God’s Name Explained: YHWH, Yahweh, Jehovah, Yehova with Nehemia Gordon

Nehemia (00:00:00):
15, 18, there’s a man named Gallus, he’s actually a Catholic. He’s the confessor of the Pope. And he says, well, how do we pronounce this name right? If it has the vowels of Adonai, how do we pronounce it? And he says, well, if you pronounce the vowels the way that it’s written, it would be ya. But the Jews say those are the vows of Adonai. And as far as we know, he’s the first one. First Christian

Nehemia (00:00:27):
Explicitly say that if you take the vows the way they’re written in the Hebrew text, the name is pronounced Jehova. No Jewish rabbi ever revealed how to pronounce the name. We only know it from the manuscripts of the Bible. I taught that the rabbis did know. And how do I know they knew? Because in the Talmud, when it says you’re not allowed to speak the name, it also says that rabbis would teach the name to their disciples once every seven years.

David (00:00:52):
So they knew it, but they were not saying it,

Nehemia (00:00:54):
Understanding they were saying in secret once every seven years as part of some ceremony of transmitting the names so the knowledge wouldn’t be lost.

David (00:01:01):
Yeah.

Nehemia (00:01:02):
Now where do we get Yahweh? Ooh, that’s interesting.

David (00:01:15):
Welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict Podcast with us again, NAIA Gordon. We’re so glad you’re here.

Nehemia (00:01:25):
Thank you. Shalom. Thanks for having me.

David (00:01:26):
Thanks for coming back. I know we joke that we might’ve been wearing the same things the last time we filmed, but this is not the same day that we’re not pulling a wool over your eyes. This is a new day. And when you came last time, I said, I think before we were recording, I said, I really want you to come back and speak on the name of the Lord. And you said, it’s one of my favorite topics.

Nehemia (00:01:46):
It is my favorite topic, probably definitely one of my top three.

David (00:01:49):
And so now we have the time. I wanted people to get to know you. We talked about you being a karaite and what that means. We talked about the Hebrew Yeshua versus the Greek Jesus, the Hebrew Matthew, but now we have some time allotted to talk about the name of God. It’s

Nehemia (00:02:06):
A pretty big deal, right? It’s a really important deal. So in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, we have the name of God appears 6,827 times. And what I mean by the name of God in Hebrew, it’s the four letters Y Vahe, what some people call the Tetragrammaton, or literally the four letter name. And just to put that, just to contrast there, the word God, which in Hebrew is Elohim. There is another word for God, L. And there’s another term Adonai, which is Lord. And then there’s like El Shadai, which is usually translated God almighty. If you take all those titles, those are titles, take them all together. They don’t amount to the number of times that his actual name appears. And that’s kind of mind blowing that

David (00:02:53):
His

Nehemia (00:02:54):
Name appears the name Yhe. Vahe appears probably at least twice as many times as all of the other titles combined. And what’s so powerful for me as a Jew about that name is that first of all, when Moses says to God, he’s like, okay, I’m going to go to the people and say, God has sent me, what name should I tell ’em? That’s an Exodus three. And he first answers

David (00:03:18):
Famous. Does he say what name? Or does he say, who should I say sent

Nehemia (00:03:21):
Me? You’re getting me on the spot

David (00:03:23):
Here. I was just like, maybe I’ve never read it that way. But yeah, essentially he’s saying, who do I say you are? And

Nehemia (00:03:28):
Here’s the context. They’re living in Egypt for hundreds of years and there’s thousands of gods, right? So which God in particular is sending me the God of, okay, which one? And God responds, first of all, which is usually translated I am that I am. We can get back to that as in Exodus three 14. And then in verse 15, he says his actual name, yhe Vahe, which we’ll talk about how that’s pronounced. And he says, this is my name forever. And then in many translations it has, this is my memorial for generation to generation. But that word memorial, the Hebrew word actually is from a root that means to mention. So it means this is my name forever. This is my mention for generation to generation when you mention me, when you call upon me in prayer and in oaths, this is the name you are to use. And so it was clearly from the very beginning intended to use that name. Now what happened over the centuries is Jewish tradition stepped in and there became this tradition that God’s name is too holy to speak. Instead of calling on the actual name, Jews started using these replacements, these titles,

(00:04:41):
So like the Title I nine, which means Lord Idon nine appears in the Hebrew Bible, but it also doesn’t appears approximately 400 times 434, give or take, versus 6,827 for the actual name Mu. The intention was that we would call on his name. In fact, there’s this beautiful report we have in the Mishna, which is the writings of the ancient rabbis where they talk about how there was a practice of ancient Israel to greet people in the name and what does that mean to greet them in the name. So they explain, look at what happened when Gideon encounters the angel, the angel says to him, Yehovah, that’s the letters you, Hey, according to the presentation, I understand. We’ll talk more about that

David (00:05:27):
Later.

Nehemia (00:05:29):
He greets him in the name of Jehova and he says, YBI with you. And Gideon doesn’t understand what that means. He thinks that’s just, Hey, how you doing? But what the angel really meant was no Jehova is going to be with you and you’re going to be powerful. And then they bring another example, which is in Ruth, where Boaz is walking on the road to Bethlehem and he sees the harvesters in the field and they say to him, bless you. And he says them with you. So that was the greeting of ancient Israel. People would greet each other in the name. And so somehow we went from greeting each other in the name to where we can’t even say the name in Jewish tradition unless we are the high priest in the temple, is what Maimonide says. And then there’s this statement in the Talmud that says, well, in this world, in this fallen world, in the current state, we can’t say the name, but in the world to come and by the world to come, they don’t mean heaven. They mean when the Messiahs here on earth reigning as king over the world in the world to come, the name will be read the way it is written. Meaning today, whenever Jews see those letters, y Vahe or some people will say Yahweh, we’ll talk about that. Hopefully they read it as Otai, which is, as I said, another title that appears 400 and something times.

(00:06:52):
So they see those letters to ve and they replace them with a completely different word, which I’m trying to think if there’s an example like that in the English language where you see one word and you read a completely different word. Nothing’s coming to mind. Maybe a curse word, maybe. There you go. But isn’t that interesting? So we have words that are so let’s say bad that you can’t

David (00:07:13):
Say them. It’s so profane. Yeah,

Nehemia (00:07:14):
Profane. And then there’s words in many cultures that are so holy, you can’t say them. This was actually a practice in many of the ancient cultures in the Middle East that there would be a God whose name was too holy to speak,

David (00:07:28):
Really.

Nehemia (00:07:29):
The Canaanites, for example, worship to God, who we know in the Old Testament is Bal, I think maybe some people say Baal,

David (00:07:36):
Right? Yeah. That’s how we like to say

Nehemia (00:07:38):
It. But B just means Lord, and it’s different than Adonai, which is what we use for our God. But that wasn’t his name. What was his actual name? And we know his actual name now from archeology and study of ancient text was Hadad,

Speaker 2 (00:07:54):
Which

Nehemia (00:07:55):
Means something like thunder. So he was a god of thunder. He was a storm God, but the Canaanites wouldn’t call him Hadad. The AAN did who lived in Syria. But the Canaanites said, well, that name’s too holy. We’re just going to call him Lord. Wow. Right? So what an incredible parallel that we have. Now, did they copy us or did we copy them? Right? And I’ll leave that open as a question of history,

David (00:08:20):
But

Nehemia (00:08:20):
I think it was more a matter of this was a practice in many cultures, and Jews probably said something like, well, what is the name of our God less holy than the name Hadad? Of course not. So we want to honor him by doing what we know other peoples do to honor their gods by not saying his name. But that’s not what he said to do.

David (00:08:38):
He

Nehemia (00:08:38):
Said, this is my name forever. This is my mention from generation to generation.

David (00:08:42):
Got it. So I brought a little whiteboard with me, and this is to help any of our visual listeners, if you’re just listening on Spotify or something, tune into YouTube next time. Hopefully it’ll be okay for them. But this is to kind of help people. And I want to share basically what I was taught, and then I want us to backtrack and say, okay, where did that come from and what are the other perspectives, essentially? So hopefully the mic’s still catching this up or picking everything up. So thank you, Terry, for letting us use your whiteboard. And correct me if I’m wrong in any of this, but this is kind of, I think the basic kind of Christian understanding and what I was taught and what I think a lot of Christians understand to this day. So we have the Hebrew yod hay good so far.

Nehemia (00:09:35):
That’s great.

David (00:09:36):
If we were going to essentially transliterate this to English,

Speaker 5 (00:09:40):
Our

David (00:09:41):
Viewers might be familiar with YHWH. You might see it on some cool Christian hats that they sell now. And when most Christians see this today, at the time of this recording, they will say, oh, I know that that’s Yahweh. It’s become very mainstream. I think the passion translation, which is a popular newer translation, actually uses Yahweh

Nehemia (00:10:06):
And

David (00:10:06):
They’ll actually write it out. But you’ll notice you can’t actually pronounce this in English. This would be, there’s no vowels. And that is if you’re unfamiliar with Hebrew, there’s the little dots that you see all over ancient Hebrew. Those are niku, is that right? And those are essentially the vowels. You’ll see a.here, a patak or whatever, different things to give the vowels because they’re essentially saying, we’re going to add an A here. We’re going to add an O up here. They’re filling in the vowels. Does that make sense? Does that tracking?

Nehemia (00:10:45):
Well, it makes sense to me. I dunno if it makes sense to the audience. So the story behind this is that ancient Hebrew was written with consonants, and the vowels were, and this is a whole complicated subject, but basically the vowels were people say, well, ancient Hebrew didn’t have vowels. Of course it did. Every spoken language had vowels. They just weren’t written down.

David (00:11:04):
You just knew them.

Nehemia (00:11:05):
You knew them. Well, there were people who were experts who memorized the entire Bible and were able to recite every single word precisely for centuries. They were doing this. And then sometime around the year 600, give or take, they started writing these vowels down. And they did that for a number of reasons. One is they were afraid, well, we’re going to forget these. And another one was, Hebrew is becoming less and less spoken. So it became more and more important as Jews were spreading out around the world.

David (00:11:35):
So when they started adding the naud so that we could all understand exactly how to pronounce these names, the story that I was told as a Bible student is they didn’t add the nku to Yohe Vahe. They’d either leave the vowels essentially off or they would add the vowels of Adonai to signal. Don’t say yohe, Vahe, you see these vowels of Adonai. That’s because you’re supposed to say Adonai. Kind of like what you referred to the understanding that I was taught, and I think a lot of us are taught is we didn’t want to take the Lord’s name in vain. That was the real kind of thrust behind it.

Nehemia (00:12:25):
Yeah, that’s interesting because that’s not the thrust in Jewish sources

David (00:12:28):
Really

Nehemia (00:12:29):
Meaning, so you’ve got the third commandment, or as Lisa’s juice counted, the third commandment, don’t take the name of your God in vain for he will not make clean. He who takes his name in vain. The ancient Jewish understanding of that is don’t make a false oath in his name. Because the way they would make oaths is they would say as Jehovah lives, and then they would say, as Jehovah lives, I will do X, Y, Z, or I testify to X, Y, Z. And if what you’re saying is not true, you’ve taken his name in vain. In vain means falsely. And so it was a false oath. And that’s the ancient Jewish understanding of that. Now, later Jews much, much later start to say, okay, it means to say the name without good reason. But the earlier sources don’t have that at all. And I think it’s ironic that that’s the Christian understanding that. So this is okay, this is an outsider’s perspective, but I’ve encountered a lot of Christians who when they hear somebody say the word, and I’m not knocking this, I’m just saying understand from a Jewish perspective how alien this is. They think if you say something like, oh, my GOD, you’re taking the name of the God in vain from a Jewish perspective, that’s not taking his, well, first of all, it’s not his name. Yeah, exactly. That’s a title.

(00:13:51):
But taking his name means to speak it falsely. So I think it’s interesting, some Christians become very legalistic and say, oh no, you can’t say that and you’re a bad person if you say that. And Jews hear that and they’re like, we have no idea what you’re talking about.

David (00:14:08):
Yeah. Well, it reveals the lack of Jewish foundation that most of us Christians have. We’ve separated ourselves so aggressively from anything Jewish that when we find something that is in some ways inherently Jewish, which I think you could argue the whole Bible is inherently Jewish, but something that is maybe foreign to us, we have to make up our own understanding. So all that to say, to circle back the way that I was taught, and I think a lot of Christians are taught, is the Jewish people didn’t want to profane the name. Whether that was tied to the third commandment or not, it was so holy. So they stopped saying it out of reverence. And it seems like in later Christian traditions we developed Jehovah and from the Greek, they didn’t have the ya sound, they had the just

Nehemia (00:15:05):
Sound, well, Greek well, so where the J came from is that in, so Martin Luther, he translates the Bible into German. And then the English versions are based on this German. And in German, the J was pronounced Y. Actually in English it was pronounced Y as well. If you look at the original 1611 King James version, and this is interesting, when I say the original people are like, oh, I went to Bible hub and I got the King James. That’s not the one from 1611. And the differences aren’t major, but there are some differences. University of Pennsylvania has a high resolution scan online of the original 1611. And there you can see the name Yhe. VE usually is translated as Lord in all caps, but seven times it’s written, actually I believe it’s six times it’s written Jehovah. And one time it’s written Jehovah with an I. Now, as far as I know, and I’m not an expert in English, I can barely speak the language all seven times. They would’ve pronounced that something like Jehovah. And that was because they understood that first letter in Hebrew was a Y. Over time, the pronunciation of that letter changed. So the same text in English was then pronounced differently.

(00:16:19):
But in German to this day, if you were to write J-E-H-O-V-A-A-H, Jehovah, they would pronounce it Jehovah.

David (00:16:26):
Yeah. Well, and it’s weird that we pronounce it Israel

Nehemia (00:16:32):
Instead of Rael,

David (00:16:32):
Right, or Rael. Because if we’re going to take the ya and make it a ju,

Nehemia (00:16:37):
Well, so this is interesting. There’s a place in the Bible called J Israel, and there’s another place in the Bible called Israel. And in Hebrew one is Rael and the other is Rael, right? They’re both ye, but one for some reason became a J, and the other became an I.

David (00:16:53):
Yeah. And then we added the S at the end of Jesus because all Greek names ended with S. Right? Like the Augustus

Nehemia (00:16:59):
Oc all names. But you have names like, well, this is an interesting example. We have the Jewish historian, Josephus, which is in Greek yo, but in Hebrew it’s Yo. So where’d the S come from? Because that’s a style of names in Greek ending in S, maybe not all names, but many names in S. And so Yeshua, which was the Hebrew name of what became Jesus Greek, was, well, the Greeks didn’t have a sound so yeshu and they didn’t have the ion sound either. So that became Yasu and then yes. And for example, Joshua, the son of noon, in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, what’s called the subagent, the Torah portion was translated around two 50 BCE in Egypt when they were making the library of Alexandria. That’s a story. Anyway, it’s more or less probably true. And there they write Joshua’s name, which in Hebrew is ua, they write it as Jesus. So there’s actually no difference between Jesus in Greek and Joshua in

David (00:18:04):
Greek

Nehemia (00:18:05):
And in Hebrew actually there’s no difference. Right? So Joshua, the son of Nunan, the book of Nehemiah is called Yeshua, the son of Nunan, which is the same name as Jesus

David (00:18:16):
Would’ve

Nehemia (00:18:17):
Deliverer. It’s a truncated form. Well, it means this is interest important related to the name. Some Christians will be like, what do I need to know that name for? It’s not important. Well, in John 17, Jesus said that he came to, one of the things he did is he manifested the name of his father. He says in 17 six. And then at the end, in 26 of this prayer, he says, he made known his father’s name. Well, what is his father’s name and what does that mean? Well, the name Jesus Yeshua, which is short for ua, means SVA saves. And many Hebrew names are contractions of short sentences. So my name Mia means Jehova Comforts and the name Yahuah Joshua or Jesus Yeshua means y saves, he talks about coming in his father’s name and people are like, what does that mean? Or maybe they think they know what it means, but if you don’t know what the father’s name is, I feel like you’re missing a piece of the puzzle

David (00:19:16):
When we’re taught it was out of reverence that the Jewish community would stop saying

Nehemia (00:19:23):
That. That’s correct. Meaning let’s say today, if you walked up to a rabbi and you said, I know the name of God is really Yahweh. Well, many rabbis would’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but if you said some will and they’ll say, please don’t say that name. We don’t speak that name. Please don’t speak into my presence. If you said, I know God’s name is really Jehovah, most Jews will know what you’re talking about

David (00:19:49):
Because

Nehemia (00:19:49):
That’s what they see written in their text, even if they don’t pronounce it, and it’ll offend many Jews. Absolutely. And I don’t think you should be offending people, right? I’m Jewish and I speak the name, and you can say it around me, but I don’t think we should be stuffing this down people’s throats who

David (00:20:05):
Don’t want to hear it. And we’ve had to talk to people because in the Christian culture right now, Yahweh is a big deal, and it’s very much being clung to as this is the real name. We have the name. And so more and more songs are being made that are Yahweh. And we have many Jewish members at our church, and we try to help our Gentile friends like, Hey, that can be a little bit offensive. It can take them away from whatever they’re experiencing in the service, and now make them focus on, oh my goodness, that was kind of jarring. So my first question is, was that the original reason why or were they told that they were not allowed to pronounce

Nehemia (00:20:41):
It? This is complicated. It gets into periods of history where we don’t have all the answers. Here’s what we know. There’s a rabbi in the Talmud named Hanina Benon. He’s sometime around the year 1 35, 1 36. He’s put to death by the Romans in a really brutal way. And the rabbis in the Talmud are trying to find out, they’re discussing, they’re debating. Everything in Talmud is debates, right? It’s this dialogue that went on for about five centuries. And they’re asking the question, why was he so brutally executed? And one of their explanations is, well, he used to speak the name the way it is written. What does that mean the way? How else would you speak it? Well, so the tradition by that time, by 1 35, 1 36 ad was when you see the letters, you pronounce it otai Lord, you don’t pronounce it the way it’s written. And the tradition was in the world to come when the Messiah is reigning here on earth, we’ll speak it the way it’s written. They didn’t think that would be 2000 years later and we’d still be waiting for the Messiah to reign his king on earth as a flesh and blood king over the world with world peace. As Isaiah two describes,

(00:21:47):
They probably thought it would be a few years is longer than they thought. So what we learned from that is, wait a minute, there’s Jews in the second century ad who are speaking the name the way it is written. And these rabbis are saying, well, in this case, that led to him being executed in a very bad way or a very brutal way. So first of all, you can take away from that. It was unusual in the second century, but there were people who were still doing it and remembered how to pronounce it. And then they go into all kinds of complicated explanations. I don’t want to get into too much detail, but basically the name was being abused by Jews for magical purposes. They say, well, he had to speak it because people use the name in magic. And how do you know what magic is? If you’ve never heard the name, if you mispronounce the name in magic, it doesn’t have any effect. So this rabbi was teaching his students. If you hear somebody say it in this way, don’t worry about it. That’s not really the name. But if you hear him say it this way, they’ve sinned and you should condemn that.

(00:22:55):
So we learn that, wait a minute, okay, there’s Jews who are abusing it in magic, and there’s rabbis who are saying it, but only in a very limited context of teaching people what magic sounds like. So you don’t do it. And then we have a statement in the Mishna where it says, all Jews of apportion in the world to come, and again, for the rabbis of the mission of the world to come isn’t heaven. It’s here on earth.

David (00:23:21):
Yeah, it’s a restored earth essentially,

Nehemia (00:23:23):
Right? It’s a new heaven and new earth in the resurrection, something like that. In rabbinical thought under the reign of the king Messiah who’s a flesh of blood, king descended from David. And some people have a portion in that world and some won’t. And they say, all Jews have a portion in the world to come except the following. Then there’s a list of exceptions. One of those exceptions in the is those who pronounce the name according to its letters, meaning by the time that was written probably in the second century ad that portion of the mishna, or certainly based on the names of the people, it’s Rabbi Akiva mentioned there, and people we know who lived around, who were killed by the Romans during the Hari persecutions. So around the year 1 35. So by that time, there is this idea, you shouldn’t speak the name way it’s written because forfeit your portion in the world to come. But if you look at the context in which they’re saying that it’s specifically in the context of magic. So later it’s expanded to any speaking the name, the way it is written. But the original context was if someone is wounded, they would speak the verse, I am your healer. And that’s where they say, one who speaks the name the way it is written has no portion of the world to come. In saying that as sort of like an incantation,

(00:24:43):
Which is interesting because Christians heal in the name today, many Christians. But from the perspective of the rabbis in the second century, if you heal in the name, it can be a prayer, no doubt, but it can also be a magical incantation. And that’s forbidden. According to the Torres, they understood it.

David (00:25:03):
So at the foundation

Nehemia (00:25:05):
It, it’s to respect the name from people who they perceived as abusing. There

David (00:25:10):
Are other reasons, but it wasn’t necessarily outside persecution. There

Nehemia (00:25:13):
Was also outside persecution, meaning part of the Hadian persecutions was, look, I dunno if you got, your audience knows who Hadrian, he was the most evil Roman emperor who ever lived, and he wanted to stamp out Judaism. So here’s what you need to understand. Jews in the Roman Empire had what you could call in Christian terms a special dispensation. And what did that mean? That meant everybody to show you’re a loyal citizen of the Roman Empire needs to bring a sacrifice to the emperor, not for the emperor to the emperor who is a God. And the Romans conquer or they take over Judea, they finagle their way in 63 BCE under Pompe,

David (00:25:56):
And

Nehemia (00:25:56):
Then they gradually get more and more control over Israel and they realize these people won’t do it, and they’re a good source of taxation. So we have two choices. We can kill them all or we can make a special exemption for them. And the special exemption was, okay, you don’t have to bring a sacrifice to the emperor. You can bring one for the emperor To your God,

David (00:26:20):
The Jews would probably rather die than

Nehemia (00:26:21):
They were dying,

David (00:26:23):
Than worship up.

Nehemia (00:26:24):
So they realized, okay, you guys just fought a war under the Maccabees, against the Greeks. We see where this is going. The Romans, we just want the taxes and we want loyalty. And if you can’t bring a sacrifice to the emperor, you can bring one for the emperor. But no other people were allowed to do that. And this is where Christians ended up being persecuted. When Christians were Jews, they were fine. They would say to them, bring a sacrifice to the emperor. I can’t. I’m a Jew. Okay, no problem. Well, I believe in Jesus. I’m not a Jew. Okay, well then you’re going to die.

David (00:26:57):
Yeah, so a gentile that

Nehemia (00:26:59):
A gentile who became a Christian had two choices, bring a sacrifice to the emperor, to the emperor or get executed.

David (00:27:07):
There was no exemption.

Nehemia (00:27:08):
There was no two exemption for them. So they’re like, oh, this is not good. And a lot of the persecutions were over that, and all of them, it became more complicated. Being a Christian in itself eventually was enough to get you persecuted.

David (00:27:21):
But

Nehemia (00:27:21):
Initially it was just really simple. If you’re a Jew, you get an exemption. If you’re not, you get executed or you bring the sacrifice. That’s all you got to do. And the Gentile Christians, they were like, no, we’re a new category. Well, there’s no new categories. We didn’t agree to that. The Romans say, so Hadrian comes along and he says, look, this Jewish exemption, we got to do away with that enough. And why is it they can’t just worship? They can worship their God. We have no problem with that, but they have to worship our gods as well. And in the pagan mindset, that made perfect sense. There’s lots of, gods had another

David (00:28:01):
One

Nehemia (00:28:01):
In Rome, had temples to Egyptian gods and Persian gods, and we’re honoring all the gods. We’re very respectful. Well, but from the Jewish and the Christian perspective, that’s not respectful. That’s sacrilegious. So Hadian comes along and institutes all these measures to get Jews to stop being different basically that he just wanted them to assimilate. And ultimately he wanted them to bring sacrifices to him

David (00:28:32):
And

Nehemia (00:28:32):
To his gods to show their loyalty. And one of the persecutions we’re told is that the Romans forbade speaking the name. So you have this convergence of two. There’s an internal factor that people are abusing it in magic, or Jews considered magic and healing and things like that. And then the external factor is Roman persecution. The rabbis said, well, we’ll do it in the world to come. That’ll be like three years from now. I

David (00:28:56):
Mean 50 years. They’re like, we got to be close.

Nehemia (00:28:57):
Right? We’re definitely close. And there were good reasons. They thought it was close meaning from their perspective.

David (00:29:04):
Totally.

Nehemia (00:29:04):
And well, it turned out that didn’t happen the way that we

David (00:29:07):
Thought. And that happened in early Christianity as well. I think the New Testament authors were like, it’s got to be in a couple weeks from

Nehemia (00:29:14):
That. Well, I mean famously Paul is struggling with this idea of the dead in Christ, which people who have died before Jesus came back and people were like, what’s going on? We thought it was going to be really soon. This isn’t what we signed up for. And there’s some profound teachings he has there were like saying, Hey guys, slow down. This might not be what you expected.

David (00:29:32):
Yeah, totally.

Nehemia (00:29:33):
So Jews were faced with a very similar, especially after the Bar Revolt, which is right. So the temple’s destroyed in 70 ad, but then the volt is the Jews rise up and they anoint a Messiah, Simon Barba. What does that mean? They anoint him. They proclaim that he’s the king of Israel.

David (00:29:51):
And Akiva was big in that too,

Nehemia (00:29:52):
Right? Rabbi Akiva thought he proclaimed him the king of Israel. And in what sense was he king of Israel? Well, he defeated the Roman army. That was the Jewish expectation, right? It’s like they say in Luke 24, they’re walking down the road to the Emmaus and they’re sad. And Jesus, who they don’t know who he is, says, why are you sad? And he said, we thought he was going to redeem Israel. What did that mean to them? What that meant to disciples of Jesus before the road to Emmaus was that well, he was going to defeat the Roman army and rule as a flesh and blood king. And then a new thing is revealed to them in Luke 24, right?

David (00:30:28):
Yeah.

Nehemia (00:30:29):
But up until that, I mean the other Jews still can to this day have that expectation.

David (00:30:33):
Well, it’s like what the disciples asked, even the resurrected Jesus, which is, are you now going to establish your throne in Jerusalem?

Nehemia (00:30:39):
What are we waiting

David (00:30:40):
For? Yeah, why?

Nehemia (00:30:41):
Right? If you can do this, why are you not defeating the Romans?

David (00:30:44):
It would’ve been mind boggling for them. That wouldn’t be the next step.

Nehemia (00:30:46):
It was definitely mind boggling, right? It basically says that in the New Testament that this is a big shock. Hey, the world’s not going to go as you thought it would. And the other Jews are still to this day. This is the Jewish expectation. What are we waiting for as Jews for the Messiah? We’re waiting for a world peace in gathering of the exiles and defeating the enemies. You can’t get world peace until you defeat our enemies. Evidently, from what I’ve seen on the news recently, our enemies have not been defeated

Speaker 2 (00:31:15):
And

Nehemia (00:31:16):
Still want to wipe us out. There’s this profound Jewish song that people recite traditionally during the Passover Seder, and it goes something like in every generation they rose up to wipe us out. And Jews have been reciting this for centuries, for over a thousand years. And it’s mind boggling. I mean, how can you not believe in God when you have these prophecies? When I read ’em in Deuteronomy that there are these prophecies about being scattered amongst the nations and these persecutions, and then we see them not just in the black and white movies in history.

David (00:31:52):
We

Nehemia (00:31:52):
See them in our lifetimes.

David (00:31:53):
Totally.

Nehemia (00:31:54):
So I mean, to me, this is the hand of God in history.

David (00:31:57):
I mean, I always tell people the greatest evidence that I have that the God of the Bible is the one true God is the continued persecution and redemption of the Jewish people all throughout history.

Speaker 2 (00:32:09):
It’s

David (00:32:09):
Like the narrative of scripture is that he’s going to keep his people and the enemy’s always going to try to attack them and rise up a Haman. Exactly. To exterminate them. And

Nehemia (00:32:25):
So in Israel and Jerusalem, to have this museum, I’m sure you’ve been to it, Yad, of course, it’s the National Holocaust Memorial, and there are these different displays. Last time I was there, at least, I dunno if they’ve changed it. There was this display where they have quotes from the Nazis, and one of the quotes is, the chosen people are on the train to Auschwitz or something like that. And you’re like, okay, I know he’s being sarcastic, but he on some level knows that there is good and there’s evil. He thinks he’s good. Those are the side who are on the side of, I’ll use Christian terms. Those who are on the side of Satan think they’re good, but they understand there’s another side and they’re fighting against that other side. And to imagine, I mean, this literally happens that a Nazi would send to communicate the chosen people around the trains being sent to their deaths. And to use that terminology, even if it’s in a sarcastic way, I mean, it reminds me of when the high priest says The death of one man will bring redemption for the people, or something like that. Not realizing what he said,

(00:33:34):
But on some level, maybe realizing what he said.

David (00:33:36):
Yeah. Whether it was subconscious, whether it was the Holy

Nehemia (00:33:39):
Spirit or whether he knew it’s it. What a profound reality we live in. And this isn’t just history, it’s happening today. So back to the name. So there was external persecution and internal persecution, and it was never intended to be forever. Meaning within the rabbinical sources themselves when they say it’s forbidden to speak the name, and if you do, you lose your portion in the world to come. They also say, well, that’s only a temporary measure until the world to come, which hopefully will be soon. And even today, I can say hopefully will be soon. Soon here on earth. That is, and I believe Christians have a similar idea of the second coming and the millennial kingdom, right? Well, okay, well what is that name in the world to come? So the Christian, or let’s not necessarily Christian, but the attitude of Christian heists, who were these scholars who were like, okay, we’ve thrown off the yoke of the Catholic church. This is how it happened. It was part of the Protestant Reformation was people said, well, we should actually read the Bible. Well, how do we read the Bible? We don’t know Latin. Okay, let’s translate it. Alright, what do we translate it from? And Martin Luther famously, there’s this great quote from Martin Luther, I quoted in one of my books, and he says that if I were younger, I would learn Hebrew. It’s the best language of all. And he has this beautiful ironic, what’s that? It’s ironic because what he did later, but he started out as a lover of Jews.

David (00:35:07):
Totally.

Nehemia (00:35:08):
And then about 10 years later becomes, he wrote a book called The Jews and Their Lies in which he lays out a plan which becomes the Holocaust. But early on, he loved the Jews.

David (00:35:19):
His other book, the one he wrote early on, I think was called Jesus Born a Jew. And it was all about the Jewishness of

Nehemia (00:35:24):
Jesus. So he underwent a transformation for whatever reason. But at one point in his life, he said, if I were younger, I would want to learn Hebrew. It’s the best language of all.

David (00:35:33):
And

Nehemia (00:35:33):
He has this beautiful parable. He says, the Hebrew is the source, the spring, and I hope I’m getting this right. I think he says, the Greek is the river that flows from the spring and Latin is a downstream puddle. And that makes you wonder, okay, then what’s German for him? And English for us. English for us. So the Protestant reformers understood they needed to get back to the sources, and they started learning Hebrew. Not Martin Luther per se. He knew a little bit of Hebrew, but there were people even in his time who started to study Hebrew systematically. And at first they’re learning from Jews, but eventually they developed what becomes the modern academic study over centuries of the Hebrew language. And when I went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, we studied the writings of a Christian heist who is one of the great really scholars, one of the people who really established Hebrew linguistics, biblical Hebrew linguistics as a study. And so for centuries, the Christians are trying to figure out what are the rules of Hebrew and how do we pronounce that name? How do we pronounce the name Y? And they debate this for centuries. And there’s this great quote, I believe it’s in the 16 hundreds, is a Christian in England. And he said, the pronunciation of that name is the anvil upon which everybody beats their hammer,

(00:36:57):
Right? Everybody’s got an opinion and we just don’t know. Now, why don’t we know? We don’t know because the Jews stopped pronouncing it. The Jews themselves don’t know how to pronounce it. And they quote in particular, Moses Maimonides, who was a rabbi in the 12th century. He died in 1204 in Egypt, so the beginning of the 13th century. And he makes this statement that, well, how do we pronounce that name? That name is basically, he says something to the effect of, it’s a secret. And you don’t know what the vowels are because the vowels of the name are not the vowels of that name. They’re the vowels of iai.

David (00:37:39):
Right?

Nehemia (00:37:39):
That’s basically the gist of what he says. And if those are the vowels, and there is a precedent for that, we can go into if you want that there are certain words, what you can call them euphemisms. Right? What’s a euphemism? Instead of saying a bad word, I say a good word, right? I’ll say, oh my goodness. Instead of, oh my God. Right? God’s not a bad

David (00:37:59):
Word. Or Adam knew his wife. Wink, wink. Right? Isn’t

Nehemia (00:38:02):
That a euphemism? So there’s an example in biblical Hebrew of euphemism, right? That’s a great example. Adam knew his wife, right? It’s new in an intimate sense, but it means they had relations. Even relations. That’s euphemism. Euphemism. Exactly. Yes, exactly. I explained one euphemism with another euphemism. So there are euphemisms in the Hebrew Bible, meaning there are words written in the Hebrew text. If take a Torah scroll out of the arc in the synagogue, and you scroll to certain verses, you’ll find there’s a word that’s written one way, but when they read it, they read it a different way.

David (00:38:34):
Really?

Nehemia (00:38:35):
Yeah.

David (00:38:35):
Other than I didn’t know that.

Nehemia (00:38:37):
No, not I nine. There’s other words. I can tell you what they are. They’re not bad words. Well, one of them is a bad word, which I can’t say probably on this program. And instead of that word, it says the word lay to lay with, and that word, the actual explicit word is there in the Hebrew text. But nobody reads it that way for obvious reasons. And here’s the point, when they did write down the vows in the six hundreds, they wrote the vowels of the way the word is read, not the way it’s written. So in other words, you’ll see a word with impossible vowels, and some of them aren’t euphemism. They’re like linguistic variants, right?

David (00:39:16):
Yeah.

Nehemia (00:39:17):
So there’s a word for we in Hebrew, which is nu, and that’s kind of like a common word for it. And then there’s the fancy word, which is annu. And annu has more vows than annu. And when you see that word annu in the book of Jeremiah, it only appears once in the entire Hebrew Bible. It has the vows of the fancy word, but those vowels are impossible. It has five vows for a two syllable word. So what’s going on there? So they put the vowels of the way the word was read, not the way it was written,

(00:39:48):
And the people before him really come along. The first one that we know about for sure is in, or one of the first is 1518. There’s a man named Gallus, he’s actually a Catholic. He’s the confessor of the Pope. And he says, well, how do we pronounce this name if it has the vows of Otai? How do we pronounce it? And he says, well, if you pronounce the vows the way that it’s written, it would be jehova. But the Jews say those are the vowels of Adonai. And as far as we know, he’s the first one to first Christian

Speaker 2 (00:40:22):
To

Nehemia (00:40:22):
Explicitly say that if you take the vows the way they’re written in the Hebrew text, the name is pronounced Hova. Now, the way it’s presented even by scholars today is, well, and I apologize for the term. I coined it. I call it the stupid Christian hypothesis. The stupid Christian hypothesis is Peter Gallus was so stupid, he thought those were the vows of the name when he said it would be pronounced Jehovah. He didn’t know the Jews read that as I nai. But all you have to do is translate the Latin in that passage. And he explicitly says, the Jews read that as I nai. So he wasn’t stupid. He knew the Jews pronounce it as Adonai.

David (00:41:01):
And

Nehemia (00:41:01):
He wasn’t even saying, pronounce it as Jehovah. He was saying, if you take the vows the way they’re recorded, it would,

David (00:41:09):
I was taught the vowels of Adonai are put over yohe just to signal the Jewish reader that you should say Adonai.

Nehemia (00:41:20):
So the way it’s understood, and there’s some truth in that, right? But it’s a bit more complicated, right?

David (00:41:27):
It always

Nehemia (00:41:27):
Is, meaning there’s definitely a signal in the text that in some instances you read the Yhe Vahe in most instances of 6,827, that’s based on the Eppo codex or reconstruction of the Eppo Codex 6,828 in the Len Grad Codex, another important manuscript. So there’s actually a slight difference there. But of those around 430 or so times when you see, or 300 times, excuse me, when you see U, you don’t actually read it as, I don’t know. You read it as Elohim, which is the word for God,

David (00:42:03):
Do they put the

Nehemia (00:42:04):
Vows of Elohim? Ah, so they do.

David (00:42:06):
Yes. Interesting.

Nehemia (00:42:07):
And the third letter has an E instead of an ah, because Elohim is an E. So that’s signaling to the reader, read these 300 or so instances as Elohim and read these other instances as auto ni, right?

David (00:42:20):
Okay.

Nehemia (00:42:20):
No one disputes that There’s a signaling to the reader. Here’s where things get complicated. If you look at the actual vowels of A, they are not the vowels of the name Y in the manuscripts.

David (00:42:34):
Interesting.

Nehemia (00:42:35):
So the vowels of A would be a O, and the vows in the name Y are Y. But in some manuscripts in when, I can’t say no manuscripts because I found a few manuscripts where it does have the actual vowels of Adonai, and that’s what scholars call the exception that teaches the rule. So if the scribes wanted to write the vows of iai, they knew how to do it. How do I know that? Because sometimes they did right? In a handful of manuscripts, they did. But in most manuscripts, there’s different vowels. And if you look at what Jewish rabbis said about this, so there’s this great debate that takes place in 1608 between these two rabbis. And this is something I discovered. I discovered it because I was told no Jew ever said they knew how to pronounce the name.

David (00:43:29):
It was told that

Nehemia (00:43:31):
I was told that, oh,

David (00:43:32):
You were told that. Okay,

Nehemia (00:43:33):
I thought that I taught that the Jews didn’t know how to, well, here’s what I taught, that no Jewish rabbi ever revealed how to pronounce the name. We only know it from the manuscripts of the Bible. I taught that the rabbis did know. And how do I know they knew? Because in the Talmud, when it says you’re not allowed to speak the name, it also says that rabbis would teach the name to their disciples once every seven years.

David (00:43:57):
So they knew it, but they were not saying it.

Nehemia (00:43:59):
This understanding, they were saying in secret once every seven years as part of some ceremony of transmitting the names so the knowledge wouldn’t be lost. And Maimonides doesn’t actually say, no one knows how to pronounce the name. This passage that the Christian Hebrews are quoting from Maimonides just says, most people don’t know how to pronounce the name. He doesn’t say, no one knows.

David (00:44:19):
Got

Nehemia (00:44:20):
It right. Did he know? I don’t know if he knew or not. He probably didn’t know. But there were people who did know, and there were these rabbis who I found, I have a teaching called 10 Rabbi, speak on the name. And it turns out it was more than 10. But there’s a debate in 1608 between these two rabbis, they’re sending letters to each other and debating a certain point. They’re actually debating how to pronounce the word otai, which means Lord, right? Even that is debated interesting. But what they agree on is those vowels in Y vaha are the vowels of the name itself. And the one rabbi says, well, those vows are for the world to come when the Messiah reigns here on earth as a flesh and blood King, Jews will pronounce that name ye, he names the vowels. So are the names of the vows.

David (00:45:07):
And

Nehemia (00:45:07):
The other rabbi says, no, those vowels are now because they’re the same vowels as Otai, which he believed was supposed to be pronounced Edna. In other words, the other rabbi was saying No is the vowels, both of that name ve and the title, when you say otai, you’re actually, you’re wrong. That’s not how to pronounce it. Or at least in certain instances, let’s

Speaker 2 (00:45:29):
Say.

Nehemia (00:45:30):
But they’re agreeing that the vowels of the name yhe are Y, which is really interesting because it’s a fact. And when I do the teaching, I tell the audience, say, fact, say common knowledge that the vowels of the name Y are the vowels of Adonai. But in fact, those are not the vowels, number one. And number two, there are Jewish rabbis who knew and believed you could say they were wrong. So here’s a fact, right? They believe that those vowels, ye V, were the actual vowels of that name. Now, where do we get Yahweh? That’s interesting. So there is a Christian Church father named Theodate of Cyrus, and he is in the fifth century ad, and he says, the Jews pronounce the Teragram Aya, and the Samaritans pronounce it ve. And scholars, Christian Heists saw this, and they said, okay, the Jews didn’t know how to pronounce it, and they didn’t pronounce it because what’s aa? There’s no ah in the name. So that’s probably a, I will be, or I am. But the Samaritans, well, they didn’t have a prohibition to speak the name, so they must’ve been pronouncing it. Y what is VE and Hebrew? Well, in ancient Hebrew, it’s believed it wouldn’t have been Ywe. It would’ve been Ywe. The HU would be pronounced Yahweh.

(00:46:51):
So in other words, that’s a reconstruction from a Christian Church father in the fifth century quoting a Samaritan and then reconstructing back into actual Hebrew what a Samaritan would’ve meant, right? So there’s a lot of steps here. We

David (00:47:05):
Talk about, we jumped through a lot of hoops.

Nehemia (00:47:08):
One of the problems is the Samaritan stopped speaking the name way before the Jews.

David (00:47:12):
Interesting.

Nehemia (00:47:13):
Yeah. So the Samaritans actually don’t speak the name. They call God Shema, which is Aramaic for the name. So when they read in the 10 Commandments where God says, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, they read the name Yhe Vahe. And by the way, they don’t pronounce the letters as Yhe Vahe because the va, they pronounce as aba, which is interesting. That shows they didn’t pronounce it as a W, they pronounce it as a, but when they read the letters Yhe, Vahe, the Samaritans pronounce that as Shema, which is a replacement for the name meaning in Aramaic, the name,

David (00:47:52):
It’s kind of like Hashem.

Nehemia (00:47:53):
It’s exactly Hashem, but Hashem’s Hebrew. Shema is Aramaic. Got it. And there’s evidence that, or it’s guaranteed that by the fifth century when Theodate says this, they were not speaking the name. So in other words, he would’ve had to have some tradition going back, I don’t know, hundreds of years, probably five or six centuries. In other words, he didn’t hear it from the Samaritan high priest. If he’s reporting a genuine tradition, he heard it from someone who heard it, from someone who heard it, from someone who heard it, from someone who heard it, and add that several more times

David (00:48:24):
From

Nehemia (00:48:24):
Someone who heard it from the Samaritan.

David (00:48:26):
So it’s a shaky foundation to say it’s

Nehemia (00:48:27):
Very shaky.

David (00:48:28):
And we talked about this kind of jokingly earlier. A lot of Christians will today say, Yahweh is the very breath of God. When you breed, you say, yeah. And so you’re saying the name of God every time you breathe. Where’d that come from?

Nehemia (00:48:49):
I think some guy on the internet made that up. I don’t know who made that up.

David (00:48:53):
You’ve heard it. Have you heard

Nehemia (00:48:53):
Christian say that? I’ve heard that many, many years ago. And the way it was presented was, well, there are certain Native American chants where they are saying something that sounds to them like Yahweh, and it’s part of a breathing process. And now I don’t know if that is, I don’t know anything enough about Native American. I was told this by a Native American, by the way. Got

Speaker 5 (00:49:12):
It.

Nehemia (00:49:13):
So I don’t know if that is the source of it or not. And his point was, but

David (00:49:19):
That’s not a Jewish, that’s not an ancient Jewish source.

Nehemia (00:49:21):
Not that I’m aware of. No. The source I’m aware of is Jews are saying, and there are actually three different pronunciation in Jewish sources, but the most common widespread one. And it’s interesting because when they’re discussing it, they’re saying, this is a secret. Don’t tell anybody is that it’s Jehovah.

David (00:49:40):
So if it is Jehovah, and they didn’t want to say it because it was looked at as whether it was the magic or whether it was the persecutions, and then later developed into just a reverence,

Nehemia (00:49:53):
Respect and honor, yeah,

David (00:49:54):
Then why would you put the vowels there to say it?

Nehemia (00:49:57):
So that’s interesting. So in the early manuscripts, they leave out one of the vowels and you might say, oh, no, well, maybe it just has two vowels. Well, it can’t, and I could go into the rules of biblical Hebrew, but basically based on the rules of biblical Hebrew, there’s a vowel missing.

David (00:50:11):
That was their insurance of not saying it was

Nehemia (00:50:13):
Take away

David (00:50:13):
Vow. That was the way to

Nehemia (00:50:14):
Probably prevent people from accidentally pronouncing it. Even if you see those vowels, you won’t pronounce it because there’s a vowel left

David (00:50:20):
Out.

Nehemia (00:50:21):
And one of the really cool things is sometimes they did put in the full vowel. So I feel like that’s a whole discussion to do justice to that. I don’t want anybody to take away from this that, oh, it’s evil to say Yahweh is rebuking us

David (00:50:36):
Anti

Nehemia (00:50:36):
And judging us, and we shouldn’t say Yahweh. I say to people, work it out for yourself in fear and trembling with prayer and study before the creator of the universe.

(00:50:44):
And we have this beautiful verse in Psalm 44 in the Hebrews verses 20 to 21, I want to say in the, or maybe it’s 19 to 20, right? In the King James and the Hebrews, slightly different verses, but it’s there around verses 20, 21, 22, and the different versions. And it’s a beautiful passage. It says, if it talks about the Jews being sent into exile, they’re scattered among the nations, and it says, if we raise our hands to a foreign God, raise our hands and call upon the name of a foreign God, you will search it out in our hearts. And what it’s saying is, look in exile in Babylon where we were sent into the Babylonian exile, this people who two, three generations in, they don’t even remember the name of God. And they’re calling on like Daniel. He has all these different gods he’s told to worship in his three companions. And so a few generations in, they’re calling on Duke and they’re calling on Bell and these different Babylonian deities. But in their hearts, they mean Jehovah and God is that merciful we’re told there that he can look in our hearts. And I think that’s from a Jewish perspective, that’s grace

(00:51:49):
Because I don’t deserve it. I’m calling on the wrong name and he still can have mercy on me.

David (00:51:54):
So

Nehemia (00:51:54):
I don’t think we should be more judgmental than God at the same time, look, I’m obsessed with truth. I have autism. And part of that is an obsession with biblical truth. What I understand is biblical truth. And so I just want to know what the truth is, the historical and biblical truth and the historical and biblical truth. The best information I have currently is that it’s Jehovah. Could it be Yahweh? Sure, anything’s possible. And I say jokingly to people, it could be yuhu hoo, but it’s actually not a joke. It really could be Yuhu hoo. And I have actually found, this is not a joke. I found more Hebrew Jewish manuscripts with yuhu hoo than I have with Yahweh. That’s not a joke. Now, those are cabalistic texts

David (00:52:35):
Where

Nehemia (00:52:35):
They’re saying these are meditations, not how you should pronounce it,

David (00:52:38):
But

Nehemia (00:52:38):
I don’t find any cabalistic meditations with Yahweh that didn’t even come into their mind, which is interesting. At least I haven’t found those. Maybe they’re out there or maybe there’s one I did see at Cambridge University, but that’s one out of now that I think about. There might be one with Yahweh, but Yahoo vu is actually quite common, believe it or not. I don’t think it was Yahoo Vu who, because that doesn’t really fit with other, well, here’s the most important part to me, one of the most important parts. What does the name actually mean? Leave aside how it’s pronounced. How it’s pronounced informs what it means in vice versa. So what it means in Jewish sources is Hayah. He was hove. He is. And he will be. And there’s this, I recently did a teaching on this. There is an ancient Jewish translation to Aramaic where they paraphrase it, and for he will be, they explain as in the future, he will come. So he was is and he will come. Does that sound familiar from anywhere? Revelation? That’s absolutely revelation. And specifically, it’s a number of verses in Revelation. And one of the passages, it’s the same vision that Isaiah saw in chapter six where he sees the angels saying, Kosh, Kosh, holy, holy, holy in Greek. Ha.

(00:54:03):
And then in Hebrew, it’s of hosts. And that’s the context in which it says something like the Lord Almighty who was, is and is to come. So in other words, and I’m not the first one to recognize this, there are Christian scholars who have realized,

David (00:54:20):
Wait,

Nehemia (00:54:21):
That’s the meaning of the name Y and Y. That pronunciation was understood by Jews. And here some scholars will say, well, the Jews didn’t know. Okay, okay. You think the Jews didn’t know what they were talking about, but the way it was understood by Jews is ve, yeah, he was is and is to come, was then the explanation of the pronunciation. Jehovah, right? If you take the form he was, and he is, is to come in Hebrew and you combine them, you take part of each of those words, you get Jehovah

David (00:54:58):
And is the proper understanding of what we would typically translate as I am

Nehemia (00:55:06):
Better. So I am. It’s complicated. And people have literally written PhD dissertations on the Hebrew verbal system So we’re not going to solve that here. But basically I am would be understood by most Jews today as I will be, but it’s actually a bit more complicated. It really means I am now and continue to be into the future. The verbal system is complicated in biblical Hebrew,

David (00:55:29):
So it’s not a far stretch to say the I am statement at the burning bush could be translated a hundred percent am Who? There’s not a

Nehemia (00:55:40):
Question that when the Hebrew, it says I will be in the ancient Greek tut. So here’s the problem. The Greeks didn’t have the same verbal system as Hebrew. So when the Jews translated Exodus three 14 into Greek, they translated a I am, which is what Jesus says. There’s not a question when Jesus says EI am. He’s alluding to, I mean most, I think everyone accepts that.

David (00:56:08):
He’s

Nehemia (00:56:08):
Alluding to Exodus three 14.

David (00:56:09):
You’re talking about when he says before Abraham was,

Nehemia (00:56:11):
I am.

David (00:56:12):
I am.

Nehemia (00:56:12):
Yeah, I will be. Right. So in other words, that’s what it is. In Greek I am, but in Hebrew it’s a bit more nuanced. I am now and continue to be into the future. It’s a repetitive action.

David (00:56:22):
Yeah. And so it is very similar to, I am the one who is the one who was the one who

Nehemia (00:56:26):
Was, it’s the Greek equivalent of I am Well. So that’s the context. Exodus three 14, God says, I am or I will be and then continue to be into the future. And then the very next verse, he says, my eternal name is Jehova. And I don’t think it’s, let’s say it was not lost in the authors of the New Testament and the early Christians that the name Jesus means je, he that was, is and is to come saves. That’s the meaning of the name Jesus back into Hebrew. I mean, it’s the name of the Father, he will save.

David (00:57:05):
Got it. That’s so good. So as we now transition to the New Testament, I have a few New Testament questions regarding the name. But first when the Hebrew scholars, or I guess maybe Greek scholars, but I think they were Jewish, translated the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek, which we would call the Sep. Did they ever, I think the Greek word is curios, which is Lord

Nehemia (00:57:36):
Curios or curios, depending on your Greek dialect.

David (00:57:38):
Okay. Did they ever put Yohe Vahe? Did they ever put, that’s interesting, or was it always curios?

Nehemia (00:57:46):
It was definitely not. Well, it’s hard to say anything. Definitely. So the original step two agent was translated around two 50 BCE. We don’t have a copy from 250 BCE. We have a copy from around 300 ad. So about 550 years later,

David (00:58:00):
We would say that Jesus would’ve been familiar with this ent, and the first century Jews would’ve been maybe familiar.

Nehemia (00:58:09):
I would imagine when he read from Isaiah from the scroll in Capernaum,

David (00:58:13):
He’s

Nehemia (00:58:13):
Reading Hebrew, excuse me, Nazareth, he was reading from the Hebrew

David (00:58:15):
Totally. But yeah, not saying that they were speaking Greek. I believe that Jesus was speaking Hebrew and would’ve been his

Nehemia (00:58:22):
Trauma, which certainly when he was reading from the scroll, there’s no debate that

David (00:58:25):
He was totally, but would there have been an understanding of the Sept?

Nehemia (00:58:28):
So here’s what we know today after about what 70, 80 years of the Dead Sea Scrolls being discovered. So we know today, or the evidence we have is all of our earlier copies, meaning anything before the, let’s say late second century ad of the Tut has one of two things. It has either Yhe, Vahe written in Hebrew letters,

David (00:58:53):
So it’s Greek and then random Hebrew four letters.

Nehemia (00:58:55):
Exactly. And I could show you a picture of it. You can throw it up on the screen. I could send it to you. Love that. And anybody not knowing a letter of Greek will say That’s different.

David (00:59:03):
Yeah. They just randomly changed.

Nehemia (00:59:05):
All of a sudden the code change describe, wrote a different word, maybe a different scribe in some cases, meaning maybe they left blank spaces and they were filled in some cases. But so there’s a different script. All of a sudden they’re writing Greek, and when they get to the name ve, they write the letters. Ve and Orgen, who is a church father who worked more on the SubT probably than anybody, he even probably did some revisions of the SubT. He says, the most accurate manuscripts have the name written in ancient letters.

Speaker 2 (00:59:31):
Right.

Nehemia (00:59:31):
When they get to that name in the Greek text, they wrote Yhe. And then we have one Dead Sea scroll where instead of Y Vahe, they write it with a Greek pronunciation, which is ya.

David (00:59:42):
And

Nehemia (00:59:42):
Ya is almost certainly in abbreviated form of Yhe Vahe

David (00:59:46):
In Greek.

Nehemia (00:59:47):
In Greek, they’re writing Yao. And then there’s some Aramaic evidence to point to that as well, that

David (00:59:53):
Probably these manuscripts where it’s written in Greek and then there’s a Hebrew yohe Vahe. How late are those

Nehemia (01:00:01):
Documents? How late? So that’s an interesting question. Mean we have them, some of them are surprisingly late, but we also have early ones, meaning we have ones that are from the second Temple period, and then we also have stuff that might be as late as the fifth or sixth century,

David (01:00:17):
Which

Nehemia (01:00:18):
Is like, wait, you’re still doing that?

David (01:00:20):
Yeah, they’re still continuing

Nehemia (01:00:21):
That after the Christian. And so those are almost certainly Jewish copies of the SubT. I mean, the Christians had already swapped it out with Curios, and some Jews seemed to be continuing to write and paleo Hebrew letters.

(01:00:36):
And there’s this really interesting statement by one of the church fathers who says that it’s so bad when the Christian see he’s a Christian, right? He’s saying, when Christian scribes see y ve in the Paleo Hebrew, in these ancient Hebrew characters, they don’t know how to copy them. So they replaced the Hebrews letters, yhe Vahe with the Greek letters Pa pta, which is pronounced peepee, and they literally have the word peepee in there. They have a perfectly great Greek text in the Old Testament, and they get to the letters Yhe Vahe, and they’re like, I don’t know how to write those weird Hebrew letters. And the hay kind of looks like a pie.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
And

Nehemia (01:01:15):
The yin, the Vav kind of look like a yotta, so Pa, Yoda, pta. And so eventually they swap it out with Curios. And so what some scholars would say is what’s called the old Greek. The old Greek is not the one we have today of the Sep two agent, but let’s say the earlier version of the step two agent seems to have had the name U ve written in Paleo Hebrew characters or some sort of Hebrew characters or some pronunciation such as Yao found in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Q1 20.

David (01:01:44):
Wow. So when the New Testament authors sit down and they’re writing in Greek and maybe making allusions to a sep tugen,

Nehemia (01:01:53):
Well, here’s the really good one. When Peter in Acts two is quoting from Joel, and it says, all those who came all upon the name of the Lord will be saved. So two questions. What did he say in Jerusalem? On

David (01:02:08):
Pentecost? Yeah.

Nehemia (01:02:09):
Did he say ot? Nai?

David (01:02:11):
Yeah.

Nehemia (01:02:11):
Did he say curios? Did he say Jehovah? Did he say Yahweh?

David (01:02:14):
Yeah.

Nehemia (01:02:15):
And then what was written down, maybe he said ot, nai, but then they wrote it down as Y because Jews pronounced that as out of N. So these are questions we don’t have the answer to. And I say work it out for yourself in fear and trebling when prayer and say,

David (01:02:28):
But is it written as curios?

Nehemia (01:02:29):
It’s written today as curios. Absolutely. In the earliest manuscripts,

David (01:02:32):
And I know you do a lot of work with the ancient Hebrew New Testament, there’s some fragments of revelation. There’s the book of Matthew, the Hebrew Matthew. Is that all curious?

Nehemia (01:02:45):
I want to be careful in calling it the ancient Hebrew, let’s call it Hebrew witnesses to versions of the New Testament. Maybe they’re translations from Greek or Latin in some cases. Many of those have some representation of the name in Hebrew. Some actually have the letters. Ve

David (01:02:59):
Really,

Nehemia (01:03:00):
Although those almost certainly came from Christian scribes, meaning it could be a Christian translating from Latin or Greek and saying, well, I mean, I know obviously it’s the name. This would be VE in Hebrew and other instances it will have the letter hay, which is how rabbis would represent the name outside the Old Testament, which is Hashem representing the name. So why didn’t they just write Lord? So it could just be that they’re like, okay, let’s restore what originally was there. Or in some cases, and this is very controversial, maybe they’re copying from some earlier source that preserves something in Hebrew.

David (01:03:38):
Yeah, because when I look at some of the writings of the New Testament, for example, a big one that we quote all the time, Romans ten nine, which is kind of like the Christian playbook of how do you get saved? It is believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord. And I’m like, wait,

Nehemia (01:03:56):
So did he say that Jesus is iai? But in Hebrew it’s even more complex. It could be one of three things that Jesus is Jehovah, that Jesus is otai, or that Jesus is nee

David (01:04:11):
My

Nehemia (01:04:12):
Lord. Right? Well, both otai and nee means my Lord. One is only used of God and one would be used of humans or an angel. So which one did they say? And we don’t know, right? That’s a theological position that I’ll leave for Christians to argue about and debate.

David (01:04:29):
But

Nehemia (01:04:29):
The last word I want to say here, which is I think the most important thing, please don’t take away from this that I’ve learned this new thing. It’s y, and I’m going to beat my friends over the head with

David (01:04:38):
It.

Nehemia (01:04:39):
Please don’t do that love. If you don’t speak the name Yehovah in love and for unity and to find common ground, whether you’re dealing with a Jew or a Christian, then that is a desecration of the name in my view.

David (01:04:54):
Yeah. Well, I’d love to end because it’s one of the scriptures that we quote a lot, especially in the Messianic world. It’s quoted a lot, which is Yeshua saying to Jerusalem, you will not see me again until you cry out.

Nehemia (01:05:13):
And that’s a quote from Psalms, which is blessed. He’s he who comes in the name of Jehovah. And that’s interesting, by the way, we talked earlier about the greeting of ancient Israel. That was a greeting, right? In other words, the original context in Psalms is that Levites are standing at the entrance of the temple and they say, blessed is he who comes in the name of Jehovah, meaning you’re blessed in the name of Jehovah. And Jesus, Yeshua takes that and reads a prophetic messianic christological reading into it saying, wait, there’s a deeper meaning you guys might’ve missed, right? You had eyes but you didn’t see it.

David (01:05:51):
And

Nehemia (01:05:51):
The deeper meaning is not just you’re being greeted like you do every day in the name of Jehova, but there’s one who is coming. It’s not just the blessing in the name of Jehovah. There’s one who’s coming in the name of Jehovah, which that’s a pretty neat trick if you never use the name or, I dunno.

David (01:06:08):
Yeah, man, that’s crazy. Well, as we all go back to the scriptures and we read scriptures in the name of the Lord, we shall be saved, or the name of the Lord is a strong tower. Is this important for us to know if we’re going to know God intimately? Is this important to know if there’s going to be power in our prayers, or is this a fun

Nehemia (01:06:36):
Fact? So I don’t want it to be like a magical incantation, but it’s also not a fun fact. There’s this beautiful scene where Mel comes and he blesses Abraham and he blesses him by the most high God creator of heaven and earth. And this is in the presence of the king of Sodom. And Abraham hears this, and he must’ve been thinking, I know who Melek is talking about, but there’s also a Canaanite de He called the most high God creator of heaven and Earth and we’re among Canaanites. And so he responds to Melek and he says, he adds the name. He says, Yehovah the most high God creator of heaven earth. And his reason for doing that, it seems in the context there is, I know who you’re talking about, who I’m talking about, but that guy over there, the king of Sodom, he don’t know who we’re talking about. So to remove the ambiguity, it’s important that we be very specific and say, who is the most high dog creative? Heaven and earth?

David (01:07:29):
Yeah, man, that’s

Nehemia (01:07:30):
Good. Imagine if you were in a Christian denomination where they said, you cannot say the name Jesus. It’s offensive to some Christians, so we’re just going to call him God, or we’re just going to call him the Son. Well, there could be a lot of confusion if you’re in India or they have a God and they have Gods who are son of God. And they might say, oh, okay. Oh, you mean that so-and-so the son of God. Well, no, we better be more specific and clarify who we mean in that

David (01:07:57):
Case. Well, thank you for doing all of the research that allows us to have this conversation, the research that 99% of people would never do, because it is just years and years of trudging and getting manuscripts like you’re doing the hard work, you’re plowing so that we can just come and have this awesome conversation and learn so much. And I know you’re continuing to do this kind of work. So I just want to leave by one saying thank you. Thank you for the deep dives that you’re doing in manuscripts, continuing to find these Torah pearls, these Hebrew gospel pearls, all these things that you’ve dedicated your life to. How can people follow you? Stay up to date with what’s going on.

Nehemia (01:08:42):
So I’m Ham, Nehemiah and I built the wall. So nehemiah’s wall.com. That’s the way to remember that. Nehemiah was the guy in the Bible who built the wall. And that’s my website, nehemiah’s wall.com.

David (01:08:51):
That’s great. Well, thank you for coming again and sharing all this wisdom, wisdom and knowledge with us. That’s all we have for today. Join us next time on the Covenant Conflict Podcast. We’ll see you soon.