Hebrew Voices #186 – The Hamas Prophecy: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Lynell: Think about this. Our God was sad. It made Him sad, and it made Him regret…

Nehemia: That the Earth was filled with “hamas”.

Lynell: That He made man because it was filled with Hamas. That’s how strongly Yehovah feels about Hamas.

Nehemia: There are adult themes in this episode, and it may not be appropriate for children, or for all audiences.

Lynell: If you are not comfortable talking about the actual happenings of October the 7th, it’s those types of things that we’re going to talk about. Because when we do a teaching on Hamas, we do a teaching on what the Bible says the word means. And those things that happened on October the 7th to women… we’re very explicit about what happened. We’re going to talk about it. We’re going to talk about what happened to the young women. We’re going to talk about what the Bible says. The Bible uses a lot of euphenisms for… euphenisms for… you say it.

Nehemia: Euphemisms.

Lynell: Euphemisms. The Bible uses a lot of euphemisms too. For this, we’re going to talk very directly about it, and we’re going to talk about the meaning of hamas, what it means. And that’s part of it, guys.

Nehemia: And hamas is not a euphemism. It’s a very explicit term. So, if you’re not comfortable with that, consider this a warning, and you might want to skip this episode.

Lynell: Yeah, definitely. And if you have a lot of trauma in the past and you’re not able to handle talking about that, we’ll give you a really quick Cliff Notes version: hamas means violence, lies, do ethically wrong, violate the Torah…

Nehemia: A word that we’re not going to say because it might trigger you.

Lynell: Yes. Things done to women. Pillage, plunder, humiliate, kidnap.

Nehemia: There you go.

Lynell: So, there’s your… there’s your quick…

Nehemia: That’s the “TLDR.”  Too long, didn’t read.

Lynell: Yeah. So, you can look at that if you want to know what hamas means.

Nehemia: It’s a lot more to it than that, but yeah.

Lynell: Yehovah, we pray for the peace of Israel. Yehovah, we pray for those captives, those who are still captive from October the 7th. Father, I pray that You would release them. God, that you would be with them. I don’t know what else to pray, Nehemia, about that… Will you please pray?

Nehemia: Father, set the captives free. When they call out hamas, be there to save them, Father. Let them be set free. The psalm says, “like a bird in a snare”. Let them be free and set them free from that captivity. Amen

Lynell: Amen.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to the Hamas Prophecy. We are going to talk about Hamas in the Tanakh. And very obviously, this was a teaching that we were inspired to do after escaping from Israel after the October 7th Hamas attack. We were both in Israel when the attack started.

Lynell: We wanted to know what the Bible said. What does the Bible say about Hamas? Does the Bible even mention Hamas? And it does. And so, we did a Palestine Prophecy, and now we’re doing a Hamas Prophecy.

Nehemia: And I think we should mention Amos 3:7. “For Lord Yehovah does not do a matter without revealing His counsel to His servants, the prophets.” And so, I would expect to find something in the Prophets about this, even if it’s not the specific event on October 7^th. But that pattern, that type of event must be somewhere in the Prophets.

So, we started looking at hamas. You asked me, what does hamas mean? And we want to share a bunch of verses. And I actually had revelation from this. I learned something about a Hebrew word that I didn’t know, and as far as I can tell, I don’t know if anybody else knows either. So, I’m a bit surprised. No, I think we did find one of the translations had that, but it’s not commonly known.

Let’s start with Psalm chapter 11, verse five. Do you want to read the JPS there? Psalm 11:5.

Lynell: Sure. “Yehovah seeks out the righteous man but loathes the wicked one who loves injustice.”

Nehemia: So, that’s the new JPS, the 1985 JPS. King James has “the LORD trieth the righteous, but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.” So, the JPS had injustice, and the King James had violence. And they’re both right because both of them have, in Hebrew, the word hamas. Now it’s the Hebrew word hamas, not the Arabic word hamas. Just want to be clear. We’ll talk about the Arabic. The group that attacked Israel on October 7th, known as Hamas, was established in the late 1980’s, and it’s an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement in Arabic, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing, Harakat Al-muqawama Al-islamiyya. Which is Hamas.

So, is there any connection between the Hebrew hamas and the Arabic word Hamas? That’s the question. And let’s start out with, Hebrew is a Semitic language. But more importantly, in this case, the people who establish Hamas in the 1980’s, they grew up under Israeli rule. And here we have to distinguish it from the PLO, or Fatah, which was established in the 1960’s, and it was established by people who had never stepped foot in the State of Israel, who didn’t know Hebrew, who knew nothing about Jews, other than anti-Semitic tropes that they were trained on.

The PLO really had almost no connection whatsoever to Jewish culture. Hamas knew about Jewish culture. When they called their organization the Hebrew word for violence, because that’s what Hamas is in Hebrew, violence…

Lynell: You said to me when we first started talking, because we’ve studied this for a long time, there was a Sanskrit word as well.

Nehemia: Yeah, we’ve been studying this for months and finally decided, “Okay, we may never finish, we’ve got to share it.” So, the Sanskrit word is ahimsa, which… and the A there means non, and himsa is violence. And there’s an example of what we’ll talk about a little bit later, which is a false cognate. It’s a complete coincidence that the Sanskrit word himsa, violence, and the Hebrew word hamas… I think it’s a complete coincidence. There’s no organic connection there between the two words.

Now, Hebrew and Arabic, it’s different; they’re Semitic languages. And the people who decided this is the acronym we’re going to give the organization, because they could have called it Hama… it’s Harakat Al-muqawama Al-islamiyya. And Islamiya, the word Islam is the third word, so it could have been called Hama. Why did they call it Hamas instead of Hamaa? Probably because their goal was terror, and they knew that the word “violence” would strike terror in the heart of Israelis. Every Israeli knows what hamas means. Anybody who’s ever studied the Bible knows in Biblical Hebrew that hamas is violence. It also has the meaning of injustice, though, but the more common meaning is violence.

Lynell: So, this event that happened on October 7^th, it was an event of biblical proportions. It used to happen on a much broader scale, you said, but we were able to do something different this time.

Nehemia: Right. So, it used to happen all the time. These were called pogroms, and they were race riots against the Jews wherever they lived, whether they were ruled by Romans, whether they were ruled by Catholics, Christians, Greek Orthodox, Muslims. This is something that happened. Even Zoroastrians did this against Jews, and it’s actually kind of a question; why did they do this against Jews? And to me, that’s prophetic. That’s Deuteronomy 28, where you have…

Lynell: We’ve been asked that.

Nehemia: Yeah, well, it’s Deuteronomy 28, where you have the blessings and the curse, and this is the curse. If you don’t obey God, bad things happen to you. Now, does that mean the people who were harmed on October 7th were bad? No. This is a collective thing about Israel. It’s not individuals that sinned and they got punished. That’s not what we’re saying at all, God forbid. They were completely innocent people who were killed. There were babies who were literally… literally there was a baby cut out of its mother’s womb while she was alive. So, that baby didn’t do anything. That was an innocent baby. So, I want to make that clear. But yes, it has biblical significance, anything like this.

Lynell: So, I just want to reiterate that word because I’d never heard it before. But since then, you hear it all the time.

Nehemia: Which word?

Lynell: Pogrom.

Nehemia: Oh, pogrom.

Lynell: I’d never heard that word, and I thought, what does that mean?

Nehemia: Pogrom is a race riot against Jews.

Lynell: There you go. But the difference between today and say, back in…

Nehemia: Right. So, let’s say, for example… or even before Hitler, you had the Khmelnytsky massacres in 1648, where something like one third of the Jews of Europe were wiped out. So, imagine October 7th, but it doesn’t stop after three days. It goes on month after month after month, until one in three Jews are dead, and then the survivors… can I be really brut… really…

Lynell: Honest?

Nehemia: Honest here. So, I have blond hair and blue eyes. I don’t know why that is, but it could be, probably… a bunch of my ancestors were raped, and they survived, and the Jews in the Middle Ages developed this idea, which is contrary to the Bible. The Torah talks about, or the Tanakh talks about, all inheritance is through the father.

Lynell: It’s Ginger. Just saying!

Nehemia: Okay, ginger and blue eyes. All right. And you want to call them bluish green? Whatever. That’s not the point. Right? The point is that you, of Cherokee extraction, are actually darker than me, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.

Lynell: True.

Nehemia: And the reason for that is that… and she’s more Cherokee than that lady in the Congress, but we’re not saying she’s a pure Cherokee. No, no. Right. Like, you have one Cherokee ancestor out of, like, 64 or something.

Lynell: Somewhere.

Nehemia: Yeah, whatever. I’m like, “Wow, what a nice tan you got.” She’s like, “No, this is what I look like.” All right. So, the point is that the Jews developed this idea in the Middle Ages. The Torah says inheritance and tribal affiliations are according to the father. They developed this idea that it’s according to the mother because they often didn’t know who the father was, frankly, because these pogroms were so common, and they involved murder, theft, kidnapping and rape. And that was the standard.

So, what happened on October 7^th, Jews all over the world said, “This is Kishinev! This isn’t supposed to happen in Israel!” Kishinev was the one in 1904 that was famous. Fewer Jews died in Kishinev. It was a town in what today is Moldova, I think. I think it’s the capital of Moldova, which is next to Romania. It was part of the Russian Empire in 1904, and they just started massacring the Jews. And by the way, it was around the time of Passover.

These massacres in the Christian world often happened around the time of Easter, which coincides with Passover, and what would happen is they were in their churches and they would hear these sermons, “The Jews crucified our Lord!” And people would get whipped up into a frenzy of hatred. They’d hear terms like “Antichrist”, they’d hear terms like “Christ killer, killers of God, the Jews did it”, and then they would get whipped up into a frenzy and come out of their churches and attack the Jews. And this is just what happened.

And in the Kishinev massacre, fewer people were killed, but then it became famous because there was a lot of news coverage about it, and it was in modern times. But there were massacres throughout 1904 and 1905 where thousands and thousands of Jews were killed. And not only did no one come to save us, the people who were committing the massacres were being egged on by the secret police of the czar, which is the forerunner of whatever it’s called today, what later became the KGB. Or the same kind of idea of the KGB was the Tsar’s secret police, the same people who fabricated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s a forgery that was made by the Tsar’s secret police. And we know they existed, so when we say secret police, we mean they were, like, in plain clothes. And it’s not a conspiracy that they existed, but they were a secret police, that is.

So, this happened all the time in Jewish history. The difference was that on October 7th we had an army that came to fight back, and the army then went into Gaza to root out the enemy, to make sure that they don’t do this again. And are they never going to do it again? They probably will try, but we’re going to do the best we can to limit their capabilities to do this, because they’ve promised to do it again. There was the interview of the one Hamas guy who says, “October 7th, we’re going to do 8th, 9th, 10th and a millionth. We’re going to keep doing it.” And the other Hamas leader said, “This is a rehearsal for what we plan on doing throughout the whole country.”

So, this is biblical. And it says here, Yehovah hates… say hates.

Lynell: Hates.

Nehemia: It actually doesn’t say hate. It says His soul hates…

Lynell: His soul…

Nehemia: The soul of Yehovah hates the evildoer… Yehovah has a soul. The soul of Yehovah hates the evildoer and lover of Hamas. Is that what Christians call the Holy Spirit, Yehovah’s soul? No, I don’t know. That’s theology.

Lynell: I don’t know, spirit versus soul. So, I’m not a theologian either. Let me ask you this. When they named it Hamas, do you think that they knew that in Hebrew what it meant…

Nehemia: That it meant violence? They definitely knew that.

Lynell: Do you think that was a part of their tactic?

Nehemia: These were people who had been in Israeli prisons. Absolutely! It was a tactic to terrorize Jews. We have an organization that to us means freedom, but we know to you it means violence, and we’re coming to kill you all. Which is in their charter, which we’ll get to later. But yeah, let’s save that.

What I want to do is look at the different meanings of hamas in the Tanakh and the significance of hamas. One is, God’s soul hates hamas. The next one is actually the first time hamas appears in the Tanakh, and we’re told hamas was the reason for the flood. Hamas is the reason that God decided to wipe out humanity, except for one family that He preserved, because the world was full of hamas.

Lynell: Let’s read that.

Nehemia: So, it’s Genesis 6:11-13. And 11 and 13 are really interesting because they’re in what we call a chiastic structure. A chiastic structure is a sort of poetic structure where you say… you have a phrase, and then a second phrase, and then the next sentence, or a later sentence… you switch them, and then the second phrase comes first, and the first…

Lynell: Give me an example.

Nehemia: So, my favorite one is when God gives this commandment which, boy, it applies to Hamas. It says “Shofech dam ha’adam, ba’adam damo yishafech”. So, there you hear some alliteration, even if you don’t know Hebrew. Shofech dam ha’adam, ba’adam damo yishafech. So, first of all, hear the alliteration there. It’s dam, dam, dam, damo. Right? So, it’s literally four dams. And it begins with shofech and ends with yishafech. So, it’s ABC – CBA.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: All right? That’s a very sophisticated type of chiastic structure. And in a sense, it’s not very sophisticated; it’s very simple. The purpose there of the chiastic structure is this is… oh, what does it mean? Genesis 9: “He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed”. And blood and man sound similar, but it’s “he who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” So, it’s ABC – CBA, and the purpose there is clear; it’s so people memorize it. And once you know that and hear it in Hebrew two or three times, if you know Hebrew you’ll memorize that. Here it’s a little bit different. Here it’s maybe more poetic. So, here it says… we’re going to read verses 11 and 13. You can read verse 12 too if you want.

Lynell: “The earth became corrupt before God. The earth was filled with lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noah, ‘I’ve decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with…’” what’s this word?

Nehemia: Let’s just read what you have.

Lynell: Lawlessness? “…Because of them. I’m about to destroy them with the earth.”

Nehemia: Right. And the word there is hamas. The word lawless, in both cases, is hamas, and in this context it means probably something like violence. But what it says here, I’m going to give you my translation and you can hear a little bit better. I’ll explain the AB – BA, the chiastic structure. “The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with hamas. And God said to Noah,” I’m skipping verse 12, “God said to Noah, ‘The end of all flesh has come before Me because the earth is filled with hamas because of them. And behold, I will destroy the earth.’” So, the word for corrupt and the word for destroy has the same root – ShaChaT.

So, you don’t hear the chiastic structure in English, but you hear it in Hebrew. So, it starts with vatishachet, and it ends mashchitam, or near the end. It has, at the beginning of this three-verse section, shachat, and at the end, shachat. The next element is, the earth was filled with hamas, and then He says, “for the earth was filled with hamas” at the end of verse 11 and the first half of verse 13. Right, that’s AB-BA. And here hamas is… they translate as lawlessness. Hamas is violence in this context. But it’s not just violence, it’s also corruption. And we can see that here the earth was corrupt, vatishachet, “it was corrupted”. And so here, hamas is a synonym for vatishachet. And the earth was corrupt. Essentially, “and the earth was filled with hamas”. So, Hebrew likes to say everything twice, right? It’s like they felt like, in ancient Hebrew speech, they weren’t heard unless they said everything twice. Sometimes more than twice. Here, it’s… really shachat is four times, in fact, if you look at verse 12.

Lynell: So, one of my favorite parts about this, Nehemia, because I’m thinking about… we’re talking about God and God’s soul. We go up to verse 5. I love that it’s important for us to understand what God was looking at. It says “Yehovah saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And Yehovah regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. Yehovah said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created, men together with beasts, creeping things, birds of the sky, for I regret that I made them.’ But Noah found favor with Yehovah.”

Nehemia: We need to do a whole study on this word “regret” as applied to God. Do you know what the root is there?

Lynell: No, no, no, I don’t.

Nehemia: The same root as my name. NeHeM. It’s the nifal, which is lehinachem, which can also be translated “to be comforted”. So, how does it come to mean regret? That’s a separate study. Let’s not go down that rabbit trail.

Lynell: Okay, but I’ll put that on there. But here’s the thing that I think is really important. When we talk about the study on hamas, we talk about the fact that the flood happened because there was so much hamas on earth and God…

Nehemia: And that was corruption.

Lynell: …His soul hated hamas. And the part that… I mean, I wrote this down because it’s just… think about this. Our God was sad. It made Him sad, and it made Him regret that…

Nehemia: The earth was filled with hamas.

Lynell: …that He’d made man because it was filled with hamas. That’s how strongly Yehovah feels about hamas.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. But to summarize here, hamas is parallel to ethical corruption, right, with the connotation of violence as well. So, we’re going to do the next part of this study is, what we’re going to do is what the dictionaries do. So, with a dictionary, if we looked in a dictionary… and we did look in a bunch of lexicons, what does the word hamas mean? And they gave us several definitions. So, here I’m going to make a distinction between a dictionary that is prescriptive and descriptive.

Lynell: Okay, what’s the difference?

Nehemia: So, a prescriptive dictionary is what we all grew up at school looking in.

Lynell: Webster’s?

Nehemia: Webster’s. The teacher would say, “You used that word, you used it wrong. Look it up, see what it means,” and you’d look it up and it would tell you, these are the four sanctioned definitions. We’re prescribing to you what it means.

Lynell: And then they give you a sentence and pronunciation.

Nehemia: Right. And if it’s not in that dictionary, it doesn’t mean that.

Lynell: Okay. That’s prescriptive.

Nehemia: Now, we… in reality we have a lot of words in our speech that don’t mean, in the dictionary, what the dictionary says. Let me rephrase that; we have a lot of words in our speech that mean, in our speech, in our daily usage, they have meanings that aren’t in the dictionary and that’s why they’re updating the dictionary all the time. So, when I was at Hebrew University at Mount Scopus, they had something called the Oxford English Dictionary, which was like 20 volumes. It filled up an entire… it was like the size of this couch, lengthwise, or the volumes lined up on the shelves. And it’s a descriptive dictionary. It doesn’t just tell you what the word means, it says, “Here’s what it meant in the 1600’s, and here’s how we know. Here’s an example of how it was used. And here’s what it meant in the 1700’s. How do we know? Because it was used in these three instances.” And then sometimes they’ll be usages that existed in the 1600’s that aren’t around today, and vice versa.

So, why is that important? What I want to do is reverse engineer what the descriptive dictionary did. So, when you look at a biblical Hebrew lexicon, the authors of the Bible didn’t use those dictionaries, because they didn’t exist. What the authors of those dictionaries did is they looked at all the verses in the Bible and they said, “Okay, what are the four definitions of hamas? And let’s give examples of each one.” And they may have missed some because they’re doing every word in the Bible. We have the advantage here of where we spent several months on one word, right?

Lynell: We did.

Nehemia: So, we probably put a lot more energy into the word hamas than they did. And that’s what people in my field would later do, is they’ll write an article, and they’ll say, “A new meaning of this word has been discovered that nobody ever noticed.” Happens all the time.

Lynell: We wanted to see for ourselves.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: Not what the dictionary said, but what it meant.

Nehemia: Well, and how do we know that? And how is the…

Lynell: What the Tanakh actually says about it…

Nehemia: How is it used in the Tanakh? Right.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: We’re also going to do a second thing, later, where we’re going to do something the dictionaries also do, which is comparative Semitic linguistics. So, Hebrew is part of a family of languages, and the importance of the comparative Semitic linguistics is, the Tanakh was written over 2,000 years ago, right? 2,500. The last book in the Tanakh… well, depending when you think it was written… around 2,500 years ago. And it was written over a period of a thousand years.

And look, if I was to look up a word in English, I would say, “What does this word mean in the English language in the 1600’s?” I’d look in the dictionary, and I’d look in the Oxford English Dictionary, and if I found a meaning that I didn’t find in the Oxford English Dictionary, then I’d say, “Wait a minute, okay, what does this word mean?” And that happens, by the way. English linguists actually encounter this, where they find a word, and they’re like, “Okay, is this some dialect, a local dialect of a certain part of upstate New York?” That’s an actual example. Or maybe it’s a certain dialect of a certain part of Scotland or something, because we don’t…

Lynell: Like here in North Carolina, is our brogue that you and I…

Nehemia: Well, that’s pronunciation. So, the question is, do they have words that we don’t know from anywhere else in English?

Lynell: Ah, okay.

Nehemia: And… I won’t give an example, but because we’re going to go down a rabbi trail there… or a rabbit trail. But the point is that not everything in the English language is in the dictionary. But here’s the important thing; the body, or what we call the corpus, of English literature is over a billion words. The corpus of the Hebrew Bible is much less than that. The Hebrew Bible is about a thousand pages, and then you maybe have some inscriptions. And the inscriptions are mostly: “There were three efas of flour that were sent to the kitim.” Right? And it’s more and more of that. “In the third year, there’s five efas of flour and three of wine,” or whatever. So, we have a lot of Hebrew inscriptions, but we don’t have a lot of words from those inscriptions. Meaning, it’s the same word over and over because they’re mostly like administrative lists.

And then we have inscriptions like, for example, the Siloam inscription, or the Shiloah inscription in Jerusalem, where we know every single word in that inscription except one. And there’s one word that’s unique in the entire history of the Hebrew language that has survived. Now, that might have been a common word that people used every day, but the Bible and the thousand pages just never mentioned that word.

Lynell: Didn’t you have a story about that, like with a broom or somebody that was…?

Nehemia: No, that was where they forgot the meaning of a word in Isaiah.

Lynell: Oh, they forgot it.

Nehemia: But it was a unique word in the Bible, right? But it was a word that was… Isaiah says, “And they will sweep away,” or “I will sweep away Babylon with the broom of destruction.” And the rabbis were discussing this verse, and they said, “What is this word, broom?” They didn’t know what it was. It’s matateh. They had no idea what it was until they heard the maidservant. They saw her hand a broom to her subordinate, and say, “Take the broom and sweep the floor.” And they said, “Oh! That means broom! It’s that thing that we have in our houses.” But in the Tanakh it only appears, I think, in that one place, and it wasn’t part of the learned dialect that the rabbis knew when they spoke Hebrew and studied Hebrew. But the maidservant knew it. And there it’s like the brogue of North Carolina. You go to these fishing villages in the Outer Banks, and you have a few hundred people who speak a specific dialect that nobody else speaks, and they might have words that were used hundreds of years in English that nobody else uses anymore.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: And that’s what happened with the broom of destruction in Isaiah, that the rabbis learned the word from this maidservant. Why the maidservant? She probably came from some distant village where they still spoke Hebrew and used words that had been forgotten in the big cities.

Lynell: Do we know how many times hamas was used?

Nehemia: Oh, we can look that up. I don’t think I checked that.

Lynell: I think that was interesting.

Nehemia: In our months of study.

Lynell: I know. I was just thinking, I don’t think I have that written down either.

Nehemia: So, it appears 68 times in 67 verses.

Lynell: Wow!

Nehemia: Yeah. And there might be other forms of it I’m not including. So… but that is… the verb, at least, appears or… no, it’s a noun, actually, in that form. No, that’s the noun and the verb. All right. So, what are the definitions of hamas in the Hebrew, in the Tanakh? And this is an important principle. The Bible needs to interpret the Bible, because what the word means today might not be what it means in Biblical Hebrew. I was once giving a talk in southern Israel… actually in some of the areas that were attacked on October 7^th, and I was giving a talk to a group about the Aviv while we were going out and looking at the Aviv. And there was this Israeli woman who was listening in on us, and I explained, aviv in Biblical Hebrew, refers to a state of the ripening of the barley. And she interjects, like Israelis will, into other people’s conversations that have nothing to do with them, and she’ll say, “That’s not true. Aviv means spring.” And I said, “Thank you so much for saying that ma’am.” I’m sure I didn’t say that. That’s what I would say today. I was probably rude. But why did she say that? Because in modern Hebrew, aviv means spring. And from the 14th century, we can talk about… and here it’s from a descriptive dictionary, right?

Lynell: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Around the 14th century, if I remember correctly, the meaning of spring starts to appear in Hebrew literature. Before that, it didn’t mean spring. It meant this stage in the ripening of the barley. So, the point is, words change over time, and we have to interpret the Tanakh based on the Hebrew of that day. And when we look at later Hebrew, we’re treating it like another Semitic language, essentially.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: All right. So, three definitions in the Tanakh with some sub-definitions. So, number one, it’s violence, which includes rape, pillage and kidnapping, and we’ll look at some examples of that. It means ethical corruption, which can include humiliation, lying, and violating the Torah. And then the third definition is one I didn’t know about, and isn’t in any dictionary that we could find, as far as I remember, and that’s to do something rigorously. And we’ll get to that at the end.

All right. Let’s start with violence. Nehemia says let’s start with violence. Hamas…

Lynell: Let’s start with the definition.

Nehemia: Let’s start with rape and pillaging. Joel 4:19. Do you want to read that one?

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, here… one of the things we’re looking for is, how is the word used in the verse? And what is the parallel? Because remember, Hebrew likes to say everything twice.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: And so, if we can find these parallels, we can see what it means in that specific verse. And there might be some nuance we’re missing, and we’ll look at a bunch of verses to get the nuance, but we can see the general meaning in Joel 4:19.

Lynell: “Egypt shall be a desolation”?

Nehemia: Yep.

Lynell: “In Edom, a desolate waste because of the outrage to the people of Judah, in whose land they shed the blood of the innocent.”

Nehemia: So, they translated hamas as “outrage” in the JPS, which tells me absolutely nothing. Here hamas means violence. And how do I know it means violence? It’s parallel to “they spilled innocent blood”.

Lynell: “Shed the blood of the innocent.”

Nehemia: Shafchu dam naki, they spilled innocent blood. And so hamas against the children of Judah, in that they spilled the innocent blood in their land, is what it says. And then another verse where we can see hamas meaning violence. And look, you can’t just look at one verse, because in one verse you might say, “Oh, okay. Well, it kind of does mean just…” they said outrage, right?

Lynell: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Well, it certainly doesn’t mean ethical corruption in Joel 4:19, right? Think about it. So, because of the ethical corruption against the children of Judah because they spilled innocent blood. No, it’s not just generic ethical… I mean, it’s a violent act, right? Something that results in blood being spilled. So, Genesis 49:5, we can read 5 through 7. That is where Jacob is blessing his children, and he has a blessing for Shimon and Levi. And the background here is that Shimon and Levi, or Simeon and Levi… when Dina, their sister, was raped, they tricked the men of Shchem to get circumcised, and they went and killed them all when they were weak from circumcisions. Start in verse 5.

Lynell: Genesis 49:5?

Nehemia: 49, start in verse 5.

Lynell: “Simeon and Levi are a pair. Their weapons are tools of lawlessness. Let not my person be included in their counsel. Let not my being be counted in their assembly. For when angry they slay men, and when pleased they maim oxen.”

Nehemia: And that’s a play on words because the name of the city is Shchem, which means the “shoulder of an ox.” And then the son of who raped Dina was called chamor, which is a donkey. So, we have like, animal terminology here.

Lynell: “Cursed be their anger so fierce and their wrath so relentless. I will divide them in Jacob, scatter them in Israel.”

Nehemia: So, this was a blessing, which in a sense was a curse. And what’s the curse part? All the other tribes got a contiguous piece of land, meaning there was a territory that they got. The Levites didn’t get a territory. They got individual cities, 42 or 48, depending on how you count them, cities scattered throughout Israel, and Simeon, they got little cities and regions within Judah. So, both of those tribes didn’t actually get contiguous land, meaning a continuous piece of land.

So, where’s hamas here? So, I’ll read you what it says in the Hebrew. “Simeon and Levi are brothers. The tools of hamas are their wares… for in their wrath they killed a man…” I’m skipping part of it here. “For in their wrath they killed a man” is the explanation of “the tools of hamas are their wares.” And here it means the tools of violence. So, hamas here means violence, and it definitely doesn’t mean “ethical corruption” in the sense of nonviolent ethical issues. You could say it’s unethical to kill somebody, but it doesn’t mean ethical corruption in the sense of robbery, lying… well, maybe robbery. Lying… theft, right? That’s the kind of… taking advantage of the poor, which is what hamas sometimes means. Here it doesn’t mean that, it means violence.

Lynell: So, verse 6 says, “Let not my person be included in their counsel.” Who is this talking?

Nehemia: Actually, it says, “let not my soul enter their counsel”. And counsel is where we get together and we discuss what we’re going to do. Yeah, so what does he mean by that? That’s… let’s save that for a separate study. Genesis 9:24.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: At this rate this will be a four-hour teaching.

Lynell: No, no, no, no, no. Genesis 9:24.

Nehemia: Yes, my love.

Lynell: All right. Genesis 9:24.

Nehemia: And so, the background here is, they asked Gideon if he wanted to be king. And he said, “No, you have a king. God’s your king. You don’t need me.” And then Abimelech, his good-for-nothing son, said, “Oh, I’ll be king, and I better kill all my brothers, or they might claim the throne.” So, he killed all of his brothers, but he missed one. And another part of the background is, Gideon’s nickname is Yerubbaal or Jerubbaal. So, it’s… do you want to read it?

Lynell: I’m in Genesis 9?

Nehemia: Judges 9:24.

Lynell: Thank you.

Nehemia: Did I say Genesis?

Lynell: I don’t know, maybe you didn’t…

Nehemia: I think Penny Penguin said Genesis.

Lynell: Penny Penguin may have said that. She may have done that. So, we’re in Judges…

Nehemia: Judges 9:24.

Lynell: 9:24. Okay. Now…

Nehemia: Judges is going to be right after Joshua.

Lynell: I know, I look at it…

Nehemia: …which is just after Deuteronomy.

Lynell: And it’s like Joshua, Judges, Ruth…

Nehemia: Right.

Lynell: So, I’m in the other place.

Nehemia: Joshua’s just after Deuteronomy.

Lynell: I know… But now I’m in… I know, I know, I know, I got it. But what I was saying is in the…

Nehemia: Yeah. In your Christian Bible.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: She’s here from the Jewish Publication Society.

Lynell: So… old habits.

Nehemia: And you used to do a thing, right, when you were… tell them about the sword drills when you were a kid.

Lynell: So, I know the books of the Bible, but I know them much better in the, in NRSV or NIV…

Nehemia: Well, the Christian order is different.

Lynell: Yeah, the Christian order is different.

Nehemia: Tell them what a sword drill is.

Lynell: A sword drill is where you put your hand on the top of the Bible and the bottom of the Bible… everybody has the same Bible, and it’s always a King James Bible, didn’t matter.

Nehemia: Mmm.

Lynell: This is just as a child. It was a game we would play. They would bring the children in… you know how they bring children in and they’ll sing or they’ll do something in front of the church.

Nehemia: I actually don’t know. I have no idea.

Lynell: So, what we would do is, before church began, there was like singing and there’s all types of things before that, and one of the things we would do as children is we would have what’s called sword drill. And it was the Bible. And the first person… you’d hold it like this, and someone would say the scripture you had to find and the first person to find it and read it won.

Nehemia: So, they’d say, like, “Judges 9:24!”

Lynell: Exactly. And you go, Joshua, Judges. Ruth! Oh, I know where that is.

Nehemia: The first person to find it would win. And were you good at this?

Lynell: I was very good at it. But now, when Deuteronomy is after Judges, it’s not in the same place, so I’m just saying.

Nehemia: Well, no. Anyway.

Lynell: Yeah, I was very good at it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Lynell: I had to be. My dad was the pastor. You had to be good at it.

Nehemia: All right, all right. Judges 9:24, what does it say?

Lynell: And I love the Bible. Judges 9:24 is on this page. Okay. “To the end that the crime committed against…”

Nehemia: Oh, let’s start with…

Lynell: 23 maybe?

Nehemia: “And God sent an evil spirit…”

Lynell: “Then God sent a spirit of discord between…”

Nehemia: Is that what it says in the JPS? In the Hebrew it says ruach ra’a, which is literally “evil spirit”. God sent… say God sent.

Lynell: “God sent an evil spirit.”

Nehemia: Wow. Between… oh, read your verse.

Lynell: “Between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem, and the citizens of Shechem broke faith with Abimelech, to the end that the crime committed against the 70 sons of Jerubbaal might be avenged, and their blood recoil upon their brother Abimelech, who had slain them, and upon the citizens of Shechem.” Is it Shem or Shchem?

Nehemia: Shchem.

Lynell: “Who had abetted him in the slaying of his brothers.”

Nehemia: So, here’s what it says. This is my translation, the correct one. “And God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the rulers of Shchem, and the rulers of Shchem betrayed Abimelech to bring the hamas of the 70 sons of Jerubbaal and to place their blood on Abimelech, their brother, who killed them.” That’s why God sent the evil spirit, meaning… “And on the rulers of Shechem, who strengthened his hands to kill his brothers.” So, God sent the evil spirit to cause… and it is correct… to cause discord. But that’s not what it says. It says an “evil spirit”. And the reason for this is to bring the hamas of the 70 sons of Gideon, of Yerubbaal, and to place their blood on Abimelech, their brother, who killed them.

Lynell: Hmm.

Nehemia: So, what did he do? He killed them. So hamas here is the violence of the 70 sons of Yerubbaal, or that was done against the 70 sons of Yerubbaal. So hamas was committed against the 70 sons of Yerubbaal by spilling their blood. And so, the evil spirit came to place their blood on Abimelech’s head. That’s the expression, “the blood is on his head”.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: In the Bible. So, hamas here means violence. Now, hamas also isn’t just generic violence. It can be spilling blood, we’ve seen. It can also be kidnap and rape.

Lynell: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: There are one, two, three… I’ll read them. I won’t read the verses; I’ll give people the verses to do some homework. Jeremiah 6:7, Jeremiah 20:8, Ezekiel 45:9, Amos 3:10. Habakkuk 1:3. Habakkuk 2:17. Six verses have hamas as part of a phrase or parallel to the word shod. Shod means pillaging. Shod is, you come in, you burn the houses, you steal stuff, you slaughter. That’s pillaging.

Lynell: Shin Dalet?

Nehemia: Shin Dalet – shod. And the phrase often there in these verses, sometimes it’s two halves of a verse, but usually it’s hamas vashod. And that’s what we call hendiadys. That’s a fancy term that means “two that are one”, and it’s when you say two things. Either one modifies the other or they’re two of the exact same things, and so hence it modifies it by saying it twice. So, hamas vashod can mean shod in the manner of hamas. That’s what it can mean. Meaning violent shod, violent pillaging, or it can mean, violence and pillaging, because the form of violence that’s being carried out is pillaging. All right.

Lynell: Hamas vashod.

Nehemia: Hamas vashod. And sometimes it’s shod vahamas. Shod vahamas or hamas vashod. So, they are two concepts that are a pair. So, it’s violence and pillaging, and we can see the kidnapping part of the pillaging in Habakkuk 1:9. So, it says… do you want to read Habakkuk one? Can you find Habakkuk? I know it’s not easy.

Lynell: I’ll find Habakkuk, and we’re going to read Habakkuk 1:9. It’s going to be back here.

Nehemia: Well, no. So, it’s right before Psalms.

Lynell: Then I can find it.

Nehemia: No, you’re in Micah, so it’s somewhere around here. Just before Zephaniah maybe? I can never find it within the 12. But there’s what we call the 12 Minor Prophets.

Lynell: It’s right before Zephaniah, right?

Lynell: Oh, there you go. I believe so. Zephaniah…

Nehemia: There it is. Habakkuk before Zephaniah. Okay. So… Habakkuk 1:9.

Lynell: “They all come bent on rapine.”

Nehemia: What’s the word?

Lynell: “Rapine”.

Nehemia: How do you spell that?

Lynell: R-A-P-I-N-E.

Nehemia: What does that mean?

Lynell: You tell me.

Nehemia: So, according to the prescriptive dictionary…

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: Rapine means the violent seizure of one’s property. Okay.

Lynell: “The thrust of their van is forward…”

Nehemia: Oh, and this is interesting. So, the example the dictionary gives… this is from Oxford Languages I guess, but I got it from Google, is “the fruits of violence and rapine”. So, here’s an example of the concept I said before where you say two things that are the same, or they’re overlapping, right? So, the fruits of violence and rapine. So, rapine is the violent seizure of property. So, it’s violence and rapine. But rapine is violent! But it’s a specific type of violence, right? So, these go together. They’re very related concepts. And that’s exactly like hamas vashod, hamas and pillaging. Because Hamas is violence, which includes pillaging.

Lynell: This says, “they amass captives like sand”.

Nehemia: Right. So, here’s what I have. “He comes entirely for hamas.” This enemy that’s attacking. “The direction of their faces are forward, and he gathers up captives like the sand.” So, here this hamas includes, or involves, kidnapping. They’re kidnapping people; they’re taking them captive. In this case, in an invasion, in a raid. I mean, it’s exactly what happened, literally what happened on October 7th.

Lynell: It’s exactly what happened.

Nehemia: Not even similar; literally what happened on October 7th. It’s the type of raid that would have happened in history centuries ago, happened in the year 2023. Jeremiah 13:22 is the next one we want to look at. And here we can see the connotation of hamas involving rape. And actually, look, while you’re looking for that, can you talk about… we have a graphic for this episode, which we really prayed about whether we were going to use this graphic. And it’s a graphic from a video that was put out by Hamas, quite proudly. They put it out because they were proud of it. They were bragging about what they did. And it has a woman named… a 19-year-old woman, girl, named Naama Levi. Can you talk about that?

Lynell: So… we did pray about it. We’ve talked a lot about it. She’s still in captivity at this moment. One of the things that I want us to do together is to pray for the captives. I know that years from now, when you look at this teaching, they’ll no longer be captive. But right now, they’re still captive. And we need to pray, especially for Naama Levi. Her last name…

Nehemia: She’s a Levite.

Lynell: She’s a Levite. And she… it’s one of the pictures that many women can’t look at. It’s taken months and months and months for me to look at it. I looked at it again last night, and these things are traumatic to… One of the things, Nehemia, that you mentioned, in the Bible, is that we have euphemisms, especially for what we’re about to talk about. And the reason… why do we use euphemisms for these types of things? Why do they use euphemisms in the Bible, Nehemia?

Nehemia: Let’s start with, what is a euphemism?

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: A euphemism is… and let’s state the… years from now, someone may not know who Naama Levi is or what this image is, and they might be listening to it and not see the image. So, can you tell them what’s in the image?

Lynell: Okay, let me tell you what the image is of a young woman, 19 years old. The film shows her… this guy with a big armament pulling her from the back of a jeep where she’s stuffed in a little area. There’s blood. She’s been beaten around her face.

Nehemia: What’s she wearing?

Lynell: She’s wearing sweatpants and a shirt.

Nehemia: It’s clear she was sleeping in her pajamas when she was kidnapped.

Lynell: And the pants, the sweatpants, they push her, they take her from the back, and they put her around, and they push her into the middle of many men sitting in the back of this vehicle. And she has blood… from the behind. You can see, all the way at the top of her pants, in the back, down through her legs, and it’s obvious that she’s been… abused.

Nehemia: Let’s not use a euphemism. What happened to her?

Lynell: She was raped. Enough that there’s blood spilled all over. Everywhere. That’s hamas. And we’ll read in the Bible where this has happened, and it’s hamas.

Nehemia: That’s literally one of the meanings of hamas in the Hebrew.

Lynell: It is. And a euphemism is when we say something like “someone had relations with someone” or…

Nehemia: Or you said she was abused; you just used a euphemism. She wasn’t “abused”, she was violently raped. She was probably by multiple people and probably… can we say it?

Lynell: I don’t know what you’re going there, I don’t know. Oh…

Nehemia: You don’t even want to say it.

Lynell: I don’t know where you’re going with it, but she was… Things that are so offensive that you can’t hear them, that’s when you use the euphemism.

Nehemia: Also, in the Tanakh, things that are scary. So, there’s one euphemism, which is whenever the word afulim appears in the Tanakh, and it appears, I don’t know the number, but a number of times, it’s instead of that word when they would read it out loud in the synagogue, they would instead read the word tchorim. Now what is afulim? Afulim are the boils of the Black Plague. Why wouldn’t they say that word? There was obviously a superstition that if you say that word, the plague might come to your town, and you’d die. And so, they said another word that also means the boils of the Black Plague, but it was a word that somehow wasn’t frightening to them.

So, think about that. And the word that was frightening is written in the Bible, and even today when they read it in the synagogue, they read this other word. Because there’s this memory, this cultural memory, that that word is so frightening that you can’t even say it. Think about that. Thousands of years later, when we have antibiotics for the Black Plague, it’s still frightening to people.

Lynell: So, after October the 7^th… and I’m sure I wasn’t the only woman to do this…

Nehemia: So, we were in Israel, and you’re in Jerusalem.

Lynell: We were. And we were in Israel.

Nehemia: Tell them what happened.

Lynell: And we knew what had happened. We knew all this. We were following very closely what had happened. We saw the videos and the pictures that Hamas put out. I mean, it was impossible not to. Put them across the AP, some of these violent photos won awards…

Nehemia: Some of the photographers… some of the photographers were Hamas terrorists.

Lynell: Right. Some of the… that’s exactly right. And, so, I would personally… Nehemia and I, we did a lot of filming during that time. We wanted people to know what was happening, and when we would go out normally, I would wear a dress. I wear… I love to wear long dresses. It’s very comfortable to me. But I would wear lots of clothes underneath. I would wear two layers of clothes, didn’t matter how hot it was. And I would wear my combat boots in case I had to run, because there were infiltrations that would happen in your area and you didn’t know if a terrorist is in the area we lived… Nehemia has a place in Jerusalem, and there’s a whole Arab area in Jerusalem… and I’m not being judgmental, all I’m saying is that there are things that have happened in that area, and still do to this day, right now, and probably will until Yehovah comes to establish…

Nehemia: So, let’s not use euphemisms. What were you doing and why?

Lynell: I was dressing… I was dressing to make it very difficult if someone wanted to rape me. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, you were wearing multiple layers, so it would take them longer and make it more logistically more difficult.

Lynell: Absolutely make it more difficult, yeah. I mean, there’s not a lot you can do. Guys, there’s not a lot you can do. There was nothing those young women could do to protect themselves except everything… There was not a whole lot you could do. You run, you hide…

Nehemia: And that was the moment where I said, “Okay, I’ve got to get my wife out of here. She’s not…” We were planning on leaving anyway, but when I saw that, I’m like, “Okay, this is not a healthy situation.”

Lynell: You know, I wasn’t afraid of a bombing, I wasn’t afraid of missiles overhead that were going off. I wasn’t afraid of that. Because Nehemia and I… you know, if something happened like that, we’re together, it’s okay. I didn’t want to lose my husband. But together, it’s okay. And I know you guys that are married and love each other will understand that. But I didn’t want… that that would be… I mean, it’s awful for the woman, but it’s also awful for a husband in that situation, so…

Nehemia: Mm.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: All right. Jeremiah 13:22. What does your JPS say?

Lynell: “And when you ask yourself, why have these things befallen me?”

Nehemia: Let me stop you here. So, in Hebrew we have four ways of saying you. What are the four ways?

Lynell: Um…

Nehemia: Oh, I’m putting you on the spot.

Lynell: No…

Nehemia: She studied Hebrew at ulpan last year.

Lynell: At, atah… my brain is not going there.

Nehemia: At…. aten….

Lynell: Oh, atem, aten.

Nehemia: There you go. So, we have four different you’s because there’s masculine and feminine, singular and plural. So, there’s masculine singular, feminine singular. Masculine plural, feminine plural. Now, why is that important? Because there aren’t a whole lot of passages in the Tanakh that are in the feminine “you”. Usually when someone’s addressed, they’re addressed as “you” masculine. Here, it’s “when you”, and it’s feminine. Because the context here, earlier in the passage, is the Queen of Israel, which might be a metaphor for Jerusalem, but literally it’s the Queen of Israel.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: Or the Queen of Judah, I suppose.

Lynell: “And when you ask yourself why have these things befallen me, it is because of your great iniquity that your skirts are lifted up and your limbs exposed.”

Nehemia: “Your limbs exposed.” So, that’s the euphemism. That’s not what it says in the Hebrew. It says, “Your…” Well, let’s see. The King James has, “Thy skirts discovered and thy heels made bare.” So, there its heels, which it is in the Hebrew. So, literally what it says is, “your heels were hamased”. And heels in the Hebrew is a euphemism because it wasn’t her heels that were hamased.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: It was her… I’m going to use a euphemism too. Well, maybe not. It was her genitals that were hamased. She was raped. Here, hamas means raped. Literally raped. That’s what it means. So, when it says your heels were hamased, the image there is she’s bent, or laid down on her back, and her heels are sticking up in the air, and the man is coming and raping her. And hamas here means they were raped. But itsays “your heels were raped” because it doesn’t want to say your genitals are raped. Even for the Tanakh that’s too explicit.

But think about this; the King James added another… well, and the JPS too. They both added another level of euphemism. So, the JPS has “your limbs exposed”, and the King James has “thy heels made bare”. The NIV has, “and your body mistreated”. So “mistreated” is a better translation of hamas, right? So, really, it’s violence were done against your heels, meaning you were raped. Which kind of violence? He wasn’t hitting your heels, right?

Lynell: Well, here in the NRSV it says, “and you are violated”.

Nehemia: Right. So, that’s a euphemism too. She was raped.

Lynell: Yeah. Of course.

Nehemia: So, how do we know that? Because the first half of the verse is, “your skirt was laid bare”, right? So, I mean, I hate to be very… I’ll be… He pushed her down, lifted up her skirt, and she wasn’t wearing four layers, and he raped her. So, hamas here means… literally means rape.

Nehemia: So, should we be surprised at what happened on October 7th? They call themselves Hamas, and it wasn’t that there was a rogue terrorist who raped a Jewish woman. They were terrorists who were captured by Israel, and in the interrogation, they said, “We had a group, we had a team, and there was one member of the team whose job it was to operate the maps, another member who was to operate the drone, and another member whose job it was to rape.” And they were told what kind of people to rape and how many to rape. Yeah. So, they were given orders in advance, “You’re part of the rape squad.” That was a strategy of war, or a tactic, maybe you should say…

Lynell: Terror.

Nehemia: Yeah, it was 100% to strike terror in the heart of Israelis, and it was very effective, quite frankly. It was evil, but it was definitely effective. It traumatized the entire Jewish people, and probably beyond the Jewish people, in a way that I don’t know… I haven’t seen since 911.

Okay, so, hamas means violence, rape, kidnapping. That’s one definition. There’s another definition of hamas which is “to wrong ethically”, and part of that is to humiliate. We see that in Job 19:7. I’ll read that. But you look for Genesis 16 while I’m going there, because that’s an important one. So, Job 19:7, it says, “Hen etz’ak hamas ve’lo e’aneh, asheva’a ve’ein mishpat.” He says, “When I call,” actually, he says, “Behold! I call out hamas! None answers. I scream, and there is no justice.” So, the parallel here is “I call out, I scream.” What does he call out? “Hamas!” There’s hamas happening, and he says there’s no justice. So, hamas here is injustice. Right, that’s what the parallel tells you. And it’s not necessarily violence, it’s some wrong, some ethical wrong has been carried out against Job. That’s what he’s talking about here. Genesis 16:5…

Lynell: “And Sarah said to Abram, the wrong done me is your fault.”

Nehemia: Give us the background.

Lynell: So, Sarah didn’t have children.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Lynell: And she said to Abraham, “Hey look, God has kept me from having children. Why don’t you take my maid and sleep with her, and I can have a son through her.”

Nehemia: What could possibly go wrong?

Lynell: And that’s what happened. He cohabitated with Hagar.

Nehemia: What a euphemism; cohabitated.

Lynell: I am going to use euphemisms. “And she conceived, and when she saw that she was pregnant, she looked down upon her mistress…”

Nehemia: She’s like, “Oh, I have a child and you don’t, ha-ha!”

Lynell: So, Sarah said to Abraham, “The wrong done me, it’s your fault.” But that’s not the word. What does it say in Hebrew?

Nehemia: It says, “My hamas is upon you”, meaning the hamas that was done to me is upon you. And here it’s not violence; there’s no violence at all. So, “My hamas is upon you. I gave you my maidservant in your bosom, and she saw that she was pregnant, and I was humiliated,” or belittled, really. “I was made light in her eyes. May Yehovah judge between me and between you.” What a powerful statement.

Lynell: That really is a powerful statement. I think that we should call that out just as a way… Guys, when somebody does you wrong…

Nehemia: Look, there have been situations where I’ve heard you say this, and I know I’ve said it myself, where I’m burning with anger and I take a deep breath and I say, “May Yehovah judge between me and that person. I’m turning it over to Yehovah.”

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: “Let go, let God”, as they say in the modern terms.

Lynell: And when someone does hamas to you, sometimes the only thing you can do is say, “May Yehovah judge between me and this person.” Because His judgment is true. We know from the Word of God.

Nehemia: Right. So, she says, “My hamas is upon you,” the Hamas that was done to me is upon you. You’re responsible for it, and the parallel there is, “I was belittled in her eyes”, or literally, “I was made light in her eyes”. So, it’s “I was humiliated.”

Lynell: Humiliated. Yeah.

Nehemia: Right. She doesn’t actually say “I was humiliated”. She says, “she despised me”, right? “I was made light in her eyes.” But the result is, I felt humiliation. And to be humiliated, that’s hamas. You can see how you get from that to rape or vice versa, right? Rape isn’t about sex. Rape is about humiliating someone…

Lynell: And violence. Yeah. It’s about violence.

Nehemia: And violating them. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Hamas also means to violate the Torah, and an example of that is Ezekiel 22:26. I’ll read that one, you open up Zephaniah 3:4. Remember, Zephaniah is just after Habakkuk.

Lynell: You want to get it, or do you want to read the one you’re supposed to read?

Nehemia: Yeah. Okay. All right, all right. Ezekiel 22:26. It says, “Her priests have hamased my Torah and desecrated my holy things.” To hamas the Torah is to violate the Torah. And I didn’t know until we did this study that there’s another nuance that I missed for years when I read this verse, for decades when I read this verse, and I didn’t know there’s a nuance that I missed. I won’t share what that is until the end.

Lynell: Read it again.

Nehemia: “Her priests have hamased my Torah”, and I think your JPS will say “they violated”.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah, “Her priests have violated my teaching”. Which is, “They have hamased my Torah,” it says, “Hamsu Torahti”. “They have done hamas against my Torah” and desecrated my holy thing. So, it means to violate the Torah. But why not just say “violate”? There is a word for violate the Torah. We’ll get to that later because I didn’t know until we did this study. “They did not distinguish between holy and unholy, and they did not make known the differences between unclean and clean. They hid their eyes from my Sabbath, and I was made unholy in their midst.” Does that sound like anything we were familiar with? I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.

People who hide their eyes from Shabbat and don’t distinguish between holy and unholy, clean and unclean. And I don’t know what that could be. Anyway, let’s go on. But that is to hamas the Torah. Okay… I’m going to control myself. Zephaniah 3:4. What do you have in your translation?

Lynell: “Her prophets are reckless, faithless fellows. Her priests profane what is holy. They give perverse rulings.”

Nehemia: Which is really strange because it’s almost the exact same phrase as in Ezekiel 22:26, “Hamsu Torah”. They have hamased the Torah. So, it should have been translated here, based on the JPS, as “They violated Torah”. In both cases, Ezekiel 22:26 and Zephaniah 3:4, who’s doing it? Kohanim, priests.

Lynell: Oh.

Nehemia: And they’re violating Torah. So, why would it say they give perverse rulings? And the answer is that this is a different… even though they’re both JPS, it’s two different translators. And the other translator either didn’t understand it or understood it differently. I would say he understood it wrongly, but that’s my opinion and I’m right. He obviously had a different opinion. So, what he was thinking is, “Okay, Kohanim give out rulings which can be called Torah, and hamsu Torah is they get… and hamas is corruption, perversion. So, “they gave out perverse Torahs, they gave out perverse rulings.” That’s his thought process. And that’s fine. Okay, it’s possible. But in both cases, you have Kohanim who are hamasing the Torah. That means they’re violating the Torah. Not their own Torah, but the Torah.

So, anyway. So, I think it’s interesting. Both are JPS, and it’s two different translators. We did a very brief search to try to find out who was the translator of Zephaniah versus Ezekiel, and we were lazy and gave up. But if somebody can find it and leave it in the comments, that would be really interesting because, I don’t know… we must know the name or the people on the committee who translated this, the 1985 JPS. Ezekiel versus Zephaniah.

Lynell: Interesting.

Nehemia: A little bit of research… it wasn’t that important to us, so we gave up. But one should be able to find that out. Anyway, next definition of hamas is a lie or deception. And that, you could say, is unethical behavior, but it’s a very specific type of unethical behavior. And for example, Exodus 23:1 and Deuteronomy 19:6 and Psalm 35:11, those three verses have the phrase ed hamas. In Psalms it’s plural. “A hamas witness” or “hamas witnesses”. Well, what’s a hamas witness? Is it a violent witness? No, he’s not getting up in court and punching out the judge, that’s not what it’s saying. He’s not humiliating the judge or the… And you could say it’s violence because he testifies against someone to be executed, and that person could be executed, and so that makes him a violent witness. That could be. That’s what I thought at first, and then I kept doing more research, and I thought that wasn’t probably the case. It’s a false witness, a lying witness. How do I know? Micah 6:12. You’re right there next to Micah, is a couple… no, the other way.

Lynell: I haven’t gone anyway yet.

Nehemia: No.

Lynell: Which way do you want me to go? I’m picking up my pen.

Nehemia: Yeah, that way. Okay. Okay, there it is. Micah 6:12.

Lynell: Okay. Micah 6:12. “Who’s rich men are full of lawlessness.”

Nehemia: And the word is hamas. They’re full of hamas.

Lynell: Oh, “…full of hamas, and whose inhabitants speak treachery with tongues of deceit in their mouth.”

Nehemia: So, here’s what it says in Hebrew, or my translation of the Hebrew: “Who’s wealthy are full of hamas, and whose inhabitants spoke falsehood, and their tongue of deceit is in their mouth.” So, it’s three different ways of saying they’re liars and deceivers. They spoke falsehood. The tongue of deceit is in their mouth and they’re full of hamas. So hamas here… in this context of a hamas witness, we see… to be full of hamas could be to speak falsehood or do falsehood, right?  But we didn’t see “do” yet… we’re about to see that.

Isaiah 53:9. Now, can you bring the NRSV? Because Christians traditionally say Isaiah 53:9 is about Jesus. The Jewish position, although there are multiple historical Jewish positions, the more common one today, especially, is that Isaiah 53 is collectively about Israel.There are Jews in the past who said it was about a specific person, who either lived in the past… some people said it was King Josiah, some it was Jeremiah. Anyway. Some say it would be the future Messiah. Isaiah 53:9

Lynell: “They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.”

Nehemia: “He had done no hamas” is what it says. And we can see here, “There’s no deceit in his mouth” is the parallel to not doing any hamas. So, hamas is to do deception, is to be a liar and deceiver. So, Jesus or Israel, whoever it is, is not doing any hamas, is not a liar. And he was killed even though he didn’t do any hamas. That’s really interesting, because I’ve heard from the other side that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Lynell: Really?

Nehemia: Yeah. Even though there was no such thing as a Palestinian in the first century, but whatever. All right.

Lynell: Jesus was a… he was a…

Nehemia: Maybe he was a Pakistani.

Lynell: He was a settler.

Nehemia: He was a Jewish settler. But that’s a different study.

Lynell: He was. But that’s… I know it’s a different study, but…

Nehemia: But Psalm 27:12. Oh, you’re so close. It’s just… Here, Psalms. Now 27:12. Sword drill, sword drill!

Lynell: I can find Psalms, I promise.

Nehemia: I believe you. It’s a big one in the middle.

Lynell: It is the big one in the middle.

Nehemia: 27:12. And it might be a different verse number in the English. Well, the JPS will have the Hebrew numbering.

Lynell: “Do not subject me to the will of my foes, for false witnesses and unjust accusers have appeared against me.”

Nehemia: All right, so here’s what… Wow. “Do not give my soul to my enemies, for they rose up against me. False witnesses who breathe out hamas.” And really, it’s, “they blow out hamas”. What are they blowing out hamas? They’re testifying falsely, they’re liars. So hamas actually means violence, unethical behavior, rape, kidnapping, pillage, but also lying! Which means, to spew out hamas from your mouth is to lie.

Lynell: So, Nehemia, one of the things when we’ve covered these, as we’ve walked through, one of the things I noticed is some of the verses that talk about robbery, they talk about the pillaging. We haven’t pulled any of those up. The plunder. Are we going to do that?

Nehemia: Oh… we said there were six verses that talk about that.

Lynell: Okay. All right.

Nehemia: And we kind of were lazy and told people to look it up themselves.

Lynell: So, we’ve got violence, we’ve got lying, we’ve got to do ethically wrong, we’ve got to violate the Torah, rape, pillage, plunder, humiliate, kidnap.

Nehemia: And did you say falsehood?

Lynell: Lies, falsehood. Okay.

Nehemia: Okay. So, there’s a bunch of verses that talk about being saved from hamas, and one of those is 2 Samuel 22:3. He says, “The God of my rock, in whom I will find refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my fortress and the place of my fleeing, my Savior: Save me from hamas.” That’s what he says. That’s David.

And this is also in, well… 2 Samuel 22 is in Psalm 18. This specific phrase is not in Psalm 18, interestingly, but then it’s repeated in 2 Samuel 22:49, which is in Psalm 18:49, where he says, “Save me from the man of hamas,” ish hamasim, a man of hamases. It’s plural there, but it’s an abstract concept. “From a man of violence, and deception, and rape and pillaging. Save me from that man, from the man of hamas.”

Psalm 72:12-14. Go to Psalm 140 while I’m reading this. Psalm 72:12-14, he says there, “Mitoch u’mi’hamas yigal nafsham”, which means something like, “May their souls be redeemed from deception and hamas.” So, it’s asking for redemption from salvation, from protection from hamas, hamas, both as violence in some verses and here as deception. Psalm 140. Can you read verses 2 through 5?

Lynell: 140:2-5. “Rescue me, O Yehovah from evil men. Save me from…” Is this hamas?

Nehemia: Yes.

Lynell: “Save me from the lawless, save me from hamas, whose minds are full of evil schemes, who plot war every day.” That sounds a lot like what Genesis says about… that sounds a lot like what we just read about Noah, in the Day of Noah.

Nehemia: Oh, that the world was… yeah. People were full of evil all day long, their thoughts and their vices, their plans.

Lynell: “They sharpen their tongues like serpents. Spiders’ poison is on their lips. Oh, Yehovah, keep me out of the clutches of the wicked. Save me from hamas,” from lawless men, “who scheme to make me fall.”

Nehemia: Can I throw something out here which is completely spontaneous here? Because we didn’t talk about this before. But I noticed that verses 2 and 5 have the same phrase, “me’ish hamasim tintzareni”, which is literally, it’s “guard me from a man of hamas”, or of “hamases”. “From a hamas person” is really what it means. I’m just thinking out loud here. It’s interesting that the word for “guard me”, the normal word for “guard me” appears at the beginning of verse 5. It’s shamar, shomreni, but in this phrase it’s a different word, it’s natzar.

Lynell: Nun...

Nehemia: Nun-Tzadi-Reish. It’s the same root as the word Nazareth or Nazarene. So, you could, if you wanted to… you guys out there, I’m not going to translate it this way, but if you wanted to, I guess you could translate this, “Nazarene me from a man of hamas.”

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: Just a thought, I don’t know. Forget I said anything. Okay. Move on, just move on really quickly. Move along sir, move along.

Lynell: You’re a lot deeper… you’re a lot deeper than most of us. I’m just saying. So, there you go.

Nehemia: All right. Okay, so there’s a bunch of verses. Habakkuk 1:2. “I call out hamas and you do not save.” Maybe we should read that. Habakkuk in the first chapter has the word hamas a number of times, and we’ve brought a bunch of different verses in different contexts. Maybe read like, I don’t know, the first number of verses of Habakkuk. How many times have you guys heard… serious question to put an answer in the notes; how many sermons have you heard in synagogue or church on Habakkuk?

Lynell: Not a lot.

Nehemia: No, I mean, maybe they have. Let’s ask.

Lynell: Maybe. Yeah. If you have, put it in the comments. I am interested.

Nehemia: Or if you haven’t, put it in the comments. I’m genuinely interested.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, it’s a small book, and there’s other books that maybe are more interesting to most people. But… so, yeah, it’s an interesting question. So, it appears five times between verses 1 through… well, no, it’s verses 2, 3 and 9, I think, all of which we quoted so far, and then it’s in 2, 8 and 17. So, let’s read 1 through 9, or 2 through 9 just because… it’s a beautiful…

Lynell: 2:8? Oh, okay, 2:8, 17… Okay I see.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: Yeah, should do those two, because they’re good. “How long, O Yehovah, shall I cry out, and You not listen? Shall I shout to You, ‘Hamas…’”

Nehemia: Say “shout to you”.

Lynell: Shout to you.

Nehemia: No, I’m supposed to say that! Y’all in the audience, say “shout to you”. So, literally this is, “I cry out, hamas! And You do not save.”

Lynell: “Why do You make me see iniquity? Why do You look upon wrong? Raiding and violence are before me.”

Nehemia: Raiding and violence, that’s shod ve’hamas. That word shod that we said is pillaging, they’re translating there as raiding. That’s not wrong. Yeah.

Lynell: “Strife continues, and contention goes on. That is why decisions fail and justice never emerges, for the villain hedges in the just man. Therefore, judgment emerges deformed.”

Nehemia: Keep reading.

Lynell: “Look among the nations. Observe well, and be utterly astounded, for a work is being wrought in your days, which you would not believe if it were told. For lo, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that fierce, impetuous nation who crossed the earth’s wide spaces to seize homes not their own. They are terrible, dreadful. They make their own laws and rules. Their horses are swifter than leopards and fleeter than wolves of the steppe. Their steeds gallop, their steeds come flying from afar like vultures rushing toward food. They all come bent on rapine, the thrust of their vanities come forward…”

Nehemia: “They all come for hamas” is what it says.

Lynell: “They amass captives like sand.” We still have 100 and how many?

Nehemia: A hundred and thirty something, I don’t remember the exact number. So, here’s why you haven’t heard a sermon in church about Habakkuk, because he’s describing the Babylonian invasion that happened in 586 BCE, and a lot of people today say, “I don’t care about the Babylonian invasion of 586 BCE. That happened in ancient history.” He says, I’m raising up the Chaldeans who are going to come and kidnap people. And they did. They took the Jews captives to Babylonia, and they were captives there for 70 years. And they raped and they pillaged, and they burned. They burned the temple. They took slaves, right? They’re not just taking captives to relocate people to the east. They’re taking people as slaves, and they’re killing them and they’re raping them, right? Sex slaves in many cases. Well, we finished defining the word hamas based on what…

Lynell: …the Bible says.

Nehemia: …what we see in the Tanakh, and if we had nothing but the Tanakh, this is the conclusion we would come to. In part two, we’re actually going to see information that comparative Semitic linguistics helps us see another facet that we might not have seen, and apparently nobody else saw, without looking at the broader cultural context of ancient Hebrew. And then we’re going to see an actual prophecy that mentions hamas in part two. Can we end with a prayer?

Lynell: Yeah, we can do that.

Nehemia: Yehovah, Father in heaven, I pray for Naama Levi. I pray, Father, that You be with her in her captivity, and she be set free soon. Father, protect her, and Father, protect all the women around the world who are being hamased. All the women around the world who are being hamased by evil, foreign aggressors, or being hamased by people who are supposed to protect them and love them. Father, I ask that You be with Your people, Israel, and that You protect Your holy city, Jerusalem, and that You protect all the people who call upon Your name, who love You. Father, protect the people who don’t even know Your name, who have stretched out their hands to a foreign God, wanting to pray to You and not knowing Your name. Father, protect those people and be with them when they call out “hamas,” asking for Your salvation. Please save them.

Lynell: Amen.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!