Nehemia: Hopefully in the second half we’ll get back the name of the Creator of the universe and see what this has to do with Yahweh. Because this is key to understanding where we get Yahweh. When I discovered this, this really was one of the most important discoveries of my life. I had heard people say this before and I’m like, “You’re just guessing. You don’t know. Stop your guessing. I want to see evidence,” and then I found the smoking gun that I’m going to share in part two.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkot. (For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Isaiah 62:1)
Michael: Bible prophesy is being fulfilled today in the land of Israel and even around the world. Jeremiah said that in the last days, Israel would come into their land in the last days, and that the gentiles would come to Israel and cry out for the abominations that they inherited from their forefathers.
It says that when the gentiles cry out in repentance saying, “Surely, we have inherited lies. We have inherited pagan gods. We have inherited things that do not advantage us at all. They’re vain.” It says that the Almighty promises that the gentiles who repent will know His hand, His might, His strength, and that “the gentiles will know that My name is,” in the King James, “the LORD.”
But that’s not what it says in the Hebrew text. In reprising The Gentiles Shall Know My Name, we have Nehemia Gordon back with us to give us an update on the greatest biblical research project of this century. Nehemia, good to have you back with us.
Nehemia: Good to be back, Michael. Shalom.
Michael: Shalom. Well, Nehemia, this is back in January of last year, of 2017, you had found at that point, I believe there were about six Hebrew manuscripts that had the correct vowel pointings, all…
Nehemia: Five. Five Hebrew manuscripts.
Michael: Five Hebrew manuscripts, and it took you how many years to find it?
Nehemia: That was over a period of about 15 years.
Michael: You started learning Hebrew at age…
Nehemia: In kindergarten. I learned some Hebrew before that, but I learned to read Hebrew and English together in kindergarten. I learned the Aleph Bet and the ABCs. We learned them together, and we were expected to be able to certainly read the prayers and understand the prayers back in kindergarten.
Michael: Well, it didn’t stop there, because you attended Hebrew University, got your degree there, and your Master’s in…
Nehemia: Biblical Studies.
Michael: Biblical Studies and a minor in Archaeology.
Nehemia: My Bachelor’s was in Archaeology. A double Major for my Bachelor’s, Archeology and Biblical Studies. Then I continued in Biblical Studies as my Master’s.
Michael: Your proficiency is so well-known in the land of Israel, that I was actually introduced to you by Rabbinic scholars of the Israeli New Moon Society. You were the one, the go-to guy, as far as understanding that ancient Hebrew technical term referring to the barley’s maturity as aviv. This is something that you’ve spent years and years researching, and they recognized it. I know that every single month they have a Rabbinic court that meets, that they had the ones who have sighted the new moon exactly, they’re documented. But the other side of that is, that begins a month, but the year begins in the month of aviv, and you were the one that provided that information.
Nehemia: Right. Really, for me, it’s a matter of – and this is what I was trained at Hebrew University, and even before I went to the University this was my approach – People say, “This is what it means.” How do we know that’s what it means? What are our sources for that? What do we really know? Somewhere there’s a source, and that source is the information we have – not what it says in the translation. For example, aviv is translated as “green ears.”
Michael: If it’s anything, it’s not that.
Nehemia: It’s not just green. It’s beyond that, right? Meaning, maybe you could translate it as “still green,” or “with a hue of green”. What people would do is they’d read, “green ears”, and they’d go and they’d find this unripe grain that wouldn’t be ripe enough to begin the year. The point is that what I did with the aviv is the same thing I did with the name. What I did with the name is – they’re telling me it’s Yahweh, right? Everybody knows it’s Yahweh. Every scholar in every university in the world knows it’s Yahweh. Jews don’t know that, right.
Michael: No, that’s a contention. Jews don’t know, but everybody else does.
Nehemia: Every Jews thinks it’s actually what I eventually discovered, which is that it’s Yehovah. But now I could prove from the sources it’s Yehovah. You ask the average Jew, and that’s what they think. But in the academic world they’re certain it’s Yahweh. Why are they certain it’s Yahweh? We really have to start this, Michael, in Exodus 3:14 and 15.
Michael: Okay, well let’s go to it.
Nehemia: Can we start there?
Michael: Let’s take everyone with us on this journey.
Nehemia: I’m going to read you the King James, and the King James changed one word that changes the entire meaning of this passage. A single word was changed that completely changed it. Kind of an important word, right? “And God said unto Moses, ‘I am that I am.’” In the Hebrew it’s “Eheyeh asher Eheyeh,” which is more like, “I will be that which I will be.” But that’s not the key point.
He said, “Thus shall you say unto the Children of Israel: ‘I Am hath sent me unto you.” Okay, so “I Am” is the name, according to Exodus 3:14. Even in Hebrew, “Eheyeh” is certainly referring to Him, let’s put it that way. Then in verse 15, “And God said moreover unto Moses, ‘Thus shall thou say unto the Children of Israel: The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent Me unto you. This is My name forever, and this is My memorial unto all generations.’” There’s no name in verse 15. The name must be the “I Am” of verse 14.
Michael: I’ve heard it argued as such.
Nehemia: And correctly so, based on the English here of the King James. Meaning, if you’re basing it on what you’re reading in the English of the King James, that is actually correct, that the name is “Eheyeh, I Am.” However, when you read it in Hebrew, instead of “Lord God” in verse 15, what it actually says is, “Vayomer od Elohim el Moshe, and Elohim, God, said further to Moses, koh tomar el bnei Yisrael, so shall you say to the Children of Israel: Yehovah Elohei avoteichem, Yehovah, the God of your fathers,” et cetera, “has sent Me to you. Zeh shemi l’olam, vezeh zichri ledor vador. This is My name forever. This is My memorial,” or literally, “mention, for generation to generation.” So what is God’s mention? What is His name? His actual name is Yehovah. What is “Eheyeh?” Eheyeh in verse 14 is the explanation of the name.
You wouldn’t know that in English, but in Hebrew it’s obvious, because Yehovah, the name, is a combination of three forms of the verb “to be.” It’s “Haya, He Was, Hoveh, He Is, and Yihyeh, He Is To Come, or He Will Be.” Now, every Jew knows that’s the meaning of the name. What’s really interesting is, recently I had a discussion with Benyamin Tsedaka. He is the top Samaritan scholar in the world. He’s written 108 books, this guy. He says to me something really interesting, and we’ll get back to him hopefully, later. He says to me, “Do you know what the name means?” I said, “I know what it means. But you’re a Samaritan. What do you think it means?” He says to me, “It means, He Was, He Is, He Is to Come, He Will Be. Haya, Hoveh, Yihyeh. He Was, He Is, He Will Be.”
So, the Jews know this and the Samaritans know it. You know where else you find this, Michael? I think you do know. It’s in the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation has, “He Was, He Is, He Is To Come, or He Will Be.” “He Is to Come” is a translation, essentially, of “Yihyeh, He Will Be.” You have this in the Jews, the Samaritans, and the New Testament. Now, you can’t tell me, “The Jews looked in the Book of Revelation and that’s where they got it.” Obviously, they got it from a common source, right? And the Samaritans certainly aren’t getting it from the Jews.
So where are they all getting this from? I asked Benyamin Tsedaka, “How do you know that’s what it means?” He said, “It’s obvious from Exodus 3:14.” So, he’s a second witness. I’d said that for years. When you read that in Hebrew, “Eheyeh, I Will Be” is the explanation of the name Yehovah. How is it an explanation? It has to do with how Hebrew verbs are structured. Essentially, you take those three forms of the verb, haya, hoveh, yihyeh, you combine them, and you get Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, God’s personal name. That’s why he’s saying, “I Will Be has sent me.” Then He explains, “Just so you know, that’s just a one-time title for now. But My name for generation to generation, my eternal name, is Yehovah.” That’s His eternal name. That’s what Exodus 3:14 and 15 means.
Now, with all that, scholars came along, Christian…
Michael: Let me ask you. You were speaking with the head scholar to the Samaritans up on Mount Gerizim. He knows what it means. What does he say the name is?
Nehemia: I asked him, “How do you pronounce it?” He said, “We don’t pronounce it. Instead of pronouncing the name, we say ‘Shema,’” which is Aramaic for “the name”. 2 Kings 17, can I pull it up to share it with the people?
Michael: Yes. I think this is very important for people to understand the background of the Samaritans. I take my tour groups up to meet the Samaritans, go in the museum, and this is one of the features. Yeshua spoke to the woman at the well, a Samaritan.
Nehemia: Right, right. Today, there are something like 600 Samaritans. In the time of Yeshua, there were a million Samaritans. They were a large contingent of people who dominated what today is northern Israel, the area of Samaria, the so-called “West Bank”, which Jews call “Judea and Samaria”.
2 Kings 17 describes the exile of the 10 northern tribes. They’re taken as captives into another land. Why did the Assyrians do this? Their policy was: it’s really hard to control people who are far away from you because they’ll rebel. How do you prevent them from rebelling? You take the people from the city of, say, Bet Shean, and you go, and you plant them somewhere surrounded by enemies. Who are they going to rebel with? They’re not going to join up with the next town, because they don’t even speak the language of the next town. They don’t have the same religion as the next town. It was divide and conquer. That’s what the Assyrians did.
The Assyrians took the 10 tribes, scattered them all over what today is Iran and Iraq, and possibly parts of Syria, and in their place, they took people from five different regions which were also in those areas.
Michael: And this is all stipulated in Kings.
Nehemia: It’s described in detail in 2 Kings 17. I’m not going to read the whole thing, but let me just read you the key part here, where he says… Okay, verse 24, “And the King of Assyria…” 2 Kings 17:24, “The King of Assyria brought men from Babylon and from Kuthah, and from Avva, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel,” meaning in the…
Michael: They replaced them.
Nehemia: Right. Why did he do that?
Michael: Running their businesses, and…
Nehemia: We want to be able to tax people, so we can’t just have a bunch of empty cities. Let’s be really honest, we want to have human shields, so when the Egyptians invade Assyria, they’ve got to go through these villages that are garrisoned by people from these five cities who are now in Samaria instead of back in Babylon and other places. So, it has two functions there. One is for taxes, and one is a human shield.
“They possessed Samaria and dwelled in the cities thereof. And so it was at the beginning of their dwelling there that they feared the LORD.” In Hebrew it says “Yehovah”. “Therefore, Yehovah sent lions among them which slew some of them, wherefore they spake to the King of Assyria saying, ‘The nations which thou hast removed and placed in the cities of Samaria know not the manner of the god of the land.’” Basically, what they’re saying is…
Michael: Now, these are pagans that have been moved in.
Nehemia: Oh, yeah. Pagans from Kutha and Sepharvaim…
Michael: They don’t know the god of the land, so to speak.
Nehemia: Right. Their thought is - it’s a very common pagan thought – and even if you go, for example today – I don’t mean this to insult anybody – if you go today to India, they’ll say, “All gods are real. We just worship this one god,” or maybe two or three gods. They don’t deny that Jesus is a god, and that Allah is a god, and Buddha is a god. They don’t have an issue with that. They just say, “We don’t worship Buddha, we worship our gods.” So that’s the way they were thinking is, “Why are these lions attacking us?” Why were the lions really attacking them? One, they were sinning, and two, the cities had been abandoned for some period of time and so lions took over the place. In Israel it was mountain lions, it’s not African lions. Big bobcat things, right?
They’re being attacked by these wild beasts, why? Because they sinned and because the area had been abandoned. They’re moving in to places that nobody lived for a few years, and they’re taken over by wild animals. So, they say, “Oh, we know why this is happening. We’d better worship the god of the land. Who’s the god of the land? We don’t know. We came into some foreign country called Samaria, called Israel.”
What happens? Long story short, the King of Assyria commands that one of the priests of the 10 tribes is sent back to teach these gentiles how to follow the god of the land. Who is this priest? He’s one of the wicked priests that got the 10 tribes exiled in the first place! We’re told earlier in 1 Kings 11 that this is the sin of Jeroboam, that the 10 tribes take priests who aren’t from Levi, who aren’t from Aaron, and they anoint them as priests. They’re priests in the Catholic sense.
Michael: The lowest people.
Nehemia: Well, they’re not from the line of Aaron. A biblical priest has to be from the line of Aaron, and they took just anybody who they thought was worthy of being a priest and they called him priest. This is one of the priests who ends up teaching the Samaritans how to follow the Torah. Well, there are Samaritans there till this day.
Now, in the story here in Kings, it says in verse 28, “Then one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and dwelt in Bethel and taught them how they should fear Yehovah. How be it, every nation made gods of their own and put them in the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made, every nation and their cities wherein they dwelt. And the men of Babylon made Sukkot-Benot.” What’s “Sukkot-Benot?” That was the god they worshipped back in Babylon. In other words, the early Samaritans did something the modern Samaritans say they don’t do, and I believe them - the early Samaritans had two Gods they worshipped, the god of the land so the lions don’t attack us, and their native god from back in their home country, where they came from.
Babylon, they made Sukkot-Benot. The men of Kuth made Nergal. The men of Hamath made Ashima. The Samaritans in ancient times – he tells me, this Samaritan leader, Benyamin Tsedka, and he is a great scholar – he says that we never called God by His actual name, Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. I believe him. Why do I believe him? Because Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian in the 1st century, confirms this. He confirms… this whole story of the Maccabees which became Hanukkah, is the Jews were rebelling against the Greeks, the Seleucid Greeks. The Seleucid Greek governor started persecuting the Jews, and the Samaritans write to the governor, and they say, “Why are we being persecuted?” They send this to Antiochus. They say, “Why are we being persecuted? We’re not even Jews. We’re just foreigners in this land.” Can I read you that, what Josephus writes?
Michael: Please do. I think this is very instructional. We’re broadcasting to Bible students out there, so the more that you fill in…
Nehemia: Well, we’ll find out really soon that this is key information.
Michael: Right.
Nehemia: Key information. Because where does Yahweh come from? Yahweh purportedly comes from the Samaritans. We’ll find that out in a few minutes, if we get to it, hopefully – if we have time. This is Josephus Flavius, “Antiquities of the Jews,” written in the 1st century, Book 12, section 258. “So, they sent ambassadors,” meaning the Samaritans sent ambassadors, “to Antiochus, and an epistle, whose contents are these.” So we have a letter that the Samaritans sent sometime around 168 or 175 BC, some time in that period, to Antiochus Epiphanes IV.
By the way, the Seleucid Emperor, his name was Antiochus Epiphanes. What does Epiphanes mean? It means, “the one who reveals himself”. He claimed to be a god, Antiochus. So they write to Antiochus an epistle, whose contents are these: “To King Antiochus, the god, Epiphanes,” meaning, “the one who reveals himself,” “a memorial from the Sidonians who live at Shechem,” meaning straight off they’re saying, “We’re not Israelites. We just live here.”
Michael: Ah!
Nehemia: “Our forefathers, upon certain frequent plagues,” mentioned in 2 Kings 17, “and as following an ancient superstition, had a custom of observing that day which by the Jews is called the Sabbath.” In other words, what they’re saying is, “We only worship Shabbat because we were attacked by lions, and it was the Jewish superstition, and this isn’t really something we believe in, we’re just doing it.”
Look, I’m not saying the Samaritans today believe this, but according to Josephus, this is a letter that was sent sometime around 168 BC. “And when they had erected a temple at the mountain called Gerizim, though without a name they offered upon it the proper sacrifices.” What does that mean, “without a name?” What that means, “without a name…”
Michael: Ignorance?
Nehemia: No, it’s not ignorance. It’s very deliberate. The Temple in Jerusalem is referred to as “the place Yehovah chose to put His name”. It’s also called “the place Yehovah caused His name to dwell”. They’re telling us around 168 or 175 BC, “we have a temple at Gerizim which follows the sacrifices of the Torah, but we don’t call the name of the God of Israel upon this temple, because it’s not the place He put His name.” They understood that. Give them some credit, that they understood that. Meaning they understood Jerusalem was the place where God put His name forever.
“Now, upon the just treatments of these wicked Jews, those that manage their affairs supposing that we were of kin to them…” in other words, your governor, who thinks we’re Jews doesn’t know the difference between Samaritans and Jews, “and practice as they do, make us liable to the same accusations, although we are originally Sidonians, as is evident from the public records.” Meaning, “you can check in your own records to see we’re foreigners in the land of Israel. We don’t come from here. We were brought from some other land,” 2 Kings 17.
Verse 261 in Josephus here. “We therefore beseech thee, our benefactor and savior…” referring to the king, “to give order to Apollonius, the Governor of this part of the country, and to Nicanor, the procurator of your affairs, to give us no disturbance, nor to lay our charge what the Jews are accused for, since we are aliens from their nation and from their customs.” “We’re just doing the Sabbath and sacrificing because there was a superstition by our ancestors when we were attacked by lions. But we’re not Israelites!”
Then they say, “But let our temple, which at present has no name at all, be named the Temple of Jupiter Hellenius.” Woah. What are they doing here? They’re not stupid, the realize why the Jews are being persecuted. Remember what happened at Hanukkah with the Maccabees.
Michael: Yeah, they put the statue of Jupiter on the Temple Mount on Jupiter’s birthday, December 25th, declaring Jupiter to be god.
Nehemia: My understanding is the focus was on Apollo. But in any event, what the Greeks are trying to…
Michael: Well, it’s the same name.
Nehemia: They mix all these things, right. What they’re doing back then, the Greeks wanted to wipe out the Jews, but not in the way the Nazis wanted to wipe out the Jews. What the Nazis wanted to do is kill every Jew. What the Greeks wanted to do is assimilate the Jews and make them Greeks. So, they came along to the Jews and they said, “Look, stop your Shabbat, stop circumcising your children. You have these things that make you distinct from other nations. We just want you to be Greeks. We want you to be part of our empire. How will we make you part of our Empire? Everyone’s the same, so why rebel? We’re just all the same.” This is assimilation, radical assimilation.
I mean, Jews came to America, and we learned to speak English, and we follow the laws, and we’re loyal to the country. We’re assimilated in that sense, but we still maintain our own distinctiveness. We keep Shabbat, those who follow the Torah. Here, they wanted to wipe out the faith of the Jews by making them become Greeks. And one of the things they said to them, one of the things we find - and we talked about this in the Open-Door Series that we did together years ago, it was a wonderful series, 18 hours of teaching.
Michael: Oh, yeah. It was tremendous. Everyone needs to get the Open-Door Series.
Nehemia: Absolutely. Honestly, it’s nine hours of me teaching there, and it’s nine of the best hours of teaching I’ve ever done. In there, I bring the source, which is in Jewish sources that say one of the prohibitions of the Greeks, one of the things the Greeks did to us is they said, “You must not speak the name of your God.” Now, why would the Greeks care if we speak the name of our God? Because we want everybody just to worship God. Just call Him ‘Theos’, Just call Him ‘Kurios.’ Just call Him ‘Lord and God,’ and then we can all pretend we worship the same god, and after a few generations, who will remember that you guys are distinct? We’ll have this big salad that mixes up, and you’ll call Him God. You can say it and believe in your heart that God is Yehovah. We don’t care about that. But don’t speak it, because if you speak it, you make it real, and if you just pretend it’s the same name, after a few generations, your descendants will forget, and we’ll be one nation.” This was the goal of the Greeks.
The Samaritans hear this and they say, “We don’t even use God’s name. Let’s just call Him Zeus,” which they translate here as “Jupiter”, but essentially, it’s Zeus. “Zeus of the Greeks, we don’t care. We’ll put any name you want on the temple. Just don’t persecute us. Why are we keeping Shabbat? Because lions attacked us. Now we’re being attacked by men, by humans, by Greeks. We want that to stop. It hurts. What are we going to do? We’ll just call the temple by that name,” which is really amazing because we have this coin here. Can I show you this coin, Michael?
Michael: Sure, please do.
Nehemia: This is a coin that was uncovered by archaeologists. It’s a coin that shows the Mount Gerizim. What’s really cool that is archaeologists have excavated it, it’s a coin from Shechem, from Nablus. It shows Mount Gerizim, that’s what we’re seeing here in the middle, and on top is a temple. There are steps leading up to the temple, because Shechem is in the valley and Mount Gerizim is up on the hill. Those steps were discovered by archeologists. So, you have a coin… and the temple was found by archeologists. That’s a temple to Jupiter on top of Mount Gerizim. That’s on their coins.
So, the Samaritans started out worshipping the God of Israel and some local deity, but they didn’t call the God of Israel by His name, according to their own word and confirmed by Josephus, and then they come along and they’re being persecuted. They said, “We’ll just call Him Zeus, or Jupiter. We don’t care. Just stop hurting us. Stop persecuting us. We’re not the Israelites that we care that much.” Back then, at least. I’m sure they care now, right? And they still don’t call Him by His name. Back then, they start worshipping this god and they start calling Him Zeus and Jupiter. Hopefully, the second half, we’ll get back to the name of the Creator of the Universe and see what this has to do with Yahweh, because this is key to understanding where we get Yahweh.
When I discovered this, this really was one of the most important discoveries of my life. I had heard people say this before and I’m like, “You’re just guessing. You don’t know. Stop your guessing. I want to see evidence.” And then I found the smoking gun that I’m going to share in part two.
Michael: Before our break, Nehemia shared with us some of his research up on Mount Gerizim and dealing with one of the head scholars of the Samaritan enclave up there, and found out a little bit of the background of how they called the name of their god, which coincidentally, is in the Book of the Kings, where it’s telling us where the Samaritans came from.
Nehemia: Why is all this important? I’m coming from an Old Testament background. I’m Jewish. But I want to emphasize for the New Testament people why this is important. There’s this passage in…
Michael: Let me read…
Nehemia: Okay, I’ll let you do that.
Michael: …a passage right out of here. Also, you had brought up that at the time of Apollonius, this is something that was put up by the Samaritans, a letter, that they had built the temple up on Mount Gerizim and dedicated it to Jupiter, and called the temple…
Nehemia: They’d already had a temple at that time, and originally, they referred to it as “the temple of the god of no name.” It’s really interesting because the Greek word there is “ananimo,” which is anonymous. Originally, it was called an anonymous temple. What that meant, again, in the context, is the temple in Jerusalem is the place Yehovah put His name, and they said, “Okay, we’re not using His name. It’s the god of no name.” What that shows you is they weren’t using the name of God with any pronunciation back in that period of time, back sometime around 168 BC. This becomes important when we get to where Yahweh comes from.
Michael: Right, but first, I want to share, this is the Lord’s Prayer. This is when Yeshua is actually praying to the Father. This is before the crucifixion. So this is the Lord’s Prayer. You wrote a book, A Prayer to Our Father, which is how Yeshua was teaching His disciples how to pray.
Nehemia: Exactly, right.
Michael: Here in Chapter 17 of John, verse 6, and I’ll read King James. “I have manifested Thy name under the men which Thou gavest me out of the world.” In verse 26 he says, “I have declared unto them Thy name. I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it.”
Nehemia: Are you telling me that Yeshua of Nazareth actually spoke the name of the Father, of Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei?
Michael: Well, we learn from your research that it hadn’t been outlawed in the 1st century at the time of Yeshua, and he’s making it known, he’s declaring it, declaring it, declaring it. He wants His name to be known all over the earth, and Yeshua is the one that is declaring it.
Nehemia: Wow. So, Yeshua’s speaking the name and He makes a point of how he…That’s interesting, we were just discussing this before we started. He says, “I have declared it,” past tense, “and I will declare it.” That’s interesting. I’ve got to wonder here if there’s an allusion here to what in the Christian understanding is second coming, or something like that. I don’t know.
Michael: I will declare it. Well, let me give you this, because he’s also talking about the Holy Spirit leading us into all truth. He will send the Spirit to lead us into all truth. By that Spirit leading us on into all truth, He will declare it. This is what we’re seeing today, that the prophets said that the Messiah will open the eyes of the gentiles. “The gentiles will repent for the abomination that they inherited, and the gentiles will know My name.” He has declared it already, and by way of the Holy Spirit, He will declare it. I contend that the Holy Spirit has worked in you to bring this out in so many ways and over 1,000 manuscripts now for this generation, which we’re seeing, knowledge is increasing.
Nehemia: Amen.
Michael: Men are running to and fro, you are running to and fro, where all these manuscripts are, these different museums on different continents, assembling all this information which has not been available at any time in history before.
Nehemia: Yeah, it really is incredible that we have access to. Let’s go back to Yahweh. Where do we get “Yahweh” from? Yahweh, really from a New Testament perspective, it comes down to when Yeshua says that “I declare the name of the Father” to his disciples, did he declare to them Yahweh? Or did He declare to them Yehovah? Or maybe something else, right? Maybe as I’ve said in the past, if we don’t know what the vowels are, it could be anything. It could be Yuhuvuhu. It could be anything. Now we have over 1,000 Hebrew manuscripts that verify that it’s Yehovah. But why is it that all these people think it’s Yahweh?
Michael: Let me stop you right there, just for a minute. Because 20 years ago I did several videos in the land of Israel, in which I was speaking the name as Yahweh. I was doing that. The information that you’re about to share with us, I didn’t want to listen to. I didn’t want to hear what you had to say. I had to admit it to myself that I didn’t want to listen because I already stake my flag on the name of Yahweh. I’d already done videos that had gone out by the hundreds of thousands all around the world, and I had a stake in that.
Yet, as this information, as you started bringing this out, it finally came to a point that I can’t ignore this. I can’t ignore this, even though a million and six videos I have and I’m pronouncing the name “Yahweh,” I finally had to change, because the information was there and the revelation also came. We won’t go into that. But I’m saying that I had a vested interest in my opinion.
Nehemia: It’s not just invested in DVDs. You’re emotionally invested in this for years. It’s really a powerful thing, being emotionally invested in things. What you did was the best you knew how to do at the time, and I believe that Yehovah honors that. Now we can do better, though. What I love about you, Michael, is you heard this information and you said, “You know what? I can do better.” You made the shift and you’re now saying “Yehovah”. I want to explain to people where Yahweh comes from.
Michael: Okay, please do.
Nehemia: For 200 years, the world has been deceived. Not really the Jewish world. The Jewish world doesn’t know anything about this. The academic scholarly world, which then spilled over into the Christian world, has been deceived by this information. I think it’s deception. When I dug into where it came from, I was shocked. Where it came from is Gesenius. Gesenius is the great grammarian of Hebrew grammar. To this day, the primary lexicons of Biblical Hebrew, Brown-Driver-Briggs and HALOT, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, are based on the work of Gesenius in the 1800s. And the primary grammar at Hebrew University, I would sit in these classes and the professor would assign an assignment to go check in the Hebrew grammar, and the grammar of Biblical Hebrew isn’t in Hebrew. It’s in English, or German, written by Gesenius.
We had students I was sitting with who were native Hebrew-speakers, who would come to me and say, “Can you help us? Our English isn’t good enough.” I’m like, “Yeah, I could read this. It’s English, it’s my native language.” So Gesenius’ Hebrew grammar is really the foundation of biblical studies in Hebrew.
Michael: Even today at Hebrew University.
Nehemia: To this day at Hebrew University, and rightfully so. He did groundbreaking work. What he really did is he collected things that were done by other people over centuries, and he put them – as Germans are quite good at doing, especially in the past – is doing things in a systematic way. He was very systematic. I consult Gesenius almost every day, Michael. I’m not saying it’s a bad grammar. I’m just saying he didn’t get everything right.
If you look at the earlier versions of his dictionary, you get a glimpse into his thought pattern. He was the one who championed Yahweh and convinced the scholarly world it should be Yahweh, because it was a debate in the Christian world up until then. Meaning, Yahweh doesn’t appear until 1599, that’s the first time it appears in the writings of a man named Gilbert Genebrard, and then it’s debated for a couple of hundred years by the Christians – is it Yehovah, which the Jews seem to think it is, or is it Yahweh?
Gesenius ends the discussion, “It’s Yahweh”, and he brings two pieces of evidence which shocked me, because I didn’t know this until relatively recently. He says this in the 1833 edition of his dictionary, which was translated in 1857 into English. In the dictionary, this part I did know, the first part. The first part is that the main source for Yahweh is a Christian Church father named Theodoret of Cyrus, who lived at the end of the 4th, beginning of the 5th century AD.
Theodoret of Cyrus is talking about the name, and he makes a statement that is quoted in certainly every scholarly work on this topic, as evidence for Yahweh. What Theodoret said in his Questions on Exodus, chapter 7 question 15, he says, “The Samaritans call it ‘Yahveh,’ while the Jews call it ‘Ayah,’” which is really interesting. At first you think he’s talking about the Tetragrammaton, Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, right? That’s what’s understood certainly when it comes to the Samaritans. But he says, “The Jews call God’s name ‘Ayah.’” What’s Ayah?
Years ago, I suggested that Ayah, which supposedly the Jews refer to God as, was a corruption of the Yah that you have in Halleluyah, and that’s definitely a possibility. Meaning, he’s not even talking about the Tetragrammaton when it comes to the Jews, because by the time of the Theodoret of Cyrus, there was a very small number of Jews who still spoke the name. It was kept as a secret among the rabbis, and certainly this gentile wouldn’t have heard it. That makes no sense, that this Christian from Cyrus, Theodoret – not Cyprus, by the way – that he would have heard this. It doesn’t make sense.
So where did they hear this from, and how did he get this information from the Samaritans? Remember, we just heard from Josephus that in 168 BC the Samaritans didn’t speak the name of the God of Israel. In fact, they referred to god by no name, anonymous, and then they rededicated their temple to Zeus, or Jupiter. That was 168 BC, and now we’re being told, sometime around 500 AD by Theodoret of Cyrus, that’s 700 years later, that the Samaritans pronounced God’s name as Yahveh. Where does he get that?
There are several possibilities. One is that maybe there was some faction of Samaritans who did speak it. I don’t know, there isn’t really evidence for that. What some scholars suggest – and by the way, this is Gesenius’ basis for Yahweh. This statement by Theodoret, what I just read to you, that is the only solid proof of any kind for Yahweh, is this statement by Theodoret, who’s quoting the Samaritans.
By the way, Theodoret didn’t know Hebrew. The Samaritans weren’t even Israelites, so their form of Hebrew was a corrupt form of Hebrew based on the northern dialect, but it was corrupted over time. They don’t have the Hei sound, for example. This gentleman, the Samaritan scholar, he says to me, “The name of God means ‘Haya, Hoveh, Yihyeh’.” I said, “How do you pronounce it in Samaritan Hebrew?” “Haya,” he says, “is abba. Hoveh,” he says, “is ebbi. Yihyeh is yebbi.” You can see some remnants there of Hebrew, but their Hebrew is different than the Hebrew that was preserved by the Jewish people. It comes from a different dialect, and that was corrupted over time. So how on earth does Theodoret know what the Samaritans call the God of Israel?
One possibility is that he heard them say some other word… and he heard maybe third or fourth hand, right? Because I doubt, he ever met a Samaritan. So somehow the word gets to him that they refer to God as Yahbeh, or Yahveh. What they might have been referring to was what we saw in Exodus 3:14, and other scholars have suggested this. That in Exodus 3:14 we saw that God is called “Eheyeh,” He says, “I Am. This is what you’ll call me for the rest of time is Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei,” which is He Was, He Is, He Will Be. But Yahveh would be pronounced in certain periods of history of Greek as “I’aveh.” Well, I’aveh could be a form of “Eheyeh,” and that’s what some scholars have suggested – that this is simply a corruption of Eheyeh and has therefore nothing to do with the Tetragrammaton. Because in this period, the Samaritans didn’t even speak the name.
There’s another possibility which I find really scary, and it’s possible this is true. The Samaritans we heard about from Josephus rededicated their temple to Jupiter. Well, what’s Jupiter called in Latin? In Latin he’s not called Jupiter. First, there’s no J in Latin. In Latin, he’s called “Yupiter”. I spoke to an expert in Latin to confirm this. So today in Latin they say, “Yov”, or “Jov,” for Jupiter, and that’s where you get in English where Sherlock Homes says, “Oh, by jove. I think I’ve got it.” He’s saying, “By Jupiter.” What are you saying? That’s what he was saying, can you believe that? I don’t know what the English were thinking back then in the 1800s.
Anyway, there are different forms of Jupiter, and I don’t want to get too complicated here, but there are different what they call “cases” in Latin. There’s Yupiter, Yovis, Yovi, Yovam, Yoveh, Yupiter. But basically, in the early Latin it wasn’t a V, it was a W, and so it wasn’t pronounced “Yov,” it was pronounced Yohweh, in Latin 2,000 years ago.
So now, we have this word “Yohweh”, and where do we get Jupiter from Yohweh? Jupiter is Yohwehpater, Father Yohweh. That is the name of Jupiter. That was the God of the Latins, Yohweh. I heard that, and I’m like, “That sounds awfully like Yahweh.” And we know that the Samaritans dedicated their temple to Jupiter, Jupiter of the Greeks. So maybe if you went to a Samaritan and said, “What’s the name of the God in that temple?” he would say to you, “That’s Father Yohweh, Yohwehpater.”
So wait a minute - maybe this is what they heard from the Samaritans, it’s just not the name of Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, the God of Israel. You say, “Okay, come on. Gesenius isn’t going to fall for that. He knew Greek, he knew Latin, he learned Greek and Latin before he learned Hebrew. He was a solid German scholar back then, even in your day, I think people learned Latin, right? The earlier generations, the Europeans and people from the west learned Greek and Latin really well. So he knew about Yohweh being the name of Jupiter, and you think, “How could there be any connection between what Gesenius, this great German scholar of Hebraic studies said, and Jupiter?”
Well, he actually admits that there is. Let me read you what he says. And I saw this and I’m like, “There it is. It’s a smoking gun.” These are the words of Gesenius in his 1857 edition of his dictionary. He says, “I suppose this word…” referring to Yahweh, and earlier in the paragraph he says, “This comes from the Samaritans Yahveh, which is Yahweh. I suppose this word to be one of the most remote antiquities. Perhaps it’s the same origin as Yovis…” which is Yowis, “and Yupiter,” meaning Jov and Jupiter, “and transferred from the Egyptians to the Hebrews.” What?
In other words, Gesenius is telling us we have two pieces of information here. We have a name for God from the Samaritans which is Yahveh, which he believes would originally have been Yahweh, and Yahweh sounds awfully like Yohweh of the Latins. In other words, we have this statement by Theodoret connecting it to the Samaritan Yahveh, which he thinks is Yahweh, and we have this Latin god called “Yohweh”. He says, “These two things can’t be a coincidence. It must be that both the Hebrews and the Latins worshipped some ancient deity who was called Yohweh or Yahweh, and they both then separated into different places. The Latins went to Italy, the Israelites went to Israel, and they both continued to call upon this name with a slightly different pronunciation. The Latin says Yohweh, and the Hebrew says Yahweh…”
Michael: Are you suggesting that it came from the Egyptians?
Nehemia: “And it came from the Egyptians,” he claims. Now, he wrote this originally in 1833, and that’s significant because at that time they didn’t really know what hieroglyphics meant. In other words, they hadn’t fully deciphered the hieroglyphics, and so you could kind of say anything you wanted about the ancient Egyptians, right?
Michael: And they did.
Nehemia: And they did, right. Famously, there was one particular group who said, “Yes, we have this document in hieroglyphics. Here’s our translation of it.” It turns out they just made that all up once the scholars deciphered hieroglyphics.
Michael: This is embarrassing for Salt Lake City.
Nehemia: Yeah, you said that. In any event, here you have him saying explicitly that he’s tying together Yahweh, or Yahveh of the Samaritans in Theodoret and the Yohweh of Jupiter, of the Latins, and saying, “Yeah, they both got that from the Egyptians.” Well, I saw this and I said, “Wait a minute. So your proof for Yahweh, the great scholar who advocates for Yahweh is telling us it’s the name of a pagan deity! And it’s the name of some Egyptian deity that both the Latins and the Hebrews worship? First of all, if it’s the name of a pagan deity, then it doesn’t mean He Was, He Is, and He Is To Come.”
Michael: Right, right.
Nehemia: And he claims it doesn’t mean that, because he bases it on a Hebrew form, I won’t get into too complicated stuff – but it’s the hiphil form, and the name “Yehovah,” which comes from Haya, Hoveh, Yiheyh, comes from the kal form, it’s a different form of the verb. The name “Yehovah” can mean, “He Was, He Is, He Is to Come”, Yahweh can’t mean that. It doesn’t have that meaning.
The actual meaning of Yahweh is unclear, as well, if it means anything. Why is it unclear? Because they believed it came from some Egyptian deity, someone who isn’t even Hebrew. I was just at the SBL conference, the Society of Biblical Literature, and this woman gave a lecture. She says, “This isn’t a Hebrew name. This is an ancient pagan name…” Today! In this century, people are still saying the same thing! This was in November 2017. A serious scholar was giving a paper saying, “This is the name of a pagan deity that transferred from other languages eventually into Hebrew, and if you want to know the meaning of the word, don’t look in Hebrew, look at these other pagan languages.”
So what he was saying back then in 1833, what Gesenius was saying, is still being advocated by people today. Now Michael, some people make fun of me. They say I’m really liberal. I say, “If you want to call him Yahweh, call him Yahweh,” and I still say that. But at least know what the background of Yahweh is and where it comes from.
The God of Israel, I believe, is far more merciful than we are. I don’t want people to hear this and say, “Oh, no. I’ve been praying to the wrong god.” You haven’t been praying to the wrong god. You were doing the best you could with what you had. But now you’ve got better information, and you should be convicted by that. You need to follow the truth when you discover it.
I’m going to read a passage from Psalm 44. I talk about this passage - this was a life-changing passage for me, Michael. It’s a verse in Psalm 44. I talk about it in my book, Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. I have a whole section on that in my book. It’s talking in Psalm 44 about the Israelites being taken into exile. If you read the whole context here, they’re taken into exile, they’re captives in a foreign land, and then they say in verse 20 in the English, 21 in the Hebrew... let me read the Hebrew. It says, “Im shachachnu shem Eloheynu, If we forgot the name of our God, venifros kapeinu l’el zar, and we stretched out our hands, our palms to a foreign god…” What does that mean? The way the Israelites would pray… I do this, and some people say, “Are you a Pentecostal?” No, I’m praying like an Israelite! This is how the Israelites would pray! They would stretch out their hands to God, raising their hands.
“If we forgot the name of our God and we stretched out our palms to a foreign deity, ha’lo Elohim yakhakor zot, will God not investigate this? Ki hu yode’a ta’alumot lev, for He knows the mysteries of the heart.” That is, I’m in a foreign land and I grew up being told, “You’re not allowed to say the name of your God!”
We have this concept in Judaism, “tinok shenishbah.” It refers to a time in history, which has come back, unfortunately. It literally means, “the baby who was taken captive by pirates”. It refers to a time in history when Jews would travel the Mediterranean, and there were these Muslim pirates, the Barbary pirates. Thomas Jefferson dealt with them.
Michael: Oh yeah, yeah. The Marines had to go to the shore of Tripoli.
Nehemia: Right, yeah. That’s the [singing] shores of Tripoli, right. So this was a problem for Jews for over 1,000 years, living in the Mediterranean, that Jewish babies would be captured. Then they would meet their father years later, and the child would have been raised as a Muslim. So rabbis discussed this, they said, “The tinok shenishbah, the baby that was captured by the pirates, Jews are supposed to follow the Torah, we’re taught. But this Jew doesn’t know any better. He was captured by pirates.”
As I’m sharing this, I’m realizing Gesenius in some way was a linguistic pirate! He captured the hearts of billions of people for the last 200 years to tell them, “Hey, guys. It’s Yahweh”, and if you read my books, you’ll find out I also think Yahweh is a pagan deity. It’s right there in his book! He’s telling you Yahweh is the name of some Egyptian deity that’s also worshipped by the Latins. And that’s why it’s Yahweh, because it fits Yohweh, the Jupiter form.
So, we’re in a world where we’ve been lied to and deceived for 200 years, and now we’re like that baby who was taken captive by the pirates, and meets his father and realizes, “In my heart, I feel that I am a Jew. I my heart, I feel the God of Israel and the truth. When I hear it, I can repent. I’m not going to be judged for what I did when I didn’t know any better.” That’s the idea of tinok shenishbah. “But now that I know, and my heart is stirred, I can return to the God of Israel.” This is what it’s talking about in Psalm 44. It literally talks about these people who grew up in Babylon and were told, “Don’t speak the name of your God.” Instead, they’re calling out the names of Baal and Marduk, and who knows what deities. They don’t know any better. But in their hearts, they’re turning their hearts towards the one true God, towards the God of Israel, in innocence.
So, I don’t think God is striking people down because they’re calling upon God with the wrong name. But it’s still important to try to get it right if we can. We’ve been captivated by this falsehood for 200 years, since 1833 when Gesenius wrote that, and now we have better information. Surely, we should act on that better information.
We were talking before, from your perspective in the New Testament, you’ve got Yeshua, and I know there are people who have been saved in the name of Jesus. They’ll tell you it was on a certain date, at a certain time. And you’re not saying, Michael, to those people, “Hey, that salvation experience you had, that was false.” You’re not saying that, right?
Michael: No, no, no.
Nehemia: That’s not the point we’re making here. The point we’re making here is, okay, you had that experience. God’s that merciful that if you mispronounced His name, He can still find you where you are. Even if you call Him by a mispronunciation based on the name Jupiter, He can still respond to your prayer. He’s that amazing, that merciful.
However, now that we know better, we should return to the truth, doing the best we can with this information, as knowledge is being increased.
Michael: Nehemia, I think that’s why Jeremiah, in his prophesy, said that the gentiles come to the land of Israel. It’s after the Jews, after Israel starts coming back, then the gentiles come back and they cry out in repentance saying, “We’ve inherited lies.” That’s all that’s required.
Nehemia: It turns out that’s a pagan deity too, Molech. That’s a different story.
Michael: That’s right. That’s right. It’s part of the lies that we inherited.
Nehemia: God is just so merciful. He’s incredible. Your people inherited lies. My people inherited lies, as well, and taught lies to themselves and to the world. Lies, when they knew the truth, that they kept hidden! They kept it a secret! This is what I discovered over the last year, that literally my ancestors were involved in a conspiracy of silence. They knew His name was Yehovah, and they wanted it to be kept hidden. Now that information is going out around the world.
Michael: Nehemia, I want you to come back, and I want you to lay that thing out, because as you say, it was literally one of your relatives that deliberately hid the name. And now His name is being known throughout the world, and you are really atoning for the sins of your fathers in…
Nehemia: That’s how I feel.
Michael: …getting this out. I know it costs you a lot, it’s costing your life to do this, you had to put aside everything else in the world to be able to do this and get this message out, and it’s my honor to be at least a little bit of a vehicle in doing that.
Nehemia: Well, it’s my honor to share this with the people. Can I end with a prayer?
Michael: Please, Nehemia.
Nehemia: Yehovah, Avinu shebashamayim, Yehovah, our Father in heaven, I lift up my hands to You. My ancestors, Father, they lifted their hands to You and they prayed to You the best they knew how. At least in their hearts, they thought of Your name, Yehovah. Now I live in a world where I can speak Your name, Yehovah. No one will persecute me. No one will burn me at a stake or put me in prison, Yehovah, at least in this free country.
I’m so grateful to be here and have this freedom, Yehovah, our Father in heaven. Yehovah, You are our salvation, Yehovah. You are yeshu’ateinu, our yeshua. You are the one who we spoke in Lamentations. It says, “Hashiveini Yehovah eleicha venashuva. Yehovah, return us to you, Yehovah, and we will return.” I need Your help, Yehovah. I can’t do this alone. Please return all mankind to You that we may return. Amen.
Michael: Amen.
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