The Tower that Still Stands – Nehemia Gordon (Open Door Series – Part 11)

The Tower That Still StandsIn The Tower That Still Stands, Nehemia Gordon tells the story of how he found the name of God with full vowels as the Twin Towers were falling on 9/11, and how we can find strength in the Migdal Oz, the “strong tower” that still stands. Sarah wrote: "This episode gave me chill bumps, again and again! I just had to stand up and shout!"

I look forward to reading your comments!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AsckpKoC1A?rel=0 Transcript

The Tower that Still Stands - Nehemia Gordon (Open Door Series - Part 11)

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

Nehemia: Yesterday I talked to you a little bit about the Shrine of the Book, which is one of my favorite places in the world. This place over here. And I mentioned that I call it the Jot and Tittle Museum. And I didn’t really explain why. I said a little bit why - that it preserves, essentially, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, which is the most important manuscript… really, it’s the most important book in the world. Because for me, at least, the Bible is the most important book in the world, and the most important copy of the Bible in the world is the Aleppo Codex. And it’s in this museum here, in the Shrine of the Book, the Jot and Tittle Museum. This is what it looks like. And I mentioned how I was so blessed that I got into the vault to see the original Aleppo Codex, not just the two top pages on display, but the whole thing. And that really, for me, was an amazing experience.

And one of the reasons this was so important to me, and I guess I didn’t share this, is that there was something in the Aleppo Codex that I encountered sometime before this. This is actually a picture of me about 80 pounds ago, in my living room, in front of my bookshelf. And I have two really important books on this bookshelf, which are, for me, the two most valuable books I have. And you can see it’s sagging under the weight, because these are big books.

But up here, I have actually a copy of the Aleppo Codex. Back in the 1970s they made this volume that had photographs of every single page of this crown jewel of Hebrew manuscripts, and they only made 500 of them. And they were very, very expensive books, and they sold out almost immediately. Well, back when Reggie White came over and he was with me in the vault, we afterwards went out, and that night he said something, something that I thought was profound. He said, “This was the best day of my life.” And I said, “Reggie, what are you talking about? You won the Super Bowl, what do you mean, this was the best day of your life? Surely when you won that, that was the best day.” He said, “No, today was, because this was an answer to prayer.” And in some respects, it was for me also an answer to prayer, but the main prayer that was answered for me was a couple of years before that.

Oh, and the next day, we were sitting in the Old City of Jerusalem and we were having lunch, and I had mentioned to Reggie how they made this book, 500 copies, and they all sold out back in the 1970s, there were none left. And Reggie, in his deep voice, he said, “I need one of those.” And so I got on the phone and I called the publisher and I said, “Do you not have one single copy left?” They said, “Sorry, there’s none left. They were all sold out back in the 1970s.”

About a half hour later, they called me back and they said, “We just found 100 copies in the basement that we didn’t even know existed, we went to check because you called.” And I told this to Reggie, and then I said, “But Reggie, here’s how much they cost.” He said, “No problem, I’ll get one.” And he actually got one for himself, one for Keith Johnson, one for Qadri Ismail, and then he said to me, “Nehemia, I’ll get one for you, too.” I said, “No, Reggie, that’s too generous, I can’t accept that.” I’m not going to tell you how much it cost, but it was a lot of money. As Reggie used to say it was muuney. [laughter] I mean, this was an expensive book. And he got it for me anyway. And so, that is one of my prized possessions up there, the Aleppo Codex. And here is the Leningrad Codex, which is my second most prized possession. Now, that isn’t as expensive. It was made in modern times, in the 90s, actually, using modern technologies. And so, it was much cheaper, and I bought that on eBay for half price. Somebody’s say “Nehemia is Jewish”. [laughter]

So anyway, these two books, the reason they were so important to me isn’t just that they’re the two most important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, but there was something in these two specific manuscripts that I came across. At first thought stumbled upon, but now I’m believing that the hand of God is in this. And what I came across had to do with the name of God, the name of our heavenly Father. His name is revealed in Exodus chapter 3, verse 15. Moses asked the question, he says, “What name should I tell to the Israelites? I’m going to say this God appeared to me. I’m going to say it’s the God of our fathers, when I go to Israel, and they’re going to say, ‘Well, what’s His name?’ What name should I give the people?”

And the reason that he would have to ask this is that there were many gods in ancient Israel, and ancient Canaan, and ancient Egypt. There was Ra, the sun god, and there was Ba’al, the lord, the master. And there were all kinds of other deities, and so, Moses couldn’t just say “the God of our ancestors”, that could have been the terafim that Rachel took and stole from Laban, right? I mean, who did he mean? So our heavenly Father revealed Himself, revealed His name to Moses in Exodus 3:15. And there it says, “Thus say to the children of Israel.” Then the four Hebrew letters, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, appear. This is a Yud, say Yud.

Audience: Yud.

Nehemia: Hey.

Audience: Hey.

Nehemia: Vav.

Audience: Vav.

Nehemia: Hey.

Audience: Hey.

Nehemia: It says Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. I knew this guy in Texas, and out of respect for the Rabbinical tradition... because the Rabbinical tradition I grew up with was whenever you see these four letters, you were to read them as Adonay, as Lord. And out of respect for Rabbinical tradition, he didn’t want to say Adonay, because he felt that was falsifying the text. So every time he saw these letters, he pronounced them as Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. Except being a Texan, he said it “Yudibabi”, so he would actually be reading Scripture, and he’d be reading it, “And Yudibabi spoken unto Moses saying,” and he’d get into the prophets and, “Thus sayeth Yudibabi.” [laughter] So I don’t want to call my heavenly Father Yudibabi, I’d like to try to actually call Him by His name.

But this is something that I struggled with for many years, that I wasn’t actually sure exactly how to pronounce His name, even once I came to the realization that it was important. And I knew it was important, because the end of this verse says, “Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey the God of your fathers has sent me to you, this is My name forever,” say forever.

Audience: Forever.

Nehemia: “This is my memorial for every generation,” say every generation.

Audience: Every generation.

Nehemia: So how do we know this name is important today? Don’t give me your opinion. Based on the verse, how do we know? Because it says, “forever and for every generation”, and presumably “forever and every generation” hasn’t transpired, we’re still in that, to the best of my knowledge. So I struggled with this, because I didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the Creator. And there was this one passage in the Midrash, which is the writings of the ancient rabbis - and ironically, it was a Karaite Jew who showed me this midrash, this passage from the writings of the ancient rabbis. And here’s what they said. The rabbis said, “Why does Israel pray in this world but not get answered?” Now, when they say, “this world”, they mean before the coming of the end times kingdom. And they said, “Because they do not know the explicit name.”

Now, when the rabbis talk about hashem hameforash, the explicit name, they mean Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, Yudibabi, the actual pronunciation. “However, in the future world, the Holy One, blessed be He, will inform them of His name, as it is written, ‘Therefore My people will know My name.’” This was back when left and right there were buses blowing up in Jerusalem, where I live, and I’m thinking about the history of my people. And the rabbis are telling us God’s not answering our prayers because we’re not calling upon His name. Now, I’m not saying all the bad things in our history happened because we didn’t call upon His name, I don’t think it’s a magical incantation. And that’s an important point. A lot of people will tell you, and I have people literally tell me this all the time. “Nehemia, how can you say that God’s name is such and such? He has personally revealed to me that it is Yahuwahu.” And I’m like, “Okay, if that’s what God personally revealed to you, you should go with that, but He didn’t reveal that to me, and I don’t see any evidence for that in the sources.”

And as I was trying to understand His name, what I wanted to be able to do is stand before God, before the Creator of the Universe in the day of judgment, and be able to say to Him I wasn’t being blown by the wind by one theory or another theory, but that I was actually basing myself on something that I found written in the oracles of God, in the Hebrew sources that were preserved by Your people. And this was something that for years I wanted to find. This was something I prayed for. This was one of my deepest prayers, “I want to be able to call upon the name of the Creator.”

One of the things I had been taught, I was taught this as a fact. In fact, I was told this is common knowledge. And what I was told is that the vowels of Yudibabi, of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, of the name of our Father in the text of the Bible actually have the vowels of Adonay. This is what I was told as a fact. In fact, every introduction to ancient Hebrew will tell you this. This is the word Adonay, which means Lord, perfectly good word, legitimate word that appears about 300 times in the Hebrew text of Scripture. But the problem is that the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, those four Hebrew consonants, that appears 6,828 times. And what I was told is that those 6,828 times they have the vowels of this other word, Adonay, which would be the vowels ya-ho-va.

Well, as I was studying Scripture, I was studying at the Hebrew University, and I was studying the Bible in the original language, and I kept seeing over and over that that simply wasn’t the case. I started to encounter Hebrew manuscripts. I started with the Leningrad Codex, and I saw in the Leningrad Codex that in fact there weren’t the vowels of Adonay. What I was being told was a fact that everybody knows was simply factually untrue. It just was not the case. And these are the vowels that I actually found in the Leningrad Codex, over here. Here is what’s called a shva, say shva.

Audience: Shva.

Nehemia: The Yud and the Vav... kamatz, say kamatz.

Audience: Kamatz.

Nehemia: And that would be pronounced something like Yehva. And the problem with this is that I immediately knew when I saw this that something was missing. And the reason I knew something is missing is that this Hey, this H in the middle of the word, doesn’t have a vowel attached to it. And in Hebrew, if you have a letter like that in the middle of a word, it has to have a vowel attached to it. Even if it’s the end of a syllable, then it’ll have a symbol telling you - called a silent shva - that this is the end of a syllable and it doesn’t have a vowel.

So basically, I looked at that, and I said, “Something is missing.” And what I realized happened is the scribes, following this tradition of not pronouncing the name, the Jewish scribes decided, “We’re not going to put all the vowels of the name.” Because one of the things that they did, if they if they would make a mistake in writing, for example, and they wanted to erase something, well, they had several methods of erasing it. They didn’t have an eraser, like we have on pencils. They could scratch something out with a razor, they could blot it out with water. You know, they’d literally dissolve the ink, blot out a word. Or they could leave it without vowels. If they remove the vowels, people would see that and say, “Okay, we’re not going to read that word.”

And when I saw this, I realized that the scribes didn’t want us to read this word, and therefore, they took out one of the vowels. And that also made me realize that if I could figure out what that missing vowel was, that would be the pronunciation of the name. Because the scribes wouldn’t have any reason to take out the vowel unless that was the actual pronunciation. You know, in the Rabbinical prohibition on the name, there’s no prohibition of pronouncing the name Yihawehi, because everybody knows that’s not the pronunciation of the name. The only prohibition is to pronounce the name - the rabbis have a phrase - to pronounce the name the way it is written, to pronounce it according to the true pronunciation. And it’s actually really interesting. If you go to most rabbis and you say the name Yahweh, they won’t bat an eye, they’ll have no problem with that. But if you pronounce the name a certain other way, they will go ballistic, because you’ve violated the ban on the name, which is an interesting point.

But I wanted solid proof. I didn’t just want opinion or speculation. I wanted solid proof, and I was searching for this and struggling and praying. God, please open my eyes and let me see this. And for years I was struggling with this. You know, there’s this movie The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille, one of my favorite movies - I think Michael likes that movie, too, right? One of my favorite movies. But what I really wanted to do for a number of years was pray to God, calling upon His name, calling upon the name of our Father, according to the true pronunciation to the best of my knowledge, to the best that I could find in His oracles of God. In the Cecil B. DeMille movie, there’s a really strange thing that goes on. They refer to the God of Israel repeatedly as “the God who has no name”. Four times in the movie, they call him “the God who has no name”. And there’s this one scene that kept going through my head as I was praying to God asking Him, “Please open my eyes so I can know your name.” I felt like I was Moses. Moses, in this scene that we’re about to see, was being cast out into the desert after he had killed the Egyptian, and Ramses, the son of Pharaoh in the movie, who’s played by Yul Brenner, who I love, he had a great hairdo. [laughter] Yul Brenner, he’s sending Moses out into the desert, and here’s what he says. And this is how I felt.

Movie quote: I commend you to your Hebrew God, who has no name.

Nehemia: And I felt like I was being sent out into the desert, to the God who has no name. And this was my prayer - for God to open my eyes and let me have some knowledge of what His name is. Well, a little over 10 years ago, I had this job while I was doing my master’s degree at the Hebrew University. I was a researcher on something called the Hebrew University Bible Project. And I was a starting researcher, very junior in the field, and so they gave me the worst job of all. And the worst job was as a proofreader. And my job was actually to proofread the Bible. They were printing a text of the Bible in Hebrew, and I had to take the Aleppo Codex and compare every jot and every tittle. Now, just so you know how mind numbingly boring that is, let’s show this picture here. There are four things in every page of the Hebrew text of Scripture in the manuscripts. You’ve got the consonants, say consonants.

Audience: Consonants.

Nehemia: Those are the Hebrew letters- Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, etc. And then you have the vowels. Those tell you how to pronounce the constants, how to put them together. In English, it’s A, E, I, O and U. Those are actually letters in English. In Hebrew, the vowels are actually a series of dots and dashes written above and below the letters. Then you also have, in addition to the vowels, say vowels.

Audience: Vowels.

Nehemia: You also have the accents, say accents.

Audience: Accents.

Nehemia: The accents break up the verse into subsections and tell you also how to pronounce the word. Is it syllable or syllable? In Hebrew, is it Adonay, or Adonay? If you don’t read Hebrew, you don’t know that, but when you read it in the Hebrew text of Scripture, it tells you with those accents. And the fourth thing, which is very interesting, are what they call the he’arot Mesorah, the Masoretic notes. That’s these notes in the columns. You see, all on the margin here they have these many, many notes, and altogether there are tens of thousands of these notes, and they’re actually proofreading notes that tell the scribe exactly how to copy the text down to the jot and tittle, so that when they copy it, they copy it exactly the way it was before them. This was something that the scribes were obsessive about.

One of the reasons they were so obsessive - thank God they were obsessive - but one of the reasons is that many Jews believed that if you spell the word a certain way... and let me back up, there’s very often multiple ways you can spell the same Hebrew word. In fact, in English we kind of have that. The word “theater” is spelled one way in America and a different way in Britain. Well, in ancient Hebrew - in the same place, in ancient Israel - they could spell the same word four different ways. And it really doesn’t change the meaning, but the scribes came from this tradition that the different spelling could possibly have mystical meaning. And because they were dealing with this tradition of one spelling having this mystical meaning, a different spelling having a different mystical meaning, they said, “Okay, we’ve got to copy it exactly the way we received it, down to the jot and tittle.” That’s why I call that the Jot and Tittle Museum. Because this manuscript, the Aleppo Codex, which is the primary source of these tiny little details, is preserved in the Shrine of the Book.

Well, I had this horrible job, and I would spend hours and hours and hours going over every little dot and every little dash and making sure it appeared exactly the same way in the manuscript, in the Aleppo Codex, as it appeared in the printed edition that they were preparing. And the reason this was so boring... And at first, I was excited - wow, I get to follow in the footsteps of generations of Jewish scribes who used to come from all over the world, literally, to compare their Bibles with the Aleppo Codex, to fix them. And so, it was exciting when I heard about it. When I actually did it, it was… I would sometimes afterwards not be able to see straight. Because I was staring at these little details, and I wasn’t the first proofreader. I was the second or third proofreader. And so, by the time I came along, I would sometimes sit for five hours, and find some little, tiny mistake that really nobody else would have even noticed in 100 years, if they weren’t looking for it. But this was the job, and it gave me some access to these Hebrew manuscripts, and so I was thankful for that.

Well, one day I’m looking through these manuscripts, and I’m looking at every single detail, and I come across this. This is in the Book of Ezekiel. And here I’m reading, “Vayehi devar Yehvah,” that impossible form, there’s a missing vowel, you see it on every page of Scripture, “elay le’emor, ben adam sim panekha el Tzidon,” it’s a prophecy about Sidon, “vehinave ale’ha. Ve’amarta, ‘ko amar Adonay,’” and all of a sudden, I come here and I see it says “Yehovah”. And that missing vowel, the one the scribes took out and didn’t want us to pronounce, there it was.

And I said, “Wait a minute, maybe this is a fluke.” You know, I’m like Gideon. Gideon was a Litvak. You know that, right? [laughter] God said, “What sign do you want to prove that I’m sending you on your mission? And Gideon said, “Okay, I’m going to put this fleece on the threshing floor, and I want the entire threshing floor to be dry, but the fleece to be wet.” And he came, and he squeezed it out in the morning, and it was full of water, but the threshing floor was dry. He said, “God, I need a second sign.” And the second sign he asked for was that the threshing floor be wet, and the fleece be dry. And that’s what happened the next morning. And so, I’m like Gideon, I needed a second sign.

But just as this happened, something happened. I had a phone call, just as I found the name. This name I prayed for for years, the pronunciation of the name of the Father, Yehovah. Just as I discovered that and saw that in the Aleppo Codex, the phone rang, and the voice on the other end of the phone told me that something had just happened. A plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. And I actually said this to the person on the phone, I said, “Well, maybe it was a fluke.” And actually, back in the 1920s, if I’m not mistaken, there was a light plane that flew into the Empire State Building. I said, “Yeah, it’s got to be an accident. You know, I can’t imagine too many people were hurt.” I didn’t know at the time; I didn’t have a radio or access to the internet where I was. And so I put down the phone, and I decided I need to find a second time, if the name Yehovah appears a second time. I need to know this isn’t a fluke.

And I began. I put aside my proofreading duties, and I started to scour through, looking for another example of this, where it has Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey without the missing vowel, with the vowel that was supposed to be there. And as I was doing this, I realized, “Wait a minute, how did they end up putting in the vowel?” They were supposed to leave it out, and they did that most of the time. The name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey appears 6,828 times. That’s 6000.

Audience: 6000.

Nehemia: 800.

Audience: 800.

Nehemia: And 28 times.

Audience: And 28 times.

Nehemia: And most of the time it appears with the missing vowel. It can’t be pronounced based on the way it’s vocalized in the text. But I realized that the reason that this vowel slipped in is that as they were copying it, they were also reading it. And before modern times, the way everyone used to read is they would read by muttering under their breath. And in fact, in the book of Joshua and in the first Psalm, it talks about meditating upon the Torah day and night. Did you ever think about that, what it means to meditate? Does that mean where you go like this, “Ommm... Torah?” No, that’s not what it means. To meditate upon the Torah day and night means to read it. And the way that they would read it is they would look at the book and they would read, “Bereshit bara Elohim...” They’d be muttering under their breath. And that word, vehagita, ye’hegeh, is the same word that is the noise made by a pigeon, by doves. It sounds like they’re speaking under their breath. And as the scribes were copying the text of Scripture, they must have been pronouncing the name the way they knew how to pronounce it. And that’s how that vowel ended up in there.

Well, I said, “Okay, but maybe this was just a fluke, who knows. I can’t go based on one example, I’ve got to find a second one.” And I was scouring through Scripture and going page after page after page. And after about 20 minutes or so I found another one, a second time where it said “Yehovah”. And just as I found that I got a second call. And the voice on the other end of the phone told me that a second plane had just flown into the towers. And, you know, for years I hesitated if I should tell people about this, and I maybe told a few people, because what I don’t want people to say is, “Okay, Nehemia had this experience, and therefore, we shouldn’t look at the evidence.” I still want you to go back and look at the sources, look at the evidence. If somebody tells you the name is Yahawahah, you need to go and say okay, “Well, where’s that in the sources? Is that just your opinion? Did that idea pop into your head? Show that to me somewhere in a source, that when I stand before God, I can point to it and say look, God, this is what was preserved by your people.”

And, you know, there’s a statement that the Rabbinical sages who banned the name, who forbade people from speaking the name, they knew what that name was. And here’s what they said in their sources. They said, “Sages transmit the four-letter name,” that’s Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, Yudibabi, “to their disciples once in a seven-year period.” So those scribes who were copying the text of Scripture, they knew the name, they just said, “This is a secret. We don’t want to let the secret out.” And what happened is, God, somebody say God.

Audience: God.

Nehemia: ...didn’t want that to remain a secret. That’s what I believe. And as they were copying it 6,000 plus times, he let them get away with it. But every once in a while, as they were copying it, they put in that vowel. And here’s the really interesting thing. There are no other vowels that they put in, in that missing place. It’s always the O. Now, if you want to still say Yahweh, that’s between you and your heavenly Father.

I know what I have to do. I have to go based on this evidence that’s been presented to me. I also found it in a second place. And actually, I’d come across this earlier, and I kind of dismissed it because I thought it was a fluke. Remember, I’m Gideon, and that was in the Leningrad Codex. And I said, “Well, that’s just one manuscript. It’s an important one, but it’s not the earliest one.” But when I saw it in the Aleppo Codex, which is the most important manuscript of the Bible, and I said, “Here are two witnesses, and it appears more than one time in each of these places, I can’t ignore this evidence anymore. I mean, this evidence is overwhelming.”

And one of the places that I should have known about this, and it only hit me afterwards... you know, this happens. Sometimes, when you see something that you haven’t ever seen before, and then you say, “Wait a minute, why wasn’t that obvious the whole time? That should have always been obvious.” And here was one of the places that it should have been obvious, and that’s from the Hebrew names. The name Yehovah appears in compound names. My name, Nehemia, is a compound name. It means “Yah comforts”. And we have two types of compound names in ancient Hebrew, where the Yud Hey Vav, the first few letters of His name appear at the beginning of the name, and where they appear at the end of the name. So Yehoshua, say Yehoshua.

Audience: Yehoshua.

Nehemia: That means “Yehovah saves”. It’s a compound of Yehovah and yoshia, Yehovah saves. There are many names like this. Yehonatan, “Yehovah gives”. Say Yehonatan.

Audience: Yehonatan.

Nehemia: Yeho’achaz, “Yehovah grabs hold”. Yehokhanan, “Yehovah has grace, mercy, love”. Yehotzadak, “Yehovah is righteous”. Well, there’s a second pattern of names, and that’s important, to look at all the evidence. The second pattern is where the Yud Hey Vav appears at the end. And in those names, it’s always yahu. So you have Yeshayahu, which means “Yehovah saves”. It means the exact same thing as Yehoshua. Say Yeshayahu.

Audience: Yeshayahu.

Nehemia: You have Netanyahu, which means “Yehovah gives”. Say Netanyahu.

Audience: Netanyahu.

Nehemia: You have Akhazyahu, “Yehovah grabs hold”. Chananyahu, “Yehovah has grace, love, mercy”. And Tzidkiyahu, “Yehovah is righteous”. So these five names on the left and the five names on the right mean the exact same thing. The only difference is that in the first set the Yud Hey Vav is in the beginning, and in the second set the Yud Hey Vav is in the end. And I think this is a key piece of evidence that we need to look at, and it’s one that, you know, in retrospect, I’m like, “How come I didn’t put more emphasis on this?” I was aware of it, but I didn’t put that much emphasis on it.

And I think from these two paradigms, we have to say, if the name is Yud Hey Vav in the beginning, then it would be yeho, if it’s at the end it will be yahu. Now, in our Father’s name, is the Yud Hey Vav in the beginning or the end? Is it yahu or yeho? Beginning or end? Beginning. Huh. Okay, so that actually is consistent with what I came across in the manuscripts. And what I love about these manuscripts is that there was a time when these were secrets, when you had to travel across the world and get special permission in order to be allowed into the special room with white gloves in order to see them. But today, I’ve got both of them on my bookshelf, and you can get them on your bookshelf, too. One of them is very expensive, I’ll admit that, but actually today both of them are online. The entire manuscripts have been scanned and put online for free so anybody can go and check these things. That’s what’s exciting to me. I mean, we are in a period where knowledge is increasing. Somebody say Book of Daniel.

Audience: Book of Daniel.

Nehemia: You know, this name, the name of our heavenly Father, I am so excited about the name. There’s this verse in Proverbs chapter 18 verse 10, which says, “The name of Yehovah is a strong tower, the righteous runs into it and is safe.” And that phrase in Hebrew, strong tower, is two Hebrew words. The word migdal, say migdal.

Audience: Migdal.

Nehemia: Oz.

Audience: Oz.

Nehemia: Migdal means tower, and oz means strong, strength. Migdal oz, a strong tower. What is a strong tower? You know, this is actually a term of a certain type of fortification that today... I mean, what on earth is that? We don’t live with fortifications like that. But here’s actually a strong tower from an ancient castle that appears in northern Israel. It’s a place called Nimrod’s Castle. It actually was not built by Nimrod, although it was built by a nimrod. But Nimrod’s Castle, in the Golan Heights, is this massive fortification on top of this very tall mountain, that is very difficult to get to. And once you get past and pierce through these outer walls, then you have to deal with this. And this is what they call the migdal oz, the strong tower. In British castles they refer to it as a keep. You know, you have a keep, which is the central part of the castle. It has the stronger walls, thicker walls than all the rest of the castle. That’s the last refuge when everything else fails. And that’s what our heavenly Father is, His name, and He is a strong tower for us.

And I actually encountered this and saw a testimony to this over in this place. And a lot of people are going to hear this and they’re going to say, “What? Nehemia is talking about a church?” This is a church building, and I’m excited about this church building. And the reason I’m excited about this church building… does anybody know where this church building is? It’s in New York City, and it’s right next to Ground Zero. And some people call this, you know about the Ground Zero mosque? Some people call this the Ground Zero Church. The proper name is St. Paul’s Chapel, and this is a strong tower.

And when I first heard about this, I laughed. Actually, Keith told me about it, to be honest with you. And when Keith first told me about it, I said, “Yeah, that’s your Christian thing, it’s a church, I don’t want to hear about some church, get out of here.” And I had to go and see it for myself. Remember, I’m from Missouri, deep in my heart. And so, I went, and I saw it. And the story of St. Paul’s Chapel is that when the two towers collapsed, that this chapel was untouched. Not a single window was broken, even though it was across the street. There was dust that came in, but there was not a single piece of damage to it, even though it was built in 1766. I mean, people used to go there, and the historical significance is that you have there George Washington’s pew, where he used to sit and do his thing over there, back when the country was first founded and New York was the capital, it was one of the early capitals. And St. Paul’s Chapel survived 9/11. People literally ran into it and found refuge there.

There are stories of people who literally, as the debris was crashing down, they ran in there and found refuge. And the reason I’m so excited about it is this is what I saw at the front of the chapel. This is a sculpture of Mount Sinai. It was actually made by Pierre L’Enfant, the same person who designed Washington DC. At the bottom, he has the Ten Commandments, and up at the top of Mount Sinai, with light coming out of it, he has the name of our Father in heaven, Yehovah. Now, how many churches have you been in that have Yehovah at the front of the church? Not many. I’ve never been in one besides this one. But remember, I’m like Gideon, I need two witnesses, say two witnesses.

Audience: Two witnesses.

Nehemia: This is what appears up above that, at the top of one of the arches. A second time, the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey in these black letters. And I believe that this building was a literal fulfillment of the verse, Exodus chapter 20, verse 24, “In every place that I cause My name to be mentioned, I will come to you and bless you.” Woo! [applause] Am I allowed to get excited?

Audience: Yes!

Nehemia: Okay, let me out of my Litvak box for a few minutes, Keith, is that okay? I mean, this is amazing, come on. People literally ran into the place where our Father’s name was put, where He placed His name, and they were blessed there, and that was the strong tower of His name. Woo! Wow, I’m excited about that. This place over here, does anybody know what this place is? Besides Keith - I know you know, because you were there. Nobody has any idea what this place is. What is it?

Audience member: The place where David and Goliath...

Nehemia: That’s very good. It’s Emek Ha’Elah, the Valley of Ela, or Elah, as we say in Hebrew. The Valley of Elah. And down here is where David fought Goliath. Up here you can see part of an Israelite fortification on the left, and across the valley is where the Philistines were garrisoned during this 40-day standoff. And every day they would come down into the valley, and the two armies would line up approximately here in this almond orchard. And every day Goliath would go out, and he would insult the Israelites and he would insult the God of Israel, challenging them to send somebody out who can defeat him.

And you can imagine why the Israelites were cowering up in that fortification on top of the hill, saying, “Well, we don’t want to go down there and fight. We’re going to let you insult us and insult the name of our God.” And David comes along and hears this, and he’s incensed. He said, “Okay, I can’t use the armor and I can’t use the sword, but I know that there’s a tool that God has taught me how to use.” And that tool is his shepherd’s sling, which was actually a stick with a rope attached to it, and he would use this sling and he would swing it, and a rock would go flying. And in the past, he had effectively used that weapon to kill a lion, say lion.

Audience: Lion.

Nehemia: And a bear.

Audience: Bear.

Nehemia: And he knew that God was preparing him for this day by killing the lion and the bear. And he said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to go kill Goliath.” And he went down into the valley, picked up five smooth stones. Now, why five? Why not just one? Is that a lack of faith in God?

Audience: No.

Nehemia: He thought he might miss four times.

Audience: No.

Nehemia: No, I think he did. I’m dead serious. He was allowing for the possibility that he would miss. He knew that God was guiding his hand, but that doesn’t mean you’re always going to get exactly what you want. Just because you pray for something and say, “Oh, heavenly Father, I want XYZ...” you’re not guaranteed that, that’s not how it works. Some people have that attitude, “If I say it, then I’m guaranteed it and He’s required to give it to me.” God doesn’t owe you anything. You owe Him, it’s not the other way around.

So David took into consideration the possibility that not only would he miss four times, he was accepting the possibility he would miss five times and be killed, and he was prepared for that. And that’s how much he had faith in the God in heaven - that even if he died fighting Goliath, he knew he was doing the right thing. You know, if David went down there and knew exactly what would happen and was guaranteed the outcome, I would look at that and say, “big fat hairy deal”. You go down there and knew you’re going to win the battle? He went down there not knowing what would happen, and he still went out to fight the enemy, who was insulting the name of the God of Israel. And this is what he says when he faced Goliath. He said, “You come to me with sword, spear and javelin.” He had three weapons, the Philistine. “You come to me with sword, spear, and javelin, and I come to you in the name of Yehovah of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel who you have insulted.”

And so David was not going to let this man insult the God of Israel and not do anything about it. And he was prepared to die for that. When I went there with Keith, this was back in, I believe it was February. Keith and I went over there, to the Valley of Elah, and we were going there to do something I like to do with tourists. You know, I take tours around. I always take them to the Valley of Elah to get souvenirs. And the souvenir you get from the Valley of Elah is the five smooth stones. I mean, it’s a great little souvenir, it’s free, and you walk away with something that really, to me, has a lot of meaning. We went there and got our five smooth stones over there in the Valley of Elah, and Keith is sitting there and he’s tossing his stone up in the air, and he’s playing with it back at my apartment, and he says, “Nehemia, where did these stones come from?” I’m like, “What are you talking about, we just picked them up in the Valley of Elah.” And he says, “No, where did they come from? How were they brought into the valley of Elah?” And they were at the bottom of a creek, so they were washed in from somewhere. Where were they washed in from? And, you know, the reason they’re smooth - it’s not from the water washing over them, it’s from the stones smashing against each other, smoothing out the rough edges, kind of like me and Keith. [laughter] And I said, “Okay, how can I find out where this came from?” I went onto Google Earth tap, tap, tap on my little laptop. It took me about 30 minutes to trace this creek that runs through the Valley of Elah where David got his smooth stones back to its source. And I found that the source was this little town in the mountains of Judea. And it turns out that the name of this town is Migdal Oz, strong tower. [audience gasps] [laughter and applause] So it says in the book of Proverbs, “The name of Yehovah is a strong tower,” say strong tower.

Audience: Strong tower.

Nehemia: Migdal oz, say migdal oz.

Audience: Migdal oz.

Nehemia: “The righteous who runs into it is safe.” David goes out against Goliath, and he says, “I’m going to come against you with the name of Yehovah.” And what does he do? He takes the stone and swings it and kills Goliath. And that stone comes from Migdal Oz, the strong tower of Yehovah’s holy name. [applause] Woo! This is incredible. It gets better.

Oh, I’ve got to tell you about this. Keith Johnson did something very controversial. He wrote a book called His Hallowed Name Revealed Again. In the book A Prayer to Our Father, that we wrote together, we wrote about 5 or 10 pages, I don’t even remember, about the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. And we had to, because it says there in the prayer that Yeshua taught, “May your name be sanctified.” And you can’t talk about that and not talk about what His name is, I don’t know how you can do that. So we had to talk about what His name was, and I did it very hesitantly. I said, “Keith, people aren’t going to like this, we shouldn’t talk about this.” And so, what does he do? He goes out and he writes 226 pages about it. [laughter]

And actually, he originally wrote it as what I called “the little study”. And it was, it was a little study of, I don’t know, 100 pages, 150, whatever. And I said, “Keith, keep this to yourself, don’t show this to anybody. People will be upset; they’re not going to invite us to come speak. [laughter] This is too controversial a topic. You can talk about the name of God, but if you talk about the pronunciation, don’t do that, people will be upset.” Well, guess what happened? He went out and he did it. And what convinced me to follow, to go along... because I could have said, “Okay, this is the point at which I separate myself.” Where, you know, there’s that rope yoking us together, I’m going to snip the rope, because I can’t deal with this.

What convinced me is something that happened over in Colorado. We were traveling around the country speaking, and this one particular place... You know, they don’t always put us up in nice hotels like the Rood Crew. In this particular instance, they put us up in somebody’s house, and we actually shared the same room. Somebody say, two beds.

Audience: Two beds. [applause]

Nehemia: So we were sharing the room in two different beds over in Colorado, and Keith had spoken that night about the pronunciation of the name Yehovah, and the man who was hosting us - he was what I call, and I hope this doesn’t insult anybody... actually, I don’t care if it insults anybody - he’s what I call a Jewabe. And what I mean by that is, because he loves God so much and loves our heavenly Father so much, and he sees that God gave His word to the Jews, and he is a believer in, as he calls him, Yahshua, he sees that Jesus, as he calls him Yahshua, was Jewish. He says, “Okay, I want to be like the Jews.” And what he ends up doing is he emulates all the things he sees in modern Judaism. Even to the point where this man, who was in his 70s, had a bar mitzvah, at his Messianic congregation, which I thought was kind of strange, because a bar mitzvah is a ritual for 13-year-old boys in Judaism. I’ve never heard of a seventy-year-old man doing it. But okay, it came from a good place. And so, I call him a Jewabe... I’m an obnoxious person, let me be honest with you. So I say that obnoxiously, but really, he meant well, and I respect that.

But one of the things that he was told when he joined this congregation, wanting to get closer to the Hebrew roots of his faith, is he was told, “You must never utter the word “Jesus”. That’s a forbidden word, an evil word. This is what he was told. He was told, “You must only call him Yahshua.” And he said, “Okay, I accept this, I want to be part of this congregation, and I don’t know,” that’s what he said, “I don’t know any better, if you tell me it’s Yahshua then it’s Yahshua.”

Well, one day he came to his congregation leader, and he said, “You told me the name of the son was Yahshua, what should I call the Father?” And his congregation leader told him, “You don’t need to know that name.” And the way this came up is, I was sitting in the dining room, eating a bowl of shredded wheat, because I like to do that after my presentations, late at night. And Keith was sitting in the living room with this man, on his couch, and they were talking about the name. And Keith said, “I wish I could show it to you in my Bible.” And the man said, “They told me I don’t need to know that name.” And Keith said, “I wish I could just show it to you in my Bible.” And the man said, “They told me I don’t need to know that name.” And Keith said, “I wish I could just show it to you in my Bible.” And the man said, “They told me I don’t need to know that name.” And finally, I said, “Just show it to him, Keith.” And at that moment, the man stood up and he was about to walk out of his own living room. And I saw the fear in his eyes. He was terrified of being confronted with the name of the Father of all mankind, the Creator of the universe, because he had been told by the religious police, by the hounds of hell, that he must not speak the name, that that name is dangerous, that he as a gentile shouldn’t worry his pretty little Jewabe gentile head about it. And this broke my heart to see this. You know, in Isaiah 56 talks about the sons of the gentiles who join themselves to Yehovah, and they love the name of Yehovah, they love the name of the Father, and here this man was terrified of the name. And I decided, “Keith, I told you, you shouldn’t do this. It’s too dangerous, let’s stay away from it. But now I’m going to follow you and talk about this every place we go, about the name of our heavenly Father.” [applause]

A part of the story that maybe I shouldn’t tell... Well, I had been discussing with Keith about our presentation, and I said, “Well, I’m not going to bring the whole thing about 9/11.” He’s like, “Nehemia, are you kidding me?” You know, the whole thing about the towers. I’m like, “No, let’s not bring that, it’s too controversial.” But I think it was important, because it was part of my own experience with this. You know, Keith, after he wrote this book, he was invited to go on a Christian television station and teach about this name. And when I heard about this, I said, “Okay, there’s no way that the hounds of hell are going to go for this, that they’re going to sit by quietly.” And Keith said, “Oh, no, they’ve invited me to come to do a 12-part series, and it’s going to be broadcast once a week on television.” And actually, this is what came out of it, this DVD 12-part series. It appeared on Christian television, they showed the first six episodes, and then the hounds of hell started howling. They said, “This is too much information for the people to know,” and it was pulled from television, and the rest of the series was never broadcast. And, in fact, Keith would have never seen the rest of the series, except by an act of God, that he ended up getting the DVDs the day that they cancelled it from television, pulled him from their website, and expunged his name from any record or history having to do with the station. That very day he received the DVDs, it was a miracle.

When the hounds of hell hit us, one of the things they said to the Christian television station - you know, they had to come up with an excuse about why they should pull this. And they said, “Well, Keith is bringing these resources, the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. And those aren’t trustworthy sources, those are anti-Messiah sources.” This is what they said. And I said, “Wait a minute, you’re telling me that the Jewish version of the Bible... you go to any Jewish bookstore, any Jewish synagogue in the world, and there’s only one version of the Hebrew Bible, and that’s the same version you’ll find in the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex and in 50 or 60 other Masoretic manuscripts, and you’re telling me that one’s anti-Messiah? That’s strange, it’s in the Shrine of the Book...”

Anyway, this is what they argued. And at that point, I said, “Keith, what we need to do is go and speak with this expert at the Hebrew University.” And the reason I said that we should do that is that most of what Keith knew, admittedly, about the Aleppo Codex and Leningrad Codex came from me, and I wanted him to get it from some of the primary sources.

And so, I called up on the phone one of the world’s foremost experts in the Hebrew text of Scripture. And so we had this appointment to see him, and he actually didn’t even want to see Keith. He’s like, “Why would I want to see some Methodist pastor from the US? What are you talking about? I don’t meet with people.” That’s not what scholars do, they’re in the ivory tower and they don’t want to engage with the simple people, the little people. And I convinced him, I said, “Would you please do this as a personal favor to me? It’s very important.” And so, we ended up going there, to the Hebrew University, to meet with this scholar to talk about the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex - mainly the Aleppo Codex. And before we did that, I said to Keith, “You know, in all these years, since I’ve come across this name, Yehovah, with the full vowels in Scripture, I only ever looked at the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. And I said, “Why don’t we do something radical? Why don’t we go and look for a third witness?”

And so, on our way to meet the professor, we stopped over at the library at the Hebrew University. They have there the third key manuscripts of the Hebrew text of Scripture, which is called the Cairo Codex of the Prophets. We sat down, and it had two volumes. And, again, this was a photograph of every single page. And we looked in the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, which, by the way, is actually older than the Aleppo Codex. The Aleppo Codex is from around the year 924, say 924.

Audience: 924.

Nehemia: And it was written by Aharon Ben Asher, who was actually a Karaite scribe in Tiberius. It’s considered the crown jewel of Hebrew manuscripts, but it’s not the oldest, what’s called, Masoretic manuscript. That’s the manuscripts that have the full vowels and accents and proofreading notes. The oldest one is from the year 895, from his father, Moses Ben Asher. And the Cairo Codex of the Prophets was copied by Moses Ben Asher.

So we went and we looked at this Cairo Codex of the Prophets. I had one volume, Keith had another volume, and we’re flipping through and we’re looking, and we’re only really looking for the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. And we keep finding it with the missing vowel, the missing vowel. And all of a sudden, after about 10 minutes, Keith finds one that he thinks has the vowel. And I go over, and I look at it, and I say, “Keith, that could be it, but I need to be 100% sure.” And to be honest with you, the reason I wasn’t 100% sure is that the Cairo Codex of the Prophets is not as good a photograph as the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. Those were high quality photographs. The Cairo Codex of the Prophets is a much lower grade of photograph, and you see all kinds of dots and things like that in the photograph, and I wasn’t 100% sure if that was just something produced by the photograph, or if there was a real vowel there, an O, a kholam. And so, we sat down again, and we looked again and again, and we’re flipping through and again, the missing vowel, say missing vowel.

Audience: Missing vowel.

Nehemia: Then again, after about 10 minutes, I don’t remember if it was Keith or me, it was probably Keith, we find a second one. And I say well, that could be it, but I’m not 100% sure. Again, 10 more minutes we’re going, and then after about 30 minutes, we finally find this. Oh, this is me sitting in the library, looking, and this is the Cairo Codex of the Prophets - the photograph, obviously, of it. And this is what we found. This is Ezekiel, chapter 7 verse 4. Here we found the O, the kholam, where it says “Yehovah” in the third witness with the full set of vowels. Can I get an amen?

Audience: Amen.

Nehemia: Now, here’s the really exciting thing. The really exciting thing is what it says in this verse. It says, “Viydatem ki ani Yehovah,” “and you shall know that I am Yehovah.” [applause] Woo! Wow. I mean, that is amazing. We went to meet with this professor at the Hebrew University, and Keith goes to him and explains to him what’s happening with the hounds of hell, who are challenging us and telling us that we must not share with the people the name Yehovah, and their main issue, they claimed, was the Hebrew sources. And I’ll let you in on a secret, what their real issue was. Their real issue is the classical debate between Jews and Christians about certain passages. You know, Psalm 22. Does it say that Yeshua... that it was pierced through, or was it lions? I mean, you can read about these things online. I had no intention of getting dragged into these debates. These are the classical debates that go back literally 2,000 years. You can read Justin Martyr in the 2nd century, who was the first person to debate these things in writing, and he’ll bring the same arguments that these people bring today. And so, there’s really no point, from my perspective. You know, this isn’t what I’ve been called to do, to debate about our faiths.

What I think is more valuable is for us to focus on what we have in common, and what we can learn from each other and about ourselves from that common ground. And so, Keith explains this whole thing to him, and he says, “Professor, I need five smooth stones.” [laughing] Because we had just come from the Valley of Elah and we just learned about the migdal oz. And Keith says to him, “I need 5 smooth stones.” The professor leans back in his chair, and he says in his thick Israeli accent, “Stone number one.” [laughter] And he starts to tell us five key things that we need to know about the Aleppo Codex.

The first one, he talks about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls are about 1,000 years older than the Aleppo Codex, physically older. So the earliest scrolls are from around 300 BC. The Aleppo Codex, we said, was written in 924 AD, so that’s actually 1,200 years older, the Dead Sea Scrolls are. He said, “However, the Dead Sea Scrolls, when you compare them, there are no two scrolls that are identical. Each one is different, and some of them are copied very carefully, some of them are done very haphazardly.” And one of the interesting things about that is that there’s a category of scrolls that have been proofread. And the way you know that they’ve been proofread is you’ll be coming across and reading a word and all of a sudden, you’ll see a little letter written above the line, and that will be a missing letter. But that letter is only missing when you compare it with the Aleppo Codex. Now, wait a minute, the Aleppo Codex is 1,200 years younger than the Dead Sea Scrolls, so what are they comparing it with? And apparently, they’re comparing it with something that existed back then that was the source of the Aleppo Codex. And scholars refer to that as proto-Masoretic scrolls. Meaning, we have the Masoretic text, the Jewish version of the Bible, and that existed in some form or another back in the time of the Second Temple. And most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are not of that characteristic, they’re copied very haphazardly. They’re an important witness, but they’re not what Jews in that period considered to be the authoritative text of Scripture. And that was stone number one. The Aleppo Codex was considered by all the Jews of that time to be the authoritative texts of Scripture.

The second thing he said to us, which shocked me, (in heavy Israeli accent) “It looks as if an angel wrote it,” which in English means, “It looks as if an angel wrote it.” [laughter] And I heard this, and I was shocked, because this professor wasn’t speaking as a man of faith. Whatever faith he had, that was his business. He was speaking as a scientist, and he’s telling us the Aleppo Codex looks as if an angel wrote it. And I said, “What on earth are you talking about?” And he explained, he said that when he looks at the Masoretic notes, those tens of thousands of notes in the margins, and they tell you how to exactly copy the text of Scripture... when he looks at other Masoretic manuscripts from that period, they 95% match the Masoretic notes. The Aleppo Codex matches it 100%. And he explained that when he has the Aleppo Codex, he only needs that one manuscript. Now, here’s the thing. About a third of the Aleppo Codex is missing. And in those missing sections, he has to look at 50 or 60 other manuscripts to compare them and see what the text says. But with the Aleppo Codex, he only needs the one manuscript, because that’s how accurate it is. And that’s what he means “it looks as if an angel wrote it”.

Stone number three kind of surprised me, too. He told us about the Karaites and the Rabbanites. And I’m like, “Well, I know a little bit about that.” And what he explained is that in that period, there was this big split between Karaites and Rabbanites, and Keith is looking at me like, “Yes, I know this, too.” But why is that important? Because those two groups back then didn’t really trust each other too much when it came to matters of faith. But what they all agreed upon was that the Aleppo Codex was the authoritative text of Scripture. Now, if the Rabbanites had come along and just made up that text and plucked out these vowels from the thin air, and just completely concocted this manufactured text, the Karaites would never have gone for it. And if the Karaites had done that, you better believe the Rabbanites would never have gone for it. But both groups knew that this was the authoritative text of Scripture, going back, they said, to the time of the prophets. That was stone number three.

Stone number four was about Maimonides. He said that Maimonides, a great 12th century Jewish scholar, philosopher, he actually explicitly mentions the Aleppo Codex, and he gives his stamp of approval as this being the authoritative text of Scripture. And really, number four, from my perspective, is less than number three, but this is what he said.

And number five was a very interesting thing, that I guess I kind of knew in the back of my head, but it never occurred to me how important it was. And that’s that the Aleppo Codex is a Karaite manuscript written by a scribe named Aharon Ben Asher, as I mentioned, in the year 924 in Tiberius. The Leningrad Codex is a Rabbanite manuscript. And it only occurred to me as he was saying this that, “Wait a minute, these are the two witnesses that we had found for Yehovah, and both of them have the name.” And that means this isn’t some sectarian opinion or version, but both sets of scribes knew that this was the name that was transmitted from sage to disciple, sage to disciple, once every seven years, and it slipped out in both of them. Now, maybe that was a complete accident, complete happenstance, but somebody say, God.

Audience: God.

Nehemia: I believe that God wanted this name to come out. One of the interesting things about the Aleppo Codex and the other Masoretic manuscripts is that they were written in Tiberius. And the reason that’s so interesting is that we’re told that in Second Temple times there were three manuscripts of the Bible in the Temple. They were called the Temple Courtyard Manuscripts, and we’re even told there was a guild of scribes, called the Temple Courtyard Proofreaders. They would take Bibles written anywhere in the world, and they would bring them to Jerusalem from all over the world, and they would compare them with these three Temple Courtyard Manuscripts.

And the interesting thing is that we know that at least two of them survived the destruction of the Temple. One of them was brought to Rome - Josephus mentions it - and kept in the palace of the emperor. And the other one, we’re told by a third century rabbi, is called the Manuscript of Ma’on. And why is it called the Manuscript of Ma’on? He explains - because today it is in Beit Ma’on. And it turns out that Beit Ma’on is - and Michael will know where this is – Beit Ma’on is up on the hill overlooking Tiberius, just a few miles away from Tiberias. Actually, in modern Tiberias it’s part of the modern-day city. It’s actually where the water tower is, if you know where that is in Tiberias. That is the ancient site of Beit Ma’on. So the scribes are based in Tiberias, and they’re copying this text of Scripture that matches these proto Masoretic Dead Sea Scrolls from over 1,000 years earlier, and they’re writing it right next door to the place where one of the manuscripts from the Temple has survived at least until the third century. Somebody say, hallelujah.

Audience: Hallelujah.

Nehemia: I mean, that’s amazing. Do I have time for barkat?

I want to share one other thing. Because one thing that I asked the professor was about the vowels. He told us about these five smooth stones, and I was very impressed with that, but what brought us to him was really about the vowels. How valuable are those vowels? Because this is the thing that the hounds of hell will tell you; the Jewish scribes who copied the text of Scripture just invented the vowels out of their hearts. They had this text of the consonants, which they also falsified, according to the hounds of hell, but what they completely manufactured was the vowels, so they say.

And so, I asked the professor this, and I kind of knew the answer, but I asked him so Keith would hear. And one of the pieces of evidence that I had come across was in Leviticus chapter 23 verse 4. Let’s look at this verse. I think this is one of the most important verses in the Bible. It says, “These are the appointed times of Yehovah which you shall proclaim them.” And the last words in English are “in their appointed time”, in Hebrew bemo’adam, in their appointed time. And I understand this to mean that we are required to proclaim the feasts in the time that God has appointed them.

Well, this became a big point of contention at the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, in the time of Rabbi Akiva. There was a certain rabbi who was the head of the Sanhedrin named Gamaliel. Have you heard of that guy? And actually, the one that you’ve heard of from the New Testament, from the book of Acts, that was the grandfather of this Gamaliel. This is Gamaliel II. So Gamaliel II was the head of the Sanhedrin after the Temple was destroyed, around the year 90. And two witnesses come before him and testify that they saw the new moon. And he accepts their testimony, he says, “Okay, based on this we’re going to begin the month.” They came to testify on the third day of the month, and the reason for that is that this was the seventh month, and because of Rabbinical tradition, the first two days they always celebrate as Rosh Hashanah. But the purpose of the witnesses was to decide not about what I call Yom Tru’ah, but they wanted to know about when they should observe Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And so, they brought in these witnesses, and they testified, and Gamaliel II accepted their testimony.

There was a man sitting in the back named Rabbi Joshua, and he heard the testimony, and he knew that the witnesses were lying. And how did he know they were lying? I won’t even go into the details, how he knew they were lying, but he believed they were lying. And he decided, “I cannot observe Yom Kippur based on the testimony of these false witnesses, when they say they saw the new moon.” He knew that it couldn’t have been seen on that time. And so, he decided he was going to observe Yom Kippur by himself, just with his family alone, the day after all the other Jews.

Gamaliel II heard this, and he was incensed, he was enraged, and he ordered Rabbi Joshua to appear before him on the day that Rabbi Joshua believed to be Yom Kippur, and to publicly desecrate that day. Because he wanted everybody to observe on the same exact day. This is how the spiritual border police operate. They talk about unity, but they really mean is uniformity, that everybody has to do the exact same thing. And so he was ordered to appear before Raban Gamliel, and he doesn’t know what to do, and he goes and he seeks advice. And he says, “I can’t appear before him on the day that I know to be Yom Kippur, because of Leviticus 23:4. ‘These are the appointed times of Yehovah which you shall proclaim them in their appointed times.’ What am I going to do? I’ll be violating the appointed times as I understand them.” Rabbi Akiva comes along, and he says, “Don’t worry, Rabbi Joshua, I can interpret this away for you.” So he takes off the last words of the verse, and the next thing that he does is he says, “It’s true that it says, ‘the days which you shall proclaim them,’” that’s the exact Hebrew phrase. But what we can do is this little trick where we change the vowels, and we can read it as, instead of otam, them, say otam.

Audience: Otam.

Nehemia: We can say “atem”, you, yourselves. And that’s actually just a change of the vowels. And instead of “these are the appointed times which you shall proclaim them”, it’s “these are the appointed times of Yehovah, which you shall proclaim yourselves.” And Rabbi Akiva explained that what the verse really means is, whenever you proclaim those days, even if you’re mistaken, even if you’re forced to do it, even if you intentionally are falsifying the days, we have no other times, God has no other times, than the days that you yourself have proclaimed, based on this change of the vowels. Now, this is actually a key concept in Rabbinical thinking. That the rabbis have this God-given authority from Leviticus 23:4 to change the times, make them whenever they want them to be. And this is how Hillel II came along in the year 359 and just made up whatever days he wanted, using the best science he had at the time, but it’s been outdated for 1,600 years, and we can go out today ourselves and see the new moon and see that they’re very often two days off. Now, why is this important? Because this happened around the year 90, and what Rabbi Akiva did is he changed the vowels from otam, say otam.

Audience: Otam.

Nehemia: Them, to atem, yourselves. Say atem.

Audience: Atem.

Nehemia: Now, which way do you think they read this in the synagogue? In every synagogue in the world, which way do you think they read it?

Audience: Atem.

Nehemia: No, they read it “otam”. And that’s because Rabbi Akiva could make any interpretation he wanted, but he did not have the ability or authority to change the vowels. They were fixed in concrete, even in the time of Rabbi Akiva, in the year 90 AD. So don’t let the hounds of hell tell you that these scribes just made up the vowels out of their hearts. Here’s the example that the professor brought, which excited me, even though it sounds trivial at first, and it’s actually the triviality that’s so exciting. There’s a list of 12 stones in the breastplate of the High Priest, and one of those stones in Exodus 26:17 and 39:10 is called bareket, say bareket.

Audience: Bareket.

Nehemia: Bareket means carbuncle, say carbuncle.

Audience: Carbuncle.

Nehemia: Say carbuncle again.

Audience: Carbuncle.

Nehemia: Now say it 10 times fast. No, but isn’t that a great word, carbuncle? [laughter] So bareket means carbuncle, and this word appears three times in Scripture, twice in Exodus as bareket. But here’s the really interesting thing that the professor pointed out - that when the word appears in the Book of Ezekiel, the same exact stone that also means carbuncle, say carbuncle.

Audience: Carbuncle.

Nehemia: That there the word is vocalized, the vowels in that word is barkat. Now, why is that important? And the reason it’s important is that everybody, every Jew of that time, knew the Book of Exodus, they read it in the synagogue every year. And if you’re going to vocalize, if you’re just going to make up the vowels, just pluck out any vowels you want from the thin air, you’re going to vocalize the verse in Ezekiel, according to the verse in Exodus, because that’s what you’re more familiar with, right? And what this shows is that the scribes weren’t just making up the vowels. What they were doing was transcribing a pronunciation tradition, whether it was in writing or whether it was orally, that we can debate and discuss, but there was clearly a pronunciation tradition that went back all the way to the time of Ezekiel and Moses, because it’s actually preserving a difference in how Hebrew was pronounced, in the pronunciation of this precious gem, the bareket/barkat, all the way to the time of Moses. The reason this is so interesting to me is that, do you know what is the name of the mayor of Jerusalem? His name is Nir Barkat, or is it Nir Bareket? And actually, you hear to this day in Israel, half the people will call him Nir Barkat - which is his real name - and half the people will call him Nir Bareket, because that’s what they heard in the synagogue when the Book of Exodus was read, bareket. So to this day, this difference in the pronunciation continues to exist, and if the scribes were just making it up, they definitely would have written bareket in the Book of Ezekiel. So that’s how detailed and precise these vowels are. They preserve a difference from the time of Ezekiel and Moses. I mean, that’s incredible.

The last thing I’m going to talk about is the Yom Kippur War. You’ll see in a minute why I’m talking about this. It broke out on September 6, 1973, and it was on Yom Kippur, as the name implies. The Syrians and the Egyptians invaded Israel in a surprise attack at two in the afternoon when everyone was in the synagogues. It was an unprovoked attack, out of nowhere. It was a difficult war for Israel because we were taken by surprise. Israel’s strategy throughout the other wars was - we always have to strike first, because we don’t have the capability of holding back an enemy if they strike first. And this particular battle was very difficult. In fact, Syria invaded Israel with 1,400 tanks in the Golan Heights. Israel had 177 tanks at the outbreak of the war. They were outnumbered nearly 10 to 1. And it actually got worse as the war went on, because the Iraqis got involved, and the Moroccans got involved, and the Jordanians and the Saudis sent tanks as well. The whole Arab world said, “This is our chance to take Israel out.” Most people don’t know that - that 150 foreign tanks, non-Syrian tanks, were destroyed in Israel’s battle with the Syrians in the Golan Heights.

So Israel was having a real hard time with this war when they invaded, they were taken by surprise. In fact, an entire Israeli Brigade, the Barak brigade, was wiped out, it was gone. It was expunged from the books, destroyed in the first couple days of the war, trying to stop the Syrians. And what the Syrians did is they attacked with a three-pronged attack. They attacked in the north, the south and the central part of the Golan. And the attacks in the central part and the south of the Golan were successful. They broke through the Israeli lines. By the second day of the war, the Syrian tanks had reached what they call the escarpment, that’s the area overlooking the Galilee, at the edge of the Golan Heights. And from there, there was nothing to stop them. I mean, if they had continued, they would have gone all the way to Haifa and Akko without a problem, and cut Israel in half, and they would have been in Tel Aviv the next day, and Israel would have ceased to exist.

And in fact, the Israelis talk about this to this day as what they call a milkhama kiyumit, an existential war. You know, if the Syrians lost the war, they would be humiliated. If Israel lost the war, Israel would cease to exist. Literally, it would cease to exist. People have written entire books on this, asking the question - the Syrians broke through in the central part and the southern part of the Golan, and then they stopped. Why? Why did they stop, why didn’t they push through? They were 12 miles away where Israel stores its tactical nuclear weapons. They could have seized those, and that would have been the end. And even if they didn’t get those, they could have been in Tel Aviv in a day or two without a problem. There was nothing, Israel didn’t have anything to stop them.

So why did they stop? And no one knows, that’s the real answer. No one knows to this day why they stopped, and people have written entire books, but it seems that one of the reasons they stopped was because of their command structure. With the central part and the southern part going forward, they had to wait for the northern part to catch up. And so the decisive battle was in the northern part of the Golan. And everyone agrees that was the decisive battle. And just to give you some idea of what numbers we’re talking about - 1,400 tanks, what is that? You know, I don’t know, I’m not a military historian. But look at this. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, with 2,000 tanks across a 900-mile front. The Syrians invaded Israel with 1,400 tanks across a 50-mile front. And this is actually one of the greatest tank battles in history, one of the top 10. When I read about this, I needed to go to the Golan Heights to investigate and find out what was going on. And this is me in the Golan Heights. This is actually an old Syrian tank. I believe it’s a T-54 or T-55, I could be wrong. But I came to the Golan Heights to find what is going on here. How did Israel hold off 10 times their numbers? How could that possibly have happened? I mean, is this a miracle or is this just a coincidence? I don’t know. So this is where the major battle took place, in this orchard here. This is a place called the Valley of Tears. Say Valley of Tears.

Audience: Valley of Tears.

Nehemia: Israel called it the Valley of Tears after the war to describe the tears of the Syrians, because so many Syrians were killed in this valley. And what’s amazing about the battle here is in this particular sector, in the northern part where they held out, Israel was outnumbered 15 to one. Not nine to one, as in the overall numbers, but 15 to one, they were outnumbered. And somehow, they managed to hold off the Syrians for four days. And how did they do it? And why didn’t the forces in the south and the central continue? Why did they stop?

After four days of fighting, there were three tanks left to the north of the Valley of Tears under a man named Avigdor Kahalani, who now is a well-known Israeli politician, but back then he was a tank battalion commander. To the south there was a hill called Booster Hill, and there were four surviving tanks there. Altogether, four plus three is seven. Seven Israeli tanks held off hundreds of Syrian tanks. And at that point, there were only seven tanks left. Reinforcements finally arrived after four days, and the reinforcements consisted of 13 tanks that had been damaged in the previous battles. The commander of those 13 tanks was a man named Yossi Ben Chanan. And he had been on his honeymoon in Nepal. He decided he had to get back to Israel because if he didn’t, it might not be there when his honeymoon was over. And he was essentially right.

When he arrived on the scene with his 13 tanks... and he actually didn’t even have crews for the tanks when he showed up. He arrived at the airport, bought his own ticket to get back, went straight to the battlefront, put together 13 tanks from repair shops. These have been damaged in previous battles. And the people who manned the tanks were people who had been wounded in previous battles. These were people who actually checked themselves out of the hospital in order to fight this battle, because they said, “If we don’t fight this, this will be the second Holocaust.”

And one of the reasons is that Israel lacks is what’s called strategic depth. You know, the Golan Heights is 20 miles wide, that’s it. If they break through this point, there’s nothing to stop them.

So Yossi Ben Chanan shows up with the 13 tanks, and Avigdor Kahalani is there with the seven tanks, who has held them back for four days. And guess what the Syrians do. They have hundreds of undamaged tanks that they can still commit to the battle, and that are rolling into the battlefield. What they do is they turn around and they start to retreat. And what do the Israelis do after four days of battle, and they’re down to 20 tanks? They go after the Syrians and chase them back into Syria. [applause] Do you realize this is literally the fulfillment of biblical prophecy? He talks about, in the Book of Deuteronomy, how one will chase a thousand and 2 will chase 10,000? But there are prophecies about the small numbers chasing the big numbers, and that literally happened here.

Now, Keith is all into this thing of numbers, he gets really excited about numbers. And as a Litvak Jew, you’ve got to have some very impressive numbers to impress me, to convince me, because I’m not so big into numbers. I’m very skeptical about that. But the number seven is definitely a number that I find very interesting. And I think it is interesting that Kahalani had seven tanks at the end of that battle, and he had started out with something like 43 tanks. But at the end, there were only seven tanks that survived. Three in the north, four in the south. Seven Israeli tanks, if we can see the slide. And the 7th Syrian Division launched a surprise attack. That’s who they fought, the 7th Syrian Division. It was actually called an infantry division, but it was mostly tanks that they were fighting. And they attacked in the seventh Hebrew month, because it was Yom Kippur, remember? Which is the seventh month of the Hebrew year. And it turned out they attacked on Shabbat, which was the seventh day of the week. And they were defeated by seven tanks from the 77th Battalion. [applause] Did I mention it was the 7th Israeli Armored Brigade? Wow. Oh, and after 77 hours of battle. About 77 hours. They say it was about 80 hours, but I’m willing to say it was 77. [laughter] Is that a miracle or a coincidence? And ultimately, it’s a matter of faith - you have to decide for yourselves.

But when I went to investigate this, I came across the war memorial for the 7th Armored Brigade that defeated the Syrians. And guess what it says there in Hebrew. This is the motto, it turns out, of the 7th Armored Brigade. It says, “Be’esh yavo, besufah merkevotav.” It’s a verse from the book of Isaiah, which says, “Behold, Yehovah, He comes with fire, and like a tempest His chariots.” [applause] Now, what chariots are they talking about? Do you know what the Israeli-made tank is called? Does anybody know? It’s called Merkava, which means chariot. So their motto is, “Behold, Yehovah, He comes with fire, and like a tempest His chariots.” And that’s the 7th Armored Brigade, which defeats the 7th Syrian Division in 77 hours. I don’t know how you can say that’s a coincidence.

Turns out this is the emblem of the 77th Battalion that held off the Syrians. It has here a tank in the center, and here are three arrows of fire coming out, and it’s got an olive branch, because in Israel we don’t fight because we love war, we fight because we want peace. And at the bottom of their emblem - this is the unit that held off the Syrians - it says in Hebrew, can somebody read that? It says oz. Now, oz in Hebrew numbers is Ayin Zayin - 77, but it also means strength, as in migdal oz, the strong tower. [applause]

So their motto is, “Yehovah is coming like a tempest, and like a fire His chariots,” and their emblem is oz, the migdal oz of Yehovah’s strong name, and they defeat the Syrians in this battle that they should not have won by all accounts. Now, that still doesn’t explain what happened. You’ve still got to ask, “Is this a miracle or a coincidence?” Because there’s really no rational explanation. Even if the Syrians had lost that battle up in the north, why didn’t they push through in the south and in the central part of Israel, grab the tactical nuclear weapons and overrun Israel in a matter of a couple of days? There was nothing to stop them. I mean, really. If they had gotten the bridges over the Jordan River, there would be no way to stop them. So why did they stop?

As I was investigating this, I came across an Israeli documentary called Zero Hour. And this is actually a documentary, interestingly enough, made by Orthodox Jews. This does not come from the Methodist camp, and it doesn’t come from the Karaite camp. It’s actually made by Orthodox Jews, and they even talk about these orthodox yeshivas, of what you might call born again Jews, which are Jews who return to the roots of their own faith, of the Jewish faith, after not being religious for several generations. And let’s watch it and see what it says. They have an interesting piece of information here.

Video: The Syrian front opened on a disastrous turnover. Emek HaBacha, the Valley of Tears. Avigdor Kahalani, the Tzvika unit. The Syrians advanced on the mountain line of the Golan Heights, the Bnot Ya’akov Bridge. There they stopped. Why did they stop? Why didn’t they continue their attack? The Syrian soldiers have taken along civilian clothes. The Syrians had promised that God forbid they would invade the land and take our daughters, Syrian officers told them to take civilian clothes along with them and invade Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Tiberius. But a miracle happened. They stopped in the mountain line of the Golan Heights. Avigdor Kahalani said, “I was alone only three tanks and I stopped 150 Syrian tanks.” The war of the Judgment Day, a time when a person is at one with his Creator. A time when God says to his sons, “Dear sons, I want to redeem you.” A time when they stood in synagogues and yeshivas praying the afternoon prayer. A time of the Priestly Blessing. For your thoughts are not my thoughts. The Egyptians thought if they attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, they would be victorious. But the complete opposite happened. On Yom Kippur we were on high alert. Everyone was in the synagogues, “war, war”, shouts in the synagogues. Did we thank our Lord? We began to give thanks. The nation of Israel began to realize their great mistake, and many began to repent and return to their heritage. Or HaChayim, Or Same’akh, Makhon Meir. Yeshivas for those who returned to their heritage. People began to open their eyes and recognize the holy name of God…

Nehemia: Woo! [applause]

Video: … Judgement Day.

But the question remains to this very day. How could it be possible that the Syrians were stopped on a mountain line of the Golan Heights? The answer was recorded during an investigation session conducted by the Secret Service while interviewing an officer of the Syrian 9th Division. “Why did you stop on the line in the Golan Heights?” The officer answers, “I’d like to see you cross that Syrian line after seeing a long row of white angels standing on the line and a white hand…

Nehemia: Woo! [applause]

Video: … from heaven motion to you. Stop! I stopped.”

Nehemia: Woo! Woo! Wow. All I can say is wow. You know that Syria, historically, was actually an historical enemy of Israel going back thousands of years. And actually, it was back then known as the kingdom of Aram Dameseq. Aram is Aramea, the land of Aramaic, and Dameseq is Damascus. So, the Aramaic Kingdom of Damascus, that’s what Syria was always known as. And there’s a story in the Bible about an earlier war between Aram Dameseq, the Aramaic country of Syria, and the kingdom of Israel. It appears in 2 Kings chapter 6. I’ll read to you from the Hebrew. It says, “And the king of Aram,” of Syria, Aramaic land, “was fighting against Israel. And he took counsel with his servant, saying,” this is 2 Kings, chapter 6, verse 8, “saying, ‘I’m going to camp in such and such a place,’” meaning, “I’m going to camp my army at such and such a place.” In verse 9, “And the man of God sent to the king of Israel, saying, ‘Be careful from passing by this place, because the king of Syria, the king of Aramaic land, is camping there.’ And the king of Israel sent to that place which he said to him the man of God, etc.” Let’s skip ahead here. Verse 11, “And the heart of the king of Aramaic land was angry over this matter. And he called his servants and he said to them, ‘Halo tagidu li mi mishelanu el melekh Yisrael?’” “Who among us is on the side of the king of Israel?” He thought he had a spy. And what was really happening is Elisha, say Elisha.

Audience: Elisha.

Nehemia: Elisha was the disciple of Elijah; he became the prophet after him. Elisha was sending the king of Israel this information, saying, “Look, I know where the kingdom of Aramaic land is going to be camping, beware of that spot.” And the king of Syria thinks he has a spy among him. How do they know this? In verse 12, “And one of his servants said, ‘No, my lord the king, for Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, he tells the king of Israel the matters that you speak in your inner bedroom.’” “He knows the word that you speak in your bedroom.” In verse 13, “And he said, ‘Go and see where he is, and I will send, and I will grab him.’ It was told to him, saying, ‘Behold, he is in Dotan.’” So now we begin the Syrian expedition to Dotan. They’ve got to arrest Elisha so he can no longer give away their position. They don’t know how it works, but they just know that they can’t have this information leak.

So verse 14, “And he sent their horses and chariots and a great army. And they came at night, and they surrounded the city.” In verse 15, “And the servant of the man of God arose early in the morning, and he went out and behold, an army was surrounding the city and horses and chariots. And his servants said to him, ‘Ah ha!’” that’s what it says in Hebrew. “Ah ha!” [laughter] “Ah ha my lord, what are we going to do?” In verse 16, “And he said, ‘Do not fear, for there are more with us than there are with them.’ And Elisha prayed, and he said, ‘Yehovah, open please his eyes that he may see.’ And Yehovah opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire surrounding Elisha.”

[applause]

I think this is what happened in this other war, in this war in 1973, when we once again fought the king of Aramaic land, the people of Syria, and the army of Yehovah came out and defeated them and sent them running.

My prayer is, Yehovah, Father, our Father in heaven, please, Yehovah, open my eyes that I may see those whom You send, and may He also open your eyes, as well. Amen.

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  • TJ Hansen says:

    Each time I hear this, I reap something new. I end up sharing it with my friends.

  • Kitty says:

    How many years have people been searching for His Name, centuries, generations, way back. By some miracle He used Nehemia to reveal it in our time. I was wondering if you have ever heard the rumor that the Romans called certain of the jews “yahoos”, based on their calling on The Name? For a very very long time I have wondered what His name is, it says hundreds of times that we should call on it, but I had no access to the information until now. Thank you for all the time and passion you have put into finding this truth.

  • Denise Powell says:

    Is Nehemiah Gordon and Keith Johnson still in China?March 15,2020

  • Teresa Henriques says:

    Fantastic, Amazing!! ?Your tachings have helped me through many years until now, to increase my faith and my love for our Heavenly Father. I live by myself, and I enoy staying at home on Shabat, reading and listening to you, Keith Johnson, and Yono from Australia. I live in Colombia out in the country side. I haven’t found a place to gather and share all these wonderful things. Thankyou.?

  • bigfaithgirl says:

    Nehemia I found the movie “Zero Hour-the Israeli-Arab Conflict” it was so informative to understand.Thank you.

  • Janice says:

    Also if all that is not enough, Jacob and Laban, put up a pile of stones, annonted it and swore an oath that neither one of them would passby into each other’s terrirory wth evil intent.

  • Avril says:

    This was fantastic! Thank you for sharing this with us.

  • Darlene Stewart says:

    I was truly blessed by this video, Awesome God we have.

  • Sarah says:

    This episode gave me chill bumps, again and again! I just had to stand up and shout!

  • Margaret says:

    *L* I have to wonder how many peoples and homes you have reached through this video, causing Yehovah’s name to be known, held to hearts, and ‘mentioned’ – as in Exodus 20:24.

    I understand myself as being blessed, according to His promise!

    Whoot!!!

    • Yosef says:

      You know, it says who so ever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved. It’s no wonder the hounds of hell want to stop it from being spoken .

      Thanks so much for this video !