Hebrew Voices #138 – The Importance of Examining Manuscripts in Person

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Importance of Examining Manuscripts in Person, Bible Scholar Nehemia Gordon shares how blessed he has been to examine 4 of the “Big Six” Bible Manuscripts using sophisticated ultraviolet and infrared equipment and the surprising things he discovered about how the name of God was preserved in these manuscripts.

I look forward to reading your comments!

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
02:20 Vatican Bible Manuscripts
03:18 Oxford Bible Manuscripts
04:18 Cambridge Bible Manuscripts
05:21 Examining scrolls vs manuscript images
06:50 Two Greek Papyruses with God’s name
09:56 Yehovah in Holocaust Torah scrolls
12:47 Examining “Big Six” Manuscripts
16:45 Turns out that wasn’t a cholam
18:55 A controversial vowel correction
22:05 The cholam wasn’t added later
25:48 Yehovah erased in the Aleppo Codex

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Hebrew Voices #138 – The Importance of Examining Manuscripts in Person

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

Michael: Because of the resources that are coming into the Makor Hebrew Foundation, which is Nehemia Gordon's 501c3 nonprofit organization, and it has enabled him to travel the world and to be able to go into places, purchase the equipment, and go into places for the cutting edge in biblical research into the ancient Hebrew manuscripts. And Nehemia is back with us because he has such a treasure trove to share with us. Nehemia, thanks for coming back. Take it away.

Nehemia: Michael, thanks for having me back. You know, for the last few years I've been studying Hebrew manuscripts... really, for decades I've been studying Hebrew manuscripts, but it's gone into overdrive in the last few years, as there's been a worldwide drive to digitize Hebrew manuscripts and make them available online. And so, really, for the last three or four years, I've been going through these manuscripts studying the name of Yehovah, looking for the name with full vowels. Today we have over 2,400 manuscripts with those full vowels.

Michael: Over 2,400. Every time you come back, every time I hear, it's more that your team’s working on.

Nehemia: We're pushing 2,500. I came to a certain impasse in my research, and the impasse was that there were certain things I couldn't know without examining the manuscripts directly, not just from high resolution color photographs.

Michael: And that's why you've had to travel the world...

Nehemia: I have traveled, and actually I'm going to show people up here on the screen. This is me at the Vatican. It says up there “Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.” One of my dreams for years has been to get into the Vatican to see their manuscripts, and it was not easy, I had to jump through many hoops. They don't let just anybody in there. It's actually a big deal to be let in there.

At the Vatican, Michael, I was like a kid in the candy store. I was able to see Shem Tov's Hebrew Matthew. I was able to see two of the oldest Torah scrolls that have survived. They were quite annoyed with me, because normally what they do is they sit you up on this little manuscript reader, and there's like three people on the desk. And here I'm saying, "Well, I need more room for the Torah scroll, I need the entire table.” But that's what I needed, and I was able to see things in those Torah scrolls that I would never have known from the photographs. And so, it really opened my eyes to many things.

Michael, I spent two weeks at Oxford University, where I did a seminar workshop in Biblical Hebrew manuscripts with the top people in the world. During those two weeks I got my hands on more Hebrew manuscripts than most scholars will ever get their hands on in their entire careers, and certainly more than I had ever gotten my hands on...

Michael: That's in two weeks.

Nehemia: In two weeks I handled something in the neighborhood of 200 manuscripts. I don't mean photographs; I mean actually handling the manuscripts. Things I had learned about and heard about and read about. And I thought, "How would I ever know what that is? You're talking to me about the flesh side and the hair side - how can you tell the difference?” Well, once you've handled 200 manuscripts, you can generally tell the difference.

So I learned a great deal over the last year. I would even venture to say I've learned more over the last year about Hebrew manuscripts than I learned up until that point my entire life. Very eye opening, it was a real blessing. I went in to see this one set of scrolls - there are three scrolls at this one little library in Cambridge, it wasn't the main library – and one of the scrolls hadn’t been opened in decades. They had kept it in a tin can, and they weren’t able to get the tin can open. And they eventually had to saw it open or something, I’m not sure. But they told me, “Come back in two weeks, and by then we’ll get it out. We’ll have a special conservator open it up.”

Michael: Did you get to see it?

Nehemia: I did, absolutely.

Michael: So they opened that old rusty can, huh?

Nehemia: They open the rusty tin can, and when we took out the Torah scroll, there were literally piles of rust that came out with it. And I'm not exaggerating - they had to go get a vacuum cleaner, because they didn't want to damage the manuscript, this Torah scroll, by the rust sliding across it. So they were trying to remove it by bringing it up with a vacuum. It was an incredible experience, Michael, it was a huge blessing.

Just to give you an idea of how unexpected some of the things are once you get your hands on them, I want to show here... This is from the British Library. And this is a scroll of the Book of Esther. And I had seen photographs of the text, and I had been studying the text. And I thought, "Why are these images so blurry? Whoever photographed this must have done a horrible job.” And I get to the British Library, in London, and I order this manuscript, and it's smaller than... well, it's the size of my pinky, actually, but I have a long pinky. You can see there in inches. It's a tiny little scroll, and it's the type of thing you would never know if you just looked at the photographs online, and certainly if you read other people's transcription of this, you would never know the character of this scroll.

This actually applied to something from the New Testament. Michael, here I am posing with Sloane 237, which is a manuscript in the British Library which has part of the Book of Revelation with vowels. And I go there, and I was shocked to see it was something that you could fit in a pocket. I had no idea. I thought this was a giant tome that would fill an entire table, and it turned out it was literally something that would fit in the pocket. And there were actually quite a lot of manuscripts like that that I was very surprised to discover.

One of the places I got to go… this is actually a photo of a papyrus. I've actually shared this papyrus before, this isn't new. You know, one of the things I'll hear from people is, “Well, in the Greek sources, God's name is written ‘Yahweh.’” Okay, whether that's true or not is a different discussion. But I found that there was a Greek papyrus where it has the name of God in Hebrew written in Greek letters, and it says there “IEOA”, which sounds awfully like Ye-ho-vah. They were writing the vowels out as Ye’o’ah. Now, I knew about this. This one's at the British Library, papyrus number 121, and I knew about this other one, which is a papyrus located in Berlin. And so, when I went to Berlin, I was actually able - they didn't let me handle the papyrus but I was able to photograph it.

And the story of me getting this photo, Michael, is kind of incredible. They had on display in Berlin at this museum - it's called the New Museum, the Neues Museum. At the New Museum they have the head of Nefertiti, which the Germans stole from Egypt, and it's the centerpiece of their museum. And they have guards all over the place so that you do not take a photo of the bust of Nefertiti. And why is that? Presumably it's because they want to sell photographs themselves. Okay, fine.

So this manuscript, this Greek manuscript papyrus, with IEOA (Ye’o’ah) in Greek, is actually in the room next to the Nefertiti exhibit. And they have five or so papyruses, and they're stacked one on top of another, and if you press a button one of them slides out, stays there for a few seconds, and then slides back in. And the reason they do that is they don't want it to be constantly exposed to the light, so this limits the light exposure.

So I see this, and I'm like, "This is a manuscript I... I wrote to the library and asked them for a color photograph, and they never responded,” at the new museum. And there I am standing over it, and there's guards everywhere to make sure you don't take photos... But I somehow miraculously was able to get this photo. So you can see there in black and brown where it says IEOA (Ye’o’ah) in the Greek.

I'm going to zoom in a little bit so people can hopefully see it. It has Iota, Epsilon, Omega, Alpha. It says there – IEOA (Ye’o’ah), just like in the one in the British Library. I'm not saying this proves Yehovah's name is Yehovah, that is the pronunciation. I'm saying you have lots of different variations in the Greek manuscripts; one person counted them as 33 different variations, and you can't just say, "Well, we have Yahweh in the Greek.” No, we have lots of things in the Greek, because the Greeks didn't know how to pronounce the name. And they had heard Jews saying different things. Maybe they had misheard certain things, and in this case, in this papyrus, they write it as IEOA (Ye’o’ah).

Here I am, Michael, at a place in London, and having the opportunity to go into this place was one of the greatest blessings of my life. It's called the Memorial Scrolls Trust. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was originally part of the Westminster synagogue in London, and after the Holocaust, there were 1,564 Torah scrolls that eventually arrived in London at the Memorial Scrolls Trust. There are synagogues around the world, Michael, who will tell you, "We have a Torah scroll from the Holocaust.” Nine and a half times out of 10 that means they have a scroll from the Memorial Scrolls Trust. Almost all the Torah scrolls from the Holocaust originated in London at this one place.

And out of the 1,564 scrolls, only 150 remained at the headquarters, and those were the 150 oldest scrolls, which were in the worst condition. Some of them were waterlogged. What happened is on Kristallnacht the Nazis burned the Jewish synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia, which is today the Czech Republic. Somebody came and put out the fire, and the Torah scroll was salvaged from the fire. And many of the ones I looked at there were salvaged from this fire. You could see where they were damaged by water, damaged by age.

One of the great surprises to me, within this collection - I looked at 101 Torah scrolls in their collection. I opened them up and examined them, I had to get special permission, it was a whole process. Two of them weren't Torah scrolls, they were scrolls of the Haftarah, that is the Prophets' portion.

And here is the scroll of the Prophets, and there you can see... This is the Haftarah, the Prophets’ portion read on the festival of Shemini Atzeret, what you refer to as the Last Great Day. It's 1 Kings chapter 8, the eighth day of Sukkot. It's the Prayer of Solomon, and it says, "And it came to pass when Solomon finished to pray el Yehovah.” And there Yehovah is written with the full vowels.

I'll make a little bit bigger; you can see it there. Yehovah with the full vowels in a scroll, which is extremely unusual. Normally we'll find this… I can't even say nine times out of 10; 99.999999 times out of 100 we're finding this in codexes, which are book form. Here is the name Yehovah actually written by hand in a scroll. Extremely rare. I found two scrolls like that of the Haftarah in the Memorial Scrolls Trust. One of the reasons it's so rare is normally the Haftarah is printed, it's not written out in a scroll, but in two of them it was written out on a scroll.

Michael, this is one of the highlights of my life right here, this photograph. I know I look very serious. But here I am sitting in St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of the Leningrad Codex, the famed Leningrad Codex. During my travels, for about a six- or seven-month period, I had the opportunity, Michael, to examine not only the Leningrad Codex, but the Aleppo Codex, the Damascus Crown, and Sassoon 1053 - the six key manuscripts of the Tanakh. There are six key manuscripts.

There are two I haven't examined yet. One of them I was hoping to examine this spring, but then COVID-19 hit and I wasn't able to do it. That's the one in the British Library, Oriental 4445. The sixth manuscript - it's unknown exactly where it is, so I don't know that I'll ever be able to. I'm not saying this to brag, quite the contrary. I'm humbled that I am currently the only living person, as far as I know – the only living scholar, for sure - to have studied and examined, directly and physically, four of the six key manuscripts of the Tanakh. There are scholars who have examined two of them. I don't know of any other scholars who have examined three, let alone four.

Michael: And that's incredible. That is the manuscript itself…

Nehemia: That’s the Leningrad Codex!

Michael: …sitting right there in front of you, that you don't get to see.

Nehemia: Oh Michael, I went to St. Petersburg, Russia, and they told me, "Don't let anyone think they can come because you came and saw it. Anybody else who comes we won't let them see it. It's a very rare thing for us let anyone see it.” I met with one woman who had been coming to the library for 10 years every summer, and I asked, "Have you seen the Leningrad Codex?” She said, "No, they'll never let me see it.” And I thought, "Okay, I'm not going to get to see it.” I went there to see other things as well, so it wasn't the only thing I was there for. But on the second last day they brought it out, and they let me spend five hours examining it with a microscope.

These four manuscripts I just talked about - the Leningrad Codex, Aleppo Codex, Damascus Crown, Sassoon 1053 - I examined them with a microscope using ultraviolet and infrared, as well as visible light. Just to be able to examine them with this microscope, Michael, is a miracle. I was at this conference in Oxford, at the workshop, and I was explaining to one of the professors there what I was trying to research, and she said, "Oh, you should ask this person in Berlin, she's examined this Torah scroll at the State Library of Berlin.”

So I write to the woman and she says, "Well, we examined it, but not what you're asking about. You're asking about something very specific.” She said, "Let's write a proposal and see if they'll let us come and examine it.” I couldn't believe it. If I had to pay for this through my ministry, we couldn't afford to have this type of research done. The woman brought in a $50,000 X-ray fluorescence device. It was operated by somebody who's authorized to work in nuclear power plants, because it's putting out X-rays, it's radiation. He's a radiation security safety specialist.

So while we're examining this, she shows this other tool that doesn't cost $50,000. It's much simpler, you can stick it in your pocket, and you can examine things. Basically, it's a microscope that has ultraviolet and infrared. I said, "Okay, but I need this little piece that attaches to it, where can I buy that?” She said, "You can't buy that.” I said, "Where do I get it?” She says, "If I deem you worthy, I'll give you one.” She designed it herself. I was deemed worthy in the end, and I was able to then travel all over Europe and use this device.

I want to show you some examples of things. And again, this is why it's so important to study the manuscript directly, if you can. So this is the Leningrad Codex. I didn't take this photo; this is a photo that's published online. It's a photo that was taken in the 1990s. And here we have, on the second line, the second word from the right, it says Yehovah, and it looks like it has the full vowels. Michael, I went through every single instance in the Leningrad Codex, in the Aleppo Codex, in Sassoon 1053. I didn't go through every one in the Damascus crown, because there's too many, but I went through a couple dozen in the Damascus Crown, and I examined them under the microscope. In this case, I didn't even need the microscope. We take out that page from the Leningrad Codex... you saw it was a stack of pages, right? They're actually in little folders called quires. In this case, the quires were originally sewn together, they've now been disassembled, by and large.

So we take out that section and I immediately see that dot, which I thought might be a kholam. I wasn't sure, I put this with a question mark. That dot only appears on this photograph, not in real life.

Michael: Really?

Nehemia: Yeah!

Michael: Only on the photograph?

Nehemia: The photograph from the 1990s had some piece of schmutz on it. Maybe it was on the lens of the camera, I have no idea. I take this out, and I don't understand. I'm looking at this, and there's nothing there. Now, in other instances, I look at the dot and I say, "Hey, that's not a dot of ink, that's a freckle on the animal.” In this case, there wasn't even a freckle on the animal. That only is it not ink, there's actually nothing there. That is a phantom dot over God's name, and you would think I'd be upset because I'm trying to verify that God's name is Yehovah, and here it's missing the vowel. I was so happy, because we'd found truth. And there were another 30 or 40 places where it did have the full vowels - Yehovah, and that's verified.

I want to show you something from another manuscript. It's a bit complicated, but here we have an instance where, if you look in the bottom right, below the word you see some dots and you see a dash in the second and third letter from the right, and the parchment around them looks kind of weird. And the reason it looks weird is someone took a razor, scratched the vowels off from below those two letters and put in two different vowels.

And up until I went to examine this manuscript, there was a debate between the two top scholars in the world, who are Hebrew linguists, and the debate was about whether this was a correction by a second scribe, or whether the parchment was damaged during preparation when it was made. And this is a photograph through a microscope, the 50x microscope that I have, and there's no question that this was a correction. Someone scratched off the two vowels and replaced it with two different vowels. Why did they do that? Because the original vowels written by the original scribe were contrary to what people thought were the rules of Hebrew grammar.

Now, let's put this in perspective. When we talk about the rules of English grammar, we open up our English grammar, and it tells us what the rules are. So the grammar we use today for English is prescriptive. It's a prescription, this is what you should use. Pre-scriptive, it's a prescription, this is what you should use. But the grammars of ancient languages are de-scriptive. They don't tell you what it's supposed to be, they tell you what we find de facto in the manuscripts, in the sources, in the texts. And so, the grammars that have been written had a rule that those two dots at the bottom that are one on top of the other, it's called a shva; the rule was you can't have three shvas in a row.

And lo and behold, in this manuscript, in another place, there were three shvas in a row, and the debate was about this place - were there originally three shvas in a row, or that's just some damage to the manuscript, it's not a correction and there's two shvas in a row and they're broken up by a patakh, that little line.

And examining under the microscope, I was able to put that debate to rest, it is now definitive. I'm going to zoom in here and show you. You can see as clear as day, once you understand what you're looking at, that originally there were three of these shvas in a row and one of them was scratched off and replaced with that line, which is the patakh. So, this is really important. People will say, "Well, the rules of Hebrew grammar...” What are those rules based on? They're based on manuscripts. What if those manuscripts have been changed? We can actually now go and examine manuscripts and determine if they were changed and how.

So the big question I had going to St. Petersburg, Russia was as follows. I wanted to know - when the kholam was put there... there's usually a missing vowel in the name Yehovah to make it unpronounceable, but in about 50 places the kholam was put there - was that done by a later scribe?

And I'll be honest with you, Michael, I was a little bit nervous, but I wanted to know the truth. I considered it a distinct possibility that I would get there, look with my microscope, particularly in the infrared - it just opens up your eyes and you can tell if it's a later ink or the original ink. So I got there and I was a bit nervous, and for two weeks I'm begging them to let me see the Leningrad Codex, because I want to know in those 50 or so places where it has the full vowels Yehovah - is that the original scribe, Shmuel Ben Yaakov in the year 1008, or is it some later scribe who maybe came along 500 years earlier and added the O? And I was nervous, but I prayed. I said, "Yehovah, whatever the answer is, I want to know the answer, and I will accept it.”

And I got the microscope, and I sat there for five hours going through each instance, and in almost every instance, the vowel is the original kholam written by the scribe who used a different type of ink than the... Let me back up here. The Leningrad Codex, at some point in history, we don't know exactly when, was restored. And the restorer came with a pen and traced over the letters. And my question was, when he traced over the letters, did he also add a kholam? Did he also add that O, the missing O? What Keith calls the “holam from heaven”? That was my question.

And when I looked under the microscope and infrared, I could see that the kholam was original, because it's with a different type of ink than the one who re-inked it, who reinforced the ink. There was one exception, and this was amazing, Michael. In this one exception that I found, it had the original kholam... and then, look, when the guy was doing the re-inking, he wasn't using a microscope. And so, he didn't always put the lines on the same place as the original lines. And so, he went to put the kholam - the re-inker put in the kholam - and it's slightly to the left of the original kholam.

So when you look under the microscope, you can see - here's the original kholam, and right next to it is the added kholam by the re-inker. And that was, to me... I mean, that was the definitive... I mean, that was incredible to me. That that was one of the greatest moments of my life. I was able to actually examine the Aleppo Codex, the Leningrad Codex, Damascus Crown and Sassoon 1053, and every one of them I was able to verify that the kholam is really there. And the Leningrad Codex, which had the big question mark for me - was that a later scribe who added that in? The answer was definitively no. Usually the re-inker didn't bother with the vowels. He certainly didn't bother with the kholam there, of the name, but in one instance he did, and he put it right next to it. It's pretty close, but you can see with the microscope. There are two kholams, one superimposed next to the other. Definitive 100% you can't say this was added by a later scribe.

Michael, I found places in the Aleppo Codex where the name was written Yehovah with the full vowels, and someone came along and erased the O. No one was more shocked about this than I was. I did a teaching a few years ago - I went to Israel and I met with the top expert in the world. I should say he was the top expert in the world in the 1980s, one of the top experts, anyway, of the Aleppo Codex. He spent years studying the photographs of the Aleppo Codex. And I asked him about the places where, in my view, the scribe had accidentally put in the kholam and gave us the full vowels.

Just to back up, in most instances in the Aleppo Codex, in five of the six key manuscripts, God's name is written - Yeh-vah, and there's a missing vowel. And then I found in about 50 places in the Leningrad, in Sassoon 1053, in the Aleppo... Damascus Crown is an exception, because in the Damascus Crown it's over 1,000 places, so there you can't say it's an accident. There the scribe intentionally put in the kholam, no question about it. It's an exception when he doesn't put in the kholam, when he doesn't spell it Yehovah with the full vowels.

But in the other five of the other six, it's very rare where every once in a while, the scribe puts in the full vowels. And I suggested - my suggestion has been for years - that the scribe accidentally put it in because he knew that's how it's pronounced, and in his head he was pronouncing it, so he put in the O. So I asked this man a few years ago, who was one of the great experts of the Aleppo Codex, and he said, well, from what he remembers working in the 70s and 80s not with photographs, but with the actual codex - what he remembers is they never erased a single vowel or a single accent of the name. And I said, "That solves it. They accidentally put in the O, and then they weren't allowed to erase it.”

And one of the purposes of my research, Michael, was to prove him right. And I said that in a study I did on my website, on nehemiaswall.com. I said, "I'm basing this on the information given to me, but I wish I could see it for myself!” Michael, now I've seen it for myself. I spent nine hours examining the Aleppo Codex. I checked every single place where it has full vowels, and I found that not only did they erase vowels in some instances - in other words, it said Yehovah with the O and somebody came along and erased the O, because that was the standard way of writing it, without the O, so they erased the O.

Not only did they erase the accents, not only did they erase the vowels - I found five places where they erased the actual letters Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. In some of those places where they erased Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, they replaced it with Adonai. And maybe we'll talk about that next time; that's a whole topic unto itself, so I want to save that. But what I had said before was based on the information I was given, and I even said at the time in the study I put on my website, "I wish I could see it for myself.” And now I've seen it for myself not only with the naked eye, but with ultraviolet and infrared.

So here's the point. There were places they wrote Yehovah with the full vowels, and they took out that vowel they were supposed to hide. So why then did they leave it in, in a number of instances, approximately seven instances? Why did they leave it in? There are a few possibilities. One is they left it in because it didn't bother them too much. But then why erase it in that other place? So probably what happened is they missed it. And people will say to me, "How could they have missed it in the Aleppo Codex? Nehemia, in your own book Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence you quoted the professor who said it's as if an angel wrote it.”

Okay, I know information I didn't have at the time. When I wrote Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, I didn't know that on every single page - and mark my words - every single page of the Aleppo Codex someone came along – and we know who it was, it was Aaron Ben Asher in most cases, sometimes it was a man named Shlomo Ben Buya’a, the two original scribes who worked on it together, or as partners, in a sense - and they scratched off mistakes and replaced them with the correction.

Every single page has things like that. And they did it not only with regular words, they did it with the name Yehovah itself.

Michael: And this is something you couldn't see without direct examination with the microscopics, or...?

Nehemia: So, to be fair, before I examined it directly, I found out that... And I knew about this several years ago when I did the teaching. I found out that there was a database that had been prepared, and the rumors of database were greatly exaggerated. The database was actually a pile of papers this high - handwritten notes by three scholars who spent several years examining the direct images - not just the images, the direct pages of the Aleppo Codex.

And I was told by one of these three people who worked on it, he was the one who told me they never erased a vowel or an accent of God's name, of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. Now, why would he say that? Because it was 40 years ago, he didn't remember. I got my hands on the database. Again, it's a pile of papers this high, and I spent days combing through that data, and there they document every single time someone made a change, and there isn't a single page of the Aleppo Codex that doesn’t have corrections.

And that actually makes sense. Maimonides, the great rabbi of the 12th century in Cairo, mentions the Aleppo Codex. It wasn't called the Aleppo Codex then, it was called the Manuscript of the 24 Books, meaning of the Tanakh, here in Cairo, and he says, "Ben Asher proofread it many times for many years.” When you proof something, you find mistakes.

Michael: Right.

Nehemia: And so, what Maimonides said in the 12th century we can now verify 100%. So the reason I asked to get direct access to the Aleppo Codex is I now had a tool that these scholars in the 70s and 80s didn't have. They didn't have a handheld microscope with the special base that has ultraviolet and infrared.

Michael, it was an incredible experience, I was so blessed. There were things there that I would have never imagined that I discovered looking at it, first of all directly with the naked eye, but then with the microscope. Just incredible revelations.

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Torah Scrolls from the Holocaust
My Search for Hebrew New Testament Manuscripts
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  • Kevin George says:

    Re: 16:45 Turns out that wasn’t a cholam
    So I checked the high resolution photos of the Lenningrad codex and found that on the next page, Ps. 49:14, the first word (zeh), the zain has a segol, an accent mark, and a stray ‘shurek’. Being about the same location in the frame of the photo, it appears to be the same bit of shmutz!

  • Michael Griffin says:

    When I was lead to study the original language some years ago and look into the original manuscripts, I was also led to Nehemiah Gordon. I had downloaded the digital resource of the Aleppo Codex and began to study. One night, I was telling my wife about how often Yhvh appeared within the text. “Look, I’ll open a random page and I bet I can point out an example. See? Right there, I’ll zoom in.” When I hyper zoomed the text, I was shocked to find that you could SEE where they had not only scraped away the cholam but also put a stray pen mark over the top of it to try to hide it. You never would be able to see it with the visible eye but with modern technology and a clear enough image, you could clearly see what was done. I stood there in shock and silence for a moment. This was long before I heard your teaching about them not making revisions to the name.

  • Louis Korkames says:

    Shalom Nehemia! Yes, you must be from the “Show Me” state! Thank you for continuing to fight through to get to see these documents. Fight on! And thank you for sharing your findings. It makes me feel like we’re walking in the footsteps of our forefathers, kicking up the dust that the ancients kicked! You can see and show us their pen-strokes. It strengthens my faith and my resolve to share the great name of our creator, Yehovah! Shalom

  • Duane Hiebert says:

    Shlum.
    So are you saying that His name is spelled יהעוה

  • Karla says:

    Last night I was telling two people about your travels to find YHVH name in person and those that tried to make it hard on you. This morning this video, can I get a Second Witness! Bless You!