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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look forward to reading your comments!

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

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

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

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Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words

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

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

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

Elon: Hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: A small…

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

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

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

Nehemia: Oh, I love that one!

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

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

Elon: It’s artik.

Nehemia: Artik, okay.

Elon: Artik.

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

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Oh, really?

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

Nehemia: Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: Yeah.

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

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

Nehemia: That means “behind you”.

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

Nehemia: Which is “straight ahead”.

Elon: Straight ahead, exactly.

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

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

Nehemia: Right.

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Yeah, but how does that explain Somalia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: I doubt the ancient Hebrews knew that…

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

Elon: Hi guys!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Yeah.

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

Nehemia: It could be very confusing.

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

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

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

Nehemia: Trans-Jordan, right.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: I didn’t expect it to!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Really?

Elon: And ballahot are demons from the Bible.

Nehemia: Demons from the Bible?

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

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

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

Nehemia: Like what?

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

Nehemia: Okay, that’s a good example.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: Are they?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Wow, okay.

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

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

Nehemia: Really?

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

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

Elon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

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

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

Nehemia: “The Hebrew Language Patrols,” basically.

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

Nehemia: Oh, so he knew who he was!

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

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

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

Nehemia: What?

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Please. You say something about Ladino.

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

Nehemia: In the previous episode.

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

Nehemia: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: More than Greek, you’re saying.

Elon: More than Greek, yeah.

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

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

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

Nehemia: Which means Spanish, right?

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

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

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

Nehemia: Probably from Phoenician times even, maybe.

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: Stefah? Okay.

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

Nehemia: Interesting.

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

Nehemia: Okay.

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

Nehemia: Okay!

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

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

Elon: Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemia: “To be seen again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon: Maybe greetings could be something I can…

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

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

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

Elon: Ba’al.

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

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

Nehemia: Wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio TranscriptCOMING SOON

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
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Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
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SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS
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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

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Study – The Great ‘I AM’ Revealed
Torah Pearls #4 – Vayeira (Genesis 18:1-22:24)
Palestine Prophecy – Complete Four-Part Series
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!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio Transcript

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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The post Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study, Reconciling the Bible with Science: Part 2, where Nehemia hears from Dr. Gerald Schroeder about Jewish attitudes towards the Biblical creation story and how seemingly superfluous details in the text actually point to scientific understanding.

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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #199, Are We in the Last Days?, Nehemia obeys a dream to interview Joseph Dumond about his end-times predictions tied to the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles.

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Hebrew Voices #199 – Are we in the last days?

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Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to a live episode of Hebrew Voices. I guess that’s what this is. I am here with Joe Dumond. Joe Dumond… I would describe as… well, I’ll let him describe himself. But the last Hebrew Voice I did with him was called “2300 Days of Hell,” if I remember correctly, and then we did a very short conversation. It was about a week or so, I believe, before October 7th, or the Hamas genocide invasion. And you made some kind of statement there about how catastrophic things are going to happen. “The sky is falling.” Those are my words, right? “Black swan event.” And I thought, “Yeah, right. When does that ever happen? Never in my lifetime. Not to this degree,” and beyond any expectation, happens. So, here I am with Joe Dumond. Shalom Joe.

Joe: Yeah. The last time we met, you were telling us… I was having an Erev Shabbat with you and your sister and her family.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: I think that was a week… a week before October 7th.

Nehemia: Right, that sounds about right. And people can go see that, I think, on YouTube or TikTok or someplace like that. I don’t remember where we were streaming.

Joe: Yeah. What you said… you said, “You want to do an interview?” I said, “Sure, let’s get together.” And then you invite me for supper, and you go for a walk, and you pull out your phone. And… is this the interview?

Nehemia: I guess it was. It was. It was very… what’s the word?

Joe: Impromptu.

Nehemia: It was impromptu, which I guess all my interviews… well, not all, but… This one is sort of impromptu as well. And I’ll just tell the audience that I had a dream two nights ago, and I woke up from the dream, and you were in the dream. You were center of the dream. And I had, I would say, a feeling in my heart that I was supposed to bring you on the program and talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. That was my takeaway from the dream. You know how many times I’ve had that happen with interviews? This is the first one. So, I’m like, I don’t… we’re in uncharted territory. I don’t know where we’re going with this…

Joe: You were looking for… so, you… when you told that to me… So, here’s the email Nehemia sends me. “You want to do a podcast?” No, “How are you?” “How is your wife?” “How you been?” “What have you been doing?” “What do you do?” Just, “You wanna do a podcast?”

Nehemia: That’s partly my autism, that I skip all the niceties. Don’t be offended by that.

Joe: That’s… Nehemia, I’m not offended. And I’m saying, “What? Oh, yeah, of course I want to do a podcast with you. That’s a silly question.” So, I write back, “Okay, where, and what subject?” And then he tells me about this dream. And how can I refuse a dream that God tells him to have an interview with me? So, what are we going to talk about?

Nehemia: And I don’t want to say that I heard an audible voice like Abimelech in Genesis 14, “Go to Joe, for he is a prophet…” No, that wasn’t what happened. It was just the kind of feeling… the feeling I had at the end of this is, I don’t know what this is about, this is really weird. But it seems like Joe has a message that he’s supposed to communicate, and I’m supposed to help convey that.

So, I’m going to let you talk. By the way, I’m also kind of losing my voice… I’m kind of losing my voice. I’ve been in the hospital a couple times with some allergic issues. So, all the more reason to let you talk.

Joe: How’s your health been?

Nehemia: My health is great when the doctors don’t put me in the hospital. This was entirely doctor induced, so…

Joe: Okay.

Nehemia: But anyway…

Joe: I’m heading to… I’m heading to see the cardiologist here in two weeks, so…

Nehemia: Okay. Wow.

Joe: We’re all getting older.

Nehemia: Alright, yeah, we are. Yeah, well, I’ll be praying for you. So, Joe, what message would you like to share with the audience about anything that’s on your heart?

Joe: I’m kind of scared, because if this is a dream, Yehovah set this up. And I believe He has. You and I first met… do you remember the first time we met?

Nehemia: I remember we were walking outside of Zion’s Gate in that little narrow thing between the two walls. That’s what I remember.

Joe: Yes. That was the second time we met.

Nehemia: Oh, that was the second time? Okay.

Joe: First time we met, I met you in Lansing, Michigan.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: And you were sitting at the table in front of the hall, and I was early. It was about four o’clock. The meeting started at seven. I just wanted to know if I was at the right place. You didn’t even look up from your phone, and you said, “Yeah, this is the place, and it’s at seven o’clock.” And I didn’t know who you were. I’d never even heard your name before, and then I see you get up in the stage dressed as a rabbi, and “who is this guy?”

But I want to say, and I want to say this publicly; you changed my life that day. That night. That was the first time I heard about the crescent moon and the barley. You and Michael Rood. The first time I heard that God had a name. You blew me out of the water. I bought everything on Michael’s table that night, and I was just stunned. So, thank you. Thank you for sticking your neck out there so many years ago. You changed my life. And now there’s a bunch of people listening to what I teach and talk about, and it’s mostly the same stuff you do.

Nehemia: And wow, that would have been 2005. That’s when that speaking tour was. So, 19 years ago. Wow.

Joe: Yes. Yeah. But because of that, two months later you sent out an email. I started following you on email then. You sent out an email that Passover is going to be 30 days early, and you blew my cover. I was with the Worldwide Church of God, and I thought I could keep both calendars at the same time, one day apart, and nobody would know any different. But you are 30 days early. And I wrote you a hate email, and I apologized, for changing the calendar. But I didn’t understand it then. But what was happening was Yehovah was setting me up for a test. Was I going to keep the Barley Crescent Moon calendar? Or was I going to continue to do the Hillel calendar even though I knew better?

But at the time, I couldn’t prove which one was right, and the same scriptures for both. The week before Passover, Yehovah showed me what Yeshua said, “No man knows the day or the hour.” And once I understood that it blew me away. Of course, it’s a crescent moon. Nobody knows the day or the hour, that’s the Feast of Trumpets. Of course, that’s the simple answer. But it started with you and Michael. And I just want to thank you, because otherwise…

Nehemia: You know what? Some people have never heard of you or aren’t familiar with you. What’s your website, so people can find out more?

Joe: My website is https://sightedmoon.com/, and YouTube and Amazon, Joseph F. Dumond. You search that. If you want to put in “false prophet”, you can get all kinds of people that hate my guts. You can learn everything you want about me.

Nehemia: Do you claim to be a prophet?

Joe: Never.

Nehemia: Okay, so how could you be a false prophet if you don’t?

Joe: What is a prophet, though?

Nehemia: Ooh, that’s like a whole discussion. What is a prophet by you? So, just so the audience understands; I’m a Karaite Jew. But you’re coming also from a New Testament perspective. So, is there a different understanding in the New Testament of what a prophet is than my Old Testament understanding?

Joe: My understanding is that a prophet is anybody who speaks Torah.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. So, that’s not my understanding of prophet. My understanding of prophet… Jeremiah says, “Who stands in the counsel of Yehovah, let him make heard.” I’m paraphrasing here, but basically somebody who hears the word of Yehovah, either directly from Yehovah or from one of His angels, that is a prophet. Jeremiah’s description is, he’s standing in the throne room, to use our terminology, and he’s eavesdropping on the conversations between Yehovah and what we call the angels. Isaiah describes the same thing. Yehovah… And then Micaiahu in 1 Kings, I want to say it’s 22, “Yehovah says, who will go for us?” And one of the spirits comes forth and Micaiahu, who’s overhearing… Abimelech in Genesis 20, is not a prophet, even though God is speaking to him in a dream. He says, “Go to Abraham. He’ll pray for you,” “ki navi hu” “for he is a prophet.” Well, wait a minute. Isn’t Abimelech a prophet? Now, maybe there’s different definitions of prophet, right? And the New Testament might have different… Maimonides has a vast theology about different levels of prophecy, right?

Joe: Yeah, I didn’t go there. I think I found someplace in the Bible where it tells me that if you’re speaking Torah, you’re prophesying the Word of God.

Nehemia: Ah, so maybe prophesying is different in the New Testament than prophesying in the Tanakh. Meaning, there’s semantic shifts all the time, which means the meaning of words changes over time. In the Tanakh, in the Old Testament, the word Pesach is always a sacrifice. In the New Testament it talks about the Feast of Passover, which my upbringing in Judaism was the Feast of Passover. So, the meaning of words changes over time.

By the way, you told me something that kind of shocked me. And I’ve been out of the calendar… let’s say the guts of the calendar and dealing with it, since October 2nd, 2016. And you just told me it’s…

Joe: Passover, 2016. You told me you were getting out. In person in Israel.

Nehemia: Okay, well, I didn’t say that publicly. So, that was six months earlier.

Joe: No, you said it to me privately.

Nehemia: Which has now been revealed for the first time. Thanks there. But… live on YouTube! No, but you just told me that this is the seventh day of Sukkot for you. Today is August 26th, 2024. I’m going to be celebrating the seventh day of Sukkot in about two months. So, how did you get… and I actually literally don’t know the answer because I’m staying out of it. How did you get today to be the seventh day of Sukkot? Two months early, by my reckoning, which may be wrong…

Joe: So, as you know, and you’ve broadcast this on your teachings about the discrepancy of what is Aviv barley, and that’s been going on since, well, since the Temple was destroyed. And during the Middle Ages, you have Karaites going back and forth, and they’re arguing over what is Aviv barley, and it continues today. It’s no different. So, my qualification of what is Aviv barley is, it’s got to be ready or roastable to begin to make the wave offering. And basically, I’ve learned most of this from you. We differ a little bit on what is Aviv.

So, this year I and Randy Cates went to Israel in February. We were down in Be’eri. We went down and visited the memorial where the rave was slaughtered and could see all the asphalt where the cars were burnt. And it was a very emotional trip. But down in Be’eri, we showed people video of the barley that we had. We had, we believe, enough for an omer of barley. I know Devorah goes by fields of barley and Joel Halevy goes by one field of barley, I believe, that’s brown and ripe, and that’s where the difference comes in.

So, I went there personally. I had another guy go with me, and we found barley that was Aviv. And so, we announced it, we looked at, had other people look at… are we right? Can we really be that far ahead? And that’s what we did. So, I have to go with what I see. I can’t deny what I saw.

Nehemia: So, guys, there’s an interview I did with Nadia Vidro, who is a scholar at University College London, although her office is at Cambridge, and it’s an interview I did with her about Karaites in the Middle Ages and having different understandings of Aviv barley. Alright. So, Joe, last time we did a broadcast, like you said, it was a week before October 7th, the worst event that’s happened in my lifetime. Really, the worst thing since the Holocaust that’s happened to the Jewish people. Wow. And you made some, I don’t know…

Joe: I made some… I dropped some big hints there, but I thought this was just a short little five-minute video, and I wasn’t trying to give away the whole teaching at one time. I thought we were going to talk later that week. Yeah, there’s a lot more to follow up with that.

Nehemia: Well, let’s jump forward now, a year, almost a year. And I… look, I haven’t really delved into your teachings that much, to be honest with you, and you have written thousands or tens of thousands of pages…

Joe: You’re not following me through…

Nehemia: No, but give us the… what’s the word? The “in a nutshell”. The nutshell, no pun intended. Give us “in the nutshell”, what do you think is going to happen in the next month, year, ten years? What do you see in your prediction? And obviously you’re saying it’s not prophecy in the sense of Jeremiah, is it, what you’re saying? Meaning you haven’t seen this in a vision… or have you? I don’t know, I’m asking.

Joe: No, I’m not… Like, the big joke here is I’m not a strong believer in visions and dreams, and sure enough, you have a vision or dream to have an interview with me…

Nehemia: And I’m a big skeptic too when it comes to that kind of thing. There’s the classic statement like, was that God speaking to me or was it bad pizza? And I tend to have a lot of bad pizza.

Joe: I’m gonna get pizza jokes from now on.

Nehemia: Yeah. It’s not my joke, it’s an old one. So, what do you think’s going to happen? What do you… based on your understanding, where are we going? Where is the world going?

Joe: Give me a moment here. In 2008, when we first met to talk, when we knew who we were, I gave you a great big box of material. And you looked at it and rolled your eyes and said, “Oh, no! What am I going to do with all this stuff?” But this subject that I’m talking about, you know that I’ve been chasing this since the beginning, 2005, it’s about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years.

Nehemia: Sabbatical and Jubilee. Let’s start with a really…

Joe: The shmita and Yovel.

Nehemia: Let’s start with a really basic understanding: What is Sabbatical and what is Jubilee? I know there was a Christian guy out there teaching a few years back. He had a book about the “Shemaitah”. So, what’s the shmita and what is the Yovel? What are the Sabbatical and Jubilee year? Assume people know nothing.

Joe: “ShmAitah”, or shmita, whichever way you want to pronounce it, is every seven years. We’re talking about Leviticus 25, and Leviticus 25 tells you that every seven years the land shall have a rest. And it’s just like the Shavuot; seven Sabbaths, or seven Sabbatical years, and then after the 49th year you have a 50th year, and that is also a holy year. So, that’s when the land is restored to the people. And that’s what I’ve been teaching.

Now, it’s not just about that. I’ve been able to prove, through history, the Bible, tombstones we’ve got… I don’t know, 40-some-odd tombstones from Zohar, now. Many of them you don’t have, or you don’t even know about yet, and that’s what the latest book was actually supposed to be about. But it kept going back to the Mishnah and where the Mishnah has changed things, so I had to do the calendar issue. So, we’ll have that book out hopefully this fall.

But I document every Sabbatical and Jubilee year throughout history and have them all line up. Without force-fitting them, without hammering the puzzle pieces together. I just show you, here’s where they are, and this is how they work. But some of them are according to Hillel, and some of them are according to the Crescent Moon and the Barley Calendar, and that’s where the discrepancy comes. That’s why Wacholder, Zuckermann, Sher, and Marcus, who are the known authorities on the shmita and Jubilee years, dismissed all of them because they couldn’t understand the dating and the different calendars.

I happen to be raised in both, and recognized the difference really quick, so it made it easier for me to figure them out. So, that’s what I do, and then that’s what I teach. We use 2 Kings 19:29 to proof, that’s the beginning, and from that scripture alone you can count every Sabbatical year from 701 BC, forward and backward, and every Jubilee year from 700 BC, forward and backward.

Nehemia: Alright. So, let’s open up 2 Kings, what you just quoted. In fact, I’m going to ask you to open up and read it. But before we do that… So, just for the audience who isn’t following, maybe, just as we have a weekly Shabbat, which is you work six days and rest in the seventh, there is an annual Shabbat in the Torah, in Leviticus 25 and other places as well. And you plant your field for six years, and you let the land lie fallow on the seventh. And then there are seven annual Shabbats which then culminate in the Yovel, the Jubilee year, which is the 50th year.

And by the way, there’s an ancient debate, or discussion, in the Talmud about whether… or in other sources as well, about whether the 50th year is year 1 or whether it’s year 0, and then the next jubilee begins with the 51st year. In other words, that’s not self-evident necessarily.

Joe: That’s Rabbi Yehuda.

Nehemia: And then there’s this statement in the Talmud that when the Temple was destroyed… the Second Temple in the year 70, or they say the year 68, which is where life gets really interesting…

Joe: Or 69.

Nehemia: Or 69, according to Maimonides, right. So, it gets a little bit complicated there. So, they say then the Jubilee was abolished. Now, where you came in… and this is something I’d looked at before you and kind of hit a dead end, is there are these tombstones from the southern end of the Dead Sea from a place called Zohar, or Tso’ar, and people were dying in the 4th century and the 5th century CE or AD, meaning after the Temple was destroyed hundreds of years, and they’re saying, “He died in such and such a year of the destruction of the Temple, which was the third year of the Sabbatical cycle.” Or something like that, I don’t remember exactly. And then there was one from Sidon or someplace like that in Lebanon.

Joe: Baalbek.

Nehemia: Baalbek, okay, there you go. And so, at the time I looked at it, maybe there were 20 or something or 30, and you’re saying they’ve now published 40 of these tombstones. So, you’ve actually accumulated more evidence…

Joe: They’ve actually published a hundred.

Nehemia: One hundred? So, you’ve accumulated more evidence which… there I just want to give you credit. I looked at this 20 years ago or so, or maybe 15 years ago, and I found everything that was available at the time. You’ve actually been following this, and more evidence has been published, and you’ve come to certain conclusions.

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Alright, now, I’ll let you go to 2 Kings. What do you have in 2 Kings?

Joe: Okay, 2… Well, just one thing. I asked this elderly lady to go and search out this footnote that I found in one of the tombstones, and just search it out for me. I was busy doing…

Nehemia: You mean it was a study about the tombstones? You don’t mean it was in the tombs…

Joe: It was a study about the tombstones.

Nehemia: It wasn’t a footnote on the tombstone. Okay.

Joe: Yeah. Not on the tombstone, no. And I didn’t expect to hear back from her for about three, four, or five months. She comes back in three weeks with 100 tombstones. And I said I couldn’t believe it. It was amazing. And she’s here in front of me now listening, so, she’s excited about this. Anyway, 2 Kings 19:29. “This shall be a sign to you.” So, a sign is a Sabbath of some sort. “You shall eat this year such things as grow of itself, in the second year what springs from the same, in the third year sow and reap, plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them.” Okay, is that close to what you say in the Hebrew?

Nehemia: Let me pull it up. I’ve got to pull it up in the Hebrew. So, it’s 2 Kings 19:29. “Ve’zeh-lecha ha’ot” “This is for you a sign” “achol hashanah safiach” “Eat this year after growth.” We can talk about what that is. “U’bashanah hashenit sachish” “and in the second year,” actually volunteer grain. “U’bashanah hashelishit zir’u ve’kitzru” “and in the third year, plant and harvest,” “ve’nit’u chamim ve’ichlu pri’yam,” “and plant vineyards and eat their fruit.” And this is… what’s the context here? So, there have been, if I remember correctly… Oh, this is from… it’s…

Joe: It’s the attack on Hezekiah by Sennacherib.

Nehemia: Okay. So, basically the Assyrians had invaded Israel, and they devastated the land. And there’s the famous Lachish, the… tavlit, the relief. It’s the Lachish relief which shows Judean prisoners being taken prisoner by the Assyrians, and they’re being carried off to Babylonia or someplace like that. And it’s interesting because there’s three people being crucified there, or impaled, on the Lachish relief. There’s a replica at the Israel Museum and in the Archaeology Department at Hebrew University, but the original is actually in the British Museum. I saw it once, a few years back. And they found it in Ninveh, in what today is northern Iraq.

Okay, so the land’s been devastated, all the vineyards have been pulled up and the fields burned, and he’s saying, “You’re going to eat the after growth,” which… what do you understand from that?

Joe: You can eat what grows of itself. Whatever comes up this year, you’re allowed to eat.

Nehemia: In other words, when you’re harvesting the crops, some seeds fall, and those are going to pop up even though you didn’t plant a crop because you were under siege.

Joe: It’s a Sabbatical year.

Nehemia: So, you assume this is a Sabbatical year, not that it was a siege. Is that what you’re saying?

Joe: Well, I’m not looking at the siege part. I’m looking at, what is he allowed to do? The prophecy is, you can eat what grows of itself, but you just don’t plant. The second part is the same. You eat what grows of itself in the second year, you just don’t plant. But in the third year you plant.

Nehemia: So, it’s not obvious to most readers… and you could be right. But it’s not obvious to most readers that this has anything to do with Sabbatical year. What most readers I think would understand… and actually, guys, post in the comments. Tell me if you agree. My understanding of this, maybe I’m wrong…

Joe: Are we going to have a majority vote here, or what?

Nehemia: No, but you’re offering an interpretation. I’m offering another one. And the people who say, “Well, we just read it, we don’t interpret it.” You’re interpreting it, but your interpretation is implicit. You don’t realize that you’re interpreting it. So, my understanding of this, my interpretation, is that this is talking about… they were under siege, and they couldn’t plant. And so, they have no choice but to eat what’s left over. And the next year they’re not going to have a whole lot of seed, because you save seeds from your harvest. Well, now we’re just barely surviving, so it won’t be till the third year that they’re going to plant. But you understand that this as a Sabbatical and Jubilee year here, or what are you saying?

Joe: Two years that you don’t plant back-to-back.

Nehemia: Okay, so it’s a Sabbatical and a Jubilee. In other words, this is like Shavuot, when you have Shabbat on Saturday, and then on Sunday you have Shavuot, so there’s two days in a row that you’re not working. And it’s funny because I’ve had Messianics tell me, “Well, that’s impossible. You can’t have two days in a row. That’s not what God intended.” And that’s why they want to follow the Rabbinical system of Shavuot. But in the Rabbinical system, sometimes it’s on a Sunday too. It’s just about once every seven years on average, or maybe a little bit different, but…

Joe: Yep.

Nehemia: So, either way you’ll have two days in a row that are non-workdays. Here it’s two years in a row that are not planting, which is definitely what Leviticus 25 describes. Okay, go.

Joe: Okay. So, this is… the Assyrians record this date. There’s only two dates that the Israelites are recorded in history. One is the Battle of Qarqar and the other one is this day, 701 BC. So, it’s the most documented.

Nehemia: What was the first one?

Joe: The Battle of Qarqar in 853, when Ahab is killed.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: And the other one is this one. And that’s the only way we’re able to put the Israelite and Jewish kings into a historical chronology. Otherwise, we don’t know where they fit because they’d left no records.

Nehemia: We don’t know relative to our current chronology. Now, I’ll just throw it out there that the rabbis claim they do know, and they have a different chronology. But you’re saying secular historians have gone through thousands or millions of Assyrian tablets and Babylonian tablets, and they’ve been able to cross-reference these two historical events mentioned in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible, with the Assyrian chronology. Which then has been fit into our current chronology, where this year is 2024. That’s really what you’re saying.

Joe: Yeah. So again, as I began to do this current book, The Stones Cry Out, we kept going back to the Mishnah, which is the one written by Rabbi Judah in around 180 and redacted around 180, began by Rabbi Akiva in 133 or before that. But there’s these mistakes that are incorporated into the Mishnah, then the Talmud, the Babylonian Jerusalem Talmud, and then the Mishnah Torah by Rambam, and have now become part of their Torah, or their calendar. But they’re mistakes that they brought in, which began in the Maccabean times. So, that’s what this first book is about; documenting this chronology step by step, and how these mistakes come on. And bringing it down today.

Nehemia: But back up here. So, I was a bit distracted. I was making sure the video was actually live. So, let me understand what you’re saying here. So, you’re saying that the Rabbinical date where we’re now in 57… I want to say 83.

Joe: 83, I don’t know. I think it’s…

Nehemia: We’re about to go into… Tav-Shin-Nun-Gimel, sorry, not Nun-Gimel… Tav-Shin-Pe-Gimel, and we’re about to go into Tav-Shin-Pe-Dalet, 5783 – we’re about to go into 5784. So, you’re saying… and that actually is first formulated, or the earliest source we have is Seder Olam Rabbah, which is from maybe the 3d century or so. So, that chronology is wrong, is what you’re saying.

Joe: Okay, so just explain Seder Olam, because they don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s….

Nehemia: Well, there’s a midrash called “Seder Olam Rabbah”, “The Great Order of the World”, and there they tell us, for example, that the Persian period, I want to say, was 54 years or something like that. And secular historians say, no, it was much more than 54 years. In other words, they say the Temple wasn’t destroyed in 5… this is the rabbis… the Temple wasn’t destroyed in 586 BCE, like secular historians say, they say it was destroyed about 150… the First Temple, rather. It was destroyed about 150 years later. And then part of that is this kind of ideal that the First Temple, I want to say, was 410 years, and the second was 420, or vice versa, I don’t remember.

Joe: No, what they’re trying to do is take the Daniel 9 prophecy of 490 years and the 483 year… apply it to Simon bar Kokhba to make him the Messiah.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting, because I’ll get Christians who will say, “Obviously Jesus is the Messiah because the order to rebuild Jerusalem in Daniel fits exactly with the chronology that we present to you.” And then my question is, how do you know that chronology is correct? And they have no idea. They just read it in the encyclopedia.

Joe: So, the first…

Nehemia: And that encyclopedia… Well, that chronology is based on the assumption that Jesus is the Messiah. It’s a bit of a circular argument. And you’re saying the Rabbinical chronology is based on Bar-Kokhba being the Messiah. Which if you believe he’s the Messiah, great, and if you don’t, then that’s just a circular argument, right?

Joe: Well, yeah…

Nehemia: I don’t think anybody says he’s the Messiah. Well, I mean, yeah, nobody today says Bar-Kokhba was the Messiah, but people were willing to die… hundreds of thousands of people were willing to die for their belief that Bar-Kokhba was the Messiah. They died in the Battle of Beitar, including Rabbi Akiva.

Joe: But the Daniel 9 prophecy was first used by the Maccabeans to prove that, I believe, John Hyrcanus was the Messiah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: So, this Daniel 9 prophecy has been used multiple times.

Nehemia: “Used and abused” is what you’re saying.

Joe: That’s right. And if you… So, we’ve got one book, The 2300 Days of Hell, which takes the Daniel 9 prophecy and dissects it word by word and shows you the whole history of this prophecy. And it’s not about Yeshua. It’s not about Jesus. It’s not about that at all.

Nehemia: Who’s it about?

Joe: King David.

Nehemia: Help me out here, I haven’t heard this explanation. So, King David in his first incarnation, or is he going to come back in through the resurrection?

Joe: Okay. Well, I’m trying to get back to our meeting, but…

Nehemia: Alright, let’s… People can go read The 2300 Days of Hell. It’s a book that’s available. Alright, let’s go back to October.

Joe: We also need to cover this quickly, too. So anyway, the II Kings 19:29, counting by seven will line up with every Sabbatical year and all the tombstones. All of them. Even the Baalbek one that I had trouble with; I think I can make it work. So, that’s almost all of them. So, I’ll leave the Baalbek one out because it’s controversial, and the Jubilee years, also from 700 BC, line up with the Jubilee years mentioned in the tombstones of Zohar. They all fit.

Nehemia: So, here’s why this is important… let me give you a little bit of background. So, Maimonides has a long, elaborate discussion about when the Sabbatical year is. And he says, in the end, all of these explanations are not important.

Joe: Hang on, hang on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

Nehemia: Because we have a tradition of what it is.

Joe: Wait, wait, wait, wait!

Nehemia: I jumped ahead.

Joe: You jumped ahead, because you and I did an interview in 2018, and you surprised that one on me. I never knew about that.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Joe: And you were about to show me that maybe I might not be right, and Maimonides… now continue, shows you that my dates are right.

Nehemia: So, anyway, he comes up and he says, “It doesn’t matter, all of our explanations.” And look, it’s very involved, and I guess people can go listen to that interview, right, from 2300 Days of Hell that we did on… somewhere. But he says, “We have a tradition, and it’s a reliable tradition, about when the Sabbatical year is.” But then you have tombstones that predate Maimonides by over half a millennium, and you’re saying they do line up with Maimonides, or they don’t?

Joe: They line up with Maimonides, and you read it to me, it says that this year, or last year, was a Sabbatical year, but by tradition we keep it the year and a half before or…

Nehemia: Right, so his tradition doesn’t line up with the tombstones.

Joe: No.

Nehemia: Okay. But…

Joe: And he admitted, this year or last year was a Sabbatical year, which does line up with all the tombstones.

Nehemia: Hmm. Okay. Alright…

Joe: And that also lines up with II Kings…

Nehemia: So, you still have two traditions. One is the tombstones as you understand them, and the other is Maimonides telling us about a tradition around the year, give or take, 1200. And that tradition is different than the tradition that was around in the 4th century, the 5th century, when these people were dying, and somebody was writing on their tombstone: “Year three of the Sabbatical cycle”, right? That was obviously a tradition that was around, unless they just made it up…

Joe: That same tradition that they had, that Maimonides talked about in 1177 A.D… that same tradition is continued to today, and the Sabbatical year today that the Jews keep is one-and-a-half years before…

Nehemia: Okay, so that’s important. So, if you go Google, “When is ‘ShmAitah’ or when is shmita…” “…when is the Sabbatical year,” you’re going to find out the Rabbinical date, which is really not… it’s not even the Rabbinical date. It’s the date of Maimonides from the year around 1177, that he had heard from one of the Jews who came from Israel.

By the way, there’s a bit of a problem there, and the problem is that the Jews were wiped out from Israel when the Crusaders came… I want to say it was 1099, that killed all the Jews in Israel. Now, there was a community of Jews from Israel who had been living in Cairo, where Maimonides wrote this, for centuries, even before the Crusaders. So, when he says, “There’s a tradition from the Land of Israel,” what he really means is, he heard from the synagogue of the Shamayim, which is nothing to do with Shammai. It’s Ash-shams, which is the Arabic word for, “the Levant”, which includes Israel. Or it was called also… the Yerushalmim Synagogue, the Synagogue of the Jerusalemites. So, he heard from the people in the Synagogue of the Jerusalemites in Cairo, “This is when the Sabbatical is, and we know because we came from Israel.” But as far as I know, maybe there were one or two little communities up in the Galilee, in the mountains, like Peki’in claims that they were never wiped out by the Crusaders because they were at the top of a hill and the Crusaders didn’t bother to go up there. But basically, there were virtually no Jews in Israel in the year 1177. So, that’s an interesting little hiccup in his explanation, right?

Joe: Yeah. Not really. The facts speak for themselves, but… so, getting back here, why would God tell you to interview me today? What’s… So, if you go to my website, we have all these Sabbatical and Jubilee years, you can download them for free. Just go to the library. You’ll find them there, you can download them for free, or you can order this booklet from Amazon. And I’m not trying to do a commercial here. You need to know this because it’s important. Why would God have Nehemia Gordon, Dr. Nehemia Gordon from Hebrew University and all these credentials…

Nehemia: Well, I got my doctorate from Bar-Ilan University, but go ahead.

Joe: Okay. Okay, but why would He tell you to interview me? Because there’s something that you don’t know about the Jubilees. They’re prophetic. They reveal prophecy. The same way the holy days reveal prophecy, end time prophecy. If you don’t know the holy days, then all you’re doing is guessing, and that’s what Christians do when you don’t keep the holy days. You’re just guessing.

Nehemia: I think it was CNN that had this motto, “News you can use.” So, give me a practical thing of… what’s going to happen? And look, you could be wrong, but based on what you believe is going to happen in the next month and the next year… and maybe the next ten years. Give me that. What’s a takeaway here, something people can actually test?

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: In other words, they’ll look back and say, “Oh, can you believe Joe said that? He’s so silly.” From ten years ago. Or they’ll look back and say, “Joe knew what was going to happen!”

Joe: Joe Dumond was shutting down sightedmoon.com in 2020 if nothing happened. We’ve been warning people about 2020 since I started this in 2005. That’s based on the Daniel 9 prophecy. Seventy weeks, 70 Jubilees. It’s not weeks, it’s not 490 years, it’s 70 times 49… 70 Feasts of Weeks. The word there is shavua. It’s the female word for Shavuoth. Right? And I’m not a literal scholar, and I don’t speak Hebrew, but Daniel is told to hide the books. So, how do you hide the books? Put it in plain sight. Seventy Jubilee cycles are for your people. All 12 tribes, not just the Jews. It’s all 12 tribes. Seventy weeks from when? It’s not Ahasuerus, it’s not Cyrus, it’s not Darius. It’s from the burning bush. When Moses was told by Yehovah to go and get the people, seven times he’s told, “Go, go.” And Moses got all these excuses. “Go and get the people.” So, the only way you can know what year that is is by doing the chronology in Genesis according to a 49-year Jubilee cycle and counting them out. We’ve done that. Rabbi Yehuda was correct.

Nehemia: So, hold on. You say year 50 is also year 1 of the next cycle?

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay. I just wanted to clarify that.

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay. Where’s the news I can use, Joe? What’s going to happen in the next month? Is Iran going to start World War III?

Joe: I’m going to lead up there, because you already know what I told you, but you don’t remember it.

Nehemia: Probably. I remember one thing you told me, but you haven’t made it public, and I’m not going to share it, but…

Joe: Yeah, well, okay, I think I know what you’re saying. I’m not saying that either.

Nehemia: Let’s not go there. Alright.

Joe: No. Okay. So, 70 weeks, and then, how do you prove that? It says 7 and 62. It doesn’t say 62 and 7. It’s not the seventh place at the last seven years, like most Christians try to say it is. It’s 7 and 62. Seven Shavuos, seven Jubilee cycles, and then Messiah the Prince will appear. So, you count from the burning bush seven Jubilee cycles, and I’ve got those all laid out for you in this book. Do you want me to show you? I can show you here online. Do you want me to show you?

Nehemia: Show me. Yeah, yeah. This is this is your… the ball’s in your court.

Joe: Yehovah told…

Nehemia: Bear in mind it looks like you’re a little fuzzy here, so if you’re showing something with really high resolution you might have to make it big. And I’m actually looking here online at the video. Oh, we have some people in the chat.

Joe: Can you see that?

Nehemia: Yeah, I can see it. I hope the audience can see it. Let me try to refresh and see if people can see it.

Joe: So, this is the chart I told you about there, that you can have. You can get them free, print them off yourself, do it in color. So, the exodus takes place at 1379 BC. Can you see that? Do I need to blow it up?

Nehemia: Exodus… it’s always good to blow stuff up…

Joe: How’s that?

Nehemia: Yeah. So, the exodus is where?

Joe: Okay… 1379 in the blue here.

Nehemia: That’s the exodus from Egypt, according to your reckoning. And that’s minus 1379. What does that mean? 1379 BCE?

Joe: BC years. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. And there’s no year 0, right? Or is there, in your counting?

Joe: That’s right.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Right. So, seven Jubilee cycles and you will see the Messiah, the Prince. So, we count one Jubilee cycle. So, in the middle I got one, two, three. There’s four, five, six, seven… and after seven Jubilee cycles there is King David, born in 1040 BC. He’s anointed Messiah, the Prince. Messiah means Mashiach, means anointed. It doesn’t mean Jesus. Messiah the Prince is born in 1040, he’s anointed by Samuel as a young shepherd boy somewhere in the second Sabbatical cycle, we don’t know when. He’s anointed by Judah, when he becomes King over Judah in 1010 BC, and then again in 1003 BC by all of Israel.

Nehemia: So, I just realized something. You’re reading this right to left.

Joe: Yes. I’m trying to be Hebrew.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: I didn’t know I was going to publish this when I did it. I was just me doing my little thing.

Nehemia: But then the one with the Hebrew years is left to right, isn’t it?

Joe: Okay, so this one over here is also from right to left, bottom to top. This one starts from the counting of Adam. So, we go back here to the creation of Adam, and Adam… whoops, one more.

Nehemia: So, what year are in now, according to your reckoning?

Joe: Adam was born, or created, in year 1.

Nehemia: So, what year are we in now, from the creation, from Adam?

Joe: One second, one second.

Nehemia: I just want the answer.

Joe: So, everything on the right-hand side is going to be counting from Adam. Everything on the left-hand side… come on, how come this isn’t moving?

Nehemia: You’ve got a little thing on the bottom there that you need to drag.

Joe: There you go.

Nehemia: It’s for a Macintosh. Who can understand Macintosh?

Joe: Now what happened?

Nehemia: Houston, we have a problem.

Joe: Houston, we got a problem. I’m going to stop sharing. I’ll go back. No, I got to go out again. One second.

Nehemia: So, look, we have a comment here in the chat from someone named… I can’t read their name, but he says, “70 weeks was fulfilled long ago by Christ.” What do you say?

Joe: Yeah, right.

Nehemia: No. Explain why that person… you disagree. What’s your… And the 70 weeks of Daniel, he means, and you’re talking about, right?

Joe: He’s talking about the 70 weeks of Daniel being the creation from Ahasuerus or 483 years to Jesus’s start of his ministry. Three-and-a-half-year ministry. And now he’s got three-and-a-half years in when he returns. It’s called the gap theory; it’s created by Julius Africanus…

Nehemia: So, when is the 70 weeks fulfilled according to you?

Joe: It’s not been fulfilled yet.

Nehemia: But when will it be fulfilled?

Joe: Well, that’s what I’m trying to show you. I’m trying to let you…

Nehemia: And by the way, just so it’s clear for the audience; you do believe in Yeshua, right?

Joe: Yes. But…

Nehemia: You just don’t think the prophecy about him was fulfilled yet in Daniel, or…

Joe: No, it’s not about him at all.

Nehemia: It’s not about him at all.

Joe: Let me just get back here…

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: If you keep jumping to these different places, there’s a base you got to have. And if you don’t got the base, you’re all over the place with “Jesus is the…” what it’s talking about, and it’s not talking about him. So… Okay. We’re going to go back here to the seven Jubilee cycles for Daniel, or David, sorry. Then it says in the prophecy, 62 Jubilee cycles. So, if we count 62 from here, that brings us to 1996. There’s the 69th Jubilee cycle; 1996 was the end of that Jubilee cycle, and that’s the beginning of the 70th Jubilee cycle, which is the one we’re in now. So, you ask what year it is, it’s the year 2024, and that is equivalent to the year 5860 since the creation of Adam.

Nehemia: 5860.

Joe: So, the one on the right is… the one on the left.

Nehemia: So, the rabbis say we’re in 5783 and you say we’re in 5860. Okay, gotcha.

Joe: That’s right. So, we can do that. We can show why that’s happening. We don’t have time today to do everything.

Nehemia: No, no. I’m waiting for the news I can use. How do I plan my life in a practical sense if I think you’re right?

Joe: Yes. I just lost it again. I got to get this back up, because you do need to see it.

Nehemia: So, like, in other words, if I… and this sounds really bad, but if I thought a year from now the world economy was going to collapse, I would go take out a 30-year mortgage because I’d never have to pay it back. That would probably be a bad decision, because I might end up regretting it. But…

Joe: Well, I’m not here. Somebody else took my information and tried to make a book about the economy, and they fell apart in their face because they didn’t get all the details.

Nehemia: Look, and this happened in world history. In the year 1843 there were people who didn’t plant… or in 1842 who didn’t plant their crops in the United States because they believed Jesus was coming back in 1843, and apparently, they were disappointed. It’s actually called in history the… wasn’t it called “The Great Disappointment” or something?

Joe: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And then they thought it was 1844, and those people didn’t plant their crops for 1844, and they were financially devastated. So, guys, this could be wrong. Please don’t make financial decisions based on this, but also, it’s good to be prepared.

Joe: So, we are now in the 70th week spoken of by Daniel 9.

Nehemia: It’s kind of like Obama, who says that the oceans are rising, but he has like a $60 million beach house like one foot above the ocean. So, he doesn’t really believe it’s the oceans are rising. Okay. Or he’s not… Go ahead.

Joe: I believe this. I believe this.

Nehemia: I believe you believe it.

Joe: I believe this. So, Daniel 9 goes on to say, in verse 27… I believe it’s 27… let me just pull it up here and I’ll read it.

Nehemia: Daniel 9:27. Let me pull it up in my Tanakh here.

Joe: So, Daniel… oops. We’re going to spend a lot of time in Daniel, so this is good to know. Daniel 9:27, “Then he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week.” That’s another issue; we’ll just skip over that. “But in the middle of the week, in the midst of the week, in the middle of the shavua, in the middle of the Jubilee.” When’s the middle of the Jubilee? Nehemia?

Nehemia: Halfway through this… Oh, the Jubilee? I don’t know. If I knew, this would be my book not yours.

Joe: 1996 was the last Jubilee year. 2044 will be the 49th year, and the middle is 2020. Did anything happen in 2020?

Nehemia: There was a global pandemic.

Joe: “In the midst of the shavua, the week, he shall bring end to sacrifice and offering.” I’m reading the English. Okay. “And on the wings of abominations,” plural, “shall be one who makes desolate.” So, when you seen me and took me out to your sister’s place last October, why did I tell you I was there?

Nehemia: Remind me.

Joe: I was looking for the abomination.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: So, this is talking about an abomination.

Nehemia: That’s right! Wasn’t it some, like, church in East Jerusalem or… Well, I don’t remember what it was, maybe I was…

Joe: I had found a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was a brand-new shrine. The forms were still on it. It was in the place where I expected it to be. It was being built just before I expected it to be installed, and everything was lining up, and then it wasn’t installed. And then you and I went out for supper.

Nehemia: And where was that again? Wasn’t that like somewhere near the Mount of Olives or something?

Joe: It’s the Mount of Offense, what the history calls Golgotha.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Okay. So, now…

Nehemia: The Mount of Offense. Wait, is that Jabel Mukaber? Help me out, remind me.

Joe: I don’t know what that name is, that might be…

Nehemia: Is that where the United Nations is located?

Joe: No, no. It’s across the valley from the United Nations.

Nehemia: Oh, I think I know what you’re talking about, okay, alright. So, there was a shrine of the Virgin Mary that wasn’t set up. So, you lost me. The Virgin Mary is the abomination of desolation?

Joe: Well, any statue is an abomination. Okay, so, we have this clue, “In the middle of the week, he shall bring an end to sacrifices.” So, what happened in 2020? Everything went for a lockdown.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: Now, WHO announced that lockdown on March 11th, and that’s when I began my count from.

Nehemia: Who did? Remind me. Was it Fauci? I don’t remember.

Joe: No. Not “who.” The World Health Organization.

Nehemia: Oh, oh, WHO. The World Health Organization. Okay.

Joe: They announced. No, I wasn’t asking you a question.

Nehemia: I was just like, “who’s on first?” Okay.

Joe: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: WHO, The World Health Organization. Okay.

Joe: They announced the pandemic on March 11th, and they advise everyone to start locking down. Now, what I didn’t understand at that time was that Israel… Prime Minister Netanyahu locked down Israel on March 25th. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, okay, it doesn’t mean nothing if you stay in Daniel 9. Flip over the page to Daniel 12.

Nehemia: And my sister got a ticket going for a walk in what you would call in America a forest preserve or like, a nature reserve, because she wasn’t wearing a mask.

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: And there was a policeman who was standing at the entrance to this nature reserve. The ticket was actually eventually overturned because they’re like, this is ridiculous, but she had to go to court. So, anyway, go ahead.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of stupid stuff went on. But there was fear. Nobody knew how to stop this thing. Daniel 12…

Nehemia: But there was no reasonable reason to think that someone out in the ocean on a paddleboard could infect anybody else. That wasn’t reasonable, come on.

Joe: Well, you can get the blue whales…

Nehemia: Even at the time… Yeah, get the walruses all sick. Okay, gotcha.

Joe: Yeah. Okay, so now jump to Daniel 12 verse 11.

Nehemia: Daniel…

Joe: “And from the time that the daily”, the word sacrifice has been added, “From the time that the daily is taken away and the abomination of desolation set up, there shall be 1,290 days.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: So, the question I asked people, “what is the daily?” When I’m talking about this for the last number of years, 2020 was in front of me. We didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, but we knew something was coming…

Nehemia: And you were expecting something in 2020, and you’ve been vindicated because of the pandemic, is what you’re saying.

Joe: If nothing happened in 2020, I was closing up sightedmoon.com.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: And I’m still here.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: So now, what happened in 2020 is now history. We can look back. So, where is “the daily?” What is the daily that was taken away?

Nehemia: You tell me.

Joe: Every synagogue, every temple, every mosque, every church, every place of worship around the world went into lockdown.

Nehemia: But not the liquor stores in Texas, that I can tell you.

Joe: Not the liquor stores in Texas.

Nehemia: It just blows my mind.

Joe: Yeah. Netanyahu announced on March 25th, 2020… I believe that was the first day of Aviv for the Hillel calendar, I think. And they went into lockdown. You could not have ten men get together for a prayer at that time.

Nehemia: And that was the first Passover that my mother spent alone in her life, and she is not young. Well, I mean, she’s very young, but she’s my mother, so figure that out.

Joe: Yeah. And I’ve had two Passovers with you and your mother, so…

Nehemia: Yeah, but not this one. This one, she did…

Joe: No, not this one.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: The daily. What is the daily? Hosea 14:2: “The bullocks of your lips shall be our offering,” right? I’m really butchering that scripture. Hosea 14:2

Nehemia: Hosea… which, by the way, in some of the translations they take… this is actually really interesting… they changed the word… let me find it here. Hosea 14… I think it’s a different verse in some, in English numberings. But Hosea, oh, opened up Joshua 14:2. There it is, okay. It says, “Return Israel to Yehovah your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity. Take with you words and return to Yehovah. Say to Him, forgive all iniquity,” or literally ‘bear’ all iniquity, “and take good and let us pay for the bulls with our lips.” And some translations translate, “Let us pay with the fruit of our lips.” So, they change the word parim to perot, which is, it’s actually changing the Hebrew. As far as I know, there’s no manuscript that says that that I’m aware of, at least.

Joe: So, instead of doing the morning and evening sacrifice at the Temple, we’re now doing those morning and evening sacrifices with the prayers of our lips at 9 and 3 PM Every day.

Nehemia: Okay. So, you’re saying there was no minyan, there was no prayer quorum that got together during this period, and that’s “the daily…” the prayers that represent the daily sacrifice, is what you’re saying. And just so people understand, in Rabbinical Judaism, they actually have an idea that each prayer represents, and is an actual fulfillment of, a certain sacrifice. So much so that there’s a prayer on Shabbat called Mussaf, which means “the additional”, and it refers to “the additional sacrifice”.

So, there’s a morning sacrifice, that a prayer is said for… and then, around ten… well, it depends, I guess, when you start your prayer, but sometime later in the service is a second additional prayer that’s being offered through the lips. So, in other words, I would read this, at least today, and I would say that it doesn’t mean that if I accidentally ate pork, that I go and recite this specific prayer in place of that bull. But in general, I’m full of sin and I should offer prayer in place of sacrifice.

But the rabbis take this very directly. There are daily sacrifices, and you have to offer specific prayers as a fulfillment of those daily sacrifices. And even on Shabbat, an additional prayer in place of that daily sacrifice. That’s just the background here. So, you’re saying Daniel 9 is referring to those prayers?

Joe: That’s what I’m reading, that’s what I’m understanding. And this actually, Hosea 14:2 is a haftarah portion for Shabbat Shuvah, as well. So, it comes in again later on…

Nehemia: Which is when, in our story? Help me out there.

Joe: Shabbat Shuvah is the Sabbath between the Day of Trumpets, or the Feast of Trumpets, and the Day of Atonement.

Nehemia: So, how does that fit in with… What does that have to do with the pandemic? Or it doesn’t.

Joe: Well, that’s later. I’m just giving you… I’m throwing you a bone. Keep it for later. Okay?

Nehemia: Alright. And people, go listen to Prophet Pearls, I think we covered that somewhere.

Joe: Yeah, so, I’m in Israel, I’m looking for this abomination, and Keith hears… I’m going to bring Keith into it, because Keith was a part of this, and… that’s my 3:00 alarm going off there, by the way. So, I went and met Yehuda Glick. You know Yehuda Glick?

Nehemia: Uh-huh, of course, Rabbi Yehuda Glick.

Joe: And I warned him. I gave him my book, The 2300 Days of Hell, and two weeks later, an assassination attempt was made on his life. That was in 2014, I believe.

Nehemia: I think he was shot three times in the chest, if memory serves.

Joe: I thought it was seven times.

Nehemia: Might have been seven, right. It very well could he. It wasn’t just like Trump, where they nicked his ear, let’s put it that way.

Joe: No, he was shot all over the place, and he survived.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: So, he agreed to meet with me. I showed him what I’m trying to explain to you, then he got a little, “I’m not really sure if I want to hear this.” But I told him, “Israel is about to be attacked. It’s going to be a major attack. I don’t know where or how, but it’s about to happen.” Then Keith heard about it. Keith thought I’d lost my mind. I also wrote a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu advising him, but I don’t know how far that got. But Keith thought I’d lost my mind. So…

Nehemia: And this was in 2020, or no? When was this? Sorry…

Joe: 2023.

Nehemia: So, this is just before October 7th. You wrote a message to Netanyahu, “Israel is about to be attacked.” Is that what you’re saying?

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. And this is something that you figured out based on this study of the Sabbatical cycles.

Joe: What we just read, these scriptures. From the time that Netanyahu locked down Israel on March 25th… 1,290 days later brings you to October 6th.

Nehemia: And about 1,200 people were murdered that day. That’s interesting.

Joe: And at that time… I thought it was 340.

Nehemia: On October 7th? Oh, well, in the attack. Meaning, I don’t know how many specifically on the first day, but I don’t know that we even have the final number.

Joe: On October 6th there was nobody killed.

Nehemia: No, no, October 7th I’m talking about. The October 7th massacres culminated in… they originally said 1,500, now, I think the count is somewhere in the 1,200s.

Joe: Yes. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. And we don’t know exactly, because there are bodies that, you know…

Joe: Yeah. There was 1,400 and change; 1,200 were killed, 250 or so were kidnapped, and we don’t know how many of them are alive. So, that day affected my life. I’ve been watching every detail about this since then. Every hostage. It was traumatic. And I wasn’t even involved, and it was traumatic. But October 6th is the 1,290-day count. And it says that in 1,290 days, the abomination will be set up. Well, there’s no statue of Mary where I’m expecting it, but I’m looking, and all of a sudden there’s all these thousands of rockets going up, and they don’t stop like they normally do after ten minutes. Something’s different this time. And we got shrapnel landing in Jerusalem, and the rockets are exploding over Jerusalem, and I’m feeling the concussions in Jerusalem, and I think you too.

Nehemia: I was there, yeah.

Joe: Yeah. What is going on? And we don’t know anything that’s going on, we just, there’s… what do we do? And I’m staying on the Mount of Offense. I’m in Arab Jerusalem, the place where you won’t go. And there’s gunfire and there’s stuff starting up, and then, what the heck have I got myself into? It was a scary time.

Nehemia: You’re staying in a hostel or guest house or something in… There aren’t hotels there, are there? I mean, it’s kind of a dangerous…

Joe: Well, there’s a Panorama hotel there.

Nehemia: I guess there are, okay.

Joe: But I had to move there because they were getting very suspicious of me in the convent where I was staying.

Nehemia: Okay. You were staying in a convent to begin with? Oh, I remember that.

Joe: That’s where the abomination…

Nehemia: Didn’t I drop you off somewhere near there?

Joe: You dropped me off at the small gate, made me walk all the way over there.

Nehemia: That’s the place I can’t go because I would be killed.

Joe: I know. And I understand. I’m not complaining.

Nehemia: Well, there’s a chance, at the very least, my car would be stoned. Alright.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. I’m not… Anyway, so the 1,290 days. So, I’m in the Kidron Valley, I’m praying to Yehovah. Why is He letting this happen to His people? Where is God? I’m hearing bits and pieces Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon. There’s so many people being killed, and you know… what’s going on? Saturday night, after praying this, after getting mad at God for letting this happen, these people were… in my brain, these people were keeping Shemini Atzeret. They were obeying God, they were celebrating all night at Shemini Atzeret. And… I’m not trying to judge anybody, but they weren’t…

Nehemia: They weren’t because they were on the wrong date? What are you saying?

Joe: No, they weren’t keeping the holy days. They were having a rave; it has nothing to do with Yehovah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: And I’m not trying to judge anybody. Again, my heart goes out. But I can’t deny what I’m reading, and I can’t stay silent because of Ezekiel 33. You got it… “When you see the swords, you got to tell people.” And they think you’re nuts; they think you’re nuts. And Keith thought I was nuts. October 7th, Yehuda Glick wrote me and said, “You were right.” The next day, Keith wrote me and said, “Wow, you’re right,” you know. But what was I right about? I was right about this major disaster. Who wants to be right about that?

Saturday night, somebody sent me a video. And I don’t have a picture of it, but in the video of the rave, at the beginning of the video, most of them that you can see, there’s a giant inflated Buddha statue over the top of the DJ tent. And you see them all dancing around the DJ tent, Friday night and Saturday morning. And then as the gliders are coming in, you still see them dancing, and then the sirens go off and they all start running for their lives. And then the inflatable Buddha deflates, and nobody sees it anymore. “It will be in the corner of a holy place.” The holy place that he’s talking about, which I didn’t realize, is Kadesh Barnea. That is where Kadesh Barnea is, out there, the fringe of the altar, or the corner of the altar. The fringe of Israel is Gaza. It’s at the fringes, at the outer….

Nehemia: So, wait. Back up. So, the Nova rave, you’re saying, took place in the biblical site of Kadesh Barnea?

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: And you’re saying that they set up a Buddha there, which was the abomination of desolation.

Joe: No… It’s abomination. I think there’s more coming…

Nehemia: Oh, okay. So, are you saying that the book of Daniel predicted the Nova massacre, or the Nova rave? Is that what you’re saying?

Joe: I’m saying that Yehovah is real. And if you treat Him like nothing, you could die.

Nehemia: Well, that’s a theological statement that I don’t actually disagree with. But in the specifics….

Joe: Well, when Israel set up the golden calf, 3,000 people died…

Nehemia: So, is the Buddha at the Nova rave predicted in the Book of Daniel? Is that what you’re saying? Because it’s the first time I’ve ever heard that. Is that what you’re saying?

Joe: Yes, I’m saying that’s what it’s pointing to right now.

Nehemia: Okay, gotcha.

Joe: It matches precisely the 1,290 days. Now, if you go back to Daniel 12 and you read verse 12.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: “Blessed is he who waits and comes to the 1,335 days.” Now, the people in my group were arguing with me about… we were discussing it, not arguing, we were discussing it. And I didn’t know where that fit in.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: But if you count the 1,335 days again from March 25th, 2020, that brings you to November 21, I believe it is… November 22nd, and two days later, the first hostages are released.

Nehemia: Okay, so the release of the hostages was also predicted, according to you, in the Book of Daniel.

Joe: It’s what I’m reading.

Nehemia: Okay. What’s coming next? That’s what everyone is like… listening. What’s coming next according… And you could be wrong, but… you’ve been right before, so…

Joe: Let me add a little bit more to this.

Nehemia: Yes.

Joe: Netanyahu locked down Israel again on September 18th, September 25th…

Nehemia: 2020, you mean?

Joe: 2020, yes. September 18th, 25th, and December 27th in 2020. When we count 1,290 days later, that brought us to just about the time that Israel attacked the embassy in Damascus. Seven days later, Iran attacks. It’s approximate, it’s not a hundred percent. Each of the 1,335 days at that time was when negotiations for the hostages began, but they fell through. Then the December one just ended here, and that was the Iranian attack on Israel. So, I don’t know what this means, but I’m seeing patterns developing here.

Nehemia: So, based on these patterns… we’re August 26th, 2024. What’s the next date you think something significant is going to happen?

Joe: 2024.

Nehemia: Yeah, but when?

Joe: This is the thing. So, in the fall holy days, we have the Feast of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement. And during that time, there’s the ten Days of Awe.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: During those Ten Days of Awe, it’s a time that the shofars are blown, the trumpets are blown. And it’s a reminder to repent and get back to Yehovah so that your name will be found in the Book of Life by the end of the Day of Atonement, when the tekia gedola is sounded, the last shofar blast, as the sun sets. Right?

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: Okay.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying, is this on the Rabbinical reckoning that this is going to happen? So, in other words, October 12th, 2024, is the Rabbinical date of Yom Kippur, and that’s when something major is going to happen.

Joe: I don’t know…

Nehemia: Or by then?

Joe: I don’t know.

Nehemia: You don’t know. Okay. What are you predicting. What’s your…

Joe: I’m not predicting. So, here’s what I am predicting: 2044, at the end of 2044 begins a Jubilee year of 2045. That’s the beginning of the seventh millennium. These Sabbatical Jubilee years, 120 of them, prove that beyond doubt. I have more proof…

Nehemia: So, is Yeshua coming back in 2044 or 45? What do you…

Joe: Hang on… let me answer one question before you ask another one.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: 24… so, no matter what theology you subscribe to, I don’t care if you’re Pentecostal, Protestant or Jewish, whatever end time theology you subscribe to, you have from 2024 to 2044 for all end time prophecy to take place.

Nehemia: Whoa! Hold on, hold on! So, all end times prophecy is going to begin this year and culminate…

Joe: No, it’s already begun.

Nehemia: It’s going to culminate in twenty… So, we are in the end times…

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: Literally, according to your understanding.

Joe: One hundred percent for sure.

Nehemia: And it’s going to culminate in 2044 or 45.

Joe: No. Whatever theology you subscribe to must be done by then. Now, I believe in Yeshua, and Yeshua said unless those days were cut short… so they’re going to be cut shorter than that. So, let me show you something else. Now this… again, you may not agree with this. This is coming from the Book of Luke.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Luke says, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the last days.” And what that means is that when you’re getting married, when you’re buying property, when you’re eating and drinking… because that’s what he says. When that happens, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. Were they bad for doing that? It says the same thing in the days of Lot, “As in the days of Lot, they were eating and drinking and partying and getting married and buying property.” That’s not evil. So, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything until you look at the Jubilee cycle. So, Noah’s flood was in the year 1656… over here on the right-hand side.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: Which is equal to 2181 BC.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Okay. It’s in the sixth Sabbatical cycle, the sixth sabbatical cycle of that Jubilee cycle, and it took place in the fourth year, at the second Passover. So, the fourth year, counting from the bottom one, two, three, four. It’s a time of judgment on the world. So, we go down to, as it was in the days of Lot, and Lot was the year before Isaac was born. That’s 2047 from the creation of Adam, which is the year 1790 BC. And that’s the third year, again at Passover, when Sodom and Gomorrah is destroyed. A major judgment at that time.

Now, here’s what Luke didn’t say, “As it was in the days of Joseph.” Here’s Joseph’s seven days of plenty in purple, and seven years of famine in red. And they end, the famine ends, in the third year of the Sabbatical cycle. But I can’t use that as my proof, because Luke doesn’t talk about it. When you compare each of these together to our time today, that equals the year 2033-2034 as a time of judgment. So, when I did this as an experiment, I understood that the eighth day feast, the ones that the Jews don’t know what it means, is equivalent to the Jubilee year. So, I make 2045 the Jubilee year, the eighth day feast, and I count back seven days for the Sukkot, which is from 2044 to 2030. I make a day for a year, and then five days before that for the Day of Atonement. So, what would be the judgment now? Is it would be when Satan is locked away? That’s the Azazel goat is thrown in the pit in Leviticus 16.

Nehemia: Wait, slow down. So, Satan is locked away now, in 2024?

Joe: 2033.

Nehemia: Oh, 2033, Satan will be locked away.

Joe: So, that represents the Day of Atonement. And ten years before that, the Ten Days of Awe, represent 2024 to 2033.

Nehemia: Oh, so we’re in for ten years of bad stuff?

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: Is your prediction… Okay.

Joe: Stay away from the fan because there’s a lot of crap flying.

Nehemia: Okay. Okay. I hear you. I can imagine what it’s like to… well, I can’t even imagine. Like, if you’re living on the border of Russia and Ukraine, this is about as bad as it can get.

Joe: No, it’s not.

Nehemia: No, it’s not? Okay.

Joe: No. If we go to Daniel 8. Are you okay? Are you going to go to Daniel 8, or are you still catching…

Nehemia: Go for it. No, no, I’m definitely still catching my breath and trying to follow. And I’m looking for what we call in Hebrew, the takhles. What’s the bottom line? Right?

Joe: The bottom line?

Nehemia: Yeah. The bottom line of news I can use, of some practical application of this.

Joe: Okay.

Nehemia: Or what’s a hypothesis that I can test? Where if it doesn’t happen, Joe is wrong? Because I like that in 2020 you’re about to shut down the website…

Joe: 2020 was a hypothesis you could have tested.

Nehemia: What’s the next one I can test? Is there anything in 2024 between August 26th and December 31st?

Joe: If your readers want to test this, I wrote the book The Ten Days of Awe. So, it’s on Amazon, it’s on my website. They can go and get it, it’s six or seven hundred… I don’t know how to write a small book, so it’s six or seven hundred pages. That’s going to talk about what we’re going to share here now.

Nehemia: Okay. And maybe it’s not fair that I’m asking you for… I’m asking you for the peanut shell version of a 700-page book. Okay.

Joe: In Daniel 8 it’s talking about the goat from the east coming against the ram and destroying it. And the ram is Medo-Persia. So, in this prophecy… so, we went through this yesterday verse by verse and explained it to everybody, and I just shared it and said, “What do you see?” And everyone started to see it. It’s talking about the Ottoman Empire. The Medo-Persian goat, or ram, is the Ottoman Empire, and it’s destroyed in 1916, 17. Out of that empire come these four other nations, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran. There’s also Saudi Arabia in there, but that’s a fifth one, which is…

Nehemia: Was Iran part of the Ottoman Empire? I didn’t…

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: Really?

Joe: Wasn’t it? Pretty sure it was.

Nehemia: You know what, that’s not my field of expertise. But someone Google it and post it in the comments.

Joe: Okay, yeah, somebody will Google it, correct me. So, out of that, the little horn is Iran, is pushing to the east and the west and the north. So, now we go in here… and I don’t know where it is. It’s talking about… Oh, verse 13, Daniel 8 verse 13. “Then I heard a holy one speaking.” Who’s the holy one? That’s the question I ask. “And another holy one said to that certain one who is speaking, ‘How long will the vision be concerning the daily sacrifices?’”

Nehemia: Alright, you’re in Daniel 8, what verse?

Joe: Thirteen.

Nehemia: Okay. Let me follow… Yeah. Alright, go on.

Joe: So, we’re coming back to the daily sacrifice again. “How long will the vision be concerning the daily sacrifices and the transgressions of desolation, the giving of both the sanctuary and the host to be trampled underfoot?” So, when I looked at every word here, the word sanctuary can also be translated as saints. It’s the saints that are going to be trampled underfoot. Do you see that or not?

Nehemia: I mean, so, no… it says kodesh ve’tzava mirmas… kodesh is… holiness, it can mean. But saints would be something like kedoshim, like a plural. No? I mean…

Joe: Yeah?

Nehemia: Kodesh… Yeah, I don’t, but hey, let’s just move on. That’s not how I could read it, but… Yeah.

Joe: Okay. “And he said to me, ‘For 2,300 days, then the sanctuary [or the saints] will be cleansed [or will be vindicated],” is what I have.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: So, now I’m going to jump out of your realm and I’m jumping into the New Testament, going to the Book of Revelation.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: Okay. So, we have in Revelation chapter 6, we have the six seals, or seven seals. The first seal is the white horse, and that is a religion that’s going out to conquer. And we all know which one is doing that today.

Nehemia: Which one? Tell me.

Joe: I don’t want to say it on the air because you could get banned for life.

Nehemia: Oh, and you’re actually Canadian.

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Yeah. So, you literally have to self-censor here. Go on.

Joe: Yes, I do. Then the next horse is a red horse, then the third horse is the pale horse, and the fourth one is the black one. And there are certain nations that are attacking Israel that all have those colors as the flag.

Nehemia: Wait, what are the colors again then? Colors of the flag? Help me.

Joe: White. Red. Green. Black.

Nehemia: So, what nations have those? It’s interesting because there aren’t that many colors in all the flags in the world, but there are a specific set of countries that particularly like green because they consider it holy color.

Joe: Hamas.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, no. But in general, green is considered a holy color in a certain religion. Okay. You know, it’s interesting, in Israel you’ll see shrines that are painted blue, and you know that’s a Jewish shrine. It might be an idolatrous shrine to a dead rabbi, but it’s a Jewish affiliated shrine. And then green is a different color, a different religion.

Okay. Go ahead. I don’t want to get you in trouble with Justin Trudeau or whoever that guy is. Alright.

Joe: I’ve got a video out there that I can’t share on YouTube or on Facebook, which explains this in great detail.

Nehemia: So, where is that video that people can see if they want to find it?

Joe: I can send you a link if you want.

Nehemia: So, there’s like a secret link you have to get because there’s literally censorship going on. Alright. Wow, that’s amazing.

Joe: It’s a big secret, don’t tell nobody.

Nehemia: I never thought I would live in this world.

Joe: Again, we have to be careful today.

Nehemia: Yeah. I remember this kind of thing during the… I remember this kind of censorship when we lived during the Cold War, and you’d hear about this in the Soviet Union. But now this is going on in Canada with, what do you call that, the… you have like… these kangaroo courts?

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Called like a human rights tribunal or something. I mean, it’s insanity. Alright, go ahead.

Joe: Yeah. But it’s everywhere. You see these major marches, and they’re flying these same color flags. They can do that, but if you carry an Israeli flag, you’re going to be arrested for disturbing the peace.

Nehemia: Yeah. Wow. Alright.

Joe: That’s the time we’re in now, again. In Revelation 6, you got those six horses. The fifth seal is the souls underneath the altar that are martyred. And they’re told to wait, and they’re saying, “How long until you vindicate us?” So, I’m connecting that vindication back to this 2,300 here.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: When we count from March 20…

Nehemia: So, we have the vindication. That’s definitely there in Daniel 8:14. Okay.

Joe: Yeah. And I’m connecting that to the vindication in Revelation 6.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: The fifth seal, whatever number that is.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: So, these 2,200 days start from the first time that Netanyahu locks down Israel. That brings us to July… what is it? July 12, I think it is, in 2026. Okay, so now…

Nehemia: Are we still looking at the timeline here, or do you want to…?

Joe: Yes, we are. We are about to jump back onto that.

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Joe: IF, – big capital I-F, biggest word in the Bible… if I’m correct and Satan is going to be locked away at atonement in 2033, that’s at the end of the three-and-a-half-year tribulation, the Great Tribulation, which begins at Passover in 2030. At Passover in 2030, the two witnesses of Revelation are killed. They speak for three-and-a-half years, there’s no rain on the earth. That brings you to 2026.

Nehemia: No rain as in water, precipitation or…

Joe: As I understand it, there’s no rain anywhere on the Earth.

Nehemia: Oh.

Joe: This is a major famine. They begin their work… I want to say in the fall of 2026, but this 2,300 days is telling me it’s July 12, which is throwing me off here, and I’m not sure why, but I’m going to report it because that’s what I’m seeing.

Nehemia: And that’s in July 6, 2026…

Joe: July 12.

Nehemia: Sorry, July 12, 2026, something big is going to happen.

Joe: I believe… Yes. Well, it’s going to be something involving the two witnesses… it may not be big, but it could be. I don’t know.

Nehemia: It’ll be big for the two witnesses.

Joe: And that is just two years from now, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Less than two years.

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Alright.

Joe: Okay, so now, the Ten Days of Awe represent the ten days the trumpets are sounded to warn you. So, I was in a dilemma. So, the first holy day is 2024, Shabbat Shuvah is 2030, the Day of Atonement is a holy day. Do we sound the trumpets on those days? And I don’t know…

Nehemia: And here, days represent years? Is that…

Joe: These are representing years, yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: So, now I go back to the Book of Revelation, written by a Jew named John. I’m just trying to give it a little bit of… with you. And he says there are seven trumpet plagues which start in Daniel 8… I mean, Revelation 8, I’m sorry. So, I did not know to apply the trumpets to 24 to 30 or 25 to 29 and 31 and 32. And I’m not sure which they’re going to be. We’re going to find out. But here’s… you’re looking for some great big thing to look for. The first trumpet is… which I believe is in 2024, one third of the trees, one third of the grass will be burnt up.

Nehemia: So, that’s going to happen between now and the end of 2024?

Joe: That’s my understanding…

Nehemia: Or are these Hebrew years? What’s the time frame here?

Joe: I believe the year begins Aviv to Aviv.

Nehemia: So, in other words, between now and March, let’s say roughly March…

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Maybe February, according to you, 2025, there’s going to be burning up of…

Joe: One third of the trees.

Nehemia: In the world, or in Israel?

Joe: That’s the part I don’t know. Is it the world? Is it the United States and Canada? Is it the Land of Israel? And if you look on a map right now, about a third of Israel is up in the north and on fire from Lebanon from the rockets…

Nehemia: So maybe this is already happening with these…

Joe: I don’t know. I’m what I’m doing, Nehemia, is I’m reading the scriptures and I’m trying to see where it fits today according to the Jubilee cycle.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: I’m not trying to say this is what’s going to happen. I’m saying, “Here’s the prophecy that I believe fits in this chronology.” But the second trumpet is the one that I’m concerned about. So, if you have Revelations there…

Nehemia: Let me… I believe the book is called “Revelation” singular.

Joe: Yes, you’re right.

Nehemia: So, let me pull that up on my little…

Joe: Revelation 8.

Nehemia: Oh, here it is. Give me a second… I got to pull up Accordance. Revelation 8. You can start reading and I’ll… get there.

Joe: Okay. Then the second angel…

Nehemia: Verse 1. Are we in… What are we… just so I know how to catch…

Joe: Revelation 8:8.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Yeah. “Then the second angel sounded, and something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea. And a third of the sea became blood, and a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships was destroyed.” So, when I read that, the great mountain is a nation, and it’s a nation going down into the sea. The sea is people, and this nation is going down in flames. So, it’s a revolution, a war, a riot… something. Now, that’s the second trumpet, and according to my understanding, which is flexing and changing, it’s 2025.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: There’s two things that go with this. Right now, I see Kamala Harris possibly winning this election, and she’s all woke up and she doesn’t like Israel. That scares me.

Nehemia: What do you mean, she’s “woke up”? You mean the sense of, like, woke? What is it?

Joe: Yeah, yeah. Woke, right?

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: The other one is, I see Trump winning and all the riots beginning. Either he wins or loses, riots are going to come, because January 6th all over again or… I don’t know. I just… I got a bad feeling about this election this year.

Nehemia: In the United States.

Joe: In the United States. But then if I go back to read Daniel 8… and what we did was we went through verse by verse yesterday and read Daniel 8, and if that is applying this to Israel… Daniel 8 is telling us that Israel is about to lose this war, because that little horn is going to come up and defeat it.

Nehemia: And what’s the little horn here, Iran or…

Joe: Iran.

Nehemia: So, if Israel wins the war, and I guess… So, what is losing the war look like? Because we could end the war tomorrow, and Hamas will say, “Well, Sinwar is still alive, so we won,” even though Gaza is devastated and will take decades to rebuild.

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Meaning, death is their objective. So how do you define winning the war?

Joe: Even if you killed him and you got your hostages back, that would be a victory for you, for the state of Israel. But Lebanon is still a threat, and Iran still hasn’t finished their plan. So, as I read Daniel 8, not Revelation 8, but Daniel 8, step by step, with this understanding, I see, in the next two years, Israel losing.

Nehemia: There’s this expression of Pyrrhic victory, and it comes from an ancient Greek king who fought against the Romans, and he won. I think his name was Pyrrhus, or something like that. And he said, “I don’t know how many more of these victories we can afford.” We’ll be ruined if we have too many more of these victories. Because… they won it, but at such a high cost.

Joe: If Kamala Harris…

Nehemia: So, there could be a Pyrrhic victory here, I don’t know.

Joe: If Kamala Harris gets in, and you don’t have the two or three US fleets to shoot down all the missiles coming from Iran…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: You can only get some of them. I don’t know if you can get them all yet. I hope I’m wrong, but based on the last one, you had a lot of help.

Nehemia: So, I saw an interview with one of the former heads of the Israeli Air Force the last time Iran attacked with hundreds of weapons. And we had knocked out something like 97 or 98%. He said when we designed these systems, our goal was to reach 80% interception. No one ever dreamed we would take out 97%.

Joe: Yeah, I read 99. So…

Nehemia: Whatever the number was, right? Who knows?

Joe: I’m hoping I’m…

Nehemia: I think five ballistic missiles got through and they damaged an airfield somewhere.

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: And they killed or seriously wounded a little Muslim girl, which, from the Shiite perspective, that’s a victory, too.

Joe: So, if you’re looking for a test to what I’m saying, look for a great nation to fall through civil war or a war. Not Ukraine, not Russia. It’ll be the United States, United Kingdom, or Israel, the State of Israel.

Nehemia: So, one of those countries is going to be defeated, according to you, probably in the next two years, between now and 2026, or in 2024…

Joe: Well, I don’t think in 2024, but I think it’s going to be 2025.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: The 2026 date, the two witnesses are coming back to “vindicate the saints”, if I’m understanding that correctly. They’re vindicating the saints while they… In order to vindicate the saints, the saints have to be destroyed, and a bunch killed. And we’re just…

Nehemia: Who are the saints in this context?

Joe: Okay, so my definition of saints would be the DNA descendants of the 12 tribes. They don’t have to be “holy” Torah believers.

Nehemia: So… and then, just so everyone understands, you’re talking about the British-Israelite theory, or what do you…

Joe: Yes. I don’t call it a theory; I call it a fact.

Nehemia: Alright. So, the Northwestern Europeans is…

Joe: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: Okay.

Nehemia: So which nations specifically is this? It’s like Germany and Denmark or…

Joe: No, Germany is not included in that.

Nehemia: Oh, Germany is not included.

Joe: Holland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, a little bit of France, part of France, the British Isles, and…

Nehemia: Why isn’t Germany included? Aren’t they part of the Germanic nations? Aren’t they cousins of the… No, but aren’t they? Okay, I guess we have different ideas of… Aren’t they cousins of the Norwegians and the Anglos and the… I mean, they’re literally… Anglos and Saxons are from Germany, aren’t they?

Joe: No, the Anglos and Saxons were tribes of Israel that went through Germany. Germany is a descendant from the Hittites, which were stationed in northern Israel and Turkey, modern day Turkey. So, you can trace the German migration up to there, when they migrated. This is during the…

Nehemia: This sounds like it is a different rabbit trail. Let’s focus on the world ending here. Alright.

Joe: So, again, you’re looking for, where’s the thing to say Joe Dumond is right or wrong? I am constantly changing… after 2020, I’m constantly changing and perfecting and refining my understanding.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: But it’s based on these Ten Days of Awe. It’s based on the “as it was in the days of Noah,” and Lot. It’s based on the fall Holy Days converted to years. It’s based on this final 120th jubilee cycle. It’s based on the 70th Jubilee cycle of Daniel 9. It’s all right there in this Jubilee cycle that we’re in.

Nehemia: So, are we in the year of Yom Teruah? Of what rabbis call Rosh Hashanah? Is that…

Joe: Say again, are we what?

Nehemia: Are we in the year of Yom Teruah, what in Rabbinical Judaism is called Rosh Hashanah? Is 2024, early 2025, the first of the Ten Days. It is…

Joe: It’s Yom Teruah. What’s Yom Teruah? Now, I don’t want to say Rosh Hashanah, I want to say Yom Teruah.

Nehemia: Alright, just for the audience who isn’t familiar with the terminology, I mean, right. Okay.

Joe: Yeah. So, Yom Teruah, you used to teach, and I agree, is the day of shouting. Shouting.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Joe: So, if we look at 2024, and I have some of the people in our group saying that that day of shouting began in the Fall before Aviv, which is 2023.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Joe: And they could be right in that understanding. And they say that because the Day of Atonement, in 2033, is in the fall. It doesn’t go right to Aviv, it’s in the fall. So, they’re trying to count ten full years from atonement to atonement.

Nehemia: What do you mean, there’s people in your group who are saying that? Because I’m talking to you, I don’t know who the people in your group are. Are you part of, like, a denomination or… And the audience… I’m asking for who may not know this.

Joe: Every Shabbat we have a midrash. We read the Torah portion based on a three-and-a-half-year Torah schedule, and then I let people debate, discuss, and argue about what it says. And we learn a lot from each other, and we have some great teachers joining us. And…

Nehemia: And where does this take place? Is this online?

Joe: On Zoom. So, I have a weekly newsletter.

Nehemia: How can people join this if they want to at least taste it and see if it’s for them?

Joe: Go to sightedmoon.com, look on the latest newsletter, and it says, “Join our Shabbat Meeting”.

Nehemia: Okay. Does it cost money, or do you have to become a member, or what does it involve?

Joe: Yes. It requires you to pay $1,000 a week to Joe Dumond privately, and then you can join.

Nehemia: That’s a joke, right?

Joe: Yeah. Yes. Don’t you know me yet?

Nehemia: No. I’m asking for the audience who really doesn’t know. Like in some groups, if you want to go to their study, you’ve got to be inducted and go through a baptism or something. I’m genuinely asking because I don’t know.

Joe: No. Go to sightedmoon.com, hit the link “Join our Shabbat”, then hit the Zoom meeting. If we don’t know you, we’re going to ask you, how do you know Joe Dumond? Because we got hacked a few weeks ago and got a whole lot of crap on our site.

Nehemia: But if somebody comes and says, “Well, I heard about you on Nehemia’s podcast.”

Joe: On Nehemia and Joe.

Nehemia: Okay, there you go.

Joe: And then we’ll let you in.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: So, you raise your hand. You want to comment, I’ll let you comment.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: We got a good group of people there. Some of them are very strongly opinionated, which is good, but I’m not the only voice.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: You’ve been there. I didn’t let them… Keith was there one time, and I let them discuss with Keith.

Nehemia: I was on some kind of Zoom call that you had… that was part of that group? I don’t know where… I just joined it. I just clicked on a link. I don’t…

Joe: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: That’s what it is. So, again, so what I’m doing here, Nehemia, is I’m showing this stuff. But what I’m showing you here now is a little picture on a TV screen, and you don’t see it. I have a 20 x 12-foot banner. 20 feet x 12 feet. And I walk you through this step by step. My teaching takes eight hours.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: And I show you this. And then once we’re done… Like, we’ve rushed through this today… What is it… an hour-and-a-half?

Nehemia: Yeah. We’re almost we’re coming on… an hour and 40 minutes.

Joe: Yeah. That’s nothing. That’s just…

Nehemia: I believe you. So, the bottom line here is, and we have to wrap it up. But the bottom line here is, people can learn more on sightedmoon.com. You’ve got books that they can read. And if you’re right, between now and 2033, a lot of really bad things are going to happen. Is anything good going to happen? Around 2033…

Joe: Yes. Our Messiah, your Messiah, my Messiah, will be here, and Satan will be gone by 2033.

Nehemia: By 2033. Okay. Alright. You know, there’s a saying, like we always, in Judaism, like to end on a good note, right? So, this is the good note we’re ending on. The Messiah will come, and Satan will be locked up by 2033?

Joe: Yes. I’m saying Satan will be locked up by 2033.

Nehemia: Okay.

Joe: And then King David will be here. I forgot this… Micah, I believe, says that Yehovah is going to lead King David up to Jerusalem from the south of the Dead Sea, and behind King David will be the remnant of Israel.

Nehemia: And is that the resurrected David? Because David’s dead right now, as far as I know. Is that…

Joe: Yes, sir.

Nehemia: Okay. And literally David.

Joe: So, David will be resurrected.

Nehemia: Okay. Hmm. Yeah.

Joe: Yes. Not somebody pretending to be David. The real David, and this is coming in 2033.

Nehemia: If David is leading Israel, how does Yeshua play into that? We’ve got a bit of a lag.

Joe: We don’t want to discuss that right now.

Nehemia: Okay. Alright. There, guys, you heard it. You got…

Joe: Isaiah 43…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: “I am Yehovah. I am your Savior.” Isaiah 43, I don’t know what verse. Isaiah 12, “I am Yehovah, I am your yeshua. I will become your yeshua.” And that’s how I… they’re the same as…

Nehemia: Guys, if you want to know more, you can go to sightedmoon.com and join one of the Shabbat groups and ask these questions. And hopefully the lag won’t be as intense that time. Any final words, Joe?

Joe: One last thing.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Joe: Yehovah told you in your dream or vision, caused you to believe that you needed to interview me today. This is… for me it’s the seventh day of the feast, the great libation, Makor Hebrew Foundation, the wells of living water. I think everything that happened here today is significant. And I think, if your dream… and I’m not a big dream believer… and you’ve done this. I believe we need to pay attention to this. The Jubilee cycles are important, and we’re at the end. So, we got to stop playing games. We got to stop hating on each other because we don’t part our hair the same way. Right?

Nehemia: I’m a big believer in that! Don’t hold a man’s hair against him.

Joe: So, the Messianics are still messed up. They’ve got to come back, and the time to repent is now. Come back to Yehovah, come back to the Torah, stop all this other stuff that you’re doing, that’s not Yehovah. It’s not Torah. It’s a deception. Come back and study your Bible. And if the Bible is boring and something else is more interesting, then you’re being deceived. It’s time. Now is the time. We don’t have any more time for playing games. It’s going to get worse. We need each other. The toes, the feet, the butts, the chest. We all need each other, but we’re not the same. And if we don’t unite, we’re dead. And we all have…

Nehemia: Do we all have to be the same to unite? Or can we have differences and unite? I’m genuinely asking what you’re saying.

Joe: We can have differences and still be united.

Nehemia: That’s a beautiful thing to end on. We have this concept in Jewish history, “sin’at chinam,” which is “free hate”, where you hate somebody for no reason. And the opposite is “ahavat chinam,” “free love”, where you love somebody for no good reason. You love them just because you… really just because they’re your brother and sister.

Joe: Say that again. Ahavat chinam?

Nehemia: Ahavat chinam.

Joe: Ahavat chinam.

Nehemia: So, that means “free love”. But in the sense of “free” as in… there’s no good reason why I love you, but I love you because we are united in a common purpose, even though we don’t maybe see eye to eye. And we’re brothers and sisters, all part of God’s people. And so, we should love each other, not because you did something for me or it benefits me in some way, but just love for no good reason, for free. So… just in the way that people hate for no good reason, for free.

Joe: I hope that everybody will share this and talk about it at your next Shabbat meeting with your own group. If you want me to come and explain it, I can do Zoom, I can do it in person, whatever you want. It needs to be talked about. Time’s up.

Nehemia: Alright. And on that note. Shalom!

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
Jeremiah 23:18
Isaiah 6
1 Kings 22:19-23
Genesis 20:7
Leviticus 25
2 Kings 19:29
Daniel 9
Exodus 3-4
Daniel 12
Hosea 14:3 (Christian verse 2)
Matthew 24:22
Luke 17
Daniel 8
Revelation 6
Revelation 8
Isaiah 43:3; 12:2-3

VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
07:05 What is a prophet?
09:16 Calendar variance
12:10 Sabbatical and Jubilee years
34:25 Prophetic Jubilees
1:05:51 What’s the news I can use?
1:35:21 Ending on a good note
1:37:18 One last thing

BOOKS MENTIONED
2300 Days of Hell
by Joseph Dumond
https://sightedmoon.com/product/the-2300-days-of-hell-book
(Amazon, non-affiliate) https://www.amazon.com/2300-Days-Hell-Witnesses-Josephs/

The 10 Days of Awe
by Joseph Dumond
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJ3ZDVNL

The Abomination that Makes Desolate, The Epilogue
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CS3MZ4YV

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #95 – 2300 Days of Hell 
Hebrew Voices #154 – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 1
Support Team Study – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #153 – Sighting the New Moon in the Middle Ages
Hebrew Voices #168 – Israelite Archaeology at the Israel Museum
Tricks of Translation PLUS #2
Prophet Pearls #7 – Vayeitzei

OTHER LINKS
Impromptu interview warning about Oct 7:
https://www.tiktok.com/@nehemia.gordon/video/7284358057939750190 
https://sightedmoon.com/

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

“Secret” video link:
https://app.screencast.com/5xoIU3PfBqV5Z?commentid=0Mvz0z04UlT2FHkJP5gXvz&conversation=UtkkAlSnKky5Zk2w9R9Oiv&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3uZwBUdDYzK4X1jd3thMa8BuogXwCp-me3rU-p3ge197F3KkJ1cCpMa-c_aem_lAs__wlmkHEiTfFyCaghvQ&tab=Details

The post Hebrew Voices #199 – Are we in the last days? appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #196, Reconciling the Bible with Science: Part 1, Nehemia speaks to Orthodox Jewish physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder, who expounds a biblical proverb to explain the age of the universe and presents the argument that God created a pre-Adamic race.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio Transcript

Hebrew Voices #196 – Reconciling the Bible with Science: 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.

Gerald: God created the laws of nature that predate the universe; they’re not physical, they’re outside of time. They can create something from nothing. That’s the definition of God in this universe.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Gerald Schroeder. He has his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a renowned physicist who has written about reconciling the Bible with science. Shalom, Dr. Schroeder. We’ve had you on the program before, I think you probably don’t remember.

Gerald: No, I do remember but I don’t remember the date.

Nehemia: Oh, it must have been almost 10 years ago.

Gerald: Really? Wow!

Nehemia: I was trying to get a Minion cake from a bakery. I think it was called New York Bakery, or something, on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem, and your wife was right in front of me, and she got my cake!

Gerald: Okay! That I don’t remember.

Nehemia: It was the day before we did the recording! And you mentioned, as we were getting to know each other, something about a Minion cake, and I was like, “That was my Minion cake!” That was your wife! It’s a small world!

So, Dr. Schroeder, let’s jump into it. I had another guest on my program recently who talked about, from a scientific perspective, his explanation that the world is only 6,000 years old. And you have a different explanation of the age of the universe. The age of the Earth in particular, I think, is what we’re more interested in.

Gerald: It’s the age of the universe, so it’s the same thing.

Nehemia: So, how old is the Earth?

Gerald: Who was the person, so I have some perspective here?

Nehemia: It was Kent Hovind.

Gerald: Ken?

Nehemia: Kent Hovind. He is a Christian Evangelical Young Earth Creationist.

Gerald: Okay. The first question I have to ask him is, how fluent is he in Hebrew? That was the first question you should have asked him. I didn’t hear the recording. If he’s not fluent in Hebrew, he should stay out of the argument since the whole text is based on the Hebrew text. The whole argument is totally related to… There’s a proverb that says, “A word well spoken,” it’s Proverbs 25, “A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver.”

The commentator Maimonides in about the year, I’m making a guess, 1110, 1120-30, almost a thousand years ago, writes, “What was King Solomon talking about when he wrote ‘A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver?’” And he writes like this… this was well before anyone was worried about dinosaurs or cavemen. We’re talking about almost a thousand years ago. He says, “The Torah has several levels of meaning. ‘A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver.’ The ‘dishes of silver’ is the literal text of the Torah. And when you look at a dish from a distance, you see the silver dish, but you can’t see what’s inside it. Only when you look deep into the dish itself do you find the apples of gold. What’s the silver dish? The literal text of the Bible. What’s the golden apples? The secrets of why one word was chosen over another.”

Now, you’ll notice that it wasn’t apples of silver in dishes of gold, it was golden apples in dishes of silver. The silver is the literal text; the gold, being more valuable, takes that text way beyond the meaning. The silver dish has huge value, obviously. No one’s throwing out a silver dish, at least not in my house. I don’t know about your house, but not in my house.

Nehemia: I don’t think we have any silver dishes.

Gerald: I beg your pardon?

Nehemia: I don’t think we have any silver dishes in my house. But if we did, we probably wouldn’t throw them away.

Gerald: So anyway, the deeper meanings are the subtleties within the text, and the subtleties within the text allows you to see that there’s a reality of two different perspectives of time. And that’s the whole answer to the age of the universe. The universe is 6,000 or whatever years old from the biblical perspective looking forward. But we don’t live in that perspective, that’s the Bible’s perspective. I don’t know how to say God’s perspective. It’s the perspective that God gave in the written text, and that is why in the six days of Genesis… and when I get to Gerry Schroeder, I’ll tell you it’s my idea, okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: The calculations are totally mine. But the idea that the Torah perspectives is thousands of years old. And it is Maimonides and… it doesn’t matter, they’re all from the same period, about a thousand years ago that… why is the numbering of the six days of Genesis rather bizarre? The numbering of the text is six days; at the end of each day there’s a couplet that appears nowhere else in the entire Hebrew Bible. And that is, in the English translation, “And there was evening and there was morning,” and then the day is numbered. You’re probably familiar with that, this and this happens, “in the beginning God creates the Heavens and the Earth,” and there’s this and this, “and there’s evening and morning, day one.” More things are happening, “a second day,” “a third day,” “a fourth day,” “a fifth day,” “the sixth day.”

So, the question stands out like a flame. Why does the text say, “day one”? Evening, morning, day one? It says, “second day,” “third day”, “fourth day”, “fifth day”, “the sixth day”, give me a first day. Why does the text say there is evening… this is not me speaking. As I said, I’ll let you know when it’s my idea. But this forms the entire basis for all the calculations that the universe is 6,000 years old, and the universe is 14 billion years old, from two different perspectives.

The text writes “day one” because there had not yet been a second day. That means the perspective of time is from the beginning looking forward in Genesis. It’s not from Sinai. By the time you get to Sinai, there have been hundreds of thousands of days. If the perspective of time in the Bible for these six days was from Sinai, the text would have written, “Evening and morning, a first day,” because it’s been thousands of days until you get to Moses on Sinai. You had to go through the whole Egypt experience, and the Exodus, and the wandering, et cetera.

So, the text says “day one” because the Torah sees time from the beginning looking forward. That’s not now. There wasn’t yet a second day means it’s from the beginning. The only time there wasn’t a second day is on the first day, and therefore the text writes, “evening and morning,” “yom echad,” “day one”.

I’ve got to tell you, there are many unfortunate… you refer to me as Gerry or Yakov. I refer to you as Nehemia, right? My Hebrew name is Yakov. So, there are, unfortunately, many mistranslations that write “there is evening and morning,” into English and into other languages also. “A first day.” The fact is, the Hebrew says, “day one.” There’s no question about the Hebrew.

So, the Torah sees time from before there was a time there was a second day, which means the Torah… the Torah, meaning the Hebrew word for the Bible… The word Torah is the Hebrew name for the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. So, the Bible, the Torah, sees time from the beginning looking forward until you get to Adam, where the description of time changes and becomes Earth time. So, we have this cosmic view of time looking forward from the beginning.

Nehemia: So, it’s really interesting what you’re saying. I just pulled it up on BibleHub.com, because I read it in the Hebrew like you do, so I actually wasn’t aware, or I certainly didn’t remember, that in Genesis 1:5 a lot of translations have “the first day”. I’m looking at NIV, New Living Translation, King James Bible, New King James. But then the New American Standard Bible has, “There was evening and there was morning, one day.” So, some of them do have in English, “one day”, but then other ones have “the first day.” They’ve even added the word “the.” So, that’s interesting, I didn’t remember that. So, you’re making a distinction between “the first day” and “one day”.

Gerald: No, no, no! The commentators a thousand years ago made the distinction. I put the numbers in.

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Gerald: I didn’t make that distinction.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: And the commentary is, “The reason that the Torah says day one,” it’s not me, Nehemia. I’m not stealing from anyone, okay? When it becomes my idea, I’ll tell you.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: I’ve got to… thank God. I’ll tell you. I think God got the address wrong that He let me be the one to make the calculation, but anyway…

Nehemia: Alright.

Gerald: The text says, “day one,” to quote Maimonides, Nachmanides, they’re all from the same time, around 1,000 to 1,500 years ago, “because there was not yet a second day.” That is the commentary on “day one” from a thousand years ago. Now, why would that interest anyone? Because Nehemia, in a static universe, it makes no difference where you see time from. Zero! The only difference in perspective of time that we have in this universe is because the universe is expanding. And the commentary on the creation of the universe, again, from these same commentators, it reads like something out of NASA. A very small point… This is not a modern comment, remember, it’s a thousand years ago. A very small point, not “matter” as we say, the Hebrew is “Dak me’od ein bo mamash,” “So thin there’s no physicality.” We call that stuff “energy” today. “Dak me’od,” “It’s so thin,” “ein bo mamash,” there’s no… you can’t call that air because air has plenty of “mamash”, you get caught in a hurricane and you know how much “mamash” air has. And then this, “dak me’od ein bo mamash”, as the universe expands, changes into “mamash”, into “matter” as we know it, and that’s when the clock begins.

Again, now I’m about to tell you when it’s Schroeder. Then it says in the commentaries, “When this first matter forms, time grabs a hold.” Now before that time, time is going by…

Nehemia: Where does it say that?

Gerald: In the commentaries, Nachmanides and Maimonides.

Nehemia: Okay. Nachmanides says that before there was matter there was no time, basically, is what he’s saying…

Gerald: No, I say that. He writes this, “mi she’yesh,” “When we finally get matter, time grabs hold,” “yitfos bo zman.” “mi she’yesh yitfos bo zman,” a strange statement.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: So, that’s in his commentary on Genesis chapter 1 verse…

Nehemia: Verse 5.

Gerald: 1 or 2 or 3, one of the first few verses. So, time grabs a hold. Now, before that, time is going by, but he uses the word “tofes”, “but it grabs a hold”, because energy is outside of time. Time is only linked into something, so that’s the beginning. I call it the cosmic clock. Now comes Gerry Schroeder.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: So, I say, when is the first matter that formed? And I have no wiggle room here, I’m stuck. Electrons, protons… what’s the first stable matter? Well, let’s see. Electrons are formed when neutrons decay. Neutrons decay into protons and electrons. Neutrons are not stable unless they’re inside an atom, so they have a short half-life of a few minutes. So, that’s the reason that electrons and protons match. In the universe, by convention we call protons positive and electrons negative, and that’s why they match, because neutrons, like the word neutral, are essentially, in simplistic talk, a combination of a proton and an electron. But they disintegrate, and then you have a proton and an electron.

That’s the beginning of matter. Because protons define matter. If I say I have an atom with one proton, I’m saying hydrogen. If I say I have an atom with two protons, it’s helium; six protons, carbon; eight protons, oxygen. My background is nuclear physics. And the Earth science is just lucky, it’s the two things together, or fortunate. I was told once… I was on with Pat Robertson once, and I said I was just lucky, and he said something… I apologize for getting off track, but it was a huge lesson. I said, “I was just lucky,” and he said to me, “You weren’t lucky, you were blessed.” Now not blessed like, “Oh boy, I am blessed.” No, it’s a gift. He said, “It wasn’t luck. You studied physics and Earth sciences so that you can put these together. It wasn’t luck.” It wasn’t like, “you deserved it.” It was like a gift. We think some things are… you know what I’m getting at, right?

Nehemia: Well, I think there’s this thought that luck is this kind of force in the universe, and we can influence it. Sometimes we can’t influence it; we can do things that cause bad luck… and that’s not a Torah concept, that there’s such a thing as luck.

Gerald: Well anyway, getting to being blessed. But in any event, so what’s the first stable matter that formed? Protons.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: So, I say the clock of the Bible is when matter forms, time grabs ahold. “Mi she’yesh yitfos bo zman,” that’s Maimonides… I’m sorry, it’s Nahmanides, let’s get it right… but let’s stick with Nahmanides. So, time grabs a hold when stable matter forms. That’s the beginning of Gerry Schroeder’s calculation.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: So, the Bible sees time from there looking forward.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: We see time from looking back from today. We measure 14 billion years looking back, the Torah makes six days looking forward, however it goes, and with those two different perspectives you get a universe that can be 14 billion years old or only a few thousand years old. They’re both true.

Nehemia: Okay. So, when they… So, talk to me about… there are radiometric dating systems, like potassium argon and uranium lead. So, when those date a rock, and that rock gives a date of a billion or two billion years… I don’t think we have rocks on Earth that are more than two billion years old according to those dating systems, or those methods. What are you saying?

Gerald: I’m saying that Earth is… I’m going from memory now. I had a bad fall about a half year ago and it really knocked out the science…

Nehemia: I’m sorry to hear that.

Gerald: It has affected my memory, so I… from memory. But the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, I think that’s the number. The Earth is four billion years old, four and a half billion years old. The Earth is that old, the universe is just under 14 billion years old. On Earth as we measure time… and that’s where we live, I mean, where else are you going to measure? You measure on Earth, even before… We’re using an Earth based clock. The radioactive measurements of the decay of those nuclei you can measure quite accurately. The choices were 100% correct, that we have an Earth that’s billions of years…

Nehemia: Other people say, “Well, they’ve done Carbon-14 dating on the age of the Earth.”

Gerald: I hope you correct them with that.

Nehemia: Carbon-14, even according to the most maximalist claims, doesn’t go back millions of years.

Gerald: The half-life of Carbon-14 is about 5,000 years.

Nehemia: Right.

Gerald: So, after 20 half-lives, there’s nothing left to measure.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying maybe 100,000 years.

Gerald: No, what did you just say? I heard a sentence about 100,000 years.

Nehemia: No, you said there were 20 half-lives, so 20 times 5,000…

Gerald: Oh, just for the number.

Nehemia: I think it’s considered accurate to 50,000 years, if memory serves me. I could be wrong.

Gerald: It for sure isn’t measured to billions of years.

Nehemia: For sure. So, in any event…

Gerald: But let your readers know, because you said it before, there are about six radioactive clocks.

Nehemia: Uranium, lead, potassium, argon… So, if you take uranium lead dating and you find a rock that says it’s two billion years old…

Gerald: I have one right here in this room.

Nehemia: Do you? You’re saying this isn’t a satanic lie of the scientists who want to destroy our faith, this is actually correct.

Gerald: As we measure time on this, it’s absolutely correct. And the argument… I had this once in front of a whole group of students, and their teacher was there, and he had always taught a Young Earth. He started saying how the flood could have caused the changes because that’s often the argument. “Well, the flood would have mixed up all the…” the flood messed up nothing because we happen to have fossils from before the flood that were dated in several different ways, not just radioactive, and they match. The flood couldn’t have changed… in brief, the flood could not have changed the radioactive decay of these elements. It takes nuclear events like atomic bombs to change rates of decay.

Nehemia: Which… we’ve had atomic bombs, so there is a little bit of a problem. But…

Gerald: I’ve actually seen quite a few.

Nehemia: Right. I understand you were involved in nuclear testing; I think we mentioned that in the last interview.

Gerald: Yeah, the SALT Talks, the Strategic Arms Limitation.

Nehemia: Alright, so… let me ask this question. You talked in the beginning about the plate of silver with the apples in it, which is a phrase from Song of Songs if I’m not mistaken.

Gerald: Proverbs 25, I think it’s Proverbs 25.

Nehemia: Oh, Proverbs 25, okay. It’s from, you say, King Solomon. So, what you’re saying is, there is metaphor in the Bible and there’s non-literal meanings. So, if you were to get into a time machine, which you’ll probably tell me doesn’t exist because you’re a physicist, but if you were to get into your Tardis and travel back and meet Adam, was there a literal man named Adam that walked the Earth and he had a wife named Chava, Eve? Do you believe that was the case?

Gerald: I think for certain there was. And there were other homo sapien sapiens around at the same time. He was the first homo sapien sapien to have a soul, a neshama.

Nehemia: Ah! Wow!

Gerald: That’s verse 26 through verse 27 of Genesis chapter 1. It makes it very clear. And this is from memory now, so anyone who’s looking it up in the Bible, it’s Genesis chapter 1 from verse 26, I hope I remember. God says, “Let us make Adam,” “na’aseh Adam,” “let us make,” I’m emphasizing the verb now, “let us make Adam”. And the next sentence says, “God created the Adam,” the English misses that totally, the “the.” … God says, “Let us make Adam.” Making is a process verb, and he wrote, “it takes time and stuff.” And that’s why it says for six days, in the opening, “God created the Heavens and the Earth.” And then later in chapter 2, it says, “For six days the Lord made the Heavens and the Earth.” “Made,” “asiyah” takes time and stuff. Creation does not. And Nehemia, stop me if I’m blabbering away too much.

Nehemia: No, this is great.

Gerald: So, Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, God says, “Let us make,” and I’m emphasizing “make Adam”. Stuff and time. The next sentence says, “And God created the Adam.” Well, if I got Adam made in verse 26, why do I have to create him in verse 27? Because the making is the physical body; creation is something from absolute nothing, and whatever it brings into the world, it brings it in instantaneously. So, something over time was made Adam, and it’s Adam there, but the next sentence God creates “the Adam;” the Hebrew has the “the,” “the Adam,” “et ha’Adam”. And that creation can’t be his body; we already mentioned in verse 26. That creation is the spiritual creation, the soul.

Because according to all the ancient commentaries that I have read, and I have not read all of the ancient commentaries by a long shot, but I’ve read a lot of it, all commentary says that there was one physical creation, the opening sentence of the Bible. All the other creations are spiritual. So, when God says in verse 27 of Genesis chapter 1, “God creates the Adam,” that’s a spiritual creation. It changed a homo sapien sapien person into a homo sapien sapien human.

Nehemia: Wow.

Gerald: That’s the problem.

Nehemia: Wow!

Gerald: Nehemia, I promise you, I’m not bending it in any way. God forbid.

Nehemia: No, I’m not saying you’re bending it. I want the audience to understand, because there’s some subtleties here. So, we have two Hebrew verbs; asah, Ayin-Sin-Hey, and you’re saying that’s a process, that’s “to make”, and there’s bara, Bet-Reish-Alef, which is to create, what we call ex nihilo, something out of nothing.

Gerald: Only God does creation. People can do making.

Nehemia: So, in verse 26 God said, “Let us make man.” But then in verse 27 it says, “and He created man,” and that creation is something out of nothing.

Gerald: He makes Adam, and then God creates “the Adam”.

Nehemia: The Adam, ha’Adam. But also, it says “Zechar u’nekevah bara otam,” “He created them male and female.”

Gerald: Yeah, beautiful. “He called their name Adam.” Nehemia, it’s a beautiful quote, “and He called their name Adam.” That sentence you just quoted ends, “and He called their name Adam.” We don’t even know if that Adam in that verse in Genesis could have been Adam and Eve, because He called their name Adam.

Nehemia: Well, it says, “Male and female He created them.” That’s female as well.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: Alright, so, if I can put it maybe in layman’s terms… and correct me if I’m wrong; you’re arguing that evolution took place, there was Australopithecus afarensis which evolved into some later…

Gerald: … the word developed. If you skip out the word evolved, use the word developed.

Nehemia: Okay. It developed into more advanced hominids, and at one point God decided… I hope hominids is the right word; “this particular hominid I’m going to give a soul, and it’s no longer going to be an animal, it’s going to be ha’Adam, ‘a human being.’” Is that what you’re saying?

Gerald: A hundred percent.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Gerald: And those hominids, homo sapien sapiens, they go back over 120,000 years. They look just like you and me. They invented farming 11,000 years ago, long before Adam. That takes brains!

Nehemia: But those were people who didn’t have souls.

Gerald: They were people. They weren’t humans.

Nehemia: Okay. Do all humans today have souls?

Gerald: Well, I live in the Middle East, where I question that sometimes.

Nehemia: But joking aside, meaning you could say, “Hamas isn’t responsible for raping little boys and killing people because they’re not human,” but that’s the atrocity of it. When a lion kills a person nobody says, “What an immoral lion,” because lions, that’s what they do. But when a human kills another human, then it’s because they have a soul that makes it so abominable.

Gerald: Yeah, it makes them responsible, yeah. Your description was one hundred percent of what I was thinking. I thank you for making that statement, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, so this is mind-blowing. I find what Kent Hovind and other Young Earth creationists teach, I find it very attractive because it has this very literalistic approach. “All the scientists are wrong, the world is only 6,000 years old, and when you find a tree down in a coal mine, it’s really a tree that couldn’t be more than 6,000 years old.” And at the same time, I feel like I have to do these mental gymnastics to make it work.

Gerald: I was just going to mention another person who is very much like yourself that I won’t mention the name of; you probably know the name also. In fact, if we turn off the speaker a second, I can just tell you.

Nehemia: We’ll edit it out. I have an editor here.

Gerald: Do you know the name Zola Levitt? Did you ever know Zola Levitt?

Nehemia: He interviewed me once, yeah. I’ve met Zola Levitt.

Gerald: We met, he read my book, and he said it changed his life because he’d always been a Young Earth person, and suddenly he realized there’s no reason for the gymnastics.

Nehemia: Would you mind leaving it in? It’s up to you.

Gerald: I don’t mind, no. I was a good friend of his. I slept at his house…

Nehemia: I mean leaving in that you mentioned his name, if that’s something you’re comfortable with.

Gerald: I didn’t know if you were comfortable with it.

Nehemia: Yeah, I think people would find that interesting. Look, I’m not a Christian, so part of the audience that’s Christian is saying, “Well, it’s just those Jews, and the Jews don’t take it literally.” And look, this is one of the things I asked Kent Hovind. I said, “Well, you’ll agree there are things that aren’t meant to be taken literally,” and of course he agreed.

Gerald: Yeah, … literally, but you have to understand the perspective of the Bible.

Nehemia: Right. I was once having a conversation with a Flat Earther, and I mean literally a Flat Earther. And there’s a verse in Yeshayahu, in Isaiah, which says, “The Heavens is His throne, and the Earth is His footstool.” And this Flat Earther told me that’s literally true. God sits on a really big chair with His feet on… I’m like, that’s just stupid to me. I mean, I shouldn’t insult other people’s beliefs, but from my perspective that’s irrational. Obviously, that’s a metaphor, and yes, the Bible is full of metaphors.

So now, this brings us to, for me, what’s a fundamental question. When it says, “God made man out of the earth,” out of a clump of dirt, you’re saying that’s metaphorical? What are you saying?

Gerald: Chapter 2 verse 7.

Nehemia: Here, it’s verse 7, “Va’yitser ha shem Elohim et ha’adam afar min ha’adamah,” “And the Lord God made the man dust from the earth.”

Gerald: “Made.”

Nehemia: What’s that?

Gerald: Asiyah.

Nehemia: Well, no, it’s va’yyitser there, yatsar.

Gerald: Va’yyitser, double Yud. There’s two Yuds in that, by the way.

Nehemia: Right.

Gerald: Other than the yatsar, when he forms the animals, there’s only one Yud. There’s a nice little derash on that.

Nehemia: Alright, well you can share that derash too, but I guess the non-literal interpretation. So, you’re saying that’s metaphorical; God didn’t actually…

Gerald: No, no, it depends what you mean by forming. I don’t think He did it like a pottery, that He formed him. That’s why I don’t use the word evolution. The problem with evolution, it didn’t need to have, but it’s been built into it, that the first stage in evolution is random; random mutations, random changes. The word random is the problem, so I say developed. That life did develop by God twinkling, because I don’t see how any way, in my understanding, that rocks and water and all the oil slimes or whatever… well, there were no oil slimes. Rocks and water, that’s what you have, turn into life.

Nehemia: Could I call your approach “guided evolution”?

Gerald: I’d call it guided development. Okay, guided evolution. Yeah, okay, if it’s guided, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright. In other words what you’re saying is, in Genesis 2:7, “And God formed man,” or ha’adam, the man or humankind, “from dust from the earth,” He did it through a process that took, from some sort of perspective, millions of years.

Gerald: Yeah, that’s why it’s formed, asah. If it had said, “And God created…” notice it doesn’t say, “God created Adam from a bunch of…” it’s “God formed.” Those are process verbs. By process I mean stuff and time.

Nehemia: Tell us the derash, the non-literal interpretation of the second Yud there. The word vayyitser there is with two Yuds.

Gerald: Look, when it says, “And God formed the Adam,” it’s spelled with the one Yud, ve’yatsar is spelled with one Yud, it’s the Hebrew letter Yud. It’s the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet; it’s the beginning. “Ve’ya”, it sounds like “ya” for the English speakers. And when it says, “God formed the animals,” it’s the same thing, sequence word, “God formed the animals, this, this and this, God formed the Adam, this and this.” But the ve’yyatsar for the “formed” for the animals is one Yud, and Yud is the first letter of God’s explicit name in Hebrew, so they get one soul. Adam gets two Yuds, he gets a double soul. All life, all animal life, has the first; it’s the creation in which God creates these animals, and that’s the nefesh. All animals have a soul, a nefesh, it’s the soul of life. I don’t know how else to say that. But we get a nefesh, because we’re part animal, and then some verses go by, and then God creates the Adam. That’s the second soul, so we have a nefesh and a neshama.

The nefesh knows, “Me, me, me, and I’ve got to survive.” That’s why an animals’ basic instinct is food, survival, and even if you have a pet… I don’t suggest doing that… a friend of mine wanted to pet one of his favorite cats while he was eating. Well, that caused him to have a bunch of stitches in his hand, because although he’d been feeding this particular animal for a decade or so, he made the mistake of putting his hand near the animal’s head and food. That’s the nefesh, “it’s all about me”.

And there are people who are nefeshdiks, that they think the world is spinning. That’s the great song, “Let me tell you babe, this world isn’t spinning just for you alone,” it’s a wonderful song. The neshama takes the “me, me, me” and it makes it like “we” or “us”. The neshama knows that there’s a spiritual oneness that connects the whole world; that everything you do affects further issues, but as an effect it’s universal. So, the neshama knows… the jargon, I think, would be “the other”. The neshama knows you have to act in a way that’s decent to other people. You’ve seen people that are nefesh. Nefeshdik people throw their garbage in the street, and they don’t even care about it! I have to walk in that street, so why do I have to walk by his garbage?

Nehemia: I want to summarize in… maybe in more simple English terms. The way the word in Genesis 2:7 is spelled has what we would call an extra Yud, which isn’t actually necessary for the spelling of the word, and that indicates that humans have both this life force and some kind of a soul which animals don’t have. Does that summarize, basically, what you’re saying?

Gerald: Yeah. Any dog lover would say that dogs have a soul, but we have a higher soul.

Nehemia: Okay, alright. But all human beings, all homo sapiens alive today… because here in we’re in dangerous territory…

Gerald: Yes, I agree with you before you even say it. They all have a neshama. They’re all humans. They’re all humans.

Nehemia: Because for example, there are these… what do they call it? Christian identity, which is kind of like this white supremist movement, who say that they’re actually descended from different lines. That Jews are physical descendants… they have this weird theology that they’re physically descended from Satan, who raped Eve and produced offspring, which was Cain. So, they want to say there are humans who don’t have the same inherent… they’re not made in the image of God in the way that others are. And that’s where we get into really dangerous territory, I think. Certainly, from a Tanakh perspective, it’s un-Torah.

Gerald: I don’t see the basis for that theologically. I mean, maybe they can try to read something into verses. I would not call that the golden apple, I would call that the rotten apple!

Nehemia: So, there’s an old joke… well, it’s not a joke. The Greek word for parshanut, for “interpretation,” is exegesis. “Gesis” is reading, G-E-S-I-S, and “ex” is from, and then there’s eisegesis, which is you read into. It’s not a joke, that’s actually the terms.

Gerald: I’ve never heard of that.

Nehemia: So, what they’re doing is eisegetical; they have a racist doctrine they’re trying to justify, and they’re grasping at straws in the biblical text to try and read something into it which… you would never get that from the biblical text alone. But if you’re trying to explain, “I know this person is inferior to me because I’m a racist bigot. How do I explain that from the Bible?” That’s basically what they’re doing.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: This is kind of mind-blowing. And look, Dr. Schroeder has many books he’s written. We’re going to put links on my website, NehemiasWall.com, where you can…

Gerald: Can I just say one thing about… If there’s no time I won’t say it.

Nehemia: No. there’s time. I think we have another hour, technically, so go ahead! There’s as much time as you need, go ahead.

Gerald: The Bible gives the ages of people. Later, I’ll get into something else, if you remind me, about a subtlety about why nothing is superfluous in the Bible. But the Bible gives the ages of people. Now, why does the Bible break our heads? It’s hard enough to study the Bible, let alone to know that Adam and Eve had 130 years until they had their third kid, Seth, and Seth is 105 years until… In any event, why do we have to know these ages? Because they let us form a calendar. Otherwise, there would be no 6,000-year calendar that people are concerned with. The only reason they have it is because you add all the ages in the Bible, they’re all given, and you add kings and queens, and it comes to a number less than 6,000 years. Not the biblical, but you get to the end of the Hebrew Bible, and then you have to add the kings, queens and everyone else. Christians would add on Jesus, et cetera, and you get to less than 6,000 years. If the numbers hadn’t been given, if the ages of people hadn’t been given, there would be no calculation, no problem. So, the ages are given… and why was I getting onto this point? Sorry, I forgot, I was getting there for a reason.

Nehemia: You were talking about, why is it that we’re told the ages of the people? Because it gives us a calendar. And so, I think really the question for me is, are you saying that from the time of Adam and Eve were given a neshama, a soul, that the world really is around 6,000 plus-minus years? Give or take a couple hundred years.

Gerald: Exactly. Because then it says Adam lived 130 years and had a kid named Seth. He was doing that on Earth, not in outer space. From Adam on, it’s an Earth-based calendar. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: So, we add up those years and we see how long-ago Adam was. Then Barbara, my wife, Barbara Sofer, she writes every two weeks for the Jerusalem Post called The Human Spirit. It’s really worth getting on her blog. Her pen name is Sofer. She has a blog every… for the readers I’m saying this, she has thousands of people… Every Friday she puts out about 20 lines or so on Facebook. I don’t have Facebook, it’s her Facebook. Sofer, her name is, B. Sofer.

Nehemia: And you said this is your… who is this?

Gerald: My wife.

Nehemia: Your wife! Okay, Barbara Sofer, we’ll put a link on my website as well.

Gerald: Okay. She has a pen name; sofer means “writer”. In fact, it was her name before we married, and so it’s her professional name. So, she has a website and every Friday she puts out a blog of about 15-20 lines, which she spends hours on, on a summary of what we’re reading in the Bible the next day in the synagogue. So, if you want to go through the Hebrew, it’s a summary in English. It’s written in English.

So, what am I getting at? Okay, leave that aside. If we add up all the years… Oh, here’s what I was getting at. Barbara and I were in London giving lectures back-to-back. She’s a great speaker and a great writer. We have an afternoon off, and we go to the British Museum. Not the Science Museum, the British Museum in London. We walk in on the Mesopotamian Wing; it’s a whole wing, and what do we see? A sign, “The First Cities”, a whole section related to the first cities that are known in the world. Not the first little towns, the first big cities. They date back to, Nehemia, the time of Adam.

National Geographic a half a year ago had something very similar. They date back, and the year is given, they say, “Such and such, approximately this amount of years ago, the first cities appear.” I look at the number and I say, “Barbara, look at the number!” Of course they give in BCE, they say BC, so you have to add 2,000 years onto that. It matches the biblical. I know the numbers because I work with this stuff all the time. So, it matches Adam! I say, literally, Nehemia, “Thank God the curator of this entire exhibit…” and I said literally “thank God”, because these people are busy all the time, and he was there to answer my question. I didn’t mention Adam, I didn’t mention neshama, I didn’t mention the Bible, nothing. Why did the cities form at this time? That was my question. Do you know what his answer was? “We’ve no idea. We have no idea because it’s strange, because the population explosion of humans starts thousands of years earlier when farming was invented.” Farming was invented 11,000 years ago, and we’re talking about something like 6,000 years ago, that’s thousands of years. He said, “We have no idea why suddenly…” and it was sudden. Do you know what the answer is? He gives a year that’s about 200 years after the biblical date. He gives it in BCE or BC, so you add the 2,000. So, what does it mean? I know what it means. Before the creation of the neshama, there were homo sapiens all around, but they weren’t humans, they were people. They had all the drives of an animal but all the skills of a human; opposing thumbs, intelligence to invent farming, how to treat this one… they were animals!

The neshama comes into the world, and for the first time ever you could have people of different clans that smell differently and who had different folks and grandfolks live together. You couldn’t have a city before the neshama, because if you didn’t look like me, talk like me, and come from my mishpachah, “extended family”, my chamulah, I had you for dinner, either roasted or boiled. I mean, it was literally a dog-eat-dog world. The neshama changed the world, and suddenly people who weren’t from the same family line, the Hebrew word being chamulah or mishpachah, could live together. You couldn’t have a city before this.

What’s amazing, Nehemia, at this time also… in fact, that’s what the plaque said besides the timing, I’m seeing it in my head. “However, the most important discovery at the time was the invention of…”

Nehemia: Agriculture.

Gerald: What did you say, poker?

Nehemia: No, I said agriculture.

Gerald: No, that goes back 4,000 years before that.

Nehemia: Ah, okay. What was the most important discovery?

Gerald: Writing.

Nehemia: Writing! Okay.

Gerald: Now, why was writing invented? Because cities appeared. And what happens with cities? Now Sam and his family lives in the city. Frank and his family live on a farm; all rainy season, all winter long, Sam in the city is weaving baskets, and Frank on the farm is growing corn. Come the spring, Sam in the city picks up his 50 big storage baskets, carries them out to Frank on the farm, and Sam in the city said to Frank on the farm, “You need these baskets, they breathe and you can store your corn, and you’ll have corn for the whole year…” there’s no supermarkets, “and it won’t get moldy.” And Frank on the farm says, “Sam, you’re a gift from heaven. I really need those storage baskets. I’ll give you two baskets full of corn for your family if you’ll give me the other 48 baskets for me.” And Sam in the city says, “It’s a good deal. I’ll trade you these for two big baskets for my family.” Then Frank breaks the bad news: “Sam from the city, you came out two weeks too early. The corn won’t be ripe for another two weeks. Don’t break your back carrying the baskets back to town, leave them here and write out…” And that’s why all the first writing is economic transactions. All the first writing isn’t, “Hallelujah, there’s a God.” All the first writings are, “Frank on the farm and Sam in the city owes this and that.” Writing is invented because of trading. Trading is invented because of division of labor. Division of labor is because Frank lives on the farm and Sam lives in the city, and they do separate stuff.

Nehemia: So, trade is the basis of civilization. Is what you’re saying?

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: At least the writing part of civilization. So, let’s go back around 6,000 years… what is it? 5,780?

Gerald: 5,780, yeah, about 6,000.

Nehemia: Around 6,000 years. So, we have a human being, his name is Adam, and he has a wife named Chava. Are there other people who have souls at that time who aren’t their physical descendants?

Gerald: No, and that’s what… Oh, I get you. I’m going to say two things about this. First let me say what’s on my mind, and then please say that again.

Nehemia: Sure, please.

Gerald: What’s interesting about the age that’s given at the British Museum for the first cities is it’s a few hundred years after the biblical age of Adam, which is exactly what would be needed because the soul has to spread. The soul spreads biologically, and according to Rashi, sociologically also. To answer your question, I think one couple gets the soul…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: And it spreads biologically and also sociologically. Supposing you were soulless. You’re a mom and dad and have kids and they’re soulless, but they see this family over there and they’ve really got something going for them. They sing on Friday nights. They just seem to have a better life. “Junior, why don’t you go play with those kids, maybe you’ll pick something up from them.” And Junior picks up a neshama, because, if Rashi’s correct, the commentator Rashi from the year 1050 approximately, we see one particular place where it implies that if a souled person, an ensouled person, raises another child that wasn’t from souled parents, that child will have a neshama also. In other words, the neshama is able to be instilled sociologically as well as biologically.

Nehemia: So, at the time of Adam and Chava, Adam and Eve, which you take to be literal people if I understand correctly…

Gerald: I think so, for sure.

Nehemia: There may have been thousands of people in the world, tens of thousands maybe. Not every one of them was given a neshama, but by a couple of hundred years later or something that soul had spread to every human being. Is that…?

Gerald: I don’t know if to every human being, but it certainly had spread enough so you could start having cities. Notice there are only cities in the Middle East. There are only cities in the Fertile Crescent. There weren’t cities over in China yet; the soul hadn’t spread. It doesn’t mean that the Chinese are inferior because… no one had souls in those days. There’s only this one little… and it spread.

Nehemia: It’s interesting you mentioned China. So, I lived in China for a year, and I was a high school teacher there. My students used to tell me that what they were taught is that every human today is descended from… they said a monkey, but they meant an ape. And they said, “We’re descended from a different monkey than you’re descended from.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Well, they found fossils, Australopithecus robustus.” It used to be called Peking Man, and Chinese people are descended from that. I don’t even think it was a hominid, Australopithecus; he didn’t walk up. Anyway, “and we’re descended from something else.” So, that’s what they were taught.

I don’t think mainstream anthropologists or physical anthropologists accept that; I think that might have been what their ignorant teacher taught them. Are you saying that not every human being today is a physical descendant of Adam and Eve? Some are descended from people who were… the idea of neshama was transmitted to them, a soul was given to them…

Gerald: I never thought about it that way. I would say yes, they still have the same neshama, because when neshama comes into the world and it bifurcates, it spreads. And again, the commentary of Rashi said about how you can get it biologically. It says, “These are the children of Moses,” but then it mentions Aaron’s children also. I don’t remember the verse, but I remember the context of it. And it’s because those children had been raised and influenced by Moses. I guess that’s what the point being there, that that’s how they could be called the children of Moses even though they’re children of Aaron. That happens in the Book of Exodus.

Nehemia: So, in the Andaman Islands there’s a famous island called North Sentinel Island, which according to mainstream anthropologists and scientists has been cut off from the rest of civilization, from the rest of humankind, for ten, or tens of thousands of years. They call it the last uncontacted tribe. And there’s a question about whether they’ve actually gone through… whether they actually have fire on this island. It’s 500 people or something like that. We don’t actually know if it’s 50 or 500 people. So, they were never really in contact… It’s a thought experiment.

So, the people on the North Sentinel Island… There was a Christian a few years ago who said, “These are the last people who have never heard the good news of Jesus.” And he went to, what they call “share the Gospel” with them, and they killed him. They killed him because they’ve had bad experiences of people coming in the past and kidnapping. I think it was the British government or the Indian government, kidnapped 10 or 20 of them to try to bring them back and to teach them the language, teach them our languages so we could communicate with them, and then they ended up dying of disease. So, they have bad experiences with strangers coming and kidnapping them. But the people who are there virtually have no knowledge of the outside world except for the boats they see go by and the planes maybe that they see fly over.

So, do they have a neshama? And you don’t have to answer; it’s just kind of a thought experiment here. Let’s get to the flood. Young Earth Creationists would say everyone on North Sentinel Island is a descendant of Noah, a physical descendant of Noah and his children. So, talk about the flood.

Gerald: Well, one thing that’s very interesting about the flood. Just before the flood… I’m bypassing your question.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: Just before the flood… why does God bring on the flood? Because the world, I’m almost certain it’s chapter 10, but I’m not sure it’s chapter 10…

Nehemia: It’s chapter 6.

Gerald: It’s Exodus…

Nehemia: No, the flood is Genesis chapter 6.

Gerald: Okay.

Nehemia: And you’re looking for verse 5. It says, “Rabah ra’at ha’adam ba’aretz,” “Great was the evil of man on the Earth,” “V’kol yetzer machshavot libo,” “and all the,” “yetzer,” “the thought of his heart was only evil all day long.”

Gerald: Okay.

Nehemia: It’s chapter 6 verse 5.

Gerald: Okay, I’m going a bit further than that then. When does it say the flood is going to come? I’ve got the wrong glasses.

Nehemia: Well, technically you could say it says it in the previous…

In 6:3 it says, “My soul will not remain for man.”

Gerald: Here we go, “The world was filled with violence.” Where does it say that?

Nehemia: You’re looking for verse 11.

Gerald: Of what chapter?

Nehemia: Chapter 6 verse 11. It says, “Va’tishachet ha’aretz lifni ha’elohim va’timaleh ha’aretz hamas.”

Gerald: Ah yeah! Okay, yeah, so, tell your readers about it… or maybe you did already. Have you told them?

Nehemia: I’m going to do a separate discussion on that. But please, share your… So, the word there for “violence” is hamas.

Gerald: Yes. The readers… it’s literally hamas. And we read that on the day when Hamas attacked our people on October 7th. That was the portion that we read in the synagogue that day! It’s frightening. And it says, and the word there, you’re going to do a session on it, so I don’t want to pre-empt you…

Nehemia: No, go ahead, please share it, share your thoughts.

Gerald: … that is violence, the Hebrew text there is, and I’m going to use my glasses.

Nehemia: Is “hamas”.

Gerald: Is “hamas”! At the end of this it says, “And God says that hamas must be destroyed.” That the violence must be destroyed. And the word violence… your readers, you’ll hear this from Nehemia in more detail, but the word for violence is hamas. It’s not changing the transliteration; that’s what the Hebrew says and that’s how you pronounce it. It’s the exact same sounding word. Now, hamas for the Arabs is an abbreviation of several things, but no one knows, and I doubt if there’s a person listening to this knows why everyone calls it Hamas. The UN calls them Hamas. The American president calls them that. Everyone calls them that because it is Hamas. In the Middle East here we call it Hamas. And we read it in the synagogue that day!

Nehemia: It almost sounds like it’s prophetic.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: And maybe not almost.

Gerald: It was, because we tore the country apart politically, and God said, “You want to tear it apart? Run the system yourself.” God stepped back. The attack was coming, this is now Gerry Schroeder, okay? The attack was going to happen. You don’t build 500 kilometers worth of tunnels, and you have weapons and machines that can fly in the air that can carry people… It was all happening. That wasn’t what brought on the attack. I mean, our being separate. But the fact that we were torn politically… people may not realize, but our country was torn politically into two camps as whether we should reform our Supreme Court… it wasn’t getting rid of democracy, that’s what the people who are against the reform… “They’re trying to destroy democracy.” It’s not true. In my opinion we were trying to make sure democracy is balanced. Our Supreme Court is the strongest Supreme Court in the world. It has power that no other Supreme Court has. And they’re not elected officials, they’re appointed by themselves. I just plead for one thing; make it like the American system where each new justice is vetted. It may be brutal. We listen to some of these vettings on American TV that gets here. It’s almost brutal, but it keeps the Supreme Court honest. Not just honest, but… how should I say it? It’s directed to what it’s supposed to do. We don’t have that here. We don’t have that here, so it’s a problem. I’m not going to get into it. I never took part…

Nehemia: Aharon Barak was once described by an American judge as… I think they called him a judicial buccaneer. Buccaneer in the sense of a pirate. But anyway, that’s a whole separate issue.

Gerald: But the result of the attack was… the attack was coming, but the disaster of the attack was because God stepped back and said, “You want to tear your country apart? I’ll help you get it back together.” Because the entire password of this war is, in Hebrew, yachad, “togetherness”. I’ve been with the IDF… I don’t want to get into my history with the IDF… I mean, I was part of it. I’m an old guy now, but… we never had the byword, “we’re together, we’re together” … we were torn apart… Anyway, I don’t want to get into politics, but it was so sad. Okay, let’s leave that aside.

Nehemia: I would say as a side point that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hamas is called Hamas. When they formed their organization, these were people who had some knowledge of Hebrew and Israeli culture, and I think they chose that word very deliberately. It is an acronym in Arabic for the Islamic Resistance Movement, but it couldn’t have been lost on them the significance of this word in Hebrew as well.

And by the way, in Arabic it has a meaning, which is “intensity in war and religion.” Basically, it’s being a zealot; that’s what hamas means in Arabic. It’s hard to believe that they weren’t aware of it. Look, Yahya Sinwar, who is now the leader, he wasn’t before, he speaks fluent Hebrew. What was different between Hamas and the PLO is that Arafat was born in Egypt and didn’t know the first thing about Israel. He didn’t know the first thing about Palestine. Hamas is different; they grew up under Israeli rule. They were formed under Israeli rule. They had served time in Israeli prisons before they broke off and formed their Islamist movement.

Gerald: We cured him of some kind of disease!

Nehemia: Yeah, he had a heart disease that Israel cured him of. Well, he’s not the founder, but the point is that the founders back in the 80’s, a lot of them were very well versed in Israeli culture and the Hebrew language. Let’s get back to the flood.

Gerald: I don’t have an answer for the flood.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Gerald: I have no… I used to teach… until a few years ago. I taught for 25 years at what’s called a yeshiva, a place where you come to study about God, and I taught science and Bible there. For a few years running, about three years running, all the teachers got together… we closed the doors, and we tried to figure out the flood. We did that for three years running, and we never got an answer of how you can show that in the world that there was a flood. I do not know from my studies, which doesn’t mean I know everything. I want to make that very clear; my Earth science wasn’t focused on trying to find a flood… earth science and nuclear physics, my two majors. But I don’t know of data that are strongly pointing in favor of the flood. Now, other persons may have, and so I’m saying I haven’t studied even 1% of the information. However, I can say explicitly: the flood could not have changed radioactive decay chains. No matter how hot you get water, the temperatures that change nuclear reactions occur in atomic bombs. Those are the temperatures that you require. Obviously, there’s nothing left.

Nehemia: To me the easiest explanation is that the word for eretz, which we translate usually as “earth”, could also mean “land”. So, there could have been a regional flood that flooded parts of Mesopotamia, or the Black Sea is one of the popular theories these days. I’m not saying that’s the answer. Maybe Kent Hovind is right, and the world is only 6,000 literal years old, and all the fossils in the world are explained by that. I don’t know, I’m not an expert.

Gerald: No, no! That couldn’t change the fossils.

Nehemia: No, I’m saying I don’t know. So, you’re saying, though… there were fossils before the flood.

Gerald: Oh, sure, the fossils from before the flood have… show a strata layer that you can guess ages of, and a radioactive age that matches the strata layer that, if there would have been a flood, they would have been changed… they were pre-flood. The Bronze Age fossils are good ones, they…

Nehemia: So, dinosaurs weren’t walking around with humans?

Gerald: No, dinosaurs died about 30 or 40 million years ago. Dinosaurs were way before there were people. Would you say were or were not?

Nehemia: Would I say? This gentleman that I interviewed, he argued that there were dinosaurs on the Ark; that Noah built a really big boat and there were dinosaurs on the Ark.

Gerald: No, there were no dinosaurs; dinosaurs disappeared. The number is quite strongly confirmed now… the last 40 years. The impact in the northern part of the Caribbean, off the Yucatan…

Nehemia: Chicxulub, or something like that. I can never pronounce it.

Gerald: Yeah. That date is around the whole world.

Nehemia: Let me ask you another question. So, we have… is it 93 naturally occurring elements?

Gerald: I think it’s 92, but I don’t know.

Nehemia: 92 or 93, whatever the number is, it’s definitely not my field. So, the standard explanation from mainstream scientists is that originally, from the Big Bang… do you believe in the Big Bang? Let’s start with that.

Gerald: My first book is called Genesis and the Big Bang.

Nehemia: There you go.

Gerald: The Big Bang… The Big Bang is the best news for God since Moses came down from Sinai. If you’re Christian, you could say Jesus also, but as a Jew I say the Big Bang is the best news for God since Moses came down from Sinai. The Big Bang is just another way of saying there was a creation to our world, which was big news 40 or 50 years ago, because 100 years ago the universe was considered to be eternal.

Nehemia: Oh, so this brings up something which maybe, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine, it might not be your expertise. But what comes to mind for me is Olbers’ Paradox. Because the Big Bang essentially solved Olbers’ Paradox, didn’t it? That’s this idea that there’s an infinite number… the universe is infinite and there’s an infinite number of stars, so at night there should be no darkness because every point in the universe should end in a star.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: And scientists struggled for centuries; why isn’t the night sky light?

Gerald: Yeah. And the answer would be…

Nehemia: The universe isn’t infinite and it’s expanding.

Gerald: Yeah. It had a beginning and that’s it. If it was infinitely extant and infinitely old the light would be bright. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Right. So, that actually solved a problem that had been in science, or Western thought, going back to the Greeks.

Gerald: There’s such strong data now that there was a creation… Robert Jastrow, one of the founders of NASA, which began as the Goddard Space Agency and became NASA… they bled together. He was one of the founders. He writes… it’s a wonderful piece of literature; I actually have a copy of the original. It was in a newspaper article back… when was it? It must go back at least 40 years, and he writes, “The story ends like a bad dream. We scientists have climbed the mountain of ignorance. As we finally pull ourselves over the final rock, we’re greeted by a band of theologians that have been sitting there for centuries.”

Nehemia: And the term Big Bang originally was to mock the concept, if I remember correctly.

Gerald: Yeah, Fred Hoyle. Fred Hoyle on the BBC in the 1950’s. Big Bang.

Nehemia: Because it implied God, that there was a creation. So, you made a statement when we were talking about the flood, that you don’t know of any data that support a flood. Am I right? It seems like your approach is, you look at what the scientific data are and then you try to see how it fits in with the Bible along with historical Jewish interpretation. Would you say that’s your approach?

Gerald: I would say that. And I’m saying that if it doesn’t match, and it’s significant, it means you just haven’t found the data. But if it conflicts… as an example, that until the mid-1950’s, I think it was, we said that the universe is eternal. I would say the science is wrong.

The Bible has a tremendously good track record of being correct. And for the Christian listeners, I want to make it… and Jewish ones even more especially, when it says God chose the Jewish people, it doesn’t mean that they’re wonderful or better, it just means that they’re the marker.

You should make it very clear; there are only two peoples, two nations in the entire Hebrew Bible, that’s The Five Books of Moses and all the writings and Judges, et cetera, and Joshua and Judges, et cetera, all of them. In all the Hebrew Bible there are only two nations that God says explicitly, “If I had my way I would destroy them.” One was Amalek, and that’s where we relate Hamas to Amalek. And what’s the second nation that God said, if he had his way, He would destroy them? It’s in Deuteronomy; the Jewish people. He said, “You’ve been such a bunch of lousy people. You didn’t follow My laws.” Read it, it’s chapter 32. “You’re such a bunch of lousy people. I give you the laws, you rebel right and left. If I had my way, I would destroy you, but I can’t.” I’m paraphrasing the literal Hebrew text, but I’m paraphrasing. “The nations of the world would say it was by their power that this happened, and they wouldn’t realize that it was I that made it happen.” God made a covenant with us that we would be a marker in this world.

I had a very close Christian friend that her mother said to her, “You want to believe in God? Follow the Jewish people. The history doesn’t make sense.” And it doesn’t make sense, and that’s why God says, “I would like to destroy you, but I made you My marker. Not for the better; you’re such a bunch of schlemiels. You don’t follow,” et cetera, et cetera, “but you are My marker.”

And it is identical to the argument that Moses used. When we come out of Egypt, we’re about to go into the Promised Land, and we, our forefathers, say, “No, no, no!” The women didn’t say this, by the way, the men said it; the text is very clear about who dies in the desert in the next 40 years. Only the men over 20 years old, and under 20 they didn’t because there’s a connection between the amygdala and the frontal cortex… we’ll leave the biology out of it. The men say, “Let’s go back to Egypt. We can’t beat them; we can’t beat them.” And God hits the roof and says, “You know what? I’m going to destroy you and make you a new people.” And what’s the logic that Moses uses? He’s always used it, always. It’s never… his argument with God is never, “Oh, they’ll be good people…” Moses knows the facts of life.

Nehemia: He’s met the Jewish people.

Gerald: He knows it. So, what does Moses say? “You can do it, but it’s not in Your best interest. Because if you destroy them now, on the edge of going to the land, the people of the world will say that You destroyed them here at the entrance of the Promised Land because You weren’t strong enough to beat the nations in there to give them the land.” And God backs down. You can read the text. People don’t like to read it that way but it’s exactly what it says, “Va’yinachem,” “And God repents.” Yinachem means “repents” or “rethinks” the actions, and He says, “You’re right, I won’t. But they’re going to walk for 40 years now in the desert. And those people who were old enough to know better, they will perish in the desert. They won’t come in. But the children under 20 will come in.” Because if you’re under 20 you’re not responsible, because of the connections in the brain.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: But it’s always the argument… the argument works, and this is the problem God has Himself in Deuteronomy. “I would have destroyed you but you’re My marker.” And look at the history of the Jews. If you’re looking for the invocation of God in the world, there are many. Just try to look at the chemistry of how you remember anything. I’d just been working on it before we got onto Zoom. The complexity is frightening, and it’s all going on right in here.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying that the complexity of the human brain and of life couldn’t just be accidental, is that what you’re saying?

Gerald: Yeah. And I don’t think… like, these arguments that are used by Dawkins, that climbing the mountain… that step by step, if the complexity exceeds what would normally develop over time in many, many people’s opinion who have studied the complexity in really great depth…

Nehemia: There’s a concept they call intelligent design; irreducible complexity. There are things if you take away one element the whole system breaks. So how could it have gradually evolved?

Gerald: Yeah, I’ve heard about that. I don’t think we even have to hang onto that, just the extreme complexity. Because it’s always risky to say, if you can’t define something that you know if you… I apologize, but there’s a book… I’m sorry, I have it on my shelf. There are so many wrong choices. In the development of the world, at each stage of mutation there are a million wrong choices and one or two that will work to make things go forward in a way that will allow for the complexity to develop towards life. Now, it didn’t have to develop life, but the likelihood is so slim. Nehemia, even if you look at the creation of the universe, the universe is made for complexity. The construction of an atom that has a heavy nucleus and these almost ethereal electrons that weigh… each electron has the identical charge of the proton but it weighs almost 2,000 times less! Why should something that’s 2,000 times lighter have the identical charge of this massive proton? And it’s electrons that allow life, because it’s the sharing of electrons among atoms that make atoms bond to form molecules that form life! If the universe wasn’t like that, you couldn’t share electrons. You couldn’t move them; they’d be too heavy.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying even the rules of physics are so unlikely to create the elegant world in which we live that that has to be divine intervention. Is that what you’re saying?

Gerald: And Scientific American a few years ago, which is very highly materialistic, said, “This is another proof that there must be an infinite number of universes.”

Nehemia: Right! And we just happen to live in the one where everything is elegant and works out.

Gerald: Yeah! There’s always an answer!

Nehemia: Well, so they need a huge amount of time and an infinite number of universes to make it work from a materialistic perspective. I know you’ve got a bunch of books; we’re going to put links to those on the website. Any final things you want to share?

Gerald: www.geraldschroeder.com. There is a God in the world. God is active in the world. I urge you to watch The Proof of God in Five Minutes, please. It has three million views, it’s enough already. And as I say again, I get nothing from it, zero. But it’s important to have arguments on how to answer a skeptic. It is crucial, there are a lot of skeptics in the world… that… for instance, I’ll give an example. There’s a wonderful book, the science is fantastic, it’s A Universe from Nothing by Krauss… pardon me for the Christians in the group, but he’s a Jew that wrote it. The science is magnificent. I urge you, just forget the last chapter, the last chapter could not be stupid enough than I can imagine. And he has quotes from Dawkins and other ones. This is the final nail in the coffin. We creat the universe from absolute nothing. He fails to point out the fact that you create the universe from absolute nothing provided you’ve got the laws of nature.

And that’s exactly what The Proof of God in Five Minutes is about. In fact, he once, in an interview, the author of this book, A Universe from Nothing, if you read all the book except the last chapter and then at least wrap your head around the fact about the stupidity that this argues against a God. God creates the laws of nature that predate the universe. They’re not physical, they’re outside of time. They can create something from nothing! That is the very definition of God in this universe.

And the only name for God in Genesis chapter 1 is Elokim. God is made manifest in nature. There’s several names for God in the Bible but the only name for God in Genesis chapter 1 is Elokim, and that’s the name of God physically acting in the universe. God is manifest in nature. So, if you want to know the physics behind the universe, A Universe from Nothing is extraordinary, but you have to watch the last chapter. And when he was confronted by someone saying, “But you have to have the laws of nature.” He says, “Don’t be a nitpicker; who cares where they come from.” The laws of nature… that’s the whole story!

Nehemia: It’s kind of an important thing, you would think.

Gerald: The laws of nature! It’s the whole story of God’s gift to the world.

Nehemia: Fascinating, wow. Thank you so much for joining us on the program, we’ve learned a lot. We need to have you back on to talk about so many more things.

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.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Proverbs 25:11
Genesis 1-2
Genesis 6
Deuteronomy 32
Numbers 14
Exodus 32

BOOKS MENTIONED
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #21 – A Physicist on the Nature of God (Rebroadcast)
Hebrew Voices #22 – Creation, Evolution, and the Human Soul (Rebroadcast)
Hebrew Voices #184 – Creation vs. Evolution: Raw and Unedited
Hebrew Voices #186 – The Hamas Prophecy: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Hamas Prophecy Part 2
Hebrew Voices #88 – A Geneticist's Perspective on the Tree of Life

OTHER LINKS
Dr. Schroeder’s website
Maimonides’s commentary on Genesis 1
Nachmanides’s commentary on Genesis 1
Barbara Sofer
Barbara Sofer | The Jerusalem Post

The post Hebrew Voices #196 – Reconciling the Bible with Science: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.