Latest / truthunedited / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE _ Why Was the Book of Jasher Removed From the Bible
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: The Bible tells you about a book, by name, that
- 0:03Speaker 1: is not in your Bible. Joshua chapter 10. The sun
- 0:07Speaker 1: stands still in the sky over Gibeon, and the text asks,
- 0:12Speaker 1: Is this not written in the book of Jasher? 2
- 0:16Speaker 1: Samuel chapter 1. David mourns the death of Saul and Jonathan,
- 0:21Speaker 1: and the text records, Behold, it is written in the
- 0:24Speaker 1: book of Jasher. Two different books, two different centuries. both
- 0:30Speaker 1: pointing outside their own pages to a text that has
- 0:33Speaker 1: vanished from history. If the Bible references this book, why
- 0:38Speaker 1: is it not in the canon? Was it removed? Was
- 0:42Speaker 1: it suppressed? Was it forbidden? The conspiracy says yes. The
- 0:47Speaker 1: evidence reveals something far more powerful. This is the true
- 0:51Speaker 1: story behind the most misunderstood lost book in Scripture. The
- 0:56Speaker 1: first thing to understand is the name itself, Most English
- 1:01Speaker 1: readers assume Jasher is a person, like Moses or Isaiah
- 1:05Speaker 1: or Daniel. It is not. There was no man named Jasher.
- 1:11Speaker 1: The Hebrew word is Yashar. It is spelled Yod-Shin-Resh, and
- 1:16Speaker 1: its root meaning is breathtakingly simple, to be straight, to
- 1:20Speaker 1: be level, to be smooth. In its metaphorical usage, which
- 1:25Speaker 1: is how the Old Testament uses it over 115 times,
- 1:30Speaker 1: It means upright, righteous, just, honest, a life without moral zigzags,
- 1:36Speaker 1: a path aligned with God's own standard. Job chapter 1
- 1:40Speaker 1: verse 1. Job is described as blameless and Yashar upright.
- 1:46Speaker 1: Isaiah chapter 26 verse 7. God himself is called the
- 1:50Speaker 1: upright one. The word is not obscure. It is not rare.
- 1:55Speaker 1: It is one of the most common moral terms in
- 1:58Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bibles. And the full title of this book,
- 2:01Speaker 1: in Hebrew, is Zephir Hayashar. The book of the upright,
- 2:07Speaker 1: not the book of a man named Jasher. The book
- 2:10Speaker 1: of the upright ones, Israel's heroes, Joshua, David, Jonathan, their victories,
- 2:16Speaker 1: their laments, their songs of valor. And this is where
- 2:20Speaker 1: the mystery begins to dissolve forever. because when scholars examine
- 2:24Speaker 1: the two biblical passages that cite this book, the genre
- 2:28Speaker 1: becomes unmistakable. The first citation appears in the context of
- 2:33Speaker 1: a military victory, the sun standing still at Gibeon. The
- 2:38Speaker 1: second appears in the context of a funeral lament, David's
- 2:42Speaker 1: Song of the Bow. One is a battle hymn, the
- 2:46Speaker 1: other is a dirge. Both are poetry. The original book
- 2:51Speaker 1: of Jasher was not a lost gospel, not a hidden prophecy,
- 2:55Speaker 1: not a suppressed revelation containing secrets the church did not
- 2:58Speaker 1: want you to read. Scholars, conservative and critical alike, uniformly
- 3:04Speaker 1: agree on what it was, an ancient national anthology of
- 3:09Speaker 1: Hebrew poetry, battle hymns, and lamentations. A songbook, a military
- 3:16Speaker 1: and cultural record of Israel's greatest moments, composed in verse,
- 3:21Speaker 1: and the evidence goes even deeper than most people realize.
- 3:25Speaker 1: The two citations that survive in the Hebrew Bible, Joshua
- 3:29Speaker 1: and 2 Samuel, span centuries. Joshua's conquest dates to approximately
- 3:35Speaker 1: 1400 or 1200 B.C., depending on the chronological model. David's
- 3:41Speaker 1: lament dates to approximately 1000 B.C. That alone means the
- 3:47Speaker 1: book of Jasher was a living document updated across generations.
- 3:52Speaker 1: But there may be a third reference. In 1 Kings 8,
- 3:56Speaker 1: verses 12 and 13, Solomon dedicates the first temple with
- 4:00Speaker 1: a short poetic declaration. In the Hebrew Masoretic text, there
- 4:05Speaker 1: is no mention of Jasher. But in the Greek Septuagint,
- 4:10Speaker 1: the ancient translation completed in the 3rd and 2nd centuries
- 4:13Speaker 1: before Christ, An additional line appears at 1 Kings 8,
- 4:19Speaker 1: verse 53. It reads, Is it not written in the
- 4:23Speaker 1: book of the song? The book of the song. In Greek,
- 4:26Speaker 1: Biblion Tessodes. Now watch this. The Hebrew word for song
- 4:31Speaker 1: is Shir, spelled Shin Yodresh. The Hebrew word for upright
- 4:37Speaker 1: is Yashar, spelled Yodshinresh. The same three consonants, rearranged. Textual
- 4:44Speaker 1: scholars like Immanuel Tov and F.F. Bruce have identified this
- 4:49Speaker 1: as a scribal anagram, a transcription variant of the same title.
- 4:54Speaker 1: The Book of the Song and the Book of the
- 4:56Speaker 1: Upright are almost certainly the same book. Three biblical books, Joshua,
- 5:02Speaker 1: 2 Samuel, and 1 Kings, cited the Book of Jasher.
- 5:07Speaker 1: Across four centuries of Israelite history, from the conquest to
- 5:12Speaker 1: the monarchy to the temple itself, So what happened to it?
- 5:16Speaker 1: It was not destroyed by conspiracy. It was not burned
- 5:20Speaker 1: by a pope. It was not confiscated by a council.
- 5:24Speaker 1: Like thousands of ancient texts, from Sumerian chronicles to Egyptian
- 5:29Speaker 1: medical scrolls to Greek philosophical treatises, it simply was not
- 5:34Speaker 1: copied enough to survive. It may have perished in the
- 5:38Speaker 1: Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., along with the
- 5:44Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant and countless other treasures. Its loss
- 5:48Speaker 1: was not remarkable. It was ordinary. Ancient texts die when
- 5:53Speaker 1: no one copies them. There is one more layer worth noting.
- 5:58Speaker 1: The Talmud and the medieval commentator Rashi argue that Sefer
- 6:02Speaker 1: Hayashar is not a separate book at all. It is
- 6:06Speaker 1: a metaphorical title for the Torah itself. Specifically, Genesis is
- 6:11Speaker 1: which records the lives of the upright patriarchs. Even the
- 6:15Speaker 1: ancient rabbis debated what this book was. But here is
- 6:19Speaker 1: what most people never discover. Jasher is not the only
- 6:23Speaker 1: book the Bible mentions that is not in the Bible.
- 6:27Speaker 1: It is not even close to the only one. Open
- 6:30Speaker 1: your Bible to the historical books, 1 and 2 Kings,
- 6:33Speaker 1: 1 and 2 Chronicles, and begin counting. Count every time
- 6:39Speaker 1: the text points you to another document, another record, another
- 6:44Speaker 1: source that the biblical author used but that is not
- 6:47Speaker 1: included in the canon. The number will stagger you. The
- 6:52Speaker 1: Bible references at least five royal archives. The Chronicles of
- 6:56Speaker 1: the Kings of Israel, cited 17 times in 1 and
- 7:00Speaker 1: 2 Kings. The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, cited
- 7:04Speaker 1: 15 times. The Acts of Solomon, cited in 1 Kings
- 7:09Speaker 1: chapter 11. The book of Shemaiah the prophet, cited in
- 7:13Speaker 1: 2 Chronicles chapter 12. The book of Jehu son of Hanani,
- 7:19Speaker 1: cited in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. Court records, state archives,
- 7:25Speaker 1: the minutes of a kingdom that ruled for centuries. Not
- 7:29Speaker 1: one of them is in your Bible. Then there are
- 7:32Speaker 1: the prophetic records. The book of Nathan the prophet, the
- 7:36Speaker 1: man who confronted David over Bathsheba, the book of Gad
- 7:40Speaker 1: the seer, who advised David through his years as a fugitive,
- 7:46Speaker 1: the prophecy of Ahijah the Shillanite, who told Jeroboam he
- 7:50Speaker 1: would receive ten tribes, the visions of Iddo the seer,
- 7:55Speaker 1: referenced three separate times in 2 Chronicles, covering the reigns
- 7:59Speaker 1: of Solomon, Rehoboam, and Abijah, and a lost collection of laments,
- 8:05Speaker 1: Funeral dirges composed by Jeremiah himself for King Josiah, referenced
- 8:11Speaker 1: in 2 Chronicles 35. Five prophets whose writings the Bible
- 8:16Speaker 1: acknowledges by name, and none of their documents survived. And
- 8:21Speaker 1: then there are the ones no one expects. A book
- 8:25Speaker 1: called The Wars of the Lord, referenced in Numbers 21,
- 8:29Speaker 1: verse 14. A collection of divine battle accounts that from
- 8:34Speaker 1: the earliest period of Israel's history. Gone. And three letters
- 8:39Speaker 1: from the Apostle Paul himself. One to the church at Laodicea,
- 8:44Speaker 1: referenced in Colossians chapter 4, verse 16, where Paul instructs
- 8:49Speaker 1: the Colossians to read it. One earlier letter to the
- 8:53Speaker 1: church at Corinth, referenced in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 9,
- 8:58Speaker 1: where Paul says, I wrote to you in my letter.
- 9:02Speaker 1: a letter that predates 1 Corinthians, and one tearful letter,
- 9:07Speaker 1: referenced in 2 Corinthians 2, verse 4, a letter of
- 9:11Speaker 1: severe rebuke that Paul wrote through many tears, letters from Paul,
- 9:17Speaker 1: written to churches, read by congregations, gone, 15 books, at least,
- 9:24Speaker 1: referenced openly, by name, in Scripture, not hidden, not suppressed, named,
- 9:31Speaker 1: and not one of them is in your Bible. So
- 9:34Speaker 1: the question is no longer, why was the book of
- 9:37Speaker 1: Jasher removed? That question assumes something that never happened. The
- 9:42Speaker 1: real question is far more important. Why does the Bible
- 9:46Speaker 1: reference books it does not include? And the answer to
- 9:49Speaker 1: that question changes everything. Referenced does not mean inspired. This
- 9:55Speaker 1: is the single most important principle that most people have
- 9:59Speaker 1: never been taught about how the Bible works. Just because
- 10:03Speaker 1: the Bible cites a book does not mean the Bible
- 10:06Speaker 1: considers that book to be divinely inspired scripture. The biblical
- 10:11Speaker 1: authors were not writing in a vacuum. They were also historians.
- 10:16Speaker 1: They used sources. They cited records. They quoted poetry. They
- 10:21Speaker 1: drew from archives, court documents, national songbooks, and prophetic collections.
- 10:28Speaker 1: And not everything they cited carried the authority of the
- 10:32Speaker 1: Word of God. Think of it this way. A history
- 10:35Speaker 1: textbook can cite a newspaper article as a historical source.
- 10:40Speaker 1: The newspaper article provides evidence. It corroborates a date, a battle,
- 10:46Speaker 1: a treaty. But the newspaper article does not become a
- 10:49Speaker 1: textbook because a textbook cited it. The two documents exist
- 10:54Speaker 1: at different levels of authority. One is the definitive account.
- 10:59Speaker 1: The other is a source. The Bible can cite a
- 11:03Speaker 1: national songbook without that songbook becoming scripture. A document can
- 11:07Speaker 1: be historically accurate without being divinely inspired. And the biblical
- 11:12Speaker 1: authors knew the difference. This is not speculation. the Bible
- 11:17Speaker 1: demonstrates this principle directly. In Acts chapter 17, verse 28,
- 11:22Speaker 1: the Apostle Paul stands before the philosophers of Athens and
- 11:26Speaker 1: quotes the Cretan poet Epimenides. In him we live and
- 11:32Speaker 1: move and have our being. In Titus chapter 1, verse 12,
- 11:37Speaker 1: Paul quotes another Greek poet, again Epimenides, calling the Cretans
- 11:42Speaker 1: always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons. Paul recognized true statements
- 11:48Speaker 1: in pagan poetry and used them. Did that make Greek
- 11:52Speaker 1: pagan poetry into scripture? Did Epimenides enter the canon because
- 11:57Speaker 1: Paul quoted him? No. Paul cited a source. He did
- 12:02Speaker 1: not canonize it. The biblical authors did the same thing
- 12:06Speaker 1: with the book of Jasher. They cited a national songbook
- 12:09Speaker 1: that confirmed a historical event. They did not elevate it
- 12:13Speaker 1: to the level of divine revelation. and there is an
- 12:17Speaker 1: even more striking example. In the letter of Jude, verses
- 12:21Speaker 1: 14 and 15, the author directly quotes from the book
- 12:25Speaker 1: of 1 Enoch, chapter 1, verse 9. The quotation is unmistakable.
- 12:31Speaker 1: Jude attributes the words to Enoch, the seventh, from Adam.
- 12:35Speaker 1: Does this make the entire book of Enoch, all 108
- 12:39Speaker 1: chapters of apocalyptic visions, angelic hierarchies, and cosmic geography, the
- 12:45Speaker 1: inspired word of God? The scholarly consensus is clear. Jude
- 12:50Speaker 1: recognized one specific prophecy as truthful. He did not canonize
- 12:55Speaker 1: the 108 chapters around it. Quoting a source is not
- 12:59Speaker 1: the same as endorsing every word that source ever produced. So,
- 13:04Speaker 1: what does make a book scripture? The ancient communities of faith,
- 13:08Speaker 1: both Jewish and Christian, recognized five criteria that that distinguished
- 13:12Speaker 1: inspired revelation from useful reference. First, prophetic or apostolic authorship.
- 13:19Speaker 1: The text had to come from a recognized messenger of God. Second,
- 13:24Speaker 1: evidence of divine inspiration. The text had to bear the
- 13:28Speaker 1: marks of God's own voice. Third, widespread community acceptance. The
- 13:33Speaker 1: text had to be received and used by the broader
- 13:36Speaker 1: community of faith, not just a local sect. Fourth, antiquity
- 13:41Speaker 1: and historical consistency. The text had to be genuinely ancient
- 13:46Speaker 1: and consistent with the historical record. Fifth, theological alignment with
- 13:51Speaker 1: the Torah. The text could not contradict the foundational revelation
- 13:56Speaker 1: God had already given. A national songbook of military victories,
- 14:01Speaker 1: no matter how beautiful, no matter how ancient, no matter
- 14:04Speaker 1: how beloved, did not meet these criteria. The original Book
- 14:08Speaker 1: of Jasher was lost to history, but its name was not.
- 14:14Speaker 1: And because the name survived in the Bible, it became
- 14:17Speaker 1: one of the most forged titles in literary history. The
- 14:21Speaker 1: ancient Book of Jasher disappeared, but the name Book of
- 14:24Speaker 1: Jasher did not. It sat there in Joshua chapter 10,
- 14:30Speaker 1: in 2 Samuel chapter 1, waiting in the text of
- 14:33Speaker 1: the most widely read book in human history. a famous
- 14:37Speaker 1: title attached to a missing document. And throughout the centuries,
- 14:41Speaker 1: that gap became irresistible to forgers. The first counterfeit appeared
- 14:46Speaker 1: in 1625, printed in Venice, written in Hebrew. It bore
- 14:51Speaker 1: the title Sefer Hayashar, the Book of the Upright, and
- 14:55Speaker 1: it contained an elaborate collection of Jewish legends, Kabbalistic folklore,
- 15:00Speaker 1: and dramatically expanded retellings of stories from Genesis through Joshua.
- 15:06Speaker 1: It described Enoch's ascent to heaven in vivid detail. It
- 15:10Speaker 1: recounted the Tower of Babel with cinematic flourishes. It gave
- 15:14Speaker 1: Nimrod a backstory that reads like ancient mythology. The stories
- 15:19Speaker 1: were fascinating. They were also medieval. This text was compiled
- 15:24Speaker 1: sometime during the Middle Ages. Scholars debate whether it dates
- 15:28Speaker 1: to the 11th or 12th century. And it was never
- 15:31Speaker 1: intended by its original compilers to be the biblical book
- 15:35Speaker 1: of Jasher. It was a midrash, a genre of Jewish
- 15:40Speaker 1: interpretive literature that imaginatively expands biblical narratives for devotional and
- 15:45Speaker 1: educational purposes. But when it was printed in 1625, publishers
- 15:51Speaker 1: saw an opportunity. They marketed it under the famous biblical title.
- 15:57Speaker 1: And the confusion began. The second counterfeit appeared in 1751,
- 16:00Speaker 1: and its story is far more dramatic. a London printer
- 16:06Speaker 1: named Jacob Ilev, announced to the public that he had
- 16:10Speaker 1: discovered the authentic Book of Jasher, translated, he claimed, from
- 16:14Speaker 1: the original Hebrew by an 8th century English monk named
- 16:18Speaker 1: Alcuin of York. The announcement electrified literary and religious circles.
- 16:24Speaker 1: A biblical lost book, recovered after millennia. But when scholars
- 16:29Speaker 1: examined the text, something was deeply wrong. The content was
- 16:33Speaker 1: not ancient Hebrew poetry or military hymns. It was filled
- 16:37Speaker 1: with Enlightenment-era deistic philosophy and thinly-veiled anti-biblical arguments. It read
- 16:44Speaker 1: less like a recovered artifact and more like a polemical
- 16:48Speaker 1: tract dressed in ancient clothing. The forgery was exposed. Jacob
- 16:53Speaker 1: Iliv was brought before the courts. He was tried, convicted
- 16:57Speaker 1: of fraud and blasphemous libel, and sentenced to three years
- 17:01Speaker 1: in prison. The most famous English book of Jasher was
- 17:05Speaker 1: written by a man who went to prison for faking it.
- 17:09Speaker 1: The third counterfeit is the one most people encounter today.
- 17:13Speaker 1: In 1840, a scholar named Moses Samuel published an English
- 17:18Speaker 1: translation of the 1625 Venice Midrash. This is the version
- 17:23Speaker 1: circulating on the Internet right now, the one quoted in
- 17:27Speaker 1: conspiracy videos. the one sold in Christian bookstores with covers
- 17:31Speaker 1: designed to look ancient and mysterious, the one that people
- 17:35Speaker 1: read and believe they are holding a lost book of
- 17:38Speaker 1: the Bible. They are not. They are holding a medieval
- 17:42Speaker 1: text compiled over a thousand years after the original book
- 17:46Speaker 1: of Jasher was lost, translated into English in the 19th century.
- 17:51Speaker 1: It is not ancient. It is not the biblical book.
- 17:54Speaker 1: It is a medieval midrash. repackaged for a modern audience
- 17:58Speaker 1: that does not know the difference. One more confusion deserves attention.
- 18:04Speaker 1: Some claim the Book of Jasher is preserved in the
- 18:06Speaker 1: Ethiopian Orthodox canon, the ancient Christian tradition that maintains 81
- 18:12Speaker 1: books in its Bible. It is not. People confuse the
- 18:17Speaker 1: Book of Jasher with the Book of Jubilees, which is
- 18:19Speaker 1: in the Ethiopian canon, because both texts expand heavily on
- 18:24Speaker 1: the narratives of Genesis. But they are entirely different documents,
- 18:29Speaker 1: from entirely different periods, with entirely different purposes. So if
- 18:33Speaker 1: the original was lost, and the modern versions are forgeries,
- 18:37Speaker 1: how do we know what is Scripture? How was the
- 18:40Speaker 1: Bible we hold actually assembled? The Hebrew Bible is not
- 18:44Speaker 1: one book. It is a library, and it has a name,
- 18:48Speaker 1: the Tanakh. That word is an acronym, formed from the
- 18:52Speaker 1: first letters of its three divisions, Torah, the law, Genesis
- 18:58Speaker 1: through Deuteronomy, the five books of Moses. This section was
- 19:02Speaker 1: closed and universally authoritative by approximately 400 B.C. No one
- 19:08Speaker 1: debated it. No one questioned it. It was the bedrock, Nevium,
- 19:13Speaker 1: the prophets, Joshua through Malachi, the historical narratives and the
- 19:18Speaker 1: prophetic oracles. This section was solidified by approximately 200 B.C.
- 19:24Speaker 1: By the time of Jesus, The prophets were quoted as
- 19:27Speaker 1: authoritative scripture without qualification. Ketuvim, the writings. Psalms, Proverbs, Job,
- 19:35Speaker 1: the Scrolls, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. This section was
- 19:41Speaker 1: finalized by the first century A.D. It was the last
- 19:45Speaker 1: to close, and the boundaries were debated longest here. But
- 19:49Speaker 1: the critical question is, who decided? Jewish tradition credits the
- 19:54Speaker 1: Great Assembly, the Anshe, Knesset, Haggadolah, a body of 120
- 19:59Speaker 1: sages led by Ezra the scribe after the Babylonian exile.
- 20:04Speaker 1: Their task was not to choose books from a pile
- 20:07Speaker 1: and decide which ones to keep. Their task was to
- 20:11Speaker 1: recognize what the community had already accepted, across generations, across centuries,
- 20:17Speaker 1: as the voice of God. They did not invent the canon.
- 20:21Speaker 1: They confirmed it. You may have heard that a formal
- 20:24Speaker 1: council met around 90 AD at a place called Jamnia
- 20:29Speaker 1: or Yavne and officially decided which books belong in the Bible.
- 20:33Speaker 1: That council never happened. The idea was proposed by a
- 20:37Speaker 1: German historian named Heinrich Greitz in 1871. For decades, it
- 20:43Speaker 1: was repeated as fact in textbooks and seminary lectures. But
- 20:47Speaker 1: modern scholarship has entirely rejected it. The rabbis at Yavne
- 20:52Speaker 1: discussed marginal questions, whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs
- 20:58Speaker 1: defiled the hands, which was their way of asking whether
- 21:01Speaker 1: these books were holy. But they did not hold a
- 21:04Speaker 1: formal canonization council There was no vote. There was no decree.
- 21:09Speaker 1: The canon was not decided in a single meeting. There
- 21:12Speaker 1: is one more piece of evidence. In 1947, a Bedouin
- 21:16Speaker 1: shepherd threw a rock into a cave above the Dead
- 21:19Speaker 1: Sea and heard something shatter. Inside the caves of Qumran,
- 21:24Speaker 1: archaeologists discovered the greatest manuscript found in history, the Dead
- 21:29Speaker 1: Sea Scrolls. Among them were copies of nearly every book
- 21:33Speaker 1: of the Hebrew Bibles. and alongside the biblical texts, the
- 21:37Speaker 1: community had preserved copies of 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees,
- 21:42Speaker 1: the Temple Scroll, the War Scroll, and the Community Rule.
- 21:47Speaker 1: But no Book of Jasher. If the book had survived
- 21:50Speaker 1: into the Second Temple Period, if it had been circulating
- 21:54Speaker 1: among scribes and scholars in the centuries before Christ, it
- 21:58Speaker 1: almost certainly would have appeared at Qumran, Its absence confirms
- 22:03Speaker 1: what the historical record already tells us. It was already lost.
- 22:08Speaker 1: One final fact. Different Christian traditions maintain slightly different canons.
- 22:14Speaker 1: The Protestant Bible contains 66 books. The Catholic Bible contains 73.
- 22:19Speaker 1: The Eastern Orthodox traditions include 76 to 79. The Ethiopian
- 22:26Speaker 1: Orthodox canon contains 81. They disagree on the margins. on
- 22:31Speaker 1: books like Tobit, Wisdom, and Maccabees. But on the book
- 22:35Speaker 1: of Jasher, there is no disagreement at all. None of them,
- 22:40Speaker 1: not one tradition, not one denomination, not one canon on earth,
- 22:45Speaker 1: includes it. The Bible was not assembled in a smoke-filled
- 22:49Speaker 1: room by men with an agenda. It was recognized over
- 22:53Speaker 1: centuries by communities who knew the voice of God when
- 22:57Speaker 1: they heard it. A book cannot be removed from a
- 23:00Speaker 1: canon It was never in. The original book of Jasher
- 23:04Speaker 1: was a national songbook, a collection of battle hymns and
- 23:08Speaker 1: lamentations celebrating Israel's heroes. It was never in the Torah,
- 23:13Speaker 1: never in the prophets, never in the writings. It was
- 23:17Speaker 1: never considered scripture by the ancient Israelites, by the rabbis,
- 23:22Speaker 1: by the early church, or by any council in history.
- 23:26Speaker 1: No pope removed it. No emperor banned it. No denomination
- 23:30Speaker 1: suppressed it. There was nothing to remove because it was
- 23:35Speaker 1: never included. The book was not hidden. It was not suppressed.
- 23:40Speaker 1: It was not forbidden. It was referenced openly by name
- 23:44Speaker 1: in two and possibly three books of the Bible. The
- 23:47Speaker 1: Bible told you about it. The Bible pointed to it
- 23:50Speaker 1: as a historical source. And then history lost it. The
- 23:54Speaker 1: way history loses most ancient documents, quietly, gradually, without conspiracy.
- 24:01Speaker 1: So why do people believe otherwise? Because the idea of
- 24:05Speaker 1: hidden knowledge is intoxicating. It makes you feel like an insider.
- 24:10Speaker 1: It makes you feel like you have discovered something that
- 24:12Speaker 1: the establishment, the church, the Vatican, the scholars, did not
- 24:17Speaker 1: want you to know. There is a psychological term for this, reactance.
- 24:22Speaker 1: When people feel that information is being restricted, they desire
- 24:26Speaker 1: it more intensely. regardless of whether the restriction is real.
- 24:31Speaker 1: But the irony is devastating. The Bible is the one
- 24:34Speaker 1: that told you about the book of Jasher. Joshua 10.13
- 24:40Speaker 1: 2 Samuel 1.18 The forbidden knowledge was printed in your
- 24:47Speaker 1: Bible the entire time. There is no cover-up. There is
- 24:51Speaker 1: no suppression. The Bible named it. The Bible cited it.
- 24:56Speaker 1: and the Bible made no attempt to hide it. The
- 24:59Speaker 1: real danger is not that the book of Jasher was
- 25:02Speaker 1: hidden from you. The real danger is that people are
- 25:06Speaker 1: reading medieval forgeries and 18th century hoaxes written by convicted
- 25:11Speaker 1: fraudsters and anonymous medieval compilers and treating them as though
- 25:17Speaker 1: they were the word of God. The conspiracy did not
- 25:20Speaker 1: hide the truth. The conspiracy replaced the truth with counterfeits.
- 25:25Speaker 1: and the counterfeits are sitting on bookshelves and circulating on
- 25:29Speaker 1: the Internet right now, marketed to believers who deserve better
- 25:33Speaker 1: than a lie dressed in ancient clothing. So what does
- 25:37Speaker 1: this actually reveal about the Bible and about the God
- 25:41Speaker 1: who preserved it? Every ancient king wrote history to hide
- 25:45Speaker 1: his failures. Pharaohs chiseled their defeats off monument walls, losses erased,
- 25:51Speaker 1: victories inflated. so that no one ever saw a pharaoh lose.
- 25:57Speaker 1: Roman emperors did the same, and they had a name
- 26:00Speaker 1: for it, damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory. Statues melted down,
- 26:07Speaker 1: names chiseled off inscriptions. A person erased from the record
- 26:11Speaker 1: so completely, it was as if they had never lived.
- 26:15Speaker 1: But the biblical authors did the exact opposite. They left
- 26:19Speaker 1: the footnotes in, By openly citing lost military songbooks, state
- 26:24Speaker 1: court records, and prophetic writings that did not survive, the
- 26:29Speaker 1: biblical writers were not building an impenetrable sealed myth. They
- 26:33Speaker 1: were doing honest history in plain sight. The very presence
- 26:38Speaker 1: of the book of Jasher in your Bible is not
- 26:40Speaker 1: proof that something was stolen from you. It is proof
- 26:44Speaker 1: that the men who wrote this book had nothing to hide.
- 26:47Speaker 1: The Bible did not hide the book of Jasher from you.
- 26:51Speaker 1: It told you about it, openly, by name, twice. It
- 26:57Speaker 1: also told you about the book of the wars of
- 26:59Speaker 1: the Lord, about the chronicles of the kings, about the
- 27:03Speaker 1: book of Nathan the prophet, about the visions of Ido
- 27:07Speaker 1: the seer. It named them. It cited them. It pointed
- 27:12Speaker 1: to them as historical sources, and it did not pretend
- 27:16Speaker 1: they were scripture. The Bible is not afraid of other books.
- 27:20Speaker 1: It is not threatened by them. It references them freely,
- 27:24Speaker 1: because the authors of Scripture were not building a fortress.
- 27:27Speaker 1: They were telling the truth. And the truth includes the
- 27:30Speaker 1: fact that Israel had a national songbook, and court archives,
- 27:34Speaker 1: and prophetic records, and military chronicles, and that some of
- 27:38Speaker 1: those documents inform the text you hold in your hands.
- 27:42Speaker 1: The real forbidden knowledge is not what is missing from
- 27:46Speaker 1: the Bible. It is what is in the Bible that
- 27:48Speaker 1: most people have never read. Think about what survived. Sixty-six books,
- 27:54Speaker 1: forty authors, three languages, fifteen centuries, written on three continents,
- 28:01Speaker 1: in the deserts of Sinai, in the courts of Babylon,
- 28:05Speaker 1: in the prisons of Rome. Surviving conquest, exile, empire, fire,
- 28:11Speaker 1: and the slow decay of everything ink touches. Empires rose
- 28:15Speaker 1: and fell. Libraries burned. Languages died. Entire civilizations vanished into sand.
- 28:23Speaker 1: And this book, this collection of 66 documents, endured. Not
- 28:28Speaker 1: because a committee chose them. Not because a pope declared them.
- 28:32Speaker 1: Not because a political council ratified them. But because communities
- 28:37Speaker 1: of faith who had walked with God long enough to
- 28:39Speaker 1: know his voice recognized it when they heard it. The
- 28:43Speaker 1: book of Jasher was not forbidden. It was a songbook,
- 28:48Speaker 1: a beautiful, ancient, national anthem of Israel's heroes. And it
- 28:53Speaker 1: is gone. Not because someone hid it, because time took it,
- 28:58Speaker 1: the way time takes everything that is not preserved by
- 29:01Speaker 1: the hand of God. Thousands of texts were written in
- 29:05Speaker 1: the ancient world. Most of them are dust. The ones
- 29:09Speaker 1: that survived did not survive by accident. They survived because
- 29:14Speaker 1: a hand held them through fire, through exile, through empire,
- 29:18Speaker 1: through every century that tried to bury them. What God
- 29:22Speaker 1: chose to preserve, He preserved. And you are holding it.
- 29:27Speaker 1: If this video showed you something you had never seen before,
- 29:31Speaker 1: share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe
- 29:34Speaker 1: to Bible Origins for more scripture journeys that trace the
- 29:37Speaker 1: truth from Genesis to Revelation. And if you have not
- 29:41Speaker 1: yet watched our investigation into Isaiah's portrait of Jesus, written
- 29:46Speaker 1: 700 years before Bethlehem, that video is waiting for you
- 29:50Speaker 1: right now.