A Linear Historical Timeline. This article explores The Star of Jacob Prophecy and its historical significance.

From Balaam’s oracle to the headlines on your screen

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Amarillo, Texas  ·  Elul 5786 / September 2026

I first published this material months ago. It sat on the site with one view. That is on me. The teaching was buried in chapters, asides, and personal scenery that did not help a reader walk the road. This post is the rewrite: one line through time. The Torah first. Then the Zohar. After that, the dates. Then the headlines as they appeared.

No decoration. There is no Christian overlay. No private setting. Only what the Tanakh says, what the Zohar says, what Rabbi Ephraim Palvanov has been teaching in public, and what the newspapers printed on the day the thing happened.

My teachers in this matter are Rabbi Tovia Singer, Rabbi Ephraim Palvanov, Rabbi Mendel Kessin, Rabbi Zev Leff, and others across the Jewish world who have said, in their own language, that we are no longer speaking about a distant acharit hayamim. We are watching it.

Rabbi Singer has said the prophecies are unfolding now, in real time, in the headlines. Rabbi Palvanov has spent years mapping Balaam’s star onto the Zohar’s calendar and onto a comet the astronomers named before anyone in a beit midrash asked for it.

Rabbi Kessin has been saying for years that the last war of Persia and the pride of Edom sit inside the same window. Rabbi Leff has said he hears the footsteps.

I am not a prophet. I am a chazzan in Amarillo who learned to read the Zohar with Palvanov’s classes and the Tanakh in the other.

What follows is the sequence.

I. The Oracle Itself

The oldest messianic line in the Torah does not come from a son of Jacob. It comes from Balaam, son of Beor, hired by Balak to curse Israel, who opened his mouth and could not curse them. In Parashat Balak, he says he is looking to the end of days — acharit hayamim — one of the few times the Chumash uses that phrase.

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but he is not near. A star has gone forth from Jacob, and a scepter has risen from Israel; it shall smash the brow of Moab and tear down all the children of Sheth. Edom shall be a possession, Seir a possession of his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly.

— Numbers 24:17–18

The Hebrew is darach kochav miYaakov. Darach is a path, a trail. Kochav is a light in the night sky. The combination is not a still lamp. It is a body that moves and leaves a wake. That is why Jewish readers for generations have heard a comet in the verse, not only a metaphor for a king. The scepter that rises with it is the staff of Israel. Moab is on the east bank. Edom is the west. The oracle is not a Christmas pageant. It is a map of the last war and the last king.

The Rambam cites this verse as one of the proofs that Mashiach will come. The Ramban reads the star as the gathering of the dispersed, a light crossing the firmament from the ends of heaven. Rabbi Akiva applied the verse in his generation to Shimon bar Kokhba and called him Bar Kokhba, Son of the Star. The revolt failed. The verse did not retire. It waited.

II. What the Zohar Added — The Calendar Inside the Star

The Zohar on Parashat Balak, volume III, 212b, does not leave the star as poetry. It gives a weekday, a Hebrew date, a duration, a first city, a collapse of buildings, the death of a ruler, a spread of the light across the world, wars in four directions, the loss of faith among the nations, the rise of a proud king, and then — when the star is gathered in — a trembling in the Land, a cave, a fire, a branch that rules, and the revealing of Mashiach.

It is taught that in the future the Holy One, blessed be He, will rebuild Jerusalem and reveal one firm star, glowing with seventy pillars of fire, and with seventy sparks flashing from it in the middle of the firmament, and they will be reigned over by seventy other stars, and they will glow and burn for seventy days.

— Zohar III, Balak 212b

And the star will be seen on the sixth day, on the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month. It will be gathered on the seventh day, at the end of seventy days. On the first day, it will be seen in Rome. On that same day, three high structures of that city of Rome will fall, and a great edifice will fall. The ruler of that city will die. Then the star will spread out to be seen in the rest of the world. In that time, great wars will stir all around the four corners of the world, and no faith will be found among its people.

— Zohar III, Balak 212b

In the middle of the world, when that star shines in the middle of the firmament, a great king will arise and rule the world, and his spirit will gain pride over all the kings, and he will awaken a war between the two sides, and he will become strong against them.

— Zohar III, Balak 212b

On the day that the star will be hidden, the Holy Land will tremble forty-five miles around the place of the Holy Temple, revealing an underground cave. From this cave will come out a blazing fire… and a great branch will grow out, and it will rule over the whole world… Then Mashiach will be revealed to the entire world.

— Zohar III, Balak 212b

The sixth month is Elul. The sixth day is Friday. The twenty-fifth of Elul is the day the Sages assign to the first day of Creation. The Zohar is saying: the sign that Jerusalem is about to be rebuilt in truth will rise on the anniversary of the world’s first dawn, on the eve of Shabbat, and it will burn for about seventy days.

Rome, in this literature, is not only the city on the Tiber. Rome is Edom — the power that sits at the center of the West in a given generation. Palvanov has also noted that in the lifetime of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Beirut served as a Roman administrative capital in the East. When the Zohar says “a city of Rome,” a reader who knows the second century does not have to fly to Italy to find the buildings.

III. The Teachers Who Said: Look Up

Rabbi Ephraim Palvanov, writing at Mayim Achronim and teaching in Toronto, is the one who put the calendar on the public table. In December 2023, he taught that astronomers had found a new comet, C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, discovered 9 January 2023, predicted to reach perihelion — closest approach to the sun — on Friday, 27 September 2024. That civil date was 25 Elul 5784. A Friday. He said he was not a prophet. He was reading the Zohar next to an astronomy bulletin.

We know that one of the oldest prophecies and traditions about the Moshiach likely comes from Balaam, a Gentile prophet who came to curse Israel but couldn’t. Instead, he gives a prophecy that actually says, ‘I will tell you what will happen at the end of days.’

— Rabbi Ephraim Palvanov, cited in Israel365 News, 29 January 2024 and 28 August 2024

Israel365 News printed the claim twice before the comet arrived: first in January 2024 under the headline “EXPERT: Star of Jacob will appear on Friday, September 27,” and again in August 2024 under “Scientists expect Star of Jacob to appear this month.” Palvanov added the disclaimer then, and he has kept it: there are ways to read the passage. He still looked at the sky.

Rabbi Tovia Singer has not built a comet calendar. He has done something plainer. He has stood in front of cameras and said that the wars the Prophets named are no longer commentary. They are the news.

There are messianic prophecies unfolding now.

— Rabbi Tovia Singer, 2026 interview on missionaries and the signs of the age

What’s going on to the north? It’s in Ezekiel 38 and 39. Well, it’s happening right now as we are speaking, in real time. Israel is battling Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah, in the north. Those are headlines. Like, we don’t have to guess.

— Rabbi Tovia Singer, “The Signs of Messiah’s Arrival,” June 2026

Rabbi Mendel Kessin has taught for years from the Ramchal that the cosmic week is winding down, that Persia’s war and Edom’s pride sit inside the last window, and that the year 5786 carried the gematria of yavo Mashiach. After the nations moved to recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September 2025, he called the vote itself a messianic event: the world lining up as Gog.

The United Nations is Gog and Magog. The UN represents the world, and therefore it must defy Israel. That is a messianic event. It means the Messiah is here.

— Rabbi Mendel Kessin, September 2025, reported by Israel Today

Rabbi Zev Leff asked whether Mashiach is here and answered in the old language that still fits: if you ask me if he is here, he is not here; if you ask me if I hear his footsteps, I hear his footsteps. He pointed to the ingathering, the land giving fruit, and the nations gathering against Israel as the shape of Gog and Magog.

These men do not agree on every date. They do not need to. They agree on the direction of the river.

IV. The Long Fuse — Before the Comet

1989 / 5750 — The Zohar’s last “late” gate

Palvanov has taught the Zohar’s calculation that the end of days begins a cosmic six hours before the Sabbath of history. Six hours is a quarter of a day. A heavenly day is a thousand years. A quarter is 250 years. Count back 250 years from the year 6000, and you land at 5750 — 1989–90. That year, the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union cracked. A million Jews began to come home from the north. Palvanov’s own family was in that wave. The Talmud already said that the greatest sign of redemption is the Land bearing fruit again. By 1989, that sign was no longer a hope. It was an export.

9 January 2023 — The astronomers name the star

9 JANUARY 2023

A new comet is logged: C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS).

Astronomy circulars; later cited by Palvanov in his December 2023 class “Will Mashiach Come This Year?”

No rabbi commissioned the discovery. Purple Mountain Observatory in China and the ATLAS survey in South Africa found a dirty snowball on a long loop from the Oort Cloud. The predicted perihelion was 27 September 2024. Palvanov opened a Hebrew calendar, saw 25 Elul on a Friday, and remembered Balak 212b.

7 October 2023 / 22 Tishrei 5784 — Simchat Torah

7 OCTOBER 2023

Hamas-led militants burst from Gaza on Simchat Torah. More than 1,200 were murdered in Israel. Hostages taken into the tunnels.

Every paper on earth.

This is not the star. This is the war the star would later illuminate. The Zohar said that when the star appears, wars will already be stirring in the four corners. By the autumn of 2023, Israel was fighting in Gaza, under fire from Lebanon, watching Yemen close the Red Sea, and listening to Iran speak in the voice of Persia. Rabbi Singer would later say, ” We do not have to guess. The north is Ezekiel. The headlines are the north.

Isaiah 17 had waited longer than any city on earth. “Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a ruinous heap.” Damascus had been conquered and rebuilt for three thousand years. The verse was still standing. So was the palace.

13 April 2024 — Persia fires in the open

13 APRIL 2024

Iran launches a direct missile-and-drone attack on Israel — the first time in history Tehran strikes the Jewish state in its own name, not only by proxy.

International wires, 13–14 April 2024

Singer has marked that date. For decades, Iran worked through other men’s hands. On 13 April, the mask came off. The midrash that Kessin teaches — Persia moving against the world, Edom answering — stopped being a page in Yalkut Shimoni and became a ticker.

31 July 2024 — Haniyeh in Tehran

31 JULY 2024

Ismail Haniyeh, political chief of Hamas, is killed in Tehran hours after Iran’s new president is sworn in.

Reuters / AP, 31 July–1 August 2024

The head of the October 7 political house dies in the capital of Persia. The scepter of Numbers 24 is not a metaphor when the men who planned the massacre start falling in other people’s bedrooms.

V. The Seventy Days

Friday, 27 September 2024 — 25 Elul 5784

27 SEPTEMBER 2024

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS reaches perihelion. Astronomers call it visible. Photographers catch it in twilight. Palvanov later says he saw it from his own backyard.

NASA Earth Observatory; Sky & Telescope; BBC Sky at Night; Palvanov, “Lebanon & Iran in the End of Days,” 9 October 2024, and “The Mashiach Window,” 2025

The same civil night, while the comet was at the sun, Israeli aircraft put bunker-busters into Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Dahiyeh, south Beirut. Multiple apartment blocks came down. A mushroom cloud stood over the suburb. The next day, the IDF and then Hezbollah itself said Hassan Nasrallah was dead.

27–28 SEPTEMBER 2024

“Hassan Nasrallah, Who Led Hezbollah for Decades, Killed at 64.” “Israel kills Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in airstrike.”

The New York Times, 28 September 2024; Reuters, 28 September 2024; AP, 28 September 2024

Hassan Nasrallah, who led the militant Hezbollah organization in Lebanon for more than three decades, was killed on Friday in heavy Israeli airstrikes just south of Beirut.

— The New York Times, 28 September 2024

The Israeli military said it carried out a precise airstrike on Friday while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters… The strike leveled six apartment buildings.

— Al Jazeera, 28 September 2024

Read the Zohar again with those two sentences in your hand. A star seen on Friday, 25 Elul. On that same day, three high structures fall, a great edifice falls, and the ruler of that city dies. Palvanov’s reading: Beirut was Rome-in-the-East when the Zohar’s teaching was born. Nasrallah was the ruler of that fortress-city. The buildings were not a parable. They were dust on Saturday morning television.

Amos had already named the fire: “I will send fire upon the house of Hazael, and it shall devour the palaces of Ben-Hadad. I will break the bar of Damascus.” (Amos 1:4–5) Palvanov tied the bunker-busters to that fire. The comet was the clock. The fire was the headline.

The comet remains in the sky

The Zohar said seventy days. Perihelion was on 27 September. The closest approach to Earth was on 12 October 2024, during the Days of Awe into Sukkot of 5785. Naked-eye photographs filled the astronomy pages through October and into November. Palvanov counted the window to about 6 December 2024, when the object faded from ordinary sight. That is not midrash. That is an ephemeris.

16–17 October 2024 — Sinwar

16–17 OCTOBER 2024

Israeli troops kill Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and architect of October 7, in a ruined house in Rafah. A drone films a wounded man throwing a stick at the camera. Netanyahu calls it a milestone in “the sunset of Hamas’s evil reign.”

IDF statement, 17 October 2024; The New York Times, 18 October 2024; CNN, 17 October 2024

Haniyeh in July. Nasrallah on the day of the star. Sinwar three weeks later. The brow of Moab, in Balaam’s speech, is the leadership of the east bank of hatred. The children of Sheth are the wider swarm. The verse does not say Israel will argue with them. It says the scepter will smash.

5 November 2024 — A proud king in the middle of the world

5–6 NOVEMBER 2024

Donald J. Trump is elected the 47th President of the United States, to take office on 20 January 2025.

Every American paper.

The Zohar said that while the star shines in the middle of the firmament, a great king will arise, his spirit high over the other kings, and he will awaken war on two sides and prevail. Palvanov and Kessin have both, in different keys, cast this figure as a tool — a Cyrus, not a redeemer. Isaiah 45 calls Cyrus “My anointed” and still leaves him a Persian. The Jewish reading does not require the man to be righteous. It needs him to be useful. I will not baptize a president. I will also not pretend the Zohar’s “proud king in the middle of the world” landed in a vacuum.

6–8 December 2024 — The star is gathered; Damascus falls

8 DECEMBER 2024

“Syrian rebels topple Assad, who flees to Russia in Middle East shakeup.” “Damascus has been liberated, and the tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown.” Rebels enter the capital unopposed after a two-week lightning offensive. The family that ruled Syria for fifty years is gone in a night.

Reuters, 8 December 2024; CNN, 8 December 2024; The New York Times, 21 December 2024

Syrian rebels seized the capital, Damascus, unopposed on Sunday after a lightning advance that sent President Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia after a 13-year civil war and six decades of his family’s autocratic rule.

— Reuters, 8 December 2024

Israel bombs Damascus as 50-year peace deal ends with Assad’s overthrow: ‘Direct result of our forceful actions.’

— New York Post headline, 8 December 2024

Count it. 27 September to 6 December is seventy days. Assad fled in the night of 7–8 December. Palvanov taught “Damascus in the End of Days” on 10 December 2024, two days after the palace gates stood open. He read the Zohar’s “earthquake in the Holy Land” as a political quake first: the old order of Ishmael in Syria collapsing in the same week the star went dark.

Isaiah 17:1 is not finished. Damascus still has streets and minarets. The prophecy says the city will cease to be a city and become a ruinous heap. What fell in December 2024 was the kingdom of Damascus — “the fortress will disappear from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus” (Isaiah 17:3). The throne of Ben-Hadad was empty. The portraits came off the walls. A year later reporters walked Umayyad Square and wrote that the sign “Assad’s Syria welcomes you” was gone. That is not the last word of Isaiah 17. It is the first word that verse has been able to speak in three millennia.

Zechariah 9 ties Damascus to the resting of the word of Hashem at the threshold of the last king. Palvanov spent a class on that knot: why would the Presence brush Damascus at all? Because the north has to break before Zion is quiet.

VI. After the Star — 2025 and 5786

The Zohar does not say Mashiach stands up on day seventy-one. It says the star is gathered, the Land trembles, wars continue in four directions, faith thins out among the nations, and then — in a time it does not date to the hour — a branch rules and Mashiach is revealed to the whole world. The years after the comet have been that middle.

The four fronts

By the end of 2024, Israel had fought in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen’s approaches, and the Syrian space that Iran had used as a corridor. Palvanov said the Zohar’s “four sides” were no longer a homily. Hezbollah’s arsenal was broken in the weeks after Nasrallah. The Houthis kept firing and kept getting hit. In August 2025, Israeli strikes killed the Houthi prime minister in Yemen. The papers treated it as another raid. The sequence treated it as another name on Ishmael’s roster.

September 2025 — The nations vote

SEPTEMBER 2025

Western governments and a United Nations majority move to recognize a Palestinian state on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5786.

UN coverage; Rabbi Kessin’s recorded response, 19–22 September 2025; Israel Today, 29 September 2025

Kessin called the UN “Gog and Magog” because Gog is not only a man from the north. Gog is the world assembled against Zion. Zechariah 14 and Ezekiel 38 do not require every rifle to be Russian. They require the nations to decide that Jerusalem is theirs to carve.

5786 — “The Messiah will come”

Kessin taught that 786, the number of the year 5786, equals yavo Mashiach — “the Messiah will come” — and also the language of the revelation at Sinai. He read the Yalkut Shimoni on Persia’s last war and said: ” This is the last war; a heavenly voice says, ‘ Do not fear; your redemption has arrived. Whether a student accepts every gematria is not the point. The point is that a senior teacher of hashkafah stopped speaking in the future tense.

Palvanov’s July 2025 class, “The Mashiach Window,” given as his last biweekly at the Sephardic Kehila Center in Toronto, asked the question his students had started to ask: you have not talked about the star in a while — where are we? His recap was blunt. The comet came on the day. He saw it. An oppressor of Israel died. Buildings fell. Then the political earthquake. Then fires around Jerusalem in a later season that he was willing to read against the Zohar’s fire. “We’ve basically [seen] that whole passage. Everything has been fulfilled from the comet to the death of the oppressor to the buildings to the earthquakes to the fires.” He did not say the story was over. He said the opening acts were no longer theoretical.

2026 — Persia, Edom, and the year 5787

As these lines are written — 22 September 2026, the week after Rosh Hashanah 5787 — the war with Iran and its remaining arms is the air the Jewish world is breathing. Singer sat with interviewers and kept pointing at Ezekiel 38. Kessin kept pointing at Paras and Edom. Palvanov taught “Trump, Iran & the Year of the Horse” in February 2026 and “Are We Living in the End of Days?” in July 2026 and answered a student who asked the simple question: Are we in the end of days? “Absolutely. I believe we 100% are.”

Rosh Hashanah 5787 fell at sundown Friday, 11 September 2026 — twenty-five years to the day from the falling of the towers in New York, the other “Rome” some readers have always heard in the Zohar. I will not force 2001 into 25 Elul. The Zohar’s date in 2001 was not 11 September. Honesty is part of emunah. What I will say is this: Edom’s towers have already fallen once in our lifetime, and Edom’s pride is again the weather of the world, and the shofar of 5787 sounded on a Friday night when the whole earth was already marked with ash. The Sages said the footsteps would not be quiet.

VII. What Has Not Happened Yet

A serious Jew does not pretend the scroll is finished because the first columns came true. The Zohar still awaits its full revelation. The Rambam still waits for a king from David who fights the wars of Hashem, builds the Temple in its place, and gathers the dispersed. Rabbi Leff repeated those three tests in 2026. They have not been checked off. Isaiah 17 still has a heap where a city stands. Ezekiel 38 still has a gathering of nations larger than a proxy war. Zechariah still has feet standing on the Mount of Olives. The Third Temple is not up. Mashiach is not revealed to the entire world.

That is not a reason to go back to sleep. It is a reason to stay awake without becoming a date-setter. Palvanov’s standing sentence is the right one: I am not a prophet. I am reading. Singer’s standing sentence is the other right one: it is happening now; we do not have to guess. Both can be true.

VIII. How to Read This Without Losing the Torah

Christians will try to steal Balaam’s star for Bethlehem. Rabbi Singer has been dismantling that theft for decades. Numbers 24:17 is about a king who smashes Moab and takes Edom. The man from Nazareth did not do that. The verse is still in our book.

Internet mystics will try to turn the comet into Nibiru, a second sun, a planet of fear. The Zohar does not need a second sun. It needed a kochav on a path, on a Friday, on the 25th of Elul, burning for about seventy days, with buildings and a ruler falling in a city of Rome as the light appeared. That is a narrower claim. Narrow claims are stronger.

Politicians will try to wear the star as a campaign pin. Cyrus was a tool. Pharaoh was a tool. The proud king in the Zohar is a tool. The scepter rises from Israel, not from Washington and not from Moscow.

The work that remains is the work that the Sages always named: teshuvah, unity, Torah, the mitzvot of the Land, and the refusal to bow to the seventy nations when they lose their faith. The Zohar said that when the star shines, faith will not be found among them. Look at a university quad, a UN gallery, a comment thread. Then open a Chumash.

IX. The Line, One More Time

Balaam saw a star out of Jacob and a scepter out of Israel, not now and not near.

The Zohar dated the star to Friday, the 25th of Elul, seventy days, Rome, three structures, a palace, a dead ruler, four-front war, a proud king, a trembling Land, a revealed Mashiach.

Astronomers, with no interest in Balak, set perihelion for Friday, 27 September 2024 — 25 Elul 5784.

That night, the comet reached the sun, and Nasrallah was buried under the buildings of Dahiyeh.

Seventy days later, the comet faded, and Assad’s Damascus ceased to be a kingdom.

In the same window, Haniyeh died in Tehran, Sinwar died in Rafah, a proud Western king returned to the middle of the world, the nations voted to carve Jerusalem, and Persia came out of hiding.

Singer says the prophecy is happening now. Palvanov says the opening passage has already walked onto the stage. Kessin says the last war is this war. Leff hears footsteps.

I am a Jew in Amarillo. No prophet’s staff. I have a Zohar, a Tanakh, a calendar, and a stack of newspapers. That is enough to say to anyone who still thinks this is a metaphor: the star was in the sky. The buildings fell. The ruler died. The city of the north lost its king. The rest of the page is still being written in front of your eyes.

May we have emunah in the days when the Exodus seems small. Help us not invent what the text does not say. May we not deny what the text and the day have already said together.

חזקחזקונתחזק

Learn with us at beithashoavah.org  ·  Teachers: Rabbi Tovia Singer, Rabbi Ephraim Palvanov, and the living chain of Torah.

Sources for the reader

Tanakh: Numbers 24:17–19; Isaiah 17:1–3; Amos 1:3–5; Ezekiel 38–39; Zechariah 9 and 14; Isaiah 45:1–3.

Zohar III, Balak 212b (verses 501–503 and following), as translated in standard editions and as taught by Palvanov.

Rabbi Ephraim Palvanov: “Will Mashiach Come This Year?” (Dec 2023); Israel365 News interviews (29 Jan 2024; 28 Aug 2024); “Lebanon & Iran in the End of Days” (9 Oct 2024); “Damascus in the End of Days” (10 Dec 2024); “The Mashiach Window” (31 July / 1 Sept 2025); “Are We Living in the End of Days?” (July 2026).

Rabbi Tovia Singer: ongoing classes 2024–2026 on Ezekiel 38, the signs of Mashiach, and “prophecy happening right now.”

Rabbi Mendel Kessin: teachings on 5786, Persia and Edom, and the UN as Gog (Sept 2025; 2026 lectures reported by Israel365 News).

Rabbi Zev Leff: interviews on the footsteps of Mashiach and Gog and Magog (Hidabroot / Living Inspired, 2026).

Headlines as cited: New York Times, Reuters, AP, CNN, Al Jazeera, New York Post, NASA Earth Observatory, Sky & Telescope — dates given in the body.

This essay replaces earlier chapter drafts on beithashoavah.org. Those drafts mixed the timeline with private scenes that did not belong in the argument. The argument is the timeline.

A Question for Tony Robinson and the TorahResource Conference

Judah · Ephraim · Jeremiah’s rings · Zechariah 12 · 7 October 2023

When Tony Robinson found out that I had returned to my family in Israel without Jesus, he told me, “We the nations…” What I think he meant was Ephraim. Tony said we know just as much as the Jews.

That sentence is the question before the TorahResource conference.

• Do you eat honey from a rock?
• Does your story match your DNA?
• Are you Abraham’s children the way the Christian Bible says — spiritually — or the way Genesis, Y-chromosomes, and a Cohen badge say?
• Does DNA prove your covenant?

Hashem left a Blueprint that answers those questions in real time. It runs through my Cohen family. It runs through the only two people on earth who claim to be from Abraham in the body, not in a sermon.

The proof is not Hebrews 8. The proof is the Blueprint of Creation — the book I wrote as Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, and the companion work The Ten Sayings.

Judah and Ephraim must come back together. If they will not, the leftover name for that refusal is the one Malachi already used: Esau, I hated.

What Tony built, and what it cannot carry

Tony Robinson of Restoration of Torah Ministries spoke at TorahResource on Hebrews 8:13.

He split the verse into two spheres of obsolescence.

Sphere one: Israel’s human duty under Deuteronomy 6 becomes obsolete because God writes the Torah on the heart.

Sphere two: Aaronic priesthood, animal offerings, and the earthly sanctuary become obsolete because of Yeshua’s blood. He keeps the Law. He retires to the engine room.

His wife, Tina, is Jewish on her father’s side. The conference language is “Jewish eyes,” thematic analysis, and chiastic outlines. The destination is still a first-century death that initiates Jeremiah 31.

Rabbi Tovia Singer will not grant that court. Hebrews changes baalti bam — “I was a husband to them” — into “I disregarded them,” then announces that what is old vanishes. That is not peshat. That is a Greek note treated as the lab notebook.

Tony is a chemist. He knows primary data. Jeremiah in Hebrew is the notebook. Hebrews is a later student’s paraphrase with one verb flipped. October 7 has more data in the same notebook. You do not publish the paraphrase and call it the reaction.

Honey From The Rock

He made him ride on the high places of the earth, and he ate the produce of the field; He made him suck honey from the rock, and oil from the flinty stone. (Deuteronomy 32:13)

Honey from a rock is not a metaphor for a Gentile who found the Jewish Bible and now lectures Judah on what vanishing means. It is Israel’s odd food: sweetness where there should be none. A people pulled from flint. A priestly marker that survives the Inquisition. A city the nations cannot put down.

If your gospel needs the rock to be obsolete so the honey can be Jesus, you are not eating what Moses served. You are selling a different jar.

I came home without that jar. That is what Tony heard. His answer — “we the nations know just as much as the Jews” — is the oldest Ephraim temptation in the book: we have the words; therefore, we have the birthright.

Hosea already named the other side of that sentence. Ephraim mixed himself among the peoples. Then he is called “not My people,” and then, in the same prophet, “sons of the living God.” The repair is a return, not a claim of equal authorship.

Does your story match your DNA?

The Christian Bible says you are Abraham’s children by faith. Genesis says Abraham’s covenant line runs through Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob, in bodies, in a land, with a sign in the flesh. Those are not the same sentence. Everyone has a connection with Hashem.

There is no need for anyone to become Jewish unless you see the One True God, the God Who took you out of the land of Egypt. Everyone else is family returning to the Torah. Our Cousins. The other chosen nations that stand for Hashem.

Hashem Left a Measurable Trail.

All human Y-DNA, in the model I use from Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced, collapses toward three fathers — Noah’s three sons — on a timescale that does not need deep-time mythology.

Abraham’s paternal signature does not appear in “every nation that believes.” It appears in specific branches: Isaac through Jacob, Ishmael through Hagar, and the sons of Keturah.

Only two people on earth stand up in public and say: we are Abraham’s seed in the body. Jews through Sarah. Arabs through Hagar. Not “spiritual Israel.” Not a conference badge. Blood.

Christianity and Islam both claim Abraham and then detach the claim from the family that actually carries the Torah and the Land. That is why I called them two sides of the same coin.

The Blueprint does not run through a broken paternal chain that lists God as a man’s father. If that chain is broken, it is not Abraham’s.

The Family Israel

My family is not a metaphor. I discovered I was Jewish at thirty-five. Sephardic names — Diaz, Lucero, Trujillo, Almanzar, Ramirez — hidden after 1492, whispered through Mexico and the Texas panhandle. In 2001, a bat kol told me to live as a Jew.

In January 2017, my uncle Yosef Diaz’s FamilyTreeDNA Big Y-700 came back as J-FT235823, within the Cohen Modal Haplotype, with a parent line branching in the late First Temple Levant. The dashboard shows the Cohen badge. Grandfather Luz Diaz. Uncles. Male descendants. Priestly continuity on more than one side of the house. From Judea to adobe to Amarillo.

Aaron’s Sons The Cohen

That is honey from a rock. Not because DNA is the covenant — halakhah is the mother and the commandments — but because the Blueprint did not vanish when the Church said the first covenant grew old.

A Cohen marker that still matches Aaron’s window is what sphere two cannot explain. Jeremiah 33 said the Levites would not lack a man. My uncles are not that man at an altar. They are the receipt that the line was not a shadow ready to vanish.

Does DNA prove your covenant? It cannot baptize a Gentile into Judah. Anyone can falsify the claim that Abraham is now a mood. It can show who was hidden and who came home. It can ask Tony a chemist’s question: if the Torah is your foundation, why is the priestly Y-chromosome still ticking in families that left Jesus on the table?

The Rings Are Rising. The Center Is Not Signed

Jeremiah 30–33 is not a jumble. It is a booklet.

A Judah’s land and cities speak again

  B     Both houses sown

    C     New covenant: My Torah on their heart

  B’    Sun and moon: Israel will not cease

A’ Jerusalem rebuilt, not uprooted

Jacob’s trouble sits in front (30:7). David and the Levites sit behind (33:14–26).

A and A’ are moving in real time: 1948, 1967, a city the world cannot drop. B and B’: Judah planted; the nation not erased. Ephraim still the open verse. C is not done. No honest checklist says every Israelite knows Hashem without a teacher.

The Rabbis Speak: Jeremiah, Zechariah, Moses

Zechariah 12 is the next panel. Jerusalem is a burdensome stone (12:3). The tents of Judah first (12:7). Then the land mourns as for a firstborn, family by family (12:10–14).

7 October 2023 — Simchat Torah 5784 — is that mourning. Singer has said it in plain speech: Zechariah 12 is end-time, after the return, after Jewish Jerusalem, then the trauma. Not a crucifixion ripped from verse 10. A nation that had been tearing itself apart stood in one hesped. That is Mashiach ben Yosef weather. It is not Jeremiah 31:33 completed.

Glazer’s codes cluster “seventh of October,” Iran, Hamas, the morning after Hoshana Rabbah. Kessin puts the hostages and Persia on a last-war clock. Palvanov reads Sukkot and Chanukah as redemption architecture, not children’s play.

Leff will not let Jews get comfortable in a sweet exile while the world lines up at the stone. Tatz will not sell a date; he will sell emunah when the Name is hidden. Sokol handed the mic to men who, after that Shabbat, started reading the Nevi’im as if the ink were wet.

None of them — if they are reading Tanakh — get to cash C because A’ is under fire.

Judah and Ephraim, or Esau, I hated

Ezekiel 37 is not replacement theology. It is two sticks in one hand: Judah and the Israelites with him; Joseph, that is Ephraim, and the Israelites with him. One nation. One king. David. Sanctuary in the midst. That is the same consolation as Jeremiah 30–33.

Obadiah 18 puts the reunion in a furnace: house of Jacob a fire, house of Joseph a flame, house of Esau stubble.

Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? … yet I loved Jacob, and Esau I hated. (Malachi 1:2–3)

The Ten Sayings is the public repair of a family wound that starts in Genesis 27. A father’s incomplete blessing. A brother’s stolen name. Sinai’s words are not a new religion. They are the Blueprint spoken aloud, so brothers, stop treating blessing as zero-sum. Fohrman showed the architecture: the Ten Words are already living in Genesis.

My book Adam says the Tree of Life was in the midst from the start. Christianity never left the Garden because it needs the fall to be total and the Tree to be a man on a stick. The Torah says the path was guarded, not deleted. Proverbs 3:18 already named the Tree. Deuteronomy 32 already named the honey.

So here is the conference question, without poetry.

If “we the nations” means Ephraim — the lost house that must become a flame with Judah’s fire — then Ephraim’s job is to come home to the Torah Judah never stopped carrying, not to announce that Judah’s priesthood is sphere two. Kalev was Judah. Yehoshua was Ephraim. The two who told the truth about the Land were already a two-stick pair. The ten who said “we cannot” died in the sand.

If “we the nations” means we have equal say over Israel’s notebook, that sentence is Esau’s. Esau is the brother who treats the birthright like soup and the blessing as something you can take with a kiss, even though the dots over vayishakehu already marked it as false. Palvanov’s Edom work is the long version. Rome, then, a church that says the first covenant vanished, is that kiss at scale.

Tony, you can be a friend of Judah. You cannot be Judah’s co-author. You can keep kosher and still be standing on the wrong side if the price of your system is a vanished altar in a book that swears the opposite. Tina does not need your spheres to be a daughter of Israel. She needs Jeremiah in Hebrew and a people who will not trade her father’s line for a Melchizedek footnote.

What part of the New Covenant did Jesus initiate?

None of the signs Jeremiah gave.

• Not both houses under one Torah on the heart.
• Not “they shall all know Me.”
• Not Levites who never lack a man.
• Not a Jerusalem that is finished holy.

The Bible Is Speaking

What we have is A and A’ in motion, a stone the nations are lifting, a mourning that already happened family by family, and a Cohen badge on a ranch in Texas that sphere two cannot metabolize.

The brothers must come back together. Ezekiel 37. Two Sticks That is Ezekiel. The fire of Obadiah. That is the Ten Sayings of family medicine. That is Adam: one human family, three fathers after the Flood, one chosen house to guard the Tree so every family can live.

Ezekiel 37 Judah and Ephraim

Judah without Ephraim is a fire without a flame. Ephraim, without Judah, is a nation that knows “just as much” yet still cannot say the Shema without a Greek overlay. Together, they are the stick. Apart from that, the leftover name is the one God already used for the brother who would not let Jacob be Jacob.

Eat the honey from the rock. Match the story to the blood. Let the Blueprint, not Hebrews, tell you who Abraham’s children are.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah — Amarillo, Texas

beithashoavah.org

Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life  ·  The Ten Sayings

Checklist — so the center stays empty until it isn’t

Text	Sign	Now
Deut 32:13	Honey from the rock	Hidden Jews, Cohen lines, a people still here
Jer 30:7	Jacob’s trouble	Shoah; 7 Oct 2023
Jer 31:23–26 / 38–40	Land and Jerusalem	1948, 1967, the stone
Jer 31:27–30	Both houses sown	Judah, yes; Ephraim, the question
Jer 31:31–34	Torah on the heart; all know Him	Not yet
Jer 33:14–26	David and Levites	Not yet
Zech 12:3	Burdensome stone	Visible
Zech 12:10–14	Mourning as a firstborn	7 October 2023
Ezek 37	Two sticks, one nation	Commanded; not finished
Obad 18 / Mal 1:3	Joseph’s flame; Esau stubble	The fork in the road

FAQ

What did Tony Robinson mean by “we the nations”? He said it when he learned I had returned to Israel without Jesus. If he meant Ephraim, the prophets require Ephraim to join Judah, not to supervise Judah’s notebook. If he meant equal revelation, that is Esau’s claim.

Does Cohen DNA prove priesthood? It does not replace yichus and halakhah. It does show a Levantine priestly Y-line surviving expulsion and silence. That survival is the opposite of “ready to vanish.”

Are Christians Abraham’s children? Not the way Genesis measures children. Faith does not rewrite a paternal covenant or a land oath. The two public, bodily claims Abraham makes are Jews and Arabs.

Must Judah and Ephraim reunite? Ezekiel 37 says yes. Obadiah says the alternative is Esau as stubble. The Ten Sayings are how brothers stop treating blessings as theft.

PART II

Jeremiah’s A–B–C Rings

A ring is not a decoration. In Hebrew rhetoric, the middle is the load-bearing verse, and the outer members interpret each other. You cannot cash the center and throw away the wings. That is the argument against reading Jeremiah 31:31–34 as a stand-alone “new covenant” that retires the rest of Israel’s file. There are at least four nested rings. They all point at the same partners and the same unfinished signs.

The five-oracle ring (Jeremiah 31:23–40)

This is the A–B–C that matters most. After the poems of 30:5–31:22, the Masoretic text places five short salvation oracles.

Slot	Verses	Content
A	31:23–26	Judah’s land and cities speak blessings again. Farmers and flocks. Thirsty souls filled.
B	31:27–30	Both houses sown: Israel and Judah, seed of man and beast.
C	31:31–34	New covenant with both houses. Torah on the heart. All know Me.
B’	31:35–37	If sun and moon cease, Israel ceases. They cannot. Israel will not.
A’	31:38–40	Jerusalem rebuilt from Hananel to the Corner Gate. Not uprooted again.

A ↔ A’ — inhabited Judah / rebuilt Jerusalem. Land language on both ends.

B ↔ B’ — both houses planted / the nation that cannot be erased while creation holds.

C — the only place in Tanakh that uses the phrase berit chadashah. It sits in the middle on purpose.

Lundbom notes the glue: od (“again”) in 31:23 and lo od (“no longer”) in 31:34 form an inclusio. Continuity and discontinuity live in one envelope. The Torah is not replaced by another religion. The manner of knowing changes. The partners do not.

What the ring forbids: lifting C out as a first-century church document. If A and A’ are land and city, and B and B’ are both houses plus a nation that lasts as long as the sun, then C is written for those same houses in that same land. A completed C with an empty A’ is a broken chiasm.

The inner ring of C (31:31–34)

Days coming (v. 31). Not like the covenant of the Exodus day (v. 32) — baalti bam, “I was a husband to them,” in the Masoretic Text. This is the covenant: Torah in the inward parts; I am their God, they are My people (v. 33). They shall not teach… for they shall all know Me; I will forgive (v. 34).

The LXX reads the husband’s verb as “I disregarded them.” That single change is what Hebrews needs. The ring around C does not. A husband who writes Torah on the heart is not one who has discarded the marriage so that others could pick up the ketubah.

C’s partners are named twice: the house of Israel and the house of Judah (v. 31), then the house of Israel after those days (v. 33). “Israel” here is not a church title. It is the northern house returning into the same covenant as Judah — Ezekiel’s two sticks in prose.

The poem cycle in front of the ring (30:5–31:22)

Barbara Bozak’s map of the poetic core is six poems that alternate masculine and feminine address: Jacob’s trouble (m.), Zion’s incurable wound (f.), tents rebuilt (m.), virgin Israel and watchmen on Ephraim (f.), the returning procession (m.), Rachel weeping then Ephraim the dear son (f.).

Jacob’s trouble (30:7) is the first movement consolation must pass through. Rachel’s weeping (31:15) is the last poem before the five oracles. 31:22 — “The Lord has created a new thing: the female encompasses the gever” — sits on the seam labeled chadashah just before the berit chadashah.

The outer frame: chapters 30–33

30:1–3 is the title page: write these words: I will restore the fortunes of Israel and Judah; I will bring them back to the land I gave their fathers. Chapter 32 is the enacted sign: a field bought in Anathoth during the siege. Chapter 33 returns to the city, then tightens the oath: a Branch for David; Levites who shall not lack a man; if you can break day and night, then My covenant with David and with the Levites can be broken. It cannot.

33:17–26 is B’ written in institutional language. Sun and moon in 31:35–37 guarantee the nation. Day and night in 33:20–26 guarantee David and Levi. A reading that retires the priesthood must cut this page from the booklet.

The rule the rings teach

1. Partners stay named. Israel and Judah. Not nameless new people.
2. Land stays terrestrial. Cities, gates, towers, fields in jars.
3. Torah stays Torah. Written deeper, not replaced.
4. The center cannot be collected early. If C were finished, A’ would already be holy to the Lord, never uprooted, and chapter 33’s Levites would have a man.
5. Ephraim is inside the booklet. Watchmen on Samaria’s hills. Rachel. Both houses are sown. A “nations know as much as the Jews” claim that does not walk Ephraim back to Zion is standing outside the ring.

That is the literary answer to Tony’s spheres. The wings can move. Jerusalem can rise. The land can mourn as for a firstborn. The middle is still the middle.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Hashem of Israel, and the War Over Jerusalem

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo, Texas

Rosh Hashanah 5787  ·  13 September 2026

People keep saying Judaism and Christianity are two sides of the same coin.

They are not.

The original Blueprint is Torah. It was given in Hebrew to a people who stood at Sinai, in a language that behaves like chemistry—letters as elements, roots as compounds, speech that creates. Christianity took that Blueprint, translated it into Greek and Latin, and built a church. Islam took the memory of that Blueprint, declared the book in our hands corrupted, and built an ummah. Christianity and Islam both installed a later central figure. Both wrote a new scripture. Both taught that Israel’s covenant was finished.

Christianity and Islam are the two sides of the same coin.

They look different. They fail the same tests. And the war unfolding in front of our eyes—over Jerusalem—is what happens when two replacement systems meet a people and a city that refuse to stay replaced.

The Coin

One side keeps the text and changes the heir.

The Church becomes the “new Israel.” Sinai is fulfilled or set aside. The servant of Isaiah 53 becomes one man. Jerusalem becomes a symbol, a basilica, or a stage for someone else’s return. The Greeks gave that move its philosophy. Logos. Ousia. Hypostasis.

Latin gave it law and empire. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was recast in the language of Athens and Rome. The Filioque, the schism of 1054, fifty thousand denominations—that is not one faith guarding one Name. That is a divided kingdom arguing in borrowed tongues.

The other side preserves the history and discards the text’s reliability.

Islam says that the Torah was given to Musa. Then it says the scroll Jews still read is tahrif—distorted in meaning and later in the wording itself. The Qur’an tells the People of the Book to judge by what they have. Four centuries later, Ibn Hazm cataloged “errors” and blamed Ezra.

Popular teaching now is simple: your book cannot be trusted; ours corrects it. The qiblah turns away from Jerusalem. Abraham and Ishmael are sent to build a house a thousand miles from Moriah. The final community is not Jacob’s children. The Jewish state is not a dispute about borders. In the theology that feeds Hamas and Iran, it is din batel—a canceled religion that has no right to rise.

Different mint. Same metal.

Both claim Abraham. Islam and Christianity both step off the line through Sarah and Isaac the moment the land and the living Jews become inconvenient. Both say they honor the God who spoke in the Hebrew Bible. Neither submits to that God as He named Himself: the God of Israel.

How Far From Hashem

Hashem did not give a philosophy. He gave a people, a land, a language, and a book.

He hid the name Jerusalem in the Five Books on purpose. The word never appears in the Torah. Instead, Moshe keeps pointing: ha-makom asher yivchar Hashem—the place that Hashem will choose. Twenty times and more, mostly in Devarim.

The Tree of Life stood in the midst of the Garden. Tradition places the altar on that same cosmic center: the Foundation Stone, the navel of the world. Adam offered there. Abraham bound Isaac there. David bought the threshing floor there. The Name chose a hill and then waited until a king from Judah could stand on it.

A replaced person can be spiritualized. A replaced city cannot.

Measure the distance:

Covenant. Hashem binds Himself to Jacob’s line and does not repent of His gifts. The Church inherits Israel. The ummah cancels Israel.

Book. We still read the Hebrew. Christianity kept the pages and changed the key. Islam remembered the Torah and then taught that our pages are not that Torah.

Place. Zion. The church spiritualized it. The mosque redirected prayer away from it and built a rival center.

End of days. Isaiah and Micah: Torah goes forth from Zion; the word of Hashem from Jerusalem. Zechariah: Ten men from the nations take hold of a Jew’s garment. Survivors of the attack on Jerusalem go up for Sukkot. The coin says the opposite—Jews convert, Jews disappear, or Jewish sovereignty is a theological crime.

That is not a family quarrel about “fulfillment.” That is a different God-story wearing Israel’s vocabulary.

Language Is Not Neutral

The language you choose trains the mind that looks at the world.

Hebrew is verbal, historical, covenantal. Dabar is word and deed. Shalom is wholeness in motion. Letters carry weight, number, and form. The world is spoken into being. Hearing is the first commandment: Shema Yisrael.

Greek asks what a thing is. Latin asks who has jurisdiction. Those are powerful human instruments. They are not the language from above. When John writes “In the beginning was the Logos,” he performs a collision and a key change. When the Qur’an is recited as the final Arabic speech, it claims to close a book it never fully received.

You cannot get the God of Israel out of a system that will not stay in His language, on His mountain, with His witnesses.

Tahrif and Supersession Are Cousins

Christians do not need to call the Torah forged. They call it old.

Muslims do not need to keep our verses as canon. They call them altered.

The result for Israel is the same. The gift passed. The heir changed. The city is up for grabs.

Jay Smith is right about this much: the Qur’an feeds on midrash, Targum, and late Christian tales, then denies the integrity of the book it fed on. Our own work on the Septuagint is the Christian twin: translation became theology; theology became replacement. Neither system can afford a Jewish people who still have the original, still speak the Name, and still live in the place the Torah pointed at without naming.

If they believed the Tanakh on its own terms—I will bless those who bless you; to your seed I will give this land; you are My witnesses—they would not spend centuries trying to get rid of us, convert us out of existence, or explain why our return is a problem to be solved.

A handful do believe it. Size is not faithfulness. Two and a half billion Christians, two billion Muslims, fifty thousand church letterheads—and fifteen million Jews who can measure, in their own bones, how few have read the book they say they inherited.

The War Before Our Eyes

On October 7, 2023, the coin showed its face.

This is not the first border war. It is a war over whether the God of Israel still has a people and a city. The sermons that call a Jewish capital on that mountain illegitimate are not “politics.” They are tahrif with rockets. The blood-libel language recycled on Western streets is not “critique.” It is the old church accusation in new clothes. Iran’s proxies, the UN theater, the churches that cannot say “Israel” without a lecture, the mosques that cannot say “Jerusalem” without erasing Zion—these are two sides of one refusal.

Zechariah did not describe a metaphor. He described nations gathered against Jerusalem, and then survivors were required to go up and keep Sukkot. Isaiah did not describe a church. He said: For Zion’s sake I will not be still, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest.

We are watching men try to keep a counterfeit in circulation after the witness people came home.

1948 should have ended the Christian chart that said Jews would never be a nation again. 1967 should have ended the claim that Jerusalem would stay under Gentile rule forever. The years since October 7 should have ended the fantasy that this is about settlements. It is about the Name.

Hashem hid Jerusalem in the Torah so that when the city rose again, no one could say Moshe forgot to mention it. Hashem pointed. He waited. He brought us back. The nations are doing what the prophets said nations do when the place He chose becomes visible again.

The Blueprint Has Not Moved

Adam received a charge. Noah received a world. Abraham received a line. Sinai received a nation. The Tree of Life was never a metaphor for a church or a final prophet. It is the unchanging Blueprint for humanity—and Israel was chosen to guard it for the sake of every family on earth, not instead of them.

We are one human family in DNA. We are not one covenant. The distinction is already in Rebecca’s womb: two nations, two paths. The path that carries the Name runs through Isaac, Jacob, Zion, and the book we still open in Hebrew.

Christianity never left the Garden in one sense. It built a system on a different reading of the first chapters and then claimed the original had been replaced. Islam took another road of replacement. Both stand outside the reality that the Jewish people still possess the Book handed down from those who heard the words of Hashem.

No later claim erases Sinai.

What We Are Asking

We are not asking the nations to become Jews. The Torah already gave the children of Noah their seven. We are asking them to stop minting the coin.

Stop teaching that Israel is a closed chapter. Please stop teaching that our book is forged. Stop treating Jerusalem as anyone’s prize except the One who chose it. Bless the people He named. Come to the mountain He pointed at. Learn the language He spoke.

For out of Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of Hashem from Jerusalem.

The war you are watching is not proof that the covenant failed. It is proof that two civilizations built on replacement cannot tolerate a people and a city that refuse to stay replaced.

Hashem of Israel is still the God of Israel.

The coin is counterfeit.

Zion is not.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah

Amarillo, Texas

Scripture to sit with: Isaiah 2:3; Isaiah 43:10; Isaiah 62:1; Micah 4:2; Zechariah 8:23; Zechariah 14:16–19; Deuteronomy 12 (the place He will choose); Genesis 17. Romans is not the end of this story. The prophets are.

The Torah does not begin with a sentence. It begins with a hinge.

English readers are handed a clean, finished line: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Hebrew readers are handed a letter that is closed on three sides and open only forward, a noun that refuses to stand alone, and two stories whose first three verses cannot be understood except as one another’s missing half.

engediresourcecenter.com

Not Quite the Beginning – En-Gedi Resource Center

That is the claim of our sages, and it is the claim of the grammar itself. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of Bereishit are not two drafts left in the same folder by accident. They are a blueprint that generates infinite meaning precisely because every letter is load-bearing. Remove one, and the house of creation does not stand.

This is an English lesson from Hebrew. And it is a lesson in how to see the Writer’s fingerprint.

The first three verses of the first story

Genesis 1:1–3

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ
וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם
וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר

When God began creating the heavens and the earth — the earth being tohu and vohu, with darkness over the face of the deep, and the spirit of Elohim hovering over the face of the waters — Elohim said: Let there be light. And there was light.

Notice what English usually hides.

Rashi’s first grammatical observation is not midrash. It is syntax. The word reshit in the Tanakh is almost always in the construct state — “the beginning of something.” It does not like to stand alone as “In the beginning.” Read as a construct, verse 1 is not the main clause. It is the temporal frame. The first completed divine speech — the first sentence — arrives only in verse 3.

Verse 1 names the objects: heavens and earth. Elohim is the subject. Creation is an act of a Master Builder who speaks structure into existence. Verse 2 names the problem: watery chaos, formlessness, darkness over the deep. Verse 3 names the first solution: light that divides. The whole first account will proceed by separation — light from dark, waters from waters, land from sea, day from night.

Elohim is the Name of judgment, of measured power, of “God saw that it was good.” A builder evaluates. If it is not good, it does not stand.

The first three verses of the second story

Genesis 2:4–6

אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם
בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶרֶץ וְשָׁמָיִם
וְכֹל שִׂיחַ הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ וְכָל־עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִצְמָח
כִּי לֹא הִמְטִיר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים עַל־הָאָרֶץ וְאָדָם אַיִן לַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה
וְאֵד יַעֲלֶה מִן־הָאָרֶץ וְהִשְׁקָה אֶת־כָּל־פְּנֵי הָאֲדָמָה

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that Hashem Elohim made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub of the field was yet on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for Hashem Elohim had not caused rain upon the earth, and there was no human to work the ground. And a mist would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground.

The grammar has flipped.

Heaven and earth are no longer the objects of a verb. They are the parents. Toledot comes from yalad — to give birth. “These are the begettings of the heavens and the earth.” The cosmos is now the subject that generates. God is present as facilitator: Hashem Elohim, the compassionate Name joined to the judging Name.

And the problem is the exact inverse of chapter 1.

Chapter 1: too much water, too much darkness, no structure, a world that cannot stand.
Chapter 2: no rain, a parched field under unrelieved light, no human to till, a world that cannot grow.

Chapter 1 solves chaos by dividing.
Chapter 2 solves barrenness by uniting — a mist rises, heaven’s water and earth’s dust meet, and only then can life be formed from the ground.

Rabbi David Fohrman has spent years showing that these are not rival drafts. They are two faces of one act, nested like Russian dolls. You cannot imagine one without the other. The second story is what happens inside the first story’s sixth day, and the first story is the architecture that makes the second story’s garden possible. The “disharmony” that source critics treat as evidence of multiple authors is, on close reading, a designed inversion.

That is the Rabbi’s grammar: not “reconcile the contradictions,” but see the hinge. The texts know each other.

An English lesson from Hebrew

English likes finished subjects and finished verbs. “God created.” Done.

Hebrew in these verses is doing something more dangerous.

1. Construct state. Bereshit wants a partner. Rashi: There is no reshit in Scripture that is not bound to what follows it. The opening of the Torah is grammatically incomplete until you keep reading. Creation is not a closed event in the past tense. It is “in the beginning of God’s creating…” — a process whose first speech act is light.
2. The flip of subject and object. In 1:1, heaven and earth receive the accusative marker et. They are made. In 2:4, they beget. The same two nouns change grammatical roles. That is not sloppy editing. That is theology written as syntax: the created world is invited to become a co-creator. Rain from heaven, mist from earth, human from dust — generation, not only fabrication.
3. The small letter. In a Torah scroll, the heh of behibaram — “when they were created” — is written small. The sages hear worlds that were created and destroyed before this one, or the name of Abraham hidden in the letters of creation itself. A diminished letter is not a typo. It is a door.
4. Two Names. Elohim builds and judges. Hashem (the four-letter Name) is the Name of mercy, of presence that makes growth possible — related, the sages note, to rechem, womb. The second story needs both Names together because organic life requires both structure and compassion. One Name could not tell the whole story. Neither could one chapter.

English translations that flatten 1:1 into a standalone past-tense sentence and that treat chapter 2 as a “second, basic folk tale” have already lost the lesson. The Hebrew teaches you that meaning lies in the relationships among letters, words, and chapters.

Each letter depends on the others

The sages say the world was created with the letter bet. Why not aleph? Because the bet is closed above, below, and behind — you may not inquire what is above, what is below, what was before. It is open only toward the future, toward the next letter, toward the story that must still be read.

That is not anti-intellectual. It is a theory of reading. The first letter of the Torah already tells you that no letter is self-sufficient. Bet needs resh, aleph, shin, yud, and tav to become Bereshit. And Bereshit needs the rest of the verse, and the verse needs verse 2, and chapter 1 needs chapter 2, and Genesis needs the rest of Torah.

The Vilna Gaon could find the law of redeeming the firstborn encoded in the letters of the first word. That is not a parlor trick. It is the claim that the blueprint is fractal: the whole is in the part, and the part is unintelligible without the whole.

Infinite meanings are not a license to say whatever we wish. They are the opposite. Because the letters are interdependent, every new meaning must still fit the other letters. Midrash that ignores grammar is not the sages’ method. The sages’ method is to press the grammar until it yields another coherent story — and then another — without snapping the first story.

PaRDeS is not four disconnected layers. It is one text generating four depths because the letters were written to bear that weight.

The Writer’s fingerprint

Modern criticism looked at two Names, two orders of creation, two tones — cosmic liturgy versus intimate garden — and concluded: two authors, later glued by a redactor who did not mind the seams.

Look again at the first three verses of each story.

• Problem in 1: excess water, darkness, no form.
• Problem in 2: no water, unrelieved exposure, no growth.
• Solution in 1: speech that separates.
• Solution in 2: mist that unites.
• God in 1: Elohim the Builder, evaluating.
• God in 2: Hashem Elohim the Facilitator, causing rain, forming from dust, breathing.
• Heaven and earth in 1: objects.
• Heaven and earth in 2: parents.

That is not a seam. That is a chiasm of worlds. A redactor stitching scraps does not invert the physics of the problem and then invert the grammar of the nouns. A single intelligence that wants you to hold transcendence and immanence at once does.

The fingerprint is the interdependence. Judah’s story in Genesis 38 is woven into Joseph’s story in 37 with the same verbs of recognition and the same lost garment used as false evidence. The flood is written as a controlled return to tohu and a re-creation, with ruach Elohim again over the waters. Sabbath language returns in the rainbow. These are not coincidences piled up by chance. They are the same hand.

Michelangelo painted the gap between two fingers. The Torah writes the gap between two chapters and then refuses to let you close either one.

The garden needs the architecture of the six days. The six days need a creature who can till and keep. Structure without rain is a desert. Rain without structure is the deep. The Writer knew both.

How the sages insist we read

We do not read chapter 1 “scientifically” and chapter 2 “mythically.” We read both through the lens that the letters themselves demand: as a unified blueprint whose surface already contains its depths.

The sages are not adding meaning from outside. They are following the dependencies that the text installed.

• Why start with creation rather than the first commandment? Because the nations will one day say, “You are thieves.” The opening chapters are the deed to the world. (Rashi, citing Rabbi Yitzchak.)
• Why bet? To teach the direction of inquiry.
• Why two Names? Because justice without mercy cannot sustain a world, and mercy without justice cannot order one.
• Why toledot of heaven and earth? Because the cosmos is not a finished object. It is a lineage. You and I are in the generations of that first mist.

Tohu vavohu is not only primordial soup. It is any life that has form without purpose, or purpose without form. The mist that rises is not only hydrology. It is the meeting of what is above and what is below that makes a human possible.

philipcox.substack.com

Tohu vaVohu – by Philip Cox – The Inside Job

Read one chapter without the other, and you get a half-god: either a distant Engineer or a local Gardener. Read them as the sages and as the grammar require — each letter leaning on the next — and you get the paradox the Shema will later name: Hashem is our Elohim. Hashem is One.

That is the genius. Not that the text is pretty. That the text is so tightly designed that the only way to “solve” its tensions is to become a better reader — and a more whole human being.

The first three verses of each story are not two openings. They are one sentence, spoken in two registers, waiting for a reader who will not put the book down after verse 3.

Keep reading. The next letter is already holding this one up.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Noach, the greatest prophet of his generation, stands at the hinge of worlds: the last king-sage of an antediluvian city whose ruins still speak, the builder whose vessel preserved life, and the survivor who carried the memory of a single human family that once spoke one language and knew Hashem.

This essay draws the thread from the Sumerian tablets of Shuruppak through the excavations of the last century, the Zohar’s cosmic Shemitahs, the work around Lake Van and the mountains of Ararat, and the growing Noahide movement.

It is offered as research for the rewriting of Adam, the Blueprint of Creation, and the Tree of Life, and as a backstory that can move that movement: the original tradition is not a late invention.

The books of every college would have to be rewritten if the Jew is true—just as New Mexico footprints and Folsom points forced American prehistory textbooks to change when the evidence would no longer fit the old short timeline.

The Cosmic Calendar Only Torah Explains

The Talmud (Chagigah 13b–14a; Shabbat 88b) records 974 generations before Adam. Psalm 105:8 speaks of the word commanded to a thousand generations; twenty-six generations from Adam to Moses leave 974. These are not metaphors. Combined with the Zohar and later kabbalists (Rabbeinu Bechaye, Tiferet Yisrael), they sit inside the doctrine of Cosmic Shemitahs: seven cycles of 7,000 years totaling 49,000 years, after which a cosmic Jubilee returns the world to tohu va-vohu.

No other religion provides a coherent account of tens of thousands of years of human (and pre-Adamic) history while preserving moral agency, covenant, and a single Creator. Earlier cycles were more sophisticated; each subsequent generation, from the height of Adam, grew dimmer in perception even as technical skill sometimes increased. The flood generation was the nadir of that decline. Noah was “righteous in his generations”—the greatest prophet of that generation precisely because the rest had forgotten.

That framework is why the same flood memory appears on every continent. Humanity once shared a single language and a single knowledge of Hashem. After the waters receded, only those who stepped off the ark could tell what the world had been like before. The stories that survived—Ziusudra, Utnapishtim, Atrahasis, Noah—are not independent inventions. They are the testimony of the remnant.

Shuruppak: A Real City, a Real King, a Real Inundation

The Sumerian King List names five antediluvian cities. The last is Shuruppak (modern Tell Fara / Fara in southern Iraq). Its final king before “the flood swept over” is Ubara-Tutu; his son is Ziusudra (“life of long days”), the figure later called Utnapishtim (“he found life”) and Atrahasis (“exceedingly wise”). The Instructions of Shuruppak, one of the oldest wisdom texts, is addressed by the father to his son.

In 1931, Erich Schmidt directed a joint excavation by the American Schools of Research and the University of Pennsylvania at Fara. They reached the ruins after cutting through roughly 45 feet of overburden in places. Between the Jemdet Nasr (Fara I) and Early Dynastic (Fara II) levels, they found an inundation deposit. Schmidt wrote that the biblical flood story

“seems to be based on a very real event or a series of such, as suggested by the existence at Ur, at Kish, and now at Fara, of inundation deposits, which accumulated on top of human inhabitation.”

He added that “the Noah story” may symbolize the survival of Sumerian culture after that break.

Samuel Noah Kramer, the epigraphist on that season and later the great Sumerologist, returned to the same evidence. He noted that Ziusudra was already a venerable literary figure by the mid-third millennium BCE and that the flood motif was too central to be “nothing more than a total fabrication of fancy and fantasy.”

Noach’s Sons Have The Story

Kramer concluded, following Max Mallowan’s “Noah’s Flood Reconsidered,” that the Mesopotamian story and the Genesis version based on it were inspired by an actual catastrophic (if not worldwide) disaster whose traces remain at Kish and Shuruppak around 3000 BCE.

These are not the quotes that dominate introductory textbooks. Textbooks prefer to treat the flood as “myth borrowed during the Babylonian exile.” They rarely linger on the fact that the city named in the oldest tablets was excavated, that a sterile silt layer sits exactly where the texts place the catastrophe, and that the excavators themselves connected the dirt to the Bible.

The History Books Would Have to Be Rewritten

Adelheid Otto of LMU Munich, who has returned to Fara with geophysical survey and new soundings, states the obvious that earlier teams already saw: Shuruppak is “the city where, according to various cuneiform texts, the flood took place, and the king of Shuruppak named Ziusudra built this ship and thereby saved humanity.”

She notes the thick layers of inundation found by earlier excavators and the city’s uniquely watery setting. A simultaneous surge of the Tigris and Euphrates, combined with blocking southerly winds, could inundate all of southern Mesopotamia.

The plans to save the world were completed because a righteous man received the warning, tore down his house, built the vessel to specification (gopher wood, rooms, pitch inside and out, three decks, dimensions given in cubits), gathered the seed of life, and shut the door when Hashem shut it.

One Language and One Place: The Stories Match

The Atrahasis and Gilgamesh versions preserve the same engineering logic: roof it like the Apsu so the sun cannot see inside; make the tackle strong; use bitumen. Divine command, coupled with human obedience, produced the only structure that rode out the storm. After seven days, the waters stilled; a window was opened; birds were sent; sacrifice was offered. The survivor then told the story of the world that had existed before.

The Mountains of Ararat and the Work at Lake Van

Genesis says the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. That region is eastern Turkey, around Lake Van (the “Lake Vaughn” of current fieldwork) and the volcanic massifs that include Tendürek and Ararat itself.

Matthew LaCroix and collaborating archaeologists and geologists (including Robert Schoch) have documented megalithic ruins both on land (Ayanis, Kef Kalesi) and underwater. The submerged structures lie 75–85 feet down—the deepest confirmed megalithic ruins yet identified.

Lake-level reconstructions and the last major eruption of the adjacent volcano place those ruins before the lake reached its present height, consistent with a Younger Dryas or earlier date. The stonework shows the same precision, tool signatures, and sacred geometry (including six-spoke Flower of Life motifs) found at Göbekli Tepe, Puma Punku, and other “impossible” sites. Mainstream dating assigns the visible Urartian layer to the first millennium BCE; the deeper architecture does not fit that layer.

What Our Mother Earth Says: I Call Heaven and Earth to Witness

A few dozen miles away, the boat-shaped Durupınar formation has been mapped for decades. Recent soil chemistry and ground-penetrating radar (Noah’s Ark Scans team working with Turkish archaeologists, including Prof. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University, plus specialized radar originally developed for U.S. defense) show statistically large differences inside versus outside the outline:

Three times the organic matter, elevated potassium consistent with wood ash, an eight-fold pH shift, 40 percent higher carbon, and right-angled anomalies and possible deck-like layering at depths matching a three-deck vessel whose length is given in Genesis as 300 cubits. Atila has said the current data increase the likelihood that the formation is the ark “with each passing day.”

These are not proofs that close every debate. They are the kind of converging physical traces that, in any other field, would force a rewrite of the chapter. Hashem’s handiwork is visible in the preservation: a silt layer at the exact city named in the oldest tablets, a boat-shaped anomaly whose internal chemistry differs from the surrounding mountainside, underwater megaliths that should not exist at that depth if the conventional timeline is complete.

One Language, One Memory, One Argument

Flood narratives exist from Mesopotamia to the Americas, from China to Australia. They share a chosen survivor, a vessel, animals, birds, a mountain landing, and a sacrifice. That distribution is what one would expect if a single catastrophe were remembered by the descendants of a single family who later scattered after Babel, when the one language was confused.

Only the people who lived through the event and walked off the vessel could have described the antediluvian cities, the moral collapse, and the precise instructions for the boat.

Matthew LaCroix makes the same case to Christian and Muslim audiences that this research makes to the Noahide world: the Hebrew account is not a late derivative. It is the distilled, covenantal version of a memory that is older than the tablets we have recovered. If that is so, then the standard college narrative—civilization begins in the fourth millennium, the Bible is myth assembled in exile, deep time belongs only to geology and not to Torah—cannot stand.

New Mexico: Close To Home

The New Mexico footprints at White Sands (dated 21,000–23,000 years ago) and the Folsom points, which first proved that humans hunted Ice Age megafauna, already forced American prehistory textbooks to be rewritten. The same intellectual honesty applied to Shuruppak, the Shemitah cycles, and the Ararat evidence would be required of world-history and comparative-religion textbooks.

The Noahide movement, growing worldwide, is not inventing a new religion. It is recovering the seven laws given to the children of Noah—the remnant who stepped onto dry ground and were told that the rainbow is the sign that the world would not be destroyed that way again.

The Greatest Prophet That Saved The Underworld

The greatest prophet of his generation built the vessel, completed the plan, survived, and told the story. The dirt at Fara, the chemistry at Durupınar, the stones under Lake Van, and the Zohar’s 49,000-year calendar are the data that challenge the critics. The original Blueprint remains.

The physical traces now being mapped in the mountains of Ararat add a second, independent line of evidence that the Torah recorded real history rather than later myth. Genesis 8:4 does not say the ark landed on the single peak of Ağrı Dağı. It says it came to rest “on the mountains of Ararat”—the highland region of ancient Urartu in eastern Turkey.

That is exactly where two clusters of remains have been studied: a high-altitude wooden structure on the mountain itself and the boat-shaped Durupınar formation in the foothills a few miles south.

The Durupınar Formation: Dimensions, Chemistry, and Radar

In 1959, a Turkish army captain spotted a 157-meter (515-foot) boat-shaped ridge on aerial photographs. That length corresponds to 300 royal Egyptian cubits—the exact figure given in Genesis 6:15. The width-to-length ratio also falls within the biblical proportions. The site sits at roughly 1,920 meters elevation in the foothills, well within the “mountains of Ararat.”

Recent work by Noah’s Ark Scans, working with Turkish archaeologists under Prof. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University and using specialized radar originally developed for U.S. defense applications, has produced the most detailed subsurface picture yet. Ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography show right-angled anomalies, a central corridor, and layered features consistent with three decks—the number specified in Genesis 6:16.

The Soil

Soil samples taken from inside the outline versus immediately outside it show statistically large differences: approximately three times the organic matter, 38–40 percent more potassium (associated with wood ash), an eight-fold pH shift, and higher carbon.

Andrew Jones of the scans team called the internal-versus-external contrast “statistically staggering” and “the most compelling evidence for an oral tradition origin.” Atila has stated that the accumulating data raises the probability that the formation is the ark “with each passing day.”

These are not the kinds of results that appear in standard textbooks. They are the kind of converging physical signatures—geometry matching the cubit specification, internal architecture matching three decks, and a closed chemical system consistent with decayed timber—that would force a rewrite if they belonged to any other ancient vessel.

The High-Altitude Wooden Structure and the 2009 NAMI Expedition

A second body of evidence comes from higher up on the mountain itself. In 2009, the Hong Kong-based Noah’s Ark Ministries International (NAMI) team documented a large wooden structure at approximately 4,100 meters (13,500 feet), exposed in ice and rock.

Footage shows compartments, sloping floors, support beams, openings, and boards joined in a manner consistent with heavy timber construction.

A black, shiny coating on some surfaces was identified as pitch—the material Genesis 6:14 commands Noah to use “inside and out.” The team dated the wood to roughly 4,800 years. Later visitors, including an American researcher in 2014, reported a second deck.

The Building Pattern Matches The Torah

Randall W. Younker, professor of archaeology, initially skeptical, examined the images and reports from people who had been on site and concluded: “I am convinced it is not a recent fraud or fake—it has been up there for some time—so it is a legitimate archaeological site. As such, it deserves a careful study.”

Gilbert H. Grosvenor, long-time editor of National Geographic, had already written that if the ark were ever found, it would be “the greatest archaeological discovery in history \ldots and it will alter all the currents of scientific thought.”

Mainstream academic literature treats both sites with extreme caution and often dismisses them. That is expected: accepting either would require rewriting the chapters that presently treat the flood as a local Mesopotamian memory later inflated into a universal myth.

The Torah’s recording, however, is precise on the points that can still be checked: the landing region (mountains of Ararat, not a single summit), the dimensions in cubits, the three decks, the use of pitch, and the fact that only a survivor who had lived through the event could have transmitted those details.

Why Only a Survivor Could Have Told It

The pre-flood world of Shuruppak, the moral collapse, the exact building instructions, and the landing place in the highlands of Ararat could not have been invented centuries later by people who had never seen the vessel. Someone who walked off the ark onto dry ground in that region told the story.

That story was preserved in the Hebrew record with a fidelity that later cuneiform versions (Ziusudra, Utnapishtim) echo but do not surpass in covenantal and dimensional detail. The same memory appears, in broken form, on every inhabited continent because the remnant who left the ark were the ancestors of all subsequent nations—and they once spoke one language and knew Hashem.

The work at Lake Van (megalithic ruins at depths inconsistent with the later Urartian layer), the silt at Shuruppak, the chemistry and radar at Durupınar, and the high-altitude timber on Ararat itself are not isolated curiosities. Together they form a chain that begins in the oldest Sumerian tablets, passes through the Torah’s exact specifications, and ends in the ground of eastern Turkey.

That chain is the handiwork of Hashem and the reason the books of every college would have to be rewritten if the Jewish recording of history is allowed to stand. The Noahide movement, growing across the world,d is recovering the laws given to the children of that remnant. The ark that saved them is still, in fragments and chemical signatures, where the Torah said it would be.

Hazan Gaviel ben David

• How Christianity Took Jewish Roots
• Deuteronomy’s Covenant for America: Torah Blueprint, Rabbi Glazerson Codes, Gog Magog & 250th Anniversary
• Creating a Vessel of Worship: The Midbar of Silence, the Question of Justice, and the Song of the New Generation
• Milestone 19: The Lord Descending in Power upon Sinai on the Third Day
• A Dialogue on the Noahide Laws: Understanding the Seven Laws of Noah in Judaism

A Response to Rabbi Efraim Palvanov

Rabbi Efraim Palvanov’s lecture, Jesus in the Talmud, was given in good faith to Christians at the Villa Maria Education and Spirituality Center. He opened books; many churches only meet as internet weapons. That matters. The Talmud is a sea of Jewish wisdom. I learn from Palvanov on Edom, on history, on the long memory of Jacob’s twin.¹

This essay exists for a different reason.

If a Christian walks out of that room still clutching a list of “365 prophecies Jesus fulfilled,” we have not started at the beginning. That list is not in our Bible. It is a later inventory laid over the Tanakh. Biblical faith, if the word biblical means the book Israel received, does not begin with a man who dies for someone else’s sins. It begins in a garden with two trees, and it returns in Moses’ last speech: life and death, good and evil, set before you today.²

The Talmud is great. How well do you know your Bible?

Why I Am Writing This

I write as a chazan who has spent years in rooms with pastors and as a Jew who once lived inside the church’s reading of “our” book. The site I keep, beithashoavah.org, is built on one claim: we are one human family, fractured since the brothers of Genesis, and the Tree of Life was never replaced by a cross.³

Palvanov’s class asked Christians to hear Jewish sources. I am asking Jews and Christians the harder question first. Before we debate Yeshu in Gittin or Sanhedrin, can we read Genesis 2–3 and Deuteronomy 30 without importing a second plot?

That is the reason for this essay. Interfaith speech that starts in the Talmud will be clipped. An interfaith speech that starts in the Garden has to address the text.

Pros and Cons of the Palvanov Lecture

Pros. He did not hide Gittin 56b–57a. Palanov showed that the same sugya has Yeshu telling Onkelos to seek Israel’s welfare. He put Messiah, son of Joseph, the leper at Rome’s gate, and the Temple signs forty years before 70 CE on the table, rather than leaving them to hostile channels. He treated Christians as adults who could hear a Jewish voice. For an audience raised on “the Talmud says Jesus boils in excrement,” that correction is a public service.

Cons. Coded Balaam-as-Jesus readings and “Christian-sounding” Talmud lines become missionary clips the next morning. Chronology is soft: Yehoshua ben Perachiah is a century early. The venue’s goal — to help Christians learn about Jews — can blur into “the rabbis almost agreed with us.” Most of all, the lecture cannot carry the load Christians actually bring: a claim that Tanakh already announced a dying-and-rising God-man hundreds of times. If that claim is false, the Talmud debate is a side room.

Tovia Singer’s caution belongs here. Missionaries who say they do not believe the Talmud still quote it when it helps. Manis Friedman’s caution belongs here too. You may explain the difference without pretending that the two covenants are one. Palvanov sits between them. This essay chooses Singer’s starting gate and Friedman’s plain speech: serve the Father’s written word.⁴

The 365 Prophecies Are Not in Our Bible

Popular Christian apologetics still repeats that Jesus fulfilled 365, or 300, or “every” messianic prophecy. Search the Tanakh for that catalog. It is not there. What you find are specific promises about a king from David, ingathering, peace among nations, a rebuilt House, knowledge of Hashem covering the earth as water covers the sea. Those have not arrived. That is why Jews say the Messiah has not come. It is not stubbornness. It is literacy.⁵

A substitute death that pays the moral debt of the world is not the plot of Eden, not the plot of Leviticus (where a person brings his own offering and returns), and not the plot of the prophets (where Hashem says return and live). Ezekiel 18 is blunt: the soul that sins shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. Isaiah 53 is a debate we can have — Israel as servant, a righteous sufferer, later midrash — but it is not a license to rewrite Genesis.⁶

If the Bible is true, start where it starts.

The Garden: Answer Fohrman’s Three Questions

Rabbi David Fohrman, in A Book Like No Other, Eden, will not let the story stay a lullaby. He asks the questions a child would ask.⁷

First: Why a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Those ideas have nothing obvious to do with trees or with each other. What is each tree for?

They are not two snack options. There are two ways of being human. The Tree of Life is life received from the Giver — relationship, trust, remaining in the Father’s definition of good. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the ability to name good and evil from ourselves. The Torah later calls wisdom a tree of life to those who take hold of her.⁸ After the path is guarded, Sinai is not Plan B. It is the same Tree in a form that a nation can walk.

Second: What is the function of each tree? If they may eat of every tree but one, they already have life. Why plant a Tree of Life in the middle and later treat it like an emergency? Why would God withhold the knowledge of good and evil if “do not eat” already required knowing that a command can be broken?

The Only Verse That Promises Eternal Life

Adam was not a statue. He already knew enough to hear a command. What he did not have — and was not to seize — was the right to author good and evil. The Tree of Life was not extra decoration. Eternal life in Genesis 3:22 is attached to eating from that Tree, not to a later human sacrifice. In Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I argue Adam was never automatically immortal. Life was given and had to be chosen. The cherubim guard a path, not a hole in the ground where the Tree once stood.⁹

Moses answers the “emergency” question at the end of the Torah. He sets before Israel life and good, death and evil — the two trees in speech, with no flaming sword:

“For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven… But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”¹⁰

The Tree without the angels. That is biblical faith.

Third: Eve seems to misidentify the tree. The text says both special trees are in the midst. She speaks as if the forbidden tree is the one in the middle. Did she confuse them?

Fohrman is right that the geography is the theology. When the human eye treats the forbidden as the center, the Tree of Life is already off-center. Chavah’s sentence is the first time a human relocates the middle of the world. Every later religion that puts a man, a church, or a caliphate in the middle of the Garden is repeating her grammar. The Father’s written word keeps Hashem in the middle. Chosenness is not a trophy. It is the firstborn’s job to remember where the center is.¹¹

One Family, Two Brothers Against Jacob

We are one large family. The fractures are family fractures. Ham and Canaan open a wound after the Flood. Ishmael and Isaac split a house. Esau and Jacob shared a womb. The prophets do not treat those names as museum tags. They treat them as patterns that return when Jerusalem becomes a cup of reeling.¹²

Ishmael The Donkey of Zachariah 9:9

Ishmael is named Pere Adam—a wild-donkey of a man. His hand against everyone, everyone’s hand against him; he dwells alongside all his brothers.¹³ That is not a racial slur. It is the Torah’s picture of untamed strength living next to the covenant line, blessed with nationhood, not given the everlasting covenant of Isaac.¹⁴

Esau is Edom. He is the twin who sold the birthright and later comforted himself with the thought of killing Jacob. Our Sages read Rome — and the Christian civilization that rode Rome — as Edom: the brother who wants the blessing without the yoke. Palvanov’s own Understanding Edom series traces that line. I have written the same identification: Esau is not Ishmael. Brad Scott taught the opposite when I was in the church. The Hebrew Bible and the Jewish library do not.¹⁵

Esua I Hated

Psalm 83 puts them in one sentence: the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, a pact against Israel’s inheritance. Obadiah judges Edom for violence against his brother Jacob. The war we are watching is not “religion versus religion” in the abstract. It is the old triangle: Jacob holding the Land and the Book, Ishmael pressing as the wild donkey, Esau pressing as the twin who cannot bear that the birthright stayed in the tents.¹⁶

Hashem said the end from the beginning.¹⁷ The brothers of the world are still broken. The Jewish people were chosen to keep the Father’s written word so that the family has a way home. If we are chosen, the family should not replace that word with a second scripture or a dying god.

Zechariah: Check the Address

People say “Zechariah 12 says two of the city and one was saved.” That is not what chapter 12 says.

Zechariah 12 is Jerusalem as a cup of reeling and a heavy stone. Nations gather. Judah is made a firepot. Hashem defends the tents of Judah first. Then the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem receive a spirit of grace and supplication, and they look to Hashem concerning those who were pierced, and mourn as for an only son. Jewish reading does not have to donate that verse to John 19. It can remain Israel’s mourning in war, the piercing of her own, the grief of a firstborn nation.¹⁸

The “two parts / one third” text is Zechariah 13:8–9:

“And it shall come to pass in all the land, says the LORD, that two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein. And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined…”¹⁹

The “part of the city” text is Zechariah 14:2: the city is captured, houses plundered; half the city goes into exile, and the rest of the people are not cut off from the city. Then Hashem goes out to fight.²⁰

Three different cameras: siege (12), refining remnant in the land (13:8–9), partial exile from the city, then divine war (14). Mixing them into one slogan is how prophecy becomes a meme. Read the addresses.

A remnant refined, calling on the Name, hearing “You are My people” — that is Sinai language coming home. It is not a church altar call.²¹

Chosen Means the Father Already Spoke

Rabbi Fohrman shows that the Ten Sayings of Sinai are already pulsing through Genesis in order — family law written in family wound. Rivkah’s warning about Esau is already the grammar of “no other gods.” The civil branches of Ki Teitzei grow from those same fractures.²²

Psalm 147 is not polite. He declares His word to Jacob, His statutes to Israel. He has not done so for any other nation. Christians and Muslims may hold translations. They were not in the forty-year yeshiva.²³

So the question returns. If the Jewish people are chosen by Hashem, should not the family accept the Father’s written word? The who of the Tanakh is not a committee. The Boss speaks. Hashem commands. Hashem forgives the one who returns. He does not install a mediator you must worship in order to reach Him.

Maimonides could say Christianity and Islam spread monotheism among the nations and still deny that either one is the Tree. Palvanov can say Jacob and Esau may yet embrace and still not put Esau in Jacob’s tallit. I can honor a lecture that opened the Talmud for Christians and still say: do not start there.²⁴

Conclusion

The Talmud is great. How well do you know your Bible?

Know the Garden. Answer why there are two trees. Know that Moses put both trees back in your mouth and heart. The 365 prophecies Jesus fulfilled prophecies is a poster, not a pasuk.

Know that Ishmael is the wild donkey who dwells against his brothers, and Esau is the twin who never made peace with the birthright. Know that Zechariah 13:8–9 is the two-thirds and the third, and Zechariah 14:2 is half the city, and Zechariah 12 is the stone the nations break themselves on.

Then, if you still want to talk about Yeshu in the Bavli, we can. We will talk as people who have read the Father first.

For the longer Tree of Life argument, the Esau and Ishmael essays, and the Fohrman reading of Genesis as Sinai in seed form, see beithashoavah.org.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Debunking Christian Myths About the
• Hashem Chose a Family: The Tree of Life Blueprint Was Given to Protect All of Adam
• Bible Codes Revealed at Yiboneh with Rabbi Moshe Zeldman
• How Christianity Transforms the Tanach’s Messages of Life into Doctrines of Death:
• How Can Christianity and Judaism Be “Two Sides of the Same Coin” When One Looks Nothing Like the Original Blueprint?

Why the Bible Is the World’s Greatest Self-Help Book — and Why Resistance, Not Comfort, Makes a Person Whole

A teaching for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the year 5787

The Highways Are Already in the Heart

“Happy is the person whose strength is in You; the highways are in their heart.”

Ashrei adam oz-lo bach; mesillot bilevavam. The pathway to You is always on his heart.

So opens the psalm that names the blessed life not as a life without struggle, but as a life whose inner roads already run toward Zion. The mesillot — raised highways, built-up roads — are not out there waiting to be discovered. They have already been laid down inside the heart. The question of this season is never whether the path exists. The question is whether we will walk it when the road begins to resist us.

Self Help

The self-help shelves of the world are the most purchased books on earth, and almost no one who buys them becomes whole. That is not an accident. Most of those books sell a life without friction: optimize the self, protect the self, curate the self, soothe the self.

The Bible does the opposite. It is not a manual for the self. The Torah is the operating system and source code of the human mind and body. It tells you what you are made of, what broke, what the repair costs are, and who holds the compiler. You cannot debug a life with a book that refuses to name the Architect.

The World Began in Stumbling: Tohu, Resistance, and Two Trees

Start at the beginning. That is where the stumbling starts.

“The earth was tohu vavohu — formless and void — and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of Hashem was hovering over the face of the waters.” The world does not open in comfort. It opens in chaos.

The first movement of holiness is not the removal of resistance. It is the Spirit of Hashem moving over the dark waters — what the mystics called the pool of souls, the raw material of every life that would ever be asked to become righteous.

We are all already righteous in potential. Almost no one tells his own soul that it is good. The greater soul Hashem wants us to build in this world is not assembled by affirmations. It is assembled by His commandments and by the daily coronation of Him as King.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: The Soul

That is what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come to teach: not that we are already finished, but that hope is still possible inside unfinished chaos.

In the garden stand two trees. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A world with only the Tree of Life would be a world without resistance — no choice, no friction, no becoming. How can a person live in a world with no resistance?

He cannot. He can only float. Chava did not invent the fall out of malice. She named the structure of this world. Life in a body, in history, in marriage, in a nation, is the decision to eat from knowledge — to enter the field where good and evil actually press against each other — rather than remain in an untested immortality.

That is reality. Not the English paraphrase. Reality.

Ezer K’negdo: The English Lie and the Hebrew Truth

The first resistance Hashem built into the human being is not an enemy. It is a spouse.

“It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make for him an ezer k’negdo.” English Bibles say “helpmeet,” “helpmate,” “a helper suitable for him.” That translation is a softening. It is almost a lie. The Hebrew does not say assistant. Ezer is the word used, over and over, for Hashem Himself when He comes to Israel’s rescue — a warrior-helper, not a secretary. K’negdo means opposite him, facing him, against him.

Rashi, quoting the Talmud, refuses to let us sentimentalize it: if he is worthy, she is a help to him; if he is not worthy, she is against him, to oppose him. Chava was created to resist Adam — to place friction in the path of the isolated “I.” She was not made to complete his brand. She was made so that he would have to become someone large enough to love another soul as his own.

Love Your Neighbor- As Yourself

The first commandment of resistance is therefore this: love your wife as you love yourself. It is so hard because we are trained, by every self-help gospel of the age, to focus on the I, the Me, the private soul.

The one who is righteous understands that the whole world is his soul. The neighbor is not an accessory to the project of the self. The wife is not a member of the support staff for the husband’s dream. She is the first Sinai he will ever stand in front of.

I watched a film from Iran about the African communities there. It opens with a woman telling her husband that his idea of becoming a musician has no place in her world. She will not help him. The scene is not cruel. It is Genesis 2 speaking in a kitchen. A soulmate is not sent to remove the stones from your road. A soulmate is sent to be the stone you must learn to bless. She resists you so that you will become better than the man who only ever consulted himself.

Parshat Ha’azinu: Heaven and Earth Are Called to Witness

This Shabbat, 8 Tishrei 5787 — September 19, 2026 — is Shabbat Shuva, the Sabbath of Return that sits between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The reading everywhere is Parshat Ha’azinu, Devarim 32, the song Moshe places in the mouth of Israel as a witness against them and for them.

“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth.” Heaven and earth are summoned because, from Genesis 2 onward, they are our first parents. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth.” Man is dust of the adamah and breath of the heavens.

What Hashem does to the earth, He also does to the human being, because we come from the stars and from the soil. When the land is judged, the body is judged. When the land is atoned for, the people are atoned for. That is why the song can end: “and He will atone for His land, His people.”

The Tzur – Our Rock

The Name that dominates Ha’azinu is not a feeling. It is Tzur — the Rock. “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, righteous and upright is He.” A rock does not remove resistance. A rock is what you strike against, what you hide inside, and what does not move when you do.

Hashem found Israel “in a desert land, in the howling waste of tohu.” The same word as the opening of Creation. We do not graduate out of chaos. We are found inside it. He circled him, instructed him, guarded him as the pupil of His eye, like an eagle stirring the nest — which is to say, like a parent who will not let the young remain untested.

Then comes the stumbling that repeats in every generation: “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked… You neglected the Rock that begot you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth.” Prosperity is not the opposite of resistance. Prosperity is often the place where we refuse it. We want the Tree of Life as a lifestyle and the Tree of Knowledge as a hobby. Ha’azinu will not permit that split.

The Song Of Operation

The center of the song, and the center of these Days of Awe, is the verse that should be written on the doorpost of 5787:

See now that I, I am He, and there is no god with Me. I put to death, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; and there is none who can deliver from My hand.

— Devarim 32:39

That is the most important reality. Not the reality we prefer. The reality that judges us and heals us from the same hand. Rosh Hashanah asks: Who is the King? Yom Kippur asks who will let that King wound and heal him. Shabbat Shuva stands between them and says, “Return.”

Mikveh Yisrael: Hope Is a Baptism, Not a Mood

What Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come to teach is the hope we have in Hashem. Not optimism. Hope.

The Hebrew word for hope is tikvah. The Hebrew word for the gathering of living waters — the pool in which the impure immerse and rise permitted — is mikveh. They are the same root, k-v-h: to wait, to gather, to hope.

Jeremiah names it without apology: “Mikveh Yisrael Hashem” — Hashem is the Hope of Israel, and Hashem is the mikveh of Israel. Rabbi Akiva heard the verse on Yom Kippur and said: just as a mikveh purifies the defiled, so the Holy One purifies Israel.

Hope is not a feeling you manufacture. Hope is an immersion. You go down into the chaos — tohu, the dark waters, the year that will not be easy — and you rise because the waters themselves belong to Him.

That is why the word can be translated, in the old Christian tongue, as the user of this teaching remembered it, as a kind of baptizing. Not as a borrowed sacrament. As the original Jewish act: the whole body, not one finger left dry, lowered into the gathered waters of the One who is both Judge and Fountain.

“Hope in Hashem; strengthen yourself and He will give your heart courage; and hope in Hashem.” The verse says Kaveh twice. You hope, you are strengthened, and then you hope again. Resistance is not a sign that hope has failed. Resistance is the medium in which hope is baptized.

5787: Friction Is Coming to Israel — Who Is Your Hope?

The work of the righteous will always be resistance in this world. That is not a prediction about geopolitics. It is the architecture of Creation, of marriage, of teshuva, and of Jewish history.

Friction is coming to Israel. It has never stopped coming. Ha’azinu already sang it: the nation will grow fat, forget the Rock, be handed over, and then — when power is gone, and no one is left, bound or free — “Hashem will judge His people and relent toward His servants.” The question of 5787 is not whether there will be resistance. The question is: Who is your Hope?

The Mikvah Of Israel

If your hope is a headline, it will drown. Hope is not a coalition; it will fracture. If your hope is the isolated I — my soul, my peace, my optimized year — it will discover that the self cannot be its own mikveh. If your hope is Hashem, then even the wound is inside the healing, and even the opposition of the one you love is inside the making of a greater soul.

The righteous person does not get a year without friction. He gets a year in which friction is interpreted. Adam hears in a spouse’s resistance the original ezer k’negdo. He hears, in the resistance of the nations, the song that already told him the Rock would both wound and heal. He hears, in his own stubborn “I,” Hillel’s second question: “And if I am only for myself, what am I?”

The Ethics of the Fathers: Work, Strength, and the Unfinished Task

Pirkei Avot does not flatter us. It trains us for resistance.

The world stands on three things: Torah, avodah (service), and acts of loving-kindness.

— Pirkei Avot 1:2, Shimon HaTzaddik

Not on comfort. Not on self-esteem. On Torah, service, and chesed — three forms of work that meet a resistant world and refuse to leave it as they found it.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

— Pirkei Avot 1:14, Hillel

The first clause saves you from self-erasure. The second saves you from the religion of the I. The third refuses to delay. That is the whole psychology of teshuva in one Mishnah.

The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy, the reward is abundant, and the Master of the house is insistent. It is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

— Pirkei Avot 2:15–16, Rabbi Tarfon

This is the opposite of the self-help promise. You will not finish. You are not permitted to stop. The Master is insistent. That insistence is not cruelty. It is the dignity of being needed by the house’s Owner.

Who is mighty? One who conquers his inclination.

— Pirkei Avot 4:1, Ben Zoma

Might is not the absence of an opponent. Might is the inner victory that only an opponent makes possible. Chava is opposite Adam. The nations opposite Israel. The yetzer opposite the soul. Hashem is opposite the isolated self, asking it to become a highway.

Choose Life Inside the Resistance

Moshe had already said it, one parsha earlier: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.” The two trees are still standing. The English world will keep selling a garden with only one of them. The Torah will not. A human being becomes whole not by escaping friction but by letting friction become the place where the Spirit still hovers over the waters.

Adam/Humanity=Chava/Life + Resistance

Love the one who stands opposite you. That is the first resistance and the first repair. Tell your soul it is good — not because it is finished, but because the Spirit of Hashem has been moving over it since the first dark morning. Crown Him King on Rosh Hashanah. Go down into the mikveh of Yom Kippur, the Hope of Israel, and rise. Walk the highways that are already in the heart.

The work of the righteous will always be resistance in this world. That is not a sentence of despair. It is the description of a calling. The Rock wounds and heals. The spouse opposes and completes. The year 5787 will not be smooth. It does not have to be. It has to be true.

Mikveh Yisrael Hashem. Who is your Hope?

G’mar chatimah tovah. May you be sealed for a good year — not an easy one, a true one.

Inspired by Chief Rabbi Goldstein

Shabbat Shuva / Parshat Ha’azinu 5787

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Primary sources cited

Tanakh: Bereishit 1:1–2; 2:4, 2:9, 2:16–18, 2:23; 3:22–24. Vayikra 19:18. Devarim 30:19; 32:1–4, 10–11, 15, 18, 39, 43. Yeshayahu 40:31. Yirmiyahu 14:8; 17:13; 50:7. Hoshea 14:2–3. Tehillim 27:14; 33:20; 84:6; 121:1–2.

Chazal: Yevamot 63a; Rashi on Bereishit 2:18; Mishnah Yoma 8:9; Pirkei Avot 1:2, 1:14, 2:15–16, 4:1. Rambam, Hilchot Ishut 15:19; Hilchot Teshuvah 1:3.

Liturgical frame: Rosh Hashanah 1–2 Tishrei 5787 (sundown 11 September 2026 – nightfall 13 September 2026); Shabbat Shuva / Ha’azinu 8 Tishrei 5787 (19 September 2026); Yom Kippur 10 Tishrei 5787 (sundown 20 September – nightfall 21 September 2026).

A letter to Glen Beck, to the Christian world, and to anyone still willing to read the book we heard at the mountain 3339 Years Ago.

I am one of the Jews the prophets said would come back. Isaiah 56:6

Not a metaphor. Not a church. A man whose mom’s mom, my grandmother, closed the curtains on Friday night and told her never to tell anyone the secret. 911 changed that.

I was thirty-five years old on 911 when my mother told me I was Jewish. I was a devout Christian for all of those years, I know, according to one of 40,000 in the denomination. The one thing I knew was the Bible.

A grandson of Luz Ramirez Diaz from Mexico by way of Spain, whose two sons’ Y-chromosomes came back Cohen Model Haplo match. Who immediately became a Messianic Jew and gave up everything except Jesus. I thought to myself, now, I can make sense of the Christian Bible. How does the Christian Bible make me a complete Jew?

I became the Director of a Mayim Hayim Messianic Jewish Congregation in Amarillo, with about 100 congregants on both Friday and Saturday. In 2005, I was on God’s Learning Channel for about five years and introduced Bill Cloud, Brad Scott, and many other friends whose phones are now dead.

I watched Glen on Fox and learned from Bill Cloud and others from the Hebrew Roots Ministries from 2001 to 2015, and walked with them until I kept Sinai without their mashiach Yeshua, and then the phone died.

Isaiah 56:6 The Stranger That Keeps Shabbat

Isaiah said the lost would be found. Jeremiah said they would come from the north country and from all the lands. Ezekiel said the bones would stand. Ezra and Nehemiah wrote the paperwork for a return.

Amos said they would not be pulled up from the soil again. Obadiah said saviors would go up on Mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau. I am not inventing a role. I am standing in a line that the text already drew.

This is for Glen because he keeps asking the same thing I ask every day I listen to your show. The Torch. A play off the burning bush. My Rabbi David Fohrman shows how that burning bush is Israel, not the truth as from Christian forefathers. The Bible has given you the full blueprint, Glen.

The End From The Beginning: Six Alefs

Ask Bill if he is familiar with Isaiah 46:9: “I have told you the end from the beginning.” I learned it from Bill and Brad Scott. The verse says, “The end is in the beginning,” Glen, every detail. But for 3339 years, no one has been listening to the Jew.

Glen, putting a Christian perspective on Jewish history is like telling a Jew about his history and his Bible. Bill Cloud, in the prophecy chair, speaks as if he had 3339 years of Jewish learning. Bill does not read Hebrew, and Brad Scott was one of America’s greatest Hebrew teachers.

I learned Hebrew from Brad for over 10 years. Brad could not read Hebrew even though he could read the letters, and yet he taught it because he said it was not like any other language. By the way, chemistry is the only language equal to Hebrew. The Bible is the lecture notes. You had to be at the lecture to know what the notes mean.

This is also for the Christian world, because you have spent two thousand years reading our mail and returning it marked “fulfilled.”

But, yet you say in the same breath, “that will be fulfilled in his second coming”. Jesus will fulfill all that has been prophesied in his return.

It is for the truth-seeker who is tired of being told that the people grabbing a Jew’s garment in Zechariah 8:23 are a satanic one-world religion that will follow a false messiah after the Temple is built for Satan.

The end-time prophecy for Christians:

The Antichrist / The Man of Lawlessness

Daniel’s “little horn,” Paul’s “man of lawlessness” who sits in the temple claiming to be God (2 Thessalonians 2), and Revelation’s beast from the sea plus the false prophet. He makes a covenant, breaks it at the midpoint, demands worship, and is given authority for 42 months. The number 666 and the mark of the beast belong here. A rebuilt temple in Jerusalem is assumed by those who read this literally and in a futuristic sense.

The Backbone: Daniel’s Seventy Weeks

Daniel 9:24–27 is the chronological hinge. Seventy “weeks” (seventy sevens of years = 490 years) are decreed for Israel and Jerusalem. Most futurists treat the first 69 weeks as fulfilled up to the Messiah, then a gap (the church age), then a final seven-year “week.” In the middle of that week, a coming ruler stops the sacrifice and sets up the abomination of desolation. That seven-year period is identified with the tribulation of Revelation.

Israel is Not The False Religion. They are the nation the prophets said would come.

I. What The Prophets Actually Scheduled

Isaiah 11:11–12 — a second time, Hashem recovers the remnant of His people from Assyria, Egypt, Pathros, Cush, Elam, Shinar, Hamath, and the islands of the sea. He lifts a banner for the nations and gathers the dispersed of Israel.

Isaiah 43:5–6 — from the east, from the west, from the north, from the south. “Bring My sons from afar.”

Isaiah 49:6 — too small a thing to raise up the Son of Jacob. I will make you a light to the nations.

Jeremiah 16:14–15 — days are coming when they will no longer say, “As the Lord lives who brought us up from Egypt,” but “As Hashem lives who brought us up from the land of the north and from all the lands where He drove them.”

Jeremiah 23- “Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when they shall no longer say, ‘As Hashem lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As Hashem lives who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”

What Part of The New Covenant Did Jesus Initiate

Jeremiah 31 — a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Torah on the inside. And then the clause your pastors skip: if those ordinances depart from before Me, the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation. The sun is still up. We are still a nation. The covenant did not migrate to Rome.

Ezekiel 36 — I will take you from the nations, gather you, bring you to your soil. I will sprinkle clean water. I will put a new spirit in you. The land that was desolate will be tilled.

Ezekiel 37 — dry bones. Two sticks. Judah and Joseph. One nation, one king.

Amos 9:14–15 — I will plant them on their soil, and they shall no more be pulled up.

Obadiah 1:17–21 — on Mount Zion there shall be deliverance. The house of Jacob shall be a fire, the house of Joseph a flame, the house of Esau stubble. Saviors on Mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau, and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.

Ezra and Nehemiah are not children’s church. They are the first return’s minutes: lists, walls, mixed marriages sent home, Torah read in the square until the people wept. We are the second wave of the same file.

That is my credential. Not a vision. A passport stamp the prophets already printed.

II. What Bill Cloud Sold You, And Why It Is Not Hebrew

1 Thessalonians 2 13And we also thank God constantly^d for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men^e but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. 14For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews,^f 15who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind 16by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!^g

The Jew

On your program, Bill took Hosea 6 and started a clock at the time of departure. “Two days” became two thousand years since “the Messiah left.” That is Paul wearing tzitzit. Hosea’s “us” is Israel, torn and promised healing. It is not a stopwatch begun at Golgotha.

He took the katechon from 2 Thessalonians — a verse that does not exist in our book — and used it to decode Dugin, then kept Paul’s furniture. A Jew reads Ezekiel 38 without a restrainer from Salonika. Persia is named. The Name is sanctified. There is no Church in the credits.

He mapped Gog as Russia plus Islam so that an invading force could be destroyed and Jesus could return. Partial map, wrong ending. The Rambam does not end Ezekiel with a second advent. He ends the Laws of Kings with a man of David’s house who keeps the Written and Oral Torah, fights the wars of Hashem, builds the House, and gathers the dispersed. If he is killed, he is not the one.

Uncensored Hilchot Melachim 11:4 puts Jesus in Daniel 11:14 — the lawless of your people exalt themselves to fulfill the vision, and they stumble. Then the inventory: Jews slain, remnant scattered and humiliated, Torah altered, most of the world taught to serve a god other than Hashem.

That Last Sentence Is The Sentence Shoreshim Cannot Afford.

Then both houses, named the Nazarene and the Ishmaelite, who arose after him, pave a road they do not own, so that the nations already know the words “messiah” and “torah” when the real King stands. Zephaniah 3:9.

If that verse is your religion, Glen, you have already had a king for two thousand years. You have already had a high priest “after the order of Melchizedek.” The body of Christ already had a temple of the body and a temple of the Church. You have already changed times and laws. You do not need a future Antichrist to sit in our House and finish a checklist you claim was finished in the first century.

There Can Never Be A Anti-Christ In The Tanach

The Antichrist doctrine is the delay button. The first coming did not gather us, nor did it seat the Torah. Rather than fail the Rambam’s test, the Church invented a sequel and a scapegoat. The sequel is the Second Coming. The scapegoat is a Jew-facing monster who will do in seven years what your king did not do in twenty centuries. Then we must bow.

There Is No Antichrist In The Jewish Bible.

Deuteronomy 13: A sign that leads you away from the commandments is the test you have already failed. There is a false mashiach: if he dies without the House and the ingathering, he is not the one.

There is Gog and M’Gog. Edom is Christianity. Ishmael is Islam. There is no cosmic anti-messiah Israel must coronate so history can proceed. When Mashiach is revealed, the nations know. There is no vacancy for a double.

Christianity and Islam are not Judaism’s other half. They are two sides of one coin minted from our pages — two later books, two final men, two endings in which Israel is baptized or made dhimmi. That is the series on beithashoavah.org. The coin Bill needs is Judeo-Christian. The problem is that there is no Judeo. The coin the Rambam minted is Edom and Ishmael paving the road.

III. The Stage That Has Already Stood Up

The people came home. 1948, the same year Abraham was born in the Jewish calendar,1948. 1967 The Six-Day War and the Temple Mount back in the hands of Israel. Half of world Jewry on the soil, Amos said, would not spit them out again.

The land woke. Ezekiel 36 is not poetry when the desert exports fruit.

Hebrew lives in the street.

Jerusalem is a burdensome stone. Zechariah 12:3.

Persia is on the page of Ezekiel 38.

October 7, 2023 — 22 Tishrei 5784, Simchat Torah — sits inside Zechariah 12 the way Singer reads it: a national piercing, a mourning like a firstborn, a turn toward the Name. Glazerson’s tables clustered the year. The Vilna Gaon’s school put the opening of Gog near Tishrei.

A star from Jacob. Numbers 24:17. Zohar III 212b: 25 Elul, a Friday, seventy days. Palvanov flagged 27 September 2024. The same window took Nasrallah.

Rabbi Kessin and Cyrus As Trump

A gentile tool like Cyrus. Isaiah 45. Trump is not the donkey rider. He is the door-opener category that the text has already invented. Kessin can call him Esau repaired. The Rambam would still ask whether the House is up.

Zechariah 9 begins at verse 1, not verse 9. Damascus, Hadrach, Hamath, Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Ashkelon. Palvanov’s Damascus class put that corridor on footage. Ishmael is the wild donkey of Genesis 16:12. The King of 9:9 rides a chamor.

Zechariah 9:1–8 is the north-to-south march: Hadrach, Damascus as His resting place, Hamath, Tyre, Sidon, then the Philistine line — Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron. Only after that corridor is broken does verse 9 say: your King comes, righteous, saved, ani, riding a chamor — a donkey — and a colt, son of she-asses.

Verse 10 is the payoff the churches skip: chariots cut from Ephraim, the horse cut from Jerusalem, the bow cut, and he speaks shalom to the nations, sea to sea. If verse 9 was already closed in the first century, verse 10 is a lie. The horse and the bow are still on the table.
The Rambam in Iggeret Teiman already set the donkey and camel — Edom and Ishmael — before the messiah, who rides. The chapter starts in Damascus. The rider has not been revealed. Verse 10 — horse cut, bow cut, peace from sea to sea — is not paid.

Zechariah 14 Is Not Paid. Flesh Consuming While A Man Still Stands.

DNA did not baptize anyone. It did something colder. Jeanson’s Traced is the three-trunk tree I used in Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life — Shem, Ham, Japheth; three wives; seventy names in Genesis 10. Mainstream labs will not grant him a clock. They will grant this: living Jews and Levantine Arabs carry a majority Canaanite ancestry.

Only two of the seventy nations still stand up and say Abraham is our father. And only one of those two still carries, at Temple-period depth, the Cohen Modal Haplotype Hammer and Behar published in Human Genetics in 2009. My uncle’s kit made my grandfather a Cohen on paper. The tree is on the site.

IV. The Red Heifer, The Altar, and The Lamb We Still Owe

Christians treat the red heifer as a countdown clock for their Antichrist. That is theft of a commandment.

Number 19 is not a prophecy chart. It is law. A red cow without blemish, never yoked, burned outside the camp, ash mixed with living water, sprinkled on the one who touched death. Without that water, a Jew cannot enter the sacred.

Ezekiel 36 promised clean water when we came home. The generation that came home has raised heifers and measured them the way the Mishnah measures them. The Temple Institute did not do that so Bill Cloud could book another hour. They did it because the Torah did not expire.

The altar is the same file. Exodus 20 and 27. Ezekiel 43. You cannot bring what the Torah requires to a metaphor. Passover is not a communion wafer. Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 16: the lamb, the house, the night Hashem passed over.

Every Jew who can become tahor and stand in front of a consecrated altar is still commanded to make that offering. Exile postponed the act. Exile did not repeal it. The return the prophets described is the return of a people who still owe the lamb.

I will not lie to you and say the Chief Rabbinate has restored the korban. I will tell you the requirement never moved. A Jew who came home and pretends the lamb is optional is playing the same game as a church that pretends the lamb already walked in and closed the account. The heifer, the altar, and Pesach are not your apocalypse props. They are our unfinished obedience.

V. The Christian World is calling the Noahides the Antichrist

Zechariah 8:23 is not vague.

“In those days it shall come to pass that ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the garment of a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

Isaiah 2 and Micah 4: the nations stream to Zion. Torah from Jerusalem, not from Rome, not from Mecca, not from a studio in Dallas.

Isaiah 56: the foreigner who joins himself to Hashem, who keeps Shabbat from profaning it, who holds fast the covenant — I will bring them to My holy mountain.

The Rambam: a gentile who takes the seven laws of Noah because Hashem commanded them to the children of Noah through Moses, has a share in the world to come.

That is a Noahide. Not a convert. No new Israel. Not a beast system. A child of Noah who stopped worshiping a man and started taking the God of Israel at His word for the human race.

The Christian End Times

Christians have spent decades on prophecy channels calling that man the Antichrist. End Time Headlines heard “international congress in Jerusalem” and reached for Revelation 13. Letters to the editor heard “Noahide laws” and reached for FEMA camps. That is what happens when your eschatology requires Jews to crown a monster in a Temple so Jesus can arrive. Any gentile who walks toward Zion without kneeling to your king looks like the plot.

Look at the plot the prophets wrote. The Jews return. The nations grab the garment. The nations do not grab a pope. They do not grab a caliph. They grab a Jew and say God is with you. That sentence contains no Antichrist. It has a robe.

Thousands of them exist now. Former pastors. Former missionaries. Men who took the cross off the wall because they read Deuteronomy 13 and could not unread it. They are not recruiting you. Rabbi Oury Cherki said it in plain language: we are not engaged in persuasion. We open a gate for those already seeking it. The fear in your comment threads is not exegesis. It is the sound of a sequel losing its extras.

VI. What I Need From You, Glen

Glen, I hear you every day asking people not to believe what you are saying and to prove you wrong by asking questions. Why do 4.5 billion people who claim they believe the Bible try to replace the people, the Jews, and the Bible?

Hosea 3: The real meaning is Israel. We are still waiting for our King and High Priest. You have had a king and high priest for over 2000 years.

Ezekiel 38 is written about a time when Israel returns as Paras and the Name, not as a prequel to Revelation.

Daniel 11:14 is speaking of Christianity the way the Rambam read it, uncensored.

What is the Time Period Of Zechariah- Nuclear Weapons

Zechariah 9:9 from Damascus, not from Palm Sunday. The Donkey is Islam. Zechariah is speaking of our day. Today, 5787.

Read Zechariah 8:23 as a compliment to the nations, not as a warrant.

Read Zechariah 14 as unpaid.

And if you still need a Hebrew guest, put on the air a Jew who came home the way the prophets said, and a Noahide who grabbed the garment the way Zechariah said. That is the show the book already outlined. Everything else is Rome with a tallit.

I have written the long form in Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, and The Star of Jacob Prophecy. The family tree, the Cohen match, the Two Sides series, and the Zechariah 14 piece are at beithashoavah.org. I am not asking the Christian world to convert. I am asking it to stop calling the return Antichrist and the garment a mark.

The Jews came home. The heifer is being watched because the Torah still speaks. The altar is being measured because exile is not repeal. The lamb is still owed. Ten men from the nations are already reaching for the sleeve.

That is not the end of your religion’s movie. That is the middle of ours.

The Timeline In Front of You. The Bible and The Jew

Course	Text	What the teachers say has already happened
Long exile without a king or Temple	Hosea 3:4–5	From Rome to the twentieth century
Promise of return from the ends of the earth	Deut. 30; Jer. 30:3; Isa. 11:11	The second gathering began
Jacob’s trouble without parallel	Jer. 30:7	The Shoah — and from it, salvation
Gentile door opened; imperfect remnant comes home	Ezra 1–3	Balfour to 1948; secular pioneers first
Land answers; Jerusalem held; an army stands	Ezek. 36; Zech. 8, 12	Agriculture, 1967, the IDF
Star from Jacob, seventy days	Num. 24:17; Zohar III 212b	25 Elul 5784 comet; Nasrallah; Damascus
National mourning that makes one people	Zech. 12:10–14	Simchat Torah 5784 / October 7
War of the roofs against the clouds	Ezek. 38–39; Zech. 14; Megillah 31a	Sukkot’s war, Persia-named, unfolding now

Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah — House of the Water Pouring
Amarillo, Texas
beithashoavah.org

A Book Like No Other

Rabbi David Fohrman will not let Genesis put you to sleep. You’ll quickly realize we are not studying the same book as before.

In A Book Like No Other, Eden Part 1, he asks the questions a child would ask if the story had never been sung as a lullaby. Why is there a Tree of Life and a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Those two ideas have nothing obvious to do with trees, and nothing obvious to do with each other. What is each tree for?

The Tree of Life looks extra. If they may eat of every tree but one, they already have life. Why plant a second tree in the middle of the garden and then treat it, later, like an emergency? And why would God withhold the knowledge of good and evil? If Adam and Chavah already had to know that “do not eat” meant something, they already possessed what the tree was supposed to give them.[1]

Those are not advanced questions. They are the elephants in the first garden. If you cannot answer them, you do not understand the story you think you inherited.

Here is the harder sentence, for Jews and for everyone who claims “the Bible.”

We Are Not Studying The Same Book.

We use some of the same words. Night and day are still night and day. The problem does not start with the snake. It starts with the first letter of Genesis.

Kind of mark	Where the sofer writes it	What the page actually does	What a translation hides
Large letter (ot rabbati)	בּ of Bereshit (Gen 1:1)	Creation opens with an oversized bet—a house, not a private thought.	Looks like an ordinary “In the beginning.”
Large letters that spell a second word	ע of Shema and ד of Echad (Deut 6:4)	The two large letters form ed—“witness.” Israel and Hashem testify to each other.	Two ordinary letters in “Hear” and “One.”
Large letter as a midpoint	ו of gachon (Lev 11:42)	Tradition treats this vav as the middle letter of the Torah.	No sign that the scroll is counting itself.
Large yud	יִגְדַּל (Num 14:17)	Moshe asks that Hashem’s strength “be great.” The yud = 10, the ten tests / ten spies hanging in the air.	“Let the power be great” with no extra ink.
Large heh	הַ in Ha l’Hashem (Deut 32:6)	“Is this how you repay Hashem?” The interrogative heh is blown up, so the rebuke cannot be skipped.	A small grammar word.
Small letter (ot ze’ira)	א of Vayikra (Lev 1:1)	Hashem “calls” Moshe, and Moshe’s humility is written into the first letter of the book.	“And He called” in full size.
Small heh	בְּהִבָּרְאָם (Gen 2:4)	“When they were created”—a diminished heh. The sages read worlds made and unmade, or Abraham hidden in the letters.	“When they were created,” nothing missing.
Small kaf	וְלִבְכֹּתָהּ (Gen 23:2)	Abraham weeps for Sarah with a reduced kaf—grief held in, or a tear the page will not fully show.	“To weep for her.”
Broken letter	ו of shalom in brit shalom (Num 25:12)	Pinchas is given a covenant of peace, and the vav is split. Peace after zeal is written as a fractured letter.	“Peace” looks whole.
Inverted nuns	Before and after Num 10:35–36	Two verses about the Ark traveling are fenced off like their own little book. The Talmud says they are not in their place.	Two ordinary verses in the march narrative.
Dotted letters (nekudot)	Ten places in the Torah—e.g., dots over vayishakeihu (Gen 33:4); over et (Gen 37:12); over Aharon in the Levitical census (Num 3:39); over lanu ulevaneinu (Deut 29:28)	The dots are not vowels. They are a second text sitting on top of the first: sincerity in doubt, a word that may not fully belong, a secret that is “for us and our children.”	Clean letters. No dots.
Written one way, read another (ketiv / qere)	Throughout—e.g., a word written without a letter the reader must still pronounce, or na’arah written defective	The ear and the eye are given two slightly different Torahs on purpose.	One flattened English word.
No vowels, no punctuation—on purpose	The entire scroll	חלב can be fat or milk. ירא can be fear; he will see; he will be seen. The sofer is forbidden to add the vowels that would close the question.	Every translation has already been chosen for you.

The Highlights For The Exam Were Left For Every Student In The Family

The sofer is not allowed to “fix” any of this. If he writes a normal vav in shalom, or a regular-sized aleph in Vayikra, or forgets the dots over Esav’s kiss, the scroll is not kosher. That is the lecture leaking through the notes.

A Christian or secular “Bible” can print Genesis to Deuteronomy and never show a single one of these marks. The Jew who says “Torah” is holding a page that already argues with itself—large, small, broken, dotted, inverted, and still unfinished until a living mouth reads it.

The First Letter Already Refuses a Pew Bible

The Torah does not open with a sentence. It opens with a letter the size of a house.

A sofer writes the bet of Bereshit larger than every letter around it. An English Bible cannot show you this. “In the beginning” wears the same font as “God created.” In the scroll, creation begins with a letter closed on three sides and open only to the left. The midrash hears a world built like a bet: a house that does not open backward into what was before. The Aleph wanted to start the Torah. It was told to wait for Anochi at Sinai.[2]

Already, the first ink is an argument. Already, the page is not a standalone book.

If you cannot see the large bet, you are not reading the Torah. You are reading a translation of notes.

The Torah Is Oral

Rabbi Mordechai Becher said the quiet part first. When other people talk about “the Bible,” and Jews talk about “Torah,” we are not naming the same object.

The Bible, as they mean it, is the printed page: five books of Moshe, then the Prophets and Writings. Letters on parchment. A standalone text. Open it, translate it, preach it, dismiss it. That is the whole claim.

When a Jew says Torah, he means something larger. The written words are the tip of the iceberg. Under them is a living tradition that goes back to Sinai—the reading, the pauses, the definitions, the applications, the way a people actually kept the thing. Without that, you do not have Torah. You have an ancient document you cannot finish reading.

Six Alephs In The First Sentence

Count the first verse with Jewish eyes.

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

Seven words. Six days plus Shabbat. Twenty-eight letters—the stretch of a lunar month. Inside those seven words sit six alephs. Aleph is also eleph, a thousand. Da’at Zekenim hears what the Talmud already said: this world, as we know it, has run for six thousand years.[3] Six alephs in the first sentence. The seventh word, hashamayim, is the word without an aleph. Its root can be heard as desolation. Six thousand, then a seventh that is not like the six.

You have not left verse one. You have already been handed a calendar. None of that appears in “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Same words? No. Night and day.

You Cannot Even Sound The Page

Hebrew in the scroll has almost no vowels. The sofer is forbidden to add them. חלב is fat or milk. ירא is fear; he will see; he will be seen; he will show. There is no punctuation. “No swimming allowed” and “no swimming allowed” are the same marks until a mouth puts breath in the right place.

When we read Torah in shul, we do not recite it. We sing it. The melody is the Oral Torah. It is the punctuation that the page refused to print.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch said the Written Torah is shorthand for a lecture. NaCl means sodium chloride only if you have heard of chemistry. Hand the same scribble to a stranger, and he thinks you have been drinking the chemicals.[4] That is the Torah vs Bible problem in one picture. One person heard Sinai. The other person is holding the notes.

Fohrman’s Garden Will Not Flatten

Now go where Fohrman will not let you sleep.

Two trees in the middle. One is life. One is the knowing of good and evil. God says to eat of every tree, but not that one. Later, God says the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil—now, lest he take also from the Tree of Life and live forever. Then come the keruvim and the turning sword.

If they were allowed the Tree of Life before the sin, why is it a threat after? Adam’s death? If it was the penalty for the other tree, were they mortal already, or not? Adam and Eve were already mortal; what is a Tree of Life doing in a garden of the living? If they were not, why plant a tree whose only job is to keep them from dying?

And the knowledge tree. Why hide good and evil from the only creature told to rule?

Why Hide Good From Bad From Your Children?

The snake’s first words are not even a clean sentence in Hebrew. Af ki amar Elohim—“Even if God said…” Most translations tidy it into “Did God really say you may not eat from any tree?” That is not what the letters do. The snake begins mid-insinuation. Chavah then answers with words God did not say: “Neither shall you touch it.” The midrash hears the added fence as the crack.[5] The English reader never sees that she added a word, because the English already fenced the whole conversation into Sunday-school dialogue.

Fohrman asks what the two trees have to do with each other. A reader with only the notes says: one is immortality, one is morality. A reader in the lecture hears Devarim 30 at the other end of the same book: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.”[6] The two trees are still speaking in Moshe’s mouth on the plains of Moav. You cannot see that if Genesis is a children’s origin myth and Deuteronomy is a later law code. That split is how people claim they are studying our book while studying another one.

The Scroll Argues With Itself

Jews, this next part is for us.

We say we study Torah. Too often, we study the same flattened object the nations study, only with better footnotes. We treat large letters as calligraphy. Our tradition treats dotted letters as trivia. We treat a broken vav as a sofer’s curiosity.

The Talmud does not.

In Kiddushin 66b, the vav of Pinchas’s shalom is severed so the word can also be read shalem—whole. A blemished Kohen’s service is invalid because a letter in Bamidbar is written wounded.[7] In Shabbat 115b–116a, the Holy One sets signs above and below “When the Ark traveled,” because those two verses are either not in their place or are a book inside the book.

Does Your Bible Contain These Notes

[8] In Menachot 29b, Moshe watches Hashem tying crowns on letters he cannot yet read, and is told: a man named Akiva will hang mountains of law on every thorn.[9] In Kiddushin 30a, the early sages are called soferim because they counted the letters. The vav of gachon is named as a midpoint.[10] In Nedarim 37b, words read but not written, and written but not read, are classified as halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai.[11] Avot de-Rabbi Natan lists ten dotted places in the Torah. Ezra leaves the dots for Eliyahu: if the prophet says I wrote them well, I will take the dots off.[12]

“And he kissed him” is not vayishakeihu with a dot on every letter, so Esav’s mouth is in dispute with itself.[13] “A sign on your arm and frontlets between your eyes” does not describe tefillin—until a people who heard the lecture pull two-thousand-year-old boxes out of Qumran and show you they already knew.[14]

If that is Torah, then a vowel-pointed, regular-sized, punctuated English Bible is not Torah. It is a useful crib sheet. It is not the book.

We Do Not Understand Our Book Either

How can anyone understand?

Not by claiming the words are the same. “In the beginning God created” is not Bereshit bara Elohim with a large bet and six alephs counting six thousand years. “Do not work” is not a physics definition. “Afflict your souls” does not say fast. “Covenant of peace” is not brit shalom with a vav; you must break on purpose.

Night and Day.

The nations hold a Bible: a closed text, vowels supplied, letters normalized, trees moralized, Sinai turned into a sermon. We, the nation of Israel, are commanded to hold a Torah: an open house built like a bet, a first sentence that is already a calendar, a garden whose two trees are still arguing in Devarim, a scroll that sings, a page that dots, breaks, inverts, and enlarges itself so that no one can pretend the lecture is over.

Israel uses some of the same words. We are not studying the same book.

The first honesty is to say so. The second is to go back to the large bet and stay there until the house opens. The third is to admit that even we—teachers, chazanim, people with twenty-five years in the room—are still standing where Moshe stood in Menachot: watching crowns being tied on letters we have not yet earned the right to expound.

That is not despair. That is the beginning of reading. A book like no other does not let you finish it on the first pass. It only lets you discover that you were never in the room you thought you were in. Then, if you are still willing, it hands you the notes and points you toward the voice that wrote them.

The Last book of the Christian Bible is Malachi, and its warning is: “Remember Moses, my servant.”

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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Courage to go against the whole world, that is what my grandfather Abraham taught us some 4000 years ago. Strength to keep Hashem’s statutes and commandments and His Torah. Genesis 26

The Easy Way Brings Atrophy and No Growth

Friction is the key to this world. You were tricked into coming — and you will need Heaven’s strength to stay faithful.

Keeping the Torah will take courage and strength. That sentence is not a slogan. It is the plain reading of Moshe Rabbeinu’s last charge to Israel and to Yehoshua, and it is the plain reading of life. The world was not built as a smooth path. Friction is the key to this world.

The soul is drawn down into concealment, and the same concealment that hides Hashem is the workshop in which a human being becomes strong. The strength does not originate in personality, willpower, or public approval. The strength comes from Hashem.

Be Strong and Courageous: The Torah’s Own Charge

At the threshold of the Land, Moshe does not tell Israel that observance will feel easy. He says: “Chizku ve’imtzu — be strong and courageous; do not fear and do not be terrified of them, for Hashem your God is the One who goes with you. He will not fail you, and He will not forsake you.”

The same words are repeated to Yehoshua by Moshe and then by Hashem Himself: “Be strong and very courageous to observe, to do, according to all the Torah that Moshe My servant commanded you.” Strength here is not only battlefield nerve. Rashi, following the Sifrei, reads the doubled language as two fronts: strength in Torah and courage against the yetzer and against those who mock the mitzvah.

Physical bravery without moral clarity is incomplete. Moral clarity without the strength to act is incomplete. Both are required, and both are gifts that Hashem places in the one who stands.

The same grammar appears when Israel goes to war. The Kohen addresses the people with four expressions — do not be faint-hearted, do not fear, do not panic, do not be broken before them — because the enemy’s first weapon is noise: shields clashing, horses screaming, trumpets, shouts.

Rashi, citing the Sifrei, maps each phrase onto one of those tactics. The answer is not a louder shout. The answer is: “Hashem, your God, is the One who goes with you to fight for you.” Courage is not the absence of noise. Courage is knowing who stands in the camp.

Bold as a Leopard: Public Faith Without Shame

King David wrote, “I will speak of Your testimonies before kings, and I will not be ashamed.” The Tur opens the entire code of daily Jewish life with that posture. Before a Jew puts on clothes, before he washes his hands, he is told to be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of his Father in Heaven. The source is the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot.

Boldness here is not aggression. It is the courage to be different: to keep Shabbat when the marketplace does not, to guard speech when mockery is cheap, to wrap tefillin and make a berachah when no one is watching and when everyone is watching. The foundation of a life of Torah is not private sentiment. It is public fidelity without embarrassment.

You Were Tricked into Coming to This World

Why does keeping Torah require that kind of nerve? Because this world is not the soul’s native climate. The Sages taught that a person must carry two notes: “I am dust and ashes,” and “For my sake the world was created.” Both are true. The descent is real.

Before birth, the Talmud says, the soul is made to take an oath: be a tzaddik and do not be a rasha — and even if the whole world tells you that you are righteous, be in your own eyes a rasha, meaning never stop the work. The soul does not volunteer for concealment. Chassidic teaching, drawing on the Zohar and Tanya, describes the descent as a kind of holy trick. Above, the soul basks in revealed Godliness.

It does not want the body, the hunger, the confusion, the friction. Hashem sends it down anyway, because only in a world of concealment can a created being choose. Only here can a spark be lifted by a human hand. You were tricked into coming to this world — not as a cruelty, but as a mission.

And you are tricked into leaving it: death comes when the work of this body is complete, not when the ego is finished shopping. The soul that screamed against descent will one day scream against departure, because by then it will have learned to love the work.

Tanya states the metaphysics without romance: the Jewish soul is “an actual portion of God above.” That is why the strength is available. Immutable permanence is a Divine quality — “I, Hashem, have not changed” — and a spark of that unchanging firmness was placed in mortal flesh. The courage to keep Torah is not self-invention. It is the soul remembering what it already is.

Friction Is the Key to This World

Kabbalah hears the word olam, “world,” from helem, concealment. What the eye sees — trees, oceans, markets, governments — is a veneer. Beneath the veneer is Godliness. The purpose of creation, the Midrash and Tanya insist, is not that heaven remain heaven. It is that this lowest world becomes a dwelling place for Hashem. Sparks fell. Every object, every hour, every difficult person holds a spark waiting to be elevated by a berachah, a mitzvah, a word of Torah, an act of chessed.

That elevation produces heat. Friction is not evidence that you chose the wrong path. Friction is evidence that you are moving something heavy. A soul that stays in the harbor of ease generates no traction. The Chassidic masters describe the soul as sandpaper, a plow, and a polishing cloth.

The resistance that wears a person down is the same resistance that makes the world shine. If spiritual life feels effortless, it may be because it is producing nothing of substance. If marriage, work, tefillah, and Torah study generate strain, that strain may be the price of traction. Statics has no friction. Dynamics always do.

This is why obedience does not cancel struggle. The yetzer does not retire when a person takes on more mitzvot. Often, it intensifies as more light enters the room. The Sages already knew this: a person does not stand on words of Torah unless he has stumbled over them. Standing is a dance, not a statue. The people at Sinai moved backward twelve miles at each commandment and were pushed forward again by angels. To stand before Hashem is to know the tremor and remain.

Three Pillars, Deep Roots, and Deeds Greater Than Talk

Shimon HaTzaddik taught that the world stands on three things: Torah, avodah, and gemilut chasadim. Ideas without deeds cannot hold. R. Elazar ben Azariah compared a person whose wisdom exceeds his deeds to a tree with many branches and shallow roots: any wind turns it over.

Judaism is not a theory of courage. It is the art of doing — wrapping, blessing, giving, stopping work before sunset, returning a lost object, honoring parents, guarding the tongue — whether feeling is absent or present.

Moshe comforts a generation that has just heard the curses of Ki Tavo: “Atem nitzavim hayom — you are standing today.” Rashi, citing the Tanchuma, hears consolation: you angered Hashem in the desert, you made a calf, you refused the Land — and nevertheless you are still standing. Nitzavim is not a casual pose. It is a pillar.

It is a nation set firmly in place, a leader showing humanity a way. The same parashah then insists that the Torah is not hidden in heaven or across the sea. “It is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.” Near does not mean easy. Near means possible. The Rambam rules that every person can be a tzaddik like Moshe in the sense that matters: each can choose, and each is helped along the path he chooses.

Where the Strength Comes From

If the work is this hard, where does the power come from? Not from optimism as a mood. From Hashem as a Presence.

“Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I strengthen you, and I help you.” “Those who hope in Hashem will renew their strength.” The priest’s speech before battle ends in the same place: Hashem walks with you. Yehoshua is told the same thing three times in one chapter because leadership, inheritance of the Land, and daily Torah all require a strength that is borrowed from the One who does not change.

Chassidut adds a practical mercy. Even when a Heavenly voice seems to close a door, teshuvah remains open to the one who overpowers his impulse and returns. The Alter Rebbe writes that if a person strives with great effort, his repentance is accepted. Strength is not the same as never falling. Strength is getting up with help that was waiting before the fall.

Moshe also binds the living to the dead and the unborn. The covenant is made with those who stand here today and with those who are not here today. Immortality, as later teachers read that verse, is not an escape from this world. It is writing the next chapter so that the dead live in our deeds and we live in our children. That too takes courage: to keep a covenant you did not invent, in a generation that did not ask for it, with a strength that is not your own.

What This Asks of Us

Keep the Torah anyway. Hold fast to it when the world is loud. Do it when the soul remembers that it was tricked into a body. Keep it when friction burns. The concealment is the point. The sparks are the work. The pillar is the stance.

Be bold as a leopard without becoming cruel. Be strong as a lion without confusing force with holiness. Speak of Hashem’s statutes before kings and do not be ashamed. When the shields clash and the horses scream, remember the four phrases of the Kohen and the one fact underneath them: Hashem, your God, walks with you.

You were sent here. You will be taken from here. Between those two tricks lies a short, severe, luminous assignment: reveal the Godliness that the word olam hides, lift what fell, stand today, and draw the strength from the only Place it has ever come from.

Chazak ve’ematz. Be strong and courageous. Hashem will not fail you, and He will not forsake you.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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• “You Shall Not Murder” – The Hair That Binds Isaac, Esau, and Samson
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Nitzavim–Vayelech: Courage, Return, and the Door Noach Opened

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein is the spine of both parshiyot. For Rosh Hashanah week 5786.

Nitzavim: The stance that is already strong

The last Shabbat of the year does not open with a soft word. It opens with a stance. Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei Hashem Elokeichem: You are standing today, all of you, before Hashem your God. Chief Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein hears the verb before he hears the date. The verse uses nitzavim, which implies standing with strength.

It is not omdim, mere presence. It is planted weight. According to Rashi, this is God’s promise that we will never be destroyed. We will endure throughout history; no matter the difficulties, challenges, and calamities we face, we will still be standing strong in the end. And we are still standing strong.

Rashi’s midrash is the first comfort after the curses of Ki Tavo. Their faces paled. Moshe answers with a fact, not a softer list: you are still here. Egypt did not finish you. The calf did not finish you. The desert did not finish you. Nitzavim is a consolation that has the shape of courage.

Goldstein wrote that sentence in the year after the October 7 massacre, when Jewish communities from Johannesburg to Jerusalem had to decide whether standing was still possible. His answer was the parsha’s answer. We are still standing strong.

Vayelech: The Second Parsha is a Marching Order

In 5786, the two portions are read as one. Standing is not the last word. The next word is motion. Moshe tells Israel and then tells Yehoshua: Chazak ve-ematz. Be strong and courageous. Hashem, your God, goes with you. He will not fail you nor forsake you. That is the second parsha’s charge to every man and every woman who must walk into a battle that is not only of armies.

Goldstein’s teaching on fear belongs here. On Vayishlach, he reads the verse without anesthesia: Yaakov was very afraid, and it distressed him. The danger was real. The fear was real. Our Sages teach that courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. Yaakov splits the camp, prepares a gift, and prays. Strategy is not unbelief. Prayer is the training ground for trust. Fear and laziness come from the body. Courage comes from the neshama.

Pirkei Avot gives the definition that has to be memorized before any later war of the spirit: Who is mighty? He who conquers his inclination. Yehudah ben Teima adds the emblems: Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven. The Shulchan Aruch opens the code of ordinary mornings with that lion. Rise like a lion to serve the Creator.

When Israel went out to battle, the kohen spoke four negations of fear. Israel, do not be faint. Men of battle do not fear. Do not panic. Do not be broken before them. Hashem, your God, goes with you to fight for you. Rashi says the four phrases answer four ancient tactics of intimidation: clashing shields, screaming horses, trumpets, and shouts.

Noise is the first weapon. Inner strength is the answer. Goldstein carried Yehoshua 1:6 into the years after October 7: Be strong and courageous. You do not become safe through weakness. You find peace and safety through strength. Weakness is not compassion. Silence before a lie is not piety. Vayelech is the order to move while still standing.

Hayom-Today Spent Forty Years in the Furnace

Nitzavim does not pretend the standing was cheap. Four verses earlier, Moshe said the quiet sentence: Hashem had not given you a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear until this day. Hayom is the name of a strength that had to be grown in heat.

Forty years of manna. Graves in the sand. A generation that could not enter. A new generation that watched and learned. Courage here is not a mood. It is what a person looks like when they have come through a furnace and can finally say the first line of the Ten Words from the inside.

Isaiah speaks to a later furnace with the same grammar of enough. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem. Her term of service is over. Her guilt is paid off. She has received from the hand of Hashem double for all her sins. Double. Not a mild sadness.

A ledger the prophet is willing to read aloud. The people who stand hayom in any century are a people who have already paid. The land and the city do not call them tourists. They call them children whose bill, Isaiah says, has been marked paid, and who are therefore free to come home.

Return in Any Way. Open The Heart Today

The same parsha that plants the monument also writes the return. When all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, you shall return to your heart, and you shall return to Hashem your God. Hashem will gather you from among all the people.

He will bring you into the land. He will circumcise your heart. Then Moshe lowers the ladder to the ground. This commandment is not too wondrous and not far off. It is not in heaven. It is not across the sea. The thing is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.

Jerusalem and the land are calling. Return in any way. Buy the ticket if you can. Learn one verse if you cannot. Light the candles a grandmother hid. Say the Shema with the word “hayom” inside it. Open the heart. That last act is not a consolation prize. It is the first act the Torah names.

You shall return to your heart. Today. A man or a woman in Amarillo, Johannesburg, or a prison classroom can do that before sundown. Goldstein’s nitzavim is the public name of that inner motion. We are still standing. Therefore, we can still turn.

HaMakom: The Place Where You Are Seen

There is a special time in the design of creation that lets a person occupy a day larger than a clock. The Torah calls one coordinate haMakom, the Place Hashem will choose. Hashem Himself is called HaMakom, the Place of the world, whom the world does not contain.

On the day the soul stands before Him — Rosh Hashanah as kingship and as universal judgment — a person is seen as he is. Not the headline of his failures. The ninety-nine percent that was sent into a world of choice. The hidden things belong to Hashem. The revealed things are for us and our children to do.

Moshe already said the covenant includes those who are not standing here today. Midrash Tanchuma reads the missing bodies as future souls. The Talmud records that Moshe sat in Rabbi Akiva’s later classroom. The Torah’s own hayom is an address, not only a date. To learn, to accept the yoke, to open the heart, is to travel — not by gadget but by the design of a day that was never locked. How could this be reality? Only if the blueprint of creation includes a Place where time is thinner, and a people commanded to stand in it.

Choose Today. Good from Bad. The Choice is in our Hands

Vayelech’s courage has content. Nitzavim names it. See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your seed may live. The choice is in our hands now. Not in heaven.

Not after a committee meets. Hayom. Goldstein heard the same chapter as a public ethic: choose life in hospitals, in the protection of the innocent, in the way a nation treats the stranger. The verse is not only private mussar. It is how a landlord-species runs a world that God has promised not to flood again.

Pirkei Avot will not let the choice stay abstract. It is not upon you to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it. Hillel: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? The now is hayom. The way this morning is rising like a lion.

The battle a man or a woman faces is often not a border. It is the inclination that wants the curse while blessing the self in the heart, the poisonous root of the parsha. Courage is saying no to that speech. Hope in Hashem. Be strong, and let your heart take courage.

God Closed the Ark. Noach Opened the Door to Tikkun

The courage of Vayelech predates Yehoshua. It is the courage of the first man to open a door onto a repaired world. Fohrman, reading Noach against Genesis 1, shows that the Flood is not only a punishment of persons. The earth itself was corrupt. The earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth, and behold, it was ruined.

Demolition of a house. Then recreation in the order of the days: wind over water, upper waters parted from lower, dry land, plants, birds, animals, and humans. All except the heavenly lights, which were never destroyed. God closed the door of the ark on His world. Noach opened the door to ours.

Meat is permitted. Man becomes landlord. God swears by the rainbow that He will not unmake this world again. The seventh day was already the first sign-covenant with Adam. Shabbat is an everlasting sign that the Creator finished a world and will not treat time as disposable. The new world is a world of tikkun.

Repair is the only option left on the table. That your days and the days of your children may be multiplied upon the land like the days of heaven upon the earth. Heaven on earth is not a slogan for people who wait for God to reopen the sky. It is the assignment given to those who hold the keys.

Hashem will not flood the world. We can still ruin the earth with violence. That is why standing strong is not nostalgia. It is the landlord’s duty. Bring heaven down. Choose good over bad. Open the heart. Open the door.

The Land is Calling. The Monument Is Still On Its Feet

For Zion’s sake I will not be still, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Comfort, comfort, My people. The double payment has been named. The gathering of chapter 30 is not a metaphor that expires in the classroom. Jews return in planes and in teshuvah and in the small bravery of a public life that refuses to hide. Goldstein’s sentence after the massacre was not complicated. We are still standing strong. Rashi promised it. Vayelech orders the next step. Chazak ve-ematz. Go in.

A Charge

Be strong and courageous. Not because fear is a sin. Yaakov was afraid. Because fear is not allowed to drive. Rise like a lion. Conquer the inclination. Do not be broken by the noise of shields. Stand as nitzavim: a monument people, witnesses that a covenant cut in Avraham’s flesh and restated on the plains of Moav still has living stones.

Forty years made hayom possible. Double payment has been recorded. The land calls. The heart can open today. God closed the ark. Noach had to open the door. The world is repaired. Like the days of heaven upon the earth. That sentence is a task. It takes strength from within. It takes the neshama Goldstein says is already light, already strong, already purposeful, if we will let it lead the body into the day.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah · Amarillo · Nitzavim–Vayelech 5786

• Milestone 7: Esther Delivered from Death on the Third Day
• A Dialogue on the Noahide Laws: Understanding the Seven Laws of Noah in Judaism
• The Eternal Struggle of Self: Reincarnation, the Expanding “I,” and the Soul’s Never-Ending Journey
• “Take Words: Reclaiming Loving Guidance Before It’s Too Late” Find A Friend
• The Torah’s Hidden Clock

The Tanakh and Chazal do not give us a Hollywood calendar. They give us structure.

Zechariah 13:8 is the cut:

“And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, says Hashem, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein.”

Two parts. One remains. That is not a slogan. It is the prophet’s measure of how severe the sifting will be. Zechariah 14 then gathers the nations against Jerusalem and describes the plague on those who came to fight her:

“Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their sockets, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.” (Zechariah 14:12)

For two thousand years that verse sounded like exaggeration. After Hiroshima it sounded like a laboratory report. Flesh, eyes, and tongue going while a man is still standing is the language people used when they first saw what a nuclear flash does to a body.

Singer has warned, without flinching, that if a nuclear device ever gets through, “that’s it.” The verse does not require us to pretend we have already seen that plague. It requires us to admit that the prophet described a death the ancient world could not invent.

The duration traditions sit next to that verse. One line from the Vilna Gaon’s school says the war of Gog and Magog lasts nine seconds. Another transmission, cited in the name of the Gaon by later poskim, says twelve minutes. Rabbi Akiva in Mishnah Eduyot 2:10 said the judgment of Gog lasts twelve months.

These are not contradictions if you listen. Seconds or minutes is the strike. Twelve months is the accounting. In an age of buttons and missiles, a war that once sounded impossible because men fought with horses now sounds like the only kind of war that matches the text.

Gog and Magog Three Confrontations

Rabbi Mendel Kessin has taught for decades that Hashem split Gog and Magog across three confrontations so the world would not be erased in one blow: the first two world wars absorbed much of the decree; the last stage is a confrontation over Israel rather than a slaughter of the whole earth — unless we force the harder script. The UN as the seventy nations, Persia as the named enemy, and the rise of Israel among the nations are, in his reading, the last scene of the beriah.

Efraim Palvanov has walked the same three prophets — Ezekiel, Zechariah, and the Zohar’s reading of Balaam — and tied them to Sukkot, to the seventy nations, and to the Vilna Gaon’s short-war tradition. The war that begins in Tishrei is not a rumor. It is the calendar the sages already marked.

Rabbi Akiva Tatz does not date the hour. He dates the epoch. We are in year 5786 of a 6,000-year clock. Labor pains are not the birth. They are how you know the birth is no longer theoretical.

Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson’s codes are not a substitute for peshat. They are a second witness in the letters: ketz hayamim, Gog, Persia, the enemy of Israel, appearing in tables he has published alongside statistical work with Professor Haralick and the late Professor Rips. Codes do not start a war. They testify that the Author of the war already wrote His Name in the scroll.

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What has already come true — and what has not

Honesty is a mitzvah here.

These things the prophets required, and history has already delivered:

• The Jewish people returned to the Land after two millennia.
• Jerusalem is in Jewish hands.
• The city is a burdensome stone to the nations (Zechariah 12:3). Every coalition that tries to lift it cuts itself.
• Persia is named in Ezekiel 38:5. Modern Iran is not a stretch. It is the name on the page.
• Nations gather against that city, not against a metaphor.
• The purpose clause in Ezekiel 38–39 has begun: the world is being forced to decide whether the God of Israel is real.
• Mountains have now melted on camera. The vocabulary of Psalm 97 is no longer only liturgical.

These things have not yet been completed, and it is a lie to say they have:

• The full gathering of all nations against Jerusalem in the sense of Zechariah 14.
• The plague of 14:12 in its full measure.
• The two-thirds/one-third cut of 13:8 as a finished global accounting.
• The mountain of the House of Hashem established so that all nations stream to it to learn Torah.
• Mashiach revealed, the Temple standing, and Hashem’s knowledge covering the earth.

Kessin, Singer, Palvanov, Tatz, and the Gaon’s school all refuse the cheap version of “every prophecy is already done.” The cheap version makes teshuva optional. The real version makes teshuva urgent.

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How much more Is The Strength of Hashem

The glacier is ice. It has no covenant. It has no Name written on it. And still, when it fell, the USGS called it an earthquake, China and Nepal closed their border, bodies washed into India, and the whole earth looked up.

Hashem let the world see a mountain melt like wax so that no one can say, when He judges, “We did not know what melting looks like.”

If that is what He does with a glacier that has no soul, what will He do when He judges those who come against Zion — the mountain He chose, the people He swore to, the city He called a cup of trembling?

Zechariah 13:8 says two parts are cut off and a third remains. That third is not the spectator section. It is the remnant that calls on His Name. Zechariah 13:9 finishes the thought: “They shall call on My Name, and I will answer them; I will say, It is My people; and they shall say, Hashem is my God.”

The glacier was a warning shot from the roof of the world. The next melting will not be ice. It will be pride, empires, and the tongues that rehearsed war against Jerusalem.

The work now is not to date the nine seconds. The work is to be found in the third that remains — kosher, study, fidelity, love of neighbor, receipts instead of slogans — while the mountain of Hashem is being lifted above every other mountain the nations still trust.

Hashem has already shown the cameras what wax looks like.

How much more when He judges the universe.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah

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

The Ten Sayings, the Family Story, and Healing for the Nations

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Elul 5786 / August 2026

I have been sitting with Rabbi Menachem Leibtag’s last shiur on Ki Tavo and with Rabbi David Fohrman’s reading of the Ten Sayings through the house of Yitzchak. The two of them do not cancel each other. Leibtag shows how Devarim is built. Fohrman shows where the Sayings were already living before Sinai ever shook. Together they answer a question I have carried from church tables to a small esnoga in Amarillo: whose family story is this Book?

The Torah does not call them the Ten Commandments. It calls them Aseret HaDevarim — the Ten Sayings, the Ten Words. A commandment can hang on a courthouse wall and be ignored. A saying is speech. Speech is how the world was made. Speech is how a family is torn or put back together.

Until This Day

Leibtag closes his sixth class on a verse that should not be hard and is. “You have seen all that Hashem did before your eyes in Egypt… the great trials that your eyes saw, those great signs and wonders. But Hashem did not give you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day” (Devarim 29:1–3).

Israel had eyes. They had ears. They stood at the sea and at the mountain. What changed hayom?

Leibtag follows Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Sforno. Until now, the nation was not ready to take the covenant as its own. Rashi adds the story of that same day. Moshe gives the Sefer Torah to the sons of Levi. All Israel comes and says: We also stood at Sinai. Do not make it theirs alone. Moshe rejoices. Hayom hazeh nihyeita le’am — this day I understand that you want to cling to Him.

Seeing the event and knowing the event are not the same act.

What the Rambam Locates at Sinai

The Rambam in Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 8 will not let Israel’s faith rest on signs. Signs leave a suspicion: perhaps it was sorcery. The ground of belief is Ma’amad Har Sinai. Our eyes saw, and not a stranger’s. Our ears heard, and not another’s. Face-to-face, Hashem spoke with you. He did not cut this covenant with our fathers, but with us, we who are all here alive today.

Shemot 19:9 says they will hear Me speaking with you, and also in you they will believe forever. Before Sinai, the Rambam says, their trust in Moshe still had hirhur — afterthought, room for doubt. Sinai is the seeing that does not need a middleman.

So the Rambam places the decisive eyes and ears at the mountain, in the first year. Devarim 29:3 places the heart to know at the end of the fortieth year. I will not paper over that gap. Both verses are true.

What About the People Who Already Saw?

Three groups stand inside the verse.

The first are those who were under twenty at the time of the Exodus. They saw Egypt with a child’s eyes. They are still alive. Moshe can say “your eyes saw” and mean it. They saw. The Torah still says the gift of knowing did not arrive until now.

The second were born in the wilderness. They did not see the plagues. They ate manna they never asked for and wore clothes that did not wear out. For them, “you have seen” is already inherited sight. Devarim 29:14 will say the brit is also with those who are not standing here today. Their eyes are later eyes. The verse still includes them in hayom.

The third is us. We did not see the sea split. The Rambam’s rule is severe. Later generations do not believe because we saw what they saw. We believe because a nation saw, and the chain holds. If even eyewitnesses did not know until forty years had done their work, then our distance is not a lesser faith. It is the same faith — delayed knowing — stretched across more years.

The people who saw all those things before that day prove the point. Sight was not the missing organ. Readiness was.

Time Is Not the Clock. Time Is the Teacher.

Avodah Zarah 5b hears 29:3 and says a person does not stand on his teacher’s mind until forty years. Rashi sets that reading next to the Levi story. Both can be true. One is inner. It takes forty years to understand what you have been hearing. One is communal. Only today did they demand the Torah as theirs, not Levi’s.

Hayom in Devarim is not only a date. It is the day a people can stand. Forty years of manna, of cloth that did not rot, of Sichon and Og, of graves in the sand, were not waiting for a calendar page. They were wearing down the part of the soul that can see a miracle and still ask for a different menu.

Leibtag notes that verses 4 and 5 shift into first person. I led you forty years… that you might know that I am Hashem your God. Either Moshe is quoting God, or he is putting the first line of the Ten Words in quotation marks. The whole midbar was so you would take in Anochi Hashem Elokeichem. The eyes that matter are the ones that finally read the wilderness as that sentence.

The sages said there is no earlier and later in the Torah. The Name is was, is, and will be at once. “Until this day” is not an apology for slow students. It is the moment the same event becomes visible from the inside. Sinai happened. The sea happened. They happened again every day in smaller form until someone said, “I see what this has been.”

Groundhog Day

You do the same things. You wake to manna. You fold the same garment. You hear the same rebuke. You bury another name from the old generation. Then one morning the loop does not feel like a loop. It feels like a sentence that just closed.

That is not mockery of the forty years. It is what 29:3 describes. Egypt was spectacle. The midbar was repetition. Spectacle does not give a lev lada’at. Repetition, if you stay in it, can.

I live that pattern without leaving Egypt. The same parsha returns. The same berachah. The same failure. The same Shabbat. Then, without a new miracle, the old one opens. Wow. I see. The verse allows that ad hayom hazeh can mean both a generation that never saw the mountain and one that did.

The Rambam is not contradicted. Sinai remains the event no later sign can replace. Devarim 29:3 says something Sinai did not say. Even after you have seen, you may not yet have been given the heart that knows what you saw. The giving of that heart is also from Him. It arrived, the Torah says, today — for them on the plains of Moab, and for anyone who has walked around the same mountain long enough to want the book for himself, not only for Levi.

You Stand Today

Nitzavim 29:9–14 is the moment the Moab covenant stops being a speech about the people and becomes a speech with them. It answers Leibtag’s question about the seam at the end of the Tochacha. Why another brit after Sinai and after the curses?

Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem. Nitzavim is not casual standing. It is being posted for a legal act. The generation that has a heart to know is now the generation that can stand. Heads, tribes, elders, officers, every man of Israel. Then the ones who do not speak: children, wives, the stranger who chops wood and draws water. They do not recite the curses on Ebal. They are still named.

Le’ovrecha bivrit — that you may pass into the covenant. Same root as crossing the Jordan. The brit in Moab is the threshold. Ebal and Gerizim will be the land. One crossing is legal. The other is geographic. Both are hayom from the Torah’s side.

Not with you alone do I cut this covenant and this oath, but with those who are standing here with us today before Hashem our God, and with those who are not here with us today.

That is Devarim 29:13–14. All future souls. All future Israel. The people who will stand on the two mountains are already addressed. So are the people who will read this in Amarillo. You do not need a time machine. You need the Torah’s “you” to be larger than the camp in Moab.

Devarim Is Not a Second Law

Leibtag, following Rav David Tzvi Hoffmann, shows that the main speech of Sefer Devarim is built on the Ten Words. The first two dibrot are emunah: Who is speaking, and to whom you may not bow. The remaining eight are how a people lives in a land. From chapter 6 through 26, the mitzvot hang on that frame.

Greek ears heard Deuteronomion — second law. The book never says that. Mishneh Torah in 17:18 is a copy the king must write, not a replacement code. Ramban already listed what appears here for the first time in writing: divorce, slander of a bride, conspiring witnesses, the king, and more. Nearly a third of the 613, in the Rambam’s count, surface in this book. They are not Moshe’s inventions. They are words he received at Horev and at the Tent and held until a generation had a heart to know.

New laws. New mercies. The forgotten sheaf. The escaped slave you will not return. The worker paid that day. And an unbroken promise: the same Anochi, the same oath to the fathers, the same “not with you alone.”

A second law would mean the first had failed. Devarim means the first was always meant to be lived in a house, among brothers, with eyes that finally see what the wilderness had been saying for forty years. The Boss who pulled you out of the house of slaves is the same Boss still speaking on the plains of Moab.

Bitter Water, a Tree, Twelve Springs, Seventy Palms

Three days after the sea, there is no water. Then there is water they cannot drink. Ki marim hem — they are bitter. Hashem shows Moshe a tree. He casts it into the water, and it becomes sweet. Then they camp at Elim: twelve springs and seventy date palms (Shemot 15:22–27).

The Mekhilta reads the twelve springs as the twelve tribes and the seventy palms as the seventy elders. Rabbeinu Bachya and others push the image one step further. The seventy palms are the seventy nations. The twelve springs nourish the seventy trees. Israel is not an oasis for itself. The water that was bitter until a tree entered it is meant to run toward every household that came off the ark.

In Adam, the Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I have taught that the Tree of Life is the original operating system of the human family. Yechezkel sees a river from the House, trees on both banks: fruit for food, leaf for healing (Yechezkel 47:12). The pattern is already in Beshalach. Bitter water is the world after brothers stop seeing one another. The tree in the water is Torah entering the wound. Elim is what the camp looks like when the twelve remember they were sent for the seventy.

One Family from Adam through Noah

Genesis 10 is the Table of Nations. From three sons the earth is filled. Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced argues, based on Y-chromosome lineages, that living male trunks cluster in a way consistent with Shem, Ham, and Yefet. Mainstream genetics does not grant his dates or his rooting. What the Torah requires does not wait on the lab. Me’eleh nifretzah kol ha’aretz — from these the whole earth was populated (Bereshit 9:19). Every national hatred is a family quarrel wearing flags.

Adam is the blueprint, not a tribal mascot. Vayikra 18:5 says asher ya’aseh otam ha’adam vachai bahem — the human being who does them shall live by them. Adam. Not only Yisrael. Sinai did not invent the code. Sinai published it for a kingdom of priests whose job is to keep the water sweet for the seventy palms.

Chosenness is not a racial boast. It is an assignment. When Israel fails the assignment, the Name is desecrated. When Israel lives the Sayings, the nations have a well they can drink from without turning the well into a different god.

The Tanakh does not flatter the nations, and it does not flatter us. The families of the earth will be blessed through Avraham, and they will also press against Tzion. Christianity and Islam built cathedrals of meaning on Jewish text and then told the family that wrote the text that the Author had moved. The signature the Torah keeps offering is simpler than their metaphysics. Anochi Hashem Elokecha asher hotzeiticha me’eretz Mitzrayim. The God who took you out of Egypt. Not a man. Not a later recitation. The One whose first public word to a nation was an act of extraction from slavery.

The Family Story the Church Did Not Keep

I sat in church rooms for twenty-five years. I heard the Ten Commandments treated as a monument, or as a foil for grace, or as something Jesus either intensified or replaced. What I did not hear is that the Sayings are a family document. Rabbi Fohrman’s Season 4 of A Book Like No Other is not a sermon that uses Yaakov as an illustration.

It is a claim about how the Torah is written. He tracks words in the same order from the deception-and-reunion saga — Bereshit 27 through 33, with Lavan in between — into Shemot 19 and 20. Genesis is the hidden commentary. The Ten Sayings are the public repair.

The First Tablet Is Already in the Tent

Anochi. Who is the Doer. At Sinai, God says, “I am Hashem, your God, who took you out.” I am the One who acted. In the tent, Yaakov says to the blind father: I am Esav, your firstborn.

He names himself as the doer of the hunt. The first Saying is an identification. The family story is a mis-identification. Sinai tells the nation: do not become someone else in order to be loved. Let the Parent name you.

No image. No other gods. Fohrman hears the shofar at Sinai as a cry before it becomes words, and he sets that cry next to Esav’s “tze’akah gedolah u’marah ad me’od” — the great and bitter cry when the blessing is gone. God, who needs nothing, opens Himself to being refused.

Idolatry is not only bowing to stone. It is forcing the Parent into a form you can manage with your hands and eyes, the way a son tries to manage a blind father’s love with goatskins.

Do not carry the Name in vain. This is Fohrman’s cleanest hit. The phrase Hashem Elokecha appears for the first time in the Torah when Yaakov, already in costume, answers Yitzchak: ki hikrah Hashem Elokecha lefanai — because Hashem your God made it happen for me (Bereshit 27:20). The Name is used to make a lie hold. The next time the phrase is loaded this way is the third Saying. The Torah is pointing. You remember that scene. Do not do that again.

Shabbat, Both Parents, and the Second Tablet

Rivkah says stay with Lavan yamim achadim, a few days, until your brother’s heat turns. The few days become twenty years. Yaakov works without rest in a house where wages change ten times. Fohrman reads Shabbat against that grind. Rest is not a nap. Rest breaks the hierarchy in which a human being is only labor.

Honor father and mother — not father alone. After the stolen blessing, Yitzchak and Rivkah together send Yaakov to Padan Aram. The text says he listened to his father and his mother. Esav watches. Then Esav, who has already married women who embitter Rivkah, takes a daughter of Ishmael because he has seen what honors his father.

The fifth Saying is not only Yaakov’s obedience. It is also Esav’s late attempt to hold both parents in view. Honor is what stops the family from splitting into Dad’s son and Mom’s son.

Fohrman’s sharpest structural claim is this. Every horizontal crime in Yaakov’s life is bleed-through from a vertical wound — a fracture with Yitzchak, or later with Lavan standing in as father. Murder, the neighbor’s wife, theft, false witness, coveting: they are what happens when a child cannot trust that there is blessing enough.

Esav says in his heart he will kill his brother when mourning comes. He has motive and later four hundred men. He does not do it. That restraint is the fifth Saying holding the sixth. Lavan puts Leah in the dark where Rachel was expected. The house that stole a firstborn blessing is trapped inside a firstborn marriage. Goatskins. I am Esav. Identity theft is the prototype of false witness.

Do not covet. The word is already in the closet. Bigdei Esav hachamudot — Esav’s coveted garments, the ones Rivkah puts on Yaakov. Coveting is not first about a house or an ox. It is about believing your own face is not enough, so you put on your brother’s skin to be lovable. Lo tachmod is the Torah forbidding that costume.

You Cannot See God. Then You See a Face.

The first tablet says no form. You saw no image at Horev. The saga ends: ra’iti panecha kir’ot penei Elokim vattirzeini — I have seen your face as one sees the face of God, and you accepted me (Bereshit 33:10). Yaakov has learned the only permitted image: the brother who was the rival. God remains unseen. The neighbor becomes visible as someone whose existence is not the theft of yours. That is the last Saying enacted. They weep. The zero-sum game of the one blessing in the dark tent is, for a moment, not running.

Fohrman asks the ugly question. If Genesis 27 is a catastrophe of favoritism, why does Sinai look like God picking Yaakov’s children over the Esavs of the world? His move is integration. In the tent, Yitzchak speaks to Esav and Rivkah speaks to Yaakov. At Sinai God takes up both voices.

Nominally He addresses the children of Yaakov. Really the speech is aimed at the whole human house — including the older brother who cried. Chosenness is not Dad loved me more. It is: the family that lived the wound is commanded to publish the repair.

Leibtag takes those same Ten Words and shows they are the spine of Devarim. Fohrman shows they were already the spine of the family. Together they are one claim. The Author who spoke at Sinai had already been speaking in Beersheba.

What I Carry Now

The tree goes into bitter water. The springs number twelve. The palms number seventy. The Ten Sayings repair the house of Yitzchak so the house of Noah can drink. Whether a man accepts Jeanson’s clock or only the Torah’s table, we are not separate species of human. Prophecy says the quarrel with Israel will not be the last word. The Boss who took a slave nation out of Egypt has not changed His Name.

I do not need a pastor to certify that these Words belong to Israel before they belong to the nations. I needed my mother’s kitchen, a beit din, a prison classroom, and the Book. Live the Sayings when you sit in the house and when you walk on the way.

Teach the children the family history, not a slogan. When a brother can look at another brother and see a face like the face of God, the nations are already being healed — one household at a time. That is the only scale on which a tree ever sweetens water.

As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. 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

• The Raising Lion
• “Take Words: Reclaiming Loving Guidance Before It’s Too Late” Find A Friend
• The Ten Sayings: Healing the Nations as One Family
• Toldot | תולדות | “Consequences”
• What the World Missed: The Star of Yaakov and the Quiet Dawn of Redemption

Rico Cortes (Wisdom in Torah) is a Hebrew Roots teacher.

Rico Cortes (Wisdom in Torah) is a Hebrew Roots teacher. In the video “Part 1 companion,” he argues a technically correct point from Leviticus: the Pesach lamb is a shelamim (peace/fellowship offering), not a chatat (sin offering).

He then still applies John 1:29 (“the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”) to Yeshua by blending other images—Isaiah 53, Yom Kippur, ransom language, and Hebrews. That combination is exactly where the Levitical system is left behind.

Here is the list of Leviticus prohibitions and structural rules that teaching runs against. These are the ones most directly in play when a man is presented as the lamb that removes the world’s sin and when that lamb is treated as a picture to look at.

Unauthorized slaughter and blood outside the designated place

• Leviticus 17:3–4, 8–9: Anyone who slaughters an ox, lamb, or goat and does not bring it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting to present it as an offering to Hashem—bloodguilt is on that person. The blood must be brought to the altar.
• Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement…” Atonement by blood is tied to the altar, the priesthood, and the specific animal brought by the offerer or the community. A death that occurs outside that system does not fulfill the verse.

No human being may be offered

• Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2–5: Do not give any of your offspring to Molech. Human sacrifice is an abomination. The Torah never authorizes a man—even a righteous man—to function as the korban. The animals in Leviticus 1–7 and 16 are animals. Substituting a human for them inverts the entire category.

Each person bears his own sin; no transfer of guilt onto another human

• The Levitical system has the sinner (or the community via the high priest) bring the prescribed animal. The two goats of Leviticus 16 work inside that framework; they do not license a later human to “take away the sin of the world.” Ezekiel 18 (which restates the same principle) is consistent with Leviticus: the soul that sins shall die.

Images and likenesses

• Leviticus 19:4: “Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves molten gods.”
• Leviticus 26:1: “You shall not make idols for yourselves, or set up a carved image or a standing stone… to bow down to it.”
• The Second Saying (Exodus 20:4 / Deuteronomy 5:8) is the same commandment restated: no likeness of anything in the heavens, on the earth, or in the waters. A lamb presented as “the picture of Messiah” or “the man coming like a lamb to die for our sins” is precisely a likeness made to be looked at and meditated upon. That is the thing the commandment forbids.

Priestly and ritual boundaries

• Only descendants of Aaron may handle the blood and the offerings (Leviticus 6–7, 16). A teacher who assigns the high-priestly or atoning function to a first-century Galilean man is assigning a role Leviticus reserves for the kohanim operating at the altar.
• Different offerings have different blood applications (thrown, placed on horns, sprinkled toward the parochet). Mixing Pesach (shelamim), daily tamid lambs, and Yom Kippur goats into a single composite “Lamb of God” erases the distinctions that Leviticus spends chapters establishing.

Rico can quote Leviticus accurately on the classification of the Pesach lamb and still violate the book’s actual operating rules the moment he maps that lamb (or any other korban) onto a man whose death is said to remove sin for the world. That mapping is the violation.

On the second part of your question: the Torah does not give us a lamb as a picture of a coming man. Exodus 12 and Leviticus 23 give Israel a meal of protection and covenant identity, eaten in haste, with blood on the doorposts so the Destroyer would pass over.

It is not a visual aid for later theology. When later writers turn the lamb into an image of a dying Messiah, they are doing the thing the Ten Sayings and Leviticus 19:4 / 26:1 prohibit—making a likeness and attaching redemptive meaning to it. The commandment is “no images except the ones that help us understand Messiah.” It is no likeness of anything.

On Rico Cortes, Leviticus, and the Lamb of God

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah  ·  August 29, 2026

Rico Cortes presents himself as a Torah teacher and holds the title of Kohen. That title is not a decoration. It is a lineage, a charge, a burden. The kohanim were set apart to guard the altar, to handle the blood, to teach the people the difference between what is holy and what is profane. When a Kohen teaches the nations to violate the Torah, the violation is not his alone. It is his by inheritance.

In his lecture “The Passover Lamb Was Never a Sin Offering — So What Did John 1:29 Mean?,” Cortes does exactly that. He makes the most guarded category in the Levitical system — the sin-bearing offering — and he hands it to a man. He creates the image the Second Saying forbids, and he makes it the centerpiece of devotion. He does this not as a pagan, but as a man who claims to stand inside the covenant.

The violations are not subtle. They are structural.

In Egypt, the lamb was not a dinner animal. It was a god. The ram was the face of Khnum, the potter who formed men from Nile clay, and of Amun, king of the gods. That is why Moses refuses Pharaoh’s offer to sacrifice in the land. Exodus 8:22 in the Hebrew — English 8:26 — is blunt: ki toevat Mitzrayim nizbach l’Hashem Eloheinu… hen nizbach et toevat Mitzrayim l’eineihem v’lo yiskelunu. “We would be slaughtering the toevah of Egypt to Hashem our God. If we slaughter the toevah of Egypt before their eyes, will they not stone us?”

Rashi on Genesis 46:34 says the same thing about shepherds: every shepherd is toevat Mitzrayim “because the flock is a deity to them.” The construct is toevat Mitzrayim — Egypt’s toevah — not “Israel is an abomination.” A grammar teacher would mark the English. You do not call a people’s god an “abomination” in their own mouth and then expect them to stone you for killing it. You stone a man for killing what you hold sacred.

Shadal and A. S. Yahuda both note that Hebrew toevah sits next to Egyptian wab / uab — “pure, set apart, holy.” What Egypt called holy, Israel called toevah, and the Torah uses Egypt’s own category against Egypt: the ram they set apart is the animal Israel must slaughter. Pesach in Egypt is not a picture of a later Messiah. It is Israel killing Egypt’s false god in public, under a sentence of stoning, and walking out alive. That is why the lamb is taken on the tenth and held four days. The whole street can see what is about to die.

Leviticus 17 is unambiguous. The blood that makes atonement must be brought to the altar, to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. Blood outside that place is bloodguilt. A death that occurs on a Roman cross, outside the Temple, outside the priesthood, outside the prescribed animal — that death cannot fulfill the verse. It stands outside the system entirely. Cortes knows this. He teaches it. And then he steps over it.

Leviticus 18 and 20 are equally clear. Human sacrifice is an abomination. The Torah never authorizes a man to function as the korban. The animals in Leviticus 1 through 7 and in chapter 16 are animals. Substituting a human for them inverts the entire category. It is not a fulfillment. It is a desecration.

And then there is the image. Exodus 20, Leviticus 19, Leviticus 26 — the same prohibition, repeated, reinforced, never softened.

No likeness of anything in the heavens, on the earth, or in the waters. You shall have no molten gods. No carved images. No standing stones. A lamb presented as the picture of Messiah, a man coming like a lamb to die for the sins of the world — this is a likeness made to be looked at, meditated upon, adored. It is the thing the commandment forbids, dressed in the language of redemption.

The Christian will reach for Abraham and Isaac. That reach fails.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, showed that the Akedah is the Torah’s loudest no to human sacrifice. In a world where children were property, and the gods demanded them as payment, God stops the knife. He does not require what the nations require. He abhors it. The story is a polemic against patria potestas — the idea that a father owns his child and may dispose of him however he pleases.

Rabbi David Fohrman, in his lecture on Re’eh, draws the same line from Deuteronomy 12:31 — do not do this to Hashem your God; every abomination He hates they do for their gods, even burning their sons and daughters in fire. He is pointing back to the Akedah and saying: “That is what the nations do, and I will not have it.”

The Akedah is not a precedent for a man dying as a sin-offering. It is the Torah’s declaration that no man, no son, no human life, may be placed on the altar. The story ends with a ram caught in the thicket. The ram is the substitute. The son walks away. That is the point.

Cortes, as a Kohen, should know this. The kohanim were the ones who stood between the people and the altar. They were the ones who taught the difference between the clean and the unclean, the holy and the common. When a Kohen takes the altar’s most sacred function and assigns it to a man, when he takes the Second Saying’s most guarded prohibition and turns it into an object of devotion, he is not teaching Torah. He is teaching its inversion.

The prophet Ezekiel saw this coming. In chapter 44, God says to the kohanim who turned from Him: you have not kept charge of My holy things, you have set up your idols in My sanctuary. The charge is not new. It is ancient. And it falls on every Kohen who trades the altar for an image, the blood for a man, the covenant for a cross.

Cortes is not the first to do this. He will not be the last. But he does it with the title of Kohen on his lips, and that makes the violation heavier, not lighter. The kohanim were given the Torah to guard it. When they teach others to break it, the guard has become the thief.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo, Texas

Nation, Not Religion: What Pastors in This City Taught Me About Friendship with the Jew

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Elul 5786 / August 2026

I have been the chazzan for the Jewish community in Amarillo for twenty-five years. What I am trying to show is simple. Over those years, every pastor I have dealt with in this city has carried the same agenda. Their book tells them: to the Jew first.

Their book tells them they will not see the one they wait 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.

The polite form of that agenda is a sentence I heard again this week. Pastor Glenn Stoker of Bible Believers Baptist Church on Rockwell Road 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. 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.

The Call and the Texts

I listen to Pastor Stoker’s radio program some Sundays on the way to work. He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He holds that the King James Version is the Bible, and that anything else is not translated correctly. I asked how the King James could be the perfect translation when no Hebrew scholars sat at that table, and none sat at Nicaea either.

He said I was ignorant. Had I not read the book about the compilers? I asked whether he had ever spoken with an Orthodox Jew. Assuredly yes, he said, several. Then I asked why Christians claim that our Bible contains Jesus everywhere. In that moment, the call left the Jewish community and landed on the nation. He believed the Jews would be in the tribulation and would suffer because we would not believe in Jesus.

What followed was texting. The wording below is from the phone, not from memory.

I wrote first with courtesy.

Thank you very much. I have not been able to speak to any pastor in my 25 years as a Jew. Thank you again. Gavriel Ben David

I sent the site.

beithashoavah.org Here are my credentials as a Hazan.

His answer to the work was not a verse.

Pastor Stoker text:

I don’t care what your credentials are or from where; if you can’t tell the difference between a non-practicing Jew and a Jew who converted to Christianity on his own, ie Mordachi Ham, etc I’ll stroke your oversized ego though and check it out.

I asked him the question I have asked for years, the question a teacher named Yehuda Yisrael puts to missionaries in the same words.

Deuteronomy 4, the whole chapter. That is our covenant with Hashem, just like Jeremiah 31. What part of the New Covenant did Jesus initiate?

Then I sent Jeremiah 31:35–36 in both English and Hebrew. The Lord of hosts is His name. 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. That is the answer found in the same chapter that Christians use for a new covenant. The sun still stands. Israel is still a nation before Him.

I answered his question about authority. He asked it more than once.

We have 613 commandments, and my boss is Hashem. What other authority do I need as a Jew other than Moses and the GOD who took us…

The Tree of Life. The Ten Sayings, Exodus 20. That is where every human being should get his authority. From the God of Israel.

I do not understand your question because I have stated this at least 4 times. The Torah is from Hashem…

He did not then open Jeremiah 31. He answered the writer.

Pastor Stoker text:

Write all you want. You still have no absolute authority

Where is your absolute authority?

Answer the question: what is your final authority?

Ok, prove the Torah is 100% accurate without any mistakes, then show some facts that no man could have known when it was written

Hazan Gavriel text:

I asked where the Tree of Life is. He answered with a label.

Pastor Stoker text:

Yep, read about the “Tree of Life,” kind of getting into the kabala

Hazan Gavriel text:

I laid out the six days of creation and the seventh as the history of man— Psalm 90, a day as a thousand years.

Day one: light from darkness, Adam given the knowledge of good and evil and the power to choose.

Day two: waters from waters — the Flood, the ark on Ararat, dry land again.

Day three: seed after its kind — Avraham in 1948 of the Jewish calendar, then Yitzchak, Yaakov, Israel.

Day four: lights for signs and seasons — the prophets.

Day five: swarming things and birds — Israel scattered.

Day six: beast and man, and the choice of the sixth millennium.

Day seven: Shabbat. The thousand-year rest is coming. Baruch Hashem.

He answered the map in three words.

Pastor Stoker text:

typology not doctrine

Gavriel text:

I answered the label from the peshat. Genesis 8 is a world begun again. The wind of Hashem moved over the waters the way the Spirit moved in the beginning. Waters separated. Dry land. The ark rested. He never wrote back after that second creation and Noah as a beginning. Silence is also an answer.

How I Came to Sit at Those Tables

I was raised in church — Baptist and Catholic rooms, Black father, Spanish-speaking mother whose people came up through Jalisco, Guanajuato, Durango, Chihuahua, and New Mexico.

911 – On the eleventh of September, 2001, when I was about thirty-five, my mother told me what the house had been hiding: secret candles, Ladino in the kitchen, spring cleaning that was more than spring cleaning. She said we were from Spain, like every family member said.

Her grandfather was a Cohen, but we did not know until I did both of my uncles’ DNA. My two tios both tested positive for the COHEN MODAL haplogroup through the Jewish DNA testing site, FamilyTree DNA. My family is related to the owner of FamilyTree DNA.

I went to Israel in 2002. I met Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute. Rabbi Richman asked me if I was coming to return since my mother was Jewish. I was still a Jewish Christian then. I studied for years in Messianic and Hebrew Roots circles — Brad Scott, Bill Cloud, and others. We founded a ministry. Mayim Hayim Ministries mayim-hayim.org

That website is still there, but the content is not Christian.

I wore tzitzit and talked about Yeshua and the Torah in the same breath. In 2012, I completed a Conservative conversion in El Paso under Rabbi Stephen Leon. I now serve as chazzan of a very small Sephardic minyan in Amarillo, Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, and I teach Torah within the walls of a prison.

Twenty-five years of standing for this community is long enough to know which invitations were friendship and which were recruitment. I am not writing as a man who never loved the church. I am writing as a man who sat in its Bible studies, Seders, and Chick-fil-A booths, and then stayed Jewish when the friendship ran out.

The First Four Shepherds

The first was Pastor Bo at Trinity Fellowship Church. I was in a men’s Bible study on a book called Following in the Master’s Footsteps. The questions I asked did not line up with the history he was giving — not Jewishly. He called me and asked me to leave. People come to his Bible study, he said, to listen to him and not to me.

The second was Pastor Bill Glimm of Grace Community Church. I had invited him to a Passover Seder, and then to another gathering. In the conversation, I mentioned Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints.

He said those people are not his brothers. If I said they were, he would call the police or have security walk me out of the building. I asked him plainly: Are you saying Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not your brothers? I told you, he said. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult. Mormons believe the devil is Jesus’ brother. Leave now, he said, and he called security. I left.

Grace Church My First Visit

I remember the first time I visited Grace Church; the sermon was on Matthew 23, which is not a good chapter for the only Jew in the house. I was called a Judizer by Bill. He once told me that I do not need legalistic rituals; I keep Passover every day.

Later, one of Bill’s largest donors found out he was an Iranian Jew and started coming to our Center. He never stopped being a Christian Jew from Iran. I will always love him; he gave over $200,000 to Mayim Hayim Ministries, which Mayim Hayim gave away until our best friends stole everything we did not give away.

The third was Pastor Polis of Hillside Church, one of the largest congregations in Amarillo. We met at Chick-fil-A. The owner introduced us and told him I was a Jewish man in this town who did not believe in Jesus. We sat down over coffee. I asked why he kept Shabbat on Sunday.

Because Jesus was resurrected on Sunday, he said. I said the Greek of the resurrection accounts does not give the Church the sentence it thinks it has. Mia ton sabbaton — the first of the Sabbaths — sits in the counting of the Omer, not in a transfer of the seventh day. Pastor Polis is college-educated in Greek.

I said he knew what the phrase means. He said he would have to go home and study it. The next time I saw him, he was with his son. You are not to say anything in front of my son, he told me. I am the one who teaches my son doctrine. The third time I saw him at Chick-fil-A, he was with his wife. He walked past me as if I were furniture.

That is why, when Pastor Stoker called, I was skeptical and also glad. I know the radio voice. I also know what happens when a Jew asks the text to remain the text.

Other Rooms in This Town

Pastor Maurice Burks, who one day accused me of hitting him in the Sam’s Club. I asked him a question about Christianity, and he said he was not going there. I said to Maurice, ” You, as a pastor, should be able to defend your faith in and out of season and he called me a liar and said the Christian Bible does not say that. Then he called me the “devil”.

2 Timothy 4:2 New International Version: The Proof That Is Why I Ask

² Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.

1 Peter 3:15: Advises believers to always be ready to give an answer or defense for the hope they have, doing so with gentleness and respect.

I did get upset because he, as a pastor, just called me a liar and took off. I pulled up the verse on my phone in seconds and followed him to show him the verse; that is when he said I assaulted him in Sam’s Club. He started yelling as loud as he could and said, ” Stop, Archie, this man is assaulting me, and I knew his many years in theft management had kicked in. Sam’s has cameras, so I was not worried, but I was shocked that all of it, in front of our wives, was more embarrassing.

Pastor Herman was an ex-railroad engineer turned pastor.

Pastor Graves was the Black pastor I sat with in good faith. The heads of the Black Israelite Congregation who looked at my Yemenite rabbi and at me and told us we were not Jews. Blood, they said. Geography, they said. We did not fit the story they needed.

A gentleman I remember as Pastor Graves looked at the weapon I carry — a Jew in Texas, a chaplain, a man who has buried family in a violent year — and said I looked as if I thought I was bad because I carried a gun. He said he was going home to get his and we could have a shoot-out. We left.

Pastor Dr. 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 to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.

Open the Hebrew of Isaiah 61. The recovering of sight to the blind is not there. It is in Isaiah 42, and it is in the Greek of the Septuagint that 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.

Pastor Lee Simpson told me I had answered many of the questions he carried. Then he said he could not teach that to his people. They were not ready. The text is allowed to move a man in private. The congregation must not be disturbed.

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. Tzitzit and a kippah became a punch line so that ham could stay on the table.

The Church of Christ congregations I have met in this town have been the hardest. They denounce 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.

Pastor Larry, who pastors a church in Fritch, let me know that the Christian Bible and the New Covenant were, in effect, not the Old Testament.

Even a man from a Reform temple told me he did not lose anything in Israel. That, he said, is why they are called Temples: there is no need for another one. I pray they turn to Hashem and to His Torah as Jews.

The Sentence I Cannot Forget

My niece’s husband, Bishop Ludwig Onoko, said it 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. The Temple, in that sentence, is not the house of prayer for all nations. It is a trap laid for the Jews so that the nations can be proven right. Stoker said the polite part: nation, not religion. The bishop said the last act. Same script.

The Questions That Were Not Answered

Which clause of Jeremiah 31 did Jesus initiate, and where does that chapter name the blood of a crucified messiah as the start of the new covenant?

The reply is stages, patterns, and the Greek book proving itself.

Bible Believers Baptist Church Glen Stoker

Here is the scorecard of the Stoker thread as the phone recorded it.

I asked how the King James could be perfect with no Jewish scholar at 1611 or at Nicaea. On the phone, I wrote that about forty-seven scholars translated it, and there was not one Jewish scholar among them, nor at Nicaea. He had already called me ignorant and told me to read the book about the compilers. A bibliography is not a name.

I asked why Pharaoh would stone Israel in Exodus 8:26, and I sent the King James and the Hebrew, the ram-god of Egypt in our tradition, and the fact that the Passover sacrifice is a peace offering, not a sin offering. He did not answer 8:26.

I asked what part of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 Jesus initiated, and I sent 31:35–36. He did not name a clause.

I asked how the Christian replaces me if only Jews and the sons of Abraham still claim that father, and if Jeremiah says the seed does not cease while the sun stands. He did not open the verse.

I asked where the Tree of Life is. He said kabbalah.

I laid out the six days and Genesis 8. He said typology, not doctrine. Then he stopped writing.

He asked where my final authority is. I answered: 613, Hashem, Moses, Deuteronomy 4, Exodus 19, Exodus 20, the God of Israel. He asked again. Then he raised a new exam: prove the Torah one hundred percent, with facts no man could have known when it was written.

One question he answered outright on the call: had he spoken with an Orthodox Jew? One textual note he offered later: “Isaiah is not the end of our Bible; Chronicles is. That is true of the Tanakh’s order”.

It does not answer Jeremiah 31. The rest were redirected, labeled, or turned into a remark about my ego.

What Nation-Not-Religion Means for a Jew

I do not write that every Christian on earth is this way. I write what I can swear to. Pastor Bo, Pastor Bill Glimm, Pastor Polis, Pastor Brown, Pastor Carr, Pastor Simpson, the Church of Christ rooms, the bishop, and Pastor Stoker. The faces change. The terms of friendship do not.

The flag is allowed. The beanie and the strings are a problem. The Jew who keeps Shabbat is religion. The Jew who is only a prophecy token is nation. The moment you read Jeremiah 31 as still naming Israel and Judah, the support cools. That is what happened on the phone: first the offer, then not the religion, then authority, then typology, then silence.

Their book tells them to go to the Jew first. Their book tells them the story is unfinished until we say the verse they require. As long as there is a chance to convert us, they are friendly. When there is not, we are a nation they can pray over and a religion they can wait to watch fail.

Typology and Doctrine

A pattern that helps a man see is not the same as a commandment. I do not bind anyone to a six-thousand-year clock. The sages themselves argued about the length of the days. What I will not surrender is this: the Torah’s week is not a children’s story.

Creation, Flood, Avraham, prophets, exile, the beast and the image, and then rest — that is the shape of the world I was given. The rainbow after the Flood and the Shabbat after the six days are both signs that judgment is not the last word. Covenant is.

The difference between us is not whether a day can be a thousand years. The difference is whether Israel remains Israel when the thousand years are spoken of. If the seventh day 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 mountain is still the mountain. The House is still ahead of us.

What I Carry Now

I carry a weapon because I live in this country and because this year has already taken family. I carry tzitzit because the Torah told me to. I carry a small congregation and a prison classroom because the hidden ones are still coming home — crypto-Jews, the wounded, the men who found a Chumash after they lost everything else. I do not need a pastor to certify that we are Jews. I needed my mother’s kitchen, a beit din, a priestly memory in the blood, and the Book.

To the pastors who were kind: thank you. To the pastors who wanted a shoot-out, a fist over Luke 4, a radio joke about a beanie, or a front-row seat at Jewish tribulation: I am still here. The Third Temple, when it stands, will not be built so that we can accept an antichrist. It will be built because Hashem spoke of a house for His Name. If you love that House, love the people without a conversion clause.

As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. 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

Parashat Ki Teitzei: The 74 Commandments, Family Fractures, and the Tree of Life for the Nations

Parashat Ki Teitzei 5786 | Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19 | 9 Elul 5786 / August 22, 2026

• Ki Teitzei contains more mitzvot than any other parsha (74).
• These laws are the practical, civil branching of the Ten Sayings.
• They arise from real family problems recorded in Genesis.
• The ultimate goal is restoration: the Tree of Life healing humanity’s divided family.
• Brief note on Jeanson’s peer-reviewed Y-chromosome and mitochondrial work pointing to three ancestral fathers and three ancestral mothers.

I. The Tree of Life and Its Healing Leaves: The Torah

Ki Teitzei (Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19) is the densest parsha for mitzvot (classically 74), and many of them function as legal tikkun or retrospective commentary on earlier narratives rather than free-standing rules.

II. The Trunk: The Ten Sayings as the Source

Brief overview of the Ten as the root system. Each of the following sections takes one Saying (or a related cluster) and shows how specific mitzvot of Ki Teitzei grow from it and repair a Genesis family wound.

III. Branch 1 – Shabbat / Sabbatical Rest (1st–4th Sayings cluster)

• Mitzvot of rest, release, and non-exploitation (workers’ wages, forgotten sheaf, sabbatical-related kindness, etc.).
• Genesis root: Cain and Abel — conflict over land, offering, and the first bloodshed that broke rest and brotherhood.
• Application: Rest is the foundation of a civil society that does not devour its own family.
• Noah Commanded to Keep Shabbat: The “OT” Rainbow as a sign of Shabbat and Creation.

IV. Branch 2 – Honoring Parents & Family Continuity (5th Saying)

• Laws of firstborn inheritance, two wives (beloved and hated), rebellious son, levirate marriage (yibbum), and protecting the next generation.
• Genesis roots: – Isaac & Rebecca / Ishmael & Isaac – Esau & Jacob – Rachel & Leah and the transfer of the birthright to Joseph – Judah & Tamar
• Key insight: Preference and favoritism fracture the family; the law restores fairness and continuity.

V. Branch 3 – Do Not Murder / Protect Life (6th Saying)

• Laws against kidnapping, false testimony that endangers life, the rebellious son procedure, burial of the executed, roof parapet (preventing accidental death), and the fighting men/pregnant woman case (Exodus 21 echoed and extended).
• Genesis roots: Cain & Abel; the near-destruction of Joseph; Yaakov–Lavan conflict that led to Rachel’s death in childbirth (yatz’a cycle); the threat to Binyamin.
• Theme: Family conflict produces collateral damage to the next generation. The law holds both fighters responsible and protects the vulnerable.

VI. Branch 4 – Do Not Commit Adultery / Sexual Integrity (7th Saying)

• Laws of the captive woman, defamation of a wife, adultery, rape, seduction, prohibited marriages, and purity in the camp.
• Genesis roots: The sexual and relational fractures around Judah & Tamar, the captive-woman pattern, and the consequences of disordered desire in the patriarchal families.
• Civil society requires protected boundaries so the family line is not further broken.

VII. Branch 5 – Do Not Steal / Property & Honest Dealing (8th Saying)

• Returning lost objects (including the ox), honest weights and measures, not muzzling the ox, timely payment of wages, collateral rules, and interest prohibitions.
• Genesis roots: Joseph as the “ox”; the brothers’ sale of Joseph; Laban’s repeated theft of wages and flock; the cycle of taking what belongs to another.
• Repair: Returning what was lost restores trust within the extended family.

VIII. Branch 6 – Do Not Bear False Witness (9th Saying)

• Laws against false accusations of a bride, honest testimony, and related judicial integrity.
• Genesis roots: The brothers’ deception of Jacob with Joseph’s coat; false reports that destroyed trust.
• Truth-telling is required to stop the cycle of family destruction.

IX. Branch 7 – Do Not Covet / Guarding Desire (10th Saying)

• Laws limiting desire for the captive woman, mixed species, and the broader restraint of appetite appear throughout the parsha.
• Genesis roots: The original coveting that led to the sale of Joseph and earlier sibling rivalries.
• Desire must be trained so it does not consume the family.

X. Branch 8 – The Nations & Amalek (Extension of the above into the wider family)

• Laws concerning Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Egyptians, and the final command to remember and blot out Amalek.
• Genesis roots: The 70 nations; the lines of Esau (35) and Ishmael (35); the ongoing hostility that began in the family.
• Zechariah 13:8 (two-thirds) as a prophetic echo of the firstborn/double-portion theme.
• The Jewish people stand as witnesses who must both remember the wounds and offer the cure.

XI. The Tree of Life as Healing for the Nations

• Summary: Every civil law in Ki Teitzei is a branch that grows from the Ten Sayings and is rooted in a Genesis family fracture.
• DNA evidence (Jeanson, Traced) confirms we are one family descending from a small number of ancestral parents. The fractures are therefore family fractures.
• The Tree of Life (Torah, the restored way of living) is the medicine.
• Israel’s unique role: to guard and give that Tree to the nations so the divided family can be healed.
• Closing invitation: Living these mitzvot is not only personal piety; it is the practical work of repairing the human family and offering the nations the leaves of the Tree for healing (cf. Ezekiel 47 / Revelation imagery of the leaves).

XII. Conclusion

• Ki Teitzei is the Torah’s detailed blueprint for turning the Ten Sayings into a functioning, compassionate civil society.
• That society is the repaired family of Adam.
• The descendants of Jacob carry the responsibility to model and share the Tree of Life so that the nations — our larger family — may live.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei (“When you go out”), contains more mitzvot than any other parsha—seventy-four commandments. These are not a random collection of rules. Instead, they form the practical, civil branching of the Ten Sayings (the Aseret HaDibrot).

Each law addresses a wound that first appeared in the family stories of Genesis. Together they reveal how Hashem governs the world through measure for measure (middah k’neged middah). They also show how He honors human free will and offers the Tree of Life as a source of healing for the entire human family.

Middah k’neged Middah

• Two wives and the firstborn (Deut. 21:15–17). The language of the “beloved” and “hated/senuah” wife, plus “first of his strength,” deliberately echoes Jacob, Leah, and Rachel (Gen. 29–30, 49:3). Jacob favored Rachel and effectively shifted the double portion toward Joseph (son of the beloved) over Reuben (son of the less-loved Leah). The law insists the actual firstborn’s rights cannot be overridden by preference. Commentators such as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks treat this as the Torah correcting the family dynamics that produced so much strife in Genesis.
• Returning the lost ox/animal (Deut. 22:1–3), with the parallel in Exodus 23:4 about your enemy’s ox. Joseph is repeatedly associated with the ox (shor): Jacob’s blessing calls him the firstling of his ox (Deut. 33:17), and the imagery of a wandering/lost animal resonates with Joseph “wandering in the field” seeking his brothers (Gen. 37:15). The command to return even an enemy’s animal, and not to ignore it, can be read against the brothers’ treatment of Joseph and the eventual reconciliation with Jacob. The Exodus formulation already frames the duty toward “your enemy,” so the Deuteronomy restatement intensifies the ethical demand.

Other clear narrative roots include:

• Amalek (Deut. 25:17–19) — direct recall of the attack in Exodus 17.
• Remember what happened to Miriam (Deut. 24:8–9) — explicit pointer to Numbers 12 and the laws of tzara’at.
• Ammonites and Moabites barred from the congregation (Deut. 23:4–7) — grounded in the story of Lot’s daughters (Gen. 19), Balaam, and the refusal to offer bread and water during the wilderness journey.
• Levirate marriage / yibbum and chalitzah (Deut. 25:5–10) — the legal institution already enacted in the Judah–Tamar narrative (Gen. 38) and later in the Book of Ruth.
• Multiple social-justice laws (treatment of the stranger, orphan, widow; timely wages; pledges; forgotten sheaves, etc.) that repeatedly invoke the Egypt experience as the formative “story” that generates the commandment.
• The rebellious son (Deut. 21:18–21) and the beautiful captive (21:10–14) are linked in midrashic tradition to the chain of consequences that begins with taking a captive and ends in a dysfunctional household (and, in some readings, to figures such as Absalom).

Additional possible links appear with the mother-bird law (compassion/parental imagery that some teachers, including Rabbi David Fohrman, connect back to patriarchal family dynamics), the prohibition on kidnapping/selling into slavery (echoes of Joseph), and the ox that must not be muzzled while working (again resonating with Joseph-as-ox imagery).

The Trunk: The Ten Sayings Branch into Civil Society

The Ten Sayings are the root system. The dense civil laws of Ki Teitzei—laws of inheritance, lost property, workers’ wages, safety, sexual integrity, judicial fairness, treatment of the stranger, and the final command concerning Amalek—grow from those roots. In addition, they show how the great principles of Shabbat rest, honor of parents, the sanctity of life, fidelity, honesty, and restraint of desire operate in daily life and in a functioning society.

These laws did not appear in a vacuum. They answer real fractures already recorded in Genesis.

Measure for Measure: The Way Hashem Runs the World

Hashem’s justice is reciprocal. What a person sows returns in kind, often through the next generation. This principle runs through every major family conflict in Genesis and is answered by the mitzvot of Ki Teitzei.

• Cain’s violence against his brother returns as exile and restless wandering.
• Yaakov’s angry curse in the fight with Lavan (“Whoever has your gods shall not live”) returns years later when Rachel dies in childbirth.
• The brothers’ sale of Joseph returns when they stand trembling before the unrecognized viceroy, fearing for their own lives and for Binyamin.

The civil laws of this parsha take that same reciprocal logic and turn it toward repair. For example, returning a lost ox, protecting a pregnant woman caught in a fight, ensuring fair inheritance, and refusing to exploit the weak all reverse the earlier pattern of taking, favoring, and endangering the vulnerable.

Free Will: The Dignity and the Danger

Measure for measure is never mechanical fatalism. Every fracture begins with a free choice, and every opportunity for repair remains open through free will.

God’s words to Cain in Genesis 4:7 capture this perfectly. The Hebrew does not use the ordinary word for a hinged door (delet). It uses petach—an opening, an entrance. “Sin is crouching at the petach.” Some traditional readers hear in that word the opening of the grave or the mouth of destruction. Yet the verse continues: its desire is for you, but you can rule over it. Cain is given his whole life to improve.

Cain’s later cry, “My iniquity is too heavy for me to bear” (Genesis 4:13), has long been read by many as the beginning of recognition and the possibility of teshuvah. Hashem’s protective mark shows that the opening was not slammed shut. Free will remains. The same God who spoke to Cain still leaves the petach of return open before every member of the human family.

Family Stories That Shape the Laws

The laws of the two wives and the firstborn’s double portion answer the favoritism and rivalry between Rachel and Leah. They also address the earlier tensions between Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau.

The command to return a lost ox (and all lost property) answers the theft and betrayal surrounding Joseph, who is himself called an ox in Jacob’s blessing.

The case of two men fighting and striking a pregnant woman so that “her children come out” (veyatz’u yeladeha) echoes the Yaakov–Lavan confrontation. The same root yatz’a (“to go out”) appears when Yehudah later describes Joseph’s disappearance to the Egyptian viceroy: “One went out from me.” Consequently, the cycle of conflict that forces children out of the family and threatens the parent’s life is precisely what the law seeks to interrupt.

Even the final command to remember Amalek reaches back to the wider family of the seventy nations that branched from Noah’s sons. It also refers to the ongoing hostility that began in sibling rivalry.

One Family Confirmed by DNA

Modern genetic research, including Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s work in Traced, points to a remarkable convergence with the biblical account. Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA studies indicate that the great diversity of humanity traces back to a very small number of ancestral fathers and mothers—consistent with the three sons of Noah and their wives after the Flood. Therefore, we are not separate species or unrelated tribes. We are one extended family that has been fractured by repeated choices against the Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life as Healing for the Nations

Because we are one family, the fractures are family fractures. The 74 mitzvot of Ki Teitzei are Torah’s detailed blueprint for repairing them. Furthermore, they turn the Ten Sayings into a civil society that protects life, restores what was taken, honors proper order, and restrains destructive desire.

Israel’s unique role is not superiority but responsibility. As keepers of the Tree of Life, the Jewish people are commanded to live by these laws and to offer its fruit and leaves as healing to the nations (see Ezekiel 47 and the imagery of the leaves as healing for the nations). The same reciprocal principle that once multiplied fracture can now multiply repair. This happens when free will chooses the Tree’s path.

Living the Lesson in Elul

We stand in the month of Elul, the season of return. The petach remains open. Every civil commandment in this week’s portion is an invitation to choose the measure that heals rather than the measure that continues the wound.

May we, the descendants of Jacob, take up our responsibility with joy. May we live the mitzvot that repair the old family stories. And may the leaves of the Tree of Life bring healing to the entire human family—one free choice at a time.

Shabbat Shalom.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David Esnoga Beit HaShoavah

Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson continues to uncover the hidden precision of the Torah through equidistant letter sequences (ELS) and gematria. In this latest teaching, he presents a remarkable finding: using a letter skip equal to the gematria of the word Yisrael (ישראל = 541), the Torah itself encodes the identity of the Messiah as ben Yishai (son of Jesse) and ben David (son of David), tightly bound to the word teshuvah — repentance.

This is not random. The Torah is the blueprint of creation. Its letters form living codes that still speak with mathematical exactness in our generation.

The Precision of the Skip: Gematria of Israel = 541

The numerical value of the five letters of Yisrael is:

• י = 10
• ש = 300
• ר = 200
• א = 1
• ל = 30

Total = 541

Rabbi Glazerson searches the continuous stream of Hebrew letters in the Torah at a skip of 541 letters. Within this structured dilug (skip), the phrases and words for Mashiach ben Yishai and ben David appear in meaningful proximity to teshuvah.

This alignment is highly significant. According to the statistical standards used by researchers such as Professor Eliyahu Rips, such tight clustering of related terms at a meaningful skip is far beyond chance.

Why Repentance Appears with the Messiah

The Rambam (Maimonides) is clear in Hilchot Teshuvah: the coming of the Messiah and the final redemption are conditional upon the Jewish people returning to Hashem through genuine repentance. Without teshuvah, there is no complete geulah.

Rabbi Glazerson’s table shows this exact relationship encoded in the Torah itself. The codes do not merely name the Messiah; they place him next to the very condition required for his arrival. The Torah teaches, through its hidden layer, the same truth that the open text and the sages have always taught: return to Hashem, and the Redeemer will come.

The Larger Blueprint

These findings fit the consistent pattern Rabbi Glazerson has shown for years:

• The Torah encodes the stages of redemption.
• The physical preparation often comes through a “son of Joseph” figure who opens the way.
• The final spiritual redemption arrives with Mashiach ben David, the son of Jesse.
• The indispensable key is teshuvah.

When the gematria of the name of the people of Israel itself becomes the key that reveals both the Messiah and repentance, the message is unmistakable. The destiny of Israel and the coming of the son of Jesse are inseparable from the nation’s return to the Torah.

A Call for Our Generation

We stand in a time of great upheaval. The nations continue to gather pressure against Jerusalem. Yet the Torah’s codes keep surfacing the same ancient promise with fresh clarity. The blueprint has not changed. The path remains the same: teshuvah, return to the commandments, strengthening of Torah observance, and trust in the God of Israel.

Rabbi Glazerson’s latest table is another luminous confirmation that the Torah is unlike any other book. Its surface narrative, its literary structure, its numerical relationships, and its hidden letter sequences all testify with one voice. The Messiah, son of Jesse, is bound to the repentance of the people whose very name equals 541.

May we hear the call of the codes and of the open text. May we do teshuvah from the depths of the heart. And may we merit to see the complete redemption speedily in our days.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Chapter Nine: Codes That Don’t Lie – Glazerson’s Torah Oracle
• 606 + 7= Ruth, The Code
• The Torah’s Living Timeline: Verses That Speak Our Generation’s Story – From 1948 to October 7 and Beyond
• Bible Codes Israel and Ishmael: Professor Glazerson, DNA Evidence, and the 70 Nations
• Milestone 17: Hosea’s Plea that the Lord Would Grant Life to Repentant Israel on the Third Day