Hebrew Voices #207 – Nehemia on “Sounds like Freedom”

Hebrew Voices #207 – Nehemia on “Sounds like Freedom”

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Deborah: Welcome back to the Sounds Like Freedom podcast. I’m your host, Deborah Henne, and I’m here today with Dr. Nehemia Gordon, who is the creator and host of the Hebrew Voices podcast. He has written two popular books on the Hebrew origins of Christianity and is active in interfaith dialogue. Dr. Gordon earned his PhD from Bar Ilan University in biblical studies, writing his doctoral dissertation on The Writing, Erasure, and Correction of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts. He also holds a master’s degree in biblical studies and a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has worked as a translator on the Dead Sea Scrolls and a researcher deciphering ancient Hebrew manuscripts. He is currently working on cutting edge research utilizing Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible.

Welcome, Dr. Nehemia.

Nehemia: Hey, thank you. Shalom.

Deborah: Shalom to you as well. Now, I am a huge fan of your work. I’ve used some of your research and materials in some messages that I’ve preached. I’m a huge fan of your research and what you bring to the Hebrew word studies and the Hebrew origins of the Christian faith. In particular, I was actually introduced to you and your work through my cousin, who sent me your video about Yahweh and the origins of Yahweh. So, what I would love is for my listeners to hear what you discovered about the origins of Yahweh and the name of God.

Nehemia: So, Yahweh is… the Anchor Bible Dictionary puts it best; it calls Yahweh a scholarly guess. In other words… let’s back up. We have this challenge, which is that Rabbinical Judaism forbade Jews from pronouncing the name of God, which was written 6,827 times in the most accurate manuscripts. And it’s written with the consonants, but it’s not pronounced. So, the assumption is, we don’t know what the vowels are.

So, imagine if you had my letters N-H-M, and you didn’t know if it was Nuhumu or if it was Nihimi. And that’s because Hebrew has two different sets of writing; it has the consonants and the vowels which are written separately, and it’s generally believed that the vowels originally weren’t even written. Even today, if you go to a synagogue and you pull out the Torah scroll, it doesn’t have any vowels written. That is, it’s just the consonants.

So, where do you get the vowels from? Well, you go to a printed book, and you see what the vowels are, and you read it over and over until you know it. And then you go back and read the unvocalized text. That’s, in practice, how it’s done today when somebody reads in the public liturgy, in the prayers in the synagogue. Now, you can pick it up if you’re fluent in Hebrew and read it without even practicing, and you’ll get probably 90-95% of it right. You might make some mistakes, but maybe 98% you’ll get right.

So, the problem is, what are the vowels of God’s name? We know it’s Y-H-V, and then the last one is H, which is usually silent at the end of a word. Okay, so how do we pronounce that? The scholarly guess is that it’s Yahweh, and that’s based on a number of pieces of evidence. One of those is that there is a church father named Theodoret of Cyrus. For years I mispronounced his name, and then I met an expert in what they call the church fathers, and he says, “No, that’s ‘Thee-odd-urret.’” I always called him “Theodore-et” because I didn’t know how it’s pronounced. At least in English, they say “Thee-odd-urret.”