Hebrew Voices #74 – The Name of God in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Name of God in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, Nehemia Gordon talks about how a Karaite Jew came to study the New Testament in Hebrew, what he discovered regarding God’s name in a Hebrew gospel preserved by Jewish rabbis, and how we know Matthew was originally written in Hebrew.

I look forward to reading your comments!


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Hebrew Voices #74 - The Name of God in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew

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

Nehemia: Here’s an image from Matthew chapter 1 verses 18-25, and if you can read mediaeval Hebrew, you can read this. It’s an unusual script if you’re not familiar with it. But right over here you have this symbol, which is the symbol Hey, and it appears twice. This Hey over here and over here, what this represents is the name “Hashem”.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkot. (For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Isaiah 62:1)

Michael: Shalom, Torah fans. Since January of 2017 I received several calls from Nehemia Gordon, who was breaking new ground in biblical research that I felt needed to get out to the world, and so before he left for Israel, he and I got together for Shabbat Night Live to pre-record a series which we released this last fall, The Gentiles Shall Know My Name. I didn’t get to watch this series until it actually aired on television, and at the end of this series, I was so moved by this, I wanted to call Nehemia immediately and say, “Nehemia, I need an update. When can you come and spend some time?” He said, “I’m busy. I’m on some projects right now that I can’t leave at this point.”

And just a couple of weeks ago he gave me a call which I will never forget, because what happened during this last year, and what he’d been working on for the last several months has really been an historic event in the history of Bible research, and things that have not been known for over 1,000 years have now come to light. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have Nehemia Gordon back with us. Nehemia, good to have you here, finally.

Nehemia: It’s great to be here. Great to be back. What had happened is, we started about a year ago looking for more Bible manuscripts with the full vowels of the name Yehovah. We started out… in 2001 I had two Bible manuscripts, and then over the years I found a third, a fourth and a fifth. And in a period of about 15 years, I knew about five Bible manuscripts with the vowels “Yehovah”.

Michael: Okay. Now, there are a lot of people… I believe it’s hundreds of thousands, that have joined us since the episodes have aired. Let’s go back and capture some of these things, because there were things that you laid out in the last series that I think we need to revisit. But he significance of this as far as the vowels in the name - can you give us a little background on that?

Nehemia: In most of the Bible manuscripts… What we’ve been told for 200 years is that God’s name is Yahweh. The Jews forgot how to pronounce the name, and these Christians rediscovered this pronunciation Yahweh, or they invented this pronunciation, Yahweh, about 200 years ago. I looked up in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, which is really a respected source, and it said, “Yahweh is a scholarly guess.” I said, “Guess? Surely we should be able to do better than that.”

I started to pick apart… what are the sources? How do we really know it’s Yahweh? I saw there really was nothing in any Jewish or Hebrew source that supported that. So I started to look for sources that would be Jewish sources. I really didn’t even know where to go and stumbled upon some things while I was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem working on my master’s degree. Shall I tell this story? It’s one I’ve shared before.

Michael: I think you need to, because why this name is significant, it appears how many times in the Hebrew…?

Nehemia: The name appears 6,827 times in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament. That means, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, God’s holy name appears more than, “Lord, God,” which is “Adonai, Elohim, El Shadai, El Elyon.” Beautiful titles, right? But if you combine all of those together, they don’t even come out to half of the actual personal name of God.

In Exodus 3:15 He says, “This is My name forever.” It’s usually translated, “this is My memorial for generation to generation,” like some memorial plaque and He’s dead, or something. If you look in the Hebrew it means, “this is my mention for generation to generation.”

So this is what we’re supposed to call Him by His name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, revealed in Exodus 3:15. The problem was, for the last 200 years, scholars said, “We really don’t know what the name is.”

Let me back up. Jews have this tradition of not speaking the name.

Michael: Okay. That’s where it started.

Nehemia: That’s where it starts.

Michael: They don’t speak it.

Nehemia: Jews don’t speak it. I grew up that whenever you see those 4 letters, 6,827 times in your Bible, thousands of times in the prayer books and other things, you’re always to read them as Adonai. Adonai means Lord. This is a tradition that goes back at least 1,800 years, some people claim longer.

Because of that, it was assumed that Jews don’t know what the pronunciation is. We were told, “These are the vowels of Adonai.” Well, I started studying Hebrew manuscripts; my prayer was to know, “What is Your name based on Hebrew Jewish sources?” That on the day of judgement I could point to that source. If God says to me, “Nehemia, you mispronounced My name. Why did you do that?” I’ll be able to say, “Father in Heaven, who I’m standing before right now on the day of judgment, this is how it was recorded by the scribes who preserved Your word. And I love Your word and I believe in Your word, and it was in Your very word that I found Your name written there.”

I couldn’t find “Yahweh” anywhere, in any Hebrew or Jewish source. Now, on the other hand, I didn’t know how to pronounce the name, and I was told that the name has the vowels of Adonai.

Michael: Okay, so the Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, you were told, and this is what’s taught in American Christian cemetery, that Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, the vowels are the vowels of Adonai.

Nehemia: [laughing] I was taught that at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not just at Christian seminaries, and this is in the grammars of Biblical Hebrew, the main grammar of Biblical Hebrew is written by a German guy named Gesenius in the 1800s. To this day, it’s the definitive grammar of Biblical Hebrew. People have modified it and improved upon it, but that’s the basis of modern Biblical grammars, and Gesenius established that the name was Yahweh. What did he base it on? I think we’ll get to that in a future episode.

Michael: Okay. Well, you’re going to show us the source where that came from, right?

Nehemia: We’re going to actually get to the source, yeah. But before we get to that, 17 years ago, I’m sitting minding my own business, and I have this job at the Hebrew University and I’m proofreading the Bible. And as I’m proofing the Bible, I had already seen that the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey doesn’t have the vowels of Adonai, which made no sense, because I was told this as a fact. It was common knowledge. It’s in Gesenius, the Biblical Hebrew grammar. Everyone knows those are the vowels of Adonai. But I open up the manuscripts, and not only is it not the vowels of Adonai, but it’s missing one of the three vowels. How do I know it’s missing a vowel? There are certain rules of Hebrew grammar in phenology and pronunciation. If you have those four letters, you have to have at least three vowels, or at least vowel symbols.

So there’s a vowel symbol that’s missing, and I realized, “If I could know what that vowel symbol is, maybe that’s the name.” There I am, minding my own business, I’m proofreading the Bible and I’ve got a stack of photographs of the Aleppo Codex, the most accurate copy of the Bible in existence.

Michael: And this is what the Shrine of the Book is protecting, the nuclear-proof vault is to protect this.

Nehemia: The Shrine of the Book has two pages on display, and the rest of it’s in the vault, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. But I have one-to-one color photographs and I’m checking every jot and tittle. All of a sudden, I find a place where one of those vowels that’s supposed to be missing isn’t missing. And there’s a full set of vowels, and I can read the name the way it’s written. Because the way it’s normally written in most Bible manuscripts – and today, I can tell you, because I know about the name in over 1,000 Bible manuscripts – most Bible manuscripts, about 80 percent of the Bible manuscripts we’ve looked at don’t have this missing vowel, meaning, it’s missing in those manuscripts. Even the ones that do have it, usually don’t have it.

In other words, the name 6,827 times, the Aleppo Codex only has those full vowels seven times, which means the rest of the places that…

Michael: It’s missing.

Nehemia: …it’s missing. And why is that? Because the scribes don’t want us to pronounce this name.

Michael: Deliberately missing.

Nehemia: Absolutely. By design, they left out the middle vowel so Jews wouldn’t come across that word and you wouldn’t accidently pronounce it. That was what they were doing. And every once in a while, they slipped up and they put in the full vowels. They put in that missing vowel. Why did they do that? It’s like when you’re maybe texting and you’re thinking of a certain word in your head, and you type a word that sounds like that. It happens to me all the time. I write “their” instead of “they’re” or “too, two, and to.” So they’re writing it and they slip up and they put in the full vowels. They didn’t do it often. Seven times out of thousands of times is not a lot, at all. The Aleppo Codex it’s seven times, in the Leningrad codex it’s about 50 times. That was the other one I had 17 years ago.

Over the years I amassed more. I got five manuscripts a little over a year ago, and then I start to look for more. I had shared in The Gentiles Shall Know My Name about how I found 16 rabbis who explicitly said that the name is Yehovah. So we were told this myth. It’s a myth that the Jews don’t know how to pronounce the name, and I found out the Jews think they know how to pronounce the name, at the very least. No one will talk about this in the scientific literature, in the academic literature. You’ll look in the encyclopedias and in the journal articles, they won’t say anything about, “The Jews thought they knew how to pronounce the name but they were wrong, and here’s our reason.” They don’t even address it, because they don’t even know about it.

So we have 16 rabbis who say the name is Yehovah. Then I had only five Bible manuscripts. I felt a little awkward there. I had only five Bible... I need more Bible manuscripts. My goal, Michael, was to get to 10 Bible manuscripts, and I thought if I worked for the rest of my life, I might get to 10. Instead, now I have over 1,000. It’s a miracle, and I want to talk more about that in a future episode, about the miracle.

But in a way, this brings me full circle back to something that we started out many years ago. This is looking at the name Yehovah in the Old Testament, in what I call the Tanach, that’s my Bible.

You came to me with an issue in the New Testament, your Bible, and asked me a question. And that now can come full circle and teach us all something about the name in my Bible. Can we go back to that, what the original problem was?

Michael: Well, this is one of the most significant things in my life. I was living in Jerusalem and we had a young man that was attending one of the yeshivas. He was a son of the pastor from the United States. As a matter of fact, his father, I woke up to the Hebrew roots of the faith. And so now, years later, his son is coming over and attending a yeshiva, and week by week, it just kept on getting more bizarre. I saw this young man as he was attempting to follow what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew. This was his reasoning for doing what he was doing, and this is something I brought up to you.

This is really two days before the Passover, in which Yeshua is crucified. “Then spake Jesus…” I’m reading King James, “to the multitude…”

Nehemia: This is Matthew 23.

Michael: …”and His disciples.” This is Matthew 23 and this is in verse 2 here. “Then spake Jesus to the multitude and to his disciples, saying, ‘the scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. All, therefore, whatsoever they bid or command you to observe, that observe and do.’” So he was, in his heart, wanting to follow what Yeshua, what Jesus said to do…

Nehemia: So this man believed in Yeshua, and he’s Jewish, and he’s saying, “Hey, I should actually do what Yeshua said to do and obey they Pharisees…”

Michael: Right.

Nehemia: Because they sit in the seat of Moses.

Michael: Right. And so he was up every morning at 4:30 in the morning davening at the Wall. He was doing all these things. And when he would come over for Shabbat dinner, then he would start bringing up, “If we eat this first…” and this is really encoded in this book, you may be familiar with it.

Nehemia: Oh, yeah.

Michael: Guide to Blessings. If you eat this first, then you must say this blessing, but if you eat more of this other thing, then you say this blessing, and it was just mincing on things that, if Yeshua really said to do this… And I watched the light go out in this young man’s eyes. It’s like he got so confused by these things. You were raised as a Rabbinic Jew.

Nehemia: Yeah. My father was an Orthodox Rabbi. I was raised as a modern-day Pharisee. This was just common, daily life. If you ate an apple, you made a certain blessing over the apple, “Boreh pri ha’etz, Blessed is the One who creates the fruit.” A beautiful thing, right? Until you realize, I want a snack and now I’ve got to start thinking, “Do I eat this thing first, or that thing first? Which blessing do I make on it?” And really, it becomes a major part of everyday life. So you sit down for a snack and you’ve got an apple and you’ve got a glass of water, so you make one blessing over the apple, a different blessing over the water. Then you want bread, so now you get up and you wash your hands according to a certain ritual and you make the blessing over washing the hands, that God commanded us to wash the hands. Then you sit down and you make the blessing, “Hamotzie lechem min ha’aretz”, the blessing over the bread.

Now, if I had done the bread first, the blessing over the bread covers all the other foods, and so I don’t need to then… Now I’ve made extra blessings. So now it becomes a strategic question, what do I eat first? And it’s ridiculous.

Growing up, I remember thinking, “God can’t care what I eat first. That can’t be. I don’t find this in the Bible.” I was looking in the Torah, in the Five Books of Moses, and I was saying to my rabbis, “You’re spending all day teaching me which blessings to make, and all kinds of rules, which shoe to put on first in the morning, all kinds of rules and regulations. That’s not in our Torah.” And they’d say, “It’s in the Oral Torah, that there were these teachings of the Pharisees, these takanot,” that I talk about in The Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus, and I ended up writing a book about it. I didn’t set out to write a book, I set out to answer your question that you came to me with saying, “How could…?”

Michael: Yeah, this is the book that answers my questions…

Nehemia: Right, exactly.

Michael: …and brilliantly.

Nehemia: It really started out with you coming to me saying, “Hey, Yeshua seems to be saying, ‘All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do.’” It sure sounds like he’s saying to obey the Pharisees.

And when I was doing this research, of course, I didn’t know actually what a Moses’ seat is, because we don’t have those anymore in modern day synagogues. So I had a background in archaeology, my bachelor’s degree was in archaeology, and people can see here, this is a Moses’ seat at Chorazin in Israel.

Michael: That’s right.

Nehemia: It was discovered in excavations, so they did have it 2,000 years ago, and you can read about it in some of the Rabbinical literature, they make references to it. It turns out what they would do is stand in the synagogue and read from the scroll of Scripture. You see, Yeshua did that in the Gospel of Luke.

Michael: That’s right.

Nehemia: He read Isaiah 61. Then after the reading, the rabbi would sit in this chair and say, “What we just read - this is what it means, and you have to accept my interpretation.” And so the one who sits in the seat of Moses, that is sitting in the seat of authority. That’s what it means in that historical context. Once I found this out, I said, “Wow, Michael, this really is a problem.” In other words, from the New Testament perspective…

Michael: Yeah, and let me give you a little bit more background on that. I had this question because I saw this man’s life change, and it was changing for the worse, what was going on. And I felt responsible for it, I just felt responsible for his father and for him, and I was really praying about this, and I said, “There is no way that Yeshua said this.” I knew I couldn’t talk to any Christians or Christian Ministers and say, “There’s no way that Yeshua couldn’t have said something that’s in the King James Version of the Bible,” because I’d be tarred and feathered by doing that.

Nehemia: The other issue is, I think most Christians will read that and say, “That was only up to the crucifixion. Now, that’s done away with. We don’t actually have to follow what Jesus said. It was nailed to the cross.”

Michael: That’s right.

Nehemia: And here you had somebody who was Jewish who was saying, “I want to follow the Torah,” and instead of following the Torah he ends up obsessing about, “Do I eat the apple first or drink the water first, because that depends on which blessing I say.” And saying, “Yeshua told me to follow the Pharisees, because they sit in the seat of Moses, they’ve got the chair of authority.”

In other words, when this man maybe was a Christian, he didn’t have to worry about this, because all the law was nailed to the cross. Now that you’re trying to follow the Torah, well, the Pharisees tell us a lot of things about how to follow the Torah. Do we have to obey them? It sure sounds like it from this verse.

So here’s what I did, which to me made sense. Let’s see what other manuscripts say, because this is what I do. I look at manuscripts. [laughing] This is what I’ve been trained to do at the Hebrew University for decades. At the time - this was many years ago - so I look in the Greek manuscripts, and as far as I could tell, at least from what was documented, all the Greek manuscripts had the same thing. There wasn’t any difference.

Michael: Yeah. I think I said at the time, every extant Greek manuscript says basically the same thing right there. I was lost. I couldn’t go any further with my resources, with my skills. But I knew you to be an honest scholar, and that when I ask you questions, if you didn’t have the answers, you would dig.

Nehemia: Yeah. I try to find out.

Michael: And you went on a digging expedition that resulted in what we’re going to be able to share with everyone during this series. What happened, or the initial things?

Nehemia: Initially, what I found, you can see it here. This is a section from the British Library manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. What? It turns out there’s this Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew that was preserved by Jewish rabbis.

Michael: That’s right.

Nehemia: Here it says, this is section 97, it’s divided differently, but it’s the same words. It says, “Az diber Yeshua el ha’am ve’el talmidav,” “then Yeshua spoke to the people and to his disciples,” “l’emor, ‘Al kiseh Moshe yeshua Perushim vehachamim,” “upon the seat of Moses sit the Pharisees and the sages. And now, all that he says to you, diligently do.” In other words, what’s their claim to authority? That they sit on the seat of Moses. Therefore, do what Moses says. It’s so brilliant. It reminds you of where they say, “Shall we pay our taxes?” “Well, whose face is on that coin?” “Caesar.” “So, give it to Caesar.”

“What’s the name of that chair they sit in? It’s the seat of Moses? So do what he says, do what Moses says, not what the people in the chair say,” [laughing] which is incredible! What a brilliant answer. I’d never have guessed this in a million years, based on what I read in the King James Version, based on what I read in the Greek, and here we find it in a Hebrew manuscript.

So I’d found this in a Hebrew manuscript. This was published originally by George Howard in 1987, and he knew about nine manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. Two of his manuscripts read exactly this way. And I said, “There have got to be more manuscripts.” So I start digging for more manuscripts. I’m not sure I want to get to what I found there first, I think want to share one of the really interesting things that came up.

As I’m looking at this Hebrew Matthew, I’m like, “Hey, that was interesting for Michael in Matthew 23 and Matthew 15, there might be some other interesting things in this Hebrew Matthew.” So I start reading it from the beginning, and look what I find! It’s really cool. And this ties into what we started out with, talking about the name.

So here’s an image from Matthew Chapter 1 verses 18-25, and if you could read mediaeval Hebrew you can read this. It’s an unusual script, if you’re not familiar with it. But right over here you have this symbol which is the symbol Hey. It appears twice. And this Hey, over here and over here, what this represents is the name “Hashem.”

Now, remember, this was copied by a rabbi. Meaning, if you believe what we’re told in ancient sources, it was written by Matthew in Hebrew - we’re told that by Papias, a church father who died in the year 130, who tells us that Matthew collected the words in the Hebrew language, and each translated them as he was able. What happened is, Matthew wrote this in Hebrew. At some point it’s brought over into the synagogue. And you think, “How did this get into synagogues?” What happened is, the Catholic Church came along and started persecuting Jews who believed in Yeshua. So where are they going to hide? They hide among the other Jews and they bring their manuscripts with them. Over the centuries, they assimilate, and this now is being copied by a Jewish rabbi.

When a Jewish Rabbi sees God’s name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, outside of the Old Testament, it’s very rare for him to ever write Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. It happens occasionally, but it’s very rare. Normally, instead of writing Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey he uses a symbol to represent the name, and that symbol is usually a Hey with a line over it, which is exactly what we see here.

So coming back to the name, I’m looking years ago in the New Testament in Hebrew, and I see the name of the Father, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. Well, in the Greek it doesn’t appear. In the Greek you have Kurios, which is Lord, and you have Theus, which is God. But you never have the actual name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and I’m not even here talking about the issue of the vowels, just the Tetragrammaton, the personal name of the God of Israel revealed in Exodus 3:15, appears 6,827 times in the Tanach and the Old Testament, appears zero times in the New Testament, until we find this Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.

And I say, “Wait. What’s that doing there?” The name was in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, and then everything started to make sense. There’s a Dead Sea Scroll that was discovered at a place called Nachal Hever, and it’s the Septuagint in Greek, it’s the Old Testament in Greek. But when it comes to the name of God, it doesn’t say “Kurios” in these earliest copies of the Septuagint. It says, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew. You’re reading this document in Greek and all of a sudden you see a Hebrew word!

What happened is, as Christians started to copy the Septuagint, they didn’t know how to read the Hebrew or write the Hebrew, and then it was replaced with “Lord”, which by that time had become a Jewish tradition. But originally, it seems, from this evidence here – and we’ll get into some other exciting things that I discovered! – there are other really exciting things, other New Testament documents that I came across… [laughing]

Michael: No, not yet. Not yet. I have been waiting for 18 years, because you told me when you found these other Hebrew manuscripts of these other Gospels, you said, “I can’t release it. We can’t say anything about it.” I said, “Don’t tell me what they are. That way, I don’t know, and so that’s the answer I can give to everyone.” I’ve been waiting 18 years for this, Nehemia!

Nehemia: But now we can release them. [laughing] This is really exciting.

Michael: And you’ve got them.

Nehemia: It’s really exciting. Anyway, Michael, I want to look at something here before we wrap up the first part here. What made George Howard think that this was an original Hebrew document, not just a translation from Greek? Here we have Matthew chapter 1, and we can see what it says in the Greek here. Chapter 1 verse 21, “She’ll bring forth a son, you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” It’s really interesting, I’ll ask Christian groups around the world. I’ll say, “Do you know what the name Jesus means?” and a lot of them will have no idea. Some of them will say, “Oh, it means salvation,” which isn’t entirely accurate. It’s true, but it’s only half true.

Now, if you look in the Hebrew Matthew what it says is, “You shall call His name Yeshua, for He will save My people from their iniquities.” And the Hebrew word for Yeshua, or the name there is Yeshua, and the three words in English, “He will save” translate into a single word in Hebrew, this word “yoshia”. So why is He called Yeshua? Because “yoshia, He will save.” That makes perfect sense in Hebrew, because the name Yeshua itself is a contraction of two Hebrew words, and those two Hebrew words are “Yehovah,” the name of the Father, “yoshia”, “He will save”.

Some people have pointed in the New Testament where it talks about “He comes in His father’s name” and “His Father’s name is in Him,” and that’s literally true, that the name “Yeshua” has in it the name “Yehovah, Yehovah yoshia”, “Yehovah will save” or “Yehovah saves”.

So this name “Yeshua” is itself a shortened form of Yehoshua, which is the name Joshua, and there were people in the Old Testament who had this name. Joshua, the son of Nun, was the first man ever to be called “Yehoshua”. His name originally was Hoshea, “he saves”, and Moses decided, “You know what? Now that we’ve been taken out of Egypt, my servant, Hoshea, I’m going to change his name to be more specific about who saves,” and he called him Yehoshua, “Yehovah saves”.

Then Yehoshua, Joshua the son of Nun, in Nehemia 8:17 – my favorite book, the book of Nehemia – because I wrote it. No. [laughing] In that book he is then called Yeshua. So there’s no question whatsoever, Jesus of Nazareth in his day was known as “Yeshua”.

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Verses Referenced: Exodus 3:15 Matthew 23:1-3 Matthew 1:18-25 Related Posts: The Name Yeshua in Ancient Babylon Hebrew Gospels from a Vatican Junk Box Hebrew Manuscript of the Book of Revelation The Hebrew Gospel of Matthew with Nehemia Gordon How the New Testament Interprets the Tanakh Reading the New Testament Through Jewish Eyes Hebrew Gospel Pearls Hebrew Voices Episodes Support Team Studies Nehemia Gordon's Teachings on the Name of God
  • Rebecca Freeman says:

    Is there any Bible available to buy with the name of God as it is written throughout the whole of scripture?

  • Robert Conrick User_6267 says:

    Fantastic teaching amazing eye-opening discoveries!
    Is there a copy of the book of Acts in Hebrew?

  • TONI says:

    Fab fab fab mehtsuyan!

    do you have anything on ECHAD!

  • Hsiu-o Yu says:

    Relative to יְהֹוָה means “He was , He is and He will be”, Rev. 17:8 says “…the beast that was, and is not, and yet is”, could this , basing the same rules, be a Hebrew name ?

  • Caron says:

    You mentioned the reason that instances of 7 in 1000 vowels were accidentally written. Is it possible some purposely inserted the vowels because they didn’t agree Gods name should be suppressed? Just wondering! Thank you for your research!
    Psalm 83:18

  • Jose Cruz Marquez Aguilar says:

    Hello Nehemia!!

    Once I did read about a theory about John 19:19 that says abut the title that was put in the cross (Jesus/Yeshua Of Nazareth The King Of The Jews) could actually be “Jesus/Yeshua of Nazareth AND King of the Jews”, because, according to this theory, in Hebrew, when taking the first letter of each word, we would have YHVH… I don’t speak Hebrew, and Google translator doesn’t seems to help. So, have you read anything about it? Is it possible?

    Thank you, I’m learning a lot with your messages, and I’m very excited about your Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS project with Keith Johnson.

    Yehovah bless you!

    Jose.

  • jim galgano says:

    yes sir,ive just recently was introduced to your teachings.several years ago i realized that many things ive been taught was incorrect and my belief is that our translation may not be accurate,as i have always used kjv. i got a interliner hebrew ot greek nt,i have found it very difficult trying to learn the language on my own so using that particular bible and using strongs concordanance. then i purchased the complete jewish bible which also differsfrom the hebrew interliner, my question is what do you recommend as the most accurate tranlation in predominately english language

  • William says:

    What prayer was John, Luke, teaching his disciples to pray, causing Jesus’ disciples to ask Him for a prayer, or are we seeing “ora traditions”?

  • William says:

    We, Christians have, no doubt, received the “Traditions of our fathers”
    Praise YEHOVAH, for your diligence and may Arons bleszing be upon you and yours, SHAAAAALOM HAVAH NAGHILA!

  • auntganny says:

    You know, Nehemia, my suspicion is that Moses didn’t make that decision to change Joshua’s name….but it was Yehovah who led Moses to do that. Yehovah often opens our understanding about Himself through the names his servants are called in the Hebrew scriptures. Just as Yehovah changed Abraham’s name…and Jacob’s name, I would not be one bit surprised that He did it with Joshua’s name, too. In fact, it seems to me that Yehovah was still changing some names in what we call the NT…even through Yehoshua Yeshua! Peter, for example….And then when we get to Revelation, again some are receiving new names! I just love how Yehovah is using you to open our eyes to the truth about Himself.

  • Ann Watson says:

    Nehemia, since you are reading and studying some of the new testament, I wonder if you would shead some light on fasting from a biblical perspective. How did they who fasted as did John and Yeshua survive 40 days without food or drink? What did fasting really mean? Or is the English translation missing the boat due to translation?

    • Steve says:

      I don’t believe it says that Yeshuah fasted from water. It does say this in luke however “For forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry.” Meaning it was food.
      It also states that food of the bread of life.

      I cannot see the body lasting long without water being that it is made up of I think it’s 97% water (not sure if the exact amount) but it’s been proven to we can live many days without food, but not many days without water.

      If someone has any quotes where it says specifically water as well as food, please post the info, as I have found nothing.

      • Ann Watson says:

        Thank you for this most helpful information. As always you are a great gift to us who have been seaching the truth of the written word. It’s always best to search the earliest script. Since I am not a scholar but a student I am so grateful for the gift of You, Nehemiah.

      • Bible believer says:

        Exodus 34: 28
        “So he (Moses) was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.”

        Adults are 75% water by weight. In the natural, without water, life ends in 3-8 days. In the Spirit, “all things are possible!”

  • Joost says:

    The ZOHAR is written in HEBREW but it is a heap of nonsense.

    Closer to chaos than anything else. Both examples to hide a truth.

  • Mark says:

    Great research!
    שלום

  • Walter Schwenk says:

    Totally grateful to Shem Tov for preserving this second or third witness to the accuracy of the NT. Between greek, aramaic, and hebrew sources, we can hope to understand what Yahshua REALLY taught and beware the traditions of men. Also majorly grateful to G Howard, and also to you Nehemia for popularizing this source of information.

  • Steve says:

    Nehemiah,
    Thank you for verifying once again what I have thought for many years now.
    I don’t say this to brag, because everything I am blessed with comes from my Father in heaven, and all credit and praise goes to Him, always, but I have a what I will call (for lack of words) a 6th sense about things in this life, from just knowing things are correct, or not correct in my heart, not knowing why, or how I know, it’s simply unexplainable. I guess you could call it blind faith, (like Peter had walking in the water) and it is definitely a gift I do not take lightly or for granted.
    I’ve been a believer both in worldly church and now just a believer, my entire life. I’ve been blessed many times over. For almost 40 years (I’m now 54) I have been given this gift and felt wrong some how when situations arise or people use wrong names for instance.
    For awhile I used Jesus and god of course, then I came to groups now that are more Hebrew based and keep Torah and feasts and such. I recently within the last 6 years came to realise Yahweh as everyone seems to like to use, does not seem correct nor feel right using it.
    I for a few years, used it, but rarely, because it just felt out of place. Once the word Yehovah came around, I instantly and immediatly felt in my being that this was the correct name, and have since used it regardless of what others may think or use. Again I cannot tell you why or how I know this, and I cannot explain it (aside from how I have already), it would be like our Father trying to explain something that only he could understand, but I feel it is the correct name, and until I am told differently by my Father, I won’t be using any other word, and will continue to call Him by what I believe to be His name, Yehovah.

    Thank you for this, it re-confirms that my gift or feeling is spot on and again it is a blessing to have this gift of understanding(?), I’m not really sure how to explain it exactly. Thank you for your research and insight and in depth study on this.