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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #186 - The Hamas Prophecy: Part 1, Nehemia and Lynell explore the prophetic meaning of the word Hamas in the Hebrew Bible with striking comparisons between modern headlines and the words of the ancient Hebrew prophets.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED

Amos 3:7
Psalm 11:5
Deuteronomy 28:64-68
Genesis 6:11-13
Genesis 9:6
Genesis 6:5-8
Isaiah 14:23
Joel 4:19
Genesis 49:5-7
Genesis 34
Judges 9:23-24
Jeremiah 6:7
Jeremiah 20:8
Ezekiel 45:9 
Amos 3:10
Habbakuk 1:3
Habbakuk 2:17

Habbakuk 1:9
Jeremiah 13:22
Job 19:7
Genesis 16:5
Ezekiel 22:26
Zephaniah 3:4
Exodus 32:1
Deuteronomy 19:6
Psalm 35:11
Micah 6:12
Isaiah 53:9
Psalm 27:12
2 Samuel 22:3
2 Samuel 22:49; Psalm 18:49
Psalm 72:12-14
Psalm 140:2-5
Habbakuk 1:2-9

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Support Team Study - The Hamas Prophecy Part 2

The post Hebrew Voices #186 – The Hamas Prophecy: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #185 - A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz), Nehemia does a deep-dive into what exactly is or isn’t prohibited during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. He distinguishes the 3 Hebrew words all translated into English as “leaven”, describes how drastically different modern food production is from ancient times, and cuts through the controversy about alcohol.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #185 – A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz)

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

If you read it in the English, you wouldn’t get that. You wouldn’t know there’s a difference between leaven, and leaven, and leaven, that they’re three different things, seor, chametz and machmetzet.

Shalom everyone, this is Nehemia, and I’m going to be talking today about the question of leaven. What is leaven? In Hebrew, chametz. There was a talk about a similar topic last week, and there might be a certain amount of overlap.

One of the things we have to do here is go right back to the Hebrew and throw out the English, because in Hebrew there are three different words that are all translated in English as “leaven”. And so, we have to get heavy into the Hebrew here to understand what’s going on.

The first word is chametz. Chametz quite simply is “leavened bread.” It’s the opposite of matzah or matzot. Matzot is the Hebrew for “unleavened bread”. The holiday we’re going to have next week is called in English “the Feast of Unleavened Bread.” In Hebrew that’s the Feast of Matzot. So, matzot is simply the Hebrew word for unleavened bread and the opposite of matzot is chametz.

The second word is machmetzet, which actually only appears in two verses, and it means “that which is leavened”. And there’s a subtle difference between leavened bread and that which is leavened. We’ll talk about that later on.

And the third word is seor. In Hebrew it’s Sin-Alef-Resh, and seor is also always translated in the English as “leaven” but it’s actually quite different from chametz. Chametz refers to leavened bread and seor is actually what we would call today, “yeast”. And more specifically, it’s what they called in the ancient times, or what we call today, “sourdough starter” or “sourdough”.

Today we have sourdough bread, and what exactly is sourdough bread? The way they made any bread in ancient times was, they would take a piece of bread from the previous day’s bread and then they would stick that into the new dough. And that’s called a sourdough, or a sourdough starter, that little piece they would take from the previous day’s bread.

And why did they take a piece of bread from yesterday’s bread? Because the bread has sat for a certain number of hours, and it concentrates. And what they would do is… actually every day they would take dough from the previous day. And over time the yeast from the air goes into the bread and multiplies, or at the end of the day they would take dough and use it the next day. And they would do this every single day.

Yeast… there’s yeast in the air, of course, and then it rises. And if you want to make it rise quicker, you simply take a piece of dough that already has yeast in it and stick it in the new batch of dough. That’s how they would make bread rise. Today we buy a little packet of yeast, and we pour it into our dough. Or some flours today even have the yeast premixed, what they call self-rising dough. But in ancient times it was this sourdough. It’s called sourdough because it becomes soured after sitting out for a while, and it’s highly concentrated with yeast.

“For anyone who eats chametz from the first day through the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.” So, here we have a direct commandment; we have to get rid of all the seor because we’re not allowed to eat chametz. When you read that in the English, you don’t see that. You see you have to get rid of all the leaven because you’re not allowed to eat leavened bread. So, that’s the word seor. So, there’s a big difference between seor and chametz. Seor is sourdough or yeast, and chametz is leavened bread, and you wouldn’t know that from reading the English.

So, let’s look at the first passage, the first time that the commandment concerning leavened bread actually appears in the Tanakh, and that’s in the Book of Exodus, chapter 12 verse 15. And there we read, “Seven days you shall eat matzot.” Matzot, remember we said, is unleavened bread. “Seven days shall you eat matzot; indeed, by the first day you shall completely remove,” or “cause to cease,” literally… if you don’t know how bread was made in ancient times, you might not understand the difference between leaven and leavened bread. Seor, what they’re translating as leaven, is again, this yeast or sourdough starter that is then put into the dough and causes it to rise quicker.

Now, one of the things that isn’t obvious, and you can only really know this through experience, is that really any dough will rise if given enough time. Any dough made from flour or made from a grain of flour. For example, if you take regular flour, and you mix it with water and you don’t add yeast, it will eventually rise, but it will actually take about two or three days. And the whole point of adding the yeast is to make it rise within about six hours. Today they have yeast that makes it rise much faster. But basically, you want it to rise in a relatively short amount of time.

So, here we have in this verse, Exodus 12:15, it tells us to “cause to cease”, it says, “all the seor.” And they sometimes translate that as “utterly remove”, and that’s a correct translation. But it literally means “to cause to cease;” the word there is tash’bitu. And the word tash’bitu is the verb form of Shabbat, Sabbath. Shabbat means “to cease from work”. Here the word is being used as “to cause it to cease from existence”, that is to completely cause to cease all the leaven that you have in your houses, to get rid of it completely. And again, the word here is seor. You get rid of the seor, the sourdough starter, and then you won’t have chametz, you won’t have leavened bread, because you won’t be able to make leavened bread. It will take three days for the bread to leaven instead of just six hours if you get rid of the yeast, the sourdough or sourdough starter.

We find three different types of commandments, or three different formulations in the Torah about leaven and leavened bread. It says in a number of different places, “it shall not be found”, “it shall not be seen”, and “it shall not be eaten”. Let’s take a look at these.

In Exodus 12:19-20, it says, “Seven days seor …” Remember, seor is their sourdough starter. “Seven days seor shall not be found in your houses. For anyone who eats machmetzet, that soul shall be cut from the congregation of Israel, whether from the sojourners or from the native born of the Land. You shall not eat any machmetzet in all your habitations. You shall eat matzot.”

Well, what is this machmetzet? Machmetzet, if you look in the Hebrew you’ll see, has the same root as the word chametz but it’s a different form. It’s actually a noun that’s derived from a Hiphil verb, and in this case, it has the meaning of “that which leavens”. Whereas chametz is leavened bread, machmetzet seems to be anything that leavens, not necessarily just bread. For example, beer. Beer is, well, in ancient times especially, beer was considered quite simply liquid bread. They would let bread sit for a very, very, very long time and eventually it would turn into beer. It didn’t taste quite like beer today, but basically beer is flavored liquid bread. And so, there’s an example of something which leavens but is not bread itself. The same thing with whiskey, by the way. Grain whiskey is, of course, also made from grains, and it actually goes through the same leavening process that bread goes through, it just goes through it much more intensively.

So, here we see that, “seor may not be found in our houses”. And why may it not be found in our houses? Because if you eat machmetzet, you’re going to be cut off from the congregation. And so, again we’re seeing “get rid of this yeast”, or sourdough starter, “which is used to make things that leaven” because you’re not allowed to eat leaven. So, there it says, “it shall not be found”.

And actually, because it says, “it shall not be found”, the rabbis have a custom of going out the day before Passover, going around your house, and doing what they call bedikat chametz, “a chametz examination”, and looking for it. And then they actually symbolically find a piece of chametz, and then they say, “We found all there is, and there’s nothing more to find.” Which isn’t actually what the verse is saying here. What the verse is saying here is, get rid of it so that it is not there. It doesn’t literally mean to look for it and then have it not found, but simply get rid of it.

The next verse we’re going to look at is Deuteronomy 16:4 and there it says, “Seor shall not be seen in all your borders for seven days.” So, here we see that the formulation of, “it shall not be found” and “it shall not be seen” is really the same thing. It’s quite simply expressing it in two different ways, “it shall not be found”, and “it shall not be seen.” It just won’t be there. Get rid of it. You shall not have any seor, that’s what it means. Get rid of the seor.

In Exodus 13:3 we see something slightly different. There we see, “And Moses said to the nation, ‘Remember this day in which you went out of Egypt from the house of slavery, for Yehovah brought you out from this with a mighty hand and therefore no chametz may be eaten.’” And here it’s interesting; it doesn’t say, “no chametz may be seen”, but it says, “no chametz may be eaten”. In another place we’ll see it says, “no chametz will be,” may be, “seen”.

But it’s interesting that it never says, “no seor may be eaten”, because you don’t eat seor. Seor is not food, it’s a dough that’s highly concentrated with yeast. And if you read it in English, you wouldn’t get that. You wouldn’t know there’s a difference between leaven, and leaven, and leaven, that they are three different things: seor, chametz, and machmetzet. And again, seor is this leavening agent, chametz is leavened bread itself, a loaf of bread, or a piece of bread, or a pita, and machmetzet is anything that’s leavened.

In Exodus 13:7, it’s a very interesting verse which in the English makes absolutely no sense. Let’s read it in English. In English it would say, “Unleavened bread must be eaten for seven days, and no leavened bread may be seen or may any leaven be seen in all of your borders.” It sounds repetitive, but in Hebrew it’s not repetitive. It says, “Matzot must be eaten for seven days and no chametz may be seen, nor may any seor be seen in any of your borders.” So, here we’re saying we have to get rid of all the chametz and all the seor. And remember, again, chametz is leavened bread and seor is the leavening agent. We have to get rid of all of those things. And let’s think on a practical level today. That means I cannot have a packet of yeast sitting on my shelf. I’ve got to get rid of even that, especially that.

Well, what is this chametz? What is this leavened bread? And for many years, I read the passage we’re about to read, and I didn’t understand it. And the reason I didn’t understand it is because there’s this thing which I call the “18-minute myth”. Every Jew is taught that dough begins to rise, it begins to leaven, after 18 minutes. And it’s stated as a scientific fact, but it’s simply not biblically correct. Let’s see how we know that.

In Exodus 12 it describes how the Israelites went out of Egypt. And remember, this begins in verse 33. This is late in Exodus 12, after we were already commanded not to have any seor. So, there’s no yeast or sourdough, no leavening agent, and this is what it tells us about the Israelites as they left Egypt.

“And Egypt pressed the nation to hurry, to send them away from the land, for they said, ‘We are all dying.’” This is during the plague of the firstborn, in every house somebody’s dying. “So, the nation took up their dough before it had risen,” and literally what it says is, “before it had become chametz.” “Their kneading troughs bound up in their dresses over their shoulders.” So, they had a little bowl that they would knead the dough in. They just stuck the dough in that bowl, and put it in their garment, wrapped it in the folds of their cloak.

“And the children of Israel traveled from Ramses to Sukkot, about six hundred thousand male foot soldiers besides the children. And also, a mixed multitude among them, and flocks and cattle, very much property. And they baked the dough which they brought out of Egypt as matzot cakes for it had not risen.” Again, in Hebrew it says, “For it had not become chametz.” “For they were driven out of Egypt, and they could not tarry, and they also had not made provisions for themselves.” 

So, what happened here? What’s being described? All over Egypt people are dying, it almost seems randomly. In every house there’s a dead person. And the Egyptians are saying, “Get out of our country, now leave.” And so, the Israelites take this dough that they were going to make for themselves some kind of food. They knew they were leaving, and so they were going to make for themselves food for the way, but it didn’t have time to rise. They didn’t have this leavening agent because they got rid of all the seor. So, it would have taken a long time to rise, certainly more than 18 minutes, and they stuck this dough in the kneading troughs, these little bowls, and they stuck that over their shoulder and carried it with them. And either at Sukkot or on the way to Sukkot… that’s the first town they came to after they left Egypt proper, on the way to Sukkot or at Sukkot, they baked this dough that they had taken with them out of Egypt. That’s what it says. Let’s read that again.

Verse 39, “And they baked the dough which they brought out of Egypt as matzot cakes, for it had not risen, for they were driven out of Egypt, and they could not tarry.” They didn’t have time for it to rise because they were driven out of Egypt, and they also had not made provisions for themselves. So, why are they baking this unleavened dough, which is kind of like not something you normally would want to eat? Why are they forced to bake this on their way to Sukkot, or at Sukkot? Because they didn’t make provisions. That’s what they had, and this is very significant.

I read this for many years, and I said, “Wait a minute. It certainly took more than 18 minutes for them to get from Ramses to Sukkot.” And so, I never understood how it could be that the bread didn’t rise? It must have taken them at least a day. Today I know, because I’ve tried it, that it takes much more than a day, certainly much more than 18 minutes, and even more than a day, for bread to rise if it doesn’t have yeast in it.

And you can do a very simple experiment… well, now is not the time. After Chag HaMatzot, after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, I recommend that you try this, it’s a very easy experiment. I’m not a cook! I don’t normally cook; I know how to heat up things. But here, I left my normal practice and bought a bag of flour, and I made sure it wasn’t self-rising flour. I actually had whole wheat flour, just to make sure we’re close to the conditions of ancient times. I mixed it with room temperature water, and I put it out. You have to leave it out; if you put it in the fridge, it’ll never rise or it’ll take a very long time. I left it out because there’s yeast in the air, and it can collect yeast from the air or attract yeast, and I saw that after the first day nothing happened. After the second day, nothing happened. By the third day I started to see bubbles, and by the fourth day I saw that it was full of bubbles. Those bubbles are the leavening process beginning, or the outcome of the leavening process that produces gas, or one of the things it produces is gas.

So, what’s being described here in Exodus 12:33-39 is that the Israelites are leaving Egypt and they’re taking with them this dough out of Egypt. And probably a day or two later, when they get to Sukkot, or on their way to Sukkot, maybe that night, they bake it and make it as matzot.

So, very clearly it takes more than 18 minutes for something to leaven. And what we’re forbidden is to eat something that has actually gone through this leavening process where it’s producing these bubbles. Again, I want to emphasize, if you’re using self-rising flour, which is a very common thing today, it will completely rise in an hour and a half because it has baking soda in it which makes it rise even faster, and that’s leavened for sure. But if you take flour without any leavening agent, it will not rise after 18 minutes, it won’t even rise after a day. And that’s very significant for making matzot for ourselves, that there are simply no requirements to have it completely done within 18 minutes.

It’s actually very interesting, this 18-minute myth. I looked it up to see where it came from. The rabbis quote it from the Talmud, but the Talmud doesn’t actually say this. What the Talmud talks about is the time it takes for dough to rise for different people, and it says, “For the deaf man, the dough rises in the time that it takes him to walk a mile.” That’s what it says. It sounds ridiculous, the time it takes for a deaf man to walk a mile, that almost sounds like a joke of some type! But this is the type of thing the Talmud talks about, all kinds of different strange scenarios. And later, the rabbis looked at that and they said, “Well, it takes 18 minutes to walk a mile, and it must have said deaf man because you can’t ask him how long his dough has already been rising, and so, that’s the maximum amount of time.” They sort of just assume that’s what the Talmud means, even though it doesn’t actually say that in the Talmud. The Talmud is simply talking about a deaf man, and it actually talks about different types of dough rising. But in any event, that’s clearly not consistent with what it says in Exodus 12:33-39, because here we’re seeing it’s much longer than 18 minutes.

Alright, the next thing we’re going to look at is, we have three places where it talks about eating with chametz. In two places it says, “You must not slaughter with chametz,” and in the third place it talks about not eating with chametz. Remember, chametz is leavened bread. Let’s look at those passages.

The first one is in Exodus 23:18, and there it says, “You must not slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice. And you must not leave over until morning the chaylev.” Chaylev we talked about in our previous study. Chaylev is a certain type of fat; there’s a list in Leviticus 3. “You must not leave over until morning the chaylev fat of my festival offering until morning.” So, this is Exodus 23:18, and it’s not immediately clear what it’s talking about. It doesn’t mention anything here about Chag HaMatzot, about the Feast of Unleavened Bread, it says “feast” or “festival offering”, but it’s not immediately clear what it’s talking about here. “You must not slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice.” It’s just not clear. What sacrifice? And what does it mean “to slaughter together with chametz”?

Now, Exodus 23 is repeated, almost the entire passage, almost word for word. It’s paraphrased in Exodus 34. There’s this whole section of Exodus 22 which is then repeated in Exodus 34, and there, from this parallel, we can learn a lot about what Exodus 23 is talking about and vice versa.

So, in Exodus 34, when this verse is repeated, in verse 25, it says, “You must not slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice and you must not leave over until morning the Passover Festal sacrifice.” So, here we see that. And we could have guessed this actually from Exodus 23:18. But in Exodus 34:25 it’s explicit that this is talking about the Passover sacrifice. We could have guessed this, because in Exodus 23 it talks about not leaving over until morning, and we know that’s one of the rules of the Passover sacrifice, that nothing of the Passover sacrifice can be left over until morning. It’s eaten in the evening, and by morning it has to all be gone, and anything that isn’t eaten or burned has to then be burned. But in Exodus 34:25 it’s explicit and clear that this is talking about the Passover festal sacrifice.

It’s interesting, because in Hebrew it has the phrase “zevach chag hapasach”, which means “the sacrifice of the Passover Feast”. But this is not referring to the holiday of Passover. The holiday isn’t called Passover, it’s referring to the festal sacrifice. And we can confirm that by looking in Exodus 23, where it refers to the sacrifice as “chagi”, “my feast”, or “my festal sacrifice”. You might need to know a little bit more Hebrew to appreciate what I just said in that last part.

But in any event, it’s still not clear what it means “to slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice”. What does that mean? Does that mean I’m holding chametz in one hand, leavened bread, and the knife in the other, and I slaughter the animal? It’s just not clear.

In Deuteronomy 16 it clarifies that situation. In verse 2 it says, “And you must slaughter the Passover to Yehovah, your God, from the flock or from the cattle in the place where Yehovah shall choose to place His name.” That’s significant in itself because at the time of the Exodus they had to slaughter the animals in their houses. And that was something that was unique for Egypt, for the first Passover that took place in Egypt. In Deuteronomy 16, we’re told you have to do it at the place where Yehovah chooses to place His name, which of course is the chosen place, the Temple, or the Tabernacle before there was a Temple. And you can’t do it in your house anymore; that was only in Egypt.

And then it goes on in verse 3, and it says, “You must not eat it together with chametz. For seven days you will eat in addition to it matzot, the bread of poverty, for in haste you went out of the land of Egypt, in order that you remember the day of your going out of the land of Egypt all of the days of your life.”There’s a couple of important things here. First of all, it seems from this that eating it together with chametz, or slaughtering it together with chametz, it seems to mean while chametz is present. In other words, it seems to be saying in Exodus 23 and 34 that you cannot slaughter the Passover sacrifice while you have chametz present. You have to get rid of all the chametz, and only then may you slaughter the Passover sacrifice. And that’s what it means here in Deuteronomy 16:3 when it says, “You must not eat it together with chametz.” You can’t eat the Passover sacrifice while there’s chametz present.

And then it says an interesting thing; it says, “For seven days you will eat in addition to it matzot, the bread of poverty, for in haste you went out of the land of Egypt, in order that you remember the day of your going out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life.” So, why are we commanded to eat unleavened bread and not eat leavened bread? It says explicitly here in Deuteronomy 16:3, “So that you remember the Exodus from Egypt.” And that almost seems obvious, that’s almost like a truism, and we’ve already seen that in Exodus 13.  We saw, “You may not eat chametz because Yehovah took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand,” Exodus 13:3. And here in Deuteronomy 16:3 it’s repeating that. The reason that we must eat unleavened bread, matzot, and that we can’t eat chametz, leavened bread, is to remember that Yehovah took us out of Egypt and to remember this incident where we didn’t have time to bake the bread, we didn’t have time to let it sit and rise because we went out in haste.

And why do I emphasize that? I mean, it’s obvious that we’re not supposed to eat leaven on Chag HaMatzot, The Feast of Unleavened Bread, because we went out of Egypt. I hear from a lot of people today, “Why are we supposed to eat matzot, unleavened bread? To indicate that we’re removing the leaven from our lives.” And I guess they mean by leaven, sin. But that’s not what it says in the Torah! The Torah tells you explicitly why you’re not supposed to eat… And it’s a very beautiful thing, I guess, to remove the leaven from your life, but it doesn’t say that in the Torah. The Torah tells you explicitly why we’re supposed to eat matzot and why we’re not supposed to eat chametz, because we went out in haste from Egypt. And this is a commemoration, a remembrance, that Yehovah took us out of Egypt. Which is, of course, the defining moment of the nation of Israel. Yehovah took us out of slavery, and by taking us out of slavery He made us His nation. He was our redeemer, our savior, and we became His people.

The next passage we’re going to look at is the laws of chametz, of leavened bread, as they relate to the flour offering, in Hebrew, the korban mincha. The laws of the flour offering are first given in Leviticus chapter 2, and there we read, in Leviticus 2:11, “Every flour offering that you offer to Yehovah you must not make as chametz, for you must not burn any seor or any honey as a fire offering to Yehovah.”

And again, in English you would have completely missed this because it would have said, “You must not make as leavened bread for you must not burn any leaven.” And you would think those are the same thing. But here we see we cannot take the flour that we offer to Yehovah and make it as chametz because we’re not allowed to burn seor or honey as a fire offering to Yehovah.

Okay, seor, we know, is put into the dough and makes it chametz. That is, you take the leavening or yeast agent, and you stick it into the dough, you mix it into the dough, and then from that you end up with chametz. What does honey have to do with it? What honey has to do with it is quite simply that honey is another thing that can act as a leavening agent. Honey is highly concentrated with sugar, and that will speed up the leavening process. And what I mean by that, again, is that if you leave out any dough that doesn’t have any leavening agent in it, it will eventually rise after three or four days. But if you stick honey in it, then it will leaven much quicker. It won’t leaven as quickly as if you stick seor, or sourdough, in it, but it will leaven so much quicker.

So, we’re forbidden here to burn seor and honey upon the altar of Yehovah, and therefore we cannot make the bread of the flour offering as chametz. I should point out that there are certain specific flour offerings that are brought as chametz, that are the exception to the rule. Those are the thanks offering and the new bread offering that’s brought on Shavuot, in the Feast of Weeks, but we won’t get into that, that’s a different conversation.

But the rule is, you’re not allowed to burn seor or honey upon the altar of Yehovah, and even in those other sacrifices, in the thanks offering that’s in Leviticus 7, where it talks about that you do make it as chametz, the flour offering. You don’t burn that on the altar, you just eat it as chametz.

From this point we’re going to skip over the rest of the topic of the flour offering, because that’s really a different subject that we can go into a different time. But this helps us in defining exactly what leaven is. We see it’s not just something that’s leavened using yeast, or using sourdough, it’s something that’s leavened using any leavening agent, even honey. And again, this doesn’t mean we have to get rid of all the honey in our houses because it doesn’t say that. It says to get rid of the seor, the sourdough, which is yeast, and to get rid of the chametz. We can have honey, but we just can’t mix the honey in with our dough.

One of the things we saw earlier was this word machmetzet. It appeared in Exodus 12, verses 19 to 20. It appeared twice, and that’s actually the only two places it appears in the Tanakh, twice in that verse, in Exodus 12:19-20. And machmetzet was significant because it means “that which leavened”, and not necessarily leavened bread. It can apply to whiskey, to beer. But this raises the question, what about other things that ferment, other things that go through a fermenting process maybe similar to the way that grains ferment as well?

And there’s a theory out there that anything that ferments cannot be eaten on Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And for example, some Karaites would say that you can’t drink wine on Chag HaMatzot because wine has gone through a fermentation process and therefore it’s also machmetzet. It’s not chametz, it’s machmetzet, “that which has leavened”. And really, this is a question we have to ask; does the term machmetzet, “that which leavens”, apply just to things made from grains? Or does it apply to anything that leavens?

Another example is, some Karaites won’t eat yogurt on Chag HaMatzot, on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because they say that yogurt has also gone through a fermentation process. Well, let’s look at the biblical evidence and see what we can derive from this, if we can answer this question. Is it just grains, or is it anything that leavens?

And the first clue is with the Hebrew word for vinegar, and the Hebrew word for vinegar is, now, don’t get confused here, the Hebrew word for vinegar is chometz. Now we’ve been talking the entire time about chametz, but chometz is a different word. First of all, chometz has the accent, the emphasis, on the first syllable, whereas chametz has it on the second syllable. And in English, at least as I write it, chametz has an “A” and chometz has an “O”. Chametz, again, is leavened bread, chometz is obviously from the same root, but it’s a different word which means vinegar.

For example, we see this in Numbers chapter 6 verse 3, and here it’s talking about the nazir or what they call in English the Nazarite. Nazir is a person who makes a vow to separate himself from ritual impurity and from anything derived from the grape. He can’t even eat the seeds of grapes. And it lists the various things he can’t eat. It starts in Numbers 6:3 and it says, “He must separate himself from wine and intoxicant, he must not drink wine vinegar or intoxicant vinegar.” An intoxicant is simply very strong wine, “and he must not drink any soaked grapes and he must not eat any grapes or raisins.” And it goes on that he can’t even eat the seeds or the skin of the raisins.

So, here it’s significant for our question. We see that he can’t drink wine vinegar, and wine vinegar is chometz yayin, that is chometz made from wine, or intoxicant vinegar, which is chometz made from shekhar. And again, this is clearly related to the word chametz, there’s no doubt about that, they’re both from the root Chet-Mem-Tsadi. And the word chometz can mean the word vinegar even without the word wine or intoxicant next to it. It’s in many places in the Tanakh. I’ll just bring one which I think is a very interesting one.

Proverbs 10:26, it says, “like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is the lazy person to those who send him”. I love that image, because you can just see the person who sent this guy out to do the work, and he’s sitting around being lazy not doing the work, and it burns his eyes and it’s annoying to his teeth. It’s a beautiful metaphor there, it’s a very powerful metaphor that you can almost feel. “Like vinegar to the teeth,” and the word there is chometz. It doesn’t have to have the word wine next to it, wine chometz, or wine vinegar; chometz by itself means vinegar.

What’s significant about this? Well, a number of things are significant. Let’s leave the question of vinegar aside for a moment. The fact that in Numbers 6:3 it talks about wine vinegar, wine chometz, let’s assume that vinegar itself is chametz for a moment. If vinegar itself was chametz because it’s called chometz, its name comes from a similar word, or from the same root, that would seem to imply that wine itself is not chametz, and let’s look at this a little bit closer.

The way that vinegar is made is that wine continues to ferment, and eventually it sort of spoils and becomes vinegar. And if it’s only called chometz once it’s gone past the process of wine, already into this vinegar fermentation, that would seem to imply that wine itself is not chametz, that it’s not leavened in a biblical sense. Because otherwise wine itself would be called chometz. The question is, though, is chometz itself? I mean, now we’ve looked at the question of wine, but what about chometz itself? Actually, let’s leave that to the end, the question of chometz itself.

There’s more evidence that wine itself is not considered leaven. We’ve just seen that there’s wine vinegar, which implies that wine itself is not chometz. Another piece of evidence is concerning the wine libations that are brought on Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. We saw before that you can’t slaughter the Passover sacrifice while there’s any leaven present, and leaven can’t be brought upon the altar of Yehovah. But we know for a fact that wine was very often brought as a libation and poured out in the Temple. Libation means something you pour on the ground in the Temple.

In Leviticus 23:12-13 it talks about the day of the wave sheaf offering, which is the Sunday during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And there it says, “And you shall offer on the day of the waving of the sheaf a whole yearling lamb as a burnt offering to Yehovah.” And of course, you can’t have a burnt offering without a flour offering that accompanies it, and a libation offering. And so, it explains what those are in verse 13. It says, “And its flour offering shall be two tenths of fine flour mixed in oil as a fire offering to Yehovah, sweet smelling. And its libation offering shall be one quarter a hin,” a hin is an ancient measurement, “one quarter a hin of wine.” So, we see very explicitly that they’re bringing wine as a libation offering in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot, on the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

And there’s another place where this is very clear as well, from Numbers 28. We won’t read the whole passage, but in Numbers 28 it talks about the libation offerings, or about the offerings that are brought in all the feasts, on all the appointed times, and specifically when it talks about the Feast of Unleavened Bread, we see there as well that there are wine libations that are brought on the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

And so, it’s very clear that if they’re bringing wine as an offering in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot, on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the Feast of Matzot, that wine could not possibly be considered chametz, or leavened, because you wouldn’t be bringing leaven into the Temple as an offering on the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It’s inconceivable.

And it’s very clear from the passages we read that the Passover sacrifice can’t be offered together with leaven, that you cannot offer these offerings on Chag HaMatzot together with leaven. It’s inconceivable. And I think we can conclude from that that wine itself is not leaven.

And this actually confirms what we saw earlier from Numbers 6, where it talks about vinegar as being chometz of wine and chometz of intoxicant, implying that wine and intoxicant themselves are not chametz. The question is, still, what about vinegar itself? Is vinegar chametz? The question here is, does the fact that the name of vinegar derives from the same root as the word for leaven mean that vinegar itself is leaven?

And here first, before we really examine this, we have to do what’s called Comparative Semitic Linguistics. And I won’t go into too much detail about this, but basically, in Hebrew, whenever you have a root that has the letter Chet in it and the letter Tsadi, either of those letters, you have to look in other Semitic languages to see what the value of that Chet is and what the value of that Tsadi is. And the reason for that is, in ancient Hebrew the letter Chet, the eighth letter of the alphabet, was sort of like a “C” in English. In English the letter “C” is sometimes pronounced as “K” and sometimes as “S”, it has a single symbol even though it represents two different sounds. And in ancient Hebrew, the Chet as well represented two different sounds, one was “Chet” and the other “Het”. And we can see which sound is intended by looking at other Semitic languages because they actually take two different letters for those two different sounds. Whereas in Hebrew it’s a single letter, just like “C”. It’s the same with the Tsadi, and there are actually several letters in Hebrew that represent more than one sound. And actually, in ancient Hebrew there were 29 different sounds even though there were 22 letters.

Well, when we compare this to other Semitic languages, we find that the word for leaven and the word for vinegar are actually the same root. And here, I have to emphasize the fact that they have the same three letters in Hebrew in their root doesn’t mean that they’re really the same root, without looking in other Semitic languages because of that Chet and Tsadi. But here we actually find that they are actually the same root. And in other Semitic languages we find that the meaning of this root is “sour”, that’s the base primary meaning of this root, something which sours.

And it seems to me that the reason that vinegar is called wine chometz, or wine vinegar, is that it’s soured wine in a very literal sense. That’s what it is. Bread which is leavened is… we even call it today in English, “sourdough”, because it has a sour taste to it. I don’t think that necessarily means, though, that anything that’s sour is chametz. Because what we see all the time is, “don’t eat chametz because you have to eat matzot”. And I think as a rule of thumb, anything you can’t make matzot out of cannot possibly produce leaven in a Torah sense.

In other words, if you can’t make matzot out of grapes, which obviously you can’t, then you cannot have leaven from grapes as well because chametz is the opposite of matzot. Chametz is leavened bread and matzot is unleavened bread.

So, it seems to me that chametz, and even machmetzet, that which is leavened, is very specific to things that are made from the grains. And that’s something that’s very easy to test. You take the flour, and you mix it with water, and you let it sit. And you’ll see after a number of days whether or not it’s leavened.

For example, if you take potato flour, potato starch, and you mix it with water and you let it sit… and I’ve tried this, that’s how I know, it will never leaven. It will eventually spoil after two or three days; it’ll start to stink. You’ll see mold forming. You won’t see bubbles bubbling up like you will with the flour made from one of the grains.

So, chametz is very specific to these five grains. The five grains, of course, are wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt. And you can see that if you take other flours that it won’t rise, it won’t leaven. It will just rot or mold.

So, that brings us to the conclusion of our topic or discussion of what is leaven. We’ve seen here that leaven is something made from one of the grains, a flour of the grain, that if baked without giving it a chance to rise will produce matzot. But if left for long enough will eventually rise, will go through a leavening process where it produces bubbles. And there’s a technical definition that I won’t get into. It also produces alcohol and other byproducts, even in bread, by the way.

And it’s very clear that this isn’t something that just takes 18 minutes, which is generally taught by the rabbis, or something that all Jews are just taught as a fact. It takes a lot longer than 18 minutes. We saw that when the Israelites left Egypt, they brought their dough with them and baked it on their way to Sukkot. And it was at least a day before they had a chance to do that. In any event, it was very clearly longer than 18 minutes. We saw that you have to completely get rid of all of your chametz.

One of the things they do in Israel today is they have a legal fiction, where they sell the chametz to a gentile. And what they do is there’s an Arab family that they say, “Okay, we’re going to sell you this for a certain amount, and we’ll buy it back from you just after Chag HaMatzot.” And that’s ridiculous. And then they just leave it in their houses and the Arab never picks it up. That’s ridiculous, because if the Arab showed up and said, “I want this chametz,” you wouldn’t give it to him. I mean, that’s a legal fiction, it’s a loophole they’re trying to jump through. And the truth is it says, “It shall not be seen,” and “It shall not be found,” and what that means is that it shall not be there. If I went to look for it, it wouldn’t be there.

We saw that chametz, that is, leavened bread, could be made as well using honey because that also serves as a leavening agent. And we saw that in Hebrew, vinegar is called chometz, or chometz yayin, soured wine, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that chometz, or vinegar itself, is chametz, leavened bread, it just simply has the meaning of soured. And we saw that wine, especially, is very clearly, even though wine is clearly going through a fermentation process, wine is not considered chametz in a biblical sense, because otherwise it wouldn’t be offered in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

“What about plain flour? Is plain flour a yeast?” And the answer is no, plain flour is not chametz. However, there is a type of flour they sell, which is called self-rising flour, in Hebrew they call it kemach le’afiah, or baking flour, and that actually contains a leavening agent in it. So, that’s not plain flour, although it may look like plain flour, so, you have to be careful there. That does contain seor in it.

Okay, I can’t think of a source off hand, the main source would be the Tanakh, of course. In this case, the way I found out about the sourdough was quite simply looking into the history of how bread was made, and I discovered that 200 years ago they didn’t simply take a packet of yeast and pour it into flour. They had sourdough, which, again, was this dough that was taken from a previous day’s leavening, and so it was highly concentrated with yeast, and they used that to infect the next day’s dough.

“You mentioned about the wine offered in the Temple,” not so’ar, it’s seor. So’ar means anything “Seor”. So, the wine offered in the Temple, the word is shekhar, simply means “intoxicant”, that which causes one to become drunk. And that’s strong wine, what we would call fortified wine, as opposed to wine that’s just been given a short amount of time to ferment and doesn’t have a high alcohol content, or maybe it has to do with the type of grapes. In any event, you really just need to look at the history of food production, which has drastically changed over the last 100 years.

You’re right, there’s a problem here, that the ancient Israelites weren’t sitting and reading the labels of the ingredients because they made everything themselves and it was much more simple. And if you got rid of the seor, the sourdough starter, then there wouldn’t be any leaven, because you’d have to go out of your way to make leavened bread. You’d have to let it sit for the first four days of Chag HaMatzot to produce leavened bread because you didn’t have the sourdough starter. So, you’re right, we live in a different culture and a different society today, where foods are produced in a much different way than they were in ancient times and it creates a lot of problems, there’s no question about that. But I think the basic principle is what we need to follow; that we have to not eat anything that’s leavened, any of the five grains that are leavened, or anything else that could leaven.

“What if the 15th of the first month,” this is the question, “What if the 15th of the first month happens to be a Shabbat? I mean about burning the rest of the Pesach offering in fire before the morrow.” “Bread yeast is a fungus species.” Yeah, you can look it up. There’s a lot of websites on the internet that explain what yeast is in technical terms, in a technical sense. It is a living organism, and it actually exists in the air, and it lives off of flour and reproduces. That’s why if you leave out the flour for three to four days, you’ll end up with it being highly concentrated with yeast from the air.

So, what about the fire? I’m not sure what the question is really about the Pesach offering and fire. We’re forbidden to kindle fire on Shabbat, but sacrifices in general are brought on Shabbat and there’s an eternal fire, so when it comes to sacrifices that’s sort of the exception to the rule as far as fire is concerned. So, it’s not a problem.

The question was, “Are eggs considered chametz, or leavened bread, or leaven in any sense?” No, they’re not. Eggs are not considered chametz. Eggs are probably used in a lot of Passover recipes because eggs will expand when you bake them, and it artificially creates something that looks similar, or maybe has a similar texture to leaven. But eggs themselves are not leaven.

Okay, I think they actually had warning, because in Exodus 12 they were given warning sometime before the 10th of the month that this would happen, that they would have to get rid of all the seor and not have chametz. But they were also told that they have to be ready to leave in haste. That they were to eat the Passover sacrifice “with their loins girded and their staff in their hand” because they were going to be sent out at any second. And I think that’s a major part of the message of Passover, Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, that the redemption could come at any second, that Yehovah would cause it to happen very quickly after 430 years of slavery in Egypt. At a moment’s notice they would have to leave.

Ah, first of all, Yochanan mentions yeast in the air, which I see that I missed. I didn’t answer. I don’t think we’re responsible for things in the air. And again, when it says seor, in the ancient times what it was specifically referring to was the sourdough starter, which was flour that had concentrated amounts of yeast in it. It had attracted yeast over a number of days until it became concentrated.

Somebody asked about animal food. And I’ll get to Ivan’s question in a minute. I was jotting down the notes here. Animal food… and I have, of course, Georgia, who’s sitting right next to me, my little baby Georgia dog. Ironically, in Israel… well, not ironically. I think it’s almost ridiculous, but in Israel they sell kosher for Passover dog food. I kid you not! On Friday, I picked up a bag of Passover dog food. There is such a thing. I don’t know if it’s necessary. In other words, I think you can feed your dog leaven. If it’s dog food it’s not human food, and it’s not fit for human consumption. It’s not even kosher to begin with. It’s probably made from… I don’t even want to talk about what it’s made from. But Georgia has kosher for Passover dog food. I don’t think it’s necessary, though.

Yeast extract. Why did I write this? Ah, you asked about the soups that contain yeast extract. So, here we have… and again, you can research this and learn more about it, but you’ll find that there’s yeast made in two different ways today. There’s yeast that’s grown in a petri dish, because remember, yeast is a fungus. It’s a living organism, and you can actually grow it in a petri dish. And that itself I don’t think would be considered seor. You wouldn’t be able to put it in your flour because, like honey or baking soda, it would cause leavening. But that itself I don’t think would be considered seor. It wouldn’t be inherently forbidden on Chag HaMatzot.

However, most yeast that you buy today is actually a byproduct of beer and whiskey production. Remember, whiskey and beer are made from grains that are hyper fermented, and at the bottom of the barrel or the vat where they’re making this beer, there’s this sort of soup of hyper, hyper, hyper, super yeast-filled barley, and that’s what you buy in the store. They take that, they dry that out, they package it, and that’s usually what you buy in the stores as baker’s yeast. So that, obviously, would be no different than dough you let rise for 40 days. In other words, that is called brewer’s yeast, but it’s basically the yeast that you usually buy in the store. At least I know in Israel that’s the most common type they have and that itself is inherently seor and has to be removed on Chag HaMatzot.

“When they left Egypt with the dough, wouldn’t the seor have already been mixed with the dough, as that would have been mixed in already?” That’s a very good question. The answer is that earlier in Exodus 12, it told them to get rid of all the seor so there wouldn’t have been seor in their dough. I think what you’re pointing at is a very good point, that it wasn’t just an accident that they didn’t have leavened bread when they left Egypt. It wasn’t just a fluke. It was because they were commanded to get rid of the seor that the flour never rose. But then, if they had waited long enough, the flour would have risen anyway. So, there are two reasons why we have unleavened bread. The first is that we were commanded from the beginning, even before the Exodus, but also because we had to leave so suddenly. That even if we wanted to make leavened bread, we couldn’t.

Somebody’s asking about beer. Any alcoholic beverage made from grain is going to be chametz, and that means beer and it means whiskey. Both of which are made from grains. Somebody asked about rum. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what rum is made from. I think it’s made from sugar or from molasses, in which case, I don’t think it would be… I mean, basically, you have to find out what these things are made from, and if they’re made from any grain then they’re going to be chametz.

I see we’re now down to the second round of questions. I don’t think it’s really relevant what they ate in ancient times. In ancient Israel they didn’t eat bananas, but bananas are not chametz. But they certainly didn’t eat the corn, which comes from the new world, but corn is not chametz. I think there’s something to what you’re saying, that if you make things yourself, then you’ll know what’s in it. But the fact that’s what was done in ancient times isn’t really the issue. The issue is that you’ve no way of knowing what a lot of things are, and so, yeah, if you make things yourself, you’ll be more on the safe side. But again, I don’t think it’s so much what they did in ancient times as being the issue.

“You said that vinegar, chometz yayin, and wine are not chametz, but could any of them be made machmetzet? Remember no chametz would be offered with the burnt offering, nothing is said in the Torah about machmetzet.” No, but the point is that during Chag HaMatzot you can’t be offering even machmetzet… you can’t have machmetzet even in existence, so how could you be offering wine in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot if you can’t have machmetzet? To me, that’s a decisive truth that wine itself is not machmetzet or chametz. As I mentioned before, there is a Karaite opinion that claims otherwise, and you can ask people who think that how they explain the fact that wine is offered in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot. I don’t see how you can get around that.

Okay, here I was PM’d a question, which is a good question. Somebody asked about non-alcoholic beer, does that contain leavening too? And non-alcoholic beer is quite simply beer that somehow… I’m not exactly sure how they do it, but in any event, it’s simply made from barley, and it’s fermented barley. So, yeah, even non-alcoholic beer is chametz as well. In ancient times, again, I know that in ancient Egypt, the ancient Egyptians first discovered beer, and they did that by letting their bread sit for too long. And they referred to it simply as liquid bread.

Okay, we’re going to make this the last round of questions. The last four questions. Somebody asked a good question here. “What are the five grains?” And you could look these up in an encyclopedia, and ultimately, the way to know is to take these flours and see if they rise, which I’ve done, and you can do very easily. They are wheat, barley, rye, spelt, and oats.

You’re typing your question, “What do you think Yehovah is trying to teach us about the Feast of Pesach, of Unleavened Bread? Why is He telling Israel to get rid of the leaven during this time?” Okay, that’s a very good question, and we saw the answer directly in Deuteronomy 16. It tells us exactly what the reason is. The reason for Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, is to remind us that Yehovah took us out of Egypt, which is a pivotal event in the history of Israel. It’s the event that marks Yehovah redeeming the nation of Israel and taking us as His chosen nation. And that’s the significance of Chag HaMatzot. It tells you that right in the Torah so there’s no question about it. It has nothing to do with removing leaven from your life.

By the way, without getting too far… I’ll skip that, it doesn’t matter. Malachi, New York… Actually, before we go to Malachi, somebody PM’d me a question here which I think is very important. And they actually did this a while ago, so I should answer it. Somebody asked, “Are we supposed to slaughter a lamb or a goat for Passover today? Why? And why not?” And that’s a very good question. Today, are we supposed to bring the Passover sacrifice? And first of all, of course, we are supposed to, but can we do it under the current circumstances? I think it’s very clear that the answer is no.

First of all, you can only bring it in the chosen place, the place where Yehovah has chosen to place His name. We read that before in Deuteronomy 16, very clearly. And today, the place where Yehovah has chosen to place His name forever is Jerusalem. It tells you that in a number of places in the Tanakh, that Yehovah has chosen to place His name there forever. So, you can only bring it in Jerusalem at the place of the Temple. Today we physically can’t do it, because if you did you would be shot in the back. So, it’s impossible today to bring the Passover sacrifice, unfortunately. There are other reasons why we can’t as well, because of issues of ritual purity, but that’s a whole other topic. But even if those were solved, there’s the physical problem of actually getting to the chosen place where Yehovah has chosen to place His name and bring Him the sacrifice, so we physically can’t bring it today.

“Well, it says to follow what Yehovah’s commanded us in His word, and that means to be a Karaite.” Yeah, you’re absolutely right. “You talked about a whole bunch of things that are nonsense, and we don’t do things that are nonsense.” We do get together and tell over the story of the Exodus, because in Exodus 12 it talks about this evening as Leil Shimurim, “a night of watching”, or “a night of remembrance”. And in ancient times, what that meant was they’d slaughter the Passover sacrifice and sat there eating it all night. They had to finish it by the morning, and to eat a lamb in one night and to have it completely eaten by the morning meant they were sitting there eating all night and telling over the story of the Exodus at this “night of watching”, Leil Shimurim. So, today we don’t have the Passover sacrifice, but it’s still Leil Shimurim, it’s still a “night of watching” where we tell over the story.

Okay, so, you ask about the haggadah. Haggadah simply means “to tell over”. So, we do tell over, but we don’t tell over… if anybody has been to a Rabbinic Passover Seder, they know that the rabbis sit around telling stories about this rabbi and that rabbi, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Exodus. The Exodus is mentioned, but the main emphasis is about this rabbi and that rabbi, and we don’t tell those stories over, we just read directly from the Torah and from the Psalms about the Exodus from Egypt. Or tell over the story in your own words if you prefer. But we don’t tell over stories about dead rabbis, that doesn’t have anything to do with the Exodus.

To my knowledge, corn flour will not rise. It doesn’t leaven, as they say. I mean, if you stick baking soda into anything, it’ll appear to rise, but it doesn’t actually leaven. It won’t bubble up like wheat flour will. So, a tortilla wouldn’t be leavened bread, it would have to have been made from one of the five grains. If you want, there’s a very good recipe for matzot, for unleavened bread, on the Karaite Korner website, which isn’t the usual type of matzot that you buy in the store. It’s a special type… well, it’s not special, it’s just a different recipe. It’s a traditional way of making matzot; the Karaite Korner website.

Oh! I love chapati! I love Indian food in general! Actually, here in Jerusalem we’re doing a Passover Seder, telling over the story of the Exodus, and Melech ben Yacov, who’s been here a number of times giving teachings, he’s going to be cooking an authentic Indian meal, so I’m really looking forward to that. And it’ll probably take us all night to finish Melech’s meal. Anybody who’s been there knows what I’m talking about.

Okay, I think this is going to be the last question, Hortium. “What food should be used for the Seder of the first night of the first Chag HaMatzot? Is it only matzot and maror, which are mentioned in the Torah?” You can eat anything you want on the first night of Chag HaMatzot, but for all seven days you should be eating matzot. It says, “Seven days you will eat matzot.” You can also eat bitter herbs on the first evening as well, but you’re doing that as a commemoration of the Passover sacrifice, because originally that was meant as part of the Passover sacrifice. And you can do that as a commemoration, but it’s not actually the Passover. You have to bear in mind that you’re not actually doing the Passover sacrifice.

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VERSES MENTIONED

Exodus 12:15
Exodus 12:19-20
Deuteronomy 16:4
Exodus 13:3
Exodus 13:7
Exodus 12:33-39
Exodus 23:18
Exodus 34:25
Deuteronomy 16:2-3
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The post Hebrew Voices #185 – A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz) appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #183, Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1, Nehemia continues his discussion with Dan Vogel exploring parallels between Mormonism and Islam, Joseph Smith’s attempt to establish a theocratic empire on the American frontier, and the rapidly-shifting nature of revelation and institutional religion.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1

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

Dan Vogel: Joseph Smith put out to the people that he’s just dictating God’s words, or that he’s dictating the words on the stone. Privately, he has a different definition of revelation that is more liberal, more nuanced, than what he let out.

— —

Nehemia: So, I’m back with Dan Vogel, who I consider to be the greatest living historian on early Mormonism, if not one of the greatest. I don’t think it’s exaggeration to say you’re the greatest living historian on early Mormonism, and that’s for this reason, Dan. The way I look at it is, in scholarship, in academia, there are consumers and producers. And most people, I think, who write on early Mormonism, I could be wrong, I think they are consumers of the documents. And you’re actually a producer of the documents. Not in the sense of that forger Hofman, but in the sense of, you go, and you hunt them down and you edit them and then publish them. So that now I don’t have to go and look in some newspaper from 1830 that, if I’m lucky… today I can find it online, but back then, good luck. You actually have now made it available, so now I can find out, okay, what are the sources?

Now, somebody could argue that you didn’t do a correct job of… they could always argue that, and I’m sure you would say there’s mistakes you made. Everybody has that. But you’ve made these sources available, and then your conclusions are based on the sources, rather than going to dig up sources to back up what you want to argue or what you believe or something. Which is what, frankly, some people do in every field, let’s be honest.

So, all right, so, we talked about the first vision. And before we go on, I want to bring up this and I want to get your thoughts on it. So, I am now convinced, after the research I’ve done, which I admit is relatively limited in scope, mainly preparing for this interview… I’ve been doing research for the past year. Actually, first I did the research, and I’m like, “Okay, I got to talk to this guy.” This is the guy I’ve got to talk to. And hopefully, I’ll do an interview with Royal Skousen one day because he’s another guy… I’m really fascinated in his work.

I’m convinced that everybody in Old Testament and New Testament studies, and probably Islamic studies, but I don’t know enough about that, should be forced to take a class on early Mormonism and study it, because there are things that we can learn from early Mormonism that we can apply to these other fields. And I’ll give you an example, and I want your thoughts on it. So, there’s a big… not even a debate; there’s a big discussion about Paul in the New Testament, which letters he wrote. And they’ll say, “Well, Paul wrote this letter, but that letter is either a forgery or it was written by one of his disciples, depending on your perspective.” And the reason is, he uses the same energy as Paul, but in a completely different way.  And so, that’s not Paul’s terminology; his student heard that term and he’s using it in a different way.

And I look at early Mormonism, and look, I’m not a Mormon, I don’t believe in Mormonism. So, from my perspective, I accept the critical approach that says, Joseph Smith just pretty much made it all up. And if Joseph Smith made it all up, and he’s saying about the First Vision, “It was the Lord.” And then it’s the father and the son, and those are very different things… I think they are. And then in the Book of Mormon he’s anti-Masonic, but later he joins the Masons. I mean, this is textbook stuff that you would say, “Well, no, that was written by Joseph Smith.” If you were coming from a New Testament studies or Old Testament studies, “Joseph Smith wrote that, but Oliver Cowdery must have written that,” or some other guy, right? Who knows? “Because they have different approaches to Freemasonry, or they have different approaches to what the First Vision was.”

A great example is something I wrote to you in messages before this interview, which to me is an incredible example, is this idea of what happens when you die. So, in the Book of Mormon, there is eternal damnation, eternal punishment. And then in the Doctrine and Covenants… tell us about that one, because that’s incredible! You would have to say in medieval studies or Old Testament / New Testament studies, that there’s two different authors. But we know there’s not two different authors, or at least we think so, right?

So, tell us about that, about the eternal damnation, or punishment, in the Book of Mormon, versus in the Doctrine and Covenants or Book of Commandments.

Dan: Right. Well, Joseph Smith had to deal with… What a lot of early charismatic groups end up having to deal with is non-fulfillment of prophecy. Recovering from mistakes, trying to change or spin certain things. I liken it to just about like, if you study psychics; psychics who foretell the future, who read people’s fortunes and things. They’re not always right and they don’t always expect themselves to be right either. But neither did Joseph Smith. Plus, you start right away with the failure of certain things. He would give out, “God’s decrees are unalterable,” one of the statements. And then he would give a decree, and this decree said, “So-and-so will go with so-and-so on a mission,” and it would give a list of…

And in the beginning, his revelations had to do with minute details of everyday life almost, like administrative things. Every little administrative decision is a revelation because that’s what they bragged about, being different than everybody else. “We have revelation, and they don’t!” That’s why they don’t have authority, they don’t have revelation.

Well, when he assigned so-and-so to go with so-and-so on a mission, and then that person apostatized before the mission, well, didn’t God know that? So, he would try to get out of those things by saying that God can alter what he says. Joseph Smith himself would say, “Well, God would say, do this, do this,” but then certain things would change and then God would change what he would do. So, he would try to spin it that way. And a lot of his early followers noticed that and quit!

Nehemia: So, this is not unique in the history of religion.

Dan: No.

Nehemia: In Islam, famously, Muhammad… the original revelation was that they should pray in the direction of Jerusalem, and then at some point, Allah changed his mind. And here I want to be careful because I’m not an expert in early Islam, but basically there was a new revelation that says, “No, the qibla is now towards Mecca.” And this actually is a major focus of Islamic jurisprudence and study, what are the earlier parts of the Quran? Because it’s not in chronological order, and what are the latest parts? Because they have what’s called the doctrine of abrogation; Allah absolutely gives new revelation, and only the latest revelation is what’s binding today. So, if in one verse he says, cut the throats of the unbelievers or something, and I’m sure I’m misquoting that, I apologize. And another one he says, “There’s no compulsion in matters of religion.” It’s fundamental which is later, and which is earlier, because that determines what you do in the 21st century. And there are huge debates about this in Islam, if I understand correctly.

So, you’re saying there’s a similar thing in Joseph Smith’s career, where his revelations would… God would change his mind, basically? And maybe in your terminology, would you say that? How would he describe it?

Dan: Okay. So, he had different ways of getting out of these problems…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Dan: …or recovering from failure. So, another example would be the main revelation or reason for Joseph Smith. His mission was to establish a new Jerusalem in America, a “Zion” in Independence, Jackson County, Missouri. And that never happened.

Nehemia: Well, originally it wasn’t even in Missouri. Wasn’t it across the Mississippi River in Indian territory? Am I wrong about that?

Dan: Originally it was in Indian territory, but as the missionaries went there to find a spot, they were kicked out of the Indian territory. And so, Joseph had to even come to Missouri to find the place. Why didn’t he just look in his stone or whatever and find it when he was over there in Ohio? No. Joseph Smith had to come all the way to Missouri and look around, and then he gets a revelation. “Oh, it’s by the courthouse in Independence, Missouri.” And that’s where it was established, within the territory, United States territory, at the time. And, yeah, it was supposed to be among the Lamanites, and…

Nehemia: Which are what we would call the Native Americans, or in my generation, they called them the American Indians.

Dan: Yeah. The American Indians, now, Native Americans. They were in the Book of Mormon “Lamanites”. There were Nephites and Lamanites, and the Lamanites destroyed the Nephites. And then the Lamanites became the Native Americans. And they believed, the more early Mormons, part of Joseph Smith’s mission was to convert the Native Americans, who were Israelites. And fulfill Old Testament prophecy by converting… and New Testament, converting them to Jesus and causing them to repent and learning their true heritage. And that was all part of the latter days. The signs of the latter days was the restoration of Israel, which this was his version of it.

So, that didn’t happen. They got kicked out of Missouri. They got persecuted and kicked out of Missouri, and they were never able to fulfill that revelation, and it caused a lot of anxiety about unfulfilled revelation. So, how do you handle that? And Joseph Smith gets another revelation, when he’s in Illinois, that says it was a commandment to build the temple in this new Jerusalem. But you were hindered, but when you go to do everything you can to fulfill God’s commandments, and you can’t, God accepts the offering. And so, it was kind of “revoked.” The commandment to build the temple in this generation was revoked because they had been obedient in trying to do it, but were hindered from doing it, so God more or less excused them from the commandment. It’s still a prophecy. The prophecy’s still in effect, but the commandment to build it in this generation has been suspended.

Nehemia: Was there something where they said, “Well, no, he’s saying I accept the offering.” So, he’s not saying, “Well, you didn’t get to do this because you were sinners,” which would be like an Old Testament sort of explanation. You’re saying it’s because some outside force hindered them, and you did the best you could, basically is…

Dan: Yeah, that was part of it. But at the time… at the time when you get really down into the weeds of it all, you’ll find out that Joseph Smith at first had no explanation for why they couldn’t establish Zion, and how they got kicked out of the Holy Land. So, early Mormons, they lost their Holy Land, similar to the Israelites losing their holy Land. And how do you explain this loss? God said David’s supposed to sit on the throne forever and ever, and that didn’t happen. How do you explain that? And so, they have their own crisis that they worked out with prophets. But then you have, just as the early Mormons did, the same thing, but in a compressed amount of time.

Nehemia: So, this is an important… and we’re going to gloss over this, I apologize to the LDS folks listening. There was one of the most shameful events, from my perspective, in American history, where the early Mormons settled Missouri and they were violently dispossessed of the land that they legally purchased. And the response of the governor was to issue an order; it was called the order of extermination, right?

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I’ve heard you explain this: “Well, they were terrified, the people there.” Okay, that doesn’t justify… I don’t think that justifies violently dispossessing people of their land. You could say the people in Cicero, Illinois, who violently drove out African Americans, were terrified, and I believe they were actually. Not legitimately, because it wasn’t legitimate, but they were actually terrified of African Americans, so they violently drove them out of Cicero, Illinois, in the 50’s. They tore one house apart, brick by brick, or something like that. My dad told me that. I grew up in Chicago, and he told me that happened in the 50’s. So, violently dispossessing the Mormons of their land, even if they had concerns, well, they should have used the law, in my perspective. But this is something that happened in US history that I was never taught. This is, I think, one of the great injustices of US history. Tell us about that. Let’s talk about that, because that’s…

Dan: From what you’ve heard, it seems like these Missourians just out of nowhere starting persecuting these Mormons and cast them out… called out an extermination order. The governor, Boggs, did, and kicked them out of their state, and it doesn’t make any sense.

Nehemia: No, I’m saying I acknowledge… well, you tell us what happened. Let’s do it that way.

Dan: That’s the story you usually hear, but there’s more…

Nehemia: Okay, you’re saying that’s what the average… Let’s be honest, most of my audience has never heard of it, so…

Dan: There’s more to it. What if I told you the Mormons were the first ones to call out an extermination order against the Missourians?

Nehemia: Okay, I didn’t know that.

Dan: Does that change some things?

Nehemia: I didn’t know that. Tell us more about that.

Dan: So… the Mormons. They were kicked out of Jackson County, Missouri, and it was mostly because of the people living there were slaveholders, and they perceived the Mormon immigrants as non-slaveholders. And the Mormons that moved there were zealous extremist religionists. They weren’t just believers in some kind of different doctrine. Their beliefs included this world. They’re coming into your community, where you’ve raised your family and you have a lot of investment, and they’re coming in and they’re saying, “God has given us this land, you might as well leave. And you can’t stop the predictions. God’s predicted that we will own all of this land, so you might as well sell it to us. Now.” And then they have this book, the Book of Mormon, that predicts that these Indians across the line, just across the line, are going to rise up and destroy the Gentiles.

Nehemia: And Gentile in this context means the non-Mormons.

Dan: Which means the non-Mormons. And those who don’t convert will be destroyed. So, the Mormons scared the non-Mormons; they were frightened. Now, the Mormons were trying to get them out, trying to get them to sell, trying to… all sorts of things… and getting up and in their sermons talking about all of this prediction in the Book of Mormon about what the Indians, or the Native Americans, will do. And in conjunction, the believing Gentiles and converted Native Americans will join into an army and cleanse America, basically. But until then, they will build a new Jerusalem, and it will be a place of refuge while America is going through a lot of tribulations and wars and things.

So, you’re predicting all of that, and then… the tipping point was when they were publishing a newspaper right there in Independence. It was the only newspaper, and it was Mormon. And in there, W.W. Phelps, the guy that was the editor of that, published an article called “Free People of Color.” And, more or less, he was talking about migrating converted black Mormons into Missouri, and they would be free, although Missourian’s have slaves. And they knew that the mixture of bringing free blacks in with the enslaved blacks would cause a lot of social commotion and problems and rebellion. And the United States had just gone through some slave rebellions of its own, and they were afraid of that as well. And then they saw the Mormons as stirring up this possibility of being wiped out by the Native Americans, or the blacks rising up, because they see all these free blacks running around their community all of a sudden…

Well, the thing is, there were no black Mormons to come into that area. That was all, what I interpret, as a way of making them want to leave. Bringing free blacks into their community would be one motivation, perhaps, for them to leave. But this strategy backfired on them, and the Missourians went and destroyed their press and kicked the Mormons out of there, out of that county. And they were welcomed into Clay County, the neighboring county, and they went there for a time before they went to their own county, where they were supposed to stay, in their own county, Caldwell County, and they didn’t stay within that county, they started spreading into other counties.

And then the Missourian’s had enough, and they started organizing a vigilante militia. But the Mormons, Sidney Rigdon, the guy that was next in line to Joseph Smith, more or less, got up… he was a big public speaker type orator, and got up and said, “We’re not going to put up with this persecution anymore. If you persecute us, we will take this battle to you, and it will be a bloody war of extermination.” And he was the first one to use that term.

Nehemia: I guess that was a bad choice of words on his part in retrospect, but that doesn’t justify ethnically cleansing, or religiously cleansing… because it’s not ethnic… religiously cleansing Missouri of its Mormons, which is what happened. But I guess we’re arguing… I look at this as like, if you were a Catholic in 14th century Germany and you saw people dying left and right from the Black Plague, and your priest in your church was telling you, “It’s because the Jews are poisoning the well.” So, I understand why they wiped out the Jews in all these different cities all over Germany in the 1340’s, because they genuinely believed the Jews are poisoning the well.

And on top of that, you have Jews who have prophecies that say, “Well, one day our Messiah is going to come, and we’ll rule the world.” Now that’s kind of hypothetical and more like… no Jew thinks that’s going to actually happen. We pray it might, but it’s not going to probably happen in our lifetime. And so, I want to draw an analogy there to… I understand you’re saying there’s a difference, that there were all kinds of social upheavals, and the Mormons were maybe more “this-worldly”, as far as the fulfillment of prophecy. Whereas for Jews it’s some hypothetical thing in the future, but from the perspective of the Catholics, what they think is, “Well, yeah, the Jews are going to bring in the Antichrist, and he’ll try to take over the world. And they’re in league with Satan, and we better kill them now before they kill us.” It’s hard for me not to see an analogy between the persecution of the Mormons, even though they might not have handled things right in Missouri, and the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages. And obviously there’s a million differences, but it seems to me to be an analogy there.

Dan: It wasn’t just abstract. The Mormons actually formed their own “Army of Israel” and armed them…

Nehemia: It was like 500 guys and very few guns. I mean…

Dan: They armed themselves, and they went to the neighboring county of Davies, and they actually burned three cities. And then they had a skirmish in the southern Caldwell County, called the Battle of Crooked River, and several people on both sides got killed. They actually attacked a state militia. They attacked the state militia. Then they went around burning people’s houses. So, it was an insurrection, more or less, that had to be put down. And they didn’t just put it down, they decided to settle the whole thing. They arrested Joseph Smith, and several other leaders, and put them in Liberty Jail, and held them for six months.

Nehemia: What year is all this taking place? Or what span of years?

Dan: 1838 through 1839.

Nehemia: So, the first settlements in Missouri were in what year? Or the first expedition to Missouri by the Mormons; what year was that?

Dan: 1831.

Nehemia: So, 1831 they arrive there trying to convert what they call the Lamanites. They get kicked out of Indian territory. They end up in Missouri itself…

Dan: In Jackson County. In1831 they choose the location. This is Joseph Smith’s fatal mistake… was to choose an exact location by revelation that he could hang on to, and where people had already lived. It would have been better if he chose some place where no one else was living. But he didn’t. He chose this spot, and he did it by revelation, which was a mistake. This is the fatal mistake of his career, right here.

By 1833, till 1833, they’re being kicked out of Jackson County, and they go to Clay County. Then they settle Caldwell County. Joseph Smith makes a few trips, only about two, maybe three, later. By 1838, Kirtland, Ohio is not conducive to staying in for Joseph Smith, so he moves permanently in 1838 to Missouri to escape creditors.

Nehemia: So, they started out in upstate New York. They end up having their headquarters in a place called Kirtland, Ohio, and then their headquarters becomes Missouri. It eventually becomes southwestern Illinois, Nauvoo, where he eventually is murdered there, or in that area.

Dan: Right.

Nehemia: So, I want to draw an analogy here. And I’m not an historian, I’m a philologist, so I use history to understand ancient texts. I think you use text to understand history. So, we’re kind of opposite in what we do. In around roughly the same time, because you called it an insurrection, that’s really interesting. Roughly around the same time, within a few decades, in China you have something called the Taiping Rebellion. And it’s founded by this person who has a revelation, just like Joseph Smith, except in his revelation, he finds out he’s the brother of Jesus. He rebels against the Qing emperor, and he establishes what is essentially an empire in central southern China that lasts for over ten years.

So, he does what I think you suspect Joseph Smith wanted to do; he creates a religious empire. And it takes foreign powers from Europe to defeat him. The Qing can’t defeat him. They bring in Chinese Gordon, who is a general who was eventually killed at Khartoum. There’s an international force, General Tso, from General Tso’s Chicken, who is from Changsha, or a suburb of Changsha, where I lived for a year, he was the Chinese general who led the Chinese forces. But by himself, they couldn’t defeat the Taiping. It was called the Heavenly Kingdom.

That could have happened in the United States. We could have had… and I think I’ve heard you say, I think, correct me if I’m wrong, that one of his objectives was to create a theocracy in the western part of the United States, in the Mississippi Valley, and that actually could have happened if history had gone slightly differently. So, talk about that. Like, that’s unbelievable. Like, like we don’t… today, I don’t know…

Here’s my impression of Mormons as a non-Mormon. Like, we even make jokes, right?  We make jokes that, at the airport, when they’re frisking the Muslim in the hijab, well, they’re not doing that to Mormons, because the Mormons are these docile, friendly people. That’s not your experience, because you grew up Mormon, right? And you know the history. But I think that’s the impression of the average American, is, we have no security concerns from Mormons. But history could have gone way different. I want you to talk about that for a little bit.

Dan: Well, there is a militant strain in Mormonism. It’s in the Book of Mormon. Book of Mormon is a revolutionary document. It predicts the founding of a theocracy. What I call the New Jerusalem government, in the wilderness of America. But this wasn’t a foreign idea. I mean, you had the Burr conspiracy. Aaron Burr…

Nehemia: So, tell us what the Burr conspiracy is.

Dan: Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Nehemia: Right. Well, okay.

Dan: He was trying to start a Western coup, what they call Western coup; a government independent of the United States.

Nehemia: Really?

Dan: Yeah. It never came to fruition.

Nehemia: All right, we’ve got to stop here a second. Who is Aaron Burr? And what was this Burr conspiracy? You can’t just gloss over that.

Dan: Okay, so, this is around… He was running for president and failed at that attempt, but… it’s a Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, that Aaron Burr was trying to formulate a coup, and a Western Empire in the unchartered territories of the United States, basically. And, in the early days, it was believed that… or accused, Andrew Jackson was accused of conspiring with Aaron Burr, but not so sure about that…

Nehemia: Really? And at this point, “western” means what? Across the Appalachian Mountains? Where is “western” at this point?

Dan: Yeah, okay. In Indian territory, past the Mississippi.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. Across the Mississippi.

Dan: Before the Indians were driven there.

Nehemia: Okay, so, this is before the Trail of Tears and the…

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: But they are still Indians in, or Native Americans, across the Mississippi, just not the tribes that later were expelled to there. Okay, so, across the…

Dan: It was a short-lived kind of “adventure,” you might call it, that totally failed. It didn’t go anywhere. They used the Royal Arch cipher, it is said, to write messages dealing with this conspiracy to establish a government in United States territorial areas.

Nehemia: Okay so, there’s precedent for a rival…

Dan: Government.

Nehemia: Government in the west. That’s interesting. I didn’t know about that. Okay.

Dan: So, Joseph Smith, though, according to the Book of Mormon and the prophecies… these are prophecies that he was trying to fulfill… was going to establish a New Jerusalem government with Native Americans. It would be mostly their government, with the aid of believing Gentiles and “non-Israelites,” let’s put it that way.

Nehemia: So, believing Gentiles is another way of saying white Mormons. Is that…

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: All right. So, I think this brings us back to a bigger question, which is why did Joseph Smith write the Book of Mormon? And…

Dan: That’s why! A lot of people don’t know that nowadays. They all see that as prophecy in the future. It’s a very nebulous idea. You know, when Jesus comes again, maybe, when the world is changed anyway. They don’t realize that Joseph Smith was trying to do it!

Nehemia: So, you believe one of the reasons he wrote the Book of Mormon was in order to lay the foundation for this theocracy in the western part of what at the time was the US territory…

Dan: Well, he had no location.

Nehemia: Okay. Somewhere he wanted… this would give him authority to rule this theocracy, basically, is your contention.

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay. So, that…

Dan: The prophet of this theocracy that would have a perfect community, they would be one in love and heart, their hearts would be knit together, and they will have this perfect utopian society. Not unlike Quakers, Shakers… The Oneida commune is another secular kind of experiment in communalism. And so, Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon, it was all about communalism. It was all about the ideal of that Acts passage where it talks about the early Christians had all things in common.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting, because the Taiping rebels focused on those verses as well, in Acts. And then later Mao sort of retconned the Taiping Rebellion as an early worker’s revolt, and as a proto form of communism. Because actually, I think it was before Marx, or at least before his publication of the Communist Manifesto, that, at least the initial Taiping… I could be wrong about that.

But the initial Heavenly Kingdom, I think, might have… it certainly didn’t… even if Marx had written his works at that point, they wouldn’t have been aware of it in south central China at that point. But they experimented in some form of communal pooling of property, which early Mormons did as well. And I find that that was really surprising. I mean, some of the things that got them in trouble was experimenting with redistribution of wealth, and it failed, essentially, from an economic perspective, right? That was the whole bank in Ohio that failed, because they’re trying to print money and then give it to people, and they have no way to back it up.

Dan: The bank was a different kind of thing, but it failed. But before Joseph Smith even arrived in northern Ohio, in that Geauga County, there were already Christians practicing a form of communalism… they were kind of a group associated with Alexander Campbell’s Church of Christ, or Disciples of Christ. They were called the family, Morrelli family, and Joseph Smith tried to correct or change the way they did things in this communal group. But it was essentially… he established a bishop, the Bishop Edward Partridge, who was a former Campbellite, and Sidney Rigdon, who was also a former Campbellite, who had been a bishop in the Campbellite group. But the bishop just meant ‘leader of a congregation’ to them.

Here, Joseph Smith changed bishops to have authority over worldly affairs, like economic and land and things like that. And the plan was that when you join this, and you gave everything up to Jesus, you gave the bishop all your property, and then he decided what you needed and gave that portion back. And he would save the other portion for the poor. So, that was the plan to begin with.

Nehemia: Do you think this has something to do with Joseph Smith growing up in abject poverty, that he has this ideal? “Well, nobody should have to have that poverty. Some people have too much, and so we should share it with the people who don’t have.” Do you think that has anything to do with it?

Dan: Yeah. It has to do somewhat with that, that he thought these religious people that didn’t share enough with the poor were hypocrites, basically, and he said, “If you’re not equal in wealth, you’re not equal in the kingdom of God in heaven.” He demanded… it’s a high demand religion from the start. Giving up your all. Eventually it doesn’t work, and they replace it with tithing 10% of your…

Nehemia: So, you’re saying the Mormons today are getting off easy with 10% compared to what it was in the early days?

Dan: No, it’s harder now.

Nehemia: Oh, how so?

Dan: In the beginning, the 10% was just of your increase, of your interest for that year. Not on everything, of the interest. So, it wasn’t like a 10% of your gross income.

Nehemia: But in the Kirtland days, it was 100%. And then you get back what the bishop thinks you need.

Dan: Well, yeah, it’s a lesser law. It was the lesser law.

Nehemia: I don’t know means, the lesser law.

Dan: Meaning easier. It was an easier law. Tithing was an Old Testament practice…

Nehemia: For sure.

Dan: And that’s a lot easier than the law of consecration. The law of consecration is where you consecrate everything.

Nehemia: Right. So, compared to, though, the Kirtland days, they’re getting off easy, is the point.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. And even the Missouri days. Well, okay, there’s a lot where… I want to go back to why he wrote the Book of Mormon.

Dan: Okay.

Nehemia: Because now we have almost a contradiction in what you’re saying, and I’m sure you can explain it, but my mind’s all over the place. So, you’ve talked about how… so, the doctrines and covenant. Let’s talk about that for a few minutes. What is that? And what was it originally?

Dan: Well,Joseph Smith, he was dictating his revelations through that same stone to begin with.

Nehemia: And we’re going to go back, because we didn’t really talk about the stone and the magic. I want to spend some time talking about that, but we’ll hopefully do that later.

Dan: Write a note or something.

Nehemia: Yeah, I have notes here. Yeah.

Dan: So, he was dictating revelations beginning with that translation crisis, so that opened up a whole thing. And people would come to him, “Well, what do we do in this case? What do we do in that case?” And he would get a revelation and answer that question or this question. “What does it mean in this passage of Scripture?” And he would get a revelation, and he would give an interpretation of that passage of Scripture directly from God. So, they started accumulating these revelations, and one of the important ones was called “The Law”.

Nehemia: What do you mean, The Law? There was a publication called The Law?

Dan: Well, it was a two-parter, but now it’s combined into one. Now it’s Doctrine and Covenants section 42.

Nehemia: So, it was originally called “The Law”. Wow.

Dan: The Law, which was, “What do you do in this circumstance? That circumstance? What is adultery? What is fornication? What is murder? What is…”

Nehemia: By the way, we’ve been speaking for over two hours, and we haven’t spoken about polygamy. We probably won’t even get to that. But that’s what probably people are waiting for. “When is he going to talk about polygamy?” That, to me, is the least interesting part of this whole thing. To me.

Dan: It’s all wrapped up all together. It’s all intertwined. That’s why it’s so hard to unravel. So, he’s getting these revelations, and then he wants to publish them, and some people resist publishing the revelations. They’re not so sure that they should, mostly because they know it’s a different quality than the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon, the stone, and it’s a translation of Prophets, but is Joseph Smith a prophet?

Nehemia: So, that’s actually a question in the early days.

Dan: Yeah. Is he on the same level? He’s a translator! Right?

Nehemia: Wow.

Dan: Remember that one revelation? One of the early revelations given in March of 1829, says that “He should pretend to no other gift than to translate the Book of Mormon.”

Nehemia: I want to open that up and show that to the audience, but I want to first understand what are all these revelations, right? So, I think that’s really fascinating, that… So, they’re writing these things down as he’s revealing them. How did they get published? Like, are they originally published in the newspaper or something?

Dan: No. So, they’re going to publish it in a book form. And they are publishing some of them in the newspaper, in a Mormon periodical called The Evening and the Morning Star, published in Independence, Missouri.

Nehemia: Wow. Wow.

Dan: In 1831. Well, and they’re trying to fulfill, “The word of the Lord shall come out of Zion, out of Judah.”

Nehemia: Ah, and the new Zion is Independence, Missouri.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. Okay.

Dan: That’s what they’re trying to do. And so, they publish some of these revelations, and now they decide they need a rule to judge people by. They’re having problems with people not obeying the commandments, not listening to the revelations. And so, they need to have a rule, a way of judging people, and they need to publish this so there’s an expectation on everybody to… this is what is expected. And some balk at that; they’re not so sure that should be done. They resist. But Joseph Smith overcomes it by challenging them to produce a revelation equal to what they consider the least of these revelations.

Nehemia: Wow.

Dan: If you can’t do it, you’ve got to endorse it.

Nehemia: Okay, we have to stop there for a second. So, in Joseph Smith’s lifetime, there were people who tried to disparage him by comparing him to Muhammad.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: I want to make a comparison to Muhammad, but not to disparage him, just as two phenomena of history. The Quran itself has a doctrine called inimitability, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing, which is this idea that you are not capable of producing a single surah. In Islam, the miracle of Islam… they say Jesus and Moses perform miracles, healing, and Jesus… and Moses splitting the sea… the miracle of Muhammad is the Quran itself. And the proof that it’s a miracle is you can’t produce even a single chapter of the Quran. And that’s in the Quran itself; it’s the doctrine of inimitability. They have this idea that it’s the greatest of all poetry ever written. I’m not a judge of poetry, so I don’t know.

And of course, the response to that by non-Muslims is to say, “Well, I can’t produce a single sonnet of Shakespeare either, because Shakespeare wrote those. I can’t write a single play of Shakespeare. It doesn’t mean Shakespeare had revelations from God.” But it’s incredible to me that early Mormonism… and Mormonism, maybe, even today, has the same doctrine.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: “Let’s see you produce a single revelation the way that Joseph Smith has.” And then, here’s the other analogy to Muhammad. So, in Islam there’s this doctrine that Muhammad was illiterate, and therefore you can’t say he was imitating something he read somewhere because he actually couldn’t even read. And he had no education, so, how did he write such amazing poetry? That’s part of the miracle, and it’s almost verbatim in some cases. I’m exaggerating, not verbatim, but it’s uncanny, the parallels where they describe Joseph Smith, I think rightfully so, as uneducated and crass. Or as his wife or his mother says, he couldn’t even… I think it’s his wife. After he dies, she says, “He couldn’t even dictate a letter! How could he have dictated the Book of Mormon? He couldn’t even dictate a personal letter.” Am I right about that? Is there something there?

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so, talk to me about these parallels. And I know you’re not an expert on Islam, but am I wrong? There’s something here like in the parallels as different phenomena and completely different periods of history, and I can’t believe for a second that somebody in Joseph Smith’s time was sitting down and reading Islamic theology and saying, “Hey, we should steal that one. We should claim inimitability.” No, but I think they’re two independent outgrowths of different situations. That’s my view. Talk to me about that.

Dan: Yeah. How do you respond to the challenge, and why? They’re challenging him because they listen to him every day. They know the revelations sound like him, but in an imitation-biblical style.

Nehemia: Would you say that the revelations he had… Sorry, go ahead.

Dan: So, they knew what he sounded like, and they knew that the revelations, even though there are some moments where they’re very… the language is very eloquent. You could still hear Joseph’s voice. So, that’s the question; do the prophets speak and just dictate God’s words? Or does God use them to speak through, and their different personalities show up? So, they saw the weakness, and one of his revelations says that God speaks to man in his own weakness…

Nehemia: What does that mean?

Dan: Through his own understanding. So, these revelations are saying that God is speaking through Joseph Smith. Not Joseph Smith dictating God’s words that he perceives or hears, and he’s just repeating them. So, it’s not literal. Joseph Smith is right away. So, I’ve always contended that Joseph Smith put out to the people that he’s just dictating God’s words, or that he’s dictating the words on the stone. Privately, he has a different definition of revelation that is more liberal, more nuanced than what he let out, that is less faith-promoting.

So, when he challenges his followers to imitate God’s words, he knows they’re not going to be able to do that, even if… They all can write better than him. The people challenging him are more learned than he is and can use language, written languages…

Nehemia: Particularly Sidney Rigdon is truly a talented orator, right? And writer.

Dan: Yeah. In the style that people would expect in the 19th century. Nowadays, we’d probably be all rolling our eyes.

Nehemia: In contrast to Joseph Smith, who famously, in the Book of Mormon, instead of, “in those days”, he’s dictating, “in them days”.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Right. So, that’s clearly his… and I shouldn’t say clearly because Royal Skousen might disagree with me. But to me, it’s clear that this is him expressing things in the dialect of English that he knows. I mean, I guess you can make a bunch of arguments about it, but it seems to me that’s the case. And it seems to, I think, most people that’s the case… most non-Mormons.

Dan: Yeah. So, I would argue that when he’s in the spirit, he probably feels that he dictates better than he normally can talk. And he gets into a mode of speech that he doesn’t write in his letters. Writing a letter, that Emma mentions, is totally different than speaking. So, Joseph Smith is very good at language, spoken language. Even in the Book of Mormon, the writers in the Book of Mormon complain that they’re not good writers, that they’re better… if they were there in person speaking, you would feel the spirit. It would be much better.

Nehemia: I see.

Dan: So, he’s letting his own weakness show, but he’s a charismatic leader. He already has confidence that he can get people to do what he needs to be done, and he knows that he can speak. He knows he can’t write that well, right?

Nehemia: So, he’s having these revelations. They’re collecting them, and then when do they first… and they’re initially publishing them in the periodical, the newspaper. But then they have something called the Book of Commandments, right?

Dan: Okay, so, just to finish my earlier thought before we move on, he knows that these guys are not going to pretend to speak in God’s voice. It’s too frightening for them to even attempt it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: He knows they’re not going to do it. And he has confidence that he can dictate things like the Book of Mormon, like his revelations, and pseudepigraphal writing. He can imitate pseudepigraphical writing, writing by pretending to be a prophet. He can do that. He has confidence. That’s why he’s doing it. And he’s not the only one, there are lots of people in his environment writing revelations. There are Mormons that later go on, like Sidney Rigdon himself, to dictate revelations. There’s a 16-year-old boy in Kirtland, Ohio, that dictates a whole book that sounds a lot like Isaiah wrote it.

Nehemia: So, you say on the one hand, he knows… like, here’s what it sounds to me like you’re saying. He knows he’s willing to pretend to be God’s voice, but he knows they’re not willing to do that.

Dan: No. In my interpretation, he believes he is inspired.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Dan: He is inspired. But it’s coming through him. He knows it’s coming through him.

Nehemia: So, this is what you call the pious fraud…

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I hope we can talk about that. That was the initial thing that got me interested in wanting to talk to you. I was fascinated by that.

Dan: In my view, he believes he is a prophet.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: But not the kind he projects to everybody else to promote their faith in his revelations. That’s the trick he learned as a money digger; how to build confidence in other people, how to get other people to believe what he’s seeing in his stone. Anybody can go up and say, “I see,” whatever. Right? “I am looking in this crystal ball and I see this and that.” How do you get other people to believe that you are? And that’s the talent that he developed before he became the Mormon prophet.

Nehemia: So, we’re going to circle back to money digger. I hope we’ll have time and energy because that’s a fascinating thing in and of itself. You kind of alluded to it in an earlier section where you talked about… they were visionary, and they were untraditional, and if we don’t get to it, guys, go to Dan Vogel’s YouTube page. He has long videos about the seer stone, and folk magic, and all of that, and I think that’s one of the most interesting things about the whole story. All of it’s interesting, but we’re talking about these revelations he’s having. He knows they’re not going to imitate him, but there are people who are doing it. Like Hiram Page has a seer stone, and they’re writing down what he says, and Joseph Smith goes ballistic.

Dan: Well, that’s one of the problems with charismatic religions; that charisma spreads to everybody. You’re attracting people so they’ll have charismatic experiences, but then they start getting revelations that can compete with yours. And there’s a chance that the whole thing could splinter into a thousand pieces, with different groups going off here and there, liking that person’s revelation or that person’s over yours. And, to hold it together is the trick Joseph Smith is trying to negotiate from day one. Hiram Page is like right there in the first year.

Nehemia: So, tell us about Hiram Page. Pretend the audience never heard of him. Tell us what happens there. That’s incredible to me.

Dan: Well, Hiram Page was a brother-in-law to… had married one of David Whitmer’s sisters, and he’s right there where the Book of Mormon is being translated.

Nehemia: And in fact, some of the Whitmers are some of the scribes who are transcribing Joseph Smith’s words. So, these aren’t just some random people; they’re at the epicenter of the revelation of the Book of Mormon.

Dan: Yeah. Sometimes they give Oliver Cowdery a rest. And John Whitmer, his handwriting has been found in the original dictated manuscript of the part that the… less than 40%…

Nehemia: I think it’s 28% survives, according to…

Dan: 28%, that sounds right… that has survived. So, we know that that part was done at that time, during the month of June.

Nehemia: I want to point out something which blows my mind. So, I think some people who first become acquainted with the story of Joseph Smith will say, “Well, the whole thing is made up. He didn’t sit there dictating a book to people.” But we actually have the manuscript in which they copied down his words, and it’s very clear it was a dictation.

Dan: Yes. And it’s oral, and there are mistakes in it that are not visual.

Nehemia: Right, exactly. That’s incredible, that we would have 28%, or maybe it’s a little bit more now with multispectral imaging, being able to read 28% of the original manuscript. Like, I wish we had 28% of the original copy… I wish we had 1% of the original copy of the Book of Jeremiah, which, by the way, is described as the same thing. They said to Baruch, the son of Neriah, “How was this written?” He said, “Jeremiah would speak, and I would write.” So, we have an interesting parallel there. So, Jeremiah wasn’t looking into a hat, presumably, but that’s a whole separate story. It’s a dictation. All right. Hiram Page… he’s at the epicenter.

Dan: Yeah. Well, they’re not so sure Joseph Smith is the one and only prophet, the leader; there’s no such thing yet. He’s just a translator. And he’s gotten some revelations, but aren’t we all supposed to get revelations?

Nehemia: And didn’t Joseph Smith himself say that? That everyone is supposed to have the holy spirit or something? Was there something like that?

Dan: Well, yeah. It’s supposed to be a restoration of the spiritual gifts: tongues, prophecy… in their meetings, they stand up and prophesy, or speak in tongues, and see visions. They are a very charismatic group. Not so much like the Mormons are today. It’s all been institutionalized. And that’s part of my next book, that’s coming out in a few months…

Nehemia: Oh, wow. What’s the book called? Do we have a preview?

Dan: It’s the middle years. It’s Joseph Smith: Charisma Under Pressure.

Nehemia: Wow!

Dan: Charisma Under Pressure. And it’s working off of Max Weber’s From Charisma to Institution, is one of his studies. He’s a sociologist from the 19th into the 20th century, and he wrote about how charismatic groups… and it’s not only religious charismatic groups, it’s any kind of group that has a leader that’s based on personality, the draw, the personality kind of a thing. It could be a business, even…

But all groups, these charismatic groups, have this instability built into it, and it tries to seek this homeostasis, an equilibrium. And how does it do that? And also, be dealing with the problem of unfulfilled prophecy. How do you overcome that? Like the early Christians. And it eventually becomes institutionalized, where charisma doesn’t rest in the personality of the leader, it rests in the office. Anybody who inherits the office has the charisma of the office. And it has this tendency to balance itself.

So, Joseph Smith, one of his genius parts is that he was able to build an institution that was self-preserving. And, by the time the unfulfilled prophecy came around, the institution was strong enough to survive it. That’s it in a nutshell.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. So, charisma… and by charisma, what you mean here, I think, and what I definitely mean, is that they believe that they were actually having these spiritual revelations, experiences. You know, I wondered, before I studied this, why would anybody believe something as outlandish as the Book of Mormon? And the answer from speaking to Mormons is, “Well, I prayed about it, and it was revealed to me that it’s true. And why don’t you pray about it, Nehemia, and see if God, or Jesus, or whatever, gives you a testimony that it’s true?” So, that’s a charismatic experience.

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: Right? So, the very thing that makes Mormons such devout believers, and certainly in the early days, is a danger, because now you have competing voices. Maybe the spirit doesn’t just tell me that the Book of Mormon is true, maybe it tells me that, “Hey, it’s not supposed to be Independence, Missouri, it’s supposed to be Nauvoo, Illinois, or Utah, or someplace like that.”

So, that brings us to Hiram Page. Hiram Page is in the home of the Whitmer’s, and what happens?

Dan: Well, he starts getting revelations. People want to know, where is this Zion? Is it here in…

Nehemia: Oh, it’s that exact thing.

Dan: Is it here in Fayette? Are we in the Holy Land? Is this part of the Promised Land right here? And Hiram Page starts getting these revelations through a stone. And he gets a reem of them, basic choir, you know, they called it a reem, a lot.

Nehemia: So, people are writing down what he says; he’s not just getting revelations.

Dan: Yeah! Just like Joseph Smith.

Nehemia: Wow.

Dan: And he locates Zion. It appears from the descriptions, anyway, that it’s right there. And so, Joseph Smith gets a counter-revelation, labeling Hiram Page’s revelations as satanic. “These are false revelations, and they are not to follow these, and it has not been revealed where Zion shall be.” At this point that’s what it declared; nobody knew where Zion was. And it would be shortly.

So, I interpret that as they had this anxiety, this need for the mysteries… they wanted the mysteries solved. They wanted somebody to get revelations about these things, and just wasn’t delivering fast enough, and this was his cue. This was his cue to step it up a little bit.

Nehemia: So, this is important. I think this is one of the pivotal events in the history of the early church, because it’s not just, “Okay, Hiram Page is having Satan reveal stuff to him,” or whatever the terminology is, but then they have an outcome from this. Tell us about that, where they establish that there’s only one person who’s allowed to be a revelator. Isn’t that something that comes out of this?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. So, they take Hiram Page’s stone, and they grind it up, according to tradition. They ground it up and destroyed it and destroyed his revelations.

Nehemia: And Hiram Page isn’t resisting this. He accepts this, right?

Dan: No. He was having a lot of influence on the Whitmer’s and Oliver Cowdery. So, they’re all not clear on, “Well, what is going on here? Is Joseph Smith… we’re supposed to follow Joseph Smith and Joseph Smith only?” Well, Joseph Smith gets a revelation more or less saying ‘yes’. If there’s to be any revelations given, it will be given through Joseph Smith.

Nehemia: Wow. That’s convenient… for him.

Dan: That’s what they do. They call it a revelation of convenience, yeah.

Nehemia: Who calls it that?

Dan: It’s just a term that they throw around.

Nehemia: Not the Mormons though, right? They would say it’s a true revelation, right? I’m asking.

Dan: Yeah. Right.

Nehemia: Okay. So, the result of this is, not only does this silence Hiram Page, it prevents anybody else from challenging his authority, right?

Dan: Not exactly.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Dan: So, not exactly. Another, let’s say, challenger, came about when he moved to Ohio the next year, a woman we know as Hubbell.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: This woman started getting revelations, and they had to get another revelation saying basically the same thing, that only Joseph Smith is to get revelations for the church.

Nehemia: Okay. Does Hiram Page accept Joseph Smith’s revelation and say, “Okay, I was wrong. It was Satan”?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Do we know if Hubbell accepted it?

Dan: Not much is known about her. Just her name and the story. Some scholars think they know her identity, but I don’t think she had a very long history with Joseph Smith or the church.

Nehemia: Okay. Isn’t there something where David Whitmer… like, at some point in the beginning Joseph Smith is looking into a hat at a stone, and he’s claiming there’s revelation coming to him through the stone, right?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: And at some point, he stops using the stone. And I read somewhere, or heard somewhere, that David Whitmer becomes convinced, I think, that that’s where Joseph Smith went off the path, because he stopped using the stone. Tell us about that.

Dan: Yeah. So, true. So, he’s using the stone, he’s getting revelations through the stone, and at what point he gives the stone up and starts just using revelation, inspiration, through his mind, is uncertain. But it’s early. He gives the stone to Oliver Cowdery. And Oliver Cowdery… his family had it after he died in 1850, gave it to Brigham Young’s brother, Phineas Young, who took it to Utah, and we got the picture of it.

Nehemia: So, we have the stone to this day.

Dan: It’s a stone that they published a picture of. You can see it on the internet.

Nehemia: And to be clear, the church, the LDS Church in Utah, they’re the ones who published the photo, and they say this is the stone that Joseph Smith used to reveal the Book of Mormon, right?

Dan: Yeah, and it has a little leather bag.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: Which is probably an amulet bag.

Nehemia: Oh, interesting. So, this isn’t Dan Vogel, the ex-bitter Mormon who’s trying to bad-mouth Joseph Smith and saying that he used the stone… the LDS Church itself says that, right?

Dan: That’s right.

Nehemia: Wow.

Dan: Way back before we had any sources and things, and it was just David Whitmer talking about this stone that he saw Joe Smith using, there was a time when everybody knew it during the 19th century. Then there was a time when nobody seemed to know about it, and it was, “Oh, David Whitmer, he’s an anti-Mormon. He was a non-Mormon at the time he’s saying this. He’s just trying to hurt Joseph Smith.” Actually, he’s trying to help Joseph Smith. He believes in the stone, so he wouldn’t make up the stone to hurt Joseph Smith if he’s trying to say Joseph Smith made a mistake by giving the stone up. You know what I’m saying?

Nehemia: Right. For sure.

Dan: And that’s where a lot of real conservative apologists on the internet… the internet’s kind of a good thing and kind of a bad thing… you have to be careful…

Nehemia: Ain’t that the truth.

Dan: It’s a place where smart people learn faster, and where dumb people learn faster also. But misinformation is spread, and people that are not very critical, or just casual learners, pick up the wrong information. It’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. So, be careful out there, everybody.

Nehemia: Well, there’s this one apologist… I saw a video where this apologist says, “Well, who are you going to believe? David Whitmer talking about a stone? Or Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, who… the prophet who revealed the Book of Mormon and the scribe who transcribed certainly most of it… Who are you going to believe? Them? Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, who say it was the spectacles? Or David Whitmer, who became an apostate, who ended up leaving the church? 

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s not for me to decide.

Dan: Oliver Cowdrey and Joseph Smith, in their official accounts, talked about Urim and Thummim, the interpreters, or Joseph Smith used the term “spectacles” in 1832. That was the official line. And the reason why was because they were downplaying the folk magic origins of early Mormonism. They were for the mainstream and trying to convert people. And this is the official accounts. Now, you should be wary of any official account, not just Mormons.

Nehemia: But if you believe that Joseph Smith is a prophet, and Joseph Smith says this is how it happened, and you talked about the curtain… whether there was a curtain or not, I guess that’s a matter of debate, or maybe sometimes there was a curtain. I understand their perspective. If you have this burning feeling in your heart, and literally they talk about a burning feeling, I think, that says this is true, and Joseph Smith is a true prophet, and Joseph Smith writes that it was these spectacles… I understand why they believe what they believe. But what you’re looking at is all of the evidence from different sources. Some of them are anti-Mormon and some of them are pro-Mormon, right? Like, David Whitmer is a believer until the day he dies, right? They just did a movie about it. The LDS, I think, made a movie about how, although he left the church, to the day he died he’s testifying the Book of Mormon is true, and he really saw it; that has to do with the witnesses. Did you see that movie that came out recently?

Dan: No.

Nehemia: Do you know what I’m talking about, though?

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay, I think it’s called The Witnesses, or The Witness, or something like that. It was a good movie. Well, I don’t know if it was a good movie. I found it entertaining. I don’t know if it was correct or not. Okay. So, Hiram Page has these revelations, this woman has other revelations. At the end of the day, the conclusion is there’s only one prophet who’s allowed to have revelations for people to follow in practice, right? Meaning, isn’t there some idea that you can have a revelation, but you can’t be teaching that this is what you should do? Something like that.

Dan: Yeah, you can have personal revelation, but you can’t give… the revelation that Joseph Smith dictated said Oliver Cowdery can have revelations, but he could not write them.

Nehemia: Hmm. Okay.

Dan: You can have revelations, but you are not to write them. Because he knows that it gets codified in the book, and the book becomes the law, and that’s the one reason why he wants them published. So, these revelations answer and keep the people from straying too far away from Joseph Smith’s central authority. There are other problems that crop up, and he’s constantly doing maintenance on his primary sole position. He’s like the translator of the Book of Mormon, then he becomes one of the high priests, then he becomes the president of the High priests, then he becomes the president of the church. So, his control of the organization develops over time. There are people resisting all the way, David Whitmer being one of them. Resisting his sole command of the church.

On the stone thing we have… so, Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith are the only ones talking about this Urim and Thummim and translating with the Urim and Thummim, and… because it’s the party line; they are trying to move the church away from the folk magic origins.

Nehemia: Anyway, thanks so much for all your time.

Dan: Thanks for having me.

Nehemia: I hope we are able to broadcast all of this. We’ve been recording at this point, guys… I think this is a personal record for me. We’ve been recording for, I want to say, almost like 7.5 hours or something like that. So, thank you so much.

Dan: Alright.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Acts 2:44; 4:32
Doctrine and Covenants 42 (originally “The Law”)
2 Nephi 31:3 (Book of Mormon); Doctrine and Covenants 1:24
Helaman 3 p.427; 5 p.445 (Book of Mormon 1830 edition)
Mosiah 8:13; 28:14–15, 20 (Book of Mormon)
Ether 3 (Book of Mormon)
Qur’an 2:23; 10:38; 11:13; 17:88; 52:34
Jeremiah 36:17-18

BOOKS MENTIONED
On Charisma and Institution Building
by Max Weber, S. N. Eisenstadt

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #118 - Trinity and the Christian God
Hebrew Voices #164 – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 1
Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #155 – Meet the Samaritans!

OTHER LINKS
Dan Vogel’s YT channel

FAIR Mormon Apologetic Site

The Joseph Smith Papers

Witnesses (2021)

The post Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #184: Creation vs. Evolution: Raw and Unedited, Young Earth creationist Kent Hovind of DrDino.com explains to Nehemia about the errors of evolution, dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, and the formation of heavy elements in stars. Nehemia's most controversial guest to date, Hovind describes himself as a "lowly high school science teacher with a non-accredited degree from a Christian school who happens to believe [the Bible] is true and evolution is not only stupid it's dangerous."

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Transcript

Hebrew Voices #184 – Creation vs. Evolution: Raw and Unedited

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: Okay. Is this being recorded? Got it. Alright, I think we’re recording. Alright, let me just jump into it, and we’ll just have a conversation here. What is your timeframe? I’ve done interviews everywhere from 25 minutes to 7 hours, so, just to warn you!

Kent: Well, I have to preach tonight at 7:00 o’clock.

Nehemia: Okay, we’ll be done by then.

Kent: Okay.

Nehemia: If it’s okay, we’ll just go naturally. Like I said, it might be half an hour, it might be as long as it goes.

Kent: Okay.

Nehemia: If it’s longer, we’ll probably break it into multiple episodes.

Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Kent Hovind, who, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say is the most controversial guest I’ve ever had on the program! Shalom Kent!

Kent: Hey, shalom, very good to be with you!

Nehemia: Is it okay if I call you Kent?

Kent: Sure! I get called a lot worse than that on the internet, you would not believe.

Nehemia: I can imagine! So, Kent is, I think, probably one of the most famous Young Earth creationists in the world. Let’s start with, what is Young Earth creationism? Because some of my audience won’t be familiar with that. But in one sentence or in one phrase, you’re opposed to evolution, is that right?

Kent: Well, yes. I have been a Baptist preacher for 50 years. I taught high school science and math for 15 years.  And I started a ministry back in 1989 called Creation Science Evangelism, defending the Bible as being scientifically accurate.

The Bible says God made everything in six days, but our kids in public school textbooks are being taught dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. Well, somebody’s lying. I mean, big time lying! I believe the Bible is true. God made everything in six days, and if you add up the dates in the Bible… if you look at the Bible, Genesis chapter 5, it says Adam was 130 when Seth was born and Seth was 105 when Enos was born. The dates are all right there in Genesis 5. After the Flood, you go to Genesis 11, and there’s more dates given of how old they were when their kids were born. Anybody can add them up. It comes to about 6,000 years for the age of the Earth.

So, I started traveling and teaching about the Bible being scientifically accurate. God made everything. And animals always bring forth “after their kind”, “after their kind”, “after their kind”, there are no exceptions. These evolution charts that they’re teaching our kids in school, where they have the sunflowers are related to frogs; this is not only propaganda, it is flat stupid.

I’ve done 351 debates now with atheists at universities. The most famous one… I was debating three atheists at the same time at Embry-Riddle University, south of Jacksonville, Florida, and one of them asked me, “Where did God come from?” And my two-minute answer has 900 million views. Two minutes long. Type in, “Where did God come from?”

Nehemia: What’s the answer? Give us the 30-second version.

Kent: Well, the question is invalid. If I said, “Why are elephants orange?” How would you answer that? They’re not orange. I can’t answer your question about why they’re orange because they’re not orange! To ask “where did God come from” assumes God had to come from somewhere. God’s not limited by time, space, or matter; we are. He created time, space, and matter. “In the beginning,” there’s time, “God created the Heaven,” there’s space, “and the Earth,” there’s matter. He’s outside of time, space, and matter. We’re the ones that are stuck in time, space, and matter, not God.

So, the question is invalid. “Where did God come from?” “Where” involves distance. He’s already everywhere. “Did” involves time, past, present, and future. God’s already standing at your funeral. He’s not limited by time. “Come” indicates He’s not there already. No, He’s already everywhere. So, the whole question is invalid. 

Nehemia: So, I feel like my job here is to sort of be the devil’s advocate, no pun intended, because people can Google your videos and see hundreds of hours… and I hope the conversation we have is that I’m offering maybe a… coming from a Jewish perspective, maybe I’m throwing questions at you that… well, in the debates I’m sure you had all these questions. I’m sure I’m not going to say anything you haven’t heard a million times.

So, you said that to say that the world is millions of years old, when Genesis says that the first man was created about 6,000 years ago, that somebody’s lying. And so, I want to discuss the word “lying”. Does it have to be a lie? There are things in the Bible that, you’ll agree… or maybe you don’t agree…

Is everything in the Bible meant to be taken literally? Let’s start with that. Maybe that’s a much more important question.

Kent: Yeah, there are obviously parables and allegories, such as “like” and “as.” There are parables in the Bible, certainly. But when it talks about things like the Creation, it says very clearly that God created everything in six days. And he wrote it on the Ten Commandments with his finger. God said, “Honor the Sabbath, for in six days, the LORD made Heaven and Earth, the sea, and all that in them is.” That’s really inclusive. Everything was made in six days. He said it again in Exodus 31. God made everything in six days. And again, in Deuteronomy. So, the Bible’s clear. Whether it’s true or not, the Bible does clearly teach that God made everything, which would have to include dinosaurs, in six days.

Nehemia: So, I asked your staff to send me a thumbnail photo, and it shows you riding on a Triceratops, or something like that. And I understand that’s to be cute and everything, but is it your contention that humans and dinosaurs lived side by side on the Earth, let’s say before the Flood or something?

Kent: Oh, they had to. It’s no big deal. See, reptiles, like snakes, lizards, et cetera, never stop growing; it’s called indeterminate growth. Humans grow to be 16 or 18 years of age and then they stop growing, but they keep living after that. Reptiles don’t do that; they never stop growing.

Well, the Bible says that before the Flood came, people lived to be 900. What would happen if a lizard could live to be 900? It’d be 50 feet long! The dinosaurs were simply big lizards that lived with Adam and Eve. They were not millions of years ago. And then Noah would have taken them on the Ark.

You say, “Dinosaurs on the Ark?” Well yeah, he took two of every kind. Not two of every species, two of every kind. There’s only about 30 different kinds of dinosaurs. And Noah was 600 years old when he built that boat. He’d be smart enough to figure out, “I don’t have to bring the big ones. I’ll bring two babies. I’ll be sure to bring a pink one and a blue one.”

Nehemia: I’m not a biologist, and so I really don’t know the answer to this question, but snakes in the Amazon rainforest; why don’t they grow to be the size of dinosaurs? You’re saying reptiles continue to grow forever until something kills them…

Kent: We have in our science center here… we’re in Lenox, Alabama. Good luck finding that on the map; it’s 70 miles straight north of Pensacola. Somebody gave us an old gravel pit, 140 acres, straight north of Pensacola 70 miles in. We called it Dinosaur Adventure Land; it’s awesome! Come visit. It’s all free. People come from all over the world. We have, in our science center here, a 24-foot snakeskin that a friend of mine sent me. He’s a missionary in the Amazon. He said, “My natives just killed a big snake. Would you like the skin?” “Yeah!” There have been 50-foot snakes killed down there. So, snakes… they may reach the point where they’re so big, and they get cumbersome; they will keep growing as long as they’re living. That doesn’t prove that they’re going to keep living forever. Somebody might kill them, or something may kill them. They’ve got enemies too.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: But yeah, they never stop growing.

Nehemia: Interesting. So, I read somewhere on the internet… and I don’t believe half of what I read on the internet. Especially when there’s a lot of what I call ad hominem attacks, people attacking other people. I’m sure you’ve had a lot of ad hominem attacks, but it said on one website that you claim that Tyrannosaurus Rex ate plants only. Talk to me about that.

Kent: Yeah. If you read Genesis chapter 1 and 2, God said to Adam and Eve and all the animals, they’re all going to be vegetarian. He said, “I’ve given you every herb for food.” Now later, after the Flood’s over, Genesis chapter 9, God says to Noah, “now you can eat meat”. And if you look at the evidence… you can get these charts on our website, DrDino.com, before the Flood they’re living to be 900. And after the Flood something changed; they dropped off to 400, then 200, then 100. And today hardly anyone makes it to 100.

So, back here before the Flood, the Bible clearly teaches they were all vegetarian. People say, “Well, look at those ferocious teeth.” Yeah, look at the teeth on a panda bear who lives on bamboo. Maybe they had those big teeth to chomp giant watermelons, I don’t know. But the Bible says they were vegetarian.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: And after the Flood, the humans were allowed to eat meat. The assumption would be, if everything changed, and I cover that on my video #2… you can get my whole video series for $50, it’s 18 hours on all this kind of stuff. But video #2 is about what made them live to be 900? And what changed? Why don’t we live to be 900 today? So, yes, if somebody showed you, and they think it’s controversial that I said that the T-Rex was a vegetarian, I confess. I believe the Bible is true.

Nehemia: Do you believe lions and bears were vegetarians before the Flood? Is that what you’re saying?

Kent: Yeah. During World War II, the British had a hard time getting meat for their zoos because they’re giving it all to their soldiers. And they had a lion named Little Tyke. You can Google it. And they gave it nothing but vegetables for the whole time of the war. It did fine. Changing from a plant-eating lion to a meat-eating lion is not a very big change.

Evolutionists want to believe they changed from an amoeba to a lion. You want to go from an amoeba to a lion, now that’s a big change. Going from plant-eating to meat-eating is nothing major. They get all bent out of shape over that stuff. It’s the pot calling the kettle black.

Nehemia: Let’s go back to the issue, if it’s okay… You said either the world is millions of years old or it’s 6,000 years old; someone’s lying. And I’d asked you if there’s metaphor and parable in the Bible. So, look, the people who… not all of them, because I interviewed a really interesting guy named Dr. Gerald Schroeder, who is an MIT physicist. He said that the world is both literally billions of years old, but also 6,000 years; something to do with time dilation. I had an hour-long conversation with him, and I didn’t understand a single word. But he’s a physicist, and much smarter than me in that field for sure.

So, my point is, maybe there are other possibilities. It seems like you’re saying there’s a binary here. Either the world is 6,000 years old or it’s millions of years old. And somebody’s lying, or maybe they just have a different interpretation than you.

In other words, there are definitely people who believe in the Bible devoutly. And you might disagree; you could say they don’t believe devoutly. But I think there’s people who believe in the Bible devoutly, certainly in the Jewish world, who would say, “Well, the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day, so, maybe the first three days were millions or billions of years.” So, tell me why that’s wrong.

Kent: Well, the Bible says in John chapter 1, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” It’s talking about, “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the word was God. And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Obviously, this is talking about Jesus. And Jesus said, “By him were all things created in heaven and in the earth.”

So, the Bible is claiming that Jesus created everything, which I agree with. I think Jesus was God in the flesh, and the Jews missed it. He came on a donkey proclaiming himself king; three days later they crucified him. But Jesus said, “He answered and said, ‘Have you not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female?’” Here’s Jesus claiming the beginning was when he made Adam and Eve. He’s talking about marriage and divorce. The same thing in Mark 10:6, “From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.” This is what Jesus said. He was there, he did it.

The Bible says clearly that man brought death into the world, “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.” “Since by man came death… in Adam all die…” The Bible’s clear. Jesus said the creation of Adam and Eve was the beginning and nothing died until Adam sinned. And “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is…” This is what it says, and Adam was, “the first man”, and Eve is “the mother of all living”.

So, I don’t think a person can claim to believe the Bible and believe the Earth is millions of years old, because all you’ve got to do is add up the dates. Adam was 130 when Seth was born; Seth was 105 when his son was born. The dates are all given. Read Genesis chapter 5, add them up, 130 plus 105, et cetera, et cetera.

And then after the Flood, in Genesis 10 and 11, more dates are given. Let’s see, Shem was 100 years old when Arphaxad was born. And it gives all the dates; you can make a chart. I’ll send you one if you like.

Nehemia: I’ve done that, and I’ve seen it. Look, so, you introduced a lot of theology, which is totally legitimate, because you’re coming from a religious perspective. And most people who are listening to this program are coming from a religious perspective, which is totally fine. I try to approach things… there’s the faith side of things; that’s a better word than religious. A faith side of things, and there might be a factual science side of things.

There was this great series when I was a kid. I think his name was James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. Did you ever see that?

Kent: I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t seen it.

Nehemia: It’s a really good series. He talks about how in the Middle Ages people were required to believe certain things about… I want to say it was geocentrism or something like that. The sun went around the Earth. I don’t remember exactly; it’s been decades since I saw it.

But when they were firing their cannons, they used the Copernican system because it worked. And look, today, when you fire a rocket into space, you use Newtonian physics even though the same physicists will tell you, “Well, actually Newton was wrong, and Einstein was right. The Newtonian model is false, but it works under certain circumstances.”

So, the way I’m trying to approach this is, when I use my phone, I’m assuming on some level that what mainstream science is telling me is correct. Whether it is or not, I don’t know, but I know my phone works.

And it seems you have a lot of heavy lifting, because you’re trying to explain all of science through the lens of a book that I believe that God revealed to my ancestors 3,500 years ago. We have this principle in Judaism, “God speaks in the language of men”. He’s speaking to us in terms that we can understand.

Kent: Right.

Nehemia: Talk about that. Why does it have to be a lie if somebody interprets the Bible differently than you? Maybe they’re just wrong, or maybe you’re wrong. Maybe we’re both wrong.

Kent: True.

Nehemia: And I’m not saying I’m taking one side or the other. I’m trying to flush these things out.

Kent: No, no, I understand. Well, there’s two ways to look at it; the biblical way clearly teaches about 6,000 years. I don’t think anybody’s going to argue with that. The scientific way to look at this… But first you’ve got to understand these big numbers they throw out, like 13.8 billion years ago. The human brain cannot absorb this.

Let me put it in perspective for you. Let’s say you’re walking across the street in Boston, and we’re going to say every inch you move is 285 years. Here we are today in 2024. Columbus discovered America 500 years ago.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Kent: That’s a few inches ago. This is Columbus discovering America. Jesus died in 28 AD, roughly. Noah’s Flood was about here, and Creation would be about here, 4,000 BC. That represents 6,000 years of human history, not even walking across the street. Now you want to see what 13.8 billion years looks like? Well, that’s going from Japan to Boston. If every mile is one and a half million years, that shows 13.8 billion years, every foot… I’m sorry, I said inch. Every foot is 285 years. It takes 24 years to go an inch, to go across the United States; that’s 3,000 miles. Well, if the Earth began as a hot ball of rock 4.6 billion years ago, that’s what that represents. So, when they say 4.6 billion, that’s from the Pacific to Boston, every foot being 285 years. There’s the hot ball of rock beginning. So, every mile is one and a half million years. This line shows what 4.5 billion looks like. So, just to get across South Dakota is 2,572 million years. These numbers simply get lost in the human brain.

Here you are back in the street in Boston. Here we are today. That’s Columbus discovering America. That’s Jesus dying on the cross. There’s the Flood, and there’s Creation. So, there is no possible way to prove the Earth is billions of years old.

On my video series… I’ve been covering every Friday night on our channel… we’re on about nine different channels; if you go to DrDino.com they’re all listed there. But go on YouTube to Genesis Baptist Church. Every Friday night we’ve been talking about different scientific ways to show the Earth cannot be billions of years old.

If I told you my Bic pen is 5,000 years old, you could say, “Come on now, Hovind, it’s a ballpoint pen. The ballpoint wasn’t invented until 1888.” Just that one scientific fact proves my claim of 5,000 is wrong. There was no ballpoint pen until 1888. And then you could say, “It’s made of plastic. Well, plastics weren’t invented until 1907.” Well, you just proved my claim wrong again. And you say, “Wait, it’s Bic Corporation. Bic didn’t even become a company until after World War II, 1945.” So, you can’t claim your pen is 5,000 years old, I’ve disproven that three different ways. I still don’t know how old the pen is, and I don’t care, but it’s after 1945.

So, if someone says this Earth is billions of years old, I say, “Guys, I’ve got a couple of questions for you. Forget the Bible, let’s just look at the science. Would you agree the moon is going around the Earth about every 28 days? Would you agree that all the scientists say the moon is getting further away from the Earth?” The moon is leaving us about an inch and a half a year, and I can bring up all the slides on that to prove it if you like. NASA… everybody agrees the moon is leaving us, they call it the lunar recession problem. Well, if the moon is leaving the Earth an inch and a half a year, that would mean it used to be closer. And bringing the moon closer creates a problem, a couple of problems.

If two objects are attracted to each other, like two magnets or something like that, when you take them to one-third of the distance, you take that fraction, one-third, flip it over, and square it, it’s nine times the gravitational pull; it’s called the inverse square law. Bringing the moon back into one third of the distance makes it nine times the gravitational pull. They’ve done all the math on this many times and say, “Guys, look, if you bring the moon back one billion years ago, it snaps together. The Earth-Moon system cannot be more than one billion years old.”

Okay, then why are we telling everybody the Earth is 4.6 billion years old? It’s not possible. Forget the Bible, just the science says it can’t be more than one billion. It’s like my Bic pen here. You say the Earth is spinning; except for the flat-Earthers, we all agree with that, the Earth is spinning. But the Earth is slowing down a thousandth of a second every day. They know why; lunar drag, Coriolis effect, tidal friction, et cetera. We know why. The fact is, it’s measurable.

Every year and a half they add a second to the clock. It’s called leap second. I think it’s every year and a half because the Earth is slowing down. The clocks are going off, but who cares, it’s a thousandth of a second. But whatever it is, some number, they add a second to the clock. I don’t think any scientist is going to argue with you, “Yes, you’re right, the Earth is slowing down.”

Okay, well then, I’ve got a question. Does that mean it used to be going faster? Well, yeah. How far back in time, in your imagination, can you go before this becomes a problem? If you speed up the spin of the Earth, not only do you affect the daylight hours and the nighttime hours, you create a problem called the Coriolis effect. The winds are circulating around because of the different speeds of the different latitudes. The Coriolis effect wind patterns would be horrible. The Earth would bulge out like a pancake. Then you would have a flat Earth, if it was billions of years old.

So, I think you can look at probably 50 different scientific indicators that say it’s not billions. Now, that doesn’t tell you when it was created, but just the moon tells me it’s not 4.6.

Nehemia: I’ve got to say, when you bring all of this scientific information, and I don’t have the skill set to know if any of this is correct or not, so, I’m going to ask people in the comments to come, people who know more about this science. If what Kent is saying is wrong, then guys, post something in the comments or come and debate him.

Kent: Yeah!

Nehemia: But I’ve got to say, it’s far more impressive to me when you quote this scientific information than when you’re quoting to me… And look, I’m not a Christian. I’m Jewish, so, certainly when you’re quoting what Jesus says, it doesn’t convince me. But even when you’re quoting Genesis, Genesis is obviously interpreted in different ways.

There’s a famous rabbi, Rabbi Schneerson, I believe it was; he died in 1994. He was the Lubavitcher Rebbe. From what I’m told, he said, at least, is that when the Earth was created it was mature. So, Adam wasn’t an embryo when he was created, he was a 30-year-old man. And when the trees were created, they might have looked like they were 5,000 years old. And when the mountains were created, maybe they looked like they were billions of years old, because that’s what a mountain is. So, from a Jewish perspective, that’s not controversial and that’s not a lie, it’s just a different way of interpreting what the Bible says.

Now, since Adam was born, there you’ve got a really good point, that we’re at the year 6,000 range. I’ll agree with that. We’re making a bunch of assumptions about the chronology, but let’s call it 6,000, or 10,000, or whatever.

Kent: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s neither here nor there, but it’s not billions. But I think it’s much more convincing when you bring the scientific stuff than when you say, “Well, the Bible says this, and there’s no other way to interpret the Bible other than this literalistic way.”

But you’re the first one to admit, I think you are, that when it says, “Eve is the mother of all that lives,” she’s not the mother of dogs, and she’s not the mother of caterpillars. She’s the mother of all humans. So, it’s a matter of how we interpret these texts within their context, using common sense. And for me the context is historical context. God wouldn’t reveal something that the ancient people couldn’t understand. I guess there are some things they couldn’t understand. But overall, it would have to have been comprehensible in a way that they could wrap their heads around it, otherwise what was the point of it? And if He would have said, “Well, there were billions of years,” they wouldn’t have understood that, I think. I don’t know. I’m kind of thinking out loud here, so, go ahead…

Kent: Well, slide #41, this is in the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20. God wrote this on the rock with his finger and handed the rock to Moses. Moses went down, got angry and smashed it. He broke all Ten Commandments at once, the worse sinner in the world. He goes back up and God says, “Moses, this time you write them down.” So, the same thing. The Ten Commandments are written down on a rock the second time. It talked about the Sabbath in Exodus 20, “In six days the LORD made heaven and Earth, the sea, and all that in them is.” How can you not interpret that to be that He made everything in six days?

Nehemia: Well, because in Psalms it also says He stretched out the heavens like a curtain and a tent… you don’t believe that do you? Or you do?

Kent: Oh, yeah. See, if you look at the Creation account in Genesis, God made the Earth first. He made the stars on day four. He made the sun, moon, and stars on day four. He made the Earth first. And then 17 times, not just in Psalms, 17 times in the Bible it says God stretched out the heavens.

I think that’s why, when we look at the stars through our telescopes, we see a red shift. It’s called the Doppler effect. If you’re standing by a train track and a train’s coming by, as it comes closer, it squeezes the soundwaves together and raises the pitch. As it leaves you, it stretches them out, or refracts them, and it lowers the pitch. So, you’re sitting there, and the train goes, “raaa-aa-aww”, it drops in pitch. The train is making the same noise, but you’re hearing it differently because it’s being compressed or refracted.

Well, the same thing happens with light. If an object is producing light, but that object is moving away, it’ll be stretched out; the light will be stretched. And if you look at it through a spectroscope, it’ll give what’s called a redshift. You can Google that. And astronomers look at the stars in all directions, and they say, “Wow, they’re all giving a red shift. That means they’re all moving away.” I would say that’s probably a reasonable conclusion. And then they say, “Well, that would mean they used to be closer.” I would agree. And then they’ll say, “See, that proves the Big Bang.” Oh no, the fact that they’re moving away doesn’t prove they’ve been moving away for billions of years.

I think God made the Earth, then He made the stars, and then He stretched them out. So, everybody’s asking the question, how did the light from the stars get here if it’s only 6,000 years old? Well, that’s the wrong question. “How did the star get from here to there?” is the question, not “how the light gets from there to here”. God made them all in six days, stretched them into place, and they probably are billions of light years away. I wouldn’t argue about that. But a light year is a distance, it’s not a time. A light year is a distance. It’s just a way to prove some big number in a single sentence, light year. How far can light go in a year?

Nehemia: So, does it go faster than light? Is that what you’re saying?

Kent: Well, the star is moving.

Nehemia: Right.

Kent: Even in their Big Bang Theory. They say in the Big Bang Theory a dot the size of an atom exploded and has traveled millions of times faster than the speed of light. That’s what the Big Bang Theory says.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: To have matter going faster than light, I think, is a real problem. To have light go faster than light, they’ve been doing that for years. At Princeton University they did an experiment and they got light to speed up to 300 times the speed of light; they’ve been able to speed light up, slow light down, they slowed it down to…

Nehemia: Okay guys, this is a beautiful opportunity, because I don’t know the first thing about this stuff. But someone out there knows if… well let’s put it this way, they don’t know if it’s right or not, but if there’s a refutation to the claim that Kent is making, come in the comments or contact his website and debate him on that.

Kent: Sure.

Nehemia: Because I think that whether it’s true or not that light can go faster than the speed of light, that I don’t know, but someone can verify or refute whether Princeton University makes that claim. And I honestly don’t know; that’s really interesting. That’s really fascinating.

Look, the redshift is a real thing that nobody disputes. That’s the beauty of it. There’s where I love what you’re doing. You’re bringing information that probably the average person doesn’t realize, that mainstream scientists are saying that the universe is speeding up and stretching out. And then you’re offering, actually, a really interesting literalistic explanation of what, to me, seems straightforward as a metaphor; that God stretched out the heavens. You’re saying, “No, that’s literally true.” That’s really interesting!

Kent: Well, if you watch my video #7, I tell people, “If you watch my whole video series, 18 hours…” I used to loan my videos out. I learned right away, Christians especially don’t steal, but they borrow and never return! So, you can buy it for $50. When you’re done send it back, and I’ll give you your $50 back! But meanwhile, I’ve got the $50 in case you don’t send it back.

But 18 hours, video #7 is actually six hours long, DVD #7, on commonly asked questions like, what about the speed of light? Well, back in 1814, 200 years ago, a guy discovered this redshift phenomenon. The dark absorption lines were seen by this guy 200 years ago, and he said, “Wow! That looks like that star is receding, or going away.” The redshift, Google it. I think anybody watching your program who understands physics will say, “Yeah, we understand the redshift phenomenon.”

So, whether the observer is moving towards the light, or the light is moving away from the observer, it still causes the same effect. Just like if you’re driving by a stationary object that’s making noise, like a train track, going, “ding, ding, ding, ding”, as you’re driving closer, it compresses the sound, “ding… ding… ding… ding… ding…… ding…… ding…… ding……” it’s called the Doppler effect.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Kent: Nobody argues about this. Christians, everybody agrees; there’s a redshift and there’s a Doppler effect. So, what is causing it? Well, clocks, gravity, and the limits of relativity… this is from EarthSky Magazine. What is The Red Shift? From whatever magazine this is. So, I’ve got tons of stuff on this. It looks like “the light from nearly every galaxy is redshifted.” They found that in 1910. Well, that looks like all the galaxies are moving away. I agree.

And then they went to the stupid conclusion of claiming “that proves the Big Bang”. No, no, no. Hubble… it said the redshifts were used to estimate distances. That’s where it gets a little fuzzy around the edges of science here. The Bible says God sits on “the circle of the Earth,” and that He “stretched out the heavens,” Isaiah 40. Seventeen times in the Bible…

Nehemia: Okay. Let me stop you there for a second. There, you agree that God sitting on “the circle of the Earth,” I’m asking, is a metaphor. Or do you think He’s literally sitting on the circle of…

Kent: I think God is everywhere. He’s sitting in my heart… See, He doesn’t take up any space, so He’s not…

Nehemia: So, I once had a conversation with this flat-Earther, and he quoted me this verse. Or actually, I think it was a different one than Isaiah, where it says, “The heaven is His throne, and the Earth is His footstool.” And this flat-Earther said to me, actually I think it was a she, “That’s literally true, isn’t that beautiful?” I said, “No, that’s stupid. God sitting on a really big chair?” Come on, nobody now… I don’t think even in ancient Israel they believed… I would argue they didn’t believe that God was sitting on a really, really, really, big chair. Solomon says, when he builds the House of God, which we call in English the Temple, he says, “Well, this is the House of God. But the heavens can’t contain You, and even the heavens beyond the heavens can’t contain You.” Meaning, they understood that God is not a physical finite being.

Kent: Right.

Nehemia: So, okay, I’m going to let you go on. I apologize.

Kent: Well, for the flat-Earthers, you can fill this in, “He sits on the circle of the Earth.” They’ll say, “See? The Earth is round. It’s a circle.”

Nehemia: Right! They say it’s like an upside-down plate or something.

Kent: I say, “Okay guys, listen. I taught mathematics, trigonometry, algebra, geometry, for years. There’s no such thing as a circle.” A circle is a completely imaginary object using flat plane geometry. If I draw a circle on paper, the thickness of my ink now turns it into a cylinder. It’s this tall, but it’s a… So, technically a circle is purely imaginary. They’re practical to talk about; we talk about Pi, and radius, and all that, circumference, but the circle doesn’t exist.

In solid geometry you could have a sphere; that exists, but a circle is only an imaginary construct which is useful and necessary. But if the Earth is really flat, and it’s a circle like they’re saying, then the Earth doesn’t exist at all.

Nehemia: What they say is it’s like an upside plate, or a pot cover or whatever. Okay, in any event, that was a distraction. Let’s go back. So, “And the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers… that stretched out the heavens.”

Kent: Seventeen times it says, “God stretched out the heavens.” So, everybody is asking, “how did the light get here from the stars?” I say that’s the wrong question. If the stars are being stretched out away from us, how did the star get from here to there? “He stretched out the heavens,” Job 26.

So, millions and millions of students are being brainwashed into believing the Big Bang based on this redshift, when they should be taught this proves the Bible is correct, “He stretched out the heavens.” So, yeah, I cover in video #7 some of the commonly asked questions that I get, what about carbon dating and all this kind of stuff.

Nehemia: Oh! Talk to me about carbon dating, I work with physicists on carbon dating. Talk to us about carbon dating. Is carbon dating not true?

Kent: Well, here’s a piece of coal…

Nehemia: “You look older than your profile picture.” “I’ve been under a lot of pressure.” That’s cute!

Kent: Here’s coal dating a diamond. They’re both made out of carbon.

Nehemia: That’s cute!

Kent: Yeah, “I’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: So, fossils are really dated by which layer they come from. The geologic column was made up in 1830 of all the different layers, the Cenozoic, the Mesozoic, the Paleozoic, and the Jurassic age, Triassic, and Mississippian. I also taught Earth Science for 15 years. The geologic column does not exist anywhere in the world. It does not exist, it’s imaginary. If the top layer is younger, I keep asking… I’ve 351 debates now. I say, “If the top layer is younger, like you’re claiming, where did it come from? Did it come from outer space? How can the top layer be younger? If I shuffle a deck of cards, is the top card younger? If I take my little sand art toy, which is here somewhere, and flip it over, if it makes layers… No. All the layers of the Earth are the same age. All over the world petrified trees are found standing up.

See, during the Flood, the moon would be holding the water up, making a bump called the high tide, while we’re turning. So, we on Earth get to see high tide, low tide, high tide, low tide, but the moon only sees high tide. Well, by holding the high tide while we’re spinning… if the Earth were covered in water, like Noah’s Flood… In other words, if you push all the continents down and smooth out the world, there’s about a mile and a half of water everywhere. That’s how much water is in the ocean, enough to cover the whole Earth a mile and a half deep. Well, just that water going up, down, up, down, because it would become harmonic if it wasn’t interrupted by hitting continents, the tide would go up and down 200 feet every six hours, 12 and a half minutes. If the water is coming up 200 feet, where’s all the water coming from to fill that bump? It’s being sucked in from all sides.

And from the east, it’s always being sucked in at the same speed the Earth is turning the other way. Well, at the North Pole the Earth is turning zero miles an hour. At the equator it’s at 1037.6 depending upon your altitude and high tide, et cetera. So, if the water is going sideways at 1,000 miles an hour, what’s that going to do? It’s going to rush in and take all the rocks and stuff and round them off all over the world.

I live in a gravel pit. We have trillions of rounded rocks right here. Come down, I’ll give you all you want. The rounded gravel, it goes from Alabama to North Carolina, these gravel seams that we dig out of right here. All the gravel seams, all the layers of the Earth, were made in Noah’s flood in one year with what’s called tidal pumping, the water going up and down. Every time it comes up, it rushes in; every time it goes down it rushes out. That’s what made all the layers in one year.

But anyway, back to carbon dating. If you walked into a room… put my slides up there… and you found a candle burning on a table, and I asked you, “Hey brother, when was it lit? How long has it been burning?” You say, “I don’t know, it was burning when I got here.” Okay, well let’s do some science, empirical science. Let’s measure how tall the candle is. So, we get our micrometers and we measure it 30 different ways, and we find out that candle is seven inches tall. Now, this is a fact. We all agree that the candle is seven inches tall. When was it lit? Well, I don’t know. Well, let’s do some more science. Let’s measure how fast it’s burning. Suppose we measure and we find out it’s burning an inch an hour, nobody argues. Two scientific empirical facts; it is seven inches tall, and it is burning an inch an hour. When was it lit? I still can’t tell you unless I make a few assumptions; how tall was it when it started? Has it always burned at the same rate? You can’t prove either of those.

When they dig up a fossil and want to carbon date it or potassium argon or rubidium strontium, or lead-208, lead-206… there’s about nine different methods they use now. They’re all based on the same assumptions. Do we know how much was in it when it started? Do we know the decay rate has always been the same? And neither of those can be proven. Matter of fact, it can be proven that we don’t know, and that they change. The decay rate of all of these radioactive elements can be changed with magnetic field changes, solar flares… there’s a lot of things that they know that will change the date. I can show you some.

Nehemia: I don’t want to get into too technical details because we’ll lose the audience. So, for carbon dating in particular, we have the dendrochronology that allows you to have calibrated carbon-14 dating.

So, I hear what you’re saying about potassium argon. There’s nothing to calibrate it against. But we do have tree rings that we calibrate the carbon-14 against, don’t we?

Kent: Well, true. Even then they find discrepancies. When they find their carbon date does not match the date that they want from tree rings, they simply call it, “Well, we have to date it again.” Why do you have to date it again?

Nehemia: It’s calibrated, that’s the whole idea… well, I’m not an expert in this, but my understanding is that they accept that the rates in the atmosphere aren’t necessarily uniform, and that’s why it has to be calibrated.

Kent: Well, we know any volcano can change that atmospheric content greatly. But the oldest tree they’ve got to go on is the Methuselah tree at 4,400 years old, the Bristlecone pine in California. That was the Flood, 4,400 years ago. Why is the oldest tree 4,400 years old? Of course, some trees might have survived the Flood. What’s the Flood going to do to a tree?

Nehemia: Well, I don’t know. If it’s going up and down 200 feet, that might grind them into powder. But my understanding of dendrochronology is that they take different samples of trees in a particular area, and they line them up based on when there’s a lot of rain, not a lot of rain, and they can go back thousands of years.

Let me ask you this question. Here’s what I work with in my field. We’ll take a manuscript and we’ll do a carbon-14 date, and it’ll say that it’s 700 years old. Are you telling me that’s not trustworthy because the whole system is wrong?

Kent: With carbon dating they get wild dates. A freshly killed seal carbon dated at 1,300 years. They just killed it, it wasn’t 1,300. The only reason they knew it was wrong is because they just killed it. Had they not just killed it, they probably would have accepted that date. The troubles of radiocarbon dating are deep and serious. They allow “…for contamination… fractionalization…” There’s all kinds of ways to try and fix the date that they get. “No matter how useful it is… there are gross discrepancies… the accepted dates are selected dates.”

Nehemia: I’m going to invite the audience, because you’re giving sources here, I really appreciate that. Someone out there is an expert in carbon dating or in radiometric dating, in archeometry. Come and stitch this part of the video and tell us why Kent is wrong if he’s wrong.

Kent: Sure.

Nehemia: That’s a challenge I’m going to throw out to an archeometrist out there, to somebody who deals with radiometric dating systems, because it’s beyond my skill set. This sounds really impressive, Kent, but I don’t know if it’s right or not.

Kent: Okay. Well, first of all, I want to say the Bible clearly teaches 6,000. That would be my final authority. But I’m not afraid of any science they’ve got to bring it up. But if they want to use any dating method, all you’re doing is saying “this object contains a material that is decaying”. That’s like your candle is burning. I agree that carbon-14 is decaying and turning into carbon-12, nobody is arguing about that. That potassium is decaying into argon; the uranium is decaying into lead. All of them are based on the decay rate of something.

Do you know the rate’s always been the same? Do you know how much was in it when it started? You can’t know that. And has there been no contamination? There are many things that affect it. Let’s see, two mammoths found side by side were carbon dated at 22,000 and 16,000.

Nehemia: So, here’s what… and again, I’m going to invite someone who’s much more of an expert on this than I am. But from the experts on carbon dating that I’ve spoken to, things have changed dramatically in the last 15, 20 years, to the point where… and you’re talking 250,000 years ago, that’s something completely different. But for the periods in which we have calibrated carbon-14, which is around the last 5,000 or 6,000 years, it’s pretty accurate. Once you get beyond where we can calibrate it, you’re right, it’s based on a bunch of assumptions, which maybe are right, maybe they’re not.

Anyway, so, yeah, somebody who knows a lot more about this, come and tell us why he’s wrong or why he’s right. Ooh! I like penguins, go back to the penguins. So, tell me about the penguins.

Kent: They took samples off of a living penguin and carbon dated it at 8,000 years old, because it lives near the magnetic north pole or south pole where the magnetic fields are going to be affecting this. We know the magnetic fields affect…

Nehemia: I’m pretty sure it’s the South Pole.

Kent: Oh, okay. It affects the carbon dating, the rate of decay. The solar flares can greatly affect it. I’ve got a whole list in here somewhere of all the things that affect carbon dating. When they date a sample of known age it oftentimes doesn’t work. If they date a sample of unknown age, they assume it works, because there’s no other way to verify it. As the “elements decay they produce helium.” There’s less helium in the atmosphere than we would get in only two million years.

All of this argument, though, is to do one thing; try to rescue the pacifier the atheists need. Time. How can you explain an amoeba turning into a whale? They’ll say, “Given enough time…” It’s always their answer. And if you can take away the billions of years, this whole chart because obviously stupid. If you think you are related to a whale and a sunflower, you need to go and see a shrink. You’re in serious trouble!

But the kids are being taught right now in school, while we’re sitting here, millions of kids in America, and probably billions worldwide, are being taught, “Your ancestor was an amoeba and it evolved into all these things today.” This is propaganda, this is not science. They have humans being related to the flamingos. If you want to believe that, I don’t care what you believe. I do care that you want to call it science and I do care that you want me to pay to have all the kids taught that stuff.

If somebody believes this garbage, they should go and start a private school and teach it to anybody who’s willing to come learn it. I’m not against private schools, but in a public school that everybody is forced to pay for, you should teach science. It is science that flamingos produce baby flamingos. That’s all anybody has ever seen. Nobody has ever seen a flamingo produce a non-flamingo baby. They’ve never seen a flamingo come from a non-flamingo.

Science is what we can observe, study, test, and demonstrate. It would be science to say all the flamingos probably had a common ancestor. Okay. No, they want to say, “That proves flamingos and humans and whales have a common ancestor.” That is where I start to object. That’s not science. That’s what you believe, that’s your religion…

Nehemia: You brought up a public policy issue here which I think one could make an argument about. Should taxpayer funding go towards things that can’t be proven and things that are theories and hypotheses? I think those are some valid questions you’re raising there, and to what extent should the government be involved, certainly the federal government, in education? But those are public policy issues that I think are beyond the scientific scope of what we’re talking about here. But okay, you’re allowed to bring that up. I’m just saying, for me, I would have to do a lot more thinking about that.

I can tell you definitely, there are things being taught… I’m in Texas right now, and people think, “Oh Texas, it’s really conservative.” No. Down the street there are schools where they’re teaching them things that, five or ten years ago they would be kicked out of polite society for teaching the kids. And now they’re teaching them that as fact, and they’re teaching them that they’re bigots if they don’t accept these facts. So, we do have some problems here, that’s not a question. Whether it’s the whole scientific thing here…

So, talk about speciation because there, I think, you have some interesting… Oh, I like cows. Tell us about the cows. You’ve got a nice little picture of cows.

Kent: Twenty-four times in the first seven chapters of Genesis, it says, “The animals will bring forth after their kind.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: He said it 24 times! They’re going to “bring forth after their kind”. Well, there are 450 breeds of cows that might have come from a common ancestor called a cow. And there’s a lot of variations in cows. They now have a breed of cows that are 20 inches tall, full grown.

Nehemia: That’s a stable cow!

Kent: That’s a dog, only it’s dumber. Cows can jump. I would accept that; it’s been proven that cows can jump. There’s a cow jumping over a six-foot fence. I wouldn’t argue with that. So, can I conclude that, since we have observed a cow jumping over a six-foot fence, if we give the cow vitamins and minerals and take it to the gym, someday the cow could jump over the moon? Would that be a logical conclusion? No, teacher, I bet there’s a limit on how high cows can jump. Have they reached the limit yet? I don’t know, but they’re not going to jump over the moon.

They’ve been doing this with dogs, trying to get dogs that are smaller, or bigger, or something. There are now 339 breeds of dogs. There’s the biggest dog and the smallest dog, they probably had a common ancestor called a dog.

Nehemia: That’s so, cute!

Kent: There it is, yeah. Those chihuahuas… a lot of people don’t know this. You can use chihuahuas for bear hunting and you don’t need a gun. The bear will die laughing, or he’ll choke on it!

Nehemia: That’s funny!

Kent: The fact that we see that probably all the dogs, wolves, and coyotes had a common ancestor, I wouldn’t argue with that. I ask four-year-olds when I do my sermon sometimes, I’ll get a four-year-old and I’ll say, “Okay kid, here we have a dog, a wolf, a coyote, and a banana. Which one is not like the others?” They get it right every time. I’ve only had one kid ever get it wrong, he said, “The boy.” Okay, well, yeah, I know.

God said they’ll “bring forth after their kind.” That’s all we’ve seen. Atheists want to argue, what’s a kind? Well, Darwin wrote a book about the origin of species. Let’s see, the definition of species… let me show you the problem here. The definition of species… here’s National Pornographic. “A species is defined as a group of organisms that can reproduce naturally with one another and create fertile offspring.” Can a cow and a pine tree mate and produce fertile offspring? No.

Nehemia: For sure.

Kent: I think we would all agree that a cow and a pine tree are different kinds. Species. Look at this, “A kind or sort.” So, the biblical word “kind” is probably similar in most cases to our current definition of “species”. Synonyms for species… let’s see, what are the synonyms? A kind. The Biological Dictionary, the definition, “A species is a group of organisms that share a genetic heritage and are able to interbreed.” We have on our North 40 pasture here a bunch of animals that kids come and get to pet them. We’ve got the sheep, the donkeys, and the cows all mixed together. They go out, eat together, live together. The cows show no interest in mating with the sheep, and the sheep show no interest in mating with the pine trees! They know what their kind is. Leave them alone, they’ll figure it out. You don’t have to worry about it, they know.

God said they will “bring forth… after his kind… after his kind… after his kind… after his kind… after his kind”. I mean, it couldn’t be more clear. Whether it’s true or not is not the point now. The Bible does teach they bring forth after their kind, 26 times in the first seven chapters.

Now, what is this definition of species? Well, let’s see. The definition of species. They’ve never come up with a good definition. I’ll show you. The textbooks are still struggling with that. I should have had it right there. Species, “An organism that can reproduce with one another in nature and produce fertile offspring.” What is a Species? Scientific American, “To this day, scientists struggle with the question… The debate over species definition is far from over.” Okay. “It may seem a surprise, but scientists are struggling to agree on something so basic as ‘what’s a species?’” What is a species exactly? “There is no general agreement among biologists on what species are.” There are 26 different published definitions of species. They still don’t know.

The Bible says very simply if they bring forth, they’re the same kind. Can you mate a dog and a cat and get living offspring? No. They may mate and exchange genetic information, but it won’t produce a baby.

Nehemia: So, just to clarify, you’re talking on… Here it’s complicated because I would imagine if you… how do I put this politely? If you marry a woman who’s currently your age, you’re probably not going to produce offspring. But you wouldn’t say you’re a different species, because when she was younger, presumably she could.

Kent: Sure.

Nehemia: And maybe she couldn’t as an individual because of some condition she had, but human women in general can produce offspring even though there’s individual human women who might not be able to produce offspring.

Kent: Right. But there are no cases where a human has been able to produce a baby with an ape, a gorilla, an orangutan, a monkey, those are all distinct kinds. Humans are not related to apes, monkeys, or orangutans. We have a similar body structure.

Nehemia: I’m curious if anybody has tried in vitro to do that. I actually don’t know the answer to that.

Kent: Oh, there are people who tried mating with dogs, and cows. You would not believe some of the strange things…

Nehemia: No, that’s actually mentioned in the Torah, in Leviticus.

Kent: Yeah. God told you what to do them, too!

Nehemia: It’s something you’re not supposed to do, so, obviously people were doing that and still are. So, this is fascinating. I want to do a thought experiment here, and I don’t know where this is going to go, so bear with me here. And I apologize if I’m going off the reservation here. Can you still hear me?

Kent: Yeah, I hear you fine. No problem.

Nehemia: Okay. So, what you do is really fascinating, and I know a lot of people who have watched your videos for decades. I watched your videos 20 years ago and I found them really fascinating.

So, my thought experiment is this; there’s a lot of Jews. Look I’m Jewish, okay? There’s a lot of Jews who believe the world is literally 6,000 years old, but they don’t do what you do. And I’m trying to think out loud and hear your thoughts about why that is. And I know for some of them they just say, “I’m not bothered by it. I don’t know why the science doesn’t match what I read in the Torah, but I don’t care.” It’s kind of like when I fire my cannons, I’m going to use what science says. When I go to my synagogue and read my Bible, I’m going to believe what the Bible says.

So, why do you think it is that there are whole ministries in the Christian world, and there’s a lot of really smart Jews who deal with science, a lot of smart Jews who believe in a literal 6,000-year-old world. Why do you think it is? And again, this is a thought experiment. This may go nowhere. I’m not aware of any Jews who are doing what you’re doing, so, I’m wondering why that is.

Kent: That’s a good question. I don’t know. They should be, if they really wanted to defend the Torah, defend the 6,000-year age of the Earth. Read Genesis 5, and Genesis 11, and do the math. We know Joseph was down in Egypt and became the assistant vice Pharoah, or whatever they called him. So, they know the approximate time when Joseph lived, and we’ve got dates from the Bible adding straight up to Joseph. It’s not hard, figure it out. It’s about 6,000 years old. So, there should be some Jewish Creationists out there talking to these folks who are claiming billions of years.

If you go back to my experiment of how long it takes to cross the street in Boston, that’s 6,000 years. If you want to go from California to Boston, that’s 4.6 billion. That’s ridiculous, that’s stupid. See, that stuff gets lost in the human brain. That’s why the Atheists rely on that.

How on earth can an amoeba turn into a whale? They say, “Given enough time.” That’s always their answer. What if you take away time? See, time is their pacifier. That’s what keeps them from crying, “You give me time, and I’ll do it.”

In the first place, we’ve never seen an amoeba produce a non-amoeba. We’ve never seen a bacteria produce a non-bacteria. There are some bacteria that have a very short generation time. They’re born, grow up, get married, and make babies in eight hours. Every day, you can see three generations in one day. So, in one year you can see over 1,000 generations of this bacteria. And so, they watch them for years in the laboratory, and they get some strange bacteria, but they’re still bacteria.

Nehemia: Well, yeah. And their argument will be, “Well, we’ve observed speciation in fruit flies,” that one species of fruit fly evolved into another species of fruit fly, or something like this. What do you say about that?

Kent: Sure. Well, all they did with the fruit flies is they nuked them, microwaved them, and x-rayed them. They did all kinds of mean things to the fruit flies, and they got them to have curly wings, they couldn’t fly. They got them to have no wings, they couldn’t fly. They got them to have no eyes, they can’t see. They never got an improvement on the ordinary fly. All they did was mess up a whole bunch of flies. So, that’s not any support for evolution.

All we’ve observed with mutations, and there’s been plenty, plenty of mutations that have been seen… mutations; all they do is destroy things. Mutations don’t make something better. Natural selection doesn’t make that new mutated one survive.

Adolf Hitler was a strong believer in evolution, and he had a chart he was going by of the different types of humans. He said there are different races of humans, which is a mistake to begin with, but he had them all classified. He had the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic, the Norwegians, blue eyes. He said they’re the superior race. Now, under them were the Germans, and he had the whole list down to the Jews at the bottom. He said they’re close to pure ape. Hitler tried to kill all the Jews, and he killed a bunch of them. He tried to kill them all. He thought he was improving the human race by getting rid of the inferior species. Right above the Jews, he had the blacks. When Jesse Owens, the black American athlete won the most gold medals in the Olympics in Germany in 1936, Hitler refused to shake his hand and walked out of the stadium. He said, “It’s not fair to make my men compete against this animal.” He thought blacks were animals.

So, what you believe about this evolution theory has a profound effect on how you will behave. My video #5, called The Dangers of Evolution, in this series, tells about how this theory is not only stupid, it’s dangerous. Here we are teaching our kids in public school, “You are nothing but an animal.” And then we wonder, why are they acting like animals? Well duh, look what you taught them for 12 years. Evolution is the dumbest and most dangerous religion in the world. Natural selection doesn’t make anything new; it selects from what’s already there. So, nobody’s ever seen a good mutation, but Darwin thought…

Nehemia: Can we agree… I hope we can agree. It says in the Torah that God created man, male and female, in the image of God, and then when it talks about not committing murder, the reason given in Genesis 9 is because we’re created in the image of God.

Kent: Right, exactly right.

Nehemia: And so, the inherent value of all humans, whatever race, we’re all one species, that is a core principle in the Torah. And whether you say it’s literally true or metaphorically true, it doesn’t matter. It is true because God said it’s true, that we’re all created in the image of God.

And so, I hear what you’re saying about the danger of turning us into animals, or an ideology that says we’re not made in the image of God; it devalues humans. And racism… people say, “Why does racism bother you so much?” Because it denies this fundamental core value of God’s revelation, which is that we are made all in the image of God. If you say that one race is superior to another race, then you are denying that core biblical principle. Would you agree with that?

Kent: Yeah. All it is is they’re talking about skin color. It’s a human race. There’s one race, the human race. There are different colors of cows. Is it okay if the brown cow mates with the black cow? Would that be okay? Yeah, it’s a skin color. They all look the same in the meat locker when you take the skin off.

So, humans, we’re all human. I tell people I have never met a black man, never. You haven’t either. This is black. Have you ever met a black man? I never have. They don’t exist. I’ve never met a white man! Here, this is white; I am not white. I’ve seen lots of different shades of light brown to dark brown, but that’s it. We’re all human, we’re all interfertile, and there’s no superiority because of the color of your skin. That is just absolutely evil.

Nehemia: Amen. Alright, we’re agreeing on that! So, we found some common ground here. So, I want to bring up something really controversial, and if you’re not comfortable talking about this, we can drop it.

Kent: No, anything.

Nehemia: So, I Googled you before this conversation, and there were people accusing you of promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Being Jewish, I’ve got to ask; do you believe The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true and legitimate historical document?

Kent: It’s been 20 years since I looked at that. I’ve got it in here someplace. I mention that on my video #5, The Dangers of Evolution. No, no, I do not believe the Jews are inferior, nor do I believe they are superior. I think we’re all human.

Nehemia: No, but do you believe there’s a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, perhaps going back centuries?

Kent: There have always been people who want to control the world, like Pinky and the Brain.

Nehemia: I don’t know if I know about Pinky and the Brain.

Kent: Satan came to Eve; he said, “Eve, if you eat off of that tree, you get to be God.” That’s where it started, that’s where the evolution theory started. Satan wants to take over God’s kingdom, so, God kicked him out of heaven and he came down to Earth. Adam and Eve were doing just fine, probably for 100 years. We don’t know how long they were in the Garden in perfect harmony. But Satan said, “If you follow me and eat off that tree, you get to be God.” And that’s where the evolution theory got started.

So, there probably have been cabals of Jews who say, “We’re going to take over the world.” I don’t know. God’s laughing at all their plans.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: He that sits in the heavens shall laugh. Whether it’s true or not, there’s all kinds of lodges and secret societies that get together, like Pinky and the Brain, “What are we going to do today, Pinky?”

Nehemia: I don’t know about Pinky and the Brain. I think that’s after my time so I’m not sure what it is.

Kent: It’s a cartoon of two mice, one’s really stupid, I guess, I’ve only seen part of it. But their goal is, every episode they’re going to try and take over the world.

Nehemia: Oh, okay! See, I didn’t know that. So, you’re saying there are Jews out there who might be trying to take over the world, but like…

Kent: … who wanted to take over the world. There were Japanese that wanted to take over the world. There have always been people who want to take over the world!

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: Whether they’re Jewish or not is not the question.

Nehemia: So, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, do you think that’s an historically accurate book?

Kent: I have no idea. I have no way to verify that, I don’t know. So much of history that gets hidden or twisted by the time it gets to us. I trust this book [the Bible], but I’m a little bit skeptical about everything else I read.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: I’m willing to read it. I’m willing to listen. I’m willing to learn. But this is what’s true [the Bible]. So, no, I didn’t promote it. I just mentioned it.

Nehemia: Okay. Because the standard explanation, of at least mainstream historians, I think, is that it’s a plagiarized book put together by the men of the czar based on a book that was originally written about Napoleon III, or something like that, who people were afraid wanted to take over the world. I don’t know.

Anyway, okay, guys, make of that what you will. Write in the comments and give us your thoughts about it. 

So, you have something here about the number of fingers… Oh, did you see the Palestinian boy with six fingers that was made by AI? Anyway, that’s a different thing.

Kent: I’m just pointing out mutations. Mutations happen. All mutations that have been observed are harmful or fatal. Nobody has seen a good mutation. Hair all over the face; that’s a mutation. Extra thumb; mutation. Mutations are doubling of chromosomes or twisting or perverting the chromosomes. They’re all mistakes. Nobody has even seen a good one.

Nehemia: What about sickle cell anemia? Doesn’t that protect people from malaria?

Kent: Yeah, that’s like saying…

Nehemia: Isn’t that… that’s not a mutation, but it’s…

Kent: Yeah, it’s true!

Nehemia: Or actually it is, I don’t know.

Kent: It’s like saying, “Hey, if you cut off your feet, you can’t get athlete’s foot!” Is that a good mutation? No. Sickle cell anemia is not good. It may protect you from something else, but it itself is the same as cutting off your feet and protecting you from athlete’s foot.

Nehemia: I’m not saying it’s good, but it would explain why the people who had it survived and the people who didn’t maybe died of malaria. And so, it was emphasized by that… like, pressure, sort of.

Kent: Yeah. That is an example of something bad happening that protects you from something else bad that’s happening. That’s not adding new information. It’s certainly not going to change an amoeba into a human. And that’s the best they always bring up. Guys, you would need trillions of mutations to change an amoeba into a human.

Nehemia: That’s why they need billions of years.

Kent: That’s why they need the billions of years.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: So, I’m always saying, look guys, there are no… here it is slide #1741, okay. Here’s a five-legged bull. That’s not new information.

Nehemia: And that’s not bull.

Kent: All mutations do is remove information or double existing information, duplicate information, or scramble up information. “There is no scientific evidence that mutations support evolution.” There’s no “new useful information” ever added, ever.

Short-legged sheep; that’s a mutant. He would not last in nature. He’s the first one the wolf is going to catch. There’s a two headed turtle; that’s mutant, that’s not ninja. He’s going to die in the first winter because nobody makes a double-neck turtleneck sweater.

So, scrambling up letters of the word Christmas will get you all kinds of words, but it won’t get you Xerox, Zebra, or Queen, the letters aren’t available. There’s a biology textbook that says, “Normal fruit flies have two wings, this mutant has four. This rare mutation, like most mutations, is harmful.” Guess what? This fruit fly with four wings cannot fly. That’s not helpful. They say, “Look at that, it’s new information.” It’s not new information; he already had wings! You duplicated information. One professor said, “People with sickle cell cannot get malaria.”

Nehemia: Here you go.

Kent: That’s the one they always give.

Nehemia: Okay, even I’ve heard that one.

Kent: Yeah? Cut off your legs and you can’t get athlete’s foot either. What does that prove?

Beneficial mutations: color that allow animals to camouflage better. That’s not mutation. They already had white feathers or brown feathers, some just had more white and they blended in with the snow better. They already had feathers, they already had white feathers. They lost some color; that’s not adding information.

So, I go through in my video #7, probably for 40 minutes, on this topic, because it’s so common. Because evolutionists rely on mutations to change something, and they don’t. Beneficial mutations are non-existent. And if they were, if you could find…

Nehemia: Wait, wait, wait. Go back. What was that thing about HIV?

Kent: This one?

Nehemia: No, one forward, I think. One back, one back.

Kent: Back, back, back, back.

Nehemia: You skipped it, go forward. Slowly, there might be a delay here. Something about RNA and HIV; that sounds controversial.

Kent: There it is. RNA viruses, HIV, there it is. What’s happening, all that’s ever seen is they take information that already exists, scramble it, delete some, duplicate some. They’re not adding any more.

If I told you I’ll give you a box of the alphabetic letters, A through Z. I’ll give you thousands of each letter in a big box. I want you to dump it out. Is it possible that you’ll dump them out and spell a word on the table? Maybe, like Scrabble. Is it possible you’ll dump these letters out and spell a Japanese word? No, the letters aren’t available. I would have to add new information to the box.

So, mutations, all they do is scramble existing information, and if you had one that did evolve a little better, now, who is it going to marry? You’ve got to get two of the opposite sex in the same place. What if one happens here and one happens in China? Now they can’t find each other. And what if one happens now and one happens 30 years later? Now you’ve got a problem. They’ve got to have two at the same time, of the opposite sex, in the same place, and they’ve got to find each other and be interested. You’ve got a whole bunch of problems here!

And they want to rely on that. They think that is somehow evidence that an amoeba can turn into a human. I say, “Guys, I don’t care if you believe that, but you need to admit it’s a belief. It’s not science, we don’t observe that.” That’s why I continually say evolution is a religion. This is what they believe happened. This is nothing but artwork. This is a bunch of lines on paper. This isn’t science. We don’t know that a protozoa turned into a sunflower, and a frog, and a dinosaur, and a human, and a horse. You don’t know any such thing. You believe it.

And you tell anybody in your audience, I’ll debate any evolutionist, any day, with half my brain tied behind my back!

Nehemia: And to be fair, guys, I’m not an evolutionary biologist, so I don’t really have a way to evaluate a lot of what’s being said here. I do find it fascinating because I do deal with history, so, I find it fascinating…

I want to go back to the Bic pen that you mentioned maybe an hour ago. That, you know, when plastic was invented and when Bic became a corporation. And there is where, in my field, I would say, “How do we actually know when plastic was invented? And how do we actually know when Bic became a corporation?” Meaning, you’re saying that it couldn’t be before 1888, or something like that, because ballpoint pens weren’t invented.

So, a lot of times I’m dealing with things in my field where people say, “Well, we know X, Y, Z.” And it turns out we actually don’t know that at all. And then ten years later everybody says that’s wrong. So, that’s actually a really important thing, that a lot of things that we think we know, we don’t actually know. People don’t distinguish between fact and hypothesis, and then theory becomes really controversial what that is.

So, there’s information that says the Bic Corporation was founded in whatever year, or ballpoint pens were patented in 1888. Maybe they existed before that, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it. Here’s my real point; how do we actually know that the Bic Corporation was founded in 1945? Because we have newspaper accounts that might mention that, and we have historical documents that might show when the corporation was founded. So, people mentioned it at the time when it was happening. The first advertisements might show up for Bic pens in 1945, or whatever year it is. So, we have corroborating pieces of evidence that we can go back and look at it. I haven’t done that work and I doubt you have either. You Googled it like I Googled it, right?

Kent: Sure, sure.

Nehemia: Is it correct? Who knows if it’s correct? I would not assume anything you read on the internet is correct, and I wouldn’t assume anything you read necessarily in history books is correct. Because I’ll tell you, all the time I’ll see things where it talks about… and here is something you can speak on maybe. I’ll read in textbooks, or in popular scientific magazines, where it will talk about how they carbon-14 tested a fossil. Well, that’s a pretty neat trick, there’s no carbon in a fossil! How did they do that? So, talk about that for a minute, because there you’re making a valid point. How do you carbon-14 test a fossil?

Kent: Right. But see, they do carbon date living tissue. It only works on things that contain carbon, obviously something that was alive and was breathing in CO2. Well, we know there are things that affect the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. A volcano eruption can do that, a forest fire can do that. Anyway, that’s another story.

But you’re right. Observable science, that’s what you’ve got to go back to. What’s your definition of science? Well, science is what we can observe, study, test, and demonstrate. We cannot observe any animal producing anything other than their same kind. We never observe a shark producing a non-shark baby. It’s never been observed. So, why are we teaching the kids, at taxpayer expense, that sharks are related to sunflowers? Why are we allowing this in our textbooks? If somebody wishes to believe this, that’s fine, I don’t care what they believe. But they want me to pay to have this chart put in all the textbooks so the kids can learn that the shark and the sunflower have a common ancestor. That’s propaganda, that’s not science! Even if it’s true, it’s not science yet because it hasn’t been demonstrated, observed, and tested.

Nehemia: So, how could you demonstrate that in theory?

Kent: Well, sharks always make baby sharks. Sunflowers always make baby sunflowers. There are no exceptions. If somebody wishes to believe otherwise, they should admit that’s their religion. You can believe whatever you want; I don’t care! But don’t call it science! They are trying to say evolution should be part of science. No, evolution should be part of a fairytale book or part of a religious book, but it’s not part of science.

Nehemia: Wait a minute. So, you wouldn’t say, though, that Jesus rising from the dead was part of a fairytale book, right? So… 

Kent: I don’t think we can prove that scientifically. I believe he did.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Kent: I trust my eternity to that. But I didn’t see it. There were people who did see it who reported it at the time. Over 500 witnesses reported they saw him alive after the crucifixion, according to the Bible. All I can go on is that I have chosen to believe this book is true. I’ve chosen to believe Jesus did rise from the dead. He prophesied that it would happen. He told it in advance. “Guys, I’m going to Jerusalem. They’re going to kill me, and I’m going to rise from the dead.” He told his disciples ahead of time. I know that from four different witnesses: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They all said that. So, I think four witnesses is enough. In a court of law, two witnesses can convict a person. And in the Torah, two or three witnesses… every word’s established in the mouth of two or three witnesses. So, I think we have enough witnesses and I’ve chosen to believe that. But if somebody said, can I prove it scientifically? Did I observe it? No, nobody alive today…

Nehemia: So, if somebody comes to you and says you’re believing fairytales… But your point is that it shouldn’t be taught by governments. Let’s say that the resurrection of Jesus shouldn’t be taught by the government in public schools because that’s your personal conviction.

So, here you’re dealing with, again, a public policy issue, which is valid, which is the separation of church and state for example, which I think most people in the Western World would agree with. Maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know. But it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re saying, that there are things we can’t prove, and those shouldn’t be taught in public schools. Okay.

Kent: Well, here’s an example…

Nehemia: Those are interesting points.

Kent: Okay, I taught biology and had to teach anatomy one time. It is a biological fact that we have a muscle, that we’ve all chosen to give it a name called the deltoid. It raises your arm this way. The kids can learn, “Okay, boys and girls, this is the deltoid, this is the biceps, and here’s the triceps. This is the humerus, this is the radius and ulna, these are the flexors, these are the extenders.” You can learn all the muscles of the body, and all the bones, and all the anatomy, and never talk about evolution. There is no doctor on the planet who worries about evolution while he’s doing surgery! He better know his anatomy to not cut the wrong stuff. Even if it’s true, evolution is not science and it’s useless. Who cares?

Nehemia: So, this goes back to James Burke’s example, in The Day the Universe Changed, about the people who were to fire cannons. Even though they believed the Catholic theology about geocentrism or whatever, the sun goes around the Earth, when they came to fire the cannon, they used the Coriolis effect, or whatever it was. I don’t know the exact details, and the bottom line is, it worked.

And you’re saying you can be a practicing doctor, you can be a practicing scientist, and evolution doesn’t change it one way or another. And that’s a really interesting point. Like, what is the practical application of evolution? I guess an evolutionary biologist would say there’s a lot of practical applications, I don’t know.

Kent: Tell me one.

Nehemia: I’m not an evolutionary biologist, I don’t know.

Kent: You tell all your evolutionary biologists out there; I challenge them to show a practical application for this and to show an example. I have asked for years, what is the best evidence for evolution? They are still teaching in our biology textbooks today that the baby growing inside the mother, the embryo, has gill slits. That was proven wrong in 1874, and they’re still teaching that. I say, “Guys, if you wish to believe that, that’s fine, believe whatever you want. But don’t call that science.” I’ve got it on here somewhere, embryology as part of the evidence for evolution. Earnst Haeckel made up this idea after reading Darwin’s book. Do you see it on there anywhere? There we go, embryology, here we go.

Darwin predicted, “we should find evidence for my theory” in 1859. The textbooks are teaching the embryo has gills slits. I cover Lies in the Textbooks in my video #4. Here’s a human embryo. It has four different wrinkles under their chin. They develop into bones in the ear…

Nehemia: I’ve got more than that!

Kent: Yeah, well… they never have anything to do with breathing. Here’s a fat guy who’s got five or six chins and he can’t breathe through any of them! What happened is, Earnst Haeckel read Darwin’s book in 1860. He said, “Wow! I like this theory. There’s no God. Whoa, I like that!” A lot of people like the idea of getting rid of God. Because if there’s a God, that means He owns this place and that means He can make the rules. “Thou shall not”, “Thou shall not”. Well, they don’t like some of those rules, so they deny His existence.

Earnst Haeckel took a drawing of a human and a dog embryo at four weeks in development. Now, he was an embryologist at the University of Jena, in Germany. He liked Darwin’s theory, so he changed the drawings of the dog and the human and made them look exactly alike. Here are the actual drawings, of studying ones that they’re seeing, compared to his fake drawings. He made charts of his fake drawings of all kinds of different animals. Let’s see, the fish, the turtle, the duck, the human, the pig, the sheep, and he made the embryos, the top line, all look alike. Here’s his fake drawings. Underneath are actual photographs of those same creatures at that same stage in life. Now, either he’s a lousy artist or he’s a liar.

Well, the fact is, we know he was a good artist, and he was a liar. His own university, the University of Jena, held a trial. He’s their professor, and he was convicted. He confessed, “A small percentage of my embryonic drawings are forgeries. I had to fill in missing information.” It wasn’t missing, Ernst. You’re lying! He said, “I should feel utterly condemned, except that hundreds of other people lie also.” They lie, so, it’s okay for me to lie. That was his defense.

This biogenetic law, this embryology stuff that’s taught, I have a debate on that coming up this Wednesday, in two days. Go watch my channel Genesis Baptist Church on YouTube. He said this law “cannot be weeded out.” It’s been proven to be wrong, it’s as dead as a doornail. Haeckel was convicted of fraud, but the drawings persist. I collect biology textbooks. I’ve got them from all the different publishers from many, many years, back to the 1800’s. His fake drawings are still in use today! That’s Haeckel’s chart!

Nehemia: So, you’re telling me in 2024 there are kids out there who, in their textbooks, have a drawing that’s fake. That’s what you’re saying.

Kent: It was proven wrong in 1874!

Nehemia: No, but are they still publishing this today in the 2020’s?

Kent: Oh, yeah. Sure.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kent: You can Google right now “embryology.” It’ll probably show Haeckel’s fake drawings. The most recent biology book I have from a university is 2017. If somebody’s got a more modern one they’re not using, send it to me. I’ve got a collection of them here and I’d like to get some newer ones. But they’re still saying embryology… here we go, right here. They’re still using fake drawings. This is a public-school science book. Here it is, “they prove common ancestry.” Those are not gill slits. They’re just plain lying!

Here’s a 2017 biology textbook using Haeckel’s fake drawings. There they are. Those are not pharyngeal gill slits. The reason this is important to evolutionists is because they want to say it’s not a human yet while it’s growing inside the mother. It goes through fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal stages. So, it’s still in the fish stage, it’s okay to kill it. This is how they justify abortion. They say it’s not a human yet. No, it’s a human the instant it’s conceived.

Here’s a 2020 textbook, Early Embryonic Development Shows Similarities. This is… I’m sorry, it’s propaganda, it’s not science. Haeckel’s drawings were proven wrong in 1874 and they’re still teaching it today. I’ve got all kinds of stuff on this. This goes into homology.

It’s important because they’re desperate. They’ve got to have some kind of evidence to say, “Wow, we evolved from an amoeba, boys and girls.” They want so badly defend this dumb theory that we’re all related, and it’s just not true. This is saying, “God is wrong. God said they’d always bring forth after their kind, but we know the Bible is wrong because we know things produce different kinds.” Really?

I challenge any evolutionists. I’ll tell you what, I’ll take on 20 at a time, 20 against Kent. You can host it on your channel! Here’s the rules: one topic at a time, no interrupting, equal time for both sides, not for each person, and they can choose who they want to answer. I want the evolutionists to give the best single evidence they’ve got for evolution. I then get equal time to refute it. Then they go onto their second-best evidence, and I’ll refute that one. I’ve had 351 debates with evolutionists at various universities. I’ll take them all on. I’m just a lowly high school science teacher with a non-accredited degree from a Christian school who happens to believe this book [the Bible] is true, and evolution is not only stupid, it’s dangerous. It’s not science.

We’ve never seen a cow produce a non-cow, ever! If they wish to believe that, believe whatever you want. Dogs make dogs without exceptions. There’s big dogs and little dogs, but they’re still dogs.

Nehemia: We are grateful to God for that, that dogs produce dogs. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I wish I knew more about this topic so I could have a more intelligent conversation with you. But I invite people to come and share their thoughts in the comments here. And like I said, if Kent has said something here that is demonstrably either untrue or true, I think, stitch it and share the information that you have because I don’t really know enough about this.

I just go back to this thought that I just don’t think Jews are concerned about this that much. And there’s a lot of Jews… here’s what I’ve heard from Jews. “If you want to believe the world is billions of years old, and that helps you in your faith, that’s fine. I choose to believe it’s 6,000 years old.” That’s the type of thing I’ll hear from a lot of Jews. “Okay, well how do you explain this scientific claim?” “I don’t know, I don’t care.”

Kent: Okay.

Nehemia: That’s the thing I’ll hear from a lot of them, and I think it’s fascinating that you’re actually wrestling with these issues. And whether you’re successfully resolving them or not, people can debate, but you are wrestling with these issues, and I think that’s really interesting. Any final words?

Kent: I’m trying to defend two things. I’m trying to defend the Bible; I believe it’s true. I’m also trying to defend science from a stupid religion being inserted in our science book. I love science. I taught science for 15 years. We have a science center here at Dinosaur Adventure Land in Lenox, Alabama. Come on down! Type in “Dinosaur Adventure Land”. We love science. I taught Earth science, biology, and physics for 15 years, and I love them. I taught algebra, geometry, and trigonometry also. So, I’m not against science, but evolution isn’t part of it, that’s all. And they’ve snuck it into our science books and called it science, but it’s not science. If you had a science book that was teaching the moon is made of green cheese, I would object to that too.

Nehemia: So, before we end, could you just spend a couple of minutes talking about the evolution of elements? How you get uranium in stars and stuff like that, because this isn’t just biological evolution that you’re challenging, you’re actually also challenging, meaning… Well, you explain it. I’m sure you can explain it better than I can.

Kent: Well, when someone says we’re going to discuss evolution, I say, well, let’s define the term. What do you mean by that word? Because there are six different meanings to the word evolution. There is cosmic evolution, the origin of time, space, and matter; that’s never been demonstrated. Then there is chemical evolution, which you’re talking about here now. How did all the elements come? Chemical evolution. According to their Big Bang Theory, the big bang produced hydrogen and helium, and maybe a little bit of lithium. How do you get all these other elements? Let’s see, the Big Bang produced hydrogen and helium. Okay, how do you get gold out of hydrogen gas? I’d like to know how to do that, I’m sure the Jews would like that too! How do you get gold out of hydrogen and helium?

Nehemia: That was an unnecessary comment…

Kent: I like money too, okay!

Nehemia: I’m really uncomfortable with that, Kent. I’m just going to have to say that.

Kent: Oh, okay. I’m sorry.

Nehemia: Really not a cool thing to say.

Kent: It’s just kind of a stereotype.

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s all the more reason not to say it. It kind of feels a bit anti-Semitic.

Kent: Alright, well I’m sorry. Retract that, okay?

Anyway, chemical evolution, the theory of life’s origins; this is a real thing. They teach the Big Bang produced hydrogen and helium. How do you get to iron if you can’t fuse past iron? They’ve known that for a long time. How do you get gold, silver, and platinum out of hydrogen gas? It can’t be done. The most massive stars, eight times the mass of the sun, have enough pressure to produce all the elements up to iron. They can believe that if they wish, and maybe that’s true.

Nehemia: Isn’t it supernovas? Isn’t that the explanation? How we get all that Jewish gold that you’re talking about.

Kent: Yeah, but still, that’s only up to iron on the chart.

Nehemia: No, no supernovas… is that not the explanation?

Kent: The supernova, they claim… it’s all theoretical.

Nehemia: When it explodes it creates the heavier elements is their explanation.

Kent: It only creates the elements up to iron, which is #26. There are 92 naturally occurring elements. How do you get past iron? This is a real problem.

Nehemia: I’ll be honest, I can’t get past the gold thing. So, I think it’s a perfect time to wrap it up. Thanks, Kent, for coming on the program.

Kent: Alright.

Nehemia: If you guys can send me the files, I’ll have my editor… Oh, send me the slides that you used if you don’t mind, and my editor will put them in posts, I guess. I don’t know. Alright, thanks a lot.

Kent: Come visit our Dinosaur Adventure Land in Lenox, Alabama. We’d love to have you down here. It’s all free.

Nehemia: Thank you for the invite, shalom.

Kent: Thank you, bye-bye.

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The post Hebrew Voices #184 – Creation vs. Evolution: Raw and Unedited appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1, Nehemia joins Cambridge University lecturer Dr. Benjamin Kantor to discuss using manuscript errors and transcriptions to reconstruct old Greek and Hebrew pronunciations. 

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1

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: So, this was like a profound realization I had in my undergrad at Hebrew University. We were learning Phoenician epigraphy; that was the name of the class, Introduction to Epigrafia Kna’anit or something like this, yeah, Canaanite.  And the professor said, “Here’s the Shin, and in this inscription is pronounced ‘th’, but here, from 200 years later, it was pronounced ‘sh’.” And somebody raised their hand and very innocently asked, “How do you know that?” And he didn’t have an answer.

…

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Benjamin Kantor, who is a post-doc researcher at University of Cambridge in Biblical Hebrew Philology, and he did his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you, Dr. Kantor, for being here with us.

Dr. Kantor: Yes. Thank you for having me.

Nehemia: Yeah. I saw you give a talk at the SBL a few years back, and I’m like, this is amazing stuff, what you’re doing. This is the kind of thing that I dreamed one day could be done, and essentially, you’re doing it. What I understood you to be doing is reconstructing the pronunciation of ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. And that’s amazing because, look, I deal with a lot of people who… and we’ll talk about the letter Vav, hopefully we’ll have time to. I love the letter Vav. But they’ll say, “You know, Nehemia, you pronounce Hebrew with Vav, and that’s because your ancestors came from Europe and you’re really just speaking Yiddish, because there is no Vav in ancient Hebrew,” meaning a “v” sound.

Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.

Nehemia: And I’m going to use these… I’m trying to use terms that everyone understands. We’ll talk later about bilabial stops and bilabial fricatives and labiodental fricatives, and you explain what that is. So, the “v” sound versus the “w” sound. And then you’ll get people who will say, “Well, you know, when we read Hebrew, we do the ancient Hebrew.” And then it’s just like a made-up thing.

And what I love about what you’re doing is, you’re actually finding evidence of how things were pronounced, and little clues. So, tell us a little bit about how that works. How can you know how an ancient language was spoken?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. It’s a great question. We have to start by asking what language we’re after first, right? Because there’s going to be different methodologies for different languages, right? Which makes sense, because not everything is the same type of language, same type of phonology, same type of script, same type of alphabet.

So, I’ll start with Greek because it’s probably a little bit easier to understand, and then I’ll move and talk about Hebrew, because it’s a bit more complicated.

So, with Greek and for those who know me, I just came out with a big book about how ancient Greek was pronounced.

Nehemia: Tell us about that. Because let’s assume nobody in this audience knows you.

Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.

Nehemia: Like, you taught your children to speak ancient Greek. Is that right?

Dr. Kantor: Well, my first-born son, yes. As he was growing up, one and two… He’s about to turn six now. Already from one year old I started speaking in ancient Greek with him and just…

Nehemia: Like, not Modern Greek, but actually Koine Greek.

Dr. Kantor: Koine Greek.

Nehemia: It’s amazing.

Dr. Kantor: He picked it up really quickly. And the thing is, it’s not so miraculous when you think of the fact that thousands and thousands used to do that in ancient times. It’s just that they need the input, and you have to just give them a lot.

Nehemia: But Koine Greek is a dead language now, right? I mean, no… I shouldn’t say nobody because obviously somebody… nobody speaks it as their native tongue. Look, so this is what Ben-Yehuda did, famously. He came to Israel, and he started speaking to his first son, Benzion, only in Hebrew. And then his daughter, who was born after that, only in Hebrew, and eventually they learned other languages too, because it wasn’t really sustainable. But their first language was really Hebrew, and they were the first children for over a thousand years. We’ll talk about how long. And you did that with Koine Greek. That’s absolutely amazing!

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. I mean, it’s not like my son only spoke Koine Greek.

Nehemia: No, so it wasn’t his first language. But still, to be able to speak it fluently… that’s astounding.

Dr. Kantor: Well, I wouldn’t say he could speak it fluently, but…

Nehemia: To be able to speak it at all is astounding.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, hespeaks some. And a lot of it came down to just having a lot of time with him. And you know, it’s not always possible to do this. But due to various circumstances in our life at the time, I was spending a lot of time with him every day, which is more than I might have gotten to otherwise. It was really a very nice thing. And so, I just said, “I’m going to go,” and I probably, for a stretch of months, did probably roughly 50% in Greek with him every day, or at least tried to get around that number. And I don’t do it as much anymore, so it’s not as common. But at that time, I did a lot, so he could pick it up quick and understand. And he understood quite a bit, so there was probably a time where we could do our basic daily life interactions with a two-year-old in Greek. It was really fun.

So, for those who don’t know, I just came out with a book about how Koine Greek was pronounced in Judea, Palestine specifically, from probably about Alexander’s conquest and the spread of Hellenism, and then all the way until the end of the Byzantine period and the advent of Islam in the area. So, almost like a thousand-year period.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. So, somewhere around 332 BCE, give or take, all the way up until 638, give or take as well.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah. Right, right.

Nehemia: Okay. That’s incredible.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. So, for that, what I did… and this wasn’t a methodology that originated with me, but I just used it for this region; there’s two main things that I did. One was look at every inscription and ancient papyrus parchment I could find that was provenant to the area, had some kind of archaeological context and whatnot. So, things from the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Greek, many inscriptions from Jerusalem, Caesarea, and you basically document the spelling of every single word. And then you see what the most common spelling, the “normal standard spelling” is of a word, and then you look at every place where somebody “misspells a word”. And then you document all of those, determine the proportions, statistics over time and century…

And so, basically, we’re looking at… if you were a scholar, say, a thousand years from now, looking back on today, and you found a collection of children learning to write, right? Because literacy is much higher today, so obviously what many people are doing as scribes back then is something a lot of our children do at a much younger age. And so, if you saw children learning to read and write and you just allowed them a bit of freedom, they might spell a word like “tough” as “T-U-F-F” or they might spell a word like “love” as “L-U-V”. And so, you look at that, and if you gather up enough of those spelling interchanges, you can say, “Okay, he’s spelling it T-U-F-F, so, that must mean in this context, that F-F has the same sound as G-H, and then in this context O-U has the same sound as U.” And so, you gather up enough of these spelling interchanges, or “spelling mistakes” if we’re going to be non-scholarly about it, and…

Nehemia: And you say that because maybe they’re not mistakes, right?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah.

Nehemia: There may not have been a standardized spelling for certain things.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the things that we, as moderns, can overlook, is just how much the printing press invention in the 15th century has affected the way we think about language and writing. Because that finally gives a lot more room for standardization when you can just print things out and get them out.

But before, when everything’s copied by hand, that meant everyone who’s writing, copying things, learned how to write in a certain school or from a certain teacher, and they might have different sorts of conventions. And so, in the ancient times, even though there were standards for spelling and common scribal practices and things that we can see that scribes saw, “Oh, this is a popular convention that I should start doing now, because these others are doing it,” not everyone did it the same way. And so, what might have been just a convention to convey a certain sound, we might call it a mistake. We compare it with what’s in the dictionary. But what’s in the dictionary itself is standardizing a certain form of scribal education, in the case of Greek.

So, with Greek, that’s what I did; document all those times where you have spelling interchanges. And that works really well for Greek because you have vowels, right? Because consonants, you don’t get consonant interchanges very much because, when consonants change, if a sound like tuh becomes thuh, if you don’t have another sound in the language that sounds like thuh, it might just still be represented 99.9% of the time with the same letter. And that’s what we find in Greek is, the consonant interchanges are very, very rare. You have to read hundreds and hundreds of texts to find one, maybe, of a particular one you’re looking for.

There’s a change that I know happened in Greek, but looking through, I think my database covers like 50,000 words, there’s probably less than ten words that actually show an interchange with this consonant. So, consonants are a lot harder to find. But vowels, you’ll find those interchanges everywhere. Sometimes where, of all the words that have a particular vowel in it, some might have variation 40% of the time in a particular period if the sound has changed and scribal conventions have changed just so.

Nehemia: Would you say vowels are also more flexible within languages? I think of the example of English. English has obviously the United Kingdom, and you’re from the US like me and we pronounce vowels quite differently, very differently, in between the US and the UK. And then go to Australia and forget it, right? Whereas with the consonants there’s a lot fewer differences. Would you say that was true of ancient Greek to some extent?

Dr. Kantor: In terms of regional accents? Well, I think a lot of it does come down to just what comes through in the writing. There could have been a good deal of variation in consonants. Like, there’s evidence that in Egypt people would pronounce… they weren’t as good at differentiating between things like duh and tuh due to Coptic influence. I mean, it comes through in the writing sometimes, but it doesn’t always. Whereas vowels, because vowels are all contained in one space, and if one moves from one to another area, like if E is instead pronounced as “ih”, it starts to sound a bit more like “eh”. And so, whenever a vowel changes, it almost always starts to sound like another vowel, or be in between. And so, it’s harder to know how to represent it.

Nehemia: I see.

Dr. Kantor: Whereas consonants don’t do that as much. There are some that kind of encroach on each other, but with writing systems a consonant can change, and whatever letter was used to represent it before is probably still the best one to do so.

Nehemia: So, this was a profound realization I had in my undergrad at Hebrew University. We were learning Phoenician epigraphy; that was the name of the class, Introduction to Epigrafia Kna’anit or something like this, yeah, Canaanite. And the professor said, “Here’s the Shin, and in this inscription is pronounced ‘th’, but here, from 200 years later, it was pronounced ‘sh’.” And somebody raised their hand and very innocently asked, “How do you know that?” And he didn’t have an answer. And I’m like, “You’re right, it’s the same symbol. How do we know it was pronounced ‘thuh’?” Let’s say at some hypothetical point it might have been pronounced ‘thuh’, because you have in Arabic the ‘tha’, but how do we know in these two Phoenician inscriptions that it was? Or Canaanite inscriptions…

So, that’s interesting, what you’re saying, that the symbol remains the same, but its realization, its pronunciation, may differ over time. Wow.

Dr. Kantor: Oftentimes. Yeah. I mean, that’s generally what happens with consonants. And then every once in a while, you get somebody who’s maybe not as well trained to know the standard spelling and they might substitute… Like the sort of things you’ll get is when “duh” becomes “vvv”, then you might get a “Z” symbol to represent it, because then it’s in between.

Nehemia: Because “Z” is similar. Okay.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. So, you do get that occasionally, but it’s not as common; vowels are much more common. So, that’s kind of how it works with Greek is, you document all those times where you have spelling “mistakes” and make a statistical analysis.

And then the other thing you can do… So, that’s something, I mean… when you talk about reconstructing ancient Hebrew pronunciation, you can do that same thing, but because of what I just said, the consonants giving you far less data than the vowels, that method doesn’t yield as much fruit for Hebrew. It does sometimes. Like, there are things you can look at, like you talked about the Vav. Once you start to see Bet and Vav interchanging, then you can conclude, “Okay. This means that the Vav was probably no longer pronounced as ‘wuh’, and now it’s pronounced as ‘vuh’.” And that happens quite early. And so…

Nehemia: Well, let’s save it for later.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, we’ll come back to that later because I know you like the topic. But that’s one. Another one might be if you get Tav interchanging with something like Samekh. Maybe that would happen for a ‘thuh’ sound. So, you do get those occasionally. And then the use of Vav and Yud for matres lectionis can also indicate something.

So, that does work for Hebrew, that same kind of spelling mistakes, or spelling interchange method, but it doesn’t yield as much fruit. What we have with Hebrew, which is also something we have with Greek, is looking at how Hebrew words are written in another languages’ scripts.

So, like when Greek letters are used to transcribe Hebrew, or Latin letters are used to transcribe Hebrew, and we actually have thousands of words like this, maybe 2,000 or 2,500 words in the two main corpora of this in ancient times, mainly, the second column of Origen’s Hexapla, which was like the first parallel Bible in the world…

Nehemia: We’ll come back, and you’ll explain what Hexapla is.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. But one of the columns in this parallel Bible from the 3rd century is the Hebrew Bible written in Greek letters instead of Hebrew. And originally this was the whole Bible, but now we’ve only got about 1,500 words from it. And then Jerome, within a couple of centuries after that, in his commentaries… he learned Hebrew, and in his commentaries, he’ll often quote something from the Hebrew Bible but write it out in Latin letters. And so, a lot of what I work on is analyzing when Hebrew is written in Greek. Which is one of the reasons I did my pronunciation work, to know how Greek was pronounced, so, we’re not just in a circular system, right?

Nehemia: Right. This is aproblem that I’ve seen in a lot of, let’s say in the popular realm, which trickles down from the scholarly realm, is they’ll say, “Well, this is what it was in ancient Egyptian.” As if we know how ancient Egyptian was pronounced down to the vowels. And actually, the vowels in ancient Egyptian are a huge problem. It’s beyond the scope of this program. Or they’ll talk about, “Well, we see this in the Akkadian inscriptions.” Well, how do we know how to pronounce Akkadian? That’s a whole realm, and it’s not that simple.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Can I just say something on that? Because that brings up a fun memory. One of my professors during my PhD studies was talking about… she was a brilliant professor. She is an epigrapher, and she had been meeting with some Indo-European historical linguists and they were talking about pronunciation. Because often, dealing with things like Phoenician, Punic and ancient Semitic languages, you often deal with these transcriptions and going back and forth between pronunciations.

She’s like, “So, I always wonder, we often go from taking assumptions about pronunciation of Indo-European languages that are transcribing our languages. And so, how do you guys know how?” And they’re like, “Well, we get it from you!” It’s just like realizing that, at the end of the day, I think with historical phonology, and this is my main field, we have to admit a lot of what we’re doing is kind of circular. But we just keep going around in the circle and rechecking everything and making sure that it all makes sense. Because sometimes that’s all you can do. Sometimes with ancient studies the best you can do is operate with an assumption and then see if it works with everything, and then when you come back around you might have to refine it a bit and go again and again.

So, I think that to a degree it always is going to be like that. But, when everything does work quite nicely together, there’s a high probability that it is the way it was.

Nehemia: Well, like an example of Egyptian, we’re essentially relying on Coptic, and that’s a living linguistic tradition. There are still people who recite the prayers in Coptic, or in the 19th century, when it was documented, for sure there were. And so, if something had changed in Coptic, we might know about it. And I’ve seen examples where they can understand where things have changed, or maybe we don’t know. Like, people will say to me, again with the Vav, and they’re so confident. And I’ll say, “Well, how do you know how the Mem is pronounced?”

I mean, if you look at every Jewish community around the world, they all pronounce it something like muh. Unless there’s some I don’t know about. And then with the Vav, we have variation; that we’ll talk about. So, that’s fascinating what you’re saying. So, with the Hebrew, you said you’re looking at Greek, and so, you did the Greek to get to the Hebrew. I love that. That’s amazing.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. I mean, it is really funny, right? My giant, almost 900-page book, it’s titled The Pronunciation of New Testament Greek, because I focus on 1st century and Roman period. And then subtitled Judeo-Palestinian Greek Phonology and Orthography from Alexander to Islam because that was really the full corpus of it.

But yeah, a lot of what the beginning of that was actually doing research on the Greek of Judeo-Palestine for my work on ancient Hebrew phonology. Because a lot of what was done on it before just took it for granted that ancient Greek phonology is all the same everywhere. I mean, people wouldn’t have said that, but you’re dealing with a very specific context. And then people would quote Allen’s Vox Graeca, the general ancient classical Greek phonology work. And it’s like, “Well, we really do need something specific to the time and region.”

Nehemia: Right.

Dr. Kantor: And so, that was kind of the start of that. So, you look at, then, Hebrew transcribed into Greek. And so, something like shalom, you know, is Sigma-Alpha-Lambda-Omega-Mi. And you look at enough of those, compare it to how Greek was pronounced contemporaneously, and then reconstruct what that meant for Hebrew pronunciation. But again, that’s just one ancient tradition of Hebrew.

Nehemia: And so, there you just brought an example where there’s a limitation, which is that Greek, as far as I understand, didn’t have a “shuh” sound. Right? So, we can’t assume that… you know, in the Tanakh we have the switch between… some Israelites pronounced it shibbolet, we’re told, and some pronounced it sibbolet. And we can’t assume that in the 1st century in Israel they pronounced it “suh”, just because it’s transcribed as Sigma. And I apologize for my Greek pronunciation. That’s what I learned at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. So, it works partly and partly it doesn’t work, right? Meaning, you have some kind of an “O” sound, clearly, I think you said… Did you say Omega or…

Dr. Kantor: Omega.

Nehemia: Omega. Okay, so, you’ve got an “O” sound there, but the “shuh” and suh… something is literally lost in transcription in this case, right?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. And it’s an interesting one because we know that different Hebrew speaking communities pronounced that consonant differently at some point. So, you mentioned the shibbolet thing. And even late in the Second Temple period one of the defining linguistic traits that differs the Samaritan tradition from others is that Samaritan will pronounce the Sin as a “shuh”, so…

Nehemia: Whether it’s Shin or Sin, in Jewish Hebrew, you’re saying they pronounce it “shuh”.

Dr. Kantor: Right. So, if you have a word like ya’aseh, “will do,” in Samaritan, it’s yeishi, with a “shuh” sound, and things like that. That was the original sound, which was probably something like sthuh, became a merged “suh” in Jewish Hebrew and “shuh” in Samaritan Hebrew. And so, there are different things like this where, even in ancient times already you have different dialects, different traditions of Hebrew with different pronunciations. And we don’t have access to all of them, but some of them we can trace.

Nehemia: In the case of Samaritan Hebrew, we essentially have access to modern Samaritans, who people have studied and recorded for decades. So, we don’t know if 2,000 years ago in Shchem… or do we know? That’s actually a better question. Do we know if 2,000 years ago in Shchem, Samaritans, or what later became Samaritans, distinguished between “shuh” and “suh”? One of the examples that I asked a Samaritan about is, so, we have Bilaam Ben Be’or (Balaam), who’s called Shtum Ha’ayin, which means, “the open eye”. But if all “shuh” and “suh” are the same, it could be Stum Ha’ayim, which means the shut eye. And maybe there’s even an intended pun there in the Bible, in the Torah, in Numbers. So, do we know if 2,000 years… do we have any evidence one way or the other if 2,000 years ago… Maybe not Samaritans per se, but if there were differences like that, let’s say in the Hebrew of Samaritans or Jews in 1st century in Israel?

Dr. Kantor: So, I think we can be pretty confident that there are differences, partly because there are some ancient traditions that record differences. And the ones I’m thinking about in particular are often between the colloquial language and the biblical register.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr. Kantor: Like, take for example, the name Rivka,Rebecca in English. We get Rebecca from the Septuagint, which has it as Rho-Epsilon-Beta-Epsilon-Kappa-Kappa-Alpha, where it’s literally “reh-beh-kka”. Whereas in Hebrew it’s just two syllables: Riv-ka. Now, I think that was probably actually a particular biblical tradition that did that to very orthoepically preserve orthodoxy.

Nehemia: Explain “orthoepically.”

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: If you just did an interview with Jeffrey, I’m sure he probably used that word.

Yeah, but people might be watching it in a different month or…

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, and so…

Nehemia: He absolutely talks about orthographically and empathetically…

Dr. Kantor: And so, orthoepic… “orthoepy” basically just means that readers of a biblical tradition, of a textual tradition, will do extra careful things while reading to make sure the reading is preserved right, and so that words don’t run together, that consonants are pronounced clearly, that vowels are pronounced clearly, and things like that.

Nehemia: And so, it’s like my grandmother, who was an immigrant from Eastern Europe, used to say to me, “Nehemia’le, enunciate! Enunciate!” Because that’s how she learned English. Her English was not great when she first arrived in the US. And so, she was always told, “enunciate”. So, is that what orthoepic is? That you’re almost exaggerating the features in order to preserve the pronunciation?

Dr. Kantor: Yes, yes, exactly, right. So, you might have things like… like in Tiberian Hebrew, you have a word like “mikdosh” for temple or sanctuary, and sometimes you get the Kuf geminated to really separate it clearly. So, like mi’q’dosh. And so, I think that’s kind of what was happening with Rebecca. It was Rivka or Riv’qa, but “Riv’q’a” to really make it clear. So, you get that in the Greek. I think that’s maybe what’s behind the Septuagint. I could be wrong, but I think that’s maybe what’s going on.

But we have, actually really interestingly, on the west coast of ancient Israel, if I’m remembering right, in the first few centuries of the Common Era, two inscriptions from the same family context. One seems to be done by a professional scribe, and it has that “Reve’ka”, and then one seems to be done by a less professional scribe, perhaps just someone the family knew, and there it’s just Rho-Epsilon-Beta-Kappa-Alpha for Rev’ka. And so, to me that shows, “Okay, there are maybe multiple pronunciations going on, maybe one more colloquial, one more for biblical register.”

We have something similar in Jerome, where, when he’s transcribing the Bible, a place where etymologically, historically, you would have had a “double-R” in something like Merrehem. He just writes a single-R, and that’s this compensatory lengthening where, instead of saying a consonant twice, you get a long vowel or something, which we see in the Hebrew traditions of the Middle Ages. But then when he’s writing/transcribing Hebrew in another non-biblical context, there you do find the double-R in barrama.

Nehemia: So, that’s a really cool thing, the double-R, or double-Resh, essentially. So, this is something… there’s… You know, Nehemya Aloni published… I’m sure you know about this, this grammar by… I think it was named Eli Ben-Yehuda HaNazir.

Dr. Kantor: Oh, yeah, yeah, yes.

Nehemia: And he says, “I sat in the squares of Tiberius to listen to the speech of the common people,” and the specific issue he was going there to… he had written this grammar based on the Hebrew of the Bible. I’m not sure what that means at this point anymore, but what he thought was the Hebrew of biblical times, and he says, “There’s this one rule. I’m not sure if it’s correct, that there’s a Resh with a dagesh…” Which you don’t have graphically in the Aleppo Codex, for example, but in his grammar that existed.

So, he went to hear; do people actually speak that way? And he determined, yeah, they actually do. And you’re saying that’s in an inscription from hundreds of years later. He’s the 9th century, I believe, or maybe 10th century, and you’re saying hundreds of years earlier we have an inscription that reflects that… not inscription. We have Jerome. Wow!

Dr. Kantor: Jerome’s… It’s actually… I can’t remember. I think he attributes it to… it’s not exactly the New Testament, because he calls it the Gospel of the Hebrews, and it’s in the Hebrew rendering of… I can’t remember if this is the quotation of Psalm 118 or the context of Jesus coming into Jerusalem, but it’s the phrase, “In the highest,” and it’s barrama in this Gospel of the Hebrews, according to Jerome. I mean, people can check me on that. I think that’s what the source is.

Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay. Wow.

Dr. Kantor:  I mean, I’ve written about this somewhere in one of my things, so, it’s written somewhere…

Nehemia: Don’t you love it when you meet a scholar, and they’re like, you wrote on page 32 five years ago… I don’t remember. First of all, I wrote that ten years ago, and I only got published five years ago. I don’t remember.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Yes. It’s probably in something I wrote about performance and recitation of Hebrew in ancient times.

Nehemia: We’ll find the link and we’ll put it up on nehemiaswall.com.

Dr. Kantor: So, yeah, there’s evidence like that for different pronunciation traditions, and things like that continue even into modern traditions. Like, there are many communities where you’ll find the biblical tradition can only have a single Resh, whereas the Mishnaic tradition, which I think probably reflects something closer to spoken, could have the doubled Resh and so forth.

Nehemia: Spoken, like, in what period are we talking about?

Dr. Kantor: Like ancient times. So, talking about the Roman period, the Tannaitic period, where you’d have a spoken element of Hebrew, and I think Mishnaic Hebrew phonology often shows more semblance with that, and the biblical tradition has a more conservative…

Nehemia: So, for the audience, tell us what that means, Mishnaic Hebrew.

Dr. Kantor: Oh yes, right.

Nehemia: Assume they don’t know what the Mishnah is… and what does Mishnaic Hebrew have that’s different for Biblical Hebrew? Was it a living language? Or was this an artificial scholarly language in the time of Mishnaic Hebrew?

Dr. Kantor: Right. So, Mishnaic Hebrew would, in the way I’m using it, go back to the Tannaitic period we’re talking about, the first two centuries of the Common Era. It’s the language of what would become the Mishnah, a very foundational document in Judaism. But in terms of the periods, it’s later than Biblical Hebrew, and there are a lot of different opinions about how Mishnaic Hebrew originated. Some people consider it a continuation of just a different dialect because it looks different than the Bible. The verbal tense system looks different. The vocabulary is a bit different. The grammar is different. And so, some would say it’s a continuation of separate dialect.

Others would say it’s sort of the product of imperfect learning of Hebrew by people who were more Aramaic speakers. Others would say it’s a continuing development of Hebrew past, the later stages of Biblical Hebrew. I mean, there’s a bunch of different theories around for what it is, but I think in one way or another, Mishnaic Hebrew, even though it is literature and a literary language and how it’s appeared in the Mishnah, I think it flows more out of the spoken language at the time of the first couple centuries of the Common Era than Biblical Hebrew would.

So, that’s why, if I see something that’s present in Mishnaic Hebrew, but not in Biblical Hebrew, I might be more prone to think it reflects something of the spoken language.

Nehemia: So, let me see if I understood… so… or, what’s your position on it? I guess that’s the better question. In other words, you’re saying one possibility is, in the time of Jeremiah there were people who spoke an earlier form, proto-Mishnaic Hebrew. And the second possibility is, no, it was a development out of Biblical Hebrew; you go several centuries, and you end up with Mishnaic Hebrew. Is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Kantor: So, yeah. Personally, I would take a very diplomatic view that would say there’s some element of all three of those theories. There are some who very much more strongly say it’s just a continuation of a different dialect that existed as early as Jeremiah. I think that’s going too far because I don’t know if there’s a lot of evidence for that. But we do know that there’s a lot of Hebrew that continued that we don’t have recorded in the Bible, obviously, because the Bible is a very limited corpus. So, it’s a continuation of some dialect of Hebrew that’s, to some degree or another, related to Biblical Hebrew, but not necessarily the same thing. But also, just development of language change. Obviously, Aramaic contact, people coming back from exile and…

Nehemia: And a whole bunch of Greek, too…

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, and then Greek. Probably plenty of Greek loanwords in there and all of that. So, I think it’s a combination of several factors. It is a continuation of the diachronic development of Hebrew. So, you could see it as… you look at late biblical Hebrew books and you see more parallels with Mishnaic Hebrew.

Nehemia: Diachronic; that means how it changes over time.

Dr. Kantor: Oh, I used that word. Yeah, thank you.

Nehemia: No, no. You’re good.

Dr. Kantor: Thank you.

Nehemia: One of my jobs is to try to translate for the audience. Look, frankly, one of my jobs is to pretend to be an idiot and ask questions I know the answer to. And look, I might have a different understanding of what the answer is, but my audience has heard me. I want them to hear you.

Dr. Kantor: No, it’s very good. Yeah, of course, of course. So, yeah, I think natural development of Hebrew over time, because late biblical Hebrew does seem similar to Mishnaic Hebrew in some ways, but also, contact with Aramaic and all of that. So, I would say elements of all of that come into play with… I mean, it’s something that’s going to be further debated and further refined and all of that. I think Nili Samet is working on commentary on Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, where she’ll deal with some of these issues. So, yeah.

Nehemia: So, she’s going to tie that, you think, somehow to… we haven’t read her commentary yet, but presumably she’s going to tie it to something in proto-Mishnaic Hebrew or something like that.

Dr. Kantor: Well, she was here, actually… was it earlier this year or last year? And she gave a talk about some of the lexical different vocabulary items that she was mapping out in terms of the history of Hebrew and how it relates to things. And so, it seemed quite interesting. So, I think she might have some good advances in this discussion to look out for. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Cool, cool. The example that comes to mind for me is the sheh instead of asher, which you have in Kohelet. All right, wow. So, we talked about the Shin, by the way, and something that came to mind for me just now is, in proto-Ashkenazic… that’s the time I prefer, the Ashkenazic Hebrew before the 14th century, there was no distinguishing Shin and Sin, to the point where I look at the Bible manuscripts and they just left out the diacritical mark, because…

And then there are what we call Masoretic lists, where they’re like, “These are the words written with a Shin, and these are the words with the with the Sin,” which was entirely hypothetical for them because they didn’t have a way of distinguishing the pronunciation. So, they needed a list to tell them, “In case you want to know, this word isn’t related to that other word.” That’s a Sin, like shtoom and stum, right? So, that’s interesting. So, let’s get to the Vav.

Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.

Nehemia: So, how do we know that… I mean, it’s an axiom of biblical Hebrew linguistics, let’s say mainstream biblical Hebrew linguistics, that the original pronunciation of Vav was, and I’m going to use your term here, and let’s see if I can get it right. I made myself a little cheat sheet here…

Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure, sure.

Nehemia: It was a “labial velar approximant.” Maybe it was “wuh”. Like water in English. Maybe not exactly, but something like that. So, how do we know that?

Dr. Kantor: Well…

Nehemia: Do we know that?

Dr. Kantor: So, there would be two ways of getting at this question. One is what I already mentioned about the transcriptions, and you look at how things are transcribed and try to reconstruct based on that. The other would be cognate evidence. So, I’ll answer first from the cognate evidence…

Nehemia: Tell us what cognate means.

Dr. Kantor: Oh yeah. So, cognate is where you have languages that are related; if a word might sound the same in multiple languages, or similar enough where you can kind of assume there’s some sort of relationship. So, like if you think of Greek and Latin, for example, have many shared words. English, French and German, all sorts of things like that.

So, when you look at the Semitic languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, things like that, there is no “vuh” reconstructed for Proto-Semitic. All the languages that we can trace would attest to, at least at their earlier stages, having…

Nehemia: What is Proto-Semitic?

Dr. Kantor: Right. So, Proto-Semitic would be like a grandfather or grandmother of all the Semitic languages. And in linguistics, historical linguistics, everyone who does this is aware that it’s not going to work perfectly like this, but a “proto language” is something that you hypothesize as sort of the parent language from which all the daughter languages come. And so, at least theoretically, you should be able to see what happened, see what the proto language was like, and map out changes to explain how all the other languages have their different sounds, or words, or things like that.

Nehemia: So, in English we have Proto-Germanic. So, both English and German go back… and Dutch, all those go back to Proto-Germanic, but then Proto-Germanic goes back to Proto-Indo-European. So, that’s the thing you’re talking about, right?

Dr. Kantor: So, things like things that, where you eventually have a proto language, and you can have proto languages for each sub-branch of it. So, you can have Proto-Semitic, and then from that you would have two main branches where you’d have Akkadian on one side and the other things like Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Ugaritic on the other side. But even within those, then you could talk about proto-Arabic, and then beneath that are all the Arabic dialects. And you could have proto-Hebrew, and within that are the Hebrew traditions, like Samaritan, and…

Nehemia: And so, you’re saying when we look at all of the Semitic languages, the assumption is, when you go back far enough, there’s a “wuh”, not a “vuh”.

Dr. Kantor: Right. So, like if you look at Arabic, Arabic has a “wuh”. If you look at Akkadian, the evidence is that it was a “wuh”, even though that’s fallen out…

Nehemia: Wait, tell me that. I don’t know that story. It’s fallen out in Akkadian studies.

Dr. Kantor: In Akkadian…

Nehemia: Oh, it’s dropped the “wuh”.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Like the “wuh” is not always present where you might expect it historically. It hasn’t dropped out entirely. You still have it in words, like for example, like the conjunction… because I was thinking of the conjunction wa, like in Arabic you have wa, whereas in Akkadian that’s just oo.

Nehemia: So, in other words, “wa” means “and”.

Dr. Kantor: Yes.

Nehemia: In Akkadian, the word for “and” is oo.

Dr. Kantor: One of the words for “and” is oo. But you do get it in other places. Like you have war’dum, or washbaq, whichmeans “I live here”, “I reside here”. So, you do have wa in Akkadian. But I was thinking of the conjunction Vav, which is why I said that, because the parallel to Vav, “veh…”

Nehemia: So, in other cases, it hasn’t fallen out. It’s still…

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, in other cases, you still have it.

Nehemia: In Akkadian, how do we know how to pronounce… and we’re not going to go down this path, but how confident are we in how to pronounce Akkadian? Meaning, how do we know how to… don’t we know how to pronounce Akkadian because they basically have their version of the Rosetta Stone? What is it? The Behistun inscription. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that. And so, they’re basing that on Farsi, which then goes… anyway… So, yeah.

Dr. Kantor: I’m not an expert in the Akkadian historical phonology so I won’t say what all is available for there. There would be better people to ask than me for that. But I can say we do have… I mean, just like the same methods I mentioned for Greek and Hebrew, we do have scribal interchanges over time, because Akkadian is one of those things people forget is attested with an enormous amount of material in the ancient period, like…

Nehemia: Millions of documents which haven’t even been translated.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Sitting in tablets and museums and places and all that. So, there’s a lot of material to see scribal interchanges and scribal changes over time. And then, when we get late enough, this is something I worked a bit on, is we do have Greek transcription of Akkadian, but this is much later. So, it can be a bit more difficult.

Nehemia: How much later?

Dr. Kantor: So, like around the turn of the Common Era. So, like maybe Hellenistic period time.

Nehemia: So, 1st century BC, 1st century CE.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Around there, give or take, two or three centuries in either direction. Yeah. So, we do have things there, and we do know that there do come to be certain interchanges over time particularly with the sign for “wuh”, the sign for “muh”.

Nehemia: So, we have an example like that in Biblical Hebrew versus Aramaic, or even later Hebrew. We have argaman, in Aramaic that’s arga…

Dr. Kantor: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: Argawan or argavan. You tell me, is it argavan or argawan?

Dr. Kantor: It depends on the period. So, we got on the cognate…

Nehemia: That’s a color, so… what color that is exactly? Uh, I’m slightly colorblind so, yeah. Crimson something.

Dr. Kantor: But all that was just to give the background to say that, for those working on historical phonology in each of their languages, Akkadian, Arabic, all of that, it makes the most sense because all those languages have “wah”, that Proto-Semitic certainly had a “wah”. And so, we would expect if at some point Hebrew does have a “vuh”, which we know obviously it does, because there’s plenty of pronunciation traditions that have that, then at some point, between Proto-Semitic and Hebrew, “wuh” changed to “vuh”. I mean, that is pretty well established. The question when, exactly, that happened is a more difficult thing. Somebody could argue it happened earlier or later, but so, that cognate evidence is the basic thing.

Then the other side would be, okay, the earliest transcription… like, the earliest tradition we have of any biblical Hebrew reading tradition, like, documented as a pronunciation… I’m not talking about the Hebrew text itself, because that doesn’t have vowels so we can’t use that as a continuous documentation. You can use where they write the vowel letters sometimes to say, “Okay, here’s a word here or there,” but in terms of continuous, the earliest thing we have is those Greek transcriptions that I worked on. There’s nothing before that that’s a continuous transcription of a reading tradition giving you the vowels.

Nehemia: What do you mean by continuous?

Dr. Kantor: So, you could say the Dead Sea Scrolls are a few centuries earlier, but with them, the information you’re going to get about pronunciation is only going to be occasional because the consonantal text, if you just have Dalet-Bet-Reish, that’s not going to tell you much about how it was pronounced.

Nehemia: So, it’s like what we talked about before, is the Shin “thuh” or is the Shin “shuh”? Well, we need another language or some kind of statement, maybe in Hebrew, that could happen as well. Like when Sa’adiya Ga’on makes the statement that all of the Hebrew letters have the same pronunciation except for these, and he doesn’t mention Vav as one of those. It’s clear Sa’adya pronounced it as “wuh”. It doesn’t mean all the Jews at that time did; obviously they didn’t, as we’ll get to. Unless he pronounced Arabic with a “vuh,”. This is… you know, it’s mind boggling!

You talked about the circle, right? That’s based on my assumptions about Arabic. That’s interesting. All right, so…

Dr. Kantor: So, yes, that continuous question, meaning just that there will be occasional spelling interchanges, but you can’t just read word by word and see how it’s pronounced.  

Nehemia: Oh, I see what you’re saying.

Dr. Kantor: Whereas the Secunda, the Greek transcriptions of Hebrew, it is just continuous. Like if you found Genesis 1:1, you’d be able to read, “Breishith bara,” you know, it continuously… and you wouldn’t have to just look for spelling interchanges because every word is written out with Greek, with the vowels, the Greek consonants. So, even if the information it’s giving you isn’t complete in terms of,
“Is the Sigma representing this or that,” because Sigma can represent a number of letters. It’s at least there, it’s giving you something.

And so, that’s the earliest record we have. And there, when they transcribe Vav, they do it in two different ways. One, at the beginning of a word, like when it’s the conjunction Vav, “and” it’s just Omicron-Epsilon. That’s in Greek at the time, contemporary Greek, this is the OO sound. So, if you’re using a vowel sound to represent a consonant, chances are it’s probably going to be a semivowel like “wuh” or “yuh”.  Because Yud, “yuh,” is transcribed with just an “ee” sound, and so, “wuh”, especially at the beginning of a word, “oo” or “wou” would be transcribed that way.

If it was “vuh” then you might make use of Greek Veta, which had shifted from “buh” to “vuh”, using both lips, like a Spanish “vuh” sound. And then we also see in the middle of words… Now, I wouldn’t totally deny the possibility that the other method could also transcribe a “vuh” sound. The other method is, after the vowels Alpha or Epsilon, which are like A or E, then you just get the Epsilon. Now, historically in Greek that was an “auo” or “euo” sound, but around this time, it came to be pronounced as “av” or “ev”. And so, you could argue that after a vowel like “ah” or “eh”, it had shifted to “vuh”.

However, it seems to be just a scribal convention, because of those historical diphthongs, Alpha, Ipsilon, Epsilon, Ipsilon which are associated with these “auo”/ “euo” sounds. Because that’s how you get it when it transcribes Arabic or Akkadian too, when we have those diphthongs. And we know that shift to “vuh” didn’t happen there.

But there is one word: it’s the word gewatto or gewatho, for “his pride”. And there, it’s a different form than the biblical form, which would be, ge’evato or ga’avato. There it has the “eh” vowel instead. It’s a long “ehh” with an Eta, andthere, because you don’t have the scribal convention, because Eta–Ipsilon wasn’t the same diphthong status as the other ones, which were short diphthongs typically. There you go back to the Omicron-Ipsilon to transcribe the Vav sound. So, literally it comes out as “geh-wa-tho”, “ge-yu-wa-tho”. And so, I think all that together suggests that, in the Greek transcriptions of Hebrew from the Roman period, that tradition is pronouncing it as “wuh”.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow, that’s fascinating. All right. Let’s shift for a minute, and we’ll come back to this. And tell the audience what the Hexapla is. Let’s even start… what’s the Septuagint? You mentioned that a few times. The LXX. And then, how do we get the Hexapla out of the Septuagint?

Dr. Kantor: Right. So, there are many scholars who would then say that that question requires a seminar and a multi-lecture series…

Nehemia: So, we have the expression in Hebrew, “standing on one leg”.

Dr. Kantor: Yes, yes. Sort of as a legend, first, the Septuagint is what’s considered 70… it means 70, septuaginta, you have domekonda in Greek means “the seventy”, because there’s a legend that 70 translators were gathered in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE and translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.

Now, there was probably something that happened in Alexandria involving whether the Jewish community there or Jews coming in from Judeo-Palestine or some combination of that, and translation work that began there and then continued on for the next several centuries to complete the whole Bible, and then further revisions after that. But in short, it goes back to, at least at its beginning, probably Alexandria in Egypt, and Jews translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.

Nehemia: But the short answer is, it’s the ancient Greek translation of the Torah, and then eventually the Tanakh.

Dr. Kantor: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: Plus a few other things thrown in there. Okay. And then, how do we get from that, the original Septuagint, let’s call it the “proto-Septuagint”, because we don’t have that. Am I right?

Dr. Kantor: Well, we have reconstructions of, you know…

Nehemia: I mean, what we have are 3rd century manuscripts like Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, but we don’t have the one from 250 BC or 100 BCE. Maybe fragments of it, so…

Dr. Kantor: Works of, you know, just like the textual, critical endeavor of trying to get back to the earliest retrievable text possible for the Septuagint, as what people would call the old Greek. But then later versions of it are… yeah, that’s mostly what we have in manuscripts.

Nehemia: And then, what’s the Hexapla?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. It’s interesting, because I think as time has gone on, you know, Origen deserves less and less credit for it. So, Origen, he’s a Church Father. Now, he, of course, was in charge of the whole project, but I think what the final product was… So, this was a work that went on in Caesarea Maritima, on the west coast of ancient Israel, in the middle of the 3rd century. Origin began this work; he was the head of a project that said… There’s scholarly debate about why exactly he did it, but probably one of the reasons was to get a firm, established Septuagint text, because there were different versions out there, and comparing it with the Hebrew to see how it differed with the Hebrew and be able to mark up where a text might be different among different communities. Or it differed from the Hebrew, and so people could know what was going on, basically, when you compare the Greek and Hebrew Bibles and different versions of the Greek text. So, what he did…

Nehemia: And this is the 3rd century CE, right?  

Dr. Kantor: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, would you say that by the 3rd century, the Greek Septuagint, meaning the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was more fluid than the Hebrew text at the time? Because by this time we have… at least we’re told we have, something approximating the Masoretic Text, where Rabbi Akiva, a couple centuries before that, or a century before that, is interpreting the difference of whether there’s a Vav or not a Vav,even though it doesn’t change pronunciation or meaning. So, would you say it was more fluid at this time?

Dr. Kantor: That’s a good question. I suppose it depends on how you define fluid, and this, again, is getting a bit out of my area of expertise. But I would say there’s definitely significant differences between different communities’ versions of the text that were worth sorting through.

Nehemia: And that’s what Origen is attributed to have done.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. He definitely was in charge of the project, but what I’m about to talk about is where I think he deserves less credit. And so, what he ended up doing was putting together a giant book, probably 40 or 50 volumes on a shelf of six… because hexapla is “six-fold”. It means “six-fold” in Greek, six columns; in some places more, but we won’t get into that. Six columns of text. In the furthest left column, you had the Hebrew Bible, probably one word per line, or sometimes two or three words per line…

Nehemia: In Hebrew characters?

Dr. Kantor: In Hebrew characters. This doesn’t survive anywhere, but people who have worked reconstructing that say it must have been there, and it’s in ancient descriptions of it. People who saw it say there was something there. So, I think it’s pretty certain it was there.

And then the second column is matching up to those one, sometimes two or three words per line, the same Hebrew words written out in Greek characters instead of Hebrew. And then after that, there were four separate Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, one by Aquila, which is probably the closest formally to the Hebrew, and then Symmachus, and then the Septuagint, and then Theodotion.

And so, many, many scholars after Origen would use this, at least when it was still there. It probably got destroyed a few centuries later, after he did it. But…

Nehemia: Was there only one copy of this?

Dr. Kantor: Probably, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Dr. Kantor: There was probably only ever one copy because there are 40 volumes. So, it was…

Nehemia: So, so, we don’t have the original Hexapla. What we have is… what? What do we have?

Dr. Kantor: A lot of… I was describing this to my dad once to illustrate what I was working on. And I was like, “It’s as if you had one of the most important books in all of history. I mean, 40 volumes on a bookshelf. And then somebody just threw a grenade at it, and it exploded, and all these fragments stuck to all sorts of other things. Now we have to try and piece it back together.”

Because that’s really what has happened. I doubt anyone ever copied it in ancient times because it was so huge. It probably sat at Caesarea and a lot of people that did work from it would come and visit it. And I think there was probably a copy of Psalms that circulated more than just in Caesarea, because that’s what we find quoted a lot everywhere else. That’s what we have in the Genizah here. We have a page, the oldest page of any manuscript of the Hexapla that remains to this day is here in Cambridge. And that’s from Psalms. The other one, which is the…

Nehemia: That’s the Palimpsest with the Jerusalem Talmud and one of the poets on it?

Dr. Kantor: Piyyut on it. And then the undertext is the Hexapla. Just very fragmentary bits of it. And then the other one that we have that survived is in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, and that’s Psalms. And then…

Nehemia: Is that also a palimpsest?

Dr. Kantor: That’s also a palimpsest, yes. So, the two most important texts for this are both palimpsests.

Nehemia: Meaning, for the audience, they erased the text of the Hexapla and wrote something else over it, because they didn’t care about the Hexapla. So, these are at least two copies just of Psalms. Okay, so, what else do we have?

Dr. Kantor: And then everything else we have… There are a few others that are … those are the two most important. There are a few others that maintain something of the columns and are just very scattered. Between all of these, it’s not much more than 1,050 words or so. And then everything else is just little tiny bits of quotations in ancient Greek writings, like in the Church Fathers, in the margins of Septuagint manuscripts, in the Syro-Hexapla, which is a Syriac Bible based on the Hexapla to make one text. I won’t get into all the details…

Nehemia: They didn’t have six columns on this.

Dr. Kantor: Not six columns… well, there’s debate about what it was exactly, but it might have been just an annotated Syriac version of the touched up, refined, annotated Septuagint text. But it has a lot of marginal notes to mention differences, and there are some quotations of the Hexapla there. And then, just a lot of things in commentaries and things like that. So…

Nehemia: So, the commentaries are quoting the parts of the Hexapla?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, they’ll quote parts of the Hexapla. And I should mention, I was thinking a lot of this from the perspective of the second column, the Hebrew and Greek letters, because that’s much more fragmentarily attested. But if you consider all the other translations, we got a lot of that in ancient Greek commentaries on the Bible, where they’ll say, “Oh, and Aquilla says this, and Theodotion says this, and Symmachus renders it this way.”

Nehemia: And we think they’re quoting that from the Hexapla.

Dr. Kantor: Almost certainly, yeah.

Nehemia: I mean, there could have been a manuscript of Aquila, right?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. It’s certainly… yeah. And so, that’s definitely possible. But usually when they quote them in groups, they’re all together like, okay, they must have been looking at it, or quoting somebody who looked at it. And what we find is much of that… I mean, it’s a bit easier with the Secunda, the Greek transcriptions of the Hebrew…

Nehemia: Tell us what the Secunda is. So, the first column is the Hebrew… well, you kind of did. The Secunda is the Hebrew written out in Greek characters, right?

Dr. Kantor: Right, right.

Nehemia: And so, we don’t have the original except for some Psalms palimpsests. And so, we have…

Dr. Kantor: Well, that wouldn’t be original, it would just be… original format.

Nehemia: Right, it’s at least the original format. So, we have quotations and commentaries, and then we have notations and margins of manuscripts, right?

Dr. Kantor: Right, right. And so, all of that, like for the Secunda, outside of those two main palimpsests, the one in Milan and the one here, it’s all just scattered. And so, you might have, you know, like in John Chrysostom, an Early Church Father, his works, you might find 50 to 100 words. But they’re scattered, so you have to read through his commentary, and there’s one here. You read through it again, and then there’s two here.

Nehemia: And then this brings another problem. So, John Chrysostom, presumably… I probably mispronounced that… he’s got a bunch of manuscripts of his works too, right?  

Dr. Kantor: Oh, my goodness!

Nehemia: So, how do we deal with that problem?

Dr. Kantor: So, I wish I had… when I was working on this. So, another thing I have coming out is a critical edition of the Secunda.

Nehemia: Okay! Wow.

Dr. Kantor: So, that’s been a big project that is now in the editing proofing stages. So, within the next couple of years it should be out.

Nehemia: So, did you have to track down all the manuscripts of John Chrysostom?

Dr. Kantor: So, Chrysostom is the absolute worst, because if you could imagine… I went to the library down here to get… so, it’s a big stack of books about this tall, and that is just the index of the manuscripts for Chrysostom.

Nehemia: The index of the manuscripts!

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, the index is about eight volumes tall.

Nehemia: When you say the index, there’s a whole lot of manuscripts is what you’re saying.

Dr. Kantor: Right. So, it takes this many books to say, “Now for his work on this, these are the libraries and the list of manuscripts for this work, for this work.” And that’s just the index. Then you have to go and actually find the manuscript.

Nehemia: How could you possibly check… like, there’s too many data points, and then not all of these… so, how do you do this?

Dr. Kantor: Well, you get everything you can. So, the reason you won’t see a lot of critical editions of Chrysostom’s work in Greek is because it would be such a nightmare to go through all of that material. But for me, it wasn’t so bad because I’m just doing two words here or there.

Nehemia: Oh, right. Okay.

Dr. Kantor: And so, even if there’s 20 or 30 manuscripts for the work I’m dealing with… Because he wrote so much… so for one book of his there might be 20 or 30 manuscripts. So, it’s not… when I’m just checking one word in it, you can go through all of those.

Nehemia: I see. Okay.

Dr. Kantor: So, yeah, you look at digitizations online. There was one I found in the Wren Library here. I emailed with some monks on a peninsula in Greece to send me…

Nehemia: In Mount Athos?

Dr. Kantor: Yes, exactly. To send me a CD rom of the images…

Nehemia: Oh wow! Oh, that’s cool!

Dr. Kantor: Or in other cases, printed out images that they sent in the mail. And so, yeah, I have in my library over there a CD-Rom from them. So, you gather all this stuff any way you can, and you just document as much as you can.

Nehemia: That’s a monumental work you’ve undertaken.

Dr. Kantor: Well, I…

Nehemia: I want to pause here for a minute. And just… for the audience to appreciate, this is a monumental work for you to make a critical edition of the Secunda, of this Hebrew-transcribed-into-Greek, because, like you said, there’s so many different… Like, it’s not just that you went to the printed edition of John Chrysostom and said, “This is what it says,” you tracked down the manuscripts. That’s incredible!

Dr. Kantor: It definitely took a long time, and it’s going to be quite a headache to proof that whole book, which I’ve just started recently, going through the proofing, finally. But the most interesting thing, I think, was one of Chrysostom’s commentaries is only preserved in Armenian, a portion of the Isaiah commentary, which is where we have a good number of transcriptions. So, analyzing that meant doing a historical phonological analysis of how Armenian transcribes Greek, which transcribes Hebrew.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Dr. Kantor: So, that’s probably the most interesting chapter in the book.

Nehemia: Presumably, this Armenian evidence isn’t as robust as things that are still in Greek, I would think, because every time you translate you potentially…

Dr. Kantor: You lose stuff.

Nehemia: You’re maybe lost in translation and then lost in the transmission, so there are two problems. Wow!

Dr. Kantor: Exactly, exactly. So, there’s going to be phonological things that differ, where maybe two sounds in Greek become one in Armenian, and then the transmission thing, and…

Nehemia: Like maybe there are two characters in Armenian… I know nothing about Armenian, that look very similar, and there are mistakes.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow! That’s amazing!

Dr. Kantor: I needed help for that one. There’s a professor over at King’s, Bert Vaux, who helped me with some of the Armenian stuff. That’s one of the great things about being in Cambridge is you can get help from experts just down the block.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s really monumental. That’s amazing. All right, so, the Secunda. So, your conclusion from the Secunda, and we’ll take the letter Vav as an example, is that the Vav was pronounced “wuh” in the 3rd century CE in, let’s say in Caesarea, where Origen was working. Right?

Dr. Kantor: Yes. In that tradition, the… and the reason I said Origen doesn’t deserve as much credit is related to the answer to this, because for many years people would always say, “Origen wrote the second column”, “Origen did this”, “Origen did that”. But he didn’t know Hebrew well enough to do that. I think he got the second column from the Jewish community of Caesarea, or he saw them doing that kind of transcription thing and said, “Hey, can you guys help me and expand this to the whole Bible?” But I think that tradition originates, and the text, in some fashion or other with the Jewish community of Caesarea. For that community in the late Roman period, I think they had “wuh”. However, that’s not the only piece of evidence in ancient times. You also have… there are a few interchanges in the Dead Sea Scrolls between things like Bet and Vav…

Nehemia: Oh.

Dr. Kantor: …which I think might indicate… Again, some of them are difficult because you could maybe analyze it different grammatically. Could it be a conjunction Vav instead of the preposition Bet, or vice versa? But taken all together, I think there is enough evidence to show that in the Hellenistic Roman period there were already at least some communities… maybe some that had pronunciation “vuh”. But, I think, when we have the continuous traditions like the Secunda, I think that shows a “wuh” pronunciation.

Nehemia: So, I’m going to quote here from… I guess this is your PhD dissertation.

Dr. Kantor: Okay.

Nehemia: And people can download this online, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s freely available, and it’s absolutely… I found it a riveting read. I don’t know that everyone will, but I definitely had to look up a lot of terminology, a lot of linguistic terms that are used here. But you wrote a bilabial fricative, and in parentheses you wrote the Greek Beta. So, that would be pronounced…

Dr. Kantor: “Vuh”.

Nehemia: “Vuh”. Well, “vuh.” We’ll get to that.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Like making a “vuh” sound, but with just your lips. So…

Nehemia: So, there’s actually two “V’s” in English. Am I right about that? Meaning there’s the V of the word “valve”, and then there’s like the normal V of “have”, and I don’t know, vault, or maybe… But in any event, linguistically there’s a distinction…

Let’s dwell on that for a minute. What is the difference between… and here are the terms; the voiced bilabial fricative and the voiced labiodental fricative? So, one’s written with the Greek Beta by linguists, not in ancient times…

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: …in this International Phonetic Alphabet, and the other is written with a “V”. What’s the difference between… Because to me they both sound like “vuh.”

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah. So, the voiced bilabial fricative… In phonetic terminology, we use terms that talk about where you make a sound.  So, if you have a dental sound, it means where your tongue is on your teeth. Like dental. And labial, like lips. So, if you’re making a sound with the labials, like a “bi-labial,” bilabial meaning two lips, “stop” would be like “puh” or “buh”, because you stop the air. “Buh”, Bilabial stop.

Now, a fricative means you continue to let the air go through with the two lips, so, it becomes “vvvvvuh”, and then a labiodental means you’re combining a lip and the teeth like that “vuh”, and then letting the sound go through.

Nehemia: And those are two different sounds.

Dr. Kantor: They’re two different sounds.

Nehemia: Linguists identify two different sounds there, whereas I think 99.99% of the audience, including me, will… if I heard two audio recordings of that I’m not sure I could distinguish them.

Dr. Kantor: Right, because in English, we don’t have the “vuh” sound, whereas in Spanish, you know, some of the Spanish “vuh” is pronounced as “vvvuh”.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. So, going back to Saadia Gaon… I believe it’s Saadia Gaon… he makes the statement somewhere that the Vav is produced by… No, it’s not Saadia Gaon, it’s some other grammarian roughly from that period. I want to say it’s David Alfasi or somebody like this who makes the statement that the Vav sound is produced by pushing the lips together, and that’s then cited by many people saying, “Well, see, it was a ‘wuh’.” But you’re saying, “No, there’s a sound where the lips are pressed together, which is a ‘vuh’.” Is that right?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah.

Nehemia: I mean, not about David Alfasi, but in general.  

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, I mean, certainly. A sound by the two lips becoming very close, “vuh,” can definitely be a fricative sound as well as…

Nehemia: Meaning “vuh” as opposed to “wuh”. Okay.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. “Wuh”, “vuh”. I mean, they both involve both lips.

Nehemia: I think this also shows how close the two sounds are together, which explains why, as I understand, at least, in a number of languages there was a shift from “wuh” to “vuh”. And maybe vice versa, I don’t know, because they’re really similar sounds, right?  

Dr. Kantor: And it happens in Latin as well. In some contexts, it happens in Greek. You see this happening in multiple languages around the same time because I mentioned earlier how there are certain diphthongs, where you have two vowels together in Greek, like “auo” or “auw”, that eventually became “auv”, and then “av”. So, things like that can happen.

And in Latin also, something which would have been like in ancient times, salwete, for “hello,” eventually becomes salvete. And so, you get these changes, and part of it might be because “wuh,” in addition to its phonetic name as labio velar approximant, it can also be just called a semivowel, because it’s like in between a consonant and a vowel. Which means it’s less salient, and so, sometimes in languages, depending on the contact situation they’re in, something that’s less salient…

Nehemia: What do you mean by less salient?

Dr. Kantor: Less notable, in a way. It’s easy to miss. Imagine between two words, like if I say something like pru u’rvu, where you just have a “uu”, or if it was in ancient…

Nehemia: “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Dr. Kantor: …frru warrvu, or something like that, the “wuh” would be easier to miss than if I changed that sound to a “vuh”. It’s easier to lose a “wuh” or a “yuh” in between vowels, things like that, whereas a “vuh” sound is going to be more strong. And so, sometimes, depending on the contact situation of languages, maybe that salience, that wanting a sound that’s stronger, or an assimilation… not like people make a decision about language change, but that speakers can “assimilate” one sound to another, and maybe the less salient goes to the more salient sometimes.

So, maybe that explains why it happens in multiple languages. I mean, I’m not an expert in the cross-linguistic patterns for “wuh” becoming vuh, but it definitely happens in a number of…

Nehemia: I think you probably are compared to most linguists, even. So, you mentioned something interesting; pru u’rvu. So, in Hebrew we have… This raises a different problem. You said one of the pieces of evidence in the Secunda for the “wuh,” I’m just thinking out loud here, is that it’s written as “oo” when it’s a conjunction, when it means “and”. But in Biblical Hebrew, as we understand it… from my understanding I should say, let’s be specific, we have a conjunction, meaning the word “and” that sometimes is “oo”. So, how do we know that… maybe originally it was always “oo”, and then sometimes it dissimilated into “vuh” and, but in the time of the Secunda, it was always…  

Like, you mentioned the circle… So, my thought is the “oo” at the beginning of a word, which is a conjunction, is a bad example, or maybe a problematic example. I guess all examples are going to be problematic in some ways. Fair enough.

We’ll come back to this. I want to read what you wrote here.

Dr. Kantor: Sure.

Nehemia: You talk here about evidence from Mishnaic Hebrew that there were Jews who pronounced, or at least there were people who pronounced the letter Vav as a “vuh”.And the evidence I’m familiar with is, Bar-Asher brings us that Yavneh can be written with a Bet or with a Vav, sometimes two Vavs. Or avazim, geese, is with a Bet or two Vavs.

So, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate in favor of “wuh” here for a second. So, our evidence for Mishnaic Hebrew presumably comes from something like the Kaufmann Manuscript, which was written in the 10th or 11th century. I’m told by the experts in Talmudic studies that the Mishnah was entirely oral, or mostly oral, up until the 9th century. Maybe there was a copy here and there, but by and large it was oral. And then they decided to write it down, and then that became dominant. And even in the early 10th century, we have these statements about, “Well, you can’t really trust what’s in the manuscripts. It’s the people reciting orally that’s the reliable version.”

So, how do we know? In our manuscripts, it’s Yavne with a Vav orwith a Bet, or avasim with a Vav or a Bet, but maybe that’s a product of the 9th century when it was written down. How do we know? Do we know?

Dr. Kantor: So, yeah…

Nehemia: Maybe it’s a question for Bar-Asher, not for you, to be fair…

Dr. Kantor: So, this is one thing that makes texts that were transmitted very difficult to use for historical phonological reasons. I mean, you can if certain things become regular, and you can if you do reconstruct the earlier form of the text as having the same variant, then they can be. But like for all my work on the Greek things, Greek pronunciation, I only used things that were actually dated to the time of consideration. When you’re dealing with manuscripts, they…

Nehemia: So, when did John Chrysostom live? Help me out here. Like 4th or 5th century or something?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And all your manuscripts are from that period? You’re not dealing with like, 10th or 15th century manuscripts?

Dr. Kantor: So, I don’t use anything John Chrysostom for my Greek pronunciation stuff. The reason later manuscripts for something like the Secunda are fine is because there was no ongoing tradition that would interfere. You know what I mean?

Nehemia: Oh, right.

Dr. Kantor: The scribes who were copying it probably didn’t know much of what they were copying. Because you have a Greek scribe copying Chrysostom’s commentary, and then suddenly he sees a Hebrew word transcribed into Greek. He’s probably not going to go, “Oh, I pronounce this this way, so, let me change it.” Now, they do do that occasionally, actually. I should correct myself, because there are places where medieval scribes who did know something about Hebrew will even correct the quotations of the Secunda. But you can document this. And because we have so many different witnesses, and we have the ones here and in Milan, where you can establish certain phonological features that we can see now because we have it all, but scribes who are copying in the Middle Ages wouldn’t have known.

And so, you can tell when they’ve changed something, or you can tell when there are scribal errors. But you’re not going to get the same features of a living tradition interfering with the transmission of it like you do. Because, as Morag has shown, it’s such a common feature in Hebrew traditions for the pronunciation of the local languages to affect how things are transmitted in the reading tradition orally, but you just don’t have that with something like the Secunda in the same way. Occasionally you get it. People will change it, but there’s usually enough manuscript evidence to be like, “Oh! I got you. You changed that to look more like standard Hebrew!” But you’ve got to shift it back.

Nehemia: So, in any event, going back to, let’s say the 2nd or 3rd century. We have the Secunda people who are saying “wuh” for the letter Vav, and we have the Mishnah, apparently, based on what’s been argued in the evidence so far is they’re saying “vuh”. So, you have both traditions side by side, which you kind of said before, I guess. Okay. So, you have a diversity…

Dr. Kantor: Yeah. I mean, I think a better data point would be the Dead Sea Scrolls interchanges, Bet and Vav, because that’s older. I think it’s not super common, so you can’t argue that it was really widespread, but it’s definitely there. You have both side by side to some extent in the ancient period. The wind blowing around papers in here… and so, you have both in each in the ancient period to some degree.

But the question about the Mishnaic examples would be, just how early is it attested? And if it is attested in the manuscript tradition later, can we assume that it was also, part of it, an earlier stage of textual transmission? I mean, I think… there are other things like…

Nehemia: My favorite is when they write kivyachol with Vav.Which is this… I’m not getting into details, but it’s inherently a Bet.  It’s the Bet, meaning “in”, and they write it with a Vav. But again, that’s in manuscripts that are from… not before the 9th century, because we don’t have earlier manuscripts than that.

Dr. Kantor: But you do get it in enough things like… certainly by the Byzantine period you have it in plenty of disparate works, like in Bereshit Rabbah you have plenty of examples of this. And the relationship between Hebrew phonology and Aramaic phonology is probably relevant for this change. And then you get it in Greek transcriptions, like where it becomes really obvious that Hebrew traditions have “vuh” is when in Greek transcriptions of the Byzantine period you see Vav transcribed with the Veta, instead of an Omicron-Ipsilon.

Nehemia: So, an example that comes to mind for me, and someone needs to trace this and track this down, maybe you’ve already done it, is in Josephus. He writes, “Levite”, something like Levitas, with an Upsilon, which you’re saying could be le’u’tas, right, meaning a “wuh”.

Dr. Kantor: Well, at Josephus’s time, it would probably be something almost in between, like le’wvui’tas, with that bilabial fricative, sort of a rounding of a labialization. So, le’wui’tas, le’vui’tas, something…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s a combination almost, I’m hearing. Wow.

Dr. Kantor: Exactly. So, if you listen for the “vuh”, you’re going to hear the “vuh”. If you listen for the “aewui”, you’re going to hear the “aewui”. That was right when it was changing.

Nehemia: Wow. So, but wow. But then David, he writes…

Dr. Kantor: But he might also just be continuing the Septuagint spelling too.

Nehemia: Right, that’s true. But then the name David, which is written with an Upsilon in the Septuagint, he writes with a Beta.

Dr. Kantor: In which manuscripts, though, is the question…

Nehemia: That’s the question. Because that’s something someone needs to track down. And I think I looked, and our earliest manuscript of Josephus anyway, is from the 9th century. So, who knows if that’s not a product of the scribe who’s copying it?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, because that is a difficult one. Because that’s something that changes too, over time, is the spellings of “David” in Greek change over time, and scribes often update these things. One of the hardest things is that all these spellings get updated by scribes almost subconsciously. I did some research into how certain words are spelled in the Septuagint manuscripts over time, and we have certain fragments from Qumran, so you can go back as early as like 1st – 2nd century BC, or so, and map them out. We have more or less something from every century all the way to Vaticanus, and what you’ll find is that, in the same exact way that scribal patterns change in papyri and inscriptions outside of Bible manuscripts, you see them changing in exactly the same way in the Bible manuscripts.

And so, if a scribe wrote it this way in the, you know, 1st century BC when he’s writing a letter, and then it changed a few centuries later, you see that same exact thing mapped out in Septuagint manuscripts. So, it can be really hard to use that kind of data.

Nehemia: In other words, they were updating the language as they’re writing it, because just… okay.

Dr. Kantor: It’s just that’s how they write it.

Nehemia: Well, it’s like… I’ll take an analogy here, the King James Version, where there are some names that are written with an “I”, and almost nobody who prints it today is going to write it with an “I”, they’ll write it with a “J”.

Dr. Kantor: Oh, yeah. Exactly.

Nehemia: If it’s the name Jacob that was written with an “I”, they’re going to write it with a “J” because that’s just how it’s written. Now, maybe it was pronounced Jacob in the 17th century. I’m not an expert in 17th century English, but the spelling convention gets updated. So, that’s really interesting.

This has been an amazing conversation.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed it.

Nehemia: Oh wow, this has been awesome. Any final thoughts about your research, about some of the things you’re doing? Tell people what you’re working on next. Of course, don’t give away any secrets that some other scholar might steal, but…

Dr. Kantor: Well, I can tell something that is about to come out, which I’ve been working on, so, it just finished. And I’m now extending into other areas, and that’s the relationship between all these Hebrew traditions linguistically. When we talk about Samaritan, Tiberian, Babylonian, Palestinian, if we could put these on a language tree, how do they all relate to each other? So, a book about that is about to come out, probably within the next month or so.

Nehemia: Before this will be broadcast.

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, so it’ll be out. It’ll be called The Linguistic Classification of the Biblical Hebrew Reading Traditions of Phyla-and-Waves Model, with the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Culture series.

Nehemia: Oh, so it’ll be available to download for free online.

Dr. Kantor:  Yeah, it’ll be available for free to download online.

Nehemia: Oh, beautiful. We’ll put up a link, and that’s really exciting. Just talk a few minutes about where people can find what you do. You’ve got some incredible stuff on YouTube. You have some stuff on Amazon, like for example, you’ve done some stuff on Codex Vaticanus we haven’t even talked about. Just give us some of the places where people can find… What are some of the other things you’ve done and where can people find it?

Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure. Of course, anything I’ve written you can find on a CV page of mine. This would actually be on my website too. So, for my online presence, you can either go to www.koinegreek.com, which will be the Greek things I do. And a lot of sort of living language speaking, ancient Greek resources, even short movies, films in ancient Greek, and various things, and reading practice and pronunciation things, which you mentioned. Codex Vaticanus, where it’s the New Testament section of Codex Vaticanus made cropped down so you can carry it in your hand like a book with verse references, a pseudo facsimile of that that you can use.

And then my other website for some of my Hebrew stuff that I do is www.biblicalhebrew.com, and there you’ll find actually a number of ancient languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic as spoken languages. Not a lot of material yet. I’m just starting there, so, a lot more time to fill that out.

Nehemia: So, if you want him to put up more stuff, go to those websites. Can they write to you through the website and nag you and ask you to put up more stuff?

Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: He’s got some incredible stuff on Greek. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me. This has been an amazing conversation.

Dr. Kantor: Yes. Thank you. I really enjoyed it myself. Thank you.

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Judges 12:5-6

BOOKS MENTIONED
The Pronunciation of New Testament Greek: Judeo-Palestinian Greek Phonology and Orthography from Alexander to Islam
by Benjamin Kantor

The Linguistic Classification of the Reading Traditions of Biblical Hebrew: A Phyla-and-Waves Model
by Benjamin Kantor

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Study – Wow, It’s a Vav!
Support Team Study – Bible Vowels of Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down
Support Team Study – The Vowels of the Aleppo Codex

OTHER LINKS

https://biblicalhebrew.com/

https://www.koinegreek.com/

(PDF) Recitation and Performance in Late Antique Hebrew: Linguistic Hints of a Performance Register in Greek and Latin Transcriptions of Biblical Hebrew from Late Antiquity (researchgate.net)
by Ben Kantor

THE SECOND COLUMN (SECUNDA) OF ORIGEN'S HEXAPLA IN LIGHT OF GREEK PRONUNCIATION
Dissertation by Ben Kantor

The LXX and Historical Greek Phonology: Orthography, Phonology, and Transcriptions | Benjamin P Kantor - Academia.edu
by Ben Kantor

The post Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls, Nehemia joins Avielah Barclay, the first female Jewish scribe in modern times. They discuss why Judaism clings to such ancient technology, how writing with the proper intent is just as important as the correct content, and erasing mistakes in accordance with a variety of Jewish traditions.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Transcript

Hebrew Voices #181 – The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls: Part 1

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

Avielah: Andevery time you see God’s name written by this particular scribe, you’ll see it written like that.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Because there is a tradition. Not everyone writes God’s name like this.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today in London, England with Avielah Barclay, who is a soferet STaM. She is a professional Jewish scribe who writes STaM, which is Torah scrolls, phylacteries, and mezuzas, right? Do you write all three of those?

Avielah: I do write all three of those.

Nehemia: Wow. So, I wanted to start off with… we were discussing before we started about whether you’re a sofer STaM or a soferet STaM. Soferet is the feminine. Normally what people say, and by normally I mean… almost every time in my life I’ve ever heard the term, it was sofer STaM.

Avielah: Yep.

Nehemia: And STaM is an acronym for “Sefer Torah, Tefillin, Mezuzah.”  “Torah scroll, phylacteries,” and “mezuzas”. Which you’ll talk about… we’ll talk about. So, you’re a soferet STaM. You self-identify as a woman, and you are a woman!

Avielah: That’s right!

Nehemia: Okay. You self-identify as soferet STaM because you are. So, is it unusual? I feel like I’m asking a loaded question. It is unusual to be a soferet STaM. Of all the working professional scribes in the world, let’s put it that way, what percentage are sofrot (feminine) versus sofrim (masculine)?

Avielah: Well, I couldn’t put an exact number on it, but it is very unusual. But it’s getting less and less unusual all the time. So, that’s the important part. The very vast majority of Hebrew ritual scribes, and I’m not just talking about being able to do Hebrew calligraphy, it’s not only Hebrew calligraphy, it’s Hebrew calligraphy weighed down by thousands of rules and centuries of tradition.

Nehemia: Yeah. And when you say thousands of rules, you literally mean thousands of rules.

Avielah: I mean…

Nehemia: Oh boy, here we go. So that’s the book full of the rules for being a… I like the term Hebrew ritual scribe.

Avielah: Right. Well, I mean, I think that’s the best way to describe it in English, myself.

Nehemia: Well, it’s a good description. I like it.

Avielah: Because there’s a lot of ritual attached to it, and the items that we create are used ritually. So, it doesn’t include everything. Obviously, a ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, is also used in ritual. It’s used in a wedding, right? And so is a get, a Jewish divorce, used in a ritual, but anyone can write those. You just have to make sure that you are writing them correctly.

Nehemia: So, I think we need to back up here for the audience.

Avielah: A little bit.

Nehemia: So, this is almost a profound concept. Let’s start with the fact that Jews today write scrolls, which is an ancient technology which most of the world stopped using on a wide basis in the 2nd or 3rd or 4th century, something like that. Jews were using scrolls… and this is actually a bit debated.

Avielah: Right, because different cultures moved over to codices at that point, what we know as a book now, and didn’t keep using scrolls, yeah.

Nehemia: Right. But Jews continued to use scrolls, even for non-ritual texts, up until probably, we believe, the 8th century. And “we believe” is another way of saying this is what scholars guess based on almost no evidence.

Avielah: Yes. Well, we have that dark area, don’t we? Where there’s very little written material. It’s just poof for a few centuries, as you know, and then, oh, it’s back again. It’s like someone turned out the light, and now it’s back on.

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So, it ends with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more particularly the Bar Kokhba Scrolls in 135 CE, and then the next time we have written manuscripts… it’s a bit debatable, but it’s sometime around the 800’s. Maybe there are one or two things from the 400’s and the 700’s. There could be a few things like that, but they’re generally Torah scrolls, which is kind of the point we’re trying to get to.

But as far as codices, or codexes, that is, book form, those start to show up in the 800’s. And full-blown in the 900’s. They’re the standard thing. People are still using Torah scrolls even today though, in the 21st century.

So, let’s start with that. Why are Jews using a technology that went out of vogue in the 3rd century CE or the 9th century, depending on which community you were in? Why are they still using that in the 21st century? That’s the question.

Avielah: Well, there are a lot of reasons. If you want the practical reason, then obviously technology, book technology, did change. And it changed at different rates and with different materials, right? So, inks changed, styluses changed, depending on the place, and we got different materials also coming from different parts of the world. So, you know, we didn’t have paper until China invented it, and then it made its way over, for example. We used to only use gvil, this more tanned leather, until parchment was invented in Turkey.

Nehemia: Well, papyrus existed, but we still didn’t use papyrus.

Avielah: No, that’s true. Papyrus was used earlier, obviously, because that’s basically the advent of writing, where we used… when I say “we” I mean humanity who was writing, were using reeds, such as this, that come from the Middle East. This is an Iranian reed, that’s what we would call it now. It’s a Persian reed, and they would write on papyrus.

Nehemia: Is that because it came from Iran? Or is that a style of reed?

Avielah: You can grow it in other places. I didn’t import this from Iran. But that’s a valid question.

Nehemia: So, it’s a style of reed.

Avielah: It’s a variety of reed. I’m not a plant specialist. I’m not a botanist.

Nehemia: Oh, you mean the style of the actual plant.

Avielah: The actual plant, yeah. Not the way it’s cut, no.

Nehemia: Let’s talk about that for a second. The classic image that we have, for most people, I think, is that Moses was sitting around, and there was a feather coming out, and he was writing a scroll. Did Moses use a feather, a quill?

Avielah: Moses did not use a quill. Moses did not use a feather. I can pretty much guarantee that. Basically, all writing with ink and stylus back then, like in Egyptian times, would have been done on papyrus, and using a reed. And in the beginning, it was…

Nehemia: What do you mean by stylus?

Avielah: When I say stylus, I just mean any pointy thing, as it were. These aren’t pointy per se, because they’re cut, as you can see, so that they have a broad nib, and they’re all cut in slightly different ways. This one was actually made for me by a Bukharan sofer who’s a friend of mine.

Nehemia: Ooh, okay.

Avielah: Yeah, and he’s a sofer, so that’s how they cut reeds in Bukhara if you’re a Jew.

Nehemia: And Bukhara is in Central Asia, where there were Jews up until the fall of the Soviet Union, when they were all ethnically cleansed.

Avielah: Yeah, and some escaped to the US and some escaped to Israel, and there’s still a little valley, I think. Yeah, you should talk to a friend of mine, Reuben. He’s an expert. He’s a Bukharan Jew in the United States. So, a stylus is…

Nehemia: So, a reed is a type of stylus?

Avielah: Yeah, because “stylus” is a more general term. A stylus could also be… you could maybe refer to this as a stylus. This is my bone folder; it’s made out of elk bone.

Nehemia: Wait, what is that?

Avielah: Well, a bone folder is something used in bookbinding, but you also use it in sofrut.

Nehemia: And sofrut is the Hebrew word for scribal arts.

Avielah: Yes. So, when you’re writing or repairing Sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls), or tefillin, or…

Nehemia: Mezuzot.

Avielah: …Mezuzot, or actually Megilot as well, Megilat Esther, the Book of Esther, you use this to score the lines because you have to imprint the lines into the parchment.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s what you use.

Avielah: It’s what I use. My husband, who you have already interviewed, actually uses a wooden dowel with a rose thorn.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: Because that’s what his teacher taught him, and we have different teachers. So, this, as long as it’s either vegan or comes from an animal that is kosher if you were to eat it… so elk is fine because it’s a kind of deer, and deer are ruminants. They chew their cud and have cloven hooves, so according to the Torah we’re allowed to eat them.

Nehemia: And they’re quite delicious, I can say from personal experience.

Avielah: Where I’m from, in Canada, you can get kosher bison and venison.

Nehemia: I’ve had elk.

Avielah: Num, num, num.Yeah, yeah. So, you can use it for burnishing as well. I actually used this last week to burnish…

Nehemia: Tell us what you mean by burnishing.

Avielah: Burnishing is when you want to flatten a surface. So, if you’re going to do, say, for example, gold leaf, which we’re not allowed to do in STaM; that is a specific rule that they discuss in the Talmud, saying you cannot put gold letters in a Torah scroll, otherwise that invalidates the whole thing. But when I make Judaica, like ketubot, wedding contracts, or prayers, or whatever psalms for people, then if they want to have gold leaf, I will burnish it. You can use a stone; you can use something like this. It just gives the metal a really lovely, mirror-like finish, so that it’s brighter.

Nehemia: So, I want to go back to this. You said that anybody can write a… well, what were the things?

Avielah: Well, a get, you really need to be Jewish and a scribe, because there are so many rules attached to gittin.

Nehemia: Okay, and the get is the certificate of divorce.

Avielah: Right, and the certificate of divorce in some ways is actually more important than the wedding contract, because at least in Judaism, in ancient Judaism, the ketubah was important because then it outlined the responsibilities, and duties, and rights, et cetera, of a husband and a wife, and that is important. But a get was more important, in some ways, because we needed to be really clear who was free to marry whom. But a ketubah, as long as you know Hebrew well enough, or Aramaic, whatever text you’re going to use, to not make an error, then you’re good to go. But with a get, you really do need to be a Jewish scribe. It’s more of a closed practice, like a lot of Judaism is a closed practice.

Nehemia: What do you mean by a closed practice?

Avielah: I mean, only Jews can do it, and some of the practices are only for certain kinds of Jews. For example, I’m not a Kohen, I’m never going to be the high priest, so I don’t need to know any of those rules. Although it’s very interesting, and if I were ever invited to do anything a high priest would do, for example, I would not do it, because it’s not for me. That’s all. So, that is closed to me. Ithas nothing to do with my gender, it has to do with the fact that I’m a Yisrael. I’m just a regular Jew. I’m not from that lineage, right? And it’s the same with anything Levitical. And again, some people would say, “Well it’s also because of your gender,” but it’s not for me. So, it’s the same thing; certain things are for everybody, certain things are just for Jews, and certain things are just for certain kinds of Jews because we have a hierarchy.

Nehemia: So, this is really interesting. I want to nitpick here on a small point you just made in passing, which is that there are three categories of Jews: Kohen, Levi, and the third category isn’t called Yehudi, Jew, it’s Yisrael. Which is just another way of saying a regular Israelite who’s not a Kohen, meaning a priest, or not a Levi.

Avielah: An Israelite, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. Alright, so let’s go back to…

Avielah: The technology; why are we still using this technology in the 21st century? Well, on the one hand, tradition is really important in Judaism; any kind of Judaism. It doesn’t matter what brand or denomination of Judaism someone may ascribe to, it’s still been influenced by our traditions to one extent or another.

And when it comes to the Masora, the tradition with scribal practice, although there is more than one way of doing it, it’s definitely a very specific tradition. And it has always been done Ish m’pi ish, literally, “mentored from man to man”. It literally means from the mouth of one man to another. But in my case, it would be isha because I’m a woman. So, it’s been handed down for hundreds of years, thousands of years. When I say that, there has been some evolution of the tradition, and depending on what part of the Jewish Diaspora someone may have learned in, they might do things differently.

So, for example, a Mizrahi, or a Yemenite, or a Maghrebi, or a Sephardi scribe is more likely to use a reed, it can just be bamboo, it doesn’t have to be a particular kind of reed, than a feather. Because really the Ashkenazi, the Western and Eastern European Jews, were using feathers. And why is that? Because when Jews started moving into Europe, during Roman times, the further north we got, we realized that the same varieties of reeds don’t grow in Europe as grow in the Middle East and the Near East.

So, you could not… this is one of the reasons why Europe could never have invented writing, at least not in this way! It’s because the reeds that grow here you can’t use as a pen. There’s actually a halacha, there’s a rule, in here, that talks about, “Oh, you have to use a reed. You must never use anything else but a reed. We always use reeds.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.

And then another voice chimes in, because this is a collection of many, many sources over the generations, and says, “What about feathers? We can use feathers, can’t we? Why did we start using feathers? Because we all use feathers.” And the answer comes, “Well, why do we use feathers? Because they don’t make reeds like they used to.”

Nehemia: Wow. So, it was a practical consideration.

Avielah: Because Christian scribes used feathers, and we could not find the reeds, so we started using feathers. Depending on where Jews lived, they would adopt Islamic book arts, perhaps, because of the materials available. Or, out in China; you’ve seen Kaifeng Torah scrolls, right? Those are also made differently because of the available book arts and available technologies.

Nehemia: Oh, the… I was going to say parchment, but I know that’s not correct. The leather.

Avielah: It’s more like an alum-tawed goat. It’s a white, white leather.

Nehemia: It’s the coolest material I’ve ever seen in a Torah scroll.

Avielah: Isn’t it amazing?

Nehemia: Yeah. The Chinese scrolls are just so distinctive.

Avielah: The other thing I wanted to say about the tradition is the fact that we can’t just print them, or silkscreen them, or whatever, because the thing that puts the sanctity into them… because you’re obviously well aware of the kind of kavod, the kind of respect, that we pay to Torah scrolls for example, and the deference we have for these objects. Not in any inappropriate way, it’s not worshipping the objects, obviously, but they as a vessel hold the word of God. And what’s important is that the person who writes them has the appropriate kavanah, the appropriate intention, and the right sort of holy consciousness, and that is what imbues these things with the sanctity. That’s why you have to say each word before you write it. You have to say each letter before you write it, and you have to make a special declaration every time you’re going to write God’s name because you’re never supposed to write God’s name…

Nehemia: What’s the declaration?

Avielah: Well, it’s basically, “I’m writing this name for the sake of the sanctity of the holiness of the name.” Some people also say, “…for the sanctity of this particular piece of STaM,” whatever it is, so if it’s a Sefer Torah or a mezuza, or something like that. But you need to do that, and there are different traditions around that, some say. You have to make a special dip of your pen…

Nehemia: Oh really?

Avielah: Yeah and have that consciousness even when you’re dipping. And then others say, “Oh, if you dip you still need to test your pen, because you don’t want to dip then write, because if you make a blob, you will have blotted God’s name, and that’s very…”

Nehemia: And you can’t erase the mistake; the “blob” mistake, right?

Avielah: No, no, you can’t. That’s one of the many, many rules. You can only correct it by adding ink. And you can’t correct by carving away or shaping. That’s another reason why we can’t have things like screen printing and stuff like that. Although we have books that we use in the synagogue, obviously, that are a printed version that we can read, we can’t have a public reading. We need to have a scroll, and we need to have somebody who is minimally observant, you know, Shabbat, kashrut, and that sort of thing, to be writing those things for us.

Nehemia: I want to dwell on this point for a minute. This is a key… I wouldn’t assume that the audience knows this, that there are these three ritual objects: the Torah scroll, phylacteries, and we can describe what that is, I suppose, and mezuzas, which you can show us, actually. They are these three ritual objects that have to fulfill certain specifications and be prepared in a certain way in order to be valid for ritual use. That’s basically what it comes down to. Is that right?

Avielah: Yes, and there’s a long chain of that. It begins, actually, well before the scribe. It begins with when you’re making the skin, the hide, into parchment. Actually, it starts with the animal; the animal has to be kosher. The feather you write with has to come from a kosher bird that you would be allowed to eat.

Nehemia: So, you can’t use an eagle’s feather?

Avielah: Never, ever. Then the whole thing is not kosher. The whole thing is pasul, and if you did something like that, and then you sold it to someone and they didn’t know, all the blessings they would say on that would be in vain, and they would all land on you. There’s going to be a special place in the afterlife for people who do that.

Nehemia: Just so the audience understands, and it’s not just a tradition, meaning it’s a halakhically binding, if you consider it binding, ritual that you hear the Torah read every week in the synagogue. And if the Torah is read from a scroll that wasn’t prepared according to all these specifications, then you haven’t fulfilled the duty. Is that essentially what it is?

Avielah: It’s essentially true. Now, we’re very lucky that God is merciful. So, if it’s just through a mistake, then… you know, humans do make mistakes. And that’s one of the reasons why when you write something like a Torah scroll, not only do you have to be so, so, careful about copying it exactly from another Torah scroll, or from a book that we call a Tikun le’Sofrim. I have a little bit of one. I have just Breishit here, just Genesis, it’s just a small… and it has all of the top and the bottom of the columns, and it has little codes on it. So, it tells you how much you have to stretch or cramp your letters. And it also tells you if one of God’s names is coming up. You see, it says “kodesh” over here, because sometimes there are words that can refer to idols or things that are not God, so you have to be careful not to sanctify those, because that…

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. I saw a Torah scroll when I was doing my research, where there’s a phrase where it says, “Elohei Adoni Avraham“, it’s in Genesis 24, “the God of my Lord Abraham.” And the word “Adoni” was cut out, leaving a blank space, and then rewritten in very small letters above the line. And it’s very clear to me, at least, that what the scribe did is, he wrote “Elohei“, and then instead of “Adoni” he wrote the exact same four letters, but with the thought that it was one of God’s titles. And when he realized that he’s like, “Oh no, I wrote a sacred name here!” Even though “Adoni” means “my Lord”, referring to Abraham, he wrote the Lord,referring to God. And so, he had to cut it out, because now he has a holy name where it doesn’t belong. Even though it’s graphically identical to the word that means “my Lord”. Meaning, anybody besides that scribe would look at that, and could never even theoretically know it was done wrong, but he knew.

Avielah: Right, and that is exactly why you have to be able to trust your scribe, like you trust your lawyer, your doctor, your jeweler, et cetera. You need to be able to trust them 100%. Not that they’ll never make a mistake, but that if they do make a mistake, they will make it right and they’ll be honest about it. You know, I’ve made mistakes. It’s awful, but it happens. And just to add to your story, some opinions would say he shouldn’t have just cut that name out. He would have pasul-ed the entire yeria, the entire sheet of parchment, and he would have had to start that sheet again, just rewrite that entire sheet, and he would have had to bury that.

Nehemia: This is in the Middle Ages. They quite routinely cut out the name of God.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah. And you can still do that. You’re really supposed to cut out other things on either side, and not just the name of God, but again, there are different opinions. And practice has changed, like I said, not just by location, but over time to some extent.

Nehemia: Yeah, I found one passage where it talked about if you left out a word, that what it talks about in the medieval literature is you write it above the line.

Avielah: Yep!

Nehemia: And this rabbi in the 19th century or something says, “Today nobody will know what that is and they’ll be confused, so don’t do it.”

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they’re not used to it. Back in the day, meaning even four or five hundred years ago, they would routinely write entire verses above the line. And now they don’t do it, or if they do it it’s extremely rare, I suppose.

Avielah: I’ve seen that. Yeah, it’s very practical to be able to do that, and it’s not ideal, but at the same time, when you come across that, at least you caught the mistake.

Nehemia: Yeah. It’s probably more common, I would think, in an Esther scroll. Let’s go back to this. We have Torah scrolls, tefillin, which is phylacteries, and mezuza, and Esther scroll. Does that have to be written with the proper intent? Meaning, there’s specific intent that goes into writing those first three things, right? And that’s why you need to trust the person. Like whenever you write God’s name, you have to be thinking “this is a holy name”. Right? And you were saying some people even say the words, “I’m writing this for the sake of…”

Avielah: And say each letter as well.

Nehemia: Tell me that.

Avielah: Because that’s one of the ways you avoid making a mistake. If you look at your layout guide, if you look at your tikun, and you’ve got that isolated so you’re not accidentally writing something from a different line…

Nehemia: So, open that up and show me a place where it has God’s name and tell me what you would do when you got to that.

Avielah: Okay, so right here, for example, it says “Kodesh” here.

Nehemia: Holy.

Avielah: Right. So, you go along, and you go, “Oh, look, here we go.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And there’s a circle above it. And there’s actually another one down here. See? Circle…

Nehemia: Let’s find my favorite one, the Tetragrammaton.

Avielah: There’s also instances where it says “chol“, because it might be referring to idols or something like that. So, it makes sure that you don’t sanctify it. It also takes your attention to that.

Nehemia: Right. Like, for example, in the Ten Commandments, where it says “Lo ihye leccha Elohim acherim.” You shall not have other elohim…

Avielah: Exactly.

Nehemia: So, elohim there doesn’t refer to God.

Avielah: No. Don’t go running after other gods. That’s right. So, you can’t sanctify that word, because you’re talking about the other gods.

Nehemia: So, you have to make sure not to sanctify that word. That’s amazing.

Avielah: Exactly. Otherwise, you start again, and that’s your punishment.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about the mezuza, because that’s fascinating in and of itself. That’s like a special case, right? Of course, when I want to find it, I’m not finding it…

Avielah: That is exactly the same for me.

Nehemia: Okay, I know there’s one here in Genesis 15…

Avielah: I’ll tell you another story while you’re looking for it…

Nehemia: Yeah, tell me.

Avielah: So, I was writing part of… oh, yeah, that’s not what you’re looking for. This is not the “God’s name” you’re looking for.

Nehemia: Oh, okay, so I’m looking for where it says kodesh here.

Avielah: You’re looking for where it says kodesh, and then go across and you can see here we’ve got…

Nehemia: Right. So, I’ve seen other ones where it’s underlined, and they’ll write above it, “kodesh“.

Avielah: Right, yeah, sometimes they do that as well. It’s depending on the layout guide; there are different ways of doing it as long as they get your attention.

Nehemia: Oh, here is… so that is Alef-Dalet-Nun-Yud, right?

Avielah: Right, and that is “kodesh”. There are instances of a little word on the side, that instead of “kodesh” or “chol“, it actually says “safek“, which means… oh, here we go. There’s “chol”. So, here we go. This is “chol”, so you do not sanctify that.

Nehemia: Ahhh.

Avielah: It’s already warned you. “Don’t do it!”

Nehemia: Okay. It says “rak la’anashim ha’el”, “only to these people,” and “ha’el” means “these”, but it could also, if you didn’t have a context, it could be God.

Avielah: And if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, or if you don’t understand what it says. It needs to be all those things, right?

Nehemia: Right. Wow! So, you have to mentally form an intent in your mind that, “When I write this word…” Here’s an example of “Adoni”, my Lord – not referring to God. And it says “chol.”

Avielah: It says chol.

Nehemia: Which means non-holy, or non-sacred.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about this in a second. So, that was interesting. I was trying to explain this to someone, and I actually wrote an academic journal article, and I referred to non-sacred words. And one of the peer reviewers said, “What do you mean? Isn’t every word in the Torah sacred?” Yeah, but not in this context. Meaning, a sacred word is one of the seven or ten names of God, and everything else is non-sacred. Even a title of God like “Rachum“, merciful one, is considered non-sacred, meaning you’re allowed to erase it.

Avielah: Yeah, there are seven that you have these extra special rules applied to them, but yes, in theory in Judaism, God has around 100 names. “Harachaman“, the Merciful One…

Nehemia: Right. But those you’re allowed to erase by traditional law, by Halacha, which means they’re considered chol, they’re considered non-sacred. Alright, so here we’re in Genesis 19 verse 5, and, oh, it’s talking about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And it says Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey…

Avielah: Right, and it says “kodesh”.

Nehemia: And it says “holy”. So, how would you do this? You come to this, you’re a scribe, you’re working. You’re writing a Torah scroll. What do you do?

Avielah: So, I get to that line, and I generally will have something over, like that, and I just move this down so that I…

Nehemia: That’s so cool! You know why that’s cool? Wait, I don’t know if people saw that. So, she has something that makes sure she only copies from the line she’s on, and not another line.

Avielah: It is so easy to copy from the wrong line because you often have repetition as well.

Nehemia: So, there are so many manuscripts, Torah scrolls even, where we have these scribal errors. Where it’s clear that the scribe’s eye jumped as he’s looking back and forth at his source, and his eye jumped from one line to the next line, and he missed an entire line. Then he has to come back, and he has to scratch out five lines, and rewrite them as four, or four, rewrite them as five… different scenarios…

Avielah: It’s not funny. That is where your burnisher comes in handy so you can re-prepare the surface of the parchment so you don’t get furry letters. You want to have nice, sharp letters.

Nehemia: Well, sometimes they get furry letters. And sometimes the entire page, after 800 years, the entire sheet, all the ink has flaked off except for those five lines that he rewrote. There, the ink stuck better. And sometimes it’s the opposite; everything is intact except for those lines.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: Alright, so you come here, and you mark off so you don’t go to the wrong line, and you write ki mashkhit normally. And now what do you do?

Avielah: The other thing you do is… I mean, what I do is I always have paper, just printer paper, just normal craft paper, down on top of the naked parchment, like the blank stuff that I haven’t written on yet. And then, where I’m writing, I’ll have this very close at hand so that I have it right in front of me. And then, like I said, I’ll cover everything up…

Nehemia: So, this is what you’re copying from?

Avielah: Right. So, I basically isolate everything that I’m doing to avoid mistakes. Partly because, again, some of them have tremendous significance and consequences, and other times… you just don’t want to waste your time. Let’s face it; it’s backbreaking work, literally. Then I would come to this, and then I’d go, “Okay, so ki – Kaf, Yud…”

Nehemia: Do you say the word “ki”? You say it out loud?

Avielah: Yeah. This is what I was taught. Now, you could speak to other sofrim or sofrot and ask them what they were taught. Some of it will be exactly the same and some of it will not be. Right. And you just do that, and then… but you take notes…

Nehemia: I want to stop you for a second. That is so interesting. So, one of the things I found in the medieval literature as I was working on my PhD dissertation is that there are two types of approaches, and I was dealing with Torah scrolls and God’s name. So, there are two approaches. One is: We examine in great minutiae and detail the Talmud and the writings of Maimonides, and we come to the conclusion as to what the law is. And there’s a completely different approach, which is, we go, and we ask the scribe down the street. And some of the top rabbis of the Middle Ages will say, “Well, yes, we’re supposed to do X, Y, Z, but I asked the scribes, and here’s what they do.”

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: And that’s what I refer to as scribal praxis. Meaning, what did they do? In Hebrew we say, “Minhagei sofrim.” What is the act of practical thing done by scribes? And that might not line up with what the legal texts say, and that’s because the people who wrote the legal texts may not have known how to actually write a Torah scroll.

Avielah: They may not have been scribes, and not all scribes are rabbis.

Nehemia: So, there are three professions that required very specialized knowledge that even someone like Maimonides may not have had, which was a scribe, meaning a STaM scribe, specifically of Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzas, a mohel, a circumciser, and a shokhet, somebody who slaughters animals. Now, you might read all the books in the world about how you’re supposed to perform circumcision… I’m going to trust the guy who was taught by the other guy who did a thousand of them before he let the new guy do even one, and then supervise him. I’m not going to trust the guy who read a bunch of books. And so, this is kind of a specialized…

Avielah: No. You cannot be self-taught with this. You cannot be self-taught with any of those things.

Nehemia: Right. So, that’s fascinating to me.

Avielah: Because it’s actually not about you. It is about you in that you are bringing this, and you are the vessel, and you are providing it, and you are serving. But you’re not allowed to sign it. Other than that, this is the way that you are serving God and you’re serving your community. So, it’s not about you, it’s about everyone out there.

Nehemia: Talk about you’re not allowed to sign it.

Avielah: Who’s going to be reading it? You have to think about, “Is what I’ve written kosher? So, it’s fine. But is it hard to read? Is it ugly?”

Nehemia: I want to go to that. When you write a Torah scroll, you can’t sign it at the end and say, “This was done by Avielah.”

Avielah: No, no, no! Never. Never ever.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: Not a Torah scroll. That’s another one of those very specific laws. Now, that being said, I did come across… this is one of my many stories. I have a million of them, because I’ve been doing this… in October it’ll be 20 years, since I earned my te’uda, since I officially became a soferet. I started studying Hebrew calligraphy from the ’90’s, and then I’ve been a Judaic artist since 1994, and then from ’97 I started learning sofrut. Because I was living in Canada, I was living in Victoria…

Nehemia: Wow. I’m so sorry for that, that you were living in Canada. I’m just kidding. The Great Northern Wasteland.

Avielah: Yes, yes, you know, some of my ancestors actually emigrated to the United States and fought on the side of the British during the American War of Independence.

Nehemia: Talk about mistakes…

Avielah: Yeah, and now it’s on tape. And obviously, they lost, so… they were given land in Ontario, they were given free farms in Ontario. They negotiated with the local First Nations People, and they were given farms in Ontario as a reward from the king, and they were given titles, and it’s the only title that’s recognized in Canada, “United Empire Loyalist”. I know all this is irrelevant so it’s going to be edited out.

Nehemia: Wow. No, no! We should keep this! This is a fascinating subject.

Avielah: You were the one that made the comment about being sorry that I’m Canadian.

Nehemia: Now you’re a refugee in the United Kingdom. Alright, let’s move on.

Avielah: I’m a U.K. citizen! I’m both.

Nehemia: Alright, so… let’s finish this.

Avielah: We don’t even know what we were talking about now.

Nehemia: No, let’s go back to this. So, you wrote the word “ki.” I think we lost our place. We’re now on page… where were we? Oh, here it is… “ki mashchit.” So, you actually say each word as you’re writing because that’s how you were taught.

Avielah: So then when you come to the end of Mashchit, then…

Nehemia: Presumably you don’t say God’s name.

Avielah: You don’t… well, we don’t know how to say God’s name really, do we? I know there’s a debate about that.

Nehemia: That’s a separate conversation.

Avielah: It is a separate conversation, but…

Nehemia: Let’s move on.

Avielah: What I would say is, I would make a verbal declaration that I am about to write this holy name for the sake of the mitzvah of Sefer Torah and for the sake of the holiness of the name. And that does not give you permission to write it, because really, you still should only ever write any of God’s names in STaM, in ritual items. You’re not supposed to just write them all over the place.

I saw online, someone was printing them on cushions, and I was just like, “Please don’t do that!” You know, you don’t want people sitting on God’s name on cushions. Then you would say Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Nehemia: So, you would pronounce out each of the four letters…

Avielah: I would say the four letters, and I would still look each time. I know how to write this name, right? It’s stamped, like “simeni kachotem al libecha”, right? It’s stamped on my heart, this name. But I still look, and say it, and write, and look, and say it, and write. Because that’s what you do; that’s how you don’t make a mistake. Sometimes you still make a mistake, hopefully not with any of God’s names. You might also notice that the two “Heys” here are written differently.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm, they have crowns on them. Is that what you’re referring to?

Avielah: No… I mean like, see the gag and the regel? Like the roof and the leg here…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s intentional.

Avielah: That one looks like a Dalet, and this one is rounder, like a Resh. And then you see the little Yud, the foot, here, of this Hey is wider, and it’s got like a little foot sticking out, and then this one is really narrow. And every time you see God’s name written by this particular scribe, you’ll see it written like that.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Because there is a tradition… not everyone writes God’s name like this, but there is a tradition that Yud is the dad, the first Hey is the mom, the Vav is the son, and the second Hey is the daughter.

Nehemia: Of what? I’m not trying to be…

Avielah: Life, the universe, everything. Forty-two. And the two Heys are differentiated from each other because mama energy is different than daughter energy. It’s not the same. All mamas are daughters, but they’re not all mamas.

Nehemia: I’m lost here.

Avielah: It’s a family. It’s a nuclear family. Not that that’s the only way to be a family, but…

Nehemia: So, that isn’t implying God is a family, is it?

Avielah: No, but it shows that in this particular tradition there’s this idea that “being,” because we know this; the Tetragrammaton, as the Greeks call it, that that is the verb “to be” in the present tense. Which is why when you’re speaking Hebrew you don’t say the verb “to be” in the present tense; you just skip over it. Right? Like, if you were going to translate it, it would just have that missing. If it was in a different tense…

Nehemia: In most contexts, yeah.

Avielah: Yeah, but you know what I’m talking about. And that is because it’s just “being”. It’s existence. And it’s got both genders here.

Nehemia: In other words, when you say, “the boy is big”, you say “hayeled gadol”, and the word “is” is not expressed in Semitic languages, usually, in the present tense.

Avielah: That’s right. But that’s why. Because “God is”. It’s like it says in the Bible, “I am which I am” or, “I am that I am” or, “I will be that I will be”.

Nehemia: Right, different ways of translating it.

Avielah: Exactly. So, that’s why we don’t say it. So, that is that tradition. Now, this is not part of the tradition that I was taught. I had two teachers. They taught me more in the German tradition. Mark was taught in more of a Polish tradition, although his teacher was Indian, and my teachers were Canadian and American, Turkish and Russian. But their teachers were. So, you teach what your teacher taught you.

So, I teach in the German tradition. There are different ways of writing. When you’ve seen my husband Mark’s writing, that’s very much more Polish. The way I write is like this, and it’s much more square. It’s much more, like, as I like to say, “eins zwei, eins zwei“. It’s very square, it’s very zero degrees, 90 degrees. And his is much more dancy, a bit rounder, because that’s generally how the scripts go. And there are different scripts in different countries, but of course, I’m not German. I’ve never lived in Germany, but that’s the tradition I was taught in.

As you know from looking at manuscripts, you can go, “Oh, well, this could have been written in a particular country, or it wasn’t necessarily written in this particular country of the Diaspora, it might have been written somewhere else by someone who was just trained that way.” Because now, with people moving around so much… I mean people always moved around, but it’s easier now.

Nehemia: We have a big problem with Italian manuscripts in that… So, a lot of manuscripts have what’s called a colophon, which is a section at the end where the scribe says, “It was the third day of the week of such and such month and year, and I wrote this for so-and-so.” But in most manuscripts that hasn’t survived, and in Torah scrolls it never existed. There are actually some exceptions, but that’s a different story.

Avielah: I have a story about an exception.

Nehemia: Ooh, I want to hear that. Well, there are a bunch of exceptions where the colophon is a forgery, but there are actually a bunch of real exceptions where it’s not a forgery. When I say a bunch, I mean a few dozen, maybe, that have ever been found. Maybe less than that.

Avielah: A lot from Megillat Esther.

Nehemia: No, I’m talking about Torah scrolls.

Avielah: I know. But with Megillat Esther also. Like these Italian ones, like these young women, and actually girls, that were writing Megillat Esther, like 200, 300, 400 years ago. Some of these Megillot Esther that have been up for auction in the last several years. And they all have colophons. And some of the sofrot today have colophons attached to their…

Nehemia: They do?

Avielah: …Megillot Esther. Yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. So, the problem with Italian manuscripts where there’s no colophon or it’s a Torah scroll, is that in the instances where we do have a colophon, we will sometimes have the same scribe will write in Ashkenazi style, which is Northern European-German. The same scribe will write in the Sephardic style. The same scribe will write in the Italian style, and it really came down to the patron who bought the manuscript from them. It’s not necessarily a Torah scroll. It could be a book on medicine. He’ll say, “I want this in the Sephardic handwriting.” “I want this in the German handwriting.” And the scribes in Italy, especially Northern Italy, did all three fluidly, without a problem, and whoever ordered it and said, “This is the style I want,” he would write it in that style.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, you’ve got to be really careful. You look at a style and say, “Oh, that’s the writing of Northern Europe,” but it was really written in Venice. So, you’ve got to be careful with that.

Avielah: Yeah. You do, actually, and actually this sofer STaM, the Bukharan sofer STam I mentioned earlier who made this for me, he was askedto write a Torah scroll that Mark actually arranged for him to write for this community, but of course they were Ashkenazi. So, they were like, “Oh, he’s Bucharan? What is it going to look like? We want it to reflect us.” So, he was like, “It’s not a problem. I’ll write in your way.” And he did!

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: So, you know, that was a few years ago.

Nehemia: So, tell me about the colophons.

Avielah: The colophon. Well, obviously with Megillot Esther it’s quite common, especially with these young women. There have also been notes left behind. There was a Torah scroll that I checked, it must have been 15 years ago now, and I won’t say the community. I don’t tend to announce communities, because it’s their Torah and their business. So, I was checking it, and I was rolling through, and it obviously was very old. And it was made up of a couple of different scrolls that had sort of been patched together a bit, but it was very nice.

Nehemia: What do you mean it was made up of a bunch of scrolls?

Avielah: Well, sometimes if part of a sefer is damaged, you either will rewrite new and attach to that, or you will have different damaged parts and you amalgamate two other scrolls to get one good usable scroll.

Nehemia: I call that a “Franken-scroll”.

Avielah: Oh, you haven’t seen the Franken-scroll we have at our house! It’s literally a patchwork.

Nehemia: Okay! And I don’t mean that in a negative way.

Avielah: No, we don’t either!

Nehemia: I think Franken scrolls are beautiful because you think you have one scroll, and you realize “this is actually ten scrolls”.

Avielah: So many different traditions, yeah.

Nehemia: Exactly. And different periods and different styles…

Avielah: And it actually takes a lot of skill to be able to piece these together.

Nehemia: Yeah. Unless it’s Yemenite, because every Yemenite scroll is written according to the same tikun, so you could take any column from a Yemenite scroll and insert it into any other scroll.

Avielah: Yeah. Identical, that’s right.

Nehemia: It’s identical at least in terms of what’s in that column, maybe not what’s on each line.

Avielah: They also have more letters in their Torah scroll than the rest of us.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yes, they do. So, it’s all very well to say the Torah is identical for all Jews and always has been forever, but actually the Yemenites have, I think it’s eleven more letters.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah. But it doesn’t change the meaning of anything, which is important. It’s mostly just Yuds and Vavs, that sort of thing.

Nehemia: Meaning the spelling is slightly different.

Avielah: Yeah, it’s just the spelling. So, just like in Modern Hebrew, they would maybe insert a Vav somewhere that wouldn’t normally have a Vav because there are no vowels used in Modern Hebrew.

Nehemia: It’s worse than that. Two or three years ago, the Academy of the Hebrew Language decided they were going to change the spelling system. So, everything written ten years ago, if it’s reprinted today, is supposed to be updated. The word eema, Alef-Mem-Alef, for the last two thousand years it’s been Alef-Mem-Alef. They decided “No, it should be Alef-Yud-Mem-Alef. Because it’s “E”, and every time we have “E” we should put in a Yud.

Avielah: But we don’t need it.

Nehemia: I don’t need it! But that’s the rule they made.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah, and we don’t make those rules.

Nehemia: So, the spelling has changed in our lifetimes… in the lifetimes of babies! It’s that recent…

Avielah: Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s a good way of putting it, actually. God, it’s almost like the Academie Francaise, isn’t it? “We’ve made a decision, everyone!”

Nehemia: Oh no, it’s much worse.

Avielah: “We didn’t ask any of you, but we’ve made a decision.” So… the end of the story. So, I’m going through this Torah, and I’m taking notes. And, you know, it needs a little repair, but it’s not in too bad a shape because whoever fixed it last did a very good job. And I get to the end, and I go, “Oh, isn’t that interesting? An extra helek, I see.”

So, what that means is, at the end of the Torah, at the very end, where it ends with the word Yisrael, obviously, I noticed there was more stitching and extra parchment before we got to the actual wooden roller. And I thought, “It’s probably just because there hadn’t been enough at the end.” Because you really should have more at the end, because then when you roll…

Nehemia: So, an extra column?

Avielah: Well, there’s an extra piece. It wasn’t just a column. But you need to have more at both ends anyway so that the roller doesn’t damage the letters at either end. That’s just a practical…

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: Then I opened it up, and I went “Oh!” Someone had written on this extra piece, “tikanti”. “I fixed this.”

Nehemia: Are you serious?

Avielah: I am serious! Very carefully, he wrote, “Tikanti, Eliezer Friedman, Pest, 1947.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: It gives me chills!

Nehemia: Wow! So, he said, “I fixed it,” so-and-so, and the year… and the place.

Avielah: His name is Eliezer Friedman, and I’m thinking, “1947? What sofer was in Pest in 1947 fixing Torahs? That has got to be the most incredible story!” Obviously, he wrote it all in Hebrew, so…

Nehemia: Wow! So, let’s start with… I’m going to assume he was part of the Neolog movement.

Avielah: I don’t know anything about… I would love to find out who he was.

Nehemia: So, that’s the largest denomination in Hungary. It’s actually one of the oldest denominations in modern Judaism. It’s older than the Reform movement, if I’m not mistaken. Today, it’s still the largest denomination in Hungary. And I’m guessing that in the Neolog movement, it’s okay to put a colophon… And I don’t know, I’m making stuff up. Because I don’t know. You’re right, that’s unbelievable!

Avielah: You don’t know! You’ve got me sitting right here, but you’re making stuff up.

Nehemia: No, meaning, I’m making it up in that I’m trying to hypothesize why would this have happened.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah!

Nehemia: This isn’t supposed to happen!

Avielah: Some say that if you do add an extra… you can’t write anything on the actual Torah scroll. That is adding to Torah. That is a massive no-no, as you know. But if you sew an extra piece on, and maybe write on the back, then it’s not adding to Torah.

Nehemia: Was this on the back?

Avielah: I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. But he did make a point of having extra parchment. Again, 1947, in Pest! Like, where is he getting this beautiful, white, new parchment? It was pristine.

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: And he had taken the trouble of sewing it on and then writing this. And I asked the rabbi, “Where did you get this scroll from?” And he’s like, “I don’t know.” So, I thought, “Okay.” I’ve asked around, some of the Hungarian Jews, and the Hungarian rabbinical students that I know here in London, and I don’t even know where to begin. But that…

Nehemia: That’s crazy.

Avielah: That is going to be a really good story. That’s going to be a book, a movie, a miniseries, a podcast. You don’t know this man’s story. It could be amazing.

Nehemia: That is a pretty incredible story. So, the colophons I know about, there are two types. Most of the colophons that are considered authentic are on Karaite Torah scrolls. They’re mostly in the Firkovich collection in St. Petersburg. A bunch of those are forgeries, but some of them are actually real. Some of them are authentic.

Avielah: Really? Are they really authentic?

Nehemia: Well, according to the scholars who studied them in the 19th-century they’re authentic, yeah.

Avielah: I’m sure they know more than I do.

Nehemia: There’s one that’s definitely authentic that is at Trinity College, Cambridge, and that’s also a Karaite scroll. It’s not actually a colophon, it’s a vow inscription. The guy had something that happened in his life, and he made a vow. “If I get through this, I’m going to dedicate a Torah scroll. I’m going to pay for a Torah scroll.” And when he finally has the Torah scroll written, at the end he writes out, “This is what happened…” and there are 10 signatures.

Avielah: Really? That is interesting. So, he was like, “I made this neder, and I have fulfilled my neder.”

Nehemia: That’s exactly right.

Avielah: Wow, 10 signatures; that sounds like maybe he had a big beit din there, like a minyan.

Nehemia: No, it’s kind of like there were ten witnesses. With Boaz, weren’t there 10 people at the Gate of Bethlehem? I don’t remember. Anyway, the other example, which is a mystery, is, there’s a Torah scroll from Otranto, which is Southern Italy, in the early 12th century, which has a colophon with a specific date. As far as we know, there were no Karaites in Italy in the 12th century, so you can’t blame it on the Karaites in this case. So, somebody decided, “Okay, I can write a colophon in the 12th century.” So, that already kind of makes sense, because it’s so long ago it was before some of these rules crystallized. I mean, the rules were there, but maybe they weren’t equally applied everywhere.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: But in 1947…

Avielah: Yeah, that’s very modern.

Nehemia: I mean, come on! We’ve got books that have been printed that say what you have to do and what you can’t do.

Avielah: As far as the origin, like, the very beginnings of some of these rules, I literally would have to go and research each one to find out where they came from, and when, and when they started going into larger use. We have definitely gotten stricter and stricter and stricter as we’ve gone on. Which in some ways is helping us write better and is helping us make things that are easier to read, and are very practical as far as, these are the materials and things like that. So, those are good, as I would personally define them.

But then there are others that are just… sometimes their argument seems to be strict for the sake of being strict. “And I can show you how strict I am”, and I don’t have a lot of time for that. I know that if that is meaningful for someone in their particular practice, then obviously, bevakasha, please do, because people have to make decisions for themselves.

Nehemia: What would be an example of that?

Avielah: Well, things to do with, for example, Sefer Tagin, where…

Nehemia: Tell us what that is. I know your husband’s doing a PhD on it.

Avielah: Yes, he is writing a PhD on it. He’s almost done. Yeah, it’s exciting. How do I explain Sefer Tagin? This is where I go, “Oh, that’s a vague question and I have a lot of detailed answers.” You probably have a more concise answer to that.

Nehemia: I’ll give the short answer. It’s a book that says, “You put a little symbol there and another symbol there,” I call them doohickeys. I’m from the Mid-West. You put a little doohickey here and a little doohickey there. So, how are people strict as far as Sefer Tagin?

Avielah: So, when you’re saying doohickeys… So, I’ll elaborate on your doohickeys. That is, there will be certain letters that are written differently in order to convey a different idea, or to act maybe as lecture notes. Which actually the Torah is, as some people will teach, “lecture notes,” referring to other things that we are meant to do, other traditions, to remind us of other ideas.

Nehemia: And some of them we don’t know why they’re there, right? Or do we?

Avielah: Well, the thing is… nowadays, for example… so, one that’s very obvious that a lot of people spot right way is the “Pei milufefet”, or Pei melufa, which is the letter Pei, or Fei, and it’s got a spiral in it. Or it’s got a tiny letter Pei/Fei inside where the normal little tongue is.

Nehemia: So, it doesn’t look like a normal Pei. I call it a curly Pei.

Avielah: Yeah, fine. So, I have come across many sifrei Torah that were written 300 years ago, and I’ve restored those. And I know from a historical point of view that restoring those is not a popular thing, but if you want to keep using something, you have to keep it kosher. And there is obviously a difference between restoration and conservation.

Nehemia: What does it mean that you restored it?

Avielah: Well, so, for example, generally, when people bring me an old Torah scroll, they want me to fix it and make it kosher again. So, that means if there’s missing ink, then I will add ink to the areas where there is missing ink.

Nehemia: So, the ink may have flaked off.

Avielah: It may have flaked off, or it may have corroded, because maybe the original recipe of the ink had an imbalance; it was too acidic so it would have crumbled away. Maybe too much iron, or something, if it happens to be iron gall ink. That sort of thing. Or it could be that it was stored in less-than-ideal conditions. Which most of them are, let’s face it, because most people don’t understand how to treat parchment nowadays because it’s not ubiquitous like it used to be.

Although to be fair, most people weren’t literate either, so they wouldn’t even come across parchment. But maybe it’s cracked; maybe the ink is totally fine but there’s a tiny crack. So, if the second the letter does not have any integrity, then the whole Torah is not kosher.

Nehemia: So, how do you fix a letter that’s cracked?

Avielah: So, for something like that, you would add ink, for example. If you have a torn seam, then obviously, we can sew it together. I have something here called “giddin“, and it is also made from a kosher animal. And generally, it’s made by a couple of families who live in Eretz Yisrael, in Israel, and it’s their parnasa, it’s the way they’ve been supporting themselves financially for generations.

Nehemia: And these are sinews or something, right?

Avielah: It is the sinew from the back end of the animal. Basically, the Achilles tendon and the hamstring area. What they do is they card it. They dry it and card it and spin it into really fine…

Nehemia: Card it?

Avielah: Sorry, I have an agricultural background as well. So, carding. There are these special sort of brushes with metal teeth… and you do the same thing with wool, but machines do it now. People don’t tend to hand-card wool from their sheep. And they’re very flat, and they’ve got these metal teeth. And you basically comb them back and forth like this, and that lines all the fibers up in the same direction. And then that’s when you can spin it, because if the fibers aren’t all aligned in the same direction…

Nehemia: And they do that with these sinews?

Avielah: They do it with the sinews, yes. So, they come out of… so, that is what we sew them together with, the sheets. With a gold-plated or a silver-plated needle; not everybody does that, that’s my tradition.

Nehemia: Why use gold-plated needles? I’ve never heard of that.

Avielah: Some scribes will not use steel or any kind of base metals when they are writing or repairing any of these articles. And I say “repairing” lightly because you can’t always repair them. Others just use normal needles, but I use silver or gold plated, and that way you have a fine metal. And unfortunately… and I say “unfortunately” because it comes down even to when I am using a blade or a knife or something like that. And believe it or not, I can plate silver just by wiping it, that’s a way of doing it. You can basically electroplate, without using electricity, onto the blade. But even just those molecules will make it less sharp, and you can see, you can feel how it’s a different blade.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah. Just by adding a few molecules. Yeah, it’s amazing.

Nehemia: Well, this is really interesting. Hold on a second. So, if you have a mistake in a Torah scroll, and you have to erase a word and it’s not God’s name, how do you erase it?

Avielah: Well, it depends. I have a series of erasers that are okay to use because they are considered kosher or vegan or just neutral. They don’t contain any non-kosher animals, for example. That way it fits the halacha, the Jewish law component, but also, you have to respect the materials. You need to use materials and techniques that are going to respect the materials that you’re trying to fix and not cause any damage and not have any kind of long-term negative consequences.

Nehemia: Do you have one of those erasers here?

Avielah: They’re over there. But I do have a blade. Sometimes we’ll just use a razor blade. It depends.

Nehemia: And that doesn’t have to be silver plated, right?

Avielah: Well, I do.

Nehemia: You do? Really?

Avielah: I do, but a lot of scribes don’t bother with that, and I’m not judging them. And then there’s your regular X-Acto blade knife. So, it depends. Sometimes you need to scratch it out, other times… it depends. Sometimes I will use… this is a bit of lava that I got when I was 12, in Hawaii, on the beach. And you can see there are little bits of parchment caught in the holes of the lava. That’s actually what that is.

Nehemia: So, what do you do with the lava?

Avielah: Oh, you scratch it out. You grind it out. You can use glass. Some scribes use glass. Some, actually,are so skillful with these that they can literally lift out, they can literally take just a layer of skin off, basically, and lift it out basically without making too big of a big hole. I never learned to do that, and I’m too scared to so I don’t do it that way. Instead, what I do is I work from the top. And like I said, I might just use a series of different erasers. I have an erasing shield…

Nehemia: When you say erase, you don’t mean like on the back of a pencil, like rubber?

Avielah: No, not like that.

Nehemia: What do you mean?

Avielah: You can actually use a white plastic eraser, because they…

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah, you can.

Nehemia: And that will remove ink?

Avielah: It depends. That’s why I usually start with a blade or something. I use… oh, it’s over there as well… really, really, fine sandpaper. Like really super-fine sandpaper. But you also have to know that the sandpaper is vegan, because you don’t want the adhesive that’s in the paper to not be kosher. I’m not saying that all scribes practice the same way I do, but that’s how I do it.

And it’s the same if you need to do any gluing, like when you’re patching a Torah or anything like that, and you have to use an adhesive. You have to make sure that it’s not made out of non-kosher animals, because then you’ve pasul-ed the whole Torah again. You’ve made it unfit for ritual use.

Nehemia: Talk to me about the balance between… you said… So, some people are upset when you take a two- or three-hundred-year-old Torah scroll and restore it. Talk to me about that. Why would they be upset?

Avielah: Well, some people feel like the moment that, because it’s so old and let’s say it’s never been repaired, then everything about it is from that time and from that tradition and from that person. And that’s all the materials manufacture and it’s… everything. And the moment I come to it, the moment I put one drop of my ink on it, the ink will have a little bit different recipe. It obviously is from modern times. If the ink has faded, if it fades to dark gray or brown or something like that, it’s fine. But if it’s turned red, then it’s never been kosher to begin with.

Nehemia: Why was it never kosher to begin with?

Avielah: Because there are different recipes, but you’re only allowed to use certain ingredients. But that’s just one of the things that we’re taught.

Nehemia: What ingredient would be there that would make it unkosher to begin with?  Because presumably it’s red because of rust.

Avielah: Not necessarily, no. At least in my experience, when I’ve come across iron gall ink that has corroded, it’s actually usually turned greenish black, if that makes sense.

Nehemia: It makes perfect sense.

Avielah: And it’s corroded, and it’s become quite crumbly.

Nehemia: And you mean actually greenish? Because the greenish would indicate there’s copper in there.

Avielah: Sometimes it’s green or sometimes it’s bluish.

Nehemia: That’s also copper.

Avielah: But the thing is, I have to make a caveat, that is that I have tetrachromatic vision.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Avielah: So, I actually see a million more colors than other people because I’ve got a different combination of cones and rods and things like that.

Nehemia: I see.

Avielah: So, I’m not saying that if you looked at it you could see it, I’m just saying that this is what I’m seeing. And then when it comes away, like when it crumbles away and it’s just the parchment left, you can see the kind of staining because it sits on top of the parchment. It doesn’t soak in like with paper. It sits on top of the parchment, which is why you can use a blade to take it off and not make a hole, for example.

You can see the way the parchment’s been stained. Usually, it’s sort of variations of beige or brown or something like that, but even that can tell you the ink content. But it’s like the curly Pei, because we went there, but then we didn’t finish going there.

I’ve fixed many Torahs where they were full of these beautiful letters from Sefer Tagin, which are supposed to make you go, “Ah, I see this dot here,” or, “I see this particular letter there,” and that’s supposed to remind me of the lesson of such-and-such. Or that’s supposed to be more information on how to behave or how to be a better person, or that sort of thing.

So, there was a scribe that had gone through this particular Torah, and several sifrei, several Torahs that I fixed, where they went, “Oh, those aren’t considered kosher anymore,” or “My tradition doesn’t recognize those anymore, or never did.”

Nehemia: Okay, so they removed the curly Pei’s.

Avielah: They didn’t remove them, they just took a really thick quill, and they just went mrrr, mrrr, mrrr, and they just covered up, with a bunch of ink, they just covered up the curl…

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Avielah: …to make one really big, thick, ugly tongue inside the letter, instead of a proportionate tongue, which would have been nicer. They didn’t take the time to do that. So, to me, that’s a bit like you’re destroying our older tradition, which I don’t think you should do. This is just my personal opinion. But it’s also a bit lazy. But that’s good for me, because by the time I got this Torah, like another hundred years later or whatever, his ink… and I’m saying his because a hundred years ago it was very unlikely that a woman would have been fixing this Torah, but not impossible, his ink had already started to fade. Because obviously he didn’t have very good quality ink so I could see the swirl coming through.

Nehemia: Okay! Did you restore it as a swirl?

Avielah: Yes, I did. And that took a long time.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: Well, the thing is, that’s part of the estimate I gave to the synagogue that owned any of these Torahs, because like I said, I’ve seen it many times. I’ve said, “Okay, there’s this. This is how I think about it, and this is why, but at the end of the day it’s your Torah scroll.” So, if I don’t restore all of them… because they’re not not-kosher either way, really. If it used to be kosher, we should leave it that way. But nowadays, they’re not really considered kosher. But it would be really nice to bring back the tradition, I think. And so do several other scribes, male and female scribes. So, I leave it to them, basically.

Nehemia: You talked before about how there were these innumerable rules, and they’re getting more and more strict, and you mentioned Sefer Tagin. So, now’s a good segue into… you were going to give an example of that from the curly Pei’s. So, what are the strict rules that you think, “Okay, that’s overkill?”

Avielah: Oh, sorry. What I meant was like when someone comes along later and they find something to do with Sefer Tagin and they don’t accept it, so they write over it so that it’s “modern-looking” now and they’ve destroyed the Sefer Tagin element. The curly Pei is one example.

Another example is, there are a couple of letter Kufs. The letter Kuf, that’s where we get the letter ‘Q’ from, eventually, in English, because English actually comes from the same place that Hebrew and Arabic and Greek and everything comes from, now what we see all the time is Kuf has a space between the long descender, the long leg, and its roof. So, there’s a space there. You have to write a space.

There are two instances. It used to be, according to Sefer Tagin, where you would actually have that leg, that descender, touching the roof. And they were for specific reasons, deliberately, and they were to reflect a particular idea. A lot of Torahs I’ve come across, also some other scribe has gone, “Uh, that shouldn’t be touching… scrape.” But now that that’s been done, I’m not really supposed to restore it. So, that’s why I don’t like when… but like I said, I’m just speaking from me. I’m not saying what the rules are. This is where I’m coming from as a scribe.

Nehemia: If it’s any consolation, in the Middle Ages they would restore Torah scrolls every couple of hundred years, or I guess we don’t really know how often, and when they would do that, they would often systematically go through and change the shapes of certain letters. Like, I saw one Torah scroll where in every single Hey, the left leg was originally touching the roof. And every single instance, except a few where he missed, the restorer came and scraped it away. Which is Chok Tochot, so, you’re not supposed to do that, but whatever. Who’s counting? So, it violates a certain obscure rule, which is actually in the Talmud, so it’s not that obscure.

Avielah: Not that obscure. Makes it more universal that way.

Nehemia: Right. But apparently, he figured it was better to do that than to…

Avielah: Leave it as it is.

Nehemia: …than to leave it, and he did it systematically throughout the scroll except for a few places where he missed.

Avielah: You could argue that it was already a letter Hey, and that after he scraped it was still a letter Hey.

Nehemia: Well, he scraped it because I think he thought it was a Chet. Or he knew it wasn’t a Chet, but it would be misinterpreted as a Chet.

Avielah: Right. So, if he thought, “Oh, this person put a Chet where it should be a Hey,” and he turned it into a Hey from being a Chet, then that is Chok Tochot.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Avielah: But if he thought, “Oh, it’s just one of these old fashioned Hey’s that we don’t consider kosher anymore” because, as you know, Hey and Chet used to look a lot more similar than they do now.

Nehemia: They can still be confused today, but okay. Especially in the old, printed books of the 19th century…

Avielah: Oh, terrible printing!

Nehemia: Sometimes, the printing is so imprecise that they’re indistinguishable sometimes, the Hey and the Chet, because the top does touch there.

Avielah: It’s true. I feel your pain. I’m really into typography as well.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Thank you so much for joining us. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. I didn’t realize I was sitting down with the first certified modern female scribe, and I’m really honored. Thank you.

Avielah: Well, thank you, Nehemia. That’s very kind of you to say, and I appreciate you having me on your podcast. It’s been a lot of fun, hasn’t it? I can imagine we could geek out around a lot of stuff, actually.

Nehemia: And hopefully, we’ll have another opportunity to do this.

Avielah: Yeah!

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 24:12, 27, 42, 48
Genesis 19:5
Deuteronomy 6:9; 11:20
Jeremiah 17:1
Gittin 45b (Talmud)
Ezra 2:55; Nehemiah 7:57
Esther 1
Genesis 19:18
Deuteronomy 25:17-19; Exodus 17:8-16
Genesis 24:63
Exodus 11:7

BOOKS MENTIONED
Even Sapir (1866) by Rabbi Yaakov Sapir

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Study – Paleo-Hebrew and Papal Parchment Repair
Hebrew Voices #142 – Sign Language of the Synagogue
Hebrew Voices #145 – Decorative Doohickeys
Support Team Study – The Dog Ate My Torah Scroll 

OTHER LINKS
Online Course - Introduction to Hebrew Calligraphy (Allison Barclay (Avielah)) | Domestika
Soferet Avielah Barclay (@soferetavielah) • Instagram photos and videos
Soferet (2006)

Dr. Gordon’s PhD dissertation:
The Writing, Erasure, and Correction of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts

To email Avielha: [email protected]
Avielah’s (outdated) website: http://soferet.com

The post Hebrew Voices #181 – The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, SBL Reactions 2023: Part 1, Nehemia joins Dr. Kim Phillips and Nelson Calvillo to share the highlights of the most important annual conference on biblical studies including a review of the scholarly work of TikTok-famous bible pundit Dan MacClellan and another session about a groundbreaking theory on the origins of ancient Hebrew accent marks.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Hebrew-Voices/Hebrew-Voices-180-SBL-Reactions-2023-Part-1.mp3

Download Audio

 

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #180 - SBL Reactions 2023: Part 1

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

Kim: This is not an artificial product. It’s not, as you said, that the Masoretes sat down and said, “Okay, here’s the half verse marker.” Extraordinarily, this has been preserved since before the fall of the Second Temple, the way naturally that the text is read.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m Dr. Nehemia Gordon with this year’s SBL Reactions. And joining me from last year is Nelson Calvillo, who’s a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research.

And for the first time joining me for SBL Reactions is Dr. Kim Phillips, who is a research associate at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, an affiliated lecturer at the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge Biblical Hebrew, and last, but certainly not least, a research fellow at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. Shalom, Nelson and Kim!

Kim: Shalom. Good to see you.

Nelson: Shalom, Nehemia, shalom, Dr. Kim Phillips. Great to be here.

Nehemia: Thanks for joining me, guys. So, what we’ve done in the past, Kim, is everybody shares the top lectures they went to. SBL, for those who haven’t seen one of these before, is the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting. It’s gone back to the 1800’s.

It’s funny. I once, in one of my articles, quoted something from the 1905 meeting, and at that meeting there were 5 or 10 lectures the entire meeting. Well, now there are over 1,000 lectures, so you can’t go to all of them.

There were lectures that I wanted to go to that I couldn’t go to because I was speaking at the same time, and all kinds of things like that. So, I’m going to let you start, Kim. What was the top lecture that you went to?

Kim: I think I’m going to have to have a pair of lectures, if that’s okay.

Nehemia: Fair enough, absolutely.

Kim: Sophia Pitcher works in Masoretic studies, particularly focusing on the ta’amim, the accents, and she gave a couple of papers, one of them in the Biblical Hebrew Poetry section, where she was co-presenting with Emmylou Grosser, and the other she was presenting in the Masoretic Studies section. And she was speaking alone at that point, and in both of the papers she more or less gave us an overview, an introduction, to her very particularly linguistic way of looking at the ta’amim, the riddle of the ta’amim.

Nehemia: Tell the audience what ta’amim are. Let’s assume people don’t even know Hebrew. What are the ta’amim?

Kim: Okay. So, when you open a Hebrew Bible, you are faced with a whole gamut of information on the page. First of all, let’s say it’s a Tiberian Bible codex. You’re faced with three columns of the biblical text, assuming it’s one of the prose books, so Genesis through to 2 Kings, or Second Kings… whichever I’m meant to say, Nehemia. I remember from last time that…

Nehemia: No, it’s fine! I’ve since found out that it’s a very British thing to say, “One Corinthians”, and “Two Kings.” So that is something the British do in general, I found out.

Kim: Okay, phew, good! So, let’s say it’s one of those books. There are others in three columns as well, but let’s just say it’s one of those. And at the top and the bottom of the page of this Masoretic codex, and in the margins of the three columns, you’ve got all of the Masoretic notes. We’re not talking about those; we’re talking about the biblical text itself.

The biblical text itself is formed up of three different strands: the consonants, the consonantal text, and then a series of dots and dashes above and below those consonants, and sometimes in the middle of the consonants themselves, representing the vowels. But then in addition, there’s a whole other set of lines and dots which represent the accents.

So, the vowels and the consonants are together sufficient for somebody just to read the biblical text, so “Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz,” et cetera. I didn’t need any accents there except to know that “ha’aretz” was the end of the verse. So, I guess I kind of did need an accent, sort of.

But the accents are in the Tiberian Bible. They appear on every single word, and the big question, the question that has occupied scholars for centuries now is, what is their primary function? We know a cluster of their functions, but we’re still really trying to pin down, what is it, at root, that these accents do? I’ll pause there in case somebody wants to respond, but I can carry on.

Nehemia: No, I’m riveted. Keep going Kim.

Kim: So, we can list some of the things they do. Generally, the accents, as it appears on each word, will appear on the accented syllable of each word. So, melech, king, is accented at the beginning of the word. But if I take the same consonants and put in some different vowels, malach, he ruled, and you can hear that the stress is at the end of the word. So, usually, not always, but usually, the accent appears over the stressed syllable, melech, at the beginning, malach, at the end. That’s one thing. That’s kind of the easiest part.

Most scholars, I think, agree that in some sense the accents show how to divide the text into sense units. I deliberately put that pretty vaguely because I think expressing it like that, almost everyone would agree, to some extent, that it shows where one unit of sense ends and the next unit begins.

Nehemia: Can you give us an example of what you mean by sense units? Nelson and I might know, but maybe the audience doesn’t.

Kim: Sure, yeah. Let me open up a Hebrew Bible here. In fact, since we were working from Genesis 1 just now, let’s do so here.

Nehemia: To give another example, you talk about accents. So, for example the word Elohim, that you read, or recited by heart, we know it’s Elohim and not Elohim. Now Elohim isn’t a thing in Hebrew, so that’s why your example is better, melech and malach, or ka’tavti and katav’ti, or b’katav’ti, where it actually does change the meaning. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Kim: Yeah, sure. So, as I said, every word, more or less, in the Tiberian Bible has an accent, and those accents… I’m already running into problems here, where we’re trying to get an example of how the sense is broken up by the accents here.

So, back to Genesis 1:1. According to the accents, I would read it like this, in terms of sense, “Bereshit, bara Elohim, et ha’shemayim v’et ha’aretz.” So, I break it up, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And we can kind of sense already intuitively in English how… I’m already going to be taking sides here, how pausing or lengthening at certain points in the sentence just gives a very different sentence.

For example, if I were to say, “To learn Masora, you must study hard.” Then I would be saying something quite different if I was speaking to a young lady called Masora. And let’s say there’s a textbook she has to study, and that textbook is written by a guy called Hard, so in that sense I would say, “To learn, Masora, you must study Hard.” Whatever I’m talking about, whatever field of discipline, let’s say it’s economics, Masora can only learn about this economics if she studies the textbook by Hard.

So, even there, in those two example sentences, “To learn, Masora, you must study Hard,” and, “To learn Masora, you must study hard,” we can see that the way that we pause, the way that we divide up the individual groups of words, makes a difference to the meaning. So that is another aspect of what the accents do.

And just finally, the accents as a third element. At least nowadays and for centuries… but we’re not quite sure how far back it goes, but for centuries we can say at the very least, the accents have also indicated the various melodies by which the biblical text is sung or is chanted or is cantillated. I’ll pause there.

Nehemia: That’s a great explanation. I want to bring an example. This is an example that the medieval commentators talk about, Deuteronomy 26:5. There’s a ceremony where you bring this basket of your tithe, and you present it before God. And then it says, “Arami oved avi,” which is always translated, I think, “My father is a wandering Aramean.” And so, now that I’m thinking about it, this is a mishpat shemani, “a nominal sentence”. The word “is” actually doesn’t even appear there; it’s implied by the juxtaposition of these two nouns.

So, the way the accents divide that up, famously, is “Arami, oved avi,” “An Aramean destroys my father”, or “destroyed my father”. And then the rabbis explain, who’s the Aramean that destroys “my father”? That is Laban, who tried to destroy Jacob. Which is like, “What?” No, this is talking about Abraham, who is “the wandering Aramean.” He came from Aram Naharaim, “Aramea between the two rivers,” in Mesopotamia. But the accents actually seem to indicate a different interpretation of the phrase, that it’s referring to “Laban who tried to destroy my ancestor, my father.”

And so, there’s an example where the accents are contrary to what we would expect the plain meaning to be, and maybe we’re wrong. Or the accents are taking a side against the plain meaning. That’s possible too, right?

Kim: In that case, I think the example of Laban, “Laban was attempting to destroy Jacob,” is also represented in Targum Onkelos, if I remember correctly there.

Nehemia: I don’t remember off the top of my head. But I know for sure that that’s an early Rabbinical Midrash and that it seems that the accents are giving the break-up of those three words in Hebrew, “Arami oved avi” according to this Midrashic interpretation rather than the peshat, and maybe that is the peshat and we’re just wrong. I don’t think so, but… So, it actually can affect interpretation.

And we’ve actually, in previous SBL Reactions, talked about Sophia Pitcher’s hypothesis, but I’d love to hear it from you. What I find so intriguing about it is… look, I gave a paper. I don’t know that my paper is going to… well, maybe it will actually, I don’t know. Most papers that you hear aren’t going to fundamentally change the field if the hypothesis is accepted. Whereas if hers is accepted, this is a game changer. So, tell us what her hypothesis is now that you’ve explained the overall scholarly approach to the accents.

Kim: Well, okay. I should give a disclaimer that Sophia is working from a very, very heavily linguistic framework, and that’s pretty new to me. So, I’m still very much trying to piece together my understanding new word by new word. There is so much terminology in this field.

As far as I understand, Sophia is using a linguistic model called prosodic phonology, which I had to look up! And I think all that means is that, when we speak, we cluster words together. We use different speeds, we give different words different pauses, different stresses. Sometimes our voice goes up, sometimes our voice goes down. Sometimes our voice goes up in pitch, sometimes our voice goes up in volume, or down in volume, et cetera. So, those are the kind of contours that we’re very, very used to when we actually speak, but which linguists now study very, very formally and try to understand how it is cross-linguistically. So, across different languages, how is it that pitch, or volume, or stress, or pause, or rhythm… how are they used? How do they all combine into the grand process of making sense of what somebody is saying? I think that is, more or less, prosodic phonology. And Sophia, if you are listening, forgive me please if I’ve got it completely wrong!

Nehemia: Well, she’s promised to come on the program and explain her hypothesis.

Kim: Oh, that would be brilliant!

Nehemia: But the audience might not hear that for another year, so you’re sharing the gist of it.

Kim: I hope I’m sharing the gist of it! Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the big departure that she’s presenting, really from my perspective, is what she calls the continuous dichotomy theory, or model. I forget what she calls it.

Kim: The law of continuous dichotomy.

Nehemia: The law of continuous dichotomy. There it is, LCD.

Kim: LCD, that’s it.

Nehemia: And I was taught that at Hebrew University of Jerusalem as fact… say “fact.” That this was common knowledge… say “common knowledge.” The audience, not you guys. But you could if you want. And she’s coming along and saying, “No, that’s not correct.” And what’s so amazing to me is… one of my teachers at Hebrew University, Simcha Kogut, he has two books on the accents, and in both of them he’s analyzing how the medieval commentators reacted to the accents. But all of his reactions assume the law of continuous dichotomy. Well, now maybe we have to go back and look at what these medieval commentators said if the law of continuous dichotomy is wrong. Or more importantly, maybe it’s still right, but maybe they didn’t know about it. And we had this conversation as we were walking back from one of the lectures, Kim, about William Wykes.

Kim: Yeah.

Nehemia: And Sophia Pitcher says William Wykes invented the law of continuous dichotomy. And when I heard that a few years ago it blew my mind because, I thought, that’s just a fact. That’s common knowledge. Ibn Ezra is engaging with the law of continuous dichotomy. And I forget who all the other rabbis are… Radak is engaging... These are examples from the Middle Ages, but who says? Maybe they looked at the accents in a completely different way and we don’t necessarily know what that way is. Maybe they were wrong, but we can no longer take the law of continuous dichotomy for granted. To me that’s the biggest challenge of her research, whether she’s right or not.

Kim: Yes. But the more I dig into it, the more I think that actually lots of useful parts of what we learned with LCD can be maintained. Now, I think Sophia would want to push back against that and say, “No, we need to have a whole new framework.” But yes, in essence, what Sophia is saying is, “Look, we now know this prosodic chronology. We now have analyzed how languages rise in intonation, fall in intonation, and in pitch, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, what the accents are doing is marking that for the reading of the biblical text,” which is a very beautiful matching of a phenomenon that we see in the biblical text, in the Masoretic text, with the sort of phenomenon that linguists are studying from modern spoken languages.

And to my mind it’s quite intuitively plausible because, over the last two to three decades, I think one of the major strands of development of understanding within Masoretic studies in general is that the Masoretes really didn’t make this stuff up. It’s not that they sat down after the Talmud was finished and thought, “Right, what are we going to do now? I know! Let’s get to work on the biblical text!”

And so, what the Masoretes weren’t doing was sitting down with a bare consonantal text and working out, word by word, “which vowel we should put here? which accent should put here?” That’s not what they were doing. They had received an oral tradition of the correct pronunciation, the correct reading of the biblical text, which had been preserved orally for centuries.

So, what the Masoretes are doing towards the end of the first millennium is finding ways to write down what had been passed on to them orally. Namely, a correct way that the text should be read, the correct places where the text should be emphasized, the correct places where your voice should go up and should go down, and where you should pause. And what Sophia is saying is, “Yeah, absolutely. And the accents are a part of that big picture.” I think that just makes reasonable…

Nehemia: Wow, this reminds me of… I forget his name, one of the 20th century physicists who came up with this rule to explain how subatomic particles work, and he said, “The law knew more than I did,” or “The formula knew more than I did.” He came up with this formula, and then he started to discover things based on this formula. And I think what she’s saying is, and I think what you’re saying as well is… What I was taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 90’s was that… I don’t know if this was said explicitly but it was implied, that the Masoretes decided, “Okay, this is the middle of the verse, we’ll put an etnachta there.” “Now this is the middle of the first clause, we’re going to put an accent here.” “Now this is the middle of the first half of the first clause, we’ll put an accent there.”

And what Sophia seems to be saying, and I think what a lot of the work of Geoffrey Khan and his students really bring out, is that they had this oral recitation, and these people are referred to in the Talmudic sources as “ba’alei mikra”, “the masters of Scripture”, the people who are reciting the Scripture. And then you also had Tanna’im, who were reciting the Oral Law. You had people who would recite this vast knowledge of information without necessarily understanding everything they were reciting. They just knew, “Here is where you put this word, and here is how you pronounce that word.”

Then the Masoretes came along and said, “How do we record this in graphic form?” And they might not have understood the linguistics behind it, they just knew, “here’s where your voice goes up”, “here’s where your voice emphasizes”, “here’s where your voice has a trill”. I’m thinking of the shalshelet, assuming that’s what it really is… you know, “va’yitma’hame’ah” or something like that, where you’re kind of pausing and really emphasizing that word.

So, they had these linguistic patterns that they recorded with graphic symbols, and this is why her explanation is so attractive. To do what scholars have told us for centuries, we don’t need more than five or six symbols. You have two keisars, a melech, a mishneh and a shalish, and then you have a conjunctive accent… six, and you’re done. Maybe you had one more for some disambiguation or something. We don’t need all the numerous symbols that we have.

So, the explanation was, “Well, that’s for cantillation, and we’re not really interested in cantillation.” That’s actually what I was taught at Hebrew University. “Why do we have more than six or seven symbols? Because that’s for the cantillation. They’re chanting it in the synagogue in some kind of stylized way.” “Okay. Why are they doing that?” So, she says they’re doing it because that’s how people spoke. Wow!

Kim: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that, if I’m reading her correctly, then she’s saying this is a natural language phenomenon. That phrase comes up quite a lot. So, to come back to what you were saying, this is not an artificial product. It’s not, as you said, that the Masoretes sat down and said, “Okay here’s the half verse marker.” It’s that this has been preserved, extraordinarily, since before the fall of the Second Temple; the way, naturally, that the text is read. Perhaps in a stylized kind of a way, in a very intentional, formal, stylized kind of way, but nonetheless, it is a natural language phenomenon and therefore it should be accessible to be analyzed using the tools that we know from other natural languages. And that’s exactly what Sophia is doing as far as I can understand it.

Nehemia: Well, we’re going to stick with that until she comes on the program and corrects all of us!

Kim: Yes, that’s what I’m counting on!

Nehemia: Alright, I’m going to bring my… I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite lecture. In all sincerity my favorite lecture was Kim’s lecture, but we’ll save that for a different discussion. Maybe we’ll do a whole episode for just that. No, it really was mind-blowing because it brought up some issues of how I’ve been dealing with the manuscripts where I now have to second guess. “Okay, so I need to reevaluate a lot of what I’ve been doing with some of the manuscripts because there’s different…” and I knew that there are different types of manuscripts. I’ve talked about this, I’ve written about it, I’ve taught it, but I never applied it in the way that you apply it. So, we’ll save that for a different lecture, or a different episode, not a lecture.

So, my favorite lecture was Kim’s, but the one I want to talk about is, I went to a review of a book written by Dan MacClellan, Dr. Dan MacClellan. He is actually quite famous as a TikToker, and he actually referenced that in his… It was basically a review. You had several people, scholars who were giving reactions to his book, which is about… I forget what it’s called. Nelson, if you could Google it. It’s like The Nature of YHWH, which he pronounces as “Adonai”, or something like that. And what he’s talking about is, what was the understanding of God, of deity, in ancient Israel? And then they had several scholars responding to his view. And there was some critique, but by and large they agreed with him.

And what I found so interesting was the reaction of one of the critics. I forget her name. Actually, I never knew her name, I’ll be honest… I’m sure she said it at the beginning. But I didn’t know a lot of the folks who were speaking. And she said that what she’s looking for when she studies the religion of ancient Israel is, whatever the biblical text was opposed to, that was the original religion of ancient Israel.

And I thought, “Wow! She said the quiet part out loud!” Because that is the approach that a lot of particularly critical scholars of so-called “higher criticism” of the Old Testament… And look, I deal with what’s called “lower criticism.” And it’s called lower because it’s lower on the page, not that it’s lower in importance. But textual criticism, where the people are trying to figure out how the biblical text was written in the first place.

She explained her starting approach. Or what she’s really interested in, I should say, is, what was Isaiah opposed to? That must have been the folk religion, the original religion, even the official religion of ancient Israel. What was Jeremiah opposed to? That was the religion of ancient Israel. And I thought that was such an interesting way to explain it.

Did you find the name of the book, Nelson?

Nelson: I think so. The one that comes up most recently is… and I’m going to pronounce it “Yahweh” just because I think he…

Nehemia: Yes, but he says Adonai actually.

Nelson: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: He pronounces it Adonai.

Nelson: So, it’s YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach

Nehemia: There you go, okay. Oh yeah, and a lot of it was the cognitive approach, which I don’t know that we need to get into. But I thought her comment was so interesting; that, if Deuteronomy is telling you to cut down the Asherah poles, that’s because Asherah was the original religion of ancient Israel. And YHWH, Adonai, Yahweh, however you pronounce it, had a consort. Which in a sense is correct, but is that the original religion of ancient Israel? Or was that a corruption of the religion of ancient Israel?

And then it depends… do you believe that the prophets, as we have them, were inventing a new religion and coming out to oppose an existing religion? Or were they the official original? And official is an interesting word because, if you went to the court of King Manasseh, even according to the Tanakh, yes, Asherah was the wife of God. And if you didn’t believe that you’d be executed for heresy. Or if you didn’t bring the sacrifices, maybe, I don’t know… now I’m making stuff up. I don’t know if he actually executed people for heresy! I don’t know if they had that concept.

But definitely it talks about how, in the time of Josiah, they were taking all these idols out of the Temple. So, her approach… and again, I forget her name. I apologize to her, and we should try to find out, Nelson, and interview her. Her approach is, “No. Josiah is making up a new thing. Before that all the ancient Israelites worshiped in that way, and Josiah is inventing a new approach.” So, I’ll let you guys discuss.

Kim: I have thoughts, but I don’t want to hog the conversation!

Nehemia: No, please! We want to hear what you have to say.

Kim: Well, my first thought is how strikingly that uncovers the preconceptions and the preunderstanding that you’re bringing to the table. And I’ll explain what I mean. If you are willing to accept… let’s call it a hypothesis for now, that God really did appear to a bunch of condemned slaves at Mount Sinai, and really did enter into a special relationship there, and really did reveal something of His nature, et cetera, then, to my mind, that really decisively answers the question, “what is the original or authoritative religion of Israel going to look like?”

And so, for somebody to be willing to entertain different understandings of what the “official religion,” or popular religion, or whatever, it suggests to me that there is a kind of default assumption. “Okay, we’re assuming there was no Sinai, or we’re assuming if there was a Sinai, what we have in the biblical texts isn’t a faithful reflection of what was spoken there. And therefore, all that we’re left with is this kind of historical soup from which we need to drag out the various ingredients as best we can from inscriptions or from reading between the lines of the biblical texts itself, or from archeological remains,” et cetera.

So, I think, if I’ve understood correctly, that that’s quite a nice demonstration of how this whole business of biblical criticism actually depends a huge amount on your preunderstanding that you actually bring to the text before you start reading it. I’ll pause there.

Nehemia: I think they would openly say that. I don’t think that’s something they’re hiding. I’m going to put words now into the mouth of the lady whose name I can’t remember! Which is always a dangerous thing, because maybe I’m wrong. But I think she would say, “Well, that’s the approach of a conservative apologist to say that God actually revealed Himself at Mount Sinai. And we have to, as historians, assume that’s not the case and that was all made up later.” And then when they approach the New Testament, they’ll say the same thing. I’ll give you an example. James Tabor has said, “As an historian I can’t engage with Jesus rising from the dead. What I can engage with is that people believe that Jesus rose from the dead.” Which is actually more than people are willing to stipulate in the case of Mount Sinai.

And I agree with the statement in the sense that, as critical historians, I don’t know if we can say that. I mean, I believe that God revealed Himself at Mount Sinai, but the question we can engage with is, did the ancient Israelites believe? Whether He did or not is a question of faith, because we weren’t there. But did the ancient Israelites believe that? And I think these folks would say no. They look at that like legends about King Arthur, that they were made up hundreds of years later.

And I think you’re absolutely right, Kim. It shows their starting preconceptions, and I’ll even use the word bias. And I don’t have a problem with them having a bias, because I have a bias when I study Islam. I don’t believe the angel Jibril revealed himself in a cave to Mohammed, but I also believe that Mohammed’s disciples believed that the angel Gabriel revealed himself, and maybe Mohammed himself believed that, even. And so, here we have to, I think, distinguish between faith and what we can talk about as critical historians. So…

So, here’s the problem I have with their approach. I think they would say they don’t have a bias and we do. And I think we should acknowledge that everybody has some sort of a bias. My starting assumption is that God did have this covenant with Israel.

Kim: Yeah, I think acknowledging that we all have biases is very important, rather than lobbing it like a brick over the fence to explain why they’re wrong, “it’s just their bias”. We all have biases; we all start from a particular place.

But I think what it does sometimes make me want to think is, “Well, I want to listen to what you say because I can see that you’re a good scholar. I can see that you’re going back to evidence. I can see that you’re doing the work carefully. But equally if at any point you say, ‘Therefore you are wrong for believing X, Y, and Z.’ I want to say, ‘Really! If I started from your set of assumptions maybe, but why should I start from your set of assumptions? If I have other good reasons for thinking that there really was a revelation at Sinai, then already we’ve started from very different places, and so we’re going to interpret the evidence differently.’” So, it gives me a kind of caution before I get too worried about some of the things that I hear getting said from my faith perspective.

Nehemia: To me this is a sort of missed opportunity. If you believe what the prophets say, then the Israelites were influenced by the Canaanite religion. And so, if you want to understand that Canaanite religion… Let’s say you went to the average house in Northern Samaria somewhere in the year 850 BCE and you said, “Okay, what is it you believe? How do you practice your faith?” I think they probably might not be too far off on their conclusions, in some ways. In some ways not.

But then the question is, how do we explain that? How did that come to be? And if you asked one of their priests in those days, they might actually agree with Dan MacClellan and say, “No, this is their original religion. And those people down south, and that pesky prophet Hoshea, he is coming to destroy our ancient faith. And we are the conservatives who are preserving the religion of our ancestors that goes back to Moses.”

That’s the whole point of Judges, of that story of Jonathan the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, or apparently, Moshe, is that it seems that the people at these high places had a chain of tradition that claimed their faith went back to Moses. And the prophets we have in our Bible disagree with them, though. Most of them anyway. Some of them don’t really refer to that, necessarily, but most of the prophets seem to disagree with them. Maybe all of them.

Kim: I wish I’d been at the session; it sounds very interesting. I certainly think that examining ancient Near Eastern sources, examining the epigraphic evidence, et cetera, is very, very informative. I don’t have a problem at all with saying that some of the images that we see in Scripture are taken from ancient Near Eastern mythology, ancient Near Eastern ways of understanding the world. In fact, in my mind when you look at the comparative data, it seems blindingly obvious.

But I don’t have a problem with that at all. If a preacher today doesn’t use images and metaphors that are relevant to today’s culture, he’s not going to be understood. And in the same way, if the prophets back then… they were communicators, so they had to use images that were meaningful, viable to their audience.

Nehemia: That’s a profound statement, Kim. And the example that comes to mind is where it talks about God in Psalms, and it uses a bunch of metaphors that we have, that are in the ancient Near East, applied to Baal. He’s the rider on the clouds, and he’s the one that brings thunder and lightning. I may be misquoting it, but something to that effect.

But that doesn’t mean that they worship Baal. It means that… I’ll use a modern Christian terminology when they talk about Christmas. They’ll say, “This is a victory for the church.” That’s something I hear a lot. Some people say, “Christmas has Pagan origins,” the Yuletide log and all that. Okay, but if you’re trying to convert a bunch of pagans in Norway, and they’re not going to give up this symbolism, what you can do is reinterpret that symbolism as applying to Jesus rather than Zeus, or something like that. And it’s not the exact same thing, but I think maybe there is some parallel; it is a similar strategy. What do you think?

Kim: I’m aware that I really haven’t given Nelson much chance to respond! But yeah, I distinctly remember a sermon from many years ago, and it will clarify to the people of the relevant age how long ago this was, when the preacher was talking about our access to God in prayer. And he was saying that in Christ our access is like broadband internet rather than dial-up internet! It’s… which, if I was trying to preach a similar sermon today, I wouldn’t be able to use that, because people would go, “What’s dial-up? I haven’t got a clue!”

And so, it was an example there of an image or a metaphor being used which was incredibly bound to a particular period of time. Twenty years earlier, people wouldn’t have had a clue because, what on earth is broadband? Twenty years later, people would have a clue because, what on earth is dial-up? But for that short period of time, it was a metaphor that spoke to people, that communicated, so he was right to use it at that time.

Nehemia: I think that’s a perfect way to end, Kim. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you Nelson. Shalom.

Kim: Take care!

Nelson: Shalom also!

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:46 Ta’amim & prosody
23:00 Saying the quiet part out loud
38:44 Outro

VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 1:1
Deuteronomy 26:5
2 Kings 21
2 Chronicles 33
Judges 18
Psalm 68

BOOKS MENTIONED
YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach
by Daniel O. McClellan

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes

Support Team Study – MORE Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021
Hebrew Voices #144 – The Scribe of the Leningrad Codex
Support Team Study – Bible Vowels of Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #142 – Sign Language of the Synagogue

OTHER LINKS

Moving On from the Law of Continuous Dichotomy | Sophia L Pitcher - Academia.edu

Sophia L Pitcher | University of the Free State - Academia.edu

“The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism” by A.E. Housman

The post Hebrew Voices #180 – SBL Reactions 2023: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Released From the Support Team Study Vault! In this episode of Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2, Nehemia speaks with a scholar at University College London about how Karaites implemented the Aviv calendar in the tenth and eleventh centuries, how their medieval Aviv controversies mirror those still raging today, and how they managed to maintain community cohesion despite profound difference of calendar observance.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Hebrew-Voices/Reaping-the-Benefits-of-the-Medieval-Aviv-Calendar-Part-2-NehemiasWall.mp3Download Audio

Transcript

Support Team Study – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2

Nadia: This is what I’m seeing in the sources.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: That they are very open to this diversity, and also, even, I told you when we last talked...

Nehemia: So, I’m waiting for you to tell the story! I’m trying to get you to tell the story about the woman and her ketubah.

Nadia: Yes, exactly!

Nehemia: This is the pinnacle of the entire conversation because it’s such a profound expression of diversity. I was shocked.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Nadia Vidro of University College, London.

So, here you have a letter from the year 416, or sorry, 417, and that is not the Islamic…

Nadia: Of the Hijra.

Nehemia: Okay, so what is that in the Gregorian calendar, off the top of your head?

Nadia: It’s not that easy to calculate.

Nehemia: Okay. Sometime in the 11th century.

Nadia: Yeah, so it will be 1020 or something.

Nehemia: Somewhere around there, okay. And it says, “This year was intercalated according to the…” and I can’t really see that there, “the mu’ayyidun and plain,” meaning non-intercalated “according to the kabbasun.” So, what are the mu’ayyidun and the kabbasun?

Nadia: So, these are two interesting terms as well. Kabbisa means “intercalated”, so kabbisun are “those who intercalate.” And ayyid in Arabic means “festival”, so mu’ayyidun are “those who celebrate”. But those two terms, you don’t see it in the literal translation of the terms, but they actually refer to how much barley you need to find.

Nehemia: Okay. So, there are these two factions, and they have names.

Nadia: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow!

Nadia: For this particular issue.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: And this probably is because they go to the fields and they see the same barley, and, for example, they agree on the stage, but they don’t agree on how much you need to find. So, those who found a little bit of this particular stage of barley, they’ll celebrate.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: But those who say, “No, this is not enough, maybe it’s enough for a sheaf offering, but it’s not enough for…"

Nehemia: So, there’s a question here of what quantity it is. Is it a plot? Is it a patch? Is it throughout the entire country?

Nadia: Is it just one omer? Yeah, all those opinions that you're mentioning are recorded in the books.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Nadia: Usually, they’ll say that the whole country is unfeasible to check. So as long as they find a couple of fields that are in the same stage, we can assume that probably the whole country will be in the same stage.

Nehemia: They’re extrapolating from what they found and what they haven’t found.

Nadia: They’re extrapolating, but not from a small plot. From a number of fields they can extrapolate to the whole country, for example.

Nehemia: But then, there were other opinions, you’re saying, where it was just a sheaf and that was enough. Is that right?

Nadia: Yeah, sometimes.

Nehemia: Wow, okay.

Nadia: Sometimes it’s that because you need to offer one omer.

Nehemia: So, that’s the minimum based on their understanding of the Biblical timeline.

And this is a bit off topic… not really off topic. So, you said it’s not practical to go and look around the whole country, and I can tell you, having done it in the Modern Era with multiple vehicles, and we’re talking over the cellphone, and one vehicle is going down this road, and the other is going down that road, and we cover massive… maybe not in American terms but in Israeli terms, we’re covering a large portion of the country, large sections.

And I should say, when we first started out, we didn’t even know where to look. We looked in Samaria, we looked in the Galilee, we looked all over the place, and we realized the earliest ripening places are the Jordan Valley and the Northern Negev. And those are the exact spots that you mention here in your article! That’s amazing!

Nadia: Yes. This is discussed in the sources, where you should go, and what are the limits of the Land of Israel. But they’re only discussing the southern parts because they always say in the north it ripens later. We don’t need to be bothered with that.

Nehemia: And this is from your article, in the years 415 and 418, just like today where I would use the Gregorian Calendar and say it’s 2022, even though in the Rabbinical Calendar it’s Tav-Shin-Peh-Bet...

Nadia: Yeah, they’re using a lot of Hijra.

Nehemia: So, they’re using the Hijra, because they’re living in an Islamic dominated culture. So, they say, in the years 415 and 418 they did barley inspections in the district of Gaza, near Rafiach, near Rafah, in 410 and 413, and in the district of Tzohar in 416, which is the Jordan Valley, the southern end of the Jordan Valley.

Nadia: Yeah, many texts talk about the Jordan Valley.

Nehemia: And the district of Ramla… that’s interesting, because I would have thought that Ramle is kind of a late ripening area. And the district of Ashkelon. Well, there was one year where the main field we found was just south of Ashkelon. It’s amazing! So, we stumbled upon…

Nadia: Well, it’s the same Land of Israel, right?

Nehemia: That’s true! And look, I was aware of some of these reports. Meaning, there was one that was published by, I think, Judith Schlanger, or somebody like that, decades ago, so I knew they were looking in the district of Gaza. So, maybe I’m cheating a little bit! It’s not that I'm cheating. I found on my own, not just me but other people I was involved with, that the Northern Negev was one of the places that would ripen early. And then that was confirmed by one of these reports, which I think is included in your article as well.

So, this is fascinating. It’s the same sort of area.

Tzohar is interesting. Do you know what they meant by "Tzohar"? Because Tzohar is at the southern end of the Dead Sea, there’s no barley there today. But if you go half an hour north by car, there’s a whole lot of barley there. So, did they literally mean Tzohar?

Nadia: Well, that’s what they write.

Nehemia: That’s what they write, okay. That’s interesting.

Nadia: That's what they write. They discussed if Tzohar is actually a good place to check, not necessarily only in agricultural terms, but also in Biblical terms, whether this belonged to the Land of Israel.

Nehemia: Okay. And what they meant by Tzohar was somewhere on the southern end of the Dead Sea. We’ve got the tombstones from Tzohar that mention the Shemitah, incredible tombstones and documents there. And I guess they must have been involved in some sort of agriculture. And look, at Qumran they found sickles, which are on display at the Israel Museum, and that blew my mind. I was like, “Who’s growing crops here in the Dead Sea Valley?” But I know the Dead Sea used to be higher, and the water table was higher, so that may have affected it as well.

I want to talk about these statements in one of these letters here. Let’s talk about this here. You quote how… there are people by name. Here it says, “On Tuesday a field was inspected on which there was abundant grain. The majority of it was green and doughy,” that’s that technical term there, “and the pistachio-colored was beginning to spread. The community did not agree on the opinion that the festival was in Safar,” and Safar here means?

Nadia: It’s a Muslim month.

Nehemia: Okay. They’re using the Muslim names for the months. And why are they doing that? It’s obvious to me why they’re doing that. If I say Nisan, well when I think Nisan is might be different to when you think Nisan is.

Nadia: Absolutely.

Nehemia: So, we need some kind of way, just like today we’ll say March 22nd, right?

Nadia: Yeah, to have a common grid.

Nehemia: Exactly, right. And it says, “The teacher, Abu Said, and many in the community intercalated.” So, there was a dispute that year, and it sounds like almost every year. You bring one year where there wasn’t a dispute! There are all these different years where they're…

Nadia: There was often a split in the community where some part of the community decided to intercalate, and other parts of the community decided that the barley was ripe enough to actually celebrate Passover. And that means this for the course of this year they were a month apart. They celebrated all the festivals a month apart.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nadia: And you didn’t always have to stick with the same group.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Nadia: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, tell me about that.

Nadia: When I analyzed this chronicle, this logbook of intercalation, you can see that sometimes a part of a group that in the previous year were together, and then there was a second group that did something different, one part of this first group was split, and joined the second group. And then in the next year, they made the decision to join with the second group because they thought that this year’s Aviv was ready to celebrate.

Nehemia: And could that be because there were three factors? It could be that maybe some of the factors lined up with that group this year… So, we have quantity, location, and what was the third one?

Nadia: Well, the location was more or less agreed. So, quality, amount and time.

Nehemia: Okay. So, it’s the stage of the ripening, whether it has to be by the beginning of the month or… what was the other opinion?

Nadia: Before Passover.

Nehemia: Before Passover, okay.

Nadia: You always need to know before Passover.

Nehemia: So, let’s dwell on that for a second. So, one of the factions… and this is literally today one of the disputes that’s going on, so this is incredible, there was one group that said, according to what you’re saying in the 10th, 11th century, you have to have the Aviv before the beginning of the month. And the other said, "No, it’s fine. We can go 14 days into the month as long as it’s by what would be the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Chag Ha’matzot, and if it’s not then we wait until the next month."

Nadia: That’s precisely the opinion.

Nehemia: Wow! And this is the 10th, 11th century.

Nadia: That’s precisely the opinion. I think the beginning of the month was winning, because it was much more practical, but you still see people arguing up to the 14th day.

Nehemia: And they weren’t just arguing, they were observing based on that, right?

Nadia: To me it seems so, yeah.

Nehemia: So, here you have, “The majority celebrated the festival in the middle of Muharram of this year. For the teacher Abu Said and for those who intercalated the previous year with him, this year was plain.” Meaning not intercalated; they didn’t add a thirteenth month.

Nadia: They didn’t need to.

Nehemia: “But Abu al-Tayyib Shalom intercalated this year after intercalating the one before.”

Nadia: Yeah, sometimes you had those sequences of two intercalated years, which is unheard of, and…

Nehemia: Oh! So, they did have two years in a row that had 13 months. That happened.

Nadia: That would happen. There is a discussion about this… well, there’s a discussion about everything, basically!

Nehemia: So, was there a discussion… or do we have a practical example where they said this happened?

Nadia: Here you see a practical example of this one teacher, Abu al-Tayyib. Is this Abu al-Tayyib? Yes.

Nehemia: He is. “Abu al-Tayyib intercalated this year after intercalating the one…” Okay! So, it’s two in a row!

Nadia: Yeah, you had those.

Nehemia: According to Abu al-Tayyib Shalom. I love that name! It’s got the Arabic first name but his last name is Shalom.

Nadia: Yeah, you have those sequences of two intercalated years. I don’t know how often that happened, but it definitely happened.

Nehemia: So, you’ve got whether it has to be by the first or the 15th.

Nadia: Fourteenth, not fifteenth.

Nehemia: Fourteenth, okay.

Nadia: Because of the Passover sacrifice.

Nehemia: Well, you have to have it by the 14th so the 15th can be the Feast of Unleavened Bread, sorry, that’s what I meant. So, you would have to have it by the 14th or the 1st. You have to decide whether it’s one of these three stages. And then you have to decide how much is it, whether it’s a patch that produces two omers or an omer, or whether it’s all over the land, and maybe something in between. So those are the three main factors.

So, how did they function? Because some people would look at this and say this is, as we say in Hebrew, a balagan. This is impractical to have a community when you have all these differences and disagreements, and even one part of a faction may side with the other faction.

Nadia: So, as I said, they were very open to diversity. How exactly that ran in practice, it’s a little bit difficult to imagine. One thing that helped me to understand what happened there was when I read that, for example, they didn’t necessarily have one synagogue for everyone, they just had small private places of study and worship. So, if you wanted to celebrate those festivals with the group, maybe you just did it in your little private place of study and worship. And the other groups who made different decisions went to other studies, went to other places of worship.

Nehemia: Yeah, but think about the ramifications.

Nadia: You didn’t have to share one single synagogue.

Nehemia: Okay. So, some of the ramifications could be like, Abu al-Tayyib, he has his shop open on Sunday, and Abu Said says, “No, Sunday is a feast. What are you doing? You’re violating the holiday.” But they were able to function.

Nadia: That was a right for them.

Nehemia: So, they tolerated that.

Nadia: They tolerated that.

Nehemia: So, this is a profound level of tolerance you wouldn’t expect. In particular, you wouldn’t expect it in Judaism, which historically wasn’t all that particularly tolerant of diversity. I think Judaism was tolerant of diversity of thought, not diversity of action.

Nadia: So, it seems to me Karaites are different in this sense.

Nehemia: I could say today we strive to be but aren’t always successful. But is that what you’re seeing in the sources?

Nadia: This is what I’m seeing in the sources.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: That they are very open to this diversity, and also even, I told you when we last talked…

Nehemia: I’m waiting for you to tell the story! I’m trying to get you to tell the story about the woman and her ketubah.

Nadia: Yes, exactly!

Nehemia: This is the pinnacle of the entire conversation because it’s such a profound expression of diversity. I was shocked.

Nadia: So, I found this one passage in the Book of Commandments by Levi ben Yefet, who was an early 11th century scholar, where he talks about vows made by women in relation to Numbers 30, I think. Numbers 30, the chapter in the Bible where the Bible says that a father or husband is allowed to override a woman's vow.

Nehemia: Essentially, if he hears about it, on the day he hears about it, he can say, “I cancel that vow,” or something like this, and then the vow is null and void.

Nadia: Yeah, but what Levi ben Yefet says is that in important things that are actual commandments, that are actual religious obligations, if a woman decides to… In a year when there is disagreement about the festivals within the Karaite community, if a woman decides that she wants to celebrate with one group and her husband is of a different opinion and sides with another group, he is not allowed to stop her from following the calendar that she chose, that she sided with.

Nehemia: Wow! So, she’s allowed to follow her conscience and her husband can’t invalidate her decision.

Nadia: That’s it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Nadia: Because he says obligations are different from other vows.

Nehemia: So, in other words, what the Torah’s talking about in Numbers, I think generally the thought is, the woman says, “I’m not going to eat green vegetables on Tuesday.” And the husband hears this, and he says, “No, I invalidate that,” or he’s silent and that stands.

Nadia: Yeah.

Nehemia: And what Levi ben Yefet is saying is, “Well, that’s voluntary things. If it’s something that’s actually a commandment, she can follow her conscience and her husband has no say in it.” Is that what it says?

Nadia: This is what it says.

Nehemia: Okay. So, I’m just thinking out loud here. Is this like some level of feminism that we wouldn’t have expected from Judaism in the 11th century? Or what is this?

Nadia: I think it’s definitely a level of tolerance that we probably don’t think existed.

Nehemia: Or we didn’t realize existed.

Nadia: Or we didn’t realize existed. I don’t know if it spreads to enough areas to call this feminism.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough. And that’s beyond my expertise as well! Alright, so you have this tolerance where even a husband and wife can decide, “We’re going to observe the feast on a different day, or a different month,” we’ll get to “day” in a minute, hopefully, certainly in a different month, and that’s accepted. They don’t get divorced. They don’t split up. He has to accept what she’s doing and respect it, it sounds like. That’s incredible.

Nadia: Yeah, that’s within the Karaite community. But we also see the same thing between Karaites and Rabbanites, because in the period we’re talking about, Karaites and Rabbanites were allowed to marry each other. They weren’t forbidden from doing this, and we definitely see marriages like this. And in those marriages, there are special clauses about festivals and how they should treat those festivals that sometimes don’t fall on the same months because one will follow the Rabbanite calendar and the other the Karaite calendar.

Nehemia: Or one of the Karaite calendars!

Nadia: Or one of the Karaite calendars! And so, they always insert a clause that stipulates that they'll mutually tolerate each other's festivals…

Nehemia: Wow.

Nadia: …and they will not desecrate each other's festivals.

Nehemia: Thank you so much for joining me; this has been an amazing conversation. We’re going to come back and we’re going to talk more about the calendar, about the new moon, and how that was observed. Thank you.

Nadia: Thank you.

We hope the above transcript has been a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the transcript has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If this teaching has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting Nehemia's research and teachings, so he can continue to empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
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SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS
(Please click here to donate)
Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible.

VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:30 Amount of aviv needed to declare
07:20 Timing of aviv in relation to the month
11:19 How did they function as a diverse community?
13:28 The story of the woman and her ketubah
17:30 Outro

VERSES MENTIONED
Numbers 30

BOOKS MENTIONED
Book of Commandments 
by Levi ben Yefet (11th c.)

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #154 - Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #153 – Sighting the New Moon in the Middle Ages
Support Team Study – Calculating Passover in the Middle Ages
Hebrew Voices #28 – The Renewed Sanhedrin
Biblical Calendar Video - NehemiasWall.com

OTHER LINKS
Nadia’s articles in the Journal of Jewish Studies (Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies)
Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism journal (Indiana University Press)
Jewish Studies Quarterly (The Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies, Princeton

The post Support Team Study – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #179,  Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 2, Nehemia continues the exploration of piyyut with expert Dr. Gabriel Wasserman. They discuss the historical need to keep things fresh within a traditional framework, the room for improvisation within ancient Jewish prayer, and a demonstration of Gabriel’s own modern spin on the art.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Hebrew-Voices/Hebrew-Voices-179-Rapping-Ancient-Hebrew-Poetry-Part-2-NehemiasWall.mp3Download Audio

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #179 – Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 2

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: Yeah, for sure.

Gabriel: That’s really important, that if the whole idea is, “Ugh! To have the same service every day is boring, so we’re going to write piyyutim.” And then people selected which piyyutim they say, and they said the same ones every year!

Nehemia: And they made it boring!

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices, where I’m here today with Dr. Gabriel Wasserman, who got his PhD from Yeshiva University in New York and then did a post-doc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shalom, Gabriel.

Gabriel: Hi!

I’ll mention, yesterday a friend of mine said, “Oh, there’s this WhatsApp group, Last Minute Shabbat Meals. Let me find you a meal to go to.” And I said, “Okay, that’s cool. I’ll go.” The average age of the people at this meal was probably around 23, and there were some quite immature people there. And when they went around the room and said, “What do you do?” And I said, “I study piyyut.” And there was this immature young man, and first he’s like, “You’re into that garbage! How can anybody be into piyyut?”

And I said, “Well, since I was a child, I’ve felt that when you have the same liturgy every day, day after day, week after week, it gets boring. It gets fixed. But the idea of keeping the structure so that you’re still very much within the tradition, but the words change, that, I find, is very inspiring." So, he said, “Oh yeah! Saying it in your own words,” he says, “God made butterflies! That's awesome! God, butterflies are so cool!” And he’s saying it in that kind of voice.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: So, the host, who himself was only 25 years old but was more mature than these others, he says, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m saying a piyyut!” And I said, “That’s not a piyyut.” I mean, aside from everything else, it wasn’t poetry.

Nehemia: Right.

Gabriel: And of course, he was intentionally trying to mock. But the main thing is, there was no structure to it. Now, I don’t want to say that later on stand-alone piyyutim don’t get written; they do. Ezra Fleischer, according to his strict definitions, would probably not use the word piyyut for them, and I hesitate for that. A piyyut that’s just a prayer on its own…

Nehemia: So, when I was growing up, we went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur. I’m like, “What is taking 10 hours or 8 hours?” And that was the piyyut. So, that’s not considered piyyut?

Gabriel: But what it was, it was the regular services expanded by piyyut. The brachot were the same, “Baruch atah haShem, magen Avraham,” “Baruch atah haShem, mecha'yeh meitim.”

Nehemia: It just took an hour-and-a-half to get to Magen Avraham.

Gabriel: Exactly.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough. So, it wasn’t really a stand-alone piyyut.

Gabriel: But that’s very easy to miss when the only time you say piyyut is on Yom Kippur. Because when the whole year everything is very bare bones… If you go to a community where there’s piyyut very often, then you see on Yom Kippur the piyyut is much longer, but it’s still that same phenomenon of expanding…

Nehemia: So, what you’re saying is that if you went to synagogue in the Galilee in the 5th, or 6th, or early 7th century, when you heard the cantor reciting the Shemoneh Esreh, he would also intersperse it with piyyut. Or piyyut will be part of the structure of the Shemoneh Esreh.

Gabriel: A piyyut would be the Shemoneh Esreh. The only thing that wouldn’t be were the very short doxologies at the end.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. That’s really interesting. You’re saying the intention really was to keep it interesting.

Gabriel: I think so. And that’s what Fleischer thinks.

Nehemia: So, look, we have the classical paytanim, the poets, Kalir and Yannai.

Gabriel: His name was El'azar be-Rebbe Kilir.

Nehemia: Kalir or Kaliri.

Gabriel: Or Kaliri, yeah.

Nehemia: I say Kalir. Alright, in any event.

Gabriel: I say Kalir too, but the point is his name was El'azar.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: His father’s name was something like Cyril, Kürillos (Κύριλλος)

Nehemia: Interesting.

Gabriel: And so, he was El'azar ben, be-Rebbi, El'azar son of my master Kilir, Kelir, however you want to pronounce it. The point is his name was not Kalir. It’s not a last name… people say ha’Kalir, “the Kalir”. No! His name was El’azar, Lazarus.

Nehemia: Okay. So, did he write these piyyutim, these liturgical poems, because he was a cantor in a synagogue? Or was he writing it for other people?

Gabriel: Almost certainly.

Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay, I didn’t know that. So, he was doing it for his own usage is what you’re saying.

Gabriel: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow!

Gabriel: And by the way, the piyyutim of the… I don’t want to say kerovot. A kerova is a sequence of piyyutim that’s meant to cover the whole Shemoneh Esreh.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: And there are other kinds of piyyutim, like yotzer. But the kerovot of the Kaliri, that made it to European Rites… generally, you would have one for the first service on Rosh Hashanah, and one for the second service on Rosh Hashanah, and one for the service on… So, here’s the problem; on the first day of Sukkot and on the second day of Sukkot… this is getting a little involved, but Rabbanite Jews within the Land of Israel have one day of the festivals. There are also week-long festivals, but the middle days are of less stringency. And Rabbanites in the diaspora have two days of festivals. This is a simplification. I don’t want to get further into it because it’s a real digression.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: The point is, when, in the 19th century, scholars were trying to figure out who was El'azar be-Rebbi Kalir and where did he live, they noticed that they had one Kerova for him for Shavuot, for the Pentecost, and they had two for Rosh Hashanah. But one was for the morning service and one was for the second day, the Mussaf, the “additional service”. But they noticed there were two for Sukkot, which in Ashkenazic Machzorim, Ashkenazic Festival prayer books, are recited on the first day and on the second day. So, they said, “Wait a minute. If he wrote two, he must have had two days. He must not have lived in Palestine.” So, now we know this is all completely wrong because we see that, if you look in the Cairo Genizah, which is a storeroom, you’ve probably talked about it before…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: It’s a storeroom in a synagogue in Cairo where so much has been discovered that wasn’t known at all before.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: We spoke earlier, and you asked about… Oh, this wasn’t recorded, right? About Shmuel Hashlishi, that book?

Nehemia: Yeah, we talked before the recording about how there was this paytan, this liturgical poet, who was completely unknown, and his writings were discovered only in the Cairo Genizah. And you were involved in a book written about him.

Gabriel: Yeah. So, we now see that there are five or six Kerovot by El'azar be-Rebbi Kalir for Shavuot. There are… I forget how many for Yom Kippur. So, did he keep five days of Shavuot? No. Clearly, every time he got up, maybe sometimes he reused an old one, but sometimes he would get up, and probably people loved that, when he got up and said, “There’s going to be a new one this year.” And people were probably thrilled, enthralled to hear the world premiere.

Nehemia: Interesting, very interesting. So, before the Cairo Genizah, they had this very small corpus, this very small repertoire of his material, and they jumped to incorrect conclusions based on that. That’s really interesting.

Gabriel: Partly because what piyyut had been meant to be, to constantly refresh the service, but then it had gotten fixed.

Nehemia: Now, I want to ask a question…

Gabriel: You see what I’m saying?

Nehemia: Yeah, for sure.

Gabriel: That’s really important, that if the whole idea is, "To have the same service every day is boring, so we’re going to write piyyutim." And then people selected which piyyutim to say, and they say the same ones every year.

Nehemia: And they made it boring!

Gabriel: Again, it’s not the same thing... what?

Nehemia: And they made it boring.

Gabriel: And they got bored again. But I’ll tell you, it’s not the same thing to have the same prayer every single day and to have the same prayer every single year.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: To have a composition that you haven't had recited in a whole year is still something refreshing and renewing, which is not the same as having the same service every day. Agreed?

Nehemia: Or every week, yeah.

Gabriel: Or every week, or every month. Meaning, it’s still even more amazing when the poet can just get up, and he’s just like… what would you call it?

Nehemia: Ad-libbing?

Gabriel: Rap duels. Do you know rap duels?

Nehemia: So, you’re not suggesting that they were ad-libbing these…

Gabriel: I think the really talented ones might have.

Nehemia: Really? Wow.

Gabriel: In fact, hold on, in Megillat Achima’atz there’s the story of someone who did… No, the story is that he changed some of the words.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: He had upset someone, and they were really angry at him. And then he came from Italy to the Land of Israel, and he was there. And he changed some poem, which was a known poem, at least known to him. He changed the words so instead of cursing the enemies of the Jews, he cursed the Karaites instead, because he was trying to suck up to the rabbis in Jerusalem because they didn’t like him. And when he did that, they made up to him. So, it was an ad-libbing of a line, but I think there was probably some ad-libbing.

I want to screen share something with you.

Nehemia: Sure. Let me ask you this. So, when Kaliri or Yannai wrote a poem, did they actually write it down and bring that parchment into the synagogue with them? Or do we have no idea?

Gabriel: How should I know?

Nehemia: We don’t know, okay.

Gabriel: I will tell you a story though. It’s from hundreds of years later, in Europe. It takes place in northern Italy.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: Shlomo ha’Bavli, Shlomo ben Yehudah, spends a year writing the Yotzer sequence. Yotzer Or is the first blessing before the Shema, a different part of the liturgy, actually both in Rabbanite and in Karaite liturgy. So, Yotzerot, we were talking about Kerovot, which are called in the Shemoneh Esreh, Yotzerot, go through the various blessings, the brachot around the Shema. Fine.

He wrote this very, very complicated poem which goes through every single verse of the Song of Songs and uses each verse either as a beginning of a line of a stanza or the end of a stanza. So, the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, “He will kiss me with the lips of his mouth.” So, it will say like, “The light,” he’s talking about light, because the first bracha Yotzer is about light, “The light and rescue of the happy ones, of the fortunate ones who observe this observance,” Passover, “I will thank him with songs like those that sing the Song of Songs.” So, you see the words “Song of Songs” at the end of that stanza.

The next stanza of the last clause will be “His kisses." Then, "May he kiss me.” So, they say he spent a year writing it. It's an extraordinarily complicated piyyut, and if you want to understand it, you really need to spend a lot of time. And there’s a lot of scholarly debate about lines in it and what they mean.

So, his student, Meshullam son of Kalonymus, was there, and he said, “That was really good. Tomorrow,” they had two days of the festival in Italy, “tomorrow I’m going to do the same.” So, given the prohibition of writing on the festival, he wouldn’t have written it down. He would have composed it in his head. That second night, keep in mind, would have been the Passover Seder. It would have been quite occupied. He got up the next morning and he said his piyyut, which also is based on all the verses of the Song of Songs, and that in Ashkenazic communities today… sadly today very little. But certainly in my community in Washington Heights, and in communities that perpetuate the tradition, that one’s said the first day, and that one’s said the second day. So, you see? What he did in a year, he composed in his head…

Nehemia: Overnight.

Gabriel: Either over the day or on the spot. But let me show you a screen share.

Nehemia: That’s a great story.

Gabriel: It is a great story. Does it matter if it’s true? No. The point is that people could envision people making up on the spot, or practically on the spot… no?

Nehemia: Mmm.

Gabriel: Because we can’t know if it’s true.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: How would we know? How could we?

Nehemia: So, it’s a legend told about those two piyyutim.

Gabriel: Right.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: But the fact that it could be told shows that, in the consciousness of the times, this is the kind of thing that could go on.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: You see why that’s important, yes?

Nehemia: For sure.

Gabriel: Like today, probably no one would make up that story, because everyone knows how you pray. You pray straight out of the Siddur like that Karaite rabbi told you. He said, “You didn’t pray.”

Nehemia: Right, exactly.

Gabriel: This is a world where you could get up and in front of everybody you could… what is it called, like a rap battle?

Nehemia: Well, you ad-lib.

Gabriel: You ad-lib, yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: But again, it’s within the structure of the alphabet, it’s within the structure of the brachot. That’s what’s very important. It’s not just getting up and saying “Butterflies!”

Nehemia: Right. No, it has to have a fixed structure and a poetical meter and a rhyme or something.

Gabriel: Right, okay. It may follow the verses of a Biblical book. Here, I am going to… do you see my screen?

Nehemia: It’s starting to come up. I see it now, yeah.

Gabriel: Okay. So, this is of me serving as cantor. “...b’rachamim rabim, somech noflim v’rofe cholim...” This is the regular second blessing of the… Ah, I should say this. Later on in Europe what happens is, because the day-to-day texts get sanctified, and the idea, which we’ve been talking about a lot, this idea, “Oh my gosh, you didn’t actually say the words that have been fixed! You didn’t pray.” This becomes more and more of an idea, and therefore what ends up happening is that… the tradition developed such that the standard text of the bracha is said, with few exceptions. There are cases where the standard text gets dropped and only the piyyut is said, but where the standard text is said, and then before the closing doxology, the piyyut is recited, and then the doxologies.

So, the first thing you’re going to see here is…

Nehemia: Give us the commentary before we see it, and then just play the video and then give a commentary after.

Gabriel: What do you mean?

Nehemia: Meaning, don’t try to talk over the video or nobody is going to hear you.

Gabriel: No, no. The first thing you’re going to see here is, you’re going to hear the words of the… it starts with the second bracha of the Shemoneh Esreh because the video got cut off.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Meaning, the video didn’t start until the second one. But it’s going to start with the regular words that are said every day, “Atah gibor l’olam ha’Shem, me’chayeh metim atah, rav l’hoshiya,” “You are mighty, You resurrect the dead.” And then before the Chatimah, I’m going to pause, the congregation is going to say the piyyut. Which is, again, definitely not historically how they were intended, because how is the congregation supposed to know the words, especially if you’re ad-libbing it? But it did become, because… again, there’s this idea that once you print them in the book, how can you rely on the cantor to say them? Everyone has to say them!

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: But what I did here, actually, was still nonetheless very creative and somewhat revolutionary in that once they say it, I don’t just say the last line and then go to the Chatimah, I say the whole piyyut, and then what you’ll see with some of the harchavot, “expansions”. So, in the blessing about God vanquishing evil, which actually is what we talked about, it’s part of the same bracha. We talked about Birkat ha’Minim, but it’s not just about heretics, it talks about evil and the evil empire. So, on Purim, which celebrates the vanquishing of the evil enemies of the Jews at the time of the Persians, what the Kaliri did is… El'azar be-Rebbi Kalir… is, for each bracha there’s a little piyyut. And then he made a huge expansion in that blessing so he could tell the whole story.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Look. “...b’rachamim rabim. Somech noflim v’rofe cholim, u’matir asurim, u’mekayem emunato lishnay afar. Mi kamocha ba’al gevurot u’mi domeh lach, melech memit u’mechayeh u’matzmiach yeshuah. V’ne’eman atah l’hachayot metim.”

Synagogue Attenders:

Ha'melech be'kes Yah chak le'zerah ko yihiyeh

Ba'kamim kol-neshem lo techayeh

Ben-be'chorat chal d'var eheyeh

Be'kotz asher nichmar va'yechayeh

Be'chen tzif'o tzatz le'tzidim she'yihiyeh

Yatzah le'marero mor bi'gshamim mechayeh

הַמֶּֽלֶךְ בְּכֵס יָ"הּ חַק לְזֶֽרַע כֹּה יִהְיֶה
בַּקָּמִים כָּל־נֶֽשֶׁם לֹא תְחַיֶּה
בֶּן־בְּכוֹרַת חַל דְּבַר אֶהְיֶה
בְּקוֹץ* אֲשֶׁר נִכְמַר וַיְחַיֶּה
בְּכֵן צִפְעוֹ* צָץ לְצִדִּים שֶׁיִּהְיֶה
יָצָא לְ֯מָרֲרוֹ מוֹר בִּגְשָׁמִים מְחַיֶּה.

[translation:]

The King [God] – inscribed, on Yah’s Throne, for the progeny of [Abraham, who had been told] “Thus will be your descendants”:
Among your enemies, do not keep any soul alive!
[Saul], descendant of Bechorath, violated Ehyé’s word,
For he pitied the thorn [Agag], and kept him alive.
Therefore, his serpent spawn [Haman] sprouted up, to be [a thorn in the Jews’] sides –
[Mordecai] went forth to embitter [Haman], [with the help of God, who] brings resurrection through rain.

Gabriel:

Ha'melech be'kes Yah chak le'zerah ko yihiyeh

Ba'kamim kol-neshem lo techayeh

Ben-be'chorat chal d'var eheyeh

Be'kotz

הַמֶּֽלֶךְ בְּכֵס יָ"הּ חַק לְזֶֽרַע כֹּה יִהְיֶה
בַּקָּמִים כָּל־נֶֽשֶׁם לֹא תְחַיֶּה
בֶּן־בְּכוֹרַת חַל דְּבַר אֶהְיֶה
בְּקוֹץ

Synagogue Attenders: BOOOO!

Gabriel:

Asher nichmar va'yechayeh

Be'chen tzif'o

אֲשֶׁר נִכְמַר וַיְחַיֶּה

בְּכֵן צִפְעוֹ

Synagogue Attenders: BOOOO!

Gabriel:

Tzatz le'tzidim she'yihiyeh

Yatzah le'marero mor bi'gshamim mechayeh

צָץ לְצִדִּים שֶׁיִּהְיֶה

יָצָא לְ֯מָרֲרוֹ מוֹר בִּגְשָׁמִים מְחַיֶּה.

Baruch atah Adonai

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי

Synagogue Attenders: Baruch hu u'baruch sh'mo

ברוך הוא וברוך שמו.

Gabriel: Mechayeh ha’metim.

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים.

Synagogue Attenders: Amen.

אמן

Gabriel: So, in that one, it was telling various things. It began with the word “ha’melech” because the way this piyyut works is, the Kaliri found two verses with exactly 18 words in the Book of Esther. One of which talks about the rise to greatness of Mordecai, the other of which talks about the rise to greatness of Esther. It’s genius! He found verses with the right number of words which had just the right topics, the two main heroes… One of them is “Va'ye’ehav ha’melech et Ester mi’kol ha’nashim va’tisa chen va’chesed lefanav mi’kol ha’betulot,” “The King loved Esther out of all the women, and she found favor in his eyes out of all the virgins.” And the other is, “U'Mordechai yatza mi’lifney ha’melech bi’lvush malchut techelet va’chur,” “Mordechai went forth in front of the king in royal raiment, royal blue and white linen.”

So, these are perfect verses, and he splits them up such that the first word of the piyyut in the first bracha is “va'ye’ehav”, “and he loved”. Now in the verse, “va'ye’ehav” is talking about the king. The king loved Esther, and the kind of love it's talking about, it means sexual lust, but he weaves it into a sentence. He starts, “Va’ye’ehav omen yetomat hegen,” “The omen, the one who raised Mordechai, loved the wonderful orphan.” And it’s a very different kind of love there, leaving aside the Septuagint, which translates it as, “Mordechai took Esther as a wife.”

But in the next stanza, the one which you heard here, I begin, “Ha’melech b’ches Yah chak devar eh'yeh,” “The King declared that the throne of God,” the king there is God. In the verse, it was “the king loved Esther,” the king was the king of Persia, the emperor of Persia, Ahasuerus, Achashverosh. So, he’s using the skeleton of the verses, but the words don't have to mean what they meant in the verse.

And the last line before the conclusion, “Yatzah la’marero Mor bi’geshamim mechayeh.” Mor, Mordechay was called Mor, like myrrh, the fragrant myrrh, “he went forth to imbitter Haman,” “le’marero”, which is, again, playing with the sound of the words because bitterness is the opposite of the fragrance of myrrh. I guess if you tasted it, it probably wouldn’t be very sweet.

Nehemia: But they sound similar, is the point.

Gabriel: They sound similar, and what did he do? “Bi’geshamim mechayeh”, “With the power of God, who is the one who resurrects with rain.” So, he’s talking about the rain because in the winter you’re supposed to mention rain, and in the summer dew, because of the seasons. So, he worked that in, and he mentioned resurrection there at the end. “Bi’geshamim mechayeh” doesn’t even have to mean resurrecting, it just means giving life. Rain gives life in the world as it is, but it fits with resurrection.

I’m going to skip now to, as we said, the harchavot, the expansions in the bracha about vanquishing evil. So, he has, as we see here, a short stanza which fits this whole structure where you’re going. Each stanza has a successive word from this verse and from that verse, Biblical verses, and it has the successive letter of the alphabet in the acrostic and an acrostic from his name. And then it expands. So, where is this?

“Baruch atah Adonai, melech ohev tzdakah u’mishpat,” Okay, we’re almost at it. That was the blessing, “the King who loves righteousness and justice”. Now, this next bracha is Birkat ha’Minim, which again, is against heretics, but the focus here is more against evil.

“…malchut zadon meherah te’aker u’teshaver… bi’mherah b’yamayenu.”

Synagogue Attenders: [to mutter the following:]

Va'yasem layla u'tnuma himane'a

Leil asher tannin va'yarev heniya

La'dorot oto hitzniya

Lihiyot le'pil'o tzanua

La'chad zed-yahir u'be'ashmuro hichniya

Va'tachrich yechumav shach zedim machniya

וַיָּֽשֶׂם לַֽיְלָה וּתְנוּמָה הִמְנִֽיעַ

לֵיל אֲשֶׁר תַּנִּין וְיָרֵב הֵנִֽיעַ

לַדּוֹרוֹת אוֹתוֹ הִצְנִֽיעַ

לִהְיוֹת לְפִלְאוֹ צָנֽוּעַ

לָכַד זֵד־יָהִיר וּבְאַשְׁמוּרוֹ הִכְנִֽיעַ

וְתַכְרִיךְ יְ֯חוּמָיו שָׁח זֵדִים מַכְנִֽיעַ.

[Translation:

[God] made it at night that He prevented [Ahasuerus’s] sleep,

The same night [Passover] when He had shaken up the dragon [Pharaoh] and Yarev [=Sennacherib].

[God] filed away this night, for [all] generations,

For it to be filed away for miracles to happen on it.

He entrapped the haughty foe [Haman], and in the wee hours he humiliated him;

The bundle of [Haman]’s children – [God] brought them down, He who humbles the wicked.

Gabriel: [Repeats that stanza allowed, distinctly chanting:

Va'yasem layla u'tnuma himane'a

Leil asher tannin va'yarev heniya

La'dorot oto hitzniya

Lihiyot le'pil'o tzanua

La'chad zed-yahir u'be'ashmuro hichniya

Va'tachrich yechumav shach zedim machniya

וַיָּֽשֶׂם לַֽיְלָה וּתְנוּמָה הִמְנִֽיעַ

לֵיל אֲשֶׁר תַּנִּין וְיָרֵב הֵנִֽיעַ

לַדּוֹרוֹת אוֹתוֹ הִצְנִֽיעַ

לִהְיוֹת לְפִלְאוֹ צָנֽוּעַ

לָכַד זֵד־יָהִיר

Synagogue Attenders: BOOOOO!!!!!! [Noisemaking, because of the mention of the “haughty foe”, Proverbs 21:24, here referring to Haman, our arch-enemy.]

וּבְאַשְׁמוּרוֹ הִכְנִֽיעַ

וְתַכְרִיךְ יְחוּמָיו שָׁח זֵדִים מַכְנִֽיעַ.

Synagogue Attenders: [Begin to recite the following lines, but don’t get very far, because after a few seconds Gabriel starts reciting them out loud:]

Gabriel:

Ezrach bat chutz / Be'chesel gahutz

Bi'ntiv nachutz / Sachat tze'et chutz

Bama eda / Pitul yidah

U'pilulo nodah / Be'yado'a tedah

Gmulav chiba / Be'ol ha'mesubal

Ve'unu bi'sval / Kodei nisbal

Daliyav be'lud de'ot / Arba'a me'ot

Be'livant yaven le'ot / Ahd yuchash ot

Harim tzach dileg / U'gva'ot bileg

Va'anam mileg / Be'tzalmon mashleg

Ve'tanin kezamam / Bo ba'yom zumam

Be'gicho umam / Be'etzbah humam

Zoru lo'azim / Metzah me'izim

U'kaf'u be'azim / Ke'nevel re'uzim

Cheil tzavah Far'o / Be'sasa'a pera'o

U'bat be'nas u'kra'o / Mool av ve'zar'oh

אֶזְרָח בָּט חוּץ / בְּכֶֽסֶל גָּהוּץ

בִּנְתִיב נָחוּץ / סָכַת צֵאת חוּץ.

בַּמָּה אֵדַע / פִּתּוּל יִדַּע

וּפִלּוּלוֹ נוֹדַע / בְּיָדֹֽעַ תֵּדַע.

גְּמוּלָיו חִבַּל / בְּעֹל הַמְסֻבָּל

וְעֻנּוּ בִּסְבַל / קוֹדֵי נִסְבָּל.

דָּלְיָו בְּלוּד דְּאוֹת / אַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת

בְּלִבְנַת יָוֵן לְאוֹת / עַד יוּחַשׁ אוֹת.

הָרִים צַח דִּלֵּג / וּגְבָעוֹת בִּלֵּג

וַעֲנָם מִלֵּג / בְּצַלְמוֹן מַשְׁלֵג.

וְתַנִּין כְּזָמַם / בּוֹ בַּיָּם זֻמַּם

בְּגִיחוֹ עֻמַּם / בְּאֶצְבָּע הֻמָּם.

זֹרוּ לוֹעֲזִים / מֵֽצַח מְעִזִּים

וְקָפְאוּ בְעַזִּים / כְּנֵֽבֶל רְעוּזִים.

חֵיל צְבָא פַרְעֹה / בְּסַאסְּאָה פְּרָעוֹ

וּבָט בְּנָס וּקְרָעוֹ / מוּל אָב וְזַרְעוֹ.

[Translation:

Ezraḥ [Abraham] looked outside at the clear constellations,

In their hasty path. He heard [from God]: “Go outside!”

“How will I know?” He showed his mischievous [doubt].

And his judgment [for doubting] was: “Surely know [that your children will be enslaved.”

[Thus doubting, he] brought harm to his descendants, in the yoke that they bore;

They were punished with burdens [imposed by] the people that bow to idols.

His offspring flew off to Lud [=Lydia, here Egypt], for four hundred years,

Weary with mud for bricks – until the sign [of redemption] was hastened!

The shining One jumped over mountains [in the merit of the patriarchs, called “mountains”], and he strengthened the hills [the matriarchs],

And he scalded ‘Anam [=Egypt] into snowy silence.

And when the dragon [Pharaoh] plotted, he himself suffered a plot, into the sea,

In his battle, his lights were put out, and he was confounded by [God’s] finger.

The foreign speakers [Egyptians] were scattered, for they had been brazen with their foreheads;

They froze in the fierce waters, crushed like a wine-vessel.

Pharaoh’s armed forces – God took retribution from them.

And He looked at the fleeing [sea] and split it – in the [presence of] the patriarch [Jacob] and his descendants.]

Gabriel: I like to imagine…

Nehemia: So, you were rapping that!

Gabriel: …that when the Kaliri got up and said it, the first time ever and no one had heard the words, that it was something like that. The power of it. First of all, the short lines with the “la” with the constant rhymes, totally fit the genre of rap. But the expressiveness… again, we can’t know what their music was like, but the problem is today, most of this would just be, as you saw, the congregational mumbling, often without even the cantor saying it all. Which makes no sense, since first of all this is the cantor’s prayer, and second of all, how were the people supposed to know it?

Now, today we have prayer books, so today, when it’s fixed and it’s printed, everyone can follow along. Here’s the problem; people can’t really… it’s really hard. They’re stumbling over the words, and nobody is interpreting it for them because, as you see, in rapping it and in singing it, I was interpreting it. But cantors don’t know how to interpret it because they don’t understand the words either. And if it just goes silent then the cantor doesn’t have to understand it because the cantor doesn’t have to do anything.

Ultimately, I think this, in the long run, is what led to the demise and what led to the dropping of piyyut in most communities outside of certain occasions, as you mentioned, Yom Kippur. And even then, there was more and more cutting and replacing it with other things like very long silent prayer.

Let’s watch a little more of this.

T'vu'im az k'sharu / Tofefot be'chen sharu

U'paz ba'sof usharu / Ve'el-shur nusharu

טְבוּעִים אָז כְּשָֽׁרוּ / תּוֹפֵפוֹת בְּכֵן שָֽׁרוּ

וּפָז בַּסּוּף אֻשָּֽׁרוּ / וְאֶל־שׁוּר נֻשָּֽׁרוּ.

[Translation:

When [the Israelites] saw the drowned [Egyptians], the women sang with drums.

And they were made happy with gold at the sea, and to [the Wilderness of] Shur they were eagled.]

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: This is talking about the Israelites. He starts the story of Purim with Abraham.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: And it goes very quickly from Abraham to going out of Egypt. And he was just talking about, “ve’elnusharu”, “and to Shur,” to the wilderness of Shur, which is the crossing of the sea, it says, “vayetz’u el midbar shur.” Hebrew is, of course, written without vowels, typically. The next word is nosharu, nusharu or nasharu, and most likely I think it’s nusharu, and it means, “they were eagled”. It’s a nonce word, it’s an invented word. They were brought, “al kanfay nesharim”, God says, "I will bring you out on eagle’s wings.” So, he makes a verb from it, “they were eagled”.

Now, there are other interpretations on whether it should actually be pronounced slightly differently and mean something different. That’s my favorite. But it just shows you how each of these words, because they’re invented words, he’s using all of the tools he has in his toolbox to create. And so, you get questions like, what does the word mean? What is he alluding to? What is the Biblical verse? Is there a Rabbinic tradition that he’s alluding to? Maybe it’s a tradition we don’t even know about.

Nehemia: Gabriel, let’s…

Gabriel: So, at this point right after they cross the Red Sea, that’s when Amalek comes, and that’s the beginning of the story of Haman, because Haman was called “the Agagite.” Agag is the king of Amalek.

Yakshu amarim / Shuv le'gei chamorim

U'mi chashuvim morim / Nitmeru le'marim

Kisher tzir tachan / Lut be'ushei tzachan

Lehamtik mar le'machan / Le'bal lakut be'bochan

Luvu le'elim / Ve'af lahat ha'elim

Ve'nekavu elim / Be'tzedek b'nei elim

Miharu le'alush / Ve'kol-batzek milush

Ve'ragnu be'pilush / Adei dok chalush

יָקְשׁוּ אֲמָרִים / שׁוּב לְגֵיא חֲמוֹרִים

וּמֵי חֲשׁוּבִים מוֹרִים / נִתְמְרוּ לְמָרִים.

כִּשֵּׁר צִיר תַּֽחַן / לוּט בְּאוּשֵׁי צַֽחַן

לְהַמְתִּיק מַר לְמַֽחַן / לְבַל לָקוּט בְּבֹֽחַן.

לֻוּוּ לְאֵילִם / וְאַף לַֽהַט הֶאֱלִים

וְנֻקָּֽבוּ אֵלִים / בְּצֶֽדֶק בְּנֵי אֵלִים.

מִהֲרוּ לְאָלוּשׁ / וְכָל־בָּצֵק מִלּוּשׁ

וְרָגְנוּ בְּפִלּוּשׁ / עֲדֵי דֹק חָלוּשׁ.

[Translation:

They fell into the trap of words: “Let’s go back to [Egypt], the land of asses!”

The significant waters indicated [this folly], by turning to bitter [water].

[Moses] the emissary made appropriate prayer, to cover up the stench [of sin],

To sweeten the bitter [waters] for the camp, so that they would not quarrel with and test [God].

They were accompanied [by angels] to Elim, and [God’s] blazing rage was strong against them,

But they were called elim, in the merit of being descendants of the elim [patriarchs].

They hastened to Alush, and there was no more dough from their kneading.

So they complained in public, until their portion [manna came] from heaven.]

Nehemia: Gabriel, we’ve got to wrap it up here. So, this has been amazing Gabriel. You’re a philologist who studies piyyut, liturgical poetry, and here we had a poem from El'azar Kalir who wrote that poem.

Gabriel: 6th to 7th century, yes.

Nehemia: 6th to 7th century.

Gabriel: El'azar ben — be-Rebbi — Kalir, El'azar son of Kalir.

Nehemia: So, it’s from around, let’s call it 1,300 years ago, or 1,400 years ago, actually.

Gabriel: Yes, we’re in the 21st century now.

Nehemia: 7th century would be the year 600.

Gabriel: What?

Nehemia: So, a 1,400-year-old liturgical poem, and you are not just researching it and interpreting it, and deciphering it, you’re actually reciting it as part of an actual liturgical service, and you’re doing it in a modern way with rap. I think that’s a beautiful combination. I think if I had gone to a synagogue like this as a child, I might not have been so bored out of my mind.

Gabriel: And maybe piyyut would have been your favorite part.

Nehemia: It might have been.

Gabriel: If it was done like this.

Nehemia: But instead, they literally had an opera singer who would come in. And I called it the yodeling. Maybe he wasn’t yodeling technically, but he would do all these flourishes where it would take him like three minutes to say one word. And I said to my mother, “I’m so bored.” And she said, “Well if God likes opera, we’re all going to have zchus. We’re all going to be blessed.”

Gabriel: Let’s just say that the cantorial style that you’re talking about was also something very powerful in the 19th, early 20th century. By the time we were kids, it had become Rococo, and the practitioners… there were some people who could do it well; most couldn’t. The congregations didn’t appreciate it anymore because, again, like rap, it all depends on the… what is the word? It’s a word with an R, I think it’s a French word. The interplay between the performer and, in this case, the cantor and the congregation, and understanding what… Because again, I’m sure the one in your synagogue when you were growing up was probably not very good at it.

Nehemia: He was actually a very skilled opera singer, and I mean he was literally an opera singer.

Gabriel: Literally that’s what he did.

Nehemia: But he didn’t understand any of the words…

Gabriel: That’s the worst!

Nehemia: I’m sure he didn’t. And we certainly didn’t understand because he was yodeling.

Gabriel: So, I actually go to Baltimore every two weeks, and I meet with an old cantor who’s 93 years old, and he’s really into preserving the lost tradition of Eastern Ashkenazic cantorial art. And he says, “The most important thing is, you understand the words, you interpret the words, and you have that feeling, that yir'at shamayim”, that “fear of heaven”, “that when you’re saying them that you mean the words.” You understand them, and literally what you’re doing is interpreting the words. And I think that’s also what I was also doing in the rapping.

Nehemia: That’s beautiful.

Gabriel: And then when you interpret them, the people don’t need to understand the meaning of every single word because you’re communicating…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: I’m just thinking, if that opera singer had been a rapper, and didn’t understand the words of this piyyut… And by the way, the number of people who do understand the words of this piyyut in the world today is probably under 15. And it would just be awful! I can just imagine having no idea… it’s not about the genre, it’s about knowing what you’re doing.

Nehemia: Right. This has been wonderful, thanks so much, Gabriel, for joining us. And this has been a wonderful conversation, not the kind of conversation the audience would normally have access to. So, I really want to thank you.

Gabriel: Thanks.

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VIDEO CHAPTERS

00:00 Keeping things interesting
09:48 Improvisation
15:55 Demonstration of piyyut
25:06 The rapping philologist
32:52 Outro

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #178 – Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 1Hebrew Voices #151 – Royal Attire 1: Lost Tribes and Magical Names
Support Team Study – Royal Attire 2: The Karaite-Rabbanite Schism
Hebrew Voices #160 – Does God Have a Body?
Support Team Study – Rabbinical Necromancy
Hebrew Voices #165 – Open Siddur Project

OTHER LINKS
The Karaite Press
Dr. Wasserman's YouTube Channel

The post Hebrew Voices #179 – Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this new episode of Hebrew Voices #178,  Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 1, Nehemia explores the origin and nature of Jewish liturgical poetry with expert Dr. Gabriel Wasserman. They discuss the historical use of the term “rabbi", the definitions and power of liturgy and poetry, and how the development of the 18 benedictions led to the creative expressions of piyyut.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Hebrew-Voices/Hebrew-Voices-178-Rapping-Ancient-Hebrew-Poetry-Part-1-NehemiasWall.mp3Download Audio

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #178 – Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 1

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: Somebody obviously doesn’t know what they’re doing, let’s put it that way. Somebody may know what they’re doing…

Gabriel: I have met Judeo-Christians who did and then when I asked, “Why do you do that?” They said, “I don’t know.”

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Dr. Gabriel Wasserman, who got his PhD from Yeshiva University in New York and then did a post-doc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shalom, Gabriel!

Gabriel: Hi!

Nehemia: So, here you are, what I would call a Rabbinical Jew, and we’ve spent all this time talking about Karaite literature. But actually, your main field of research is something called piyyut. What is piyyut? And why do you study it?

Gabriel: That's correct. Piyyut is Jewish liturgical poetry. So, the word actually is ultimately from the Greek poietes, “a maker”, from which we get the English word “poet.” And that, through the intermediary of the verb l’fayet, which we actually don’t see until hundreds of years later, but it ultimately does appear, which means “to make”, "to do this - making poetry", we get the abstract verbal noun piyyut, “making poetry”, and it becomes the word for “a liturgical poem”.

So, what is it? I’m going to start from the point of view of Rabbanite piyyut, because that’s primarily what I work on, and it’s also where piyyut starts. Ultimately, you see piyyut in the Karaite world as well.

Nehemia: For sure, yeah.

Gabriel: Starting much later. We can get to that. So, I’m going to have to start with, how does Rabbanite prayer work? The Torah gives stories. Prayer is what people do; it talks about people praying to God. There’s no specific verse that says, “You shall pray!” The verses that say, “Oh, you are in exile and you’re going to seek the Lord, your God,” which certainly imply a kind of prayer, but what that looks like the Torah doesn’t tell.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: We have the Book of Psalms, which again, contains all sorts of expressions of thanksgiving, and praise, and petition, but it doesn’t say, “You shall do these things.” So, Jews have got to pray, but there’s not really any guidance from the Bible. There’s maybe guidance, but there are no rules about what that's going to look like. So, in the earliest Rabbinic text, which is the Mishnah, there’s already this concept of a bracha, a “liturgical blessing”, where each blessing concludes with the words, “Baruch atah Hashem,” and then two more words.

Nehemia: Tell us what liturgy is because some of the audience might not know that word.

Gabriel: Okay.

Nehemia: You keep saying liturgical. What is the difference between liturgical and prayer?

Gabriel: Liturgy is formal prayer. Would you say that’s a good… Formalized prayer?

Nehemia: Yes. I would agree with that.

Gabriel: In a given religion or faith community.

Nehemia: So, in other words, prayer could be: It’s -20 degrees outside and I’m freezing. And I’m like, “Oh God, I’m cold. Please save me from this cold. I don’t want to die.” That could be prayer…

Gabriel: That’s not liturgy.

Nehemia: And liturgy would be, I get out of the cold, and I say the Shehecheyanu Blessing.

Gabriel: Sure.

Nehemia: Would that be liturgy?

Gabriel: It would be liturgical, yeah. You’re saying a liturgical blessing.

Nehemia: Okay. So, it’s a formalized form of prayer.

Gabriel: But in the example you just gave it was still very spontaneous.

Nehemia: You’re right!

Gabriel: It’s not that you said, “I went to the synagogue…” That’s why I said, "I don’t know." But you’re using a liturgical framework.

Nehemia: So liturgical, but not liturgy, okay.

Gabriel: As opposed to, if you go to the synagogue and they’re all saying the blessing, and it’s something they do every day, then that’s definitely liturgy.

Nehemia: So, I want to explain for the Christian audience, or people who came from a Christian background… And you may not know this terminology. I learned this myself interacting with Christians. They have a concept of what they call high church and low church.

Gabriel: Sure, yeah.

Nehemia: High church is where you go to the church and there’s these words that you recite at this time by this priest, or this pastor…

Gabriel: Who’s wearing specific things, and there’s a specific tune… yeah.

Nehemia: And here’s the surprising thing; I would say every Jewish sect or movement is high church.

Gabriel: Interesting! I think you’re right… but.

Nehemia: Even Reform Judaism is high church.

Gabriel: I think you’re right, with perhaps some exceptions in the very recent…

Nehemia: Like Renewal, or something like that?

Gabriel: Yeah, yeah, yeah...

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Gabriel: Like Renewal, or things like online Chavurah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Although some of them, I think, from a Christian point of view would still be high church. But I think some of them are not, some of them are really low church. But again, they’re outnumbered, by far, by high church. It’s funny you say this, because within Judaism you have certain groups who will call others or will call themselves high church, because within that…

Nehemia: Oh really? I haven’t heard that.

Gabriel: Oh, yes! And they use it somewhat ironically because it’s not church, because we don’t have churches.

Nehemia: Right, right.

Gabriel: I was just looking at a message yesterday, where it was saying, "Oh, this specific synagogue, they’re very careful about the cantor who’s leading the services, very careful on specific clothing, and on reciting them to very specific melodies that are fixed, and with a choir, and whatnot. It’s very high church," and he put it in quotation marks. He was not saying it derogatorily. He was saying, "I like it," as opposed to, there are informal, what we call a stiebel, coming from the Yiddish words for a “little house”. And it’s where a bunch of people get together, and the words might be very similar to what you’ll see in what we call high church synagogues, but the whole atmosphere is… there is a prayer leader, but nobody is actually following along, and each person is at his own pace.

Nehemia: But within the context of Judaism, with, let’s say, formal major movements within Judaism, you don’t really have a concept, which you do in the Tanakh, which is spontaneous prayer.

Gabriel: Well, no! There’s certainly spontaneous prayer. You don’t think so?

Nehemia: In the synagogue?

Gabriel: Okay, in the synagogue. Yes, for the most part not. I’m not saying people don’t pray. There are definitely people who come to the synagogue. Probably historically more women than men because of the lower literacy, because they haven’t had the same kind of educational opportunities that men had. Not that all the men were so educated, but they would come to synagogue, and they would come, and they would say, “I’m coming to synagogue. I’m going to pray so much that I’m going to…” whatever.

Nehemia: Ah! And there are examples like that. There’s a famous Chassidic story about the man who comes to the synagogue, and he’s reciting the Aleph-Bet in the back of the synagogue. That’s an exception to the rule. What’s so beautiful about this story…

Gabriel: Right! Right! So, it goes on, it definitely goes on, you’re saying.

Nehemia: And by the way, Karaites are more high church than even Rabbanites in their synagogues.

Gabriel: How so?

Nehemia: So, a typical Shabbat morning Karaite service will be around four hours in Israel.

Gabriel: In Israel? Interesting. Because in America it’s much, much shorter.

Nehemia: Yeah, because no one would stick around and pay attention for three or four hours. Let’s say, at certain times of the year, especially, it could easily be four to five hours, and that’s not unusual.

Gabriel: Those times would be like Bein Hametzarim?

Nehemia: Yeah, yeah, in Tammuz, for example.

Gabriel: Right, Bein Hametzarim, or how certain holidays…

Nehemia: And it’s all very formalized. The cantor reads a verse, the congregation responds. The cantor reads half a verse, the congregation responds. So, it’s very formalized, and that’s very much what Christians would call high church. And there’s actually a section called Tefillah b’Lachash, which is where you insert for 30 seconds a prayer in your own words.

Gabriel: That’s not high church.

Nehemia: In a sense it is! Because even that is formalized, “Right now, put in your own words!”

Gabriel: Because you’re told when! Aaah!

Nehemia: “Right now, put in your own words!”

Gabriel: Okay, because you’re saying in any synagogue even if we say, “Okay, now you have this time to pray in your own words,” we told you when to do it.

Nehemia: “We’ve just been here for four hours. Now 30 seconds to a minute to two minutes in your own words, silently.”

Gabriel: Hold on! So, tell me, what’s a church like?

Nehemia: What’s that?

Gabriel: What’s a church like, then? A low church.

Nehemia: I haven’t been to that many churches. I don’t really know.

Gabriel: I don’t know either.

Nehemia: So, maybe I’m misusing these terms!

Gabriel: I don’t actually know what goes on in low church!

Nehemia: No, what I think goes on in low church is, they say, “Oh! The band is going to play a song and people are going to be waving around their hands.” And I could be completely wrong because what do I know about church?

Gabriel: That’s Pentecostal.

Nehemia: So, for example, Pentecostal would be considered low church, absolutely.

Gabriel: Low church? Okay.

Nehemia: I believe so.

Gabriel: Do Pentecostal have any liturgy, or not?

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

Gabriel: Almost none? You don’t know?

Nehemia: I have no idea. I could be completely misusing the terms I have no idea!

Gabriel: We are two Jews talking to a largely Christian audience about how we’re not like you. Wait, we don’t know what you’re like.

Nehemia: Oh, no. I wasn’t to say we’re not like you. My whole point was to say, “What do we need all this piyyut for?” And we need the piyyut because we’re high church!

Gabriel: Ah! Right, okay.

Nehemia: Now, maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my understanding of piyyut.

Gabriel: You’re saying maybe you’re wrong about low church, but you’re explaining why we’ve got it. Got it.

Nehemia: Why do we need all these piyyutim? Because we come to shul, we come to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, and we’re there for ten hours! What are we doing for ten hours?

Gabriel: We’re not dancing and saying things that aren’t words.

Nehemia: No! In fact, the cantor is reciting liturgy the entire eight to ten hours.

Gabriel: Right.

Nehemia: And that’s literally eight to ten hours. I don’t think I’m exaggerating, right?

Gabriel: It’s 12 hours in my synagogue.

Nehemia: Okay, there you go.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Nehemia: I don’t think I’ve ever made it 12 hours, but yeah. Alright, so now that we understand the need for piyyut, and maybe I’m wrong about the historical need, is that the historical need for piyyut?

Gabriel: Let’s step back.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: Let’s step back. So, already in Mishnah, which reports traditions in the names of rabbis, an anachronistic term, but whatever, sages.

Nehemia: I want to stop you on that… they didn’t use the word rabbi?

Gabriel: Even when you see, like it says, “Rebbe Akiva omer,” that’s a title. If I said…

Nehemia: “Aseh lecha rav.”

Gabriel: I know that you’re now Dr. Gordon, but let’s say this was ten years ago.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: And I said, “Mr. Gordon and,” I also wasn’t a doctor ten years ago, “Mr. Wasserman were speaking, and they were giving a lecture.” And then somebody who knew nothing about the culture said, “Oh, I get it. People who are speaking at lectures are called Misters.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: What happens in the lecture is, we reported statements that Misters said. Misters are what you call people who speak, and it’s not.

Nehemia: So, what about “aseh lecha rav”?

Gabriel: What?

Nehemia: What about in Pirkei Avot, “Aseh lecha rav,” “Make for yourself a rabbi”?

Gabriel: That’s not… “give yourself a master”, a rav is a master, is adon.

Nehemia: But a master teacher, right? No? Okay, let's go back…

Gabriel: You wouldn’t say, “hu rav”, you would say, “That’s the…”

Nehemia: Ah-ha, I hear you. Okay.

Gabriel: “Hu rabo” you could say, “Rebbe Yehochanan hu rabo shel Rebbe Eliezer.”

Nehemia: Okay. “It’s his rabbi,” you could say.

Gabriel: No. “It’s his master.” The one over him.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Yes.

Nehemia: I don’t know if that’s any different. Meaning…

Gabriel: I think so. Because you know why?

Nehemia: Why?

Gabriel: But you find… and you do find stuff like this in Midrashim. Let’s say… I’m making up this example, but it would be something like, “Ma'aseh b’goy echad.” “There’s a story told about a certain Gentile,” “she’halach l’rabo b’medinat ha’yam,” “who went to his master who lived way out in the sea.”

Nehemia: No, rav also obviously has a secular sense. When it says, “Antigonus Ish Sokho said, 'be like someone who serves his rav.'”

Gabriel: So, there it means “master” as in a slaveholder.

Nehemia: Exactly. So, it has a secular sense as well.

Gabriel: No, but I’m saying in the example I gave, where it’s not a slave, not “Maseh b'eved echad,” but simply “Maseh b’goy echad,” who went to his master, meaning “teacher.” It does occur in secular topics.

Nehemia: So, it would mean “teacher” there too?

Gabriel: Yeah. And “rabo she’limado”, yes, here’s actually a real example. When it’s talking in tractate Pesachim, where it talks about reclining; reclining meaning lying down roughly in a 45 degree, if not 90 degree position.

Nehemia: During the Passover service.

Gabriel: During the Passover ritual, yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: And the Talmud states two statements. One says that a disciple in the presence of his master does not recline because it’s not respectful. And the other says, “A student,” “Talmid bi’fnei rabo,” “A disciple in the presence of his master, does recline.” And how do they resolve the difference, the contradiction? They say, "In this one, where it says he does not recline, that’s his master who taught him Torah, and the other case, where it says he does recline, that’s his master who taught him carpentry, rabo.”

Nehemia: Interesting. So, it means teacher in that respect.

Gabriel: Yes, but it’s not a rabbi, a religious title, it's simply…

Nehemia: Oh, okay. That sounds like another topic for a podcast.

Gabriel: You could say, “the carpenter teachers were called rabbis.” That doesn’t translate, it's… one of the sages…

Nehemia: So, the teachers of the period of the Mishnah, you were talking about that.

Gabriel: Yes. And they already had this concept of brachot. So, there’s the Shema...

Nehemia: And what are brachot?

Gabriel: Let’s first say what the Shema is.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Because the Mishnah actually begins with the Shema. So, the Shema is probably one of the most famous things in Judaism. It’s a declaration of faith, basically, a declaration of God’s oneness, and some other things. In the Shema, there is a verse that says, "you should speak these words when you get up and when you lie down, and when you’re on the road, and when you’re at home". Now, regardless of what these words mean in context, it clearly was the practice, certainly by the time of the Misnah, and probably much earlier… I forget if Josephus alludes to something like this, that they were said formally in the morning and in the evening. Understanding that when you rise up and when you lie down as referring to meaning every day to specifically say these words.

There’s debate in the Talmud, and outside it, on whether the verses actually mean that, or whether these words refer to the whole Torah and it just means you should speak words of Torah and whether "when you get up and when you lie down" simply means at all times. That is immaterial, because the practice was clearly that the Shema was said in the morning and in the evening, and indeed, in all Jewish services.

Today, Rabbanite, Karaite, Reform… the Shema is part of the service in the morning and in the evening. I don’t even think that needs to be qualified. You know where we talked, we said maybe there’s some low church. I think you won’t find a Jewish service where there’s not some form of the Shema in the morning and in the evening.

But in the Mishnah, it talks about saying the Shema, and then it says that you say two brachot before, and then after. Or whatever; two before and one after in the morning and two before and two afterwards in the evening. It’s taking this Biblical passage, and it is putting it in a liturgical framework, which is basically declaring, "this is the liturgy." Because I could read a Biblical passage any time. What makes it the formal liturgy? Again, leaving aside the question of whether that’s what you need to do to fulfill the Biblical commandment of the Shema, whether it is a Biblical commandment of the Shema.

I would, by the way, be really interested, I have not researched this thing in seeing the various Karaite points of view about whether there indeed exists a commandment to say the Shema in the morning and in the evening.

Nehemia: Okay, we have to do more research. And my understanding is…

Gabriel: I get there are multiple opinions.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: But I would guess the majority opinion is that no, there isn’t, but we do it anyway because we’re Jews. You’ve got to say the Shema.

Nehemia: Pretty much, yeah. That’s my understanding, but I could be wrong.

Gabriel: Because if you don’t say the Shema in the morning and in the evening, you’re a goy. And maybe even if you’re a goy you say the Shema in the morning and in the evening. Sorry.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: In the sense of…

Nehemia: A non-Jew, yeah, I understand.

Gabriel: No, I meant it in the sense of a Jew who’s totally forgoyished.

Nehemia: Let’s move on.

Gabriel: Yeah. You understand what I meant, no?

Nehemia: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Gabriel: In the sense of…

Nehemia: Yeah, let’s move on.

Gabriel: So, that’s one of the major components of Rabbanite liturgy, parts of which actually get imitated in Karaite liturgy much later than when Aharon ben Yosef makes his Karaite Siddur. You have “Yotzer or u'voreh choshech” as part of the liturgy surrounding the Shema.

And then the other major Rabbanite prayer is called the Shemoneh Esreh Brachot, the “18 Blessings.” And let’s not get into details of exactly how many there are because that’s a whole other topic.

Nehemia: Here I will jump in.

Gabriel: It can vary depending on the region. It depends on the liturgical day of the week, they are various…

Nehemia: But here I will jump in. So, I’ve been to Messianic Jewish congregations where they recite the Shemoneh Esreh, the “18 Benedictions”, the Amidah, and they include Birkat ha’Minim!

Gabriel: Pfft! Your readers aren't going to know what that means, your listeners.

Nehemia: No.

Gabriel: Oh, you gave a lecture on this?

Nehemia: I’ve talked about Birkat ha’Minim...

Gabriel: Okay, you’ve given one already about this.

Nehemia: It’s the benediction that was added according to…

Gabriel: To get rid of the Jewish Christians.

Nehemia: To get them to leave the synagogue. So, it’s a curse of the Jewish Christians.

Gabriel: So why are they doing it? Do they know what they’re doing?

Nehemia: I don’t think they know what they’re doing.

Gabriel: Okay.

Nehemia: Somebody obviously doesn’t know what they’re doing, let’s put it that way. Somebody may know what they’re doing…

Gabriel: I have met Judeo-Christians who did and then when I asked, “Why do you do that?” They said, “I don’t know.” The people who knew that was the purpose of the bracha, and these were people who had been raised as Orthodox Jews.

Nehemia: Wait. They were raised as Orthodox Jews, and they became Christians or something?

Gabriel: Yeah, and they became, as you said, Messianic, Christian Jews.

Nehemia: And then they recited the Birkat ha’Minim?

Gabriel: Yeah. I said, “Are you saying it against yourselves?” And they’re like, “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Nehemia: Wait, in what context were they saying it?

Gabriel: They were very wedded to the… they couldn’t give up the practice. Maybe eventually they did.

Nehemia: Wait. So, in what context? In the context of a Messianic congregation?

Gabriel: No, at home.

Nehemia: Oh, just at home they were cursing themselves?

Gabriel: Yeah, at home.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting.

Gabriel: Meaning, they hadn’t given it up because they couldn’t give up the Siddur as they knew it.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting.

Gabriel: That was part of their… you get up in the morning and you read the Siddur.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. That’s amazing.

Gabriel: By the way, this just shows the power of…

Nehemia: Of liturgy.

Gabriel: Of formal liturgy in Judaism, and for Jews.

Nehemia: So, this is important to note. This is a place where, I think, the analogy of high church collapses. Because as far as I know, and here I don’t know what I’m talking about, but as far as I know, Christians don’t have a concept that if I’m sitting at home, I recite the liturgy by myself.

Gabriel: Books of hours.

Nehemia: Say it again. Ah, they do have it, okay.

Gabriel: Book of hours.

Nehemia: So, that’s monks in the Middle Ages who are doing it. Okay.

Gabriel: Not necessarily. You find… again, I don’t know about today, today it’s certainly possible, but in the past, in 18th century, 17th century, you find books for noble ladies and noble men, and they have these illustrated books of hours that they are saying, and at the given hour they’re saying… And these people are not monks, these are married people who are... Again, the very high church, the Catholic or Anglican.

Nehemia: So, the concept in Judaism is that the liturgy is carried out even if you’re by yourself, not in a congregation. I once had this from a Karaite, a Karaite rabbi, ironically, who said to me, “Did you pray this morning?” I said, “Absolutely.” He said, “What did you pray?” I said, “Well I just talked to God, and kind of kvetched.” He said, “That’s not prayer. For it to be prayer, you have to recite the actual prayer of the Siddur.” By which he meant the Siddur of…

Gabriel: By which he meant: that’s not liturgy.

Nehemia: Exactly.

Gabriel: What language was the conversation in?

Nehemia: In Hebrew.

Gabriel: So, he said, “Ain zot tefillah,” right?

Nehemia: Exactly.

Gabriel: But what he means is, you and he were using the word tefillah with very different meanings.

Nehemia: I knew exactly what he meant.

Gabriel: Because nobody would say what you did was not tefillah in the sense of “va’titpalel Chana,” “And Chana prayed.”

Nehemia: I'm going to disagree with you. I knew exactly what he meant, and he knew what I meant.

Gabriel: Of course, you knew. But you were using it in different ways, and you knew that. No?

Nehemia: And he knew I was using it in a different way. Here’s what he meant; there’s a duty to pray, in Karaite understanding, his Karaite understanding for sure, once in the morning and once in the evening in place of the daily sacrifices. And what he was asking me is, “Did you pray in place of this morning's daily sacrifice?” And I said, "Yes, I did." And when he heard I hadn’t prayed the prayers of Aharon ben Yosef’s Siddur, the prayer book of Aaron ben Josef from the 13th century, I believe, to him that wasn’t prayer.

Gabriel: He believed that doesn’t count as…

Nehemia: Absolutely, 100%. He said, “That doesn’t count as prayer in place of the daily sacrifice. You haven’t fulfilled your duty as a Jew.” That’s exactly what he meant.

Gabriel: Now, were you thinking of it as prayer in place of the daily sacrifice, to fulfill your duty as a Jew?

Nehemia: 100% I was.

Gabriel: You were.

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Gabriel: Because there’s also prayer that’s not, there’s also, as you said, when you’re cold.

Nehemia: For sure.

Gabriel: And you say, “Oh God, get me out of there.” You’re not doing that in place of the daily sacrifice.

Nehemia: No.

Gabriel: And then we would all be in agreement, no?

Nehemia: Yes, perhaps.

Gabriel: We would all agree the attempt was not to replace the daily sacrifice.

Nehemia: In that case, yes, for sure. Alright.

Gabriel: But you know what? He might not use the word tefillah there. He might use the word bakasha.

Nehemia: He might, or chanina or t'china.

Gabriel: T'china, or bakasha.

Nehemia: Alright, so in any event, we have this Jewish prayer going back to Mishnaic times, Tannaitic times. Does it go back to Temple times, do you believe?

Gabriel: The Shemoneh Esreh Brachot? I don’t think so.

Nehemia: The bottom of you is cut off.

Gabriel: There are those who think so. It doesn’t make sense with my read of the sources.

Nehemia: Okay. So, you have this Jewish liturgy…

Gabriel: But it’s really right after the Temple period. You’re dealing within 15 years.

Nehemia: Well, I mean the 19th was added, they say, at Yavneh, so around the year 90, right? Is that correct?

Gabriel: Ah! But what I think a lot of people think and they don’t get, they say, "Oh! There were the 18 that must have been around for hundreds of years, and then the 19th was added at Yavneh." No! It seems more like that maybe the 18 had only been around for three months, and then the 19th was added. Maybe the 18 had been around for three hours and the 19th was added in the context of writing the prayer.

Nehemia: So, why is it called Shemoneh Esreh?

Gabriel: Because there are some versions that combine two of the others, actually.

Nehemia: Ah! Interesting.

Gabriel: And maybe only much later to explain when they didn’t understand that. They went back, and they said, “Well, we have this tradition that the others were put together by Shimon HaPakoli, but this one was by Shmuel HaKatan, and so maybe Shmuel HaKatan added it later.”

But maybe the story is Rabban Gamaliel says, “Who can make a tefillah, a prayer, a liturgy?” And Shimon HaPakoli gets up and says, “18 Brachot.” And he says, “Okay, but you didn’t include anything about cursing the heretics. Who can write one about cursing the heretics?” And Shmuel HaKatan says, “Oh! I can.” I have no idea. It could have been that it was 10 years apart, it could have been 20 years apart.

Nehemia: I got you. Okay.

Gabriel: I don’t think it was more than that because it seems it was all taking place at Yavneh under the auspices of Rabban Gamaliel.

Nehemia: Okay. So how do we get from that to piyyut, to “liturgical poetry"?

Gabriel: So, it seems that at the beginning there were no real fixed words. As I said, each bracha is some kind of prayer that concludes with the words “Baruch atah HaShem,” “Blessed are you, our Lord,” and then a concluding sentence. That was, more or less, fixed very early. What about the rest of the prayer? Did rabbis declare how the rest of the prayer had to be said? Or was it that a bracha could be something in your own words and make sure to conclude with this, for example, “Baruch atah HaShem, chonen hada'at,” “who graciously gives knowledge?” But the words before it could be a prayer about knowledge in my own words.

So, Prof. Ezra Fleischer was a great scholar of piyyut and liturgy in the 20th century. He says, “No, it seems that originally,” and I’m quoting secondhand. I haven’t exactly seen where he’s written this. I've seen certainly about some things, so don’t take this as necessarily 100% accurate. He says, “Yes, at the time of Rabban Gamaliel in the last decade of the 1st century. Rabban Gamaliel said, ‘This is the text of the Shemoneh Esreh Brachot. This is how you have to say it.’” And all further elaborations, all, as we said, piyyutim, poetic versions of it, all changes, all had to do with later communities that branched out and changed things to make it more interesting.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: It sounds nice, right? Wait a minute.

Nehemia: I don’t have an opinion on if it’s nice or not, but it’s interesting. It’s a good theory.

Gabriel: Is it? So, Ezra Fleischer was born, raised, and came to adulthood, and lived his early adult years in Romania. First it was fascist Romania, and then it was communist Romania, and then he went to prison for Zionist activity in communist Romania.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Eventually he finally got out in the 1960’s and he got to Israel, but he was already in his mid to late 30’s by then. He grew up in 20th century oppressive regimes where they had tools like newspapers and radio. They said, “We’re going to make a new official anthem, and everybody has to sing it every day or you’re going to get reported to the police.” They could do that because you're going to know the words, because you’re going to learn the words from the newspaper, and everybody can read them. You can’t do that in the year 90 in the Galilee. Well, Yavneh is in Yehudah, in Judea. You can’t do that! There’s no newspapers, there’s no radio. How are you going to write a complicated prayer and expect everybody to say exactly the same words?

Nehemia: Okay. Do they expect everybody to say the same words? Wasn’t it just a sheliach tzibur, the cantor, who was reciting the words?

Gabriel: Well, there’s a double prayer. Everyone says them silently and then the cantor repeats them. And yes, if you’re unable to say them, then the cantor fulfills it for everybody.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: But even so, are you going to send cantors all around the Jewish communities of the world and teach them?

Nehemia: Maybe.

Gabriel: Maybe? But it’s much easier if you’re in communist Romania and you have the state power, and you could…

Nehemia: So, you’re saying his interpretation was an anachronism based on those times.

Gabriel: Well… Listen, if they were the ones in charge, if the rabbis were like the fascist or communist authorities, then they’d have much more ability to make royal proclamations. They weren’t. The Romans were. They were the equivalent of the illegal… and I know they were given some protection, but they were certainly in periods of persecution, which they just had the Temple destroyed… they were more like the anti-communist dissidents who are trying to spread something. And then, in a world with no internet, it’s very hard to spread such things.

Nehemia: So, here’s an interesting analogy. In communist China today you have the official government church, an official Protestant Church and an official Catholic Church.

Gabriel: There are five. There's Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Daoist, and Buddhist, I think, are the official religions that they recognize.

Nehemia: Wow. I’m not sure about the Daoist. I don’t know much about it.

Gabriel: I know there are five.

Nehemia: So, you have an official Protestant Church, and then you have what are called the house churches.

Gabriel: Which are illegal.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Gabriel: They’re illegal.

Nehemia: They’re illegal. And they also aren't centralized because they’re illegal.

Gabriel: Right.

Nehemia: So, if you’re in some house church in a little village, you have no idea what is being taught at Dallas Theological Seminary, and you have no idea what’s being taught at whatever the other seminaries are in other places. All you know is what your pastor taught you, and his pastor taught him, and his pastor taught him.

Gabriel: And that’s today, with the existence of the internet. Although China very often…

Nehemia: No, it’s censored.

Gabriel: There is internet in China, but it’s very limited. In a place like North Korea, where there is no internet, then you...

Nehemia: Even in communist China, with these house churches, you have what Christians are saying are very strange aberrations from mainstream Christianity.

Gabriel: Interesting.

Nehemia: For example, you have a sect called the Shouters. I won’t go into all of this; you have something called the Eastern Lightning.

Gabriel: Wow! What’s Eastern Lightning?

Nehemia: Google it. The only way these things could flourish, mainstream Christians say, is because there’s no communication between the individual house churches and the centralized body of teaching. They don’t have a pope, the Protestants, but they have a consensus of teachers on certain points. And the people in these house churches aren’t aware always of what the consensus even is on these different points of doctrine and theology. Sometimes they are, but a lot of times they’re not.

So, what they tried to do in Hong Kong, before the current regime, is they would bring people over from mainland China for seminars to say, “Here’s what you have to believe. Here are the things you have to do. Here’s what we believe about the Eucharist," and all the different doctrines. And when they don’t have that, you end up with generations of people who are reading their New Testament and they’re coming to their own conclusions. Or they’re seeing what’s done in the folk religion around them. So, you’re saying Rabbinical Judaism was like that in the late 1st century CE?

Gabriel: I don’t know. I’m raising questions about Fleischer’s narrative.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Is that fair?

Nehemia: It’s fair. So, here’s the question I have, and I don’t know the answer.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Nehemia: Who was in control of a synagogue in Peki’in in the Galilee in the year 100?

Gabriel: In the 1st century? I have no idea.

Nehemia: Was it a rabbi, or was it just some…

Gabriel: What’s a rabbi?

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: I’m serious.

Nehemia: Was it someone who looked to the authority of the Sanhedrin in Yavneh? That’s the question.

Gabriel: I have no idea.

Nehemia: Alright, fair enough. And do you think in Babylon it was different?

Gabriel: What?

Nehemia: In Babel, was it different? In Babylon.

Gabriel: The 1st century during Babylon, we know nothing!

Nehemia: Alright.

Gabriel: But later on, they’re definitely saying Shemoneh Esreh Brachot.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: 18 Benedictions. But the formulation of them, certainly in different communities, is different. Certainly, in Babylonia versus in Palestine, the texts are different even though the brachot are the same 18. Again, you have 19 in Babylonia, you have 18 in Palestine, but the liturgy, the structure is very, very similar.

Nehemia: So, how do we get from that to the piyyut? Let’s get to the piyyut.

Gabriel: Okay. So, at some point you start seeing where, instead of any kind of text resembling the fixed text we see otherwise, we see the texts of these brachot. You see just the chatimah, just the “seal”, the concluding doxology, “Baruch atah HaShem,” “Blessed are you, our Lord who grant’s knowledge,” or whatever. You’ll have this little poem that is the whole lead-up to that. And not just that, but let’s say you have 18 Brachot.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: You’ll have a poem that runs through them. How can you have a poem that runs through them? It’s broken up by doxologies. Well, you can make it clearly one, because let’s say maybe each stands as its own rhyme, which may or may not rhyme with the doxology. And I’m getting a little ahead of myself because the earliest piyyutim were actually before the existence of the phenomenon of rhyme.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Hebrew is one of the earliest languages where rhyme appears.

Nehemia: Really?

Gabriel: Syriac is probably a little earlier. Syriac being a Christian-Aramaic dialect during these centuries, during the late Roman Period.

Nehemia: Okay, I've got to ask a stupid question. What is a poem where there’s no rhyme? What makes it a poem?

Gabriel: A poem is something with regularity. So, if you have something like a fixed number of words per line, or a fixed number of syllables per line, or how short and long syllables or stressed and unstressed syllables interplay and it’s the same in each line, certainly classical Greek and Latin poetry is based on…

Nehemia: So, it’s like rhythm rather than poem?

Gabriel: What do you mean "rather than poem"? No, these are poems.

Nehemia: It’s rhythm rather than rhyme.

Gabriel: Right. You can have rhythm. You can have acrostic, which is where each line begins with the successive letter of the alphabet or of a name...

Nehemia: So, would you consider the Psalms to be poems?

Gabriel: Absolutely!

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: In Psalms, in Biblical poetry, the main aspect is parallelism. So, you have in the Psalms… let’s look at Psalm 147, “Hallelu Yah, ki tov zamerah eloheinu, ki na’im, navah tehilah,” “Halleluyah, for it is good to sing to our God,” that was clause A, “for praise is sweet, and beautiful.” “Boneh Yerushalayim, Adonai, nidechay Yisrael yechanes,” “God builds Jerusalem, He ingathers the dispersed of Israel.” “Gadol Adoneinu ve'rav ko'ach, ve'litvunato ein mispar,” “great is our God and great is His strength, and to His wisdom there is no reckoning.”

So, each line has parallelism. Now, parallelism can be many things. Parallelism can be synonymous, parallelism can be related things, like the first clause of the line we just quoted. The first line brings God strength, and the first half says God’s strength is great. The second half says God’s tevuna, God’s thought…

Nehemia: Discernment, wisdom.

Gabriel: Discernment is great, but they’re still parallel. Parallelism can be opposites. Parallelism can be, “The righteous rejoice in the light and the wicked cry in the dark.” Especially if it keeps going on, and then it says, “The righteous are successful with wealth and the wicked decay in poverty.” It's about regularity, that repetition of structure. It all boils down to structure.

Nehemia: The example I love is, “Ha'azinu ha’shamayim va’adaberah v’tishma ha’aretz imrei-fi.”

Gabriel: From this week’s Parashah, yes.

Nehemia: Well, it’s going to be broadcast later, but you have both. You have synonyms and you have antonyms, you have shamayim va'aretz, and you have…

Gabriel: Ha'azinu and tishma.

Nehemia: Exactly, which are synonyms. Va’adaberah and imrei-fi are also synonyms.

Gabriel: It’s synonyms, but it’s different parts of speech. One is “I speak” and the other is “words”.

Nehemia: And then you also have three items in each, you have A-B-C and A-B-C.

Gabriel: Right.

Nehemia: Hazinu ha’shamayim va’adaberah, va’tishma ha’aretz...”

Gabriel: Va’adaberah, yeah.

Nehemia: “...imrei-fi.”

Gabriel: Ada’berah.

Nehemia: Adaberah, okay.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Nehemia: You have three and three, so you have the structure there. Alright, so we’ve got poetry in the Bible which doesn’t have rhymes.

Gabriel: Correct.

Nehemia: It has more rhythm and structure.

Gabriel: And parallelism.

Nehemia: And parallelism, okay.

Gabriel: Parallelism is the defining feature in Biblical poetry.

Nehemia: But not always. For example, you have a Psalm that ends repeatedly “ki l’olam chasdo, ki l’olam chasdo”.

Gabriel: That’s not parallelism?

Nehemia: No.

Gabriel: Not in the line itself. You’re right, it’s not parallelism in the tikbolet in that sense that we…

Nehemia: It’s a refrain, right?

Gabriel: But it’s a refrain, yes.

Nehemia: Alright. So, now you jump forward to… what century are we in for the earliest piyyut that you’re dealing with?

Gabriel: The earliest? Again, it depends on what you define as a piyyut. Murky.

Nehemia: What do you define as a piyyut?

Gabriel: Let’s say we’re in the 4th century, the 5th century.

Nehemia: Okay. Who’s the earliest? Do we know a name of a paytan, of “a poet”?

Gabriel: The earliest piyyutim are anonymous.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Gabriel: The earliest piyyutim are anonymous. The last, we say, of the preclassical paytanim is a man named Yose ben Yose.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Preclassical paytanim do not have rhyme. Paytanim means “authors of piyyut”. Preclassical paytanim do not have rhyme and they do not sign their names. If there’s an acrostic, which there usually is, it’s going to be alphabetical, which is also what we find in the Bible. We don’t find any name acrostics in the Bible, we find alphabetical acrostics in the Bible.

Nehemia: Right.

Gabriel: Psalms and Proverbs. Is there one in one of the Prophets? I don’t think so. Maybe.

Nehemia: There’s Lamentations.

Gabriel: Yeah right, there’s Lamentations, which is all alphabetical. Even the last chapter, which is not alphabetical, has exactly 22 verses. Did you know that?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: There’s no way that’s a coincidence.

Nehemia: Okay, interesting.

Gabriel: So, you’ve got poets, and they’re saying, “I want to write my Shemoneh Esreh Brachot. I’m going to start the first bracha. I’m going to keep the themes that are the traditional themes of the bracha,” which you can see from the closing doxology, which is “Baruch atah haShem, magen Avraham.” “Blessed are you, our Lord, the shield of Abraham,” based on Genesis 15:1, “Anochi magen lach,” “I am a shield to you.”

Nehemia: So, by doxology you mean the benediction, the blessing at the end of…

Gabriel: Those three words, “Blessed are you our Lord," and…

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Doxology literally means “an expression of praise”.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: And… Do you mind if I eat this apple? I’m just getting really hungry.

Nehemia: Go ahead and eat the apple! We don’t need to edit it out.

Gabriel: We don’t need to edit it out?

Nehemia: Wait, are you going to make a bracha over the apple?

Gabriel: Sure!

Nehemia: Would you share that with people?

Gabriel: Baruch atah Adoni Elohenu Melech ha’olam boray pri ha’etz.

Nehemia: Amen! Tell us what you just said. Don’t swallow! I’m kidding!

Gabriel: I did swallow! You didn’t really want chunks of apple coming through the Zoom?

Nehemia: I’m kidding! But tell us what the bracha you just said is. The doxology.

Gabriel: “Blessed are you our Lord, King of the Universe,” or perhaps, “eternal King,” because olam is complicated in Hebrew, “creator of the fruit of the tree.” Now, that is a very simple bracha because it’s only one sentence. The kinds of brachot that we’re talking about, which leave room for poetry, are ones where there’s a whole couple of sentences or paragraphs, and then they conclude with the theme “Baruch atah ha’Shem”.

Nehemia: Okay. Alright, so we’ve got the preclassical poets. We end with Yose ben Yose and then we get to the Classical.

Gabriel: He doesn’t sign his name. The only reason we know his name is because on certain poems it says in manuscripts, “This is by Yose ben Yose.” Can you trust that?

Nehemia: Oh, okay. Maybe.

Gabriel: I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m saying… because once they start signing, then you know, but until then… But my point is, I want to explain the structure first, how you have the first bracha is “the shield of Abraham”. So, I’m going to write my piyyut and I’m going to start with Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet. And I'm going to have something, and let’s say it even has rhyme already. Let’s say we’re in the 6th century, and it’s going to be about Abraham and how God is the shield of Abraham, protector of the ancestors, the Patriarchs, and it’s going to end “Baruch atah haShem, magen Avraham”.

The second one, you’ll see I’m still continuing the same poem because I started the first one with Aleph, so I’m going to start the second one with Bet, the second letter of the alphabet. And then it might be the same structure. I might have something that’s called a milat keva, “a fixed word”, such that every second line in the stanza begins with a specific word. So, my first line might be, let’s say I’m writing it, and this is a piyyut to be said in the morning service on a fast day.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: So, I might say, Aleph, “You protected Abraham…” And then there’s going to be a fixed word. The second line is always going to begin with the word shachar, “morning”. But I would fit it somehow with the theme of Abraham, so I’d say, “In the morning, Abraham got up,” because it says a lot of times where it says, “Abraham got up in the morning.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: And then maybe I'd allude somewhere to the concept of a fast, or I’d have a fixed word. I’d have the word ta’anit, “fast”, somewhere maybe in the third line or at the end, “Baruch atah haShem, magen Avraham.”

The second bracha will be the same structure except it will begin with Bet, the next letter. And then again, I’ll put “morning” in the beginning of the second line, and I’ll put ta’anit, “fast”, somewhere else, such that it’s basically reframing the brachot, restating them in a poetic language. But by adding these key words, it’s keying them to the occasion for which it’s written.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Now, eventually the poets get bored with sticking close to the themes of the brachot, especially for poems…

Nehemia: Yeah, I’m listening.

Gabriel: Let’s say you’re writing for the Sabbath. On the Sabbath, the Shemoneh Esreh Brachot, although colloquially people call it Shemoneh Esreh, we have seven Brachot in the basic prayer. And the first three and the last three are the same as always, and the middle one is about the sanctity of the Sabbath. So, if you want to write about the theme of that blessing and the theme of the Sabbath, you’ll just end up writing about the Sabbath every single week. Which is all fine and dandy, but eventually it’s going to get kind of boring.

So, in Judaism we read the Torah every Sabbath, and we divide it for simplicity’s sake because yes, in the past there were various ways of dividing it. But any traditional synagogue today will read one Parashah, one portion, each Sabbath such that they’ll finish the Torah in a year.

And so, poets start writing… so, you’d say I’m beginning at the beginning. So, the first bracha, as we said, is magen Avraham, so I’m going to start with Aleph. I’m going to have rhyme. I might have an acrostic of my name somewhere in there, but I don’t want to write it all about Abraham. Maybe when we’re dealing with the Torah portions that are about Abraham I’ll write about Abraham, but what if it’s the Torah portion that’s dealing with the crossing of the sea, the splitting of the sea? Abraham’s long dead by then. So then, I’m going to write about that and only at the very end of the blessing I’ll have some allusion to, “and You split the sea in the merit of Abraham, blessed are You, our Lord, the shield of Abraham.”

And then the next one is the resurrecting of the dead, the theme of the second blessing. And then maybe I’ll say, “And then they passed through the sea and the Egyptians were dying, and they were so evil, they’re not going to get resurrected again. Blessed are you, the Resurrector of the dead.” They’re not going to get resurrected by the Resurrector, like I threw in, and sometimes it’s quite thin, the reference to the blessing.

The point is, what they do is, effectively they take this fixed structure, which, as Nehemia said, if you go to any Jewish synagogue today, with the possible exception of some renewal groups, and you’ll find there’s high church. These are the blessings you say. And it’s totally… I don’t want to say subverting. In a way, you could say subverting, although I don’t think the authors would have viewed them as that. And certainly, the communities that used them didn’t. They viewed it as very much within the tradition because you have the structure, it’s not just chaos.

Nehemia: So, this has been amazing Gabriel. You’re a philologist who studies piyyut, liturgical poetry, and here we had a poem, that was Eleazar ben Kalir. Who wrote that poem?

Gabriel: 6th to 7th century, yes.

Nehemia: 6th to 7th century.

Gabriel: El'azar bi’Rebbe Kalir, El'azar son of Kalir.

Nehemia: So, it’s from around, let’s call it 1,300 years ago, 1,400 years ago actually.

Gabriel: Yes. We’re in the 21st century now.

Nehemia: 7th century would be the year 600. So, a 1,400-year-old liturgical poem, and you are not just researching it, and interpreting it, and deciphering it, you’re actually reciting it as part of an actual liturgical service. And you’re doing it in a modern way with rap. I think that’s a beautiful combination. I think if I had gone to a synagogue like this as a child I might not have been so bored out of my mind.

Gabriel: And maybe piyyut would have been your favorite part.

Nehemia: It might have been.

Gabriel: If it was done like this.

Nehemia: But instead, they literally had an opera singer who would come in, and I called it "the yodeling". Maybe it wasn’t yodeling technically, but he would do all these flourishes where it would take him three minutes to say one word. And I said to my mother, “I’m so bored.” And she said, “Well if God likes opera, we’re all going to have zchus. We’re all going to be blessed.”

Gabriel: Let’s just say that the cantorial style that you’re talking about was also something very powerful in the 19th, early 20th century. By the time we were kids it had become Rococo, and the practitioners… there were some people who could do it well. Most couldn’t.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: The congregations didn’t appreciate it anymore, because again, like rap, it all depends on the… what is the word? It’s a word with an “R,” I think it’s a French word, the interplay between the performer and, in this case the cantor and the congregation. Because again, I’m sure the one in your synagogue when you were growing up was probably not very good at it.

Nehemia: He was actually a very skilled opera singer, and he was literally an opera singer.

Gabriel: That’s what he did.

Nehemia: But he didn’t understand any of the words.

Gabriel: That’s the worst.

Nehemia: I’m sure he didn’t.

Gabriel: That’s the worst.

Nehemia: And we certainly didn’t understand as he was yodeling.

Gabriel: So, I actually go to Baltimore every two weeks, and I meet with an old cantor who’s 93 years old. And he’s really into preserving the lost tradition of Eastern Ashkenazic cantorial art. And he says the most important thing is, you understand the words, you interpret the words, and you have that feeling, that yirat shamayim, that fear of heaven, that when you’re saying them, you mean the words. You understand them, and literally what you’re doing is interpreting the words. And I think that’s also what I was doing in the rapping.

Nehemia: That’s beautiful.

Gabriel: And when you interpret them, the people don’t need to understand the meaning of every single word, because you’re communicating the…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: I’m just thinking, if that opera singer had been a rapper and didn’t understand the words of this piyyut… and by the way, the number of people who do understand the words of this piyyut in the world today is probably under 15, it would just be awful. I can just imagine having no idea. It’s not about the genre, it’s about knowing what you’re doing. No?

Nehemia: Right. This has been wonderful. Thanks so much, Gabriel, for joining us, and this has been a wonderful conversation. Not the kind of conversation the audience would normally have access to, so I really want to thank you.

Gabriel: Thanks.

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VIDEO CHAPTERS

00:00 What is piyyut?
01:51 How does Rabbanite prayer work?
07:50 Karaite Liturgy
10:57 Historical use of “rabbi”
15:13 Historical need for piyyut
19:52 Birkat haMinim
26:59 The development of the 18 benedictions
36:09 From the 18 benedictions to piyyut
46:06 Structure
54:56 Outro

VERSES MENTIONED
Pesachim 108a:11-12 (Talmud)
Deuteronomy 6:7
Psalm 147
Deuteronomy 32:1
Psalm 136
Lamentations
Genesis 15:1

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #151 – Royal Attire 1: Lost Tribes and Magical Names
Support Team Study – Royal Attire 2: The Karaite-Rabbanite Schism
Hebrew Voices #160 – Does God Have a Body?
Support Team Study – Rabbinical Necromancy
Hebrew Voices #165 – Open Siddur Project

OTHER LINKS
The Karaite Press
Dr. Wasserman's YouTube Channel

The post Hebrew Voices #178 – Rapping Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.