scroll, because I’m not sure I ever put it quite that way, about what Moses wrote.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: So, in my upbringing, which was an ultra-Orthodox Rabbinical approach, there was this idea that Moses went up to Mount Sinai and he received the Torah, the entire Torah, from Genesis 1:1 to Deuteronomy 34:12.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: And there’s even discussions in the Rabbinical literature that, as he wrote down Deuteronomy 34, which is the account of his death, that he wrote it in tears, because he’s writing about his own death prophetically.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: And that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: And there are even rabbis in the Middle Ages who say, “Yeah, that’s the story we were told, but come on.” I mean, they don’t put it exactly this way, but basically, “Come on, that’s a story for children, that Moses wrote down Genesis 1:1 to Deuteronomy 34:12 up on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights,” which it does not say.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: But actually, Ibn Ezra, for example says, “Moses wrote individual scrolls, and eventually the scrolls were attached together, and that's why some things are out of chronological order.” Famously, Numbers chapter 9 takes place before Numbers chapter 1.

Ross: Exactly.

Nehemia: And we know because it gives dates.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, when they sewed those scrolls together, it wasn’t that they made a mistake; although I guess you could say that. But actually, it seems more likely that it was arranged thematically in that section rather than chronologically. And this actually spawns an entire genre of interpretation that the rabbis have, which is juxtaposition of sections.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: Why is this section next to that section?

Ross: There’s no early or late in the Torah.

Nehemia: That’s a separate thing.

Ross: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: That’s the Numbers 9 and Numbers 1. Juxtaposition is, why is this section next to that section? Well, I don’t know. Because Moses went into the tent and wrote down what God said. But if he wrote everything on a separate scroll, then he just stuck it in the jar, stuck it in the jar, stuck it in the jar, and there’s a jar full of a whole bunch of little scrolls, and each scroll might say, “This is the Torah of the Burnt Offering,” the instruction, and that’s the heading that we actually have in a certain section in Leviticus. “This is the Torah of the Guilt Offering.” So that was maybe a separate scroll. And maybe it even said it on the outside of the scroll so when you open it, you’re like, “Okay, what is this? Okay it says this is the Torah of the Burnt Offering.”

So, when they sewed them together, in some instances they did it based on theme, on subject. There’s instances where you can demonstrate in Deuteronomy, which is a bit surprising for a bunch of reasons that I’m not going to get into...

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: … but you can show that they have juxtaposition based on common words or common themes. Like, there is a section where it says, “Don’t lend on interest,” and the commandment immediately after that is, “Don’t bring the price of a dog into the Temple.” What does that have to do with it? Because the word for interest means “to bite”.

Ross: Okay.

Nehemia: And then you have a dog, and dogs bite, and it’s a word that applies to a dog biting. So, it seems like there was maybe a really small scroll, and they sewed the other one next to it.

So, it says in Deuteronomy 31:24, “And it came to pass when Moses finished writing the words of this Torah,” this instruction, “upon a book until their completion.” So, what does that refer to? Does that refer to the Book of Deuteronomy? Does it refer to the Five Books of Moses from Genesis 1:1? And what you’re suggesting is, maybe it doesn’t even refer to the entire Book of Deuteronomy. Is that right?

Ross: That’s correct. And just briefly, just to touch it, what it…

Nehemia: Blasphemy!

Ross: I know! I know!

Nehemia: Alright, go ahead.

Ross: But what really took me back was reading “he completed it to the very end.” And I thought, “Wait a minute, woah, woah, woah!”

Nehemia: And that’s chapter 31; it continues for three more chapters.

Ross: Yeah, okay, so you get it! Then it caused me to really look, and part of my book and part of my lecture at the time… I didn’t know who Shapira was. I was writing a book called Finding the Hand of Moses: What Did Moses Write? Because the other thing that was really getting my attention is that, throughout the Pentateuch, if you look… of course we don’t meet Moses until Exodus, obviously. But the only place where first-person is used is in Deuteronomy, and not all of Deuteronomy. I think Moses is mentioned some 700 times roughly, which indicates a third person…

Anyway, this is what got me thinking, “Is there something which records something within the Torah that Moses actually wrote?” That’s what really drove me. And so, Tabor sent me this article, and the article was about Chanan Tigay’s book, and so I thought, “Let me check this out.” Got into the book, couldn’t put it down, and realized that this guy, Shapira, was a scroll merchant, if you will. He’s running around the world at the time, and some people have accused some of his practices, Nehemia, as being a little bit shady. But he would acquire…

Nehemia: Not a little bit shady, very shady. Before we get to that, I want to go back to the first-person thing, and I want to challenge you, at least challenge people to think about this.

Ross: Okay.

Nehemia: So, your argument is, when it says, “And the Lord spoke to Moses saying,” in Numbers let’s say, or in Leviticus, that that wouldn’t be Moses writing that. It would be somebody else writing about Moses, and that’s a possibility. And I don’t have a problem with that because I would just say it was Joshua. It says that Joshua was in the tent, and he heard everything that God spoke to Moses.

Ross: Okay.

Nehemia: You may disagree with that; you’re entitled to your opinion.

Ross: No, no, no, it could be, it could be, yeah.

Nehemia: And then therefore they weren’t Moses’ words anyway; they were God’s words speaking to Moses, if you believe what it says. And if you don’t believe what it says, then it has nothing to do with Moses anyway.

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: So, I want to challenge that, because writing in first-person… I don’t know if it’s obvious that that is the only way for somebody to express themselves. And I’m going to bring something; I did a series that, I don’t know if it’s going to be broadcast before this or after this, depending on the time slot on where it gets edited. But I did a really interesting series with an historian who is an expert on early Mormonism.

So, we have the Book of Mormon, and unless you’re a believing Mormon, you pretty much think Joseph Smith wrote the whole thing. Joseph Smith Jr. And it’s not in first-person, but then he also has things called the Doctrines and Covenants, which is sometimes in first-person, and then sometimes it’s not in first-person, it’s in third person. And I’m paraphrasing, I’m not an expert in this, but it’s something to the effect of, “God revealed His word to His servant, Joseph Smith.”

But we know Joseph Smith made that whole thing up and wrote it! But it’s not in first-person, and that’s a relatively modern example, but why would it have to be different? Meaning, why is it that Moses couldn’t write, “And Yehovah spoke to Moses saying…” isn’t that possible?

Ross: Certainly, there are a lot of things possible, but just to take this…

Nehemia: And some people are going to be really upset. We say, “Le’havdil elef alfei havdalot,” “To separate a thousand thousand differentiations” between Moses and Joseph Smith Jr. But the point is, if you don’t believe that the Torah is the word of God, you’re taking a secular scholarly approach. Fine, we’re going to explore that. Then why couldn’t Moses have written Leviticus and Numbers the same way that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Jacob and the Book of Moroni? And all the others, the Book of Alma…

Ross: I’m with you, I’m with you on your statement “keep it separate.” But the thing that really made me think… I didn’t arrive at these questions based on reading anything in the academic world, it was just the text. So, it wasn’t like I said, “Well, what do the scholars believe? And that’s what I’m going to go with.” I had never read a book from a scholar about the text. I came from a very religious upbringing; this is the word of God, and let’s start there and really dig deep.

So, when I got to Deuteronomy, and the first time I really recognized, “And Jehovah,” Yehovah, “spoke unto me, saying…” I remember thinking, “That’s interesting.” It really just caught me off guard, because I thought I knew the Torah pretty well, but I recognized that it was only in Deuteronomy. And again, it could be that in some cases… There are times where I will write a description for my class, “In this class, Ross talks about…” And somebody could say, “Ah, look Ross, you did it too!” So, I get that, but what really hit me was in Deuteronomy, at the end… there are even some discussions, I believe, in Rabbinic literature, where they say, the discussion you brought up earlier about did Moses wrote about his own death, and people say, “Well no, Joshua wrote that.” Of course, some say he wrote it…

Nehemia: It’s a machloket, it’s a debate. So, what was I going to say now? I forgot. Alright, keep going, sorry.

Ross: So, Deuteronomy 1 begins, “These are the words which Moses spoke on the other side of the Jordan,” at least that’s the way I would translate it. And so, it seemed to me, and this doesn’t take anything away from the sanctity of the text, but it struck me as something which another scribe… Joshua? I don’t know, someone else wrote, because it’s describing from, presumably, from west of the African Rift, events that transpired east of the Rift.

Nehemia: Okay. I’ll play the devil's advocate again.

Ross: Okay.

Nehemia: There used to be a country called the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: Why was it called Transjordan? Because it’s on the east side of the Jordan (River)…

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: Opposite the Land of Israel, what they called the British Mandate of Palestine. So, it’s entirely possible to sit on the eastern side of the Jordan River and call yourself, Ever Ha’Yarden, Transjordan.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: But I hear what you’re saying. You’re raising interesting questions and valid questions, and these are definitely something to think about. Jews don’t have a problem asking questions, especially when they’re asked in faith. Meaning, if they’re asked, “Hey, let’s undermine the Bible,” well, Jews aren’t comfortable with that.

Ross: That’s right. Well, I’m out, if that’s the case, yeah.

Nehemia: But if they’re asked in the sense of, “Hey, we want to understand what is going on here and understand the text better” because you might say, “Hey, there’s a contradiction; Moses died on Mount Nebo and never entered the Land. Yet it says he wrote it in Transjordan, meaning the western side of the Jordan from where the Israelites were. Well, that doesn’t make any sense. Did he swim across the Jordan, write the scroll, and run back?”

So, you’re asking what I think are really valid questions and interesting questions.

Ross: Yeah. And without belaboring, because this is a very detailed discussion, and again, these are questions that come to my mind as I read, in the desire to understand the word of God. And as I read these things, this really set me up to teach the class in 2019. But going into this, I found seven places in the Torah where it says, “And Moses wrote.” In other words…

Nehemia: Before you get to that, hold that point. You mentioned your class; share with the audience where they can come and hear you teach a class. You do ongoing classes.

Ross: I do.

Nehemia: You have a book which is above your right shoulder, but to me it looks like your left shoulder. I don’t know, it switches it around.

Ross: I can’t ever get that straight.

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s a Zoom thing. So, tell us about your class and about your book.

Ross: I will, thank you. Everything that I do, audio or video now, goes through my YouTube channel. It’s very simple: RossKNicholsTV on YouTube.com, RossKNicholsTV. I have a website, rossknichols.com, Facebook, RossKNichols. Everything is RossKNichols. Let me tell you why, Nehemia. There’s a witch, a wiccan by the name of Ross Nichols. So, I always put the “K” in.

Nehemia: What?

Ross: Yeah. I have some people… one guy wrote to me one time and said, “Hey, are you the Ross Nichols that wrote…” Now this guy has been dead a while, so hopefully I’m not that guy! But anyway, he’s a famous wiccan. If you Google Ross Nichols, I’ll come up in the hits too, but I don’t want people to… So put the “K” in, is what I’m saying!

Nehemia: What does the “K” stand for?

Ross: Kirby, K-I-R-B-Y.

Nehemia: Kirby.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, Kirby, when is your class? So, it’s on YouTube. Is it a live class or is it recorded?

Ross: Every Saturday morning I premiere a video that my son Seth and I put together. We video it, we put it up, and then I chat with the people watching the premieres. And then after the premiere I do a live. And of course, I do streams on Wednesday and Thursday nights too, and podcasts…

Nehemia: We’ll throw it up on the website, NehemiasWall.com, on the post for this episode we’ll put up the link to your class. And tell us about the book.

Ross: The book, yeah. My main book is called The Moses Scroll, and it details the entire saga, the most controversial case in Biblical history, about Moses Wilhelm Shapira. And it covers from the time that the story begins, virtually at the very beginning of the story, when he comes to possess, and how he comes to possess, what is called “a curious manuscript written in Paleo-Hebrew letters.”

Nehemia: Can I jump in here and give the 30-second version? And then you’ll give the details.

Ross: Alright, let’s do it.

Nehemia: So, this guy named Moses Shapira, who was a Jew who immigrated to Israel in the 1800’s from Poland, on the way he converted to Christianity, opens up a store, and becomes an international manuscript dealer. He brings this scroll eventually to the British Museum at the time. He’s going to sell it for a million pounds or something, and it purports to be a scroll discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea, and you’ll give more details… in Transjordan, the eastern side of the Jordan, in Wadi Mujib, Nahal Arnon, and it’s proclaimed by one of the greatest scholars of the time, Christian David Ginsburg, who incidentally is also a Jew who converted to Christianity…

Ross: Right!

Nehemia: … to be a forgery. And Shapira slinks off across the channel, I want to say to Amsterdam or someplace like that and commits suicide. That’s the story in a nutshell. And one of the main arguments is, “Well, this couldn’t be authentic because scrolls couldn’t possibly survive in Israel near the Dead Sea because there’s too much rain and water.” And then in 1947 they discover the Dead Sea Scrolls, and somebody says, “Uh-oh!” And by the way, where are those scrolls that the British Museum never bought? And you’re searching for those scrolls.

Ross: That’s right!

Nehemia: Alright! That’s the 30-second version, one-minute version. Now share some of the details on that.

Ross: And that is the version that has been known and repeated since 1883.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ross: But behind the scenes, there’s a lot to the story. So here it is, and you did it in 30 seconds. I don’t know how long it would take me. It takes me some 200 and some-odd pages.

Nehemia: Well, we don’t have that much time!

Ross: That’s okay. I’m not going to read it to you. I’ll tell it to you.

Nehemia: Alright.

Ross: So, in 1865… I’m going to take you back to 1865. The Ottomans are in control of what was then called Palestine. The Ottomans are trying to get a handle, Nehemia, on a group of people called the Bedouin. The Bedouin resist being put under this Ottoman rulership. But the Ottomans are trying to civilize the world, so they’re trying to conscript the Bedouins to military service; they’re trying to get taxes out of them. Anyway, there’s this big push and the pasha is trying to really enforce this. So, it describes that at a certain point two or three… the reports vary, several Bedouin are fleeing from their enemies. The enemies are the Ottomans, and they find refuge in a cave high up in the Wadi Mujib, in Nahal Arnon. They go into the cave, and at the back of the cave on a niche is a scroll. Now this is not the real scroll, Nehemia, but I promise you if I find it, I’ll call you. This is a replica of one of the strips. It’s not quite to scale either, but it’s kind of cool to show…

Nehemia: Is that bigger or is that smaller than what it’s supposed to be?

Ross: This is bigger.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s important. We’ll remember that later.

Ross: Yeah. So basically, the Bedouin… Shapira’s not involved. The Bedouin discover what they think… they hope it’s treasure, Nehemia. They see a bundle, it looks like old rags, and it’s got some black sticky bitumen or asphalt or something on it. So, they go back, and they rip it open, and they find 16 blackened leather strips with some bizarre writing; they can’t read the writing. So, they throw them aside, they think this is trash. They hoped it was gold; it wasn’t gold. But one of the Bedouin picks up these pieces and takes them back to his tent.

The quick version of the story is that he holds those in his possession for about a decade, and supposedly his life turns good. It’s like a luck charm to him. He has lots of sheep, Nehemia, lots of women, he’s the talk of the Bedouin village. But one of the Arabs living in Jerusalem at the time… we know from historical sources this guy's name is Erekat, and he’s the sheikh of Abu Dis. He happens to be the chief of the tribe who helps people at the time. In the 19th century if you wanted to travel to Transjordan, travel past Jericho safely, you had to go to Erekat. He hears, through the wind of the desert, about these scrolls. He knows his buddy Shapira is a scroll merchant, so he goes to his shop, and he says, “You might be interested in this. I heard this story.” Shapira is very interested in it, so Erekat arranges, through an intermediary by the name of Salim, to bring a sample of the scroll to the shop. So Shapira’s away from his shop, he comes back to the shop, there is waiting on him one of the pieces, one of the 16 pieces.

The long story is that over a period of about five weeks, meetings on the road to Jericho… he meets with this intermediary, and at the last meeting… he pays a little bit of money each time he meets him. “Here’s some money,” he gives him more strips. By the end the guy tells him, “This is all of it.” Shapira, meanwhile, is transcribing this Paleo Hebrew. Now remember, nothing in Paleo at this time… this is 1878 by the way. There’s been no discovery of a leather manuscript that’s written in Paleo, nothing, so there’s nothing to compare it to.

Nehemia: Now we can read Paleo Hebrew even in the 1860’s, because it’s essentially the Phoenician script, and there were Phoenician inscriptions that were discovered even in the Renaissance.

Ross: Lapidary inscriptions, yes.

Nehemia: Right. Usually, they were on sarcophagi and things like that, and they were written on stones. So, okay.

Ross: Yeah, that’s right.

Nehemia: So, he’s deciphering… not to mention that scholars knew how to read Samaritan script…

Ross: Sure.

Nehemia: Which is close enough to where you can figure out… it’s not exactly Paleo Hebrew, but it’s close enough to where you can figure out most of Paleo Hebrew just from the Samaritan script. There’s a famous story about Nachmanides, when he came to Israel, he discovered a coin and he couldn’t read it, so he brought it to the Samaritans, and they were able to decipher it. And it turns out it was from, I don’t remember if it was the Great Revolt or the Bar Kokhba Revolt. I want to say Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Ross: Wow.

Nehemia: And the Samaritans were able to decipher it. They actually got it a little bit wrong, but they could read it, basically. Okay, so Shapira is this Jewish immigrant who’s returned to Israel from Poland, he’s converted to Christianity on the way, and he now has a shop in the Old City. All that’s accurate, right?

Ross: Yeah, that’s right. That’s correct.

Nehemia: Okay. And now he’s got 16 pieces of a scroll from what is claimed to be Wadi Mujib, according to the story.

Ross: According to the story, that’s right. And just to kind of orient your viewers…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ross: This falls between… this is the summer of 1878. Remember, August 19, 1868, Frederick Augustus Klein discovered, or is shown by his Arab guide, the Moabite Stone, the Mesha Stele. So, there’s a lot of interest in what is going on…

Ross: Tell everybody what the Mesha Stele is.

Nehemia: The Mesha Stele is a basalt monument that was discovered in 1868, and it tells the story… It’s one of the greatest archeological discoveries of all time, in my estimation, because in many ways it confirms a Biblical story from 2 Kings chapter 3.

2 Kings chapter 3 talks about a battle after the death of Ahaz. Ahaziah, the next king comes up, there is this enormous tribute demanded of the King of Moab, and we’re talking about the northern tribes of Israel, had this big tribute placed on the land of Moab. Well, the king there was a king by the name of Mesha, and during the turmoil resulting in the death of Israel’s king, he thinks, Nehemia, that he no longer has to pay taxes.

So, he tries to not pay his tribute, and the king in the north teams up with Jehoshaphat in the Kingdom of Judah and the King of Edom, this is 2 Kings 3, and they decide they’re going to swing around the south end of the Dead Sea, they’re going to bring Mesha back under subjugation and make him pay his bills. So, the long of the short of that story is that King Mesha, according to the Biblical account, comes to battle, he thinks he can take the link of the chain with Edom, badly mistaken.

By the way, Elijah the prophet’s involved, Elisha the prophet is involved in this story, and the story is that God says, “You’re going to be fine, you’re going to win.” King Mesha battles them off, ultimately, and the Biblical story ends very strangely; wrath came upon Israel, and they returned back home. Well, what people found shocking about the Moabite Stone, the Mesha Stele, is even though it’s from the opponent's viewpoint, there are like 18 or 19 correspondences. Like you’d go, “Wow, a correlation! So maybe the Bible story is true!” There is a battle.

Nehemia: Well, it definitely happened, the details… You know, it’s interesting, I did an interview with Dr. Michael Oren on the Six-Day War, and he wrote the definitive historical study on it. And he talked about how the Syrians… I think at the time they’d only ever written one book about the Six-Day War, and the person who wrote it was executed, if I remember correctly.

Ross: Wow.

Nehemia: And so, it’s a common thing today that when people write histories and they tell it from their perspective, depending on the agenda they’re trying to promote, either they never lose the war or they were horribly humiliated. And that’s all the more reason… like in China the narrative is, “We were horribly humiliated by Western powers, so we have to resist the West and not be humiliated again.” And it’s something that drives the dialog, how they retell the story from 200 years ago, from like the Opium War of 1842. Is that exactly what happened? Well, we have a different story in the West, but there are correspondences like you say, and that’s what is so interesting to me. Is this the Moabite story? And in the Moabite story, the hero is Mesha and his God, Chemosh.

Ross: That’s correct.

Nehemia: Whereas in the Israelite story, the heroes are the Israelite kings and the God of Israel, Yehovah. I find that fascinating!

Ross: Let me tell you, the thing that really… and by the way, that’s in my book too; I tell the whole story. But I will say this; not only does the Mesha Stele… Mesha is giving glory to his God that ultimately Israel went back home. But what’s fascinating is that here is an inscription in stone, dated, no scholar of any reputation says that it’s fake, and it mentions in line 31 the name Yehovah. Now, it’s not pointed, as so many manuscripts you’ve discovered, but it says Yehovah.

Nehemia: Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey is there. The pronunciation is a separate question.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: Until recently, it was argued that that was the oldest surviving inscription mentioning Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, the God of Israel, and arguably it’s the oldest undisputed… still the oldest undisputed.

Ross: That’s right. That’s what I would say.

Nehemia: Certainly, in Hebrew characters; in this case we’d call it Phoenician, but it’s Moabite.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: But it’s the same 22-letter alphabet.

Ross: That's right. And so, just to orient people, this discovery that is brought to Shapira, 16 leather strips…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ross: He begins to transcribe them. Now, believe me, he is all in the middle of the recent news. In fact, there is one story, at least according to his daughter in a book called The Little Daughter of Jerusalem by Miriam Harry, Shapira’s daughter, she says, Nehemia, that her dad actually uncovered the Moabite Stone. Whether that’s true or not… But he was doing excursions into the land of Moab, and I believe there is some substance there.

But ultimately you have the same cast of characters. Moses Shapira is very much part of it, you mentioned Christian David Ginsburg, who we’ll get to. There’s a Frenchman by the name of Monsieur Charles Clermont-Ganneau, a brilliant young scholar at the time. So, all these same characters. Well, Clermont-Ganneau involves himself in the Mesha Stele even though the Prussians were in the works to try to get this. The long story on that is, it’s blown to smithereens.

Nehemia: That’s Prussians with a “P”, as in the country of Prussia, which later became the German Empire or the United German Empire.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, this is before there’s a country called Germany, that this is taking place…

Ross: Yeah, this is 1868.

Nehemia: So, it’s close. Germany was united in 1871, if I’m not mistaken.

Ross: The scholarly world is really into this thing. So, there is this idea that Shapira was involved in the discovery. But one thing that’s important is leading up to our story of this scroll discovery; the discoverer, the man, Frederick Augustus Klein, who is the one who is shown the Mesha Stele first, said that he believed that what would come from Moab would be other great treasures. Remember, there was a lot of research and archaeology going on, primarily through the Palestine Exploration Fund, in the land of what we would call Israel. Not so much Jordan, and part of the reason was because of this Bedouin problem. You couldn’t safely go there, and so it was very limited on Westerners traveling over there.

Nehemia: And look, some of the background of that is that at the time, what later became Turkey, what at the time was the Ottoman Empire, was known as the sick old man of Europe, and they didn’t have a strong central government. And wherever in the Middle East there isn’t a strong central government, the locals pretty much do whatever they want. And especially the Bedouins out in the desert, they run things. This is something that’s going on right now as we’re recording. In the Sinai Peninsula, particularly in Northern Sinai, where the Bedouins essentially are… I wouldn’t exactly call it an uprising, but it is not safe to travel through Northern Sinai right now, because the Bedouins run things. And they might decide to just kidnap you or kill you, and the central government in Cairo doesn’t really have strong control over that. And that’s what things were like in Jordan.

The reason, by the way, that things aren’t like that today in Jordan is because it’s a Bedouin regime that runs that country. They’re these Bedouins that came from Arabia who were kicked out by the Saud family, the Hashemites, or Hashemi. They rule Jordan today. But at the time it was pretty much a free-for-all. If you weren’t in a major city which was surrounded by a wall, or some kind of fortification, then the Bedouins might just rob you blind. So that kind of stifled archeological investigations, travel, and things like that.

And look, the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to state the obvious, is that a Bedouin claims he wandered into a cave and found these scrolls when he was looking for his sheep. He threw a rock after the sheep…

Ross: Right, right.

Nehemia: Some people question whether that’s what really happened, or whether he was actually looking for artifacts to sell. That’s the revisionist version today. And we have a story from around the year 800 by Bishop Timotheos, who was in Iraq, and he writes a letter about a Bedouin who is hunting with his dog near the Dead Sea, and they found a cave. And in the cave, there were these scrolls, and the Jews came down from Jerusalem for the scrolls.

So, these types of things are known to have happened in history before the Dead Sea Scrolls and since the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so, it’s kind of surprising that they would have this scroll and they would say, “Well, nothing can survive in the area of the Dead Sea.” But then again, Timotheos was in the year 800 or so.

Ross: Yeah, but you know that…

Nehemia: It’s a thousand years later.

Ross: Yeah. You know the quote, and now today scholarship knows it, but in the 1800’s, you think there are…

Nehemia: That’s a good point, they didn’t know the story of Timotheos, that’s possible.

Ross: Yes. So, there are only really two accounts of ancient scroll discoveries in and around Jericho prior to 1946-47.

Nehemia: I think Origen in the 2nd century mentioned something about…

Ross: That’s right.

Nehemia: But okay, those had only been in the caves maybe for 50 years at that point…

Ross: Right.

Nehemia: … or 100 years, 200 years. It wasn’t over a thousand years, 1,800 years later.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, fair enough, they wouldn’t have necessarily known that it’s possible. Alright, so what ties all this together? And hopefully we’ll get to it…

Ross: Yeah, we will.

Nehemia: But what ties it all together is your book is a pun, is a play on words; The Moses Scroll. Am I right? It’s the scroll of Moses Wilhelm Shapira, but it’s also, according to Shapira, I think, and certainly according to modern scholars, it is an early version of the Book of Deuteronomy…

Ross: Correct.

Nehemia: … that Deuteronomy is based on.

Ross: Correct. So, we can move into the scroll story. But to get the background, ultimately, what happens is, Shapira begins to look at these strips. They’re not easy to read, Nehemia, he doesn’t have modern technical tools. You and I were talking before the recording about all your gadgets…

Nehemia: Yeah. This would have been solved in a couple of hours with multi-spectral imaging. I don’t even think you would need multi-spectral imaging. You almost certainly, if they were authentic, could have done it with a camera. What you do is, it’s just a regular camera, you remove the IR filter. Most cameras today have an IR filter that protects the sensor from infrared radiation which could damage it. And so, you remove that filter, and then you have some sources of light that you then take a photograph at 1,050 nanometers, and you should be able to read this like it was written yesterday. If it was what it claims to be.

I want us to read that passage. You shared that with me, I don’t know if we should save that… let’s do that.

Ross: What’s that?

Nehemia: So, you showed me a passage before the program where Shapira has written a letter to, I believe it’s Hermann Strack in Germany, but he wrote it in English, which wasn’t his native language because he was from Poland. And his English isn’t so great, but there’s a passage there where he’s describing what he went through to decipher these scrolls, really these strips. We call them scrolls because they’re only written on one side; scrolls are usually rolled up. These were folded up which was a bit unusual.

Ross: Yeah. Well, there’s something about that. Do you want to read that? And we’ll talk about the fold.

Nehemia: Tell us about the fold first, because that’s interesting.

Ross: So, just to demonstrate, again this isn’t to scale, but the way that Shapira got these, he said they were folded… I’ll show your viewers, so that the side with text is text to text, and the back, which is coated in an asphalt, or a dark black sticky substance, is folded back-to-back, face to face, so that at no time do the letters touch the sticky backing.

Nehemia: I see; if you roll it, it would touch. By the way, there’s natural bitumen in the area of the Dead Sea. It used to be called in Latin Mara Asphaltum, or something like that, “the asphalt sea”, because there were actually asphalt bergs floating on top of the sea. I’ve seen remnants of that in the area of the Dead Sea, most of them were mined in antiquity. And when they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the jars was covered with leather, if I remember correctly… no, I’m not sure it was covered in leather. But in any event, it was sealed with asphalt, meaning with natural bitumen. And so that’s entirely plausible today. At the time maybe it wasn’t, I don’t know.

Ross: Yeah. This is the thing that really pulled me into the story is that no one at the time had seen anything like this. So first of all, he’s looking at 16 strips. He discerns through careful study, Nehemia, that it looks like this is two copies. In other words, the 16 broken pieces represent two copies of the same manuscript, written in different hands, by the way.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ross: Yeah. And so, it’s got a lot of peculiarities; can I say that word? The first thing is, it’s written in a continuous script with the exception of when you get to the ten words. By the way, it has a version of the ten words in the manuscript. Every word is separated by a dot, a word-separating dot, an interpunct. And no one had seen anything on leather in Paleo at the time, or in Phoenician characters, nor had they seen these word-separating dots. They only knew that from lapidary. So, here’s what they said…

Nehemia: Well, they knew it from the Samaritan Torah, certainly by the 1860’s. They knew that the Samaritans wrote in something that resembled Phoenician, and each word was separated by a dot. You call it “interpunct”, a dot that’s about midway, mid-height of the letter.

Ross: Yeah. By the way, this is a question for me. Is every word in the Samaritan Pentateuch, in the Torah Scroll, the Samaritan, is every word separated?

Nehemia: Not necessarily. If you have a phrase… in some manuscripts you have the phrase, like “et ha’aretz.” So, “et” will be attached to “ha’aretz” as a single unit, if memory serves.

Ross: Let me tell you this, that’s the way this is. So, you say, “Lo tignov…”

Nehemia: That’s also the case with the Siloam inscription. Had they discovered the Siloam inscription at this point yet?

Ross: No, no, no, we’ll get to that.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Ross: So that’s 1880; 1868, Moabite Stone, 1878, Shapira gets this manuscript. He decides it looks like Deuteronomy because it begins, “Eleh ha’devarim asher dibehr Moshe.”

Nehemia: Wait, so it’s third person. “These are the words that Moses spoke,” so he’s third person in the title there too.

Ross: That’s right, in two places; the beginning and the end. It looks like a scribal notation. At the end you have a colophon and at the beginning you have this introduction, but it’s only one sentence, and then it begins… the manuscript is all first person after that.

Nehemia: By the way, another example, which is a modern example of writing in third person, is the autobiography of… what was the general’s name? He’s the guy who slapped the guy in the face.

Ross: Patton.

Nehemia: Patton. So, Patton wrote an autobiography of himself. He took copious notes and had a diary because he believed he was going to be a great general. So, he was keeping notes about what he was doing when he was at West Point, when he was very junior, not even an officer.

Ross: Did he do any of it in first-person, or all of it?

Nehemia: I don’t know the answer to that; that’s a good question.

Ross: Yeah.

Nehemia: But most of it is in third person, “And then Patton came upon the ruins of Carthage and knew he was at the site without being told of a great battle!”

Ross: Right!

Nehemia: Yeah, come on, the guy looked it up. We know how he knew that; he studied the history.

Ross: That’s right, it’s a good example. So, when Shapira starts reading this, he says, “It seems like it's close in many ways to Deuteronomy, except that it’s not exactly just Deuteronomy, and it has some significant variations, and it’s lacking… for one piece, by the way, there’s nothing of chapters 12 through 26. Nothing. If you charted what’s in, what’s out, chapters 12 through 26 are not.

Nehemia: Hey Ross, what’s some final words? Where can people find you? And what’s your website? Where can they find out more?

Ross: Website is rossknichols.com. What my son and I, Seth, are really doing is really ramping up our YouTube channel. We’re putting up content, we’re going to put a lot more up, youtube.com/rossknicholstv. They can subscribe and keep up with everything right there.

Nehemia: Thanks so much Ross, shalom.

Ross: Hey, thanks for having me, Nehemia!

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