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The Call of Josiah
In this video, Nehemia discusses the "Call of Josiah" and how you too can be part of uncovering the truth of Yehovah!

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The post Stand Up Like King Josiah! appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #206, Revelation or Imagination: Part 3, Nehemia learns from Royal Skousen how the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon was changed to match printing errors despite the belief of some Mormons that angels helped operate the printing press. Nehemia also shares his vision for elevating Biblical Studies to its greatest potential.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Alma 42:10 (Book of Mormon)
Alma 43:17 (Book of Mormon)
1 Nephi 22:31 to 2 Nephi 1 (Book of Mormon)
e.g. 1 Nephi 8:20 (Book of Mormon)
Matthew 7:13-14
Alma 39:13 (Book of Mormon)

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes

OTHER LINKS
The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale Edition)
edited by Royal Skousen 

Book of Mormon images courtesy of:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/images?lang=eng

Dr. Gordon’s PhD dissertation:
The Writing, Erasure, and Correction of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts

https://wordcruncher.com

Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research (ihbmr.com)

The post Hebrew Voices #206 – Revelation or imagination: Part 3 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #205, Safeguarding History Part 2, Nehemia continues his discussion with collectibles expert Leven Parker about the harsh reality of asset rich but cash poor institutions and the tear-stained letter of one of Judaism’s most famous Rabbis.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED
2 Timothy 4:13

BOOKS MENTIONED
1984
by George Orwell

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #139 – Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021
Hebrew Voices #157 – SBL Reactions 2022: Part 1
Support Team Study – SBL Reactions 2022: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #180 – SBL Reactions 2023: Part 1
Support Team Studies – SBL Reactions 2023: Part 2
Support Team Study – Passover Letters from the Elephantine Papyri
Hebrew Voices #48 – Jewish Freedom in America
Hebrew Voices #158 – Sassoon Codex Under a Microscope
Hebrew Voices #172 – Chinese Jews of Cincinnati
Hebrew Voices #166 – What is Reform Judaism?
Hebrew Voices #165 – Open Siddur Project
Hebrew Voices #163 – Treasures of the Hebrew Library in Cincinnati: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #138 – The Importance of Examining Manuscripts in Person
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 4

OTHER LINKS
Revolutionary War Blockade Run Mail
A Letter of Jonas Phillips to the Federal Convention
Thief sold stolen gems to at least 45 buyers on eBay, British Museum says
MTV deletes news archives from internet, erasing over two decades of articles
Letter from David Maimonides to his brother Moses

The post Hebrew Voices #205 – Safeguarding History: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #204, Safeguarding History Part 1, Nehemia speaks with collectibles expert Leven Parker who makes a case for the private ownership of artifacts and manuscripts over libraries and museums. They discuss the important role of chain of custody, and the present - and potential future - dangers of historical documents in government hands.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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If you have found Nehemia Gordon’s teachings to be of value, please consider supporting his efforts through his ministry Makor Hebrew Foundation.

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VERSES MENTIONED
2 Timothy 4:13

BOOKS MENTIONED
1984
by George Orwell

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #139 – Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021
Hebrew Voices #157 – SBL Reactions 2022: Part 1
Support Team Study – SBL Reactions 2022: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #180 – SBL Reactions 2023: Part 1
Support Team Studies – SBL Reactions 2023: Part 2
Support Team Study – Passover Letters from the Elephantine Papyri
Hebrew Voices #48 – Jewish Freedom in America
Hebrew Voices #158 – Sassoon Codex Under a Microscope
Hebrew Voices #172 – Chinese Jews of Cincinnati
Hebrew Voices #166 – What is Reform Judaism?
Hebrew Voices #165 – Open Siddur Project
Hebrew Voices #163 – Treasures of the Hebrew Library in Cincinnati: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #138 – The Importance of Examining Manuscripts in Person
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 4

OTHER LINKS
Revolutionary War Blockade Run Mail
A Letter of Jonas Phillips to the Federal Convention
Thief sold stolen gems to at least 45 buyers on eBay, British Museum says
MTV deletes news archives from internet, erasing over two decades of articles
Letter from David Maimonides to his brother Moses

The post Hebrew Voices #204 – Safeguarding History: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the SNEAK PEEK of Revelation or Imagination: Part 2, where Nehemia learns from Royal Skousen how Joseph Smith misread the seer stones, the role of editors and copyists in the transmission of the Book of Mormon, and why he changed passages in the English translation of the Book of Isaiah.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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The post Support Team Study SNEAK PEEK! Revelation or Imagination: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #203, Revelation or Imagination: Part 1, Nehemia interviews the top scholar in the world on the Book of Mormon. Although the original manuscripts of the Bible have been lost, the original manuscripts of the Book of Mormon have survived and provide fascinating analogies that highlight the similarities and profound differences.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: 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: This is amazing to me, because here we’re doing something I wish I could do with the Book of Exodus, which is… see, is this the handwriting of Joshua, and here’s the handwriting of Moses? And I don’t have that opportunity. And here we… it’s amazing that we can do this in the original manuscript.

Royal: Yeah, and it does turn out to be very important for this, this issue of easier and difficult readings, which we talked about.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Royal Skousen. He’s the editor of the Critical Text Project of the Book of Mormon. He taught in universities for 50 years; 41 years at BYU, Brigham Young University, nine years at a variety of other universities including Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Texas-Austin, California-San Diego, and a University in Finland I won’t attempt to pronounce the name of.

Before we get started, Royal, I want to try to convince my audience to listen. So, we’re going to talk today about textual criticism of the Book of Mormon, and the reason this should be important to my audience, to everybody who’s listening here, is that what I deal with is textual criticism of the Tanakh, of the Old Testament, and also of the New Testament. For textual criticism to be valid, there’s sort of this assumption that it should apply to any text. And here, we’re going to take an example that we don’t have in the Tanakh, or in the New Testament, where, with the Book of Mormon, we have literally the original manuscript, in English. And then we have a copy of the original manuscript called the Printer’s Manuscript, and then we have two editions that were made under Joseph Smith’s supervision, the 1830 and the 1837. And what Royal has done…

Royal: And 1842.

Nehemia: And the 1842; so we have three. So, we have an opportunity to do something we couldn’t even dream of with the Book of Exodus, with Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, which is to compare the original manuscript with a second manuscript, which was a copy, and then other editions, in this case printed editions, that were made under the supervision of, at least what I would say was the author, Joseph Smith Jr.

So, with that said, Royal, thank you for coming and joining me on this program. I’m so excited. And one last thing in this pitch; guys, just so you understand who we’re dealing with here, this is the Emanuel Tov of the Book of Mormon. I mean, I don’t think that’s an exaggerat… No, really. I mean, you’re the guy. So, the fact that you’re joining me on my program, I’m really honored. I did have Emanuel Tov on the program as well.

All right. So, let’s give the audience a little bit of a background, though, because I don’t know that everybody in my audience understands what the Book of Mormon is, and more specifically, how it was produced in 1828 and 1829 in manuscript form.

Royal: Well, I think it’s… basically, you can say it’s a religious history of some peoples that came from Jerusalem about 600 BC. And under the leadership of a man named Lehi, they broke into two opposing groups, named after two of the sons. One is called the Nephites, after Nephi, the other the Lamanites, after Laman. And the book basically describes religious aspects of the Nephites, plus the wars that went on between the Lamanites and the Nephites.

The Lamanites are cursed with a dark skin because of their evilness, and they ultimately end up conquering and destroying the Nephites at the end of the book, about 400 AD. So, we have about a thousand-year history here in the text, and I think it’s… there is some debate about the general Mormon interpretation that the American Indians, at least some of them, derive from the Lamanites, the darker-skinned people. So, it’s a very interesting history because Joseph Smith says that he received some gold plates from an angel, and his job was to translate a good portion of these plates. His translation, though, is not like what we would think of as a translation, which would be that you have this text here and you’re going to convert it into English, say. Instead, he received, it looks like, a revealed version of the translation, that it isn’t actually his translation. That it’s coming from the Lord is the way I would put it. He had a stone, which he used, the seer stone, and…

Nehemia: I have a picture of that, that I’m going to put that up there. And just for the audience to understand. So, I’m Jewish. I’m not a Mormon, but you are a believing Mormon, and part of what you’re presenting here… and in a sense, can I say you wear two hats? Because I say that about myself; I’m a believing Jew, but I also work as a textual scholar from, in a sense, a naturalistic perspective when I’m looking at the medieval manuscripts of the Bible. Would you say that’s how you approach it as well? That you have your faith aspect and your…

Royal: Well, yes. This critical text project is not some project of the religion faculty at BYU. In fact, for those 41 years I was in English and then in linguistics at BYU. So, I’m a linguist. I consider the text strictly from a linguistic textual point of view.

Nehemia: Okay. Alright.

Royal: But I do find evidence of what witnesses said, and what’s in the original manuscript, that indeed, the text was being, in some sense, dictated. It was being given to Joseph Smith, and he was dictating it to his scribes.

Nehemia: And let me show a picture here of…

Royal: It’s hard for some…

Nehemia: …of the stone. I’m going to show a picture here of the stone. So, this is the seer stone you’re talking about, and…

Royal: That’s right. That’s the one that was used. Now, the thing is, no one, as far as I know, has tried to use it lately.

Nehemia: Okay! But this isn’t just… I mean, so some people, I think, in the audience, who are Mormon… and for example, my wife has a work colleague who is a very devout Mormon. His wife does work in the temple. I don’t know exactly what that means. And I was talking to them about the seer stone, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s just what the anti-Mormons say. That’s not something Mormons believe.” But you’re a believing Mormon who taught at BYU, and this photo I just showed of the stone, that comes from the church, am I right?

Royal: That’s right. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, for the Mormons who aren’t in the, maybe in the loop… because this is a relatively recent thing the church published, I think 2015. Just talk a minute about the seer stone, and… That’s something that Mormons acknowledge. Am I right?

Royal: Well, no. A distinct group that believes that Joseph Smith did not use the seer stone…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: … they believe that there was an apparatus that came with the plates, which was a breastplate and two silver bows, and they held two clear kinds of… I guess glasses, like, that the person could look through. And… the idea is that you would look at the plates and there would be then somehow a translation projected for you. And that’s called the Nephite interpreters. You had to use the plates. No one was allowed to see the plates at first, and so it had to be done behind a curtain. And there are a lot of people… this is the traditional view.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But no one ever directly saw Joseph Smith doing this because they couldn’t see the plates. They weren’t allowed to. They would have been behind the curtain. But there is some evidence that in the very beginning, Martin Harris, one of the witnesses, did receive a sheet of paper with the characters on it, a translation, from around the curtain, and he took it to New York City to have it examined by Professor Anton and others. Well, that’s about the only account we actually have. It’s secondary of using this instrument. There are, though, nine people, and Dan Vogel, who you interviewed, I think…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Royal: Nine people who witnessed that Joseph Smith had the seer stone. He would put it into a hat, put his head up to it to obscure the light, and the descriptions are, that he gave, was that he saw on parchment the characters he was translating, and underneath, the English translation, which he read off. And that’s what… the nine can’t really testify as to what he saw, but they all say that this is what he did. He had the seer stone. He put it in a hat to obscure the light. He would dictate, the scribe would write it down as they would go along, and so… since you have nine witnesses, three of whom were never Mormons…

Nehemia: Really?

Royal: Yeah, three of them are non-Mormons, and they say this is what he was doing, and it was incredible. But he was doing it. And so, I believe he did do it, and it is miraculous. Yeah. But…

Nehemia: So, the seer stone…

Royal: But ultimately, I just want to say, so, ultimately… what we have to deal with is the manuscript, and text of the Book of Mormon, and that’s where we make our ultimate judgments as to this text, not the accounts of what might have gone on in the transmission of the text.

Nehemia: So, this is what I love about what you do, from what I’ve read and seen some of your videos… you talk about… or I guess most of what your research deals with is from what came out of Joseph Smith’s mouth to what people wrote down and then was transcribed. And you don’t have to be a believing Mormon to deal with that, because… I mean, that’s a fact that really isn’t disputed. That Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon to a series of scribes who then wrote it down, and then a copy of that was made, and then it was printed. Right?

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, that’s within the… I guess you could say the naturalistic realm. What Joseph Smith saw in the hat, that’s a matter of faith.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: What he recited, those are facts. Well, I guess we don’t know what he recited. We know what they wrote down from what he recited.

Royal: That’s correct.

Nehemia: Okay. And that’s what I love about this topic. You can be a believer and talk about what he saw. And of course, Dan Vogel would say he was lying, and he made the whole thing up, right? I guess. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think that’s what non-Mormons would generally say. And a Mormon believer would say, “No, he actually saw something in a vision.” Is that fair to say?

Royal: Well, that’s what I would say. Now…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Other people are having other viewpoints. There are some scholars that believe that he is getting ideas from this instrument, and he is putting it into his own language.

Nehemia: Really!

Royal: Yeah, that is the more prominent viewpoint in Mormon scholarship. Is that…

Nehemia: Ah, in scholarship. Okay. Is that what they’re teaching in Sunday school?

Royal: No, no, no. But they’re not teaching any of this, really.

Nehemia: Really? Okay.

Royal: They would just say we have the Book of Mormon, and here it is.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And most Latter-Day Saints think that the Book of Mormon that’s printed right now is what Joseph Smith got. They just don’t have any conception of all the…

Nehemia: But there are differences, and we’re going to talk about some of those differences.

Royal: Right.

Nehemia: So, give us the process here. And what really surprised me when I spoke about this with Dan Vogel, and I think you agree with this, is that the Book of Mormon was dictated by Joseph Smith in a period of something like 80 or 90 days. Is that right?

Royal: Well, for the part that he did with Oliver Cowdery, beginning in March of 1829. He’d done the 116 pages that were lost, of the Book of Lehi, plus the beginning first two chapters, apparently, of the Book of Mosiah, which we don’t have either. People haven’t really recognized this, but those were lost. And he had a little bit of Mosiah done in 1828. So, the majority of what we have of the text was dictated from March through the end of June of 1829, and that’s pretty… it’s not disputed, I don’t think, by anyone.

So, if he is creating this text out of his own mind from ideas, it’s pretty miraculous. The dictation by the scribes don’t have him, and the manuscript doesn’t have him, making lots of corrections and revising and so forth, that you and I might do if we were translating from ideas. So, that’s one reason why I believe he was actually being given the text and he was reading it off. Now, some people don’t like this. They think, “Oh, that’s too easy.” But I don’t think… I don’t think you have anybody claiming that kind of revelatory nature, even of biblical texts… maybe there are some, but just the text is being given straight to the prophet to write down, you know.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. Well, so, you know, what I was taught… I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and what I was taught is, Moses went up to Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights, and he came down with a scroll, and that scroll was the Torah. Now, that’s not about…

Royal: What about breaking the Ten Commandments?

Nehemia: Well, no. So, he also came down with the tablets, but he came down with this scroll. And there’s a description that, when he wrote about his own death in Deuteronomy 34, he wrote it with tears pouring from his eyes. Now, as an adult, I read that, or even as a teenager… meaning, I read the Torah, and I’m like, that’s not what it says. It doesn’t say that he came down with the scroll. It says he came down, like you said, with the tablets.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: And you have the phrase that’s repeated throughout, particularly Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, which is, “And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying.” And the way medieval Jewish scholars described it was that each one of those sections where it says, “And the LORD spoke to Moses saying,” was a separate scroll.

Royal: Oh…

Nehemia: Being a separate piece of parchment, or leather, actually, probably not parchment. And that somebody came along, meaning somebody being Moses or Joshua, and sewed them together. And that’s why, for example, Numbers 9 takes place before Numbers 1, because they were sewn together maybe thematically rather than chronologically.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s like, for example, what Ibn Ezra in the 12th century describes. So, you have this sort of fundamentalist view, which is taught to children, and then you have Jewish scholars in the Middle Ages are like, “Well, we’re reading the Torah, and that’s not what it claims.”

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: Then you have the modern secular view that says… for example, Reform Judaism says that the Torah was made up of four different sources over hundreds of years that they assigned letters to; J-E-P-D. What’s amazing to me about the Book of Mormon is, nobody claims, today, that it’s made up of different sources written over hundreds of years, but it was dictated by Joseph Smith, whether through revelation or through his imagination, depending on who you are, over a period of a few months. So, that, to me, is amazing.

Royal: That’s right. That’s pretty well, I think, acknowledged. Trying to get a hold of that, and what it would mean for a human to do it, or for Smith to do it, or whatever, is a more difficult question. And I think the text is way too complex for it to have been Joseph Smith’s mind, particularly when Stan Carmack and I have found all this evidence for the language of the text, centering in the 1500 and 1600’s of English, and not King James English, but just 1500, 1600’s English, and it’s not upstate New York dialect either, you know. So, it’s a very… a lot of people have lots of opinions over this issue, I’ll say that much.

Nehemia: Well, and I think one of the things that, let’s say my non-Mormon audience won’t be aware of, is that the style of the Book of Mormon is not the English of the 19th century, of 1829. You have a lot of King Jamesian phrases, “and it came to pass” and “wherefore” and things like that.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: But you’re saying there’s parts of it which aren’t the dialect of the 19th century and don’t come from the King James Bible as well. Is that right?

Royal: Right, there’s phrases… a lot of them have been removed because they didn’t make sense. There’s one place where “but if” is used, meaning “unless”. And in 1920 James Talmage replaced “but if” with “unless”, because he could tell from the context it means that. But if he had opened up the OED that was in the process of being published, he could find “but if” meaning “unless” up to the 1600’s, and it’s sitting there in the original text, and it’s sort of just, well, it’s sitting there.

Nehemia: Alright. So, I want to get into some of the nitty gritty here, because we have the original manuscript, which Joseph Smith dictated to a number of different scribes, and then we have a copy of that, like we said, called the Printer’s Manuscript, and then we have the first edition of 1830. So, I want to show here something that you’ve shared, which is the original… actually, before I get to the original manuscript, how do we have the original manuscript? Because that’s a story in itself.

Royal: Well, that’s why it looks like a Dead Sea scroll. It is fragmented and broken up because Joseph Smith put it in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, a hotel that was being built in Nauvoo in 1840.

Nehemia: That’s Nauvoo, Illinois.

Royal: Yeah, Nauvoo, Illinois. And it sat there for 41 years. And the seal had broken, and water got in, and mold. Mold ate most of the manuscript up, and there was probably 30% left. And Lewis…

Nehemia: And here we have a picture. Tell me if this is correct. This is the…

Royal: That’s right. There’s the cornerstone…

Nehemia: This is the actual stone in which Joseph Smith placed the Book of Mormon, and you’re saying water got in… the original manuscript, and water got in.

Royal: The seal broke, yeah. It was a hot lead seal they put around it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: The real problem was that he… Well, he thought he was preserving it. Of course, he was guaranteeing its destruction by putting it in there. But Bidamon, after his wife died, who was Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife. After she had died, he said, “I’m going to finish that building out there,” and so he started tearing things apart. He came upon the cornerstone. He didn’t know it was there, opened it up, and found that some of the middle portion and the very top had been preserved in all this mass of being eaten away and so forth. He gave away most of it to LDS people. He wasn’t a Mormon, and he gave it away to LDS people that he thinks showed respect to it and weren’t just interested in monetary aspects of it. So that’s what he did. And most of that 25.5% have ended up in the LDS church archives. A lot of it is fragmented, and part of my job was to take some of the fragments that were owned by other people in the Salt Lake area and put them together.

We have about 3% were owned by the Wilford Wood family, and he, Wilford Wood, went back east and got those fragments from the son of Lewis Bidamon in 1937. So, some of the fragments were discovered only later. There’s some of the fragments from the last two leaves… the main owner that had received this material from Lewis Bidamon was going to give them to the church about 1950. And he lived in the Hotel Utah, and he was there talking to the housekeeper, who was LDS, explaining to her what he was going to donate. And two of the fragments fell on the ground from the last two leaves, and she picked them up and hands them to him. And he says, “Oh, you keep those. You keep those.” So, the family has these fragments, and they’ve been divided up amongst family members, five, six of them. But we’ve been able to track them down and photograph them, and everything, and some of them have been donated to the church. People have kept these things. So, the history of this is really… something. Something almost like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where…

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of, let’s say, like the Cairo Geniza or the Aleppo Codex, where… let’s say the Aleppo Codex, the most important manuscript of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. We have two thirds of it at the Israel Museum, and a third of it was believed burned, but now it’s believed that it was stolen or taken, and it might be sitting somewhere in South America or in Europe.

Royal: Oh, no! That kind of thing.

Nehemia: There was a taxi driver in New York who was from Aleppo, and he was a Jew who fled from Aleppo. And he walked by the synagogue of Aleppo the day after it was ransacked in 1947 by Muslim mobs, and he picked up two pieces of the Aleppo Codex, and he walked around with them in his pocket for decades. And when he died, his wife sent them in to the Israel Museum. So, we have two fragments that were believed… of the section that was believed destroyed… that have survived.

Royal: And that, that gives it a track to it.

Nehemia: Oh… and they’re extremely important, because they’re from Exodus. And most of the Torah portion of the Aleppo Codex is missing. So, it’s… they’re a really important witness to the Aleppo Codex. And then we have a photograph from a guy who was traveling through Syria in the 1800’s, and he bribed the synagogue official in Aleppo and took a photograph and published it. And that’s from one of the missing pages. So, we have like… so there are some interesting parallels here.

Royal: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright. I want to show a page here. I’m going to do the share screen. So, here we have page four of the original manuscript. Tell us what we’re looking at here. I labeled the different scribes, but tell us, like, how do you know there’s different scribes here?

Royal: Well, Oliver Cowdery has a very fine hand. One particular characteristic is, he always writes out A-N-D with an ampersand, unless it’s an initial chapter one, which is a capital A, then he’ll will write out capital A-N-D, but otherwise it’s got that… And it’s… after you’ve studied his hand for decades, you know it. The next one down below took some time to identify. It’s John Whitmer. This means that the first part of the Book of Mormon is actually translated last, because it covers the portion that had been lost of the 116 pages. So, John Whitmer is one of the… the Whitmers were the people that Joseph Smith was staying with and doing the… finishing up the translation, and he acted as a scribe. And he begins… they always begin where there’s a break in the text. They don’t do it in the middle of a phrase. And it was, “And it came to pass.”

Nehemia: Let me zoom in here so people can see the transition. And this is the part when I looked at it, I got it wrong, and so now I’ve corrected.

Royal: So, the A-N-D is Whitmer. And it’s true. The first three words the quill isn’t giving out the ink properly. Probably… but the A-N-D is definitely his A-N-D. Notice the line right below it has “go” and “do” in that same kind of…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Whereas, if you look up at Oliver Cowdery, he’s got this wonderful ampersand. There’s 50,000 ampersands that Oliver Cowdery wrote, and he doesn’t deviate from this. So, anyway, that’s one thing. But notice, the “pass”, p-a-s-s, that P is a very open…

Nehemia: This one here?

Royal: Yeah, the elongated S, that’s a sign of the Whitmers. The Whitmers were of a German background, and they like to use this “double-S” like that.

Nehemia: So, this says P-A-S-S.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Royal: And you can go down below… look down about five lines and it says, “it came to pass”, is another P-A-S-S by him.

Nehemia: Okay. “It came to pass.” That’s almost like the German S that… is that kind of what we’re…

Royal: Yeah. That’s right. It’s being influenced by that.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow.

Royal: So, this is…

Nehemia: Why is this so much thicker? Why is John Whitmer’s writing letters… Is it a different pen they’re using or…

Royal: Well.

Nehemia: Or is it how he holds the pen?

Royal: I don’t know. Oliver Cowdery always liked a sharp quill, and you can see that.

Nehemia: So, it is a different pen!

Royal: Well, not necessarily.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But I think the basic thing is that he’s dipping it with getting more ink on it than John Whitmer.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And so, you notice the first three letters, first three words, “and it came”, are Oliver’s. That’s why you’ve interpreted it that way.

Nehemia: Right, right.

Royal: …level of ink. But that was probably because he was using the quill of Oliver to continue.

Nehemia: This is amazing to me because here we’re doing something I wish I could do with the Book of Exodus, which is… see, is this the handwriting of Joshua? And here’s the handwriting of Moses? And I don’t have that opportunity. And here we… it’s amazing that we can do this, in the original manuscript.

Royal: Yeah, and it does turn out to be very important for this issue of easier and difficult readings, which we talked about, I think.

Nehemia: Definitely get that. So, now that we have this up and we’re looking at the word “and”, I know that you talked in one of your lectures about… that there is a forgery of, I think it’s a bifolio or a leaf in, what is it, the University of Chicago?

Royal: Yeah. Two leaves from Chicago, and I was… it’s a very interesting document. It came out during the Mark Hoffman period of forgeries in the early 1980’s. But the church bought it for a considerable amount of money. I do not know the exact amount, so I’m not going to speculate. But they paid enough to keep you and I going for a while. And they believed it was legitimate because there were these provenance statements that went with the document suggesting that it had been donated. It had somehow got into the library in the 1920’s, but there was no actual donation information. Who gave it or anything, you know? So, the historians like it. It’s totally bogus because it is full of errors that… I won’t call them errors… let’s say “unique properties,” that I have never seen before. It’s in Oliver Cowdery’s hand. So, there I got the photographs of it, and I had it at home. My wife, who had worked with me on the Printer’s Manuscript in Independence and was really familiar with what it should look like, she looked at that document and said, “Oh, that’s a forgery.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Just looking at it.

Nehemia: You mean your wife could tell. But you’re saying it looked like Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting.

Royal: Yeah, it’s intended to look like it, but it overall didn’t quite look right, you know. And she immediately rejected it, because she had worked on every leaf of the Printer’s Manuscript and seen so many pages of Oliver Cowdery’s writing. So, I said, “Oh, no, it’s from the University of Chicago, it’s okay.” And I started transcribing. I got to the second line, and I said, “Uh oh,” because A-N-D had been written out.

Nehemia: Instead of the ampersand.

Royal: Instead of the ampersand!

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: I found two more of them in the whole document.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Royal: This part of the original manuscript… the Printer’s Manuscript is actually in the hand of Martin Harris, and he mixes his A-N-D’s with ampersands, and this forgery also mixes the ands with the ampersands. It isn’t Oliver Cowdery. And so, I went over… I identified all the unique spellings. When you get all these unique properties, you say, “It’s better that we not accept this until someone can really explain these unique properties as being Oliver’s.” And the Joseph Smith Papers came up with this brilliant thought. “Oh, well. He’s just starting out as a scribe in Alma 3-5, and he’s making all these kinds of errors.” But of course, that isn’t a theory at all, because it could be used to explain any kind of thing you might find in this document. It’s a nonprovable kind of hypothesis.

Nehemia: Are there some scholars today who claim that this is authentic?

Royal: Well, yeah. The Joseph Smith Papers.

Nehemia: Oh, they do. Okay. Wow.

Royal: So, let me tell you. I you get the big book out, the big book of the original manuscript published by… We had this debate, and I said, “It’s a forgery, and I’m not going to accept it. I don’t want this in the legitimate fragments because it’ll contaminate everything.” And they said, “No, the provenance statements.” So, I said, “Look, if you want me to be an editor of this thing, and you can’t use certain photographs of the original manuscript unless I am, so you’re going to have to agree that I will write up my own section against the two leaves, and you will write your own section.” And they said, “Oh, we’ve never done this before. We’ve always had the editors come to some kind of agreement.” I said, “Well, we’re not going to have that here. We’re going to bring the argument out to the readers and let them see it.” So, they did theirs, and I did mine. The review board thought it was brilliant that we actually allowed… the church doesn’t really like disagreement in its things.

Nehemia: So, this is a good opportunity to explain to the audience what a critical edition is. Because what you created is a critical edition, and some people think “critical” means you’re criticizing the text.

Royal: Yeah, I know they do.

Nehemia: So, explain what that means.

Royal: Well, it just means judgment. It comes from the Greek word krisi, meaning judgment. You’re making a judgment as to how the text should read. You’re also allowing… a critical text allows notes for the reader to see the alternatives so they can make a judgment if they wish to take a different position, you know, looking at the apparatus and what the variants are. So, a critical edition is one that allows the reader to see the evidence for the reading. One of the readings is selected in the text, but the other ones are in the apparatus.

Nehemia: And look, we have that for the New Testament. There’s the Nestle-Aland, I believe, who are…

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: Where you read the Greek text, and on the bottom there’s a bunch of notes that say, “In some manuscripts it has this word, and in some manuscripts…”

Royal: Yes, that’s correct

Nehemia: “…this verse is missing,” or this… let’s say… there’s what’s famously… the long ending of Mark isn’t in early manuscripts.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: So, you did that for the Book of Mormon, and we have that for the Tanakh. We have the BHS, and now the BHQ, which, quite frankly, aren’t nearly as sophisticated as Nestle-Aland. We had somebody in 1776, Benjamin Kennicott. He’s the last one to do, like, a very thorough critical edition of the Old Testament. So, we’re a bit behind the times in the Old Testament studies, but…

Royal: Well, it’s a lot harder in many respects. I know, the Greeks have all these manuscripts and fragments and stuff like that, but…

Nehemia: Well, like the Hebrew University Bible Project is doing that for the Old Testament, but they started in the 60’s, and they’re like five books in out of 24, so…

Royal: Yeah, I know. The original editors won’t be alive!

Nehemia: No, they’re not alive, the original editors.

Royal: They’re already dead!

Nehemia: But like, just to give you an example, let’s say in the Old Testament… I was reading the other day in the Book of Zechariah, there’s a certain word that’s written with this vowel in every manuscript, but then there’s a rabbi in the 12th century who says, “Well, there’s this other vowel there, and here’s what it means.” Well, wait a minute. That means he had a manuscript that had that other reading, right? So, that’s an example in the Old Testament.

Let’s look at some… oh, I do want to look at this. So, Joseph Smith, he dictated the Book of Mormon to Oliver Cowdery and John Whitmer, and then… talk to us about…

Royal: And Christian Whitmer.

Nehemia: And Christian Whitmer… talk to us about what we have here at the top of this image. I’m going to share my screen.

Royal: Oh, yeah. Let’s go back to that.

Nehemia: Yeah. Because that’s what… in my field, we would call a paratextual notation. It’s not actually part of…

Royal: Yeah, they are… yeah, I call them extracanonical.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Royal: So, when Oliver Cowdery is taking down dictation, the first page here… actually, we’re missing one and two, the very beginning of I Nephi. Then we have… we’re in the middle of, I think, the second chapter and page 3. And it’s in Oliver Cowdery’s hand, the whole page, and he goes to here, on the 4th page. Then he stops, and John Whitmer takes over, for all we know, the first time.

Nehemia: Oh.

Royal: Now, it may not be the case, but it’s the first we have of John Whitmer, and he will go on to the bottom of the page. Now, he was supposed to write, when he was done, a notation at the top, the header, telling what this page was about.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And he never did write them. His brother, Christian Whitmer, wrote every one of them. So, “Nephi goeth up to Jerusalem to bring…” probably, “back the plates” or something.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: So, he wrote it. So, Christian Whitmer, when he… The main thing that happens is, except for this exception, we can generally find the last person writing on the page writes the header.

Nehemia: Mm.

Royal: So, it means they don’t know in advance what it’s going to be about.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: They write it all down, and then the last scribe decides. But John Whitmer would not do it. And he was… I don’t, you know… there’s sort of a resistance. I don’t know what it is, but Christian Whitmer did it for his own stuff, and he does it for his brother. And Oliver Cowdery, if he ends a page, will write the header, even though there may be another scribe up earlier on the page.

Nehemia: So, you call this extracanonical. Is that you saying that these are Christian Whitmer’s words and not something dictated?

Royal: That’s correct. It’s Christian Whitmer. Now, the very first one, we could not read at first. We could not read it. It was so difficult. But finally, Robin Jensen, my co-editor, was able to get somebody to make an image that it actually read; we could read it. And he brought it down to me on his computer, and I read it off, and I have it. It’s actually… hold on.

Nehemia: Wait. So how do you know that Joseph Smith didn’t dictate those words at the top of the page? Do you have a hint of that somewhere?

Royal: Well, sometimes they put in unique things about the… that don’t exist elsewhere in the text…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: For instance, there are these people called the Anti-Nephi-Lehies.

Nehemia: Right.

Royal: Never Lehites. You would expect maybe “Lehites”, given the Book of Mormon. Well, when Oliver Cowdery wrote the header for that page, he put Anti-Nephi-Lehites. So, it’s not Joseph Smith; it’s the scribe just writing down what he thinks it ought to be. Often, it’s “et cetera”. The only thing that’s in the header is “et cetera”. It means whatever they were talking about; the wars, usually the wars, et cetera, et cetera. So, I don’t think it represents in any way something Joseph Smith was telling them.

Nehemia: Are there some scholars who believe that that is part of the revelation? The thing…

Royal: Well, I haven’t heard of them.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But you know, you never know what’s out there.

Nehemia: Right, right.

So, I want to show what’s on the website of the Joseph Smith papers. And you have something which is a better image, you’re saying. Kind of cool. So, this is page 3 at the top.

Royal: Well, there’s the top, where you can’t read it.

Nehemia: So, this is the one you can’t read, but you’re saying…

Royal: They did an image where you could read it, and it’s supposed to be put online now.

Nehemia: And it might be, and I just don’t know where it is. That’s possible.

Royal: I don’t know either. I haven’t even looked, but they keep…

Nehemia: So, this is the header that’s illegible, but you have a better photo.

Royal: No, I don’t.

Nehemia: Oh, you don’t.

Royal: The photo I took it off of, Robin Jensen had. It was another one they had taken under certain… you know, they try to do different ultraviolet settings and so forth. I’ll tell you what it reads. I put it in the book, “Nephi cries unto the Lord for his brethren.” And if you get into the text, it has that “Nephi cries unto the Lord for them,” and so, you know, the…

Nehemia: So, that’s with a different wavelength or something of ultraviolet. Is that what we’re saying?

Royal: Yes, yes, it had to…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: I don’t know how he got it. Frankly… I had not been able to… I had only been able to read the word “brethren”. Only brethren. I really couldn’t read… So, my transcript in my book, in 2001, has “brethren”.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But it turned out to be right, and… but it’s virtually… Oliver is just copying what he found something. It wasn’t really the main idea, even, on that page, but it was something he just… and he put it at the top of it.

Nehemia: Gotcha. Okay.

Royal: It’s done.

Nehemia: Well, let me go back for a second… to the leaves from University of Chicago. So, has anybody done a test on the ink to see if it’s the same ink that Oliver Cowdery used in other places?

Royal: Well, they test the ink for its time period and various things like that, and the paper, too, and it matches the time period. But Mark Hofmann, the forger, was well known to go into libraries and cut out end sheets from books that dated from the 1830’s and so forth. So, he would always pass the paper test, because that’s what he did the forgeries on. To get the ink right, in his forgeries, he was caught by this. He was heating the inks, and it would oxidize, and thus get an older time period. But the problem was, when he heated it, he did it too fast and caused the ink to crack.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Those forgeries had cracked ink, which is not a characteristic of… It’s faded, oxidized ink, not cracked ink.

Nehemia: What about the University of Chicago pages? Do they have cracking?

Royal: No, no, they’re… it passes some of those aspects. But if you read my analysis, there’s all these misspellings, all these… it’s a bad text, almost. Everywhere else, the original manuscript is better than the Printer’s Manuscript. It’s a better text. Except for the Alma 3 thru 5 from the University of Chicago. It is a terrible text. It’s got all kinds of bizarre readings.

Nehemia: Oh, tell us about the unique name of the movement that’s based on the University of Chicago. Instead of Mormon, it has something else.

Royal: Oh, yeah, well. This is… every Hoffman… I’m saying it’s Hoffman. I believe it is. Every Hoffman document has a reason. And the reason for this one, besides just causing trouble, was… it’s not the earliest, but it’s the second and third occurrence in the text, the earliest we have of “Morman.” It is spelled M-O-R-M-A-N.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: It’s done in heavier ink flow. It’s going along and it’s fine, and then he takes his quill, and he doesn’t override it, he just writes it with heavier ink. MOR-MAN. MOR-MAN. He wants us to see this. And if we followed it, we would have to say we’ve discovered, from the original manuscript, that the real name of our… our nickname is MORMAN, you know…

Nehemia: So, do you think he was doing that to cause… and Mark Kauffman was this forger who actually, like, killed people, didn’t he?

Royal: Ultimately, yeah, to prevent people from revealing that he was a forger.

Nehemia: So, was he doing this to make it more valuable, do you think? Or really just to cause trouble or…

Royal: Well, both. If you’re saying this is a document that’s got the original spelling of Mormon, that will help. But I think a lot of it was pernicious behavior.

Nehemia: Like, for example, there’s…

Royal: I can tell you an example.

Nehemia: Yeah, go ahead.

Royal: There’s an 1830 Book of Mormon at the University of Utah, and I went and opened it up, and here’s this beautiful handwriting, “Joseph Smith Jr., Susquehanna, Pennsylvania”, written in it. And I look at the description of this, when it was given, and so there’s no notion that there was a Joseph… that he had written this in this book, that it was even his book. And then I looked at who had looked at this 1830 recently, and there was Mark Hoffman’s name on the list! So, the guy just goes in, and he’s going to cause real trouble by just signing Joseph Smith’s name. He can sign his name. He knows how to do it. And he signed his name, and I don’t think Joseph ever got a Book of Mormon down in Susquehanna anyway, it’s…

Nehemia: Yeah, but in that case, my guess… and I don’t know that much about the Mark Hoffman forgeries, but my guess is he had some other forgery, and he wanted someone to go compare it with a document that’s in a respected library and say, “Oh, it is the same handwriting and the same…”

Royal: Yeah, he did do that, quite a bit. He needed an independent handwriting of Martin Harris for the Salamander Letters, so he wrote a letter to somebody else with a poem of his, and it was in this handwriting. So then, then that was used. “Oh, well, you can check this handwriting because it’s in this letter he wrote.” Well, that was a forgery!

Nehemia: By the way, we have an example like this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So there… and you talked about how he would take paper from the 1830’s…

Royal: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: That was blank paper… Mark Hoffman, you were saying did that. So, a lot of the Dead Sea Scroll forgeries, they’re tiny little pieces that came from the margins at the top and bottom of real Dead Sea Scrolls. And those might be worth a few thousand dollars, a blank piece of leather. But if you add ink to it, now all of a sudden, it’s worth a fortune. And one of them that is believed by many scholars to be a forgery is in California, I want to say. And there’s a place in the Book of Deuteronomy where it mentions Mount Ebal, and in this fake Dead Sea scroll, instead of Ebal, it has Grizim, which is what’s in the Samaritan version. Now, if he had just written Ebal…

Royal: Yes.

Nehemia: …yeah, that’d be worth a lot of money. But to say one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls has this textual variant, now, all of a sudden, it’s worth a fortune. So, you’re saying that’s what the MORMAN thing is… or, I’m wondering if that’s why he did it; to make it worth more.

Royal: Well, the thing is, the church knew about it, and they just ignored it.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, that’s an interesting question. So, what is the approach of the… and I guess the official name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints…

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: …in Salt Lake City. What is their approach to what you’re doing, to your critical text project?

Royal: Well, I would say most of them are just ignoring it and stifling it. They do not cite the Yale edition. They do not refer to any…

Nehemia: Well, the Yale edition is… because we haven’t talked about that yet.

Royal: Okay, well the Yale edition is… I published the first edition in 2009. I published a second one in 2022. It is the original text of the Book of Mormon as I’ve been able to construct it. We don’t call it “the original text” because you really can’t be sure of that, even though we textual critics love to say, “I have got the original text.” So, I called it “the earliest text” because it was based on the earliest sources. And, at the back, it has an appendix of about 700 and some of the important variants in the history of the text. It isn’t a list comparing my edition versus the church’s edition. In fact, in many cases we agree. But it’s just, what are important variants in the history of the text? So, the Yale edition… it’s got all the bad grammar which people have complained about, and Joseph Smith tried to remove. And it’s all in there in the earliest text…

Nehemia: Tell us about the bad grammar, because I think the audience… like “in them days”. Tell us, what is that about?

Royal: Well, “in them days.” There are about two or three of these in the original text, and there’s “they was yet wroth”. “They was yet wroth” is in the original text and… they’ve been removed. And, for a standard edition… there’s no sense, people reading… for most people just to read something which will stop them and make them think about the language rather than what’s the story, what’s going on. So, the church has accepted Joseph Smith’s attempt to clean up the bad English. And he made, in 1837, he made lots of changes to the text; 2% of them removed bad English, 2% of his changes.

Nehemia: When you say bad English… so you’re a linguist. So, linguists don’t make judgments like that.

Royal: Well, it’s my neighbors that make the judgment. If they read “they was yet wrought”, they’d say, “What have you done, brother Skousen? You’ve put a bad English thing in our Book of Mormon!” And I said, “No, it was there originally.” It would be something that they would consider dialectal, yokel, country folk, whatever.

Nehemia: In other words, the Book of Mormon has forms of English that maybe that’s the way Joseph Smith talked. Like instead of “in those days” he would say “in them days”. Is that the explanation?

Royal: Well, that is how people have interpreted that. My colleague, Stan Carmack, as a linguist, started studying all the bad English, so-called, in the Book of Mormon, and discovered that it was all found in academic writing in the 1500, 1600’s. You get examples of “in them days” in academic writing in the 1500’s, 1600’s. So, we have come to the hypothesis that the text is not Joseph Smith when it says, “in them days”, but in fact, it’s reflecting this archaic English that would be prevalent in 1500, 1600’s. Even accepted. It wouldn’t be considered bad English.

Nehemia: And I want to give an example here. So, you’re the expert in English, so you’ll correct me if I’m wrong here. So, a lot of native English speakers in the United States, instead of “ask” they say “aks”.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: But there was a time when “aks” wasn’t wrong, that was just a way that people spoke. Isn’t that right?

Royal: Well, yeah, in old English you had both of them, “ask” and “aks”. King Alfred used “aks”, and then it became… in the United States, it became isolated with speakers in Appalachia and so forth, and Black speakers use it. They didn’t invent it. Some people think that it’s Black English, but it isn’t. It’s just the derivative of this.

Nehemia: And when was King Alfred, who spoke that way?

Royal: He said “aks.” Well, there are lots of…

Nehemia: When was it? Like what century? I don’t know.

Royal: Well, King Alfred is about 800 AD.

Nehemia: So, in 800 people were saying “aks”.

Royal: And “ask”. It was a variation.

Nehemia: And “ask”, okay.

Royal: Some people would say “ask”. Orginally it was “ask”, and, in Old English it developed a variant, “aks”, which is easier to pronounce. So, for a long time in English you had both of them. But the Book of Mormon doesn’t have any examples of…

Nehemia: No, no, but when it says, “in them days”, it’s not that it was wrong, it’s just that’s how some people spoke. Is that fair to say?

Royal: That’s right. What I actually wrote… in the 1500 and 1600’s, and that’s really hard for people to get. The Helsinki people, when they did these big data studies and they came across “in them days”, they were shocked. They thought, “Oh, only hicks in America say, ‘in them days.’”

Nehemia: And that was one of the accusations. There was the guy in… I want to say he was in Ohio, who wrote the first critique of the Book of Mormon, and he says it was written in Yankee vernacular. Isn’t that…

Royal: Yeah. That’s right. And you see enough of those, you would say, “Oh, this is bad English, and it’s just Joseph Smith. It’s just Joseph Smith.” Stan Carmack and I have taken a really strong position that those don’t represent Joseph Smith’s bad English. There’s so much other of the archaic language that is Joseph Smith’s language, but it’s in the Book of Mormon. It makes us think we’ve got to accept these too.

Nehemia: Thank you so much for joining me in this fascinating conversation. There’s so much more we didn’t get to, and I hope we can do a follow up with other maybe…

Royal: Where are you? Where is this institute that you… of the Hebrew Bible? Where is it?

Nehemia: So, the physical location is in… or let’s say the mailing address is in Bedford, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, but we have people involved in the institute virtually.

Royal: I saw their names. They look pretty legit.

Nehemia: Oh, they’re very legit. We have someone at Cambridge University, in Jerusalem. Emanuel Tov is on the board of advisors. So, we’re creating a worldwide network of… and really, my dream for the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscripts is to do for the Hebrew Bible what you’ve done for the Book of Mormon. I don’t know if we could… it may take generations to do that, because we have a lot more manuscripts. Right? But if someone is… I’ll look in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and it’ll tell me in the little note that there’s a dozen manuscripts that have a different reading. Really? Where are those manuscripts?

Royal: And what are the readings?

Nehemia: Well, it’ll tell me what the other reading is, and I’ll look at those manuscripts and it won’t say what they claim it says.

Royal: Yeah, I know.

Nehemia: And so, my dream is that somebody can pull up the biblical text, the Hebrew Bible text, the Old Testament, and click on a word, and see every manuscript that has that. And they can see it for themselves. And you’ll need to know some Hebrew for that, but you’ll be able to pull it up for yourself and see that. There’s a project doing that for the New Testament, and they have about half the manuscripts already. But we have nothing like that for the Old Testament.

Royal: You must transcribe every one of them separately.

Nehemia: Absolutely. Well, they’re working on…

Royal: … collation, putting them together, because otherwise you’re going to create a monster where you’re saying, “Oh, this is like this manuscript, and I’m going to just go through and find the differences.” I tried that.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Royal: I screwed up really bad, you know.

Nehemia: So, we have the monster. It was created by Benjamin Kennicott in 1776, and he compared around 600 manuscripts.

Royal: Wow!

Nehemia: He also included printed editions, so they’re not all manuscripts. And for every word, he’ll tell you, “These are the differences in these 12 manuscripts, and here’s the difference…” Now, he didn’t check all the manuscripts himself. What he did, in some instances… He sent a letter to Turin, Italy, to Torino, and he said, “Can you look in your manuscripts and send me a list of your differences?” Well, they sent him the ones that they thought were important. And did they transcribe those correctly? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Now we can check it. Can’t always check it, but a lot of times we can check it now. And that was 1776. He didn’t have access to the Cairo Geniza. He didn’t have access to the Firkovich Collection. He didn’t have access to what today we consider to be the most important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. So, someone needs to bring this into the 21st century, and that’s my dream. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Deuteronomy 27:4-6

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OTHER LINKS
The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale Edition)
edited by Royal Skousen 

Book of Mormon images courtesy of:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/images?lang=eng

Dr. Gordon’s PhD dissertation:
The Writing, Erasure, and Correction of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts

https://wordcruncher.com

Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research (ihbmr.com)

The post Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study, All Jews are Messianic, where Nehemia learns why Israeli newspaper columnist Elon Gilad insists the controversial title of this episode is true.

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The post Support Team Study SNEAK PEEK! All Jews are Messianic appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #202, Death and Rebirth of Hebrew, Nehemia is joined again by Israeli journalist Elon Gilad to discuss the language spoken by Jesus in the 1st century and how a Mosaic of the sun god Helios came to adorn an ancient Galilean synagogue.

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Hebrew Voices #202 – Death and Rebirth of Hebrew

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

Elon: And it’s just beautiful. And it’s this mosaic, and the text in the Hebrew… and it’s clearly no question it’s a synagogue. But in the center of the mosaic, which is the floor, the center of the synagogue, there’s a zodiac, the twelve signs of the zodiac. And in the middle, there is a portrait of God stylized as the sun god on a chariot the way they, at the time, would draw sun gods.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Elon Gilad. He’s a writer for Ha’aretz, one of the major newspapers in Israel, specializing in Hebrew and Jewish history. And he’s the author of a book called The Secret History of Judaism. His research focuses on the interface between Biblical and Modern Hebrew, with a particular interest in uncovering the origins of traditions and words. Elon shares his linguistic insights through popular TikTok videos on Hebrew etymology. He has a BA from Tel Aviv University and is currently working on a master’s there. Shalom, Elon.

Elon: Hello. This is a very important thing because this often comes up. I see in the comments in my videos a lot of anti-Israel people: “It’s a made-up language,” blah, blah. So, it’s a little hard to conceptualize, but what we mean when we say that the Hebrew died; it was a living language, and it stopped being a living language, and then it was revived. So, it’s worth discussing what we mean by what happened.

Nehemia: Okay, yeah.

Elon: It’s a complicated process, but it’s worth understanding.

Nehemia: So, explain, please.

Elon: First of all, in ancient times, obviously people were speaking Hebrew. The people who wrote the Bible, the people in the Bible, they were speaking a language. This language was very, very, very similar to the languages of their neighbors, the Edomites, et cetera. They could have spoken… I don’t know if they had, really, the idea that they were speaking different languages. You can think of it as a dialect or accent; it’s very similar. But all those other peoples, they died out a lot sooner, and Jews persevered and existed also into Hellenistic times and Roman times, and they continued speaking Hebrew. To what extent? Well, there was a gradual shift away from Hebrew and into Aramaic.

Aramaic is now an arcane language spoken by very few people. People will study the Talmud, which is mostly written in Aramaic, but at the time, Aramaic was like English. So, the Arameans, these were the people who lived in what is today Syria, these wandering people, and they died out pretty early in antiquity. But somehow the Persian Empire adopted their language as the international language of communication. And what happened was, this was the language to speak if you wanted to do anything. This was like English. If you wanted to be somebody, you had to learn to read and write in Aramaic, because that’s what communication and business was done in. Slowly, Aramaic took over and people were speaking Aramaic. There’s good evidence that Jesus, for example, didn’t speak Hebrew, he spoke Aramaic.

Nehemia: Do you want to go into what some of that evidence is? Or maybe we’ll come back to that.

Elon: Well, there are little tidbits, but the best thing is, as he dies… there’s a quote of what Jesus says when he died, just before he died. And he’s quoting from the Bible saying, “God, why have you forsaken me?” Now, we don’t have the original. We don’t have the recording, obviously, but the way that the Greek translation appears, the Greek translation seems to be translating the Aramaic.

Nehemia: Not just that, it quotes it in Aramaic, in Matthew…

Elon: That’s right, it quotes it in Aramaic. That’s right. Everything is in Greek, but that is in Aramaic. So, if Jesus was using Aramaic to speak to God and from the Bible, which is obviously in Hebrew, it’s a good indication that this would be the language he was using. If you’re going to assume that anything from the New Testament has any relation to history, I would think that that part, if anything, would be remembered, because I don’t think that would be something early Christians would invent.

Nehemia: There’s something called argument from embarrassment, that, if you’re going to make up a figure in history, he’s going to raise up an army of supermen and defeat the Romans, not get crucified.

Elon: Yeah. Why would you invent that? Why would you say that Jesus had this moment where he’s asking God why he’s forsaken?

Nehemia: It almost doesn’t sound like something that would have been made up in the 4th century because, by then you had the Trinity Doctrine, and reconciling that particular scene with the Trinity, people have written whole books to do that. And if you believe in that, guys, fine. But if you’re starting out to invent something, you invent something that’s theologically consistent or easier to explain. Alright, so go on.

Elon: So, that part seems to me one of the most authentic parts in the Bible.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And assuming that whoever wrote this, actually recording something about Jesus, he seems to be speaking Aramaic.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: But also, when we find… and there’s hardly any inscriptions, but when we do, a lot of them are in Aramaic. So anyways, there are people speaking Hebrew, there are people speaking Aramaic, it’s a mishmash of languages. Even those people who do speak Aramaic, if they’re Jewish, they’re probably still reading the Bible in Hebrew, at least in earlier periods. No, also into later periods.

Nehemia: Well, until this very day you have Jews in Uzbekistan, up until 1991, that are still reading Hebrew. Go ahead.

Elon: Gradually, the people who speak Hebrew… everyone was praying in Hebrew, reading the Bible in Hebrew, but the people who raised their children in Hebrew and told them to do their homework in Hebrew and argue with people at the supermarket in Hebrew, those are fewer and fewer. And they’re probably the poorer, the uneducated, the lowliest people.

Nehemia: This is counterintuitive for a lot of people. Some people would assume that the more languages you speak, you have the money to afford an education, so you have a higher socioeconomic status. But what you’re saying is, that actually the poor people out in some village in Judea or in the Galilee, they might have preserved Hebrew longer than the intellectual elite in the big cities. That’s what you’re saying, right?

Elon: Possibly. Although maybe the very high people, at the highest levels, they would also speak Greek in addition to Aramaic. But yeah, it means your family made the switch earlier. If your family made the switch earlier to Aramaic, you already had a higher socioeconomic status. You were in the city and not in a town.

We have a bit of this in Rabbinic literature, of this process of dying. We have the story about the rabbis at the court of Rabbi Judah the Prince. They don’t know what mat’ate, “broom” means. But one of the maids of Rabbi Judah the Prince, she’s able to tell them what it means. They’re getting some lost language…

Nehemia: She actually doesn’t tell them what it means, they overhear her speaking to her subordinate. And they’re like, “Ah, okay. We hear it being used. That’s beautiful! We hear it being used in a practical sense.” So, that’s interesting, mat’ate, because that’s a verse in Isaiah.

What I find even more interesting is that they didn’t know what this other word meant, le’sirugin, which is a word that doesn’t appear in the Tanakh. It only appears in the Oral Law. They were reciting these traditions about certain laws, and it says, if you do something… it’s talking about reading the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, the sirugin, whatever that means. They didn’t know what that meant until they heard the maidservant use that word in speech, and they’re like, “Oh, it means intermittently,” or “switching back and forth.”

That’s really interesting, because that’s not them trying to interpret a verse from the Bible, it’s something that was authored… I don’t know when, but sometime before Rebbe Yehudah HaNasi. And they’re hearing a woman who still… she’s a maidservant. She’s, like you said, the lowest socioeconomic status, or one of the lowest, and she’s still using Hebrew as a living language. So, now we’re in the early 3rd century. How do we go from that to Hebrew being a dead language?

Elon: That’s the cusp of it. When languages die, languages die. Every year we have languages dying. It’s these old maids who still speak with their sister, and they grew up with this language, and they happen to be the last two people who speak it. So, we don’t know exactly when this happened, when the last native speaker died.

Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, actually wrote a long article about this. It appears in the introduction to his big dictionary. But somewhere around that period… we don’t know exactly where or when, the last person who spoke it as a native language died. So, in that sense, Hebrew died around the time of the Mishnah, say the 3rd century. It could be the 4th century; it could be earlier. Based on that story with the broom, it gives us the idea that, apparently, there were people still speaking there.

So, it’s not a day-to-day language, but it’s not that it died. There is diglossia; I think that’s how you say it in English. Use of two languages for different aspects of your life. This is… if you think about Medieval or Early Modern Europe with the use of Latin, some people were speaking German, French or whatever, but when you write a book or read a book, or appear in a court, or do something important, or not important, you do it in Latin. So, you use Latin. It’s an important aspect of your life. You read in Latin, you write in Latin, you write letters in Latin, but that’s not the language you speak with your wife or your servants. So, there’s a use of two languages, and this is very common to this day in the Arab world.

Nehemia: Tell us about that. I find that so fascinating.

Elon: So, there isn’t a language called Arabic. There’s no Arabic.

Nehemia: I want to stop for a second. There’s no language called Arabic. That’s what you just said.

Elon: Yeah. So, we think, for us Westerners, or whatever Israelis are, there’s Arabic, English and French, and all those are equivalent. But there really isn’t an Arabic; there are lots of Arabics. In different countries in the Arab world there’s a different Arabic spoken. There’s Iraqi Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, which is very similar to Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, and then there’s Moroccan Arabic. And all these are different languages, very different languages. The difference between Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic is more than the difference between Portuguese and Italian, which we definitely think of as different languages. Now, Portuguese and Italian are similar. They’re both descendants of Latin and there’s a lot of similarities, but we don’t think of them as dialects; they’re different languages.

And the same is true about the different dialects of Arabic, different Arabic’s. You need a different vocabulary, different grammar in some senses. They are very different languages. But that’s the language that people speak to each other on the street, that people speak to their children. This is not the Regal Arabic. When they go to school and they learn grammar, they’re not learning about the language they speak. That’s a lowly language that there’s no point in even discussing, it’s just what they talk. The real Arabic, and this is what they learn in school because they don’t learn it from home, they have to learn Arabic in school. This is literary Arabic. And this is an international language. This is the language that, not only all the books are published in, but also when you’re listening to the radio, the people are speaking in this literary Arabic. Or when you’re watching a movie or a TV show, for the most part, they’re speaking this literary Arabic.

Nehemia: So, what you’re saying is, that most Arabs actually speak two languages; their local language Amiya, and then the official language Fusha. Is that fair to say?

Elon: That’s exactly it.

Nehemia: And that’s a mind-blowing concept to an American English speaker, until you think about African American English. If you grow up in certain poor neighborhoods, there’s a language you speak to your friends. And let’s say you go to university. You’re not going to speak that language at university, usually, you certainly won’t write your paper in that language that you speak to your friends back in the neighborhood. And there we’ve got to be really careful, because there’s some political incorrectness here. But the reality is that what they’re speaking in that neighborhood is a dialect unto itself, or maybe its own language with its own internal rules. And if I try to imitate it, I’m going to sound like an idiot because that’s not how they actually talk. Because I don’t know what the rules are. We think of it as, “they speak badly”, or “they speak poorly”, or “they’re uneducated”. No, they just speak a different language, and they have to learn a second language to go to university.

I remember, at Hebrew University I had a class in Arabic literature. We read about the Satanic Verses, among other things, and one of the students raised his hand and starts asking a question in his dialect of Amiya, of Palestinian Arabic. And the teacher says, “You can either ask in Hebrew or in Fusha.” And he said, “Why? What’s wrong with my language?” He said, “When they allow your language at the University in Riyadh, I’ll allow it here in my classroom.” Because you would not speak the local dialect of Arabic that you speak in the street of Riyadh. At the university, you’re going to speak the official language.

Alright, so Arabic has that. And what I think you’re saying is that, in ancient times, Jews knew Hebrew, and they knew whatever their local language was. That’s where we’re going with this.

Elon: Exactly. Their local language, and really… this depends on place and time but really what happened is that there were two languages in each community. There was the local language, a Jewish dialect of that area. So, there’s different Italians, there are different forms of Italian, Jewish-Italian, but the Jewish-Italian spoken in Venice, the Jewish Italian spoken… Only very recently is there an Italian. Italian also has many dialects.

Nehemia: Arguably there actually isn’t even an Italian now. So, if you go to southern Italy…

Elon: The Florence dialect to a certain extent became the standard Italian. And the other dialects, while they may exist, they…

Nehemia: But if you go to the market in Sicily, in Palermo, they’re still speaking something different than what’s spoken on the news that night, right?

Elon: Probably. This is all a matter of degrees, but the differences used to be probably much more significant than they are today. Once again, this is not my field of expertise. But what happened is, there’s different Jewish versions of the local language. People speak their local dialect and they speak s’fat Kodesh. Rather, they don’t speak it; they know how to read and talk in it and pray in it. And s’fat Kodesh, this is like the holy language; this is not Hebrew. This is Hebrew and Aramaic, unless you’re a child or an idiot. You’re not studying the Torah; a real Jewish man is studying the Talmud.

Nehemia: That’s going to be quotable there. Unless you’re a child or an idiot… you mean you’re not just studying the Torah, you’re also studying the… what else are you studying? Tell the audience because they may not know.

Elon: Well, you start with the Torah. You go on to the Mishnah, and then you go to the Talmud. And the Talmud is a sea which you can swim in forever, and the size is huge. But also, even the text of the Talmud, which is massive in itself, is only a small part of it, because the Jewish bookshelf is all a commentary on the Talmud. There’s books and books and commentaries written on the Talmud itself, so when you’re studying the Talmud, you might not necessarily be studying the Talmud itself, but you’re studying a commentary on, or a commentary on a commentary on the Talmud, et cetera. So, that’s where Jewish study has gone. It’s mostly concerned with the revelation that’s hidden inside the Talmud. That’s where we get our laws.

Nehemia: The revelation hidden inside the Talmud. Wow, we have to unpack that. Let’s save that for the second half, if you have time.

Elon: Okay, sure.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying that the Jews, let’s say, in Tiberias in the 3rd or 4th century CE or AD, what are they speaking? Let’s ask that question.

Elon: In which century?

Nehemia: 4th century. Let’s say 4th century.

Elon: Okay, so in the 4th century they’re speaking Aramaic. That’s why the Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud in this case, is written in Aramaic. That’s their language. That’s also the language of their neighbors, unless they are speaking Greek. But their poorer neighbors, Jews and non-Jews are speaking Aramaic. And the well-to-do Romans, they are speaking Greek, and maybe some well-to-do Jews. But they are praying in Hebrew, probably. We have some difficulty understanding, we do not really know… when we find synagogues from that period, they do not conform with Rabbinic Judaism. In other words, it seems… this is off topic here with language that we’re talking about.

Nehemia: Go ahead.

Elon: I recently went to Sepphoris. Tzippori in Hebrew. This is a city near Nazareth, and it was an important city in the Galilee. Rabbi Judah the Prince lived there for a time, if I remember correctly. It was supposed to be good for his health. So, the rabbis are living in this city…

Nehemia: He’s the author of the Mishnah, for those who don’t know.

Elon: He’s the author of the Mishnah and the most important rabbi, according to my understanding. He is the first rabbi, the founder of Rabbinic Judaism.

Nehemia: Oh wow! We’ll get back to that later.

Elon: That’s arguable, but that’s what I write in my book.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And he’s called Rebbe, Rabbi, that’s simply Rabbi. So, you would say this was “grand central” of Rabbinic Judaism. Everyone must be Rabbinic Jews. But then we uncovered a synagogue there. It’s later, like 200, 300 years later, but we have the synagogue there and you can even have a bar–mitzvah there.

Nehemia: Oh, you can? Okay.

Elon: Even today, they set it up and they have bar-mitzvahs there, and it’s beautiful. And it’s just mosaic, and the text in the Hebrew, and there’s clearly no question it is a synagogue. But in the center of the mosaic, which is the floor, the center of the synagogue, there’s a zodiac, the twelve signs of the zodiac. And in the middle, there is a portrait of God stylized as the sun god on a chariot the way they at the time would draw sun gods.

Nehemia: I’m pulling up the photo to see. So, we have Helios riding a quadriga or something like this.

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh wow! Okay, there you go. We’ll throw that up on the screen there. And you can’t mistake that as the sun. It’s actually a sun with rays coming out of it. So, in the middle of a synagogue you have a sun god. So, there’s a disconnect between, what we think of as what should have been in Judaism 1,600 years ago, but at the same time I’m looking at this mosaic and we see Sagittarius is Keshet or kashat, and then we have Kislev. So, we have these Hebrew words…

Elon: There’s Hebrew words, there’s Hebrew text… these are Jews.

Nehemia: This is a Jewish place. There’s also some Greek writing, but okay.

Elon: So, these weren’t Rabbinic Judaism people. These were not the Judaism we know from the Mishnah and the Talmud.

Nehemia: Or maybe they were. Meaning, maybe… I don’t know, give me your position on this.

Elon: I can’t see any of the rabbis mentioned in the Talmud saying that this is okay. I mean, the Bible is pretty explicit. Also, there’s no Rabbinic texts here. In Rechov, we find Rabbinic texts. So, the people in that synagogue that was found near Rechov, near Beit Shean, those apparently were rabbis whose traditions are related to the Talmud, and the Mishnah, and the kind of Judaism we are descended from. But Judaism was huge in Hellenistic times and Roman times. There were apparently millions of Jews. And they were Hellenistic Judaism, the Judaism which is similar to what we find in Philo of Alexandria.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And that has nothing to do with what we think of as Judaism, and we only have a tiny window into that Judaism because we only have the writing of Philo. There’s millions of these people, and we find synagogues throughout the Roman world. And these are completely different forms of Judaism that might have been completely disparate from one another. We don’t know; they probably read the Bible in its Greek form, the Septuagint. It’s completely different from all we know, and they just died out. There’s nothing left of that Judaism.

Nehemia: Did they die out? Or were they assimilated into Rabbinical Judaism?

Elon: It’s probably a combination of both.

Nehemia: Or maybe they converted to Christianity or Islam. We don’t know, I guess, right?

Elon: It’s likely a combination of all those things. In late antiquity there were serious disasters… most of the people in the Mediterranean world died. A bulk of them died in those disasters. There was probably a volcano eruption, the arrival of the Black Death, the sun was blotted out, crop failure…

Nehemia: Alright. I want to go back to the language thing. I think what you’re saying with all this, correct me if I’m wrong, that they had deglossia, you called it. They’re speaking Greek, or Aramaic, or some other language, but Hebrew was continued to be used as a liturgical language. And what is that different from? Let’s say cuneiform, which is a language that really died, and nobody spoke even then. And it wasn’t deciphered until the 19th century, and that was indirectly based on the whole chain of… they had Modern Persian, which was used to decipher Old Persian, which was then used in a triliteral inscription to decipher the ancient cuneiform.

But Hebrew was never like that, that it completely died out. It wasn’t a native language, but it was still used.

Elon: It was alive in the day-to-day life of at least men, Jewish men, for generations, because they used it in their prayer, and in their study, and when writing letters, and when writing books. In other words, it existed as, like, an intellectual language but not a day-to-day language. But even more than that, the words in Hebrew remained alive inside the local languages, the Jewish languages.

Nehemia: Ah, okay.

Elon: For example… and this is the most important Jewish language, Yiddish. Which means Jewish, the Jewish language, which was the language of the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Eastern Europe. We can talk about why those people are important. Other people are obviously important too, but for historical purposes they are the most important group to understand Modern Judaism.

Nehemia: That’s quite a statement. But alright, let’s leave that for a different discussion.

Elon: Okay. I need to clarify this because I’m going to get crucified here. So, it’s not that these are more important people, but at the turn of the 20th century, when the Modern Period began, nine out of ten Jews in the world were Ashkenazi Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, or Ukraine, Poland. Or they had already migrated to America. Or they were from there and migrated to France and Germany. But nearly all the Jews in the world were Yiddish-speaking or descendants of Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Nearly all the Jews who settled in Palestine and founded the State of Israel, nearly all of them came from there. Zionism happened there. It didn’t happen in Morocco, which had a substantial number of Jews. But it’s only because there were so many of them, there were millions there, and there were a few thousand in other communities.

Nehemia: So, today I think over 50% of the population of Israel is said to be of Mizrachi or Sephardic.

Elon: Yes.

Nehemia: So, how did that happen that you go from 90% to 50%?

Elon: Now it’s not so significant.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: That happened because there was a systematic murder of those Jews in the Holocaust, and the ones that didn’t migrate to Israel and didn’t migrate to America… most of American Jews are Ashkenazi. I think it is around 90% there.

Nehemia: It’s less now because of all the people who have left Israel. But when I was growing up in Chicago it was rare to encounter a Sephardic Jew. It was a noteworthy event, like, “Oh, there’s 30 kids in my class and one of them is a Sephardi, and they do this different thing.”

Elon: In Montreal, where my family comes from, my mother’s side, it’s more common because it’s a French-speaking country.

Nehemia: So, they came from North Africa.

Elon: So, North African Jews could immigrate there, and they spoke French, so it was more convenient. But even there…

Nehemia: You have to figure; what kind of Jew wants to go to a cold place like Chicago? Someone who comes from a northern climate anyway, so maybe it was a self-selecting group.

Alright, so Israel today is something like 50% non-Ashkenazi, but you say that was mostly because of the Holocaust.

Elon: So, the people who immigrated early to Israel, the founders of the State of Israel, the people involved in the reviving of the Hebrew language, the people founding the kibbutzim in Tel Aviv, the chalutzim, what you think of as Zionists…

Nehemia: The “pioneers”.

Elon: The pioneers, yeah, the chalutzim. The founding fathers, not only the leaders of the country, but also the people working in the factories, and working in the farms, and fighting in the early IDF, that was before the IDF. Those are by far Ashkenazi Jews coming from Eastern Europe.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: That’s where Zionism happened. That’s where most Jews lived. Why is this the case? A: There were much more Jews there. Most Jews weren’t Zionists. Most Jews either stayed there or were part of the Bund, or they migrated to America. A small minority… there were so many Jews there that even when a tiny minority are crazy enough to think they can go and live in Palestine and start their own country, that was enough to actually succeed in doing that.

There were smaller numbers in other places, say Morocco, which had one of the biggest communities outside of Ashkenaz. But they didn’t really have nationalism develop there. The ideas of nationalism, and Zionism is a form of nationalism, a Jewish nationalism, were later to appear there. And it just didn’t happen there. That’s not where it happened.

That Jewish community did migrate to Israel, but they migrated 10, 20 years later during the 50’s and even the 60’s. So, that’s why, when we talk about the effect, the Arabic that they spoke, Jewish Moroccan Arabic, if they would have been the people that had revived the Hebrew language, then we would see a lot of effect of that form of Arabic on the Hebrew language.

Nehemia: It just so happens that the current head of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, if I’m not mistaken… isn’t it Aharon Maman, who is a Moroccan Jew?

Elon: And the one before that.

Nehemia: Moshe Bar-Asher was Moroccan as well.

Elon: Moshe Bar-Asher. So, this is not to say… and they were significant and very important in the group of Ben Yehuda, who was Ashkenazi, there were very important non-Ashkenazi leaders in that group. So, I don’t want to exclude anyone, but it is historical fact that these are the people who did it. That’s why there’s an enormous effect of Yiddish on Modern Hebrew.

Nehemia: This brings us to Yiddish. We were talking about the directions, north, south, east and west.

Elon: Exactly. So, why do we use these particular words? Tzafon, darom, mizrach and ma’arav? And not yama, tayman, and all these other options that we could have used from the Bible? Because those were the words in Yiddish, and Yiddish is full of Hebrew words.

Nehemia: I don’t know Yiddish. What percentage of Hebrew words…

Elon: I know some. I don’t know. It’s impossible to speak in percentages of words.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: I’ve been trying to do that with Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, of dictionaries. It’s very difficult to…

Nehemia: So, let me ask this. When my great-grandfather was speaking Yiddish in Lithuania, in Vilna, in 1905, he probably couldn’t go through a day… and I’m asking this as a question, really. Could he go through a day going to the market, or whatever he was doing, without speaking Hebrew words?

Elon: No, he couldn’t carry a conversation. Maybe a few sentences, but Yiddish is full of Hebrew words, and very basic words. Maybe I’ll give an example. I’m not fluent in Yiddish or anything, but… We were just talking about north, south, east and west, so you would use the Hebrew words, tzafon, daron, mizrach, ma’arav.

Nehemia: So, in other words, Hebrew had a bunch of different words for north, but the word that Modern Hebrew chose was with the influence of Yiddish, that Yiddish had preserved this Hebrew word. Is that what you’re saying?

Elon: The way to see it is really, Modern Hebrew adopted the Yiddish word for north, south, east and west.

Nehemia: Which happened to be a Hebrew word.

Elon: This happened to be a Hebrew word.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: Now, the people revived the Hebrew language, they were aware of this and maybe a little bit embarrassed of this. But what they were really doing, they were not exactly reviving the Hebrew language from scratch, because that is something impossible to do. What they were doing really is they were taking Yiddish, and whenever there was a non-Hebrew word in Yiddish, they looked and replaced it with a Hebrew word. So, they were going through this process of cleaning Yiddish of the non-Hebrew words in it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Elon: So, if the word was Hebrew, we can keep that.

Nehemia: I’ve never heard it described that way. What’s an example of a Yiddish word that’s Germanic or Slavic that’s used in Modern Hebrew?

Elon: They’re exceedingly rare.

Nehemia: Really? Wow.

Elon: Because what they were trying to do was squash those words. If there was a word like that, they would get rid of it. There’s an exception… and we have these discussions, they’re written down. If the word is international… in other words, they don’t really talk about the language they’re speaking. They’re speaking amongst each other in Yiddish, but the protocol’s written in Hebrew, and they’re not acknowledging… because they’re embarrassed about the fact that they’re speaking Yiddish.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, they say international words we don’t have to replace. Now what do they mean by that?

Nehemia: Yeah, what’s an international word?

Elon: If Yiddish uses a word, it’s international if also the other languages are using it. So that’s an okay word. So, say…

Nehemia: I don’t know, chimiah or something like that. Would that be an example?

Elon: Chimiah, chemistry, okay?

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Elon: So, you would have to replace a word like that. But they use it also in Russian, so that’s an okay international word.

Nehemia: Okay. It’s also something that’s inherently modern. In other words, they didn’t have chemistry in the time of the Talmud.

Elon: That doesn’t matter, because also other modern things… they replaced “electricity” with chashmal, which is a biblical word.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, they replaced everything. But if it was an international word, they would say, “Okay, that’s okay.”

Nehemia: Or universita, maybe…

Elon: Universita. Ben Yehuda actually… michlalah. That was supposed to replace universita, but now it’s a college. Now it’s used for college, but it was supposed to be for university. But there’s thousands of them, all these words that end with “tiah”, “iah,”, like where we have in English “tion”, it’s “tiah” in Hebrew. Those are just the Yiddish words. Now, the reason those made the cut is because they said, “Okay, those are international words. They use them in English and also in French. So those are okay, it’s proper.” Also, telephon, telephone, telegraph, stuff like that.

Nehemia: Not for lack of trying, right? Ben Yehuda made a word for telephone, just nobody uses it.

Elon: I don’t think it’s him actually, but someone made up a word and it just never really caught on.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: But other things… many other modern inventions, planes, cars, they have Hebrew words. Now, I said there’s very few, but I think it’s worth hammering home. There’s this word davka. This is another word that Hebrew borrowed from Yiddish, and once again, it stayed because there was no problem in keeping it because it wasn’t a Hebrew word. It was a lashon kodesh word. It was from Aramaic. So davka is a technical term in the Talmud, it means that it’s not only particular to one subject, but also applicable to other forms, like other subjects, and also in cases where we’re talking about a thing. So, we’re talking about the thing literally, davka, or not literally. For example, there’s a part in the Talmud they were discussing, and it says in the Bible that they’re going to Sukkotah, and the rabbi… this is actually not in the Talmud. I think it’s in one of the Midrashim. And the rabbis are saying, “The Sukkot that they are in,” the children of Israel, Sukkot are these temporary huts…

Nehemia: From the Feast of Booths.

Elon: Yeah. The children of Israel, where it says in the Bible, in this particular verse, that they are in booths, are we talking about “booths” like in Sukkot? Or is it really a metaphor for the spirit of God taking them through something, like something kind of fanciful, supernatural kind of booths, and then it’s like booth, but not a real booth? So, then you can use the word davka, and they use the word davka. When you say “davka sukkot” it’s the literal, actual sukkot.

Nehemia: So, the rough translation is “specifically”, right?

Elon: I would use “literally”.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh, wow.

Elon: Like literally a sukkah.

Nehemia: It’s mamash literally… see what I did there?

Elon: Yeah. Mamash is another good example.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about that next.

Elon: What’s important is that it’s a technical term used in the Talmud. Now, since all these are Ashkenazi Jews, and not only Ashkenazi Jews, but we’re talking about Yiddish, where studying the Talmud it’s a common term. This word entered into Yiddish, and it has a different meaning, somewhat. It has all kinds of meanings in Yiddish. I’ll give some of them.

Nehemia: Actually, before you do that, I just want people to understand. This word davka… I grew up saying it dafka, which you can talk about the difference there. It really is an important concept in Yiddish-speaking culture. I’m a person who didn’t know more than a dozen words of Yiddish, and I knew the word davka. And it’s a word that I would not have necessarily realized was even not English until I reached a certain age, just because I was immersed with words like davka, and chutzpah, and mamesh. These are words that were so deeply ingrained in my upbringing. And my father didn’t speak Yiddish. My mother could understand it, and she could speak a little bit of it, and she does speak a little bit of it. My grandmother, that was her native tongue. So, it’s not some obscure word. And it’s an important concept in modern Israeli culture, I would say, as well. Would you agree with that?

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: La’asot davka, “to do” davka. So, tell us about davka.

Elon: It has several uses and it’s not perfectly translatable. So, we said le’asot davka. One of the ways you use it is when you say somebody le’asot davka, “does davka”, or when you say, “he’s going to school”. Okay, so somebody’s going to school. If he’s going to school davka, you’re saying he’s doing it out of spite. He’s doing it to make you angry, or he’s doing it on purpose to hurt somebody. So that’s what davka does when it’s added to the end of a sentence.

But you can also use it completely differently when you put it inside a sentence. When you say, “I like eating cheese,” you can say, “davka I like eating cheese,” and then it’s me that likes eating cheese rather than the other people. These other people, they don’t like eating cheese, it’s me that likes eating cheese. Or if I put davka before the word cheese, so it’s, “I like eating cheese, not these other foods, it’s davka the cheese I like to eat.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Elon: So, it has this specifying… but not only saying specifically, it’s saying “not the others”. And you can use it in any sentence. You can add it, and the thing you put it before, you’re saying that that thing is true while other things aren’t true.

It’s a great way that mothers-in-law insult in a subtle and a very painful way. Jewish mothers-in-law have been doing this for generations. Say your daughter-in-law made a beautiful cake, and it’s delicious and you really enjoyed the cake. It’s so good, and you say, “Zuh davka ugah me’ulah.” You said, “the cake is excellent,” but by using davka it’s surprising that the cake is excellent. It says, “I wouldn’t have expected that this cake would be good, but this one actually is.”

Nehemia: It’s like saying, “This is actually good,” that would be the translation here, I think.

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. It’s a very versatile word, and it’s a word that’s used quite regularly, right? It’s not some obscure word.

Elon: All the time. All the time in Yiddish and all the time in Hebrew. And the thing is, Hebrew could have adopted the word straight from the Talmud and used it the way it’s in the Talmud. But we don’t use it that way. We use it exactly in the same way that it’s used in Yiddish.

Nehemia: We davka use it in the way that it’s used in Yiddish.

Elon: Davka the way it’s used in Yiddish, exactly! And not like the way it’s in the Talmud. And we also davka pronounce it the way they pronounce it in Yiddish, we say dafka and not davka. It’s still spelled today in Hebrew…

Nehemia: And nobody says davka?

Elon: You could say some hypercorrect and if you’re speaking in a formal way. Or maybe you’re on TV, you’re supposed to say dav’ka with the stress at the end of the word. But people say… in regular speech, I haven’t counted or recorded, but everyone says dafka. And dafka, there is a linguistic explanation for this.

Nehemia: Tell us!

Elon: This is a partial assimilation. What happened is, there are different qualities of consonants, so the “veh” sound, that’s a voiced consonant as opposed to… and it comes as a pair, an unvoiced version of that, is a “fuh”. There’s another one that will be helpful to understand what we’re talking about as voiced. We have “vuh” and “fuh”, and we have “kuh” and “guh.” The voiced is the “guh”, and the non-voiced is a “kuh”. There’s a vibration-y-ness of the consonant, which is the voiced quality.

So, there’s some stickiness between consonants when they’re placed together. Sometimes it becomes similar to each other. If there’s a voiced consonant before or after the consonant before or after will become voiced even though it’s not supposed to be voiced, or the opposite can happen.

In this case, the “kuh” in davka is unvoiced, while the “vuh” sound that was before is voiced. So, people anticipating in their mind that they’re going to need to make an unvoiced “kuh” in a fraction of a second, they also unvoice the sound before, and instead of saying davka, they say dafka. This process happens over time, and it’s not that this is happening every time we say the word. It’s not because it’s unvoiced or not voiced. This rule of un-voicing, of the dissimilation in this case, isn’t active in Modern Hebrew, it only appears in words that Hebrew adopted from Yiddish.

For example, savta, “grandma”, is spelled as if it’s supposed to be sav-ta, again with the voice “vuh.” But we pronounce it safta, because again, the “ta” is an unvoiced consonant, and it’s backwards partially assimilated.

Nehemia: And both examples you gave are Aramaic words that were adopted into Yiddish, savta… Are there examples of a word that is an original Hebrew word?

Elon: Sure. I wonder if mamash… because mamash is in Hebrew, but it probably comes from Aramaic. I don’t think it appears in the Bible; I think it is Rabbinic. We talked about tzafon and darom and those are…

Nehemia: No. I mean, is there an example where you have that partial assimilation of the “v” into an “f”? That’s what I’m asking. I don’t know off the top of my head.

Elon: In Modern Hebrew, if this happened?

Nehemia: Do they all come from Aramaic? Savta and davka, are they all Aramaic words?

Elon: I’d be hard-pressed to find more examples of this phenomenon.

Nehemia: Ah, so there’s only two that you can think of. Okay.

Elon: So, their recovery has a lot of Hebrew words, and those words remain…

Nehemia: By the way, this happens in English, where we say “wife” and “wives”. It’s the same linguistic phenomenon.

Elon: Is it assimilation? Possibly.

Nehemia: Alright. In any event… So, there’s a bunch of words that come into Modern Hebrew from Yiddish, but it’s more complex than that. Basically, they were trying to take Yiddish and Hebraize it, is what you’re really saying.

Elon: Because the basic grammar of Hebrew, the sentence structure, it’s very Yiddish. The backbone is Yiddish, in terms of phrases. Also, there are lots of phrases, Hebrew phrases, that we say or Aramaic phrases. “Ein hanach’tom me’id al eisato,” we say. That means “a baker does not give his opinion on the quality of his dough.” It’s a way to say somebody else should comment. You shouldn’t comment.

Nehemia: Yeah. But does that come from… and I don’t know the answer. Does that come from Yiddish or does that come from the Talmud?

Elon: Yeah, so this would be used in Yiddish. Nearly all the phrases…

Nehemia: No, but what I’m asking is, is it a German phrase? A Germanic phrase that was translated into Hebrew, or it’s…

Elon: No, I think this is from Rabbinic literature, I believe.

Nehemia: Okay. And as a contrast you bring an example in one of your videos, “to close your fly.” Which actually is a Germanic phrase now translated into Hebrew, meaning zipping your pants.

Elon: Yeah. Also, in the comments to that, people have been telling me that in Lebanese Arabic they use it, in French they use something similar, in Brazil they use something similar, and Turkish they use something similar. Which I was unaware of.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, it seems like it’s almost international. I would assume, since these people are all mother tongue Yiddish speakers, that they would take it from Yiddish. But I cannot be completely confident about that anymore because it seems that everywhere around the world people say the same thing.

Nehemia: So, just to explain to the audience… let’s back up. The Modern Hebrew word for “a fly” which is the thing you zip up at the front of a man’s pants, tell us about that.

Elon: Not the zipper. The opening itself, the fly.

Nehemia: The opening itself. Okay. So, tell us about that. I’ve seen the video, but most people haven’t. So, tell us about that story.

Elon: So, we have a fly. Hebrew doesn’t have a word for that. I don’t know where the English word for fly came from. It couldn’t be that ancient because people didn’t have flies in ancient times, so there’s no word for this. But what there is, is when you see somebody and their fly is open, you say, “ha’chanut shelcha petuchah,” or “s’gor et ha’chanut”, which literally means either “close your store”, or “your store is open”. Now, this is a phrase used in Yiddish, and it turns out in many languages. In English you would say, “X, Y, Zed,” or “X, Y, Zee” if you’re American.

Nehemia: “Examine your zipper”.

Elon: “Examine your zipper.” But apparently, in many languages you say, “You left your store open; you should close your store.” I think there’s like a sexual connotation here, as if the…

Nehemia: I’m not sure. I think it comes from… people have these little kiosks, and you would open up a little awning, and that was the store. So, you’re looking now into the…

Elon: You’re implying that your wares are your…

Nehemia: Oh, maybe. I don’t know.

Elon: Yeah. Everyone can see your wares.

Nehemia: But the point is they didn’t use the word chanus or something like this in Yiddish, which is the Hebrew word for “store”, chanut. I’m asking; didn’t they use the Germanic word?

Elon: They used the Germanic, the German word.

Nehemia: Okay, that was what I was asking.

Elon: Fam, fram, something like that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: This was translated… in other words, once again, we’re going back to how the Hebrew was born. So, suddenly all these people from Eastern Europe were moving to Palestine.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: People often think of the end of the 19th century, like Ben Yehuda figures, but really that’s like a prequel to the story. Because in 1900 there were a handful of people that were speaking Hebrew, a few crazy families living in Jerusalem, it’s sort of like people raising their family in Klingon. And there are some people who could do that; there’s attempts with the Cornish in England. There’s even the 1900 Encyclopedia Britannica and their article about Hebrew, which gives a scholarly thing about the Hebrew language.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: And at the end they say, “Currently in Palestine there are some people trying to revive the Hebrew language, but this is doomed to fail.”

Nehemia: Did it really say that? That’s awesome!

Elon: “Crazy people.” And he doesn’t treat it at all seriously.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And it wasn’t serious at this point. But what happened is, 20 years later, at the end of World War I, when an international agreement said that Palestine will become the land of the Jews, at that point thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands eventually, of Jews, moved from Eastern Europe and settled in Palestine. And that concerted effort between the end of World War I and the founding of the state, that is the nation-building period. And at that point you have thousands of Jews coming from Eastern Europe, or mostly from Eastern Europe, settling in towns and cities, and those people, most of them speak Yiddish and suddenly are forced to speak Hebrew.

Nehemia: Why are they forced? And it’s a real question. I don’t know the answer. In other words, if you go to the Walmart down the street from my house and you go to ask for something, you better go with Google Dictionary. I’m not trying to be funny. And you may have to pull up, literally, Arabic. You might have to pull up Spanish. If you want to know where the cold medicine is, and you ask in English, and this literally has happened to me. I literally had to pull it up on my phone and look up the Arabic word for cold medicine, and then immediately I was told with hands “it’s over there”. So, why were they forced? That’s my question. Because you can live in another country and never learn the language. My great-grandfather, I don’t know that he spoke English until the day he died. He lived in America for 30 years.

Elon: I think these people are not immigrants. They’re not people moving to a different country to build a better life for themselves and their children. These are people who have a historic purpose. They are part of an international movement. They’re living in living history. They’re reviving an ancient…

Nehemia: So, it’s ideologically motivated, I think is what you’re trying to say.

Elon: 100%.

Nehemia: Okay. So, they davka don’t want to speak Yiddish. They want to speak Hebrew.

Elon: Exactly!

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: They’re very aware that they’re doing something historical. The people who were looking for a better life, they moved to America. The people who moved to Palestine, those are the crazy people who were really feeling a part of a movement of Zionism. These are amazing…

Nehemia: Alright, absolutely fascinating. Any final words that you want to share with the audience?

Elon: No, I very much enjoyed this, and I look forward to talking with you again.

Nehemia: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34
Isaiah 14:23
Exodus 12-13; Numbers 33

BOOKS MENTIONED
ההיסטוריה הסודית של היהדות (The Secret History of Judaism)
by Elon Gilad

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #198 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Elon Gilad’s articles at Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da24-d494-a17f-de27cac80000

Elon Gilad’s Twitter/X: https://x.com/elongilad

The post Hebrew Voices #202 – Death and Rebirth of Hebrew appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this episode of Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS: Tricks of Translation - Melchizedek: Part 1, where Nehemia joins manuscript researcher Nelson Calvillo to solve the mystery of the first tithe in history using Hebrew grammar and historical commentaries.

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The post Sneak Peek! HGP PLUS Special – Tricks of Translation – Melchizedek: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #201, Origin of Hebrew Words, Nehemia discusses with Israeli journalist Elon Gilad an ancient word for “bear” and a possible pagan connection between agriculture and Baal. 

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Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words

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

Elon: It was only important to the people in the process of nation-building, like, “We’re doing this.” Once it was done, the children that grew up speaking Hebrew as their native language, they didn’t need to prove anything.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Elon Gilad. He is a writer for Ha’aretz, one of the major newspapers in Israel, specializing in Hebrew and Jewish history, and he’s the author of a book called The Secret History of Judaism. His research focuses on the interface between Biblical and Modern Hebrew with a particular interest in uncovering the origins of traditions and words. Elon shares his linguistic insights through popular TikTok videos on Hebrew etymology. He has a BA from Tel Aviv University and is currently working on a master’s there. Shalom, Elon.

Elon: Hello.

Nehemia: Hey. So, I saw some of your TikTok videos, and, you know, it’s really interesting. I remember a few years ago when I first got on TikTok and people were like, “What are you doing on TikTok? That’s just teenagers dancing.” And already at the time it wasn’t. There were already deep theological discussions there. But now, actually when the war started last October, it’s where I was getting my news. I was watching the Israeli news live streaming on TikTok.

So, it’s really interesting. You’re doing these deep linguistic etymological discussions on TikTok. Let’s start with, what is etymology? Not to be confused with entomology.

Elon: Yeah. So, unlike entomology, which is the study of bugs, etymology is the study of word origins. In other words, why we call certain things the way we call them. And while it’s a field that doesn’t have much practical use and isn’t big in academia… it’s not something you can really do a doctorate in, it’s a really fun field because every word has its own story. And sometimes those stories are interesting and entertaining. You can learn about societies, about particular moments in history.

I fell in love with this subject close to 12 years ago. And I just started writing a weekly column for Ha’aretz, and I’ve been writing about one particular Hebrew word, where it came from, every week. It appears in the weekend magazine, and it’s been more than 10 years, so I’ve written hundreds of these. And it’s a good way to get around history and language.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, I would disagree that you couldn’t do a doctorate on it. There’s the famous story of Gershom Scholem, who founded the field of Kabbalah as a scientific study, and he was criticized by the Talmudic scholars, particularly Saul Lieberman, who said, “You’re studying sh’tut,” or sh’tuyot, “nonsense”. And he said, “Sh’tuyot zeh sh’tuyot, aval cheker ha’sh’tuyot zeh madah.” “Nonsense is nonsense, but the scientific study of nonsense is science.” And here it’s actually not nonsense. In other words, for me this is a really important topic because language changes over time. And if you don’t realize that you’ll read an ancient text, which is what I do, and you won’t understand it. You’ll understand it in your own terms rather than in the terms it was originally written in.

A famous example from… this shows my age… from my youth. There was a President of the United States who was being charged with high crimes and misdemeanors, and there was a national discussion in the United States on, what is a misdemeanor? Because a misdemeanor in Modern English, in 21st century English, or even then, late 20th century English, is something that’s not a felony. It’s a minor crime.

Elon: A small…

Nehemia: Right. But when they talked about it in the constitution, or whatever that was, the high crimes and misdemeanors, it was like treason. It was a big deal. So, language changing over time could be really important, and could be very practical. It could be, do you impeach a President for some trivial thing? Or do you impeach him for a very big deal, for treason or something? So, it actually could have very practical… maybe more practical than half the things I do, which is studying ancient texts.

So, I would disagree with that. But what is the most interesting word that you’ve come across? One that’s appropriate for, let’s say, a young audience, because I’ve heard some of yours that are… There are, as we say, some pikanti things in Modern Hebrew, some “spicy” things.

Elon: Well, there’s all kinds of interesting stories, and Hebrew gives us some nice ones. But I think my all-time favorite, not word, but journey a word went through, very far, is the word for “popsicle” in Hebrew, artik.

Nehemia: Oh, I love that one!

Elon: Yeah. I wrote about this one years ago, and it’s surprising, because the word, if you trace it all the way back in history, you’ll find that it comes from a word that means “frightening” in Proto-Indo-European, which is a reconstructed language. In other words, it’s the language spoken by people who didn’t write, so we don’t have any record of the actual language. But we know this language existed because a lot of languages spoken today, and ancient languages, descended from it, and we can… well, not me, but experts in the field can reconstruct this language. And when they go back, they can reconstruct this ancient word which sounded maybe something like artikus. We don’t really know exactly…

Nehemia: Let’s back up. So, the Modern Hebrew word for popsicle isn’t “popseekul.” What is it, for those who don’t know?

Elon: It’s artik.

Nehemia: Artik, okay.

Elon: Artik.

Nehemia: Which sounds awfully like the word “Arctic”, like the Arctic Ocean, and it’s not a coincidence.

Elon: Well, that’s right. We could trace it… there’s two ways to tell the story. We can tell it from most recent and backwards, but it’s more fun if you tell it forward in this case.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, these ancient people living in the Steppes of Asia, I think the Caucasus or something like that, they were afraid, and they had this word that they used to describe being afraid. And what were they afraid of? Bears. So, they used this word for their word for bear. And this word for bear went into all kinds of languages. It became the word in Sanskrit, and in Modern Indian languages, and in Persian, et cetera, and in English it didn’t; that word disappeared. We replaced it with a word related to brown, but that’s a different story. But this word made its way into Greek as artikus, which was the Greek word for “bear”.

Now, because there’s the Big Dipper, which is the Big Bear, or Ursa Major, the constellation in the sky that points to the Northern Star, they started using that word to also refer to northern things. One of the Greek words for “northern” was artikus, hartikus, which made its way into Latin, also artikus, or something about that, and from that, it turned… Latin slowly devolved into French, and that’s where we get the word “Arctic”, which came from French.

So, the people who… flash forward to the 1950’s. A group of Jewish Belgian investors decided that they’re going to invest in the new State of Israel, and they build the first factory to mass produce popsicles. And they look for a name, and they think, “Oh, cold, northern,” so they call it Arctic. But Arctic doesn’t really work in Hebrew. Hebrew has a hard time with a lot of consonants together, so instead of arctic, artik. And that’s what they called the popsicles.

So, this is an example of what they call a generic word, a generic term that becomes a word. For example, you Xerox things. Xerox is the name of a company, but Xerox became generic. So, the same thing…

Nehemia: Or let’s say Kleenex. Kleenex was originally a brand.

Elon: Kleenex, that’s the name of a brand, but it became the word for the thing. So, the same thing happened in Hebrew with the word for artik. It’s not exactly true, I didn’t discuss this on the TikTok. And the next year after this factory called Artik was founded, somebody else founded a competitor, and they called themselves Kartiv, and a year after that, those two companies merged.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Elon: They bought each other and they became Artik Kartiv.

Nehemia: Wow!

Elon: And a few years after that there was an investigation. It turns out that these people were stealing money, hiding money from the tax people, and they were arrested and imprisoned and the company eventually disappeared. But even after this company didn’t exist, people still call popsicles artik, and they also call them kartiv. Some people will use kartiv and some people will use artik, and there’s a distinction; it’s not universal. In other words, I don’t distinguish between an artik and a kartiv, but some people do, and they’ll use the artik for a dairy popsicle and a kartiv for one that doesn’t have any dairy, that is water based.

Nehemia: Interesting. So, it starts out as the name of a company that makes popsicles, and now it’s a generic word either for popsicles or a specific type. And it comes from this ancient word for “bear” or “frightening one”. Now, that’s interesting. So, now this opens up a bunch of different channels that maybe we can run down.

One of the… and I’m not sure where I want to go with this, but you had a video on TikTok, and I’m sure a column, I would imagine, that was behind it, where you talked about the cardinal directions; north, south, east and west. And you’re saying, in the Greek, one of the words for north was this word for bear because they saw a bear in the sky. So, talk to us about the Hebrew words for the directions because those are fascinating.

Elon: So, when we say a Hebrew word, there really isn’t one Hebrew. It’s the same way in English. There’s Old English, Middle English and Modern English. So, the same thing happens in Hebrew. In this case we’ll just talk about Biblical Hebrew, and then we’ll talk about Modern Hebrew. Now, they’re related; in other words, a lot of times words in Modern Hebrew will come from the Bible, that’s sort of the default. But in the Bible, we don’t have one system. In Modern Hebrew it’s tzafon, darom, mizrach, ma’arav, that’s it. We don’t have other words.

Nehemia: Say that a little bit slower for the audience.

Elon: Tzafon – north, darom – south, mizrach – east, and ma’arav – west. And all those words appear in the Bible, but there’s a lot of other words that appear in the Bible too, and they’re used interchangeably. There’s good questions about asking, “So what? The people walking around in King David’s time, did they use this word or that word?” It must have been confusing if different people used different terms, and the truth is, we don’t know how this exactly worked. There seems to be different systems for referring… and those could be from different periods, because we know the biblical texts were written in different periods. Or it could be geographical differences. Whatever it is, the systems they used are very interesting, and different other cultures used the same systems.

So, one of the systems follows the movement of the sun. So, you refer to where the sun comes up, and that’s where we get mizrach from. The east is where the shemesh zorachat, where the sun rises, so it’s mizrach.

Nehemia: So mizrach is really “the place of the rising.”

Elon: “The place of the rising”, “the rising.” It’s the rising of the sun. And then ma’arav, it’s really “the coming” or “the going away”. Imagine the sun goes in when it sets, because they had the idea of the sun going away into like a tent. You can see it in some poetic verses in the Bible.

Nehemia: Yeah. In the Tanakh we have, “The sun comes out like a groom coming out of his chupa.”

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: There’s this imaginary sort of room where he goes.

Elon: Like, the tent. The sun goes to sleep, and it comes up over there, which is nice. So, that’s one system that follows the movement of the sun. Then there’s another system; imagine the person standing and facing the east. So, you’re standing east, and then to your right, the south, that’s yamin. Yamin is right, your right hand. So, you say south; yamin, or teiman, those meaning “right”. And then north is left, s’mol. And west is achora, for example. The Mediterranean is called ha’yam ha’achori.

Nehemia: That means “behind you”.

Elon: Yeah, it’s behind you because you’re facing east, which is qadima, qedma.

Nehemia: Which is “straight ahead”.

Elon: Straight ahead, exactly.

Nehemia: Why did they do that? Or, what’s your explanation of why they did that?

Elon: Well, the truth is, we can’t know. We can try to guess. It’s arbitrary; they could have oriented themselves in any direction. The word “orient” by the way, that’s also itself… it’s to find your way towards the east.

Nehemia: Right.

Elon: So, we have that also in English. We use the same idea. One possibility, just off the top of my head, is that that’s where civilization was, the great nations where culture was. Because at the time, Judah, Israel, those are quite backwater regions of the world where backward people lived, and the great civilizations of Mesopotamia were in the East. So that might be the reason.

Nehemia: The explanation I’ve heard… and like you said, we don’t know, is that there were people who were traveling along the international caravan routes from Yemen to Damascus. You’d take a boat from India with your spices to Yemen and you offload somewhere. I don’t know what the port was back then. And then you go by land, maybe because of all the pirates, I don’t know. And then you’d travel along the caravan route. So, if you come from Israel and you hang a right, you go to Yemen, which is called Yemen, which means right. And if you hang a left, you go to northern Syria, and in Canaanite inscriptions and Pheonecian inscriptions they mention a land called Shamal or S’mol, we don’t know how it was pronounced, which is today in northern Syria, southeastern Turkey. So, that actually fits.

And then, if you think about it, if you’re coming by boat up the Red Sea, what’s on your right? Yemen. And what’s on your left? Somalia, which is from the word s’mol. So, it depended on where your trade route was orientated. If it was oriented on the Silk Road coming from Israel, there’s Yemen and Shamal, and if you’re coming by boat there’s Yemen and Somalia. Somalia is on your left. Which, by the way, this is something interesting; why isn’t Yemen on the left? Because whoever named it that was coming from the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea, whatever that’s called down there.

Elon: With Yemen, so Yemen is in Arabic. So, the people that named the southern part of the peninsula, the Arabs, the people of Yemen, some of them didn’t speak Arabic. This is an Arabic word for the people who live in the south. So, they’re still facing to the east and talking about the people on their right that are the Yemeni’s, the southern people.

Nehemia: Yeah, but how does that explain Somalia?

Elon: I actually don’t know the etymology of Somalia; it might not be related at all.

Nehemia: Alright, someone can check. Maybe there’s other explanations… and post it in the comments. So, it’s really interesting… so you have the directions which are front and back and right and left, and…

Elon: There’s another system that we didn’t discuss.

Nehemia: What’s the other system? Yeah, talk about that.

Elon: There’s important geographic signposts, important features of geography. So, we said that in Modern Hebrew, and also in Biblical Hebrew, there’s tzafon; that’s the north. Now, tzafon, that comes from the name of a particular mountain, Har Tzafon. This is a mountain currently on the Mediterranean close to the border between Turkey and Syria, so it’s very north from Israel. But this was like a Mount Olympus of the Canaanite gods.

Nehemia: Explain what you mean by “it was a Mount Olympus.” That’s interesting.

Elon: The abode of the gods. For many years, deep into late antiquity, even, there was an important temple there. And this was an important site; it’s where the gods lived. If you climb up you might meet Ba’al, and, I don’t know, maybe El. Ba’al, he’s the rain god, and the temples that were there were dedicated to him. So, he was a very important god. When you live in a place where it doesn’t rain all summer and your livelihood, your subsistence, is dependent on rain, the rain god is king. And Ba’al was a very important god in the region for many years. I doubt anyone worships him now, but he had his 15 minutes of fame.

Nehemia: Maybe they don’t call him Ba’al anymore. But that’s a different subject.

Elon: Yeah, in some respects, this is widely believed, that a lot of aspects of the Jewish God are taken from Ba’al. In other words, Ba’al may have a lot of… so sorry, our God, God, has a lot of Ba’al in Him. And then the poetic verses that we find in the Bible, Psalms et cetera, there’s a lot of poems that we can see are very similar to poems to Ba’al in the ancient city of Ugarit, which was where the ancient peoples lived, which is now Lebanon. So, there is something to that, that we may not call him Ba’al…

Nehemia: So, tzafon is north, where El Elion had his palace, and his son maybe came to visit him. And then what’s south in that system?

Elon: That’s the tricky one. For south, in Modern Hebrew and also a lot in the Bible, is darom. Now, darom, we just don’t know what that word means. It might be a site somewhere in the south and it’s just lost to us, because we don’t know of a site called darom. There is a route that might have to do with being high up; in other words it could be related to rom. This is a little difficult to explain, but it could be explained, and then it could be from the system of the movement of the sun. Because remember, we talked about the sun coming up, and the sun going down. The sun being high would be appropriate for the south, because when the sun goes through the south it goes in the high part of the sky.

Nehemia: That’s in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern hemisphere I guess it goes the other way.

Elon: I doubt the ancient Hebrews knew that…

Nehemia: I know, I’m just saying for the Flat Earthers there who are listening.

Elon: Hi guys!

Nehemia: Alright, so we have darom, which is the Modern Hebrew word. So, you have tzafon, and what was the opposite of tzafon in that alternative system?

Elon: That’s darom, which may have been, or not.

Nehemia: What’s another word for south that we have in the Tanakh? We have negba, right?

Elon: That’s right, there we go, negba, which refers to the desert in the south, the dry part.

Nehemia: So, if I said to an Israeli today, “Ani nose’ah negba,” “I’m traveling towards the Negev,” would they understand what I’m saying?

Elon: They would take it as you’re going south, but they wouldn’t take it as, “Oh, he’s using the word for south.” But if you’re saying you’re going to the Negev, unless you happen to be in Eilat…

Nehemia: Right, then they wouldn’t understand. If I was traveling from Eilat to Sharm-El-Sheikh, they wouldn’t understand. They’d think I was going north.

Elon: Yeah. But in 99% of your conversations in Israel, if you say you’re going negba, people understand that you’re going to the desert, which is in the south, and that would make sense.

Rarely, the word yam, which means sea, does refer to south sometimes, which means it’s referring to the Red Sea. But most of the time when the word yam is used for direction, it actually refers to the Mediterranean, so it’s referring to the west.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Now, how they could have the same word refer to south and west simultaneously, I do not know and don’t understand. But we have…

Nehemia: It could be very confusing.

Elon: Yeah, you, like, try to give somebody directions…

Nehemia: And in the Tanakh you have Ever Ha’yyarden, which usually means “east of the Jordan”, but I think there’s somewhere one verse where it refers to “west of the Jordan”.

Elon: Well, it depends. Ever Ha’yyarden is “the other side of the Jordan”.

Nehemia: Trans-Jordan, right.

Elon: Trans-Jordan. If you’re in Jordan, what we call Jordan today, Ever ha’yyarden would be Israel or Palestine. And if you’re in Israel/Palestine, and you’re using Ever Ha’yyarden, then you’re referring to Jordan.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, I want to go in a bunch of different directions here. I’m not sure which one first. I don’t know if you have a study on this or you wrote about it, but you mentioned Ba’al. The most surprising thing to me that I encountered in Modern Hebrew was when I was on a kibbutz when I was 17, and I was working in the gadash, gidulei sedeh, in the agriculture, and they used the phrase gidulei ba’al. And I was utterly shocked.

Elon: Yeah, what’s this foreign god doing in Modern Hebrew, right?

Nehemia: So, “Ba’al crops.” How did that come into Modern Hebrew? Did that come from Yiddish? I don’t know the answer.

Elon: As far as I know, it didn’t come from Yiddish.

Nehemia: I didn’t expect it to!

Elon: Maybe we should explain what a gidulei ba’al is. A s’deh ba’al is a field that isn’t irrigated. You don’t need to irrigate it; it gets its water from the rain.

Nehemia: From the sky, which the ancient Canaanites believed came from Ba’al.

Elon: Yes, the rain God. So sedeh ba’al is a field that is watered by Ba’al, the god of rain. We don’t artificially water it. I’m actually not sure specifically…

Nehemia: That could be your next column! You can investigate that, because I don’t know where it came from. I find it hard to believe it didn’t come from someone in modern Israel who said, “Ba’al is the god of rain. We need a term for non-irrigated crops. We’ll call them the ‘crops of Ba’al’ or the ‘fields of Ba’al.’” I have no idea. It’s hard to believe that’s not the case.

Elon: If I had to guess without looking at it, I would say there’s probably a precedent in Rabbinic literature somewhere.

Nehemia: It might be, yeah. If that’s the case, that’s even more fascinating, because that means there’s someone in Rabbinical literature who remembered that Ba’al was the god of the rain, which I don’t know was obvious from medieval sources.

Elon: Maybe, but it might have been used not as a technical term and not having to do with the same way we do today.

Nehemia: So, if somebody knows the answer, post it in the comments. And if not, you’ll read about it in Elon’s article in a couple of weeks, hopefully. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll find out, because I don’t know.

Elon: We have quite a bit of foreign gods and demons in the Hebrew language.

Nehemia: Give me a few examples of that, because that’s always fascinating.

Elon: So, for “nightmare”, we say chalom ballahot or siyyut. Both of these… siyyut is a demon from the Talmud.

Nehemia: Really?

Elon: And ballahot are demons from the Bible.

Nehemia: Demons from the Bible?

Elon: So, chalom ballahot… ballahot, they’re some kind of demons.

Nehemia: You said it was very rare to have a word that was Germanic of origin in Yiddish that came over into Hebrew, and I don’t know of any examples off the top of my head. Do you know of any examples?

Elon: Well, there are, like in slangy words that make it through.

Nehemia: Like what?

Elon: This is actually not Germanic, but it is Yiddish. We call cockroaches… there’s many words for this, but one of them is jūk, which would be the most common.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: Now, in Yiddish, a jūk is a beetle, and this is actually a Slavic word… a lot of Yiddish words are also Slavic, so this comes from Russian and Polish, or Ukrainian. So, that word did make its way in, but it made its way wrong. In other words, instead of referring to beetles, it’s referring to cockroaches.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s a good example.

Elon: And they tried to make that word… to stomp it out, but like cockroaches it was…

Nehemia: You can’t get rid of it! And what’s the Hebraic word for cockroach, then, that they tried to replace it with?

Elon: There’s a few. There’s also makak, there’s makak sefarim in Rabbinic literature, which is probably a “bookworm.” It was used. But the real, official scientific word is tikan, and that comes from the word tik, which is a bag or a backpack, actually a Greek word. Greek words that are used in Rabbinic literature… if they’re used in Rabbinic literature, they get a pass in the Hebrew. Like, “Oh, if the rabbis use this Greek word, then it’s fine.” And there’s many of those. So, ancient loan words are okay, modern loan words aren’t okay.

Nehemia: Well, they still end up in the language, right? Most people say fontim and not gufanim for “fonts”.

Elon: So, this revolutionary fervor that took place from the 20’s to the 40’s, and this process of, “Everyone needs to speak Hebrew and Hebrew needs to be pure, and we need to purify the Yiddish and make the Hebrew really convincingly Hebrew.” Once the State of Israel was founded, and that generation, that amazing generation that founded the State, gave way to the next generation, that generation already, and current generations, are just not interested in this at all. They stopped coming up with words, they just borrow words. It was only important to the people in the process of nation-building, like, “We’re doing this.” Once it was done, the children that grew up speaking Hebrew as their native language, they didn’t need to prove anything. They were already speaking Hebrew.

Nehemia: Wow.

Elon: It’s a language, we don’t need to do anything.

Nehemia: In some ways, you’re saying, like, that first generation that was trying to stamp out Yiddish… And they literally outlawed Yiddish theater, famously, and there were patrols that, if they heard people speaking Yiddish at a café, they would harass them. So, you’re saying they kind of had a chip on their shoulder, that generation, and maybe they felt threatened, like, “I don’t know if this is going to work, so we have to be very intense about it.”

Elon: Yeah, we know that this actually worked. They didn’t know that it’s going to work. There’s a famous story about Bialik, a true story.

Nehemia: Tell us who Bialik is. You don’t mean Mayim Bialik.

Elon: Not Mayim Bialik. Also, another comparably great Jewish person.

Nehemia: And they’re relatives, by the way. She’s…

Elon: Are they?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Wow, okay.

Nehemia: They’re relatives somehow. I don’t know exactly, but yeah, same family. Alright, so Chayim Nachman Bialik, yeah…

Elon: Chayim Nachman Bialik, he was a national poet. He was from Eastern Europe, a famous poet. He wrote in Hebrew, and he also wrote stories and coined many, many, many words, probably the second most words per person after Ben Yehuda. And the most famous person, once he moved to Tel Aviv… the city of Tel Aviv built a grand house for him to get him to come to live in Tel Aviv.

Nehemia: Really?

Elon: They built a street named after him, Bialik.

Nehemia: Even when he was alive it was called that?

Elon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Elon: And at the end of that street named after him, they built a grand house for him, and that’s where he moved, into that house. There are actually two streets in Tel Aviv named after him. There’s Bialik Street and Shderot Chen, Chen Boulevard, Chen is an acronym for Chayim Nachman.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Elon: So, he was a very, very famous man, like a superstar of his time. Also, a womanizer, but that’s another story.

Nehemia: So, give me a time period of Bialik, because I’m really bad at that.

Elon: We’re talking here, when he was already living in Tel Aviv during the 30’s, late 20’s.

Nehemia: Okay. So, he got out in time, alright.

Elon: Yeah. And he’s walking down the boulevard, Rothschild Boulevard, and it’s beautiful, and there’s flowering jacarandas around. And he’s talking with his friend Ravintsky, who was a close friend and a publisher, and they were speaking with one another the language they spoke always; Yiddish.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And then some young kid comes up, and he’s a member of the Gdudei Ha’safah Ha’Ivrit, “the Battalion…”

Nehemia: “The Hebrew Language Patrols,” basically.

Elon: Whatever. So, these are the people who were busting up theater productions in Yiddish. And he screams at Bialik, who is Mr. Hebrew Language, like, one of the leading figures in the academy… well, that was before The Committee of the Hebrew Language, and he screams at him, “Bialik, daber Ivrit!” And Bialik…

Nehemia: Oh, so he knew who he was!

Elon: Yeah. So, Bialik screams at him, “Lech la’azazel!” Which is roughly the equivalent of “go to hell”.

Nehemia: But it’s literally “go to Azazel”, which was the place where they sent, in Leviticus 16, what’s called in English “the scapegoat,” incorrectly, but yeah, go on.

Elon: Exactly. So, this kid actually sues Bialik in the courthouse.

Nehemia: What?

Elon: In the Hebrew courthouse in Tel Aviv. So, he takes him to court for insulting him, or something like that, and there actually is a trial. And Bialik gets out of it because he says that it’s actually not an insult, because Azazel is a beautiful place in Jerusalem where they used to throw the scapegoat in ancient times. This is one of the interpretations of Azazel. Azazel is really a demon god, Azaz-el. He appears as Azazel in Leviticus. But when we read some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we learn about an angel, Azaz-el, who’s the one who taught the women how to make jewelry, the men how to make weapons, he’s some kind of evil demon kind of thing. And apparently, according to Bialik, Azazel refers to the place where the be’ish beiti. This is during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there would be two goats, one of them would be sacrificed to God and the other would be walked out to the desert and thrown to its death by an appointed man as part of the custom. So, when Bialik said, and this is one of interpretations of what Azazel is, that Azazel was referring to the particular location where this is, and he didn’t say, “go to hell”, he said, “go to Azazel”.

Nehemia: “Leave Tel Aviv, get on Road number 1, and go to Azazel, east of Jerusalem” That was his defense!

Elon: “And that’s a lovely place, I only meant he should enjoy his trip there.” Obviously, nobody would find Bialik guilty, and this kid had to pay the court costs.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s a great story. So, we talked about Yiddish, and I don’t know if you have anything on this, if you don’t, we’ll just cut this out. But Ladino words… are there any Ladino words that you know about in Modern Hebrew? Because that’s… common language.

Elon: There are some. Do you want to say something about Ladino?

Nehemia: Please. You say something about Ladino.

Elon: So, Ladino, we use the word Ladino to refer to Judeo-Spanish. We said before, if you remember an hour ago, we said that…

Nehemia: In the previous episode.

Elon: In the previous episode, we said that in each area where Jews were living, they spoke a variety of the local language that was the Jewish variety. Somewhat different from the other language, the language of the Gentiles, but obviously very similar to that local language. So, in Spain there was a Judeo Spanish; likely there were several Judeo-Spanishes because Spain itself had different languages spoken in it, all descended from Latin, from Vulgar Latin. Now, in 1492, the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Also, the same people who sent Columbus on their way also sent the Jews of Spain on their way and they said, essentially, “Either you convert to Christianity and join us and party, or you can leave.” Many converted, many left. And those people who left, they took their language with them and settled in all kinds of places, in northern Africa, in Turkey, in the Balkans, in what’s today Greece, and throughout the Arab-speaking world.

Now, these people were somewhat better well-off. They were cultured, and often looked down on their lowly neighbors, and didn’t always mix with them. And they preserved their language. And this language still exists to this day, almost; there’s some native speakers. It’s likely that the language will die off as a spoken native language. Maybe it just did, I don’t know, but we’re at the end of that hundreds-of-years-long story.

Now, a big part of the community, say, at the time that World War II broke out, there were major concentrations of people speaking this Ladino around the world. The city of Saloniki, which is one of the biggest cities in Greece, maybe it was the second biggest city in Greece, it’s a major port in northern Greece…

Nehemia: And for the Christians, that’s where Paul sends a letter to the Thessalonians. That’s Saloniki, Thessalonia… Thessalonica in ancient times, yeah.

Elon: This is a major important city, and the most spoken, most common language in that city was Ladino.

Nehemia: More than Greek, you’re saying.

Elon: More than Greek, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, that I didn’t know. Okay.

Elon: Most of the people there were Jewish, and they spoke Ladino. That was the community that lived there, and it was a giant community. And unfortunately, that community does not exist, because similarly to what happened to Ashkenazi Jews and Yiddish, those people either were murdered in the Holocaust or made their way to Palestine and took on Modern Hebrew.

Now, we said before, there were a lot more Ashkenazim than there were Sepharadim people. And there’s something interesting about the fact that we call people Sepharadim.

Nehemia: Which means Spanish, right?

Elon: Sefarad is Spain in Hebrew. It really is a biblical word referring to somewhere that we don’t know. But at some point in the Middle Ages, Jews began referring to Spain as Sefarad. The same thing happened with Tzarfat and France, and that is the Hebrew word for Spain and France. So anyways, those people who migrated from Spain to the Arab world, they became very important people in their communities. The communities adopted their way of doing things in the synagogue. They founded their own synagogue. So, when we say that somebody is Sepharadi, we’re saying that they’re Spanish. But it’s not that all these people were really descended from the people that were thrown out of Spain, it’s that the local communities, because these were the “better folk”, the local communities that already lived in those areas, they assimilated into the Sephardic community, the communities of the descendants of the people who left from Spain.

Nehemia: So, just so I understand. There were a bunch of Jews who left from Spain when they were expelled in 1492, and let’s say they came to Tunis in North Africa, and they became the dominant force in Tunisian Judaism. That’s what you’re saying.

Elon: Exactly. There were Jews in Tunisia from antiquity.

Nehemia: Probably from Phoenician times even, maybe.

Elon: Possibly, but definitely in Roman times there were Jews there. And it’s likely that there were Jews there throughout that time. I think there might be a few still today. But they consider themselves, and they pray, in the Sephardic tradition, and they might think of themselves as Sephardic, Sepharadim, because the people who settled during the expulsion from Spain, who settled there, they became the important people in the community. And they exerted their influence in a way that… Because they settled in the cities, once again… there were people living in the mountains, uneducated people, and the people who came from Spain knew how to read and write. There was that kind of imbalance.

So, this happened, and we can now call all those people from the Arab world, except for the Yemenites… well, I guess also Ethiopian Jews, the Sephardic expats, they didn’t make it all the way to Yemen, and the Jewish community of Yemen was disconnected from the rest of the Jewish world from the time of Maimonides until the Modern Period. So not them, but everyone else are considered Sephardic because those people mixed into those communities, very different communities, far away communities.

Nehemia: What are some examples of Sephardic words? Meaning, Ladino words that went into Modern Hebrew.

Elon: So once again, there’s very, very few. The influence of Ladino in Hebrew is small, because, once again, the people who founded the language and the Jewish community in Palestine, which would become Israel, were mostly Ashkenazi Jews, so there was more Yiddish influence than Ladino. But you can find a little. One of those is a pile of money, like a wad of cash, in Hebrew is a stefah.

Nehemia: Stefah? Okay.

Elon: This is a slangy term. That word comes from Ladino, and originally from Greek-Turkish.

Nehemia: Interesting.

Elon: So, it didn’t come all the way from Spain, because for the hundreds of years that Ladino speakers lived in Saloniki and other areas of Greece, also in the Balkans, they adopted many Turkish and Greek words. If you want a word that goes all the way back to actual Spanish and to Latin, you can say… this is a very slangy word. Something that’s really of poor quality, like it sucks, I don’t know… you could say it’s democulo.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: Which comes from an archaic form of Spanish meaning “from the ass”, like “from your behind”, your rear end.

Nehemia: Okay!

Elon: That came all the way from Spanish via Ladino to Hebrew.

Nehemia: Okay, wow! I read somewhere that Ben Yehuda’s wife coined the word chanukiah, and she claimed that she had heard Ladino speakers use it. And that iah ending is really not common in Modern Hebrew, not in that sense. So that’s interesting. There you have a word that obviously has a Hebrew origin, Chanukah, but then this particular formation of it supposedly comes from Ladino. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what she claimed.

Elon: Maybe.

Nehemia: And they may have been using it for centuries in the Ladino world, so, very interesting.

Alright, absolutely fascinating. Any final words that you want to share with the audience?

Elon: No. I very much enjoyed this, and look forward to talking with you again, and…

Nehemia: Wonderful. Thank you so much, alright. Oh, say one last thing maybe about the Hebrew word lehitra’ot. Do you have anything you’ve ever written on that? Because that’s a great word, “goodbye”.

Elon: Well, lehitra’ot literally means “to meet again”, I guess.

Nehemia: “To be seen again.”

Elon: And like, “seeing each other.” It’s like…

Nehemia: Ah, “to see one another.” It’s a reciprocal action. Yeah, okay.

Elon: Yeah, so it’s really saying, “that we may see each other again”.

Nehemia: It’s so beautiful. Have you ever written about that in your weekly column?

Elon: I actually haven’t. No, I haven’t.

Nehemia: I’d love to read that if you…

Elon: Maybe greetings could be something I can…

Nehemia: Alright, wonderful, lehitra’ot. Thank you for being on the program.

Elon: That may be the hardest part of my work at this point, is finding words to write about, because I’ve written…

Nehemia: We’ve brought up two in this conversation, lehitra’ot, and I forgot what the other one was.

Elon: Ba’al.

Nehemia: Oh, giddulei Ba’al! That’s a really interesting one! And s’dot Ba’al. Yeah, interesting. Awesome, wonderful, thank you so much.

Elon: Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ll look into those, I hope.

Nehemia: Wonderful.

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
Psalm 19
Leviticus 16
Enoch 8-10
1 & 2 Thessalonians

BOOKS MENTIONED
ההיסטוריה הסודית של היהדות (The Secret History of Judaism)
by Elon Gilad https://www.steimatzky.co.il/011562998

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #198 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Elon Gilad’s articles at Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da24-d494-a17f-de27cac80000

Elon Gilad’s Twitter/X: https://x.com/elongilad

The post Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Join Nehemia and Lynell for the 200th episode of Hebrew Voices, Nasrallah and the Samson Option to hear how he stole her coffee, the profound biblical message in the death of Hassan Nasrallah, and why the biblical story of Samson strikes fear into the hearts of modern Muslims.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio Transcript

Hebrew Voices #200 – Nasrallah and the Samson Option

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: Who would have expected this? If you would have told anybody on October 6th that in less than a year, Hassan Nasrallah would be killed by Israel, and the Arabs would be praising Netanyahu… you couldn’t sell this as a Hollywood movie. It would be considered unrealistic. But there it’s happening. I mean, this is God performing miracles.

Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. This is the 200th episode! And I have a really exciting announcement, that Israel has eliminated the arch terrorist Hassan Nasrallah, which I can’t even believe that I’m able to announce this wonderful news, and hopefully more news soon, in the same vein. We’re going to talk about this and how this will lead us into a little bit of a biblical study. And before we get to that… 200th episode of Hebrew Voices.

I just want to share something about… we’re going to talk about how you came to be on Hebrew Voices, Lynell, my wife, but before that, I just want to talk about… and I’ve told this story many times, of why I started Hebrew Voices. I spoke at this church in West Texas, a messianic church, and there were seven people there. Keith was there as well, so seven, not including me and him, so nine altogether. We didn’t even have a minyan, a prayer quorum in Jewish tradition. And at the end, the pastor came to me, and he said, “This was wonderful. If I’d have known this is what you were going to say, I would have told the congregation you were coming.” And he had hidden from the congregation that I was coming, and the only people who knew about it were people who had heard about it from me. And he was afraid to hear what we had to say until he heard it. And it got me thinking, “What are all those Hebrew voices out there that people are afraid to hear?” And we’re going to hear some of those voices. Today we’re going to hear some Arabic voices as well about Hebrew subjects.

Oh, before we get started, Lynell, you have a wonderful story of… it’s not how we met, it’s like, I think maybe our third meeting. Can you tell that story? It was near Houston, Texas. I want to say, Katy, maybe. It’s when I was recording what eventually became one of my Support Team Studies called, “The Great I Am Revealed.”

Lynell: Is that when you stole my coffee?

Nehemia: That’s the story you tell. That’s your reality. So, why don’t you tell that story? And so, the background of this is that when I… and actually, on this particular occasion, I spoke for seven hours with a few breaks. And I told the people that when the coffee ends, so does the teaching. And I said to them, “You guys have to keep bringing me coffee because I’m going to be up on stage.” So, speaking of coffee, tell your story.

Lynell: So, I was traveling in that area. I had to fly in that area anyway. And so, you were speaking, and I was like, “Let’s go.” So, I got there, and… great teaching. It was very interesting. In the middle, when you began to stop, I was like, “I’m headed to Starbucks. I need, I need caffeine to stay attentive.” It’s a lot of material that comes at you when you have that length of teaching. So, I went to Starbucks, hurried up in my car, got in line, got my coffee, didn’t even have a chance to drink it. I picked it up in my hand and I was like sitting in the third row, and you’d already started back. And so, I came in with my coffee and I’m walking to my seat, and all of a sudden Nehemia talks. He points to me, he said, “Is that my coffee?” And I was like, “Yes, that’s your coffee.” So, I came back, and I gave him my coffee. That’s the coffee story.

Nehemia: I first heard the story when we went on our first date, and you said, “You owe me coffee.” I said, “Why do I owe you coffee?” Because I didn’t remember this. Here’s the crazy thing, this is unbelievable; we actually have video footage of this happening.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: Because we recorded that whole seven hours, or as much of it… until the batteries ran out, or the tape ran out, or, you know, video file, like SD cards or whatever. And I asked our editor, Danilo, who is in Serbia, I said, “Do you have the original raw files?” Because what’s been put on the website is edited. I mean, me like, you know, tucking in my pants, that’s not going to be there. Actually, it’s literally one example. So, I was able to get the original raw footage. This is real, guys!

Lynell: Oh, wow.

Nehemia: This is the era we live in, where there’s raw footage of…

Lynell: Of everything. Wow, I can’t believe that’s on video.

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s amazing. So, I’m going to share my screen.

Lynell: Oh, you’re going to show it. Oh, awesome.

Nehemia: I’m going to show it.

Lynell: Oh my gosh, you’re so handsome.

Nehemia: So, here is me at this event in Texas. This is the raw footage. So, I believe this is a Q&A, so you really can’t hear the people speaking who are talking to me. I’m listening to what they have to say. And here we go.

(Video): [Inaudible] [00:05:20]

Lynell: You stole my coffee!

Nehemia: Wait, what?

Lynell: I’m like, “Crud! There’s my coffee.” Mine was a caramel macchiato. What was yours?

Nehemia: Oh, I’m sure it was a heavy cream latte. So, it’s hilarious! The other guy’s bringing me coffee at the same moment, and I’m thinking, “That’s my coffee,” but then another coffee comes at me from the other side. And you can’t make this stuff up. There it is. That’s how I stole your coffee.

Lynell: And I had to go the whole rest of the time without coffee. I was sad.

Nehemia: But I’m sure you were thrilled because you were hearing this wonderful teaching.

Lynell: Now, that’s true. That really is true, Nehemia. That’s not a joke. No, it was great! And I don’t think you’ve done that teaching again, have you?

Nehemia: No, not that I can think of…

Lynell: That is an incredible teaching. If you guys haven’t seen that, you should. As a matter of fact, Nehemia, I’d like to watch it again.

Nehemia: “The Great I Am Revealed,” yeah. There’s actually more to it than I was able to present that day, but that’s for a future time. It’s really interesting stuff.

All right, so, we assassinated the arch terrorist, Hassan Nasrallah. And this is a man who was responsible for the death of probably hundreds of Israelis, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Arabs. What happened is, there was a Syrian civil war… it’s still going on. And in the Syrian civil war, Assad, the dictator, was losing, and so he needed foreign fighters to come and wipe out his own people so they wouldn’t overthrow him. And he brought in Nasrallah and his goons, Hezbollah, and they killed thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands…

Lynell: From where?

Nehemia: From Lebanon. So, they’re in Lebanon, and Syria is their neighbor. And then also there’s a sectarian conflict here as part of the story, which is that Hezbollah are Shiites and the people who are opposing Assad, who is the dictator of Syria, are Sunnis. And so, he was slaughtering Sunnis. Now, the complicated thing is that Assad is actually not a Shiite. You know, there’s two main sects in Islam. So, there’s Shiites and Sunnis, and the way you have to think about this is, Catholics and Greek Orthodox. And you’re like, “What about the Protestants in Islam?” I’m not sure there’s an equivalent of Protestants in Islam. I guess you could maybe say that’s the Salafis, or certainly the Salafis would see it that way, but yeah. So, the Shiites and the Sunnis hate each other. Iran is the main Shiite country, and so Iran backed Hezbollah, basically… not just backed, they created Hezbollah. These were Iranian… they call them Iranian proxies, but they’re really Iranian puppets.

Lynell: Is that to destroy the Sunnis? They created Hezbollah…

Nehemia: Originally it was to destroy the Sunnis, and later it was turned against Israel. So, there was a Lebanese civil war, and this was… Nasrallah started out in Amal, which is one of the other terrorist organizations that was fighting against Sunnis and Druze and Christians. So, really the Christians, the Sunnis, and the Druze were his main victims, and then he turns his attention to Israel. So, if he killed thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of Sunnis, of Arabs… many of them Christians, as well… and so, maybe he has hundreds of Israelis on his hands, maybe thousands. I don’t know what the number is. But he’s been doing this for a long time, and Israel finally reached him and killed him.

And there is a famous song that goes back 18 years to what’s called the Second Lebanon War in 2006. What happened is, Hezbollah, Nasrallah, invaded Israel and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers from the border who were on patrol. And Israel responded by launching a war against Lebanon. And Nasrallah later said, “Well, if I knew there was going to be a war, I wouldn’t have done this.” He thought Jewish blood is, is just, you know, free, and you can kill whoever he wants or kidnap whoever he wants.

And so, there’s a song. I actually can’t play it because the words are a bit… probably not appropriate for this program, but it has this very catchy tune. And people are now playing it. Jews and Israelis are playing it now all over the world. It says, “Come on O Nasrallah, we will something you, Allah willing.” That’s the part I’m not going to play. “We will return you to Allah with all of Hezbollah.” It’s “da da da da da da”. And it rhymes in Hebrew. “Da da da da da da.” So, guys you can look that up, it’s called Yalla Yalla Nasrallah. Yalla is actually Arabic for… but they use it in Hebrew, too. “Come on, O Nasrallah, we will [something] you, inshallah,” which is “Allah willing.” “We will return you to Allah with all of his…” It’s a really catchy tune. And there’s a bunch of other interesting parts in the song that you could say in a way are prophetic. Or not really, because we saw this coming, I suppose. Well, I don’t know that anybody saw this coming.

The fear was if we ever killed Hezbollah or if we ever killed Nasrallah, Hezbollah would fire 150,000 rockets at us. Well, they’ve been firing rockets at us for 11 months so what did we have to lose? And there’s a really interesting report. I don’t know if this is accurate; we’ll find out in maybe weeks or years to come. But there’s this report claiming that the way they found where Nasrallah was is that he was giving a speech, and during the speech Israel was flying F-15 fighter planes over the capital of Beirut, setting off sonic booms. And they were able to locate him based somehow on the sound pattern of the sonic booms. And the way it was reported in the international media is, Israel is terrorizing the people of Lebanon with the sonic booms and, you know, intimidating them and frightening them. Well, actually, there may have been another reason why we did it.

So… all right, there’s an interesting line there where it says, “You are a dead cockroach. You stink”. Kind of a satirical song. “You are starting to give up,” this all rhymes in Hebrew. And it says, “The IDF,” the Israeli Defense Force, “is searching you out in order to burn you with fire.” Well, how interesting that he was killed in this bombing. And actually, they say he suffocated from poison gas. That when the explosion went off… Israel dropped 80 one ton or so bombs, including bunker busters. So, you have to understand where he was. He was in the equivalent of the command-and-control center in the US. Like, under… I don’t actually know where it is, but somewhere in the US there’s a command-and-control center. And in Israel we have the Kirya, which is the Israeli command and control center. That’s where he was with his commanders and a whole bunch of top leaders. And they were having a meeting about invading the Galilee. And they’re like, “Okay, we have to kill him before he pulls against Israel what Hamas did on October 7th.”

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, they dropped 80 bombs, including bunker busters, and there was some kind of… we think at this point, the current reporting is that there was some kind of, you know, smoke or something that he suffocated on. And it’s interesting, because in the song… and this is the part that you could say is not prophetic, it says, “adif she’tisha’er ba’bor ki be’karov ata tamut.” “It’s preferable that you remain in the pit,” meaning the underground command and control center, “because soon you will die.” And that didn’t save him.

Lynell: Wow, it didn’t.

Nehemia: So, he actually stayed, probably underground for years, because he knew Israel wanted to kill him. Israel killed his predecessor in 1992, the former arch terrorist.

Lynell: I saw something, as well, Nehemia, where the person that was going to replace him was killed. The person was going to replace him again, was killed. Went down like three in… three or four in the line, Nehemia.

Nehemia: There’s a cartoon where there’s this woman with a broom, and she’s looking like, bewildered in front of the podium of Hezbollah and saying, “I’m the only one left.”

Lynell: The cleaning woman!

Nehemia: Right, cleaning woman. Right. Isn’t that funny? All right, so, I want to… I want to, I mean, there’s some incredible things coming out of this, because we killed this arch terrorist who terrorized Israel for decades. Literally for decades.

Lynell: He killed how many people?

Nehemia: Well, if you include Arabs that he killed, it’s certainly in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.

Lynell: Can you imagine the amount of blood on that guy’s hands?

Nehemia: A whole lot. Like, this is a little Hitler.

Lynell: Think about what God says in the word, what He says about killing people, about murder.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: Think about the blood…

Nehemia: I mean, this is a really wicked man who killed innocents and gloried in killing innocents. And look, he famously referred to Israel as a spider’s web. And there’s this video going around where Netanyahu said, “Well, spider’s web; I guess we held up pretty well, and you didn’t.” And what he means by a spider’s web is that Israel is weak because it’s a democracy, and democracies don’t have internal strength. And you can just cast them away with your hand like a spider’s web because there’s internal divisions. Whereas Hezbollah is a theocratic dictatorship. And he openly said that the ruler of Hezbollah is the head ayatollah in Iran. It’s like their pope, basically. So, you heard of the ayatollah? So, the ayatollah in Iran, or the grand ayatollah, is the head of Shiism, of the Shiite sect, and he’s essentially their pope. They say he’s basically the ruler on earth for the Mahdi, which is like their messiah that they believe will come in the future.

Alright, so, I want to show some things here about how the Arab world is reacting to this. So, the Jewish world is singing this song that I just hummed to you and read you some of the lines of, this song from 18 years ago. But I was surprised that the Arab world… they’re handing out pieces of baklava, which is what they do when they’re celebrating. And why is that? Because this is a person who killed tens or hundreds of thousands of them. He slaughtered them in mass, innocent civilians, women and children. And they’re celebrating, especially in Syria. And so, there are these videos going around of them handing out baklava, celebrating, and they’ve actually written songs about Netanyahu!

Now, just remember, we’re at war with Hamas in Gaza, and they’ve spread this lie that Israel is committing genocide against Hamas. Which, it’s actually the opposite; they’re using their own civilians as human shields so they’re responsible for any civilian deaths. You know, if you shoot at me, hiding behind a child, and I shoot back to save myself because I’m going to die otherwise, you’re responsible if that child dies. So, they’ve called, you know, Netanyahu, they’ve said he committed genocide and he’s a mass murderer. And now they’re singing songs praising him, thanking him for killing…

Lynell: This bad guy.

Nehemia: This evil person, Hassan Nasrallah. Actually, first I want to show you here, these are… here’s a picture of children in Syria. So, here are the children in Syria, and they’re holding up signs, and it says here, “shukran”, which is thank you, “Netanyahu!” “Thank you, Netanyahu!” And they’re thanking, and it says, “You have made the children of Syria rejoice.” And there’s the baklava that they’re handing out, and you can see, there’s the flag of Syria in the background. So, why are the children of Syria saying, “Thank you, Netanyahu, you have made the children of Syria rejoice”? Because Hassan Nasrallah slaughtered them in their thousands.

Now, do you remember there were all these protests around the world against Nasrallah, blaming him about the genocide in front of the… do you remember that? No, there were none. Nobody cared. Meaning, nobody outside the Arab world cared. Within the Arab world, frankly, they didn’t care anyway, because, you know, he was killing Syrian children. But when a Palestinian child in Gaza stubs his toe, then there’s international outrage. And frankly, now it’s a lot more than that because they’re using them as human shields. But you should be outraged against Hamas for using them as human shields. But nobody cared when he killed… the estimated number is that 400,000 Syrians were killed in the civil war.

Lynell: Wow!

Nehemia: Mostly civilians. Can you imagine that number, 400,000? And there wasn’t a single protest that I’m aware of at Columbia University, at Cornell University. Nobody cared because it was Sunnis killing Shiites. And frankly, these people don’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, most of them. And let’s be honest, a lot of the protests going on right now in the United States are paid for by Iran and organizations like Soros’s… whatever it’s called, his terrorist organization. So, nobody’s paying them to protest, so there are no protests against Syria and against Hezbollah.

So, now I’m going to play you some songs. And it’s a clip from the Israeli Channel 14, which has a montage of three different songs that just came out in the last few days, praising Netanyahu. And then I’ll read you the translation, which is unbelievable. They’re singing the praises of Netanyahu, who they were previously accusing of genocide.

Lynell: I find that so… just shocking. But when I first saw that, I was like, “That can’t be real.”

Nehemia: So, this comes from a TikTok channel “Edition 062”, which I searched on TikTok and couldn’t find, so maybe it’s been banned… I don’t know… Since this came out. But here are the… And look, there’s these pictures of Netanyahu, and you’ll particularly see Netanyahu in a kippah, which is interesting because Netanyahu doesn’t wear a kippah unless he’s visiting a synagogue. He puts on a kippah like Joe Biden puts on a kippah when he visits a synagogue. Which is so interesting. But they’re trying to portray him as, like, the stereotypical Jew. Maybe, in a sense. And by the way, this is Israeli Channel 14. It says, “shidur chai”, “live broadcast”, and in the upper left it says, “Tov lehodot le’Hashem” “It is good to give thanks to Yehovah,” to Hashem, to the name…

Lynell: I love that.

Nehemia: With the Israeli flag. Because they’re celebrating the death of this arch terrorist, Hassan Nasrallah. So, here are these Arab songs praising Netanyahu.

Now, aesthetically, you can say it’s not pleasing, which is, I suppose, a subjective thing. It’s not my style of music, I’ll be honest, but the words there are really interesting. So, the first song says, “Read the announcement and look at it. Sharpen swords. There are crazy men among us who are celebrating like eagles.” Okay, I don’t fully understand that, but sure. Song number two is the most interesting to me. “Commander sir,” they call him; it translates in Hebrew, at least, “Adoni hamefaked.” “Commander, Sir, sitting among your servants, greetings. It is our honor, honorable father.” That’s the one where they show Netanyahu wearing the kippah. And they called Netanyahu “honorable father”. That’s how much they hated Hassan Nasrallah for killing so many Arabs. This is an Arab song. Unbelievable. Song number three. “The smell of gunpowder. The lions have come. Welcome.” And lions, of course, from the lion of Judah.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: Aware of that metaphor. And then they say… and again, this is an Arab song, “Allah puts a crown on your head,” talking about Netanyahu. “Allah gives you guns.” So, they’re saying this actually in religious terms, that their god is using Netanyahu and Israel to defeat their enemies. And they’re… I mean, that’s… who would have expected this? If you would have told anybody on October 6th that in less than a year, Hassan Nasrallah would be killed by Israel and the Arabs would be praising Netanyahu, people… you couldn’t sell this as a Hollywood movie. It would be considered unrealistic. But there, it’s happening. I mean, this is God performing miracles. Of course, they see it in their terms. So, I want to show one last video, and then we’ll get into some Bible study.

Lynell: I just want to say another thing that came out of this, that I saw, was “the Grim Beeper”. They were calling the beeper “the Grim Beeper”.

Nehemia: I didn’t see that one. I love that. So, what Israel did, and Israel worked on developing this project for 15 years. They established actual corporations in Europe. I mean, look, this is conspiracy theory stuff!

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: Israel is making the beepers. The CIA makes telephones, and they’re listening to your phones directly. But it actually is true. Israel… it took them 15 years. They developed actual corporations that made beepers and walkie talkies, and… There are jokes going around where the Hezbollah terrorists are calling up the helpline. They’re on the phone calling up the helpline with the beeper company, and the guy says, “Eh… I will, eh, transfer you to a tech support.” And there’s another one, they’re selling the beepers, and the Israeli who… and like, this is satire, the Israeli is on the phone negotiating the price. And of course, he wants to get a good price because he’s Jewish, and they’re like, “Okay, we’ll only pay you 10 euros.” And he’s like, “Eh, no, I must get, eh, 20 euros for every beeper.” And the guy in the background says, “Just give him the price. We want him to buy the beeper!” “Eh, no, we got to get a good deal.”

Lynell: Oh my gosh!

Nehemia: Because they actually bought the beepers from Israel. This is a…

Lynell: That’s unbelievable.

Nehemia: I mean, yeah, it was an intelligence operation. Fifteen years it took them to do this.

Lynell: They play the long game.

Nehemia: That is the long game. Now, they say, the entire Arab world and Muslim world are throwing away their cell phones and beepers and sourcing everything from China. The funny thing is, these beepers were made in Taiwan, except Taiwan outsourced them to a company based in Hungary, and they were probably made in Israel.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: Who knows where they were made. I don’t really know. Of course, Israel hasn’t taken responsibility for the beeper operation, but we all know it was Israel. Okay. So, all right, I want to show one last clip, which is… it’s unbelievable. It was two days before Nasrallah was killed, and it’s a Lebanese Shiite cleric. So, you know how we talked about how there’s this split between the Shiites and the Sunnis. They’re like the Catholics and the Greek Orthodox, and they hate each other. Well, this is a Shiite guy, and he’s Lebanese. Now, he’s talking on Saudi state television, but it’s two days… so take that with a grain of salt.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: It’s two days before the assassination, or the killing, of this evil terror. The “elimination” is the word they use in Hebrew, chisul. Which is interesting; it’s the same word they use when there’s, like, a sale in Israel. They call it chisul. “Everything must go.”

Lynell: Ah.

Nehemia: It’s “an elimination sale”. Like, I guess we call it a fire sale or something. What do you call that when, like, you’re selling everything in the store?

Lynell: Clearance.

Nehemia: Clearance! So, he was cleared. That’s the term they use when they describe getting rid of a terrorist. There’s another word, hitnakshut, which is “assassination”. It comes from the word… well, anyway, let’s not get into that. Alright. So, okay… So, there’s an interesting video on TikTok by Elon Gilad, who’s a reporter at Haaretz, one of Israel’s national newspapers, and he talks about these terms, chisul. So, we’ll put a link on nehemiaswall.com. We actually have him coming on the program. He’s a fascinating guy, about the history of Hebrew.

Alright. So, am I sharing here? Yes, I am. Alright. And I put… this was up on some Israeli site with Hebrew subtitles. I translated them based on the Hebrew, and also, I can hear a little bit of what he’s saying in the Arabic, so I fixed the translation a bit.

(Video): [Arabic] [00:27:53 – 00:28:48]

Nehemia: So, this is another Shiite who’s saying this. I’m going to read it in English.

Lynell: He just said that Iran sold them out.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: I haven’t seen this.

Nehemia: So, I’m going to read this for those who are listening, who don’t see it. So, he says, “The Israeli army is not deterred.” And this is a guy who’s wearing a turban, which is one of the symbols of a Shiite cleric. And he says, “The Israeli army is not deterred and not afraid.” And then he says, “Be careful for yourself,” meaning Nasrallah, “and don’t think it’s right to let the boys,” he calls the shabab, the boys, meaning Hezbollah, “fight against Israel.” Don’t think it’s right to let the boys fight against Israel. “Because Israel is on its way to you tactically,” whatever that means, “and as they say, what Samson did,” and he actually says, nachnu, what we say. So, “what we say about what Samson did.” And he says about Samson, “He destroyed, he shattered, and he left scorched earth.” He left the ground burned, makhruk. And “Nasrallah, I know how you think,” he says. And then the woman stops him. “Samson the Israelite or Samson…?” Like, who are we talking about? Who’s Samson? And we’ll talk about that in a minute. It’s really interesting. We’ll talk about who Samson is and who Muslims think Samson is.

And I thought at first, he’s nodding his head. But he doesn’t really… he doesn’t… I don’t know that he nods his head. He says, “This is not psychological warfare against you.” In other words, he’s not saying Samson the Israelite, and we’ll understand why in a few minutes. “This is not psychological warfare against you,” he says, “I know what I’m talking about.” And he says, three times, “I know what I’m talking about. I know what I’m talking about. I know what I’m talking about.”

It’s interesting. The Middle Eastern style of speech is repetition. Think about the Tanakh, how it repeats itself all the time, and you’re like, why does it say it three times? Because that’s how people speak in the Middle East. And he says, “I swear by Allah, the Israeli army will enter and invade the territory of Lebanon and will reach you.” This is two days before the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, may his name and memory be blotted out. “And from here I say to you,” the cleric says, and he points to his finger, to his first finger. He says, “gather up your family.” And the second finger, “Wrap up your affairs. Write your will, because those who bought and paid for you,” meaning Iran, “have sold you out today.”

So, what does he mean “they’ve sold you out today?” So, that last part is a little bit Saudi propaganda. This is on Saudi state TV, and he knows his audience. He’s probably in Saudi Arabia in hiding from Hezbollah. I don’t know who this guy is. I wasn’t able to find out his name, but he’s clearly… you can see the way he’s dressed, he’s a Shiite cleric. It reminds me of the joke about the Hasidic rabbi. Hasidic rabbis have a certain way they dress, they have a certain outfit. And the joke is, how do you imposter a Hasidic rabbi? And the answer is: it’s impossible, because if you’re dressed as a Hasidic rabbi, you are one. So, what makes you a Hasidic rabbi? The fact that you dress that way and people think of you as a Hasidic rabbi. So, this guy is obviously some sort of a Shiite cleric, by the way he’s dressed.

So, this is incredible. Two days before the killing of Nasrallah he makes this statement that, “The Israeli army is coming for you, so make your last will and testament.” And what I really love about this, the reason I wanted to share this, the reason I want to want to talk about this whole topic, besides just to praise Yehovah for the death of this evil man…

Lynell: Amen.

Nehemia: “Tov lehodot la’Yehovah.” “It is good to give thanks to Yehovah, to praise Yehovah,” “ki le’olam chasdo,” “for His chesed is forever”, as the Psalms say. The reason I wanted to talk about this is partly because of what he said about Samson. I thought, “This is unbelievable. A Shiite cleric is talking about this arch terrorist, and he’s saying, ‘You know what Samson did.’” And basically, he’s saying, “You know what Jews do. If you mess with them and you poke them too hard, you might think you hurt the Jew,” and they did hurt Samson, “but eventually he’s going to come and he’s going to leave scorched earth and destroy you. So don’t mess with Samson.”

So, I don’t think we’re going to tell over the entire story of Samson, but the story of Samson is that he had a series of bad relationships with Philistine women. Which is really interesting, because when I first saw this, I thought, “Okay, why is he saying Samson? Because there’s a fight with the Palestinians and they identify as Philistines, even though they have nothing to do with Philistines. Historically.” So, is that what it is? But I don’t think so, now that I’ve learned more about what Muslims think about Samson. So, Samson has a series of bad relationships with Philistine women, and one of the things he did is he married this woman… not Delilah, a previous woman, and he went to be with her even though she was living in her father’s house. And he only spent time with her occasionally, apparently. And the father said, “Oh, I’ve given her to somebody else as a wife.” And Samson gets really upset, and it says he captured 300 foxes… Let’s read that.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: Let me open up my little Bible program here, or do you want to read it, please? That’s even better.

Lynell: Where is it at?

Nehemia: Okay. So, the story of Samson is in Judges 13 to 16, and like I said, we’re not going to read the whole story. But the story is, an angel came to his parents and told him he needs to be a Nazarite. Nazarites were usually something… a vow that somebody would take for a period of time. But he was a Nazarite for life, because the angel told his parents, and as a result, he never cut his hair.

Lynell: So, where do you want me to start?

Nehemia: Okay. And we learned later that his strength is in his hair. And the word nazir actually means crown, and it seems to refer to the crown of the hair. The hair is a crown on his head. Alright, on any Nazarite’s head. Okay, let’s see… oh, this is really wonderful. I don’t know if we’re going to read the whole thing. Okay. Let’s read Judges 15, just because there’s several different things in Judges that will be relevant. Let’s read the whole chapter.

Lynell: Okay. I’m going to do the JPS.

Nehemia: Okay.

Lynell: Is that okay?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Lynell: Alright. “Sometime later in the season of the wheat harvest, Samson came to visit his wife, bringing a kid as a gift. He said, ‘Let me go into the chamber with my wife.’ But her father would not let him go in. ‘I was sure,’ said her father, ‘that you’d taken a dislike to her, so I gave her to your wedding companion. But her younger sister is more beautiful than she. Let her become your wife instead.’ Thereupon Samson declared, ‘Now the Philistines can have no claim against me for the harm I do to them.’ Samson went and caught 300 foxes. He took torches, and, turning the fox’s tail to tail, he placed a torch between each pair of tails. He lit…”

Nehemia: Stop there for a second. So, this cleric, this Lebanese cleric, he is referring to, “You know what Samson did? He destroyed and he left the ground scorched.” So, it seems that this is what it refers to.

Lynell: Oh!

Nehemia: This exact story. So, let’s read that again. So, it’s Judges 15:4. So, this is incredible. A Lebanese cleric, a Shiite cleric, is referencing the Book of Judges, which is interesting, because it’s not in the Quran. There’s nothing about Samson in the Quran. He’s not even mentioned.

Lynell: “So Samson went and caught 300 foxes, and he took the torches, and, turning the foxes tail to tail, he placed a torch between each pair of tails. He lit the torches and turned the foxes loose among the standing grain of the Philistines, setting fire to the stacked grain, standing grain, vineyards and olive trees. Philistines asked, ‘Who did this?’ and they were told it was Samson, the son-in-law of the Temanite, who took Samson’s wife and gave her to his wedding companion. Thereupon, the Philistines came up and put her and her father to the fire. Samson said to them, ‘If this is how you act, I will not rest until I have taken revenge on you.’ He gave them a sound and thorough thrashing, and then he went down and stayed in the cave of the Rock of Etam.”

Nehemia: So now this is the second story. And this story isn’t about the foxes and the burning and the woman, it’s the Philistine response to that. But it’ll be relevant in a minute as well.

Lynell: Okay. “So, the Philistines came up and pitched camp in Judah and spread out over Lehai…”

Nehemia: That in Hebrew is Lehi.

Lynell: Lehi. Okay.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: “The men of Judah asked, ‘Why have you come against us?’ They answered, ‘We’ve come to take Samson prisoner, and to do to him as he did to us.’ Thereupon, 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cave of the Rock of Etam and said to Samson, ‘You knew that the Philistines rule over us. Why have you done this to us?’ And he replied, ‘As they did to me, so I did to them.’”

Nehemia: Let me stop there for a second. So, we have this interesting thing that Israel, the Land of Israel, was called for 17 or 18 hundred years, “Palestine”. So, from around the year 135 up until 1917, or actually until 1948, it was officially a district… Well, it wasn’t exactly always called Palestine, but in many of those periods it was called Palestine. Where did that name come from? So, there was originally an area called Philistia, or in Hebrew Peleshet, which was the area of the Philistines, but that’s limited to the area of what today is Gaza.

There’s actually a story in Herodotus where he talks about a certain king or general or something. Herodotus is the 5th century BCE Greek historian, and he talks about this person being in Philistia, and he leaves Philistia, and he goes to Ashkelon. So, Ashkelon already was outside of Palestine, or Philistia. How did the whole region come to be known as Palestine? So, what happened is, the Jews revolted against the Romans in the year 132. It was known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt, and they originally defeated the Romans under Bar Kokhba. And three-and-a-half years later, the Romans eventually defeated the Jews by wiping out… killing every man, woman and child in over a thousand Jewish villages. And then to strip the region of its Jewish identity, because it was called Judea, Yudea in Greek, or excuse me, in Latin and Greek.

He renamed it Palestina after the ancient enemy of the Jews. You want to strip the area of its Jewish content and identity, what the imperial invaders do is they name it after your ancient enemy. And so, he named it, Palestina. That is Hadrian, the Roman emperor, to strip it of its Jewish identity. And here we’re seeing in the Book of Judges, the Philistines are foreign invaders who rule over Judea, and here it’s literally Yehuda, the tribe of Judah. They say, “Don’t you know that the Philistines rule over us?” Alright, go on, Judges 15:12.

Lynell: “‘We’ve come down,’ they told him, ‘to take you prisoner and to hand you over to the Philistines.’ ‘But swear to me,’ said Samson to them, ‘that you yourselves will not attack me.’”

Nehemia: Because he’s like, “I can defeat our enemies. I can’t defeat my brothers.”

Lynell: Aww. “‘We will only take you prisoner and hand you over to them. We will not slay you.’ So, they bound him up with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock. When he reached Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him.”

Nehemia: Ooh, and that’s appropriate, because we’re recording this a few days before Yom Teruah. And that’s the word, heri’u. It’s from the same root as teruah. It shows you the literal meaning of this word. You know, we’ve translated it often in English as Feast of Trumpets, and where that comes from is that sometimes it refers to the blowing of the shofar as teruah, but it’s also shouting. People shouting, “Yeah, we got Samson! Woo-hoo!” That’s teruah. Alright. “And the Philistines came shouting to greet him.”

Lynell: “Thereupon the Spirit of Yehovah gripped him.”

Nehemia: Come on!

Lynell: And…

Nehemia: Come on Holy Spirit! Come upon Samson.

Lynell: “And the ropes on his arms became like flax that catches fire. The bonds melted off his hands. He came upon a fresh jawbone of an ass, and he picked it up. And with it…”

Nehemia: So, jawbone in Hebrew is lechi.

Lynell: Oh!

Nehemia: He came upon the lechi of a chamor. The lechi, the jawbone, of a donkey. And it was fresh. Alright, go, let’s read that again. That’s Judges 15:15.

Lynell: “He came upon a fresh jawbone of an ass, and he picked it up, and with it he killed a thousand men.” Wow, that’s a lot of people.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: “Then Samson said, ‘With the jaw of an ass, mass upon mass. With the jaw of an ass, I have slain a thousand men.’ As he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone away, and hence that place was called Ramat Lechi.”

Nehemia: Which means something like “the hill of Lechi”, or the “high place of lechi”. “High” in the sense that it’s a raised-up area.

Lynell: “He was very thirsty, and he called to Yehovah, ‘You Yourself have granted this great victory through Your servant.’”

Nehemia: Come on, that’s your great salvation, it says. Teshua, the same root as the word yesha, yeshua, salvation. “You have granted this great salvation.”

Lynell: Oh, wow. Say it again.

Nehemia: You have granted this great salvation.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: Boy, is that appropriate that Samson is brought up when Yehovah today has granted us a great salvation by the killing of this evil Hassan Nasrallah. Halleluyah.

Lynell: Amen.

Nehemia: All right, let’s read verse 18 again. Sorry I interrupted you.

Lynell: No, “He was very thirsty, and he called to Yehovah, ‘You Yourself have granted this great salvation through your servant, and must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?’ So, God split open the hollow, which is at Lechi, and the water gushed out of it. He drank, regained his strength, and revived. And that’s why it is called to this day Ein Hakore of Lechi.”

Nehemia: So, ein hakore means “the spring of the one who calls out”, because he called out to Yehovah. So, in Lechi there was a spring called Ein Hakore, the Spring of the One Who Calls Out.

Lynell: “And he led Israel in the days of the Philistines for 20 years.”

Nehemia: Alright, so that’s Shimshon as the judge over Israel; it’s how he became the judge over Israel. He defeated the Philistines, and there’s a bunch of other stories. There’s the famous story where his later wife, Delilah, Delila, who is a Philistine herself, tries to figure out how to tie him up, and finally she learns that it’s his hair. And let’s skip ahead to Judges 16, because anybody who hears that Samson comes… like, it sounds confused with what the Shiite cleric said. He says, “You know what Samson did?” he said. “He destroyed and he broke.” I don’t remember exactly what he said. Hold on, let me see here. Okay. What the Lebanese cleric does is, he says about Samson, “He destroyed, he shattered, he left scorched earth.” And the first thing I thought about was the story we’re about to read, where Samson, in his death throes, kills more Philistines than he did during his lifetime through his death. But that didn’t involve any fire. So, what’s he talking about, “he left scorched earth”?

Okay, that’s the story of the foxes. Without a question, that’s referring to the foxes. Except maybe it’s not. Meaning, in a sense it is, if you’re talking about Samson. But we’ll talk in a minute about what it really is. So, let’s jump ahead to Judges 16 and see about the death of Samson. So, Samson was captured by the Philistines, and we’re told they blind him. So, let’s read verse 21, and then we’ll skip ahead after that.

Lynell: “The Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down to Gaza and shackled him in bronze…”

Nehemia: Come on, Gaza!

Lynell: Mhm. “And he became a mill slave in the prison.”

Nehemia: So, he’s blind, and he’s attached with chains to, you know, like a pole or something, and he’s just pushing on that pole all day. That’s something like that. Like, normally you have a donkey do it, “but we got a Jew, so let’s have him do”.

Lynell: Oh, wow.

Nehemia: “So then the Philistines make a feast to Dagon,” and let’s go… skip to verse… let’s go to verse 23.

Lynell: “Now the lords of the Philistines gathered together to offer a great sacrifice to their god Dagon and make merry. They chanted, ‘Our god has delivered into our hands our enemy Samson.’ When the people saw him, they sing praises to their god, chanting, ‘Our god has delivered him into our hands. The enemy who devastated our land and who slew so many of us.’”

Nehemia: They sound like the Lebanese cleric, “the enemy who devastated our land”. That’s what he said, “He destroyed, he shattered, he left scorched earth.” So, they’re remembering back to what he did, not just to them, but to the land itself.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: He burned their crops. Alright.

Lynell: “As their spirits rose, they said, ‘Call Samson here and let him dance for us.’ Sampson was fetched from prison, and he danced for them. And they put…”

Nehemia: Well, it doesn’t say dance…

Lynell: Oh, it doesn’t?

Nehemia: It says, ‘let him make laugh for us,’ but might mean ‘make us laugh.’

Lynell: Oh!

Nehemia: And they called Samson from the prison, and it says va’yitzachek lifneihem, “and he played around before them”. I don’t know if I should say what that means. Go listen to the Torah pearls, where we talk about Ishmael. He played around. Same word as where it talks about Ishmael. Anyway, if you read the next couple words, you’ll see perhaps what it means, but I won’t say. Maybe someone will write in the comments.

Lynell: “And he danced for them.”

Nehemia: “He played around before them.”

Lynell: “And they put him between the pillars.”

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, it doesn’t say “then”. “And they had put him between the pillars.” Anyway, let’s move on.

Lynell: Okay. “And Samson said to the boy who was leading him by the hand, ‘Let go of me, and let me feel the pillars that the temple rests upon, that I may lean on them.’ Now, the temple was full of men and women. All the lords of the Philistines were there, and there were some 3,000 men and women on the roof watching Samson dance. Then Samson called to Yehovah, ‘Oh Lord Yehovah, please remember me and give me strength just this once, oh God, to take revenge of the Philistines, if only for one of my two eyes.’ He embraced the two pillars that the temple rested on, one with his right arm and one with his left, and he leaned against them. And Samson cried, ‘Let me die with the Philistines. And he pulled with all his might.’ The temple came crashing down on the lords and all the people in it. Those who were slain by him as he died outnumbered those who had been slain by him when he lived. His brothers and all his father’s household came down and carried him up and buried him in the tomb of his father Manoah, between Zorah and Eshtaol. He had led Israel for 20 years.”

Nehemia: So, he killed more people in his death than he did in his life, and so I would imagine that’s what he’s talking about, this Lebanese Shiite cleric. But he mentions the burned ground, which has to be the foxes. So, I did a little bit of investigation because, frankly, I’m not an expert on Islam. And I found a really interesting journal article by a scholar named Andrew Rippin, and I’ll put a link up on nehemiaswall.com. And it’s called “The Muslim Samson: Medieval, Modern and Scholarly Interpretations”.

Lynell: Interesting.

Nehemia: And he brings the Muslim sources. And what’s interesting is the Quran never mentions Muhammad… or, excuse me…

Lynell: Samson.

Nehemia: That actually might be true as well. The Quran never mentions Samson by name, but medieval Muslim interpreters… because it’s a mistake to think of Islam as the religion of the Quran. This is a controversial statement that I’ll make, but Islam has as much to do with the Quran as Catholicism has to do with the New Testament and Rabbinical Judaism has to do with the Tanakh. There’s layers and layers of interpretation and traditions on top of it, and they don’t claim otherwise. With some exceptions… you have Quran-only Muslims, but that’s a very small minority, although it’s probably more of them than there are Karaites. But still, it’s in the maybe tens of thousands of people. Okay, so, the story of Samson, you’re not going to find it in the Quran, but there are verses in the Quran that they interpret to be a reference to Muhammad in the Middle Ages.

So, there’s someone named Al-tha’alabi, whoever that is, I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that. And again, this is in Rippin’s article, and Al-tha’alabi says, “God has said…” and then they quote the Quran, chapter 97, verses 1 to 3: “Lo, we revealed this message,” meaning, I guess, the Quran itself, “on the night of power, and what will explain to you the night of power? The night of power is better than a thousand months.” No idea what that means. One of the claims about the Quran is it’s the most beautiful poetry ever. That’s typical of the poetry of the Quran, and maybe in the original Arabic it’s more beautiful, but it sounds incoherent to me. I have no idea. Not only do I have no idea what it’s talking about, but the medieval Muslim interpreters said, “What on earth is this talking about? We’d better make up a story to fill in the gaps.”

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: No, really. So, what is… it says, “the night of power”, meaning, on which the Quran or some part of the Quran was revealed, “is better than a thousand months”. So, Abu Omar Al-iraqi told us, according to… this is still from Al-tha’alabi. So, some guy who was a tradition named Abu Amr Al-iraqi told us, according to his isnad, that is, tradition, “On the authority of Ibn Abi Naji, that the prophet mentioned a man from the children of Israel who wore armor in the way of God for a thousand months.” So, when the Quran says, this is better than wearing armor for a thousand months, what does that refer to? So, the medieval Muslim sources explain, “Well, there was an Israelite who wore armor for a thousand months.” The Muslims were amazed at that. “So, God revealed,” that is the verse, “lo, he revealed,” in the Qur’an. “Lo! He revealed it on the night of power,” et cetera, “during which that man wore armor striving in the way of God.” Okay, well, still didn’t tell us who this man is. Some Israelite wore armor for a thousand months. Is that Samson?

Well, it goes on. “Abdallah Abdabah told us,” this is again the Al-tha’alabi, this medieval Muslim source, according to his tradition on the authority of some other guy, “that Samson, whom God guided because of his righteousness, was from a Roman town whose inhabitants were idol worshipers.” What? Samson was from a Roman town? Remember, the woman says in the interview with this cleric, she says, “Samson the Israelite, or Samson, you know… Which Samson?” And I thought, at first, he’s nodding his head. But he doesn’t nod his head, because he’s a muslim scholar and he doesn’t believe that Samson is an Israelite!

Lynell: Oh!

Nehemia: Samson is a Roman!

Lynell: Oh!

Nehemia: And that goes on in this source. “historians there are related according to what has been told by me,” by whoever, bla bla bla. Okay. And then al-Taburi, who is another famous source of Hadith, which is like the Muslim oral law. “Samson was an inhabitant of one of the Roman cities. He had been guided by God because of his integrity. However, his people were idol worshipers. From his and their story, the following has been told to us by Ibn Hamid, who reported…” whatever. Okay.

So, this is incredible. So, they have a story about Samson, but it’s not the story from the Tanakh. You know, there’s these Christians, and one Jew, who have these talks where they talk about how, you know, the Muslims believe in Jesus, but it’s not the Jesus of the New Testament. And I’m not going to get into that, because that’s beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here. But they have stories about Samson, and it is the Samson of the Tanakh. But what they know about the Samson of the Tanakh is completely confused.

Bear in mind this isn’t even the Quran. So, there’s the guy who wore armor for a thousand years, or a thousand months, and that’s an Israelite. But they never say that’s Samson. In the context of the man who wore armor for a thousand years, then they tell a story about Samson. They never say directly that he’s Samson, at least in what we read so far.

So, let me read… this is actually what the scholar did here, is something interesting. He took all the different traditions, and he smooshed them into a single story, which is a bit dubious, but we’ll read it anyway. “Samson was the only…” this is the Muslim story about Samson. And why is this important? Because when the Lebanese Shiite cleric is talking about, “Samson came and he destroyed, he shattered, he left scorched earth,” he knows this story. Now, it could be the Shiites have a different story. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in Islam. I’m relying on what Rippin said here, and if somebody knows better, please post it in the comments.

But this is really interesting, because this is… and a lot of things in Islam strike me as, they were sitting around the campfire telling stories, and the stories kind of got confused. It’s kind of like that game “broken telephone”. Now, they might say that… not “might,” they say the same thing about us. In other words, in the Quran it says that the Torah and the gospel are valid, but then when you look at the Torah that we have and the… And when they say gospel, what do they mean? The four Gospels or New Testament? Whatever they mean, that’s a whole separate discussion. Like, for example, in their traditions, it wasn’t Isaac who was bound by Abraham to be sacrificed, it was Ishmael, the ancestor of Muhammad.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: So, the point is, they on the one hand acknowledge the Torah, or the Tanakh, perhaps you could say it means. On the other hand, their stories don’t match the Torah, so how do they reconcile the two? They say, “Well, you guys changed it.” We did? So, in other words, in the original Torah, they claim… some Muslims, not all, but some Muslims claim, that it mentioned Muhammad and predicted the coming of Muhammad, and the Jews changed it.

Anyway… so, here’s what it says about Samson, which is, they’re confused, from my perspective story. And again, they might say I’m confused, but I’m willing to accept that they say that, because I know I’m right. “Samson was the only man among them who had submitted himself to God.” And that’s a technical term. “Submitted himself” means they’re claiming he’s a Muslim. So, there’s one Muslim in the Roman town, and that’s Samson. And then Tha’alibi, which is really interesting, “He was a Muslim, among them, one of the people of the gospel.” So, they’re saying he’s not just a Christian, he’s a true Christian, and a true Christian is a Muslim, in their distorted view of history. That’s how, you know, Muslims… and again, this isn’t even the Quran, this is in the Middle Ages.

“His mother had made him a Nazarite. He was a man from one of their villages, to which the people were disbelievers who worshipped idols.” So, he’s a pagan! Samson’s a pagan, according to the Muslim sources! So, this Muslim cleric, in 2024, a few days ago, really… he knows this story. He doesn’t know what it says in the Tanakh, although the story we’re about to read says nothing about fire, that he got from the Tanakh. Or did he? We’ll get to that.

It goes on. “Samson did not live far away from them,” meaning the idolaters. “Alone he used to fight them and struggle with them in the way of God, taking his needs from them while killing them, taking them prisoner and seizing their property.” So, this is interesting because now this is a paradigm for what a Muslim should do. You should just go steal stuff from your neighbors who aren’t Muslims. That’s basically… no, no, that’s the message here.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: “Samson would encounter them only with the jawbone of a camel.” So, they know the story in the Tanakh, but it’s been corrupted and confused. Why a camel? Because they don’t know… I mean, they do know about donkeys, so I don’t know why a camel. But that’s the way they tell the story. “When they fought him and he fought them, he would work hard and become thirsty. Sweet water would burst forth from him from the rock at Lechi.” So, they’ve read the Tanakh story! They’ve heard it! Again, it’s like sitting around the campfire. This is like the… I don’t know… the TikTok version of the Tanakh story.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: It’s so confused. You’re like, wait, what does it actually say in the Tanakh? And he would drink like… so, it’s interesting. They described this as a repetitive action, it didn’t happen once. “He would happen and become thirsty. Sweet water would burst forth repeatedly from him from the rock at Lechi,” even though it’s a one-time event in the Tanakh, “And he would drink from it until he was revived and had regained his strength. Neither iron nor anything else could hold him. He struggled with them in the way of God for a thousand months.”

Ah, so the one who struggled with a thousand months isn’t an Israelite, he’s a pagan who comes from a Roman town. And then Taburi says, “In that way he fought and battled them in the way of God. And in his raiding, he would obtain his needs from them.” So, he comes from a pagan town, but he becomes a Christian. “They were powerless before him until finally they said, ‘There is no way to get to him except through his wife.’” So, they know some of the story, but it’s been confused. And look, why do they say he’s a Christian? Probably because they didn’t read the story in the Tanakh; they heard the story from Christian monks.

Lynell: Ah.

Nehemia: Or Christian clerics, and so they assumed he was a Christian. The Christians told us the story. Now, I’m speculating. I don’t know. “They went to his wife and bribed her. She said, ‘Yes, I will tie him up for you.’ So, they gave her a strong rope and said, ‘While he is sleeping…’” obviously this is a retelling of the Tanakh story. “‘While he is sleeping, bind his hand to his neck so we may come and take him away.’ So, while he was sleeping, she bound his hand to his neck with the rope. When he awoke, he pulled it with his hand, and it fell from his neck. He said to her, ‘Why have you done this?’ She said, ‘I wanted to test your strength with it. I have never seen anybody like you.’ So, she sent a message to them, ‘I tied him with the rope, but it was of no use.’ So, they sent her…”

And I don’t know if I’ll read the whole story. Basically it’s a retelling of what we read in Genesis (Judges). She eventually cuts his hair. And guys, you can read this in Rippin’s article, which I’ll put a link to. It’s on page 242, if you want to hear the full Muslim story about Samson, who is a Christian who comes from a pagan family or a pagan town. So, he’s a convert to Christianity. And it’s interesting; in some of the Muslim sources, this story is told within the chronological order of the man known in Christianity as Saint George. So, Saint George of Lydda was a Christian martyr who was originally a Greek from Cappadocia, which is in today’s central Turkey, and he was a Roman soldier who believed in Jesus. Although according to one version of the history, he might have actually been a bishop; maybe he wasn’t a Roman soldier. In any event, he was martyred by the Romans, and he became Saint George. And later, there’s a story about Saint George and the dragon, where he slays a dragon, but that’s kind of a later elaboration of the story.

So, they think he’s a contemporary just before or after Saint George. In other words, they think Samson is someone who lived in the 3rd century CE or AD. And you think, how could that be that you would think Samson lived in 3rd century AD? Well, the Quran has Haman in the court of Pharaoh. So, chronology isn’t their greatest strong suit.

Alright. It goes on. Or let me jump ahead. So, his wife, who they don’t name… but we know her as Delilah. Delila. “She sent for the people who came and took him. They cut off his nose,” and this is after she cut his hair. “They cut off his nose and his earlobes, gouged out his eyes,” that part’s in the Tanakh, “and then stood him before the people,” meaning the Philistines… Well, it doesn’t actually say Philistines; the Romans, I guess. “And stood him before the people in front of the multi-columned minaret.”

So, the Roman pagans have minarets! Well, I guess maybe that’s where the Muslims got it from, I don’t know. “The people are…” Maybe that’s what they thought Muslims got it from, from Romans, I guess. I don’t know. “The people and their king looked down from atop it,” meaning the minaret, “in order to gaze at Samson and what had been done to him.” And this is parallel to what you read at the end. “When they mutilated him and placed him there, Samson called unto God that he be given power over them. So, God ordered Samson to seize two of the supports of the minaret…” Sound familiar?

Lynell: Mhm.

Nehemia: “On which the king…” And it’s interesting, because in the Tanakh they’re worshiping Dagon. But here, they’re Roman pagans who have a minaret rather than some kind of palace. “So, he ordered Samson to seize,” meaning God, “ordered Samson to seize two of the supports of the minaret upon which the king and the people who were looking at him were located, and pull on them. So, he pulled on them.” And Tabari adds, “God restored his sight and those things which had been removed from his body, so his ears and his nose grew back,” according to Tabari’s version. “The minaret fell down along with the king and the people who were on it, and they were all killed by it in the destruction.”

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: Then Tha’alabi adds, “His wife also perished with them.” That’s not in the Tanakh. “God restored his sight to him and made whole the parts of his body that they had afflicted, and he returned as he had been. The story of Samson took place during the days of the petty kings,” meaning the Romans, “and God is all-knowing.” So, this is the 3rd century AD if you put this into Muslim chronology.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, when the Lebanese cleric is talking about, “Well, you know what Samson did. He destroyed, he shattered, he left scorched earth.” So, there was nothing in what he did… That’s why I read this whole elaborate thing. There wasn’t a word about that, “with scorched earth.”

Lynell: Right!

Nehemia: Not a single word. So, where did they get that? Unquestionably, they got that from Judges 15, the story of the foxes.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: However, there is a subtext, and the subtext is that there is a book that was written a number of years ago called The Samson Option, and the Samson Option, according to this book, it’s claimed, is something within Israeli military doctrine. And I guarantee you this Muslim cleric knows about the Samson Option. In the Samson Option, if Israel is ever defeated and going to be overrun and destroyed, we fire off the nuclear missiles that we have and we take out the Arab states around us.

Lynell: Oh, wow!

Nehemia: And that’s called the Samson Option.

Lynell: Oh, my goodness!

Nehemia: So, when he talks about Samson, and she says, “Samson the Israelite?” And he doesn’t acknowledge and say, “yes.” He kind of smiles.

Lynell: Oh, my goodness!

Nehemia: Because to him, Samson… he doesn’t even know that Samson is an Israelite. He knows that Samson is a Christian convert from paganism. He’s a Roman.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: But he knows what the Samson Option is because that’s now something in popular culture, and that’s Israel is going to set off their thermonuclear weapons and, you know, bomb Lebanon and Syria and any enemies. I don’t think they think Israel is going to bomb Egypt and Jordan because we have peace treaties with them. But, yeah, we’re gonna bomb Tehran and maybe Riyadh and Mecca.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: Who knows? I don’t know what… I’m not privy to those decisions. So, the Samson Option is when you know you’re going to die anyway, you put your hands on the pillars and you push, knowing that it’s going to kill you.

Lynell: Wow!

Nehemia: Knowing that it’s going to kill you.

Lynell: Wow!

Nehemia: So, when he says about Samson, I don’t even know if he knows about the foxes. When he says, “He destroyed, he shattered, he left scorched earth,” he’s probably thinking about the Samson Option, that Israel might use nuclear weapons against you. So be careful! But it’s interesting; here’s a Muslim cleric in September 2024 saying, “Samson left scorched earth, so be careful. They’re coming for you, Nasrallah. Make your last will and testament.” And then you have an Israeli song from 18 years ago, “The IDF is coming to burn you, Nasrallah,” and they drop 80 bombs of around a ton each, including bunker busters, and they kill Nasrallah.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: Interestingly, he didn’t burn. His body was intact, we’re told, and he suffocated somehow from the smoke or something like this. So, this is amazing stuff, and I praise Yehovah, and I rejoice over the death of Nasrallah. But one last thing we have to talk about, and that is, there’s two verses in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs, that seemingly contradict. So, I’m going to ask you to read Proverbs chapter 11, verse 10. And this is very much the Jewish way of reading Scripture, is, you look for the contradictions. You have the thesis and the antithesis, the thesis and the antithesis, and from looking at the two of them together, you get a synthesis. Okay, what is it saying? What are the boundaries of these two different statements? Because we know the Bible isn’t contradicting itself.

Lynell: Right, of course. So, it says, “When the righteous prosper, the city exalts. When the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.”

Nehemia: Yes. Okay. And literally when the…

Lynell: Is it teruah?

Nehemia: No, it’s rina, which is “song”. Literally, “when the evildoer is destroyed,” is literally what it says, “there is song.” So, if I could sing, I would, but I can’t. But the Arabs sang for me, so thank you. Although maybe they were praising the wrong name. So, praise Yehovah. Proverbs 24:17-18. How do we reconcile what we just read with that?

Lynell: “If your enemy falls, do not exalt. If he trips, let not your heart rejoice, lest Yehovah see it, and be displeased, and avert His wrath from Him.” Whoa! Those do seem to be contradictory.

Nehemia: So, should we be rejoicing over the death of Nasrallah, or shouldn’t we? And it’s interesting, because the Talmud discusses this question. Not about Nasrallah, about our enemies, and it gives a story about… well, God was in heaven, and He was upset that the Israelites were singing over the death of the Egyptians. And He said, “Those are My creations. Why are you rejoicing? They died.” But that’s not in the Tanakh. In the Tanakh, Miriam goes out with her timbrels and she’s singing literally a song. With the destruction of evildoers, there is song, and the Egyptians were evildoers who enslaved us, and the Israelites were literally singing.

So, we know that if your enemies are destroyed, you should be singing. Your oppressors, your foreign oppressors. And so, this is the explanation of… the Talmud reconciles the two verses as follows, and there have been other explanations over the years. I’m not going to go into all of it. But this is in the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 16a, and it ties it into Mordecai and Haman. Not Haman who lived in the time of Pharaoh, but Haman who was a Persian official, apparently an Aegean, some sort of a Greek who lived in the time of Artaxerxes, or Achashverosh in the Hebrew. Ahasuerus? Or what is it in English? Or something like that.

Alright, so, there’s a story that the rabbis elaborate upon. So, Haman was required to put Mordecai on a horse and ride him around in the royal garments. That’s in the Book of Esther. And then Haman is preparing him. This is the story of the rabbis elaborating. “Haman dressed Mordecai in the royal garments. Haman then said to him, ‘Mount the horse and ride.’ Mordecai said to him, ‘I’m unable, as my strength has waned from the days of fasting that I observed.’” Remember, in the Book of Esther, there was three days and three nights of fasting. “Haman then stooped down before him and said to him…” I, uh, let’s see… this in the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 16a. So, we’re reading Hadith, we’re reading Quran, we’re reading Talmud, and of course we’re reading Tanakh. “Haman then stooped down before him, and Mordecai ascended on him. As he was ascending the horse, Mordecai gave Haman a kick. A deliberate kick.”

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: This is in the Talmud; we’re not saying this happened. “Haman then said to Mordecai, ‘Is it not written for you…’” So, Haman’s quoting the book of Proverbs, “‘Do not rejoice when your enemy falls?’ Mordecai said to him, ‘This statement only applies to Jews, but with regard to you it is written…’” And then he quotes Deuteronomy 33:29, “And you shall tread upon their high place.”

So, in other words, the solution of the Talmud… it doesn’t mention Proverbs 24:17-18, but that’s an… or sorry, it doesn’t mention Proverbs 11:10, what we just read. The subtext, though, is that the way it reconciles “do we rejoice when our enemy fails or don’t we?” And the answer of the rabbis, which I think is correct, is that the rejoicing is for the evildoers. So, you may have a personal enemy, your neighbor who you hate, who hates you, or your business rival, and… is he an evildoer or is he just your enemy? To you, he’s your enemy, and to him you’re his enemy. That doesn’t mean he’s wicked and an evildoer.

Lynell: Hmm.

Nehemia: So, Proverbs 11:10 is about the evildoer, resha’im, singular, rasha. Which is interesting because it sounds like the word Russia, but… So, when the evildoer is destroyed, there should be song. But when you have a personal enemy, who might not be an evildoer, he’s just someone who doesn’t like you and you don’t like him, don’t rejoice about that. So, the Talmud says it’s about Israel. I don’t think it’s about Israel. I think it’s about, there are people who are genuinely evil, and when they are destroyed, you should be happy. But if I have some personal gripe with somebody, you know, somebody wrote something mean about me on the internet…

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: And he sees me as an enemy, and I will accept that for these purposes, even though, you know, whatever. He doesn’t really know me, and I don’t really know him. Is he an evildoer? No. He’s just kind of a jerk. Maybe I’m a jerk too, sometimes.

Lynell: He didn’t kill 100, you know… thousands of people.

Nehemia: He didn’t kill thousands of people. This is not an evildoer, he’s just a jerk.

Lynell: Gotcha.

Nehemia: He’s a person of poor judgment, perhaps.

Lynell: Not a lot of wisdom.

Nehemia: He doesn’t follow “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. Okay. So, I don’t think it’s about Israel/not Israel. It’s about people who are genuinely wicked. That’s what rasha means; wicked, evildoers. People who are genuinely wicked. When they’re destroyed, you should rejoice. Pharaoh was genuinely wicked. He ordered the death of babies. He chased down Israel to destroy Israel, to kill every man, woman and child. And so, when those people drowned, Israel rightfully rejoiced. Haman was genuinely evil. Haman was the Nasrallah and the Hitler of his generation. He was truly evil. And so was Nasrallah. Just because I have it in for somebody because he doesn’t like me and I don’t like him, that doesn’t mean that person’s an evildoer.

You know, it’s kind of like the old thing, in football. I heard this from Keith. So, when you pray for your team to be victorious, well, doesn’t God hear the prayers of the other team? You’re rivals.

Lynell: Oh, right, right,

Nehemia: But they’re not… the other team isn’t evil.

Lynell: So, Nehemia, what’s this word in Hebrew? You said rasha. Reish…

Nehemia: Rasha. Reish-Shin-Ayin…

Lynell: Ayin. That’s what I couldn’t get, the last…

Nehemia: Which is singular rasha, in Yiddish, or in Eastern European Hebrew we would say “Russia”. That’s how it was pronounced, because…

Lynell: Oh, really?

Nehemia: …rasha in standard proper Hebrew… And in plural, resha’im. So, when resha’im are destroyed, there’s song, and Nasrallah was a rasha. Was he our enemy? He also was our enemy. But your enemy doesn’t have to be a rasha. It’s really an interesting… I think that’s profound, that’s the synthesis here. There’s this profound moral lesson here in Proverbs.

And part of Proverbs is to… you know, one of the forms of Proverbs is what’s called the chida, and chida is a riddle. And so, this is essentially a very deliberate riddle between Proverbs 11 and Proverbs 24, that you’re meant to look at these together and say, “Okay, what is the difference?” Like, there’s an example in Proverbs 26:4-5, which are two juxtaposed next to each other verses that are directly contradictory statements. And that’s a riddle. Okay, what does the first one mean and what does the second one mean?

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: There’s some nuance here that we’re missing. And the nuance here is the first verse. Proverbs 11:10 speaks about resha’im, truly wicked, evil people. And 24:17 speaks about your enemy, who may not be an evil person. He just doesn’t like you.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: If he’s an evil person, then you should rejoice.

Lynell: Amen. Then we should rejoice, because this was an evil person.

Nehemia: Who knew that, from the death of Hassan Nasrallah, we could learn one of the profound moral lessons from the Book of Proverbs? Praise Yehovah.

Lynell: Amen.

Nehemia: Now, I can’t sing, but would you sing praises over the death of Nasrallah? I’m going to put you on the spot here. Sing a praise.

Lynell: Okay. Any praise?

Nehemia: Yeah, sure.

Lynell: Alright.

Nehemia: As long as it’s a praise to Yehovah.

Lynell: Does it have to be a special song? Can we not just sing?

Nehemia: No. Any song.

Lynell: [singing] Praise Yehovah, Praise Yehovah, For He has conquered our enemies

Nehemia: Amen.

Lynell: [singing] Praise Yehovah, Praise Yehovah, For He has conquered our enemies. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen. I want to end with the words of Samson. Judges 16:28. Samson prayed when he was blinded and had his hands on the pillars.

Lynell: Yeah, that was really…

Nehemia: And he knew he was going to die.

Lynell: He was so strong.

Nehemia: He said, “Adonai Yehovah,” “Zochreni na,” “remember me please,” “ve’chazkeni na ach ha’pa’am ha’zzeh ha’elohim,” “and strengthen me, please, this one time, Oh, God.” “Ve’innakmah nekam-achat mi’shtei einai mi’plishtim,” “and let me be avenged, the vengeance of just one of my eyes from the Philistines. And I pray, Yehovah,” “zochrenu na, Adonai Yehovah.” “Remember us, please.” “Ve’chazkenu,” and strengthen us please, Yehovah, and our army and our leaders and our allies. Strengthen us, Yehovah, this time that we meet may free our hostages and defeat our enemies. And not just Nasrallah, but the rats hiding in the tunnels in Gaza. Father, I ask that the tunnels collapse upon our enemies in Gaza the way that the palace collapsed upon the Philistines. And, Father, I ask that You be with the hostages, and You be with our soldiers, and You give wisdom to our leaders and to our allies and the leaders of our allies. Father, I ask for them to have wisdom and to give them strength and to guide them, because we know everything that they do, it’s only through You that all of our victories and our salvation takes place. And I praise You, Yehovah. Amen.

Lynell: Amen.

Nehemia: Praise Yehovah.

Lynell: Praise Yehovah.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 49:9
Judges 13-16
Herodotus 1.105
Quran 97:1-3
Proverbs 11:10
Proverbs 24:17-18
Exodus 15:1-21
Esther 6
Megillah 16a (Babylonian Talmud)
Deuteronomy 33:29
Leviticus 19:18
Proverbs 26:4-5

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OTHER LINKS
The Muslim Samson
Elon Gilad explaining two Hebrew words for “assassination”
Shi’ite cleric Mohammed Ali Al-Husseini warns of Nasrallah’s impending death

Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 16a
https://www.sefaria.org/Megillah.16a.10?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
After Haman trimmed his hair, Haman dressed Mordecai in the royal garments. Haman then said to him: Mount the horse and ride. Mordecai said to him: I am unable, as my strength has waned from the days of fasting that I observed. Haman then stooped down before him and Mordecai ascended on him. As he was ascending the horse, Mordecai gave Haman a kick. Haman said to him: Is it not written for you: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls” (Proverbs 24:17)? Mordecai said to him: This statement applies only to Jews, but with regard to you it is written: “And you shall tread upon their high places” (Deuteronomy 33:29).

"Hezbollah Cleaning Lady Cartoon"

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