Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

By Nehemia Gordon

Nehemia Gordon uncovers ancient Hebrew sources to empower people with information to defend the Word of God and build their faith.... more
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Best of Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

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  1. Number 1: Hebrew Fundamentals – Yom Teruah

    Discover the biblical meaning of Yom Teruah in this short episode of our new series, Hebrew Fundamentals. Bringing together the best of Nehemia’s teachings in one accessible introduction, it’s the perfect opportunity to explore - or revisit - his material on this important appointed time. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio TranscriptCOMING SOON SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Pandora SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS(Please click here to donate)Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. The post Hebrew Fundamentals – Yom Teruah appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

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  2. Number 2: Hebrew Voices #251 – The Greatest Love Story Never Told: Part 1

    In this episode of Hebrew Voices #251 - The Greatest Love Story Never Told: Part 1, Nehemia is joined by Dr. Douglas Hamp, pastor of The Way Messianic Congregation, as he recounts what he sees as “God’s hidden love story” in the Bible, contrasting traditional Replacement Theology and Dispensationalist narratives with a third view focused on the reunification of the two ancient houses of Israel, which he likes to call “Commonwealth Theology.” I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio Transcript Hebrew Voices #251 – The Greatest Love Story Never Told: 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. Dr. Douglas Hamp: We have, basically, missed the boat, because we thought the Old Testament was not important; again, thanks to Marcion. We were told that we replaced Israel. We were told a lot of different things. And dispensationalism then comes along and says, “No, no, no, no. We didn’t replace Israel; God still loves Israel.” So, I think dispensationalism gets a few points for trying to get us back on the right track. I just think we stopped too soon. And I think, you know, in my opinion, God is opening our eyes, and we’re beginning to see this bigger picture; that it’s not Israel versus the church, it’s Israel. The whole story, from Genesis 12 till Revelation 22, the whole story is about Israel. And it’s not about the church replacing it, it’s about this promise, this people that God established, the breakup of this relationship and the restoration of this relationship. — Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Douglas Hamp. He’s the author of over 15 books. He’s the pastor of The Way congregation in Denver, Colorado, where I’ve spoken. He has a PhD from Louisiana Baptist University, graduate of Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Rothberg International School, where he got an MA in Hebrew Bible. Today, we’re going to talk about a recent book of his that came out, God’s Divorce, which was published in 2025. But he’s most famous for his Corrupting the Image trilogy which was based on his PhD dissertation at Louisiana Baptist University. Shalom, Doug. Doug: Hey, Shalom, thanks for having me. Nehemia: Yeah, thanks for coming on the program. And we kind of did this last minute. So, God’s Divorce; let’s start with what they call the elevator pitch. You know, the young people say TLDR; too long, didn’t read. So, give me, like, the 60-second version, and then we’ll go into some more detail. Doug: Yeah, well, the 60-second version is basically that the gospel, as we have so often heard it, is a bit incomplete because really it goes back to Israel. God and Israel got married, God and Israel got divorced, and God promised that he would restore His relationship with Israel. And in order for that to happen, He had to disavow, He had to annul that first covenant, the old covenant, and establish the new covenant. And the only way to make that happen was through his death, burial, and resurrection. Nehemia: All right. So, that’s what your thesis is, I suppose. How does that differ from what Christianity has generally taught over the last 2,000 years? There’s been some changes. We’re actually recording this a few days after there was a mass excommunication in the Catholic Church, partially over this issue. Meaning, one of the ideas of the Vatican II Council in the Catholic Church (and I know you’re not Catholic, right, but just for the general audience here) is that the Jews, up until Vatican II, were blamed for the death of Jesus, and were a cursed people and no longer had any relationship with God. And Vatican II kind of modified some of that. And then there’s a group within the Catholic Church (well not anymore, right) that, until a few days ago was within the Catholic Church, saying, “We reject Vatican II.” And part of that is, God has no relationship with the Jews. The Jews are cursed, the church replaced the Jews, or replaced Israel. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: So, how does your position differ from what’s commonly known as replacement theology or the fancy word of supersessionism? Doug: Right. Nehemia: That is, the new covenant replaced the old covenant, and the church is the new Israel, and the Jews are now… the Jews are just another nation like Albania. Doug: Right, exactly. And I think the church at large has missed the big picture. So, I grew up dispensationalist, and we kept the Jews over there, and the church was over here; never the twain shall meet, of course. And yes, God loves the Jews, but for the moment, He’s not really talking to them, and you know, He’s all lovey-lovey with the church. Nehemia: So, that’s different from replacement theology. Explain… Doug: It’s different. Very different. Nehemia: Explain dispensationalism, because I think a lot of people are confused about how that differs from replacement theology. Doug: Absolutely. So, replacement theology has been around a lot longer. Dispensational theology is the new kid on the block. You could look back to Darby, you could look back to C.I. Schofield, especially Schofield, and this whole idea that there have been seven dispensations as to how God is operating in this world. You had the Age of Innocence, then you had the Age of Abraham, when God is working through the patriarchs, and then the most important are the Age of Law, when God presented the Ten Commandments, et cetera, and the Jews said, “Okay, yes, we’ll do this.” And then came the Age of Grace, when Jesus came to free us from that Age of Law. Wasn’t that nice of him? And we’ve been living in this Age of Grace ever since. And then He’s going to rapture the church, take us out, and then He’ll turn His attention back to the Jews and the tribulation, and then the millennium, and then the eternal state. So, those are the seven dispensations. And I… Nehemia: Are most Protestants in America dispensationalists, or a large percentage? Doug: Well, it’s certainly a large percentage. Anybody that is basically Baptist would probably fall in that camp. A lot of evangelicals generally fall in that camp, though they may not know that they’re dispensationalists. A lot of them never heard the term, but that’s basically what their pastors are teaching for the most part. Anybody from Dallas Theological Seminary is very much of that ilk. Nehemia: So that’s very interesting when you say ilk, because you’re making a judgment there, which you’re allowed to do. I’m trying to stay out of… I mean, like, as a Jew, I’m trying to be neutral here… Doug: Right. Nehemia: …but I am trying to understand the concepts. So, when we hear about Zionist Christians, where they say that, you know, Israel is God’s chosen people, and they support the state of Israel; is that usually, or often, dispensationalist? Doug: Yes. Yeah, that’s very dispensational. Nehemia: So, in other words, God loves Israel, but He doesn’t really have… what is it? God doesn’t really have a relationship with them anymore? Is that what you would describe? Doug: Well, I mean, that becomes a little bit of a gray area, but they would definitely say that God loves the Jewish people and they are God’s chosen people. But because they basically said no to Jesus, He turned his attention to the church, and the church is basically a parenthesis in God’s big plan. And once the rapture happens, then God’s going to go back to His original plan, which was basically the Jews. So, yeah. It’s a little bit strange in that area. Nehemia: Are generally the people who are pre-trib rapture, are they generally dispensationalists? Doug: Oh, hardcore, hardcore, yeah. Nehemia: Okay. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: Like, I once spoke at this church, and it was like, in the middle of nowhere, I think in Florida, or someplace like that, and the pastor introduced the Sunday morning sermon (and I was like, you know, speaking afterwards) with “here’s what we believe”, and one of those was pre-trib rapture. And I couldn’t quite understand why that was so important. And I still don’t, frankly, fully understand… Doug: Right. Nehemia: …pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib. I mean, if you talk to most Jews about the timeline of, you know, let’s say of the end times, they’ve never given it a thought, let alone have a hard and set doctrine about it. Doug: Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. I grew up very pre-trib rapture. Nehemia: Mm-hmm. Doug: And it’s this idea that, you know, the great tribulation is coming, it’s going to be this horrific time on planet earth, but God is going to rescue His people. He’s going to snatch us out of here before that time begins. We’re going to be caught up, ascend into the air to be with our Lord, and then the worst time in human history is going to start to happen. Nehemia: And where are you on that spectrum of pre-trib, post-trib, and mid-trib? Or are you on that spectrum? Doug: Yeah, I’m definitely post-trib at this point. Nehemia: Post-trib, okay. Doug: Definitely post-trib. And this is because I’ve rethought all of my theology, and my book, God’s Divorce, is really at the heart of that. And what I discovered is that we, the church dispensationalists, have left out the most important part. And it was one of these things where, you know, I kept reading it, and I’m like, “Wait a second. I have missed something.” And I think Paul was talking about this. For example, in Ephesians chapter 2 he says that “You, once Gentiles, were strangers from the covenants and promises, and you were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel.” And he’s saying, “You’re not anymore. Now you are fellow citizens with the saints of God.” And, you know, I’m just like, oh my goodness, I’m like hearing this for the first time. And then all these things started to come back to me. I remember studying about the house of Israel, and the house of Judah, and I understood them from a historical context, but I didn’t understand them theologically. But suddenly, all these things started to fit into place, and where God has made promises to the house of Israel. And for example, in Hosea, He says, “I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel, but I will have mercy on the house of Judah.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s a very clear distinction between these two houses; one doesn’t get mercy. That’s why, you know, Hosea has to name his kid, Lo-Ruchamah, right, and Lo-Ami.” I mean, He’s talking to the house of Israel, and He says, “You’re not my people, no mercy, going to scatter you. But one day I’ll bring you back. One day I’m going to betroth you to Me.” And that betrothal language is the same kind of language that we see in the New Testament that Paul uses of the church. But when I was a dispensationalist, I thought that these were completely separate categories. I’m like, “Okay, God has a thing He’s going to do with the Jews and another thing He’s going to do with the church.” But what I realized is, what Paul was saying in Ephesians is that “I’m no longer a Gentile and I’m not separate from Israel. I’m now part of the commonwealth of Israel.” Now, this is where people say, “Oh, Doug, you believe in replacement theology.” But I don’t. I really don’t. I promise you. I do not believe in replacement theology, because I don’t think that the church has replaced Israel. I think that I have actually joined Israel, and that there’s a massive distinction. And what Paul calls it is commonwealth. You know, well, I and a couple of buddies, we coined the term commonwealth theology, but whatever, it doesn’t matter. But Paul is the one who gave us this idea of “you’re part of the commonwealth of Israel”. And once I saw that, my whole paradigm just shattered, okay? And then I could go back and I could understand that the covenant that God established with the united people of Israel back at Mount Sinai was not simply the law, but it was a marriage contract. And, you know, I came to this through my own discovery. But then, it was funny, because I was celebrating the feast of Shavuot and I was doing some research, and I’m reading this thing, I think it’s from like aish.com, or one of those, maybe chabad.org or something, and they’re like, “Yeah, and the Jewish people have always believed that God and Israel got married at Mount Sinai.” I’m like, what? Like, I didn’t know that! Man, I’m so late to the party, it’s crazy. You know, and so, God and Israel, you know, they get married. There’s a chuppah, right, over Mount Sinai, and God says, “I love you.” Nehemia: Tell the audience what a chuppah is, and how there’s one at Mount Sinai. Doug: Well, so, the chuppah is basically the wedding canopy. And so, the idea is that you kind of have the clouds up there, or maybe the fire, or whatever, and all of this magnificent glory stuff, and that was basically when God is bringing Israel into His tent, as it were. And they’re entering into a marriage contract, a marriage covenant. Out of love, not obligation, not out of duty, not out of “I got to do these laws”, but God’s saying, “I love you, Israel, and I want you to be Mine. You’re going to be My special treasure.” And Israel replies, “All that the Lord has said, we will do.” You know, they said, “we do”, right? “I do.” They take God to be their God, and He takes them to be His people. And it’s all great. But then, Israel goes after the golden calf, sort of on their honeymoon, and so, basically, from the beginning of this relationship, it’s already strained. The people of Israel are going after other gods, and this will continue for the next 700 years. So, we see all throughout the time of the judges, they’re going after Baal, Ashtoreth, Molech, et cetera. And then we come to the reign of Saul, David, eventually Solomon, and under Solomon, with all of his many wives, he’s going after their gods as well. He’s building high places for them. You have the Mount of Corruption there, in Jerusalem, and all kinds of bad stuff. And so, God finally says, “Okay, Solomon, because of all of what you’ve been doing, I’m going to split the kingdom, and I’m going to give Israel to somebody else.” And so, he gives it to Jeroboam. Jeroboam is an Ephraimite. He then becomes the king over the northern ten tribes, so, Israel, as it were. Whereas Rehoboam continues (the son of Solomon) he continues over the southern kingdom of Judah. Because God said, “I made promises to David, and I’m going to keep those promises.” But Israel, as we know it, is no longer part of Judah. It’s now its own thing, a separate kingdom. And that happens about 932 BC. And then it just goes from bad to worse, and the northern kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes, they continue to go after false gods until finally God says, “Okay, that’s it. You want to go after those other gods? Fine. Here’s your certificate of divorce.” Jeremiah 3:8, “I gave backsliding Israel a certificate of divorce.” And, you know, and then Hosea, “She’s not my people, I’m not her God. She’s not my wife, I’m not her husband. Adios.” Right? And as she’s packing her bags and leaving with her certificate of divorce in hand, God says, “But one day, I’m going to betroth you to Me in righteousness. One day I’m going to bring you back.” So, this now creates a divine dilemma. Because, according to Deuteronomy 24, it says, “If a man has a wife, and he finds some ervat davar, some unclean thing in her, and he gives her a certificate of divorce, sefer kritut, and he puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, she becomes another man’s wife.” And the same thing happens; she cannot go back to the first husband, because that would be an abomination and it would greatly pollute the land. So, now we have a problem. God said, “Okay, here’s your certificate of divorce. Get out.” She goes and hangs out with Baal, Ashtoret, and all these other gods. And then God says, “But I’m going to bring you back.” You can’t do that according to the law. And I think this is where Christians in general, for the last 2,000 years, basically, we’ve kind of missed the boat. I’m going to blame a guy named Marcion for a lot of that, but that’s a whole different story. But we have, basically, missed the boat, because we thought the Old Testament was not important, again, thanks to Marcion. We were told that we replaced Israel. We were told a lot of different things. And dispensationalism then comes along, and says, “No, no, no, no. We didn’t replace Israel. God still loves Israel.” So, I think dispensationalism gets a few points for trying to get us back on the right track. I just think we stopped too soon. And I think, you know, in my opinion, God is opening our eyes and we’re beginning to see this bigger picture; that it’s not Israel versus the church, it’s Israel. The whole story from Genesis 12 till Revelation 22, the whole story is about Israel. And it’s not about the church replacing it, it’s about this promise, this people that God established, the breakup of this relationship, and the restoration of this relationship. And so, Paul says, in Romans chapter 7, he says something astounding. He says, “You know, brethren, since I’m speaking to those who understand law, brothers, are you unaware that the law has authority over someone as long as he lives? A married woman is legally bound to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies, she’s released from the law of the husband.” And when I read this, I’m like, “Oh my goodness! Paul is talking about Deuteronomy 24.” And he’s not just giving a “By the way, here I have this kind of idea about marriage, and I’m going to loosely apply it to Jesus.” No, I think he’s very specifically saying that the wife had been divorced, and she cannot come back, and he’s talking to people who know the law. So, of course, somebody who knows the Torah, they’re going to say, “Well, of course, I mean, the whole marriage and divorce thing is Deuteronomy 24.” So, he says, “If the husband dies, she’s free from that law.” Which law? The law of marriage, the law of the husband. And this is where the church dispensationalists, whoever, have by and large said, “Well, see? We don’t have to do Torah anymore, because Jesus freed us from Torah.” And that’s when I hear the fingernails on the chalkboard, and I’m like, “No, that’s not what he’s saying.” Paul even says, in Romans 3:31, “Do we then abolish the law? No, we establish the law.” Right? So, Paul’s not against Torah, but he’s trying to explain how the house of Israel and the house of Judah come back together. This, I think, is at the heart of many of his epistles. He’s trying to explain how this separation that ended in divorce, can now be resolved, how it’s undone. How the death, the obligation, the divorce certificate, that was that handwriting that was against us, is now undone. And it’s resolved, and how we come back together. And so, then he goes on in Romans, he says, “So, likewise, you’ve died to the law,” again, not the Torah itself, but the law of the husband, very specifically, “through the body of Christ that you may be married to another, to him who has been raised from the dead.” Of course, that’s Jesus, right? So, Jesus is the one who died, that’s the first husband. And then, the Jesus who rises is now, albeit the second husband, same husband, but legally he’s now a different entity in a sense. And this is, I think, at the heart of all of this. And I think Paul was just like, “Guys, do you see how this is all coming together? This is the fulfillment of Ezekiel 37, talking about the two sticks, the stick of Israel and Joseph and the stick of Judah, and he’s going to make them one in his hand.” But when I was a dispensationalist, I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting, that’s really cool what God’s going to do for the Jews.” And, you know, it took me a long time to understand that. And part of the cognitive dissonance was that I had always heard that Jew equals Israel, Israel equals Jew. And I thought there was no distinction. But of course, we know there’s a distinction. I live in Colorado, and I’m American, but not all Americans are Coloradans, right? I mean, that’s pretty obvious, right? So, you know, New Yorkers, they’re Americans, Texans, they’re Americans, and we have to understand that, yes, all Jews are part of greater Israel. They’re a part of greater Israel, but not all Israel are necessarily Jews. And that’s because in our nomenclature, we’ve lost these distinctions between the house of Judah, the house of Israel; that’s Old Testament stuff. We don’t have to worry about that stuff. But we do, you know, and because we haven’t paid attention very well… I mean, sometimes we’ve tried, but we’ve just been, I don’t know, confused about some of these terms. And so, then we come to the New Testament, and we think, “Oh, there’s this whole new program, and Paul’s saying I don’t have to do the Ten Commandments anymore, and Jesus freed me from the law.’” So, that’s what I’m getting at. I think that’s the big story. I think that’s the forgotten love story of the Bible, and it reframes the whole thing. It’s not that, you know, God’s like, “Well, those Jews, they just didn’t accept Jesus, so to hell with them, you know, I’m going to go to this new chick called the church.” No. It’s the same bride, the same wife that God had who was unfaithful, who went after other gods, who sacrificed children to Molech, who gave Him the middle finger. And that one that completely sullied His name, God says, “But I still love you. I’m a little bit mad right now, but I still love you, and I’m going to fix this.” And so, he comes, and for that wife, he dies. For that wife, he goes to the cross. For that wife, he then resurrects so that he can take her and now they can have this new thing, this new covenant. And when you see that the old covenant was a marriage contract, the new covenant is a marriage contract. And within both of them; Torah. Right? God’s instructions are still at the heart. And so, this is the other thing, that many Christians equate the old covenant as the same as Torah. And I strongly disagree with that. I would suggest that the old covenant was the ketubah. That was, you know, the agreement of our marriage, okay? And the agreement, in a sense, is probably going to be the same in many marriages. You know, if you get married one time, you have your, for better, for worse, and sickness and health; you’re going to use those vows. And let’s say that that marriage doesn’t work out, now you get married to a new woman. You’ll probably use the same vows, because the vows are great. The problem was… Nehemia: Tell the audience what a ketubah is, because I think that then goes in towards the writing, maybe, that’s nailed to the cross. Or… I’m not really sure where you’re going with it… Tell them what a ketubah is and how it fits into this model. And… Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: …and I like… you use the phrase commonwealth theology. So, we’ve got replacement theology, dispensationalism, and you’re essentially trying to define and maybe explain a third way… Doug: Well, yeah. Nehemia: …which is commonwealth theology. Doug: If anybody’s interested. So, me and three other friends, we wrote Commonwealth Theology Essentials. Nehemia: Okay. Doug: But if you want the easier version, I highly recommend my book, God’s Divorce. It’s the same idea, much simpler… Nehemia: Before you get to the ketubah… so, I’m going to just give like a scenario here, so people understand what’s going on in Deuteronomy 24, and tell me if you agree with this, okay? I’m trying to basically explain your position, in maybe simpler terms, at least for me. So, Tom marries Sally. They get divorced, and then Sally marries a man named Ba’al. I’ll just call him Ba’al. And then, Ba’al’s like, “No, I’m done with Sally.” And now Sally’s like, “I really did love Tom.” Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: “I want to go back to Tom.” And what Deuteronomy is saying is, she’s defiled for him. That’s Deuteronomy 24:4, so he’s not allowed to marry her again. And what you’re saying is, Tom, whose name in this case is Jesus, or Yeshua, died and was resurrected, and so, that law saying it’s an abomination for Tom to marry Sally is now null and void because he’s dead, and in the resurrection, he’s allowed to marry Sally. Is that maybe a simplistic explanation? Doug: Yes, yep. Nehemia: Okay. And I think most Jews hearing this are like, “Well, all of this is just a metaphor and an allegory in Hosea and Jeremiah, and you’re taking it too far.” But the verses you quoted from Paul, I think, are justification for saying… and help me out here; most Christians would say Jesus died to wipe away original sin. And it sounds like to me what you’re saying is, “No, there was a different purpose than the death of Jesus and his resurrection.” Is that fair to say? Doug: Yeah. And, you know, of course, I want to be careful not to simplify Jesus’ death too much. I think his death did a number of things, but one of the majors, right? Because there’s the whole thing of decay, corruption, death itself. And I think his death took care of a cosmic problem as well. But we’ll leave the cosmic stuff aside for just a second. I think a lot of what Paul is focusing on is not the cosmic stuff, but on this relationship between God and Israel. For example, in Colossians 2:14, this is one of these classic passages that Christians will use. He says, “You who are dead in your trespasses and uncircumcision of your flesh, God has made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of death that stood against us with its legal demands, that is set aside, nailing it to the cross.” All right. So, I don’t have the meme right here, but in one of my studies I show this guy who has this meme, and it has Jesus on the cross, and the Ten Commandments, the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, are nailed behind his hands. And I’m just like, “Oh, that makes me ill.” Right? Nehemia: Don’t most Christians say it’s the Torah scroll, in a sense? Doug: Yeah! Nehemia: Meaning… Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: Meaning, with the exception, maybe, of the Ten Commandments. Doug: Yep, yep. Nehemia: Or nine of the ten anyway. Meaning, in other words, where it says in the Torah, I don’t know, let’s take the most famous one Christians love to say, “mixed fabrics”, which is nowhere in the Torah. It’s actually specifically wool and linen, which… we could do a study on that. Doug: Yes. Indeed. Nehemia: Sha’atnez. So, wool and linen (the prohibition of wearing a fabric that’s made out of wool and linen) most Christians say that’s done away with. There’s no problem whatsoever, because that was nailed to the cross. And what are you saying, instead, was nailed to the cross? Doug: I’m saying the divorce certificate was nailed to the cross. Nehemia: Okay. Doug: That was the ordinance that was against us, that was contrary to us, that did not allow us to come back into covenant relationship with God. And when you start looking at the writings of Paul through this other lens, it all just comes into focus. Because in Romans chapter 9, where he’s talking about, you know, he says in Romans 9:24, he says, “Even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles. As indeed,” he says, “in Hosea, those who were not my people, I will call my people. And her who was not beloved, I will call beloved.” Now, when I was a dispensationalist, I was believing in the pre-trib rapture and all that stuff. I read this and I’m like, “Oh, Paul is going back to Hosea. He just needs to find a little soundbite to kind of prove his point.” Right? But then when I came into commonwealth theology, I said, “Oh, my goodness. I completely misread that. Paul is not just trying to proof text his point. What he’s doing is, he’s explaining how the house of Judah, that became a non-people that was assimilated, swallowed up, became part of the Gentiles.” He’s saying, “Look, this is what happened; the house of Judah became a non-entity. They stopped existing. What happened to them? They became part of the Gentiles.” And so now, how does God bring this back together? Well, we still have the house of Judah. They exist as the Jews. But the house of Israel, how is God going to resolve that? Well, they’re the Gentiles. And so, when a Gentile puts their faith and trust in Jesus, they become part of the commonwealth of Israel. And now, where he says, “To those who have said that you are not My people, now you are My people.” You know… so, he says that in Romans, he says it in Ephesians, he talks about it in Colossians. He sort of alludes to it in Galatians, to some degree. But this is the underlying message of Paul’s epistles. Not the pastoral ones so much, but these real dense theological ones. Paul’s trying to explain how the promises that were made to the house of Judah and the house of Israel, how these are now put back together through Jesus. But we in the church, we’re like, “Oh, that’s not for us. That has nothing to do with us.” And that’s how I used to read it. Again, I knew about the house of Israel; of course I did. I studied that. But theologically, it meant nothing to me. I just thought, “Oh, that’s just ancient history. That’s for the Jews and all that stuff. I’m the church.” But now I realize, “Oh, I’m not the church. I’m grafted into Israel.” And when you start to look at Jeremiah 16, he talks about the two trees. And he’s talking about the house of Israel and the house of Judah. He’s talking about the olive trees very specifically. Paul talks about the olive tree. Or let’s take Romans chapter 11, where he talks about the fullness of the Gentiles. Again, as a dispensational pre-tribulation dude, I used to think, “Oh, when the last person on earth gives their heart to Jesus, then he will come back.” But now, I’m like, “Oh, my goodness! How did I miss this? He was actually saying, melo ha’goyim. He was saying the fullness of the Gentiles.” And of course, that is a prophecy that Jacob gave when he was blessing Ephraim and Manasseh. But you know, obviously, you know the story, right? Nehemia: Tell the story to the people… Doug: Jacob’s supposed to put his right hand on the head of Manasseh, right? But what does he do? He puts it on the head of Ephraim! And Joseph’s like, “Dad, what are you doing?” And Jacob’s like, “I know, son, I know. I might be blind, but I know what I’m doing.” Ephraim is going to be melo ha’goyim. And so, when Paul is talking about that, he’s talking about this prophecy that was given. And so, when he says, all Israel will be saved, how did I used to read that? “All the Jews, somehow, are going to eventually put their trust in Jesus.” That’s how I used to read it. But now I read it, “Oh, he’s not talking about every last Jew believing in Jesus. What he’s actually saying is all Israel, house of Judah, house of Israel, and they’re going to become all Israel, like they used to be all Israel.” Right? But we’ve divorced ourselves from the Old Testament. “Oh, that’s Jewish stuff. We don’t have to do that. We’re not into Torah.” And so then, of course we’re incredibly confused, and we don’t understand Paul’s writings because we haven’t taken time, by and large, to appreciate the front of the book, to understand the foundation. And then we come up with a lot of wackadoodle kind of doctrines. And, sadly, we develop anti-Semitism; we think the Jews are the problem. You know, Jesus freed us from that Jewish stuff. He freed us from the Torah. And on and on the list goes. Nehemia: Well, all right, there’s lots to talk about here. So, we brought up ketubah, and I want to circle back to that. So, in Deuteronomy 24:1, and I’ll give you my perspective here and you can tell me if you disagree with some of it. So, in the ancient world… you know, we have this idea in America called common law marriage, which is, you proclaim to the community, “this woman is my wife”, and you live with her in your house. In Texas, for example, that’s the law; not in every state. In the Torah, let’s say, in the time of Moses, as far as we know, there was only common law marriage. And if you kicked the woman out of your house, she then needed something, some proof, that she was now free to marry another person. Because otherwise she’s going to be stoned. So, that proof was this sefer kritut, which is literally a scroll of divorce, or a document of separation. And she would then have that piece of leather with the writing on it that says that “Well, look, he separated himself from me, so you can’t say I’m committing adultery. I’m now with a different husband.” Also, over time, developed this idea of a ketubah, which was a marriage contract, which would give the woman certain rights so that she’s not just kicked out in the street with nothing. But she generally has… it’s sort of like a prenup; that’s how it developed historically, at least, where she’s guaranteed 2,000 zuz, whatever that is. You know, it’s some amount of money. So, how does that ketubah, the marriage certificate… which isn’t in the Torah, but it definitely is something that developed within Jewish culture, and it was likely around in the time of Yeshua, so I see how you could then bring it into the constellation of what Paul is talking about. So, how does that play into it? How does that fit in the whole scheme of things, this ketubah, this marriage document? Doug: Yeah. Well, so, the reason I brought that up is because many Christians, at least the ones that I know, they assume that the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Sinaitic covenant, that thing is the same as God’s instructions, His Torah. And I’m saying, no, they’re two different things. And when it talks about the Book of the Law, or… you know, some of these terms are not a hundred percent, you know, precise. But the idea here is that, when it talks about the old covenant, that was where God and Israel entered into this marriage contract, for lack of a better word. And it was a brit. It was, “I’m promising to love you, you’re promising to love me.” We can call that a ketubah. I know that’s anachronistic, but it still holds. It has a nice picture. And so, then, the new covenant is going to be a new marriage contract, but Torah will still be part of it, right? Because in Jeremiah, he says, “Behold, the days are coming when I’ll make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not according to the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them. But this is the covenant I’ll make with the house of Israel after those days that I will write it on their hearts and put it in their minds.” Right? So, His instructions are part of both covenants, both the old covenant and the new covenant, the Sinaitic covenant and this new covenant. And so, you know, for me as a Torah-keeping messianic teacher, I’m constantly trying to explain to people that, “Look, we’re not trying to keep God’s commandments to be saved. We believe we’re part of the new covenant by His grace, by His goodness, His mercy, undeserved. But yeah, we want to also do what He said to do, you know?” And yet, for most Christians, there’s this huge block. You know, “I’m not in Old Testament covenant.” I’m like, “I’m not either,” right? I’m not. But the Old Covenant is not the same as Torah. It’s not the same as His instructions. Does that make sense? Nehemia: So, am I understanding correctly? So, Jeremiah 31:31 is the verse you’re talking about. It says, “Behold, days are coming, says Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and I will cut for the house of Israel and the house of Judah a brit chadasah, a new covenant.” And you’re saying that’s a new marriage contract? Meaning… Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: …the first one was at Sinai where He says, “You’re under the chuppah with Me, under the clouds, and we’re entering into a marriage covenant.” That might be metaphorically, but fine. And you’re saying that new covenant is through Jesus, through Yeshua, for those who are now taking on the role of Israel? Meaning, the house of Israel and Ephraim, is that the idea? Doug: Yeah. I mean, so, He says there in verse 32, “The covenant I made with them, though I was a husband to them.” So, they broke that covenant. So, that’s the law of the husband that Paul was referring to in Romans chapter 7. Israel and God, so, all Israel in that case, they entered into this marriage contract with God. They then went after other gods. That was the big no-no, right? It wasn’t that they weren’t perfect. Nobody’s perfect, but they went after other gods. And, you know, I’ve thought about why did God love King David so much? King David was a murderer, he was an adulterer, he did a lot of bad things, but he always stayed faithful to God. Even though he screwed up, he was faithful to God. Whereas as his son went after other gods, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, right? That was the bridge too far, and that’s why God said, “Okay, fine, we’re done. You know, I’m going to split the kingdom, et cetera.” So, yeah, both covenants (old covenant, new covenant) are marriage contracts. And yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. Nehemia: Okay. So, since the 90s, there’s been this idea among, and I’m just going to use the broad term here; you use the word messianic. I found many people who you or I might define as messianic reject that term. There’s other terms out there. Hebrew roots, which is vehemently rejected by many people. Doug: Yeah, I know. Nehemia: Because it encompasses all kinds of… I think you used the word, wacky things. So, I don’t know what term I’m going to use. Torah-keeping Christian. Would that offend you if I use that term? Doug: That’s perfect. That’s perfect. Nehemia: Okay. So, in the Torah-keeping Christian movement, or let’s say, very broadly, here, I’m saying there’s been this idea called the two-house theology, which often, but not always, had a tie-in (and I’m talking since the 90s), in some formulations of it, with British Israelism. So, how does commonwealth theology relate to the so-called two-house theology, at least as I very poorly understand it? Let’s put it that way. Doug: Yeah. Yeah. We really try to stay away from any kind of genetic discussion. I mean, maybe we have pet theories, but we don’t talk about them publicly, because it’s kind of a bridge to nowhere, you know? The whole genetics discussion; then it becomes about British Israelism or, you know, is America Ephraim and or Manasseh and… who cares? You know, I just think… Nehemia: I have this great story I love to share. I was traveling around in 2005 doing a speaking tour, and during one, like, seven-week period I spoke in 21 different places, 21 cities. So, I’m somewhere in Ohio, and I meet this guy (I think it was Ohio), and he’s telling me this elaborate theology he has. And he’s a hundred percent British Israel, right? And it was something, like, I don’t remember the details because it was over 20 years ago, but it was something like, you know, I don’t know, “Yom Kippur is going to be this event in history, and then America is Ephraim, and the United Kingdom is Menashe.” And then I was later in Washington State, and I meet another guy who tells me… I said, “This sounds like the same story that other guy said.” He said, “Oh, no, that’s completely different.” He says, and I could be getting it backwards, but he said something like, “Oh, no, he’s completely different. America,” he says, “is Ephraim, and UK is Menashe. And I say the opposite! America is Menashe and the UK is Ephraim.” And I’m like, “Oh, boy.” Later, I learned the terminology… Freud had this term called the narcissism of small differences, which I think is actually really profound… Doug: It is, it’s very profound. Nehemia: …which is this idea that the closer someone is to you, the more the small differences matter. Like, I can have this conversation with you without any problem, but if I get together with another Karaite Jew who has a different definition of, I don’t know, when Shabbat begins, I’m his mortal enemy and he wants nothing to do with me. Doug: That’s right. Nehemia: And I’m like, “Guys! What are we talking about here? Seriously?” And I think we talked at the beginning of this segment about the Catholic Church. You just had some split about something that, as a non-Christian, I’m like, “What do you guys even talking… Wait, what guys? What? Like, it’s about whether the mass is in Latin, or you have a choice whether it’s in Latin or your local language. That’s really what you guys are splitting over?” I mean, I’m not a Catholic, so, I understand it’s a big deal to them, but I really think it’s the narcissism of small differences. I think it’s worth acknowledging that. Right? Doug: A hundred percent. Nehemia: At the same time, like, “Yeah, that guy is my moral enemy! He begins Shabbat in three stars, not at sunset!” Like what, guys? Can we grow up and get past that? But look, it’s human nature as well. So, all right, there’s this island in the Indian ocean called North Sentinel Island, where the people have had contact with the rest of the world, but not in a language that anybody can understand. So, in my scenario, there’s somebody from North Sentinel Island who drifts away on a boat, and he lands in India, and he learns about Jesus. And he says, “Okay this makes sense to me.” Why does he need Jesus to die to renew the covenant? His ancestors on North Sentinel Island never heard of Sinai, never heard of the Jews, never heard of anything in the Old Testament or the Commandments. They’ve been cut off for… I mean, the secular scholars say 10,000 years; let’s not get into whether it’s 10,000 or since the flood, right? Or since the scattering of the languages. They don’t have any language in common with anybody today. Why does he need the death of Jesus to come into covenant with God? Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: The North Sentinelese man. Doug: Right. Well, you know… and again, this is where I would definitely say that you don’t have to understand all the theology, at all. Nehemia: Okay. Doug: Right. I don’t think that that’s any kind of a prerequisite. But, you know, if we are in the Bible story, then we might as well understand the biblical story, right? So… You know, for that man, I would just say, “God loves you, and He wants to have a relationship with you. You know. And Jesus is the door.” Amen, okay. Now, as he continues to study, like, well, why is Jesus the door? Okay, glad you asked, okay? This whole thing is the story of Israel. God promised that He would make Abraham a great nation, and that all the nations would be blessed through him, right? So, it’s not through this thing called the church. It’s through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. And then, God makes lots of promises to the 12 sons of Jacob. He then makes promises to David, He makes promises to Judah, et cetera. And then He makes this promise to the house of Israel, that “I’m going to bring you back. I’m going to betroth you to Me in righteousness.” But what happens to them? They become a non-entity. They become generic. They’re like everybody else. They become part of the nations. So, when the house of Israel becomes part of the nations, part of the Gentiles, the goyim, then anybody from the goyim who then puts their faith in Jesus, they get put into the house of Israel/Ephraim category, if you will, and that is how they have a covenant place at the seat, if you will, into God’s kingdom. So, you know, again, that guy from Sentinelese, whether he understands any of that doesn’t matter. But God certainly understands it, and God has it all figured out, and, you know, that’s why I don’t get into the genetics, because, like, you know what? I think that’s a waste of time, quite frankly. But, you know, as far as your standing, this is how it’s going to be. Think about the erev rav, the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt. They did not remain an erev rav. They did not remain this other group. They all assimilated into Israel. Some probably became part of Judah, some were part of Asher, some were part of Simeon, some were Benjamin, you know? And they just became part and parcel of the nation of Israel. Great. And that’s where I see myself. I’m not remaining over here in this thing called the church, or a Gentile. I become part of the nation. I’m given full citizenship. I don’t replace Israel, I just become one of you, you know? Nehemia: What is the role of the Jews now, in your worldview? Doug: Well, so, this is where we have the house of Judah and the house of Israel. And this is the two sticks that are coming back together. I think, legally, Jesus took care of all the legal paperwork at the cross. Now, practically, we don’t quite see that 100% yet, but, you know, eventually it will happen. And I think that’ll probably happen at the second coming of Jesus. But legally, it’s all in place so that the two houses can come back together. So, I still think the house of Judah has a huge role to play, and that takes me into a whole different area of study. This has to do with the covenant of death. I’m going to try to do this standing on one foot, okay, be’regel echat. Nehemia: Okay. Doug: Or in a nutshell, for our American counterparts here. Nehemia: Yeah. Doug: But, so, in a nutshell, basically, Jesus gave an ultimatum to the leadership of Jerusalem. He said, “You will not see me again until you say: Baruch haba b’shem Adonai.” So, when the descendants, the legal corporate descendants of the Pharisees, of the scribes, we can call them maybe Sanhedrin, maybe the Knesset, maybe the Rabbinate of Jerusalem, take your pick. I’m not going to die on that hill. But whatever constitutes the builders that rejected the chief cornerstone. And Peter lays that at the feet of the leadership in Acts chapter 4. He says, “You were the builders, and you rejected the chief cornerstone.” So, the builder people, which would constitute the leadership of the house of Judah, they have to accept, or respond to, the ultimatum that Jesus gave. When they say, “Baruch haba b’shem Adonai”, that’s when Jesus is going to come back. So, man, we need the house of Judah more than ever, okay? I mean, I’ve prayed a thousand times for Jesus to come back, and, well, he hasn’t come back yet. But he said when he’s going to come back; when the leadership of Jerusalem cries out, “Baruch haba b’shem Adonai”, as stated in Psalm 118, right? That the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing, and it’s marvelous in our eyes. You know, and so… Nehemia: And that’s from the Psalm, by the way. Doug: Yeah, that’s from Psalm 118. You know, and so, this is where the church has said, “Oh, the Jews rejected Jesus so they’re in big trouble.” And I go to Psalm 118, I’m like, “Well, I don’t know exactly why they rejected him, but it says it’s the Lord’s doing.” How does he work that out? I don’t know. He’s God. He’ll figure that one out. But for one reason or another, the leadership rejected Jesus, okay? It doesn’t mean that all Jews are bad. Hardly. I mean, there were so many Jews that believed in Jesus, and God loves them. And so, I’m a hundred percent on board with God loving the Jewish people. They’re still massively important; they’re still a huge part of the plan, a central part of the plan, in fact. And so that has to happen. But that’s where I get into that, in Corrupting the Image, Volume 3. I’ve got another book called Immortal Dawn coming out really soon, and I talk about the covenant of death, the brit mavet spoken of in Isaiah 28. But again, that’s kind of a different story. So, yeah, the house of Judah is still massively important. God’s going to put the two sticks back together. So, that is the house of Judah, the Jews, and the house of Israel, Ephraim, us Gentiles, putting us back together. And so, now when Paul talks about, he’s going to make one new man out of the two, that’s in fulfillment of Ezekiel 37, where he says that the two sticks will come back together. They will not be two nations ever again. They will be one nation. They will no longer be divided. Again, we don’t see that practically happening yet, but legally there’s nothing standing in the way. So… Nehemia: And that’s kind of consistent with… and I never understood this in mainstream Christianity’s view, like where it talks about the one new man, and there’s no longer Jew and Gentile, and yet in their theology, “No, the Jews are rejected, and we’re the new Israel. We’ve replaced…” Well, wait a minute. That’s not what Paul seems to be… or what it says there, in that epistle there. Doug: Right. Nehemia: So, recently I interviewed a gentleman who’s a scholar, and his argument was this… and he’s a Christian. He was saying that, no, Jesus didn’t do away with the Torah. He wasn’t antinomian, and we’re talking about Mark 7 and Matthew 15… we don’t have to get into it. But basically, his argument was that linguistically, you can make a strong case that Jesus wasn’t doing away with the ritual commandments of the Torah. So, I asked him after the interview, I said, “So, do you eat pork?” And he’s like, “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? The Jerusalem Council, Acts 15.” So, what’s your answer to that? Doug: Oh. [Laughter] Nehemia: Acts 15, Acts 21, the Jerusalem Council. Doug: Oh, yeah. Nehemia: He’s like, “Look, I don’t eat blood pudding. I only have to do four things.” Right? Doug: See, I think that’s been terribly misunderstood. Terribly misunderstood. Nehemia: Explain it. Doug: I’ve been doing a bunch of videos about that, et cetera. Nehemia: Where can people find your videos? We didn’t say that, and we’ll put it up on the screen as well… Doug: Dr. Douglas Hamp is my YouTube channel, and yeah, I’ve been putting out, you know, how Torah is still for today. It’s still for us; it’s not this oppressive thing. So, let’s take Acts 15. So, Acts 15, the real question was, does a Gentile have to be circumcised in order to come into faith, in order to come into covenant? And this was already a 1st century Jewish discussion, apart from Jesus, that was happening. And so, you have the Alexandrian, the more liberal Jews, who were saying, “No, all you have to do is come by faith, man. You just have to raise your hands in gratitude to heaven. Come as you are, and you will learn on the job.” And the more stringent school was saying, “No, no, no, no. You first have to keep Torah, and then we’ll see. We’ll have a little review time to see how you’re doing, and then maybe you can become part of Judah.” So, this discussion about, how do you become part of the covenant, was front and center in their minds. And so, the Jerusalem Council says, “Hey guys, what are we doing here? You know, our fathers couldn’t keep Torah in order to come into covenant. You come into covenant and then you keep Torah. And you’re learning. And that’s why Moses is preached and taught every Shabbat in every synagogue.” Moses, of course, being the Torah. So, what they’re saying is, if you are a new convert and you’re going to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, what would be antithetical to believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Well, believing in other gods and worshiping those other gods. So, those four things that they were talking about, that you have to stay away from idolatry, from things strangled, from blood, and from sexual immorality, which is a very broad and vague term, okay? The actual Greek there is porneia. And porneia, as we go back to Numbers chapter 20, when the Israelites really messed up at Baal Peor. Certainly, the boys and the girls were doing some hanky-panky, but it wasn’t simply about hanky-panky. It was in worship of the god of Peor, of Baal Peor, and that is why God got so upset. It’s because they were… I mean, just in His face, worshiping this false god right in the Tent of Meeting, in fact. And so, porneia is very closely tied to Temple prostitution. So, when you look at those four things; no idolatry, obviously, and then, things strangled and blood, that has to do with idolatry as well, and then Temple prostitution. So, if you’re going to believe in the God of Israel, well, obviously you cannot do these things. That’s the baseline of what you have to do in order to become a follower of the God of Israel. All right? Now, are those the only things? Well, of course not, and no Christian really believes that. They just want to be able to eat their blood, or whatever, which is a whole different story. Nehemia: Well, his argument was, I only have to do those four things. So, he said, “No, I don’t eat blood pudding. I don’t eat blood,” which is the actual thing, blood pudding, right? Doug: I know, it’s disgusting… Nehemia: But he’s like, “Other than those four things, I’m not bound by the ritual things or anything that Jesus reiterated as well.” I guess he’s… So, I want to share my screen here real quick. And we don’t have to solve this problem, but I think it’s… more people need to comment on it, on my view. So, here in the King James Version, in Acts 21, it says, “As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded they observe no such thing,” and the context here is the commandments, “save,” meaning, except, “only that they keep themselves from things offered to idols.” And when you look in the Nestle-Aland 28, it doesn’t have that “save only”, and most modern translations also don’t have these words, “save only”. There’s a textual variant in some manuscripts that do have that, right? Doug: Right. Nehemia: But the fact that that textual variant exists meant there were some Christians who were… let’s assume that that’s not original, for arguments sake, the “save only”, “except only”. So, some Christians were reading that and saying, “Wait, we need to make… some scribes, we need to make this clear by explaining it’s only these things they have to do, and nothing else.” Doug: Right. Nehemia: The fact that somebody needed to add that… we say in Hebrew, ze omer darsheni, “it says, interpret me.” Right? Doug: [Laughter] Nehemia: So, in other words, there must have been Christians at the time… and this brings to mind Bart Ehrman’s idea of the orthodox corruption of scripture. So, one of his arguments, and he has a lot of silly things in his books, but one of his arguments is that, some textual variants aren’t just a scribal error, they’re what became the orthodox church modifying the text to reinforce their theology. And it’s hard for me to believe that this is not an orthodox deliberate modification in order to remove an ambiguity. And the need for that ambiguity is likely to have been that there were some Christians reading this and saying, “Oh, these are just the four things to get started.” What you said. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: “Now we go to synagogue every week, we’ve heard about other things, we should do those too.” And then that brings up to mind John Chrysostom, who was this rabid anti-Semite, I want to say in the 5th century, but somebody could fact check me and put in the comments the correct date. And he’s rebuking the Christians who go to synagogue on the Sabbath. Doug: Mm-hmm. Nehemia: Well, who are these Christians going to synagogue on the Sabbath, and why were they doing that? Well, I mean, you can see why from Acts, right? Meaning, they hadn’t yet been homogenized into this anti-Torah, what became the orthodox Church… orthodox, not in the sense of Greek Orthodox… Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: …but what became the anti-Torah church. And they were still going to synagogue, and they were hearing things and saying, “Oh, maybe we should do that.” So, if you add these two words, “save only” you’ve now neutralized their reading of Acts 21:25. Doug: Yeah. You know, I mentioned really briefly Marcion. Nehemia: Yeah. Doug: But I mean, he is the elephant in the room. The elephant that nobody’s ever heard of. And, you know, so, Marcion is this 2nd century heretic. He was rabidly anti-Torah, anti-Sabbath, anti-Jewish. He literally took a knife to the Gospels, and he was cutting out the parts that he didn’t like that were too Jewish. And he was the guy that said, “only Paul got it right”. And he’s kind of elevated the writings of Paul above all else. I mean, I love that… Nehemia: Not even all. I think he only had like 10 epistles of Paul, or something, and the Gospel of Luke in his canon… Doug: Right, yeah. Nehemia: …if memory serves me. Doug: Yeah, exactly. Nehemia: So, he didn’t even accept some of the Gospels that… Doug: Right. Nehemia: …became part of the churches, or whatever… Doug: Yeah, you know, and so, this spirit of Marcionism; I call it haunted theology, you know… Nehemia: Okay. Doug: …because the haunted house looks okay from the outside, but you go inside and something’s spooky, something’s weird here. And I think that’s kind of what infested our theology. And even though guys like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr and Tertullian, they were desperately trying to stamp out Marcionism, but I think they failed. I think Marcionism basically became the de facto definition of Christianity. It’s kind of like if Mormonism had, you know, if that were to become just another term for Christian. You’d be like, “Wait, okay, yeah, you’re saying Jesus, but you’ve got some weird doctrines in there.” Like, that’s kind of what happened. And Marcionism was teaching that the God of the Old Testament was this demiurge, and that He foisted the law on the backs of the Jews. And He was all about rules and regulations. But then along comes Jesus, and the real true creator God, sent Jesus to free us from that old legal system that was all about do’s and don’ts. And in a nutshell, that’s Marcionism. And when I stumbled upon that study, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve heard that sermon a million times, of where Jesus freed me from the old law, and now I’m free to do whatever, and I don’t have to do that Jewish stuff.” I mean, that is straight up Marcionism. Through and through. And so, most Christians have never heard of Marcion, but they believe, or reiterate, a lot of the things that he was saying, which is terribly scary. Nehemia: You used the phrase, the “spirit of Marcionism”, and I think that’s a better categorization, because mainstream Christianity doesn’t believe that the physical universe was created by an evil god, and that the God of the Old Testament was an evil god, which is what Marcion actually argued. But there’s definitely a spirit of Marcionism. And look, there’s a certain element here, it seems to me, like, studying history as well, there’s an element of, the way to beat them is to partially join them. In other words, the way that you neutralize the arguments of your opponent is, you adopt those arguments. You see this a lot in American politics, right? You can see in American politics (and I don’t want to get into politics) but there’s a lot of things in American politics where they were central disputes between the Democrats and the Republicans, and one side adopted the position of the other in order to get, kind of, the people who were on the fence. Maybe it was a more moderate form of it, but they ended up being pulled in that direction. They call that “moving the Overton window”. So, in Jewish history, we have an interesting example of this. If you go to the 8th century, and the 9th century, and 10th century, one of the really strong arguments of the Karaite movement to draw people in was: the Rabbinites have these monstrous midrashim where God has a physical body. And it’s literally a midrash, where God has a physical shiur koma. God has a physical body, and it’s describing it, and it’s a very big body, and they’re like, “Come on, if He’s God, he’s not physical. So, you can’t say He’s just this giant who lives out in outer space” which is what this midrash was presenting. And so, the Rabbinical reply was to say, “Oh, no, that’s all allegory. No, we don’t believe that.” Right? It’s an allegory about how God… how great god is, and by the time of Maimonides, that’s just mainstream Rabbinical position, and anybody who would have been swayed by the Karaite arguments, like, it’s a strawman now. It wasn’t a strawman when the argument was first made… Doug: Right. Nehemia: …because there were Rabbinites who, at the time, literally believed that God has a physical body. Maimonides famously refers to the fool who believes that God has a physical body. Some people say he’s referring to Rashi. Doug: [Laughter] Nehemia: But we don’t need to get into that. So, the point was, if you can’t beat them, you join some of their arguments. Doug: Right. Nehemia: And I kind of wonder if that’s what happened in… I’m speculating here… if that’s what happened. The way to take the wind out of the sails of Marcion was to concede some of his points (not all of them of course) and, yes, the God of the Old Testament, not that he’s a different God, but the way he’s presented in the Old Testament is an evil, vengeful God. And now we have this loving God. Right? Now I think that’s kind of the spirit of Marcionism, rather than the literal through and through Marcionism. What do you think? Doug: Yeah, I would agree with you. And I was going to pull up a quote here. I have… Nehemia: Yeah, we love quotes. Doug: There’s this interchange. Yeah, okay. So, “Mar Abba, about 552 AD, originally a fanatical pagan. During an attempt to cross the Tigris, was brought to see the light through a miracle and an ensuing conversation with a Christian ascetic, Joseph, whose surname was Moses. Wishing to know whether Joseph might be an Orthodox, a Marcionite, or a Jew, he asked Mar Abba. So, Mar Abba says, ‘Are you a Jew?’ Joseph says, ‘Yes.’ Mar Abba says, ‘Are you a Christian?’ Joseph says, ‘Yes.’ Mar Abba says, ‘Do you worship the Messiah?’ Joseph again expressed agreement. Mar Abba becomes enraged. ‘How can you be a Jew, a Christian, and a worshiper of the Messiah all at the same time?’ And so, the narrator gives this explanation. Following the local custom, he used the word Christian to designate a Marcionite. Joseph says, ‘I am a Jew secretly. I still pray to the living God and abhor the worship of idols. I’m a Christian truly, not as the Marcionites, who falsely call themselves Christians. For Christian is a Greek word, which in Syriac means Messiah worshiper. And if you ask me, do you worship Messiah? I would worship him truly.’” So, it reveals that even at a time, a relatively late date, Marcionites designated themselves as the Christians, much to the offense of the orthodox, who must be content with misleading alternatives such as “Messiah worshipers.” I mean, oh, my goodness, right? Like, talk about stealing the words themselves, the very vocab of what it means to be a Christian. No wonder we’re confused, right? Because we have these different terms floating around, or the same term floating around, but very different meanings. Nehemia: Yeah. Doug: And that’s why, as you were kind of trying to label me at the beginning, are you a Torah-observing Christian? Nehemia: I like to put people in a box. It makes me feel more comfortable. Doug: No, I understand. And this is something that we kind of joke about. You’re like, “Well, we don’t know which label to call ourselves.” Because I know Messianic has its issues and Hebrew Roots… I don’t like a lot of Hebrew Rooters, because they become weird and they think the earth is flat and they get all weird on Yahuwah and Yahushua and, you know, pick your calendar, and all this stuff. You know, I’m like, I don’t know what’s a good term, but I do keep Sabbath, but not to be saved. I eat clean, but not to be saved, just because I think God loves me and said, “Don’t eat bad stuff.” And the feasts; I think they’re fun, but I do believe that Jesus is my king. But it’s by grace, you know? So, yeah, what is the right level? I don’t know, you know? But it just shows how confusing things have been. And I think this is the haunted theology. I think this is the ghost in the machine, is that Marcion and the spirit of Marcion has been infecting this. You know, there’s a thing I have on this thing. If people want to check it out, Haunted Theology, it’s on my YouTube channel. And I have… oh my gosh, Andy Stanley. He did this teaching. He says, “The 1st century church leaders unhitched the church from the worldview value system and regulations of the Jewish Scriptures. Peter, James, Paul elected to unhitch the Christian faith from their Jewish Scriptures, and my friends, we must as well.” So, he has on the screen, he says, “The Old Testament was not the go-to source regarding any behavior for the church.” And again, I’m just like, “Oh my goodness, lightning’s going to strike at any moment, right?” But this is mainstream Christianity today, and this is the kind of stuff that they’re teaching. And, you know, to go back to my book, I believe it’s because we have missed the big story. We’ve missed this big love story. And instead of it being a marriage contract where God and Israel get married because they love each other, because, well, when you’re in love, that’s why you get married, not because I want to sign a contract. But no, now it’s become a suzerain-vassal relationship. You know? And God’s like, “You know what? I need a people. Israel, do you want to be My people?” “Sure. What do we have to do?” “Well, just this big, long list of things.” “Okay.” Nehemia: “I’ll let you know later.” Doug: Yeah! It’s that God’s like, “I love you. Do you love Me?” “Yes!” “Good. Here’s My formula for success for a great life. You do these things, blessings. You do these things, curses.” I mean, it’s pretty simple, you know, and like, that’s it. You know, I don’t abstain from pork because, you know, I’m in fear and trembling, and if I don’t, God’s going to strike me down. I think God’s like, “Listen, pork isn’t really good for you, okay? They’re the trash collectors of the earth, and so, I don’t recommend eating the vacuum cleaner.” I’m like, “That’s great advice, Lord. Thank you.” You know? And why are so many Christians fighting tooth and nail? “You can’t take my bacon from me.” I’m like, “Yeah, but your bacon came from a trash collector. It’s not healthy for you.” So, you know, again, I just think it’s very practical why God said do this, don’t do that. And, you know, my whole spirit of why I’m trying to keep Torah has changed. I used to do it… sort of this sense of, “Well, I want to please God, so I better do these things,” you know. And, you know, that’s okay when you’re like three, four, and five; you do stuff because Daddy told you to. But eventually you’re like, “Oh! I think Daddy told me not to do that because it’s really harmful to me when I do that.” You know, and so, as you mature, you begin to understand what your parents were teaching you were not just some (well, for most parents, anyway) they weren’t just random rules. They’re like, “I love you, son, and I want you to be healthy. I want you to have a good life. And if you don’t look both ways when you cross the street, you might die.” Okay? So, that’s kind of what Torah is all about. God’s like, “Well, if you don’t look both ways when you cross the street, you might get lucky, but you might die.” So… Nehemia: But don’t you think some of the commandments in the Torah are… and maybe this is a very Jewish way of thinking about it, I don’t know. I mean there’s a medieval Jewish approach that there’s two types of commandments, and you probably think I’m going to say between, you know, man and his fellow, and between man and God. But I’m actually going a different direction. There’s commandments that we call rational commandments, and then there’s inherently Torah commandments. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: And the inherently Torah commandments are entirely arbitrary. It’s the medieval Jewish approach, or even earlier than that. And we call those sikhliot and toriot. Sikhliot is rational, from sekhel, wisdom, meaning, they’re practically good for you, right. Like, don’t eat pork because you’re going to get sick. And then there’s other things that are inherently… again, this is our approach; you don’t have to agree with it. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: There are other things that are inherently arbitrary, like, why a red heifer and not a blue heifer? Because God said so, and I don’t need to know why, and it doesn’t matter why. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: And maybe there’s some symbolic meaning, maybe there’s not, but if it was blue I’d also come up with a symbolic meaning, right? Doug: [Laughter] Nehemia: So, do you think that there are some commandments that maybe don’t have any practical function? But God said to do them, so that’s part of the covenant. And maybe, again, that’s a very Jewish approach. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t even have to comment on it. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: I’m just throwing it out. That’s a kind of a classical Jewish approach to things that… Doug: Yeah, I’m very familiar with that approach, and I don’t tend to agree with it. Because, though I may not understand everything, I don’t know why God said a red heifer as opposed to, you know, a black heifer, or something. I don’t know. Right. But I don’t think it’s random. Nehemia: Okay. Doug: I think if I could dig deeper, I would probably understand eventually. I’d be like, “Oh! Okay, I get it.” Let’s take Nadav and Avihu. Right? So, they take esh zara into the Temple. Nehemia: Strange fire, the two sons of Aaron. Yeah. Doug: And they get smoked. What happened? Is it just because God said, “Just don’t do it, because I am God, and I’m Dad, and I’m the boss, and that’s that.” That’s one approach. That’s kind of what the medieval Jewish approach would be. “God said don’t do it, so don’t do it.” I mean, yeah, that’s enough of a reason, granted. But I think the explanation, in my opinion, would be that God’s fire and esh zara, they don’t mix. And they’re kind of like bleach and vinegar. You know, like, they become combustible. They become poisonous if you put these two things together. Nehemia: By the way, if you put together bleach and toilet cleaner, you get deadly chlorine gas, and you’ll die if it’s in a small place, which makes perfect sense. I’m cleaning the toilet with the blue stuff, and I spray some bleach and now you can actually kill people that way. Be careful. Doug: Yeah. Nehemia: So, this idea that I’m referring to actually appears in the U.S. I think it’s in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, where they talk about the law of nature and nature’s God. And what they mean by that is, if we got together as rational human beings and tried to come up with the laws that we want to live by for a just and fair society, we would come up, eventually, with the ideas of don’t murder, don’t steal, but we wouldn’t come up with the idea of a red heifer or a blue heifer, or, you know… And there are blue cows by the way. It’s not a joke. All right, anyway, that’s just an idea to think about. Can we do, like, a really quick lightning round, and can you talk about your book? And I was just Googling it; I have to admit… Actually, before we get to that, I think this episode has to be called The Greatest Love Story Never Told. I think that’s the name of this episode. Right? Like, my editors are always struggling, “What do we call this?” “I don’t know.” Doug: Right. Nehemia: You can’t keep calling every episode, you know, The Secret of X-Y-Z. Like, that kind of gets banal and annoying. Doug: Right. Right. Nehemia: But The Greatest Love Story… And that brings me to something you probably don’t know. Do you know that I’ve been married since 2020, and you were on the first date that I went on with my wife. Did you know that? Doug: I was? Really? Interesting! Nehemia: You were! So, I spoke at your congregation, I want to say it was around 2018, and there was this woman there who I’d seen in Kingsport, Tennessee. And then she came to an event, and she traveled a lot for work, so if I was speaking somewhere, and she was traveling for work, happened to be traveling in that place, she’d be like, “Okay, I’ll drive an hour there to hear him speak.” So, then she came to hear me speak, I want to say it was somewhere near Houston. I don’t remember the name of the city. It was maybe Katy, Texas, or some other suburb of Houston, and then she came to Denver, Colorado. And you invited me out to dinner, along with, I think, somebody else in your congregation, and that woman was there, and I said to her, “Why don’t you come, too?” Because I thought, “Here’s a very safe opportunity, no pressure, to get to know her a little bit better.” I’d seen her at two other events. And I eventually married her. Which… I certainly did not think that I was going to date her or marry her when I invited her. I just thought, “Okay, here’s a woman who’s been to two other events, this is the third one. And I’ve had that happen before, and usually it was like some scary stalker. That was not the case here, you know. She was a, you know, very intelligent, sane woman. Although, maybe, I don’t know if we can say sane if she decided to marry me but… no, I’m teasing there. So, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, it’ll be a double entendre, or we say in Hebrew, tartei mashma. It’ll have two meanings. One is the covenant at Sinai, and then, as you understand it, this remarriage through the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also my first date. It wasn’t technically a date, right? But let’s call it that. — Nehemia: So, talk about the aliens. I Googled some of your books, which I wasn’t familiar with at all, and I saw something to do with aliens, and I have no idea where this is going to go! You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com. We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith! SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Pandora SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS(Please click here to donate)Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. VERSES MENTIONED Ephesians 2:11-22 Hosea 1:6-7 Exodus 19-24 Exodus 32 1 Kings 11-12 Jeremiah 3:8 Hosea 2:16-25 (v. 14-23 in English) Deuteronomy 24:1-4 Romans 7 Romans 3:31 Ezekiel 37 Colossians 2:14 Deuteronomy 22:11 Romans 9 Jeremiah 16 Romans 11 Genesis 48 Jeremiah 31:31-37 Genesis 15, 17 Matthew 23:39 Acts 4 Psalm 118:22-23 Isaiah 28 Acts 15; 21:25 Numbers 25 John Chrysostom, Discourses Against Judaizing Christians 1.5 Life of Mar Aba Leviticus 10 Preamble to the US Declaration of Independence BOOKS MENTIONED God's Divorce: The Bible's Hidden Love Story by Douglas Hamp Corrupting the Image trilogy by Douglas Hamp Commonwealth Theology Essentials by Douglas Krieger, Douglas Hamp, Gavin Finley, Chris Steinle RELATED EPISODES Hebrew Voices Episodes Hebrew Voices #250 – Did Jesus Make All Foods Clean? – Part 1 Hebrew Voices #160 – Does God Have a Body? OTHER LINKS Dr. Douglas Hamp Haunted Theology -How the Ghost of Marcion Haunts the Modern Church | Dr. Douglas Hamp The post Hebrew Voices #251 – The Greatest Love Story Never Told: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

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  3. Number 3: Hebrew Voices #250 – Did Jesus Make All Foods Clean? – Part 1

    In this episode of Hebrew Voices #250 - Did Jesus Really Make All Foods Clean?: Part 1, Nehemia welcomes Bible scholar Dr. Logan Williams to discuss his article exploring the textual variants behind the phrase in Mark 7 “making all foods clean,” the grammatical challenges presented by each reading, and what the passage may actually reveal about what Jesus was saying. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio Transcript Hebrew Voices #250 – Did Jesus Make All Foods Clean? – Part 1 You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com. Nehemia: It also suggests that, whatever the original text was, it was problematic. And so, different copyists and translators had to modify it in different ways. Or felt they needed to modify it in different ways to make it coherent. So, that’s always one of the questions, I think. There’s what they call Occam’s razor; the simplest explanation is the best one. Right? Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, do we really need this convoluted sort of explanation? No, it’s not convoluted. What we currently have is convoluted. — Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Logan Williams, who got his PhD at Durham University in England. He served as a lecturer at University of Exeter, and was a postdoctoral fellow at my alma mater, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At University of Aberdeen in Scotland, he’s currently the Kirby Lang Research Fellow in New Testament, where he is conducting a research project on Jesus and Pharisaic law in the Gospel of Mark. Thank you for joining us, Logan. Logan: Thanks for having me. Nehemia: So, Logan, you wrote an astounding essay on Mark 7:19. Can we maybe start with you… you have a Bible there where you could read that verse to the audience and explain how it’s usually understood. And by that, I mean… Logan: Should I pick up a kind of normal English version? Nehemia: Yeah, a normal English version. Perfect. Logan: Okay, so I’ve got my… Nehemia: And maybe start in verse 17, actually. So, this is the scene where… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: Mark 7 and Matthew 15 are really important passages, I think, to me and my audience, let’s put it that way. It’s where Jesus is having these encounters with the Pharisees, and this is interpreted, I think, by many Christians as, “Okay, the Pharisees followed the old law, and now Jesus is establishing the new law.” And I’m not saying that Bible scholars necessarily see it that way, but some do, I think, based on your paper. But I think a lot of the laymen is: Jesus is coming to put an end to the Torah law and establish a new commandment of God. That’s, I think, how a lot of people read it. You know, it’s the whole scene of washing the hands; we probably won’t get to that. Or maybe we will, tangentially. But so, read verse 17 to 19 as well. What translation do you have there? Logan: So, here’s the NRSV, New Revised Standard Version… Nehemia: Beautiful. Logan: …which is a kind of standard academic… Like, if you’re going for a default academic translation, that’s the default one you kind of start with, usually, if you’re a New Testament scholar. Nehemia: And it’s translated by academic scholars, the NRSV. Logan: Yeah, absolutely. So, here’s 7:17-19. “When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable.” This is something that he just said prior in the discourse. “He said to them, ‘Do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart, but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ Thus, he declared all foods clean.” Nehemia: And I love the NIV version, which is, “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.” So, they’ve actually supplied what you called there the implied subject. They’ve supplied it explicitly. And when you look in the Greek… and I’ve had this conversation with a number of Christians, and they’re like, “Well, I mean, Jesus said it. It’s the words in red.” And actually, I’m looking here in Accordance, and the words are literally in red. Logan: Oh, really? Nehemia: Yeah. Logan: Wow. Nehemia: I don’t know if that was made by the Accordance editors, or if that’s in the original NIV. So, they read that, and when you look in the Greek (you’re a Greek expert, I understand) the word Jesus isn’t there in verse 19, at least. Am I right? Logan: No, certainly not. Nehemia: So… Logan: There’s no subject expressed in that clause. Nehemia: Okay. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, in other words, whenever you have a verb, you have a subject. Well, I guess if it’s passive, it’s a little bit different. Maybe we’ll get to that. You know, the dog… Logan: You still have a subject, though. Yeah. Nehemia: Okay. But all right. So, the dog bit the boy. So, dog is the subject and bit is the verb and the boy is the direct object. So, here “he declared.” So, that’s interesting; the NRSV has, “Thus he declared all foods clean,” or something like that, and here we have… So, what you can see in the English translations is sort of like a mission creep, right? They’re expanding upon the translation, so now it’s “Jesus declared all foods clean,” in case you weren’t sure who “he” was. And then, I’ll read here from the New King James. It says, “Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart, but his stomach, and is eliminated, thus purifying all foods.” Meaning, what purifies all foods is, the… what’s the word… I mean they use the word here… in your translation, what was the word… I mean the word it, often drona, in Little Scott James they translate as privy, and I was kind of struggling when I was preparing for this; why don’t they translate it toilet? Oh, because they didn’t have toilets. I guess. But they had something equivalent to toilets, right? Logan: Yeah, it’s a remarkably rare word, that word, for its time. So, it appears in a few inscriptions and some other places. And some later scribes… so, Codex Bezae, which is abbreviated as Codex D, which is a Greek manuscript, which has often very interesting changes from other manuscripts, completely erases that word and changes it to ojetas, which means like pipes, or something like that. So, it’s clear that some scribe was like, “I know what that word means, but my people might not know what it means, so I’m going to change it to clarify it.” Nehemia: Oh, there’s a beautiful example like that in 1Q Isaiah A, where Isaiah, in every other manuscript, uses the word yahelu, which means to shed light on. And it swaps it out with yairu, which is just a normal word, to shed light. Logan: Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nehemia: So, it’s like an updating of the language, “because my readers won’t understand it.” He obviously understood it, because he updated it correctly. Logan: Yes. Nehemia: Now, whether Beza, or Bezae, updated it correctly, I guess, is… you know, that’s disputable. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, the point is that going to the toilet purifies all foods, according to the King James and the New King James, and really the Textus Receptus as it’s usually understood. So, here’s why I wanted to have you on. A lot of my audience looks at the NIV, and they look at the King James Version, and they say, “Well, we want it to say this, so we’re going to choose this translation over that translation because it fits better with our perspective and our overall,” let’s say, in fairness, “our overall understanding of the message of Jesus.” And what you’ve done is something really impressive, where you show linguistically and from a historical context why that is a better interpretation, or a more plausible interpretation, let’s put it that way. But there’s a lot of moving parts here. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, maybe we can start… and I was debating on how to present this to an audience who, maybe many of whom don’t know Greek, maybe let’s start with the verb katharizon… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: …and the four variants that, at least that I’m aware of, and I’m going to try to… we’ll put this up in post-production. The one that you’re arguing is probably the authentic one. I mean, guys, this particular word that means to purify, there’s four different versions of this in the manuscript tradition. You could say three plus the Sinai Gospels there, right, meaning the Syriac. But let’s assume that back translates into Greek. That’s where I’m getting the four. I’m getting that from UBS 5. Logan: Oh, yeah, yeah. You mean Peter Williams’ argument that the Syriac… Nehemia: Right. So, I’m calling that, let’s call it three plus one. Logan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nehemia: Okay, so, let’s start with that. What is the most common in the manuscripts? What is what you think is the most authentic? And why do you think it’s the most authentic? And what’s the difference, right? Because these are really very fine subtleties of Greek grammar. Logan: Yeah. So, first, I think we haven’t actually mentioned where people might find the article. Nehemia: Oh, for sure. We’ll put it on nehemiaswall.com… link to it. But yeah, tell us, where was it published? Where did you first present it? Because that’s important too, I think. And where is it published now? Logan: So, I first presented it as a draft form at Houston Christian University New Testament seminar. Nehemia: Okay. Logan: And the video of that is somewhere on YouTube. Nehemia: Oh, we’ll find that and link to it. Logan: That was two years before I kind of submitted my final version, and I made some corrections and changes to the nuances of the argument, but the broad contours of the argument are there. So, I presented it there first, then worked on it for a while, and this was an article that got accepted in, I believe, summer 2022. It wasn’t published until fall ‘24. Part of that was because Cambridge University Press got hacked… Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay. Logan: …and so, they were backlogged forever. The other part of that was, I really wanted to make sure I got everything right, so I spent a long time in between acceptance and final submission to the journal… Nehemia: Okay. Logan: …editing and tweaking and running down every single rabbit hole I could. And still there are some things that, you know, there are some stones that were unturned at the end of the day because these things are infinitely complicated. But I felt like it was finally at a point where it was okay, so then I put in my final submission in January 2024. It came out eight months later or so. So, it’s published in New Testament Studies; the journal is called New Testament Studies. The title of the article is The Stomach Purifies All Foods: Jesus’s Anatomical Argument in Mark 7:18-19. So, it’s open access; anyone can download it for free thanks to Hebrew University Jerusalem and their agreement with Cambridge University Press. Nehemia: Beautiful. So, basically, we have the anatomical argument about… or maybe, let’s say the anatomical interpretation of Mark 7:19, and then we have what I think, maybe, I can call the antinomian interpretation of Mark 7:19. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: In other words… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: …is it the stomach that purified all foods? Which actually isn’t what you argue; you say it’s the man, but we’ll get to that… Logan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nehemia: …or is it… I mean, it’s an ironic title. I mean, like when I finished the article… Logan: For sure. Nehemia: …it should say the… but okay. Logan: “The person”, yeah. Nehemia: “The person”, right, but okay. This sounded more catchy, I suppose. It’s a good title, because the man could be misinterpreted as well. Logan: Yes. Nehemia: So, is it that the man’s stomach purifies all foods? Or is it Jesus purified all food? Those are the two interpretations, basically, that are dominant in… really, I mean, going back to… This was very surprising to me; you quoted Novation, who’s like an anti-pope, if I’m not mistaken, in the 3rd century, who seems to have had the anatomical understanding, and then Origen also, earlier in the 3rd century, had the antinomian interpretation. Logan: Yes. Nehemia: So, this debate within Christianity goes back, basically… I’m bad at math, but like 1,800 years, right? I mean, approximately. Logan: Yes, for sure. So, let me go back to the variants. Nehemia: Yeah. Logan: Because you brought that up. So, in terms of the most common, which doesn’t mean the original reading… Nehemia: You mean you don’t count the number of manuscripts and whoever gets the number wins? Logan: Oh, no. But the most common in the manuscripts in terms of just sheer frequency is the reading of the Textus Receptus, the Received Text, the text from which the King James Bible was translated, which is katharidzon or katharizdon with a short O vowel in the final syllable. So, it’s an Omicron, for those who are familiar with Greek, as opposed to an Omega. Now if you have an Omicron there, katharizdon, then it’s almost certainly a part of Jesus’s speech. Nehemia: Wait, so, which one makes it part of Jesus’s speech? The Omicron. Logan: The Textus Receptus reading, which has the Omicron, the short O, katharizdon, in that reading it’s… it has to be a part of Jesus’s speech. So, everyone who was ever translating from the Textus Receptus, or any manuscript that had a short O in Omicron there, ended up with something like the KJV. “Thus purging all meats,” I think is the KJV version… Nehemia: Something like that, yeah. Logan: …or the NKJV, “Thus purifying all…” Nehemia: Meaning, the stomach, or going to the toilet, or whatever purges all meats from your body. Logan: Yeah. Something in that process that’s described by Jesus. Not going into the heart, but into the stomach, and going out into the latrine. Something about that process, at some point, purges food. Nehemia: So, that’s the anatomical explanation. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: In other words, the purging agent is something in human anatomy. Okay, go on, sorry. Logan: Yes, exactly. Yeah. So, it’s a part of Jesus’s speech, and it’s describing the result of something in the process that Jesus has just talked about. Now, how exactly you construe that is not necessarily self-evident, so we’ll get into the different options there. What I think is probably the correct original reading is the reading which has a long O at the end of the word. So, instead of katharizdon, which has the short O, it’s katharizdohhn, which has a long O, which is an Omega. Nehemia: Although Ori… in ancient times, they were pronounced the same way, which may have led to some of the errors. Logan: Exactly. Yeah. So, you have isochrony. Sorry, that’s a technical term. Nehemia: No, it’s fine. Logan: The difference between Omicron and Omega is length. So, it’s oh versus ohhh. So, often in, like, very certain kinds of pronunciation, modern pronunciation of ancient Greek, you’ll hear the difference between Omicron and Omega be ah and oh. Nehemia: That’s what I was taught at Hebrew University, okay. Logan: Yeah, but in antiquity, they’re exactly the same, the only difference is length. So, they both sound like an Omega, oh, but the difference is katharizdon versus katharizdohhn. Now, in the early centuries AD, those differences in length end up collapsing, so you get a lot of confusion in the manuscripts between Omega and Omicron all the time. If you want to learn more about that, you can read Ben Cantor’s big book on the pronunciation of New Testament… Nehemia: And we’ve had Ben Cantor on the program, of Cambridge University. Logan: Oh, great, yeah. Nehemia: We’ll put a link to that episode. We were actually talking with him about reconstructing pronunciations of Hebrew from the Greek sources rather than the actual Greek pronunciation. Logan: Oof! Not easy stuff. Nehemia: Yeah. Logan: Yeah, I’ll leave that to Ben. Nehemia: He’s brilliant. Logan: He’s a whiz, yeah. Nehemia: Yeah. Logan: So, in any event, what ends up happening is, the majority of the manuscripts end up with the short O, the Omicron, and therefore, for centuries and centuries it’s understood as a part of Jesus’s speech. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t interpret it in an antinomian way, as if Jesus is kind of undoing the law, but they interpret it as a part of his description of what’s happening when food goes into the body and out into the sewer. Now, the other reading, which is the Omega reading, was taken as original when textual criticism really blossomed in the 19th century. So, when all the collections of manuscripts and the kind of discipline of textual criticism emerges, you know, the things like the Novum Testamentum, something like this starts to get published… this is the 28th edition. You know, you get people like Tischendorf and Westcott and Hort, and, you know, that whole kind of blossoming of that discipline; textual critical scholars decide that probably the original reading is an Omega. Katharizdohhn, the long O. Now, if you take that reading, it becomes very grammatically awkward, really no matter which way you cut it. It’s very difficult to understand why this particular participle would appear here in this sentence. So, for those who don’t know Greek, I’ll try to explain this in the most ergonomic way. But if you have… Nehemia: Can I stop you here for a second? Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, the part we didn’t say is that there’s no quotation marks in ancient Greek. So, ultimately the question here is whether katharizdon, which means purging or purifying, is something Jesus said, or if this is a comment by the narrator, “You know, what Jesus just did is he purified all meats.” And when we look at the parallel in Matthew, which you didn’t really address in the article, and I understand why… Logan: Yeah. Not enough time. Nehemia: No, for sure. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: That part’s not there in Matthew, right? Logan: Yes. Nehemia: So, I understand why somebody comparing Matthew and Mark would say, “Oh, okay, here’s what Jesus said. He said the same thing in Matthew and Mark. And then the narrator,” or the author of the gospel, however you want to describe that, “added, ‘thus he, Jesus, purified all meats.’” Meaning, that’s certainly what you find in, let’s say, in the NIV, and then it’s in parentheses in the NIV, at least in my version here… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: …because it’s a parenthetical statement, not part of what Jesus said. And then, katharizdohhn with the Omega is a masculine verb, and then with the Omicron… Logan: A participle, yeah. Nehemia: So, you don’t call that a verb in… Logan: Well, it’s not a finite verb, yeah. Nehemia: All right, but it’s a masculine participle, which is… let’s say in layman’s terms, is a present tense verb, although it’s not exactly how it functions in… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: Meaning, there’s a present tense in addition and it has to do with Greek. So, it’s masculine, and with the Omicron it’s neuter. And neuter means it’s neither masculine nor feminine, like in the equivalent of English “it”. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, if it’s masculine, then who’s the he? The he is understood by most people as Jesus. Okay. Logan: Yes, so, I’ll try to just restate in other terms, in case it helps for people. The Textus Receptus reading with the Omicron makes that participle a neuter. Participles are probably closest to gerunds in English. I mean, that’s a really crass kind of analogy. Nehemia: And that would be what, for those who are… Logan: An -ing verb. Right? So… Nehemia: Okay. Logan: “Cooking the meal, I spilled the pot.” Right? So, cooking the meal, that clause in Greek would probably be something like a participial clause. That’s a very, very rough analogy. Or if I said, you know, “I cooked the meal, thus making myself something to eat,” or something, right? That second clause… Nehemia: So, making there would be the participle, right? Logan: Exactly, yeah. So, something like a gerund clause, something close to that. Nehemia: Alright. Logan: I mean, participles have a wider function, but that’s, in this case, probably the closest. Nehemia: Or you say, “I cooked the meal, satisfying my hunger.” Logan: There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, the second clause there, satisfying my hunger, would be a participial clause, or it could be a lot of things in Greek… Nehemia: And so, the word purging there, that’s what it’s functioning, and the question whether it’s masculine or neuter, what’s the significance of that? Logan: Yeah, so, if it’s neuter, then that means that clause is appositional to the entire event. And that’s a very common thing in Greek, where you have final participial clauses with a neuter participle, which just describes the effect or the result, or offers a summary of the events that were just described. So, something like, “I ate the food, satisfying my hunger,” right? Satisfying my hunger is just a description of what happens, or the result of eating the food. So, in Greek, that would be… well, there you could do it in a number of ways, right? But this is a normal thing we see in Greek, neuter. It’s not super prevalent, but it’s decently attested. And that’s why, for good reason, people who are translating from the Textus Receptus, which has the neuter, are translating that as a part of Jesus’s speech. Jesus is saying, “This is the result of the description of the events I’m describing.” However, if it’s masculine, which would be katharizdohhn, the long O vowel, which is Omega, then it’s very difficult to know how this is functioning. Because usually, masculine participles latch onto a masculine subject. However, you don’t actually have a masculine subject, a grammatical subject, in the previous clauses. You have, “do you not know that everything which goes into a person,” and that’s neuter. And it doesn’t make sense that the thing going in is doing the purging. That wouldn’t make sense. Nehemia: No. Logan: So, interpreters, naturally, right, once we say on the basis of textual criticism that this is probably a masculine participle, then it raises the question: who is the subject? Who is doing the purging, right? If it’s neuter, you can say the events are doing the purging; that’s fine. But if it’s masculine, you have to say that there’s some masculine subject that’s doing the purging, and most translators since that shift (which I think was correct textually) but most translators have taken it to be that Jesus is the implied subject of this participial clause. So, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, “you not see that anything going into a person from without,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. “Thus, Jesus declaring all foods clean.” Now, the difficulty with that is that our translations mask a huge problem here, and that is that this sentence is not actually a sentence in Greek. It’s not a complete sentence. And the first event that got me asking questions that led me down this rabbit hole, from which eventually emerged this article was, I was just reading through all of Mark in Greek over two days or something (this was during the pandemic, so I had a lot of time to just sit down and read my New Testament) and I was like, “Oh, it’s been a while since I’ve read Mark. I’ll just go through the whole thing.” And I was reading through the whole thing, and I got to chapter 7, and I saw that that phrase was katharizdon patetavromata, and I thought, “This is not a complete sentence. How do our English Bibles just render this as a complete sentence? And if it is…” Nehemia: Let me just look here. So, I’m looking here at… yeah, so it’s in parentheses, there’s a period after “out of his body” in the NIV, and then there’s an entire parenthetic statement, “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods,” quote, “clean,” period, unquote. Right? So, it’s presented in the English as a complete sentence. Okay. Logan: Yeah. And it’s not a complete sentence in Greek. What I argue in the article is that if you want this participial clause to function, if you want the subject of it to be Jesus, it requires the participle to behave in incredibly bizarre ways for which we have no analogy, whether in Mark or in ancient Greek. So, the notion that it says, “Jesus said,” and that it has, you know, over 25 words of speech, and then there’s a final hanging participial clause that then jumps out of that speech and goes all the way back and picks up the subject, Jesus, from I think verse… Nehemia: 17, I believe, if I’m not mistaken… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: Oh, no, it’s 18, sorry. Logan: Yeah, that it goes all… It jumps all the way back to the beginning of 18. I mean, that interpretation would require a very bizarre… Nehemia: I think you said something like it’s 32 words distant or something like that? Logan: Okay, 32, yeah, yeah. So, it’s… Nehemia: I mean it’s some number like that in your article. Over 30. Logan: And, you have quotation, right, you have speech that’s breaking that participial clause and the verb. So, you have to say that katharizdon is picking up pal Yesus… Nehemia: No, it’s kai legei. Logan: …implied subject of legei, you know 32 words before, and there’s just no analogy to this. I mean, it’s incredibly bizarre. It’s hard to believe that Greek readers would process that information that way, so because what’s highlighted is this speech, the notion that they should go all the way back and pick up this implied subject is very, very difficult. Nehemia: I mean, Origen was a Greek reader, and he interpreted it that way, right? Logan: Yeah, so, actually, yes, I think I granted him too much credit. It’s actually really not clear in Origen’s text. I think he says like, “Did not Jesus say these things?” I think he says like legei tauta a pen tauta, a katharizdon patetavromata. So, you could actually take his assertion… Nehemia: He could be paraphrasing. Logan: Yeah, or he could say, “Did not Jesus say the following?” Nehemia: Oh, okay. Logan: “Purifying all foods.” So, I think I granted that a bit too quickly, I think. But yes… Nehemia: That could be your follow-up article to explore the different possibilities of Origen. Logan: [Laughter] Yeah. Nehemia: And there I’d be really curious. From what I’ve learned from Ben Cantor is, there’s multiple manuscripts of Origen, and I’d be shocked if they all have the same reading, if there aren’t variants within Origen. Logan: Oh! So, okay, interesting. So, maybe, maybe one manuscript has an Omicron. I was just using whatever was on TLG. Nehemia: Right. So, in other words, like, this is one of the things Ben Cantor was telling me in the interview is… and this is my words, right? It’s almost like a bottomless pit, right? In other words, for each source, you have multiple manuscripts and attestations, right? So, the work that’s been done on the New Testament, which is monumental, over a century-and-a-half, has that really been done on Origen to that level? No, of course not. Right? So, now, you know, good luck almost, right? Logan: Yeah, yeah! Nehemia: It’s not that simple. Logan: Yeah. So, the result of all this technical grammatical stuff is two issues. One is, is the participle… have a short O or a long O, an Omicron or Omega? And if it has the Omega, does that necessarily mean it’s a narratological comment? So, we can imagine something like, you know… Nehemia: What does that mean, a narratological comment? Logan: Yes, I’ll give an example. Yeah, so, like a meta comment by the narrator. So, for example, towards the end of Mark, in the Olivet Discourse, you have all of a sudden Mark jumping out of Jesus’s speech and he says, “Let the reader understand.” Right? Obviously, Jesus is not saying “let the reader understand”, right? But that’s a full sentence, right, so that’s different. But we do have instances where Mark kind of clarifies something, right? And in Mark 7, there’s a little quip where Jesus says, he’s talking about korban, and Mark inserts, namely, that is, ha’estim doron. That means gift, right? So, there are times where… Nehemia: Jesus didn’t have to explain what korban was, because even if they were Greek speakers, and if they were Jews, they know what a korban is, or was… Logan: Yes. Nehemia: And so, you’re saying that’s a parenthetical. It’s like almost in parentheses, the narrator. What comes to mind for me is maybe my favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption, where, you know, there’s these things happening out in the prison yard, and then you hear Morgan Freeman’s voice: “And on that day Andy did such and such,” you know. “That day Andy knew,” right. In other words, the standard way, I mean, the NIV’s translation is, Mark here is like Morgan Freeman, “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean,” right? And what you’re saying is, grammatically, that doesn’t really work because it’s not a full sentence. Was that your initial argument? Logan: Yeah, not a full sentence; requires you picking up a subject too far back. But then it does raise the question: if this is a part of Jesus’s speech, what is this construction? Because it’s weird either way. And who is the subject? So, what I do in the article is, I argue that the subject is anthropos. So, it’s person. And I had kind of an incorrect name for it. I call it a, you know, nominative absolute circumstantial participle, which is one way… Nehemia: Yeah, when I read that, my eyes glazed over. I’m like, “I’ve never heard of that.” Logan: Yeah, you have to classify something, whatever. But I do some examples from the Psalms where you have this. I’ve actually found other examples. I was just reading Judges in the Septuagint the other day, and I found another one. So, maybe there’s more of these in the Septuagint. I’m not sure. Nehemia: Are there any other ones in the New Testament? Logan: So, yes, but because… Nehemia: Okay. Logan: …there’s one in Acts, and maybe one in Mark as well. There’s one in Acts where… I can bring it up. Again, maybe a follow-up article. Nehemia: Save it for your article. Don’t share it here on the podcast. Logan: Yeah. But because it would require too much discussion of explaining why I think this is actually an example of this, I decided to just say the Septuagint examples kind of cut it… Nehemia: So, give us… so for the audience who isn’t familiar about the Septuagint, what is the significance… In other words, how does that apply to Mark, right? Why did you go to the Septuagint and not, like, Plato or Aristotle? Logan: Yeah, so, the Septuagint is originally the Greek translation of the Pentateuch… Nehemia: The Torah, yeah. Logan: …the Torah, but we use that to refer to, generally, the tradition of Greek translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. Sometimes, this brushes over some complexities. There are a lot of revision processes that are going on in other kind of multiple versions of the Septuagint, so, we say The Septuagint, but often that runs roughshod over different translation traditions and re-translations and stuff like that. But so, in general, we have Greek translations of the Old Testament, of the Hebrew Bible, and the speech forms that are in these translations are very influential for the ways that Jews write and speak Greek. Now, it’s not to say that those only were mediated through the Septuagint, but there are a number of translational and kind of syntactic and idiomatic phrases that are kind of set in Jewish Greek writing and speaking because of the Septuagint. So, we have examples of that in English where we have set phrases in English that actually ultimately derive from the KJV. You know, I’m trying to think of… Nehemia: So, an example of that is “to find favor in his eyes”, which, when that was translated (my understanding is that was translated by Tyndale, or whoever) was gibberish in English, because it’s not an English expression; it’s a Hebrew-ism. Logan: Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there’s a lot of things that kind of make transitional decisions and kind of ways of speaking idioms, et cetera, that make their way into… Nehemia: So, that’s an interesting question. I once took a course with Emmanuel Tov, and he presented us that there’s two, really, approaches to the awkward Greek of the Septuagint. One is that there was a dialect of Judeo-Greek, and this is how Jews spoke, or somebody was maybe not the best translator, and he translated it very literally. And that created this set of idioms, which is what you’re describing. In other words, that style then influenced other Jewish writers Logan: Yes, yeah. Nehemia: Okay. Logan: Yeah. But maybe that kind of idiolect did exist outside of the Septuagint and carried on on its own, right? I’m open to both of those possibilities. I’m no Septuagint scholar. I’m no scholar of the history of Greek either, so I can’t really offer an informed, super research-informed opinion on that. But the important thing is that there are certain kinds of ways of constructing sentences that, if we find them in the Septuagint, it makes it plausible that Mark, maybe, is familiar with something similar. And might be doing something similar, even if that’s unfamiliar to us. So, this kind of construction, which I’ve given this horrible barbarian name to it, the ‘nominative absolute circumstantial participle,’ is just a kind of construction that we find in the Septuagint and helps explain why this participle might be masculine. So, while we can say that the reading of the more recent textual critics against the Textus Receptus is correct, but that does not mean that we must say that Jesus is the subject. And this is where I disagree with a lot of scholars who say that, if we accept the newer reading, that it’s actually an Omega and therefore it’s masculine, there’s no way around saying that Jesus is the subject. So, that’s what Craig Blomberg says. And I think the sentence after that, I just say, “I beg to differ.” So, that’s often been the assumption; that either we take the Textus Receptus and we think it’s a part of Jesus’s speech, or we take the more recent text forms, and we say that it’s a parenthetical comment and that the subject is Jesus. And those are our only two options. I say, “Actually, I can have my cake, and I can eat it too. I can say that I like the Omega, and I can say that it’s a part of Jesus’s speech.” So, that’s the kind of syntactical, grammatical part of the argument, but it doesn’t actually tell you what it means, right? Nehemia: What’s beautiful about this is, because this is such a rare structure that you had to find in a few places in the Septuagint, it explains how someone like Origen comes along (and if not Origen, then others, meaning the copyists) and they see this, they’re like, “Well, that’s weird. Oh, okay, he really meant an Omicron, not an Omega…” Logan: Exactly, yeah. Nehemia: “… because I don’t know what the structure means.” Logan: Yes. Nehemia: And then in Bezae, you have katharidzei. Could you maybe say a few words about that? Logan: Yeah, so, is there a subject in Bezae? Is it just katharidzei? Nehemia: That’s a good question. Logan: Um… Nehemia: Even if there isn’t a subject, there’s an implied subject where… Logan: Yes. Yeah, katharizdei. Yeah. So, what that does is, that actually transforms that clause into a complete sentence. So, instead of saying, “I ate the food, satisfying my hunger,” it’s “I ate the food. This,” implied, “satisfied my hunger.” Right? So, Codex D, or Codex Bezay, Bezae is probably actually correct. I think you correctly said it, Bezae. Nehemia: I have no idea. I’ve only ever seen it in writing. Logan: I don’t actually know how you pronounce it. But Codex D changes that into a complete sentence. Now, again, what’s curious, though, is that even if it’s a complete sentence, if it doesn’t say ho Yesus, if it doesn’t say Jesus, we may still dispute what the subject of that verb actually is. Nehemia: So, in other words… Logan: And the same goes with the masculine participle. Nehemia: So, in Bezae or Bezay, Codex D, “he purged all foods,” but who’s the he? Logan: Yeah, right. Well, purges, right? It’s present tense, but yeah. Nehemia: Oh, he purges, okay. Oh, “he purges all foods.” Okay. Logan: Yeah. Or it purges all foods. Right? Nehemia: Right. And he may not translate directly into English. What is an it? In other words, you could have certain anatomical parts of the body that are he, even though in English we’d say it. Yeah. Logan: And if it’s he, is it the person into whom food is going in and out? Or is it Jesus? Right? So, it’s still… Nehemia: That’s why in the NIV… Logan: … a lot is up for grabs here, yeah. Nehemia: In the NIV, it’s so important for them that they add “in saying this.” Right? Logan: Yes. Nehemia: Which is entirely the translators… well, they’re drawing that from the beginning of verse 18 from legei, he says. Logan: Yes. Nehemia: But the words “in saying this” don’t actually appear in… that’s in any Greek manuscript. Am I right? As far as… Logan: No, there’s no hutos or anything, yeah… Nehemia: Okay, alright. Logan: But it does go to show how much you have to supply to make that sentence make sense. You have to turn it into a complete sentence, and you have to (or potentially, right), you have to add the subject, Jesus. You have to… right? I mean there’s a lot of moves that are masked in that English translation. Nehemia: And in the old Syriac, and I’m getting this from your article I believe, Sinai Syriac 30… Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: …has something like umitdaka. I’m pronouncing that like an Israeli… Logan: Yeah, let me bring it up. Nehemia: And that translates according to UBS 5 into (and I guess they’re getting it from Peter’s article) kai kathorizatai, meaning something like “and is purified.” Right? So, there it’s in the passive; all food is purified. Logan: …oh, no, that’s the shita, not the other one, sorry. Yeah. Nehemia: So, it’s the itpa’al… Logan: So, it’s the kula mekhla. Or… Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there, I translate that as “Because it does not enter into the heart, but into the stomach, and it is cast out outside, and all food is purified.” So, now, what the forlaga, that’s a technical term for what the original Greek behind that translation is, is difficult to ascertain. Peter Williams, in his wonderful monograph on the Syriac translations of the Gospels, argues that it is a passive, katharizdatai. So, he argues that it’s “all food is purified”, “katharizdatai panzatathromata”, which is possible. But what’s interesting there is that it really does sound like the Syriac thinks that this phrase was a part of Jesus’s speech. Both Syriac translations seem to suggest that. So, it might be the case that they had manuscripts that had the Omicron, and they were kind of smoothing out and clarifying what it meant, or maybe they had the Omega, and they still thought it was a part of Jesus’s speech. And really, the only, kind of, point of that is to show that there’s a very, very strong tradition in our earliest translation and among our earliest interpreters. It’s not unanimous, but there is a very strong tradition of the earliest Christians reading this as a part of Jesus’s speech. And so, that just raises the issue that, right, whatever manuscript they had, this is a really prevalent idea, namely that whatever is said there is a part of Jesus’s speech. So, we should keep it as a real possibility. But yeah. Nehemia: It also suggests that whatever the original text was, was problematic, and so, different copyists and translators had to modify it in different ways, or felt they needed to modify it in different ways, to make it coherent. I mean, so, that’s always one of the questions, I think. Is it… you know it, you know, there’s what they call Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is the best one, right? Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: So, do we really need this convoluted sort of explanation? No, it’s not convoluted. What we currently have is convoluted, right? Logan: Yes, absolutely. Nehemia: In other words, saying that katharidzon, purifying or purging, goes back to something, you know, at the beginning of the previous verse (and they’re very long verses here, like I think over 30 words) that’s the convoluted one. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, by the way, it still could be right. But you’re offering, I think, a simpler explanation. Now, let’s talk a bit about the stakes, meaning, like, in the entire New Testament, or say, in the Gospels, let’s say, am I right? This is the only explicitly antinomian verse, let’s say, in the words of Jesus? Logan: I guess it depends on your interpretation of other things. Nehemia: For sure. Logan: I mean, a lot of, like, you know, a lot of people will read the end of Mark 2:23-28 as if Jesus is disregarding Shabbat law. Nehemia: Okay. Logan: I don’t take that. I don’t think that’s necessarily prevalent, but some people do take it that way. I mean, there are a lot, right? Let the dead bury their dead. Jesus doesn’t care about the Fifth Commandment, or because, you know, someone’s saying, “I should stay to bury my father,” and he says, “I don’t care about that; follow me anyways.” I mean, I don’t buy any of these interpretations, right? But there are a lot of places where people historically have seen Jesus being antinomian. Nehemia: So, here’s the difference. Every one of those, you could explain away. Logan: Absolutely, yeah. Nehemia: In other words, you could say, “Well, he’s not against Shabbat, he’s against this Rabbinical, expansive interpretation of the 39 melachot, 39 forms of labor on Shabbat.” Whereas this, you really can’t explain away. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: In other words, if the NIV is right, then it’s straight out: Jesus declared all foods clean. It’s unequivocal. Logan: So, the one caveat I’ll make to that is that I would say that I think this is probably… what I’m about to say is probably the most… from my experience, and maybe you have a different experience, is probably the most prevalent interpretation amongst, like, Messianic Jewish communities. Nehemia: Which is what? Logan: So, let’s say we take it as a part of Jesus’s speech; he declared all foods clean. What he’s actually saying is that food cannot contract secondary impurity. Nehemia: I’ve never heard that interpretation. Logan: Oh, really? Okay, I hear that a lot. Nehemia: It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but the interpretation I always encounter (and not necessarily Messianic Jews, but Christians who are looking to follow the Torah) is they’ll say, “Well, I mean, the NIV changed it, and the King James is…” Logan: “The King James is right,” yeah, okay. Nehemia: And I’m like, “Well, what’s that based on?” “Well, it’s based on my global understanding of the message of Jesus.” Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: “Okay, what’s the text critical explanation?” They don’t have one. So, that’s what I think is so important about what you’ve done, is, not only is this possible… Right? Because ultimately, this is one of the questions I want to ask you; could it be that the NIV interpretation is possible? Meaning, it’s not im-possible, right? Logan: I mean, of course, because we’re dealing with a corpus, as in like, because none of us are native Greek speakers, right? Nehemia: Yeah. Logan: And because Mark… I don’t want to be, like, prescriptivist, but Mark’s Greek sometimes can be a little, you know, like… let me put it this way: I don’t think he’s a native speaker. Nehemia: You don’t think Mark is a native speaker? Logan: I don’t think Mark is a native speaker. So, like, the people who argue that this is… Nehemia: What do you think his native language is? Logan: I think he’s native Aramaic or native Hebrew, probably a native Aramaic, at least, speaker. That’s, that’s just a vibe, right? Nehemia: Okay. Logan: So, don’t, don’t quote me on that. Nehemia: Well, I mean, you just said it on a podcast, but we won’t quote you. Logan: As in: don’t quote me in scholarly papers about that, right? Nehemia: Okay. Logan: “Dr. Williams says this” or whatever. So, but that’s a… that’s… that’s a vibe I get from Mark. But it’s not to say his Greek is bad or impossible to render, but sometimes there are some things I’m like, “Okay, I get what you mean, but…” Nehemia: So, I was once told by a professor at Hebrew University who was in the Classics Department, she said that the Greek of Josephus is basically incomprehensible to someone who’s a classicist, who’s fluent in, you know, the Greek of Aristotle and Plato. Which is difficult in itself, right? And there, it really comes out, according to this person. And he says that, by the way. Josephus says he wrote it in… Logan: In Aramaic. He wrote War in Aramaic. Oh, man, how I wish… Nehemia: In Hebrew Aramaic, a Jewish dialect, and then he has an assistant… Logan: Yes. Nehemia: … it seems, to help him translate it into Greek. So, this is not unprecedented in this period. So, what you’re saying is, maybe Mark is using an awkward construction because he’s not a native Greek speaker. Logan: Yeah. Nehemia: What I like about seeing the four variants, I think I said this already, is that it shows that whatever was original was difficult… Logan: Yes. Nehemia: …and so, people are reconciling it. Look, that’s the argument; the difficilior lectio, the more difficult reading, is preferable. Which is this principle… Logan: Yeah, so, what’s the variant that explains all the other variants, right? It’s probably the case that it had an Omega, and people thought, that’s weird, and so they kind of defaulted to an Omicron. Or if you think of a situation where someone’s reading out a text and another person is copying it, and if you’re at a time where there’s isochrony between Omega and Omicron, so they sound exactly the same, somebody could have, by default, just interpreted that as, “Oh, that’s an Omicron,” right? Like if I said there and their, you might think in some context, I might be saying a different form of there, right? Because they would sound exactly the same. So, if there was a situation where someone was copying by someone else reading a text, right; you can think of all these other situations. Something like, you know, Codex D, which has a finite verb, right? It’s very unlikely that a finite verb turns into a really awkward participle. And it’s probably unlikely that the neuter participle, which uses a very common construction of a neuter participle in apposition to a clause, then turns into an Omega. So, we’re probably left with the fact that the Omega, which is the weirdest reading, explains the existence of all the other readings. And so, we have to go with it, I think. But again, it doesn’t mean the NIV is right! Nehemia: And you noted in one of your footnotes, and I’m curious if you still stand by this, that your interpretation works with the other readings as well. In other words… Logan: Yep. Nehemia: Okay. Logan: Yeah, so… Nehemia: Even though you prefer the Omega reading. Logan: If you have katharizdon… So, let me put it this way; in terms of interpretation and translation, I think the KJV gets it right. They kind of say, “thus purging all meats”. Now, how that’s interpreted, again, I think the translators interpreted purge there as expel from the body, which I disagree with. But I think in terms of just a translation proposal, that’s pretty much on the right track. However, I happen to just think that we can get to the same translation through a different text and through understanding this clause in a particular way. — Logan: So, on the NIV, I guess, I think it would be helpful to go through, like, once we kind of accept it’s an Omega, and if we accept it’s a part of Jesus’s speech, what are the interpretations that possibly obtain? You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com. We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith! SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Pandora SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS(Please click here to donate)Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. VERSES MENTIONED Mark 7; Matthew 15 Mark 13:14 BOOKS MENTIONED The orthodox corruption of Scripture : the effect of early Christological controversies on the text of the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman Jesus the Pharisee: Maccoby, Hyam: 9780334029144: Amazon.com The Halakhah at Qumran by Lawrence H. Schiffman RELATED EPISODES Hebrew Voices Episodes Support Team Study – MORE Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021 Hebrew Voices #144 – The Scribe of the Leningrad Codex Support Team Study – Bible Vowels of Ancient Israel Hebrew Voices #142 – Sign Language of the Synagogue OTHER LINKS The Stomach Purifies All Foods: Jesus’ Anatomical Argument in Mark 7.18–19 | New Testament Studies | Cambridge Core The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - IMDb The post Hebrew Voices #250 – Did Jesus Make All Foods Clean? – Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

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  4. Number 4: SNEAK PEEK! Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah: Part 2

    Watch the Sneak Peek of Ginsburg's Lost Masorah: Part 2, where Nehemia and Dr. David Moster keep the discoveries coming; two more mystery manuscripts identified; a medieval Spanish Bible resurfaces from a Met exhibit. Then, a detail hiding in the ink that nobody saw coming: Ginsburg left his thumbprint behind. In multiple colors. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio Watch the full episode TOMORROW plus hundreds of hours of other in-depth studies by becoming a Support Team Member! SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Pandora SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS(Please click here to donate)Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. The post SNEAK PEEK! Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

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  5. Number 5: Hebrew Voices #249 – Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah

    In this episode of Hebrew Voices #249 - Ginsburg's Lost Masorah: Part 1, Nehemia Gordon sits down with Dr. David Moster, Director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, to trace the remarkable detective story behind his peer-reviewed article "A Chance Discovery." Together they unpack the world of Christian David Ginsburg, who became the unlikely founder of modern Masoretic studies, and reveal how a four-volume, 2,500-page monument of biblical scholarship turned out to be hiding a secret in plain sight! I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio Transcript Hebrew Voices #249 – Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com. David: Jews and Christians can sit down next to each other and study at the same time without… and it makes it better for everyone, in my personal opinion. So… Nehemia: Is this an example of diversity is our strength? In other words, that motto actually has something profound behind it, which is that, if everybody has the same view on the world, you’re going to have blind spots. But where diversity really is powerful (and this is, I think, a very Jewish idea) is where you have lots of different perspectives and beliefs and approaches, and you have conversations where, maybe at first you’re talking past each other, because you have a set of assumptions, they have a set of assumptions, and you realize, “Oh, I never thought that somebody else would see the world that way.” — Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today once again with Dr David Moster. He is the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the JTS, in New York. He’s also the director of the Institute for Biblical Culture. David, what is the Biblical Hebrew Program at JTS at the Jewish Theological Seminary? Does somebody have to be a student at JTS to participate in that? David: No, we actually created it for anyone and everyone. It’s all on Zoom; it’s for people at different levels. Right now, for example, we’re running 10 courses with 150 different people, and they are at levels beginning with the Aleph–Bet, reading to learn, and then we have in our more advanced classes, people reading four or five, six chapters of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, at one time. Nehemia: Wow. David: So, we really have from Aleph to Tav, not A to Z, we have from Aleph to Tav, all at the same time. It’s all on Zoom, and everyone is welcome to check out our website at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Nehemia: So, I’ll just share a little story about that. We had a member of what we call our Scholar Club write through my website and contact Lynell and say, “I’m looking for a biblical Hebrew program.” So, I told her to ask you, and now she’s taking it. She’s about to sign up for it. So, she’s like, “Wait a minute, why wouldn’t I do this? This is online. I’m going to learn something here.” She went to Israel and did the Aleph program about two or three years ago. Well, it was actually 2023, just before the war. So, she was there for six weeks at Hebrew University, very intense, but she hasn’t been able to get back to it. So, she’s going to do the online course. What is JTS, for those who don’t know? It’s actually a flagship of Jewish learning. David: It’s the Jewish Theological Seminary. It’s on Broadway and 122nd Street in New York. Nehemia: You’re such a New Yorker. That means nothing to most of my audience. David: It’s the upper, upper West Side, right near Columbia University, and it has been there for more than a hundred years. It’s a really important institution in, not only scholarship in America, Jewish scholarship, but as well, also, synagogue life and Jewish life. So, it organizes a lot of different synagogues and camps and things like that. So, it’s really a multifaceted institution. Nehemia: It really is a flagship of Jewish learning. I would put it up there with Yeshiva University and Hebrew Union College. What is the significance of it being on Broadway? I literally don’t know why that’s important. Is there a lot of music there, or something? David: Everybody knows Broadway, so there you go! It’s like, you know, everyone will ask you, “Where do you live?” You want to tell them you live by some kind of landmark. So, I guess we’re on Broadway. Nehemia: So, I grew up in Chicago, and for decades after, I would meet people from like, you know, I don’t know, Skokie or Evanston, and they would say with a straight face they were from Chicago. And I’d be like, “No, you’re not. I’m really from the city.” David: Skokie’s suburb, yeah. Nehemia: I mean, it’s whatever, it’s like a couple miles from where I grew up, so it’s six of one, one-half dozen of the other. But if you’re from there, it’s like Broadway is important, and West Rogers Park is important. Okay, so, I wanted to ask you to come on today because you have a journal article that just came out, and it is in a journal called Sfarad, which is very interesting because Sfarad is sort of the ancient Hebrew word for Spain. I say sort of because it appears in the Tanakh, and in the Tanakh it doesn’t refer to Spain. Well, I don’t know, if it does or doesn’t is perhaps a matter of debate. But generally, it’s thought it doesn’t. But Sfarad is Spain in the Middle Ages, and it’s the modern Hebrew word. When we talk about Sephardic Jews, it means that they’re associated with the culture of Jews that were expelled from Spain in the 14th and 15th century. It’s funny, I once had this encounter online, there was a person saying he was a Sephardic Jew, and one of these online scholars (meaning someone who doesn’t know anything) said, “Oh, what is he? His grandmother must be 500 years old. How could she be from Spain?” And I’m like, “Really, guys? Really?” Like, no, Jews whose ancestors were in Spain for some period of time, or not necessarily in Spain, were associated with Spain. You could be from Morocco as well. They are called Sephardic Jews. All right, so I’m going to share my screen here. I’m actually going to start with that. And you have this journal article here. And a lot of times when I’m doing the interviews, it’s before the journal article comes out. So, this is actually… I think when we scheduled this, it was before the article came out, where we first discussed it. And it’s called, “The Chance Discovery: Christian David Ginsburg’s Notes on Two Historic Codices,” which, guys, it’s actually an amazing piece of modern-day detective work. So, can we start out with, who is Christian David Ginsburg? It’s a bit of, almost like, a self-contradiction, because Ginsburg and David are Jewish names, and Christian is… I guess you couldn’t have a more Christian name. Who is Christian David Ginsburg? Why is he important for the Jewish Theological Seminary? David: Before we get to that, I need to give a spoiler. The reason this article is in Sfarad, which is about Spanish Jewry and their descendants, is because this little detective work is going to lead to two very old ancient books that come from there. So, we’re going to get there eventually. So, that’s what the Sfarad was, really, an important key to this. Now, in terms of Christian David Ginsburg, he was a fascinating person. He was living in Warsaw. He was a rabbinical student in the late 1800s, and he basically came in contact with some Christian missionaries in Warsaw. And he started arguing with them (and I’ve rarely heard this) he actually, basically, was arguing to try and convince them to Judaism, whereas they convinced him to Christianity. And he was literally in rabbinical school, and he’s like, all of a sudden leaving rabbinical school and his life behind. He even had a kid. I imagine his whole family disowned him, and he became a believing Christian. I originally thought that maybe he had converted to Christianity to be able to move up in society. There are cases like this in the historical record, of people who converted from Judaism to Christianity to move up in society, and Christian David Ginsburg certainly did that, but by all indications he was a devout believer. The cherry on top was that he was able to move up. He moved to London where his mother was from, and he was able to move through society and really become an important figure in Victorian England. And so, the period we’re going to be talking about with him is going to be in the 1880s. Nehemia: So, guys, this is important background. Jews in the 1800s, and in Russia up until 1917, were by law second-class citizens, and oppressed and persecuted. And if a Jew wanted to become a professor at a university, he would often, in many countries, have to convert to Christianity. And it’s almost… I don’t know, is it comical? Meaning, many of these Jews who converted to Christianity didn’t believe in Judaism, and believed no more in Christianity… David: Right. Nehemia: …and frankly, neither did most of the Christians around them. So, they were looking at these socioeconomic boundaries, saying, “You can’t become a professor because you are a Jew,” and he’d be like, “I don’t even believe in Judaism.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t believe in Christianity. So, just say you’re a Christian, be baptized formally and officially,” that’s a legal act in Europe at the time, “and then you can advance in society. Yeah, we’ll still call you dirty Jew for sure, of course we will, to your face, not just behind your back, but you’ll be able to be a professor, and you’ll be able to advance.” And you’re saying Christian David Ginsburg… So, he took the name Christian. He wasn’t given that name, he took that name when he converted. David: You said a lot of people didn’t believe in Judaism or Christianity. Nehemia: Yeah. David: I think Ginsburg believed in both. Nehemia: Right. David: He believed in Judaism, and after, Christianity. Nehemia: So, that’s what’s so interesting about him. In other words… I mean, I’ve encountered people who are leaders of churches who don’t believe in Christianity. And I’ve encountered people who are leaders of synagogues who don’t believe in Judaism, let’s say according to the traditional formulations. Let’s be fair there, right? And so, that’s a phenomenon that still happens today. But in the 19th century, in the 1800s, that was the difference of, you know, are you some pulpit rabbi who is barely eking out a living? Or are you a respected professor at a university? That could be the difference. David: Right. And so, Ginsburg went to England, and he became a scholar of, interestingly, people on the fringe of Judaism; the Essenes, the Karaites. He wrote a commentary on the Book of Daniel, all these different kinds of things which are really on the fringes in terms of apocalyptics and all that other stuff that’s going on, which isn’t normally in the mainstream of Judaism. But eventually he settled on something that is where I come in, and he basically wrote a four-volume encyclopedia. And it’s not a regular encyclopedia, where it’s just alphabetical and it’s just different topics. What he did was, he went through tens if not hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscript notes (and these are all on the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible) and what he did was, he made sense of them and put them all in order. And that’s his magnum opus, this four-volume work, which if you have it, you all of a sudden can open it up and really have access to dozens and dozens of manuscripts, all at one shot. Nehemia: And I was just working on something recently, related… not related to this per se, but related to this whole idea that, up until recently, the greatest scholars in the world didn’t have access to manuscripts, they had to rely on what other scholars said. And today, most people, even if they had access to the manuscript, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. And so, what he’s done… and I’ll share the screen here. This is available on archive.org, the full scan of the text. And here he wrote this book called The Masorah. And guys, what is Masorah? Masorah is something like… it means the transmission, so we’ll say something like textus receptus, or the received text… which in Hebrew slash English we call the Masoretic Text, meaning the transmitted text preserved by Jews. That’s what Masoretic Text is. Well, maybe you have a different understanding of Masorah. I’ll let you explain in a minute. David: Nehemia, tell them how many pages there are at the bottom left. It says you’re on page 6 out of… Nehemia: 2,537! David: This is a whopper! This is one of the biggest books you could ever get in both height and in thickness. It’s 2,500 pages long. Nehemia: Let’s have a look at something here. So, the Masoretic notes are these thousands or maybe like you said, tens of thousands (I don’t know that we’ve counted them) notes that have different details. So, for example, here is note 447 under the letter Mem, and it has some detail of… we could look at this and, I don’t know… David: Do a different one. That’s not… yeah. Nehemia: Okay, let’s do a straightforward one, where we won’t completely lose the audience. Let’s see, let’s find an easy one. No, that’s also too complicated for most people. Basically, it’s all kinds of minutiae of spelling, and when we say it’s the transmitted text, what it really means is, there was an attempt to preserve these details. Down to very fine details. David: Right, like right there, it says… Nehemia: Oh! This is a beautiful one. I believe Daniel Mynott gave a lecture or something related to this. So, “There are three Heys in the Torah,” “hanir’in tmuhot ve’einan tmuhot,” “which appear questionable but are not questionable.” That’s not what it means. They appear to be interrogative Hey. In other words, Biblical Hebrew has two types of… the letter Hey means the, but there’s also a Hey that introduces a question. So, in other words, you begin with… yeah. David: And Nehemia, for those of us who want to learn this, this is our second class in our class on Biblical Hebrew. Nehemia: Is it? Okay. David: It’s prefixes. So, you have one prefix, which means the, and another one which is a question mark. Nehemia: Beautiful. So, here we have ha’nefesh, which means the soul, “ha’nefesh ha’chotet hi tamut,” “the soul that sins, it shall die,” that is from Ezekiel 18:20. And then, here is a Hey that, in principle, should be a question. “Ha’shofet kol ha’aretz?” “Is it so that the judge of all the earth?” “Ha’echad ba lagur?” “Is it so that one will come to live among us?” So, this Masoretic note is saying, “These three Heys appear to be interrogative Heys, Hey ha’she’ela, the Hey of questioning, but it’s not really a Hey of questioning.” Why does it tell you that? Because a scribe copying this will come along and say, “Wait a minute; there’s no question here. I’m going to change the vowels…” David: Change it… Nehemia: “…to the regular Hey, not the Hey of a question.” So, that’s a very important note. So, my approach to these notes (by and large, there’s exceptions) but most of these notes, I understand them as sort of proofreading notes, that they’re notes for the scribe. That the next copyist (or maybe the original copyist as well, right) that when he comes to it, he doesn’t make a correction, because it’s the impulse of scribes to correct what they see as mistakes. And so, this is a sort of controlling mechanism to prevent them from making a mistake. David: Right, and it could be these are mistakes, but we keep them. That’s what it’s saying. Nehemia: Right. That’s interesting. David: “Just because you think it’s a mistake, we know it could be. It doesn’t matter. This is what we got.” Nehemia: This is how the text has come down to us… David: Come down to us. Nehemia: …and we’re going to continue transmitting it that way, and that’s what we mean by Masoretic Text. Go ahead. David: So, almost two years ago, I turned 40, and my in-laws wrote me a check. And they said, there was a condition on it for my birthday. They said, “David, you can’t use this to pay the electric company. You got to get something you like. Okay? You got to get something you like.” So, I said, “I want to get a copy of Christian David Ginsburg’s The Masorah, the 2,500-page whopper.” That’s what I wanted. Nehemia: Even though it’s on archive.org, you wanted a physical copy. David: Yeah. Anybody who’s used PDFs knows that there’s good things, but there’s bad things. You can’t really move quickly through a PDF, especially if it’s an encyclopedia. You’re not reading through, you’re jumping around… Nehemia: About a year ago, I was looking at some very fine detail in this book, in Ginsburg’s Masorah, based on the archive.org scan, and I actually couldn’t tell what the accents and vowels were, and I wrote to you and I said, “Can you send me a photo from your phone of the physical copy,” because you’re one of the few people I know personally who has a physical copy. And I all of a sudden saw, “Oh, I thought there was a patach and it was a tzere,” or something, I don’t remember. But the printing isn’t amazing, and on top of that, the scan is less amazing. So, if you take a photo with your phone, there’s details you can see. Like even here, I’ll share this again. Are these tzeres or patachs? I mean, I know from the context this is heisir, but that could have been a patach. How do I know it’s a tzere? Because I know Hebrew, right? But if I didn’t know the context, if there was ambiguous context, which was the case what we were dealing with… David: Right. Nehemia: …I would need the physical copy or a better scan, right? David: And even then, these were actually printed… and he says London on the front page. London. But it was really printed in Austria or Germany. Nehemia: Really? David: And he wasn’t the print setter. So, there are mistakes that crept in. Nehemia: But here, even if it’s not a mistake, I don’t know what he printed, or what was printed, because it’s not the greatest scan ever. And to begin with, in these 1800s (I have some printed books in the 1800s) it’s often hard to tell the difference between Hey and Chet, and very similar letters and symbols. David: Right. So, what happened was, I took the money and I said I’m going to buy this really old book. They have some reprints, which are almost as much as the books cost me, and so, I just went for the original. And it was funny, because there was this guy on eBay selling them for about six-and-a-half thousand dollars. And I wrote the person, I said, “Listen, the last time these sold at auction, it was for six hundred dollars. So, like, why are you asking so much money, that you’re going to… that’s what you want?” And he said, they’re signed; they’re signed copies. So, I said, “Okay. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to use these. I don’t care that they’re signed.” Nehemia: But for a lot of book collectors… David: Then I found on a website… Nehemia: Wait, hold on. So, for a lot of book collectors a signed original copy is worth more than not unsigned. So, if you have an original, I don’t know, The Hobbit, First Edition, signed by J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s worth thousands or more dollars. I don’t know how much it’s worth. It’s worth a lot of money. If it’s in good condition. David: Right. But I was going to be using these books, so like, it didn’t… Nehemia: So, for you, it’s functional. You don’t care if it’s something… David: Yeah. Sure, when people from your podcast come to visit my home, I’ll show them. People are interested. But for most people, it’s not the biggest deal. So, I found on a website called ABE Books… Nehemia: ABE Books. Yeah, I assume. David: I used to think it was “Abe” Books. It was A-B-E, ABE Books, and I found on there, there was a copy in Cleveland that was going for 1,100 dollars, and it was not signed. Nehemia: Okay. David: And so, that is the copy that I got. I got them to come down a little bit, but that was the copy that I got. Nehemia: Because it wasn’t signed, you got it for less. David: Yeah. There’s the six-and-a-half for the signed, and the unsigned one was just about 1,100 dollars. If you could show on your screen what it looked like. Nehemia: Ah, from your article. David: Yeah. Nehemia: “My well-worn copy of the Masorah,” it says. David: And so, Nehemia, for those who are just listening, can you describe the condition of the book? Nehemia: So, there’s four cloth-bound volumes. I believe that’s cloth. The binding is kind of tattered, torn, literally in some places torn. In one place, it looks like a little bit of it is missing. These, for collectors, would not be worth a whole lot of money. And it just goes to show 1,100 dollars instead of 6,500 dollars. David: Right. You go get a re-bound, it’s beat up. It’s like someone’s used this. Nehemia: Or a lot of collectors would just say, “No, I’m going to buy a better one. If I want one in my collection, I want one that…” Like, I saw an explanation where, like, this little thing at the top of the… what is it they call that, of the back of the binding? If this is split… or here, like for example, here it’s bent back, the difference of that, of, like, a first edition of… I don’t know, of Dickens or something, would be the difference between hundreds and maybe tens of thousands, especially if it’s signed, right? David: Right. But for me, didn’t matter. Nehemia: What do you care? Right. You’re interested in the contents. David: Right. I’m using this book. So, let’s scroll down… this is… Nehemia: Okay. David: Yeah, so you can see here that it wasn’t signed. Nehemia: So, it says on the front of volume 1, name of subscriber is left blank, name of copy is blank, and signature of the author. So, what does that mean, subscriber? We don’t think about that today. We go to Amazon and we buy a book… David: Yeah. Nehemia: What’s a subscriber? David: Yeah, so, the idea was that it cost a lot of capital to publish a book. So, before you would publish it, you would go around to all the seminaries, the churches (in this case, the synagogues) and you might say, “Hey, are you going to want to buy a book?” And then you pay in advance. And I bet… Nehemia: Look, we have something like that today. It’s called Kickstarter, but basically… David: We did! Is that still around? Nehemia: I don’t know if it’s still around or not, but I once bought something on Kickstarter and I regretted it later. But it looked so amazing. But you never know, there are some amazing things that came off of Kickstarter. So, the idea was… and here was an unusual situation, but maybe not so unusual for Jewish books; Ginsburg had to pay for the printing himself. David: Right. Nehemia: And he didn’t have any money! Right? It could be… I don’t know what it would have been; a lot of money. And I’ve printed books. It’s very expensive. Now we have print on demand, which requires a lot less capital. Right? You can do it up front for, relatively inexpensive, and then each one costs more to print. But back then, you would go to a printer and say, “I want 500 copies.” You probably didn’t have more than 500 copies, I would guess. I don’t know. Look, even 20 years ago, when I was working on some publications that were being printed by Oxford University Press and Brill, I asked the question, “How many copies do you guys print?” And one of them was 850 copies. I’m like, “How is that possible? I wrote a popular book, not an academic book, and I did 3,000 copies.” And I was told by the printer, “Are you sure you even want to do this? Is it even worth it for you?” “Yeah, it’s worth it for me. I know it costs a lot of money, but it’s worth it, because I want to get this stuff out.” And then, when I reprinted, I did 5,000 copies. Brill was an Oxford University Press. I think it was Brill, was doing 850 copies for a semi-popular book, meaning it was an academic book but meant for the broad public. So, in the 1800s, I don’t know how many copies he made. Maybe it was 100, maybe it was 500. It wasn’t tens of thousands of copies. And so, he would collect money. He would collect subscriptions and say, “Oh, you want a copy?” And if he had enough subscriptions, he could print ones maybe that weren’t subscription, I guess. I’m not really sure how it worked. David: Yeah, it was hard to get a copy. There’s a story that the tsar of Russia, who had a lot of manuscripts (and if you have Hebrew manuscripts, this book is really important) wrote a letter to the ambassador of England saying, “Hey, can you get me Ginsburg’s The Masorah?” So, yeah, it was… Nehemia: Was he able to get it? David: I imagine so. You would know better, Nehemia, because you went to St. Petersburg. Nehemia: Well, we’d have to look it up in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. So, that’d be an interesting question for someone to go look up; did the Tsar ultimately get it, and is his a signed copy? So, why was the copy signed? That’s a weird thing to us today. In other words, so, here’s an important thing; if you have a signed copy of Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby, or something he wrote, I don’t think it was signed originally. Somebody bought the book from a commercial bookseller or commercial publisher (the publisher sold it to booksellers who, then, you bought the book from them) and then you would maybe meet the author, and you would ask him to sign it. Here it’s completely different. How did these get signed, and why? David: Well, I think they were signing it almost as, like, a thank you. And like, “Hey, you signed up for this. Thank you.” And also, to make sure that you’re getting my copy, that nobody else is pirating it. Nehemia: So, this is an interesting concept. David: Yeah, like we think of pirating. Nehemia, you and I remember, I don’t know how many of your listeners remember Napster, pirated music, and all that. Like, this was going back way before the digital age; people were pirating books and selling them. Nehemia: So, here’s an interesting thing. Before the French Revolution, one of the tightest censorship systems was France, the kingdom of France. And every certain period, the French government would put out a list of books that were censored. And all of the printers around France, and Belgium, and the Netherlands, and Germany, would get that list, and they’d say, “Oh, these are the books we should print because we have no competitors.” And so, they would print pirate copies of the books that were illegal to print in France, smuggle them into France, and people would buy them. And so, we don’t think about this today (many people don’t) that there were pirated books back… There are pirated books today, right? I mean, I use this service called Otzar Chochma, where they have this online database for all these traditional Rabbinical books, some of them recent books from the last few years, and there’ll be a thing at the front page that will say, you know, “If you’re not seeing such and such, this is a pirated copy.” Today we see that kind of thing! David: People pirate my videos. There’s a guy in India that takes my videos and then just does his voiceover of exactly the same thing. And, like, yeah, it’s totally normal. So… Nehemia: So, I was once in the Philippines, in 2014, and I was asked there to speak. I spoke at this church, and this lady walks up to me and asks me to sign my book. And it’s spiral-bound. And I’m like, “Wait, I know I didn’t print a spiral-bound book.” So, she had asked me to sign a pirate copy that I guess she made herself because she couldn’t afford it. And… all right. David: You signed it. Nehemia: I absolutely signed it, and I was touched that she thought my book was important enough to pirate. She wasn’t doing it for commercial purposes. These pirates generally are doing it… In other words, they’re saying, “Wait a minute; other people want to buy Ginsburg’s book as well. Let’s make a pirated copy and we’ll sell it for a lot of money, and when he runs out of his subscription sales, we’ll pick up the slack.” David: But this was important to me, because this was my first indication that something was weird about my book. Nehemia: That it wasn’t signed. David: It wasn’t signed. So, the guy on eBay, his is signed. How come mine’s not? It’s supposed to be signed. And then… so, all of a sudden, I started opening up the book, and I noticed two things at the same time. The first thing was that all 2,500 pages had pencil scorings down the line in the margins. Nehemia: What does scorings mean? David: So, each page has two margins; let’s say, the right-side margin and the left-side margin. Nehemia: Yeah. David: Someone took a pencil and drew a line down both sides of every single page, 2,500 pages. Nehemia: So that they could write notes or something. David: Something. We don’t know. And then so that was, like, “Okay, I have no idea what’s going on here.” So, you know, now I’ve got two weird things with this book. And then, the third thing was where things actually got extremely weird. In this book, the two most important volumes are one and two. Those are really where the greatest mass of information is. And so, in one and two, every time I would go to two, I would notice these little handwritten notes, and just, like, move away from them because I didn’t understand them. But as time… remember, I’m using this every day. This is, like, on my desk. All of a sudden, I can’t ignore these notes. So, Nehemia, could you please pull up, and let’s take a look at what some of these notes look like. Nehemia: And guys, just to think about this; 2500 pages, and every single page somebody took a ruler and put a pencil mark to sort of make boundaries where they could… David: Yeah. Next time somebody asks me, “Can you do something for me?” And I go, “Oh, I don’t know if I have the time,” I’m going to think of this, Nehemia. Hey, you know, somebody… Nehemia: So, this is an example of one of these… I call these ruling lines. David: Yeah. Nehemia: Because they’re made with a ruler. David: Yeah. Nehemia: So, here are these lines. And this was made by hand in pencil on 2,500 pages. David: Scroll up for just a little bit. Nehemia: More here. David: Okay, no, scroll down… good. And so, let’s just see at that top image there. What we see over here is, we’re looking at one of the encyclopedia entries, and on the left-side margin there’s a pencil line, and then there are notes. Nehemia: By the way, I downloaded this from Sfarad. There’s a mistake here that you have to ask them to fix. They’re using Arabic numbers instead of Arabic numerals. I mean these are… David: Yeah, something happened. That’s a mistake. Nehemia: So, let’s ask them to fix it. They can fix that. At least online they can. David: Okay so, what we’re looking at here is that there are notes, and they’re cryptic. 277A… what I first thought was 376… you see in the red there Nehemia. If you could highlight it… Nehemia: All right, so here… okay. So, wait, hold on, let’s back up here. So, this is volume 2, page 243, and it’s under letter Mem, and that in Arabic says 718, which is over here. 718 in Arabic numerals, and these are in Arabic… David: Yeah, that was a font issue. Nehemia: They’ll fix the font, hopefully. And then here in Hebrew, it’s Tashiach, Tav-Shin-Yud-Chet, which comes out to 718. So, in other words, this is list number 718 under the letter Mem. David: Mem. Nehemia: And this is based on him comparing a bunch of different manuscripts, and it says here Isaiah 60:13. David: And next to it… Nehemia: And that’s in print. And then to the left, in red pen, it says 277A. The next line says, Psalms 26:8. And to the left of it in red pen, it says 370… it looks like a 6, but I assume that’s a B. And then, to the left of the vertical pencil line, it says… is that in blue pen or black pen? David: Purple, 151A. Nehemia: Okay, 151A, and below that 237B. So, yeah. David: So, automatically, I’m saying to myself… and you can scroll down. You’ll see on this one page 18 of these. Nehemia: Somebody went through a lot of trouble to add notes to a printed volume, giving what appear to be, if I had a guess, not knowing any… well, I heard your lecture so I’m cheating… David: No, that’s fine, say it, yeah. Nehemia: …but if I didn’t know anything, I would say, “Oh, these are page numbers in a manuscript that has…” David: Or early printed, because… Nehemia: Or could be early printing, yeah. David: …the first books didn’t have page numbers like we do. They had side A and side B. Nehemia: Well, to this day in Rabbinical books, they’ll say, you know, Aleph and Bet; side A and side B. David: Yeah, in the Gemara, 100 percent. Nehemia: So, in other words, we say, you know, page 55. They would say, “Oh, that’s page…” I don’t know, 22B, right? David: Right. Nehemia: So, in other words, they’re actually not counting pages technically, they’re counting folios. David: Yeah. Nehemia: A folio in Latin is a leaf, or in English now it’s a leaf, meaning it’s the physical page, which has a front and a back, Aleph and Bet. Or in Latin they’ll say recto and verso. Okay. David: So, I have on my bookshelf a really fascinating little copy of a biblical book by someone named Seligman Bayer in the 1800s, and it has notes all over it. Notes in Greek, notes in Hebrew. It’s an amazing notes thing. But I could tell very clearly that this was somebody commenting on Scripture. Nehemia: Okay. David: Whereas with this one here, it almost felt like this was explaining the book. Like, why would you put a cryptic note here unless you knew something about this book that nobody else knew? Nehemia: Who would this help? David: And I was kind of thinking, maybe these were the sources. You know, perhaps somebody’s trying to undo Ginsburg and argue against him. I wasn’t quite sure. So, the next step for me was trying to figure out who wrote these notes. That, for me, became the big issue. Nehemia: Well, I mean, I would say there’s two questions here. The bigger question I would ask, and I know you asked it, so, again, I’ve heard the lecture and I’ve read the article… so, the bigger question is, what are the manuscripts they’re referring to? Right? Because that, actually, could be really useful. And then secondly, who wrote this and why? David: Right. So, you have to say… so, in the 1800s, only a few people on earth had access to manuscripts, or at least a number of manuscripts. And so, Ginsburg was one of those people. Now you start saying, “Well, who else?” And you can probably count them on your hands, you know, and try and cross them out. But for me, the big question was, was it Ginsburg? Right? It’s his book. Nehemia: Just so people understand the significance of not having access to the original manuscript. So, there’s a famous case of the Karaite Abraham Firkovich, who went around the Middle East and the Russian Empire, and he was a manuscript collector. The Firkovich Collections in St. Petersburg were collected by him. That’s at the Russian National Library today, which is considered the greatest collection of early Masoretic Bible manuscripts in the world. So, one of the things he was accused of was being a forger. And what was the nature of his forgery? So, he would write a letter, a handwritten letter, to some scholar, and say, “I found a manuscript, and here’s what it says in this manuscript.” And eventually, people said, “That sounds too good to be true. Show us that manuscript.” And he couldn’t come up with it. And they said, “Okay, he sent us a copy of what it says. How do we know it really says that? Maybe he just made that up.” And in some instances, he… based on what I know today, almost certainly made it up. In one instance, after he died, the librarian in Saint Petersburg said, “I couldn’t find this document. He lied and made up the document.” About 10 or 20 years ago they found it. David: Wow. Nehemia: So, for over 100 years it was a fact that he was a forger, because this unbelievable document that he says he found wasn’t… and why didn’t they find it? Because there are hundreds of thousands or millions of documents in the Russian National Library. Or, back then it was the Russian Imperial Library. That was the tzar’s library, right? And, you know, they couldn’t find something. I’ve gone to libraries in the 21st century, and I said, “There’s such and such thing in your catalog. I’d like to see it,” And they can’t find it. And I’m talking about manuscripts. And I’m like, “Wait, you’re saying you misplaced a manuscript?” This happens particularly with scrolls, because scrolls don’t fit so neatly onto a shelf. David: They’re huge. Nehemia: Right. So, they’ll stick it up like you see here. This is a library, this photo, a famous one behind me… David: Yeah. Nehemia: …is a library in Bologna. Bologna University Library took this photo. So, imagine you have a scroll and you don’t know where to put it, so you stick it up here. And then, you retire, and two librarians later, they’re like, “I don’t know where that is. It’s somewhere in the library. We’ll find it one day. Maybe.” So, this happens today, especially with scrolls, but not just scrolls, with Codices. Like, priceless manuscripts are misplaced even today. So, all right, I forget why I mentioned that. David: So, you were going to say that Ginsburg, he never told us which manuscripts used… Nehemia: Oh, so Ginsburg had access to the manuscripts, but he didn’t always… well, in his introduction, he says which manuscripts he used, right? But here was one… David: He only mentions a few. He never… Nehemia: Ah, he doesn’t give the full list. David: He doesn’t tell you which he gets from which. So, if he’s using 40 manuscripts, you have to now go through all 40. Nehemia: So, let’s look at an example of what we’re talking about here from your article, okay? And you have a page here from Ginsburg, and there’s a note here, note number 390, under Kaf. It says “la’kna’ani, three times in Scripture, and they are…” and then it lists the three times that that form appears. And then, somebody writes a note, handwritten, 156a. David: So, what… Nehemia: And what we don’t know from Ginsburg is, where did Ginsburg get this note? David: Get this note. He got it from either one or more manuscripts… Nehemia: But we don’t know that from the book. David: He could have got it from all 40. But we don’t know. Nehemia: So, somebody actually did a PhD dissertation, a student of Yosef Ofer, Anat Hayut, where she went through a bunch of manuscripts (I want to say they were in London, at what is today the British Library; back then it was the British Museum Library, in the time of Ginsburg) and she found the sources of a bunch of the notes. David: Yeah, and what she basically did was, about a third of the notes she was able to find in these two or three or even four key matches… Nehemia: And some of the notes she couldn’t find, right? David: Yeah like, 60 to 70 percent; they’re not there. So, my thought was, “Wait a minute. Is this the source?” Nehemia: Hmm. David: And then, that would be very helpful to people like Nehemia and me, and hopefully some of your viewers, to say, “Well, wait. I want to look it up.” Nehemia: And here’s why it’s important to look it up. So, back in the day of Ginsburg, if I wanted to know what the note in the Masorah was (and I almost say Masorah in air quotes) on the word la’kna’ani, I had to do one of two things: I had to travel around the world looking at manuscripts, or I could look in Ginsburg. David: Right. Nehemia: And today, because the manuscripts (many of them, not all of them) have been digitized, we can look up and we can see, “Oh, you know, Anat Hayut found these four manuscripts have 30 percent of the notes. Is this in there?” And by the way, where do you look for it? Well, you would look in Joshua 13:3. You’d look in Ezra 9:1. You’d look in Proverbs 31:24. Right? So, you’d have to look in three different passages, maybe in a fourth, because maybe this note appears somewhere else in some of the manuscripts, I don’t know. And then, here’s where it’s very hard to prove the negative, right? Let’s say someone were to come today and say that Ginsburg was a forger. It’d be very, very difficult to prove. I don’t think he was, by the way. But if you wanted to prove that, back then it would be almost impossible to prove. So, he was on the honor system, in many respects. But maybe he made mistakes. And there’s no way to know if he made… or the printer might have made a mistake. David: Right. Nehemia: And there’s no way to know if the printer or he made a mistake without looking in the manuscript and checking for yourself. Where do I start? David: Right. And often, just looking at a manuscript, you see things that aren’t included on the page… Nehemia: Because they can’t include everything. They have to be selective, right? Because even today, when you look in a critical edition of the Tanakh, or any book, they can’t include everything. Right? David: Right. Nehemia: Right. So, they’re including what they think is important. Maybe there’s other things they thought weren’t important that you think is important. David: All right. So, now we’re up to the key moment. So, we’ve got this massive book, this four-volume, 2,500-page book, that has no sources. There’s no footnotes, there’s no endnotes, there’s no bibliography. We don’t know where all these mountains of information comes from. And are these notes, possibly Ginsburg himself, telling you? So, Nehemia, could you please share the next picture, where I compared Ginsburg’s handwriting, as we know it in Cambridge, with the handwriting in my book? Nehemia: Okay. All right. All right. Here we have the Kaf manuscript. Should I tell what the Kaf Manuscript is, or do you want to…? David: Sure. Nehemia: So, I was at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, and I was there to look at some Torah scrolls and some other manuscripts. And the librarian comes up to me, and he says he’s been going through some boxes, and in the boxes, he found a bunch of unpublished manuscripts. Are they of any importance? And I look at some of them, and I’m like, “Yeah, not particularly.” And then I look at this, and I see the Kaf. And what is Kaf? So, they’re alphabetical, the way Ginsburg arranged the Masoretic notes. And then he has a volume where he gives an English sort of explanation of what the various notes are, and he gets through Aleph through Yud. And he says something like, “When I have more money, I’ll do Kaf and on. Kaf through Tav, which I’ve already prepared.” And he never printed it. So, this librarian finds Kaf and shows it to me. I’m like, “Yes! This is very important.” And I send it to Prof. Ofer, who right now is working on an edition of it. And by the way, how did it end up in the Wren Library at Trinity College? So, Ginsburg needed money. Let me tell this; it’s worth telling the story. Ginsburg needed money for various things. He was deeply in debt for printing his books. He took subscriptions but it wasn’t enough. By the way, I know a story, which I won’t go into details of names, but I have a story, a very famous story in a certain community, where somebody did the exact same thing. He took subscriptions for a book that he was working on, and then he fell into debt, and he took the money to pay his debts. And the book was never printed. So, this happens. It happens in the 21st century, or maybe that was the 20th century. It might have been in the 90s. I don’t remember. So, Ginsburg falls into debt. He’s not going to steal the money from the people who subscribe. So, what does he do? He goes to Aldous Wright, who is… I don’t know if at that time he was at Trinity College, but at some point, he… and he says, “You give me the money, and when I die, you can have my library.” And when Ginsburg died, the library was turned over to Aldous Wright. And then Aldous Wright donated it to Trinity College. So, his library includes boxes of handwritten documents, including the Kaf Manuscript. Where is Lamed through Tav? Nobody’s found that yet. Could still be at Wren Library. David: So, everyone should be aware; because of Nehemia, this was put online. His handwriting was put online. And it wasn’t just like one, “Dear mom, hope you’re doing well,” note, it was 100 pages of dense handwriting. Nehemia: Yeah, so, he prepared it for the typesetter, right? Meaning, he prepared it for printing, not necessarily for the typesetters. David: And so, Nehemia, because of you, I was able to now compare his handwriting easily to mine. So, why don’t we take a look at it? Nehemia: Okay. And Prof. Ofer convinced him to put it online, but I sent photos of it to Prof. Ofer. Yeah, all right. So… David: So, let’s do the middle column. Let’s go for that. Nehemia: Okay. Yeah, there’s no question that this is the same hand. And what’s important here, guys… and you’ve really done amazing pieces of detective work here, David. What David did here is, he took the same words written in cursive, and in the case of the numbers, they’re, you know, numbers; but he took the same exact words from the Kaf Manuscript that we know was written by Ginsburg, and from his personal copy of this book, under the idea that maybe Ginsburg is the one who wrote all these tens of thousands or however many notes. And when you look at the handwriting, like the word Deuteronomy, if you just took like an E or something, who knows, right? Or a T. But when you take the full set of words, you see how he writes Genesis and Exodus, these abbreviations, Numbers. Look at the shape of the N, a little curl on the left side of the N. Right? This is clearly written by Ginsburg. David: So, my little cheap, quote-unquote cheap, which was very expensive, the most expensive book I’ve ever bought, you know, my inexpensive copy, all of a sudden didn’t have Ginsburg’s signature, but it had tens of hundreds of hours of his notes, of handwritten notes. Nehemia: So, in other words, this is Ginsburg’s personal copy, where he’s adding notes. And when he says it’s on page 163a of a certain manuscript, he knows that, because he must have some other notes. Maybe those are still at Wren Library at Trinity College. But he must have some other notes of what he sent to the typesetter, and the typesetter didn’t include those. And it could be he had index cards, right? In other words, what they would do… we don’t know that Ginsburg did this, but what many, many scholars would do back in the day, and in fact, until relatively recently, is, they would have an index card, a three-by-five or something index card. I don’t know what size they used. And on that, they would say, “Okay, there’s this note in this manuscript,” and they’d write the page number, they’d write the note, and then they’d organize those index cards alphabetically. And they’d say, “Oh, these two manuscripts have the same note. It’s slightly different wording. Now I, Ginsburg, am going to decide which of the wordings to use.” And that’s why this is important for me, because, when I see this, you know, verbiage, well here’s, you know, “va’yikana gimel ve’simanhon”, I don’t know that that’s in any manuscript. In other words, he might have found that in four different manuscripts, and each one had slight differences, and he’s giving… I don’t know, right, he might be giving what we would call an eclectic version. An eclectic version means he’s taken the four different index cards, and he says, “Okay, in this one, they misspelled one of the words. In this other one they left out this word. I’m going to give you my version.” Why? “Because it’s all kind of the same thing.” Well, but it’s not the same thing. Right? Or maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, right? David: Yes, so, here we had the exciting opportunity to see his sources. And so, for me now, the question was; well, remember that pencil line down the middle of the margins? Nehemia: Yeah. David: That was differentiating between two manuscripts, between the purple, and the red and black. Nehemia: And again, guys, just to understand here, somebody wrote a PhD dissertation. That’s an investment of three to five years… David: Yep. Nehemia: …trying to identify the source of notes, and she found, you said 30 percent of the notes. I don’t remember that. David: Yeah. Nehemia: Something like 30 percent of the notes in four of the manuscripts, and here Ginsburg is telling you not only what manuscript it is, but what page it is. But he doesn’t tell you what manuscript; you just have to figure out based on the page numbers. David: Right. Nehemia: You have to reverse engineer it. How do you do that when there’s 40 manuscripts he used? David: Right. Nehemia: So, if you can find which manuscript has a certain note on page 163A and then you check it, because it could be a coincidence, right? You check it across a bunch of different notes. Then you say, “Oh, this refers to manuscript X and this refers to manuscript Y.” So, that’s an incredible piece of scholarly sleuthing, I would call that. That’s an incredible piece of scholarly Sherlock Holmesery to try to find that kind of thing. David: Right. Nehemia: Did you find it? We’re on the edge of our seat. David: So… Nehemia: So, wait, wait. The first big lead is what they call the burying lead, David. You discovered Ginsburg’s personal copy. And guys, let’s back up. Christian David Ginsburg was a Jewish convert to Christianity. He was a true believer both in Judaism and Christianity; certainly, in Christianity he was a true believer. We know that from a bunch of different sources. And he is, to this day, considered the founder of Masoretic studies, what I spend my life on, as a modern scholarship, right? Meaning, like modern, in the sense of modern critical scholarship, right? Meaning, we have a scholar in like, what is it, the 16th century, Eliyahu B’chur, who kind of, or Elijah Levitas, they call him, who is a scholar of the Masorah, but he’s not a modern scholar using modern approaches. Christian David Ginsburg is, meaning, he’s comparing manuscripts and he’s doing it critically, and sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad, right? But in any event, he’s the founder of Masoretic studies and he is a Jewish convert to Christianity. And although you are the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program… So, let’s address this. You’re the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, yet you’ve written an article about a Jewish convert to Christianity. Is that controversial, and why not? David: It’s certainly not controversial. Nehemia: Okay. David: Listen, in the world we live in, there’s always going to be people on the edges of… Nehemia: Like me! David: …of groups who are moving back and forth and back and forth, and Christian David Ginsburg is one of those fascinating people. He’s really… you said, like you. It’s interesting, Nehemia, some of the things that he’s studied are the kinds of things that are the most exciting parts of biblical studies. Nehemia: Hundred percent. David: Right, the Karaites, the interpretation of… the Essenes… Nehemia: Why do you think he focused on these edge cases? I have an idea, but what do you think? Why do you think he would… Even the Masorah, in a sense, is an edge case. Meaning, when he’s at yeshiva, they’re not sitting there studying Masorah. David: Right, they’re not. I really want to point out that what he did was not easy. Nehemia: No. David: We were at the conference this year, Nehemia, when somebody… Nehemia: SBL, Society of Biblical Literature, yeah… David: At the Society of Biblical Literature, somebody gave a presentation about his life and mentioned how he had left a child behind in Europe, in Poland, and started life anew in England, and never had any contact back again. And that really troubled me. Like, why would he have done that? Why would he abandon his child? And then somebody raised their hand and said, “Well, how do you know he wasn’t exiled?” He probably was. Nehemia: I mean, it’s a no-brainer to me. When somebody converts to Christianity, certainly in the 1800s in Europe… David: Yeah, their family is not going to speak to them. Nehemia: Not just, they don’t speak to them, they sit shiva. Meaning, they literally sit on the ground for seven days… David: Yeah… Nehemia: … which is what you do when somebody dies. Look, my father went to his rabbi, and said, “My son has become a Karaite. Do I have to sit shiva?” In other words, does my father (of blessed memory) did he have to treat me as if I had died because I no longer accepted the Oral Law? And his rabbi’s response would have been binding to him, in his eyes. And his Orthodox rabbi said to him, “Well, at least he’s not Reform.” And what did he explain? He said, “The Reform deny both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, your son just denies the Oral Torah. He still accepts the Written Torah.” So, that was a very, let’s say, moderate response. There’s many Orthodox rabbis today would say, “Of course you have to sit shiva.” And if he was a Christian? Not he. If I had converted to Christianity or Messianic Judaism, then my father wouldn’t have asked the question, he would have known he had to sit shiva. So, in other words, his wife treated him as if he’s dead… David: You can imagine… Nehemia: His child probably didn’t have a say in it. And here, we don’t know this for a fact, but it’s reasonable to infer that that’s what happened. David: Yeah, so, the fact that he’s doing this is not without cost. Nehemia: Right, personal cost, where you decide to become a Christian knowing that you’ll never see your child again. David: Or your family. Nehemia: As far as your child knows, you might be dead. Look, I have a story from about 10 years ago, no, seven years ago. I was working on my PhD, and I went to a certain library, I won’t say which, and the librarian comes out to me, and we’re talking about Moses Shapira of the famous Shapira Scrolls. I did an episode with Edan Dershowitz about it. And the librarian says to me… and we’re speaking in Hebrew; she says, “Do you know he was a meshumad, an apostate?” And I thought, “What a strange thing for a scholar to say. That’s highly inappropriate. Like, why is that relevant?” But here’s what she really meant, right? Because Shapira was accused of being a forger. And really the subtext there is: what do you expect from an apostate? His whole life is a lie. And it really shocked me that someone in the 21st century, someone with a PhD, someone who’s a scholar, someone who’s a respected academic, still has this sort of prejudice against somebody who converts to Christianity. And this is a secular person, right? Imagine now an Orthodox Jew in 19th century Poland, right? And imagine the social cost for Ginsburg to say, “I’m going to walk away from my family, from my child, from my community, because I feel,” Christians say, “convicted by this belief.” I mean… David: Yeah. And so, in a certain sense, that’s a really fascinating person; a person who’s really navigated two different worlds and went from one to the other. So, yeah, I don’t see in any way is that an issue, personally. I will say, Nehemia, I understand that you got that comment, and maybe your father’s rabbi might have said that, but not everyone feels that way. Nehemia: No, a hundred percent, no. No, no. Look, but even my father’s rabbi said, “No, you can have a relationship with your son. You don’t have to treat him as if he’s dead.” That was a very big deal. You know, my father would have done whatever the rabbi… David: Right. Nehemia: …said, whatever he gave him as a… like, it was a she’ela. It was a formal question, right? David: Right. Nehemia: And he gave him a formal response, right, which was considered binding by my father, at least, and by the rabbi. And he didn’t. Look, I mean, I know a lot of people in, I’ll just call them Christian denominations without giving details, who remained Christians, but were no longer dues-paying members of that denomination, and their parents have to shun them. Or their children have to shun them, meaning treat them as if they’re not allowed to speak to them, they’re not allowed to interact with them. So, this happens today. David: This happens. Nehemia: Look, it happens in some ultra-Orthodox denominations today. David: But in a certain sense, it could be what led him, as you say, to the Masorah, because these notes, they’re there, but rabbis don’t study them. And so, it’s also, they were written by people who, you might agree with me on this, were most likely Karaites. And so… Nehemia: I don’t think any of the manuscripts he worked with were copied by Karaites, let’s put it that way. And some of the notes… David: 4445? You don’t think so? Nehemia: Oh, okay, all right. So, that one may be. David: That’s old… Nehemia: Right. All right, so, that one may be. But most of his manuscripts were… and that one we don’t know for sure. Most of his manuscripts were relatively late, or we would consider them late today. David: So, he has a little paragraph here, and the second part of the paragraph says, “The list of donors and subscribers for whom the work is printed will be given in the third volume.” And here’s the key part. “Each volume has on it the name of the subscriber and a number, as well as the signature of the author. Copies without these marks will be considered pirated. Christian David Ginsburg.” Nehemia: Okay. David: And so, that’s the eBay volume, which for 6,500 dollars was saying, “Hey, we’ve got it. We’ve got the author’s signature.” Whereas mine did not. Nehemia: So, in other words, the reason yours didn’t have a signature, based on this, we can infer, is because it wasn’t purchased by a subscriber, it belonged to the original author. He only signed the ones that he sent off to subscribers. David: Right. Nehemia: Along with a number. Yours wouldn’t be numbered because it belonged to him. It was his personal copy. David: Right. Nehemia: What’s interesting, by the way, is, he also writes this in Hebrew, and the word for pirated here is ganuv, stolen. That’s interesting! David: Yeah. Nehemia: Very cool. That’s very, very cool. All right. Beautiful. Wow. So, wow, very interesting. David: Okay, but let’s do some sleuthing. You ready for some more sleuthing? Nehemia: Let’s do some sleuthing. This is exciting. All right. David: Okay. All right. So, I needed to figure out what these purple notes are and what these red notes are. Nehemia: Are they consistently purple when they’re in the outer margin? David: Outer margin is purple. Nehemia: Always? David: Always. And inner margin is red or black. And I didn’t know if red and black were two different manuscripts, but I was able to determine that the red only goes up to, like, page 80, and then 81 is black. So, it’s really one manuscript. Nehemia: And this is just a question that I don’t know the answer to. I don’t know that, on my computer, I can tell that that’s purple. David: Yeah, but it is purple. Nehemia: No, no, I believe you. David: No, no, no, yeah. Nehemia: So, here’s an example, guys. I did an interview with a guy who’s a scholar of Mormonism, and he made a statement which I think is profound, and it’s something that many people who deal with manuscripts know. But he put it really, really clearly. He said, all photographs lie. Right? So, here you have the original handwritten notes, and this is a photograph of the notes, and you can see details that aren’t necessarily obvious. David: Yeah, because… so, for everyone to just kind of think about the lighting on this. Nehemia: Right. David: I’m not a professional photographer. This was from my iPhone. Nehemia: Okay. David: The second thing is, the paper isn’t white. It’s yellow from age. Nehemia: Yes. David: And then the third thing is, the purple has faded. Nehemia: Yeah. David: So, like, it’s there, but it’s a weak purple… but it’s there… Nehemia: And now that you’re telling me it’s purple, I believe you and I can see it, but I don’t know that I would know that that was purple. I would bet (and I don’t know the answer to this) but it would be interesting to open this up in photoshop from the PDF, because that’s what most people have access to, and use the eyedropper tool and see if it identifies it as purple. Guys, I’m only mentioning this because it’s important to know that, when you look at a photograph of a manuscript, you have to take into account that there is something called a white balance that… I just spent weeks working on a question related to this in Berlin; the imaging software does things that it doesn’t always tell you, that are a black box. So, just… it’s important to know that. David: All right, and I would like everyone to know that Nehemia has an open invitation to my home in Yonkers, New York, and Nehemia will update you if it’s a different color. Nehemia: I’m the worst person to tell you about what colors are. I famously once went out of the house wearing one black Croc and another that was navy blue, and when someone pointed it out, I looked down at my feet, I said, “Oh yeah, now I see it.” But I hadn’t noticed it at home. And then I bought a black car which turned out to be very dark green. And now, every time I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah, obviously it’s green.” But you know, in the lighting that I bought it, I did not notice that. So, anyway. David: Okay, so, back to sleuthing. Nehemia: Yes. David: Here we go. So, Nehemia, I had about two, three thousand notes, and I didn’t know how to make sense of them. So, the first thing that I did was try and look up all those… Nehemia: Oh, wait, this is really cool. Here you have volume 2, page 143, it’s in your article on page 5. You have a black note, you have two purple notes, and you have a red note. David: Right. And I put that in because it’s not clear, the color… Nehemia: It’s definitely not clear, yeah. David: Right. So, I started with the purple notes. I said, I want to figure these things out. And the moment of insight came to me was something that I rarely use well, is Microsoft Excel. Nehemia: Okay. David: I said, “These are numbers. Why don’t I just start plugging in the numbers?” And so, if the number is 100A and it’s on verse Ecclesiastes 12:6, I would put in Ecclesiastes 12:6, 100A. And then by doing that, what I was able to do was rearrange all the thousands of notes in a way that made sense, and something jumped at me on the screen. Nehemia: What was that? David: So, your listeners probably have heard of the term Tanakh. Nehemia: Yeah. David: Tanakh, which stands for the Torah, the Nevi’im, the Prophets, and the Ketuvim, the Writings. Nehemia: And just as a side note, if people want to learn the Hebrew of the Tanakh, known as Biblical Hebrew, where can they do that? David: At the Jewish Theological Seminary Biblical Hebrew Program. Thank you, Nehemia. Nehemia: Of which you’re the director. And you could learn online. And it’s for someone who doesn’t even know the Aleph–Bet. And guys, I don’t know if you realize what an opportunity this is to study at JTS’s program, Biblical Hebrew. David: Right. Nehemia: Let me ask a question here. So, it’s the Jewish Theological Seminary. Do they have to be Jewish to study in the program? David: Absolutely not. What we’re talking about with Ginsburg is, I think, a great example. You could be a Rabbinic Jew, you could be a Karaite Jew, you could be a believing Christian of any denomination, et cetera. We study Tanakh together, we read together, and people from all backgrounds have insights and teach me and teach each other about studying the Tanakh. So, it’s open to everybody, and I think this study that we’re talking about… I’m not bothered by Christian David Ginsburg. Neither are you, right? It’s not a big deal. Jews and Christians can sit down next to each other and study at the same time, and it makes it better for everyone, in my personal opinion. So… Nehemia: Is this an example of diversity is our strength? In other words, that motto actually has something profound behind it, which is that if everybody has the same view on the world, you’re going to have blind spots. But where diversity really is powerful, and this is, I think, a very Jewish idea, is where you have lots of different perspectives and beliefs and approaches, and you have conversations where maybe at first you’re talking past each other, because you have a set of assumptions, they have a set of assumptions, and you realize, “Oh, I never thought that somebody else would see the world that way.” So, that’s a really powerful… David: We’re reading the Book of Daniel right now. Each semester, in our most advanced class, Biblically Reformed, it’s a reading circle. So, there’s no lecture, we just read together, and we’re doing Daniel. Nehemia: The Hebrew or the Aramaic parts of Daniel? David: We’re doing the Hebrew parts of Daniel. Nehemia: Okay. David: Everything that’s in Hebrew. And the thing about it is that, when we’re studying some of the prophecies, there’s many different ways to unpack those prophecies of events. Some people are going to say, “No, this was written for the Maccabean period.” No, other people are going to say this was written for the time of Jesus. Other people are going to say, “No, it’s written for the time of the destruction of the Temple,” and you can even go further and… Nehemia: Or it’s an end times prophecy, right… David: And we’re all in the same thing studying together, aware of each other, and that’s totally fine. Nehemia: And the goal here is to understand what the words mean in their context, and not to… and I guess it’s a question of what’s the context. David: Yeah. Nehemia: But in the literary context, that’s not really in question. David: Yeah. Nehemia: The historical context is. David: And like, for example, we’re doing Daniel right now, this semester. Each semester we do a Torah, Nevi’im, or Ketuvim. We’re doing right now the Ketuvim, Daniel. And what we’re doing is, we get stuck on some verses, and it’s something we’ve never seen before, but it’s because Daniel is cryptic, kind of like this study we’re doing. Nehemia: Well, you made the comment before that Daniel is at the edge of Judaism. I think for a lot of non-Jews, that will be surprising. David: No… Nehemia: Why is studying Daniel kind of an edge case? David: Well, what I mean is, for example, is that his prophecies are open-ended enough that all of a sudden, when he’s talking about, “Jeremiah said 70 years, but I say 490 years,” all of a sudden, where do you start counting that? People from earliest Christian texts, earliest, have been saying that prophecy applies to the year 33, right around where Jesus was dying. And so, that would be a text that would kind of connect the Tanakh to the New Testament prophecies, etcetera. Nehemia: But also, in like a traditional yeshiva in B’nei Brak, they’re not studying the Book of Daniel, am I right? David: No. In Jewish traditional yeshivas, Daniel only comes up when it’s quoted in the Talmud. Nehemia: Okay. All right, that’s what most people probably… David: But back to sleuthing, Nehemia… Nehemia: Sleuthing Christian David Ginsburg’s Masorah, four volumes. You have them. You have the personal copy of Ginsburg, and… David: And cryptic notes. And I’m trying to figure out the purple notes. I put them in an Excel document, and can you please share on your screen what I was able to uncover? Nehemia: Okay, is this here in the article? I don’t remember. David: Keep going down. Nehemia: Okay. David: There it is. Nehemia: Oh! So, these are the purple notes specifically. David: So, these are the purple notes. So, for example, there’s the number 59A, and that’s on Leviticus 25:38. Nehemia: Wait, where are we? Oh, here, here this one. David: In this box, yeah. Nehemia: Okay. David: And then like… looks like a 232B, about two-thirds of the way down. Nehemia: Okay, this is, just to be clear, this isn’t all the notes because there’s hundreds or maybe thousands… David: No, this is our example notes of the purple notes. But the thing that popped out more than anything is that we’ve got the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, we’ve got the writings, the Ketuvim, but there’s no Prophets. Nehemia: And another thing here is that Chronicles appears before Psalms, so, you have the book order in this manuscript, the purple note manuscript, and Nehemiah is at the end, because in many volumes of the Ketuvim, of the Writings, Chronicles, in almost all modern printings, I believe, Chronicles comes after. It’s Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, but in many of the earlier manuscripts, Chronicles comes before Psalms. So, you know this is a manuscript that, Chronicles is on page 105B, followed by Psalms, followed by Job, followed by Proverbs, and even the order of what we call the Five Scrolls; Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Esther, that’s not uniform across all the manuscripts. So, you know an awful lot about what’s in this manuscript. David: In the order, yeah. Nehemia: Without knowing even what’s on each page, just from the book order, you can exclude a whole bunch of manuscripts. David: But the most important thing is that it’s missing the middle. It’s like a bread sandwich; you’ve got Torah and Ketuvim, but nothing in the middle. There’s no Prophets. Nehemia: It’s missing the peanut butter and jelly. David: It’s missing the peanut butter… [laughter], Nehemia, my sandwich… Nehemia: That tells you my generation. Okay. David: Right. Maybe get a little meat in there. But whatever it is, the Prophets, you’re totally missing it. And so, the reason this is weird is because I could understand missing the Writings. You start with the first section, you get to the second section, and then you end. The scribe gets tired. I can understand the Prophets and the Writings. You say, “Everyone has a Torah. Let me write the rest.” But I don’t understand, and I’ve never heard of… to this day, I’ve never heard of a single book like this where you have the bread sandwich; you’ve got the Torah, you’ve got the Ketuvim, but you don’t have the Prophets in the middle. Nehemia: This is worth dwelling on for a minute. It was exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages, let’s say before printing, to have a manuscript that had the whole Tanakh. In other words, the Aleppo Codex is actually a very unusual book, very unusual volume, in that it had the entire Tanakh. The Leningrad Codex, very unusual; it had the entire Tanakh. Our earliest undisputed complete manuscript of anything of the Tanakh in the book form, codex, is what they call Codex Petropolitanis Babylonicus, which is in the Russian National Library, from the year 916 CE. Meaning, it has a date on it and that date isn’t disputed, that’s what I mean. There’s an older one, but the date has been called into question. And it’s only the… I want to say it’s the… is it the Latter Prophets? I don’t remember. I have to pull it up on ihbmr.com. David: Yeah, Latter Prophets. Nehemia: Okay, so, we have it actually here. David: Meaning, the “prophet Prophets,” right? Nehemia: Right. In other words… so, I’m here on ihbmr.com, which is the website of the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. David: Which, by the way, is changing the field. Nehemia probably doesn’t want to boast, but his little website here is not so little. It is… people are using it every single day, and it is amazing. Nehemia: Okay. So, here we have… David: On the right. Nehemia: Yeah. And look, there’s a lot of people involved in this. It’s not just my little website at this point. There’s a lot of people working on it. So, we click on Codex P. So, here we have, Codex P, which is also known as Babylonicus Petropolitius. You mentioned ABE Books; I bought this volume for about 300 dollars on ABE Books in like, I don’t know, 2017 or something. Because I realized that this manuscript was unavailable, but it had been printed in the 1870s… David: Yeah. Nehemia: … with an early kind of lithographic technology that was, I believe, photographic. I wouldn’t assume everything on the actual manuscript is here, meaning, they might have cleaned up the plates when they printed it. I don’t know. And they certainly added the verse numbers, right? That somebody wrote in pencil or something, or in pen, wrote by hand on the printing plates or on the photographs, maybe, I don’t know, before they printed it. So, it starts in Isaiah. So, this is our earliest complete manuscript with an undisputed date. And it goes on page 224R, which is also called here A, right? Because Jews prefer A and B. David: Right, because we’re doing the A’s and the B’s. Nehemia: By the way, R and V technically is wrong, because R is recto, which means the right side, which makes sense in a Latin manuscript, but Hebrew is left-to-right. So, this isn’t the right side of the page, this is the left-side page. But many scholars today still use R and V, so we’re kind of stuck with that. Aleph and Bet is what we use in Hebrew, in any event. So, this was written in the year 916, and it ends with Malachi. So, where’s Joshua, which is part of the Prophets? So, most biblical manuscripts don’t have the entire Tanakh, even ones that have the Prophets aren’t always the entire Prophets! And why is that? Because maybe the person who ordered it only had a certain amount of money or only had a certain interest. Maybe he had a different volume that had the Torah, and what we call the Former Prophets; Joshua through Kings. We don’t know why, but you have a very unusual manuscript in your purple codex because it has the Torah and it has the Writings, but it doesn’t have the Prophets in the middle. That’s unusual! David: The bread sandwich. That’s what we got. Nehemia: Okay. David: The bread sandwich. So… Nehemia: The bread with the peanut butter and jelly missing, or the meat missing. The salami is missing, whatever you want to call it. David: Right. So, you’ve got the beginning and the end. I’ve never heard of such a thing. And so, guess what? I said, the only person on earth that I can think of that would be interested in such a kind of book is Christian David Ginsburg. And I went back to his other major book, his introduction to all these manuscripts, and there was a manuscript which he didn’t really use for his Masorah, but it’s called The Earl of Leicester’s Codex. And The Earl of Leicester’s Codex has a Torah and a Ketuvim, but no Prophets. So, I went on to the National Library of Israel on Ketiv, and I was able to semi-confirm my suspicions. I was able to find the codex, and if you could share, I’ll just show you what it looked like. We’re talking about different copies. This would be very good for our listeners to see here. This is what I saw. You can see here that there are six columns on these two pages. In between these two columns are supposed to be dozens and dozens of small notes, and on the tops and the bottoms of the page are supposed to be longer notes. Nehemia: Those are the Masoretic notes. David: Yeah, the Masoretic notes. Nehemia: The Masorah Magna is the one on the top and the bottom, and sometimes the outer margins, and the Masoretic Parve, or the small Masorah, is between… David: Right, but this photocopy, which was probably taken in the 1950s, it doesn’t capture anything. Nehemia: So, this is a scan of a microfilm, although I’m actually not even sure that’s the case. In other words, this might be that somebody made a microfilm, and then they printed the micro… I know, because I’ve done this, and I’ve seen a lot of the things available. So, what they did is, at the National Library of Israel back when it was the Jewish National University Library, the JNUL, they had a machine that would print the microfilm using a Xerox machine. And so, it could be this is a printed Xerox of a microfilm that was then scanned. That might be what this is, I’m not sure. David: So, somebody told me, and I don’t remember who, it theoretically could have been you, Nehemia. It could have been Prof. Ofer. Somebody hinted to me that this book that we’re looking at, I had found the book, because the pages match up, but I couldn’t see them… Nehemia: Wait a minute, wait a minute. So, when it has page, well, 1A, obviously, right? But when it has page 71B, that had numbers 9 and 2 on it… David: No, but look, Nehemia, 1A, what’s on 1A? Go up, go to the top. What’s 1A? Nehemia: 1A is Genesis 40 verse 1. Oh. David: Oh, it’s not Genesis 1:1. Nehemia: So, the numbering took place after… well that’s normal. Meaning, the numbering is usually done by librarians. But when it was numbered, the first 39 chapters of Genesis were already missing. Okay. David: Why don’t we scroll down, and what does it say? Nehemia: And by the way, it’s normal, in my books, in my bookshelf, right, to have the beginning and end of a book missing, and that was normal in manuscripts as well. David: Right. And what do we have? Here we have 84V to 85 with no visible Masorah, but this was going to be, if you scroll down, this book was put up for auction by Christie’s in the summer that I… Nehemia: Wait, is this the same page? David: Yep. Nehemia: Wait a minute. So, we can’t see the Masorah here. You can kind of see traces maybe of something here, but here you can see there clearly is, again, that the bottom and top and these outer margins is what’s called Masorah Magna or the Large Masorah, Masorah Hagdola. And then in between the margins, and then… in here… David: Zoom in. Nehemia: Ah, okay, we can zoom in. We have what’s called the Masorah Parva, or the Small Masorah, and then generally, these large notes at the top and bottom, and in this case in the outer margins, are often the details of what these small notes are. In other words, there’ll be a note that says, I don’t know, a certain form appears three times, and then it might give you the details of what those three times are, in these outer margins. David: Right, the Ginsburg notes. And so, right here, all of a sudden, we have on the Christie’s website, the summer that I bought my book (my birthday was in July) the summer I bought my book is the summer that this went up for auction for, I believe, one-and-a-half million pounds Nehemia: Wow! Okay. So, you didn’t buy this one, right? David: So, the Earl of Leicester… by the way, this book, we were talking about book collecting, right? Nehemia: Yeah. David: This book was bought by the Earl of Leicester on a trip to Italy, I believe. And he came back with two books in his bag. You ready? You want to know what the two books were? Nehemia: What were they? David: It was this and a little tiny notebook of Leonardo da Vinci’s. Nehemia: Wow. David: The little one cost something like four ducats and this one cost something like 12 ducats. Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, this was centuries ago, right? What century was this? Do we know? David: This is from the 1200s. Nehemia: No, no, no. What century did the Earl of Leicester travel to Italy? David: It could be late 1700s, early 1800s. Nehemia: Okay, and guys, I was just in Rome with my wife, and I remarked, you know, centuries ago, European nobility would do what they called something like the great travel, or the great trip, I forget what it was called. But it would be this thing where they would travel to all the major cities in Europe and they would do it once in their lifetime. And we hopped on a plane to go do manuscript research at the Vatican, and we got to spend a few days touring around, and I’m like, “Do you realize how blessed we are? Like, the richest people in the world centuries ago got to do this once in their lifetime, and here we are, on this tour, with like these middle class people, like plumbers and, you know, and bible scholars, right, and we get to do it today like it’s almost… not that it’s nothing, it’s still a big deal… but I don’t have to be an earl in order to do that.” So, he travels to Italy and he comes back with two books that he bought. David: Two books. This book and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, which would be, eventually, the world’s most expensive book ever sold, to Bill Gates. Nehemia: Wow. More expensive than the Sassoon Codex? David: Sassoon dethroned that book. Nehemia: Okay. So, up until the sale of the Sassoon Codex for 38.1 million dollars, that was… David: The Earl of Leicester number one… this is Holkham Hall number two, this is the… Nehemia: Ah, this is Earl Leicester manuscript number 2, okay. David: Okay. So, let’s scroll down and just see the confirmation, if you go down one little bit. So, you see over here, in this note, number 44 in Ginsburg, the word is… it’s kind of cut off on the right-hand side, me’od me’od, and then it says on the left-hand side, there’s a purple note, 10A on Exodus 1:7. What does that all mean? What that means is, we should be able to open up this manuscript to Exodus 1:7 and see the notes in action. So, let’s scroll down here… Nehemia: Let me explain the note though, just so… I want people to understand this. So, this is the letter Mem… David: Yes. Nehemia: Right. So, Ginsburg had something like little note cards, I imagine, and he arranged them alphabetically. And then he says, “Note 44 under Mem is the note b’me’od me’od, which means the phrase very, very.” David: And this phrase is unique. Nehemia: “Appears six times in Scripture.” And the importance of this note is that, if somebody’s copying this, and they might think that this is a scribal error called dittography; the previous scribe copied the word very twice. I’m going to leave one of them off. Or maybe he’s proofreading it, and he leaves one of them off, and he says, “Oh, no! Normally it’s only says very, but six times it says very, very, and I’m missing a very.” And so, he goes and he checks the six places, and he sees either “I’m missing one” or “I have them all.” Right? Or maybe a later reader checks them. It’s this method, or this system, to make sure Scripture is copied in the Hebrew text as perfectly as possible in accordance with the Masorah, which is the transmission. Right? David: Exactly. Nehemia: And there’s a debate about whether there’s one Masorah or multiple Masorahs. We won’t get into that. David: Right. So, even if it’s a little bit different, even though it’s doubled, just keep it. You might not think there should be a Bet in the front. Keep it. Just let it be, let it be. And so, we’re going to expect, if we open up the Earl of Leicester’s Codex, which is now called Holkham Hall 2, to Exodus 1:7… Nehemia: Is Holkham Hall where the Earl of Leicester has his palace? David: My family were thinking of going to England in the coming year for a week. We’re trying to get a trip to Leicester, but it’s pretty far from London, so we’ll see. But if you scroll down, let’s take a look in… this is a photo that I was actually able to get. Christie’s shared with me… Actually no, this was on the website. I didn’t even have the special permission yet. And you can see we’re on 10A, which is where it should be. We’re on Exodus 1:7, and it says b’me’od me’od; there’s the letter Vav, which is our note six times. And then the bottom part, if you scroll down just a little bit, will be the six occurrences. Nehemia: Oh, b’me’od me’od, six times… David: At this time Nehemia, I am jumping for joy, jumping for joy. You, even though you were waiting for this article to come out, you were, every month or so, we would be in touch, or two months, or so, and you saw some of this happening in real time. And so, what happened was, is that I now knew that Christian David Ginsburg had been using this codex and going through its masorah to try and understand where it fits in to his… Nehemia: David, here’s something worth looking into. I don’t know if you looked at this. You notice there’s two number 10s here. Obviously, this was numbered at two different times. Do those two numbers (you don’t have to answer now, but it’s worth looking at) do they match all the way through the end of the codex? Because sometimes when they renumbered it, they made a mistake… David: Right. Nehemia: …in one of them, or they corrected a mistake. And do Ginsburg’s match one of these over the other if they don’t always match? Right? At the beginning, they’re going to match, right? But when you get to page 5, you know, folio, I don’t know, 400, 500, however high it goes, or 200, do they still match? That would be worth looking at. David: Right. Nehemia: That’d be interesting. David: Well, we can do that now. So, the good news is, I was able to… Christie’s, I told them that, “Hey, I’m a scholar at JTS, and I’m working on this manuscript.” They told me the library which is affiliated with the new owner of the manuscript. And I was able to contact the new owner, who wished to be anonymous, and I was able to contact him. And when I reached out to him, he said, “Oh, you’re from JTS? I’ve been wanting to come to your library, because the book I just bought was written by the same scribe as one of your most important books.” Nehemia: What? David: Yeah, so if you scroll down, we can actually see… Nehemia: Guys, I’ve heard this story before, but every time I hear it, I’m still amazed. Oh, can you tell this story? David: Yeah, so, what we’re looking at is what I originally thought was Codex Leviticus. Because it starts with an L, it has a T in the middle. Nehemia: And you’re like, “What other word would it be? It has to be some word I’m familiar with.” David: Right, it has to be… And that’s just the mind playing tricks. Right? Don’t believe your mind. You need to get a person… Nehemia: No, but this is actually how people read alphabetic text. I mean, look at the word Massachusetts. You don’t say, “Oh, there’s an M, and there’s an A, and there’s an S.” No, you read the word Massachusetts. And if it’s misspelled, you still read it. Right? David: Right. Nehemia: And in this case, the word Leicester, which is spelled “lie-kester” for an American. David: Yeah. Nehemia: Lester, they pronounce it. You don’t know that word. Well, what’s Leicester? You know, it’s…. David: Right, yeah. Nehemia: It’s like, I was just listening to something yesterday on the history of Texas, and they mentioned Nacogdoches. And the person, the narrator didn’t know how to pronounce it. Right? He’s like, nag-chido… like some weird pronunciation. All right. I lived for a while in Behar County, which is spelled B-E-H-A-R, right? Meaning, if you don’t know that word, then you think, “Oh, I know a word; Leviticus. And there’s the tus.” But that’s… David: Right. So, I just assumed it was Codex Leviticus… Nehemia: So, you did all this investigation, and the answer was right… is this in purple? I can’t tell. David: Yeah, it’s in purple. Nehemia: So, you had the answer the whole time! It’s just written in a script that’s hard… or it’s a word you’re not familiar with, I suppose. David: Right. And if you scroll down, Christian David Ginsburg wrote a set of notes for the codex with the paper that was cut to the size of the codex, and they sewed it into the binding. Nehemia: Wow! David: So, not only is this book being used by Ginsburg, this book has Ginsburg in it. Nehemia: Wow! David: It’s really amazing how these things are coming together. Nehemia: So, basically, does he sign his name here? Or do you just know the handwriting? David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end, it says Christian David Ginsburg. Yeah. Nehemia: Wow. So, this is a sort of, you know, “Ginsburg was here”. He added some pages… it’s more than one page, right? David: And he just goes through the Masorah of each one, almost like he does in his introduction book. Nehemia: Wait. So, are these notes about the Masorah? David: Yeah. They’re primarily about the number of verses in each book, and where’s the middle verse, and things like that. Nehemia: So, this is an unpublished mini treatise of Ginsburg, or notes of Ginsburg, is what you’re saying. David: Yeah. I wouldn’t say treatise; almost like a commentary. Nehemia: Okay. That should be your next article, by the way. It should be. No, it absolutely should be. David: I have some ideas for the next one, but it won’t be me. Maybe it’ll be you. So, we’ll talk after. Nehemia: Okay. David: Okay. So, if we keep going down, what we see here is that JTS has a copy of… There was a scholar in Oxford named Judith Olszowy-Schlanger. Did I pronounce that right, Nehemia? Nehemia: I’m not going to attempt to pronounce a name in Polish. I pronounce it “Olshovi”, but I don’t know. She is at Oxford. She was at Oxford. She is my supervisor at the Accord Pratique de Hôtitude, where I am officially doing a postdoc, so… David: So, she, Nehemia, is very involved in… Nehemia: She is the world’s foremost active paleographer of Hebrew. David: And so, when she actually was hired by Christie’s to evaluate the book, she noticed that the handwriting is strikingly similar to the handwriting and the style of Masorah, the notes that we have of Yisrael HaSofar, Israel the scribe, who wrote a book, a Torah, at JTS in the year 1241. Nehemia: So, guys, this is important. We don’t have the beginning of the Earl of Leicester Codex, and we don’t have the end, because they were lost, apparently, (even before the numbering, the first 39 chapters of Genesis were lost) and so, we don’t know who the scribe was, except you’re saying that Judith Schlanger identified the handwriting from something where we do have the name of the scribe. Okay. Oh, and this is L44A; that’s not just some manuscript. That in Masoretic studies is one of the most important manuscripts. Okay. David: So, what we have over here is our rare book librarian, Mordecai Schwartz, on the right-hand side… Nehemia: Yeah. David: …and he is looking through some of the Masoretic material in the JTS copy from the year 1241. And then I am on the left side looking through the Earl of Leicester’s codex, the Holkham Hall 2, and we’re looking, and it’s just the same thing. Meaning, the way he wrote one of them is the way he wrote the other. It was almost like carbon copies, in a certain sense. Nehemia: And for those listening, guys, they’re looking here at these Masoretic lists. In other words, if it’s the biblical text, how else would you write the biblical text? But here, it’s a Masoretic list. So, we have the large Masorah, the small Masorah on the page, and then at the end, and sometimes the beginning of manuscripts, you have these Masoretic lists. And he has, sort of, like, a decoration around the side written with words. And they look very similar, at least in this very small photo. But you’re saying the actual content was the same as well? David: Yeah. So, it was the handwriting, the content, the order. It was almost like if you were to make… Like, let’s say you had your dish, right? You know, whatever dish you’re making, you would make it similar two times in a row. It’s kind of what he’s doing here. He’s doing the same thing, presenting it in the same way, even though they were different books. We were able to, if you scroll down, we were able to get it digitized. Nehemia: Oh, okay. Here you’re with Ardon Bar-Hama, the famous… David: Ardon Bar-Hama, the superstar of photography, of manuscripts, who did the Aleppo Codex, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the Greek Codex Vaticanus, and other things. And so, this is him doing it. He did it very quickly and very well, and maybe, Nehemia, maybe we’ll talk, perhaps in the next year or so. We could get a number of these manuscripts together to join your website at one time. Nehemia: Let’s do it now. As soon as we get off, send me the images and I’ll put them up. I need permission. David: No, no, we can do it, like, maybe with a press conference… Nehemia: Oh, okay. We should absolutely do that. David: Yeah. All right. And so, if you scroll down, so, this is now, I think… Nehemia: Wow! Okay. Do you want to talk about this? This is amazing. David: All right. And so, now we’ll see that what makes this particular manuscript different is that in… Nehemia: Hold on a second. So, 44A is above. So, this is a very famous thing about the JTS manuscript, which is that… So, we mentioned the journal is called Sfarad, which means Spain, and there was a very famous manuscript in Spain. It was famous centuries ago, meaning, it’s not just famous today, and it was called the Hilleli Codex. And here he has a note in your JTS 44A manuscript that says, chazina, I think that’s be’hilleli, “I saw in the Hilleli Codex” and then some detail that he saw. Okay. David: And so, this is a very rare phenomenon, to say, “I have seen.” Nehemia: Right. David: Because most of the time, you’re just presenting what’s come before you; you don’t necessarily say, “I matter.” You don’t matter. So, it’s almost like you just present what you have. And here he’s saying, “I’ve seen in the Hilleli Codex, which is lost.” How important is the Hilleli Codex? I don’t know. If it was around today, would it be more important? Nehemia: Well, it wasn’t lost at this time. In other words, in the early 13th century, he has access to what he believes to be a very important manuscript, which has a textual variant. Now, guys, the textual variant here is the word tidru, you will make an oath, with a dagesh or without a dagesh. Right? So, in other words, something like the difference between tid’ru or tithhru. Right. So, it doesn’t necessarily have all that significance, but to him, wanting to copy the text perfectly, whether there’s a dot in the Dalet, or not a dot in the Dalet, that’s what we’re ultimately talking about. He wants to perfectly preserve it, and he says, “I’m going to put a dot here, but I saw in this very important manuscript that it didn’t have the dot” And this is presumably the testimony of Israel the Scribe, that you mentioned before, Yisrael Hasofer. David: Right. And the same exact note, if you scroll down, is present in the JTS one. Nehemia: What’s interesting is not just that it’s the same note I saw in Hilleli, it’s… he uses the specific word. He could have written ra’iti ba’Hilleli, or there’s a bunch of other words he could have used, right? He’s using the specific Aramaic form to say, “I saw”, right, so, that’s evidently his style. David: Right. Nehemia: That’s significant. David: And we’ve gone on a lot of tangents, but here’s another one. Theoretically, Nehemia, this could theoretically be… what we’re seeing is the dawn of a new keri and ketiv. What he’s saying is, “I wrote what I saw, but I know that in this more important manuscript, they’re doing it this way.” Nehemia: Well, I don’t know that it’s more important. In other words, he’s saying, “This is what I have in my text I’m copying from, so I’m going to reproduce it, but there’s a textual variant I’m aware of from a very important manuscript.” I think if it was more important, it would be in the body of the text, one could argue. David: No, no, no! That’s because this is the Masoretic way; you don’t change, that’s the way. You keep it. That’s the whole point. Nehemia: In other words, he’s… it’s almost like he’s saying, “I’m copying the mistake, but here’s what it should say, but I don’t dare change it.” David: Exactly. He’s saying, “In the Hilleli, this is…” right. Nehemia: Okay. Wow. David: Exactly. Nehemia: Okay. David: And so, this was it. And so, the book came… Nehemia: You say… this is a huge discovery, right? In other words, not only did you find Ginsburg’s personal copy, which included notes of what his sources were in, I guess, at least three manuscripts? David: Well, these weren’t his sources. I was able to figure out these were post-encyclopedia. His book came out; he was now analyzing these books to see how much of them is in his stuff. Nehemia: Ah, so, in other words, if I ever make a second edition, I have more sources for it. David: So, what did we learn? So, we now get to talk about the Masorah, that we talked about, and if Ginsburg is correct, it means that he looked at the Earl of Leicester’s Codex and he found 97 percent of its notes were in his Masorah. Nehemia: Yeah, but not the other way around. David: Not the other way around, but that means 3 percent of his notes were not in the Masorah. These were new to him. Nehemia: Hold on a second. So, 3 percent of the notes in the Earl of Leicester’s Codex are not in his Masorah. David: So, what that means is that, if Ginsburg would have been updating the Masorah, he would have added a whole bunch… Nehemia: Some more notes. David: Right. But 97 percent, I think, is a lot to be able to say the Masorah, as opposed to necessarily the Masorahs alone. We all know there’s Masorahs. Each manuscript is different. But there’s also like a body in Ginsburg that shows you that, like, a huge chunk is where most manuscripts are going to be getting their stuff. Nehemia: So, there’s two different questions here. I don’t know that we’re going to get so much into this, because this is very complicated. But basically, it’s worth noting there’s two different questions. One is, and let’s go back and look at one of these Masoretic notes, okay? And actually, could you explain what this note is here? And what’s the significance of this Kaf volume? So, here you have a note from your personal copy. Tell us about this note. David: Well, this was me basically saying that the Kaf Manuscript doesn’t match up with my manuscript. Nehemia: Okay. David: So, my manuscripts are not the ones mentioned in Kaf… Nehemia: Oh, this is important. Start here and tell us what this is. David: Yeah. So, one more time. In Cambridge, there’s this manuscript on the letter Kaf. And this letter, in that little bit, that manuscript of 100 pages, Ginsburg tells you his… some of his sources for each note. But those notes… for example, at the top, if you look at note 415 on the letter Kaf, his source is this manuscript called ADD, additional, 15250, and then Folio 320B. That’s his source. But when you look at my note on that Kaf, I get 238A. So, my notes are not being used for the Kaf manuscript, meaning my notes are something different. Nehemia: So, guys, this is important. So, Ginsburg has the four volumes. Which volume has the Aleph through Yud? I don’t remember. Is that one of those four? David: One, yeah. Nehemia: Okay. So, he has the Hebrew, and in the Hebrew text, under the letter Kaf, he has what he calls rubric, right? In other words, here’s Masoretic List 415. It has the word va’kha’as, and it’s twice in Scripture. And what are the two instances in Scripture? Psalm 10:14 and Ecclesiastes 2:23 have the word va’kha’as with that exact form. But he doesn’t tell you what manuscript he got that from. In the English sort of dictionary, or decipherment, of which Aleph through Yud were published, and only Kaf exists now in manuscript form. Although Prof. Ofer is working on an edition of it; he has the note. Here it’s interesting; he writes Tav–Yud–Hey instead of Tav-Tet-Vav. That’s interesting. So, I wonder if the Tav-Tet-Vav was the innovation of the printer, who’s like, “I’m not writing Yud–Hey… that’s God’s name.” That’s interesting. Anyway, so, he says, “This rubric, which does not,” what does that say, “occur in the printed Masorah is…” So, in other words, he has a Masoretic rubric, or list, that doesn’t appear in the printed Masorah. What does he mean by the printed Masorah? He doesn’t mean his copy, obviously not. What does he mean? David: I believe… Nehemia: So, presumably he means of, like, Eliyahu B’chur or something like this. Or some other scholar. David: Perhaps. No, I think he means this, in volume two. He means this. Nehemia: No, but here it is printed, so… So, he must mean some other collection of Masorah. Somebody has to figure out what that means. David: Yeah, okay. Nehemia: “It does not occur in the print of Masorah, it’s from…” So, in other words, he’s saying, “I brought you this, even though if you look at standard printings of the Masorah, you won’t have that.” And that is, his source isn’t from the printed Masorah, it’s from manuscript ADD 15250, which is in the British Library today, and it’s on page 320B. And in your note, it’s 238A. What color is that? Is that purple? David: Purple. Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, he has a second source. So, here we have a chronology of these documents. In other words, the Kaf volume presumably was written before… I think we can even say something different here (and we have to verify this) but I would say, the first of these to be produced was this English, the second was this printed volume of the Masorah. Because when he’s saying, “in the printed Masorah”, it seems to me, somebody should verify this, but seems to me he’s not referring to his printed Masorah, but like a standard printed Masorah. Right? And then, he’s therefore giving you the source, which is this manuscript, and it’s a different manuscript than what he writes here. So, the chronology of these are: one is the Kaf volume in English, two, his printing of the Masorah, and three, the notes he added to the printing. If I’m right. I don’t know if I’m right. It’s… David: Yeah… Nehemia: We have to verify that. David: We could look at that very easily, but I think what he’s just saying is, “I didn’t give you the source in the printed Masorah.” I think that’s what he’s saying. Nehemia: Okay. We’ll save that for our future research. David: Okay, so, if you scroll down, I think we’re done with this manuscript. Yeah. — Nehemia: So, but wait, you have two major discoveries here. Number one, you have Ginsburg’s personal copy of the Masorah with added notes, and number two, you identified one of the manuscripts referenced in that Masorah. So, that’s purple. Did you identify the black and the red manuscripts? David: Yes. Nehemia: Okay, that’s huge! Why… you’re again burying the lead. You identified three of his man… what are the two other manuscripts? You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com. We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith! SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Pandora SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS(Please click here to donate)Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. RELATED EPISODES Hebrew Voices Episodes Hebrew Voices #209 – Read Like a Tiberian Jew: Part 1 Support Team Study – Read Like a Tiberian Jew: Part 2 Support Team Study – How the Jewish Exiles Pronounced Hebrew Hebrew Voices #78 – Chinese Origin of the Sukkot Etrog Hebrew Voices #107 – The Mishnah and the New Testament Hebrew Voices #157 – SBL Reactions 2022: Part 1 Support Team Study – SBL Reactions 2022: Part 2 OTHER LINKS Biblical Hebrew - Jewish Theological Seminary https://www.biblicalculture.org Dr. Moster’s article: https://doi.org/10.3989/sefarad.025.1261 C. D. Ginsburg, The Massorah: Compiled from Manuscripts (London, 1880-1905), 4 volumes IHBMR.com The post Hebrew Voices #249 – Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

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