Hebrew Voices #140 – Is Yahuah a Possible Pronunciation

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Nate: Have you ever discussed the name Yahuah at all? I'm sure you've heard of it.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I'm here today with Nate Petroski of NarroWay Homestead. He's a homesteader in West Virginia who has a million-and-a-half followers on TikTok, although by the time you see this it'll probably be like two million. Hey Nate, shalom, it's great to have you here.

Nate: Hey Nehemia, thanks for having me! And yes, we just broke 1.6 million on TikTok.

Nehemia: Oh 1.6! I’m already out of date. Wow, that was pretty cool. I actually already interviewed you. We did an hour-long program as part of Michael Rood’s Passover 22, it’s called Passover 2022. Now, I don't think I want to rehash all that. I'm going to refer people to that where they can listen to it, but Nate you’re a Torah keeper, and that's why I wanted to have you on the program. You actually mentioned to me that you've given a lot of thought to a bunch of topics and wanted to discuss them, and I said, “Hey, we could just chit-chat one on one, or we can record a program.” You’re an interesting guy, I’ve been watching your stuff for I think about nine months. I thought I’d seen everything you did, but after our interview on the Rood program, I went back and I’m like, “Oh, you’ve got lots of videos that I haven’t seen.”

My wife, who’s into technology, she is a computer programmer, she actually watched some of your videos about what you're doing with your internet signal out there, in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia, and she said to me, “Nehemia, this guy's a genius.” My friend Keith calls this sandbagging, where you play, “I'm just a simple homesteader.” But apparently, you're a genius, according to my wife, who’s one of the smartest people I know. Even the fact that you can broadcast this from where you are, just maybe talk about that for a couple minutes, because I'm out of Dallas 15 minutes, and I can't even get a signal.

Nate: Yeah, nobody here has been able to successfully stream from their cell phone and do a live broadcast of any kind. I have to have all the equipment up on my outdoor kitchen, the Hebrews Cafe there. It's basically a glorified hotspot with directional antennas and circuit boards and stuff that I kind of plugged together. I didn't do much of the programming; thankfully, there's much smarter people out there than me that have already done this before, so I'm just following in the footsteps of their technical innovation.

Nehemia: And that was, by the way, the first clue to me that you’re a Torah keeper. On your outdoor kitchen it says, Hebrews Café, and I'm like, "Okay". That's kind of one of those wink winks, “I know who this guy is.” I didn't know for sure, but that was my first suspicion. And the reason I even needed to have a suspicion, as we talked about in the other interview, is you've got these 1.6 million followers, but you don't actually push your faith on people: that's a whole separate channel. Talk about that.

Nate: Right, yeah, and no, definitely, I definitely don't like to push it. I like to show folks that it's there, but I don't want to just go above and beyond. Even the fact that I'm on this program, I'm talking with Dr. Nehemia Gordon, PhD. I don't even know what you have a PhD in, and all I have is dirt under my fingernails, that's my credentials.

Nehemia: I think that's part of the sandbagging. But look, I just do want to say up front that I could already anticipate, because you told me some of the topics you want to talk about in advance, and I can already anticipate there are some people who are going to say, “Nehemia, this wasn't a fair conversation. You have a PhD, and he's Nate, the simple construction guy, who happens to be a genius,” but they don't know that. So, I'll acknowledge that, you're not presenting yourself… I love that you say that, you say, “I'm not a teacher,” and you don't claim to be a Hebrew expert, right?

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: This is just kind of an informal conversation. If someone out there listening has a view that agrees with Nate, and he isn't able to defend it the way you think you can defend it, come in the comments and share your thoughts about it. I don't expect him to pull out here Hebrew linguistics and stuff like that; like I said, it’s just a friendly conversation.

Nate: Right. No, definitely, I'll admit I'm here for selfish reasons. I'm here to absorb knowledge from you even if I don't agree with you, and even if you're able to explain your views so well, and I have no rebuttal for any of my arguments. All it’s going to do is give me some knowledge that I can reflect on and give me further study. So yeah, I'm not here to defend any viewpoints. I'm here to learn.

Nehemia: There's a famous quote from, I think it was King James of Aragon. He forced the Jewish leader of the time in Spain, or specifically I think it was Aragon, whose name was Nachmanides, he forced him into a debate with this Catholic monk, who is actually a Jewish convert to Christianity, and the rabbi won the debate. And afterwards the king said, “Never have I heard a position so wrong argued so well.”

That might be the outcome of today. And then Nachmanides’ response, when he was invited to the debate, or forced really, he said, “When the mouse is invited to argue with the lion, he does not know whether to jump at the chance or to run away.” In his case, he was an ethnic minority ruled by hostile Catholic Spain, and if you won the debate he would be persecuted. If he lost the debate his people would be persecuted. It was a kind of no-win situation.

So, upfront I want to say this is not going to be a debate from my perspective. I don't do debates because of that heritage, especially I don't do debates with people coming… Well, I mean, in general I think it's far more constructive to have a constructive conversation because you really could argue something in a debate which doesn't lead to truth.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: It just sounds good and convinces people and maybe it tickles the ear, but it's not the way to find truth. Now being challenged on your views, I'm all for that, I'm for constructive conversation. But tearing people down in debates, I don't find that constructive.

Nate: Definitely.

Nehemia: Alright, let's get down to brass tacks - what were some of the things you wanted to chat about?

Nate: Yeah, well one of the things, and I’ll probably stick on it briefly just because you have gone over the name on your channel probably for thousands of hours, if I'd have to guess.

Nehemia: I don't know if it's thousands, but it's quite a few.

Nate: Yeah. When I was kind of leaving Christianity, and kind of doing more of a study, I should clarify leaving Christianity, more like leaving mainstream Christianity, and studying about…

Nehemia: Do you consider yourself a Christian? I love putting labels on people, it makes me feel more comfortable about myself.

Nate: That's great, that's great. No, I do not. Probably a year ago I would have given you a different answer, and I would have considered myself Torah-observant for several years. But I would say I’ve probably completely left that label, and I think we'll actually end up getting into a little bit, as to why, throughout this program, just because of the way it’ll end up.

Nehemia: Sure.

Nate: But yeah, I wanted to talk about the name. You have definitely made an amazing case for the name Yehovah, and I actually have one of your books, by the way, don't ask me what it's called, but I've had that for a couple of years, something about silence. You could probably…

Nehemia: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence.

Nate: That's it, that's the one I have.

Nehemia: Okay, cool.

Nate: So, I'm somewhat familiar with the way you pronounce the name. Have you ever discussed the name Yahuah at all? I'm sure you've heard of it.

Nehemia: Here's the argument I've heard about, and I've talked about this probably not that much, because a lot of what I deal with is people in the academic world.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: And then I try to talk to people who aren't in the academic world who have been influenced by that. No one in the academic world thinks it's Yahuah. That doesn't make it wrong.

Nate: Sure.

Nehemia: People in the academic world believe in all kinds of nonsense that isn’t true.

Nate: You have a point there.

Nehemia: That's why I don't deal with it a lot. But let's talk about it - why don't you present to me what you think is the best case for Yahuah, and you may convince me. I have a very open mind.

Nate: Okay, yeah. So, there's a ton of stuff out there, and I almost simple guy, there's a ton of stuff out there, and I'm fairly unfamiliar with a lot of the arguments that people actually think are really, really strong. So, all I have is the thing that in my mind just really resonated with me, and it really kind of convinced me, and I can totally be convinced another way. There's a lot of stuff I'm going to have wrong and that's just the way it is, it's going to be that way my whole life and I’ve just got to get used to it.

Nehemia: That's all of us, Nate.

Nate: I hear you, well that's cool. So, basically, I was studying a lot into just names, and history, and stuff. I was even looking at a lot of Greek names, a lot of their names end in U-S, which is actually a throwback to Zeus, as near as I can tell, going with the meanings of their names. It just kind of looked like to me that it was part of their god, and their culture to name people with that in their name.

An individual basically told me that the same thing happens in Jewish culture as well, and you have names that end, and the main name that he presented which is a very popular Jewish figure was Benjamin Netanyahu, which you obviously know he is. But it's very interesting at the end of his name, and there's other Jewish names that end similarly, if I say Yahuah, and you say Benjamin Netan-yahu, all that's missing is the "ah". So, when I started looking at Jewish names, and I know that pronouncing names generally stays the same generation through generation, and why is it that there's so many Jewish names that have that pronunciation? You’ve got all these Greek names with their god, Zeus, and it ends in that pronunciation, and I look at other cultures and I see that there, to me that just really resonated. And this is not at all an academic type of…

Nehemia: No, that's fine.

Nate: It's just something that really resonated with me, and I was like, “Wow, that is very interesting.”

Nehemia: It's definitely very interesting. Let's start with the Greek a little bit. So, I don't think the names ended with "us" have anything to do with Zeus.

Nate: Okay.

Nehemia: Let's back up a bit here. There's different families of languages, that’s generally accepted. English is a Germanic language; Germanic languages are part of a bigger group called the Indo-European languages. There are languages all the way from Northern India to Ireland that have these elements in common, that look like they trace back to a common source.

Nate: Okay.

Nehemia: It’s obvious when you look at English and German and Dutch, you see words where you’re like, “Oh, I know that word!” You have a beer garden which in German is garten. Now, a garden in English actually means something different than a garden in German, because we don’t have beer gardens… I mean we do, but it comes obviously from the German. And kindergarten – kindergarten is "child garden", but that’s a school, not where kids are playing out in the garden and growing vegetables. So the word garden is common to both languages, although it has a different nuance. At some point it had a single nuance, we presume, and then it branched off overtime.

And the word son in English, is sohn in German, spelled almost same way. So, English is a Germanic language, which is part of the Indo-European family. Hebrew is a Semitic language. One of the characteristics of Indo-European languages early on is they have what are called case endings. And that's like a complicated linguistic thing, I won't go into what that is, but the "us" is part of that case ending. So it has more to do with nouns than it has to do with the name of Zeus.

Nate: Okay.

Nehemia: Now, having said that, the idea that you would incorporate the name of a god into somebody's name, that's very common. It's extremely common in Semitic languages, but also in other languages. For example, Christopher means "a servant of Christ".

Nate: Right, yeah.

Nehemia: I guess it's Latin. And so it's very common. In Hebrew you have numerous names like that, and you have it in other Semitic languages as well. You've probably heard the name Abdallah, which means abd, servant, of Allah – "servant of Allah".

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: And then the Hebrew equivalent of Abdallah would be Ovadyahu, Obadiah; ovad, which is from the word eved means servant, and then yahu is, as you pointed out… this part your 100% right - yahu is an abbreviation of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. It’s a derivation of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey that’s incorporated into names, that's undisputed. And when I say undisputed, I should qualify that and I should say, first of all everything is disputed. I mean disputed by serious scholars, and even nonserious scholars, I suppose.

What I'm actually talking about is the standard Hebrew that survived from ancient times which is known as Tiberian Hebrew, and I only mention that because I know there's going to be someone out there who's very learned and knowledgeable and say, “Well Nehemia, that's in the Hebrew of modern Israel.” I'm not talking about the Hebrew of modern Israel, I'm talking about the Hebrew of Tiberias, of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible that have survived. There was a group of scribes in Tiberias who wrote down the way that Hebrew had been pronounced. And there are actually two other traditions that we won't go into, but that's one of the three major traditions that survived on how to pronounce Hebrew. Okay?

Nate: Okay.

Nehemia: So Ovadyahu, the yahu part is from Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Nate: Great.

Nehemia: And whenever we have names that end in what's called the theophoric element - theo is actually a Greek word that means god, so it's the reference to the god in somebody's name. So you've got a Netanyahu, Ovadyahu, Eliyahu, my name, Nehemia, is really short for Nehemyahu. Nehemyahu means Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey comforts. And what we find is at the end of a name it's always yahu. Now, that contrasts when the Yud-Hey-Vav is at the beginning of a name, and it's not yahu, at the beginning of the name it’s yeho. So, Netanyahu is a short sentence - it means Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey gave or gives. The same exact name, if you switch around the two elements, the "gave" and Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, is the Hebrew name Jonathan, which is Yehonatan in Hebrew.

Nate: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: It’s Yehonatan, which is literally the same name as Netanyahu, it means Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey has given. At the beginning it's always yeho, and as always, there’s always exceptions, we'll talk about an exception in a minute. There's Yehonatan, Yehoshua. Yehoshua is Joshua, which is obviously - I shouldn’t say obviously - I assume you know that's where they get the name Jesus. It's from Yehoshua, it's a derivation by several steps.

Nate: Definitely.

Nehemia: There is Yehochanan, which is John with a H, which is like in other languages Yohannes. So John with an H and John with an N are two completely different names from Hebrew source. One is Yehonatan, and the other is Yehochanan; one is God gives, the other is God is gracious, or God has mercy. There are numerous names that begin with yeho, and end with yahu, and then there's some exceptions.

An interesting exception is the name Yehu, who is known in English as Jehu. So, who was Yehu? He was a general at first who overthrows the king of Israel; he also kills the king of Judah. He's the guy who's riding on his chariot, and they said, “Oh, that's like the riding of Jehu,” or in Hebrew, Yehu. So Yehu is short for Yehohu, and what happens there is we have a linguistic phenomenon called dissimilation; when you have a certain sequence of sounds, O-U, it breaks apart and becomes E-U. So, the shortened form of Yehoshua, when the H drops from Yehoshua, it becomes Yeshua and that is where you get the Hebrew shortened form of Joshua. Like, Yeshua the son of Nun is mentioned in the book of Nehemiah. In Second Temple times you have certain Jews who don’t pronounce the H sound, in fact to this very day, but in that time that was a very common thing in certain areas. Certain groups of people didn’t pronounce what are called guttural letters, so Yehoshua became Yoshua, which then brought about dissimilation, which is Yeshua.

So, the names begin with yeho and end with yahu, and in the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, those three letters are at the beginning of the name, not the end, so to me that is not definitive proof, but it is a piece of evidence that is in favor of the name beginning yeho. Does that make sense?

Nate: Yeah, it does.

Nehemia: You don't have to agree with me, but does it make sense?

Nate: I'm following your line of thinking, which is the goal.

Nehemia: Alright, now let's talk about Yahuah, and I’m not saying this is your position, but I've talked to a lot of people who use Yahuah or some form of that, and they say, “Nehemia, it's Netanyahu, and then it's Yahunatan, and Yahuchanan, and Yahushua.” And my response to that is, “In what dialect of Hebrew is it Yahunatan, Yahushua, Yahuchanan?” Meaning, let's just start with this - we don't have a time machine that we can go back and hear how people spoke in the time of King David and the time of Moses. What we have are Jewish scribes who wrote down… even before the scribes, we had Jews who were professional readers. They're mentioned in early Jewish sources, and all they would do is memorize the entire Bible. They didn't necessarily know what it meant, but they'd be able to recite it for you with the exact pronunciation, and not just pronunciation, in cantillation, which I'm not going to attempt to do cantillation because I don't sing. But they would have a sort of singsong to it, which according to some theories represents just the way people spoke in ancient Israel. If you listen to Russian, it has a singsong intonation to it, and when they listen to us in English, they think we have the singsong to our language. And so, some people say that cantillation represents what’s called intonation. It’s a little bit more than intonation, it's sort of the singsong you have in language. It’s complicated stuff.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: But in any event, they wrote down the way that they learned to read it, and that became the text of the Bible we have today. They wrote down how they pronounced Hebrew; that's one source of information that we have. The second source of information is independent of them writing it down. We had Jewish communities all over the world, from Yemen to northern Russia, and from Morocco, which is as far west as you could go, all the way to China, and let's leave out China and India, all the way to Persia, because we have very good documentation for how Jews of Persia pronounced Hebrew, and how Jews of Morocco pronounced Hebrew, and how Jews of Yemen pronounced Hebrew, and how Jews of northern Russia pronounced Hebrew. If you look at all those Jewish communities and you say, “Okay, what do they have in common in their pronunciation of Hebrew words and Hebrew names?” Well, it's very, very, similar to what was recorded by these Jewish scribes in Tiberias. It's not 100% identical, sometimes there’s really interesting little quirks which are different.

One example is the word "rabbi". If you listen to Jews today, most of them will pronounce it rebbi, with an EH; that’s interesting. And in the New Testament you have reeboni, so that means the first syllable was EE, reeboni. Why is it reeboni and not reboni? And you might think “Well, it's in Greek, and they didn't know how to write it,” and that's a possibility. Second question is how do they pronounce Greek? That's not so simple either, that also changed over time. But if you go to the Jews of, I believe it's Libya, who all live in Israel today… most Jews in the Islamic world were expelled from the Islamic world between 1947 and 1956, 1970. So that community doesn't exist anymore, but when they did exist, and their descendants today in Israel, when they say rabbi, they don't say rebbi, they say reebi. And you say, “Wait reebi, that just sounds very much like reeboni,” and reeboni would be probably something like our rabbi. So you have that EE. Now how do they pronounce it in the Hebrew of the Bible? Well, the word rabbi doesn't appear in the Old Testament, but you have a cognate word, meaning a similar word in Aramaic, and it's the word rav, which is where we get rabbi, rabbi.

So, you have three different possible vowels for the first syllable; A, EE, and EH, and all three of those can be seen in Jewish communities around the world that survived into modern times. And they apparently are preserving things that we also see in ancient sources. So we have these two different kinds of information; we have what was written down by these scribes, and then we have what has been preserved by Jewish communities, and they seem to match pretty well with some exceptions.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: And we could talk about those exceptions if you really want to get into the woods.

But I have a cousin named Yehoshua, and he's not called Yehoshua because somebody read in the Bible that there’s the name Yehoshua. He's called Yehoshua because his great grandfather was called Yehoshua, and probably his great-grandfather was called Yehoshua, and his great-grandfather was called Yehoshua. And it's not that somebody, like I said, not that they read in this book that that's how that word is pronounced; this was a living name in Jewish communities throughout the world.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: And there are numerous names like that. What they tell you is how Hebrew was pronounced in an earlier time. Now, it could have changed over time, it almost certainly changed over time. I had one guy say, “Nehemia, what a fool you are saying that the language never changed.” Of course the language changed! What we're trying to do is reconstruct the best we can what it was like in earlier times, and then more importantly from my perspective is to be consistent.

I have no problem with somebody who pronounces the name Yahuah, but then you have to be consistent throughout the rest of the language. What are the rules there? So, it's not Yehochanan, it's Yehuchanan. I mean there's no evidence for that from Hebrew sources.

Nate: Okay, right.

Nehemia: But at least you're saying, “That's the prefix form, Yehuchanan, Yehushua.” Does that make sense?

Nate: Yeah, no, that does, and definitely that's one of the issues I have with any pronunciation of the name. And I watched some of your stuff, like going through the Vatican and finding all these evidences for Yehovah, but none of this stuff is dated 2000 BC. Of course, stuff has been lost, so nobody can go back 4,000 or 5,000 years and just be like, “Here it is, this is right here.” So, the whole name thing is everybody trying to dig back as far as they can, and nobody can go back as far as they want to with an audible sound. They have to go by what's written, and you have to go by language and culture, which always evolves and changes, and it's a struggle. I understand why there's this discussion.

Nehemia: Let me see if I can get you to agree with me on something, and if not, no worries. I'm of the position that I don't think God rejects anyone’s prayer because they mispronounce His name. Do you agree with that?

Nate: I would go a step further and say that He goes on who you intend to call upon, and if you say a name that's not even His name, He may graciously respond. Not that He has to, but He may choose based on the attitude of your heart and what your intent is. He may choose to listen to you.

Nehemia: Preach it Nate, I love that. Do you have a verse for that, or is that your intuition?

Nate: Well, it's kind of a personal experience, because I called on a name that I believe is the name of a false god, and I believe the correct God, the one and only true God, changed my life on that day.

Nehemia: Wow. Even though you called on what you now believe to be the name of a false God? Which you don’t have to tell us what that is, because that's not necessarily relevant. I want to bring you a verse; do you have a Bible there?

Nate: Yes, I do.

Nehemia: Okay, open up to me to the Book of Psalms. I love that you have figured out through intuition and through experience what the Scriptures tell us. I get the chills from that. I know Christians talk a lot about the Holy Spirit, and we do have in the Tanakh ruach Kodshechah, your Holy Spirit, to me, that's ruach ha’Kodesh, Holy Spirit.

Psalms 44… and I'm a big believer in context, so if we read earlier in Psalms, it talks about in verse… tell me what translation you have? Because in some translations it's verse 11, and in others it's verse 12.

Nate: I have the Scriptures, the ISR 2009, which I believe is based off the King James.

Nehemia: Okay, so I'm going to guess it's verse 11, it says something like, "You have made us like sheep,” do you have that in Psalm 44:11?

Nate: Yep, I do. It says, “You do give us as sheep to be eaten, and You have scattered us among the nations.”

Nehemia: So, this is talking about the exile of Israel. It's pretty explicit. It has “scattered us among the nations.” Read the next verse.

Nate: Let's see, “You sell Your people for no value, and You have set no high price on them.”

Nehemia: What that's talking about is when Israel was captured by the enemies, by Assyria and then later the Babylonians. They were actually taken as slaves and literally sold.

Nate: Right, okay, yeah.

Nehemia: So, they "Out among the nations as slaves". Let's jump ahead here to verse… let's see, verse 20 in some translations. It says, “If we have forgotten.” Is that what you have in verse 20?

Nate: Yep, “If we have forgotten the Name of our Elohim; or stretched out our hands to a foreign mighty one. Will Elohim not search this out? For He knows the secrets of the heart.”

Nehemia: And this is what we call a rhetorical question. It's not a question, “Oh no, the answer’s no, he wouldn't search it out!” No, it's a rhetorical question, it's telling you this is what God does.

Nate: Right, right.

Nehemia: This blows my mind, because I interact with some of these people who are sometimes called sacred namers, and they'll say, “Well, if you don't use the right pronunciation…” here's how they say it. They won't say the right pronunciation. They’ll say, “If you don’t use the right name, if you don't say Yahweh, and you call him Yahuah or Yehovah or Yahavaha,” which are all possibilities.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: I mean, if we don't know what the vowels are, if we're not 100% sure that those are possibilities, they'll say, “Well, you've called upon the foreign god, and God will reject you.”

I once met this gentleman, I spoke with him for hours, and he was a Yahuah person. And at the end of our conversation - he’s a very smart guy, he was a language teacher, so we could talk linguistic things, case endings, stuff like that. I wouldn't expect a normal person… I didn't know what that was until I went to Hebrew University, case endings, so I don't expect people to know what that is. So, at the end of the conversation, he said, “I agree with you Nehemia, you've proven your case, but I'm kind of upset.” I'm like, “Why are you upset?” He said, “Now I need to be baptized again.” I said, “What do you mean?” He was a mainstream Christian, he was baptized in the name of Jesus and the Father. Actually he was a Yahweh guy if I’m not mistaken. I don't remember, it was a long time ago, or he might have been a Yahuah person. Then he said, “I was baptized the name of…” it was Yahweh, or Yehua, or something… I think it was Yahweh, and then Yehoshua. Then he said, “Now I need to be baptized again in the name of Yehovah and Yehoshua.” And I said, “Look, I mean I'm not even a Christian, I can't speak to that, but I could show you what it says in the Old Testament, that our God is merciful, and God doesn't change.”

I mean, think of the image here. They were sent into Assyria, they were sent into Persia, they were sent into Babylon, they’re slaves in someone else’s house, they're being raised as slaves, and they're told to worship the gods that are around them. And some people have the ability to resist that, like Daniel and his three companions.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: But not everybody even knows to do that. Some people are raised up in with the names of these foreign gods and they say, “eem shachanu shem Elohinu,” “we forgot the name of our Elohim.” There are other Elohims, there's Zeus, and there's Marduk and there's many other Elohims.

“And we stretched out our hands,” that’s the biblical form of prayer. Some people think, “Nehemia what are you, a charismatic?” No, it says it right here, “we stretched out our hands.” You see this in the ancient drawings. This is how people pray, they would stretch out their hands, and throughout the Tanakh as well. “We stretched out our hands to a foreign el, to a foreign God. Will not Elohim investigate this? He who knows the mysteries of the heart.” So, I completely agree with you 100%...

And then it goes on in the next verse, let's look at that, that's beautiful. The next verse is “Because of You, we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” This is an incredible image - there are people who are being martyred for the true God, and they don't even know His name. Wow, it's amazing!

Nate: Right!

Nehemia: And God is that merciful that He accepts what's in your heart even if… forget mispronouncing it. You don't even call on the name of the right God; in your innocence you call on the name of the wrong god. I think the name is very important. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on it.

Nate: Great.

Nehemia: I think it's that important, but I don't say that if you mispronounce it, you're going to be cast down into the pit of hell, you'll lose your salvation, you need to be rebaptized - I mean I'm Jewish, we don't do baptism. But most of my Jewish brothers and sisters won't even speak this name. They'll say the name Adoni, they’ll say Ha’Shem, and maybe Ha’Shem is the name of a foreign god. There's some people who think that and it's a possibility, but God is that merciful that He can accept our prayers.

I mean boy, think of this image - there's actually this statement, it’s in my book, Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, there’s a statement in the, I think it's in the Midrash Tehillim, the Midrash on the Psalms, that says “God doesn't answer our prayers because we don't call upon His name.” I don't believe that. I think that's a perversion of the message of the Bible. He loves his name. The name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey appears more than any other name in the Tanakh, in the Old Testament. It appears more than all the titles of God. God has wonderful, beautiful titles, Elohim, El, El Shaddai, Adoni. But if you take all of those combined, they don't appear as often as his actual name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, however you pronounce that.

Nate: Right, yes, definitely. His name written is definitely all through the Scriptures, no question about that.

Nehemia: It’s either 6,827 times or 6,828 times depending on whether you're following the Leningrad Codex or the Aleppo codex.

Nate: Okay.

Nehemia: But it's approximately 6,820 something times… I mean, Elohim appears something like 2,000 times, and some of those are for foreign gods.

Nate: Right, true, very true.

Nehemia: His name is obviously important. He says, “This is My name forever, this is My memorial,” which literally means mention, “for generation to generation.” I think it's a gift to humankind that we have this name. But what we shouldn’t do - and this is what I love about both your main channel with 1.6 million followers, and your other channel, with I don’t know how many it has, tens of thousands of follows.

Nate: Yeah, it’s like 37,000 or something.

Nehemia: Yeah, it's just 37,000, yeah. That’s kind of big too. What I love about it is your humility, that you don't want to beat people over the head with a Torah Scroll, and I think we have so much of that out there right now.

Nate: We do.

Nehemia: And I've seen it for a while. I mean, you're relatively new to Torah. I don't mean that in any disrespectful way.

Nate: You’re right, that’s a factual statement.

Nehemia: In fact, I mean it in a positive way. I've been seeing this for, wow at this point it's 2022, for over 20 years.

Nate: Wow.

Nehemia: People who three years ago were Catholics, two years ago they were Protestants, a year ago they discovered Torah, and now they're beating people over the heads with the Torah Scrolls, as my friend Keith Johnson likes to say, “They're the Torah police.” I don't think that's productive; I've been around this long enough to where I'm convinced to just let people have their walk with the Creator.

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: I think that's what we're called to do. He walks in the garden, and we want to walk with Him. In English I think it says, “He's walking in the garden,” in Hebrew its “hitalech,” “He's walking about, walking back and forth.” And then it says, “Enoch walked back and forth with God,” with Elohim. So, I want to walk back and forth with Him. I don't always get it right. I do the best I can, and even with a PhD you don't get things right all the time. In fact, sometimes you get more wrong than if you don't have a PhD.

Nate: I could believe that in certain situations, for sure.

Nehemia: Yeah, but you do the best you can, and I think that's what God expects from us.

Nate: I definitely think so, and throughout my life I've had incredible periods of spiritual growth that will hit me for three to four months at a time, and then I feel I go a couple years and only learn a few things. And I'm so blown away like with everything I do. I'm a homesteader, I'm doing all this stuff. I have to know stuff about animals to an extent, I need to know solar power, internet equipment, self-curing meats, I need to know all this stuff. And I'm just so blown away that as little time as I have to spend in books and studies, the knowledge that I have, which I'm not going to say I'm very knowledgeable, but the little knowledge that I have, I did not earn. I can't believe I know some of the things I know with as little time as I've actually invested in it.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, like my wife says, you're a genius, so I think that helps. Look I think to some extent, and here I kind of want to be careful, we have this idea today in society, where “Oh, you didn't earn that, that was given to you.”

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: Well, okay, some of it was made possible by things that are beyond my control, but I also had to do something. Meaning, when you picked up that Bible and read it, you chose to do that rather than play video games, which I understand you also do a lot of video games, right?

Nate: I do, I do.

Nehemia: So, every time you pick up the Bible, you're making a choice. Now, there are people who never put their Bible down, who aren’t interested in video games, and is that a choice? Or is that just something God put in their hearts?

Nate: Right.

Nehemia: So, in that respect, I can see, and I'll agree with you about myself. When I read stuff that I wrote years ago, sometimes I'm like, “Did I write that? I don't think I'm that good of a writer.” “Did I say that? Wow.” And then sometimes I'll hear a recording I did years ago, and I’ll be like “Wow, I wish I could be that smart,” and I'm like, “this had to be God, this wasn't me. I feel like He put those words in my mouth.” That doesn't mean that you should agree with everything I say because God put them in my mouth. Whenever I'm wrong that's all on me.

Nate: Yeah, definitely, and every scholar or author or somebody that I've read their works, I feel like I find a lot of stuff that I'm like, “This just can't be right, but wow, look at this, this is unbelievable, this lines up with this, and this, and this.” And it always seems to happen to me consistently from multiple sources within a two-week period. Whenever I really learn something, to me it's like multiple witnesses. All of a sudden there's this, there's this, somebody came to visit me, and they told me this, and it's like, “Really? I was just reading about that,” and it just blows my mind when that happens.

Nehemia: That's really interesting. When I was learning Hebrew, and I grew up learning to read Hebrew, but when I was learning to speak Hebrew, when I moved to Israel, I was 20 years old. Actually, at first, I was 17, I was there for a year. I was 17 and 18, and I would learn a word, then I would start hearing that word all over the place. I'm like, “This is unbelievable. My whole life I've been around Hebrew, and I’ve never heard this word before, and now I heard it like five times in a week.” It could be the word for pineapple or something, it wasn't even necessarily something spiritual. I think there's a name for that phenomenon, I'm not sure what it's called, maybe somebody could post it in the comments. But yeah, that is a thing for sure, that I’ll encounter something and then I'll start seeing it everywhere. It’s pretty cool.

Nate: That is cool, that's really cool.

Nehemia: Any final words Nate, that you want to share with the people?

Nate: No, I don’t think so. It sort of sounds like maybe I’ll be on again some other time if you’ll have me. I’ve got some other ideas too that we could maybe talk about. Maybe we’ll give your people a break from me.

Nehemia: I’d love to have you. I think what they need, Nate, is the break from me. That’s why I bring you on.

Nate: Oh, okay, okay.

Nehemia: You know, I decided to do this program, Hebrew Voices, after I’d done over 100 hours of teaching. I did a thing called Torah Pearls and a thing called Prophet Pearls, and it was something like over 100 hours. And I'm like, “I think the people have heard enough of me, it's time to hear other Hebrew voices out there.”

Nate: Okay, yeah, that's really cool. I love that you bring in other perspectives and all that.

Nehemia: Well, thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. Would you end with a prayer?

Nate: Yeah, sure. Dear Father, thank you so much for this opportunity, and I thank You for Your word, and most importantly for Your love for mankind, and that You give us all a way to reach You, and that You have different paths for people, but yet as they sort through all these different facts and information, that as long as they have a love for You, that You will keep drawing them towards Your truth and towards You, and I thank You so much for that, I just really appreciate it. In Your name I pray.

Nehemia: And a resounding Amen. Thank you, Nate, I really appreciate it, shalom.

Nate: Shalom.

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