The REAL Name of Babylon Was Hidden Under America

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[00:00:01]The real name of Babylon was hidden under America.

[00:00:09]10 beliefs about the Bible I stopped holding in 2026.

[00:00:13]All 10 cracked the same way. I opened the Greek Septuagent, the Bible the apostles quoted, the Bible the early black church carried into Ethiopia, and I read what was actually there. Not what my pastor read, not what the Vulgate let in. The Greek and 10 doctrines I have been handed since childhood quietly fell over. You have been reading around blanks the Maseretic put there. Tonight you read what is on the other side of those blanks. 10 verses Greek first, then the divergence, then what it means for you. I want to be honest about this.

[00:00:50]I did not set out to stop believing anything. I went looking for the Bible.

[00:00:55]the writers of Hebrews and Romans were actually quoting because I had been told the apostles use the Old Testament we have today. And I wanted to see that for myself. What I found instead was that diaspora church doctrine, the doctrine most of us were handed from pulpits trained on the Maseretic Hebrew and the Vulgate Latin and the King James English has been working off of a shorter, later, smoother text.

[00:01:22]And in 10 specific places, the older Greek says something the shorter Hebrew either trims, softens, or flattens. So, this is a confession. I'm black. I'm a believer. And I'm telling you, the Bible our ancestral church kept in G and Greek is not the Bible Sunday school handed me. I believe that. I've sat with this for years. I'm not asking you to take my word for it. I'm going to walk you through 10 verses, Greek first, then the divergence, then what it means for the diaspora reader. Here is the receipt.

[00:01:58]The Septuagent is the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures produced by Jewish scholars in Alexandria starting in the 3rd century before Christ and finished sometime in the 2nd century.

[00:02:10]That dating matters. The Septtogent predates the Maseretic Hebrew text we use today by more than a thousand years.

[00:02:17]The apostles quoted it. Roughly twothirds of the Old Testament citations in the New Testament match Greek Septuagent wording, not the later Maseretic Hebrew wording. Hebrews quotes Septuagent Psalms. Acts quotes Septuagent Amos. Paul leans on Septuagent Genesis. And in 397 AD when the bishops gathered at Carthage, they affirmed a wider cannon. The cannon the Greekeaking and African churches had been carrying. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church kept that cannon. The early black church on the continent kept it. The Vulgate later reshaped it. The Reformation trimmed it again. Tonight I lay out 10 places where what the Greek preserves and what was later trimmed diverge. And I close with the verse the Ethiopian church reads as our inheritance. Septuagent Psalm 67:32 10 items one Bible. Stay with me. Let me show you how the Greek Septuagent actually got into the world. Because most of us were never taught this history. The picture I had as a younger believer was that the Old Testament dropped down on Moses, sat in Hebrew for,400 years, and then got translated into our King James English when the Reformation rolled around. That picture is wrong on every side. Long before Latin, long before English, long before the Maseretic vowel pointing system was even invented, the Hebrew scriptures had already been turned into Greek. The place was Alexandria in Egypt. The time was the 3rd and 2nd centuries before Christ. The translators were Jewish scholars working under the patronage of Tommy II Philadelphia, the Greek pharaoh whose library at Alexandria was already the largest collection of texts on earth. The tradition behind the translation is called the letter of Aristas. According to that tradition, 72 Jewish elders, six from each of the 12 tribes were brought from Jerusalem to Alexandria and translated the Hebrew Torah into Greek. The number was later rounded to 70 and the Greek translation was given the Latin name Septuagenta.

[00:04:35]The 70. Now I want to be careful here.

[00:04:39]The letter of Iris is tradition, not history in the strict sense. Scholars treat the 72 elders story the way they treat any ancient origin account with caution about the specifics with respect for the underlying memory.

[00:04:54]What is not in dispute is that the translation work began in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. That it expanded over the next two centuries to cover all the prophets and writings. And that by the time Jesus was born, the Greek Septuagent was the standard Old Testament for Jews living anywhere outside Judea. That dating is what most of us were never told. The Maseretic Hebrew text, the Hebrew text behind every Protestant English Old Testament you have ever read, was not finalized until between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. The vowel pointings and the marginal notes that fix the meaning of disputed words were the work of Jewish scholars called the Maseretsites, working long after the temple was destroyed, long after the apostles were dead, long after the African church had already been carrying the Greek. The Septuagent predates the Maseretic by more than a thousand years. I had to sit with that for a long time. The text most teachers I grew up under, called the original Hebrew, is actually a later careful preservation.

[00:05:59]The Greek I was taught to think of as a translation, is older than the Hebrew it was supposedly translated from. Now, watch what happens when you open the New Testament with this in mind. The apostles were not quoting Hebrew. The apostles were quoting Greek. The book of Hebrews quotes the Septuagent Psalms 1:6 leans on Septuagent. Deuteronomy 32 43 where the Greek reads, "Let all the angels of God worship him, a line the Maseretic shortens." Acts 15 quotes the Septuagent version of Amos 9:11 where the Greek says that the remnant of men may seek the Lord and all the nations upon whom my name is called language the Maseretic Hebrew does not contain in that form.

[00:06:48]Paul in Romans quotes Septuagent Genesis the author of Hebrews quotes Septuagent Psalms 86 and 102. Scholar after scholar has counted this and landed in roughly the same place. When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, somewhere around 2/3 of those quotations match the Septtogent Greek, not the Maseretic Hebrew. I think you should sit with what that means. The Bible the apostles quoted was Greek. The Bible Paul carried in his memory was Greek. The Bible the writer of Hebrews wrote with at his elbow was Greek. The early church for its first three centuries used the Greek Septtoagent as its Old Testament. And the Bible most of us were handed in Sunday school. The Bible behind the King James, the Bible behind the New International Version, the Bible behind almost every English Old Testament you have ever read was not the Apostles Bible. It was a careful Hebrew text finalized 700 years after the apostles died. I'm not saying the Maseretic is illegitimate. I am saying most of us were never told it was the later text and the Greek was the earlier one. Then came the Vulgate around 382 AD. The Roman scholar Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damascus to make a new Latin translation of the whole Bible. He worked at it for about 23 years and he made a fateful choice.

[00:08:17]Rather than translate from the Greek Septuagent that the Greek church had been using for 600 years, Jerome went back to the Hebrew text available in his day and translated from there. His new Latin Bible, the Vulgate, anchored Western Christianity on a Hebrew-based Old Testament. The Greek tradition canon stayed alive in the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic and Ethiopian churches. The Latin West moved toward the Hebrew, two streams of canon, one church. And in 397 AD, 15 years after Jerome started translating, the bishops of North Africa gathered at the council of Carthage.

[00:09:01]They affirmed a list of books for the Old Testament that included what we now call the dutanon, Tobat, Judith, wisdom, sirak, Baruk, first and second Mcabes and additions to Esther and Daniel that the Greek Septuagent carried. The Ethiopian and early African church kept that wider cannon. The medieval Catholic Church kept most of it. The Reformation more than a thousand years later dropped those books from Protestant Bibles. The King James of 1611 still printed the Apocrypha in its own section. But by the 19th century, English Protestant Bibles had quietly stopped including them altogether. The cannon that Carthage affirmed and that the African church carried got smaller in the West. One Reformation Council and one cheap paper printing at a time. That is the receipt.

[00:09:55]Greek first, older than the Hebrew most teachers call original, apostolic, affirmed at Carthage, kept by Ethiopia, trimmed by the West. Now, let me walk you through 10 specific places where the Greek preserves what the later trimmed text either softens, flattens, or removes. Item one, Genesis 1 verse 2.

[00:10:21]The Septtoagent in Greek reads Hedi and Eratos Kai Akatastos translated into English that is but the earth was invisible and unfernished not formless not void invisible and unfernished.

[00:10:39]Stop right there and let those two Greek words land. Aaratos without sight unseen invisible. Akatas Skiwastos, unfernished, unprepared, lacking equipment. The earth before the seven days of creation began, was already there, already a place, but it was unseen and not yet equipped to bear life. That is what the older Greek says.

[00:11:07]Now look at the Hebrew. The King James was translated from the Maseretic Hebrew reads to Vabbo. And that phrase has been carried into English for 400 years as formless and void. That translation is not wrong as a translation. The Hebrew words can mean emptiness, chaos, an unshaped state. But I want you to feel how different the picture is. Formless and void. Sounds like nothing was there.

[00:11:35]Like raw chaos. Mathematical zero. A swirling abyss. Invisible and unfernished. Sounds like something was there. But you could not see it yet.

[00:11:45]Like a house with the lights off and the rooms not yet filled. The earth as a hidden unequipped place. One is absence.

[00:11:55]The other is concealment. I used to read Genesis chapter 1 as a single sealed 7-day creation account with absolutely nothing before verse one.

[00:12:07]God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was empty raw matter. And then God started shaping it. That is the picture I was given. The Greek does not let you stay there. The Greek opens a small but real space between verse one and verse two. What some teachers in the older Greek reading church called the gap. Not a fully developed gap theory doctrine, but a textual room. The earth had become invisible and unfernished.

[00:12:36]The Greek participle egonetto, the verb behind was, carries a sense of had become in some readings, not just static was. Something happened. The earth ended up in an invisible, unequipped state.

[00:12:51]And then in verse two, the spirit of God moves over the waters and the seven days begin. I have come to believe the Hebrew quietly closed that room. The Maseretses worked from a tradition that wanted the creation account to be a single unbroken exhilarit corrupted the text on purpose. I'm saying when you translate aoratos kaakatasketos back from Greek into Hebrew, you have to make a choice. And the choice the medieval Hebrew tradition made flattens the picture. The Greek leaves the room.

[00:13:35]The Hebrew shuts the door. What I stopped believing was that Genesis 1 is a closed single event 7-day creation account with no prior state. I'm not telling you the Earth is 4 billion years old or 4,000 years old. I'm not telling you the gap is filled with a pre-adamatic civilization or a Lucifer rebellion or any of the speculations the Bible and science movement of the 19th century poured into that one Greek verb.

[00:14:04]I am telling you the Greek text I was raised to ignore preserves a verse to state invisible unfernished that the Hebrew I was raised to call the original did not preserve. In my community, in the black church I grew up in, we were given the Hebrew side of the conversation and told the Greek was a translation. I want to be careful with that. Both texts are old. Both texts are inspired in the sense that the Greekeaking church and the Hebrewspeaking community received them as scripture for 2,000 years. What I will say is the Greek Septtoagent preserves a reading the apostles read.

[00:14:42]The African church read. The Ethiopian church reads to this day. And that reading opens a textual room. The medieval Hebrew translation closes. I sit with that. You can sit with it, too.

[00:14:55]Read Genesis 1 in Brenton's English translation of the Septtoagent and read it again in the King James and feel the difference between an unseen earth and a formless one. One is a place not yet revealed. The other is a place not yet made. The Greek the apostles read says the first one that is item one and that is what I stopped believing. Item 2 P S A L LM 22 verse 16 or in the Septuagent numbering Psalm 21 verse 17 and that numbering shift matters because in the Greek tradition the psalms are counted slightly differently and when you look up the verse you have to know to look at the chapter before the sepagent reads oren cheras mokai podas mo translated they pierced my hands and my feet.

[00:15:48]Not like a lion. Not as a lion at my hands and feet. Pierced hands and feet.

[00:15:55]Greek verb oro to dig through. To bore, to pierce. The Hebrew maseretic text behind your King James reads, "Kari, like a lion." A famous English compromise renders it like a lion they are at my hands and my feet which is grammatical mush in any language. So most modern translations have to footnote it. This is one of the most contested single verses in the entire Old Testament. And the contest comes down to one Hebrew letter. The word karu in old Hebrew would mean they pierced.

[00:16:34]The word kari would mean like a lion.

[00:16:38]The only difference in unpointed Hebrew is the last letter, a vav versus a yod.

[00:16:45]Both letters are vertical strokes. They look almost identical. A scribe copying a manuscript by lamplight could confuse them. And in the maseretic Hebrew tradition that came down to us through the middle ages, the reading became kari like a lion. In the Greek Septuagent translated by Jewish scholars in Alexandria more than a thousand years before the Maserates finalized the Hebrew, the reading is orics, they pierced. That is a Jewish translation of a Jewish text made by Jews that says they pierced.

[00:17:21]For a long time, I was told the Septuag in Psalm 22:16 was a Christian alteration. I was told the apostles or the early church or some later monastic scribe had quietly rewritten the Greek to make the psalm sound like a prophecy of the crucifixion. That was the framing I grew up under. And then in 1956 when the dead sea scrolls were being analyzed, fragments of the psalms scroll from Nahal Hever, a cave near the Dead Sea were studied carefully. In one of those fragments, the Hebrew of Psalm 22:16 reads, "Kaharu, they pierced, not like a lion." This is a Hebrew manuscript copied by Jewish hands dating from before the time of Christ that agrees with the Septuagent reading. It is older than the Maseretic and it is older than any Christian copist could possibly be blamed for. The Jewish text, the older Hebrew says, "They pierced."

[00:18:23]I had to sit with that for a long time.

[00:18:26]The story I had been told was that they pierced my hands and feet was a Christian overreading of a Hebrew text that actually said like a lion. The story the older manuscripts tell is the opposite. The older Hebrew said they pierced. The Greek Septuagent working from older Hebrew or from a Hebrew parent text we no longer have translated it as they pierced. The Maseretic finalized 700 years after the apostles reads like a lion. The change went the other direction from what I had been taught. The piercing reading is older.

[00:19:04]The lion reading is later. What I stopped believing was that the Septtoagent Psalm 22:16 was a Christian interpolation.

[00:19:14]The opposite is true. Or so I have come to read it. The pierced hands and feet reading is what the older Hebrew preserved, what the Greek Septuagent translated, what the Dead Sea Scroll fragment from Nahal Hever confirms, and what the later Maseretic tradition softened. Most teachers will tell you the Hebrew is the original and the Greek is the translation. With Psalm 22:16, the manuscript evidence cuts the other way. I think you can do something with that. The next time someone tells you the prophecy of the crucifixion was a Christian invention read backward into the Old Testament, you can point to Nahal Haver, you can point to the Septuagent and you can say the older Hebrew agreed with the Greek. The lion reading is the later softening. The pierced reading is the older preservation. That is the kind of textual receipt the diaspora church reader rarely gets handed. It was in the Bible the apostles quoted. It is in the Bible the African church carried and it is item two of what I stopped believing about the text I was raised on. It 3a 7 verse 14. The verse that became the most famous prophecy of the virgin birth in the New Testament. The septtogent in Greek reads edduhippanos and gastriexa kiteexiti huan translated behold the virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bear a son. Greek noun parthonos virgin in the unambiguous sense a young woman who has not been with a man. That word in Greek does not have a wide semantic range. It means virgin.

[00:21:00]The Septtoagent translators working in Alexandria in the 2nd or 3rd century BC chose Parthonos, not neoness, which would have been the natural Greek word for young woman. They picked the word that means virgin. The Hebrew maseretic behind your King James reads alma.

[00:21:19]And Alma is where the long argument has lived for 2,000 years. Hebrew alma can mean a young woman, a maiden, a girl of marriageable age. The Hebrew word that more strictly means virgin is bethula.

[00:21:36]So the rabbitic tradition, especially after the rise of the church, came to emphasize that Isaiah 7:14 only ever meant a young woman shall conceive and that the Greek Septuagent Parthonos was either an overt translation or a Christian misuse.

[00:21:54]That argument has been in print for at least 1,800 years. I sat under teachers who repeated it. Even some Protestant translations after the 1950s started rendering Isaiah 7:14 as a young woman shall conceive instead of a virgin shall conceive. The revised standard version did exactly that in 1952 and the controversy was loud enough to make news. I want you to feel what is going on here. The Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in Alexandria more than 200 years before the apostles were even born chose the unambiguous word parthonos.

[00:22:34]They were not Christians. They had no agenda to set up the New Testament. They were Jewish translators picking a Greek word to carry a Hebrew meaning. And they picked the word that means virgin.

[00:22:45]Whatever the Hebrew Alma was capable of meaning, the Greekeaking Jewish community of the 2n century BC heard it and translated it as virgin. That is the older witness. Then Matthew comes along in his gospel 1 23 and he quotes Isaiah 7:14.

[00:23:05]He quotes it in Greek and the Greek he quotes is the Septuagent Greek. Matthew writes, "Eduarthanos and Gastriex Kiteexi, the exact wording of the Septuagent." He did not translate fresh from the Hebrew.

[00:23:20]He pulled the verse out of the Bible.

[00:23:22]The Jewish diaspora was already using the Bible that already read Parthononos.

[00:23:28]Matthew did not invent the virgin reading. He quoted the Greek translation that Jews had made for Jews two centuries earlier. I used to believe what I had been taught that the virgin birth reading of Isaiah 7:14 was a Christian overt translation of a Hebrew word that just meant young woman. I've come to read it the other way. I sip with this. The Septuagent chose parthonos before there was any Christian community to please. The rabbitic insistence on young woman came later after Matthew had quoted Septuagent Isaiah after the church had built its theology of the incarnation on the Greek wording. The hardening of Alma away from virgin looks in my reading like a community closing a door the Greek had left open. The older Greek says virgin.

[00:24:18]The later Hebrew tradition narrows it.

[00:24:21]I'm not asking you to litigate the Hebrew with me. I don't have to win the argument about whether a can also mean virgin. I am telling you that the oldest pre-Christian Jewish translation of Isaiah 7:14, read it as virgin. That translation is the Greek the apostles carried, the Greek the African church kept, the Greek the Ethiopian Orthodox Church still reads in its liturgy.

[00:24:46]What I stopped believing was that the virgin birth prophecy was a Christian retrofitting of a neutral Hebrew word.

[00:24:52]The Jewish scholars in Alexandria did the work first. The apostles quoted what those scholars had done. The narrowing came later. Item three, that is the third belief I let go of when I started reading the Greek. It 4 Deuteronomy chapter 32:8 The song of Moses the Septtoagent reads hot the hoypsis ethne host despirenius Adam estenhoria ethnon kata ariththmon angelon theo translated when the most high divided the nations when he scattered the sons of Adam he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the angels of God. Hold that phrase, according to the number of the angels of God. In the Greek, when God scatters humanity into nations at Babel and after, he divides the inheritance of those nations among heavenly beings. Angels of God plural, named here in the work of distributing the earth. Now, the Hebrew Maseretic behind your King James reads something different. It reads, "Ben, Israel, the sons of Israel." Same verse, same context. But where the Greek says, "Angels of God," the Maseretic Hebrew says, "Sons of Israel." So the King James reads, "He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel." Two completely different pictures. In the Greek, the boundaries of the nations are set according to the number of the angelic beings God appointed over them. In the Hebrew Maseretic, the boundaries are set according to the number of the sons of Israel, which makes no historical sense since the nations were divided long before Israel had 12 sons. Then in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls began coming out of the caves at Kuman and among them was a Hebrew manuscript of Deuteronomy labeled 4 Q do J by scholars. That Hebrew manuscript reads in Hebrew, Beni Elohim, sons of God, or in some readings, BeniM, sons of the divine ones, not sons of Israel, sons of God. The pre-Christian Hebrew text from Kuman agrees with the Septuagent Greek and disagrees with the medieval Maseretic. The older Hebrews said the boundaries of the nations were set according to the number of the sons of God, the divine council, the angelic beings God appointed.

[00:27:26]This is one of the cleanest pieces of textual evidence in the entire Old Testament. You have three witnesses. The Greek Septuagent translated in the 3rd or 2nd century BC reading angels of God.

[00:27:39]The Hebrew Dead Sea Scroll for QD J copied before the time of Christ reading sons of God and the medieval Maseretic finalized between the 7th and 10th centuries AD reading sons of Israel.

[00:27:57]Two of the three witnesses, both pre-Christian and both Jewish, agree on the divine council reading. The third much later witness reads, "Sons of Israel. I sat with this for a long time when I first saw it." The picture the medieval Hebrew handed down that Israel itself is the unit of measurement does not match what the older texts say. The older texts say God divided the nations among heavenly beings and Israel was his own portion. The next verse in both the Greek and the Hebrew makes that explicit. for the Lord's portion is his people Jacob. What I stopped believing was that the divine council reading of the Old Testament, God presiding over a court of sons of God or angels of God who govern the nations, was a post-biblical mystical add-on. Many of us were taught to read passages like Psalm 82 and Job 1 as poetic flourishes or as borrowings from pagan mythology that the prophets dismissed.

[00:29:02]I don't read it that way anymore.

[00:29:04]Deuteronomy 32:8 in the Septuagent and at Kuman shows the divine council picture sitting at the heart of how Moses sang about God dividing the nations. The Maseretic flattens it. The older Hebrew and the Greek preserve it.

[00:29:18]Many in the African church tradition have read it this way for centuries. The Ethiopian Orthodox commentaries take the divine council reading as natural, not strange. If you are still with me here, I want to ask you for something. I believe what we are reading tonight is part of the inheritance the diaspora church reader was rarely handed. If you have read this far into the verses, you are a witness. Not in the agreement bait sense, but in the biblical sense of someone who has seen the manuscript trail and can speak about it. So, if you are studying the text seriously and you want to be counted in this conversation, comment the word witness down below and tell me what city or country you are reading this from. I'd like to know who's tracking this with me. Six items left. The chronology gap is next. Item 5. Genesis 5. The chronology of the patriarchs from Adam to Noah. The Septtoagent and the Maseretic Hebrew disagree on the ages. And the disagreement is not small. In the Greek Septtoagent, Adam is 130 when he fathers Seth. But wait, that is the Maseretic number. Let me read the Greek carefully.

[00:30:33]The Septuagent Genesis 5:3 says, "Adam Seth at the age of 230 years." 230, not 130. The Maseretic says 130. The Greek adds 100 years right at the first generation. And the pattern repeats. Seth in the Septuagent fathers Enosh at 205. The Maseretic says 105.

[00:31:04]Enosh fathers Kenan at 190 in the Greek, 90 in the Hebrew. Kenan fathers Mahalal at 170 in the Greek, 70 in the Hebrew.

[00:31:15]The same 100year offset shows up all the way down through Methuselah. Almost every generation in Genesis 5, the Septuagent is 100 years longer at the age of fatherhood than the Maseretic.

[00:31:29]When you add up all those 100-year editions across the line from Adam to the flood, the Septtoagent chronology comes out roughly 1500 years longer than the Maseretic chronology for the pre flood period. That is a serious gap. The Hebrew Maseretic puts the flood at roughly 2,000 years after Adam. The Greek Septuagent puts it closer to 3,500 years after Adam. We are talking about a difference larger than the entire span between the birth of Christ and today and the African church kept the longer chronology. The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible which preserves the Septuagant Greek tradition through its own GES translation carries the longer ages. The early Greekeaking church kept them. The Vulgate, when Jerome translated, moved to the shorter Maseretic tradition numbers, and the Western chronologies that became dominant in medieval Europe, including Bishop Usher's famous 404 BC creation date were calculated off the shorter Hebrew numbers, not the longer Greek ones. I had to sit with this. The thing I had been taught in Sunday school that the Maseretic Hebrew chronology was the older, more reliable count does not hold up against the manuscript evidence.

[00:32:46]The Greek Septuagent is a thousand years older than the finalized Maseretic and its chronology agrees with the early African church and the Jewish historian Josephus who was working from a Greek tradition text in the first century.

[00:33:00]Josephus's numbers for the pre flood patriarchs match the Septuagent, not the Maseretic. The shorter chronology appears to be a later compression, not the original count. What I stopped believing was that the Maseretic chronology was the older, more reliable count. The Ethiopian church kept the longer one. The Greek Septtoagent preserved the longer one. The older witness is the longer one. That is item five. It 6 ps a lm 110 verse 3 or in septuagent numbering psalm 109 the Greek reads egghastros pros ferero eeneusa say translated from the womb before the morning star I begott you that is what the priest king of psalm 110 the figure who is a priest forever after the order of MelkiseDC has spoken over him by God, pre-existent, begotten before the morning star, before the first dawn, eternal generation from the father. Now look at the maseretic Hebrew. The Hebrew reads, "From the womb of the dawn, the dw of your youth." And the translations stumble over it. The King James renders it, "Thou hast the due of thy youth from the womb of the morning." That image is the dew of mourning on a young king's face. It is poetic but it is something completely different from I begot you before the morning star. One is pre-existence the other is youthful vigor at coronation. The pictures do not match. In the Greek Psalm 110 to3 reads as a divine generation from before time spoken by God over a priest king who is more than a Davidic monarch. In the Maseretic Hebrew, the verse reads as a coronation poem describing a young king's freshness on the morning of his enthronement.

[00:35:01]And when you go to the New Testament, the book of Hebrews 5:6 and Hebrews 7 quote Psalm 110, both the priest after Mechisedc line in verse 4 and the begotten language elsewhere, and they read the psalm as speaking of Christ as a pre-existent priest king. The author of Hebrews is reading the Greek. The Greek gives him a verse that says, "Before the morning star, I begott you."

[00:35:28]The Hebrew Maseretic does not give him that. I used to read Psalm 110 as a royal psalm about David's heir, a coronation song with messianic overtones. I have come to read it differently. The Septuagent preserves a priest king language about pre-existence that the Maseretic flattens into a coronation image. What I stopped believing was that Psalm 110 is a coronation poem without a pre-existent priest king reading. The Greek the apostles read carried that reading. The maseretic later compresses it. Item six, two more before the peak. Item 7. I say ah chapter 19 verse 25. The verse I cannot read in the septuagent without my throat catching. The Greek reads yulo jaminos hleos mauo and agato kiho n as kihei clarinomia mo Israel translated blessed be my people who are in Egypt and who are in Assyria and Israel my inheritance.

[00:36:34]Read that again slowly. My people who are in Egypt. The Greek prophet in the Greek Septtoagent has God himself naming Egypt. Egypt, the land of Africa, the land most Bible teachers handed me as the dark backdrop Israel had to escape as my people. Not formerly my people, not a footnote to history. My people currently in the prophetic vision of Isaiah 19 and the Septtoagen structure of that verse is even more remarkable.

[00:37:07]God blesses three nations in one breath.

[00:37:10]Egypt called my people. Assyria called the work of God's hands. Israel called his inheritance. Three covenant categories. Egypt, Assyria, Israel, Africa, Asia, and the land in between.

[00:37:26]All blessed under one roof. I want you to feel the size of that vision. In a chapter that opens with God's judgment on Egypt, economic collapse, dried up Nile, the wisdom of Egypt failing, Isaiah ends by hearing God call Egypt my people. The Greek preserves that ending with full force. I remember the first time I read Isaiah 19:25 in Brenson's English translation of the Septuagent. I had read the chapter in the King James my whole life and never noticed how strong the closing was. The King James working from the Maseretic Hebrew reads, "Blessed be Egypt, my people, and Assyria the work of my hands and Israel mine inheritance." The Hebrew there is actually close to the Greek. The verse reads similarly in the standard Hebrew, but many later translations, especially translations that grew up under European theology nervous about a positive prophetic word over Africa, soften the verse. Some render it, "Blessed be Egypt, my people," with footnotes hedging the meaning. Others paraphrase it, "So the force is gone." I'm not saying anyone changed the Hebrew. I am saying generations of western commentary worked hard to flatten what the verse plainly says. Egypt, the land of Africa is named my people by God in the Greek Septuagent and in the standard Hebrew.

[00:38:58]When I sat in Bible study as a teenager, the working framework was that Egypt in the Bible was the place Israel left, the place of bondage, the place of Pharaoh, the place God brought his people out of.

[00:39:11]That framework is not wrong as far as it goes. Exodus is in the Bible. The bondage in Egypt is real, but it is not the whole story the prophets tell.

[00:39:21]Isaiah 19:25 in the Greek the apostles read and in the Hebrew that lies behind it. Names Egypt as my people in a moment of restoration. Isaiah 11:11 names Kush, Ethiopia, subsaharan Africa as one of the lands from which God will gather a remnant. Psalm 87 to four names, Egypt and Kush as places where God registers his people. Africa is not just the place Israel left. Africa is also a place where God says, "My people," this one hit me hard. I sat with it for a long time.

[00:40:01]I had been handed a Bible where Africa was the backdrop and never the foreground, the bondage place and never the blessing place. The Greek Septuagent, the Bible the early African church carried, gave back what later European commentary had quietly trimmed.

[00:40:18]Item seven is the verse the Ethiopian church has read for 1500 years as a vindication of African covenant standing. I read it now and I read it differently. The land Africa is not a footnote in the prophetic economy. The land Africa is named by God, my people.

[00:40:38]What I stopped believing was that Africa is only the place Israel left, only the bondage backdrop to Exodus, never the land God himself called my people.

[00:40:50]Isaiah 19:25 in the Greek will not let me believe that anymore. The verse is too plain. Egypt, my people.

[00:41:00]Assyria, the work of my hands. Israel, my inheritance. Three nations, one God, one prophetic vision. Three covenant categories. The black diaspora reader who grew up with Africa as only the bondage place needs to see this verse in the Greek. The apostles carried. The verse, the Ethiopian church reads in its GZ Bible as a vindication of African covenant. The verse I cannot read out loud anymore without feeling the weight of how much was held back from my Sunday school years. That is item seven. That is the climactic item. Seven down, three to go. The three remaining are the books and chapters the Reformation removed from Bibles like the one I grew up reading. Job's extended prologue, Daniel's additional chapters, and the prayer of Manasseh. Each of them affirmed at Carthage in 397.

[00:41:55]each kept by the Ethiopian Orthodox cannon. Each quietly dropped from the King James Apocrypha section by the 19th century. And then I will close with the verse the Ethiopian church reads as the seal of the whole conversation.

[00:42:10]Septuagent Psalm 67:32.

[00:42:14]Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God. Item 8, the book of Job in the Septuagant. The Septtoagent Job is a different book in several places from the job we read in our English Bibles and the differences sit mostly in the prologue and the epilogue. The Greek job has expansions narrative material. The Maseretic Hebrew does not include. I want to point to two of those expansions specifically because they are the ones I have come to sit with. The first expansion is the speech of Job's wife.

[00:42:47]In the Maseretic Hebrew, Job's wife appears for one brief moment in chapter 2:9. She says to Job, "Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die."

[00:43:00]That is the entire speech. One line and then she vanishes from the narrative. In the Septuagent, that one line gets opened up into a longer lament. She names the loss. She names that she has wandered from house to house looking for a place to rest after the calamity. She names that the children she carried and labored to raise. And remember, Job has just lost 10 children to the collapse of his eldest son's house are now under the earth. She names the inheritance that was supposed to come through them and is now gone. The septuagent gives Job's wife a voice. The Maseretic compresses her down to one line of bitterness. The second expansion is in the epilogue. The Septtoagent Job ends with a passage that ties Job to a lineage. The Greek text traces Job's descent through Esau's line, making him a descendant of Abraham through the Edomite branch, not through Israel. The Septuagent specifically names this Edomite line connection, identifying Job as a pre-Israelite righteous figure outside the covenant line of Jacob. The maseretic job does not include this lineage passage. The job who sits in our English Bibles is genealogically silent. The job who sits in the Greek Septuagent and in the Ethiopian Bible that follows the Septuagent is named into a specific bloodline of righteous men who knew God before Israel was a nation. What I stopped believing was that the short Maseretic Job is the only authentic textual tradition. I have come to read the Greek Job with its longer wife speech and its named Edomite lineage as preserving material the medieval Hebrew tradition compressed. I'm not saying the Maseretic is corrupt. I am saying the Septuagent preserves a fuller older form of the Job story, a form that gives Job's wife a real voice and that names Job into a righteous lineage outside Israel. The Ethiopian Bible carries it.

[00:45:03]The early Greekeaking church read it.

[00:45:06]Item 8, item 9, the book of Daniel in the Septuagent. The Greek Daniel includes three sections that the Maseretic Hebrew Aramaic Daniel does not. The Septuagent Daniel has chapter 13. The story of Susanna, a Jewish woman in Babylon, who is falsely accused by two elders and vindicated by the young Daniel, exposing the elders contradictions in their testimony.

[00:45:33]Chapter 14 is Belle and the Dragon. Two short narratives in which Daniel exposes the Babylonian idol cult of Bell and kills a dragon serpent the Babylonians worshiped as a god. And within chapter 3 between verses 23 and 24 of the Maseretic Daniel, the Septuagent inserts the song of the three young men. The prayer that Shadrach, Mach, and Abedigo sing inside the fiery furnace, naming all of creation to praise the Lord with them. These three sections are in the Septuagent. They are in the Vulgate.

[00:46:09]They are in every Catholic Bible. They are in every Orthodox Bible. They are in the Ethiopian Orthodox cannon. At the Council of Carthage in 397 AD, the bishops affirmed them as canonical. The Greekeaking Church and the African church carried them as scripture for 1500 years. And then the Protestant Reformation, working from the medieval Maseretic Hebrew, dropped them. The King James of 1611 still printed them in an Apocrypha section between the Testaments, but by the 19th century, most printed English Protestant Bibles had stopped including the Apocrypha at all. What I stopped believing was that the Daniel ending at chapter 12 is the only authentic Daniel, and the rest is apocryphal fiction. The Greek Daniel with Susanna, Bell, and the dragon. And the song of the three young men in the furnace is the Daniel the apostles read.

[00:47:08]The Daniel Carthage affirmed. The Daniel, the Ethiopian cannon, retains to this day. I'm not asking you to adopt a different Bible. I am asking you to know that the Bible the apostles knew was longer than the Bible most of us were given. Item 9, ITM10, the prayer of many. This one is short and this one is heavy. The prayer of Manasseh is a brief penitential prayer 15 verses long in most editions attributed to King Manasseh of Judah, one of the most wicked kings in the entire Old Testament. 2 Chronicles 33 tells the story. Manasseh ruled in Jerusalem for 55 years. He filled the temple with idols. He built altars to foreign gods in the courts of the Lord's house. He passed his own sons through the fire. He practiced sorcery and divination and consulted mediums. Second Kings calls him the worst king Judah ever had. The king whose sins God would not forgive even after Josiah's reforms tried to undo them. And then deep in 2 Chronicles 33, something happens. Manisa is captured by the Assyrians, taken away in feathers with hooks in his nose, dragged off to Babylon, and in his distress in chains far from Jerusalem.

[00:48:35]Manasseh besought the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers and prayed unto him. That is 2 Chronicles 33:12.

[00:48:48]The text says God was intreated of him and heard his supplication and brought him back to Jerusalem. But the text does not record the prayer itself. We are told Manasseh prayed. We are not given his words. The prayer of Manasseh in the Septuagent and the Vulgate and the Ethiopian Bible is the prayer the church received as that prayer. 15 verses. Oh Lord Almighty, God of our fathers, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, thou hast appointed repentance unto sinners. For thou, oh Lord, art the God of the just, and hast not appointed repentance to the just, as to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, which have not sinned against thee, but thou hast appointed repentance unto me, a sinner." The prayer goes on. Manasseh names his sins. He names that his iniquities are more than the sand of the sea. He asks God to forgive a wicked king. He bows the knee of his heart. It is one of the most personal prayers in the entire biblical tradition. Now, here is what I had to sit with. The prayer of Manasseh was affirmed at the council of Carthage in 397 AD as part of the wider Christian cannon. The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible retains it. Many of the Eastern Orthodox churches retain it. Even the King James of 1611 included the prayer of Manasseh in its Apocrypha section between the Old and New Testaments. The translators King James commissioned in6004, the same translators who gave us the King James English we know today, put the prayer of Manasseh in their Bible, not as a footnote, as a printed text between the Testaments in its own section, set apart but bound into the same volume. The Geneva Bible before the King James included it. Luther's German Bible included it. The original Protestant Bibles included it. And then over the next two and a half centuries, the Apocrypha, including the Prayer of Manasseh, was quietly dropped from English Protestant Bible printings. By 1827, the British and Foreign Bible Society had stopped funding printings that included the Apocrypha.

[00:51:05]By the late 19th century, most copies of the King James you could buy in America, did not include it. The King James, the first grew up reading in the black church of my childhood, did not include the Prayer of Manasseh. I did not learn it existed until I was an adult studying the textual history of my own Bible. The original King James, the one the translators handed to King James in 1611, included it. The cheap printing sold in American Sunday schools by the time I was born did not. What I stopped believing was that the King James I grew up with was the original Protestant cannon. The King James I grew up with was a later trimmed printing printed without the Apocrypha section that the 1611 translators considered part of the volume. The original King James included the prayer of Manasseh, the additions to Daniel, the additions to Esther, Wisdom, Sirak, Baruk, Tobet, Judith, and the books of Mcabes, the Carthage 397 cannon, the Greek Septuagent inheritance. By the time my grandmother got her pocket Bible, those books were gone. By the time I got mine, I did not even know they had been there. Item 10.

[00:52:25]The prayer of Manasseh is part of the canon Carthage affirmed and the Ethiopian church kept. It is a wicked king's repentance and God's hearing of him. And it was in the original Bible the king's translators handed to the king. That is the 10th thing I stopped believing about the Bible I was raised on. 10 down. Now let me bring you to the closing verse. Here is the verse the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has read for 1500 years as the seal of African covenant standing. Septuagent Psalm 67:32 in your English Bible that is Psalm 68:31 because of the numbering shift between the Greek and the Hebrew. The Greek reads Ethiopia prophecy chera artistus to Theo translated Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God. Sometimes rendered Ethiopia shall hasten to stretch out her hands to God. Africa named by name in the prophetic Psalm of David reaching to God. That is the verse. Read it slowly. Ethiopia, Greek Ethiopia, the Greek word for subsaharan Africa, the land beyond Egypt, the land that the Greekeaking world knew as black Africa, stretches out her hands, a gesture of supplication, a gesture of receiving, a gesture of return to God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

[00:54:00]not to a regional deity, to the most high. The Ethiopian church reads this verse as the covenant marker of their own people. Africa rising up before God.

[00:54:11]Africa naming itself before God. Africa stretching out her hands without anyone else's permission. The verse is in the Septuagent, in the Vulgate, in the Hebrew Maseretic with similar wording and in every major canonical tradition.

[00:54:26]The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible carries it.

[00:54:30]The early African church read it. And here between you and me, this is the Bible the apostles quoted. And this is the Bible our ancestral church on the African continent kept. The diaspora reader who has been reading around blanks all his life finally gets to read what is on the other side of the blanks.

[00:54:49]This is your inheritance. Before I close in prayer, I want to do one more thing.

[00:54:55]Scholars have weighed these texts for centuries and disagree on much. What I have offered tonight is one careful reading. One reading I have sat with, prayed over, and come to hold. The textual evidence I cited is verifiable.

[00:55:12]The Greek of the Septtoagent is in print and online. Brenton's English translation of the Septtoagent is in the public domain.

[00:55:22]The Ralph's critical edition of the Greek text is the standard scholarly reference. The Dead Sea Scrolls translations are available through the Israel Antiquities Authority. I encourage you to study the primary sources for yourself. Do not take my word for any of this. Open the Greek next to the Hebrew next to your King James. Compare the verses I read tonight. Make up your own mind. The Christian tradition has held many interpretations of these passages over 2,000 years, and I am offering one careful reading, not the only reading.

[00:55:56]The text is deeper than any single retelling can capture. Now, let me close. If you have read this far, you have walked through 10 places where the Greek Septuagent preserves something the Diaspora Church Bible, most of us were handed either softened or trimmed. 10 verses, 10 doctrines. one Bible that the apostles read, that the early black church carried, that Carthage affirmed in 397, that Ethiopia keeps to this day. If this opened a door for you, leave one word in the comments. Restored. Tell me what city or country you are reading this from. Restored in Memphis, restored in Atlanta, restored in Lagos, restored in London. I want to see how many of you are tracking this conversation seriously.

[00:56:45]Send this video to one person who is studying the manuscript history of the Bible the way you are. One, subscribe to the channel. There is more of this kind of textual work coming. The Greek of the apostles is a long road and we have only walked 10 verses of it tonight. Let us pray. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

[00:57:07]God of the apostles who carried the Greek Septuagent into the streets of Rome and Antioch and Alexandria. God of the African church that kept the wider cannon when the Western church trimmed it. We thank you for the receipts of your word. We thank you that nothing inspired by your spirit is finally lost.

[00:57:28]We thank you for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Greekeaking churches and the Jewish translators of Alexandria who labored to give us the Greek of your word. We bless every reader tonight, every tribe and every tongue, every nation that has come to your scriptures looking for truth. We acknowledge that you are the God of all peoples and all humanity is yours. And we ask specifically for the diaspora reader, for the believer who grew up handed a shorter, later, smoother Bible and is now meeting the older, fuller Greek for the first time. Open the eyes, steady the heart, give grace to study the primary sources. May the verse from Septuag against Psalm 67:32, settle in our spirit. Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God. Restore what was trimmed. Restore what was held back. Restore the inheritance in Jesus' name. Amen. Walk covered. Walk named.

[00:58:31]The Greek of the apostles is yours. The Bible of Carthage is yours. The verses of Ethiopia are yours. You are free.

[00:58:40]This video is for educational andformational purposes only. The views expressed represent the specific textual and historical analysis of biblical manuscripts and should not be taken as absolute theological or legal advice.

[00:58:54]Viewers are encouraged to conduct their own independent research. Dark Faith does not claim to provide official religious doctrine.

[00:59:12]Nice to meet you.

[00:59:16]It's nice to Nice to meet you.

[01:00:05]am Miss Nice to meet you.

[01:01:16]Miss you.

[01:01:41]Goodbye.