Hebrew Gospel Pearls-Episode 19
Matthew 5:9
In Hebrew Gospel Pearls #19, Blessed are the Peacemakers, Nehemia and Keith discuss how a misunderstanding of the Sermon on the Mount can lead to death and destruction, how the best intentions of Israeli leaders led to war, and the true meaning of the Hebrew idiom to “pursue peace”.
Read the transcript of this episode
Nehemia (00:00):
The answer sometimes is no. I’ve seen this in all kinds of things in my life. I’ve seen this with, with governments, with geopolitical situations. I’ve seen this with friendships and I’ve seen this and it’s painful. And I’ve seen this with relationships. Sometimes the answer is no.
Narrator (00:15):
You are listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson, exploring Hebrew New Testament manuscripts for yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Keith (00:29):
Welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls, episode number 19. We’re in a wonderful studio doing a buffet of biblical beatitudes. The biblical beatitudes, we are actually up to Matthew chapter five, verse nine. Nehemia, I’m going to start out reading something before we even go too far. And here’s what the King… People love the King James. People love the King James. I think King Jimmy got nervous with this verse. And let me just read it. It says this, the King James version renders our verse like this, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. It seems that the translators of King Jimmy’s Bible got a little nervous with the last phrase, just like I did, just like I did. Why did I get nervous?
Nehemia (01:07):
Who said that?
Keith (01:08):
This is me speaking and what am I speaking? So I did something some, some years ago. We did what we called the Red Letter series. And what it was, it was based on Howard’s Hebrew Matthew. And what we attempted to do was to go through the parts where Yeshua actually spoke and we got to be beatitudes. What this series is doing, Nehemia, and those that are listening, is we’re going to a completely different level. Because Nehemia has brought all of these manuscripts together. We’ve got a chance to compare and to contrast. I don’t even think we need a whole lot of other Hebrew manuscripts just to focus on the controversy of Matthew chapter five, verse nine. And why do I say that? Why did the King James get nervous? Uh, I guess it’s depending on what it means by becoming children of God and also what it means to be peacemakers. So let’s get started right into five verse nine. Why don’t you read it for us based on what we have in the Hebrew.
Nehemia (01:57):
So Hebrew Matthew has (Hebrew) blessed are the pursuers of peace for, they will be called (Hebrew) Elohim, the sons of God.
Keith (02:07):
My goodness. That sounds like a bit of a difference.
Nehemia (02:10):
I don’t know that it’s that big of a difference. In other words, in Greek you say to make peace, in Hebrew you say to pursue peace. Delitzsch, who we know translated from the Greek into the Hebrew, he translates a (Hebrew) verbatim, the same, so far. Blessed are those who pursue peace, (Hebrew) for it shall be called to them, the sons of Elohim. So he has the tenses is a little bit different or the passive and the active voice, but basically, um, it’s almost identical. Let’s say, if Matthew represents accurately what Yeshua said, then he got that phrase from Psalm 34:15, which says [Hebrew] seek peace and pursue it. Delitzsch definitely got that phrase from Psalm 34:15. In other words, he saw the phrase (Hebrew), those who make peace and he said, oh, (Hebrew) is, um, is in Hebrew to pursue peace. And, um, in other words, it’s a Hebrew idiom that he’s translating back out of the Greek. And if we look, let’s see it’s Psalm 34:15, um, and we see a (Hebrew) – seek peace and chase after it. And let’s see what we have in the Greek. Um, I didn’t look this up beforehand. Um, uh, yes, so it doesn’t have that exact, that’s interesting, it doesn’t have to make peace. So, uh, we have to ask, how did he end up with this phrase? He didn’t end up with it based on the Greek. He said, what is a Hebrew idiom for making peace? Now, is there a difference between pursuing peace and making peace?
Keith (03:55):
I believe there is. And I’ll tell you something. For me, this was a change because when I saw to pursue peace, the pressure kind of went down a little bit. I don’t always feel like, I’ll be completely honest, Nehemia. I don’t always feel like being a peacemaker. Pursuing peace seems to be something that I’m pointing towards, I’m trying to do, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it like lies with me. Peacemaker feels like it’s just you. That’s how it feels to me.
Nehemia (04:23):
And you could interpret it that. In other words, someone who pursues peace. If the other side doesn’t reciprocate, okay, I tried.
Keith (04:31):
Exactly.
Nehemia (04:32):
Whereas if based on the Greek, you could say, and I don’t know that it has to be read this way. But it sounds, I guess, in the Greek that you only get credit if you actually make the peace. And boy, how can we talk about this without talking about the peace process?
Keith (04:45):
Oh my goodness.
Nehemia (04:46):
Can we talk about?
Keith (04:46):
No, listen, absolutely we have to talk about it. But we have to take our time and talk about it. So before we talk about that, can I just check, can we just check the sources, the sources regarding this? Can I go to Howard’s Hebrew first as verse nine? Blessed are those who pursue peace. And again, I love the fact that he’s using the words to pursue. For those who pursue peace, for they shall be called. And why did I say controversy? Uh, King James maybe got a little bit nervous versus the NASB. The NASB says sons of God. In Hebrew I think we’d say sons of God, but what King James says is children of God. Kinda like to take that, take the pressure off.
Nehemia (05:27):
How does it take the pressure off?
Keith (05:28):
It takes the pressure off because when you say. You have to understand. When someone says son of God, or sons of God, and I might be jumping ahead. I might be really jumping ahead.
Nehemia (05:36):
I think you’re in the plus area. Go on.
New Speaker (05:38):
You say sons of God. There are issues there. There are issues there. Sons of God. If you look at it from some perspective, you say, son of God, that means one person in one situation only. Would not take into account anything else other than the son of God. That’s the controversy. So I think King James…
Nehemia (05:57):
So that’s kind of an alien concept to a Jewish perspective because.. I do want to save this for the plus section. Or maybe for later even in this section, but okay, I hear what you’re saying. Son of God has capital S and it has a theological connotation. Uh, the question is, um, and I don’t even think it’s a question, when Yeshua said this in Matthew 5:9, did he intend to have a theological connotation to it?
Keith (06:23):
No, he’s giving a family upgrade.
Nehemia (06:25):
Uh oh.
Keith (06:26):
He’s giving everybody a family upgrade. You can, you can become a part of the family.
Nehemia (06:30):
So you’re joking. You’re joking, but there’s a denomination I once encountered, uh, I won’t say what it is. But they have a doctrine that, and they’re Christian. They say that when you die, if you’re a believer, you become part of the Godhead and that you become literally a brother of Jesus and Yahweh is your father. This is using their terminology. And, uh, you know, your name is Bill. Now your name is Bill Elohim because Elohim is a family name and you’ve become part of the family of God. This is their doctrine. Now imagine trying to have a biblical conversation with this.
Keith (07:06):
Is this for real?
Nehemia (07:06):
Oh, absolutely. More than one person, a denomination. Now imagine having, trying to have a, uh, any kind of conversation with someone who believes that when he dies he will come part of the Godhead. Can you imagine the arrogance of such a person? Um, and some of those people might be very humble. The ones I met were not. So no, I mean, it actually shows that you can have such a concept. It exists today in the 20th first century in the United States. There are, and some people would say, well, they’re not Christians, because if you have anything more than the Trinity, then you’re not a Christian in lots of theology. They call themselves Christians, look to the New Testament, look to Jesus. And they say, when they die, they’ll become part of the Godhead. They’ll become part of the family of Elohim. There’s Yahweh, Elohim, there’s Yahshua, or Jesus Elohim. Some of them use the Hebrew, some don’t. And then when you die, you’ll become Keith Elohim. If you’re part of the right doctrine and give your tithes to the right church, of course.
Keith (07:58):
What do I do to get rid of the first name? Now, can you do me a favor? So now with a little structure, just give a little structure. This is the BFA one, so little structure. So we’re going to actually be able to talk about a few things. You brought up three questions. Before we get to three questions on the issues of sons of God. Okay? Can we just talk about this? I want to go back to what you said about Israel, because this is huge. Uh, being a peacemaker versus being a pursuer of peace. What does that mean for you? Now, I want to put it in present day context, being a peacemaker, as some people say, Israel should be a peacemaker. Okay. But, maybe they’re pursuing peace and that looks different. What’s your thought?
Nehemia (08:40):
So I lived through a very tragic period of Israel’s history and it was a period of, um, I would say there was a certain segment of the Israeli population that was, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? They had this belief that, um, it was euphoria. That’s the best way to describe it. They had a euphoria that we’ve lived in this reality for over a hundred years. Long before the state of Israel, where the Arabs in Israel, the Muslims wanted to kill us. And now all of a sudden in 1993, we’ve made the peace process at Oslo. And this is euphoria. We’re finally going to make peace. And it will, uh, be the end of the period of the wars. And look, Israel had this..
Keith (09:24):
Are you telling me people believed that?
Nehemia (09:25):
A hundred percent, they believed it. And many people said, you guys are crazy. This is never going to happen. Listen to what they say. They don’t say the same things to us in English. And in Hebrew, what they say in Arabic. Just listen to them, listen to the speeches they’re giving in Arabic. They don’t want peace. This is a strategy to get more land, to use it as a launching pad to attack us deep in the heart of Israel. And you can look at the Kasam tracker. There’s somebody who tracks every rocket fired at Israel. I don’t know that there’s been a week where rockets weren’t fired at Israel since 2005. So in the early nineties, there was this euphoria that we would have peace. And look, nobody wanted peace as much as anybody who, I mean, I wanted peace. Everybody wants peace in Israel. All the Jews, I should say, want peace. And Netanyahu decades ago made a famous statement.
Nehemia (10:17):
He said, if the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there’d be no more Israel. And that’s the painful reality. That we have been pursuing peace for decades. And sometimes there are people on the Arab side who want peace, but the Arab leadership by and large has not wanted peace. They want a perpetual state of war because their objective is to destroy Israel. There was, um, so we started out in 1993 with the Oslo Accords. And that was a pursuit of peace by people who were euphoric. Who, I think to some extent they were delusional. There was a man named Yossi Beilin and he was this, uh, professor, brilliant professor from a university in Israel. And he came up with the doctrine of the peace process. And he said something like this, and this ties, in it’s related. He said something like this, look, we’ve made, we made peace with Egypt. We know what the Arabs need to make peace. Let’s cut through all the games. Let’s cut through all the negotiations and go just to the final stage, which is what we know they’re going to eventually agree to. And one of those things was there has to be an Arab capital in Jerusalem and a whole bunch of other things. I won’t go into the detail. And, um, people likened this to, and I’ll try to use sensitive language here, right? Imagine if back when in your single days you met this woman and you said to the woman, look, I know in the end, we’re going to be married. So let’s cut to the chase and we don’t need dinner. We don’t need to go on dates.
Nehemia (11:57):
Let’s just get married right now. And tonight we will consummate. Well, she’d probably slap you. And she should slap you because there is a process that you need to go through. You need to pursue peace in order to make peace. And Beilin said, this philosophy of Beilin said, oh no, let’s just make peace now. We know, we know how this is going to end. Let’s make peace. And it was a disaster. It brought death of tens of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Arabs, especially Muslims. And why did it bring death? Because that’s not how things work. There’s a dynamic you have to work through. And part of the dynamic is, um, you know, there’s a certain dynamic, especially in the middle east, but it’s just human nature, that when you… Imagine another analogy, right, parable. Go into buy a car. And you say to the people who are going to sell you the car, well, this is the price we’re going to end on, no negotiation no discussion. Is that going to work? Probably not. Probably not going to work. In fact, you’ll probably get yourself kicked out of there. And so Beilinism said, no, let’s go to the final. We’re just going to make peace. We know what peace is going to look like. Let’s just make peace. Let’s not pursue peace. And it just brought so much death and destruction because there were people on the other side who said, well, wait a minute, that’s your starting point. Let’s push it one step further. And one step further. And, and he was saying, no, this is my end point. But he said that with this words, not with his actions.
Keith (13:23):
They wanted negotiation.
Nehemia (13:24):
They needed a negotiation, right? And maybe they weren’t gonna make peace anyway. We’ll never know. Using his approach, it was impossible to make peace. And I think if you listen to what they were saying, they probably didn’t want to make peace. But that route was a disaster.
Keith (13:38):
So if these were people that were committed to the words that we see in the King James Bible, they wanted to be blessed. I want to be blessed, be a peacemaker. In fact, those outside of Israel that would say, listen, if Israel wants to be blessed, they need to be a peacemaker. And they stayed within that frame of mind. You’re saying that that frame of mind of making peace,
Nehemia (13:59):
Because what it is is peace at all costs. And peace at all costs is, nobody wants that. That’s a disaster. Well peace at all costs as you kill all of us and we’re dead in the sea. Well, that’s what the Arabs said that they wanted. So this is for decades what they would do. They’d point to the Mediterranean. And they would say, we’re going to drive the Jews into the sea, right? A little bit of metaphor there, but actually meant literally as well. Right? They’ll drown all of us, kill all of us and push us into the sea. Right? So if that’s their objective, well, you can’t have peace at all costs, right? You also can’t assume everyone’s the same, right? Part of the Beilinism, the peacemaking approach was that, well, the Arabs of Israel, what they call the Palestinians, they’re no different than the Egyptians. Well, actually there are a lot different, right? They have a different culture. They have a different history. They have a different heritage. They’re not the same. They’ve been living for decades in a different reality. Um, they, uh, look the Arabs of, the so-called Palestinians of the. West Bank and the Palestinians of Gaza are two different populations. They’re not the same people, right? They don’t have the same objectives. They don’t have the same, even the same language. Um, those of Northern Israel and Southern Israel, they have different languages. So to treat them all as a monolith, that is a recipe for disaster.
Keith (15:17):
Can you unpack for us a little bit? So you said in 93 with Oslo Accords, so what… Permission to speak about this? What was it that they put forward that made it, that meant that it wasn’t going to work?
Nehemia (15:30):
So, uh, well, really it was the attitude of the Israeli leadership openly saying, we know where this is going to end. We know what the final objective is. We just need to get to that final objective. Instead of actually going through the hard work of pursuing peace. So one of the things they said is, okay, if we gave all of the Palestinian, the areas where the Palestinians live, if we gave them all immediate independence, we would have a war. Because they would, all of a sudden have tanks and bombers and jets in Israeli territory. Israel doesn’t have a lot of depth, like most countries, like the United States. So they have to, um, I mean, you can drive across the country, literally in nine kilometers, right? It’s like five or six miles at one point, the shortest point. So, um, what they said is, what we’re going to do is we’re going to give them autonomy in Jericho and in Gaza. And we’ll see that everything is fine. And then we’ll give them autonomy in other areas and eventually independence. And so they gave them this. I remember it was the slogan, Jericho and Gaza first. And it was a way essentially of appeasing the people of Israel who were very nervous about this. It was a way of showing them, look, there’ll be peace. It’ll be no problem. And from the very first caravan of Palestinian forces who were flown over from, um, they were flown over from Tunisia. These terrorists, literal terrorists were flown over from Tunisia to rule over Gaza and the West Bank without asking the Arabs in the West Bank. The PLO was flown over there. And in the very, very first caravan, they were hiding weapons that they, that according to the agreement they weren’t allowed to have. And what’s the significance of this. Instead of saying, okay, well, they didn’t keep their word. Let’s not move forward. We’re pursuing peace. And they rejected it through their actions. They said, no, we’re making peace. Peace is going to happen. And that was from literally the very first caravan.
Keith (17:23):
Now, I mean, listen, this is our show, right? Hebrew Gospel Pearls. We’ve been to Israel together several times. I have a dear friend there, Rabbi Yehuda Glick, uh, who used to serve in the government before the situation that he’s presently in. And when he served there, he said he quit the job based on what happened in Gaza. The Jewish people were in Gaza, living there, and they were forcibly removed. Do you remember what year?
Nehemia (17:50):
Absolutely. 2005, 9,000 Jews were forcibly removed from their homes. There were Jews who were born there. Their father was born there and their grandfather had immigrated there in 1967. So three generations lived there, were two generations in some cases were buried there in cemeteries, and they dug up their graves and removed them from Gaza, destroyed homes, destroyed synagogues because they said, look, the only way we’ll have peace with the Gazans is if we give every last inch of Gaza over to the Palestinian authority to rule. And the Palestinian authority responded by holding elections, which elected Hamas. And they’ve been firing rockets at us ever since. I remember the election, I think it was around 2004. There was this one political party who had a graphic showing rockets being fired from Gaza. And their whole platform was don’t give Gaza to the Palestinians to rule. If you pull out of Gaza, instead of attacking the Jews who live in Gaza, there were about 9,000 Jews there, they’ll attack the heart of Israel. And they were laughed at, they were called conspiracy theorists. They were ridiculed. You guys are fanatics. And the day we left Gaza, virtually the day, the rockets have started and they have never stopped.
Keith (19:02):
I want you to do something. This is a biblical connection. You’re going to love this. So Yehuda Glick, he talked about this, how he wept, he fought and he argued with the government saying, you cannot do this. If you do this, we’re going to have war with Gaza, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You just gave me another whole dimension to that. But would you open up your tap, tap for a second? Um, and why are we, why are you and I not surprised about what’s happening with this group called Hamas. Can you give us a biblical definition of the group that’s called Hamas in the Tanakh.
Nehemia (19:29):
It’s under the category of you can’t make this stuff up.
Keith (19:32):
You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Nehemia (19:34):
They chose to call themselves Hamas based on an Arabic acronym. But in Hebrew, Hamas means violence and violence and corruption. Genesis 6:11, the earth was also corrupt before God and the earth was filled with hamas.
Keith (19:49):
So, I mean, for me, you can’t make it up. You can’t make it up, but his whole point was, if we do this, if we give this over, then it’s going to be, it’s going to be constant. And it was.
Nehemia (19:59):
There’s probably people in Gaza, I know there are people in Gaza who want to make peace. There’s people in Gaza and in the West Bank who want to make peace. There’s people who want to live with us in peace, but their leaders don’t and the people they elect don’t and enough of the population, uh, is able to push the whole, um, uh, it’s not really a country, but the whole geopolitical entity of Gaza and the West Bank, which are completely separate today. As we’re recording this, Gaza is ruled by the Hamas and the Palestinian areas of the west bank are ruled by the PLO. And one of the bizarre things I hear about from leftists, it’s about how they want to end the occupation. Occupation ended in 2005 when the last Jew is forcibly removed from Gaza, by Jews. There hasn’t been Jewish soldiers there, except for a few ? that happened. And then we pulled out after the wars. They rule themselves in Gaza, right? For all intents and purposes, the only thing they don’t have, they have actually more sovereignty in some respects than some sovereign nations. Like if you look at Micronesia, those countries like that, in some respects they exercise more sovereignty in Gaza, in particular, than many countries. The only thing they don’t have is an air force and tanks. Because if they did that, Israel would end tomorrow. They would just overrun Israel and destroy it. So we prevent them from having that, um, out of necessity. I mean, it’s really a situation that’s hard to understand until you realize how close things are.
Keith (21:25):
Now, here’s the controversy. Here’s the rub before we get to the second part of the verse. So what does pursuing peace look like for a person who wants to follow?
Nehemia (21:31):
Well, first of all, you have to want peace. Now the peacemaker also wants peace, but he’s not willing to go through the hard work of making peace and he’s not willing to accept no. Sometimes the answer is no, I don’t want peace. Look, this appears in the Torah.
Keith (21:46):
Talk to me.
Nehemia (21:46):
This appears in the Torah in, um, uh, it’s a Deuteronomy and it talks about when you go out to war against a nation. It’s (Hebrew), if I’m not mistaken. And when you go out to war. Here, it’s Deuteronomy 20 verse 10. When you approach a city to wage war against it, and you call out to it, Shalom, peace, peace. It shall come to pass if they answer you peace and they open up the gates to you and all the people are in it, shall be, um, uh, this is when it’s in the land of Israel, shall be tributaries to you and they shall serve you, right. So there’s an opportunity for peace and they can respond with peace. Now, here it’s when it’s in the land of Israel, it’s not some far off land. Um, it’s the land that God has given you. If they want to live with you in peace and be subject to your government, they can live in peace. If they refuse to live as subjects of, um, in this case, the only democratic state in the middle east, and they want to destroy you, then you can’t make peace with them. The answer sometimes is no. I’ve seen this in all kinds of things in my life. I’ve seen this with, with governments, with geopolitical situations. I’ve seen this with friendships and I’ve seen this and it’s painful. And I’ve seen this with relationships. Sometimes the answer is no. And pursuing peace is okay, is a good thing. Trying to force peace when the other side doesn’t want to have peace, you can’t do it. It leads to death and destruction on both sides.
Keith (23:13):
You read that whole verse? Did you read that whole verse? The one on peace.
Nehemia (23:19):
Yeah. I mean, we can read the whole passage. There’s more to it, but yeah.
Keith (23:22):
Give us, give us the passage. I’m just saying for what the passage is.
Nehemia (23:25):
And it says it shall come to pass if they don’t make peace with you and they make war with you, you shall be an enemy against them. And Yehovah will give them into your hand and you will smite all of their males with the sword, et cetera. I mean, we can go into it and read about it, but, um, but
Keith (23:41):
Tell us where that is.
Nehemia (23:42):
And it says in verse 15, thus, shall you do with all those, actually, this is the cities that are far away from you, that are not from the cities of these nations. It’s in Deuteronomy 20 verse 10. Okay. So if you’re dealing with a nation who doesn’t want to have peace, then you can’t make peace. Now, in this case, we weren’t trying to rule over them. We said, you guys look, that’s our land, the west bank and Gaza. Hebron is the heartland of the people of Israel. It’s where Abraham lived. It’s where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried. Right? My ancestors are buried there. You want to rule over their graves because you guys came in and took that from us. We’re willing to stipulate to that if you make peace with us and they wouldn’t do it. They refused to do it.
Nehemia (24:31):
This culminated in the year 2000 and what was called the Camp David Accords, the second Camp David Accords. Ehud Barak who was the Israeli prime minister, went to this place Camp David in the United States and met with Yasser Arafat. And he was willing to give them every inch of the west bank and Gaza with the exception of certain population centers in the west bank. He said, we’ll give you other territory in place of that, because we already have 50,000, a hundred thousand people living there, we can’t afford to move those people.
Keith (25:00):
Are you thinking about a place like Ma’aleh Adumim?
Nehemia (25:03):
Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel were the two things..
Keith (25:06):
You know where I got my Torah scroll, right? Ma’aleh Adumim.
Nehemia (25:10):
So the Torah will go forth out of Jerusalem. And in this case via Ma’aleh Adumim. So he said, we’ll give you, uh, we’ll compensate you for that 4% of the land, 4% of the land. Kind of like, you know, we had this thing with Mexico, the Gadsden purchase, right? Like we’re gonna make a deal. Let’s make a deal. And we’ll give you land in the negev in place of that. And so you’ll have a larger area around Gaza. And the prime minister of Malaysia asked, it was Malaysia or Indonesia, I don’t remember. He asked Arafat later, why didn’t you turn down that deal? You’ll never get such a good deal again. He said, it may take us a hundred years, but we’re going to drive every last Jew under the sea. We’re going to wipe them off the face of the earth. And if I make peace now, later generations of Palestinians who are living in peace with the Jews will never forgive me for not wiping them out, even if it takes a hundred years. So you can pursue peace. But if the other side doesn’t want peace, you can’t make it. I want to, I want to tell you about a video I saw recently. It was this young man, he’s 18 years old, and he’s surrounded by a group of, and he’s not Orthodox. He’s a secular Jew, but he loves Israel. He loves the temple Mount. And he was trying to go to the Temple Mount with an Israeli flag to wave it. Because he said, this is the holiest place in Judaism. He said, look, I’m not. I said that to you, yes. He said, I’m not, I’m not an Orthodox Jew, but I love that this is the holiest place in Judaism. And I want to express myself as a Jew by waving the Israeli flag as the symbol of the sovereign Jewish state in the holiest place to the Jewish people, which is the Temple Mount. And he wasn’t allowed to do it. Well, he, he came into contact with this Jewish woman who was a leftist protestor, and she said to him, why are you trying to make this provocation?
Nehemia (26:57):
You’re just trying to upset the Arabs. You don’t really care about the Temple Mount. He said, no, I deeply care about it. There’s only one place in Judaism that’s holy, the holiest place in Judaism. I’m paraphrasing his words. I think he would maybe say there’s many places that are holy in Judaism, but he was saying something to the effect of this is the holiest spot in Judaism, the Temple Mount. And, uh, and I want to express myself as a Jew by being there with my flag. There’s the song Hatikvah. Do you know the song Hatikvah? It’s the national anthem of Israel. And Hatikvah means the hope and it ends with the words, lihjot am chofschi bearzenu. To be free in our land, erez zion yerushalim, in the land of Zion and Jerusalem. One of the most moving things I’ve ever heard Keith is when they liberated the Bergen Belsen camp, the death camp, this concentration camp, um, where thousands of Jews died, maybe tens of thousands. I don’t know the statistics, but many, many Jews died there. And there were survivors. And the first Friday night, the chaplain from the British army comes and he says, let’s do a prayer service. And a lot of these Jews weren’t religious Jews who were in these camps. They were secular Jews, and they burst out singing hatik for the hope, the hope of 2000 years, to be a free people in our land. And that’s all this young man, this 18 year old, wanted to do is express that 2000 years hope of persecution and suffering and humiliation. And, um, and he just wanted to express that, that we are now free in our own land.
Nehemia (28:34):
We should be able to wave our own flag in the holiest place in Judaism. And she said, no, you don’t want peace with the Arabs. You just want a provocation. You just want war. Now, there was one secular Jew there, a leftist and another secular Jew there who loved the Temple Mount. And they were surrounded by a bunch of Orthodox Jews. And he said, you don’t know what people who love the Temple Mount believe, do you? She said, I know exactly what you believe. You want to destroy the Arabs and kill them. And you’re looking for an excuse for war. And he turns to all the Orthodox Jews surrounding him. He says, who here, if I said death to Arabs, who here would support that statement? And they said, none of us would support that statement. I said, who here wants peace? And every single one raised their hand and said, we want peace. These are people who are dedicated to the Jewish experience on the Temple Mount. And what they want is peace. They don’t point to the sea and say, we’re going to drive the Arabs into the sea. They say, we want to live with you in peace. And the other side doesn’t want to live in peace. Now, maybe one day they will, but we have to go through the process. And that process sometimes is, as Ecclesiastes said, there’s a time for peace and a time for war. And if they don’t want peace, it could be a time for war. But that’s part of pursuing peace. And if you go to the situation and say, well, peace at all costs, well, then you end up in a situation with tens of thousands of people dying, which is what happened.
Keith (30:02):
So we’re just a couple of weeks away from, uh, what happened just two weeks ago, which they say supposedly started..
Nehemia (30:10):
Okay, we have pre-recorded this. Tell people what you are referring to.
Keith (30:11):
Oh, I was going to explain to them about what happened, supposedly on the Temple Mount, regarding the clash of the Temple Mount. Well they always use this example. If something happens on the Temple Mount and it spreads and spreads and spreads and spreads, and pretty soon they have justification for shooting 4,000 rockets into Israel. And what always surprises me, what always surprises me is the people that have the parroting of what peace looks like. Well, if you just do this, everything will be okay. If you just do that, everything will be okay. And when you’re dealing with violence, which Hamas is bent on, how do you pursue peace, how do you have peace with those that…
Nehemia (30:48):
The Hamas charter openly says, this is not a theory about what they believe. It openly says their purpose is to wipe out the Jews in Israel and eradicate the Jewish state. But Hamas really says that, they’re not hiding it, right? The PLO in west bank, you could say, they’re hiding it. We don’t know what their intentions are. Sometimes they live in peace. Sometimes they don’t. They have, you know, it depends who’s in charge and who has the power? Hamas is not hiding it. They are a radical Islamist (notice I didn’t say Islamic) they’re Islamist, right? They’re using Islam for their political aims and this radical Islamist movement, that is illegal in Egypt, in Egypt. This is what’s called the Muslim brotherhood. And it is, um, outlawed because they’re so violent and destructive in Egypt. And they actually are the ones who killed President Anwar Sadat in the 1980s. And so this is such an evil group that even Egypt doesn’t allow them. And a bunch of other Muslim states consider them terrorist groups as well. The Hamas in Israel were supposed to have this fantasy that somehow they’ll make peace with us. They’re not interested in peace. It’s very sad. So we can pursue peace, but we can’t make peace. And pursuing peace is a beautiful thing. I would love to have peace. Why do I want peace? First of all, I think it’s good to live in peace with people. That is what the Torah is all about ultimately. It is love your neighbor as you love yourself and love the foreigner who is among you. But if the foreigner wants to wipe you out, you cannot reconcile with him in that way. Okay, fine. We can’t reconcile you under our sovereignty.
Nehemia (32:23):
Go have your own sovereignty. And they don’t want that either. They want us to cease to exist, to wipe us out. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a tragic situation, but why do I want peace? Because I have nephews who serve in the Israeli military. I know people who, if we have the next war that happens, they might die. It’s not some hypothetical thing to me and to millions of Jews. Everybody knows someone who’s going to be on the front line and any war that happens, any military service, even if it’s not a war, there is shooting that we don’t hear about over in the United States, that goes on all the time, the constant state of low-level war that’s going on. So any one of those, my nephew, one of my nephews could be murdered by the Palestinians. And so of course I want there to be peace. Who wouldn’t want there to be peace when you’ve got skin in the game. And here’s where the tragedy comes in. The Hamas in particular, in the Gaza, they have this motto they say. They say the reason we will win and wipe out all the Jews is because we love death more than they love life. It’s become a cult of death. And their attitude is, yeah, when people die, we love it. Now, do they really love it? I don’t know. Does a mother really love when her son dies and he goes, they believe, to heaven to get 72 virgins? On some level maybe she loves it. But I mean, where’s the motherly love. I don’t know. We used to have the song back in the eighties.
Nehemia (33:50):
The only hope for me and you is that the Russians love their children too, during the cold war. And the Palestinians, the Hamas say, we love our sons and daughters, and that’s why we want them to die as martyrs, killing Jews. Wow. How do you make peace with those people? You can pursue peace. But in pursuing peace, you can’t make peace in that situation. It’s a tragic situation. I think we should go over, now that we’ve talked about the controversial geopolitical stuff, we should go over in the plus section and talk about what is, I have two questions left I want to ask. What is God? And what is a son of God? Only the big issues.
Keith (34:26):
So folks, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to invite you into the plus section at BFA International. You become a premium member and you have access to absolute everything we have. And by the way, we have a whole series, Nehemia, called Temple Mount Truth with Rabbi Yehuda, Glick, where he actually goes to the Temple Mount. And there’s just a number of things that happen like that. But one of the things you’re gonna get access to is to the plus sections for the entire Hebrew Gospel series of the odd numbers, and the even numbers, I always like to make sure everyone knows this. For the odd numbers it is that BFA International and the even numbers Makor Hebrew Foundation at nehemiaswall.com. But I will tell you, we’re going to go to that right now and get a chance to talk about the sons of God issue, which I started with with the King James. It said the children of God feels a lot safer than talking about sons of God. So can we say a prayer for our friends that have been listening? Now, let me say something. Oh, I forgot one more controversial thing. So what we just talked about, Nehemia, might get us kicked off of YouTube.
Nehemia (35:23):
Very possible.
Keith (35:24):
It might get us kicked off of Facebook.
Nehemia (35:26):
Very possible.
Keith (35:26):
Might get us kicked off any number of public platforms because it’s not politically, uh, what I use the word, it’s uh, what would be the word.
Nehemia (35:36):
Political correctness? Well, and even if it is today, three minutes from now it might not be. No, I mean, if you talk about anything controversial…
Keith (35:42):
Boom, you’re done. Here’s the good news,
Nehemia (35:46):
It’s a constantly changing standard.
Keith (35:47):
What I want to say to say to our friends right now, what we need you to do, we need you to be as supportive of BFA and the Nehemiaswall, because what we are continuing to do is we’re committed to getting the information out. Now, you’ve already blazed the trail. And I have this little commercial for you right now, where you’ve been able to get on some other platforms too. Where you’re able to share messages. So we have podcasts and YouTube and Facebook and our websites. Hopefully those will continue, but we know from experience, there’s things that can get shut off. So you all, we need your support.
Nehemia (36:15):
We need your support to be able to continue to do this.
Keith (36:17):
So I want to say a prayer, Father, thank you so much for our friends that are listening. We pray that as we tackle these difficult situations, we’re reminded of the words of Yeshua to pursue peace. Help us to pursue peace, and we’ll do all that we can do on our side. And at the same time, we want to be aware of what’s happening in the world, and we want to be wise, and we don’t want to be in denial and not concerned about being politically correct. We are concerned about truth, and we thank you for it. In your name.
Nehemia (36:45):
Yehovah, our father in heaven. Let us all, as a people, Israel, seek peace and pursue it in the words of the Psalmist. And let us find a partner who we can make peace with. Father, we don’t make peace with our friends. We make peace with our enemies. These enemies who want to destroy us. Yehovah, soften their hearts and turn their hearts for a desire for peace so that we can live together. Maybe not with everything that we want, maybe there’ll be compromises. There’ll be painful compromises. But we are willing to do that in order to make peace as long as the other side will truly live in peace with us. Amen.
Narrator (37:26):
You’ve been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. For a more in-depth study, check out Hebrew Gospel Pearls Plus at nehemiaswall.com and BFAinternational.com. Thank you for your support.
The answer sometimes is no. I’ve seen this in all kinds of things in my life. I’ve seen this with, with governments, with geopolitical situations. I’ve seen this with friendships and I’ve seen this and it’s painful. And I’ve seen this with relationships. Sometimes the answer is no.
Narrator (00:15):
You are listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson, exploring Hebrew New Testament manuscripts for yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Keith (00:29):
Welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls, episode number 19. We’re in a wonderful studio doing a buffet of biblical beatitudes. The biblical beatitudes, we are actually up to Matthew chapter five, verse nine. Nehemia, I’m going to start out reading something before we even go too far. And here’s what the King… People love the King James. People love the King James. I think King Jimmy got nervous with this verse. And let me just read it. It says this, the King James version renders our verse like this, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. It seems that the translators of King Jimmy’s Bible got a little nervous with the last phrase, just like I did, just like I did. Why did I get nervous?
Nehemia (01:07):
Who said that?
Keith (01:08):
This is me speaking and what am I speaking? So I did something some, some years ago. We did what we called the Red Letter series. And what it was, it was based on Howard’s Hebrew Matthew. And what we attempted to do was to go through the parts where Yeshua actually spoke and we got to be beatitudes. What this series is doing, Nehemia, and those that are listening, is we’re going to a completely different level. Because Nehemia has brought all of these manuscripts together. We’ve got a chance to compare and to contrast. I don’t even think we need a whole lot of other Hebrew manuscripts just to focus on the controversy of Matthew chapter five, verse nine. And why do I say that? Why did the King James get nervous? Uh, I guess it’s depending on what it means by becoming children of God and also what it means to be peacemakers. So let’s get started right into five verse nine. Why don’t you read it for us based on what we have in the Hebrew.
Nehemia (01:57):
So Hebrew Matthew has (Hebrew) blessed are the pursuers of peace for, they will be called (Hebrew) Elohim, the sons of God.
Keith (02:07):
My goodness. That sounds like a bit of a difference.
Nehemia (02:10):
I don’t know that it’s that big of a difference. In other words, in Greek you say to make peace, in Hebrew you say to pursue peace. Delitzsch, who we know translated from the Greek into the Hebrew, he translates a (Hebrew) verbatim, the same, so far. Blessed are those who pursue peace, (Hebrew) for it shall be called to them, the sons of Elohim. So he has the tenses is a little bit different or the passive and the active voice, but basically, um, it’s almost identical. Let’s say, if Matthew represents accurately what Yeshua said, then he got that phrase from Psalm 34:15, which says [Hebrew] seek peace and pursue it. Delitzsch definitely got that phrase from Psalm 34:15. In other words, he saw the phrase (Hebrew), those who make peace and he said, oh, (Hebrew) is, um, is in Hebrew to pursue peace. And, um, in other words, it’s a Hebrew idiom that he’s translating back out of the Greek. And if we look, let’s see it’s Psalm 34:15, um, and we see a (Hebrew) – seek peace and chase after it. And let’s see what we have in the Greek. Um, I didn’t look this up beforehand. Um, uh, yes, so it doesn’t have that exact, that’s interesting, it doesn’t have to make peace. So, uh, we have to ask, how did he end up with this phrase? He didn’t end up with it based on the Greek. He said, what is a Hebrew idiom for making peace? Now, is there a difference between pursuing peace and making peace?
Keith (03:55):
I believe there is. And I’ll tell you something. For me, this was a change because when I saw to pursue peace, the pressure kind of went down a little bit. I don’t always feel like, I’ll be completely honest, Nehemia. I don’t always feel like being a peacemaker. Pursuing peace seems to be something that I’m pointing towards, I’m trying to do, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it like lies with me. Peacemaker feels like it’s just you. That’s how it feels to me.
Nehemia (04:23):
And you could interpret it that. In other words, someone who pursues peace. If the other side doesn’t reciprocate, okay, I tried.
Keith (04:31):
Exactly.
Nehemia (04:32):
Whereas if based on the Greek, you could say, and I don’t know that it has to be read this way. But it sounds, I guess, in the Greek that you only get credit if you actually make the peace. And boy, how can we talk about this without talking about the peace process?
Keith (04:45):
Oh my goodness.
Nehemia (04:46):
Can we talk about?
Keith (04:46):
No, listen, absolutely we have to talk about it. But we have to take our time and talk about it. So before we talk about that, can I just check, can we just check the sources, the sources regarding this? Can I go to Howard’s Hebrew first as verse nine? Blessed are those who pursue peace. And again, I love the fact that he’s using the words to pursue. For those who pursue peace, for they shall be called. And why did I say controversy? Uh, King James maybe got a little bit nervous versus the NASB. The NASB says sons of God. In Hebrew I think we’d say sons of God, but what King James says is children of God. Kinda like to take that, take the pressure off.
Nehemia (05:27):
How does it take the pressure off?
Keith (05:28):
It takes the pressure off because when you say. You have to understand. When someone says son of God, or sons of God, and I might be jumping ahead. I might be really jumping ahead.
Nehemia (05:36):
I think you’re in the plus area. Go on.
New Speaker (05:38):
You say sons of God. There are issues there. There are issues there. Sons of God. If you look at it from some perspective, you say, son of God, that means one person in one situation only. Would not take into account anything else other than the son of God. That’s the controversy. So I think King James…
Nehemia (05:57):
So that’s kind of an alien concept to a Jewish perspective because.. I do want to save this for the plus section. Or maybe for later even in this section, but okay, I hear what you’re saying. Son of God has capital S and it has a theological connotation. Uh, the question is, um, and I don’t even think it’s a question, when Yeshua said this in Matthew 5:9, did he intend to have a theological connotation to it?
Keith (06:23):
No, he’s giving a family upgrade.
Nehemia (06:25):
Uh oh.
Keith (06:26):
He’s giving everybody a family upgrade. You can, you can become a part of the family.
Nehemia (06:30):
So you’re joking. You’re joking, but there’s a denomination I once encountered, uh, I won’t say what it is. But they have a doctrine that, and they’re Christian. They say that when you die, if you’re a believer, you become part of the Godhead and that you become literally a brother of Jesus and Yahweh is your father. This is using their terminology. And, uh, you know, your name is Bill. Now your name is Bill Elohim because Elohim is a family name and you’ve become part of the family of God. This is their doctrine. Now imagine trying to have a biblical conversation with this.
Keith (07:06):
Is this for real?
Nehemia (07:06):
Oh, absolutely. More than one person, a denomination. Now imagine having, trying to have a, uh, any kind of conversation with someone who believes that when he dies he will come part of the Godhead. Can you imagine the arrogance of such a person? Um, and some of those people might be very humble. The ones I met were not. So no, I mean, it actually shows that you can have such a concept. It exists today in the 20th first century in the United States. There are, and some people would say, well, they’re not Christians, because if you have anything more than the Trinity, then you’re not a Christian in lots of theology. They call themselves Christians, look to the New Testament, look to Jesus. And they say, when they die, they’ll become part of the Godhead. They’ll become part of the family of Elohim. There’s Yahweh, Elohim, there’s Yahshua, or Jesus Elohim. Some of them use the Hebrew, some don’t. And then when you die, you’ll become Keith Elohim. If you’re part of the right doctrine and give your tithes to the right church, of course.
Keith (07:58):
What do I do to get rid of the first name? Now, can you do me a favor? So now with a little structure, just give a little structure. This is the BFA one, so little structure. So we’re going to actually be able to talk about a few things. You brought up three questions. Before we get to three questions on the issues of sons of God. Okay? Can we just talk about this? I want to go back to what you said about Israel, because this is huge. Uh, being a peacemaker versus being a pursuer of peace. What does that mean for you? Now, I want to put it in present day context, being a peacemaker, as some people say, Israel should be a peacemaker. Okay. But, maybe they’re pursuing peace and that looks different. What’s your thought?
Nehemia (08:40):
So I lived through a very tragic period of Israel’s history and it was a period of, um, I would say there was a certain segment of the Israeli population that was, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? They had this belief that, um, it was euphoria. That’s the best way to describe it. They had a euphoria that we’ve lived in this reality for over a hundred years. Long before the state of Israel, where the Arabs in Israel, the Muslims wanted to kill us. And now all of a sudden in 1993, we’ve made the peace process at Oslo. And this is euphoria. We’re finally going to make peace. And it will, uh, be the end of the period of the wars. And look, Israel had this..
Keith (09:24):
Are you telling me people believed that?
Nehemia (09:25):
A hundred percent, they believed it. And many people said, you guys are crazy. This is never going to happen. Listen to what they say. They don’t say the same things to us in English. And in Hebrew, what they say in Arabic. Just listen to them, listen to the speeches they’re giving in Arabic. They don’t want peace. This is a strategy to get more land, to use it as a launching pad to attack us deep in the heart of Israel. And you can look at the Kasam tracker. There’s somebody who tracks every rocket fired at Israel. I don’t know that there’s been a week where rockets weren’t fired at Israel since 2005. So in the early nineties, there was this euphoria that we would have peace. And look, nobody wanted peace as much as anybody who, I mean, I wanted peace. Everybody wants peace in Israel. All the Jews, I should say, want peace. And Netanyahu decades ago made a famous statement.
Nehemia (10:17):
He said, if the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there’d be no more Israel. And that’s the painful reality. That we have been pursuing peace for decades. And sometimes there are people on the Arab side who want peace, but the Arab leadership by and large has not wanted peace. They want a perpetual state of war because their objective is to destroy Israel. There was, um, so we started out in 1993 with the Oslo Accords. And that was a pursuit of peace by people who were euphoric. Who, I think to some extent they were delusional. There was a man named Yossi Beilin and he was this, uh, professor, brilliant professor from a university in Israel. And he came up with the doctrine of the peace process. And he said something like this, and this ties, in it’s related. He said something like this, look, we’ve made, we made peace with Egypt. We know what the Arabs need to make peace. Let’s cut through all the games. Let’s cut through all the negotiations and go just to the final stage, which is what we know they’re going to eventually agree to. And one of those things was there has to be an Arab capital in Jerusalem and a whole bunch of other things. I won’t go into the detail. And, um, people likened this to, and I’ll try to use sensitive language here, right? Imagine if back when in your single days you met this woman and you said to the woman, look, I know in the end, we’re going to be married. So let’s cut to the chase and we don’t need dinner. We don’t need to go on dates.
Nehemia (11:57):
Let’s just get married right now. And tonight we will consummate. Well, she’d probably slap you. And she should slap you because there is a process that you need to go through. You need to pursue peace in order to make peace. And Beilin said, this philosophy of Beilin said, oh no, let’s just make peace now. We know, we know how this is going to end. Let’s make peace. And it was a disaster. It brought death of tens of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Arabs, especially Muslims. And why did it bring death? Because that’s not how things work. There’s a dynamic you have to work through. And part of the dynamic is, um, you know, there’s a certain dynamic, especially in the middle east, but it’s just human nature, that when you… Imagine another analogy, right, parable. Go into buy a car. And you say to the people who are going to sell you the car, well, this is the price we’re going to end on, no negotiation no discussion. Is that going to work? Probably not. Probably not going to work. In fact, you’ll probably get yourself kicked out of there. And so Beilinism said, no, let’s go to the final. We’re just going to make peace. We know what peace is going to look like. Let’s just make peace. Let’s not pursue peace. And it just brought so much death and destruction because there were people on the other side who said, well, wait a minute, that’s your starting point. Let’s push it one step further. And one step further. And, and he was saying, no, this is my end point. But he said that with this words, not with his actions.
Keith (13:23):
They wanted negotiation.
Nehemia (13:24):
They needed a negotiation, right? And maybe they weren’t gonna make peace anyway. We’ll never know. Using his approach, it was impossible to make peace. And I think if you listen to what they were saying, they probably didn’t want to make peace. But that route was a disaster.
Keith (13:38):
So if these were people that were committed to the words that we see in the King James Bible, they wanted to be blessed. I want to be blessed, be a peacemaker. In fact, those outside of Israel that would say, listen, if Israel wants to be blessed, they need to be a peacemaker. And they stayed within that frame of mind. You’re saying that that frame of mind of making peace,
Nehemia (13:59):
Because what it is is peace at all costs. And peace at all costs is, nobody wants that. That’s a disaster. Well peace at all costs as you kill all of us and we’re dead in the sea. Well, that’s what the Arabs said that they wanted. So this is for decades what they would do. They’d point to the Mediterranean. And they would say, we’re going to drive the Jews into the sea, right? A little bit of metaphor there, but actually meant literally as well. Right? They’ll drown all of us, kill all of us and push us into the sea. Right? So if that’s their objective, well, you can’t have peace at all costs, right? You also can’t assume everyone’s the same, right? Part of the Beilinism, the peacemaking approach was that, well, the Arabs of Israel, what they call the Palestinians, they’re no different than the Egyptians. Well, actually there are a lot different, right? They have a different culture. They have a different history. They have a different heritage. They’re not the same. They’ve been living for decades in a different reality. Um, they, uh, look the Arabs of, the so-called Palestinians of the. West Bank and the Palestinians of Gaza are two different populations. They’re not the same people, right? They don’t have the same objectives. They don’t have the same, even the same language. Um, those of Northern Israel and Southern Israel, they have different languages. So to treat them all as a monolith, that is a recipe for disaster.
Keith (15:17):
Can you unpack for us a little bit? So you said in 93 with Oslo Accords, so what… Permission to speak about this? What was it that they put forward that made it, that meant that it wasn’t going to work?
Nehemia (15:30):
So, uh, well, really it was the attitude of the Israeli leadership openly saying, we know where this is going to end. We know what the final objective is. We just need to get to that final objective. Instead of actually going through the hard work of pursuing peace. So one of the things they said is, okay, if we gave all of the Palestinian, the areas where the Palestinians live, if we gave them all immediate independence, we would have a war. Because they would, all of a sudden have tanks and bombers and jets in Israeli territory. Israel doesn’t have a lot of depth, like most countries, like the United States. So they have to, um, I mean, you can drive across the country, literally in nine kilometers, right? It’s like five or six miles at one point, the shortest point. So, um, what they said is, what we’re going to do is we’re going to give them autonomy in Jericho and in Gaza. And we’ll see that everything is fine. And then we’ll give them autonomy in other areas and eventually independence. And so they gave them this. I remember it was the slogan, Jericho and Gaza first. And it was a way essentially of appeasing the people of Israel who were very nervous about this. It was a way of showing them, look, there’ll be peace. It’ll be no problem. And from the very first caravan of Palestinian forces who were flown over from, um, they were flown over from Tunisia. These terrorists, literal terrorists were flown over from Tunisia to rule over Gaza and the West Bank without asking the Arabs in the West Bank. The PLO was flown over there. And in the very, very first caravan, they were hiding weapons that they, that according to the agreement they weren’t allowed to have. And what’s the significance of this. Instead of saying, okay, well, they didn’t keep their word. Let’s not move forward. We’re pursuing peace. And they rejected it through their actions. They said, no, we’re making peace. Peace is going to happen. And that was from literally the very first caravan.
Keith (17:23):
Now, I mean, listen, this is our show, right? Hebrew Gospel Pearls. We’ve been to Israel together several times. I have a dear friend there, Rabbi Yehuda Glick, uh, who used to serve in the government before the situation that he’s presently in. And when he served there, he said he quit the job based on what happened in Gaza. The Jewish people were in Gaza, living there, and they were forcibly removed. Do you remember what year?
Nehemia (17:50):
Absolutely. 2005, 9,000 Jews were forcibly removed from their homes. There were Jews who were born there. Their father was born there and their grandfather had immigrated there in 1967. So three generations lived there, were two generations in some cases were buried there in cemeteries, and they dug up their graves and removed them from Gaza, destroyed homes, destroyed synagogues because they said, look, the only way we’ll have peace with the Gazans is if we give every last inch of Gaza over to the Palestinian authority to rule. And the Palestinian authority responded by holding elections, which elected Hamas. And they’ve been firing rockets at us ever since. I remember the election, I think it was around 2004. There was this one political party who had a graphic showing rockets being fired from Gaza. And their whole platform was don’t give Gaza to the Palestinians to rule. If you pull out of Gaza, instead of attacking the Jews who live in Gaza, there were about 9,000 Jews there, they’ll attack the heart of Israel. And they were laughed at, they were called conspiracy theorists. They were ridiculed. You guys are fanatics. And the day we left Gaza, virtually the day, the rockets have started and they have never stopped.
Keith (19:02):
I want you to do something. This is a biblical connection. You’re going to love this. So Yehuda Glick, he talked about this, how he wept, he fought and he argued with the government saying, you cannot do this. If you do this, we’re going to have war with Gaza, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You just gave me another whole dimension to that. But would you open up your tap, tap for a second? Um, and why are we, why are you and I not surprised about what’s happening with this group called Hamas. Can you give us a biblical definition of the group that’s called Hamas in the Tanakh.
Nehemia (19:29):
It’s under the category of you can’t make this stuff up.
Keith (19:32):
You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Nehemia (19:34):
They chose to call themselves Hamas based on an Arabic acronym. But in Hebrew, Hamas means violence and violence and corruption. Genesis 6:11, the earth was also corrupt before God and the earth was filled with hamas.
Keith (19:49):
So, I mean, for me, you can’t make it up. You can’t make it up, but his whole point was, if we do this, if we give this over, then it’s going to be, it’s going to be constant. And it was.
Nehemia (19:59):
There’s probably people in Gaza, I know there are people in Gaza who want to make peace. There’s people in Gaza and in the West Bank who want to make peace. There’s people who want to live with us in peace, but their leaders don’t and the people they elect don’t and enough of the population, uh, is able to push the whole, um, uh, it’s not really a country, but the whole geopolitical entity of Gaza and the West Bank, which are completely separate today. As we’re recording this, Gaza is ruled by the Hamas and the Palestinian areas of the west bank are ruled by the PLO. And one of the bizarre things I hear about from leftists, it’s about how they want to end the occupation. Occupation ended in 2005 when the last Jew is forcibly removed from Gaza, by Jews. There hasn’t been Jewish soldiers there, except for a few ? that happened. And then we pulled out after the wars. They rule themselves in Gaza, right? For all intents and purposes, the only thing they don’t have, they have actually more sovereignty in some respects than some sovereign nations. Like if you look at Micronesia, those countries like that, in some respects they exercise more sovereignty in Gaza, in particular, than many countries. The only thing they don’t have is an air force and tanks. Because if they did that, Israel would end tomorrow. They would just overrun Israel and destroy it. So we prevent them from having that, um, out of necessity. I mean, it’s really a situation that’s hard to understand until you realize how close things are.
Keith (21:25):
Now, here’s the controversy. Here’s the rub before we get to the second part of the verse. So what does pursuing peace look like for a person who wants to follow?
Nehemia (21:31):
Well, first of all, you have to want peace. Now the peacemaker also wants peace, but he’s not willing to go through the hard work of making peace and he’s not willing to accept no. Sometimes the answer is no, I don’t want peace. Look, this appears in the Torah.
Keith (21:46):
Talk to me.
Nehemia (21:46):
This appears in the Torah in, um, uh, it’s a Deuteronomy and it talks about when you go out to war against a nation. It’s (Hebrew), if I’m not mistaken. And when you go out to war. Here, it’s Deuteronomy 20 verse 10. When you approach a city to wage war against it, and you call out to it, Shalom, peace, peace. It shall come to pass if they answer you peace and they open up the gates to you and all the people are in it, shall be, um, uh, this is when it’s in the land of Israel, shall be tributaries to you and they shall serve you, right. So there’s an opportunity for peace and they can respond with peace. Now, here it’s when it’s in the land of Israel, it’s not some far off land. Um, it’s the land that God has given you. If they want to live with you in peace and be subject to your government, they can live in peace. If they refuse to live as subjects of, um, in this case, the only democratic state in the middle east, and they want to destroy you, then you can’t make peace with them. The answer sometimes is no. I’ve seen this in all kinds of things in my life. I’ve seen this with, with governments, with geopolitical situations. I’ve seen this with friendships and I’ve seen this and it’s painful. And I’ve seen this with relationships. Sometimes the answer is no. And pursuing peace is okay, is a good thing. Trying to force peace when the other side doesn’t want to have peace, you can’t do it. It leads to death and destruction on both sides.
Keith (23:13):
You read that whole verse? Did you read that whole verse? The one on peace.
Nehemia (23:19):
Yeah. I mean, we can read the whole passage. There’s more to it, but yeah.
Keith (23:22):
Give us, give us the passage. I’m just saying for what the passage is.
Nehemia (23:25):
And it says it shall come to pass if they don’t make peace with you and they make war with you, you shall be an enemy against them. And Yehovah will give them into your hand and you will smite all of their males with the sword, et cetera. I mean, we can go into it and read about it, but, um, but
Keith (23:41):
Tell us where that is.
Nehemia (23:42):
And it says in verse 15, thus, shall you do with all those, actually, this is the cities that are far away from you, that are not from the cities of these nations. It’s in Deuteronomy 20 verse 10. Okay. So if you’re dealing with a nation who doesn’t want to have peace, then you can’t make peace. Now, in this case, we weren’t trying to rule over them. We said, you guys look, that’s our land, the west bank and Gaza. Hebron is the heartland of the people of Israel. It’s where Abraham lived. It’s where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried. Right? My ancestors are buried there. You want to rule over their graves because you guys came in and took that from us. We’re willing to stipulate to that if you make peace with us and they wouldn’t do it. They refused to do it.
Nehemia (24:31):
This culminated in the year 2000 and what was called the Camp David Accords, the second Camp David Accords. Ehud Barak who was the Israeli prime minister, went to this place Camp David in the United States and met with Yasser Arafat. And he was willing to give them every inch of the west bank and Gaza with the exception of certain population centers in the west bank. He said, we’ll give you other territory in place of that, because we already have 50,000, a hundred thousand people living there, we can’t afford to move those people.
Keith (25:00):
Are you thinking about a place like Ma’aleh Adumim?
Nehemia (25:03):
Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel were the two things..
Keith (25:06):
You know where I got my Torah scroll, right? Ma’aleh Adumim.
Nehemia (25:10):
So the Torah will go forth out of Jerusalem. And in this case via Ma’aleh Adumim. So he said, we’ll give you, uh, we’ll compensate you for that 4% of the land, 4% of the land. Kind of like, you know, we had this thing with Mexico, the Gadsden purchase, right? Like we’re gonna make a deal. Let’s make a deal. And we’ll give you land in the negev in place of that. And so you’ll have a larger area around Gaza. And the prime minister of Malaysia asked, it was Malaysia or Indonesia, I don’t remember. He asked Arafat later, why didn’t you turn down that deal? You’ll never get such a good deal again. He said, it may take us a hundred years, but we’re going to drive every last Jew under the sea. We’re going to wipe them off the face of the earth. And if I make peace now, later generations of Palestinians who are living in peace with the Jews will never forgive me for not wiping them out, even if it takes a hundred years. So you can pursue peace. But if the other side doesn’t want peace, you can’t make it. I want to, I want to tell you about a video I saw recently. It was this young man, he’s 18 years old, and he’s surrounded by a group of, and he’s not Orthodox. He’s a secular Jew, but he loves Israel. He loves the temple Mount. And he was trying to go to the Temple Mount with an Israeli flag to wave it. Because he said, this is the holiest place in Judaism. He said, look, I’m not. I said that to you, yes. He said, I’m not, I’m not an Orthodox Jew, but I love that this is the holiest place in Judaism. And I want to express myself as a Jew by waving the Israeli flag as the symbol of the sovereign Jewish state in the holiest place to the Jewish people, which is the Temple Mount. And he wasn’t allowed to do it. Well, he, he came into contact with this Jewish woman who was a leftist protestor, and she said to him, why are you trying to make this provocation?
Nehemia (26:57):
You’re just trying to upset the Arabs. You don’t really care about the Temple Mount. He said, no, I deeply care about it. There’s only one place in Judaism that’s holy, the holiest place in Judaism. I’m paraphrasing his words. I think he would maybe say there’s many places that are holy in Judaism, but he was saying something to the effect of this is the holiest spot in Judaism, the Temple Mount. And, uh, and I want to express myself as a Jew by being there with my flag. There’s the song Hatikvah. Do you know the song Hatikvah? It’s the national anthem of Israel. And Hatikvah means the hope and it ends with the words, lihjot am chofschi bearzenu. To be free in our land, erez zion yerushalim, in the land of Zion and Jerusalem. One of the most moving things I’ve ever heard Keith is when they liberated the Bergen Belsen camp, the death camp, this concentration camp, um, where thousands of Jews died, maybe tens of thousands. I don’t know the statistics, but many, many Jews died there. And there were survivors. And the first Friday night, the chaplain from the British army comes and he says, let’s do a prayer service. And a lot of these Jews weren’t religious Jews who were in these camps. They were secular Jews, and they burst out singing hatik for the hope, the hope of 2000 years, to be a free people in our land. And that’s all this young man, this 18 year old, wanted to do is express that 2000 years hope of persecution and suffering and humiliation. And, um, and he just wanted to express that, that we are now free in our own land.
Nehemia (28:34):
We should be able to wave our own flag in the holiest place in Judaism. And she said, no, you don’t want peace with the Arabs. You just want a provocation. You just want war. Now, there was one secular Jew there, a leftist and another secular Jew there who loved the Temple Mount. And they were surrounded by a bunch of Orthodox Jews. And he said, you don’t know what people who love the Temple Mount believe, do you? She said, I know exactly what you believe. You want to destroy the Arabs and kill them. And you’re looking for an excuse for war. And he turns to all the Orthodox Jews surrounding him. He says, who here, if I said death to Arabs, who here would support that statement? And they said, none of us would support that statement. I said, who here wants peace? And every single one raised their hand and said, we want peace. These are people who are dedicated to the Jewish experience on the Temple Mount. And what they want is peace. They don’t point to the sea and say, we’re going to drive the Arabs into the sea. They say, we want to live with you in peace. And the other side doesn’t want to live in peace. Now, maybe one day they will, but we have to go through the process. And that process sometimes is, as Ecclesiastes said, there’s a time for peace and a time for war. And if they don’t want peace, it could be a time for war. But that’s part of pursuing peace. And if you go to the situation and say, well, peace at all costs, well, then you end up in a situation with tens of thousands of people dying, which is what happened.
Keith (30:02):
So we’re just a couple of weeks away from, uh, what happened just two weeks ago, which they say supposedly started..
Nehemia (30:10):
Okay, we have pre-recorded this. Tell people what you are referring to.
Keith (30:11):
Oh, I was going to explain to them about what happened, supposedly on the Temple Mount, regarding the clash of the Temple Mount. Well they always use this example. If something happens on the Temple Mount and it spreads and spreads and spreads and spreads, and pretty soon they have justification for shooting 4,000 rockets into Israel. And what always surprises me, what always surprises me is the people that have the parroting of what peace looks like. Well, if you just do this, everything will be okay. If you just do that, everything will be okay. And when you’re dealing with violence, which Hamas is bent on, how do you pursue peace, how do you have peace with those that…
Nehemia (30:48):
The Hamas charter openly says, this is not a theory about what they believe. It openly says their purpose is to wipe out the Jews in Israel and eradicate the Jewish state. But Hamas really says that, they’re not hiding it, right? The PLO in west bank, you could say, they’re hiding it. We don’t know what their intentions are. Sometimes they live in peace. Sometimes they don’t. They have, you know, it depends who’s in charge and who has the power? Hamas is not hiding it. They are a radical Islamist (notice I didn’t say Islamic) they’re Islamist, right? They’re using Islam for their political aims and this radical Islamist movement, that is illegal in Egypt, in Egypt. This is what’s called the Muslim brotherhood. And it is, um, outlawed because they’re so violent and destructive in Egypt. And they actually are the ones who killed President Anwar Sadat in the 1980s. And so this is such an evil group that even Egypt doesn’t allow them. And a bunch of other Muslim states consider them terrorist groups as well. The Hamas in Israel were supposed to have this fantasy that somehow they’ll make peace with us. They’re not interested in peace. It’s very sad. So we can pursue peace, but we can’t make peace. And pursuing peace is a beautiful thing. I would love to have peace. Why do I want peace? First of all, I think it’s good to live in peace with people. That is what the Torah is all about ultimately. It is love your neighbor as you love yourself and love the foreigner who is among you. But if the foreigner wants to wipe you out, you cannot reconcile with him in that way. Okay, fine. We can’t reconcile you under our sovereignty.
Nehemia (32:23):
Go have your own sovereignty. And they don’t want that either. They want us to cease to exist, to wipe us out. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a tragic situation, but why do I want peace? Because I have nephews who serve in the Israeli military. I know people who, if we have the next war that happens, they might die. It’s not some hypothetical thing to me and to millions of Jews. Everybody knows someone who’s going to be on the front line and any war that happens, any military service, even if it’s not a war, there is shooting that we don’t hear about over in the United States, that goes on all the time, the constant state of low-level war that’s going on. So any one of those, my nephew, one of my nephews could be murdered by the Palestinians. And so of course I want there to be peace. Who wouldn’t want there to be peace when you’ve got skin in the game. And here’s where the tragedy comes in. The Hamas in particular, in the Gaza, they have this motto they say. They say the reason we will win and wipe out all the Jews is because we love death more than they love life. It’s become a cult of death. And their attitude is, yeah, when people die, we love it. Now, do they really love it? I don’t know. Does a mother really love when her son dies and he goes, they believe, to heaven to get 72 virgins? On some level maybe she loves it. But I mean, where’s the motherly love. I don’t know. We used to have the song back in the eighties.
Nehemia (33:50):
The only hope for me and you is that the Russians love their children too, during the cold war. And the Palestinians, the Hamas say, we love our sons and daughters, and that’s why we want them to die as martyrs, killing Jews. Wow. How do you make peace with those people? You can pursue peace. But in pursuing peace, you can’t make peace in that situation. It’s a tragic situation. I think we should go over, now that we’ve talked about the controversial geopolitical stuff, we should go over in the plus section and talk about what is, I have two questions left I want to ask. What is God? And what is a son of God? Only the big issues.
Keith (34:26):
So folks, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to invite you into the plus section at BFA International. You become a premium member and you have access to absolute everything we have. And by the way, we have a whole series, Nehemia, called Temple Mount Truth with Rabbi Yehuda, Glick, where he actually goes to the Temple Mount. And there’s just a number of things that happen like that. But one of the things you’re gonna get access to is to the plus sections for the entire Hebrew Gospel series of the odd numbers, and the even numbers, I always like to make sure everyone knows this. For the odd numbers it is that BFA International and the even numbers Makor Hebrew Foundation at nehemiaswall.com. But I will tell you, we’re going to go to that right now and get a chance to talk about the sons of God issue, which I started with with the King James. It said the children of God feels a lot safer than talking about sons of God. So can we say a prayer for our friends that have been listening? Now, let me say something. Oh, I forgot one more controversial thing. So what we just talked about, Nehemia, might get us kicked off of YouTube.
Nehemia (35:23):
Very possible.
Keith (35:24):
It might get us kicked off of Facebook.
Nehemia (35:26):
Very possible.
Keith (35:26):
Might get us kicked off any number of public platforms because it’s not politically, uh, what I use the word, it’s uh, what would be the word.
Nehemia (35:36):
Political correctness? Well, and even if it is today, three minutes from now it might not be. No, I mean, if you talk about anything controversial…
Keith (35:42):
Boom, you’re done. Here’s the good news,
Nehemia (35:46):
It’s a constantly changing standard.
Keith (35:47):
What I want to say to say to our friends right now, what we need you to do, we need you to be as supportive of BFA and the Nehemiaswall, because what we are continuing to do is we’re committed to getting the information out. Now, you’ve already blazed the trail. And I have this little commercial for you right now, where you’ve been able to get on some other platforms too. Where you’re able to share messages. So we have podcasts and YouTube and Facebook and our websites. Hopefully those will continue, but we know from experience, there’s things that can get shut off. So you all, we need your support.
Nehemia (36:15):
We need your support to be able to continue to do this.
Keith (36:17):
So I want to say a prayer, Father, thank you so much for our friends that are listening. We pray that as we tackle these difficult situations, we’re reminded of the words of Yeshua to pursue peace. Help us to pursue peace, and we’ll do all that we can do on our side. And at the same time, we want to be aware of what’s happening in the world, and we want to be wise, and we don’t want to be in denial and not concerned about being politically correct. We are concerned about truth, and we thank you for it. In your name.
Nehemia (36:45):
Yehovah, our father in heaven. Let us all, as a people, Israel, seek peace and pursue it in the words of the Psalmist. And let us find a partner who we can make peace with. Father, we don’t make peace with our friends. We make peace with our enemies. These enemies who want to destroy us. Yehovah, soften their hearts and turn their hearts for a desire for peace so that we can live together. Maybe not with everything that we want, maybe there’ll be compromises. There’ll be painful compromises. But we are willing to do that in order to make peace as long as the other side will truly live in peace with us. Amen.
Narrator (37:26):
You’ve been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. For a more in-depth study, check out Hebrew Gospel Pearls Plus at nehemiaswall.com and BFAinternational.com. Thank you for your support.
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2 Comments
Yes! Add a donation to BFA to my order.
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September 29, 2021 at 3:35 am /
I have paided to have access to the plusepisodes, but can not geting to it. Can you help me with it?
Jan
October 1, 2021 at 1:51 pm /
Shalom Jan,
I got my donation refunded so i asked why and they said that there have been a malfunction on the bfa website and that we wouldn’t be able to access premium content at the moment, but they hope it will be fixed later today.
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