Ken Ham’s Question, Asked of the Pastors
Ken Ham’s Question, Asked of the Pastors: I Ask Them Another Question
Hazan Gavriel ben David · Elul 5786 / August 2026
Ken Ham looks into a camera in Kentucky and asks a question he thinks will save his church. Eric Metaxas has put Hugh Ross on a stage. Ross will not give him six ordinary days. He will not give him a flood that covers the globe. He will allow death and disease in the rock for ages before Adam and still call the work very good. Ham’s voice rises.
What kind of a God creates over millions of years and death and disease and calls that all very good?
Then the sentence that is supposed to close the case.
When you have Christian leaders saying, “Oh, you can just not believe the Bible. You can change what the Bible says”—no wonder they walk away from the church.
I heard that sentence this week the way I hear most Christian sentences in this town: through a radio on the way to work, and then through a pastor’s mouth on a telephone. Pastor Glenn Stoker of Bible Believers Baptist Church on Rockwell Road holds that the King James Version is the Bible and that anything else is not translated correctly.
I asked how a translation could be perfect when no Hebrew scholar sat at that table in 1611, and none sat at Nicaea. He said I was ignorant. Had I not read the book about the compilers?
Ham is not wrong that people walk away when they watch the text being moved. He is wrong about who started moving it. The question is not whether Metaxas and Ross can be trusted. The question is why a Jew in Amarillo—or any reader who can still see the letters—should trust any of them.
Nation, Not Religion, and a Perfect English Book
Pastor Stoker called offering support to the Jewish community after hard years. Then he told me he supported the nation, not the religion. From the pew, that sounds like kindness: flags, not a conversion class. From the Jew, it is the same agenda I have met for twenty-five years.
Israel is not a church in one folder and a state in another. Israel is a people under a covenant—land, law, Name, and seed. If you bless the map and bury the Torah, you have not blessed Jacob. You have kept the stage for the last act.
His book tells him: to the Jew first. His book tells him he will not see the one he waits for until we say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. So the Jew is not a neighbor. The Jew is an unfinished verse. Friendship lasts as long as the verse is still open.
A man who will not let a Jewish scholar near the English page is not in a position to lecture Hugh Ross about changing Genesis. He has already decided that a committee in England is more final than Moses. That is the same motion Ken Ham condemns, only older and dressed in leather.
Ham’s Dilemma Is Not Ours
What kind of God creates with death in the world and calls it very good? That is a Christian problem. It exists because Paul taught that death entered through one man’s sin, and later teachers fused that doctrine to Bereshit until a falling leaf became a crisis of faith. The Torah never said that. The human being is dust and returns to dust. Tov meod means the created order is fit for its purpose. It does not mean a museum without decay.
Judaism can read the six days as six days. The sages argued about the length of those days. I myself laid out for Pastor Stoker a reading I have carried for years: Psalm 90, a day as a thousand years; light and choice; waters and the Flood; seed and Avraham; lights and the prophets; scattering; the beast and the image; then rest. He answered in three words: typology, not doctrine. Then he stopped writing.
I do not bind a Christian to a six-thousand-year clock. What I will not surrender is this: the week is not a children’s story, and Israel remains Israel when the seventh day is spoken of. If the rest belongs to the Church instead of to Zion, then the first six days were only a preface to our disappearance. I cannot read Bereshit that way. I cannot read Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Zechariah 14, or Ezekiel 40–48 that way.
The Rule He Offered, Applied to His Own Book
Grant Ham the rule. Leaders who change what the text says cannot be trusted. Apply it to the Church that wrote the rule.
For two thousand years the Christian Bible has not merely interpreted the Jewish Scriptures. It has rewritten them—pronouns, tenses, articles, and nouns—until a book about Israel reads like a biography of a man from Nazareth. Rabbi Tovia Singer spent two volumes naming the places. I have asked pastors in this city to stand still at those places. They do what Yehuda Yisrael says they do. They filibuster. The scholars move the goalposts. They answer a question that was not asked. They offer confidence instead of a verse.
Isaiah 7:14 does not say “a virgin shall conceive.” It says hinneh ha-almah harah—the young woman is pregnant. The word for virgin is betulah. Isaiah knew that word. He used it five times. Matthew dropped the article, changed the tense, and switched “she will call his name Immanuel” to “they shall call,” because no one ever called the child Immanuel. Then English Bibles printed Matthew’s sentence back into Isaiah so the two books would appear to agree. Pastor Stoker’s perfect translation carries that sentence. A Jew who opens Isaiah in Isaiah’s language does not.
Change Words
Psalm 22 does not say “they pierced my hands and my feet.” It says ka’ari yadai veraglai—like a lion at my hands and my feet. The same word is “like a lion” in Isaiah 38. In this one verse it became a nail. The lion already walks through the psalm. No apostle quotes that clause as a crucifixion text. The English does the work later.
Psalm 110 does not say God spoke to God. It says Ne’um YHWH l’adoni—Hashem spoke to my master. Adoni is a human lord. Print both words as “Lord,” and David seems to worship his descendant as deity. That is the verse put in Jesus’ mouth when the Pharisees are tested. I have watched men use it on me in coffee shops in this town as if the Hebrew were not sitting on the table.
There Is No Aramaic In Psalms
Psalm 2 does not command the nations to “kiss the Son.” Nashqu-bar is not Aramaic smuggled into a Hebrew psalm so that bar can mean the Second Person of a Trinity. The psalm already used ben when it meant son.
Isaiah 9 does not announce that a divine child “shall be born.” Yullad is perfect tense: a child has been born. The long name describes what God is for that child. Flip the verbs into the future, and you have a Christmas card. Leave them in Hebrew, and you have a king in Judah. The New Testament never quotes the verse. The tense will not allow it.
Hosea 11:1 is Israel coming out of Egypt. Matthew makes it a toddler’s travel itinerary.
Defend Your Faith But Do Not Harm Your Neighbor
Pastor Carr wanted to fight me over Luke chapter 4. In the synagogue at Nazareth, the reading is made to say that the anointed one is sent to proclaim liberty and the recovery of sight to the blind. Open the Hebrew of Isaiah 61. The recovering of sight is not there. It is in Isaiah 42, and it is in the Greek Luke is following. A pastor who will not let Isaiah speak in Isaiah’s language will not let Israel speak in Israel’s language either.
Hebrews quotes Psalm 40 and deletes “ears You have opened” so it can insert “a body You have prepared for Me.” David’s line about obedience is removed. Incarnation language is dropped in its place.
Isaiah 53 is the fourth Servant Song. The servant is named in the songs that precede it: Israel. Isolate the chapter, treat every “he” as a single executed man, and the nations’ confession about the people they abused becomes a passion narrative. I have been that “he” in other men’s sermons. So have these people.
Daniel’s mashiach is an anointed priest or prince. Capitalize it, and a timetable appears that the first Christians themselves never quoted.
What Part Of The New Covenant in Jeremiah 31 Did Jesus Initiate?
Jeremiah 31 is the chapter I sent Pastor Stoker in his English and in the Hebrew. The new covenant is with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Torah written on the heart. Same law, internalized. Then the chapter says what Christians skip when they use it: If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever.
The sun still stands. I asked him which clause Jesus initiated. He did not name a clause. He asked where my final authority was. I answered: 613, Hashem, Moses, Deuteronomy 4, Exodus 19 and 20, the God of Israel. He asked again. Then he required me to prove the Torah one hundred percent, with facts no man could have known when it was written.
Ask for the verse. Receive the weather.
The Rooms in This Town
I do not write that every Christian on earth is this way. I write what I can swear to.
Trinity Fellowship Church
Pastor Bo at Trinity Fellowship asked me to leave a men’s Bible study because the questions I asked did not align with the history he was presenting. People come to listen to him, he said, and not to me.
Grace Church- Calvary Chapel
Pastor Bill Glimm of Grace Community called security after I asked whether Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints were his brothers. Leave now, he said.
Hillside
Pastor Polis of Hillside sat with me at Chick-fil-A. I asked why he keeps Shabbat on Sunday. Because Jesus was resurrected on Sunday, he said. I said the Greek of the accounts does not give the Church the sentence it thinks it has. Mia ton sabbaton sits in the counting of the Omer, not in a transfer of the seventh day.
He is college-educated in Greek. He said he would go home and study it. The next time he was with his son, he said, “You are not to say anything in front of my son.” The time after that, he walked past me as if I were furniture.
Vicory Church
Pastor Brown of Victory Church went on the radio and said he could eat bread on Passover. He did not need some little man with a beanie and strings hanging down to tell him that Easter Sunday would not have ham and rolls.
The Pastors That Spoke with Kindness But Refused The Truth
Pastor Lee Simpson told me I had answered questions he carried. Then he said he could not teach that to his people. They were not ready.
The Church of Christ is the clearest doctrine on Israel. “No such thing as Israel”. There is no such thing as Israel, they say. We are the Church. Replacement is not a theory to them. It is the air they breathe.
My niece’s husband, Bishop Ludwig Onoko, said the last act without ornament. We are just waiting, he told me, for the Third Temple to be built so you Jews can accept the antichrist and go through the tribulation and see Jesus returning with wounds in his hands, so you Jews can fall on your faces and say we were wrong and bow down and worship Jesus. Then you will see.
That is not support of Israel. That is a scheduled humiliation. Stoker said the polite part: nation, not religion. The bishop said the last act. Ken Ham says do not change the Bible. All three are reading a book that already changed ours.
Letters the English Cannot Carry
A translation can carry a sentence. It cannot carry a Sefer Torah.
The Torah is written without vowels. The missing vowels are not a defect. They are how a living people keeps a living reading. Large letters, small letters, a broken vav in shalom, inverted nuns that mark a book inside a book, words written one way and read another—these are not later edits. They are the text. Gematria lives in the count of the letters. Midrash lives in the grammar that looks wrong on purpose.
Christianity and Islam inherit content. They do not inherit the object. The King James cannot show a broken letter. A Greek church Bible cannot carry ketiv and qere at once. When Ham says “the Bible,” he means an English paragraph. When I say Torah, I mean a scroll whose irregularities are themselves revelation.
Devarim 28:64 says we would serve wood and stone in exile—gods neither we nor our fathers knew. Wood and stone are not a metaphor I invented this week. They are the objects the nations put at the center of public worship while we paid the tax. The verse does not require every Jew to bow. It requires that we live under systems whose worship is not Sinai. That is historically exact. It is also why a Jew is not required to treat their later books as the same species as the one we never stopped reading in the original consonants.
How Do We Trust You?
Ken Ham is angry that some Christians treat Genesis the way Christianity has always treated Torah.
If a leader may decide that “six days” are not days, that “the whole earth” is not the whole earth, and that “very good” can include ages of death before Adam—on what basis may he not decide that “rose on the third day” is a figure, that “born of a virgin” is a mistranslation of almah, or that “no one comes to the Father except through me” is first-century rhetoric?
You already did that to our book. Almah became virgin. A servant song about Israel became a man on wood. I will raise up a prophet like you became a second god. Adoni became my Lord. Ka’ari became pierced. She will call became they shall call. Ears you opened became a body prepared. Sight to the blind was inserted where Isaiah had not written it.
Then you asked why the people of that book would not kneel.
Ross uses science to loosen Genesis. Matthew and Hebrews use theology to tighten the connections to Isaiah and the Psalms. Stoker uses a seventeenth-century English page to rule both. Ham uses a camera to scold the first two and never notices the third. All four operations treat the Jewish Bible as raw material.
You ask us to trust your leaders on the resurrection, the Trinity, the virgin, the cross, and the end of the Torah. The Christians ask us to trust that when we open “the Bible,” we are hearing Isaiah, not a committee. You ask us to trust sermons from men who cannot read the letters they are quoting, and who call a chazzan ignorant for noticing.
How do we trust you?
You changed the pronouns. Scholars removed the words. Church Fathers rewrote a book that was never yours to edit. You offered the flag and withheld the covenant. You said nation, not religion, and then waited for a Temple so we could be proven wrong on our faces.
If changing what the Bible says makes a leader untrustworthy, then the question is not whether Eric Metaxas can be trusted.
The question is how the Christian world ever expected the Jews to trust it at all.
As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. The Shabbat: As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. As long as the sun and the moon stand, the seed of Israel does not cease from being a nation before Him. I am waiting for the rest. I am not waiting to be proven wrong on my face.
B’H’
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo