AN IN DEPTH STURY OF THE NAME YEHOVAH

 10 RABBIS SPEAK OUT ON THE NAME

 

Nehemia Gordon brings evidence from newly discovered Hebrew manuscripts proving that Jewish rabbis preserved the true pronunciation of God's holy name and explains why scholars ignore Jewish sources while searching out every pagan non-Hebrew text they can find.

Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, and welcome to my Raw Stream of Torah Consciousness. I want to thank all of the shofar trumpeters standing with me on the wall, helping me empower people with information based on the ancient Hebrew sources of faith.

This episode is about Ten Rabbis Who Speak Out on the Name of God. I've done many studies on God's holy name; on the name Yehovah. I've talked about this from lots of different directions, and what I really haven't given much emphasis to are traditional Jewish sources outside of the Bible. That's what we're going to look at today. We're going to look at ten rabbis who tell you the name is Yehovah, and actually call out the vowels by name. These vowels have names; Sheva, Cholam, Kamatz. You're going to learn that today. And you will hear unequivocally from Jewish sources, that God's holy name is Yehovah.

Let me start off though with a Bible verse, Psalm 91:14. It says,

“Ki bi chashak va'afaleteu, asagvehu ki-yadha shmi.”

Here, God is speaking about Israel, and he says, “Because he has set his love upon Me,” meaning Israel has set his love upon God, “therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he has known My name.” Now, you hear that in English, and you think, okay, Israel knew his name. But it doesn't actually tell us how to pronounce that name.

We'll see in the Jewish sources that, at least the way they understood this verse, the word "love" itself contains the key to knowing what the vowels are, which is so exciting! It's so cool! Now, the normal word for love in Hebrew is the word Ahava, from the root aleph, hey, bet. This is an unusual word that's used in Psalm 91:14. It's the word cha’-shak, or cha-shak’. We're going to hear that word “chashak” a lot today.

What's interesting is that I came across this passage from this rabbi in the 12th century. I bring this because a lot of times people will say to me, "Who cares what his name is? We know it's Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. Or we know it's just…we know who He is. Why do we need to know how to pronounce His name? Why is that important?”

I found this rabbi in the 12th century, Rabbi David Kimchi. He's commenting on the verse I just read, Psalm 91:14. And he says, "Knowing the Tetragrammaton," that is the four-letter name of God, "knowing the Tetragrammaton is loving God (blessed be He), and this is the greatest achievement that a person can achieve while he is still a body." What a powerful statement.

What really blew me away reading this in Hebrew is, he doesn't say while a person still has a body or he's still in a body. But he's saying, while you're still physical this is the greatest achievement that you can know, to know the Tetragrammaton, to know what God's name is. And, that it’s an expression of your love of God. That's what he understands from the verse, the verse we just read, Psalm 91:14.

“Because Israel has known Me, therefore,” literally, “because he has set his love upon me”, meaning Israel, “therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high because he has known My name.” Radak, this Rabbi David Kimchi, a famous rabbi in the 12th century, a Bible commentator, he says what that means is that knowing the Tetragrammaton is loving God. And that's the greatest thing you can accomplish while still in the flesh.

You know, we hear in the Psalms that the dead can't praise Yehovah. When you're dead, you're in a state of sleep. Yes, there is a final resurrection, I believe. But while you're a physical body, this is your opportunity to call on His name. Now, what does he mean, “knowing the Tetragrammaton?” We know what the name is. What's the problem? Its four Hebrew letters, Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. That's equivalent to the English letters, YHVH.

I have a bunch of studies dealing with different aspects of this. For example, I have an entire study just explaining the pronunciation of the Hebrew letter Vav, which many people believe is a Wow. In fact, the study, I called it, “Wow. It's a Vav!” because I showed in the earliest Hebrew sources it's documented that it’s a Va. There's a lot to talk about here. But what exactly does Radak mean when he says, “knowing the Tetragrammaton?” What does he mean by that? Meaning, there may be a separate question. What does the Psalm mean, right? Psalm 91:14. “Because he has known my name,” presumably in the context of Psalms, it means Israel knew the name Yehovah versus the name of other deities.

But when Radak takes this in the 12th century, he takes it a different direction. He says, "What does it mean to know the Tetragrammaton?" In the rabbinical understanding and context, remember, the rabbis have a ban on speaking God's name. Hence, knowing the name is knowing what the vowels are. I have a rabbi who says…what’s really interesting is this rabbi was the teacher of one of my ancestors. The rabbi’s name was Elijah of Vilna. He was actually called the Vilna Gaon.

Gaon is a Hebrew word that means great one. But really, it's the Hebrew equivalent of genius, so it's the Genius of Vilna, referring to his rabbinical knowledge, and his Bible knowledge and Torah knowledge. So, this Vilna Gaon, Elijah of Vilna (Vilna is the capital of Lithuania. The Lithuanians call it Vilnius, but the Jews called it, and continue to call it, Vilna) in the 18th century is the leading rabbi of the entire generation of this period in the 18th century.

Now, this passage from Elijah of Vilna that I'm about to read to you is quoted in Jewish sources, modern Jewish sources, by rabbis to say, “Look, our rabbis in the Middle Ages didn't know how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton.” They referenced this passage from the writings of Elijah of Vilna, this great rabbi of the 18th century. I did something really radical, which I tend to do. I decided to look it up and see what Elijah of Vilna actually said.

I found this in a footnote. It's actually in a rabbinical encyclopedia, which was saying “we don't know how to pronounce the name; see Elijah of Vilna.” I looked at the passage and here's what Elijah of Vilna says. He says, "The vowels of the name itself are hidden,” the vowels, “the vowels of the name itself are hidden. Its vowels are the secret of the Tetragrammaton."

Now, is Elijah of Vilna saying that he doesn't know what the vowels are, and that no Jewish rabbi knows what the vowels are? He's not saying that. What he's saying is, they're hidden, and it's a secret. That doesn't mean he doesn't know what the secret is. One of the things I've shown in my research in various studies, and in my book, Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, and in The Open Door Series, and many other studies, is that we actually find the name written with full vowels in the Aleppo Codex. And, since then, other manuscripts as well.

I'm not going to go into that too much today. I'll just review that quickly. What we find in most instances in the Masoretic text of the Bible is that there's a missing vowel. And, every-once-in-a-while, the scribes put in the vowel that's missing and you have the full vowels, Yehovah. The assumption here is that they know what that vowel is. How do they know to put in the "o"? Why don't they put in an "e" or an "a" or a "u"? They always put in that "o," which is called the Cholam, and this presumes that they know what it is.

What Elijah of Vilna is saying is, yes, the name is hidden and the vowels of the name of Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, are secret. It doesn't mean no one knows what they are. It's just a secret. There's this famous t-shirt in Israel. It says, you know, something like, “Mossad,” which is Israeli Secret Intelligence Agency. And, it says, "My job is so secret, I don't even know what I do." But this is a secret that people knew, and that's what we're going to see today, unequivocally, that rabbis knew the answer to this secret. They knew what the name was.

Before we get to that, I just want to look quickly at some Masoretic Bible manuscripts. I've been collecting evidence from Masoretic Bible manuscripts, and as of this recording, I have over 150 Masoretic Bible manuscripts with the full vowels, Yehovah. I'm just going to bring you six of them. These are considered by most scholars to be the top six manuscripts of the Bible.

The Aleppo Codex, which some people date to around the year 924, maybe as late as possibly as 930.

The Leningrad Codex, from around the year 1008.

British Library Oriental 4445; 4445 is considered the third most important manuscript of the Bible with vowels, from around the Year 920 to 950.

Cairo Codex of the Prophets is actually the earliest of the six, from 895.

The Damascus Crown, also known as Sassoon 507, is from the 10th century, and

Sassoon 1053, from the 10th century.

All six of those manuscripts have the full vowels, and I'm going to show them to you here. Here's Ezekiel 28:22 in the Aleppo Codex. What's real powerful about this example…pay attention to this one. It says, "Thus saith Lord Yehovah." Whenever Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, is next to the word "Lord," (and I'll do a whole separate study on this) but whenever it's next to the word "Lord," Adonai, it gets the vowels of Elohim.

In this passage in the Aleppo Codex, Ezekiel 28:22, it actually gets the vowels of Yehovah. You can't tell me that, "Well, these are the vowels of Adonai," because, by tradition, in this passage, Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, is not read as Adonai. It's read as Elohim: as God. So, what the scribe did is, he put in what he knew to be the true vowels. It’s powerful!

The next one is the Leningrad Codex, and here's Leviticus 25:17. It says, “ki ani Yehovah elohechem”, “For I am Yehovah, your God.” There are about 50 instances in the Leningrad Codex, maybe more. That's what we found so far.

British Library Oriental 4445, Leviticus 22:9, it says, “ani Yehovah me’kadsham”, “I am Yehovah who sanctifies them."

Cairo Codex of the Prophets, Ezekiel 7:4, "And you shall know that I am Yehovah." And here Yehovah has the full vowels. I mean, it's amazing.

Damascus Crown, Deuteronomy 6:4. Now, what's interesting about the Damascus Crown is it has the name with the full vowels quite often, and I'll talk about that in a future study. But here's the passage of the Shema, “Shema Yisrael, Yehovah elohenu, Yehovah echad, ve’ahavtah et Yehovah elohecha”. And it says, "Hear O Israel. Yehovah is our God. Yehovah is one and you shall love Yehovah your God with all your heart." That's three times in a row it has the full vowels. In fact, you can see in the left column here that it has a fourth time.

Sassoon 1053, is one of the six key manuscripts of the Tanakh. Moses is speaking to Pharaoh in Exodus 10:9, and Pharoah says, “Who's going to go?” And he's saying, we're going go with our sons and our daughters and our flocks and our cattle; “ki chag Yehovah lanu”, “for it is a feast of Yehovah for us.” This is one of two places I found where Sasson 1053 has the full vowels. It's pretty rare in that manuscript.

Now, we've got it in these six key manuscripts, and it's pretty rare in most of them. In the Damascus Crown its relatively common, but in the other one it is quite rare. But if it does appear in these six manuscripts, why is it that there's a secret? What's the secret? And why is it, more importantly, that Western scholars who have studied these manuscripts, that they say we don't know what the true pronunciation of The Name is?

It's quite interesting, because many people, if they understand what you're talking about, and you say, what is the name of the Father, of God, in the Old Testament? Certainly, Jews will know it's Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. But if you ask non-Jews many will know, they'll say Jehovah, and Jehovah is simply the English pronunciation of Yehovah. There's no J in Hebrew. So, Jehovah is just Yehovah. They know it's Yehovah in their Anglicized form. Why is it that scholars ignore this? Here's a great quote from Brown Driver Briggs.

Brown Driver Briggs is the key academic lexicon of the Tanakh, of the Old Testament in Hebrew. On page 218 they write, “The pronunciation Jehovah,” which, again, that's Yehovah, “the pronunciation Yehovah was unknown until 1520 when it was introduced by Galatinus.” In other words, no one in the world ever thought it was Yehovah until this Christian scholar named Galatinus came along. This is what Brown Driver Briggs is saying.

This Christian scholar named Galatinus came along and introduced this incorrect pronunciation of the name. It’s what they call “an impossible hybrid form,” which we'll get to in a minute. So, what do I do? This is what I do. I see this in Brown Driver Briggs, and I say, Galatinus? Who’s that? And, I look it up. I find a book by a Christian named Galatinus. He wrote a book called De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis. In folio 48B, he writes, in Latin, (I had it translated into English) and by the way, this book he wrote is presented as a dialogue with a man named Reuchlin, who is this German scholar. He’s quite interesting, Reuchlin, because he had a copy of the Bible, which is referred to as Reuchlinianus Codex III, and that has the full vowels, which is quite interesting. I mean, we have a dialogue here between Galatinus and Reuchlin, and we know Reuchlin’s bible has the full vowels! It's pretty cool. So, Galatinus writes to Reuchlin, he says, “These four letters,” meaning YHVH, “if they are read as punctuated, as you yourself well know, they make Yehovah.”

In other words, Galatinus didn't come up with this. He's writing to Reuchlin in this dialogue and saying, “This is well known. We know this. You know this, that the way it's written is Yehovah.” Then he goes on. He says, “However, the Jews do not dare to pronounce it as it is written, but put forth in its place Adonai, which is the same thing as Lord.” So, Galatinus is accused by Brown Driver Briggs, and others, of inventing this form Yehovah, but he quite clearly refers to Yehovah as something that was well known in his time to Christian scholars.

Certainly, it was widely believed. You could say they were wrong. You could make that argument. But it wasn't something Galatinus invented, even though he's the earliest clearly verifiable one. There are other people who wrote books before Galatinus who use that form, but it turns out their manuscripts are after Galatinus. So, Galatinus is the earliest Christian who, we can 100% say, used the form Yehovah in 1518 and folio 48B.

So, did he in fact invent this Yehovah? He clearly didn't, right? Maybe some other Christian did. What's interesting is there's a book written, and really the inspiration for this study that I'm doing today, a book written by Robert J. Wilkinson, who's a scholar. He wrote a book called Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew name of God. It was published by Brill Publishing, which is a serious academic publisher, and on page 46, from this 2015 book, he refers to Yehovah as “the distinctly Christian Yehovah.”

The implication here…not just the implication. He's clearly telling us that this is a distinctly Christian form, and that no Jew ever thought it was Yehovah! I read that, and I said, “Okay, challenge accepted.” You're telling me no Jew…that all the Jews know it’s Yahweh? That no Jew ever thought it was Yehovah? Let's look at Jewish sources. I have to admit here, in humility, I hadn't really done this before that.

What I'd looked at was bible manuscripts. What I hadn't looked at, really, were Jewish sources. Which, primarily, means rabbinical sources. I hadn’t looked at rabbinical sources outside of the Bible, because I had the Bible. Who cares what the rabbis say? But the claim here, and the claim of many people, is that no, you're so silly, Nehemia, you're making the same mistake as Galatinus, that it's not Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. Those are the vowels of Adonai. How can you be so silly? It's an impossible hybrid form.

Let's talk about the impossible hybrid form, and see if, in fact, that's true. Then we'll get to what the rabbis say. Before we get to what the rabbis say, we have to look at why it is that scholars ignore Jewish sources. We have the four letters Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, and what I found in the manuscripts of the Tanakh, over 150 so far, but most importantly in the 6 key manuscripts, is it has these three vowels. The first vowel is an ‘eh,’ called the Sheva. The second one’s an ‘o,’ called the Cholam. The third one is Kamatz, which is pronounced ‘a,’ Ye-ho-vah. What I'm told by scholars, is that this is an impossible hybrid form.

Let's see what they mean. In other words, the consonants are the consonants of the name, Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. But the vowels are the vowels of a different word altogether, of the word Adonai. That's what we're told. It reminds me of the verse when Jacob appears before Isaac, and he's pretending to be Esau, and Isaac famously says he feels the arms and these are the arms of Esau. He hears the voice. Jacob is talking about how “Yehovah made my way quick.” He's like, “What? This is not how my son Esau talks.” And, he says famously, ha-kol kol ya-akov, “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” v’hayada’im yadei esav, “and the hands are the hands of Esau.”

This is the claim of scholars that here, the consonants are the consonants of Yehovah, but the voice here is the voice of Adonai, it's the vowels of Adonai, because of the claim that this is an impossible hybrid form. So, let's understand what that means. And, in order to understand that, we're going to look at an actual impossible hybrid form. I mean, there is such a thing in the Tanakh, as an impossible hybrid form that does exist. Scholars didn't imagine that. That's a real thing. We're going to look at two quick examples. Then we're going to see if Yehovah is an example of that impossible hybrid form.

I'm going to start here in Jeremiah 42:6. In this example, Jeremiah says the word which is spelled aleph, nun, vav, which means, “we.” In Hebrew, we use this word today, and certainly we use the ancient Hebrew, “anu.” But then in the margin you see a different word. That word is five letters, aleph, nun, khet, nun, vav, which is “anachnu,” which also means “we.” And the word “anachnu" in the margin is followed by a letter kuph, and kuph is the short for “kri” or “kra” which means, “read it.”

In the body of the text it says “anu,” and in the margin it says, read it “anachnu.” What on earth is going on here? So, to understand this, we have to go back to ancient Israel. This is true in many languages. Think about how, in English, we have a formal way that we speak. Then, there's the way that maybe people speak on the street, depending on their level of education. Maybe very educated, but it's just their culture to speak in a certain way. A classic example of this is the word “ain't.” Right? Certainly, if I'm giving a lecture at the university, or speaking formally, I very rarely will use the word “ain't.” In fact, I'll only use it for emphasis, but in general I will say, is not.

But many people will use the word “ain't.” So, “anu” is more of a slang form, a shortened form. It's very similar to “ain't,” and in essence, it was Jeremiah's dialect shining through. This is the way Jeremiah spoke. We see this in a number of interesting places. That, there was the formal Hebrew that they spoke at the royal court. This was the Hebrew of the Torah, by and large. It's the Hebrew of some monumental inscriptions we have, such as the Siloam inscription. Then there's the way people spoke in the villages of Judea and Benjamin.

Remember, Jeremiah was from a village in Benjamin called Anatot. In his village, apparently, he said “anu,” but in the formal speak we say “anachnu.” It means the same exact thing, but when the scribes were copying the Bible, they came across this and said, “Look, we can't read “anu” in the synagogue, that's ridiculous. It's like saying ain't.” So, they wrote in the margin, “read it “anachnu.” Here is the key point; the word in the margin has no vowels. The vowels of that word in the margin are written in the body of the text, and we end up with this word anu, a three-letter word having four vowels written underneath it. We have four vowels for three letters, and why do we have four vowels? Because those four vowels don't belong to these three letters! They belong instead to the five letters in the margin. So, this is, quite literally, an impossible hybrid form. If I wanted to read these three letters the way that they're written in the body of the text with the vowels that they’re given, it's impossible to read it. I mean, I can't. The letter vav has two different vowels and it can't be read.

There's no question, it's not even a matter of dispute, that these vowels belong to the word in the margin. So, here we have an example of an impossible hybrid form. The claim is that Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, has the vowels of the word in the margin, Adonai. Even though Adonai is not written in the margin, but they call this a cre-perpetuim. Therefore, it's imaginary, that it's written in the margin, that we know to read it that way, and that Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, has, not its own vowels, but the vowels of some other word, the word Adonai, just like aleph, nun, vav, here has the vowels of some other word.

I'm going to bring you another example, which is a bit more colorful. I really like this example. It's one of my favorite stories, 2 Kings 18:27. 2 Kings 18:27 describes the negotiations between Ravshakeh, the Assyrian general, in 701 BC, and the representatives of King Hezekiah. Ravshakeh comes to the men of Hezekiah and he demands that they surrender. I talk about these negotiations in my book, Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. This is the scene where Ravshakeh says, “You're telling me you're trusting Yehovah, but you destroyed his altars,” meaning the high places.

It's beautiful, but before we get to that, the part I want to talk about here is more of Ravshakeh's introduction. The men of Hezekiah go to Ravshakeh, and they meet him just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, during the siege of Jerusalem, by the Assyrians. They said to this Assyrian general, "Don't speak to us in Hebrew, in Judean," (they literally say, "Yehudit,”) “speak to us in Aramaic, the language of the Gentiles. We understand that." Now, why do they say that? They don't want their own people, who aren't part of the negotiations, to be demoralized if they overhear these negotiations. I mean, these are surrender negotiations, right? If the men on the wall hear the surrender negotiations, they might run.

I love Ravshakeh's answer in verse 27. He comes along, and he says, "I didn't come to talk to you, you nobles." I'm paraphrasing here. He says, "I came to talk to” ha-anashim hayoshvim al hachomah, “the men who sit upon the wall.” And, then it says in Hebrew, “le’echol et choreyhem velishtot at shneihem imachem.” Which means “the men sitting on the wall who eat there.” I can't actually say this next word. I’d have to bleep it out. It's a word that begins, in English, with SH and ends with T, and it’s not the word sherbet. He says, “The men sitting on the wall eating their ‘sherbet’ and drinking their piss. Those are the ones I've come to speak to.” In the margin of the text, this word that I euphemistically call sherbet, “choreyhem”, and by the way, in Modern Hebrew it means the same thing. It's a curse word in Modern Hebrew. I just said a Hebrew curse word literally. So, in the margin of the text it says, “read it, tzo’atam,” which means “their excrements.” The second word, which is piss, it's a little bit harsher than that, actually. It says read it, "memei ragleihem," the water of their legs.

So, there are two cuss words here that Ravshakeh used when he was speaking to the men of Hezekiah. When we read the scripture in every synagogue in the world, we do not read those words. We read the word in the margin, which is what we call a euphemism. Meaning, it's a nice way of saying something harsh. So, instead of saying piss, it's the water of their legs, and instead of sherbet, blank, it's their excrement. Now, why is this important for us? In both of those words, “choreyhem” and “shinehem,” the vowels are not the vowels of those two cuss words. In fact, in both instances they're impossible vowels, particularly in the second one.

The second one, which I’ve translated roughly as piss, has one, two, three, four, five vowels in a three-syllable word. How could you have five vowels in a three-syllable word? And, the answer is one, two, three, four, five because those are the five vowels of the word in the margin…it's actually two words. The two words in the margin, “memei ragleihem,” the water of their legs, and so this is quite literally an impossible hybrid form. If I wanted to, I could not read these two words that are written here in the body of the text. I'm forced to read in the margin because I don't have the vowels. Meaning, I couldn't read them the way they’re written, let's put it that way.

When I did read those two a minute ago, I supplied the vowels myself. But that's not how the manuscripts of the Bible are written. Now, there are some modern printings that would give the word in the body of the text (which is called the ke’tiv) its own vowels, and the word in the margin a separate set of vowels. That's a modern innovation. That is not done in the manuscripts. In the manuscripts, the word in the margin has no vowels, and the word in the body of the text has the vowels of that word in the margin. You have to transpose them from the body to the margin and read it that way. At least that's how it's done in the synagogue.

The argument is that, in fact, Yehovah is an impossible hybrid form; that it has the vowels of Adonai. So, let's see if that's true. That should be easy to verify. So, this is what Adonai looks like. Now, I try to put the English letters inside the Hebrew letter to make it easier for you as you're watching the video. So, for example, in the Dalet I put a D, in the Nun, I put an N. In the Yud I put a Y. The Aleph, some people say the Aleph doesn't have a sound of its own. That's actually not true. Linguists call it a glottal stop. It's the sound you make when you say uh-oh. So, it's A’donai. I represented that by a little apostrophe.

So, the vowels are A, the first vowel is what's called the Chataf-Patach, (we'll learn these names later,) but it's an A, and that's why I put a little A inside. Then there's an O and an A, a different type of A. Okay, so what does Yehovah look like? There's Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, with the vowels of Adonai. In fact, this would be a hybrid form. If this is what we found in the manuscripts, with these vowels of Adonai, it would be a hybrid form. It wouldn't be an impossible hybrid form. I could read this word as “Yahovah”, but that's just not how it's written in most of the manuscripts.

Now let's compare that with what we find in the Hebrew Bible manuscripts, in the rare instances where it is written, right? In most cases it's not written with full vowels, in most manuscripts. In some of them it’s more common, like the Damascus Crown, but in most manuscripts it's missing a vowel. When the vowels aren’t missing, when we have a full set of vowels, we have what you see here on the left-hand side, Yehovah. Now, that first vowel is pronounced e, it's called the Sheva, vocal Sheva. Now, the one on the left, that vocal Sheva, has two dots, and the one on the right, that is Adonai, is made up of two dots and a line. That's also called a compound Sheva, or a Chataf-Patach.

We'll get to those names later. But, in any event, what we find is on the left, and on the right, we don't really find that. The argument of scholars is…I mean, they're not stupid. They know this, right? I'm not saying anything that’s new in this respect. The scholars say, “Yeah, okay fine, you're right, Nehemia, we find it with the Sheva, Yehovah. But really, it's the same thing as Yahovah.” In fact, there's this rule that the first letter of Adonai has an Aleph, what's called guttural letter, and because it's a guttural letter the Sheva turns into this other symbol. The E turns into an A, the Chataf-Patach, and the argument goes like this.

They say because the yud is here, and not the Aleph written in the text, it was impossible for the scribes to write the A, and they had to write this E. That makes no sense to me because we just saw two examples where there were impossible vowels. The scribe didn't care what the true vowels were of the word he was writing in the body of the text. He only put in the vowels of the word that's in the margin. Right? We saw three examples of that. One in Jeremiah, and two of them in 2 Kings, in the same verse.

So, the argument that they had to put in different vowels, as if this is a “kri-ketiv” or a “Kri-perpetuum,” that's utter nonsense. That's complete nonsense. This is not a “kri” situation, this is a different sort of situation. This is a unique situation in a sense. To make this story more interesting, I've now discovered a number of manuscripts where, in fact, the scribe did put in the Chataf-Patach. Meaning, he put in exactly the vowels of Adonai. This is what we call, in scholarship, the exception that teaches the rule.

Here we can see, on the right-hand side, a manuscript where it has the exact vowels of Adonai. On the left is the more common thing, we find Yehovah, those vowels. So, why didn't all the other scribes write the vowels of Adonai? This is the exception that teaches the rule, that shows you, if the scribes wanted to put in the vowels of Adonai, they would have put in the vowels of Adonai! They were perfectly capable of doing it.

Here is an actual example, what we call in-situ, in the actual manuscript. It's the Russian National Library EVR 2B3. It's one of several manuscripts where the scribe consistently put in the vowels of Adonai. What this teaches me is, that when the scribes didn't put in the vowels of Adonai, it's because that was not their intention. When they put in the vowels, Yehovah, which are distinct from Adonai, it's because they knew that those are the vowels that actually belong to Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey.

I don't dispute that the scribes read the word as Adonai. That's a Jewish rabbinical tradition going back to the Talmud. We'll see later the passage in Psachim, which is the earliest documented evidence of that. So, they read it as Adonai, but this is not a “Kri-ketiv,” where you put in the vowels of the marginal word into the body of the text. If they wanted to put in the vowels of Adonai, they would have put in the vowels of Adonai. Now, when scholars ignore Jewish sources, they then turn to other sources. This is kind of what inspired me to do this study; seeing some of the sources scholars are willing to use.

I thought, if scholars can use these sources, surely, we can see what the Jews have to say. I'm going to go over this very quickly. There are Christian Greek sources, there are pagan Greek sources…and by pagan Greek, I mean pagans who worshiped Zeus, and Isis, and Horus, and all these pagan deities. There are “Samaritan” Greek sources, or actually one source, and I put Samaritan in brackets here because it's actually a Christian, writing in Greek, who says the Samaritans pronounce the name a certain way. In fact, it's IABE, from where scholars get Yahweh. We don't have that from the Samaritans, we only have it from a Christian, writing in Greek, quoting the Samaritans.

We have Gnostic Coptic sources and Acadian sources. I'll do studies, probably, on each of these sets of sources, and more on the Greek in particular. But there's this wonderful study, and I'll put a link to it. It’s by this scholar at the University of Thessalonica in Greece, and he goes through different Greek transcriptions of the name Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. He’s writing his PhD on this topic. In this study he brings 33 different ways the name Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, is written in Greek sources up to the year 500. Scholars who argue for Yahweh, what have they done? They've cherry-picked a few of these sources that fit their theory.

So, in the list I presented here, for example, you could take number 29, which is IABE, and that's the Samaritan source quoted by a Greek Christian. Meaning, we don't have it from the Samaritans, we have it from a Greek Christian, who didn't know Hebrew, who's supposedly quoting a Samaritan. He said, "The Samaritans pronounce God's name IABE." That was a guy named Theodoret of Cyrus who quoted that. We'll see that in a minute. Well okay, “Ya-bei” potentially fits Yahweh, although, I don't know, maybe it's “Yehobeh,” right? I don't know what that is. There's no Sheva in Greek so I don't know what “Ya-bei,” IABE, represents. Is it Yehovah? Is it “Yahaveh,” which would be Yahweh? Is it “Yehuveh?” I don't know, right?

The Greek and the Hebrew are not the same, not to mention there's different dialects of Greek. How did the Greeks pronounce it? Number 22 has it Yota, Epsilon, Upsilon, Eau or E-A-U. What's that in Hebrew? I don't know. Number 20 is “yah-eh”, maybe that's Yahweh. What about 13? “Yo-ah.” “Yo-ah” is Yahweh? Oh, how do you get that? What's interesting is that number 15 is the only one we find in a Jewish source, and it's found in one Dead Sea Scroll. I said I'm going to do a bigger study later, specifically on the Greek. I'm just mentioning it here in passing. My point here is that there are 33 different ways the name is written in Greek sources. Most of them are pagan with the one exception of number 15.

Part of the problem is that Greek is not a good language for writing the name, Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. There's a "hey" in Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, a "h" sound. There's no "hey" sound in Greek in the middle of a word. There's no "v" sound in Greek in the middle of the word, not in the early Greek. There's no "w" sound. So how do they represent these sounds? They've got to approximate it, and that's why they approximated it 33 different ways. Some of them may not have even known how it was pronounced.

For example, I could bring you this document, British Library Papyrus number 121 from the 3rd century CE, meaning around the year 250. The beautiful thing here is, I contacted the British Library and was able to find a photo of this Papyrus. Beautiful. Look at this. It's Yota, Epsilon, Omega, Alpha, which is pronounced in Greek, something like YEOA. And I can say, there, I've proven it's Yehovah, but I didn't prove anything. What I proved is some Greek heard something, probably fourth or fifth hand, and wrote down what he thought the name was. And that's my source? Some Greek?

The earliest person in history to ever use the name Yahweh, in Hebrew, is Gilbert Genebrard, who was a Christian who wrote a book called the Carnographiae in 1599. On page 77 he actually refers to Theodoret of Cyrus, who is quoting the Samaritans, and he says, “Based on what Theodoret says in Greek, we can speculate that the Hebrew behind his Greek is “Yahaveh.” He writes this in Latin. Here, I have it. You can look at it and see it. This is the Latin text. You can see here, very clearly, it's "Yahue," which in Latin would be something like "Yahaveh." Then in the Greek it's "Yabai," which maybe in the Greek of that period was "Yahveh," right? We're dealing here with different Greek dialects.

You can see here Theodoret, and the Samaritans, and Wilkinson, who is the guy who wrote the book The Tetragrammaton in Western Christianity. He refers to Genebrard as “the inventor of Yahweh,” which, at the very least, he's the earliest documented person to call God "Yahweh" that we know of. You could say that the Hebrew behind Theodoret is "Yahweh," but he doesn't write "Yahweh," he writes IABE, right? So, you're back-translating it, and the first one to back-translate it is Gilbert Gennebrard.

Now one of the things that really got me was seeing this study by a guy named Antti Marjanen. He's a guy…and I might be mispronouncing his name. He's a scholar at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He wrote a paper called "The Nag Hammadi Contribution to the Discussion about the Pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton." He starts out by saying, "It has almost become a scholarly axiom to assume that the name of the Israelite God, the so-called Tetragrammaton, was originally pronounced Yahweh.” Okay? He's telling us this is the assumption. Okay, we know that. “Taking into account the fact that the sacredness of the Tetragrammaton had prevented its public utterance among the Jews in the first centuries of the CE.”

In other words, the Jews didn't know how to pronounce it, or they certainly didn't pronounce it, at least in the first century CE. "And the knowledge of its right pronunciation had begun to deteriorate and had altogether vanished in the Middle Ages." Meaning, the Jews don't know how to pronounce it. So, since the Jews don't know how to pronounce it, we're going to plumb the depths of every pagan who makes any vague reference to the God of Israel! He's literally doing that in this study.

What is Nag Hammadi? Nag Hammadi is a place in Egypt where they found Gnostic writings. The Gnostics believed that there were two gods: a good god and an evil god. The good god is the god of the spirit world; that was their Jesus. The evil god was the god who created the physical universe, the god of the Old Testament. In this document that he quotes (called The Gnostic Apocryphon of John) it describes a demon named Yaldabaoth. Which is interesting, because this book is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language. But it's clearly translated from Greek, and that Greek book is clearly translated from Aramaic because "Yaldabaoth" is an Aramaic name, and it means “son of chaos.”

So, The Gnostic Apocryphon of John is one of the sources for Yahweh, according to this scholar of University of Helsinki, and I've seen modern people quote this. People see his study and say, "Okay, scholars say it's Yahweh, it must be Yahweh." So, Yaldabaoth means “son of chaos,” “yeled bohu” in Hebrew. So, Yaldabaoth creates the physical universe by accident. It's a fluke: he messes up! Then he rapes Eve, and through Eve he produces a demon child called Yahweh. People are seriously arguing that, we know the pronunciation is Yahweh because Yaldabaoth raped Eve and produced a demon child called Yahweh.

If you think about it, Yaldabaoth means “son of chaos.” That means Yahweh is the grandson of chaos. I mean, it breaks my heart to see people seriously bringing this type of argument, this type of “evidence,” to prove Yahweh, when they're completely ignoring Jewish sources. I realized when I read this, I said, "If we're looking at Coptic sources written by Gnostics, and people who worshiped Isis and Zeus, and Christians who didn't know Hebrew, can we at least hear what the Jews have to say? Could the Jews please be allowed to speak?" As a Karaite Jew, it inspired me to go and look at what the rabbis have to say.

To be honest with you, normally I would shy away from rabbinical sources and say, "Okay, I want to focus on what the Bible says, alone." But, because scholars are bringing every conceivable source to try to reconstruct what God's holy name is, everything but the Jewish sources, I said, "Okay, we've got to hear what the Jews have to say." And I was quite shocked by what I discovered. I really didn't think I would find anything. I thought, "You know the rabbis aren't going to say anything about it." There was one source I knew about; I'll get to that in a few minutes. But I didn't really think I'd find anything.

Now, before we get to what the rabbis say, I want to lay the groundwork. Most of this is new discovery. I didn't know this before I started doing this study. But I want to lay the groundwork and show that Jews knew what the name was; that it was not lost. Remember, I quoted before the rabbi who said, "The vowels of the name itself are hidden. Its vowels are the secret of the Tetragrammaton. Not that we don't know what it is, but they're a secret." Maybe some rabbis didn't know the secret. But others may have, and we know for a fact that they did.

Now, I called my book Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, and I have to tell you upfront, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I had solid evidence to call it Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, and the evidence I had was a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Kidushin 71a. I quote this in my book. It's a tradition brought in the name of Rabbah Bar Bar Chanah, quite a mouthful that name. His name was Rabbah, his grandmother was named Chanah, so he's called Rabbah Bar Bar Chanah, rabbi the son of the son of Chanah.

He lived around 250 to 300 CE, and he says as follows. He says, "Sages transmit the four-letter name to their disciples once in a seven-year period." Now, in the Talmud, that's presented as a minority opinion. In fact, that's just the opinion of Rabbah Bar Bar Chanah, because the other rabbis come along and they say, "No, it's not once in a seven-year period. It's twice in a seven-year period." This is amazing, because what it's showing us is that, in the third century, there was this practice of hiding the vowels of the name by transmitting it from rabbi to disciple, either once every seven years or twice every seven years. Meaning that already by that time the tradition had varied. What this meant is, the average Jew probably didn't even know how to pronounce the name. It certainly wouldn't have been something he heard on a daily basis. But the rabbis went out of their way in the third century to preserve this name through this transmission. Now, in retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have called it Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. Maybe I should have called it Shattering the Consensus of Silence, but I called it a "conspiracy” because here you have rabbis who are telling us, “We know the pronunciation of the name. We preserve it among our own clique of people by transmitting it rabbi to disciple and we don't want the masses to know the name. It's too holy for them to know, and certainly too holy for them to pronounce."

You might wonder, "Wait a minute. How do rabbis pronounce the name once every seven years if they're not allowed to pronounce it?" If you look in the Talmud it explains. The rabbinical ban on the name was never for them. You know, it's like Obamacare, where the people who passed Obamacare aren't subject to it. They have a different health care system, right? So, these rabbis, who are transmitting the name, are allowed to speak it for the purposes of teaching it. Meaning, they can't use it every day. But, when they're transmitting it once every seven years, we’re specifically told in the Talmud, they’re not only allowed to speak it, but they’re also required to speak it.

So, one of my new discoveries is a book that I didn't know about until I started studying this a few months back. It's a book called “Sefer Hashem,” which is translated as “Book of the Divine Name.” It was written in the year 1225 CE by a rabbi named Eleazar Roke'ach, or Eleazar of Worms. Worms was an important Jewish community. The book was written in 1225, and it wasn't published until the year 2004, 800 years later. It wasn't published…by published, I mean brought to a printing press and made available to the general public. It was preserved in manuscript form, kept as a secret by rabbis for 800 years, and for the first time in 800 years this was made public. Because of that, now I have access to it.

The powerful thing is that, once it was printed, I could then go back and find the manuscript. You can see here a manuscript of Eleazar of Worms from 1225. This is the passage where he describes a ceremony for transmitting the name. One thousand years after Rabbah Bar Bar Chanah, this Rabbi Eleazar of Worms described how he received the name and transmitted it to his disciple. Let's read it. Now, in his manuscript he writes yud-yud to represent the name Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. That's because, even though he spoke it perhaps once or twice in his life when he transmitted it, and he heard it spoken, he didn't write it down outside of the Bible. He wrote it as yud-yud.

But yud-yud represents Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey. It’s a very common thing in Hebrew manuscripts for yud-yud to represent Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, the name of Yehovah. So, I'm just going to read that as Yehovah. He writes, “Yehovah’s unique, honorable, and terrifying name,” and notice how many times he says terrifying. He says, “It may only be transmitted to the modest,” and by the way, this has never been translated into English before. I found this reference in a book, and I looked up the book and found a printed edition, then I found the manuscript. It's never been translated into English.

He says, “It may only be transmitted over water.” What does that mean? That's mysterious. We'll see what it means in a bit. He says, “Before the rabbi teaches his disciple they must wash in water and immerse in 40 se'ah,” (of water; se'ah is a measurement, meaning a mikvah) “donning white clothes.” So, he's going through this whole ceremony. He's describing the ceremony. The rabbi who teaches the name to his disciple washes in the mikvah and puts on white clothes. He says, “They must fast on the day they learn it, standing in water up to their ankles.” A strange ceremony.

In other words, what they've done is, they've taken this tradition of transmitting the name once every seven years, or twice every seven years, and turned it into this whole elaborate ceremony. It's quite typical with the rabbis. “The rabbi will then open his mouth in awe and say…” and here, now, the rabbi speaks the name for the first time in the ceremony. He says "Blessed are you, Yehovah, our God, king of the universe. Yehovah, God of Israel, you are one and your name is one.” That's a reference to, of course, Zechariah, “In that day Yehovah will be one and his name will be one.” It's also a reference to the Talmud, which says in the end times all people will speak the name because of the verse in Zechariah. We'll see that later.

He says, “You commanded us to hide your great name.” That's what the rabbi recites when he's standing up to his ankles in water, donning white clothes, fasting. He says, “You commanded us to hide your great name.” Where did he command us to hide his great name? Well, that's tradition. He says, “For your name is terrifying, blessed are you, Yehovah, and blessed is your glorious name forever, the honorable and terrifying name, Yehovah our God.” And, he goes on a bit, I’m abbreviating it. “Blessed are you, Yehovah, who reveals his secret to those who fear him.”

What's the secret? The secret is the secret of the vowels, the secret of the Tetragrammaton. Then, it says, “The rabbi and his disciples shall place their eyes upon the water.” But, first we saw the rabbi speaks the name standing in the water up to his ankles. Now, he repeats it, together with his disciple, to make sure his disciple learns the pronunciation of the name. It says, “The rabbi and his disciple shall place their eyes upon the water and say,” and they read a bunch of verses. But the key verse is Psalm 29:3, where it says, “The sound of Yehovah upon the water.”

Now, in most English translations, the verse is translated, “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters,” or “the voice of Yehovah is upon the waters,” and that's probably the correct translation. But, the way these rabbis interpreted the verse is, and it's a completely valid translation, maybe not in context, but out of context it’s a completely valid translation, “The sound of Yehovah upon the water.” So, they're speaking the name Yehovah upon the water, and then quoting a verse that they interpret to mean, “The sound of Yehovah upon the water.”

This is how this rabbi reveals the name to his disciple, by reciting this together with his disciple. First, he says it to himself, and then they repeat it together. What's interesting about this is, I found this referenced in a book by Joseph Dan. Joseph Dan! I did a podcast with him on the book of Jasher. Joseph Dan is a winner of the Israel Prize. That’s the Jewish people's greatest prize for Judaic studies. It's given out by the President and Prime Minister on Independence Day. There’s a wonderful movie about the Israel Prize called the Footnote, an Israeli movie. It’s worth watching. You can get it with subtitles on Amazon.

So, Joseph Dan is an actual winner of the Israel Prize, and he's written, as of today, so far, 12 volumes of a series called, History of Jewish Mysticism and Esotericism, in Hebrew. It's going to eventually be much longer. But, currently this is a mere 6,000 pages in its twelve volumes. In volume six, page 561, he talks about this ceremony, and he writes, “In this description,” the one we just heard, “Rabbi Eleazar presented a tradition that was practiced in his surroundings and family, and that he may have participated in it himself both as a disciple and a rabbi.” So, it's not just Nehemia Gordon saying that this is something Rabbi Eleazar did, that this is just some fanciful description. Joseph Dan, the foremost expert on this literature in the world is telling us this is something Rabbi Eleazar actually did. He's not describing some hypothetical ceremony. That, in the 13th century, in 1225, there were still people who were transmitting the name of Yehovah as a secret. So, Jews did know the name, contrary to what scholars say. We don't need to look at the Coptic sources written by Gnostics who believe the God who created the world was a demon. We can look at actual Jewish sources by Jews who preserved the name of Yehovah. I don't know that every Jew knew it, but some Jews preserved this name.

I want to bring a second witness. All of you listening out there, I want you to say, “Second Witness.” The second source is another source that has never been translated into English. In fact, it's never been printed in Hebrew, this book. It's from a book of what we call responsa. Responsa are responses, that is, answers to questions. What Jews would do, and they in fact do it to this day is, they'll write a formal letter to a rabbi, and there will be a question. What do we do in a certain situation? The rabbi will write a formal response, and that response is considered binding upon the one who asks it. Now, if you didn't ask, you might not be bound by it. You can go ask a different rabbi, he might give you a different answer. And that answer is binding upon you. There's a literature of these responsa. It's tens of thousands of books. It's a huge literature, most of which has never been printed. There's one collection of responsa written in the 15th century, meaning around 1450, by a rabbi in Jerusalem named Yoseph Ibn Tzayach. In this book he collected all the questions he was sent along with his answers. What's interesting for us is question number 43, which as I said has never been translated into English, and his whole book has never been printed. This section is quoted in a recent study, but the book has never been printed, which is quite interesting.

I found the manuscript of Yoseph Ibn Tzayach's collection of responsa, and it's an autograph. Now, today when we say autograph, what happens is, somebody walks up to me with the book Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. I take out a pen, and I sign my name. When we’re talking about manuscripts and you speak of an autograph, we mean something else. A manuscript autograph is the original copy written by the author. You have to understand, in world history, this is a relatively rare thing to find an autograph. We don't have the autograph of the Torah, meaning the one written by Moses and Joshua. We have a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy et cetera.

We don't have the autograph of the New Testament. We have a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and that's the case for most documents. We don't have the autograph, but we have the autograph of Yoseph Ibn Tzayach's book and a bunch of other books that we're going to see later. It's kind of cool. What's interesting about this is, not only do we have the autograph, but the autograph was never copied and never printed. It exists in one copy in the entire world. Now, in the book he's asked the question, it’s question number 43. So, someone wrote this question to Yoseph Ibn Tzayach. He says, “A certain sage has been uttering the name according to its letters, and a certain rabbi rebuked him for this, but the sage was stubborn in his actions.” They're asking the rabbi, Yoseph Ibn Tzayach, what do we do? There is a sage who's speaking God's name the way it's written, according to its letters, and he's being rebuked by the rabbi and he's telling the rabbi I don't have to listen to you. And here, you can see the autograph of it. I highlighted the section, it says “She’elah,” and in the margin it says, “ha’mem-gimel,” the 43rd. “Chacham echad haya mechir et hashem be’oteyot,” A certain sage was mentioning, uttering the name according to the letters. “Verav echad ga’ar bo,” A certain rabbi rebuked him. I love the Hebrew nuance here, “ga’ar bo al kach,” rebuked him for it, and says, “vehu natan kateph soreret,” literally, and he presented a rebellious shoulder. The image here is of an ox that doesn't want to plough, and instead of doing what it’s master says presents a rebellious shoulder.

This rabbi, this sage actually, (it's interesting he calls him a sage and not a rabbi) is speaking the name of Yehovah and he's being rebuked, and he refuses to repent. What's interesting is that in the answer he says, “Yeah, the guy needs to repent. He's a sinner for speaking the name.” So, we have the ceremony in the 13th century of the name being transmitted in Eleazar Roke'ach's book of the Divine Name, and we have this responsom on this question asked to Yoseph Ibn Tzayach 200 years later about a rabbi who's speaking the name. What that tells you is, Jews did know the name!

 

Knowing Yehovah's name is an act of love, and we can know his name by looking in Bible manuscripts.