Hebrew Voices #229 – Rightly Dividing the Word of Yehovah

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: Think about this; here’s an analogy in English. Is the word color spelled with a U or without a U? Right? So, in British English they spell it with a U, and in American English they spell it without a U. Jews obsess about that. And here’s another famous example; the playwright Shakespeare wrote his own name something like a dozen different ways. Why did he do that? Because there was no fixed spelling. So, that’s what we’re talking about in the Hebrew text of Scripture; there’s no fixed spelling. And because of that, we say the word sukkot is spelled this way in this verse and that way in this other verse, and we want to reproduce it perfectly. And if we have differences between the manuscripts, I want to document what those differences are.

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Shannon: Hey, everybody, welcome aboard to the Shannon Davis Show. We’ve got a great one for you today. We’re going to have, this hour, Dr. Nehemia Gordon. He’s on the cutting edge of Bible research. Nehemiaswall.com is his website, and today is a live show, Tuesday, June 10th, 2025. Nehemia, welcome back to the broadcast. How you doing?

Nehemia: Hey, it’s great to be back on. Thanks for having me.

Shannon: It has been a while, and I ask you to forgive me because I should have had you scheduled before now, but I dropped the ball. But thank you for waiting on me. And we finally got it together. In between some international trips you’ve been doing, you’ve been a busy guy. I’ve been following your work and you’re doing an awesome job. Nehemia, would you be so kind as to open us up in prayer today?

Nehemia: Sure. Yehovah, Avinu shebashamayim, Oh Heavenly Father, Yehovah, give us wisdom today as we share truths revealed in Your word. Amen.

Shannon: I say amen to that. And welcome folks, we’re just going live, so please invite a friend. This will be an awesome show. Nehemia, I thought I would take you down some rabbit trails today. And maybe we could call this, Down the Rabbit Hole with Nehemia, or Q&A with Nehemia Gordon. One and the same thing. I’ve been saving up a bunch of questions for you, and so… they will be kind of unorganized. I just kind of wrote them as I recalled them. But I’m going to pick your brain today because, listen, I have the utmost respect for you, and I figure if there’s anyone that can answer my questions, it’s Nehemia Gordon, because he’s the man. I want to say this…

Nehemia: Hopefully I can answer them correctly.

Shannon: Well, I have faith in you, my friend. You’re going to do good. I just want to share a quick story. I had the honor to meet Nehemia, way back, bro, in 2007. And Nehemia, to make a long story short, my brother Damon calls me one day, and he says, “Hey man, do you want to go to Israel?” He said, “I’ve been invited to go over by the Minister of Tourism, a guy named Rami Levy.” This was 2007.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Shannon: And he said, “We’re going to go over and, you know, meet with him.” And my brother had a couple ministry clients, and they were thinking about organizing some tours, things like that. I said, “Man, I’d love to go, but I’ve got tickets to a Celine Dion concert in Las Vegas. How long is the trip going to be? Because I’m already booked. I got my ticket and all that, and I’m supposed to go to a Steve Vai concert, too.” He said, “Listen, I’m going to be there about two weeks, but if you can stay for a few days, come on.” I said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

So, I jumped on a plane, Nehemia, and I went to Israel. I had a blast, and they took us down to the Galilee area, and… then I finished my duties down there, and I came up to Jerusalem, and I remember calling you, or emailing you rather, and I said, “Hey, Nehemia, I’m in town. You got a chance to meet?” Nehemia said, “Sure.” And so, you took me down to some coffee shop, and they served some great hot tea with mint. And Nehemia brings in his laptop, and he begins to show me some of the cutting-edge research he’s working on, looking for the divine name of God in the original Hebrew scrolls. And you were showing me some of the research you were doing and got me so excited. Now, that was 2007.

Nehemia: That was a long time ago, yeah.

Shannon: It was. And you’ve come a long way since then. So, I just want to say I got to meet the man, and he’s on the tip of the spear in terms of all this research he’s been doing. Now, Nehemia, I’m just going to be asking you some questions tonight. Since we last talked, I know that you have been working on a number of projects, but one in particular I want to ask you about is searching for Hebrew scrolls of the Tanakh with the name of God, Yehovah, intact. And you had a team working for you. Was one of the guys named T-Bone or Pitbull or something like that?

Nehemia: That was his nickname, T-Bone. He wanted to remain anonymous to the public, so we called him T-bone.

Shannon: Okay. I just remember you sharing that you had a team composed of T-Bone and some others, and you were all working on searching out manuscripts. And where does the grand tally sit right now in terms of…

Nehemia: That’s a very complicated question. Just first of all, to clarify, we have two kinds of, let’s call them documents. We have manuscripts… we have a codex and a scroll. A codex is like what you see behind me. Right? It’s just like a book, right? But we call that a codex. And then a scroll is something that’s rolled up. So, what we were focusing on was actually not scrolls, but… the plural of codex is either codices or codexes. I prefer codexes. So, we were working on codexes because the scrolls generally don’t have vowels. And when they have vowels, the vowels were usually added much later after the scroll was used, although not always. There were very rarely scrolls that have originally vowels. Actually, some today, even. So, the grand total we had gotten up was over 2,000… So, here’s really what happened, okay? And I wrote a book about this; I’m not going to go into that much detail. So, the name of God, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey… it’s generally assumed we don’t know what the vowels are, right? An assumption in biblical studies is the Jews stop pronouncing it because there was a prohibition in Jewish culture to speak the name. The rabbis created this prohibition that you’re not allowed to speak the name. In fact, there’s a statement in the Mishnah that all of Israel has a portion in the world to come, right? So, it’s interesting; in Christianity, there’s this idea called Universalism, which says that everyone’s saved. And then there’s another verse that says all Christians are saved… you know, and of course, not all Christians agree with that, right?

So, in Judaism, there’s a statement, in Rabbinical Judaism, it’s Sanhedrin, in the Mishnah chapter 10. “All of Israel has a portion in the world to come,” which is, I guess, the equivalent of “saved” in Judaism. And then it says, “except…” And there’s a list of people who don’t have a portion in the world to come. And one of those is people who speak the name the way it’s written. Right? So, the teaching is that when you see the letters Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, you’re supposed to read them as Adonai or sometimes as Elohim. And if you read them the way they’re actually written, then you, let’s say, translating into Christian terms, you lose your salvation.

Well, I’m not too concerned about what the rabbis say. So, if I see the letters Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey in the Hebrew Bible over 6,000 times, I say, “Why wouldn’t we read it?” And especially since we have a commandment; it’s a commandment to Aaron and his descendants, what we call the Kohanim, the priests, and the commandment is, “They will place My name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them.” It’s in Numbers 6. And there’s a three-line blessing, and in that three lines of the blessing, each line has the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. And the rabbis themselves admit, “Well, when this was done in the Temple, they were required to use the actual pronunciation of the name because it says in Numbers 6, ‘They shall place My name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them.’” So, placing the name on the people is to actually speak it.

So, what happened is the rabbis, somewhat later than that, said, “Okay, the Temple is destroyed. We’re not going to speak the name anymore, and anybody who does loses their portion in the world to come.” And how do we know that’s true? Because the rabbis tell us, which… well, like I said, I don’t obey the rabbis. So, I wanted to know how to speak this name, and I’ll make a long story short. I’ve spoken about this many times. I’m sure I’ve spoken about it on your show. There are some manuscripts that have the name… in most manuscripts, the name is missing a vowel, okay? That’s the important thing here. And why it’s missing the vowel is not obvious. My hypothesis, and I later found out there was another scholar in Germany who came up with the same hypothesis, is they left out one of the vowels so people wouldn’t accidentally pronounce it, or maybe intentionally pronounce it.

Shannon: Oh.

Nehemia: Okay. And the point here is that if there’s a missing vowel, right… So, the Hebrew structure is, in every consonant… well, I guess in every language, in every consonant, you have to have a vowel. Maybe not like in Welsh or something like that, right? But generally, the way Hebrew works is you have a consonant and then a vowel, and then you could have an open syllable or a closed syllable. An open syllable is followed by a consonant, and then a closed syllable is, right. So, you have to have a vowel there, you can’t just have two consonants without a vowel between them. Even if there’s what’s called a semivowel, then you have to have that. Or if it’s the end of a syllable, then you have a symbol that indicates it’s the end of a syllable. This symbol is missing, whether it’s a vowel or the end of a consonant. And it’s missing, I hypothesized, and another scholar before me hypothesized in 1999… I believe he already put out that theory, although I wasn’t aware of it until maybe ten years ago, that the scribes left out one of the vowels so people wouldn’t pronounce it. Because there was a prohibition to pronounce it, and you could just, out of habit, accidentally pronounce it.

Okay, so, I ended up finding three manuscripts over a number of years that had the full vowels. And one of the criticisms that was levied against my discovery was, “Well, that’s just three manuscripts. So that’s just three scribes who happen to put a vowel in. And they didn’t always put it in; they only put it in some places.” So, I said, “Okay, you’re saying it’s only three, and that’s an exception to the rule and doesn’t really prove anything. Let’s see if there’s more than three. I don’t know.”

So, around 2016, what happened is, there was this worldwide project to start digitizing the manuscripts and making them available online, something which had happened before, but on a very limited scale. There were manuscripts that were photographed, and you had to buy these books that were very expensive, sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars, to even see what was in the manuscripts, right? What scholars worked on for hundreds of years was, other scholars would go look at the manuscript and tell them what was in it. And if there was something they didn’t think was important, they just left it out.

So, around 2016, we start to have access to the photos of the manuscripts, and I immediately see, “Wow, not only is it in three manuscripts, I’ve now found it in four manuscripts, five manuscripts, six…” I actually traveled thousands of miles to see what ended up being the fourth manuscript, before the digitization, in like 2015, and then, within a few months, we go from 4 to 5 to 50. And here was my goal; this is crazy. My goal at one point was, “Okay, I want to get to 10 in my lifetime. That’s my goal. Ten manuscripts that have the full vowels, the vowels Yehovah.”

And look, honestly, if we have two witnesses, maybe that proves it, right? But the criticism… and this is one of the things I’m dealing with is, a lot of moving the goalposts. People will say, “Oh, well…” So, literally the same person said to me, he said, “Well, that’s only three manuscripts.” And so, I travelled thousands of miles to go get the fourth manuscript. It was in Cincinnati, Ohio, if memory serves me. And I could have gone on a shorter trip, but I didn’t have the money. But anyway, it ended up being thousands of miles of travel.

So, the same person later, when we exceed over a thousand, he said, “Well, yeah, of course, that’s in all the manuscripts because those are the vowels of Adonai,” which they’re not, but that’s a different question. Right? So, there’s some moving the goalposts, right? “Well, it’s only three.” Okay. Well, now it’s a thousand. “Oh well yeah, of course it’s in all the manuscripts.” Well, it’s not in all the manuscripts. There’s a percentage of the manuscripts that don’t have the full vowels at all, not anywhere, not even a single time. And the surprising thing is the later the manuscripts get, the more, in my… So, what I found so far is the later the manuscripts, the more likely they are not to have the full vowels. Which is counterintuitive and a bit surprising, but that seems to be the case.

So, you asked what the number is. So, here’s one of the problems. There was this really important discovery by one of my colleagues recently, which is that when we talked about manuscripts, up until now, we were talking about shelf marks. What’s a shelf mark? You see a bookshelf behind me… I don’t know, do you remember when you were a kid, there was the Dewey Decimal System?

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: So, every book there has a code, and when I looked in the index, right, and they had like little cards back in the day, even in our generation, right? We were taught, I’m sure you were taught, you have like a shelf with tiny little index cards, and each book has an index card that corresponds to it, right? Well, now it’s computers… What’s that?

Shannon: The card catalog. I used the catalog.

Nehemia: Card catalog, exactly. So, every card in the card catalog corresponds to a book, and it has a little code, and that’s called a shelf mark, okay? And, in libraries they don’t use the Dewey Decimal system, they use a different system. Well, let’s say for manuscripts they use a different system. They’ll often talk about the size of the manuscript, which is important because you want all the books of the same size to be on the same shelf, right? These are smaller books than these books here. Those who are listening, I’m pointing to the background from… This is a photo I took at the Bologna University Library, the oldest university in the world, in Bologna, Italy.

Shannon: Wow, beautiful.

Nehemia: And the library isn’t original. Meaning, it’s like only… it’s only like 400 or 500 years old or something, right? I was at Oxford University, and I was looking at this old Torah scroll, and this scholar comes in from Israel, walks into the library… he was a British scholar, and he’d lived in Israel, and he said, “Wow, that’s really old.” I said, “No, it’s only about 800 years old.” And he said, “Well, it’s old enough,” in his British accent. So…

All right. So, the point is, we were looking at shelf marks. What happened was, we kind of knew it didn’t, but for all practical purposes, we would say a manuscript when we really meant a shelf mark. And so, there were over 2,400 shelf marks that we had with the full vowels. And we still don’t know what the number is; this is going to be a multi-year-long project. We’re trying to use AI; it hasn’t been successful at the moment. But what we have is, a lot of these manuscripts, they fall apart into many, many pieces, and we say, “Oh here’s, you know, ten shelf marks.” Well, those ten shelf marks are really one manuscript. Okay, so maybe the number is less than 2,400? And that part we actually knew. We did not know the scale or the extent of it. We thought, “Here and there, yeah, we think it’s multiple shelf marks in a single manuscript, but it’s probably not that common.” But no, it would turn out to be very common in one of the most important collections in the world. So, that was problem A.

Problem B… and really, these are discoveries, is that there were single shelf marks that were multiple manuscripts. So, we have literally a book on the shelf, and you open it up, and you think that’s one manuscript, meaning 800 or 1,000 years ago a scribe sat down and wrote this book. Well, no. What happened is, a bunch of books fell apart, and somebody took those pages and put them into a single volume.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, is it more or less than 2,400? My guess is it’s less than 2,400, but I don’t know that at the moment.

Shannon: 2,400 individual pages? Or 24…

Nehemia: No, it’s tens of thousands, maybe over 100,000 individual pages. I don’t know the number of individual pages. There’s one collection in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that has over 90,000 pages. That’s one collection.

Shannon: Amazing.

Nehemia: You go to Cambridge University, and they have fragments from the Cairo Geniza. And sometimes the fragments are this big, sometimes they’re this big, and sometimes they’re, you know, huge, right? Many, many pages. And each fragment is its own shelf mark. And there, of course, it’s obvious that multiple fragments will make up a single manuscript, but we don’t know how many, right?

So, when you say cutting edge, this is the current challenge that we face at the moment; what are the manuscripts we have of the Bible? And in Tanakh, or Old Testament studies, we have a challenge, which, when we look at our brothers in New Testament studies, we can see how bad our challenge is. So, in the New Testament studies, you’ll hear there’s over 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, something like that, right? I think there were over 1,500, and the number keeps growing. Well, the number is growing around the edges here and there, where they’re going to libraries, finding new manuscripts. But the bulk of them have been known for, if not decades, for maybe 100 years. Most of them, the really important ones, have been known for over 100 years.

That is not the situation in Old Testament studies, right? It’s funny, I read this journal academic article from like the 70s, and they’re talking about the four key manuscripts. And then you read one from the 80s, and they’ll talk about the five key manuscripts, and then you’ll hear the nine key manuscripts, and the number keeps growing because we don’t really even have, like, a centralized database of what all the manuscripts are. So, in New Testament studies, they have the Gregory-Aland list. So, Gregory made a list, and Aland and his wife expanded it, Kurt Aland and his wife. So, every manuscript you have like a reference for, right? There’s like a number, not of the things on the shelf, but of the actual manuscript. At least in theory. We don’t have that in the Old Testament, right? One scholar will talk about the manuscript in one way, and another scholar will publish a study, and it’ll be the same exact manuscript, and people don’t know they’re talking about the same manuscript. So…

Shannon: Well, that brings up a good question, then, for you. In the documents that you have found that have the name of Yehovah…

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: Have you thought about building a database?

Nehemia: We’re working on that. I, in fact, established an institute called the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, IHBMR. We have some of the top scholars in the world that are researching there or are consulting for the IHBMR. That’s a purely academic endeavor there. And one of the main goals is to find out and document what are the manuscripts of the of the Hebrew Bible, right? Because it’s so much more fundamental, the problem, than how to pronounce the name of God, right? That’s my private passion that I have, right?

But scholarship overall in general doesn’t even know what all the Bible manuscripts are. A couple of years ago, there was a dialog going on among some of the top scholars in the world because one of our colleagues published about this manuscript that apparently had been known for decades, it just wasn’t known to us. Like, meaning, the scholars back in the 60s knew about this manuscript because it became famous, and then everybody sort of forgot about it. And it’s a manuscript in Tbilisi, Russia… sorry, Tbilisi Georgia; that was a Freudian slip, perhaps. Tbilisi Georgia, Georgia the country, not the state in the United States. And they called it the Tbilisi Codex. Now there’s people who call it by a different name, the Lailashi Codex.

Right? So, here we have a Codex that people are talking about. They’re saying it’s 9th, 10th century. That’s what the belief is, to some extent. And we’re like, “Wait a minute. We have a handful of manuscripts from this period, and there’s one we don’t know about, and it’s almost complete? How is this possible?” Right?

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: So, we have a challenge; what are the manuscripts? And then a lot of the libraries, which are doing amazing work… I’ll give you an example. The British Library is doing astounding work. They’re one of the first libraries to digitize their collection.

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay, well, what are the Bible manuscripts of the British Library? Well, they’re not interested in the Bible, they’re interested in the manuscripts. Well, they have manuscripts of, like, a medical text from the 12th century. I just made that up, I don’t know if that’s correct, right? Meaning, they have all kinds of manuscripts from all kinds of periods, right? And they’re not interested in the Hebrew Bible per se, so that’s not what they gear their database for. So, when you go to them… and you don’t go to them, you go to their website, and say, “What are all the Bible manuscripts?” You’re not going to find the answer to that. You’re going to find, you know, there’s a commentary on the Bible, right? When you type in Bible manuscripts, you’ll find, “Oh, here’s a commentary on the Bible from the 14th century.” Okay, I’m not interested in the commentaries at this moment. I want to know what the manuscripts of the Bible itself are. What are those? Who knows?

Shannon: Well, let’s say, for example, I was at a library, just for the sake of this discussion. I came across a manuscript, and I’m looking, and I said, “Oh, there’s the name of Yehovah. I’ve got to call Nehemia.” So, I would call you, and we would need to know if you have already seen this before. And you probably had, and if so, we would move on to the next. So, are you…

Nehemia: So, at this point, honestly, at this point, there are so many… Well, and then here’s another, another major factor that comes into it. So, let me talk about the Cairo Geniza. So, geniza is a term that appears in ancient Jewish sources. And it’s a room, usually in the synagogue, or it could be a cave. A geniza could be almost anything. In Israel, there are giant dumpsters, and I mean dumpsters where normally you put garbage, but they’re geniza dumpsters.

Shannon: Oh, wow.

Nehemia: Sacred books are put in those dumpsters.

Shannon: Really?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, a geniza is a receptacle. It could be a broom closet. It could be a dumpster. It could be a box in the synagogue. It could be a lot of different things. And the geniza is where you put old books. So, every synagogue around the world had, and should still have, a geniza. And like I said, it literally could just be a box in the back of the synagogue somewhere, or it could be an entire room. So, in Cairo there was a geniza that had books in it, and it wasn’t just books, it was anything written in Hebrew letters. It didn’t even have to be in Hebrew; it could be in Arabic but written in Hebrew letters.

And in 1896, there were these two sisters traveling through Cairo. They were actually going to the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, and on their way they passed through Cairo, and somebody said to them, “Hey, we understand you…” you know, these weren’t scholars, they were just kind of collectors. They said, “We understand you’re trying to buy old books and documents. We’ve got some here in our synagogue.” And they’re like, “Yeah, whatever. We’re going to Saint Catherine’s Monastery,” which is one of the old… I think it’s the oldest continually used monastery, maybe in the world? I’m not really sure. It’s in the Sinai desert. It’s where they have the Codex Sinaiticus, or it’s where it was discovered, anyway, one of the most important manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek. And so, anyway, these sisters, they buy some documents, and they bring them back to England, or to the United Kingdom. And they eventually get into the hands of a professor at Cambridge, and he discovers the lost Hebrew source of the Book of Ben Sira.

What is Ben Sira? So, there’s a book in the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha are the Old Testament books in Greek that were not included in the Jewish Bible. So, if you look at the oldest manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint, and more importantly, the Septuagint preserved by the Greek Orthodox Church, that is the translation of the Old Testament in Greek, then you will see that there are books that aren’t in Hebrew. Entire books. And one of those is called The Wisdom of Sirach or Ben Sira. And The Wisdom of Ben Sira is of particular interest, because it says in the introduction that it’s a translation from Hebrew. So, we know it was written in Hebrew, unless he’s lying, and what these two Scottish sisters in 1896 found in the Cairo Geniza was the Hebrew original of Ben Sira. So, it was known in Greek for thousands of years, but the Hebrew original was lost. And then it was found in this broom closet in the synagogue, right, in this geniza.

Shannon: Wow! Wow!

Nehemia: And then they go to the geniza and they take out hundreds of thousands of fragments. And like I said, some of them are this big, some of them are, you know, many, many pages. So, what is in the geniza? Well, that only became available, really even to scholars… meaning, in the past, what you had to do is, you would have to get on a plane and go to Cambridge and sit in the library, and you would ask to see these binders. Actually, before that, then it was just boxes, like loose pages. But more recently, they have them in these binders and they’re sewn into mylar, which is kind of like a plastic that protects them. And, if you’re lucky and you go for, I don’t know, a month, you can go through thousands of fragments, but there are 196,000 fragments, is the estimate I heard, at Cambridge alone. There’s also dozens of libraries that have fragments of the Cairo Geniza.

So, what are all the fragments that have the name with full vowels? Well, now, most of those are digitized and available online, and I’ve started going through them. And I gave up after a certain point because there are just so many. So, if you were to find one, I’d be like, “Okay, yeah, we have lots of those.” Right? And I’ve stopped counting because there’s so many. Now, that doesn’t mean I won’t ever count in the future. I may in the future. But the problem, like I said, is, if we have, let’s call it 20,000 or 30,000 fragments just of the Tanakh with vowels in the Cairo Geniza, that’s my estimate at the moment, well, that might not be 20,000 or 30,000 manuscripts, that’s 20,000 or 30,000 shelf marks. Maybe it’s a thousand manuscripts, I don’t know. We’re going to need something like AI to determine that, I think.

Shannon: Okay, I think that’s a good answer to my question. That is complicated!

Nehemia: That’s the short answer. Oh, and then I didn’t tell you the new thing. This was all the background. So, the new thing is there’s something called the European Geniza. What’s the European Geniza? The Cairo Geniza was an actual closet in the synagogue, sort of like a closet, a little chamber. The European Geniza is by analogy; it’s not actually a geniza. What the European Geniza is… you see these books behind me? And these are from the Bologna University Library. These aren’t Hebrew books per se, right? These are just books in the library. Well, when these books would get damaged, they would cut up old books and use them in the binding. So, those are called binding fragments.

Shannon: Oh.

Nehemia: We are at the at the sort of precipice, or the gateway, to a whole new era in research, because people are starting to go through these binding fragments and document them. And you can take out your iPhone or your Android and get a photo without even taking apart the old book. And so, now we have thousands of binding fragments, which they’re calling the European Geniza. And sometimes you end up finding in these binding fragments, like, lost works, right? Now, in this case, it’s not a lost work. We’re looking for the Tanakh, right? And we know what’s in the Tanakh, the Old Testament, just we’re looking for more copies of it.

So, when all is said and done, let’s say a hundred years from now, and hopefully by then we know everything that’s in all the genizas, I can’t even imagine what the number is going to be. We might find out that there’s 10,000 manuscripts of the Old Testament that was preserved, and maybe we’ll find out there’s only, you know, I don’t know, 2,000, but we thought there were 10,000 because there were lots of different pieces.

Shannon: Well, you’ve got at least a thousand at this juncture. We could say a thousand would be…

Nehemia: Like I said, the number we stopped counting at was in the 2,400s.

Shannon: Okay. That’s a lot. Folks, we’re live with Dr. Nehemia Gordon. I got a bunch of questions, and each of these questions we could do a whole show on.

Nehemia: I’ll try to be brief, although my nickname is Short Story Long.

Shannon: [Laughter] Well listen, I’m the marathon man, so I can go six hours if we need to. So, we’ll meet somewhere in the middle. Okay.

Nehemia: Okay. So, when the coffee ends, so does the teaching.

Shannon: Folks, I’m excited to have Nehemia here. Really, I just love the research you’re doing. Okay, I’m going to ask you some rapid-fire questions.

Nehemia: All right.

Shannon: Since our last show, I understand there’s been a discovery of a new manuscript called the Sassoon Manuscript that was made available and bought at an auction. I mean, we had the Aleppo Codex, the Leningrad Codex, and then the Sassoon? Did you get a chance to…

Nehemia: They call it the Sassoon Codex. So, it’s not a new discovery. It was a manuscript that was known. It’s been known probably since, I would guess, the 1950s. Well, I mean, it was known before that. So, there was a Jewish merchant named Sassoon. And I always forget; is he Solomon David Sassoon or David Solomon Sassoon? There was one guy that was SD and the other that was DS, right? David Solomon, Solomon David, and they were like father and son, I think. So, it was one of the Sassoons who, in the 1920s… he was from a Jewish family from Baghdad, and many Baghdadi Jews end up moving to India when the British and other Europeans start to take over India, and they’re like, “Okay, well, we can speak the local languages. We’ll become your merchants.” And then he ends up eventually in Hong Kong, and then eventually in England.

And so, he ends up with this international merchant empire stretching from London to Hong Kong. And he’s got all this money, and he wants to invest it in Jewish studies, in Jewish causes. And so, he ends up buying all these manuscripts. And in the 1920s, he buys a manuscript that he realizes is really, really old and really important. In the 50s, they photograph it. Remember, up until the 50s, we’re relying on what other people say is in the manuscript. In the 50s, they photograph it, but the photographs aren’t actually available to everybody. So, you have to kind of be one of a small cadre of scholars to get access to the photos.

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: There was a book published maybe like a little over ten years ago, I want to say, maybe 2014, and it mentions that the Sassoon Codex was owned by a private… and we knew it was sold. It’s quite a crazy story. So, in the United Kingdom, in England, they have something that Americans call the death tax. The death tax is a tax your estate pays when you die. And in the UK, the death tax is so crippling that when a really rich person dies, he has to sell off a lot of his assets for his family to pay it. And so, they end up selling off this codex, and it’s bought by the British Railway Pension Fund, or some random thing like that. Just as an investment; they have no interest in Hebrew manuscripts. They ended up selling it a few years later, and then it’s in turn sold to another person, and that person whose name was Jacqui Safra, who is a businessman in Geneva, Switzerland. He owns it from 1989, all the way up until… it was sold a few years ago for $38.1 million. My understanding is it’s the highest price ever paid for a book. There are documents that people paid more for, I think it was like a copy of the Declaration of Independence… Well, it’s worth whatever anyone will pay for it. I would say it’s priceless. This was a debate that some scholars had. One scholar said, “No, I don’t think anybody should pay more than 10 million.” And I said, “You’re clearly not a Bible scholar. From a scholarly perspective, it’s priceless.” And the thought was maybe somebody would pay 30 to 50 million, that was the estimate. And I said, “Fifty million? That’s like giving it away. What are you talking about?” Of course, I don’t have 30 or 50 million, so that’s easy for me to say. But no, it’s priceless. It’s priceless because…

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: …and I’ll try to explain this really briefly. So, long story short, this businessman buys it in 1989, and he puts it in a safe and doesn’t take it out for decades. And there was a rumor that he owned it. And every time I would meet people who seemed like they had a lot of money, because I kind of assumed all rich people know each other, I would say, “Do you know this businessman, Safra?” And they would say, no, I don’t. And literally for years I would meet people and I would say, “Oh, you know, you have a really nice house. Do you know this guy Safra?”

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: “No, I don’t know this guy. A businessman in Switzerland. Why would I know him?” I don’t know. I’m just… my friend Keith Johnson says, you throw stuff at the wall, and you see what sticks. So, then out of the blue in 2019, I get an email inviting me to go examine this codex in Geneva, Switzerland.

Shannon: Oh, wow!

Nehemia: Yeah. I go there, I fly to Switzerland, we spend several days, and I end up doing a bunch of tests and examinations on it. Then it sold, what was it, last year or two years ago? I don’t remember, 2023, I want to say. Yeah, in 2023 it sold. Yeah, at Sotheby’s actually, it sold.

Shannon: You got to actually examine it before it went up for auction at Sotheby’s.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: Yeah. Were you able to photograph the whole thing?

Nehemia: Well, I have photographs of the whole thing that I was given by the previous owner and given permission to publish, and those photographs are online at ihbmr.com at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research’s website.

Shannon: Now Nehemia, what is the significance of the discovery of this? Now, this leads into another question. If I’m correct, that the official Tanakh for Israel is the Jerusalem Crown, do I have the right…

Nehemia: So, what do you mean by official? Well, what makes it official? I mean, generally in publishing, if you say something’s official, that’s what makes it official. That’s kind of a marketing term. So, let me explain this, and this is a bit complicated. I’ll try to explain this kind of in a layman’s term if possible. I’m not sure I’m capable of it, but I’ll give it a try. So, there is an inscription from around the year 1050 from the Aleppo Codex, which is considered by scholars to be the most accurate representation of what’s called the Masoretic Text. The word mesora means transmission. And, so, roughly Masoretic text is like what Christians might call Textus Receptus.

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Meaning, if you asked a Jew in the year 1200 or 1300, “What does it say in the Bible? I want to know the exact letters and the exact vowels. What does it say in the Bible?” They would say, “Well, the version that we consider to be the received text, the Masoretic Text, is the great manuscript of Aaron Ben Asher.” Today we call that the Aleppo Codex.

The importance of the Sassoon Codex is that, from the time the Aleppo Codex became famous… when that is, is a bit of a question; let’s leave that for a different discussion. But sometime around the 10th or 11th century, certainly by the year 1050 that’s the case, that in Jerusalem there are people who are going to Jerusalem to check their Bibles against the Aleppo Codex or at least check specific points in the Bible and say, “I want to know if my Bible is accurate. Let me see what’s in the Aleppo Codex.”

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: They didn’t call it that at the time, they called it the Great Codex, or Manuscript of Ben Asher. All right. So, from that time people start saying, “Oh, wait, my manuscript is wrong. Let me correct it according to the Aleppo Codex.” And what they end up doing is sort of homogenizing all the Bibles to match the Aleppo Codex, believing that the Aleppo Codex is the original Bible that Moses wrote, or that Ezra copied, right? Which maybe is correct, maybe isn’t. The importance of the Sassoon Codex is that the original version of it was copied before that process was finalized, let’s say. And so, we might have differences between the Aleppo Codex and the Sassoon Codex that go back to a time that either predates the Aleppo Codex or are from the same period as the Aleppo Codex.

So, I’ll give you an analogy in Christianity. In the Catholic world, you have the pope, and the pope is the head of the church. Well, if you went back to the year 1050, right… So, in 1053, I want to say, or 1052 is the split between the Greek Orthodox and the Catholics. If you went back to the year 1050, and you asked, you know, the Christians in Antioch, “Who’s the head of the church,” they would say, “Well, the head of the church here is the Archbishop of Antioch or the Bishop of Antioch.” What about the pope? Well, he’s just the Bishop of Rome, right? So, in other words, I don’t know that there was even a concept… certainly, if you went to the year 300 or 500, let’s call it 500. If you went to the year 500 and you said, “Who’s the head of the church,” they would say, “Well, the head of the church in Constantinople is so and so, and the head of the church in Alexandria is this other person, and the head of the church in Rome is this other guy.” Well, isn’t he the pope? Yeah, he’s the Pope of Rome. He’s the Bishop of Rome.

So, the Aleppo Codex, in a sense, and I want to, we say in Hebrew, “lehavdil elef alfei havdalot”, “to separate a thousand separations”, right? But the analogy here is that the Aleppo Codex became effectively the official Bible, which, maybe should be, maybe shouldn’t be; that’s a separate discussion. The Sassoon Codex was copied before the Aleppo Codex, or certainly, I would say, at the time or before the Aleppo Codex was the official Bible, and so, it has echoes of another official Bible, let’s put it that way.

Shannon: And is the Sassoon Codex… is it missing some of the pages?

Nehemia: It is missing some pages. Both the Aleppo and the Sassoon are missing some pages. Thankfully, they’re mostly not the same pages, meaning there are many pages of the Sassoon that are missing in the Aleppo.

Shannon: Oh, well, if you were just to take the Sassoon and the Aleppo, and reconcile them, would you have all the complete pages of the Tanakh?

Nehemia: Not all. You’d have most.

Shannon: Now, what about the Leningrad pages?

Nehemia: So, Leningrad is complete from beginning to end.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Leningrad is the basis of most modern printings of the Bible, and that’s because it’s complete. Leningrad is kind of a Johnny-come-lately, in a sense. It was completed around the year 1008. Compare that to the Aleppo Codex, which is completed around the year 925. And you say, “Well, that’s 80 years. What’s the big deal?” It’s an important 80 years. During those 80 years, the Aleppo Codex effectively becomes the official Bible. And the scribe of the Leningrad Codex claims that he relied on the Aleppo Codex, right? Or he relied on the work of Aharon Ben-Asher, right?

So, in other words, the Leningrad Codex is sort of near the end of the process. Not exactly, but it’s nearer to the end of the process, whereas the Aleppo Codex and the Sassoon Codex, they’re closer to, let’s say, when the process is in full swing. And the point is, if I take a Bible from today and I say, “Oh, it’s the same as the Aleppo Codex.” Well, no duh, Sherlock, of course it is. It’s based indirectly on the Aleppo Codex.

But what I, as a scholar, want to do, I want to get back as close as possible to the earlier manuscripts before the process was crystallized. I know that sounds a bit complicated. And look, you have to understand; I, as a scholar, am splitting hairs over the minutia that the average person would look at these three Bibles, the Leningrad, Aleppo and Sassoon and would say, “But they’re all the same.” Right? We don’t have a Bible where Ishmael was bound to the altar rather than Isaac, right? We don’t have a Bible where God chose Esau instead of Jacob. That’s not the kind of difference we’re talking about, right? What we’re talking about is a certain word spelled one way or another way, even though it doesn’t change the meaning. That’s what we’re talking about.

Shannon: Okay. So, with these three codexes, the Aleppo, Leningrad and Sassoon…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: …is that what is produced, the Jerusalem Crown? What is the Jerusalem Crown, for those who don’t know?

Nehemia: The Jerusalem Crown was a… so there was a scholar named Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, who was one of the great scholars of the study of the Hebrew texts of the Bible, and what he said is, “Yes, we have six or maybe seven manuscripts,” that’s what he had, really had access to at the time, and maybe it’s eight, right? He found another one later. He has less than ten manuscripts, and they have slight differences. He says, “But the differences aren’t that big. And when you compare all the manuscripts, even if there are slight differences in a particular place, when you compare them across all the manuscripts, they represent a uniform text.” That was his argument.

And so, he said, “All right, I need to reconstruct what that uniform text is in the places the Aleppo Codex is missing.” And about a third of the Aleppo Codex is missing. And when it was missing, he used the Leningrad and the Sassoon Codex. He was one of the few scholars who had access to the Sassoon Codex, to the black and white photos from the 1950s. So, there were really six main manuscripts he used, and you could, like, add two more later, right? But six were initially used. He had Aleppo, Leningrad, Sassoon, something called the Damascus Crown, also known as Sassoon 507. Sassoon 507 was also part of this Jewish merchant, Sassoon’s, collection. He had Oriental 4445 in the British Library, and the sixth one he had was… oh, the Cairo Codex of the prophets, which he believed was…

What’s that?

Shannon: I knew I was missing something. The Damascus Crown…

Nehemia: So, those are what you could call, based on his early research, the big six. Later, he added another manuscript by the same scribe as the Leningrad Codex, that was stolen, and it’s currently in a private collection in New York. Officially, we don’t know where it is, but I believe it’s in New York somewhere. Right? And then there’s another one in Cambridge University that he would use for certain portions… in any event… So, he has less than ten manuscripts, and he’s reconstructing what the original Masoretic Text was. In other words, if you asked Aaron ben Asher, “What is the exact dot in this exact word,” the dots are vowels and other things, then Aaron ben Asher would have told you that it’s… or let’s say that what Rabbi Mordechai Breuer was doing is reconstructing what was the Bible of Aaron ben Asher based on the Aleppo Codex and the missing portions of the Aleppo Codex, using other manuscripts and using notes.

There are proofreader notes called Masoretic notes in these manuscripts, and based on that he said, “Yes, there’s differences, but those are mistakes. We can correct the mistakes by comparing all the manuscripts and finding the common denominator between that.”

Shannon: So, can you call the Jerusalem Crown “the unified text”?

Nehemia: It’s the reconstructed Masoretic Text of the Ben-Asher tradition, that’s what you could say. So, wait a minute; then Rabbi Breuer died, and his student, who was my professor when I did my PhD, Prof. Yosef Ofer, took the process one step forward, and he said, “Okay, Rabbi Breuer printed this Bible. Let’s turn that into a digital text that we can then print as a book.” And that took years of checking every dot and dash, and he once explained how he had research assistants who would sit there for eight hours and not find a single mistake. And so, the Jerusalem Crown is a printed edition of the Bible, a modern printed edition from the 21st century, that is as close as we currently have to the Masoretic Text of Aaron Ben-Asher. Let’s put it that way.

Shannon: Well, let me ask you the million-dollar question. The Apostle Paul, Shaul, correct me if I’m wrong in my pronunciation, he said, “What advantage is there to being a Jew?” He said, “Much in every way. To them, we’re committed to being the keepers of the oracles of God.” So, I believe you’ve done a good job. Would you say that you have the Bible? The Tanakh?

Nehemia: Me being the Jews? Or me being Nehemia Gordon? I would say, yes, the Jews preserve the Hebrew text of Scripture, that’s beyond doubt. Right? And what we’re talking about, what I spend most of my hours of most days on is the minutia around the edges of small, small details. And let me explain why the small details are so important. And I could give both a theological reason and a historical reason, and I think it’s important to distinguish between the two. Because as a scholar, the theological reason is, you know, that’s not important, right? But as a person of faith, it is important. So, the theological reason is, I believe that God wrote this book and it was preserved and transmitted by Jewish scribes. And what they preserved and transmitted, I believe there’s divine intervention there. Although the story is much more complicated than I thought it was maybe ten years ago, which is that it’s not… In other words, if I ask the question, “Which of these was written down by Baruch ben Neriya, the scribe of Jeremiah?” I don’t know the answer to that, because sometimes there’s two or three different Jewish traditions about what was written down. And I believe one of those is what Baruch ben Neriya wrote. I don’t know which one necessarily, though. And maybe it’s none of those.

But again, we’re talking about the difference of… Think about this; here’s an analogy in English. Is the word color spelled with a U or without a U? Right? So, in British English they spell it with a U, and in American English they spell it without a U. Jews obsess about that. And here’s another famous example; the playwright Shakespeare wrote his own name something like a dozen different ways. Why did he do that? Because there was no fixed spelling. So, that’s what we’re talking about in the Hebrew text of Scripture; there’s no fixed spelling. And because of that, we say the word sukkot is spelled this way in this verse and that way in this other verse, and we want to reproduce it perfectly. And if we have differences between the manuscripts, I want to document what those differences are. And a lot of people want to know what those differences are.

Now, from a historical perspective, here’s another question. Already in the Second Temple period, it seems… there are Jews who are saying, “The fact that the word color is spelled with a U in this verse…” And again, this is an analogy, right? “The fact that the word color is spelled this special way in this verse tells us a secret deep message that you are very important to God, and that’s why the word color is… no matter what color you are, you’re important to God.” And then look, that’s just an analogy I made up.

Here’s the actual example. There are three verses in Numbers 28 and 29 that have aberrant spellings. And in one particular word there’s what the rabbis considered to be an extra Mem, another verse that has an extra Yud and another verse, an extra Mem. And together those three letters spell the word mayim, water. And the rabbis in the Second Temple period believed there was supposed to be a water libation in the Temple, something the Torah never commands. A water libation, right? Libations are when you take a jug or some kind of container of wine and you pour it out in front of the altar or on the altar. So, the rabbis instituted a water libation based on three words with aberrant spellings in Numbers 28, I believe it’s Numbers 28 and 29, maybe it’s in Leviticus 23. I could be remembering it wrong.

What that tells you is there were some Jews in the Second Temple period who believed that their text of Scripture was fixed down to the very letter. And they had traditions that in this particular verse, this particular word, is spelled with a U, and in this other verse it’s not spelled with the U. And that tells you no matter what color you are, you’re important to God, right? In this case, we have a water libation, right? It’s the actual example. So, wow! So, we have a fixed text already in Second Temple period; what is that fixed text? Is it the same as the Aleppo Codex and the text reconstructed of Aaron ben Asher? Or is it slightly different? That’s the $64,000 question that I spend all of my days agonizing over and trying to determine and figure out.

And then there’s a deeper question; what is the text that Baruch ben Neriya wrote? That’s already beyond the scope of what I’m able to do as a scholar. But I can get very, very close to that text. Let’s put it that way. I think I can…

Shannon: I can agree that God, Yehovah…

Nehemia: That’s a theological statement that I’m happy to acknowledge and agree with. But as a scholar, I can’t deal with that statement. Let’s put it that way.

Shannon: Here’s the deal; if we’re going to be held accountable for knowing the Word of God…

Nehemia: Yes.

Shannon: … and we did not have it, then we could all give the excuse. “Well, look, you can’t judge me for Your word, because we didn’t have it.”

Nehemia: No, but I have a different answer for that. And this is entirely a religious position. Meaning, here is me as a man of faith, and now let’s open up our Bible. So, we have Deuteronomy 30 verse 12. I’m going to start in verse 11. And so, this is God speaking; this is no longer me speaking. So, it says, Ki ha’mitzva hazot ashser anokhi metzavkha hayom, “For this commandment that I command you today,” the “I” here is Moses… lo niflet hi mimkha, “it is not too difficult for you,” ve’lo rechoka hi, “and it is not far away from you.” That’s Deuteronomy 30 verse 11.

And then here’s a very famous three words in the Hebrew, lo ba’shamayim hi, “It is not in heaven.” Le’emor, mi ya’ale lanu hashamaima ve’yikacheha lanu va’yashmi’enu ota ve’na’asena. “It is not in heaven saying, ‘Who shall go up for us to heaven, and take it for us, that he may cause us to hear it, and we will do it.’”

And then it says in verse 13, Ve’lo me’ever la’yam hi, “It is not across the sea.” le’emor mi ya’avor lanu el ever ha’yam ve’yikacheha lanu va’yashmi’enu ota ve’na’asena, “saying, ‘Who will go for us across the sea and take it for us, and cause us to hear it, and we will do it.’” Ki karov eleikha ha’davar meod, “For the matter is very close to you.” be’fikha uv’levavkha la’asoto, “it is in your mouth, and it is in your heart to do it.” So, that’s Deuteronomy 30:11-14.

And what does that mean? What it means is, in the time of Moses… let’s just say that Moses wrote the copy of the Torah, and there’s only a single copy of the Torah, because they didn’t have printing, right? So, you’d literally have to write it out by hand, and someone would take that Torah and bring it to Athens, and the Israelites would say, “We don’t have the Torah. It’s over the sea in Athens.” Okay, God holds you accountable for what you know and what you’re able to do.

Now, if somebody brings back the Torah to us from some other place, great, we’ll do what we have access to. And we actually see an example of this in the story of King Josiah. Josiah was this young boy king, and he wants… it’s my favorite story in the Bible, the story of King Josiah, Yoshiyahu in Hebrew. King Josiah is one of the last kings of Judah, and around 621 BCE he has ordered the Temple to be renovated, the Temple in Jerusalem. And in the Temple in Jerusalem they find a scroll, a scroll that had just been sitting there and wasn’t being read and nobody paid attention to.

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: They bring it to King Josiah, and they read it to him. And he rips his garment, which is what you do when someone dies. When someone dies, you rip your garment. And why does he do that? Because he just heard the Torah read to him for the first time, and he realizes we have been sinning, and we are going to be punished by God.

Shannon: Wow!

Nehemia: And what were the sins? Well, we’re told three main things were the sins that he was especially concerned with. There was an annual ceremony of reiterating the covenant, of remembering that we have this covenant with God and proclaiming this covenant and recommitting to the covenant, and that was the Passover sacrifice. So, that is the Passover sacrifice, was the annual recommitment to the covenant, and they hadn’t been doing that. Or if they were doing it, they weren’t doing it in Jerusalem, right? Meaning, there were people who were doing it like “on top of every hill and under every leafy tree,” as Jeremiah says.

The second thing is, they were worshiping God, Yehovah, the true God, the God of Israel, they were worshiping through statues. They were worshiping through idols. And they were worshiping other gods along with that, right? So, they had God and they had his wife, Ashera. Why did they have his wife? Because the Canaanite god had a wife, so they attributed to God what the Canaanite gods had had. So, they realize we’re not supposed to worship idols, whether it’s Yehovah or some other god.

Number three, the third sin that he becomes aware of, and he tears his clothes over, is that we’re only supposed to bring sacrifices to Yehovah in Jerusalem, at the Temple, and nowhere else. And he goes around the country destroying what are called the high places.

Shannon: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: So, those are the three big things that he embraces and that he was unaware of. And so, Josiah, you know, didn’t know what was in the Torah until it was read to him. So, he was bound by what he knew. Now, there are certain things you’re bound by, even if you don’t have the Torah, because they should be obvious. Even if you don’t have the Torah, you know you’re not supposed to murder people. Everybody intuitively knows that. And if they think you’re supposed to murder people, it’s because somebody convinced them of that, or they convinced themselves of that, right?

You know, in the US Constitution, they call this the law of nature and nature’s God. Most people have no idea what that means. I’ll tell you what I understand, and maybe I’m wrong. But we have this idea in medieval Judaism, and the idea is that if we sat down as rational, thinking human beings and said, “We don’t know anything about God. We want to make a society; a society that functions, and which is a civil society where we can all live together in civility. And it’s not just the strongest, just kills and murders the other person.” We would come up with certain rules and laws, and some people would call those the ethical, or the moral laws.

Some of them are not obvious. I’ll give you an example of something that’s obvious and something that’s not obvious. So, an obvious one that everybody in every society will come up with is, don’t murder. That doesn’t mean don’t kill. There are certain situations where you should kill, where, if somebody is coming to murder you or murder your family, you defend yourself, right? But you shouldn’t murder. You shouldn’t steal, right? Those are universal laws that are the law of nature and nature’s god, in the words of the US Constitution, or what they call mitzvot sikhliot in medieval Judaism. Mitzvot are commandments and sikhliot are rational commandments.

So, there are two kinds of commandments in the Torah, as Jews have seen it in Jewish philosophy; rational commandments, or things that we would figure out on our own, and those we figure out because our ancestor ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, and so, we’re expected to know you shouldn’t murder. Now there’s people around the world who think, “Oh, it’s good to murder,” right? There are entire religions that think it’s good to murder, that it’s incumbent upon them from their god to murder, especially innocent… There is an account of one of the hostages who was taken on October 7th, and for the first 50 days he thought his wife and children were alive. And he later said, “It’s good I didn’t know that they were dead, because I wouldn’t have made it through those 50 days.”

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Later, he was told by these murderous barbarians who kidnaped him…

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: “Oh we killed your wife and children because we were told we already have too many hostages. Only take men. Kill all the women and children.”

Shannon: Hmm.

Nehemia: So, there are people who believe it’s a mitzvah, who, it’s incumbent upon them from their god to kill. That is a perversion of any true religion, but that’s what some people believe. That it’s particularly incumbent upon them to kill innocent women and children civilians when they’re not defending themselves. But every society would have ultimately come up with these principles that you should not kill, you should not murder. And those are things that we would know intuitively if we just think about it and discuss it amongst ourselves as rational human beings. Those are the laws of nature and nature’s god, or the mitzvot sikhliot in Jewish terms, the rational commandments.

There’s also Torah commandments. And Torah commandments are commandments we would never figure out in a million years, unless God told us. And God… what’s that?

Shannon: Basically, he that has been given much, much is required.

Nehemia: Absolutely. Or as God says in Leviticus, He says, “I will be sanctified through those who are close to Me.” Right? When He burns up the sons of Aaron, they’re like, “What’s going on here?” He said, “Those are the people… the two sons of Aaron were the ones who were supposed to go into the Tabernacle and represent the whole people before God,” and so, there’s a much higher standard expected of those who represent God. And I believe that God chose Israel to be a light unto the nations, not because Israel’s special or holy in some way inherently, but because God said, “All right, I need some representatives for the whole world to look at, and you’ll be a good example or a bad example. A good example is if you obey Me; the world will see that this is what happens when you obey me. If you disobey me, the world will see that this is what happens when you disobey God.” Right?

So, it’s not such a desirable thing. You know, all of the great prophets of Israel said, “Choose somebody else.” And there is this story the rabbis tell, which they just made up, that God offered the Torah to all the nations, and unlike Moses, who said, “Choose somebody else,” and Jeremiah, who said, “Choose somebody else,” Israel said, “Oh, I accept that. Choose me.” That’s not a story that’s in the Tanakh, that’s a made-up story. Israel was chosen despite themselves, not because of themselves.

Shannon: Well, that was a good answer. If you’re just joining me, we’re with Dr. Nehemia Gordon. Nehemia, is it correct that you are fluent in English, Hebrew, but you also speak some Greek and Aramaic?

Nehemia: I don’t speak Greek, but I read Ancient Greek and Aramaic. I’m much better at Aramaic than I am at Greek, and a little bit of Arabic. I’m quite good at ancient Phoenician, Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, but there’s not a large vocabulary in those, so it’s kind of easy if you know Hebrew.

Shannon: Okay, so, here’s the question. What does Dr. Nehemia Gordon use as his study Bible? Now, do you prefer to read right out of the Hebrew, or do you read in English?

Nehemia: I definitely read out of the Hebrew, and I’ll look at different English translations, but I definitely prefer to read it out of the Hebrew. There’s an old saying that every translator is a traitor; it sounds better in the original Italian. It’s an Italian expression.

Shannon: Which of the codexes do you prefer to read from?

Nehemia: So, I will read from a modern digital edition, which is based on the Leningrad Codex, and then, at various opportunities, I will compare it to the various manuscripts.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Rarely do I find a significant difference. But I’ll tell you where I do find a significant difference. Before I get to that, I know you want to move to this question. I just want to finish up the thing about how there’s rational commandments and there’s Torah commandments. So, the Torah commandments are commandments we wouldn’t come up with on our own, and it’s not intuitive, at least from a Jewish perspective, what those are.

So, one intuitive one is God says, “Don’t eat pig.” Why don’t eat pig? Because God said so. Is there some rational reason? Maybe. But God didn’t tell us what that is. So, we’re supplying the rational reason, and we have to be very careful. Because what people do, in Judaism they’ve done this, they said, “Oh, we were told not to eat pig because it has parasites. If I heat it to a high enough temperature, I can then eat pig.” You know, it says in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32, “Don’t add and don’t take away from all the commandments,” and you’ve now taken away from one of the commandments. From my perspective, okay? So, we have to be very careful to provide the reason when God didn’t tell or even hint at what the reason is, because then we might end up undoing the commandments.

So, among those rational commandments… look, in Christianity, historically, there was a… you know, it’s interesting; some Christians will say that the law was done away with, and they’re not subject to the laws of God. But then other Christians have like over a thousand rules, like, you can’t let your hair grow long is one of the rules in some Christian denominations. You can’t drink alcohol in some Christian denominations. One of them, in medieval Christianity, is that you can’t marry your first cousin. Jews have historically married their first cousin. And I’m not judging it one way or another, I’m just saying that, there you have a moral principle. You say, “Well, it’s disgusting.” Well, who decides it’s disgusting? The Torah didn’t say it was disgusting, and Jews historically did it. Now, you could say there are rational reasons not to do it because of birth defects, right? But that is not an ethical decision, right? That’s not a Torah decision, let’s put it that way.

So, there is an example of a Torah commandment that… the Torah doesn’t say that. There’s a long list of people you can’t marry, right? You can’t marry your aunt, right? There’s a lot… you can’t marry your daughter-in-law. Whether it’s your physical son or your adopted son, it’s an abomination according to the Torah to marry your daughter. Okay, the Torah says… it doesn’t say anything about first cousin. Right? So, those are Torah commandments. We would never know those, or we would come to different conclusions, if we just tried to figure those out themselves. And we’re not subject to those if we don’t know about them. God’s not going to hold us accountable for marrying our first cousin or for marrying my aunt if I didn’t know any better. And that’s why God comes to educate us and tell us, “Hey, here are these commandments I want you to follow. Why? Because I say so.” Right?

All right, so, now let’s go back to the other question you asked, which I forgot.

Oh, which Bible do I use? So, I do read it from the Hebrew. And then I try to look at different manuscripts when I see something suspicious in particular, and then I’ll look at different English translations. I haven’t found any English translation that always gets it right. And sometimes, in fact, quite often on a daily basis, I’ll see translations in the English that are not translations of the Hebrew text. They’re translation of either a made up text, meaning, they read the same Hebrew I did and they said, “That doesn’t make sense to us. Let’s change the text.” And they’re actually changing the Hebrew text, or it’ll be based on the Greek or some other translation, in English.

Shannon: That’s actually a great point you brought up to lead me into my next question. I’m going to throw the Scripture up here on the screen.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: So, we can look at it. Hang on a minute. Tell me, Nehemia, if you can see this. Is it big enough?

Nehemia: Hold on… I’m going to turn the air conditioning down here because I’m hot. Yes, I can see it. Chapter 15…

Shannon: Now, I’m in Genesis chapter 15. I’m going to ask you some short questions. Okay, Genesis 15. Here’s the first question.

Nehemia: I’ll do my best to give a short answer.

Shannon: “After these things, the word of the LORD came unto Abram in a vision, saying: Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.” Okay. So, let me tell you about a project I’m working on.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: I’m doing it for myself. In the old days, if you wanted a copy of the Bible, the Tanakh, you had to hire someone, a scribe, right, to do it. And I think kings were required to copy it themselves. Is that true? Okay.

Nehemia: In Deuteronomy, it says that one of the obligations of a king is to make a copy of the Torah. Yeah.

Shannon: So, let me tell you something I’m doing, and you can be my sanity check, if I’m off the rails or what. Okay. I’ve taken a Cambridge King James Version of the Bible. I’ve got the word document up here on the screen from Genesis…

Nehemia: What does it mean that it’s Cambridge? I’m not familiar with it…

Shannon: Well, so it’s the official King James that’s printed by Cambridge to this date.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: It’s the KJV. King James Version, authorized version, 1769.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Shannon: So, it’s the only Bible that I understand in the English language that’s not copyrighted outside of England. So, if you try to take one of the other English versions…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: …and copy more than a paragraph or a page, you’ve got to get permission. But not so for the King James. It’s unbound. But that being said, what I want to do is, I’m… Let me get back on the main screen here for a second. In 2005, I prayed to God. And I said, “God, I’m just totally confused here. And I know You’re not the author of confusion.” We got people out there saying, God’s name is Yahweh. We’ve got people out there saying, we don’t know what it is. We just have the Tetragrammaton. They were saying YHWH, YHVH. We had some people that were writing G underscore D, and that’s as far as they’d gone. They wouldn’t even write any more. They thought it was profane to put the O in there. And I said, “God, I’m confused here. What is Your name?”

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: Shouldn’t I be able to know that? And fast forward, a few years down the road. I met you, and I learned about your research, and you found the divine name of Yehovah. And I’m forever grateful to the work that you’ve done. And I believe there’s others that feel the same way, like me. But when I found out the name, Yehovah, I said, “There’s no turning back for me.” So, I’m very angry, Nehemia, that today, about any English Bible, they’re going to put in here, capital L-O-R-D. So, my understanding is that every time we run across capital LORD, that’s a placeholder in the English for Yehovah. Am I correct so far?

Nehemia: Usually. We’ll talk about the exceptions to the rule in a minute. But go ahead.

Shannon: So, when I see LORD, I know that that is just a placeholder. So, as I’m reading the Bible, I will read, “After these things, the word of Yehovah came unto Abraham.” Abram. Now here’s what I want to ask you. My first question. Verse 15 says, “And Abram said, Lord GOD.” Now I’ve run into a couple situations where there’s capital GOD. Is that synonymous with capital LORD? Should I put in Yehovah here?

Nehemia: Yes. So, here it’s Adonai Yehovah.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: In the Hebrew.

Shannon: So, the word Adonai, that equals LORD, capital L-o-r-d?

Nehemia: Yes. Right. I mean, Adonai literally means “my great Lord” or “my great lords”, but… Either “my lords” or “my great Lord”.

Shannon: So, look at what I’m going to do here…

Nehemia: “My great lord” is Adonai, so “my great lord Yehovah” would be a literal translation of verse 2, Lord God.

Shannon: You’re looking at a King James Authorized Version, as they call it. I’m taking my King James, for my own purposes, I’m wanting to go in, and my bucket list is I want to create a King James with the divine name of Yehovah restored into the word. Because I think it’s an abomination to know his name, and we keep using capital L-O-R-D. So, if I were to come here and I would read down here in verse four, “And behold, the word of the LORD.” I would put Yehovah in here. Now that’s what I’m doing. Let me ask you a question. Should the name of Yehovah be in all caps, or should it be capital Y and then lowercase e-h-o-v-a-h?

Nehemia: Oh, I mean, that’s kind of a personal decision, because Hebrew doesn’t have capital letters, so I…

Shannon: Now I’m… I will go down here. “And he believed in the LORD.” He believed in Yehovah. Now this is what I’m proceeding to do. Now, let me show you something else I want to show you. Okay. I want to title this “Precise Translation.” Now, people have thrown the King James Bible under the bus, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: Because they say it’s got all those archaic thee, thy, thou, ye. But…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: Tell me if I’m correct in what I’m saying here; those pronouns are very significant, because what we’re talking about here is, we’re talking about a translation from the Hebrew Tanakh into English, for example, that I speak, and we need to have a precise translation so we can know who the audience is. And that’s very important. Let me take you down to Genesis 3:1 and just shoot this by you for a moment.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: Genesis 3:1 says, “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” Now, once again, I believe this should be Yehovah here.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s what it is in Hebrew.

Shannon: Okay. Now that’s my goal, is to get a Hebrew-to-English translation with the name back in. “And he said unto the woman. Yea,” speaking of the serpent, “Hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” Now my understanding, Nehemia, is that, in the King James, where you see thee, thy, thou, and thine, that’s a singular. When you see ye, it’s plural. Now, if you look in the other English translations other than the King James, most of them will just say you. But now we don’t know, is it a singular or a plural? And if we want to get a precise translation from Hebrew to English, we need to know that, right?

Nehemia: So, you’re asking an English question. So, let’s back up. So, Hebrew has four ways of expressing “you”. It’s you, singular masculine, you, feminine singular, you, masculine plural, you, feminine plural. Modern English only has “you”. Except in some dialects, we actually do distinguish between the singular and the plural, and the plural would be “y’all.” And where I come from… I’m a northerner. I came from… I was raised in Chicago, and there we say, “you guys”.

Shannon: Or you’uns.

Nehemia: You’uns. I’m not familiar with that.

Shannon: Down south, “Hey y’all.”

Nehemia: Y’all. But then y’all could be also to a singular person in some parts of the south, and then they’ll say, “all y’all”, right? So, the point is, in, for example, Spanish, of which I know very little, don’t you have tu, usted, ustedes or something?

Shannon: Right, tu and usted, yes.

Nehemia: Right. But then they have the familiar question, which we don’t have in ancient Hebrew. So, the point is that it would be more precise to distinguish between “you singular” and “you plural”. If you really want it to be in modern English, you should change it to “you all”, to y’all, which would be, you know, “And thou shalt speak unto him” would be “And you shall speak unto him.” But then when it says “ye” it should be “y’all”, right? In other words, you’re really saying is, in Genesis 3:1 he says, lo tokhlu, which is “y’all.” You, plural, shall not eat.

Shannon: You have a Tanach with you?

Nehemia: I’m looking at the Hebrew text here on my screen.

Shannon: Can you turn to Exodus 4:15? Chapter 4 verse 15. Because I may be able to explain my point better, and we’re going to find out if this is important or not. Because what matters to me is what’s in the Hebrew. Now, at this juncture, I don’t speak or read Hebrew. My goal is, before I die, I’d like to learn enough that I could read the Leningrad. At least enough to take a look.

Okay, so, let me read it to you in the English King James. I’m reading from Exodus 4 verse 15. “And thou shalt speak unto him and put words in his mouth, and I will be with thy mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do.” Now, by what I’ve said, that thee, thy, thou, thine, is singular, and when you see ye and you it’s plural in the King James, and that’s important. Where I saw it says, “and thou” he was talking to, I believe, Moses, “and you’ll put words in his mouth,” Aaron’s mouth, “and I will be with thy mouth.” He’s talking specifically to Moses here, “and with his mouth,” those are singular, “and will teach you what ye shall do.” So, you and ye, by what I’m telling you, would be for the whole congregation of Israel. Now that’s my understanding. What’s it say to you in Hebrew?

Nehemia: This is Exodus 4:15 in my Bible software, Accordance, and this is based on the Leningrad Codex.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, it’s ve’dibarta, “And you, singular, will speak,” ve’samta, “and you will place,” so, it says and “you will speak to him,” you, singular, will speak to him. And by the way, it’s not just singular, it’s masculine singular. If you wanted to say feminine singular, it would be a different form of the word.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, “You will speak the words,” you, masculine singular, “in his mouth.”

Shannon: Okay

Nehemia: “…the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth,” your, masculine singular, “and with his mouth, and I will instruct etkhem,” is plural, masculine plural.

Shannon: Plural.

Nehemia: Et asher ta’asun, and ta’asun is also masculine plural. “And I will instruct all y’all that which all y’all shall do.” Right? That’s…

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, the Hebrew’s very specific in distinguishing between four different types of you.

Shannon: Okay, now that’s a perfect match, because if you had read this in almost any other English version, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish that, because they don’t have the pronouns. And nobody ever explained it to me. Now, that makes perfect sense because it sounds archaic. But you know, the fact is that they didn’t speak that language back then. They actually had to bring that into the King James translation, these pronouns, so they could get precise translation.

Nehemia: Are you saying that in 1611, when they translated the King James, they were no longer distinguishing between thou and you?

Shannon: Yeah, that wasn’t in normal conversation.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: So, the reason they brought that in there is because they would not have a precise translation from Hebrew and English. You mentioned there’s female and male; there’s singular and plural. Well, the pronouns we have today don’t allow for this, except, you know, may we use y’all and you’uns, or you all. But because of the way the King James has those pronouns, that gives us an accurate, precise translation. You can’t say the same for these other versions out there, and that’s why I respect the King James, and it makes sense.

You know, now, there’s some other words that would not be necessary to keep the older translation. But when it comes to pronouns, I think it’s very important. Okay. I just wanted to run that by you. That makes sense to me.

Nehemia: Can we look at… we got back here.

Shannon: Fair enough, sure.

Nehemia: So, you asked is, whenever it says LORD in caps or GOD in caps, is that Yehovah, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey in the Hebrew? And there’s an exception to the rule. So, in 49 places in the Tanakh, in the Old Testament, we have what’s called, or what I call, the poetic form of the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, of God’s name, which is Yah. And so, show me in your translation Exodus 15:2. Let’s see what you have there.

Shannon: Okay. Yeah, sure. Folks, I’m excited to be here. We’re with a real Bible teacher scholar. That’s why I know, these kind of questions… we gotta be asking the right person, or we’re going to get a wrong answer. That’s why we’re deferring to…

Nehemia: I’m sure if we talk for two or three hours, I’ll get something wrong, but hopefully I’ll correct it in the future.

Shannon: 15 verse 2. You want me to read it?

Nehemia: Can you show it on the screen?

Shannon: Oh, yes sir. Okay. Exodus 15 chapter 2?

Nehemia: “The LORD is my strength and song.” It does not say in Hebrew, “Yehovah is my strength and song,” it says, “Yah is my strength and song.”

Shannon: Oh?

Nehemia: As in Hallelu-yah, right? So, we know the word Yah from halleluyah. Right?

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: Halleluyah is “praise Yah”. Yah is a shortened form of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. The name of God, Yehovah… And again, look, some people say Yahveh, and they have their reasons for saying that, or Yahweh in English, right? I believe it’s Yehovah. I really don’t want that to be something that divides people, because whether you say Yahveh or Yehovah, you’re at least being more precise than saying LORD, right? And LORD is very ambiguous, and perhaps intentionally so, in some translations, right? There’s actually a ruling put out by Pope Benedict XVI in which he says it’s good to use LORD and the equivalents in other languages because, when we use/do that, we’re being intentionally ambiguous. When we say Yehovah, it’s too precise and it limits our interpretation of Scripture, basically is what he says. Which it should, because if you’re being precise, your interpretation should be limited. Look, now turn to Exodus 17:16 for me.

Shannon: Okay. Hey, before we go there, I just noticed verse 3, “The LORD is a man of war, the LORD is…”

Nehemia: There it is Yehovah.

Shannon: This should be, “Yehovah is a man of war. Yehovah is His name.” Right?

Nehemia: Yes.

Shannon: Not LORD. Now I’m going to move to that verse, but let’s just say…

Nehemia: Here’s the point; just in this passage, you have LORD representing two completely different things. One is Yah, and one is Yehovah. And you might say, “Well, who cares? It’s the same thing.” Well, my name is Nehemia, and if it was really important to your precise wording… Look, my words aren’t that important; neither are yours. But God’s words are important. And if it’s recorded in Scripture, if it was important enough for this to be transmitted by the scribes, we should want to know what they actually transmitted. And in verse 2 they transmitted Yah, and in verse 3 they have Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey twice, which is Yehovah.

Yeah. That’s correct. Yah.

Shannon: Nehemia, understand my problem. My problem is that the best English translation I’ve got has got an acronym there, a placeholder at best.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, we could call it a substitution.

Shannon: Okay, it’s a substitution. Now, if I wanted to catch that mistake, because I would have made a mistake here, would I have needed to go back to the Hebrew? What I have been able to see…

Nehemia: Here would be the correct procedure, I believe, and I could be wrong in some places, but I think… And here’s something you can do with a search and replace. But before you did the search and replace, the first thing you would have to do is go to every one of the 49 instances of Yah and you would have to swap it out with Yah. Right? Every time it has LORD, and you have Yah, you have to change it to Yah. And then you could do a search and replace. And you could actually do this in Word. We’ll do it and then we’ll undo it. I’ll show you how to do it. So, you see on the upper right there you have FIND?

Shannon: Yes, sure.

Nehemia: Click on that FIND and do the drop-down. That’s not the way you want to do it. You want to do the drop-down.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: You have a little arrow pointing down there where it says FIND.

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: Not there. In the upper right, there’s a little arrow. I think this will work.

Shannon: There you go. FIND.

Nehemia: No, no, go back to that. And where it says ADVANCED FIND, do ADVANCED FIND.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Now click on REPLACE.

Shannon: Going to go to REPLACE. Yes sir.

Nehemia: Now type in there the LORD. LORD in all caps.

Shannon: Like this?

Nehemia: I would do lowercase “t”.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Of the LORD. Here’s where it’s complicated. If the verse begins… And now type in “Yehovah”.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And we’ll undo this. All right, and now click on MORE. No, not yet. Click on MORE.

Shannon: MORE, yes, sir.

Nehemia: And now do MATCH CASE.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Now it’s only going to replace the ones where LORD is in all caps. Now click REPLACE ALL.

Shannon: Okay, REPLACE ALL.

Nehemia: And you… oh, it didn’t work. Ohh.

Shannon: I think it’s the lowercase… well I don’t know…

Nehemia: So, we have a different issue going on. Now close this little thing, you have to X out of this.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Oh! I… hmm, I’m not sure. So, if you go over LORD in all caps… by the way, you have here in the Hebrew Yahveh, which I’m sure is not what you intended…

Shannon: I want to ask. I’m trying to get the Hebrew spelling of God’s name. Is that it? That’s not it, is it?

Nehemia: No, that’s not it, no.

Shannon: Okay. I better take that out, then.

Nehemia: All right. It’s supposed to be shva, cholam, kamatz, three different vowels. I’ll send it to you, if you remind me.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: All right. So, go to where you have LORD in caps.

Shannon: Okay. You want me to go find the first one?

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s in Genesis 3 somewhere. Or Genesis 2:4 is going to be the first one.

Shannon: Okay, here’s one…

Nehemia: All right. So, now highlight that.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: No, just the word LORD, not the “the”.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Okay. So, this is complicated, how we’re going to do this. So, now go to where it says… I’m teaching you how to use Word. Where it says FONT, there’s a little arrow pointing to the bottom right, where it says FONT at the top. You have to click on that.

Shannon: Oh, okay. Let’s see. Oh…

Nehemia: A little more to your left. That’s PARAGRAPH. Now. No, no, to your left. Can I draw on your… down to the left. You have an arrow pointing down at 45 degrees.

Shannon: Yep. Use it?

Nehemia: No, below that. No, above that. Yeah… not that, but the one to the left of that.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Click on that. Click on that.

Shannon: Yes, sir.

Nehemia: And you see it says SMALL CAPS. So, now undo SMALL CAPS.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: You have to click it again. It’s interesting. It’s not in small caps. So, what they did here is very complicated. So, hit CANCEL here, or hit OKAY. Hit OKAY.

Shannon: Okay. Let me…

Nehemia: Do that again.

Shannon: Small caps.

Nehemia: So, what they did in this file, and this is… here, now hit OKAY.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: All right. So, now you see it’s no longer small caps. So, here’s what they did. And this is like a type setting thing, okay. The L is a normal L… Do CONTROL+Z, so you undo this.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Yeah, UNDO. So, here’s what they did. Whoever typed in this text, they have a normal capital L, but the “ord” is not normal. The “ord” is in something called small caps. So, if you do a search and replace… this is extremely complicated. I know how to do it, but it takes several steps.

Shannon: We’re going to search on “ord”, right?

Nehemia: SEARCH AND REPLACE is “ord”, but before you do that you have to replace. Let’s do that… let’s do REPLACE…

Shannon: What if I replace this with “all caps”?

Nehemia: You could do that. Well, you can’t search for something because it’s mixed, that’s the problem.

Shannon: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: Let’s do this offline, because the audience doesn’t need to spend time on this. I’ll walk you through it. It’s like a five-stage process. Go to Exodus 17:16. I want to see what they have for… Actually, go to Isaiah 12 verse 2. Isaiah 12:2 in Hebrew has both Yah and Yehovah in the same verse.

Shannon: I don’t have my Concordance here. Where am I going to find Isaiah? Forgive me.

Nehemia: Isaiah is… Well, I don’t know what order this is in. So, in mine, Isaiah is going to be after Kings, but probably not here. It’s going to be before Jeremiah, is my guess. There we go.

Shannon: Got it. What chapter?

Nehemia: Chapter 12 verse 2. Yeah, the English has a different order than the Hebrew. So, that’s 4 … chapter 12 verse 2.

Shannon: Chapter 12 verse 2. Yes, sir. Right here.

Nehemia: So, it says, “Behold, God is my salvation…” Oh! So, here you have “Jehovah” in the English of the King James! How interesting!

Shannon: That’s a double… Well, you know, it’s got it in four or five places, but that’s all. So, my question is…

Nehemia: I think it’s seven, yeah. So, here’s what it really says in Hebrew.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: It doesn’t say, “For the Lord Yehovah is my strength and my song.” It says, “For Yah, Yehovah is my strength and my song.”

Shannon: Ah!

Nehemia: So, the first LORD there, the LORD is actually Yah.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: By the way, now you have “for the Yah”, you want to get rid of “the”. And then, the second one is Yehovah, and it has Jehovah because it’s like, “Wait, we can’t say Lord, LORD here because the first Lord is Yah, and the second LORD is Yehovah,” so, they said, “For LORD Jehovah,” which is kind of almost ridiculous. I’ll tell you why it’s ridiculous; Rabbinical Jews replaced Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, Yehovah, with Adonai, because the rabbis made a prohibition that you must not speak the name. If you do, you lose your portion in the world to come. Okay. According to the rabbis.

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: There was never a prohibition to say Yah. That’s something Christians invented, or misunderstood, probably.

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: So, if an Orthodox Jew reads this in the synagogue, let’s say… he will read, “Hine el yeshuati, evtach ve’lo efchad, ki ozi bezimrat Yah, and then he’ll say “Adonai” instead of Yehovah. But “Yah” he’ll just read “Yah”.

Shannon: Now, the…

Nehemia: So, why replace Yah with LORD? It makes no sense to me. I don’t understand that to be honest with you.

Shannon: So, you saw the mistake I was making, just changing all capital LORD to Yehovah, because some of it is Yah, but…

Nehemia: And there’s 49 of those. So, the first thing you need to do is identify those 49, replace them with Yah, and then you can go deal with the all caps problem, right?

Shannon: Okay. Now, if I…

Nehemia: Let’s look at one more, because I don’t actually know the answer. Or we’ll look at two more, if that’s okay.

Shannon: Oh, yes!

Nehemia: Isaiah 38:11.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, here I’m genuinely curious.

Shannon: If I could read Hebrew, though, I would be able to see the different spelling between Yehovah and Yah?

Nehemia: Yeah, they’re completely different. Let me show you! In fact, let me show you on the screen, okay?

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: Rather than telling you. I think you probably have to stop sharing.

Shannon: Yes. You…

Nehemia: Okay, so it makes me share the specific…

Shannon: Oh, listen. I’m having a great time here learning.

Nehemia: All right. So, hopefully you can see this. So, here was Isaiah 12:2. Let me give a different text that doesn’t have those little notes in it; that’s easier to look at. Okay, there we go. So, here’s your King James, at least in Accordance. I don’t know which version this is… I don’t think it’s 1769 per se. I don’t know which it is, to be honest with you.

All right, so here is the word Yah, okay… Oh, sorry, that’s Exodus 15:2. And then if we go to Isaiah 12:2, which is based on Exodus 15:2… right? It says, Yah Yehovah, and you can see those words. This is a two-letter word, Yah, Yud-Hey, and this is Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. You can see they look different. Now, over them I get a little thing on the bottom left, over here…

Shannon: This is beautiful! What software are you using?

Nehemia: This is called Accordance.

Shannon: Accordance?

Nehemia: You should be able to do the same thing with like, I don’t know… I don’t really use this, so I have no idea if this is going to work. But Blue Letter Bible, I think, has some kind of thing like that, doesn’t it? Where you can look at…

Shannon: Well, I don’t know. They got Hebrew, but do they have the pointers?

Nehemia: I don’t know the answer to that question.

Shannon: What do you call them? Niqud?

Nehemia: Niqud, yeah, the vowels.

Shannon: So, I need something with vowels and niqud, or it’s worthless to me.

Nehemia: “Hebrew Bible vowel…” I’m literally Googling this. I have no idea how you would do it, because I do it very different.

Shannon: Yes. Well, I don’t do it at all. That’s why I need instruction here. What do you recommend I use for…

Nehemia: Well, you want something where it lines up. Let’s do Hebrew Bible… somebody out there is like, “Nehemia, I do this every day! I know how to do it.” But I don’t, so, I just… Here you go, Bible Hub, Interlinear Bible Hebrew. So, hopefully this is correct. I have no idea; I can’t vouch for it. But let’s do Isaiah 12:2, and… that didn’t work. Some somebody out there is like, “Nehemia, don’t you know how to use the Interlinear?” No, because that’s not what I use.

Okay, let’s do Interlinear verses… Okay, there we go. So, now we just have to get to Isaiah 12 verse 2. Here we are! So, here Isaiah 12:2, and they have it exactly right. Well, I mean, they have Yahweh, but at least, you know, you can see here the letters, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, for Yehovah. And then here is Yah. Okay, now that we have this tool… Oh, can you see this? I actually don’t know if…

Shannon: I’m still on your…

Nehemia: Oh! Sorry… So, they don’t do it the same way… I usually use Zoom, and they do…

Shannon: You brought up a good point, Nehemia. Now, listen, I already know that I need the vowel pointers, and I want a tool or a Bible or a Tanakh…

Nehemia: Okay, here I’m doing an entire screen. So, can you see the Interlinear here on biblehub.com?

Shannon: I got it now, yes. Yes, sir.

Nehemia: This here it says Yah, and this has Yehovah. Now, if I go over here, do you see Accordance again?

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: All right. So, in Accordance, we have 49 times it has Yah. Okay? And I can send you a file that has these 49. And then you look up those, and so, here is going to be one. Oh, here’s an interesting one. So, it’s Psalm 68:5 and it says, ve’Yah shmo, “By His name Jah.” Well, that’s interesting. So, there, it’s not Jehovah or…

Now, if we go to Psalm 68:5, and this is in the Blue Letter Bible. Oh, and Interlinear is the one you have to see. Oh! It’s a different verse in English. Okay, it’s one verse before, so, it’s 68:4 in English. Right? So, that’s a problem, that English and Hebrew sometimes have different verse numbers. So, it says, “On the clouds by Yah,” right? And you can see that that’s Yud-Hey. And the beh here is a preposition that means “by”, right? So, it’s not Yehovah, you can see that.

And there’s 49 places in the Tanakh where it’s “Yah” instead of “Yehovah”, but they’ll have… Well, so, the King James doesn’t have “Lord” here, the King James has “Jah”. What does yours have in Psalm 68:5? Because there’s different versions of the King James, right? That’s the problem. Or 68:4, sorry, in your version, 68:4.

Shannon: Well, if you get the King James, they’re pretty consistent, unless you got the 1611. Where you’d have a difference would be NIV, NASB. Okay, I’m in Psalms. What do you want me to go?

Nehemia: Psalm 68:4 in the English.

Shannon: 68:4. I maintain that the best English we’ve ever had is the King James if we want to get accurate pronouns. But it’s got some issues, as we know. It says capital L…

Nehemia: Every translation has issues. You know, I say deal with it, right? I mean, it is what it is!

Shannon: Well, I’m dealing with it. I’m going to put His name back in, if He helps me. 68:14, okay.

Nehemia: 68:4.

Shannon: Four. Okay. “A father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows is God in His holy habitation.”

Nehemia: Okay. Chapter 68 verse 4 of Psalms. Are you sharing it?

Shannon: Oh, excuse me, no. It says Jah. I had the wrong verse. J-A-H. Yeah, all King James will be the same, unless it’s a 1611.

Nehemia: Okay. Somewhere they have the 1611 online. Now I’m really curious. I want to see it. Oh, here. It’s University of Pennsylvania…

Shannon: See, the difference between the 1611 and the later versions is just that the typeset had to be fixed. And there were some spelling errors, and there were a couple older uses of words, but…

Nehemia: But I guess the spelling errors are the older uses. Right? That’s the question, right?

Shannon: I mean, you know…

Nehemia: I don’t know the answer.

Shannon: So, basic English words that you could see the variants. Now, content’s the same, but just some of the spelling has changed. But they fixed it all by 1789. And it’s been, you know, good for the next 300, 400 years. But you can’t say that about all the other modern versions.

Nehemia: So, let’s look at another verse. I hear what you’re saying. Let’s look at another verse. And so, let’s look in the Blue Letter, or whatever that was. The Bible Hub, they’ll have it as well. So, hold on, let me find this here. I had a window here, had all the Yah’s, and I don’t know what I did with it, so I have to redo the search.

Shannon: So, I need to be on the lookout for Yah and also Jah.

Nehemia: 49… and Jehovah, we found out. We found out there are instances of Jehovah in your Bible. So, you want to look for Jah and Jehovah and fix those first, and then you’ll go back after that, and you’ll look for LORD in caps. And look, there’ll be, “O Lord” and “the Lord”, and just “Lord” in some places. Right? That’s where it gets complicated. All right, so, we have hallelujah, and we have that… Let’s see, how many times do we have that? So, hallelujah, or various forms of that… there’s also yehalelya. So, we have that 27 out of the 49 times. So, Psalm 104:35, what do you have there?

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: 104:35.

Shannon: Let me pull it up here. I’m just going to pull up another screen here, it’s faster.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: Psalm 104:35?

Nehemia: Yes, sir.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Oh! It’s a different version in… Okay, so, this keeps happening. No, it should be verse 35.

Shannon: Okay. It says, “Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth and let there be no more, lest thou the LORD, O my soul. Praise ye the LORD.”

Nehemia: Alright, so, I’m going to show you on my computer here. So, we do PRESENT.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: …learn how to share screen here.

Shannon: So, in Hebrew… Praise ye the LORD means hallelujah?

Nehemia: It’s hallelu-Yah. So, it has here… can you see my screen here?

Shannon: Yes sir.

Nehemia: Okay. What happened? Let’s get rid of these little letters here. So, we have here Psalm 104:35. It says barkhi nafshi et Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, Yehovah. “May my soul bless Yehovah,” hallelu-Yah. “Praise Yah.” Okay? So, it doesn’t say, “Praise ye the LORD.” That’s not true. It says, “Praise Yah.” Why does it do that?

Shannon: Oh!

Nehemia: Here, I’m trying to go to this thing here. Oh, and here it is on Bible Hub. So, Bible Hub has here Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, which they translate as Yahweh.

Shannon: Yep.

Nehemia: And here they have Yah. Ah, now, here’s a trick you can do. I don’t know if this works, I’ve never done this. But if we click on this little number, will it bring us every instance of Yah? Oh, it will. So, there you have the 49, presumably. Oh! Uh-oh! It has 48! So, what’s the one they’re missing in the Strong’s? I don’t know.

There’s two occurrences of be-Yah, ba-Yah, and 46 of just Yah by itself. And mine, based on the Leningrad Codex, has 49. Right? So, you see here, 49. So, here’s what we need to do to find out what… so, this is interesting. So, we can actually look at Concordance here. So, I’ll send you this document. Here are the 49, and you have to systematically compare this list with this list and figure out which one they’re missing. My guess is the one that… well, I don’t know. There’s one where it has Yah twice. Maybe that’s the one in Isaiah. I want to say it’s like 26. Let’s see… Maybe they only count that once. Where’s Isaiah in their book order? It’s Psalms. Oh, they don’t have the full list here. So, we have to click on something to see the full list… here we go.

Shannon: Nehemia, some may think I’m being presumptuous, but let me tell you something. I believe it must be done. If no one else wants to do it, I’m going to do it myself. And here’s the problem; there have been attempts to do this, and one guy just put the Tetragrammaton in there. Well, that’s not enough. Another one…

Nehemia: Why isn’t that enough? I actually like that idea. Meaning…

Shannon: Well…

Nehemia: …if we have to educate people that this word, Yehovah, right, is to be read that way, if you write it in Hebrew then they’ll know to read it. So, here’s the reason that I think that I’m okay with that; there were ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that, whenever the name appeared, they wrote Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and in the Hebrew manuscripts they wrote in ancient Hebrew letters.

Shannon: Well, here’s the problem; because you saw today that the King James had it right, with the exception of the J a few places. Why weren’t they consistent? So, there’s another guy that came in and took the King James, and at least for capital LORD, and I’m not sure he got the Yah right. He went in and put J-E-H-O-V-A-H; He spelled it with a J. Well, that’s still not good, in my opinion. It’s got to be with the Y. So, the other problem is, apart from the King James and maybe one or two more, you’ve got the issue of the missing pronouns. So, my goal is to correct my King James, which has been sitting there for 400 years and no one’s done anything about it. And now we know the name of Yehovah. You know, He asked the question; “What is My name? What is My son’s name, if you can tell.” The riddle, Proverbs 30:4, and you know, He says many other places, “I am Yehovah. That is My name.”

Nehemia: Do you know how do I interpret that verse in Proverbs 30?

Shannon: What is your take on that? Proverbs 30:4.

Nehemia: The standard Jewish interpretation is that… well, let’s read the verse. Do you want to pull it up there in your translation, and let’s have a look at that?

Shannon: I wanted to ask you about that. Let’s see. Let’s see if…

Nehemia: I understand the Christian interpretation, but it’s at least worthwhile to know another way of reading it.

Shannon: Now, it’s a riddle. And here we are…

Nehemia: So, you want to read that?

Shannon: Yes, sir. Okay. Proverbs 30 verse 4. It says, “Who hath ascended up into heaven or descended? Who hath gathered the wind in his fists? Who hath bound the waters in a garment? Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is His name, and what is His son’s name, if thou canst tell?”

Nehemia: Well, let’s start with how you interpret the question, “What is His name and what is His son’s name?”

Shannon: Well, it’s a riddle. And I believe I know the answer to that.

Nehemia: What’s the answer?

Shannon: Answer? His name is Yehovah. Because who else has gathered the wind in his fist? Was it an angel? It certainly wasn’t a man. Who has ascended up into heaven or descended? I believe the first part of the question is answered, Yehovah. I believe that’s His name.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: What do you think?

Nehemia: Well, give me the second half, because that’s the more interesting one from my perspective.

Shannon: Okay. “And what is His son’s name if thou can tell.” Well, okay. I know that you’re a Karaite Jew, and if I’m going to make any argument about what I believe…

Nehemia: Just share what your interpretation is; we don’t have to argue about it. I just think it’s worthwhile to know that there are multiple interpretations, and what are they.

Shannon: I’m only going to use the Tanakh then, is what I’m saying.

Nehemia: In your own personal belief and conviction, what’s the answer to “what is His son’s name?”

Shannon: I believe it’s Yeshua Hamashiach.

Nehemia: Gotcha. Okay. And then for the audience who doesn’t know, that’d be like the equivalent of Jesus Christ.

Shannon: Jesus the Christ. Yes.

Nehemia: Okay, great. All right. So, there’s two Jewish interpretations, at least that I’m aware of. There might be other ones of this verse. Let me pull those up here rather than… I can even give you the names of who interpreted that.

Shannon: While you’re pulling that up, I guess it ties into the other question, Elohim, let us make man in our own image. It’s talking about plural. What do you think? “Let us make man in our own image.” There seems to be…

Nehemia: Let’s come back to that.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, there’s two main ways of interpreting this in the Jewish world. One is that this is a rhetorical question. So, what’s a rhetorical question? In English a rhetorical question could be like… what is an example of a rhetorical question? Well, when you say to somebody, “Are you an idiot?” You don’t expect them to say yes or no, right? It’s a rhetorical question.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And really, it’s a way of saying, “You are an idiot,” when you say to somebody, “Are you an idiot?” Now, in Hebrew, rhetorical questions are a bit different, because the answer is usually no, in the negative. And there are a series of rhetorical questions at the end of Job, where he asks him how different things in nature were done, and if anybody knows. And the answer is “No, nobody knows that, because only God knows that.” And so, the Jewish understanding here is that this is a rhetorical question. What is the name of the human who has done this?

And so, here’s a little bit of a background. In ancient Middle Eastern culture, if someone was very important, they would be known by the name of their son. This has survived in the Arabic world, and to a lesser extent in the Jewish world. So, for example, there’s a rabbi in the Talmud named Abba Shaul, which means Father of Saul. What was his personal name? We don’t know. Because he was an important person, he was called Father of Saul, right? And then you have this in the in the Arabic world today, where you have Abu Musa and Abu… what’s the dictator of the Palestinian Authority? Abu something… I don’t even remember what his name is… Abu Abbas, that’s his name. The guy who was elected over 20 years ago and is still in power because they don’t really have elections. So, that’s Abu Abbas.

What name did Abu Abbas’s mother give him? I don’t know, but it wasn’t Abu Abbas, right? It was, you know, Ismail or something. I have no idea, right? Because he wants to be presented as an important person, he’s called Abu Abbas. And Abba Shaul was an important person, so he’s named after Saul, his son. And so, when it says, “What is his name?” If you understand it as a rhetorical question… I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying here’s another way of looking at it, right?

Shannon: Sure. I appreciate that.

Nehemia: Which is, “Give me the name of a human who can go up to heaven or go down into sheol. And if he’s really important, give me not only his name, give me his son’s name.” Right? Tell me that his name is Avi Moshe or Avi Something… the father… or Abba Something, right? And the point is, there isn’t even an important human being, because only God can do that. And there’s a similar verse in Isaiah chapter 40. Let’s look at that verse. And not to convince you, because I understand where you’re coming from.

Shannon: I appreciate what you’re saying.

Nehemia: But just to understand like what… I want to make it clear that this isn’t just like… if you didn’t know, and Jews don’t know, that God has a son named Yeshua, how would you interpret it? That’s the question. And really, I’m asking this question; before Jesus came to the earth, how did Jews interpret it? That’s really the question, right? How did the disciples of Jesus interpret this one year before he revealed himself, right? That’s the question, right?

So, Isaiah chapter 40 verses 12-16, really 12-14 are the key verses. Can you read those?

Shannon: Oh, yes sir. Let me put it up on screen for us. Okay, let’s see. Isaiah 40:12-14?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: Okay, it says, “Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?”

Nehemia: Now if you stop here, you would say, “Oh, that’s God. Obviously, that’s God.” But then when you read verse 13, you’re like, “Oh! The answer is nobody, because only God can do that.” Right? So, who here means, which human has done this? Which mortal or which, even, deity has done this, right? Which among the gods has done this? Nobody. Only Yehovah. So, read verse 13.

Shannon: Okay. “Who hath directed the Spirit of Yehovah?”

Nehemia: Nobody, is the answer. It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is in the negative, which means nobody.

Shannon: By the way, you see the capital S right here?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: Anytime we’re talking about Yehovah, we should have a capital S, not a lowercase S. Correct?

Nehemia: Maybe, maybe not. Meaning, if you say the Spirit of Yehovah… We’ll look at that in a minute. Let’s finish reading these two verses.

Shannon: Yes, sir. Where do you want to go? Okay.

Nehemia: Keep reading verses, “or being his counsel…”

Shannon: “Who hath directed the Spirit of Yehovah, or being his counselor, hath taught him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and showed to him the way of understanding?”

Nehemia: So, who did God get advice from? Because, you know, we need advice. Who did God get advice from? And the answer is nobody. It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is: there is no answer to this. Or the answer is in the negative; nobody. And that’s how Jews are understanding Proverbs 30:4 is, what is His name and what is His son’s name? Nobody, nobody can do that except for God.

But there’s another interpretation in Judaism. “What is His name and what is His son’s name?” His name is Yehovah, and His son’s name is Israel. Because it says in Exodus, and in Hosea 11 as well, that God’s firstborn son is Israel. Now, I don’t think that’s what Proverbs intended, but if you want to interpret it that way as a Jew, you can.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: If you want to give it an answer as a Jew, and you don’t believe in Jesus because Jesus hasn’t come yet, and you don’t know about him, or it’s after Jesus came and you’re not a Christian, then the answer you would have to give is, either it’s a rhetorical question, or the answer is, “Oh yeah, His name is Yehovah and His son’s name is Israel.”

Shannon: That’s a great insight there. Let me ask you about this, that I found. I wanted to know if you had seen this before. We’re talking about the name I Am. Exodus 3:14: “And God said unto Moses, I am that I am. And He said, thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: I Am hath sent me unto you.”

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: What do I do with this, now that we know the name Yehovah? Well, how would you translate this?

Nehemia: So, if you want to represent what’s in the Hebrew, you would have, “I am that I am” would be ehyeh asher ehyeh. That’s E-H-Y-E-H A-S-H-E-R E-H-Y-E-H. Ehyeh asher, asher is A-S-H-E-R, ehyeh asher ehyeh, and then he says Ehyeh has sent me unto you. And he means I am or I will be.

Shannon: Well, so that leads me to the question of… I understand that the name Yehovah means I was, I am, I shall be. Is that correct?

Nehemia: That’s my understanding, and that’s the way many Jews have interpreted over the centuries. Definitely.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And they get it from this verse. In other words… So, Hebrew is a verb-based language, like other Semitic languages, and there’s a principle that most words have a three-letter root. There are some exceptions, like prepositions and whatnot. And the three-letter root of ehyeh, “I am” or “I will be” is the same as Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. The understanding is it’s a combination of haya, hove, and ihyeh. “He was, He is, and He will be.” And that’s certainly how it was understood in the Book of Revelation when it says, “He that was, He that is, and He that is to come.” There’s almost no doubt, and this was understood by Christian scholars, that that is a reference to the meaning of the name. And it actually makes a lot of sense. If we can look at that in the New Testament… And actually, I think it’s an important context there. Let’s see…

Shannon: Where it says, “I’m the same yesterday, today and forever”?

Nehemia: No. It’s in the Book of Revelation.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And look, this isn’t some discovery of mine. Many Christian scholars have realized this.

Shannon: Folks, you’re hearing inside is the word of God. You’re not going to hear anywhere else, by and large, they don’t teach this in churches. I love the work that you’re doing. And you know, God’s not the author…

Nehemia: Revelation 1:4. Actually, we want the passage where it says, “Holy, holy, holy.” Well, let’s look at Revelation 1:4 first. Let’s start with that, because there’s a number of passages that have it.

Shannon: Oh, oh, that’s right. This was something I forgot to write down. I just saw the Seven Spirits of God. You’re going to have to do a program on that. I want to get your take on that, sometime.

Nehemia: I don’t know that I have any great insights there, but… Okay. “And peace from Him which is and which was and which is to come.”

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: But what does that mean, “which is?” It’s a strange thing to say. Why would he say that? What does he mean by that? What is there some Hebrew context to that? That’s really the question. Well, there are people who tried to give it a Greek context, and it appears again in Chapter 1 verse 8, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord.” Now who’s the Lord here? And I don’t want to get into the whole Trinitarian question. The Lord…

Shannon: … in the Aleph? I am the Tav and the Aleph?

Nehemia: Or the Aleph in the Tav, maybe. But let’s leave that aside, right? When he says, “I am the beginning and the end.”

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Where does that come from, that phrase? Do you know where that comes from?

Shannon: Well, I’m thinking it comes out of the name Yehovah. “I was, I am, I shall be”.

Nehemia: Well, not “I am the beginning and the end,” or does that come from somewhere else. That comes from Isaiah 44:6 and Isaiah 48:12, where it says, “Thus…” Let’s look at Isaiah 44:6.

Shannon: Okay. 44:6?

Nehemia: Yes.

Shannon: Yes, sir. “Thus saith Yehovah, the King of Israel, and His Redeemer, Yehovah of hosts: I am the first, and I am the I’m the last,” there you go, “and beside Me there is no God.”

Nehemia: Now, why is He saying this in Isaiah? And I want to give an historical reason of why He’s saying it, right? You can come up with all kinds of theological explanations, but the historical reason is that if we look in Isaiah 45, it mentions a man by name whose name is Cyrus, or in Hebrew, Koresh. And Cyrus was the king of the Persian Empire; he was the Persian emperor. And Cyrus, in the year 538 BCE, that’s the traditional… and by traditional, I mean the modern scholarly traditional date. I don’t know that that’s a correct date, but let’s call it 538 BCE; some people make it 516. I don’t know. So, in the late 6th century BCE, Before the Common Era, or BC, Before Christ, for Christians, Cyrus issues a decree that’s quoted in the Tanakh, which allows the Jews to go back to Israel and rebuild the Temple. It’s the opening words of Ezra, and the closing words of 2 Chronicles; it’s what’s called the Decree of Cyrus.

And the Tanakh explanation is that God put it in the heart of Cyrus to let the Jews, who had been taken captive by the Babylonians, go back to the Land of Israel and rebuild the Temple. Cyrus may have had his own reasons. So, Cyrus, who is allowing the Jews to go back, is not… And let’s read, actually, I think it’s worth reading in Ezra chapter 1, because it gives the context for Isaiah 44.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And then that gives, in turn, the context for Revelation chapter 1 verse 8. So, Ezra, chapter 1, you want to read that? Like the first four verses.

Shannon: “Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of Yehovah, by the mouth of Jeremiah, might be fulfilled, Yehovah stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, ‘Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia: Yehovah, god of heaven, hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he hath charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.’”

Nehemia: Now, let me stop there. If we just read that, we would think, “Oh, Cyrus is a perfectly good believer,” right? He knows about the god Yehovah. He calls him by name.

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: And he must believe in him. Well, not necessarily. In ancient cultures, you know, if they were trying to impress you, they would call upon the name of your god, because then you’d be more likely to listen to them. So, let’s keep reading here.

Shannon: Okay. It goes on to say, “Who is there among you of all his people? His god be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of Yehovah, God of Israel. He is the God which is in Jerusalem.”

Nehemia: So, “He is the God.” Who says that? Is that Cyrus saying that? Or is that Ezra, who is writing this down, saying this? And if it’s Cyrus, wow! Then Cyrus is a believer. It seems like it probably wasn’t Cyrus. And the reason for saying that, we’ll see in Isaiah 45 in a second. And let’s just see one thing here that’s interesting. Let’s see… Yeah, so, this is quoted in 2 Chronicles 36:23. Right? The same exact decree. And I hope I’m getting this right. Let me pull this up here and make sure this is the same.

Shannon: 2 Chronicles 36…

Nehemia: 36:23 is the equivalent of Ezra 1:3.

Shannon: “Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth have…”

Nehemia: Oh no, I’m sorry, that’s chapter 1 verse 2.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Right? In other words, Ezra 1:1 and verse 2 is 2 Chronicles 36:23 verbatim, right?

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Then it ends with the word ve’ya’al, “and let him go up”. It doesn’t bring the full decree. And the statement, “He is God,” that doesn’t appear in 2 Chronicles. So, it’s not clear; were these the words of Cyrus? Oh, and then here’s another way of reading Ezra 1:3. So, your translation is inaccurate here.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: A little different in Hebrew. Let’s look at your translation again. I would translate it differently, let’s put it that way.

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: You could disagree with me. So, they put, “(he is God)” in parentheses, to imply Ezra is the one who said those words and not… it’s chapter 1 verse 3.

Shannon: Oh, 1 verse 3. Well…

Nehemia: Sorry, go ahead.

Shannon: I’ve got an inferior version in English to the Hebrew.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: There’s no doubt.

Nehemia: Well, so the way I read the Hebrew is, “He is the god that is in Jerusalem.” In other words, there are many gods, he just happens to be the one that’s in Jerusalem, so you should go build a temple for him in Jerusalem. That seems to be what Cyrus is saying here. And your translator didn’t like that, so they put it in parentheses to make those the words of Ezra. So, in other words. “And let there be a…” well, just what it says here. “And build the house of the lord god of Israel, which is in Jerusalem.” Right? The house is in Jerusalem, not the god is in Jerusalem. But that’s not what it says, seemingly, in the Hebrew… Meaning, the way I read the Hebrew is: Cyrus is not a believer, and he says, “And let them build the house of Yehovah, the god of Israel. He is the god that is in Jerusalem.” Why are you building this temple in Jerusalem? Because the god in Jerusalem is Yehovah. Here in Susa there’s another god, and in Babylon there’s another god, right? So, they build the temple to, you know, Marduk in Babylon, and they’re going to build the temple to Yehovah in Jerusalem, because he’s the god in Jerusalem, right?

So, in other words, Cyrus is not a believer, at least the way it seems from the Hebrew. Even if the King James wants him to be. So, now let’s look at… so, we don’t have to look at it. Well, I’ll just tell you the overall. Go ahead, sorry, you want to say something.

Shannon: I want to say this. I believe we have an obligation. After nearly 300 years.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: Now, knowing the name of our God, Yehovah, we can no longer compromise and just accept capital L-O-R-D. I force myself now as I read the King James every day… God told me to speak His word; I put His name back in there. And you know what? Let me tell you the epitome of this.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: Years ago, I heard a Muslim. He was on a radio program, and he was mocking Christians, Jews. He was mocking us all. He said, “They don’t even know the name of their god. At least we know the name of ours.” And I’m thinking, “What does he mean by that?” And, well, most people don’t. Listen, I know people who are the Kohanim, last name Cohen, and I’ve come to them, and I said, “Listen, have you heard of Dr. Nehemia Gordon’s work? Listen, they found the name of Yehovah, and they’ve got the Hebrew scrolls to back it up.” Now, if we’re going to say that we know the name of God, it’s got to be in the Hebrew text. You don’t find Yahweh in there, but you find Yehovah.

Nehemia: Most Jewish people know it’s Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. They might not know the exact vowels, but they know it’s Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Shannon: Well, so I asked…

Nehemia: Imagine if you took out those vowels, you would still have some idea of how to… you could maybe mispronounce it. And look, my name is NeHEMia. People call me NehEEmia and NeehemAYa, but it’s still different than I like to say, “just don’t call me baldy,” right? That’s very sensitive.

Shannon: Nehemia, but here’s the problem. I asked Joe Cohen, my good friend.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: And I asked Ron Cohen, my friend. “You’re messianic believers.”

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Shannon: I said, “You know the name of God the Father? His name is Yehovah.” No, they didn’t know!

Nehemia: They never heard that it was Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, just maybe didn’t know the pronunciation?

Shannon: No, they don’t know. Now, some may have guessed it’s Jehovah, and I’ve heard a lot of people say Yahweh, but now here’s my next question.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: In the research you’ve done, have you ever found Yahweh? And I believe, if I heard you right, Yahweh was invented by the Samaritans and comes from Jupiter, one of the Roman gods. Is that…?

Nehemia: To be more accurate, Yahweh was invented by a Christian Hebrew scholar. I want to say the year was 1599, and he bases it on a church father named Theodoret of Cyrus. And Theodoret says that the Jews don’t pronounce the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, but he says the Jews pronounce it as Aya, and the Samaritans pronounce it Yahveh. And so, this Christian, I want to say his name was Genebrard, but I don’t remember. Yeah, I think his name was Genebrard. He comes along in 1599, he says, “Well, what does this mean, what Theodoret says? Because Yahveh is not a Hebrew word. What would it be in Hebrew?” He says, “Oh, that’s Yakh-veh,” or what later became in Christianity, Yahweh. Right. So, he’s the first one that I’m aware of, in 1599, I want to say the year is, who comes up with Yahweh. And then, 100 or 200 years ago, they were still debating it. Now the scholars have decided, “Okay, it is Yahweh for various reasons.” And we could talk hours and hours about what those reasons are.

Shannon: But it’s not His name.

Nehemia: I don’t think the best evidence points to that being His name. If you rely on Jewish Hebrew sources, then there is no evidence for His name being Yah-veh. There’s not a single Hebrew Bible manuscript that I’ve ever found that has the vowels, Yah-veh. And look, I’ve had people say, “That proves it’s not His name, or that proves that it is His name.” Right? Because whatever His name is, that’s what we won’t find evidence for. That’s like conspiracy theory thinking.

Shannon: God’s not the author of confusion. We know who is; Hasatan, Satan. Nehemia, when you first got started…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: I think I remember you also talking about God’s agricultural reckoning of time. And based on what you know, the Aviv barley, where are we at on the Hebrew calendar right now? What year are we in right now?

Nehemia: Oh. So, I have a policy of not getting involved in the Hebrew calendar. When I lived in Israel for decades, I went out and would observe the new moon, and I would examine the Aviv barley. And almost ten years ago, after I had left Israel and was living in the US, I made a decision that I need to leave that for people who are in the Land.

There’s an ancient story, which appears in the Talmud, and the story is about these rabbis in Babylon who are trying to figure out the… and this was before there was a fixed calendar, right? So, they wanted to know where we are in the Hebrew year. They would look at information from the Land of Israel, and so, there’s these rabbis sitting around in Babylonia, in what today is Iraq, and they ask, “Okay, is this a leap year or not a leap year?” Because it wasn’t fixed.

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: It was based on the agricultural cycles in Israel. And the rabbis got this information, or at least they tell the story, about these three cowherds, or in one version, shepherds, who are talking about certain things in the weather and in the cycles of nature. And the takeaway from the story is, better shepherds in the Land of Israel than scholars in Babylon. Well, right now I’m a scholar in Babylon, so I defer to those in the Land of Israel, who live in the Land of Israel. For better or for worse, they’re the ones who are living in the Land, and I’m staying out of it to defer to the shepherds. And perhaps there’s even scholars in Israel, maybe not just shepherds.

Shannon: That’s a fair answer.

Nehemia: Even if they were shepherds or cowherds, I think it would be preferable to defer to them.

Shannon: I’ve got three or four more questions for you today, and I’ll hold the rest for next time. Now you are a Karaite Jew. That means you hold to the literal translation of the Tanakh; the Torah, Prophets, the Writings.

Nehemia: I wouldn’t describe it that way. But what’s the question?

Shannon: No. In other words, you don’t include the Talmud, correct?

Nehemia: So, I don’t consider the Talmud to be Scripture. I think it’s interesting commentary.

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: Frankly, more wrong than it is right.

Shannon: I would agree with that.

Nehemia: I don’t know if that’s true or not, statistically, but it’s often wrong. And so, I just look to the Tanakh, and it’s not necessarily the literal interpretation. In Judaism we have a term, pshat; P-S-H-A-T, or Pe-Shin-Tet. And pshat means the plain meaning. Pshat is usually the literal interpretation, but not necessarily. If it says, “circumcise the foreskin of your heart”, the pshat means, don’t be stubborn and submit to God’s will. Whereas a literal interpretation would be, “Oh, I have to open up my heart and cut off a little piece,” right? So, the pshat is usually the literal interpretation, but not always. There’s a technical definition of pshat, which is the interpretation based on the language and the context using reason, which is that every word there has significance. I’ll hear from a lot of Christians who will say, “I don’t interpret the Bible, I just read it.” Well, you do interpret it. You just don’t realize how you’re interpreting it.

We will use terms in our… just like colloquial English, at least Jews will. We’ll say, “Well, that’s just an interpretation.” Well, everything is an interpretation. The question is, is that interpretation based on the language in the context using reason, or, is it what we really mean; is that a far-fetched interpretation? Did you pluck it out of context and read meaning into it? And a lot of times, people will read meaning into the text, and I’m opposed to that. I think we should…

Shannon: The reason I made that statement is because, if I was not a Messianic believer, I would want to be a Karaite. Because that’s all that I hold to, is the Tanakh. But I only preface that by saying… and I respect your answer, as a Karaite Jew, how do you spend the Shabbat? What is your understanding of how…

Nehemia: Oh, wow. So…

Shannon: Because I believe in the Shabbat, sundown, Friday night, to sundown, Saturday night, wherever I’m at. Is that right?

Nehemia: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s kind of the no brainer part. The question is… So, here we… I have a bunch of cultural baggage I need to share with the people. And whether they know it or not, when they approach Shabbat, they probably do too. If they’re reading online at, you know, a source like, I don’t know, like any mainstream Jewish source, and you’re dealing with a lot of cultural baggage. And what’s the cultural baggage? The Torah says don’t work on Shabbat, and that you should rest, or “cease” could be another way of translating it. “Cease from your work.”

So, what does it mean to work? So, the rabbis say in the Talmud, “The laws of Sabbath are like a mountain hanging by a hair.” And what they mean by that is that there are very few verses that define what work is, and they’ve made… Well, we say in English “a mountain out of a molehill”. In the Talmud, it’s “a mountain hanging by a hair”, right? They have a few words, and based on those few words they have derived or, frankly, made up, a whole bunch of interpretations or explanations of what it means to work. Strangely enough, work is not included in those, right?

So, they define work, and I call this legalistic, and a technical manner, they define work, where it refers to specific actions, to the point where tearing toilet paper on Shabbat, and I’m not trying to be funny, literally tearing toilet paper, they consider to be work. But if you’re carrying a couch on your back up and down the stairs all day within your house, that’s not work.

Shannon: Wow!

Nehemia: So, that’s an example I was given when I was younger. So, I just try to take it intuitively. What is work? Work is to work, right? I mean, if you work for a living, you know what work is. Whatever it is you do for a living, that’s work. And there are things you might not do for a living that are laborious, and those are work as well. So, that’s how I approach it.

An Orthodox Jew would say I’m violating Shabbat. That’s fine. I think they’re probably violating Shabbat, too, so, you know, the feeling’s mutual. We’re both doing our best, and if it requires someone to go across the sea, well, I’m bound by what I know, because there’s no way I could intuitively know that I’m required to work. What is work? That might be intuitive. But the actual requirement to rest on Shabbat? Nobody would come to that conclusion except that God told us to.

Shannon: And Nehemia, when we read the word in the New Testament, and Yeshua was going to the synagogue on the Sabbath, and like he was reading a scroll at one point in time; would that have been like on a Saturday morning there in Jerusalem? Or would that…

Nehemia: So, I mean, first of all, that was in Capernaum, so it wasn’t in Jerusalem.

Shannon: Okay. In other words…

Nehemia: I’m sorry, that was in Nazareth, in his own town, right? That’s where he got in trouble…

Shannon: I lived in Panama one time.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Shannon: I lived in Panama one time.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: And Friday night, when the Shabbat would start… there’s a large segment of Jewish people in Panama, by the way, and I had some next door neighbors in the condominium, and they would go out, and I think they were going to the synagogue to pray.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: I was just curious. A Shabbat service; is that usually Saturday during the day? Or can it be Friday evenings, too?

Nehemia: So, it’s interesting. I once had this conversation with a Southern Baptist, and he was saying that for him, the Sabbath is Sunday morning and Wednesday night. And I said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” He said, “Well, that’s when we go to church.” And that blew my mind, because Orthodox Jews go to the synagogue… My father, who was an Orthodox rabbi, went to synagogue if he was able to. Sometimes he couldn’t because of work, but ideally, he would go to synagogue 21 times a week.

Shannon: Wow!

Nehemia: Or you could do a double header, in which you’re limited to 14, right? But there were 21, or really 22, formal prayers every week. There were three daily prayers, and on Shabbat you have the Mussaf, which is an extra prayer. So, let’s call that 22, right?

Shannon: Wow!

Nehemia: But you only read the Torah in traditional services three times a week, Monday morning, Thursday morning, and Shabbat morning. You don’t read from the Torah on Tuesday afternoon or Tuesday evening, right? When I say the double header, what they’ll do is, the afternoon prayer and the evening prayer, they’ll go just before sunset, and they’ll stay long enough where they get the afternoon and the evening prayer in one shot, right? So, they’ll be there for like, you know, I don’t know, a half-hour or 45 minutes, and they’ll cover two prayers with one visit, right?

But in principle, they should be going to synagogue 21 or 22 times a week, right? And that’s not that you go on Shabbat, you go for every formal prayer, which is 21 or 22 times a week.

Shannon: So, really, it’s like I’ve been telling people, you know, because I was raised in the Christian church, both my grandfathers were pastors, and we were made to feel guilty if we did anything on Sunday. That… they said that’s a Sabbath. Well, I learned it’s not. It’s Friday night, sundown to Saturday night, sundown.

Nehemia: Yes.

Shannon: And I said, “Look, you’re confusing something here. You can go to church as much as you want.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: But the day you go to church…

Nehemia: I mean, aren’t there Catholics who go to mass every morning? I think there are.

Shannon: Yeah. I said, “You know, the Sabbath is one event. Whether or not you go to church or temple on that day, it’s up to you. You could go every day. But we can’t change God’s calendar of time. It’s always been Friday night, sundown, to Saturday night, sundown.” It just so happens that people go to church, a Christian church, on Sunday. Well, I think that’s wrong. I think it’s pagan. It’s like Chick fil A. You been to Chick fil A?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: This guy said, “I’m going to close on the Sabbath.” He closes on Sunday. He meant well, but he should be closing on Saturday. I’m just saying. But I agree with you; you can go to church all you want, any day you want.

Nehemia: So, then why is it pagan to go on Sunday? You can go seven days a week.

Shannon: Well, you can, but just don’t say that Sunday is the Sabbath, because it’s not.

Nehemia: And what’s interesting is, there was a scholar, and I forget his name, he was like a Seventh Day Adventist. And I believe he’s the first Protestant to have gone to, like, the Catholic University at the Vatican, and he did this research in Catholic sources to try to find out, when did they change… and someone can post in the comments here, his name. I forget, it’s an Italian name. He did this research, like academic scholarly research; when did the Catholics change from Saturday to Sunday?

And his discovery was quite surprising. The discovery was that it wasn’t until the 20th century that there was ever a Catholic… now, Protestant might be different, but there was never a Catholic until the 20th century that said, “Sunday is the Sabbath.” What they said was, “Sunday is the Lord’s Day, and the Sabbath has been done away with and replaced by the Lord’s day.” But they’ve always acknowledged that Saturday was the Sabbath, and just, “We go to church and have our main worship on Sunday morning.” That was the Catholic position. Isn’t that interesting?

Shannon: They also say in their Catholic writings that the Catholic Church changed the Shabbat from Friday, sundown, to Saturday night, sundown, as their mark of ecclesiastical authority.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Shannon: They believe they have the right to change the times and seasons, and that’s where they go wrong. So, I don’t feel guilty anymore if I cut my grass on a Sunday, because that’s not the Sabbath. Now, I won’t want to do it during the Shabbat. Listen, I had a gun store back in Georgia.

Nehemia: Oh.

Shannon: I was raised with a BB gun at age five. You know, that’s part of being an American. And I won’t get my five-year-old son a BB gun, though, forget that. Because I shot out windows and shot my brother in the fanny with it, and my grandmother confiscated it.

Nehemia: [Laughter]

Shannon: But I used to close on Saturday, and people came to me and said, “You’re crazy! That’s our biggest day.” I said, “Listen, it’s the Ten Commandments.” And I said, “I’m going to honor God, and I’m going to close on Saturday, and I’m going to open on Sunday.” Now, they thought I’d turned into a heretic because I was opening on Sunday. They said, “Are you a Jehovah’s Witness or something?” I said, “No, but I believe God will bless me.”

And, you know, we have a maid here that works with us and helps us with our children, and she appreciates the job and we appreciate her. And you know what? We give her off one day a week, which is what you’re supposed to do here, and we give her off on the Sabbath. And she’s ecstatic, because everybody else has to work on Saturday, and we give her off Saturday.

Now, let me ask you a question. About two more questions. In the synagogue, the temple, Yeshua was handed the scroll. He read in Hebrew, didn’t he? He didn’t read in Latin, did he? People are saying that they didn’t speak Hebrew…

Nehemia: If he read the scroll, obviously he was reading in Hebrew. That’s not even a question. The question is, when he put down the scroll and started to interpret, was he speaking Aramaic or was he speaking Hebrew? That’s a valid question. To suggest he read the scroll in anything other than Hebrew is kind of ludicrous.

Shannon: Well, if he read it in Hebrew, then we also know he spoke Hebrew, and so did everybody at that time. Did they?

Nehemia: No necessarily. So, there’s this idea that Hebrew was a dead language, and it’s sort of true. It’s true in the sense that, when toddlers are speaking to their mother… and that’s what we call a mother tongue, for centuries, they weren’t speaking in Hebrew. But when a Jew from, I don’t know, from Poland met a Jew from Morocco, which happened all the time, they were… A common profession for Jews was to be a merchant. And so, they would travel all over the world. And a Jew could arrive from Poland, in Morocco with his merchandise, and they could speak to each other. They did not speak in Polish or Arabic or Berber, they spoke to each other in Hebrew. And we have letters of them writing to each other from all over the Jewish world in Hebrew. There are Jews, you know, from all over the world who are writing to each other, usually in Hebrew, especially if they came from places where they didn’t speak the same language.

So, they would have a mother tongue, and if they had any kind of education, they could also read and write Hebrew, and then, in many cases, speak Hebrew. I was in Rome, where there are native Jews, Jews that have been there for… really, probably they were taken as slaves by the Romans from Judea 2,000 years ago.

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: And you go into their store, and I speak to them in English. And then the one seller turns to the other one in Hebrew and says, “I think we can get this guy for more money.”

Shannon: [Laughter]

Nehemia: And he doesn’t know that I speak Hebrew. And I thought that was amazing. “You guys, did you move to Israel?” “No, I’ve never been to Israel.” So, there are Jewish communities where the scholars would learn Hebrew, and they would learn to speak Hebrew, and especially write in Hebrew. But then there are other Jewish communities where even the local Jews… yeah, they speak Italian to each other, but if they don’t want an Italian to understand, they speak to each other in Hebrew. And that’s been going on for 2,000 years.

So, Hebrew was never a dead language in the way that, let’s say, Akkadian was a dead language, right? Akkadian was an ancient language, an ancient Semitic language spoken in Babylonia, and there was never anybody who spoke or even read Akkadian for almost 2,000 years. Ancient Egyptian is different. There were people who prayed in ancient Egyptian always, and that’s called Coptic, right? So, ancient Egyptian is different than Akkadian.

Hebrew is kind of in between, right? Meaning, Hebrew is more like Coptic, in that there were people who spoke it, even though it wasn’t their native language. And there were people who read it and wrote it, and even some scholars and some communities who spoke it. So, in that sense, Hebrew never completely died out. And, I forget what the question was that brought us to this topic.

Shannon: Did they speak Hebrew there, you know, at the Second Temple?

Nehemia: So, in the Second Temple period they definitely spoke Hebrew. I think that’s beyond question at this point in history. We have these letters that were found in the 1950s, in these caves in the Judean Desert. They’re part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but they’re from the Bar Kochba Revolt, which was between the year 132 and 135, when the Jews revolted against the Romans. And then they were chased into these caves, and some of them died in the caves. There’s one cave called the Cave of Horrors, where people actually just died in caves, eventually.

And in these letters, they write in Hebrew. They write in other languages, too, but some of what they write is in Hebrew. And in the 1950s, scholars realized that the Hebrew they’re writing in sounds like it was Hebrew that was spoken. They’re using things like contractions, and that’s a feature of a spoken language rather than just a written language. And so, it seems that even in the 2nd century CE or AD, there were still people who spoke Hebrew. It doesn’t mean everybody spoke Hebrew. It also doesn’t mean the Hebrew at the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt is the same as the Hebrew in the time of Moses or Ezra, right? Hebrew had evolved over time, but it was a type of Hebrew.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And so, Jesus almost certainly spoke Hebrew. I’m sure he also spoke Aramaic and Greek, that seems quite likely.

Shannon: Okay. Saul of Tarsus, who was later renamed Paul; I understand he was a student of Gamaliel. And someone told me, I don’t know if this is true, but if you’re a student of his, you would have had to have memorized the whole Torah and be able to recite it rote memory. If that’s the case…

Nehemia: That’s probably true. That may or may not be… That could be true; it’s a bit complicated. So, it says that… well, not just to be a disciple of Gamaliel… We have this curriculum of Jewish education where they say that by five, you know the entire Torah. And it’s different ages. I forget what all the different ones are. And there were definitely people who would memorize large swaths of information. It’s unclear, though, exactly when that comes into being, because one of the most accurate manuscripts of the Mishna doesn’t actually have that, so, that might be…

Shannon: We know that Paul was a learned man, if he was under Gamaliel. Now, I can’t prove this, but I I’ve heard it said that he was a member of the Sanhedrin and…

Nehemia: That Paul was a member of the Sanhedrin?

Shannon: I don’t know. Have you ever read anything to that account?

Nehemia: … I don’t know that there’s evidence of that. Maybe it’s true, I don’t know.

Shannon: So, this is what they said. They said if you’re a member of the Sanhedrin, you would have had to have been married. You couldn’t be a single man and be part of the Sanhedrin. So, the question is, was Paul ever married?

Nehemia: I don’t know.

Shannon: Or was he…

Nehemia: I never met his wife, but it’s possible.

Shannon: Okay. I’ve got two more questions to ask. Now, I’m going to ask you the most…

Nehemia: That’s an intriguing thought, that you’re making me think here. So, if Paul was on the Sanhedrin, was he on the Sanhedrin when Yeshua was put on trial?

Shannon: I think maybe he resigned, if he was, when he converted at the…

Nehemia: Oh, yeah, yeah, but before that; that was after Yeshua’s…

Shannon: Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. You’re exactly right. No, yeah.

Nehemia: That was quite a few years… well, not that many, but a few years before.

Shannon: Sure, you’re right.

Nehemia: So, in other words, was he a member of the Sanhedrin? That’s a fascinating thing to think about.

Shannon: Well, you know, he was rounding…

Nehemia: Somebody should write a novel of Paul on the Sanhedrin and how he behaved when Jesus was put on trial. Wow, what an intriguing idea.

Shannon: I was just wondering if he was ever married.

Nehemia: An historical novel.

Shannon: Someone said he had to have been married if he was in the Sanhedrin. Now, I’m going to ask you the most controversial question you probably ever been asked. But I do it because I don’t know the answer, and I figure, because you read the Tanakh and you study it, maybe you’ll be able to give me a good answer to this. Okay, I don’t mean to embarrass anybody, but I want to know.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: One of the commandments of Yehovah is that during menstruation week for a woman, you’re not to come near a woman and have relations. You’re supposed to be set apart. Basically, don’t have sex when your wife’s menstruating. But is that only for a seven-day period, and does it start when the period begins? In other words, Nehemia…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: …I don’t want to be judged of God for having relations too soon after my wife has had her period. I’m waiting presently. If my wife had a period on a Monday, we won’t have relations again for seven days till next Monday. Am I calculating that right, or is it actually eight days, or is it even longer than that?

Nehemia: So, let’s start with… we should not be embarrassed about this topic. It’s an important topic. Let me show you how important it is. And I know you probably want a short answer, but that is unlikely with me. [Laughter]

Shannon: No. I don’t know anybody who can answer this question for me. I don’t.

Nehemia: So, the short answer is, you’re right. But now let’s give you the long answer. So, I’m going to read you, or I want you to read me, actually, Ezekiel chapter 18. And Ezekiel 18 is a series of passages, or a series of scenarios, where Ezekiel is talking about somebody who sins and repents, and someone who does good and then he turns to bad. And he doesn’t list all the commandments, specifically; he lists the big ones. And in chapters 18, verses 5 through 9, let’s read that. And pay attention here; he’s not giving you every commandment, he’s just saying what the really big ones are to say, this is a righteous man.

Shannon: Okay. It says, “But if a man be just and do that which is lawful and right, and hath not eaten upon the mountains.”

Nehemia: And that’s some kind of idolatry, to eat upon the mountains, right? In other words, he talks about in Jeremiah, “They eat on the top of every hill and under every leafy tree.” They go up to the high places, and they eat a sacrifice to a pagan god, or to Yehovah in the wrong place.

Shannon: Usually swine too, right?

Nehemia: No. Not necessarily, no. I mean, we have high places that have been excavated. It seems like they were mostly doing sheep and goats and…

Shannon: Okay. “…and hath not eaten upon the mountains, neither hath lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, neither hath defiled his neighbor’s wife, neither hath come near to a menstruous woman.”

Nehemia: And come near is a euphemism for had sex with.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, it’s up there with idolatry and with adultery! That’s how the Old Testament looks at it. So, number one, you shouldn’t be embarrassed discussing; this is an important topic to talk about. But…

Shannon: How do we count? Nobody’s ever talked about…

Nehemia: We’ll talk about that in a second.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Like I said, I’m short story long. [Laughter] Sorry.

Shannon: Listen, take your time on this one, because I have searched high and low for an answer.

Nehemia: Yeah, basically…

Shannon: And I trust…

Nehemia: …you got it right. But I want to explain why there’s confusion.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And it probably wouldn’t be obvious to somebody who… you know, if you go and you look on Chabad.org, or .com or whatever their website is, you’re going to get the wrong answer.

Shannon: Right.

Nehemia: But I think it’s important to know why you’re going to get the wrong answer. Okay, I want you to read me another passage, and this one is from the New Testament; Acts 21:25.

Shannon: Okay. “As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded…”

Nehemia: The context here is they’re discussing, “Okay, do the Gentiles need to convert to Judaism? Be circumcised? What do they need to do?”

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: Right? This verse can be interpreted in different ways, but… Right? In other words, are these the four minimum things they have to do, and then they have to do other things as well as they learn? Or maybe they just have to do these four things. Both are possible, but let’s at least read what the four things are that are indisputable.

Shannon: “As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded that they observe no such thing, save only that they keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled, and from fornication.”

Nehemia: So, what is blood? So, blood might be eating blood, because when you slaughter an animal, you know, there’s a thing called blood pudding. They have it in, like, England.

Shannon: Yeah.

Nehemia: I once went to a buffet, and I’m like, “What is that disgusting black thing?” They said, “That’s blood pudding. We don’t eat it either, but the Scottish love it.” That’s what the English guy told me. So, that could be blood. But blood also refers to menstrual blood. Not that you’re eating it, but that you have sex with a woman who is in what’s called the menstrual impurity, or nida. So, it seems like that does apply, even in the New Testament. Even a minimalist interpretation that you only do these four things and you don’t have to do anything else, blood is part of it, the laws of blood.

All right. So, now that we understand that, Leviticus 15 is very confusing to a lot of people. I’ve had people who read Leviticus 15 and say, “Oh, if my wife sits in a certain chair, I’m not allowed to sit in that chair.” No. Leviticus 15 is a series of rules about becoming ritually clean and ritually unclean, and ritual uncleanness… it’s not forbidden to become ritually unclean. However, it is specifically forbidden from having sex with a woman who is ritually unclean from menstrual blood. And there’s two types of menstrual blood in Leviticus 15. There’s a regular period, and the word that’s used in the Torah, I’ll just use that word. The word is a “flow” of up to seven days. And “flow” here would exclude spotting, right? So, if a woman has menstrual flow up to seven days, then she counts seven days from when she first sees the flow. If it goes beyond seven days, or if it is not part of a regular cycle, meaning, if it’s a woman whose regular… Guys this is an adult conversation, it just is. If it’s a woman who is not regular, then her cycle, whenever that is, is her cycle, right? But if she is regular, and she has multiple days of bleeding, which is not part of her regular cycle, then it’s a different category. And then you count seven bloodless days. And I’ll use the Hebrew terms. There’s what we call nida. Nida is the regular menstrual cycle, and that’s up to seven days, and then there is zava. Zava is a flow outside of the regular days. And really in modern terms, like medically, we would say that’s a miscarriage.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: So, in other words, you know, the woman, it’s not her regular cycle, and all of a sudden she bleeds for two or three days. Like, wait, what’s going on here? Does she have cancer, God forbid? More than likely, it’s a miscarriage.

Shannon: Oh, okay. A real world example; last Monday, my wife had her period start.

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: So, I know that I need to wait seven days, but how do I count that? Would I say “Okay, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday…”

Nehemia: Every day is counted from sunset to sunset, and so when she first started bleeding, or she saw it, right? If she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, right? If she first saw it, or felt it, I suppose, five minutes before sunset, that counts as the first day. That’s Sunday. So, it started on Sunday in that case, right? Meaning, or let’s say if it’s Monday, sorry. So, you said it was on Monday. So, if it’s Monday, and it started five minutes before sunset on Monday, then the Monday counts the whole day. If it’s five minutes after sunset, then Tuesday is day one.

Shannon: I was going to have relations. My wife said, I can’t, I have my period. I said, “Oh great, I gotta wait seven days now.” Okay. So, Monday she started, like Monday evening.

Nehemia: You gotta pay attention when it’s sunset. So, that counts as Tuesday.

Shannon: Okay, so, how do I count?

Nehemia: So, it’s Monday sunset to Tuesday sunset, that’s day one, right? So, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and then the following Monday at sunset that is when she becomes ritually clean. She should take a bath or a shower, and then at sunset on Monday, she becomes ritually clean. Because sunset Monday is when Tuesday begins.

Shannon: Would I be safer just to say eight days?

Nehemia: No, you don’t need to say eight days. You’ve just got to pay attention to the Hebrew timing.

Shannon: Okay, because the evening and the morning were the first day, right?

Nehemia: Right, but the Hebrew days are counted, and specifically for matters of ritual cleanliness, it’s explicit, that they’re counted from sunset to sunset, right? It always in Leviticus 15, somebody, a person becomes clean at sunset, right? If they’re unclean, they become clean at sunset. In also Numbers 19, if you want to look at that.

Shannon: So, if you had your period on a Monday afternoon…

Nehemia: So, then you got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Sunday at sunset is when you’re ritually clean.

Shannon: Oh.

Nehemia: Now, if you keep bleeding into the second Sunday past sunset, now you’re into an eighth day, and then you need seven bloodless days. So, now let’s talk about where the confusion comes from. I mean, I think that’s pretty straightforward. That’s what Leviticus 15 actually says.

Shannon: Before you go there, here’s the question. Let’s say she has a three-day period, starts on a Monday and ends on Wednesday.

Nehemia: You still have seven days from when the blood first flows.

Shannon: Oh, okay. That’s important. I didn’t know that. I was confused. Okay.

Nehemia: And I want to look at something. So, there’s a bunch of laws in Leviticus 15 which quite frankly have zero application to the 21st century because they’re related to becoming ritually unclean in the context of the Tabernacle, and later the Temple. But then, in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 there’s a specific commandment that is a prohibition, unrelated… well, it’s related to 15, but… so, read to me Leviticus 18 verse 19, because Leviticus 15 doesn’t say “don’t become ritually unclean”. What it actually says is “don’t defile,” I’m paraphrasing, “don’t defile My Tabernacle when you’re unclean.” So, you’re allowed to become unclean, you just can’t have sex when you’re unclean. So, read verse 19.

Shannon: “Also, thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness.”

Nehemia: Right. So, during the period of ritual uncleanness, which is seven days from when the blood is first seen, it’s forbidden to have sex with her. So, to uncover someone’s nakedness is to have sex with them. That’s repeated in Leviticus 20. Let me find that verse…

Shannon: “Thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbor’s wife…”

Nehemia: That’s a different thing. So, Leviticus 20, not verse 20, chapter 20.

Shannon: Oh, excuse me.

Nehemia: Let’s see. A lot of the commandments in Leviticus 18 are repeated in Leviticus 20, often with slightly different wording. Well, always with different wording. Leviticus 20 verse 18 is the repeat of Leviticus 18:19. Yeah, that’s confusing, I know.

So, these are prohibitions, meaning there’s no prohibition to become ritually unclean, but there is a prohibition to have sex with a woman who is in the state of nida, of menstrual impurity.

Shannon: Yes. And, you know, this is very important, because people do it. And, you know, listen. Are you familiar…

Nehemia: Well, if you don’t know, you don’t know. I mean…

Shannon: Are you unfamiliar with this verse that says a curse, causeless, shall not come?

Nehemia: Say it again.

Shannon: It says, “A curse, causeless, shall not come.” Let me give this to you.

Nehemia: I’m not familiar with that particular translation.

Shannon: It is…

Nehemia: But it looks like it’s Proverbs 26:2. Let’s see what it says in the Hebrew.

Shannon: You know, the blessing or the curse. We have to choose.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: God blesses and He curses. If you bless My people, I’ll bless you. If you curse My people, I’ll curse you. God’s all about the blessings and the curses. We have to choose every day. And that’s why it’s important. You’re right, there are certain things that we don’t have to do today, like Temple sacrifice, or, were only for the priest…

Nehemia: Not only do we not have to do, we can’t do. There’s no way to do them, because if you follow all the stipulations that are given, it’s impossible to fulfill today.

Shannon: But Nehemia, you would agree that the Ten Commandments are still for today, and…

Nehemia: Oh, yeah. You know, I think the whole Torah’s for today, just some of it we can’t implement.

Shannon: I agree with you, and that’s why this is an important topic and…

Nehemia: For sure.

Shannon: I want to ask you one… You see, I have the divine name up on the screen, Yehovah.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: I want to thank Nehemia Gordon for making that known to me. Should I always spell in caps, or is there any time where you would put lowercase?

Nehemia: I usually wouldn’t put it in caps. I mean, in English just the Y would be caps. You could put it all in caps, if you want.

Shannon: No, I didn’t know what was the proper thing to do, or should…

Nehemia: I mean, that’s an English rule. It has nothing to do with Hebrew.

Shannon: Okay. So, I had Yehovah…

Nehemia: The young people use all caps for shouting, so we probably shouldn’t… Maybe you want to shout His name though, I don’t know.

Shannon: I just want to give him proper deference. I didn’t know. I had Yehovah speak to me audibly one time in a dream.

Nehemia: Wow.

Shannon: And if it wasn’t Him, it was his angel. It’s only happened one time in my life.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Shannon: Not before, not since. I was in Panama at the time, and I was depressed. I was, you know, just battling heaviness and, you know, the business that was going good, but I just, you know, had mood swings. And I thought, “Man, do I need psychotropic drugs? I’m having depression hit me.” And I cried out to the Lord, and He heard my cry. And I had a dream one night, and I heard God audibly speak to me in my dream. He said, “You and your brother Damon have a generational curse you need to break.”

Nehemia: Hmm.

Shannon: I woke up Saturday morning, and I realized I hadn’t went back to my bed. I had fallen asleep on my couch. And I had my Bible there on the armrest, and I just lifted it up, and I woke up Saturday morning. I’m like, man… I opened the Bible, and I just set my eyes on the Scripture. I don’t remember what Scripture it was. And the dream came back, the voice. I didn’t see God; I just heard the voice. “You and your brother Damon have a generational curse you need to break.”

So, my brother Damon called me about two days later. He said, “Man, I gotta tell you about this book. You got to get it. It’s by Derek Prince. It’s called The Blessing Or The Curse, You Choose. It’s about breaking generational curses. And Derek Prince, he loved Israel, loved Jerusalem, a great Bible scholar. He did a teaching on how, I think Deuteronomy 27 and 28 and Leviticus, there are commands that are in effect today. And if you run awry of them and break them, you can do it to your own peril. And it says, “God visits the iniquities of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those that hate Him.”

So, you know, for example, if you’re involved in incest, God will curse you. If you want to get involved with witchcraft, you’re going to have a curse. Curse of the bastard, et cetera. There’s a whole bunch of them. If you do this, I’m going to curse you, but if you do this, I’ll bless you. So, my brother said, “Man, you gotta read this book.” And I said, “Damon, I gotta tell you about this dream. I heard God tell us we got a generational curse.”

Now, he told me that our half-brother who lived in Jacksonville, Florida, was laying on his bed, and he said a demon, an evil spirit, jumped on him. He was awake and began to choke him out, like this. And he screamed out the name of Yeshua, Jesus in English, and he said the thing let go and ran out and slammed the door. He was so traumatized by it, he went and found a workshop on breaking generational curses.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Shannon: God was speaking to us, and I didn’t know what to do. They didn’t teach on generational curses. But I take it very seriously, and that’s why I asked the question about menstruation, and, you know, these…

Nehemia: And isn’t it interesting? Ezekiel 18, where we looked at the verse that talks about not having sex with a menstruating woman, is specifically about generational curses. Ezekiel 18 is an entire passage that starts off with a proverb, and the proverb is: The fathers eat sour grapes, and the teeth of the sons are set on edge. Meaning, you bear the consequences of what your ancestor did, or what your father did. And God says, “No, we’re not going to do that. Here’s how it works.” And the way it works is that you do not carry the generational curse if you repent. You also don’t carry the generational blessing if you turn away from the way of God, right? That’s what Ezekiel 18 says.

Shannon: So, God’s not going to kill us for something our parents did, necessarily, but you could feel the brunt of it if…

Nehemia: Only if you continue in that sin.

Shannon: Okay, so, we had a quandary here. Now, God was trying to help us out. He said, “You got an issue.” Come to find out, on my dad’s side, my great-grandfather dies at 52. That’s not natural. My grandfather died at 58. A year later, my dad died at 57, a year from that dream. I said, “Man, people are dying early before the time. This is not natural; this is a curse.” Came to find out that my great-grandfather was involved in idolatry. He became a Freemason, and he became a third-degree master mason. And those people over in the lodge, even if they don’t know it, they basically have bowed themselves to the demon of the lodge, Baphomet, Ahura Mazda, some have told me, that you only find out about in the higher ranks, like at 33rd degree. But he basically had gotten involved in idolatry, and God brought a bloodline curse on us.

And there was also divorce that went four generations, whoremongering, and we had some sins to repent of that had never been repented of. Nobody ever dealt with it. And that death curse hit my dad. He died a year later of cancer. So, we didn’t know what to do, but my brother said, “Hey, this book will tell us what to do.” So, we repented of our sins, said, “God, forgive us, forgive our ancestors for idolatry, fornication, adultery,” you know, whatever we could think of. And we meant business. And we repented and we broke that curse. We stood on Galatians 3:13, broke that curse, name of Yeshua. And I’m 55 now. If I can outlive my great grandfather, we broke that curse. I think we did, but listen; we cannot take these curses for granted, because God blesses and He curses.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Shannon: That’s my understanding. Would you agree? Does God today bless and curse?

Nehemia: I mean, we were looking earlier, I think… what were we looking at? Deuteronomy 30. Let’s look at that passage, because…

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: …if you ask me what my favorite verse is in the Bible…

Shannon: What is it?

Nehemia: My favorite story is the story of Josiah, but my favorite verse, or my favorite passage, is Deuteronomy 30 verses 15 to 20. And Deuteronomy 30 says, “See, I place before you today life and good, and death and evil, that I am commanding you today to love Yehovah your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments. And you will live, and you will multiply, and Yehovah your God will bless you on the earth that you are coming to inherit it.”

And this is verse 17 of Deuteronomy 30. “And if your heart turns and you do not obey, and you are cast off and you bow down to other gods, I tell you today that you will surely be destroyed. You will not lengthen your days upon the earth which you are passing over the Jordan to come in there to inherit it.” And he says in verse 19, “I testify against you today, the heavens and the earth,” meaning, I call as testimony, “the heavens and the earth. Life and death I place before you the blessing and the curse.” And this is the greatest line here. “Choose life in order that you will live, you and your descendants, to love Yehovah your God, to obey His voice, and to cling unto Him. For He is your life, and the length of your days to dwell upon the earth, that Yehovah your God swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give to them.”

So, he says, “I place before you today life and good, and death and evil. Choose life that you may live.” Right? That’s the central message of the Torah. That’s the central message of the Hebrew Bible, in a nutshell is, it’s up to you. You can choose life or death, good or evil. Choose life because you’ll live and you’ll have a blessing. If you choose evil, you’ll have a curse and you’ll die.

Shannon: Man, I want the blessing, not the curse. Nehemia, what’s next for you right now? What are you working on currently?

Nehemia: So, I’m working on a bunch of things. One of the really exciting things is Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research; IHBMR.com. That’s the research institute that I founded. We’ve got some of the top scholars in the world that are working with the IHBMR, and we are working to make Hebrew Bible manuscripts accessible to the world. Right now, it is painful to try and access some of the manuscripts that have already been digitized and made available. We’re trying to make that much easier so that scholars, and even laymen, can, at their fingertips… they want to pull up Deuteronomy 30? They should be able to do that in seconds, in the Hebrew manuscripts that have survived. So, that’s one of the really exciting things I’m working on right now.

Shannon: Now, tell me about your website. You’ve got nehemiaswall.com.

Nehemia: So, Nehemiaswall.com… I’m Nehemia and I built the wall, right? There’s the character Nehemiah in the Bible, and that’s my ministry website. And yeah, that’s where I do teachings on the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament as well, in some instances, all kinds of interesting things. My wife now has a podcast called The Wise Purpose that you can also access. It’s on YouTube, I think, and I believe it’s also on different social media. And… yeah. So, that is what we have going on.

Shannon: How can we partner with you, and do you have membership available?

Nehemia: So, people who donate to the ministry and support it, they get access to more teachings that, you know, we make available specifically to the donors. There’s different levels. We have something now called the Scholar Club, where we’re getting together monthly, and we are, you know, doing live teachings. We just did one yesterday for the general public, or no, two days ago, for the general public, on Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost in “Christianese”. And sharing some, you know, fascinating things, things I discovered while I was preparing the teaching. I learn new things every year and every day.

Shannon: Wow!

Nehemia: It’s an opportunity to share with the public.

Shannon: Tell me about your YouTube channel. Where can they find you, and where can they go to subscribe?

Nehemia: They can go to nehemiaswall.com, and you can subscribe there. I’ve got a newsletter that comes out every week, a free newsletter. It’ll inform you about all the updates. Wherever you find podcasts, you’ll find my podcast. Just type in Nehemia’s Wall or Nehemia Gordon. It’s on YouTube, we’ve got a TikTok channel, we’re on Facebook. Wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, you know, all the different podcast outlets as well.

Shannon: I saw Sister Gordon’s YouTube channel, Miss Gordon. What is your wife’s first name?

Nehemia: My wife’s name is Lynell Gordon.

Shannon: So, in the church, we would call her Sister Gordon.

Nehemia: Oh, Sister Gordon! Okay.

Shannon: So, Lynell, Sister Lynell. I saw her YouTube. Hey, that’s really good; good teaching there, and testimony. Folks, we’ll put a link up here in the show notes. You need to get over and subscribe to Nehemia’s YouTube channel. Go to nehemiaswall.com. You can sign up and support the ministry there. Nehemia, are there any universities or locations on the board for this year that you need to go out and do some more examination of scrolls?

Nehemia: I generally don’t tell people where I’m going until I’ve already been there, just as a security matter.

Shannon: Yes.

Nehemia: But yes, there are some things that I have on the agenda, some international travel to examine some manuscripts. I’ll be able to tell you about those after I’ve already come back.

Shannon: I almost forgot. I gotta show you one bonus. Can you hold one second? Hold on a second.

Nehemia: Ooh! What do we have here? Let’s unroll that.

Shannon: Nehemia…

Nehemia: A Torah scroll, it looks like.

Shannon: Now you know that I’m in Indonesia, right?

Nehemia: I did not know that, no.

Shannon: I’ve been in Bali now for nine years.

Nehemia: Oh, I was not aware of that.

Shannon: Largest Muslim nation in the world. I may have the only Hebrew scroll in all of Indonesia.

Nehemia: Okay, let’s see what you got.

Shannon: Okay, now, I got this at a Michael Rood expo many years ago, and I bought it. It was a leaf, I think of… let me see if I can get this up here…

Nehemia: I actually can’t see it now, it kind of disappeared. I think if you move too close it becomes part of the background.

Shannon: Yes. Let me let me turn my background off…

Nehemia: Okay.

Shannon: That’s gonna be better.

Nehemia: Nice.

Shannon: Now, I don’t know if I have it upside down or not.

Nehemia: No, it’s not upside down. Yeah.

Shannon: Closer to the screen?

Nehemia: No, no. Can you move it over a little bit to your left?

Shannon: Tell me if I’m going the right direction.

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s right.

Shannon: Is this… is this Hebrew? Aramaic?

Nehemia: That’s Hebrew. So, you’re looking there at… like the one passage I just read was Numbers 17…

Shannon: I should probably have this with gloves on. Forgive me.

Nehemia: No, they don’t use gloves anymore. We used to use gloves. They say you want to wash your hands, that’s for sure, and dry them well. The reason we don’t use gloves is they lack… They used to use these white gloves, and some people still require nitrile gloves. I’ve been made to put on gloves, but generally they try to avoid them because you don’t have the dexterity and you end up breaking the corners on the edges.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: That’s frankly more of a problem with books, meaning a codex, than it is with a scroll. This is a scroll, obviously. A piece of a scroll.

Shannon: You want me to come closer?

Nehemia: No, no. I can read it just fine. Yeah.

Shannon: Can you read a little bit for me?

Nehemia: If you move over to your right, because it’s kind of cut off… So, all right, there we are. So, we have here, the third line is the beginning of a section, and the section there is Deuteronomy 17 verse 9. It says: Va’ydabber Yehovah el-Mosheh, “And Yehovah spoke to Moshe,” le’emor, “saying…” Herommu mittoch ha’edah hazzot va’achalleh otam keraga. He says, “Raise yourself up from this congregation and I will consume them in a moment.” Va’yiplu al-pneihem. “And they fell upon their faces.” Va’yomer Mosheh el Aharon, “And Moses said to Aaron,” this is the rebellion of Korach, of Korah, who says, “Hey, God didn’t just speak to you, Moses. Why are you so special?” And they have this challenge, and then there’s a plague that comes upon the camp. So, that’s the passage we’re reading here.

Shannon: Let me show you the back. I was told this was smuggled out of a country in a tire axle; it would have been destroyed otherwise, and I bought it back in 2007 at the Jonah Code Conference.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Shannon: Now, what do you think this thing’s made out of? Is this calf leather?

Nehemia: Oh, I couldn’t tell you what animal, but it’s definitely leather. People who can tell you what animal… I find that a bit dubious. There are some scientists who have started to do research to distinguish between the… Oh, now it’s upside down. Between the different animals, and there are some publications recently trying to do that based on hair patterns. I definitely can’t see it well enough, and I don’t know enough about it to be able to say which animal. Probably it’s a cow, just because that’s what they usually made them out of.

Shannon: Now, this is Deuteronomy?

Nehemia: No, this is Numbers 17 is the one we just read.

Shannon: Oh, this is Numbers, okay, I had…

Nehemia: If you move it over all the way, and… I get confused, the other direction. No. Yeah, yeah. Go, the other direction… yeah, the way you’re going now, go all the way… Go all the way to one direction, to the upper right, and I’ll tell you where it starts. Oh, wait, stop here. V’ahine ha’eda…

Shannon: By the way, is this Masoretic? You see the pointers?

Nehemia: No, there’s no vowels here. Scrolls generally don’t have vowels. It’s very rare for them to have vowels. So, it starts in Numbers 15 verse 24, in the middle of the verse, if you want to make a note of that somewhere. And then if you go to the opposite corner, meaning the bottom of the next side, I can tell you where it goes up until… so, it’s from Numbers 15:24. So, it goes up until… Numbers 19:3.

Shannon: Nehemia, you mean to tell me a human being, a scribe, did this by hand?

Nehemia: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Shannon: And what would they have used? I want to know how old this thing is! Could it be just a few hundred…

Nehemia: Probably only 200 or 300 years old, would be my guess, from what I can see here.

Shannon: Can you tell me how I should store this to protect it?

Nehemia: So, I actually have a few pieces of scrolls, and I was advised by a rabbi who restores old Torah scrolls, and he said you can just put it in a picture frame. That was his advice.

Shannon: Okay.

Nehemia: And I have… let’s see, I have two or three scrolls, I don’t remember if… I have one Yemenite, and oh, one of mine is in Israel, so I have one that’s similar to that that’s in Israel. And I was told by that particular rabbi, that my piece was from North Africa and 200 years old. I don’t know that he really knows. There’s not enough study that’s been done on this. Right? Meaning, the way they wrote 100 years ago and the way they wrote 300 years ago didn’t change that much, quite frankly.

Shannon: When you were reading, I got chills. I honestly think that this may be the only Hebrew scroll in all of Indonesia.

Nehemia: Wow!

Shannon: And I brought it in my suitcase. It was in storage in America, and I went back last year, and I got it. I’m honored to have this. And I also have a shofar, which I like to blow. [Laughter]

Nehemia: Wow.

Shannon: I’m honored to have it. I’m honored to have you here tonight, and Nehemia, we would love to have you back on again. Thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight. Once again, if someone would like to contact you and support your work, what’s the best way to do that?

Nehemia: Go to nehemiaswall.com, and you can sign up there for a free newsletter. You can donate to the ministry; there’s a contact form you can write and there’s people who will read it. Not necessarily me, but somebody will.

Shannon: Please thank your wife for letting us take you for three hours today for our super marathon. And my friend, will you be so kind as to close us in prayer? Could you pray a blessing over the people out there tonight?

Nehemia: This is the blessing that God gave to Aaron, and his descendants in Numbers 6. Yevarechcha Yehovah ve’yishmarecha. “Yehovah bless you and keep you.” Ya’er Yehovah panav eleicha ve’yichuneka. “Yehovah shine His face towards you and be gracious towards you.” Yissa Yehovah panav eleicha ve’yasem lecha shalom. “Yehovah, lift His face towards you and give you peace.” Amen.

Shannon: Bonus question.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Shannon: I’ve heard that the priest would do this. What does this mean?

Nehemia: Ooh. So, it says, “And the priest will place My name upon the children of Israel.” And so, there’s Jewish sources that say this was a way of spelling out the name. It’s kind of upside down, actually. Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Shannon: Wow!

Nehemia: This was a hand gesture, because they weren’t allowed to speak it because of Rabbinical tradition, so they made hand gestures, kind of like Jewish sign language.

Shannon: Do you ever pray with your hands like that?

Nehemia: I don’t, because I’m not a Kohen. I’m not a priest. Only Kohanim really do that. Anybody can say the Priestly Blessing, but Kohanim are traditionally the ones who do that.

Shannon: My friend, thank you so much for spending time with us. We got a million and one questions next time, we’ll see you again.

Nehemia: Bye-bye.

Shannon: We’ll send you a copy. God bless you, brother. Thank you.

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