In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Scribe of the Leningrad Codex, Bible Scholar Dr. Nehemia Gordon talks with Dr. Kim Phillips about how he made international headlines and discovered new manuscripts by the famous scribe Samuel ben Jacob. They also discuss a centuries-old cover up that tried to hide how some Bible manuscripts broke the rules of Hebrew grammar.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Transcript

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: So, we have this thing in the Leningrad Codex which is controversial, but you discover that in this other manuscript written by the same scribe you have this unique feature, this unique linguistic variation. That's incredible! I mean that was definitive proof, I think, along with all the other paratextual features, that you have this unique reading.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s amazing! That is huge!

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am at Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, with Dr. Kim Phillips. Shalom, Kim!

Dr Phillips: Shalom, ma shlomcha?

Nehemia: Beseder. Wow, you speak Hebrew! Now, Tyndale House is not a Jewish institution. What is Tyndale House?

Dr Phillips: Tyndale House is an Evangelical Research Institute in the heart of Cambridge where we focus on biblical studies. We have one of the world's leading biblical studies libraries, and scholars of any faith or none are welcome to come and work in our library. We try to stock the leading staff, focusing just on biblical studies, and so by having that fairly narrow focus we can maintain the edge on keeping everything up to date.

Nehemia: Wow. So, you’re Dr. Kim Phillips. Tell us, what did you do your doctorate in?

Dr Phillips: Well, I did most of my post-grad studies in the Book of Lamentations, but then when I came to my PhD, I had been reading Ibn Ezra and Kimchi and Rashi and the other medievals.

Nehemia: Those are medieval Jewish commentators.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, medieval Jewish commentators, and I fell in love with them pretty much instantly. So, I ended up looking at Ibn Ezra’s commentary on Isaiah 40 to 66.

Nehemia: Okay, wow. And your PhD is from?

Dr Phillips: From Cambridge University.

Nehemia: Cambridge University, okay, wonderful. And Tyndale House, is that part of Cambridge University? I'm a bit unclear on that.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, well, I think everybody is!

Nehemia: Because a lot of my audience, I think, will know of Tyndale House from the publishing.

Dr Phillips: Tyndale Publishers are not Tyndale House.

Nehemia: Oh, they’re not?

Dr Phillips: No, there's no relation at all. So, Tyndale is, I think, technically an affiliated institution with the university, so we have cam.ac.uk emails and whatnot.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: Certainly, we're one of the main libraries that students, particularly post-grad students will come and use.

Nehemia: So, you’re a researcher at Tyndale House.

Dr Phillips: I am.

Nehemia: And you're also a researcher, tell us about the other… in the Cairo Genizah.

Dr Phillips: Yes, in the Taylor-Schechter Collection, which is the huge collection of Cairo Genizah manuscripts which are stored in Cambridge University Library.

Nehemia: And that's the largest collection of Cairo Genizah fragments in the world, at Cambridge?

Dr Phillips: By a country mile.

Nehemia: So, you may not know this, but I met you a few years back when I came to Cambridge to do some research. But before I met you, you were one of my heroes, and I don't have a lot of heroes.

Dr Phillips: I didn’t know that!

Nehemia: I've dealt with top sports athletes in the world, and people who are pretty well known in media, that doesn't mean anything to me, but you were a celebrity to me. And the reason you were a celebrity is…

Dr Phillips: I’m intrigued, I don’t know what to say because I have no idea…

Nehemia: Well, because you famously discovered another manuscript by the same scribe who wrote the Leningrad Codex.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: The Leningrad Codex was completed around the year 1008. It’s interesting why it’s "around", but that's a different discussion.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: By a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob in Egypt, and that is the oldest complete manuscript that we know of currently of the entire Tanakh…

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: …of what Christians call the Old Testament. And it’s the basis of modern printings such as the BHS, which, that’s a BHS right here, right?

Dr Phillips: Yep, here we are.

Nehemia: That’s the standard Bible used in Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible used in seminaries and universities around the world. And so, you found a second manuscript written by the same scribe, Samuel ben Jacob. Tell us how you did that? At the time it was an international story. I think I read about it in CNN and on Fox News.

Dr Phillips: So, the one that got into the news was a manuscript of the Former Prophets; so Joshua 3 to 2 Kings.

Nehemia: I have to stop you there for a second.

Dr Phillips: Okay, yeah.

Nehemia: You say 2 Kings and not Second Kings?

Do you know there's a whole controversy about this in the US?

Dr Phillips: No!

Nehemia: The claim is that Christians say First Kings and Second Kings, and Jews say 1 Kings and 2 Kings.

Dr Phillips: Wow! What?

Nehemia: And when they asked Donald Trump what his favorite verse was, he said, “1 Corinthians.” And people pointed out he's obviously never been to church, and he only knows about the names of the books from his Jewish son-in-law, and that's why he says 1 Corinthians and not First. But you just said 2 Kings.

Dr Phillips: Wow!

Nehemia: I don't know if that vindicates the Former American president or if it's relevant, but maybe it's a difference between Christians and American Christians in the US, I don't know.

Dr Phillips: It seems like you guys have a lot of controversies that don’t make it over the pond!

Nehemia: So, y'all would call this a storm in a teacup kind of thing. But this was a big discussion of like, why doesn’t he know it's called First Corinthians, he says it’s 1 Corinthians, but anyway.

Dr Phillips: That’s extraordinary! That’s extraordinary!

Nehemia: Back to the Former Prophets! I get distracted easily.

Dr Phillips: So, that was the manuscript that…

Nehemia: And where was that manuscript?

Dr Phillips: It's in the Firkovitch Collection.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: And we've known about it for centuries; it's in the catalogs. But what we didn't know was that it was by Samuel ben Jacob because there was no colophon to the effect.

Nehemia: So, let me explain that. If you have any old books in your house, you'll notice that often you're missing the beginning and the end. And in this case, I guess we're missing the end, which is normally where they write…

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: In the Hebrew manuscripts, they would normally write at the end that it was completed on such and such a date by such and such a scribe. So, we had this manuscript in Saint Petersburg, Russia…

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: It's been known for over 150 years or so. And your discovery wasn't that the manuscript exists, but that it was written by the same scribe as the Leningrad Codex.

Dr Phillips: That's right, that’s right.

Nehemia: So, how did you determine that? If it doesn't say in it who wrote it…

Dr Phillips: Yeah, sure. Here, we actually need to go back to an earlier discovery that I made of two single leaves from the Taylor-Schechter Collection, of Exodus.

Nehemia: Leaves is what most people call pages.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, pages, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, if chas ve’chalilah, I would just rip this out then it would be a leaf.

Nehemia: So, a leaf is what we would call two pages, but in common parlance, you found two pages.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: Of what?

Dr Phillips: Of Exodus 25:26, and Leviticus 26:27. And I remember the day. I was in the manuscript reading room and I was pouring over this beautiful leaf of the Exodus fragment as part of a mini project that we were doing on the Exodus Bible fragments. I noticed that the little marks, the little sort of symbols at the end of the Masorah Magna, were the same symbols that I'd seen in the facsimile of the Leningrad Codex.

Nehemia: So, the Masorah Magna are these notes at the bottom of the page, and so this is sort of a decoration at the end of the line or something?

Dr Phillips: Yeah, so, as you say, you've got the main text in three columns and then you’ve got these Masoretic notes top and bottom of the page. And then to separate each of the individual notes, and at the end of the note in total, there was a colon and a circle and another colon.

I thought, “I’ve seen that before, I’ve seen that before, I’ve seen that before!” So, I checked in the facsimile of the Leningrad, and then it was. And that got me thinking, “Wow. I wonder if there are other features.”

Nehemia: Because maybe everybody had that symbol.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, I did a quick search of 100 or so different manuscripts which had these little symbols, and it was fairly rare. I think there were only about five of the manuscripts which had that particular symbol. Other symbols are quite profuse, just a circle, or a dot, or a little squiggly line. It seems to be one of the very few areas where Jewish scribes who are copying out the Tanakh, could show a tiny bit of individuality.

Nehemia: That's a really good point. So, pretty much everything they're copying they've got to copy exactly as it is in the source.

Dr Phillips: Precisely.

Nehemia: But here they can express themselves with a little decoration or something.

Dr Phillips: That's right, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s a really interesting point.

Dr Phillips: That’s right. So, Malachi Beit-Arié has spent most of his career thinking about how you can identify scribes and link them from their different manuscripts. He talks about these paratextual features, that’s the phrase he uses, and we're talking about things like how a scribe fills up the end of a line if he's trying to get some sort of left justification.

Nehemia: So paratextual is essentially anything that's not part of the content of the text.

Dr Phillips: Precisely, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, absolutely.

Nehemia: Okay, so you're looking at these two fragments from the Cairo Genizah, and you identify these features that are these paratextual decorations. They're not part of the text…

Dr Phillips: That's right.

Nehemia: They’re the place where the scribe can express themselves.

Dr Phillips: Yes, exactly. So, in addition to that little symbol at the end of the Masoretic notes, the way he fills up the line. So, in his main biblical text, Samuel Ben Jacob won't extend one of the letters, like a Mem or a Tav, for example, to fill up the line, although, he will do that in his writing of the Masoretic notes, for example.

Nehemia: So, let me explain this to the audience. When we justify a column today, we press the button on Word and it just does it, but what it really is doing is it's adding spaces between the words. One of the authentic ways of justifying a text in ancient Hebrew writings is to stretch out certain letters, some people call it dilating letters. That's one way. Another way is you put in the little line fillers.

Dr Phillips: Sure.

Nehemia: So, you're saying he didn't stretch out letters in the biblical text, but he did it in the Masoretic notes.

Dr Phillips: Yes, he does, yeah. He has a selection of letters that he’ll use.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: So, I isolated about a dozen of these paratextual features from the Leningrad Codex, predominantly from the Leningrad Codex, and they were all the same in this fragment that I was looking at of Exodus. And so, I began to get very, very excited and then I started reading the Masoretic notes in more detail for their content on this fragment… this might take us a bit off piece, but…

Nehemia: No, please.

Dr Phillips: They were identical letter for letter to the Masoretic notes in another manuscript that we know Samuel Ben Jacob wrote, it’s called LM, but which we only have access to via a publication of the Masorah Magna. We don’t have the actual manuscript, sadly.

Nehemia: Someone does, it's just not available to the public.

Dr Phillips: Someone does, yes. And if you're watching – please, we really want it!

Nehemia: Yeah, we just want photos at this point.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, absolutely!

Nehemia: High resolution color photos.

Dr Phillips: That would be ideal. So, we have access at least to the…

Nehemia: In other words, somebody transcribed what was in it, but we don't have the actual document itself because it's in a safe somewhere.

Dr Phillips: Somewhere, yeah.

Nehemia: That we won't talk about.

Dr Phillips: So, they didn't transcribe the biblical text, only the text of the Masoretic notes from the top and bottom of the page; not even the Masorah Parva as it’s so called, in between the columns.

Nehemia: And how would you describe the Masorah? I describe it as like proofreading notes.

Dr Phillips: Okay, yeah. That’s a beautiful illustration or comparison. I normally say it's like scaffolding around the outside of a heritage building that you want to preserve. And so, you put the scaffolding there with all sorts of safeguards so that the heritage building doesn't get damaged in any way.

Nehemia: I call it proofreading notes because they're – you know, I’m telling the audience – they’re these little notes that will say, “A certain word is spelled this way three times and this other way two times; and here's what the three times are.” And there’s many different ways to express that.

So, if they're verbatim the same in the Leningrad Codex and in these two fragments of Exodus, or one of the fragments of Exodus, then either that one was copied from the other or they're both written by the same scribe, that seems to be the options there.

Dr Phillips: Yes, yeah. It was LM, not the Leningrad Codex...

Nehemia: Oh, LM. Okay. But we know that Samuel Ben Jacob wrote that one?

Dr Phillips: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: Thanks to a colophon.

Nehemia: So, up till now we have three manuscripts written by Samuel Ben Jacob – Leningrad Codex, LM, and these Cairo Genizah fragments, and we’re going to get to the fourth one, because that’s the famous…

Dr Phillips: We have four already in fact, because there's another manuscript in the Firkovitch Collection, which is a Torah with Sa'adia's Tafsir.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. So, it's interspersed with an Arabic translation?

Dr Phillips: Yes, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, that's right? Okay.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: Alright. So your big discovery is the fifth one?

Dr Phillips: Yeah, there we go! My discovery is getting smaller and smaller!

Nehemia: No, but it’s important, because in the case of what you call LM, we don't actually have the manuscript, we have somebody's transcription of the manuscript from the 20th century or early 21st century whatever.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Parts of it, even. And then in the other case we have verses interspersed with an Arabic translation.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: And you actually have a block of text, which is, like you said, Joshua through to 2 Kings.

Dr Phillips: Yeah! Which one am I meant to say? Second Kings? 2 Kings?

Nehemia: No, it’s fine.

Dr Phillips: I’m feeling the pressure!

Nehemia: Alright, so you identified these two fragments as being from Samuel Ben Jacob by comparing it to LM.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah. And Leningrad, yeah.

Nehemia: And Leningrad. But with LM, you didn't have the graphic decorations.

Dr Phillips: Yes, yeah.

Nehemia: Because you don’t have it; you just have a transcription.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so that’s interesting. Wow! So now we really need to see LM, to see what the graphic decorations are.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I’m remembering now, because this was a while ago, in Yevin's book on the Aleppo Codex, there is a picture, I think, of one leaf of LM.

Nehemia: Oh, there is?

Dr Phillips: I think.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: And I think that you have that same colon, circle, colon thing there.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: And so, I think that was part of the story.

Nehemia: It’s been a while, huh?

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah, it has been a while. But anyway, the point really is… I mean, yes, it is nice to have a big chunk of text that we know is written by him. And in particular, it can enable us to clarify certain oddities in the Leningrad Codex, but perhaps we'll come back to that.

But as far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing was realizing, actually, there is a way, apart from having a colophon, that you can begin to say, “Okay, this scribe that I know must have also written this manuscript, which up to now, I didn't know was written by him.” That that is possible. And when you work in the Cairo Genizah, where basically you're working with a page here, a page here, two pages here, a scrap of a page here, that's quite handy.

Nehemia: A lot of scraps and a lot of pages.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, precisely, yeah. That's what I meant by it was the potential that I think was more exciting…

Nehemia: I can't emphasize what a big deal that is! That you can look at a manuscript that was written 1,000 years ago – at this point, more than 1,000 years ago, slightly more.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: And, you can say, “Not only can I date this, but I know the name of the scribe.” That's huge!

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: I mean, how often can one do that in the history of, let's say, Hebrew textual studies? And there are cases. There’s a whole much of manuscripts they say were written by this Rabbi Joseph Rosh Ha-Seder, and people know his handwriting.

Dr Phillips: Sure, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s pretty rare. And what makes it more difficult I think, is that in biblical texts they’re writing in this kind of square, formal, hand.

Dr Phillips: Precisely, precisely.

Nehemia: Well, they all kind of look the same!

Dr Phillips: Yeah, exactly right, yeah. So, we've got lots of Maimonides fragments in the Genizah, and he has rather distinctive handwriting; he’s got a doctor's handwriting! It’s illegible.

Nehemia: That's when he’s writing in either cursive or semi-cursive.

Dr Phillips: Yes, yeah.

Nehemia: If he's writing in the proper square script, and he’s copying something, so he's not even in a hurry… well, maybe he is in a hurry.

Dr Phillips: He must have always been in a hurry!

Nehemia: This actually happened to me when I was working on my PhD and I brought a fragment, or actually not a fragment, a codex, to Edna Engel, who is a disciple of Malachi Beit-Arié, and one of the top paleographers in the world in Hebrew.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I asked her to date it, and she said, “Not only can I tell you when it's from, I could tell you the name of the scribe.”

Dr Phillips: Wow!

Nehemia: And I’m like, “What! How is that possible?”

Dr Phillips: Wow, wow, wow.

Nehemia: But that’s basically what you did.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Not basically. That's exactly what you did!

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s amazing! That's why you're one of my heroes!

Dr Phillips: Thank you! Goodness!

Nehemia: When I grow up, I want to be him.

Dr Phillips: Oh dear, you need to aim higher!

Samuel Ben Jacob is a particularly lovely case, because thanks to the miracle that is the Cairo Genizah, we have other documents written by him. We have a document, a letter, written by him when he first arrived in Tzfat…

Nehemia: I didn’t know about that, okay. What did it say in the letter?

Dr Phillips: Well, it's broken off, as all the Cairo Genizah fragments are, just where you want it. But basically, it seems to say, “I'm new here, and I’m poor, so please could you help me get on my feet?” But then we have a document written a few years later, written in 1021 actually, we have the date for that one, where he is agreeing to copy a Bible text…

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Dr Phillips: …for 25 dinars, a massive some of money, and sort of way over the odds for the Bible codices at the time. And we've got his signature for example, I think in a get.

Nehemia: That’s a divorce document.

Dr Phillips: Yep, that's right.

Nehemia: Was he a witness there? Or was he getting divorced?

Dr Phillips: He was a witness, yeah, he was a witness.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dr Phillips: And in one other place as well, I think. So, we don't just get his professional work as it were. We also have a… if I remember, a liturgical text written in his hand.

Nehemia: Okay. So, he didn’t just produce Bibles, he was producing a prayer book as well.

Dr Phillips: Apparently, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, interesting.

Dr Phillips: So, we can really sort of develop a bit of a rounded character for him.

Nehemia: That's really interesting! So, in some ways, maybe we know more about him – and this part might be a bit controversial – but it seems like we know more about him than we do about Aaron ben Asher, who was the proofreader and pointer of the Aleppo Codex.

Dr Phillips: Sure.

Nehemia: Because we have a tome that he wrote, but which parts of it he actually wrote are a matter of some controversy.

Dr Phillips: Yes, exactly, exactly. Certainly, in terms of the ich bin leiben, the actual real world in which the person lived, we know much more about Samuel ben Jacob than Aaron ben Asher.

Nehemia: Wow, that's fascinating. So, how did you then… so, you're looking at this codex of the Prophets, of the Former Prophets, and you start to notice these same paratextual symbols as in the Leningrad Codex…

Dr Phillips: Yeah, that's right, that's right. And obviously, when you've got more text, then you can do more checks, and so this manuscript, L17, unimaginatively called.

Nehemia: Is that what Yevin calls it?

Dr Phillips: Yeah, yeah, that’s what Yevin calls it. Yevin has a list of manuscripts that he thinks are significant from the Firkovitch Collection, and this was number 17. And it’s a substantial text, and so we have a lot more, and including a couple of places where - and this actually comes back to something we mentioned earlier - there are places in the Leningrad Codex where Samuel ben Jacob diverges from what one would expect based, say, on the Aleppo Codex. In absolute minutiae, the smallest of small points, but nonetheless it's a divergence. And the question as always, did he just get it wrong? Or is this deliberate? Is there some tradition that he's proposing as an alternative?

One classic case is the name of the Jerahmeelites in 1 Samuel 30, 31, something like that.

Nehemia: Something like that, we’ll look it up. But yeah, it's actually twice, “hayerachma…”

Dr Phillips: That's right, yeah, that's exactly the problem.

Nehemia: “Hayerachm…” I can’t even say it right, “hayerachmele'im”.

Dr Phillips: That's right, that’s exactly the problem.

Nehemia: And the problem is there’s three shvas in a row, which doesn't exist according to the rules of Hebrew.

Dr Phillips: Exactly right, yeah.

Nehemia: Don't you love it when there's something in a manuscript that doesn't exist in the language? And that's actually a really interesting point, because we think of grammar as prescriptive, the grammar tells you how to speak and how to write.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: But actually, grammar, even of modern languages to some extent, but definitely of an ancient language is descriptive.

Dr Phillips: Sure.

Nehemia: And if the rule is we never have three shvas in the row, and we find in one of the most important manuscripts of the Bible three shvas in a row, well then…

Dr Phillips: Yeah, let’s rethink things.

Nehemia: Then there's a different set of rules he’s following.

Dr Phillips: Sure, sure, yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: So, it's in 1 Samuel 27:10 it says, “Achish would ask, 'Where did you raid today?' and David would reply, 'The Negev of Judah, and the Negev of the Jerahmeelites,' or 'the Negev of the Kenites.'” I'm looking here at Accordance, which is based on the same text as BHS.

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: It has, “Hiyaha…” I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. “Hayarchemeheli.” So, if you have three shvas in a row, and then of course if it’s in Tiberian pronunciation, it will be “Hayarchmaleli...” I don't know!

Dr Phillips: Exactly, exactly!

Nehemia: We don’t know.

Dr Phillips: What do we do there?

Nehemia: And then in 1 Samuel 30 verse 29, it has what we would expect, “Hayerachme'eli”, where there's a shva, a patach, and then two shvas, which is perfectly fine.

Dr Phillips: That's right.

Nehemia: Alright, so…

Dr Phillips: However, in that latter case, that's been changed. It was originally…

Nehemia: How do you know that?

Dr Phillips: Because if you just zoom in, you can see it really clearly.

Nehemia: I actually photographed that with a microscope.

Dr Phillips: Ah! Here we go!

Nehemia: At Ben’s request…

Dr Phillips: Yeah.

Nehemia: And you can not only see it's been changed, you can see that it was originally a shva.

Dr Phillips: Yeah, correct.

Nehemia: Without question, when you zoom in that closely with the microscope.

Dr Phillips: So, people have been having this discussion for a long time. How can you possibly have three shvas in a row?

Nehemia: And people debated that case, and 1 Samuel 30:29, where it does follow the rules, about was it changed or was it not changed? So, I was asked to check it when I was in St. Petersburg three years ago, and definitively it's been changed.

Dr Phillips: Brilliant.

Nehemia: So, in two places it originally had three shvas in a row. So, what did you have in… now you’ve got me excited! What did you have in L17, also written by Samuel ben Jacob?

Dr Phillips: Three shvas in a row.

Nehemia: So, it's not just a fluke.

Dr Phillips: It is not a fluke. He is being deliberate; he wanted those three shvas.

Nehemia: Okay. So, what that tells us is here we have an authentic textual variant that's deliberate, and you could always say one of those goes back to an error, possibly, although maybe they both go back to two different reading traditions. We had these people who were professional readers, who would learn how to read the Scriptures, and then the Masoretes wrote it down.

Dr Phillips: That’s right.

Nehemia: That’s the standard explanation. And that actually brings us to our next topic, which we'll talk about in the next episode, which is really exciting, because one of your other fields of expertise is what’s called the Land of Israel Pointing System. The Hebrew that most people know about is actually Tiberian Hebrew, and there's actually three different major Hebrew pronunciation traditions from… I want to say ancient times, or from…

Dr Phillips: That’s right. Ancient times, definitely.

Nehemia: Okay. And you're actually one of the world's foremost experts on the so-called Palestinian, or the Eretz Israeli, the Land of Israel System.

Dr Phillips: That’s right.

Nehemia: So, join us for the next episode.

Dr Phillips: Thank you!

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