In this episode of Hebrew Voices #208: Trump in Prophecy, Nehemia speaks with Joe Dumond about how the end-times of Daniel 9 might play out in the coming years, an unexpected resurrection, and how the 10 gods of Egypt relate to the troubled era in which we live.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Daniel 9:25-27
Exodus 34:22
Matthew 24:37; Luke 17:26-28
Revelation 20:2
Daniel 12
Hosea 14:2
Matthew 24; Luke 21; Mark 13
Exodus 32
Revelation 9
Daniel 8
Revelation 11
Micah 5
Leviticus 26

BOOKS MENTIONED
Prophecies of Abraham
by Joseph Dumond

Abomination That Makes Desolate-The Countdown Has Begun
by Joseph Dumond

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #95 – 2300 Days of Hell 
Hebrew Voices #154 – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 1
Support Team Study – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #153 – Sighting the New Moon in the Middle Ages
Dumond livestream

OTHER LINKS
https://sightedmoon.com/

The Sabbatical and Jubilee Cycle Chart
https://sightedmoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Sabbatical-Jubiees-Chart-Updated-2019-1.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KN64QYX

The post Hebrew Voices #208 – Trump in Prophecy appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In the Sneak Peek of this episode of Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS: Tricks of Translation - Name in Vain: Part 2, Nehemia and manuscript researcher Nelson Calvillo are back to reveal the earliest sources that mark expansions in the interpretation of taking God's name in vain, in both Rabbinic and Christian history.

Be sure to first watch HGP PLUS Tricks of Translation - Name in Vain: Part 1, before watching this episode.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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Watch the full episode TOMORROW plus the complete series of Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS and hundreds of hours of other in-depth studies by becoming a Support Team Member!

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The post Sneak Peek! HGP PLUS Special – Tricks of Translation – Name in Vain: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In the Sneak Peek of this episode of Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS: Tricks of Translation - Name in Vain: Part 1, Nehemia and manuscript researcher Nelson Calvillo begin to unpack the prohibition to not take the name of the "LORD" in vain by deciphering the key word in the commandment.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio

Watch the full episode plus the complete series of Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS and hundreds of hours of other in-depth studies by becoming a Support Team Member!

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
[addtoany]

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | 
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 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
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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.

Make a lasting impact through the year by making your donation recurring.

Please Donate Here

Or support Makor Hebrew Foundation by becoming a member of the Scholar Club.

Learn More

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

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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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Stand Up Like King Josiah!

Lynell: This is your favorite thing to do!

Nehemia: No, I don’t like it, but we have to do it. We’re coming towards the end of the year, and at the end of the year we get an overview of the ministry’s finances and realize we don’t have the resources to pay for some of the things we’ve already done, and we definitely don’t have the resources to move forward and carry out things in the coming year. We need your help. That’s the bottom line. We have amazing opportunities to share truth, and that takes resources. It’s not just to share the truth. Lynell, you saw this amazing quote that we both thought was really relevant. Can you share the quote?

Lynell: I think the quote was, “News is free, journalism is not.”

Nehemia: I thought that was really profound, because information is free. Anybody can go to Wikipedia and find out more… honestly, they can find out more than some scholars a hundred years ago at Harvard University had access to, for free. So, information is free, but the time and expertise required to determine which information is true and which is not, that takes resources. Just think about the time, but it takes resources to dig through piles of information, much of which is not…

Ronald Reagan famously said… when he was talking about politics, he said, “The problem with my friends, the Democratic Party, is they know so many things that just aren’t so.” And this is the problem; we are flooded with information, and to find out which of it is true and which is not takes expertise and resources. And then there’s information we don’t even have.

I was praying about what we should say here to the people when we’re telling you guys, we need your help. We need your financial resources and help. And there’s this one verse that gnaws at me. It says, in Deuteronomy, “It’s not in Heaven.” We don’t need someone to go across the sea or up into Heaven to get the Torah for us.

But then we have the story of Josiah, and Josiah is one of my favorite stories in the Tanakh. He’s this young boy king. We were looking at this because we’re doing a teaching soon, on… I’ll just tell people, it’s on the Christmas tree. So, we’re looking at all the verses that talk about Asherah. There’s this Asherah tree or pole in the Tanakh, and it’s called a tree in some places. It’s a tree that was planted or set up next to the altar, originally of Baal, but then of Yehovah. In 2 Kings 23:6 it says, “And he brought out the Asherah from the House of Yehovah,” and that’s the name in the Bible for temple. It doesn’t use the word temple, that’s a later term. It calls it the Beit Yehovah. “They brought out the Asherah from the House of Yehovah,” in the time of Josiah.

What blows my mind about this story is that Josiah is this king who, at a very young age, has this burning love for Yehovah and worshiping Him. So, he gathers silver, resources, money… the word in Hebrew is kesef, which is literally silver, but it also means money. So, he gathers money and he gives it over to the service of the Temple to repair the Temple. But he doesn’t know that having an Asherah in the House of Yehovah is forbidden. He has no inkling. He’s probably thinking, “There’s this tree in the House of Yehovah. We have to beautify it with silver and gold and clean up the debris around it so people can come worship Yehovah with this Asherah tree.” He doesn’t know! He’s an 18-year-old boy, and for decades people have been serving and worshiping in a false worship. And then what happens is, because he puts the resources out there and trusts in Yehovah, they’re repairing the Temple, and they find the Torah. They find this scroll, and he’s brought this scroll. And a man named Hilkiah says, “We found this scroll.” It wasn’t him… meaning, it was Hilkiah, the High Priest, who brings it to the representative of Josiah, and then they read it to him. And he says, “Oh…” Actually, the first thing he does is he tears his clothes because he realizes, “I had the desire to worship Yehovah but there was information that we were missing. I didn’t know idolatry was forbidden. I didn’t know it was forbidden to have an Asherah in the House of Yehovah.” And so, he tears his clothes, which in ancient Israel is an act of mourning.

And I have the burning desire of Josiah to serve Yehovah, and I know there’s people out there who have the burning desire of Josiah to serve Yehovah. And they don’t know what to do, they’re not Hilkiah. Hilkiah himself didn’t know what to do until they found this scroll in the Temple! Well, today we have access to these scrolls. Today we have access to manuscripts that a hundred years ago… not a hundred years ago, twenty years ago, the top professors in the world dreamed of having access to manuscripts that I’ve held in my hands. Yehovah has given us this opportunity to share truth, and it takes resources. It absolutely does.

We’re about to fly to Israel, and then to Germany, to speak at academic conferences that I was invited to speak at. And this is an opportunity to change the world, to uncover truth. I hear people say, “Nehemia, you taught us this thing. How come that’s not in the encyclopedia?” And actually, what they’re saying is, “I shared this with my friend. And he beat me over the head with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which doesn’t say what you said.”

And so, my question is, how do we change the Encyclopedia Britannica? How do we change Wikipedia? The way to do that is… information is free. There’s a lot of things on Wikipedia that just ain’t so. How do you change that? You don’t log in and write something on Wikipedia. You do serious research, and that changes. It’s a cascading effect that, over time, will eventually bring out the truth. Because I could go right now and change something in Wikipedia. It’ll be changed back in 30 seconds. The way you change the information that most people have access to, the free information, is you’ve got to do the work. And the work is painstaking and slow. It’s giving that silver over to the people in the house. That’s what Josiah did. He said, “I trust the process. I don’t know what I’m going to find.” He never imagined that this beloved tree of Asherah which had been there for decades would turn out to be an idol he would have to take out into the Kidron Valley and grind into dust. Believe me, Josiah did not think that and that’s why he tore his clothes. He tore his clothes… this is profound. He tore his clothes, this act of mourning… this is Josiah, because he realized, “We’ve worshiped idols and the things that we loved. The Asherah tree that my father loved, and my grandfather loved, and I was taught to love, that’s hateful in the eyes of Yehovah. And I have to walk to the truth. There’s this light, and I have to walk into the light. I can’t just do what my fathers did, because what they did was wrong. I now have the truth, and I have to act on it.”

Look, I’m going to share something that very few people know. So, I don’t know if they can see this here, but that’s a hole where a doctor, two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago today, put a probe into to look at my heart. And he found out there was a 95% blockage in my heart, and they put in what’s called a stent. That was a situation where I could have dropped dead at any second. I didn’t even know it. I’m what’s called asymptomatic, but they had done this test, a routine test, and they said, “Something’s not right.” They used the word abnormal. I actually thought the woman on the phone said it was normal. “Oh, that’s wonderful.” She said, “No, you didn’t hear me, I said ab normal.” “Okay, what does that mean?” She said, “We’ve got to look and make sure there isn’t a blockage in your arteries.” And there was; 95%.

So, that really makes a man think. I could have been dead at any second. I still could be dead at any second, so what do I want to accomplish before I die? And what I want to accomplish is to make the world aware of the truth about Yehovah’s word. The truth about Yehovah’s name. The truth that’s been preserved by the people of Israel in the manuscripts. I don’t have a time machine where I can travel in time and listen in to Yehovah speaking to Moses in the tent. But I have things that were written down, and they were transmitted over the generations. And they survive in these manuscripts, and we have access to those manuscripts today. It’s the closest I may ever get to hearing… in this lifetime, I’m quite sure it is the closest I’ll ever get to hearing Yehovah’s voice spoken to Moses. I may have an inner voice where I hear Him and I perceive Him on certain occasions, but Yehovah speaking to the Prophets of ancient Israel, this is the closest I’ll ever get. And I want to uncover that and share that with people.

We’re living in this unprecedented time where, like I said, I have access today, right here on my computer that I’m speaking to you on, to more information than the greatest scholars had. Scholars I’ve met, the greatest scholars that I’ve had access to, for sure before 1990, hands down.

This morning, I was reading with Nelson, my research assistant. We were looking at this book written by the greatest scholar of the time in the 1980’s when he wrote his book, analyzing all the manuscripts. And we know more than he knew because we have access to that information. That information needs to get to the people. And the way we need to get it to them… it’s multiple fronts. One way to get to the people is through putting out videos and putting out podcasts, and that takes resources.

I get people writing in to us, and they’ll say, “This should all be free. You shouldn’t charge for it.” Okay, well I’m going to call up our editor in the Dominican Republic and tell her that we can no longer give her the resources she needs to feed her baby because the people are all telling us it should be free. Is that what we should do?

Lynell: Let me just say, about a year ago we had this exact situation come up where we had one of the people that work for us… and look, we can’t pay our people that much. They work for us because they love God, and they want this to be spread. She said to me, “Look, I don’t have enough money to pay for the hospital to have my baby. I want you to pray with me about it.” She wasn’t asking me for money, she knew we didn’t have money. I picked up the phone and I called as many people as I could and I said, “Can you please…” One of them was a corporate attorney that I knew, and people literally gave $50 or $100 at a time to take care of that. Guys, a workman is worthy of his hire. We need people for IT, we have to have producers, we want to do a woman’s podcast. Really, that’s our heart, that’s my heart, and Nehemia has said that that’s something that he really feels like we should do.

Nehemia: Well, that’s something I don’t really have the resources within my physical body to do, to communicate with women. God designed us differently; I still believe that. It says, “Male and female He created them,” and there are things I can communicate, particularly to autistic men, but hopefully to all men and women, but there are things that I can’t communicate that God has given to you in your heart to communicate. And you can communicate things that I’ve discovered in ways that I can’t to various people.

And look, that is part of the ministry, absolutely. Like I said, I need to speak to the scholars. I also need to speak to the non-scholars. And you need to speak to people who you have an aptitude to speak to. All of that is important. You can also speak to people in the business world, which I know nothing about. You were the CEO… I don’t know if people know this, but my wife, Lynell here, is a woman who comes from the business world, and she built a company… multiple companies, and she can speak to people that I have no practical understanding of how to communicate with them.

It’s funny, I was just at this conference in San Diego, and we went into this restaurant where all the scholars were coming together. And I was waiting for people to arrive, and I overheard the man say to the lady at the front, whatever that’s called…

Lynell: Hostess.

Nehemia: The hostess. And he says, “I’m looking for the nerds.” And she turns around, literally, and walks directly over to me and my other colleague! That’s literally what happened! And I said to her, “You know this may affect the tip.” She says, “I don’t care. I don’t get tips.” I said, “How did you know we were the nerds?” She said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

Lynell: You know, the thing that I’m most excited about, guys, Nehemia has an opportunity that has come up that is something we have been praying for since we were dating. This is something that’s an opportunity to present on the name of Yehovah in a unique way. And I can’t even say anything about it until everything is finished, but I’ve seen God open up for Nehemia opportunity after opportunity that has never been afforded to anyone else before. I know he’s blessed by Yehovah, and God has done such great things. We just have to have finances to support it. We can’t do it ourselves.

I said to Nehemia this past week, “It would be really nice to get paid for the work that I’m doing with what I’m doing.” But we don’t have resources to do that. When Nehemia hired me to help him, and he has, because I work for Makor, he took part of what he was being paid and he said, “Let me give you some of what I’m being paid.”

Nehemia: We didn’t, and we still don’t have any money to pay her. So literally I said, “Alright, it all goes in the same bank account. Take some of my salary and put it over onto you, because right now we don’t have the money…” Look, we do need to hire a number of specific roles just to stay afloat. People might think this doesn’t require resources, but just to do what we’re currently doing requires resources. And we need to expand what we’re doing into new areas. And look, I can’t share some of these things.

Lynell: Yet!

Nehemia: Yet, right. Eventually, after they’re done, we can share them. And one of the reasons for that is that there are certain things… look, there’s Israelis who have recently encountered this. There were Israeli heroes who were involved in the war in Gaza who went to visit places like Amsterdam and post it on their TikTok. “Hey, I’m in Amsterdam,” and they were physically attacked. What they learned is something I learned quite a number of years ago. You can’t share with the public certain things you’re doing until after they’ve already been done because it actually can physically endanger you. And certainly poses a risk to the project. Let’s just say that. I can’t say more.

Lynell: A complete risk to the project. Because there are people who don’t want this out, guys. There are people who do not want…

Nehemia: And if you think this is theoretical, it’s not. There are things that you can’t share with the public until they’ve already been done, and that’s just the reality of the world we live in. There are actually physical dangers involved, and it can endanger the project as well.

Lynell: And I told Nehemia, I said to him last year, “If God doesn’t provide for us by,” and I think I said August or September, I said, “I’ll just go and get a different job, and we’ll just find a way to make things work.” And we will find a way to make things work, because God will open doors. He will. But we’re asking that you guys would help us here. That you would pray and ask God in your heart if He would have you give something to help us in the ministry. That’s all we can ask for.

Nehemia: In 2014, I was in China, and I was teaching English in a high school. And it’s interesting… at that time I had never been paid a dime by the ministry. In fact, the ministry wasn’t always able to reimburse me for the expenses that I put out to do things like the Aviv Search. And I had to make a decision; do I continue to teach English in high school? Or do I do what I’ve been called…

I don’t know if you know this, Lynell, but I ran away from ministry. I was Jonah. I got on a boat, or in this case a plane, and I said, “I’m running away from ministry. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for this.” And I couldn’t get away from it. I was called back to it. And I had to make that decision; do I go back and do this? Well, okay, then I need to be able to be paid to do it, or I literally won’t be able to continue to do it. That was in 2014 that I made that decision. And I think it was a good decision, because in 2016 Yehovah opened these doors that I still haven’t been able to share all the things that have been discovered, and I won’t be able to until the proper time. Some of those opportunities are actually coming up this year, and so, Yehovah willing…

Lynell: Yeah, I’m excited!

Nehemia: …some of those discoveries will be shared soon. But I made that decision; I ran away to Tarsus to avoid Nineveh, and I was called back to do it, and I had to do it. And I don’t know how much time I have left. There’s a piece of metal right now in my right coronary artery, and I don’t know how much time I have left. There’s another blockage that they didn’t do anything about because that was the medical decision, so I want to make the most of what’s left. And the legacy I would like to leave to this world is that there will be the basis for people to continue after me. That really is my desire in this world with whatever time I have left.

Lynell: And if anything keeps him up…

Nehemia: And guys, you can be part of that. You can be Josiah… Like I said, he turned the silver over to the Temple and he said, “Okay you guys, figure this out.” He had no idea what they were going to do. He certainly didn’t think he would find out that this beautiful pole of Asherah would turn out to be an idol he would have to grind to dust in the Kidron Valley. But that’s how it turned out and he followed that truth of Yehovah. Please be Josiah and join us in this.

Lynell: And just because I know people are going to write and tell me… guys, Nehemia has been on a very strict diet now for a couple of years. He’s lost an enormous amount of weight.

Nehemia: As of this morning, I’ve lost about… I’m bad at math, but I want to say it’s 66 pounds. And I’ve got about another 60 or so to go, so I’m working on it.

Lynell: He’s worked very hard at it. He’s not taking his health for granted. The thing that keeps Nehemia up at night, and I know because I’m his wife, is, “If God takes me, who’s going to take over after me?” And I remember when he was having surgery done, before he goes back in there and I tell him I love him and I pray for him, what’s on his heart is, “God, if You don’t save me, who is going to share these truths?” Because, like Nehemia said, there is a method here. There is a way to get the information out. Anyone can say anything, and you can stick it up online.

Nehemia: And they do.

Lynell: And they do, that’s true! But getting the truth out is totally different. You may not know this, Nehemia, but when I was a little girl, I told God… my father was a minister. And I said, “I never, ever, want to go into ministry. And God, it’s not because I don’t love You.” I did music ministry until I was in my mid-twenties, and that’s what I thought my ministry life would be. I never had an idea that God would call me to speak to women. No clue, not at all. But I said, “God, they’re so mean to ministers, they’re mean to you. They don’t want to pay you, and I don’t want to be poor the rest of my life,” because I grew up gathering walnuts on the side of the road to pay for milk.

Nehemia: And you mean literally.

Lynell: Literally. I know what it’s like to be poor. And it’s not an unhappy thing to be poor, but I’d like to be able to pay my bills. But today it’s different. I know that I’m going to have milk on my table and I’m going to have butter in my fridge. But that’s not the desire of my heart. The desire of my heart is to grow a ministry that will make a difference in the lives, now this is me, of women. Women who have no hope, women who are in situations where it’s been hopeless, because I have been there, and God has pulled me out. I want to share that with people, and in order to do that, I feel like I need to do a podcast. And I want to have women on who have been in situations and have seen God’s hand pull them out and they know that it’s the hand of Yehovah that has done that, just like with me. I feel very strongly called to do that.

I have a friend; her name is Lori. Her husband is a friend of Nehemia’s. Lori and Jeff are friends of ours, and she’s been such a strong advocate of, “Just do what you believe God has called you to do.” I really appreciate that, and I want God to send us lots of friends who will say, “Lynell. Nehemia. Do what God has called you to do.”

Look, I don’t have the truths that Nehemia does, I’m just here to tell you. When we sit down, and he starts talking and he starts reading the Bible in Hebrew, and he starts telling me what these Scriptures are saying, I’m like, “But that’s not what it reads.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but that’s what it says.” That is unique; who else does that that you know of? Who has that skill set? I think we need to really think in our hearts what it is that God has called us to do, and if you can’t be the one… Someone once told me that… he was a missionary; “If you cannot be the one who goes out to tell the truth, then support those that God has called to do that.”

Nehemia: And in this case, if you can’t be Hilkiah, you can be Josiah. Each of them had a role. And look, Yehovah will send who He will send. When I die, if I don’t get out what I’m supposed to get out, then Yehovah will send who He will send, and it will get out. But right now, I feel, like in the story of Esther, “Maybe for such a time as this I have been called. And if I don’t do it, salvation will arise from another place.” But I have to do what I need to do, and what I’ve been called to do, and what you, the listener, has been called to do, if that’s in your heart, is to be Josiah. So, we need a bunch of Josiahs to stand up and put the resources into this so I can go and dig in the Temple and find that scroll.

Lynell: I have nothing else to say.

Nehemia: What about Gweny Penguin? She wants to be involved.

Lynell: Gweny might want to be involved? I think Penny and Penguin Shark are happy to just be in the background.

Nehemia: Cedric is happy to be here too. Cedric wants to be the only one. Let’s pray!

Lynell: Hang on just a minute, sweetheart, let me just put this back over here. They want to listen. Oh guys, I have the funniest story, the cutest story. In our family, when we sit down to eat, and we thank God for our food, our penguins pray with us! Do you want to show them how Gweny prays? She puts her head down and she prays.

Nehemia: Yehovah, Avinu sh’ba’shamayim, our Father in Heaven. I’m so grateful for every day and every hour that You give me. Father, I’m going to do the best I can to do with… the resource You’ve given me right now, which is life, the most precious resource of all that no one can pay for. Father, I am so grateful for that. And Father, I ask you that You bless those who pour their resources, like Josiah, into uncovering Your truth. Father, lead us in this path to find Your scroll in the Temple, and then to share that with the people. Father, my job is to find that truth and share it with Josiah and share it with everyone who is willing to listen. Father, give me the time, the time to live to do that, and bless all those who pour those resources into the ministry to discover truth and share that truth with people, to empower people with information about the ancient Hebrew sources of faith.

Lynell: Yehovah, I pray You would keep Nehemia, Father, that he would live to be 120. Father, I pray that You would give me wisdom in how to support him, how to support this ministry that You’ve given to him. And Father, I pray that You would open the doors for me to be able to do ministry with women with what I believe You’ve called me in my heart to do. God, I know that You don’t need the resources. You don’t need silver and You don’t need gold. God, that You just require of us our hearts and our wholehearted love toward You. Father, I pray that You would open the hearts of those who You call to support this ministry, and that they would give from their hearts. And Father, I pray that You would bless them, that You would bless them for all that they do, for every prayer, Father, for every kind deed, and Father, for every kind thing that they do toward our ministry. And God, I thank You for the people that You’ve already given to our ministry. God, I thank You for them. They are so precious and kind, and they love You. So, we thank you for all that we have, and God I pray that You would have Your will in our lives and that we would serve You and that You would watch over and keep the ministry as we do what we believe You’ve called us to do. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen.

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

Make a lasting impact through the year by making your donation recurring.

Please Donate Here

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
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Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | 
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 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
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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.

Make a lasting impact through the year by making your donation recurring.

Please Donate Here

Or support Makor Hebrew Foundation by becoming a member of the Scholar Club.

Learn More

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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Hebrew Voices #206 – Revelation or imagination: Part 3

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Nehemia: And here’s why this is so valuable for someone like me. It would have never occurred to me that someone would change the original manuscript based on a copy, but that can happen. It happened here.

Royal: When they think it’s right, they’re going to do it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Nothing’s going to stop them.

Nehemia: That’s amazing, that’s absolutely amazing.

Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Royal Skousen. 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 don’t think that’s an exaggeration. No, really! I mean, you’re the guy! So, the fact that you’re joining me on my program, I’m really honored.

Let’s look at this example. So, there’s a section that you talk about where the 1830 edition was typeset based on the printer’s manuscript, but then proofread against the original.

Royal: Yeah, only one signature. One signature that we know of.

Nehemia: Well, let’s look at this one, Alma 42:10. I’ll show you this on my screen here. These are notes I took from what you presented. So, the original 1830 and 1837 have a preparatory state, but the printer’s manuscript has a probationary state.

Royal: Right.

Nehemia: And what that shows is 1830, although it was typeset from the printer’s manuscript… And I guess we can see that because of how the printer’s manuscript is marked up.

Royal: Yes. The printer’s mark shows that they’ve used the printer’s mark to do the 1830. And very often, though, you can look at the typeset version and see extra spacing like in this one. That there’s extra spacing in the 1830 showing they had changed it. So, they originally set probationary…

Nehemia: Woah, woah, wait a minute! So, what you’re saying is that the first printed page off of the printing press had probationary state, and then they cut it out?

Royal: Yeah, that was the proof sheet.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Royal: The proof sheet, instead of comparing it against their copy, which was the printer’s manuscript, they somehow did it against the original. And they saw that it was preparatory, they changed it, and when the typesetting occurred you can see that they had a longer word there originally.

Nehemia: That’s really cool! So now we have to find this. Sorry to… okay, hold on.

Royal: Now, I don’t know… we’ll see if this holds.

Nehemia: Alma 42:30.

Royal: I’m not sure.

Nehemia: And I have to say, this isn’t the… website. Because now they’re going to make me hunt for the page, so hold on a second.

Royal: Oh, yeah. That is going to be…

Nehemia: It says, “a preparatory state”.

Royal: It’s 42:10.

Nehemia: Okay, so it’s going to be on page 337.

Royal: They’ve reset it. You’ve got to look at this…

Nehemia: My English is like Oliver Cowdery’s, I can’t spell.

Royal: I don’t know… they could have shifted the word spacing. There’s preparatory state…

Nehemia: Let’s find it here. We can edit this out if it’s…

Royal: There’s “probationary.” It’s in there.

Nehemia: “This probationary state, it became a preparatory state.”

Royal: Notice all this extra spacing.

Nehemia: You’re saying this extra space is because…

Royal: All of it. They spread that thing across because “probationary” was in there.

Nehemia: Is this because of what you call a stereotype? Or is this actual lead?

Royal: This is not a stereotype edition.

Nehemia: Okay. So, they had actual pieces of lead, T-H-E-M.

Royal: Yeah, they were still working on those 16 plates.

Nehemia: And they removed these letters, and they said…

Royal: No, they just put this one in, and they shifted things around.

Nehemia: Oh, they pushed it, okay. But they didn’t want to bother re-typesetting this, so they just left these extra spaces.

Royal: Yeah. This is extra, really long.

Nehemia: That’s cool. That’s cool.

Royal: And so, you can see that this is a doctored state. They changed it.

Nehemia: So, if we could find the proof sheet that came off the press, which we don’t have… I guess there’s the guy who claims he has it, the uncut sheets.

Royal: Well, no, wait, those aren’t that. Those are bad sheets, and only the last one is a proof sheet, only the last one. And it never appears in any bound Book of Mormon, that last sheet.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: So, collecting bad sheets as they went along… ripped-out portions, wrinkled, smeared ink… They had this collection, and at the end they just took the proof sheet and put it in as the 37th one.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: So, it’s really valuable to have a proof sheet.

Nehemia: For sure.

Royal: Because it’s the only one where we actually have a proof sheet.

Nehemia: But if we had the proof sheet for this one we would see, the spacing here would be smaller, and it would say, “It became a probationary state.”

Royal: “A probationary state.”

Nehemia: Okay, that’s cool. That’s very cool. Very cool.

Royal: Yeah, that’s right. That’s what we would see. But you usually can find evidence of it in the 1830.

Nehemia: Okay. So, here’s another one. “Chief Commander”. And again, here’s an example of how these aren’t theological changes. “Chief Commander” versus “Chief Captain”. Oh, and then here Joseph Smith reintroduced the error into the 1837…

Royal: Yes, because he was working off the printer’s manuscript. So, he put back in “captain” in that…

Nehemia: Wow, that’s amazing.

Royal: But this next one is the really interesting one.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: The 1830 typesetter had put “O” in accidentally somewhere.

Nehemia: Right, so here’s my confusion if “O” here is the original. So, the original has, “and now my son ye are called of God.” And the printer’s manuscript has, “and now, my son, ye are called of God.”

Royal: Right.

Nehemia: The 1830 has, “And now, O my son, ye are called of God.”

Royal: That’s right. The “O” is inserted by the typesetter, and then, when proofing it against the original, they decide that they ought to put “O” into the original. Oliver writes it in there in pencil. You didn’t… you know it isn’t good because if you see it in color, you see everything in color and then the penciling in of the “O”, and it’s in the wrong place. It’s in the wrong place. He put it in the wrong place. The current text has “O” there, and I took it out, of course. Those are interesting.

So, that whole section… is really influenced. And there are a couple of places where you’re not sure what really happened. But pretty much we can tell they caught errors. They corrected them, what they thought were errors, and they were. “Commander” and “probationary”, those were ones that needed to be fixed. If they had done it… we’d have a much better… See, that’s in pencil and the rest of it is in ink.

Nehemia: So, in the 1830 edition, the typesetter, who wasn’t even Mormon, put the “O” in.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: And now this has now been reintroduced from the 1830 edition back into the original manuscript in pencil.

Royal: This is Oliver Cowdery. The original should read like the 1830. He’s going backwards, so he puts in the “O”, but he puts it in the wrong place, “My O Son.”

Nehemia: This is incredible. Oh, he put it in the wrong place! Oh, wow! So, it should say, “O my son.”

Royal: Now he’s got, “My O son.”

Nehemia: “And now my O son, ye are called of God,” instead of “And now O my son.” Oh, wow, that’s amazing. So, they added the “O” based on the 1830 edition and they put it in the wrong place.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: And we know that because this is in pencil, and they used pencil in the print shop. Is that the idea?

Royal: That’s right, pencil is in the print shop, and ink is outside. They have a basic good rule to not use a pen in the print shop.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Except for some of the tape marks are in ink, but that’s the only time we ever find it.

Nehemia: So, it’s possible this was put in by the typesetter, who put the “O” in here.

Royal: No, that’s Oliver Cowdery.

Nehemia: That’s Oliver Cowdery, okay.

Royal: He’s the one doing the proofing against the original.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Royal: The 1830 says, “‘O my son,’ that makes sense. It must be a mistake. I’ll put it in.”

Nehemia: And he put it in the wrong place.

Royal: He put it in the wrong place.

Nehemia: And here’s why this is so valuable for someone like me. It would have never occurred to me that someone would change the original manuscript based on a copy, but that can happen. It happened here.

Royal: When they think it’s right, they’re going to do it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Nothing’s going to stop them.

Nehemia: That’s amazing! That’s absolutely amazing. Wow, that’s mind-blowing stuff to me.

So, let’s look at some other examples here. This is an interesting thing I want you to talk about. Let’s talk about this. Here the issue is some paratextual features.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: So, this is at the end of…

Royal: 1 Nephi.

Nehemia: 1 Nephi.

Royal: The beginning of 2 Nephi. It’s a new book. Joseph Smith was telling his scribe, when he saw the end of a section, to write “chapter”. It didn’t have any numbers, that’s just extra canonical. He knows he’s going to need chapter numbers, so he just puts “chapter”. There’s no numbers, he just puts in “chapter”. So, this handwriting is in the same ink as this, “chapter”.

Nehemia: Where it says here “chapter” in the middle, this is in the flow of the text?

Royal: Well, no, it isn’t. It’s at the end of 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi.

Nehemia: What I’m saying though, is, was this written originally? Or was this added into a blank space?

Royal: No, it’s original.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: It’s on its own line. It’s on its own line here, complete, and just the word “chapter”, in this quill ink as before and after. Then, later, Oliver Cowdery will come through and put in the chapter numbers.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: In case somebody else was doing it and they got off on the chapter numbers, and only the typesetter fixed it. But putting them in, they’re not canonical. So, he started with a “V”, and he made some mistake. He crossed it out and put in “VIII”. This is in heavier ink. It is not the same flow, it’s heavier ink. It says his quill dipped. Okay. So, he does that, then he starts reading down here, the Book of Nephi, and account, and so forth, and he realizes, “Wait a minute. This is a new book.” So, he crosses this out, and the number, and he puts “Chapter 1”. He writes it all at the same time.

Nehemia: That’s over here where he writes “Chapter 1,” right?

Royal: “Chapter 1.” And he put it in the wrong place, because it really belongs after the preface. There’s a preface here, and it should be down here.

Nehemia: So, it should be further on the page, okay.

Royal: It’s not canonical, he’s just putting it in. But then later you can really see heavier ink flow. Here, “The Second Book of Nephi.” There’s four Books of Nephi in the Book of Mormon. None of them are “First”, “Second”, “Third”, and “Fourth”. That’s all been added by editors and so forth. Oliver Cowdery added it here.

Nehemia: So, in the original, and what Joseph Smith, according to what you believe, read from the stone or the hat, said, “The Book of Nephi.”

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: And somebody added the word “Second” with a little caret symbol above the line.

Royal: He did, he did. That’s Oliver.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Now, the important thing is, Joseph Smith… see, I don’t believe Joseph Smith… he’s reading off a text. He doesn’t know what’s going to follow. This is why he says, “Write ‘chapter’ here,” because he came to an end and he could see that it was an end, however it was shown, and he said, “Write ‘chapter’… we’ve got a new chapter here.” And then they went on. And only later, when they came back, they said, “Well, we really don’t have a new chapter here, we have a new book.” And so, Oliver is making adjustments for that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: This, to me, shows that Joseph hasn’t got this thing… he’s not planning this thing out, and he should have known he was at the end of a book. But he doesn’t know he’s at the end of a book.

Nehemia: But he knows he’s at the end of some sort of section.

Royal: That’s all he knows. And he tells his scribe, “Write ‘chapter’ because we’re going to put the numbers in later.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: So, I think it’s very insightful, interesting, about what took place. So, in the Yale text, I don’t put the word “chapter” at all.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: I just put a little squiggly mark to represent a break.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And very often, Oliver Cowdery did put a squiggly mark when he put “chapter”. Like, he put “chapter” and then a squiggly and something. So, I put squiggly alone, no chapter, because it’s “extra canonical” as I call it.

Nehemia: Okay. And by extra canonical, I think you mean this wasn’t revealed to Joseph Smith, the word “chapter”, but the space was. Is that right?

Royal: The page was?

Nehemia: Meaning the word “chapter” wasn’t revealed.

Royal: No, it wasn’t.

Nehemia: That’s what you mean by…

Royal: It’s been added. I call it extra canonical; it’s been added to the canonical text.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Most people think that chapter belongs in the canonical text. It doesn’t. So, I take them out and I only have the current LDS chapters and verses out in the margin. I don’t even put the 1830 numbers at all.

Nehemia: Right. So, this is really interesting. In your belief something’s being revealed to him, but everything from what he sees, even coming out of his mouth, there’s not divine intervention. Now, contrast that with the story of the angels coming and helping him with the typesetting.

Royal: Well, that’s… yes, of course.

Nehemia: So, that’s the other extreme.

Royal: That’s made up by people. They can’t believe these typesetters in seven months did 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon, but they did. And we have almost a daily… we can see inside into what they’re doing in their struggles and all the problems. These people have paper being delivered, they have Scotch Roman type being delivered from Scotland, when in fact it came from the United States. It wasn’t made in… it’s just a face.

So, there are some Mormons that can’t believe that humans can do things; they’ve got to have God intervening everywhere. And in the transmission of the text, we just find… I don’t care what edition it is, there’s not one reading where you could say, “Oh, the Lord told the prophet here that this should be this reading.”

Now, they do say that they make a change, and the spirit confirms to them that it’s correct. They may do that; I don’t know whether it’s really accurate or not. I don’t ever base my decisions on anything like that. They sent me, once, a deal saying, “We want you to know that the first presidency in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles met in the temple on such and such a Thursday morning and approved this reading, and it says, ‘strait and narrow,’” where “strait” is “strait jacket narrow.” So, it’s redundant as “straight and narrow”. And I have it as “straight” and “narrow.”

Nehemia: Just to be clear, there’s “straight” as in there’s a straight line…

Royal: Not crooked, yeah.

Nehemia: …and there’s strait as in dire straits, narrow. Okay.

Royal: Like strait jacket or in these straits… difficulty.

Nehemia: And in the Greek New Testament it is “strait” as in not wide.

Royal: Yeah, it does that… Actually, the Book of Mormon gets through the gates and the paths and so forth appropriately, with Isaiah on one hand, and Mark and so forth on the other hand. But it’s okay, it’s fine. But when it came to that phrase, “strait and narrow,” which is not in the Bible, they wanted the redundant one, because Oliver Cowdery…

Nehemia: Just to be clear, redundant meaning, “strait and narrow” is a phrase, S-T-R-A-I-T…

Royal: That means “narrow and narrow”.

Nehemia: “Narrow and “narrow.” And that’s a very Hebraic style, to say something twice.

Royal: Yes, I understand that, and they made that argument. But I said, “But the Book of Mormon isn’t doing this.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: It isn’t doing it, so I went with the other. Anyway, they sent me this message that they had decided it was “narrow and narrow”, “strait and narrow”.

Nehemia: Wait, that actually happened? That somebody official sent you that message?

Royal: Yes, yes. The Secretary of the Committee wrote me and said, “We want you to know.” I dismissed it automatically. I said, “They have no evidence.” And even if they said God himself came down and told them it was “narrow and narrow”, I still wouldn’t follow them saying that. God would have to come down and tell me. I’m bad that way.

Nehemia: Okay. I try to have the approach that people in their faith believe all kinds of things, and it’s not for me to tell them what to believe. And if somebody wants to believe… and you obviously disagree, but if somebody wants to believe that angels came and helped the printer in New York make the first edition, okay, that’s your faith.

Royal: Well, I want the evidence.

Nehemia: What you’re saying is there isn’t evidence to support that. Fair enough.

Royal: There’s no evidence at all, and it’s just made up. It’s just made-up stuff, people. And I don’t like that kind of stuff. I like to see what the record says in the history, and so forth. So, I have not found any change. The church has always said that we had gone back to early sources. Joseph Smith said it when he did the ‘37 edition. He didn’t say, “I’ve got a new revelation.” And that’s one of the things I investigated in the ‘37 edition. I went through all 3,168 changes that he made.

Nehemia: Wow!

Royal: How many of them restored original readings of the original manuscript? Not many. Nine. What were they like? You and I could read those and predict what was correct. Like it said, “I spoke,” and it’s supposed to be, “I spake,” because the Book of Mormon only has “spake” 108 times. So, Joseph Smith would know that “spoke” was wrong, and he just changed it to “spake”. There are others like this that you and I could just predict. But the ones like, “Feeling your way towards the great and spacious building,” he didn’t change that one.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: All the ones that were missed by Oliver Cowdery when he copied, when the typesetter missed things, and so forth, they didn’t restore them. Joseph Smith didn’t restore them. And there was a religion professor that said the 1837 edition was a second inspired recension of the text. And I said, “Well, I don’t know what you mean by ‘inspired’, but I find no evidence of it.” I went through nine changes. They’re all predictable by you and me, anybody, and all the ones that he should have gotten, he missed. All the 200 and some… meaning that I put into the Yale text, he missed every one of them.

Nehemia: And I just want to emphasize, because I’m not Mormon… if there are Mormons who are watching this who are saying, “Whatever the church prints today, that is divinely inspired,” I’m not telling you that’s the case, Royal is.

Royal: They will, and they will say…

Nehemia: But it’s not my position to say that.

Royal: I understand that. They’re not going to come after you.

Nehemia: No, but I feel that it’s actually important for me to respect both views.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: And look, there are people in Judaism who will tell you, every single letter in the Torah scroll in their synagogue is what Moses wrote. And you can count the letters and find secret codes, even though there’s no two manuscripts that are identical. So, if you’re counting letters, it’s hopeless because… and here, particularly, it has to do with the spelling, which doesn’t change the meaning.

Royal: Yes, I know. I’ve seen those arguments.

Nehemia: So, alright, it’s not for me to tell them. I can tell them that I don’t find two manuscripts that are identical and so I don’t accept the thing about counting the letters. But if they want to believe that, then okay, I respect their belief. People believe all kinds of things.

Royal: I generally don’t.

Nehemia: Fair enough, that’s fine.

Royal: And I turn up that path a little more, and I say, “Let’s look at the real evidence, what we have in front of us, and it is faith-promoting.” The stuff I’m telling you is faith-promoting. It also shows that, when they did editions of the Book of Mormon, they tried their best. I think we can say that. There’s only one edition I’ve discovered where the typesetters were cheating Brigham Young: the 1841 edition. They did all kinds of nasty things in that text.

Nehemia: Which year was it?

Royal: 1841. In Britain, in Liverpool.

Nehemia: That was in Liverpool?

Royal: Yes. And it’s the worst printed book of the Book of Mormon. It’s got 720 typos.

Nehemia: Wow!

Royal: And the 1837 has about 200. 1840 has about 150, and all of a sudden you get 720 by these jokesters.

Nehemia: Wow. Let’s look…

Royal: Okay, go ahead.

Nehemia: I want to look at an example where there actually is sort of a theological… A lot of the examples we’re bringing, it doesn’t really matter…

Royal: That’s right, it doesn’t.

Nehemia: …whether it’s, “O my son,” or just “my son,” it doesn’t change the meaning.

Royal: I know it doesn’t.

Nehemia: But from my perspective, I spend all day, every day, looking at, “Is the word Sukkot spelled with two Vavs or one Vav or no Vav?”

Royal: Yeah, yeah…

Nehemia: It doesn’t change the meaning. But this is the bread and butter of Masoretic studies, which is my main thing.

Royal: That’s right. That’s what I do, too.

Nehemia: But here’s an example where it actually changes the meaning. It’s Alma 39:13.

Royal: Oh, that one’s really important.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, talk to me about this one. These are your slides, so present it. What do we have here?

Royal: So, originally, “repair that wrong” is what I believe the original manuscript read. It’s hard to read the word “repair”. The P has got a defect on top of it, so it looks like a T. And the R that he makes goes down a little, so it could be an N. So, when he did the copy of the original, he wrote “retain”. “And acknowledge your faults and retain that wrong which ye have done.”

Nehemia: And this is Oliver Cowdery who’s copying it?

Royal: It’s Oliver Cowdery copying his own hand, but there’s a defect in it. In fact, he dropped ink on this page, and the ascender to the P has a cross on it, a big ink drop, actually. But he interpreted it as a T. So, he gives “retain”. So, “retain that wrong which ye have done.” So, “retain” in the Book of Mormon can mean “keep it” or “to take it back”. Riteneo, the literal…

Nehemia: Take it back?

Royal: It isn’t even in Latin. Nobody ever used riteneo to mean “to take back,” but Riteneo, “retain that wrong which ye have done.” And you can think of it as when you commit sins, they’re out there somewhere and your job is to somehow get them back, take care of them.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: You could say “retain” is okay. But Talmage, in 1920, did not like “retain” there. It just didn’t really make sense to him, so he “x’d” it out. So, he changes what it says. He says, “Acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done.” “Go back and say you’re sorry. It’s okay.” I used to say this is the Clinton way of going about saying things. But the original… and there are other scriptures that talk about repairing the wrong which you have done, that you’re… is not just to acknowledge your mistakes, but to fix them, repair them. And I think I did one here. Did you get the next slide or not?

Nehemia: I don’t think I have that one, no. What’s…

Royal: I give other passages.

Nehemia: Do I have that? No, I don’t have that. But in other words…

Royal: There are others that talk about “repair that wrong which ye have done.” The very phrase…

Nehemia: So, that’s a phrase that appears in the Book of Mormon, “to repair the wrong that you have done.” And apparently that’s what this originally said, and…

Royal: That’s what it said I think, yes.

Nehemia: And in 1830 he printed, or copied, “retain”.

Royal: “Retain”, that’s right.

Nehemia: Right.

Royal: Keep it back. It doesn’t make much sense.

Nehemia: Yeah, it doesn’t make sense.

Royal: He realized that, but he made a mistake by deleting a word. So, then you end up with “just say you’re sorry, that’ll do the job.”

Nehemia: The beauty here is that Talmage could have never imagined that it was “repair,” and this is an example of what we’re talking about.

Royal: That’s right, he didn’t have a computer.

Nehemia: So, you were able to do a lot of this with computers. Talk about that just for a minute.

Royal: Well, I created… it took me three-and-a-half years, my own… I wrote the program to do a computerized collation of the two manuscripts lined up, 20 editions lined up. It automatically did the punctuation and the capitalization, but anytime there was a letter difference it stopped and asked me, “How do you want to line this up?” And that was really important, because Oxford had a program for doing a collation. It had a lot of garbage it put on, but it would automatically do these things. And it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. So, I wrote my own program and did my own controlling, and I created the computer collation. It’s basically the apparatus of the Book of Mormon, a total apparatus with every difference; punctuation, capitalization, the whole bit. And I’ve actually made that now available online in WordCruncher. Now WordCruncher is a search engine where you type in what you want, and it gives you all the examples. So, I’ve got it in that WordCruncher form. I’ve been using that since 2002 to write all the books and everything I’ve done. Every time I want to look at something, I go and look at what it is in the collation.

Then I wrote these six books called Analysis of Textual Variance, where I go through the main pages and talk about them, and argue for why they should be this way or not this way, and so forth. Then, when I published the collation, I did something that, as far as I know, has never been done in textual criticism. I gave, right beside the collation, the Analysis of Textual Variance linked with the variant.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: It gives the arguments. You can click on the argument immediately. You don’t have to go find the book or the articles somebody wrote about this issue.

Nehemia: This is the dream for Old Testament studies. But go on.

Royal: I put everybody’s stuff in that did work on the text, so their stuff is in my ATV. I call it ATV, all-terrain vehicle, I guess.

Nehemia: What does ATV stand for?

Royal: All-terrain vehicle, but it stands for Analysis of Textual Variance. It’s got every variant. It’s electronically there, and you can study the punctuation if you want to. Some people do; I don’t get thrilled much by it. But having it linked to the commentary directly, because otherwise, you’re at the mercy of a critical text. You look at that apparatus and unless you know what Alef means, and “A” and “B” in the New Testament, you are up a creek. And you don’t even know if, for this book, if Alef is really good or not.

Nehemia: It’s actually worse than that, because when you do track some of these things down, you find out the manuscript doesn’t say what they said it said in the…

Royal: Well, yeah, that’s… Comfort has shown a lot of that stuff. And I like Comfort too, because he’s got his commentary. But they’re selective, and it’s pretty much there, and you can use the collation to make your own studies. So, I made this available for $100 for people. I don’t think people realize what I’ve given them.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: I gave them a search engine that I’ve been using for 15 years.

Nehemia: And just to put this in perspective, you have all the available manuscripts, all the printed editions, am I right?

Royal: The most important ones.

Nehemia: The most important ones, okay.

Royal: The ones that affect the text.

Nehemia: So, if we’re looking at… let’s take the example of the New Testament, where we have over 5,000 manuscripts. No individual actually has access to all those 5,000 manuscripts, whereas they have access to everything, of significance at least, in the case of the Book of Mormon. It’s amazing that you have the full corpus of the textual…

Royal: Yeah, the apparatus is complete. It really is there. There are a few things that some people need to do. There’s a Deseret alphabet version that they did in 1858 of the 1852 text, but the only thing it would have in there is the pronunciation of names. It would tell you how they were pronouncing names at a certain time, but somebody else can study that.

Nehemia: That’s a master’s thesis for somebody out there.

Royal: That’s right, yeah.

Nehemia: Or maybe a dissertation.

Royal: So, I think the collation has been a really tremendous search engine, the key for me doing all the research I’ve done and having it… All the time when I’m writing, I just click on ATV, do a search for the word I want, and get what I’ve written about it, so I remind myself what I’ve written about it.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, I really appreciate it!

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!

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
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Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
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 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
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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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Or support Makor Hebrew Foundation by becoming a member of the Scholar Club.

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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!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio Transcript

Hebrew Voices #205 – Safeguarding History: Part 2

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

Levin: So many people ask me, “Well, you just read letters.” And I’m like, “I don’t think you understand how much knowledge I can gain from holding the piece of paper in my hand and taking a look at the way it’s constructed, the way it’s put together.” I mean, there’s so many things that when you get… and I feel the same way about those interviews. Just having the information isn’t enough. Watching it actually happening and understanding what society was like at that point of time is something that can’t be retrieved once it’s gone.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here with TikTok creator Levin Parker, who makes videos advocating and educating on collecting. And he has a focus on stamps.

This brings up a different point, which is, how do we know what happened in the past? I think the average person thinks, “Okay, I’ll look it up on Wikipedia.” But what’s Wikipedia based on? It’s based on a lot of scholarly… hopefully based on a lot of scholarly work that’s been done.

Levin: Hopefully!

Nehemia: And what’s that work based on? It’s based on all kinds of sources. We think of something like, let’s say, the American Revolution. So, we have diaries, and we have letters that people wrote.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then, we have a history book that was written 100 years later that was based on sources maybe that aren’t around anymore.

Levin: Yep.

Nehemia: So, there’s all kinds of different sources. And some of those sources will be propaganda from the British during the Revolution that maybe are lying, and maybe it’s propaganda from the Americans who are lying.

Levin: Yes.

Nehemia: And that’s why it’s all the more important to go back and look at some of these primary sources. And we have primary sources like a letter that somebody is writing, one guy to another, and telling you, “I’m in such and such a city and the British have been here for three months.” Okay, now, maybe he’s wrong.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Maybe the British are only there for two months, but at least we can combine different sources and get kind of a picture of what was going on. And the farther you go back in history, the more difficult, of course, that is to do.

Levin: Yes. And not only that, but I think that when you get into those primary sources… A lot of history writing is about telling us what the motivations were for things to happen, and I think that’s why I like ephemera so much. Because I think if you’re going to get a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a close personal friend, talking about why he did something, no matter what it is, it’s going to be a much more honest motivation than something he wrote in his diary. Because, what he wrote in his diary, he knew that was going to be published. He knew that he was trying to fulfill a specific narrative. Whereas when you’re writing a letter to a friend that you expect to be discarded, that’s where you’re actually chopping it out and really showing that depth. And that’s why I’m so attracted to postal history, because I think it’s the most honest way to really understand what it is people are doing, because it is the most raw and unfiltered version.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, guys, you might think, “Nehemia, why are you doing a program about collecting, and postal history, and philatelic matters?”

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because look, here’s just an application of that. We have Paul’s letter to the Galatians, or the Ephesians. So, this is something historians will talk about. Was that letter intended to be part of the New Testament? Or was Paul writing a letter to a specific community at a specific time?

There’s the passage in the New Testament where the guy says, “I forgot my coat.” Now, a lot of New Testament historians will say that that actually is part of the evidence that it’s a forgery. That that’s the type of thing that you would put in there if you were trying to pretend that your letter was really written by… I think it was Paul, or whoever wrote that letter. But in real letters you write that kind of thing. You’ll talk about things that 1,000 years from now people will say, “What is the reason he’s talking about his coat? Is that a metaphor? An allegory?” No! He left his coat!

Levin: Yeah! And well you know, again, it’s about understanding that 100 years ago even, every communication that you had with every other human being that wasn’t immediately within your own vicinity, you would send something out and wait days or even months in order to receive a reply. And that was your reality of human connections. And that lack of immediacy… just understanding how much that changes your viewpoint, of like you said, with a letter… like, every letter I read, it’s a description of “Here are the nine different conversation threads that we have going on and you’re addressing all the things from the previous letter that you got, unless it’s a business deal.”

And I don’t know the passage; I’m not a New Testament scholar. But yeah, “I left my coat” to me would lend credibility to it because that’s how people write letters. You’re not going to send a one-topic letter. Usually, it’s going to be multiple topics.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, when historians come to study the early 21st century, they’re going to come head-to-head with the issue of… I mean, talk about ephemeral! You have something like Snapchat…

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which I’m not sure I’ve ever used in my life. But isn’t there something on Snapchat where you send a message, and it immediately disappears after a certain number of seconds, or something?

Levin: I have daughters, and I use Snapchat with them, so… it does. But I think the bottom line is that unless that data is saved… because there are things there that you can’t get. But there’s so many things even from the early parts of the internet that are now gone. There was just a story about a major media company that took all of their…

Nehemia: MTV, I saw that!

Levin: MTV, yeah. They just took all of those past archives… and it’s just insanity that they would just shut that down from a historical point of view. But I agree with you; it’s going to be a really interesting way that future historians delve into it.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, MTV had this website with decades of all kinds of stuff…

Levin: Interviews and everything.

Nehemia: …including music history, and they just deleted it. Because they were like… I don’t know why, but I assume they said, “We don’t want to pay for this bandwidth. Nobody comes and looks at these archives.”

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: And like you said, interviews. So, you might have had an interview with, I don’t know, I’m just making something up; Elton John the day after Princess Diana died. Imagine if you had that interview. He wrote that famous song about Princess Diana, Elton John… but maybe the day she died he’s doing an interview where he says, “I don’t really like her that much. She’s kind of annoying.” And I’m making this up. He didn’t say that.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: But you’ve now lost things like that. And then a week later he’s like, “Oh my gosh, she was such an amazing person.” Because there’s kind of that nostalgia that sets in almost immediately in a case like that, when someone passes away. But that’s all gone now; they erased the archives.

So, this is a beautiful thing. Somebody could have gone… and you have the internet archive; they could have gone and archived that. I don’t know if they did, and preserved that, and they’re considered kind of like pirates doing that. But these pirates could be preserving history.

Levin: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s true. I mean, there’s a huge collecting market for bootleg recordings of old TV commercials, programs, local news stations, all of that stuff, because oftentimes the masters have been discarded. These small news stations and stuff like that, they get rid of that. And so, there is a huge market for exactly that kind of media capture.

And I think that it’s just like you were talking about those statues, where you wanted to get in there and get some modern pictures and look at that transcription. So many people ask me, “Well, you just read letters.” And I’m like, “I don’t think you understand how much knowledge I can gain from holding the piece of paper in my hand and taking a look at the way it’s constructed, the way it’s put together.” I mean, there’s so many things that when you get… And I feel the same way about those interviews, that just having the information isn’t enough. Watching it actually happening and understanding what society was like at that point in time is something that can’t be retrieved once it’s gone.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Levin: And it’s funny, because you’re absolutely right. Piracy collections are definitely highly collectable because oftentimes they’re the only examples of those recordings.

Nehemia: I just saw a thing about… there was an audiobook of… I don’t even remember what it was. Like, some movie that started out as a book, and they did an audiobook. And then when the movie came out, it got really popular, and they said, “Well, we want to redo this audiobook.” So, they hired another actor, and they redid the audiobook, and the previous audiobook is now gone.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: There’s no copies of it. People were like, “That was an amazing… There was actually original acting in that earlier version of the audiobook. And we can’t access it anywhere and nobody has a copy of it.”

And look, when I was a kid, I was a Doctor Who fan. And one of the famous things about Doctor Who is the BBC, not some small television station, threw out the originals. They literally threw them in the garbage, the originals of years and years of episodes. And now, every once in a while, a reel, a physical reel, will show up.

Levin: Yes.

Nehemia: I think there was one recently found in Ethiopia from some local station that was broadcasting it!

Levin: Yeah!

Nehemia: And they’re like, “Oh! Does anybody want this before we throw it away?” “Yes! That’s a lost episode that can’t be recreated!” And there’s one that showed up in Australia.

So, there’s an example of how collecting can be really valuable. And then, sometimes public institutions maybe don’t have the resources. Maybe they think, “Yeah, this is important, but we can’t keep everything,” which I kind of understand. They’re asset rich but cash poor, like we said.

Levin: Yes.

Nehemia: And then, the private market can do that, or the private collector. It’s really interesting stuff. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever collected, or been involved in collecting, or held in your hands? I don’t know.

Levin: My favorite item in my collection, definitely not my most expensive or my most historical item, is actually the very first cover I spent serious money on. I spent about 300 bucks on it. It was written to a gentleman that was involved in the wars against the Plains Indians in northern Wyoming in the 1870’s. And the reason I love it so much, and I won’t go into too much detail, but through the years… I’ve owned it about 15 years. And I found, not just where he was stationed, who he was fighting, what that fighting impact had on everything that was going on, I also found he had a diary that existed. And so, I know what was going on in his life during that point in time. And he actually had a son die just as he was receiving that letter, that he just heard about. And he left the war to ride 90 miles overnight to go and visit his wife and console her on the death of their child for 24 or 48 hours, and then rode back to join back up with the campaign and continue to fight.

Nehemia: Wow.

Levin: That ability to delve into somebody’s life and understand that he’s not just a soldier, he’s also a father and a husband. And to show that sign of humanity and to have that kind of experience, it’s something that, to me, shows how I can have one item, and over the course of years I learn more and more and more and more. And that’s true for many of the items that I have. I have so many items that I’ve bought for a specific reason, and then I look at it down the road and I’m like, “Oh wow, I didn’t even realize that this had implications here,” or “this explains this.” And I think that that’s what really gets me going. It’s not just the value or the historicality, but the ability to really step into somebody else’s shoes and understand what their life was like.

Nehemia: Wow. Alright, so, I’ll share this with you because it’s a philatelic… well, not about stamps per se, but… The most famous rabbi in history, or one of the most famous, was Moses Maimonides, who was actually a refugee from Spain and ended up settling in Egypt, where he was the sultan’s, or whatever the guy’s title was, the ruler’s personal doctor. And Maimonides’ brother was a merchant who went on trips to India to trade spices or whatever he traded, I don’t know. And he died on a voyage to India, his brother. Maimonides tells the story of how he would hold the last letter that he received from his brother, and he would cry over it because it was so precious to him.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, there was a synagogue in Cairo called the Ben Ezra Synagogue. And there was a little broom closet type thing in the front of the synagogue where, when they had an old book or anything written with Hebrew letters, they would toss in there because there was this idea that you can’t destroy God’s name. And if God’s name was written on a document, whether it was a Bible or any document, you had to preserve it, not destroy it. Let nature consume it over time. So, they would throw it into this chamber, called the Genizah, called the Cairo Genizah. In 1896, this professor comes from Cambridge, Solomon Schechter, and he says to the synagogue, “Hey, you guys probably don’t want this. Let me clear up some space for you.” And he purchases the full contents of the Genizah.

Levin: Wow!

Nehemia: And they found the letter that Maimonides talked about, the letter from his brother.

Levin: Wow!

Nehemia: Which is amazing!

Levin: That’s so cool!

Nehemia: It wasn’t meant to be preserved, and…

Levin: Yeah. And I can tell you that one of the other items that I really love is… I have about a dozen items from the actual Oregon Trail that were sent home by folks that were on the trail. And one of my favorites is the absolutely most bedraggled… I mean, it looks terrible. It looks like a piece of garbage. It’s definitely the least valuable one I have. But you can see the care, and the trail dust, and the dirt, and you can see that somebody deeply, deeply cherished this item. And there’s something very special about owning something that has private information that was so special to them, because I think it gives you a deeper connection with them.

It’s just like when I did a video about my daughter’s phone charms, and it’s something she’s done since she very first had a phone. And it seems stupid, but it’s such a big part of something she carried around and is part of her persona her whole life. I consider it collectible, because it highlights who she was at a certain point, and it’s something understandable of a young girl. I mean, the wad is ridiculous.

Nehemia: It’s bigger than the phone. I’ve seen that video!

Levin: It is! You have? Yeah. But I think that’s the thing that really drives me with collecting is that it gives you an insight into somebody else’s life.

Nehemia: Yeah, wow. So, this has been a fascinating conversation. Let me ask you one last thing. When I was a kid, I had a friend, one of my closest friends. He and his family were moving, and they had to get rid of a bunch of stuff, and he gave me this index card box full of stamps. I wish I had saved it, but I didn’t, and it was Hitler stamps.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: From World War II.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Or maybe from before World War II in some cases, I don’t remember. What was that worth? Was that necessarily worth a lot? Or maybe not?

Levin: No. They produced… I mean, obviously they were very aggressive about producing stamps with his image on them. There are a couple of special Hitler stamps that are worth money, but the vast, vast majority, they sell at a very minor premium over every other stamp, because people like the taboo aspect of having something from Nazi Germany that has his image on it. But they’re not necessarily valuable by any means. You didn’t throw away anything…

Nehemia: You’re making me feel a little bit better. I don’t know if I threw them away. What happened was, my family moved. My mother moved to Israel in 1990, and while I was away at summer camp, she got rid of pretty much all my stuff. And I came back… it’s a long story, but I came back from being away for like six weeks, or eight weeks, and I’m like, “Where’s all…” I actually had library books that I had borrowed, and I’m like, “Where are my library books?”

Levin: Oh, no.

Nehemia: She’s like, “Oh, I sold all of that in bulk by the pound.” And I had a coin collection. It wasn’t really valuable… it was valuable to me. It had a few Morgan dollars that were worth like $20 or something, which was a lot of money when I was a little kid.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: But it was valuable to me. And most of that was sold off in bulk, including those Hitler stamps. And I always wondered, “Oh, what was that worth?” And it was interesting, because my friend was Jewish too, and he obviously got this from a grandfather or somebody who must have collected these. Probably at the time they were issued, I would imagine. Or maybe it was people who were coming as refugees and were sending letters.

And by the way, this is a really interesting thing; Hitler was a very wealthy man, because he charged a royalty on every use of his image.

Levin: I believe that!

Nehemia: Including those stamps. Which is crazy!

Levin: You know, I might steal that for a TikTok. And I’ll tell you, I know we’re done here, but actually, during World War II there’s numerous stories of people putting large amounts of cash into truly rare stamps because they were so incredibly portable. You could sew them into the lining of a jacket, and then when you did that you couldn’t… well, you wouldn’t feel it like you would a diamond or just a piece of paper. And it’s so small that you could get away with it. And there are numerous stories of folks that were fleeing Europe during wartime that put enormous amounts of money into philatelic items and stamps because they were such a good hedge against the authorities.

Nehemia: Wow. I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating!

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, thank you so much for joining me, this has been a fascinating discussion. It’s a little bit off-topic of what we usually do, but I learned a lot. This has been really fun.

Levin: Well, thank you. I had a great time!

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!

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
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 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
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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.

Make a lasting impact through the year by making your donation recurring.

Please Donate Here

Or support Makor Hebrew Foundation by becoming a member of the Scholar Club.

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VERSES MENTIONED
2 Timothy 4:13

BOOKS MENTIONED
1984
by George Orwell

RELATED EPISODES
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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
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Hebrew Voices #163 – Treasures of the Hebrew Library in Cincinnati: Part 1
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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!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio Transcript

Hebrew Voices #204 – Safeguarding History: 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.

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

Leven: There’s this impression that the best way to protect anything is through institutions and museums. And that’s just not true, and history has not borne that out.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here with TikTok creator Leven Parker, who makes videos advocating and educating on collecting. He has a focus on stamps, and I guess I would call him an expert on philatelic matters. What’s that word, Leven?

Leven: You got it, buddy! You did it right!

Nehemia: Is that right?

Leven: You got it right!

Nehemia: What do you call stamp collecting? There’s a big word I can’t say.

Leven: Philately is…

Nehemia: That one!

Leven: Yes, yes!

Nehemia: Alright! So, this is a little bit off topic for me, and I’ll just put it out there, something that you said to me when I asked you to do the interview. You said, “Look, I’m not an expert on Hebrew stuff or manuscripts.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, I’ll just put that out there. I saw a really interesting video that you did where you advocated for the importance of private collections. And the reason I was interested in that is that my main focus right now is Hebrew Bible manuscripts. And most of the important Hebrew Bible manuscripts are in public collections such as museums and libraries. But most of them started out in private collections, and then gradually over time became part of public collections.

And I had one particular colleague who said, “All those private collectors, their collections should be nationalized,” this person is European, “and they should become the domain of the state.” So, you made a really interesting case for private collections; not talking about manuscripts, but in general. And I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard such a good case made for private collecting.” I want you to share that, just because. I don’t know if anybody else will be interested in this, but I’m interested in this.

Leven: Yeah, well I appreciate that. That’s one of those videos that didn’t do well, necessarily, compared to some of my other videos, but it was really one of my personal favorites. Because I think it’s a discussion that desperately needs to be had, because there’s this impression that the best way to protect anything is through institutions and museums. And that’s just not true, and history has not borne that out. I mean, when you have major cultural destructions, it’s because you have all of these items that are gathered in one place, and so, they’re vulnerable just because of their density.

When you think about things like the library of Alexandria or what happened in the Middle East with ISIS when they destroyed… I don’t know the names of everything that got destroyed, but watching those museums be pillaged and plundered was horrifying to see.

Nehemia: The pillaging and the plundering, which I kind of expected more, but ISIS in 2015 and thereabouts, when they conquered certain areas, they actually said, “These are ancient artifacts to collectors, but to us these are idols, and it’s idolatry, and our religion says we should destroy all idols.” And they just blew stuff up for no good reason.

Leven: Yeah, yes, and that’s exactly what I was referring to. I was thinking about it, it was probably a 20-foot-tall statue or something that they were just going at with a jackhammer and explosives. I mean, it was just horrifying…

Nehemia: There’s the famous example of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan that were blown up by… what were the people? The Taliban.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: That was even before ISIS. Now, those aren’t actually movable.

Leven: No, but…

Nehemia: But there were things in museums that they actually went and blew up and destroyed.

Leven: Yeah. And that’s all that I’m saying, is that the first step to making sure that you can preserve that history is redundancy; getting it to where it’s not isolated in one area, where it’s not subject to a single event like war, or fire, or tsunami, or whatever the case may be. Whenever you concentrate that many important things together, you’re opening yourself up to a larger level of risk.

In addition to that, as you mentioned, almost everything in museums started… almost everything in museums started in either a private collection or was ill-gotten through colonization. That’s the vast majority of what’s in museums, is stuff that came out of private collections. And I think that without an active collector market, you don’t have that farm team on the ground able to ferret out all of those important things.

I mean, right now is a fascinating time to be a postal history collector because all of the World War II material is now 70, 90 years old. I mean, it’s getting to that point where you’re having all of this stuff coming out of attics, and if you don’t have a really active collector market that’s out there trying to pick these things up, then it’s all going to get lost to history. And the best way to ensure that there is no collector market is to make it illegal to be a collector or to put hindrances on being a collector.

In addition to that, when you’re a collector and you pay serious money for any kind of item… and even if you don’t pay serious money, anything that you buy, you’re actually going to take the time and look at it and do some research on it. And that’s simply not true for most museums. Most museums have an enormous backroom and warehouses and have unbelievable amounts of stuff that sits, for hundreds of years in many cases, and never is looked at by anybody. And when you have somebody that’s putting some skin in the game and is buying it and is trying to assemble a collection… For example, I saw a presentation from a gentleman that was doing blockade-run mail during the Revolutionary War here in America.

Nehemia: Tell us what that means, blockade-run mail. What’s the blockade?

Leven: The British had blockaded ports. And I don’t want to speak specifically… I believe New York, but I don’t know all of the history specifically and I don’t want to get it wrong, but they blockaded a number of ports. And so there were privateers that were running those blockades in order to get mail through. And he actually identified… I can’t remember the number, but it was significant, it was somewhere between 7 and 12 covers that were not previously known to be blockade-run covers that he had identified and brought to light. And they were sold as such.

And collecting is full of examples of literature of people that are doing real scholarship on the items that they collect. And to say they don’t add something to the history is, in my opinion, just ridiculous.

Nehemia: So many things come to mind here. I don’t know where to even start.

Leven: Sorry, that was a lot.

Nehemia: No, that’s great! It really is amazing stuff. I think this is a really important conversation. It’s the kind of conversation that normally doesn’t take place. There is this issue in my field… For example, one of the places I lecture pretty much every year is called the SBL, The Society of Biblical Literature, and they have a policy, an actual official policy… and this is really interesting. They have a policy that anything that is in private hands with a questionable provenance… and you can talk about what provenance is…

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: You’re not allowed to give a lecture on it. And it can’t be published in a journal associated with the SBL, which is many American scholarly journals in biblical studies. But they have a special exception for Cuneiform tablets, which are tablets written in the ancient languages of Iraq, basically, and other parts of the Middle East use the writing as well. And why is that? Because without that there would be no Cuneiform studies. There’s so much in private hands that they had to carve out a special exemption!

And I’ve spoken to scholars; I interviewed one on this program who was involved in Edomite inscriptions, which are this very niche thing, that come from the mountains around Hebron. And all of them were pillaged in recent years, in the last 20 to 30 years. And by pillaged, I mean they weren’t official archeological excavations. It was some guy who comes in the middle of the night with a shovel, and he digs up and finds these inscriptions.

So, the entire corpus of Edomite inscriptions, except for maybe a couple dozen, come from illegal excavations. And it’s a bit complicated, because if they come from areas that are a part of Israel, well, the Israeli government claims ownership over them. If they come from the Palestinian territories, what’s called Area A and Area B, the Palestinian Authority makes a claim over them. Well, who knows where they come from?

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: We don’t know exactly. And it’s a difference of a few miles, sometimes a few hundred meters. So, talk about provenance.

Leven: Provenance is one of those things that is a double-edged sword. Provenance is simply the history of where an item came from, who’s owned it, and whose hands it’s passed through. In the case of archeology, where was it originally dug? Who was it dug by? And where it was transferred from there. For most collectible items, it’s the discovery of it, and then it goes through the line of whoever has bought it from one to the next.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leven: And provenance is important. But I think that one of the things to really consider is also that you don’t want to just disregard things about provenance. That’s why we have experts. Because in order to fool the guys that I know of that do top end postal history, it’s not that it doesn’t happen, it’s that it’s so difficult to happen. And I’m just a collector of relatively modest means, but I can tell you, trying to pass off an envelope that was mailed out of my special area, out of Wyoming, and be able to get away with it, the knowledge that I have is not in any book at all. It’s through 20 years of research.

And there are so many collectors out there that are better at really specific niche areas than anybody in scholarship, because it is a lifelong pursuit. It’s not one thing that they’ve done at one time. And I think, to disregard collector scholarship would do an enormous disservice to history because collectors find things all the time, every single day, that do have significance and that are important, even without, necessarily, the provenance.

Now, I’m not as knowledgeable about all the archeology ins and outs. I read about it, and I follow it, and the drama is interesting, but I definitely think things should be taken as they are. And there are many items that I would say, “Yes, it doesn’t have a provenance and there’s something about it that makes it kind of dodgy.” And so, you do have to discard those and play those games. But I think that to disregard anything a collector is doing as being useless or insignificant without it going through official hands is hubris.

Nehemia: So, there’s actually two issues here. Provenance is a fancy way of saying, “How did that artifact get into the hands of that particular person or collector?” And it’s really interesting… so, there’s two issues here. One is, how do we know it’s real? Did it come from an archeological excavation? And it went from the excavation to, let’s say, the Israel Antiquities Authority. And then sometimes the Israel Antiquities Authority will say, “We have 10,000 of these. We’ll give a license to a dealer who wants to sell another sarcophagus, because how many do we need?”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then, when you buy that in the private market, you want to be able to show, “Hey, I have this letter from the Israel Antiquities Authority given to me by the dealer, and it shows it came from this and this place.” That’s provenance; it’s kind of the chain of custody.

Leven: That’s exactly what it is.

Nehemia: So, it does two things. One is, it shows that it’s real. Or, if it was faked, it was faked by the archeologist, which is pretty unlikely. But it does happen.

Leven: Yeah…

Nehemia: And I’ll bring an example in a minute. And number two is, it shows that it wasn’t stolen. And that’s a really big deal. There’s a famous case of the Museum of the Bible who purchased, I believe it was tablets from Iraq, if I’m not mistaken, and they had them as part of their collection very publicly. And it was pretty easily shown that they were taken illegally out of Iraq. And they had to, number one, give them back to Iraq. And the word “back” is interesting; we can talk about that. They had to give them to Iraq. And number two, they were fined millions of dollars. I think it was three million dollars or something. So, they weren’t fake, but they didn’t have ownership over them. And this goes to a really interesting issue, which is that there’s this international treaty called UNESCO, if I’m not mistaken…

Leven: Yeah, I think so.

Nehemia: Which says that an artifact belongs to the country where it originated unless that country relinquishes ownership, or it was owned before they signed the UNESCO treaty, and it went into effect in that country.

So, for example, if you have an Egyptian sarcophagus from a hundred years ago, you’re allowed to own that privately. But if the government of Egypt says, “Wait a minute. That was taken out of our country in 1985,” then they might not have even known it existed. That’s the crazy thing.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s what’s really interesting about UNESCO. Even if they don’t know the artifact existed, they can claim ownership over it if it’s proven… and this is an international treaty, that it was taken out of the country without permission after a certain date.

I once bought a book from Italy, and it was from the 1600’s. So not that old; it’s a printed book. It wasn’t that rare, but it was expensive. It was like, I don’t know, a few hundred dollars. And the guy in Italy said, “You know…” I tried to buy it. And this was on AbeBooks.com, not some illicit site.

Leven: Yeah, I buy off of there. I love AbeBooks, yeah!

Nehemia: So, he said, “I live in this little village in Italy, and if I want to send this to you, because you’re outside of the European Union, I’ve got to go to the nearby town, which is a day’s journey,” meaning back and forth, and parking, and waiting, and getting permission.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: He said, “Look, this just isn’t worth it. Next time somebody buys something I’ll include yours as well, but I’m not going to go there especially for you.” I ended up buying that book from Belgium, and the guy did the same thing, but he lived in some big town. He literally had to go to a government agency to get permission to ship it outside of the European Union.

And this is an interesting thing that happened with the Museum of the Bible; they purchased a Valmadonna manuscript, which is the earliest Hebrew manuscript from England that’s survived.

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: It’s a Bible from the 1100’s, so the 12th century, if I’m not mistaken.

Leven: And it’s in Hebrew?

Nehemia: It’s in Hebrew. There were Jews in England before they were expelled.

Leven: Wow, that’s a fascinating artifact!

Nehemia: Oh, it’s very fascinating. So, it’s the earliest Hebrew manuscript from England, or maybe Bible manuscript from England, and so they purchased that at an auction in Europe. But it wasn’t obvious that they’d be allowed to take it out of the European Union because they said, “Okay, you own it. But it has to stay within the European Union unless you can get permission.” In the end they were given permission because it was… I think it was in Italy. So, they said, “Well it started in England anyway. It didn’t originate in Italy. So, if you take it out of Italy…” Meaning, their thought was, if it was written in Italy and it’s in Italy now, it should remain in Italy. That was the Italians’ position. “But since it was written in England, what do we care? You can take it to the United States or take it to some other country. It doesn’t come from here.” But that was a decision of a government bureaucrat, or a set of government bureaucrats.

Leven: Yeah!

Nehemia: Alright, so talking about provenance…

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: …I’ve seen examples where… well, we mentioned the Museum of the Bible, it’s the famous example with the tablets. But there are examples where somebody bought something at a public auction, so it’s got the seal of approval of, like, Sotheby’s, and Sotheby’s is saying that yes, this comes from a private collection, and it hasn’t been stolen. And later they find out no, it was actually stolen from… Well, “It came from such and such a museum and there’s no evidence the museum agreed to that.” It was World War II or something, and after World War II it was missing. I know examples of that.

Leven: Yeah, there’s definitely examples of that.

Nehemia: So, number one is that it’s stolen, and number two, is it fake? That’s why provenance is important. So, talk to me about… you’re saying they can’t fake it in your field. Or maybe it’s not worth faking it.

Leven: You know, I’m not saying that it can’t happen, but I’m saying that to immediately dismiss everything without provenance defeats the point of scholarship. I think that you definitely have to take into consideration, and give better credence to, items that do have provenance. But when you take a look at any field, there are so many intriguing items that don’t have that clear chain of custody. But even without that clear chain of custody, I think that things can be learned from them. Because, assuming that everything that doesn’t happen by a procedure that was created in the 1920’s, 40’s, 50’s, I don’t know when, that everything that wasn’t discovered that way is automatically not put into consideration. I don’t think that makes sense. And I think that any collector, and most museums would agree with that, is that you assess an item based upon its own right. And there’s lots of stuff that you say, “This is cool, but I don’t know.” That definitely happens.

But I think that people get too caught up in just that process, saying that everything has to be cut and dried. And the truth is, a lot of things are messy. A lot of things are not black and white. A lot of things do have a lot of questions attached to them, and that’s why we take so much time to study and see what fits together, and what doesn’t. And what registers, and what makes sense, as far as in my field of postal markings. But the same is true in any field; there’s all kinds of things that it has to fit consistently with the rest of the record that’s on hand and show signs that would exclude it from being fake. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leven: I think provenance is important, but it’s not the be all and end all of everything. And I do think it’s important that we consider where things originated from. And I think all of those treaties… it’s definitely way above my pay grade, and it’s understandable why a lot of these countries are very defensive. I mean, Italy has amazing stuff and they’re notorious for having huge bureaucracies.

Nehemia: Yeah. So look, the issue of provenance for, let’s say the SBL, The Society of Biblical Literature… and this is what they say, is that, if they allow you to work on things that the provenance isn’t clear, what it will do is encourage the guy who goes with a shovel in the middle of the night and digs stuff up. So, if you allow it into the scholarly field, it ends up encouraging that. And they don’t want to encourage the people who are pillaging.

Look, the Dead Sea Scrolls started out with a Bedouin… the story is, he was looking for his sheep. And he threw a rock into a cave and heard a jar break. And he said, “Why is something breaking in the cave?” And he went and found these scrolls. Well, recent scholarship claims that’s actually not true, that this Bedouin was looking for artifacts, probably silver and gold, and he found leather. And he’s like, “Okay, this has got to be worth something.” But the bottom line is, nobody disputes the Dead Sea Scrolls started out in a private collection.

Leven: And I think you also that have to… to me, it’s all about efficacy, and the idea that not working on those items in any way betters a Bedouin who is trying to make just a couple of bucks for his family by finding artifacts in the desert. The idea that that has any impact on those items being dug is, in my opinion, ridiculous. There’s going to be people that are willing to buy old stuff, and the bottom line is, those items are going to come to light. So why would we miss great opportunities of history because of that? Because stopping work on those items only harms our understanding of history. In no way does it change the trade in illegal antiquities.

Nehemia: So, talk to me. This is a question that… how do I put it? It’s not obvious that somebody would collect old stuff, so why should someone be a collector? Let’s start from scratch.

Leven: I can tell you, because, actually, as I’ve done with my TikTok channel, I put a lot of thought into that question, about what it is that draws me to collecting. And I think the answer that I’ve come up with is that, to me, collecting is an anthropological expedition. It allows me to understand what it was like to live on the plains of Wyoming in the 1920’s versus the 1870’s, versus the 1850’s. Or understand what the motivations were behind somebody that lived inside a big city in the 1930’s. It allows me to put myself in somebody else’s place because it’s completely unfiltered history. It is something that was physically there, and in their hands, and the way that it was used. And so, it gets rid of the narrative that you receive in any textbook, no matter what it is, that they’re looking at the types of items that I collect in order to write histories. And so, the more I can expose myself directly to those items, the better I understand.

And so, I think the fascination with collecting for me is that I gained a deeper understanding of humanity and the way people work and what their motivations are, and a deeper understanding of why things happen. Because so often with those narratives of history, we say, “Well this happened because of this.” And that’s almost never true. There are almost always 40,000 things that influenced one thing that happened. And the deeper you can immerse yourself in the actual items that existed and were around then, and that they were exposed to and that were influencing them, whether it be advertising or postal history, or whatever the case may be, I think it gives you a deeper anthropological intimacy with our forefathers and with everybody that came before us.

And it’s allowed me… I mean, I live way out isolated in western Wyoming, so trying to understand the universe of somebody that’s grown up in the inner city of Chicago is something that’s extraordinarily difficult to do because I have no frame of reference for it. But through items, I feel like it gives me an opportunity to at least get some small pictures into that life.

Nehemia: I grew up on the North Side of Chicago in the city, but I wouldn’t call it the inner city.

Leven: I think you would agree that I have no idea what that life is about, growing up in Wyoming!

Nehemia: So, it’s really interesting. I lived almost my entire life in apartment buildings, and when I moved into a house four years ago, it was like, “Wow! This is a completely different way of living.” If you hear something moving upstairs, it’s rats, not the neighbor’s kid who is jumping around and playing. It’s a different kind of way of living, for sure.

Wow, so, interesting stuff. So, you mentioned the blockade. So, I was looking here, and I found it. I discussed this in a podcast I did with Micheal Kochin a few years ago, and we’ll put up a link to it on the page. It’s called Jewish Freedom in America. But we discussed this letter. It was written… In fact, I’m going to share my screen here. This is JSTOR, where a scholarly article was written about it. It was a letter of Jonas Phillips, dated July 28, 1776, and it was written to a Jew named Gumpel Samson, and was written in what we call today Yiddish. When this was published back then it was called Judeo-German, meaning it was published in 1894.

Leven: Okay.

Nehemia: It’s a letter in which he mentions the American Revolution. And the letter today is in England, or the United Kingdom, because it says here it was intercepted by the British.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: So, here we have an actual letter that somebody wrote.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: So, that’s maybe an example of philatelic history.

Leven: And I tell you what, actually what I can do is, I believe I know a website where there’s a link to that entire collection display. You should see the display on postal history. The folks… they put…

Nehemia: Give me the link and we’ll put it up on the page, on NehemiasWall.com.

Leven: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, is that I can show you specific examples of those because of the scholarship he did on that… and there are thousands and thousands of exhibits like that where people have gone to incredible depths to find information and uncover new truths about history that’s done in just my field, much less every other collecting field.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, what’s interesting about this letter is, number one: here’s information about the American War of Independence, or Revolutionary War, that we normally wouldn’t think about. It’s from a Jew in the colonies, or now the nascent United States, who’s writing, not in English, but because he’s writing to another Jew, he’s writing in his native language, or the language he knows at least, which is Yiddish. Which is, like I said, they called Judeo-German because it’s German written in Hebrew characters but with lots of Hebrew and Slavic words, so it’s not exactly German. And then we only have that letter… So, this is another interesting point. This is not a letter that was meant to be preserved.

Leven: No.

Nehemia: So, you used that word when I was talking to you on the phone about things; ephemera.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: This was ephemeral. This was not meant to be… tell us what ephemera are.

Leven: Ephemera simply means something that had a utility that was meant to be discarded, and generally it’s referred to with paper. But ephemera is exactly what I collect, and the reason that I collect ephemera, whether it be letters or small magazines or whatever the case may be…

Nehemia: That’s a big word. Tell us what ephemeral is. What does that mean?

Leven: Ephemeral just means fleeting. It means it’s here and it’s gone. The whole idea is that it’s not supposed to be preserved. And in my opinion, ephemeral material is much more honest than any other material because it was designed to be used for a specific purpose at that point in time and then to go away. Whereas, even with things like journals and diaries, when folks write those, they often write them with a view towards posterity and pushing forward a narrative. But when you have a private letter between two people that is supposed to be discarded, that was never intended for consumption anywhere else, I believe you get a much more honest viewpoint. And the fact that you found a letter written in Hebrew during the Revolution is fascinating. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about getting into collecting. One of my favorite items that I have is a letter that’s from Kemmerer, Wyoming in 1900, and it’s all done in Chinese because there were a lot of Chinese laborers here.

Nehemia: Wow!

Leven: And it’s really important to remember that history is not… we say, this is the way people were, but it’s not the way people were. People are the same way they are now, where everybody’s different and everybody has opinions, and everybody has a different experience. You and I will both do this interview, but your experience of it and my experience are going to be different. Only by taking a look at those many different viewpoints, because I’m sure that a Hebrew’s impression of America during 1776 or 1778, or whenever that was written, is probably very different than many of the Englishmen or the Americans that may have stood on the same exact ground that they did. And to me that’s real history, and that’s what really attracts me is that it gives you that depth of understanding that you really can’t get any other way because it’s just too much to put in a book. You have to condense in order to be able write that narrative, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s always more complicated than it seems in books. And collecting lets you look at that complication.

Nehemia: Hmm. So, it’s really interesting. There is this kind of clash between the desire to have things in public institutions and the advantage of having it in private hands. And the example that comes to mind, which was recently sold, and it was the most expensive book ever sold, $38.1 million, the Sassoon Codex. So, I went to Geneva in 2019 and examined it when it was in the hands of the private collector.

Leven: Oh, wow! What a treat!

Nehemia: Yeah, it really was. It was amazing.

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: And then it was sold. But it was bought by a private person who then donated it to the ANU Museum in Tel Aviv. The ANU Museum didn’t have $38.1 million, but there was some private collector who did. And I don’t know what he said, but presumably he said something like, “I’m not getting this for me, I’m getting it because it’s part of the national heritage of the Jewish people. It should be in Israel.” I guess that was his thinking, I don’t really know. And I understand that.

So, here’s an interesting consideration, just something to think about. I’ve been to a lot of libraries where they have priceless manuscripts, and sometimes priceless books that are printed. Sometimes an early printed book could be more expensive than a manuscript.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: Like, the earliest printing of the Talmud is worth more than most manuscripts because there’s only one copy.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s from 1520, I want to say 1524, sometime around that time, 1521.

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: And they only made 300 copies, or something, and there’s no other complete copies. There’s one copy at the Hebrew Union College. So, I remember when I was there in Cincinnati at the Hebrew Union College. And people can find the interview I did here on NehemiasWall, on my website. The librarian explained to me, he said, “You know, we made a very conscious decision when we put in the fire suppression system. We could have put in halon gas.” Because they have this massive vault. And when I say vault, it’s not like when you think of a bank vault. It’s a warehouse, basically, that has reinforced concrete or whatever.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s a vault, with a blast door kind of thing. When there’s a fire you can use halon gas, and all the artifacts will be preserved. But anybody who remains in this vault after something like 90 seconds will be dead.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: “And so, we made the decision,” he told me, “To use water, which will destroy the artifacts, but it will save human lives.” Now, is that a wrong decision? Well, I don’t know, but it is a consideration. There could be some kind of false alarm, even. It doesn’t even have to be a real fire, and all those artifacts are going to be soaked and maybe damaged beyond repair.

Leven: Well, that’s one of the other things to consider about institutions versus private collectors. There’s this false narrative that private collectors don’t know how to handle items. They don’t know how to preserve them, they damage them. But the truth of the matter, at least in my experience and all the serious collectors that I know, is that when you’ve paid serious money for something and you have skin in the game, and you personally have five grand in that item, you have a very different level of protectiveness over it than somebody who works for an institution.

And so, the idea that private collectors are not protecting their items is flat wrong. And I would say that there is much more mishandling of items that happens by nature in large institutions because there are so many people that are there, and they don’t all have the same incentive that a collector does. Not just financial, but, you know, when you’re deciding you’re going to buy a letter that somebody should have thrown away and spent $5,000 or $10,000 for it, you really believe in that piece of history, and it fulfills a larger narrative. So, you’re naturally going to handle it accordingly.

Unfortunately, as you get into large institutions, there are so many examples. I mean, the British Museum just lost thousands of items that got sold on eBay by one of their employees. But the mishandling, and the fact that you have items that sit in museums in drawers for hundreds of years, that type of thing is what causes some of that damage. And so, the idea that collectors aren’t as good at protecting them is just not true.

Nehemia: So, here’s another consideration. One of the librarians at the Bodleian Library in Oxford said to me, “We’re asset rich but cash poor.” Meaning, “We have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of manuscripts,” in particular he was talking about, “but we don’t have the money. If a particular manuscript needs restoration or it should be photographed at high resolution, we need someone to donate that, because we don’t have the tens of millions of dollars that it would take to restore these things. We have artifacts,” manuscripts in this case, “that have been there at this library for 400 years.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s really interesting. Some of the manuscripts there, when they were purchased weren’t that old. But the library has been there for so long that now they’re old and unique. They bought a Torah scroll that was maybe 100 years old at the time… I mean, you can buy a 100-year-old Torah scroll on eBay. It’s not a big deal today. When they bought it, it wasn’t that big of a deal. But now it’s a 500-year-old Torah scroll, and there aren’t that many of those.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because the Jewish practice was to actually bury them in a cemetery when they were no longer useful.

Leven: Interesting.

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s interesting. We actually have fewer Torah scrolls than we have codices. A codex is like a book form. So, Torah scrolls are relatively rare because they were this ritual object. When people were done with them, meaning, they couldn’t be used anymore because the ink was flaking off or something. Or the rules had changed of how to write them, and so they were no longer considered kosher. They would bury them in a cemetery.

I was at this lecture about a year ago, and this librarian from Lithuania told me how, after the Soviet Union fell, these rabbis came from Israel, and they had hundreds of non-kosher Torah scrolls at this library. And they said, “Okay, the proper thing to do is to bury these in the cemetery.” And I was horrified!

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: Because we don’t know if those are 500, 1,000-year-old Torah scrolls. We have no idea. Or is it a 100-year-old Torah scroll? And even if it’s a 100-year-old Torah scroll, 300 years from now that’s going to be very rare, and you already had it in a public institution. So, here a public institution said, “We want to be sensitive to,” in this case, “the religious sensitivities of an ethnic minority that used to live in this country and there aren’t too many left. So, we don’t know what to do with it. All the Jews have been killed or fled.” And so, they’re like, “Okay, what do you guys do with an old Torah scroll?” “Well, we bury it.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. I understand why they do that. And so, here we have to balance religious sensitivities with the historical importance of something.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: And a public institution might not be suited for that. A private collector would say, “Oh, Okay. I just paid $1,000 for that Torah scroll. I’m going to preserve it the best I know how, at least.”

Leven: Yeah, guaranteed. And not only that, but I think that’s another thing that a lot of people don’t consider. When you nationalize any type of collectible and you say, “Okay, all of this belongs to the government and all of it’s going to be controlled,” or a single organization, or whatever the case may be. Unfortunately, there becomes an ability there to manipulate what the history says.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Leven: And as much as you want to believe that nobody will ever do that, life is long, time is long, governments change, and things happen. And so, when you have all of this history that’s in government institutions, you open yourself up to the opportunity of somebody down the road, however long, changing the history, because there’s no dissemination of that. And there’s no way to refute it because everything’s in a single institution’s hands. And so, democratizing that and allowing it to be dispersed throughout the collector community is a hedge against authoritarian regimes, or religious leaders or whatever the case may be, trying to change the history by controlling the artifacts. And that has happened numerous times. I mean, how many times have we seen book burnings, and like we were talking about, destroying statues?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leven: But that’s one of those things that a lot of people don’t consider. They’re like, “Well the government will protect it.” Well, maybe this government, but what about in 100 years?

Nehemia: Right. Well, an example that I experienced… In China there’s this ancient Jewish community that’s been there somewhere between 800 and 2,000 years. A minimum of 800 years.

Leven: Fascinating…

Nehemia: And there are these three stelae, these stone monuments, written in Chinese, giving their history. They were written… I want to say they were written in the 1500’s or thereabouts, and they’re in a museum in China. I went there and I asked to see them, and they weren’t on display. They’re up in this attic, and they were like, “We don’t really let people see this. This isn’t part of the museum. It’s not for public consumption.” They eventually let me in there, but they wouldn’t let me even take a single photo. I was like, “This is really strange.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: “Why are they hiding this part of the history?” I mean, there’s 300 Jews today in China.

Leven: Because it doesn’t fit their narrative.

Nehemia: Well, no, it actually is dangerous to them. China has a majority population called the Han, H-A-N, the Han. Most people haven’t heard of them, but Han is the main ethnic group of China. It’s 92% of the population, but that’s a story the government tells. They say there’s 55 ethnic minorities plus the Han, who are the majority. So, 8% of the population, which is tens or hundreds of millions of people, I don’t know, is the minority. And they only recognize 55 ethnic minorities. In reality, there’s thousands of ethnic minorities!

Leven: I was going to say, those numbers don’t make sense. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

Nehemia: It doesn’t even make sense according to the official Chinese narrative.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they say Taiwan is part of China. And Taiwan has the indigenous population which isn’t Han, and they’re not included in the 55. So, even from that there’s more than 55.

Leven: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: But that’s like, somebody didn’t think about Taiwan when they came up with the 55 number. And among those 55, some of those are multiple ethnic groups that have very little to do with each other and consider themselves different groups. So, here’s what China’s really thinking; they’re worried, “If we recognize that there’s a Jewish minority, that means that there’s other minorities that we haven’t recognized. And maybe they’ll say one day, ‘I don’t want to be part of China. I want my own state.’” Now, the 300 Jews aren’t going to say that because they’re not even a single building in China. A building in China would be more than 300 people. But there’s ethnic minorities of millions of people who are considered Han, and they’re considered Han, so they don’t say, “Wait a minute. Why am I being ruled by this imperialist power in Beijing? We’re this group that’s been here for thousands of years. We should have our own country.” That’s what they’re really afraid of. So, because of that they’re suppressing this pathetic group of 300 Jews who want to embrace their history and be part of a larger Jewish world.

So, there’s an example where literally the only documents are in government hands. We actually have lithographs of those from before the Communist Revolution, so we know what it says. But it would be nice to get a modern, high-resolution photo and see if maybe the guy who transcribed it 100 years ago, or whatever, made a mistake. And maybe they have the wrong century or the wrong dynasty because they wrote the wrong character. We know more today, or somebody knows more today about the Chinese than they did 100 years ago, but we can’t do that because the government wants to suppress that. Another example that comes to mind is in the book 1984.

Leven: I love that book!

Nehemia: Oh my God! Everybody needs to go and read that book. It’s really an important book for today, I think.

Leven: May take you a day, two max. Yep, it’s a great book.

Nehemia: It’s amazing. So, one of the main story lines there is the main character works in the government archives of the newspaper, and it’s his job to change history. So, there are these three different superpowers, countries, and the alliances keep shifting. And when the alliance shifts, he has to go and burn the old newspaper articles and rewrite them to say, “We’re at war with East Asia. We’ve always been at war with East Asia! We’ve never been allies, even though last year we were allies and it says that in the newspaper. But let’s destroy the archives and get rid of them so that people think we’ve always been… And who’s going to go check the government archives or the newspaper archives? But just in case anybody goes to check that, we have to, literally, rewrite history, because we have a monopoly on these historical sources.” So, I see here what you’re saying.

Leven: Well, I think you can tell how impactful it is by how much energy is spent trying to destroy past histories. When you look at the way fascism came into Europe, and you look at the Communist Revolution, and you look in the immediate aftermath of how much culture was destroyed, it shows you how much power it has. Because when they devote that much energy to destroying the history, it shows you how impactful it can be. And it should make us even more interested in making sure that these items are dispersed as widely as possible, because that’s the only true hedge against exactly that kind of manipulation. And it can happen anywhere, anywhere in the world, that that kind of concentration leads us to the possibility of history being changed in order to fulfil somebody’s narrative.

Nehemia: Well, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a fascinating discussion. It’s a little bit off topic of what we usually do, but I learned a lot. This has been really fun.

Leven: Well, thank you, I had a great time!

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VERSES MENTIONED
2 Timothy 4:13

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1984
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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.

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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

RELATED EPISODES
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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)

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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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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.