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.

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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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VERSES MENTIONED
Deuteronomy 27:4-6

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #15 – The Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Hebrew Voices #194 – Pious Fraud
Hebrew Voices #192 – Early Mormonism on Trial
Hebrew Voices #190 – Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 1
Support Team Study – Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1
Support Team Study – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #164 – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 1
Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2

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

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

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

https://wordcruncher.com

Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research (ihbmr.com)

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

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

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https://youtu.be/hyP2CJ4GEOo

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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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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

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

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

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Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words

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

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

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

Elon: Hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: A small…

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

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

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

Nehemia: Oh, I love that one!

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

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

Elon: It’s artik.

Nehemia: Artik, okay.

Elon: Artik.

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

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Oh, really?

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

Nehemia: Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: Yeah.

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

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

Nehemia: That means “behind you”.

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

Nehemia: Which is “straight ahead”.

Elon: Straight ahead, exactly.

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

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

Nehemia: Right.

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Yeah, but how does that explain Somalia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: I doubt the ancient Hebrews knew that…

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

Elon: Hi guys!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Yeah.

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

Nehemia: It could be very confusing.

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

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

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

Nehemia: Trans-Jordan, right.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: I didn’t expect it to!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Really?

Elon: And ballahot are demons from the Bible.

Nehemia: Demons from the Bible?

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

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

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

Nehemia: Like what?

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

Nehemia: Okay, that’s a good example.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: Are they?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Wow, okay.

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

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

Nehemia: Really?

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

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

Elon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

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

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

Nehemia: “The Hebrew Language Patrols,” basically.

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

Nehemia: Oh, so he knew who he was!

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

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

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

Nehemia: What?

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Please. You say something about Ladino.

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

Nehemia: In the previous episode.

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

Nehemia: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: More than Greek, you’re saying.

Elon: More than Greek, yeah.

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

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

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

Nehemia: Which means Spanish, right?

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

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

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

Nehemia: Probably from Phoenician times even, maybe.

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Stefah? Okay.

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

Nehemia: Interesting.

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

Nehemia: Okay!

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

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

Elon: Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: “To be seen again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: Maybe greetings could be something I can…

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

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

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

Elon: Ba’al.

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

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

Nehemia: Wonderful.

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio Transcript

Hebrew Voices #200 – Nasrallah and the Samson Option

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

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Is that when you stole my coffee?

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

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

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

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: I’m going to show it.

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

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

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

Lynell: You stole my coffee!

Nehemia: Wait, what?

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: No, not that I can think of…

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

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

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

Lynell: From where?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Yeah.

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

Lynell: Wow, it didn’t.

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

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

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

Lynell: The cleaning woman!

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

Lynell: He killed how many people?

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: Think about the blood…

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

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

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

Lynell: This bad guy.

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

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

Lynell: Wow!

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

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

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

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

Lynell: I love that.

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

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

Lynell: Right.

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

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

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

Lynell: Right.

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

Lynell: Oh my gosh!

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

Lynell: That’s unbelievable.

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

Lynell: They play the long game.

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

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: Okay.

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

Lynell: Ah.

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

Lynell: Clearance.

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

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

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

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

Lynell: He just said that Iran sold them out.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: I haven’t seen this.

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

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Amen.

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

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

Lynell: Okay.

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

Lynell: Where is it at?

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Okay.

Lynell: Is that okay?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

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

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

Lynell: Oh!

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: That in Hebrew is Lehi.

Lynell: Lehi. Okay.

Nehemia: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Come on!

Lynell: And…

Nehemia: Come on Holy Spirit! Come upon Samson.

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

Nehemia: So, jawbone in Hebrew is lechi.

Lynell: Oh!

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

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

Nehemia: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Oh, wow. Say it again.

Nehemia: You have granted this great salvation.

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Come on, Gaza!

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

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

Lynell: Oh, wow.

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

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

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

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: He burned their crops. Alright.

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

Nehemia: Well, it doesn’t say dance…

Lynell: Oh, it doesn’t?

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

Lynell: Oh!

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

Lynell: “And he danced for them.”

Nehemia: “He played around before them.”

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Interesting.

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

Lynell: Samson.

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

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

Lynell: [Laughter]

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

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

Lynell: Oh!

Nehemia: Samson is a Roman!

Lynell: Oh!

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

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Right.

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: [Laughter]

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

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

Lynell: Ah.

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

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

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

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

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

Lynell: Mhm.

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

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: Okay.

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

Lynell: Right!

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

Lynell: Yeah.

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

Lynell: Oh, wow!

Nehemia: And that’s called the Samson Option.

Lynell: Oh, my goodness!

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

Lynell: Oh, my goodness!

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

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: Wow.

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

Lynell: Wow!

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

Lynell: Wow!

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

Lynell: Yeah.

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

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

Nehemia: Yes. Okay. And literally when the…

Lynell: Is it teruah?

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

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

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

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

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

Lynell: [Laughter]

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

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

Lynell: Hmm.

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

Lynell: Right.

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

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

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

Lynell: Gotcha.

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

Lynell: Not a lot of wisdom.

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

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

Lynell: Oh, right, right,

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

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

Nehemia: Rasha. Reish-Shin-Ayin…

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

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

Lynell: Oh, really?

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

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

Lynell: Right.

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

Lynell: Right.

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

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

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

Lynell: Amen.

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

Lynell: Okay. Any praise?

Nehemia: Yeah, sure.

Lynell: Alright.

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

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

Nehemia: No. Any song.

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

Nehemia: Amen.

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

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

Lynell: Yeah, that was really…

Nehemia: And he knew he was going to die.

Lynell: He was so strong.

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

Lynell: Amen.

Nehemia: Praise Yehovah.

Lynell: Praise Yehovah.

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

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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

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Hebrew Voices #186 – The Hamas Prophecy: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Hamas Prophecy Part 2

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

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

"Hezbollah Cleaning Lady Cartoon"

The post Hebrew Voices #200 – Nasrallah and the Samson Option appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this fascinating Palestine Prophecy Series, Nehemia and Lynell delve into Bible prophecy and its potential relevance to the war in Israel and the Tanakh view of the end times. 
Here's the complete four-part series!

Watch the Four-Part Series!

In this new episode of Hebrew Voices #176,  Palestine Prophecy: Part 1, Nehemia and Lynell delve into Bible prophecy and its potential relevance to the war in Israel and the Tanakh view of the end times. They start off by laying the background of Zechariah 9:1-8, including the Four Fasts, the restoration of Jerusalem, and the different types of prophecy found in Scripture.

In this new episode of Hebrew Voices #177,  Palestine Prophecy: Part 2, Nehemia and Lynell continue their Bible study about the prophecy of Zechariah 9:1-8 and its potential relevance to today. They discuss the locations mentioned in the prophecies, the far-reaching influence of ancient Canaanite colonialism, and the origin & identity of the Philistines.

In this Support Team Study, Palestine Prophecy: Part 3, Nehemia and Lynell continue their Bible study about the prophecy of Zechariah 9:1-8, its relevance to the current war in Israel, and the Tanakh view of the end times. They discuss how Israel became “Palestine”, the plea to include the Arab inhabitants into the Israeli state, and the possible meanings of “mamzer” in this particular context.

In this Support Team Study, Palestine Prophecy: Part 4, Nehemia and Lynell wrestle with the surprise ending in Zechariah’s prophecy about the Palestinians. They discuss the miracles God will work in changing the hearts of Israel’s worst enemies, the promise of hope in biblical prophecy, and how Israel’s morality gets used against them.

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The post Palestine Prophecy – Complete Four-Part Series appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #198 - Nehemia on "Grotto in the Tar Pit": Part 2, Nehemia rejoins the Grotto in the Tar Pit podcast to discuss medieval equivalents of Hamas's October 7th Massacre and how examining the Vatican secret archives leads to the discovery of fragments from lost Hebrew manuscripts.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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

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

Nehemia: One of the Old Catholics, meaning who wasn’t of Jewish descent, he gets all excited and he shouts for joy, and he says, “The crucifix at the front of the church has just shined a light on us. This is a great miracle. Jesus is answering our prayer.” And one of the, what they call the New Christians, Nuevos Cristianos, who was born a Jew and raised a Jew and sprinkled with water, forced to convert to Catholicism, he says, “That’s just the way the sun is reflecting off the silver crucifix. That’s not a miracle.” And the Old Catholics spend the next few days massacring the Jews throughout Lisbon.

Here’s the crazy thing; why does the Catholic Church have the authority to burn people at the stake? Because, like, we have this idea of the separation of church and state. Sort of, we do, right? We’ll say, well, “Google isn’t the same as the government.” But it has more power than many governments. If Twitter can ban a head of state, and I’m not talking about the United States… There’s African countries where the head of state was banned by Twitter. Imagine that. You’re a country of like 10 or 20 million people, and this corporation, which has a higher annual revenue, higher annual profit than your GDP, bans your head of state. What are you supposed to do?

So, that’s pretty much the state of the Catholic Church, if you’re going back… certainly 500 years ago, and to some extent into some regions much later than that, where you have this non-government entity which has more power than the government itself. And so, imagine now you’re the king of Portugal in 1497, and you had opened up the door to the Jews, and you promised, “I’ll never do to the Jews what the Spanish did.” And the Catholic Church comes to you and says, “Well, how would you like to burn in hell forever? We’ll excommunicate you if you don’t do what we say.” “Okay, well, I don’t really believe that necessarily, but if you excommunicate me, my cousin’s going to slit my throat and claim that he’s king. That’s what’s really going to happen. Some relative of mine who has a claim to the throne is going to murder me in my sleep, probably with the help of my confessor, who I’ve trusted my whole life. So, I better do what the Catholic Church says.”

It’s a parallel to… they call this unpersoning, where one of these tech oligarchs will put you under what’s effectively excommunication. “Okay, maybe I don’t care that I’ve been banned from Twitter.” Really? Try operating in the 21st century without a bank account. See how that goes.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Without the ability to have a bank account.

Sergio: That’s the next step.

Nehemia: Well, what do you mean, the next step? They’re already doing it now. They’re literally already doing it now.

Sergio: Yeah. Like they did with the truckers in Canada when they… Yeah, and they shut down their GoFundMe and took all the funds out of it.

Nehemia: Right. That’s insane.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, no. And GoFundMe can say, “We’re a private company. We’re allowed to do that.” Really? So, let’s say I have a bank… which I don’t, but let’s say I had a bank, and somebody comes in in the United States and says, “I want to open up a bank account. And by the way, I’m an African American.” “Oh, we don’t allow African Americans to have bank accounts.” Well, they’ll be immediately shut down. And the argument is that you’re open to the public. You have to be open to any reasonable… Now, somebody’s coming in and trying to scam you, that’s a different thing. They’re saying my name is… whatever. If somebody is committing fraud, that’s a different thing. But if somebody comes in with legitimate papers and they’re an upstanding citizen, and they’re not trying to commit a crime, and you say, “I’m not going to allow you to have a bank account in my bank because I don’t like your politics.” Well, that’s what the Catholic Church was doing 500 years ago, and they had the ability to burn people at the stake.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: Thankfully, the tech oligarchs don’t currently have that ability, but they can unperson you in a way. There’s this beautiful exchange between Nachmanides, who’s also known as Rabbi Moses Ben Nachman, sometimes confused with Maimonides, who is Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. They had different…

Sergio: Now you just confused me!

Nehemia: So, one’s father’s name was Maimon, and the other was Nachman. So Nachmanides, who’s about 50 years after Maimonides dies, he has this debate with the Catholics in Barcelona, and it’s known as the Disputation of Barcelona. And it’s really an important event in medieval Jewish-Christian relations, and, really, in medieval Jewish history.

Sergio: Well, is he the one who used Shem Tov’s Hebrew Bible, or Hebrew Matthew?

Nehemia: Nothing to do with it. No, no connection whatsoever. That was a rabbi named Shem-Tov ibn Shaprut.

Sergio: Okay.

Nehemia: And this is a rabbi named Moshe Ben Nachman, or Ramban, he’s also called, who’s confused with Rambam, which is Maimonides. All right. So, Moses Ben Nachman, or Nachmanides, he’s forced into this debate with a Jewish convert to Christianity by King James I of Aragon. Nothing to do with King James Bible, which was King James I of England. Or whatever he was king of, I don’t know, England and Wales, something like that. This is King James I of Aragon. He forces Nachmanides into a debate, and Nachmanides is like, “I don’t want to have this debate.” And the king says, “What, are you afraid you’re going to lose?” He’s like, “Oh, I’m not afraid I’m going to lose. I’m afraid I’m going to win. And it’s not that I’m afraid. All the people around me, all the other Jews, are saying, ‘Don’t have this debate. If you win, we’re going to be persecuted.’” And guess what happened? He won and they were persecuted. He specifically was exiled from Spain.

But he makes this incredible statement to the king, where he says, “How can I possibly” and I’m paraphrasing here, “How can I possibly have a debate if I’m not allowed to speak freely?” And the king says, “Well, why can’t you speak freely?” And he says, “Well, in previous debates there were limits imposed on the Jewish position. The Jews weren’t allowed to say anything that the Catholics considered offensive. Like, if they said, ‘You’re idolaters for praying to the Virgin Mary,’ which…” And if you’re Catholic, I’m not trying to offend you. But that would be the classic position of a Jew in the Middle Ages. That if you’re praying to someone who’s a flesh and blood human being, who even according to Catholic theology was a flesh and blood human being, fully human, I believe they say, I don’t know… that that would be idolatry. So, if a Jew said that in the debate, they would be persecuted and all the Jews would be persecuted, so they weren’t allowed to say that.

So Nachmanides says, “How am I supposed to debate if I’m not allowed to speak freely? What I believe is going to be blasphemy to you, and what you believe is going to be blasphemy to me. Otherwise, we would have the same belief.” And the king says, “Okay, I’ll give you freedom of speech.” So Nachmanides goes into the debate, and he wins, but then the person he was debating, named Pablo Christiani, who was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism back in France… his family was from France, he then wrote an account of the debate. And in his written account, Pablo Cristiani won.

And so Nahmanides said, “What you’re saying is a lie. That’s not what happened.” And he wrote his own account, and then he was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church. And he said, “Wait a minute. You gave me freedom of speech.” And the king says, “Well, I control speech. I don’t control what’s written on Twitter.” And I’m joking, half-joking.

Sergio: Right.

Nehemia: In other words, the king said, “I don’t control what’s written. That’s controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. And if the priests say that what you’ve written, you deserve the death penalty, I can’t absolve you.” So, what the king ends up doing is commuting the death sentence to exile. In other words, what the king was able to say, “You can’t continue to live in Spain,” where your ancestors have lived, maybe for over a thousand years, since the time the Phoenicians came here with Israelite traders, merchants. “You got to go.” And so, he ended up leaving Spain as an exile. Imagine; he’s an old man, and he’s got to go on the road with pirates on the seas, and he’s got to travel and hope he doesn’t get killed. And he ends up in Israel.

Sergio: Now, is that the story where the guy he was debating was actually one of his… he used to be his mentor?

Nehemia: No, I don’t know that story. I don’t know that story.

Sergio: Yeah, it’s something about… he had to debate, and they invited him over, and his former student was there eating pork just to show him that he was going to…

Nehemia: Find out the details of that story, I’d love to read about that.

Sergio: Okay.

Nehemia: I don’t know about that. There were a lot of debates in the Middle Ages. The Jews generally didn’t want to engage in the debate, because it was no win. If you win, then you’re persecuted. If you lose, well, now you have to convert to Catholicism because you lost. Well, who judged the debate? The Catholic king and the Catholic monks. I think usually it was the Dominicans, who really hated Jews.

There’s a famous incident that’s called the… and people should look this up… it’s called the Lisbon Massacre. So, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who flee to Portugal, and in 1497, they’re sprinkled with water, or they’re told, “convert and die.” And now they’re living as Catholics; they have no choice. And there was a great famine, I want to say it was around 1507 or 1508…

Sergio: So, that’s all it takes for them to declare you a Catholic is, they sprinkle water on you and now you’re Catholic?

Nehemia: In that situation. I mean, I don’t think they’ll do that today. I can’t imagine they would do that today, but I don’t know. They did it back then. Now, was that, strictly speaking, legitimate according to Catholic law? I don’t know. Maybe you could get a hearing at the Vatican and try to get out of it, but good luck with that. They were deemed, for all intents and purposes, Catholics at that point, and then they had to be forced to follow Catholicism.

So, there’s this draught, and everyone’s ordered to go to church and pray, and they’re sitting in church, and there’s this one Jew sitting in the cathedral… I believe it’s the cathedral in Lisbon. And one of the Old Catholics, meaning, who wasn’t of Jewish descent, he gets all excited and he shouts for joy, and he says, “The crucifix at the front of the church has just shone a light on us. This is a great miracle. Jesus is answering our prayer.” And one of what they call the New Christians, Nuevos Cristianos, who was born a Jew and raised a Jew and sprinkled with water, forced to convert to Catholicism, he says, “That’s just the way the sun is reflecting off the silver crucifix. That’s not a miracle.” And the Old Catholics spend the next few days massacring the Jews throughout Lisbon, being egged on by the… I believe it was the Dominicans. It could be the Franciscans… somebody look it up and fact check me.

But there were these orders of people, meaning, like, Dominican Order. They were monks who had devoted their lives to the Catholic Church, and they go around telling everybody, “The Jews have just blasphemed Jesus and the crucifix, and that’s why we’re suffering. That’s why you don’t have bread on your table, because these new Christians are not good Christians and God’s punishing us.” And they spend days massacring the Jews, until the king’s men show up and they stop the massacre. But by then, hundreds of Jews had been killed in Lisbon.

So, this was… I mean, look, this was like the October 7th of the early 1500’s. Happened all the time. We call these in history “pogroms.” That’s a term from Eastern Europe, but it happened all over the Muslim and Christian world, or Catholic world… but not just Catholic, Greek Orthodox as well, where the Jews are accused of something and they spend days massacring them, and sometimes more.

Sometimes it comes directly from the government. There’s the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a forgery produced by the secret police of the Tsar. It’s actually kind of crazy because… I mean, it’s completely crazy, but what’s crazy about it is we know some of the sources of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There was a grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte named Napoleon III, and he was a ruler of France, and one of his enemies wrote a fake account of his plan to control the entire world. And there are entire paragraphs of that forgery, which was written in French, which were translated into Russian and became part of the protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s how bad a forgery it was.

But it was promoted by the Russian government, and today it’s promoted throughout the Islamic world. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s literally taught as fact in certain parts of the Muslim world, this thing that was a conspiracy about Napoleon’s grandson. I mean, it’s crazy. And now it’s… say, “Well, the Jews are really trying to control the world.” And look, when the Holocaust happened, what did those people say? I don’t know if I’m allowed to say in a podcast. What did Hitler say? What did the Nazis say? What they said is, “The Aryan people are fighting for their very existence against their Jewish persecutors.” That could be Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas. There really is not that much difference. Maybe you say there’s the racial aspect, which is different, but the basic idea that Jews are our persecutors, and we’re the persecuted fighting against our persecutors. In the paranoid fantasy of Hitler, that’s what was going on.

Sergio: Well, hasn’t Mein Kampf become a…

Nehemia: What’s that?

Sergio: Hasn’t Mein Kampf become a bestseller amongst Muslims in recent years?

Nehemia: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s really interesting. So, I did a podcast about a copy of Mein Kampf that was found in Gaza, and somebody was like, marking it up with notes. They were studying it. And so, I went on Amazon to see, can I get an Arabic copy of Mein Kampf? And there was somebody who was selling one. And I’ve been buying from Amazon for over 20 years. Think about that. I have been buying stuff from Amazon… originally it was books, right, for over 20 years, and I’ve never had this happen before. I buy the book, and the seller calls me up on the telephone, and he’s like, “Why do you want to buy this book?” I said, “Well, I’m researching this. What do you mean? I’m researching.” He says, “Do you want any other Arabic books?” I said, “No, just this one.” And he hangs up the phone and cancels the sale.

Sergio: Whoa!

Nehemia: Because he didn’t want to sell Mein Kampf in Arabic to somebody who wasn’t a believer. Meaning, a believer in the message of “Jews are horrible”. And my name is Nehemia Gordon, he can see that.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: And he sees this is some Jew who’s trying to…

Sergio: He Googled you.

Nehemia: Well… you don’t even need to Google me; the guy’s name is Nehemia. It’s obvious that I’m not Muslim. If my name was Muhammad or Nehamallah, which is the Arabic of Nehemia, I suppose, then maybe you would. Maybe he would have sold me the book. And I’ve never, in over 20 years, had a seller not just sent me an email, which I don’t think I’ve ever had either. But to call me on the telephone, on my personal cell phone, which you have to put in when you’re doing a shipment; never had that happen. I don’t even know if they’re allowed to do that. But he did it. And the sale was canceled because, yes, they’ll sell that book to each other, but they don’t want us buying it because… they know they’re not supposed to be disseminating Mein Kampf.

Sergio: You run into these situations all the time, like when you were buying the flash drive with all the Hebrew writings.

Nehemia: I’ve had some weird stuff happen. Some things I probably shouldn’t talk about, so let’s move on. I’ve had to smuggle flash drives with stuff that… there were governments that didn’t want me to have that information. More importantly, they didn’t care if I looked at it. They didn’t want their citizens seeing information that I had on a certain flash drive. Because they had committed massacres and didn’t want their people to know about it, so… I won’t go into more detail.

Sergio: 00-Nehemia.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Sergio: 00-Nehemia, with the microfilm now…

Nehemia: I don’t know about that, but yeah. No, I mean, anyway… So, I mean, today you would just send that file over some kind of a file transfer thing, but back then you couldn’t do that. Yeah. So, yeah. So, you have… I don’t know how we got onto the topic of pogroms. Oh, I guess we were talking about you having Jewish ancestry coming from the Iberian culture.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, here’s an interesting thing that happened. So, up until about 20, 30 years ago, if you were a Jew from Iraq, Jews from other places referred to you as a Sephardic Jew. Which is a bit strange because the Jews from Iraq have nothing to do with Spain, in the sense that Jews went to Iraq, what today is Iraq, in the time of the Babylonian exile… And technically speaking, there were Jews already there, in what today is Iraq, in 732 BCE, when… I want to say it was Tiglath-Pileser III or somebody like this. One of the Assyrian emperors invaded northern Israel and took Israelites exile to what today is Iraq. So, that’s 732 BCE. So why would you call them Sephardic Jews?

Because what happened is, in 1492, and then in 1497, in Portugal, you have Jews that are fleeing. Because even in Portugal there were Jews who were able to escape. And they’re going all over the world, and a lot of them… and this is the intellectual elite of the Jewish world. So, you have rabbis who are some of the top rabbis in the world, the most educated Jews in the world, certainly in Jewish subjects, end up getting on a boat in the middle of the night and sneaking out, and they’re like, “Where do I go?” And they end up in Iraq. A lot of them end up in what’s the Ottoman Empire. That’s how they end up in Iraq. And so, they end up in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, which is like, “Oh, Jewish merchants, that sounds great. People who can read and write. We don’t trust our own people, so we’ll have them do our accounting for us.” And that’s not a joke, that’s actually what they did.

So, you have Sephardic Jews who are literally from Spain, from Sepharad, who end up as this intellectual elite going to Egypt and Syria, and to some extent to Iraq. But where they really were heavily concentrated was in what today is western Turkey, Croatia, the Balkans area, Greece. This is incredible. I found this book that was written in Ladino, that was published in what today is Izmir, Turkey, in like, I don’t know, the 1800’s. There were newspapers in Ladino, which again, is, you would call it a dialect of Spanish or related to Spanish. If somebody read it to you, you would probably understand it if you speak Spanish, or certainly if you speak, like, Castilian.

Sergio: So…

Nehemia: You understand most of it. That’s being published in the 1800’s. It’s incredible. In Turkey.

Sergio: When the Jews started coming back to the Holy Land, what were the Sephardics mostly speaking?

Nehemia: So, this is a really interesting thing. So, there were a lot of Sephardic Jews… and here, Sephardic in a very broad sense. It includes… again, it could be a Jew who’s coming from Damascus but had an ancestor… and they distinguished. If you were a Jew in Damascus, you knew if you were a Jew whose ancestors were from Syria, or if they were from Spain, or Iberia. Could be from Portugal.

So, like, for example, in Amsterdam, there was the Sephardic synagogue, and then there was the Ashkenazi synagogue, and they were separate. In Hamburg there was a Sephardic Jewish community. So, what were they speaking? So, some of them were still speaking Ladino, and there were words… this is really cool. There are words in Modern Hebrew that come from Spanish, but really they come from Ladino. So, one of the foods that we eat in Israel… it’s kind of like getting like chicken nuggets in America, it’s called bourekas. I don’t know if you have that food. Do you have that food in your culture, bourekas? So, bourekas is a Spanish word, apparently. Even the -as ending, you could tell, it’s not a Semitic ending. It comes from Ladino, “bourekas”. It’s kind of like a phyllo pastry dough filled with cheese or potato. Somebody post in the comments if you come from a Spanish speaking country and you eat bourekas.

Sergio: If I ask my mom, she would probably know.

Nehemia: It’s probably called something else there, I don’t know. Another word is hanukiah. So, the candelabrum that has 8 or 9 branches, I grew up calling that a menorah or a Hanukkah menorah. In Modern Hebrew, that’s called a hanukiah. Hanukiah is a word in Modern Hebrew, but it comes from Ladino, and there’s a whole host of words that end in -iya in Modern Hebrew. And all of those, or most of those, come from Ladino. And some of them are Modern Hebrew constructions. So, for example… and this is really cool, listen to this example. So, to hitchhike, in British English, is called “to tramp”. They call it “tramping”, or they used to at one time. So, Israel was occupied by the British from 1917 to 1948, and so the word came from British English, tremp. Tremp is to hitchhike, to tramp. And the place where you catch a train, that’s…

Sergio: That’s got a whole ‘nother meaning these days!

Nehemia: Maybe, but in British English, at one time at least, it meant to hitchhike. So, the place where you catch a hitchhiking ride is called a trempiyada. So, what’s this yada ending? That comes from Ladino.

Sergio: Yeah, that sounds…

Nehemia: Trempiyada is a Ladino ending, meaning Spanish, or Judeo-Spanish, you could call it. Olympiyada is the Olympic Games.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: That comes from Spanish… or it comes from Ladino again. So, you have a lot of words… I don’t know if it’s a lot… there’s a list of words that come from Ladino and from Jews whose ancestors had come from Iberia, who spoke Spanish. By the way, some of them didn’t necessarily come from Spain. Some of them might have come from Sicily, which was ruled by Spain, or Naples, which was ruled by Spain, and so they spoke Spanish, because they came maybe earlier from Iberia.

So, the Jews, a lot of them who came to Israel in the 1800’s spoke Spanish. Some of them came centuries before that. We have this really cool thing where there’s a rabbi who arrives in Tzfat in northern Israel in the 1490’s. And he was a refugee from Spain, and they established a Jewish community. It actually becomes the intellectual center, one of the great intellectual centers of Judaism, in the 1500’s. It was established by Jewish refugees from Spain in Tzfat, or Safed in English. And in fact, what most people would refer to today as Kabbalah, which is kind of Rabbinical Jewish mysticism, most of that was formulated in Tzfat, in Safed, in northern Israel, by Jewish refugees from Spain. A lot of the great works of early modern Jewish literature were made by Jewish refugees from Spain. It really became a major center of Jewish learning because the Jewish refugees that were given an open invitation to come into parts of the Ottoman Empire. And the Ottomans ruled… I don’t think… did they rule Tzfat already in the 1490’s? I don’t remember. They may have. But eventually, they come to rule Tzfat and northern Israel. I know Jerusalem they took in 1517, but northern Israel, they might have ruled earlier. And you end up with them speaking, still, Ladino up until the 20th century.

And then you have a really interesting thing that happens in Modern Hebrew. This is really cool. So, you have Jews who are coming to Israel, fleeing the Russian Empire, and their native tongue is Yiddish, which is… you could call it a Jewish dialect of German. And they meet these Jews in Israel whose native language is Ladino, which is a dialect of Spanish. And they’re like, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand Yiddish.” “I don’t understand Ladino.” “How can we communicate?” “Well, we both know Hebrew.” And they end up communicating with each other in the marketplace. So, the myth is, the story is… and it’s a great story, and it’s kind of true, that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda resurrected the Hebrew language. There’s truth to that story, but he was…

Sergio: I love that story.

Nehemia: He was only able to do that because there were already people who spoke Hebrew not at home. That’s where Eliezer Ben-Yehuda comes in. They weren’t necessarily speaking Hebrew at home. But when they went to the marketplace and they wanted to buy a chicken from another Jew, and at home I speak Yiddish and you speak Ladino… so I go to the market, I go to the shuk, and I talk to you in Hebrew because we don’t have another common language. Some of them spoke Turkish and some of them spoke Arabic, but why would they speak Turkish or Arabic? It was much easier to speak Hebrew because they had learned Hebrew in synagogue.

And this was controversial. Some people said, “No, we can’t use Yiddish when we’re haggling over the price of a chicken in the marketplace.” Literally. But then others are like, “Okay, what? How am I supposed to haggle over the chicken? He doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Spanish, and I don’t know Ladino.” So, this actually becomes really important in the modern rebirth of Hebrew, that you have this massive population of Ladino-speaking Jewish descendants of Jewish refugees, and they encounter these refugees who are speaking Yiddish, and their common tongue is Hebrew. It’s beautiful.

Sergio: Yeah, that is beautiful. Yeah, that is. One thing I wanted to ask you is about the Vatican files, or the files that you found in the Vatican. What else… did you find anything else interesting in there?

Nehemia: I found all kinds of interesting things at the Vatican, some of which I can’t talk about right now.

Sergio: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: Let’s save that for a future time.

Sergio: Okay.

Nehemia: But I think what you’re referring to, there’s Hebrew manuscripts of the New Testament in the Vatican.

Sergio: Yeah, the Hebrew gospels.

Nehemia: And some people have misunderstood what I said and thought, “Oh, Nehemia’s saying that’s from the 1st century AD.” It’s not what I said. What I said is, “We have these fragments of Hebrew texts of the New Testament in the Vatican. Shouldn’t we investigate these and find out when they’re from?” And if you want to say they’re all translations from Latin, okay, that’s fine, but let somebody put in the work and do that investigation. I think that’s worth it.

One of the really interesting things that I found, that I think you’re referring to, is what I call the Vatican junk box. And I’ll explain what I mean. So, the Vatican has millions of pages of manuscripts. Literally. If you include the archives, it’s tens of millions.

Sergio: And there’s only so much people that are allowed to even look at it, right?

Nehemia: Most of it is accessible if you can get the right credentials. They won’t let you take photographs of it, but they’ll let you in to examine it today. Things have changed. The Vatican is much more open. Like, online, I believe online, you can see that what they call the Vatican Secret Archives, where they started to photograph millions… And why are they secret archives? Because you could have… So, the Vatican keeps really good records. And I don’t know that there’s… and I’m giving you a hypothetical example, because I’m not an expert in the secret archives.

So, the secret archives are communications between the Vatican and its emissaries around the world. And what do I mean by “emissaries around the world”? Essentially every Catholic priest and monk is an emissary. So, if you had… and this, I think, is an example, you have these Jesuit priests who go to China in the 1500’s and they talk to the emperor. And the emperor is like, “Wow, this Catholicism, this Christianity thing, sounds really interesting. I could get some trade relations with this, with Europe, and these people are really advanced. Okay, maybe I’ll become a Christian or a Catholic.” And so, he sends a letter to the Pope, and there’s an exchange with the Pope. It’s incredible! And they have the original letter that the emperor sent. Now it’s translated, I think, into Latin by these Jesuits, so I don’t know if it’s in Chinese or not. I don’t know. But they have these documents.

Now, why would I care about that as a Hebrew scholar? So, here’s what happens… and they have millions of documents like this. Not just with the Chinese emperor, but like, if there’s a Jesuit, like in Macau or something, in 1650, and he’s sending a report back to his superior at the Vatican, or wherever, the Vatican still has those documents! It’s incredible. And there’s literally millions of pages of these documents, as far as I know.

So, why is that important to me? So, you have this collection of letters, and what you do is you bind it, and you say, “You know what? Here’s all the reports from Macau from the 1650’s. I can’t have them as loose letters, they’ll get lost.” So, you bind them. Okay, what do you bind them with? They’re written on leather, certainly the earlier ones. Some of the later ones are written on paper. So, here’s what they would do. They would take old books and cut them up and use those to bind their collection of letters. Well, maybe what they cut up is an old Hebrew book. And they found over a thousand pages of Hebrew manuscripts as bindings in other manuscripts.

And I’ll give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Well, so this isn’t in a binding, this is where they erased the Hebrew manuscript. They took water and washed off the Hebrew letters, and they wrote a Greek medical text over it. That’s an actual example. And that’s in the Medici Library in Florence. And they took pieces of six Torah scrolls, some of which are the oldest known Torah scrolls in Europe. They predate the year 1000.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: Now, before we found this, I don’t know that there was anything written in Hebrew from Europe before the year 1000. I’m not sure. But certainly, these are the oldest known Torah scrolls from Europe, and they’re written on… somebody literally took a razor, cut up a Torah scroll, washed off all the ink, and then wrote a book over it.

Sergio: Wow!

Nehemia: And so sometimes in the Vatican archives… but not just the Vatican archives, this was done all over Europe. You have, I don’t know, you had a ledger like in the church, and the ledger said, “In such and such a year, so and so was born, and in such and such a year the plague came,” and these various events had happened. So, they have these documents. In every church they have these. Okay, well, what do you bind that with? Well, we just took some books from the Jews, let’s cut those up and use them as a binding.

Now, to be fair, sometimes they did that with their own books. It wasn’t just Jewish books. But they found over a thousand pages of Hebrew books in these book bindings. And some of them are really important lost… like lost things that we don’t really have other copies of, or we don’t have a lot of copies. Like, they found two pages from the Jerusalem Talmud, which we have, but we only have one manuscript. So now we have a second manuscript. That’s incredible! That really is incredible. Like, that’s a really big deal. I don’t know if I can convey what a big deal that is.

Sergio: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: Imagine you have two manuscripts out of the whole thing, but of this like section, and one of them comes from a book binding from some book that has nothing to do with it. So, the point is there are probably tens of thousands…

Sergio: So, can you even see the letters? Or is this from your imaging where you’re seeing the letters in the background?

Nehemia: So, that was discovered by somebody else, the Jerusalem Talmud, decades ago, and we have a full photograph of it. There is a beautiful thing where they took it out of the binding and photographed it, so we have a full high-resolution photograph that’s available now of two lost pages from the Jerusalem Talmud. They’re not really lost because we had one other manuscript, but that manuscript was one witness. Now we have two witnesses to this text. That’s a big deal. That’s not a small thing. Imagine…

Sergio: So, how’d you get into the imaging of all these manuscripts? Because like, I know you’ve been flying all over the world imaging all these ancient manuscripts, and it sounds like really exciting.

Nehemia: I’ll tell you the real answer. I was working on my PhD dissertation, and I looked through photographs, black and white photographs, of something like 90,000 pages of manuscripts, and I was looking for a certain type of thing in these manuscripts. And I had over 90,000 pages, something in that neighborhood. But I only had two Torah scrolls in that whole collection. And I thought, “That’s not really scientific.” And it’s difficult to say how many manuscripts because it depends how you count the manuscript, but over 90,000 pages of manuscripts. You could have a manuscript that’s a thousand pages, and you could have a fragment of a manuscript that’s not even a whole page.

But I’d looked through over 90,000 pages of codexes. A codex is in book form, as opposed to a scroll, which is rolled up. And I only had two Torah scrolls and I said, “I need more Torah scrolls.” Where do I get Torah scrolls? So, I had to travel places and say, “Can I look at your Torah scroll?” This is a crazy thing. I went into a synagogue, an Orthodox synagogue, and I said, “I’m doing my PhD, and I want to look at your Torah scroll. It’s not that old, your Torah scroll. It’s 150 years old. But I want to look at it because I’m looking for a certain phenomenon that was done by scribes. And I don’t care if it was done a thousand years ago by scribes or 50 years ago by scribes. I want to see what the scribal tradition over time is.” I mean, I do care if it’s older; that’s interesting. But I’m also willing to look at more recent stuff, especially in Torah scrolls, because the old practices are still continued to some extent. Not as much as I thought, but they’re still continued. They’re still continued to some extent.

Sergio: You mean modern day scribes, right?

Nehemia: Modern day scribes are still doing things that were done in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, not knowing it was done in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s pretty cool. Knowing it was done a thousand years ago, but not realizing how old it was. And maybe they’re doing it for different reasons, but they’re still continuing some really early practices where they don’t even know where it came from, which is really cool.

All right. So, I go to the synagogue, this Orthodox Jewish synagogue, and I tell them what I’m doing. And he said, “Okay, you can examine my scroll. You can come with your camera and your little measuring tapes and everything. Come back on Monday,” or whatever it was. I come back on Monday, and the rabbi sits there with this kind of, like, smug look. And he says, “When I met you, I had…” and he uses this phrase, he said, “My Spidey-sense went off.” I’m like, “Okay, what do you mean?” He said, “I looked you up and I saw you were a Karaite Jew.”

Nehemia: I said, “Yeah, I’m a Karaite Jew. That’s not really… what’s your point?” He’s like, “Well, I was wondering, you would be studying Torah scrolls and didn’t come to my synagogue, or I didn’t know you, how big is the Orthodox community?” “Like, I’m not Orthodox. What’s your point?” He’s like, “All right, I’m gonna let you examine the Torah scroll.” Okay, that’s kind of weird. Like, I’m a scholar who’s working on a PhD at the time, like…

I’ll tell you what was weird about it. I went to examine a Torah scroll in an Anglican church of the Catholic rite, where you walk into an Anglican church and you smell the incense, and there’s a statue of Mary. I’ve been examining manuscripts at the Russian National Library. I’ve been examining manuscripts at all kinds of places all over the world. And I never had somebody say to me, except that one incident, like, “Oh, you’re affiliated with this particular branch of Judaism.” What would that have to do with my research of… I’m not… and…

Sergio: So, this was for the dissertation or something?

Nehemia: That was part of my PhD dissertation, which was at Bar-Ilan University.

Sergio: Man, you really went above and beyond for that one!

Nehemia: And Bar-Ilan University is an Orthodox Jewish university. So, at Bar-Ilan University, I never had a single person say, “Wait, you’re doing a PhD at Bar-Ilan, but you’re a Karaite.” Because there were Muslims who were doing PhDs at Bar-Ilan University. There were Christians… I actually met a Messianic believer doing, I think he was doing a master’s at Bar-Ilan University, or maybe an undergrad, I don’t remember, but he was at Bar-Ilan. So, the point is that if you’re an academic institution, there should… unlike on the American left, there is not a… what’s the word? What do they call it… a religious test. So, one of the core concepts in American civil discourse is that there is not allowed to be a religious test for public office.

Now, if I go to work for Focus on the Family, and they want me to sign a certain doctrinal statement about the Trinity, that’s totally legitimate because they’re a religious institution. But if I go to work for the State of Colorado, they are not, by the American Constitution, allowed to administer a religious test. I actually saw the other day… what’s that guy’s name? Ben Shapiro appeared before the United States House of Representatives, or something like that, and literally this representative who, I don’t know… Oh, he’s the Chinese agent, I forget what his name is. This like… literally he was involved with a Chinese agent. He administers a religious test on Shapiro. He says, “Do you believe such and such is a sin?” So, if you want to ask me, even on a podcast, do you believe such and such is a sin? That’s a fair question. But if you… if I go to testify in court in a public context, in civil public discourse, it’s not relevant whether I think a certain thing is a sin or not.

Sergio: Unless it’s a court of law, right? Unless it’s a court.

Nehemia: Well, in a court of law, if you ask me, do I think…and I guess maybe there’s context. Is it against your beliefs to administer the death penalty? And you’re on a jury, they’re allowed to ask you that. But if I’m engaging in a public office, and that would include being at a university, a university does not belong to a particular religion. I, as a Jew, as a Karaite Jew, I could go and… in theory… I could go and work for Georgetown University, which is a Jesuit institution. And if they said, we’re not going to hire you because you’re a Jew, they would, and should, lose all government funding. Now, whether a university should have government funding or not is a different question. But in American civil life, there is a separation of church and state, and administering a religious test… this is what it’s called in American law, a religious test, on someone…

Now, at a synagogue, if he says, “I don’t want to let you in here because you’re not an Orthodox Jew or because you’re a Karaite Jew,” he’s allowed to do that. It was just a bit weird because I wasn’t coming as a Karaite Jew, I was coming as a scholar. But if he says, “You know what? I only let Orthodox Jews in here.” Okay, it’s your synagogue. Do whatever you want.

This was an ironic thing. I went to examine a Torah scroll, that was… a Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust, at SMU, Southern Methodist University. And the interesting thing about their Torah scroll is it was a kosher scroll, meaning it could be used in a synagogue. And then I went to examine another Torah scroll at a synagogue nearby, and it wasn’t a kosher scroll.

Sergio: So, they couldn’t actually read it.

Nehemia: They weren’t allowed to read from it in the prayer services. And so, why did they have it? Because it represents the people who didn’t survive the Holocaust. Here you have an artifact from the Holocaust, and the fact that this scroll survived but the people who used it 150 years ago… and they’re dead now… Now, at the time of the Holocaust it might not have been kosher either, but it survived the Holocaust and has been preserved. That is their physical connection to people who did not survive, and the entire Jewish civilization of Europe that was wiped out during the Holocaust. So, I understand why they have it, and I think it’s a beautiful thing they have, the synagogue. But I think it was ironic.

Southern Methodist University, which allowed me to examine their scroll… and both scrolls came from what today is the Czech Republic. So, they let me examine their scroll, and it turns out, as far as I could tell, at least, it was a kosher scroll. And the one at the synagogue, this other synagogue, was completely not kosher and they didn’t claim it was, right? Like, the letters are actually flaking off because it’s so old. That happens, especially from the 18th, 19th century. The ink was kind of a poor quality and it starts to flake off over time.

So anyway… so yeah, I’ve had some interesting experiences, gone to some interesting places, had some interesting adventures. And if I went to the Anglican church and they said, “Oh, we only let Anglicans in to examine our Torah scroll.” Okay, it’s your church, do whatever you want. But they didn’t say that. They were totally open. They loved that somebody was coming to examine… it was called Pusey House at Oxford. They loved that somebody was coming to examine the scroll, who was a scholar, who would be able to glean some benefit from it, some historical insights. Which I did. It was a really fascinating scroll.

Sergio: To you, what’s the most exciting thing you’ve gotten to see?

Nehemia: Well, that’s easy. The most exciting thing I’ve gotten to see is the Aleppo Codex. That, hands down, immediately, the Aleppo Codex. I spent nine hours over three days examining the Aleppo Codex with a microscope, and with certain other instruments, and I was able to see things that you can’t see in any available photo. Just this morning I was looking with some scholars at something in the Aleppo Codex, and I said, “I think that’s such and such, but I really can’t tell because it’s not a great photo.” So, I’m kind of guessing. Well, when you’re holding it in front of you and you pull out a microscope, you can see things you can’t see in the current available photos. Now, maybe there’ll be better photos in the future, but… That’s the most exciting thing I’ve done in my life manuscript-wise, is examine the Aleppo Codex.

Sergio: And I know that you’ve gotten some new imaging equipment. How did you… how were you able to acquire this new imaging equipment to be able to do it?

Nehemia: Well, I mean, I was able to acquire it by just purchasing it, but it was more a question of how did I know what to purchase.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: And some of the stuff you can’t actually purchase; it has to be granted to you, let’s put it that way. I was really blessed by… I went and I studied at Oxford University during a two-week seminar under the… who I believe is the greatest scholar of Hebrew paleography in the world, of this generation. Or let’s say active working Hebrew paleographer, this woman named Judith Schlanger. And she said, “You know, if you’re going to really be serious about working on these Torah scrolls and studying this particular scribal practice, you should go talk to this scientist in Berlin named Ira Rabin.” So I go to Berlin, and I meet Ira Rabin, and she completely changes my life. Because up until then, pretty much everything was just about speculation and could never be proven or disproven. Like this morning. I think a certain letter has been erased, and it used to be something else, and now it’s this, but I don’t know. I’m looking at a photograph which was done at 20 megapixels, which was a really big deal ten years ago. Today it’s not. On my iPhone I have 45 megapixels. We can do better.

So, it completely changes my life because I’m like, “Wow, I can actually prove some of these things I’ve been speculating for years, and we can do some really cool scientific tests.” It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, was with this scientist in Berlin. We went to the Vatican, and we did these tests on Codex Vaticanus, which is a Greek manuscript. And I’ll talk about that more some other day. But, yeah, that was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. After the Aleppo Codex, that’s probably it.

Sergio: Okay. And… I know there’s a lot out there, so if you could be in front of any other manuscript today… What are you hunting for now?

Nehemia: The Aleppo Codex! I want to go back to the Aleppo Codex and examine it using X-ray fluorescence technology.

Sergio: Again?

Nehemia: Well, back then I didn’t have that access to that technology. There’s a certain scientific technique that you can use where you can see things that you can’t see with the naked eye. You can’t even see it with a microscope, and you can turn speculation into definitive answers. So, that would be one thing I would love to be able to do. There’s some other things that I won’t share at the moment, because I’m trying to get… hopefully I’ll be able to do them.

But yeah, that would be incredible to be able to examine… There are certain questions that we have in these… There are things in the manuscripts that we’ve been speculating about, we meaning scholars, for over a hundred years. In some cases, much longer than that. And you can actually answer questions now in an objective way. And look, things are developing over time, where 50 or 100 years from now they’ll look back at what we’re doing and say, “Oh, isn’t it cute? They used that tool.” All right, but it’s better than nothing.

Sergio: The 5 megapixel.

Nehemia: Right, right. Or “Oh, they did 50X. Isn’t that adorable? They did a 50X imaging. And today we have… we’re using an electron microscope or something.” I don’t know, whatever. Or some technology that hasn’t even been born yet. Somebody walks around with an electron microscope in their pocket.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Like, I’ll give you just a quick example. So, there was this little dot in the Aleppo Codex that I saw, and I examined it with a 200X microscope, and it turned out it was a freckle. It wasn’t a dot of ink. And you can tell the difference. Not always… but in this case, it was actually a freckle. Like, I have freckles on my skin. So, the cow had something like a freckle, or a melanoma… I’m not a dermatologist, but it had some kind of blemish on its skin, and people looked at that. Actually, that happened in the… and that wasn’t my discovery. That happened in the Leningrad Codex, where people had transcribed these freckles as vowels, as Hebrew vowel points. And it turns out it’s literally just some kind of blemish on the animal, of the skin, the skin of the animal… the animal of the skin! The animal skin, and so I saw a similar thing in the Aleppo Codex, and that was pretty cool.

Sergio: And what’s…

Nehemia: Another thing I looked at, and I’m like, “Okay, that’s ink, beautiful. Now, I know, it’s not just a guess.”

Sergio: What’s the oldest manuscript out there? That we know of?

Nehemia: You have to say what you mean by the oldest manuscript. You mean the Bible?

Sergio: Yeah, of the Torah.

Nehemia: Because you could say the oldest manuscript is a clay tablet, which is counting somebody’s sheep or something like that, written in Sumerian. That would probably be the oldest…

Sergio: No, of the Torah.

Nehemia: But the oldest fragment of any biblical manuscript is what’s called the Silver Scrolls. They were discovered in a place called Ketef Hinnom, dated to around 650 BCE. They say it’s from the time of King Josiah. They were found in a tomb, in a burial cave. Today it’s part of the Begin Heritage Center. At the time, it was on a cliff, or a slope, really, which comes down from the Scottish Church… if people from Jerusalem know where that is.

Sergio: Is that the one with the Aaronic Blessing on it?

Nehemia: It is, it’s exactly what it is. It also has a verse from Deuteronomy that most people don’t know about that they were able to read using high resolution imaging about 10 or 20 years ago. Where first, if I remember correctly, refers to God as “shomer habrit vehachesed,” “He who keeps the covenant and the chesed,” it’s such a beautiful word, “and the loving kindness.” I believe it’s a verse from Deuteronomy, but it also has the Aaronic Blessing, yeah. And look, anybody can see that at the Israel Museum.

I guess you could say that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, is that. But everybody gets to see that, so maybe that shouldn’t diminish from it, but it is amazing. I mean, think about it; it’s a fragment of the Torah, a very small fragment, written on a silver scroll. It was probably an amulet that somebody used to for some kind of superstitious protection, ironically, but it is a quotation from parts of the Torah, and it is the oldest surviving fragment that we have. It’s pretty cool.

Sergio: Yeah. Well, I know you’re a Karaite Jew. And you were Rabbinical, and you kind of left that all behind. Is there any wisdom that we can actually glean from the Mishnah and the Talmud?

Nehemia: Absolutely! So, well, look, the Mishnah and the Talmud… First of all, there’s an entire section of the Mishnah called Ethics of the Fathers, or Ethics of Our Fathers, which is beautiful wisdom literature. It’s great advice. Some of its advice you might not agree with, but other things there are… I was talking to somebody other the other day, and they said, “If not now, when?” I said, “You just quoted a rabbi from the Mishnah.” “If not now, when?” is “Im lo achshav, eimatai?” I believe that was Shammai who said that. And then he said, “Im ein ani li, mi li?” which is kind of a tongue twister. “If I’m not for me, then who is for me?” And he said, “If I’m only for myself, then what am I?” Which is, I mean, beautiful, profound wisdom. There’s also a lot of important historical information that we can see in the Mishnah and the Talmud and other Rabbinical literature.

I hate to run after an hour-and-a-half.

Sergio: It’s okay. Yeah…

Nehemia: But I’ve got to wrap it up. I’ve got another meeting now. It was really good talking to you, Sergio. I really, really enjoyed it.

Sergio: Yeah, I enjoyed it too. Can you do us a favor and pray us out before we go?

Nehemia: Sure. I’ll pray the Aaronic Blessing, what’s on those two Silver Scrolls. Yevarechecha Yehovah ve’yishmarecha. Yehovah bless you and keep you. Ya’er Yehovah panav eleicha ve’yichuneka. Yehovah, shine His face toward you and be gracious towards you. Yissa Yehovah panav eleicha, Yehovah lift His face towards you, ve’yasem lecha shalom, and give you peace. Amen.

Sergio: Amen, amen. Alright. Well, thank you, Nehemiah. Hopefully I can have you back on some other time, because I only got a little chunk of what I wanted, but it’s cool!

Nehemia: All right, shalom.

Sergio: Yeah, shalom.

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The post Hebrew Voices #198 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #197 - Nehemia on "Grotto in the Tar Pit": Part 1, Nehemia appears on the Grotto in the Tar Pit podcast to discuss the questioning of one’s beliefs, the historical struggle for free speech, and the Spanish Inquisition.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: 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.

Sergio: Even if you believe completely one way, you should know the other perspective. You should know the flip side of the coin and everything they’re going to argue.

Nehemia: Absolutely. Well, that’s how people get surprised. They don’t know what the other argument is going to be. That’s how people end up losing their faith.

Sergio: Welcome to another episode of Grotto in the Tar Pit. I’d like to thank you all for being here, and to say we have a great guest for you today is a total understatement, because the person we have today is someone that I’ve been watching for years, a true treasure trove. If you’ve ever found a treasure map, this would be the X on the spot! So, Mr. Nehemia Gordon, how are you doing today?

Nehemia: I’m doing good, how are you doing?

Sergio: Dr. Nehemia Gordon I should say! I’m doing good, man.

Nehemia: You know, the joke is… somebody gave me a mug when I got my PhD, and it says on the mug, “Don’t show me that! I’m not that kind of doctor!”

Sergio: Oh, yeah!

Nehemia: Yeah. Tell me about the name of your program – Grotto in the Tar Pit. Maybe the audience knows, but I don’t.

Sergio: Okay. They’re not really going to know either. The reason I did it is because, first of all, you’ve got Elijah’s grotto out there on Mount Sinai, and I came back out here with Dr. Hovind in Alabama, so since he’s all about the dinosaurs I figured there’s got to be a tar pit somewhere, you know what I mean?

Nehemia: Okay! I thought maybe you’re in California. Isn’t that where the tar pits are?

Sergio: Yeah, I’ve actually passed by those; the La Brea Tar Pits.

Nehemia: Have you? Okay. I’ve never seen them; it sounds pretty cool.

Sergio: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Now, I’m going to have to wing it. The reason being I just totally deleted all my questions I had for you. So, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing!

Nehemia: That’s the best way to do it. It’ll be completely spontaneous.

Sergio: Okay. So, one question I was going to ask you… you found out that you were Jesus’ cousin 20 times removed or something like that…

Nehemia: Well, I found out he was my cousin. Let me back up. My great-grandfather was a rabbi who lived in Lithuania. He was actually born in what today is Latvia. Actually, at the time it was the Russian Empire. And he came to the US in 1923. I’m named after him, his name was Nehemia. And one of the things I was told about him is that his claim to fame was that he was a descendant of this famous rabbi who lived in the 1700’s. Well, as I got more inquisitive and more into research, I’m like, “Well, let me research that.” And I spent a period of time digging up old death certificates and birth records, and I actually found the direct link back to this rabbi who died in the late 1700’s. Once I got to that rabbi, I saw, “Oh! He’s a descendant of this other rabbi. And that rabbi is a descendant of this other rabbi.”

So, I saw that there’s this chain of rabbis… and this was a thing that rabbis did. I’m sure I had some street sweepers back in my ancestry; there are no records of that. What there are records of is, when a rabbi would write a book, he would say, “You know, I’m the great-great-great-grandson of so and so through such and such a line.” So, I was able to trace it back to at least someone who claimed he was a descendant of King David, and there was a claim that they could go father to son all the way back to David. Now that’s through my mother’s line, just bear that in mind.

But once I got back to a certain name, they were then tracing it back to King David. And then there was this website, geni.com, where somebody had taken the genealogy of Jesus from the Gospels and put it in just like a human genealogy. And then it would show you how you are related to other people. And on that website, I put in “Jesus.” I found him, Yeshua of Nazareth, and it said, “You’re related to him.” And I don’t remember the exact thing.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: I think he was something like a 33rd cousin… I could look it up somewhere, I still have it. But yeah, he was a very, very, very distant cousin. Now, like I said, I’m sure in the time of Jesus there was also someone who was a mason, meaning like a rock mason, or probably like a farmer who plowed fields, but I don’t know that guy’s name because nobody wrote it down. So, I can only tell you the famous people I’m descended from, but that’s kind of cool. And look, I’m Jewish, I’m not Christian. And so, I’ll talk to Christians, and they’ll be talking about Jesus, and they have a relationship with Jesus, and I’m like, “Look, I have a relationship with Jesus too, it’s just through lineage.”

Sergio: I remember you telling some stories about how people come in and tell you how you helped them find their way to Jesus and find their way to the Lord, just to find out that you’re a Karaite.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well look, I did a podcast about this. I’ve got my podcast, Hebrew Voices.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: People can look it up on NehemiasWall.com.

Sergio: It’s a great podcast, by the way.

Nehemia: Thank you. I interviewed a friend of mine who had come to me during a time of crisis. I interviewed him years later about this. He was going through… I’m trying to remember the exact thing. People wouldn’t find it in the podcast, but basically, he was going through a crisis of faith. And he asked me a question, something to the effect of, “Okay, I know you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re Jewish. You’re not a Christian, you’re not a Messianic Jew, but what would be the best argument in favor of belief in Jesus?”

And my background is academia… actually, my background before that is studying the Talmud; my father was an Orthodox rabbi. And the way they study things in the Talmud is, you can ask any question and analyze it from different perspectives. It’s not always what the answer is, it’s sometimes more important what the question is and how you ask it. And there’s pros and cons for every argument. So, I’m like, “Alright, as an intellectual exercise, I can say if I wanted to argue in favor of Jesus, and if I was a believer, here’s how I would argue.”

And look, there’s something called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when somebody already kind of believes something, and then they cherry pick evidence to support that. And people who are believers… I’m a believer in Judaism, you’re a believer of Christianity, I suppose. I don’t know you that well… the non-believers will say, “Okay, you guys just believe that because you have confirmation bias.” Well, maybe, but the non-believers have confirmation bias too. When they find something that doesn’t fit logically, they’ll say, “Okay, well, there’s an infinite number of universes.” Why did they come up with the multiverse theory? And there’s a whole bunch of reasons that I don’t know enough to get into, and what I do know I don’t have time to get into. But basically, they say there’s a bunch of things in physics that don’t make sense, and the only way to explain this is to say there’s an infinite number of universes, and we just happen to be in the universe where it does make sense.

Okay, so, that’s actually kind of a convoluted explanation. It might be correct or not, but they’re looking for a naturalistic explanation. And if you have to have a naturalistic explanation you might have to posit the existence of an infinite number of universes.

So, the point is, do we, as believers, do that in our own faiths? Perhaps in a way we do. Does that make any sense what I’m saying?

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Let’s put it this way. There’s this famous… and I’ll bring this Talmudic story. And I’m not a Talmudic Jew, I’m what’s called a Karaite Jew, which means I’m strictly a believer in the Old Testament.

Sergio: And I was going there, I was going to ask you about that. But I’ll let you tell your story first.

Nehemia: Well, I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. My father was a rabbi, like I said, also a lawyer. So, he knew to argue things from different perspectives. That was what a lawyer needs to do, that’s what a rabbi needs to do, is, “There’s truth. I don’t know what that truth is, but I can try to approach the truth by asking different questions and making different arguments. And maybe it’s a good argument, maybe it’s not; maybe it’s convincing, maybe it’s not. But what are all the possibilities?”

It’s something that I think a lot of young people are afraid of. They’ve been sheltered and then they hear an opposing view for the first time, and they’re horrified. They need puppies and crayons.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they’ve never heard somebody who has a different view from them. They live in little bubbles. Well, that’s completely contrary to my upbringing.

I grew up in Chicago, and I remember when the Nazis marched in Skokie… they wanted to march in Skokie actually, and there was a lawsuit. At the time, it was considered this wonderful thing that the Nazis were being represented by a Jew. And my father was a lawyer so I’m like, “Okay, what’s going on here? Why would some Jew represent the Nazis in court?” And the explanation my father gave me, and I think it was common at the time, was, “We’re fighting for their freedom of speech, not because we care about them. It’s because if they take away their freedom of speech, our freedom of speech will be taken away.” And the irony is that having this very conversation is probably going to get this podcast shadow banned! That’s the irony of it!

Sergio: Yeah, I don’t mind! I’m going to tell you right now, Nehemia, I was going to go there anyways! I was already planning on having this conversation with you.

Nehemia: So, I want to talk about confirmation bias. There’s this wonderful discussion in the Talmud about King David, and some of the rabbis are trying to explain away all the bad things that David did. And they’ll say, “You know, he didn’t actually commit adultery with Bathsheba,” and they have a convoluted explanation. I don’t even need to go into it. They’ll say, “Well, technically she was divorced.” It’s not what it says in the Bible, but they’ll come up with these convoluted explanations.

And there’s a response to that in the Talmud which is really beautiful. Another rabbi comes along and says, “You’ve come up with these convoluted explanations because you’re a descendant of King David. And so, you’re just trying to justify your ancestor to make yourself look better.” There’s this whole obsession with lineage that they talk about in the New Testament. And look, that goes on in Judaism for sure.

Sergio: If it didn’t, you wouldn’t know that you’re Jesus’ cousin.

Nehemia: Right. But at the same time, I don’t know the name of the farmer who spent his days with his back hunched over, harvesting wheat, because that guy’s name wasn’t recorded. So, the point was, they’re accusing these other rabbis, “You’re just justifying your ancestor because you’re descended from King David.”

And what’s really interesting is, this debate from around 1,800 years ago from these different rabbis, one a descendant of King David and the other not, was repeated in the Knesset, in Israel’s parliament, in the 1990’s, where one of the secular members of the Knesset called King David a bully and a womanizer. Which… okay, fair enough. But one of the things that’s interesting about Jewish history, the Bible and Jewish history in general, is that we expose all of our flaws. We don’t pretend that King David was a perfect person, because as Solomon said when he dedicated the Temple, “There is no man who does not sin.” It’s part of our human condition. So, in the Knesset they said, “Why are we idolizing him? He was a bully and a womanizer.” Okay, but he also repented. So, he had his flaws, and he was imperfect, and he did his best. And no one’s perfect.

There’s this post-modernist idea, I think it is, where you want to take whoever the hero is of the past… they call it in Hebrew “shattering myths”, and you want to find everything that’s wrong with that person. Well, show me somebody who’s not perfect, and maybe you could point to Jesus, I don’t know, and show me someone who’s human and only human who is perfect. There is nobody like that. So, everybody has their flaws is the point.

So, when this friend of mine asked me, “If you were a Christian, what would be the best argument in defense of believing in Jesus?” I’m able to answer him. I’m not threatened by that question. And he later said he was on his way out of believing in Jesus, and that allowed him to believe again.

Sergio: So, on the flip side, why believe in Satan? You would have told them the same thing. Well, not the same thing, but…

Nehemia: That’s a good question. I love that question. You know what I love about that question? It shows you the intellectual openness to say… and I’ve had this conversation with some Christians, and they cannot hear it. In the same vein that I can say “why I believe in Jesus” if I was a believer, I can say, “why I believe in Satan.” And I actually don’t know the answer to that. “Why I believe in Satan,” right?

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: But in theory I can have that conversation.

Sergio: If someone asked you, you could argue their point.

Nehemia: I can also tell you the reasons not to believe in Satan. I could probably come up with reasons to believe in Mohammed or not believe in Mohammed. I could certainly come up with reasons not to believe in Mohammed. I don’t know exactly off the top of my head what the reasons to believe in Mohammed would be because that’s not my field of expertise.

But yeah, it’s an intellectual exercise which is really important. And I think this is a very Jewish approach, what I’m saying here. And you can say it’s not biblical if you want. I don’t know, we could have that conversation. But it’s certainly part of the Jewish culture as it evolved over the centuries, which is, like I said, to ask questions. I’ve been told by Christians that if they even question certain doctrines in their heart, they are afraid they are going to go to hell.

Sergio: I personally think that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to question the world. And even if you believe completely one way, you should know the other perspective. You should know the flip side of the coin and everything they’re going to argue.

Nehemia: Absolutely, right. Well, that’s how people get surprised; they don’t know what the other argument is going to be. That’s how people end up losing their faith in Christianity. I’m not saying always, but I’ve seen it happen, where they’ve never heard the other argument and they’re presented with the most simple argument from the Jewish side or from the Muslim side, and they end up converting to Islam or leaving Christianity because they’ve just never heard the other argument.

So, the Jewish approach is to say, you don’t really believe unless you’ve questioned. And you don’t have to agree with this, but this is the Jewish attitude, to, say… let’s say about believing in God. If you’ve never questioned if God exists, whether He exists or not, then you don’t really believe in God, you’re just repeating what somebody told you. That’s the Jewish approach. And you don’t have to accept that or agree with that. I believe there’s a lot of value in that…

Sergio: Well, not in offense, I know you’ve heard the joke of what happens when you get two Jews in a room.

Nehemia: Yeah, you get three opinions.

Sergio: You get three opinions.

Nehemia: And my joke is when you get two Karaites in a room, you get five opinions, so…

Sergio: That’s a great thing! That’s a great thing! You should be able to explore everything. The guys that I told you that you might be able to get onto their podcast, that’s the reason they started their podcast. They actually wrote up a list of things that couldn’t be talked about in church.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sergio: And sat there and talked about them.

Nehemia: Yeah. Look, I understand that people have emotional commitments to certain ideas. I’m trying to play Nehemia’s advocate here. In other words, if you came to me and you say you’re open about everything, let’s talk about Holocaust denial and why you don’t believe it. Alright, don’t waste my time. I’ve met people who survived the Holocaust. I’ve been to the death camps.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: I think in American discourse they call this the Overton window. The Overton window are the things that are legitimate to discuss. But I think anything is legitimate to discuss. There was this Holocaust denier named David something or another, and he sued this Holocaust researcher named Deborah Lipstadt. And he sued her in British court because she called him a liar. She basically said like this… something which I don’t think scholars will generally say. David Irving, that was his name.

So, David Irving was a famous historian of World War II, a serious historian, and then he started to deny the Holocaust. And Deborah Lipstadt, who was a Jewish researcher of the Holocaust said, “David Irving is too good of an historian to deny the Holocaust unless he’s being intellectually dishonest.” I hope I’m getting this right. If not, please don’t sue me.

So, she was saying that he knows that he’s misrepresenting… this is my understanding of it, at least, she accused him of deliberately misrepresenting the sources. She said, “He’s too good of an historian. It couldn’t be by accident. He knows he’s mistranslating the German texts,” and all that. I don’t remember the exact details. This ended up in a court case, and I think it was a really important court case because Deborah Lipstadt had to prove certain elements of the Holocaust in court. And she won.

Well yeah, but here’s my point of bringing up the Deborah Lipstadt–David Irving case. I actually read some of the transcripts. They brought out a lot of the evidence, and you can find it online. And I’m like, “How come I’ve never heard of this?” I’ve been to Auschwitz, I’ve been to Majdanek, I’ve been to Treblinka, and nobody ever told me about these elements of the evidence. So, I believe in the Holocaust because I’ve met Holocaust survivors, and I don’t believe they’re lying to me. And I’ve been to those places, and I’ve seen some of the things that I’ve seen. I’ve seen bones in the ovens in Majdanek.

A hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, no one’s going to be able to say, “I’ve met a Holocaust survivor,” so bringing this into the public record was really important. Imagine if somebody came along 200 years later and they started to have the kind of conversations I’m hearing the postmodernists have today about the Holocaust. That’s all holocaust denial is; it’s postmodernism applied to the Holocaust. It’s really what it is.

Sergio: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, and so is anti-Zionism, to me.

Sergio: Well, what…

Nehemia: It’s very clear to me. And those are forms of postmodernism. So, I think these are important questions to have. Here’s my point of all of this, and then I’ll let you ask your question. I’ve talked to Christians, and they’ll say, “Here’s the reasons we believe in Jesus.” And I’ll ask what, to me, is a really basic question. “Have you taken that same thought pattern for proving Jesus and applied it to other figures in history?” And they get deeply offended, “How dare you compare the belief in Jesus to the belief in whoever.” It’s an intellectual exercise that I think is very useful and important. And you might be asked two or three questions by an atheist, or a Jew, or a Muslim, and if you’ve never thought about these things you’re going to get blindsided.

Sergio: So, one of the things I was going to say is that I enjoy about your podcast, is like when you went to that speaker’s square over there in England.

Nehemia: Oh, that was fun.

Sergio: Yeah!

Nehemia: The Speakers’ Corner, yeah.

Sergio: Yeah, the Speakers’ Corner. And people were there, and you were able to talk to the Muslims and just hear them out for what they had to say.

Nehemia: I don’t think I even broadcast all the things that I recorded there because I had three or four hours of recording. I don’t remember if we’d ever published it. Somebody can fact check me here, but I had a conversation with… I’m trying to remember; I feel like he was a Shiite, and he was wearing a mask. Maybe he wasn’t a Shiite, maybe he was something else.

Sergio: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Nehemia: He was some kind of Muslim, I don’t remember, who wasn’t allowed to show his face or was afraid to show his face because he thought the other group of Muslims was going to come and find his house and kill him. And I was like, “This is crazy!” I talked to this one guy who believed there was a certain man from somewhere in West Africa, Nigeria or someplace like that, and I first thought it was a joke, but they believe this guy was actually God who came down to Earth.

Sergio: What?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Sergio: There? That was there?

Nehemia: That was at the Speakers’ Corner, yeah. And in a hundred percent seriousness and devotion he believed this.

Sergio: That he was God? Come down in the flesh?

Nehemia: That this guy was like the second coming of Jesus, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. But no Christian is going to hunt down this guy and kill him. But if you said the same thing within an Islamic context… not even the same thing. If you said something much more mild from my perspective, they’ll literally try to hunt you down and kill you. Something’s wrong with the discourse. If you’re so afraid to hear other ideas that you’re going to murder somebody over those ideas, something’s wrong there.

Sergio: Yeah. Which was what I wanted to bring up to you, like, what’s going on in the colleges right now? Man!

Nehemia: Oh my, it’s insane.

Sergio: Yeah, it’s crazy. When I was out there in North Carolina, when I’d go on the train, just about every day I’d see people with Palestinian flags and banners that said, “Free Palestine”, and they were always headed to the colleges. It’s crazy!

Nehemia: Well, here’s what’s crazy about it. There’s this cartoon going around that… I think it’s Naama Levy, who is the young lady who was kidnapped by Hamas. And you can see the blood coming on her pants.

Sergio: Yeah, I think you showed that picture on your podcast.

Nehemia: So, there’s this cartoon of her standing before the United Nations. And it’s not what actually happened; she’s still, as far as I know… I don’t remember. Is she still a prisoner in Gaza? I don’t remember… or she might be dead, I’m not sure. I think she’s still a prisoner, as far as I know… as we’re recording this. But in the cartoon, they said, “We don’t believe you. But if it happened, you deserved it.” That’s what we’re hearing from the college campuses. It’s “believe all women, unless they’re Jewish, and then, we don’t believe it but they deserved it”. Well, wait a minute. How can you be saying the same thing? Look, I was never advocating “believe all women.” Some people tell the truth, some people lie, just like in any kind of situation.

And look, this is one of the things that Holocaust deniers love to bring, “Oh, there’s this person who claimed they were in Auschwitz and really they weren’t, and they’re lying for attention.” Okay, that happens. There are people who lie. But there’s this overwhelming evidence. It’s not from one particular person that we base this on.

So, the point is, they were saying believe all women, and now all of a sudden, it’s, “Unless they’re Jews and they’re in Israel. Then we don’t believe that because they deserved it”.

Sergio: Yeah. If it was anywhere other than Israel, then nobody would be thinking twice about what Israel is doing to Gaza.

Nehemia: I heard this one military expert, he says that in the entire history of discussions about modern warfare he’s never heard a debate about what the ratio was of civilians… a public debate, to combatants. That’s a new thing that’s been introduced into Israel’s war of survival in Gaza. This obsession with how many civilians died. Well, if Hamas didn’t use them as human shields, probably very few civilians would have died. And even with Hamas using them as human shields, relatively few civilians are dying. But nobody ever talked about ISIS in Raqqa, in Syria, and how many civilians were dying in Raqqa or Mosul.

Sergio: Because it’s not Israel.

Nehemia: Well, it’s not Jews. When hundreds of thousands of Muslims, including thousands of Palestinians, were killed in Syria, nobody in the Muslim world cared. Certainly, nobody had mass public protests because it wasn’t being done by Jews. So, let’s be honest here; what they care about is that Jews are involved, and they hate Jews. And if you hear what they say online, certainly, you’ll hear things like, “Well, the Jews,” and I’ve literally had people say this to me, “Well, you Jews were kicked out of over 100 countries so you must be doing something wrong.” That’s literally victim-blaming.

And the other thing is, “Well, you killed all the prophets and you’re killing our people in Gaza.” Okay, so you’re upset that somebody 1,400 years ago fought a war against Mohammed, and Mohammed killed all the men, raped the women, at least according to their sources. They take it as wives, against their will. And then one of those women poisoned Mohammed with a sheep or something like that. This is what they’re complaining about 1,400 years later. You’re going to murder a baby today because of that? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s insane. That’s literally an ancestral hatred. It’s literally what it is, which is a type of anti-Semitism.

Sergio: Well, I’m going to be straight out. When I started listening to you and Michael Rood, I did exactly what you said everybody does; I went and shook the family tree and tried to see if a Jew would fall out! So, I checked, and I think it might be there. I checked everybody, my grandparents and my parents. I checked their last names. And I’m not sure if you know about this, but during the Inquisition in Spain they told all the Jews to leave. Well, apparently if you were a family that was asked to leave, you can now claim Spanish citizenship!

Nehemia: Really?

Sergio: Yeah. And I was looking at the paper, and all my family names were on there.

Nehemia: Okay. I want to talk about the Inquisition for a minute, because I’ve had people say, “Oh, the Inquisition, that was 500 years ago.” I literally read this somewhere online once, that there was a Jew that was Sephardic and they were saying, “How could he be Sephardic?” And Sephardic could be translated as “Spanish”, meaning from Sepharad.

Sergio: From Spain, yeah.

Nehemia: And more specifically, from Iberia. Meaning not Spanish from Latin America. “How could he be Sephardic? It was 500 years ago. His grandmother must be 500 years old.” And that’s not what Sephardic means. Sephardic today… well, it has a number of definitions. But the main definition is, Jews whose ancestors were in the Iberian Peninsula, which could be Spain or Portugal, or what today is Spain and Portugal. And they either fled… and it was over a long period of time.

One of the early persecutions was in… I want to say it was 1397. And the big one that everyone knows about was 1492. Here’s what people don’t know. In 1860, in Barcelona, there was somebody who was born into the Catholic church, baptized in the Catholic church and secretly practicing Judaism. And they were hauled out into the public square, had what’s called an auto-de-fé, which is basically like a church trial, and they were burned at the stake.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: Not in 1460, not in 1560. That happened then, too. But in 1860 it was the last documented auto-de-fé, where they burned a Jew who was living openly as a Catholic but secretly as a Jew, was still being burned at the stake in 1860. Think about that. Now, what year were your grandparents born in? I don’t know if you know from the top of your head. I’m trying to think if I even… oh yeah, my grandparents…

Sergio: Oh, I don’t know…

Nehemia: My grandmother was born in 1913, if I remember correctly. 1860 would have been her grandmother. That’s not that long ago. So, go back five, six generations, and you had people who were secretly practicing Judaism, and there were life and death consequences if they were caught. Well, that’s mind-boggling. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more recent incidents. There was someone about 100 years ago who went through these archives in Spain, and that’s what he found. I bet if somebody went through the archives today, they would find more recent incidents. That’s not my expertise. But they kept really good records, and a lot of those records are still around in Spain, over in the Spanish Empire. And you had people who were being burned at the stake in the Philippines…

Sergio: In the Philippines! Wow.

Nehemia: Yeah, because it’s part of the Spanish Empire.

Sergio: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, imagine this. Here’s what happened: in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the thing that happened in Jewish history…

Sergio: He was a Jew, right?

Nehemia: I don’t know if he was a Jew.

Sergio: Was he a secret Jew?

Nehemia: I don’t know of any evidence that really supports that. But they say his navigator was definitely a secret Jew, or what they called a New Christian. A New Christian was somebody whose ancestors or himself was forced to convert to Christianity.

Sergio: Like conversos?

Nehemia: Yeah, conversos. But they still continued to practice some form of Judaism in secret. So, for example, I believe it’s in the logbook of Christopher Columbus’ navigator; he uses Hebrew letters. Why is he using the Hebrew letters? Because he’s more familiar with that alphabet. He probably learned math, or mathematics, using Hebrew characters.

So, in 1492 they said to the Jews in Spain… and just to put this into perspective, at the time Spain had the center of Judaism in the entire world. It was the intellectual and population center of Judaism in the entire world, was in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Spain is reunited after conquering Granada, and they say, “We got rid of the Muslims, now let’s get rid of the Jews!” That’s really what happened. And they issued an edict which said, “Either convert or leave.” And some people said, “They want me to be sprinkled with some water. Who cares? I’m going to continue practicing Judaism in my house, but I’m not going to give up everything I’ve had with my family. I’m in a home where my family has lived for 500 years.” Maybe since Roman times the family had lived in that house, and they had that business they were passing on from father to son. They said, “I’m going to say here. People kind of do what they want in Spain anyway.” Well, they didn’t know the Inquisition was coming. I guess they should have known. Or maybe they did know, I don’t know. There were some people who said, “I’m going to convert to Catholicism openly, but I’ll continue to secretly practice Judaism.” What people don’t realize… some people don’t realize, is that the Inquisition wasn’t against Jews. It was against Christians, or more precisely, people they considered Christians.

Sergio: Protestants.

Nehemia: People they considered to be under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, that’s who was under the threat of the Inquisition. So, it was the Jews who said, “Alright, I’ll just go through the motions, and I’ll formally convert to Catholicism. It’s just a sprinkling with water, it doesn’t mean anything.” And then years later they or their descendants are burned at the stake because they’re continuing to secretly practice Judaism.

So, a lot of the Jews said, “No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to leave.” So, where did they go? They went to Portugal, which had their doors open. They said, “Hey, we’d love to have you.” That was in 1492. Well, in 1497 the Portuguese monarch comes under pressure from the Catholic Church, and he said, “Look, this is kind of awkward. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Jews,” and he puts a different ultimatum. He says, “Convert or die.”

Sergio: Whoa.

Nehemia: And in some instances, it’s not even convert or die. He gathers the Jews into the public square in Lisbon and he has these monks sprinkle water on them, and he says, “Now you’re Christians. You’ve now entered into the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. If you go and don’t work this Saturday, you’re going to be burned at the stake.”

Sergio: Ohh!

Nehemia: So, it wasn’t anything they even consciously said. “Okay, I’ll pretend to be Christian and really be Jewish.” They were literally sprinkled with water…

Sergio: So, he forcefully put them under the authority of the Catholic Church so that he would have the authority to do this. Wow, I didn’t know that.

Nehemia: In Spain it was convert or leave, and in Portugal was convert or die. Now, why did they go to Portugal? Well, the languages are very similar, from what I understand, and they’re also geographically right next to each other. I don’t even need to get on a boat, I can just walk to Portugal. So, it was a good option for a lot of Jews. Now, some left, and then you end up having Sephardic Jews living in Constantinople, what today is Istanbul. Imagine this; you have people in what today is the west coast of Turkey who are speaking Ladino, which is sometimes described as a dialect of Spanish.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: You could also argue that Spanish is a dialect of Ladino. They’re both Romance languages. They’re very similar languages.

Sergio: It’s Hebrew and Spanish mixed together, right?

Nehemia: Well, it was the dialect of Spanish spoken by the Jews, which included a lot of Hebrew words, and Aramaic words, and then probably words from other languages that Jews had brought with them from other places. So, it was kind of this thing where, at home they would speak Ladino, but when they went into the market and they were buying something in the market or trading, then they would speak Spanish. And by the way, they weren’t exactly speaking Spanish, either. Each region of Spain had their own dialect.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: You had Castilian, and you had Aragonese, and even today you have Catalonian, or Catalan. Today we’ll talk about Italian, and Spanish and French, but go back to any time before radio, and every 100 miles someone had a different dialect that was barely intelligible to the other people. Certainly, if you’re not speaking in a public format, you’re speaking at home, you might be speaking your local dialect. I mean, it’s still kind of that way in some places.

Sergio: I speak Spanish, and if I listen very closely when someone’s speaking Portuguese, I can understand it.

Nehemia: What about if somebody’s from Argentina; can you understand them as well? Or do you have to listen closely?

Sergio: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sergio: Where the big difference is, is if somebody’s speaking Portuguese from Brazil. There’s so much slang and native words in the Brazilian form of Portuguese that I can’t understand it for anything.

Nehemia: So, this is an age-old question in linguistics; what is the definition of a dialect? And so, for example, I’m told that people from Sweden can understand people from Norway, and Norwegians can understand Swedes, but they speak two different languages, and they can both understand Danes, I guess, I don’t know.

There’s an old joke that was coined by a Jewish scholar who was the great scholar of Yiddish. Because what’s Yiddish? Yiddish is a dialect of German.

Sergio: German and Hebrew, right?

Nehemia: And he said, “Why is Yiddish a dialect of German? Why isn’t German a dialect of Yiddish?” And in reality, they both come from a common ancestor, which is Old High German or something like that. I’m not an expert. But they both come from an earlier language. It’s not that there was a Jew who immigrated to modern Germany and started speaking Yiddish and that was his dialect of German. It was that you had Jews who were living in the Roman Empire in an area that was conquered by Germanic tribes, and they started speaking whatever that Germanic tribe spoke. And the Germans of today have a language that descended from Old High Germanic, and Yiddish is also descended from Old High Germanic, and I guess there’s Low German, whatever that is.

Sergio: So, in other words, Ladino and Spanish, they both came from Latin, right?

Nehemia: They both came from an earlier language which you can call Proto-Spanish or Medieval Castilian. I don’t know, I’m not an expert. But they both came from an earlier language, that’s the point. So, here it’s different from… like, there might be a dialect of English spoken by Jews on the Lower East Side of New York 100 years ago. Well, those were immigrants who came to New York and maybe they didn’t speak fluent English. That’s different from Ladino, which was… there were Jews who were living in the Roman Empire before… they were living in Spain, and Iberia, before it was the Roman Empire. They probably came there with Phoenician traders in the time of King Solomon and Hyram of Tyre, because the Tyrians, the people from Tyre, had trading colonies in what today is Spain. And there were Jews who came along with them who were traders, so they were there before the Romans. And they were probably first speaking Phoenician… well, Hebrew and then Phoenician, and other languages over time. And the language they’re speaking when they’re kicked out of Spain, or were forced to convert, is a descendant of a series of different dialects and languages that evolved over time.

So, the point is that you have people who were forcibly converted. In some cases, they didn’t even do anything; they were sprinkled with water, and they were told, “Now you’re a Catholic.”

Sergio: Wow. That’s messed up, man.

Nehemia: And generations later, their descendants would say, “You know, in my house we don’t eat pork, and for some reason we light candles on Friday night. We don’t actually know why. And for some reason we do certain things.”

And there’s actually a really interesting example of this. There was a saint among the descendants of the Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism, a saint that is pretty much unknown otherwise in the Catholic world, called Saint Esther. And it was a way that they would teach their descendants about certain Jewish values. They had to wrap it in a Catholic veneer, like this Catholic cloak, so it’s not Esther the queen… I mean, it is; she’s from the Book of Esther. But they said, “Okay, we’ll call her a saint, Saint Esther,” and they would convey certain Jewish ideas.

Well, the Catholic Church wasn’t entirely stupid. They could see there were people who were doing things different, and they were persecuting those people for centuries. When you were caught, you were burned at the stake, and I’ve seen the documents.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: I’ve held them in my hands.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: And what do I mean by documents? The Catholic Church was proud of this. What they would do is, they would publish a document that said, “This person is being burned at the stake on Tuesday March 5th,” whatever, “1849,” I don’t know the exact date. But they would give an exact date and the exact crime, and one of the crimes was Judaismo, which is Judaizing. I’m probably mispronouncing that. But I’ve actually seen the Portuguese version of this, it basically meant Judaizing. What’s Judaizing? Your neighbor had a dispute with you, and they went to the local Catholic priest, and said, “You know my neighbor over there who owes me money, he doesn’t work on Friday night after sunset.”

Sergio: Right.

Nehemia: “And he won’t eat pork on Christmas,” or whatever it is. And they’re like, “Wait, why isn’t he eating pork on Christmas? What’s going on here?” And they go and interrogate the people, and they find out they’re secretly practicing some remnant of Judaism, and they burn them at the stake. And meanwhile the neighbor now steals his sheep and everything.

Sergio: Even if they didn’t know about it? Because I’m sure a lot of it was handed down. Things were handed down and you don’t even know what you’re doing.

Nehemia: Oh, a hundred percent. In some cases, they did know what they’re doing. In some cases, they didn’t. In some cases, you have Jews showing up… really, you have people who are nominally Catholic, showing up in Holland in 1750 and 1650, and saying, “My ancestor was one of those Jews from 1497 in Portugal.” And one of the earliest synagogues, if not the earliest synagogue in New York City, was founded by Portuguese Jews who were descendants of these conversos. So, they end up going to Holland, because Holland had freedom of religion. It had been a Spanish colony, a Spanish province. They rebelled, and one of the things they said is, “You know, we’re rebelling because we want to be Protestants. We should give freedom of religion to everybody.” And so, actually, one of the first places in Europe to give freedom of religion to Jews is the Netherlands, Holland.

And then some of them end up going to New Amsterdam. They weren’t liked in New Amsterdam, because people were anti-Semitic, but they’re like, “Okay, we can’t do anything about it. You’re free to practice your Jewish faith.” Now, these were people whose great-great grandfather was baptized into the Catholic Church because he had no choice.

Sergio: So, is this right after the Mayflower and all that?

Nehemia: I can’t tell you; I think it’s in the 1600’s… I’m bad with the American history dates. But people can fact check me and Google this. It’s sometime in the 1600’s if memory serves me, where you have…

Sergio: As soon as the Christians came, so did the Jews.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Sergio: So, right after the Christians came over here to colonize, here came some Jews seeking religious freedom as well.

Nehemia: Well, I think the Christians were here a little bit before that. In other words, the Spanish came much earlier. The Spanish are coming in the beginning of the 1500’s. I don’t know when the first colony was in North America. I know that when the first British colony… this is crazy. I read this and I couldn’t believe it. When the first British colony was established in North America, there was already a hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sergio: What?

Nehemia: Think about that! That’s crazy! But that’s how long the Spanish were in North America.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: But there are Jews, or people who were descendants of Jews, who are coming and thinking, “You know, I’m persecuted here in my little village because everybody knows my great-great-great grandfather was Jewish. If I could go to Nuevo Leon,” in New Spain, which today is Mexico, “people won’t know who I am, and they’ll leave me alone.” And they did! That’s how they ended up burning people at the stake in Manila, in the Philippines, in the 1800’s, because they’re like, “Wait a minute. You’re not allowed to do that! That’s not what a good Catholic does.” And the Inquisition ends up following these Jews into what’s today is Mexico, and Spain, and Colombia, and various other places.

Sergio: So, it was the church keeping track of people? Like, “This guy’s descended from a Jew,” and the church was just keeping records of all this?

Nehemia: How did you find out your ancestor was possibly Jewish? From your name. So, they did the same thing. The Catholic Church kept really good records, and they’d say, “Oh! Your name is Cortez. Well, we know that some people who are named Cortez who are descended from converts from Judaism to Catholicism,” and they’d keep an eye on you.

Sergio: Apparently a lot of people who were trying to evade being known as Jews changed their names by adding an “E-Z” at the end to signify “Eretz Zion”.

Nehemia: Well, I don’t know about that, that’s not my expertise. That’s very possible. I know the Catholic Church was able to figure it out, and often it was some neighbor who didn’t like you who would rat you out. And sometimes maybe they were lying and said you didn’t work on Saturday, but you really did. The burden of proof is on you; it’s not like you’re having a fair trial from the Catholic Church. And here’s the crazy thing; why does the Catholic church have the authority to burn people at the stake?

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VERSES MENTIONED
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