In the summer of 2009 Keith Johnson phoned me and told me he had written a study on the name of our Heavenly Father. He asked if I would read it and give my feedback, but I said I was too busy to read his “little study.” Over the next few months, whenever we met or spoke he would ask me to read it, and I always had an excuse as to why I was too busy to read the “little study.” I became so used to calling it the “little study” that I referred to it this way during a television interview we did the following year. Now, after finally reading His Hallowed Name Revealed Again, I can confidently call it a monumental masterpiece that honors our Heavenly Father by honoring and proclaiming His eternal name. This “little study” that you, the reader, are about to embark on has already had a profound impact on my life in a most unexpected way.

It happened while Keith and I were on a speaking tour of South Africa for our joint book, A Prayer to Our Father: Hebrew Origins of the Lord’s Prayer. In the months leading up to the tour, the promoter asked us to prepare a list of sites we wanted to visit. After giving it much thought, I told her I wanted nothing more than to teach the word of God, and would rather squeeze more speaking venues into our tight schedule than spend time sightseeing. For his part, Keith had his heart set on visiting two places: Kruger National Park and Robben Island. When we arrived in Johannesburg and learned that our scheduled trip to Kruger National Park had been canceled, Keith took it rather well. He explained to me that although he had always wanted to go to the park, the place that was really important to him was Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned during his struggle against apartheid.

Later that week we arrived in Cape Town. The promoter met us at the airport and drove us to a scenic spot on the coast where in the distance we could see the dreaded Robben Island, surrounded by the cold, harsh waters of Table Bay. It came as a shock to both of us when she informed us we would not, after all, be able to visit the island. There was a long waiting list and she had not ordered tickets in time. At that moment I saw something change in Keith. We had done everything else we had planned, speaking throughout the country, but Robben Island was the one place Keith wanted to go more than anywhere else. He now became a man on a mission. Even before the Robben Island incident, Keith had told me it bothered him that most of the people who came to our presentations were middle-class, educated folks. He desperately wanted to go out into the townships and interact with the people who comprise the vast majority of the South African population. To say the least, I was quite resistant to the idea. It was not part of our scheduled itinerary, and every time Keith brought it up I objected that we simply did not have time. Earlier in the tour I had made the mistake of drinking tap water, so I was in no condition to venture into one of these townships; furthermore, we had been warned they were very dangerous. After the Robben Island debacle, nothing could have kept Keith out of the townships. The only question was whether I would go with him.

From Cape Town we drove three and a half hours to speak in a small farming community. After our presentation we trekked into the countryside down a series of dirt roads for some fellowship at a farm owned by our local host, who happened to be an Englishman married to a Jewish woman. I remember sitting on the sofa, struggling with another bout of what Americans call “Montezuma’s Revenge.” (During my time in South Africa I came to refer to it as Shaka Zulu’s Revenge.) Keith was at the dining room table talking to our host about how he wanted to visit a township somewhere in the area before our flight out of Cape Town the next morning. Since we were three and a half hours from the airport, I was sure our host would try to convince Keith how frivolous this mission would be in such a limited timeframe. To my surprise the man said, “I know someone in one of the townships just outside of Cape Town, on the way to the airport. Shall I give him a call and arrange a meeting?” My eyes almost popped out of my head, and I moaned that I was too sick to go. Keith was undeterred and demanded more details. Our host explained that the man he knew in the Khayelitsha Township was the pastor of a small church. He had met the pastor years earlier when he helped him lay the bricks for his church. When the man said Khayelitsha, all the locals fell silent and gave each other awkward looks. The silence was broken by a heavyset woman with a strong Afrikaans accent who grew up in Cape Town. She shouted: “Khayelitsha! You can’t go to Khayelitsha! You just walk in there and they kill you!” This only encouraged Keith. A few minutes later he was on the phone with the pastor of the small brick church in Khayelitsha, and a meeting was set for early the next morning. We realized we had to drive back to Cape Town that night in order to meet the pastor and still reach the airport on time. We arrived in Cape Town after midnight, and I fell asleep while Keith planned our excursion to the township.

Early that morning we drove to the entrance of Khayelitsha, where we were to meet the pastor. Khayelitsha is a sprawling shanty-town full of tin-roofed, wooden shacks and outhouses, with a population of more than 400,000. The main road was paved but a labyrinth of smaller dirt roads and alleyways branched off it. We were told not to venture into the township by ourselves since we easily could turn down a wrong alley and get lost, which might prove to be fatal. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, the pastor met us and we followed him to his church.

The church was a simple brick building with a single, large prayer hall and some small rooms in the back. The pastor explained how various people had donated the bricks and the mortar and even the labor to construct it all. As he talked, his wife and some of his children came out of one of the back rooms, where they all lived. The pastor told us about himself and his church, then he asked us to tell him about ourselves. I told him I was born in the United States but have lived in Jerusalem, Israel, since 1993. The pastor interrupted me and asked if I spoke Hebrew. I told him that of course I did. When he heard this he began to bounce up and down in excitement, and then turned to me and said in his thick African accent: “About seven years ago I had a dream, and in that dream I saw four letters.” He explained that although he did not know any Hebrew, he had always believed the four letters to be Hebrew letters. He was very excited to meet a Hebrew-speaking person and hoped I could help him understand what he had seen in the dream.

The first thing that most English-speakers think of when they hear about a four-letter word is some sort of profanity. But as a Hebrew-speaker, the first thing I thought of was the name of our Heavenly Father, written with the four Hebrew consonants Yod-He-Vav-He. In Hebrew, this is often referred to as “the four-letter name” (shem ben dalet otiot). In English it is called the Tetragrammaton, from the Greek tetra, meaning “four,” and grammaton, meaning “letters.” My mind started to race as I wondered if this African pastor, who knew no Hebrew, really could have seen the name Yod-He-Vav-He in a dream.

I asked him if he could write the letters for me. He shook his head and told me that his native language was Xhosa; his tongue made a little click when he said “Xhosa.” He then told me he had learned English as his second language 10 years earlier when he came to Khayelitsha. Despite mastering these two languages, he had no idea how to write Hebrew. I then asked him to bring me a pen and paper. He shouted something to his wife in what I assumed to be Xhosa, and in a few moments his little boy came out of the back room with a single sheet of paper. The pastor handed me a pencil and I bent over, using my thigh as a writing surface, as I wrote out the four letters of the name: Yod-He-Vav-He. Holding up the paper, I asked him if the letters I wrote were what he saw in his dream. He looked at the paper, cocked his head to the side, and hesitantly said that it sort of looked like what he saw in the dream, but he could not be sure. As he explained this, he actually wrote the letters in the air. He must have been doing this unconsciously, but I was fairly certain he wrote Yod-He-Vav-He with his air-letters.

Keith had been quiet the whole time I spoke to the pastor about the dream, but evidently decided it was time to get involved. He looked over my shoulder at the paper and then gave me that quintessential “Keith look,” the one that expresses a four-letter English word without actually saying it. He pointed at my letters and exclaimed: “Nehemia, I can barely read what you wrote, and I read Hebrew! How can you expect him to make out your chicken scratches?” I have to admit, I’ve always had bad penmanship; my teachers in school never stopped complaining about it. Keith walked out of the church without saying a word and returned a few minutes later with a copy of His Hallowed Name Revealed Again. Since first asking me to read it, the “little study” had undergone several revisions and was now a 175-page, spiral-bound book with a striking color cover. The four letters of the name of our Heavenly Father were emblazoned on the cover in beautifully printed Hebrew: יהוה (Yod-He-Vav-He). He showed the book to the pastor, who exclaimed without hesitation: “That is what I saw! Those were the four letters!”

At this point I need to stop and share something about myself. Both my parents are Jews of Lithuanian extraction, known as “Litvaks.” The Litvaks have traditionally been considered the intellectual elite of the Jewish world. Ask any Litvak and he’ll tell you this reputation is well-deserved, earned through centuries of book learning and study. Part of my upbringing as a Litvak Jew was to distrust anything deemed “too spiritual;” dreams and miracles were best left to the realm of folk superstition. When the Xhosa pastor started to tell me about his dream, my natural reaction was skepticism. In fact, if I had not been there and seen the look on his face when he saw the four letters on the cover of His Hallowed Name Revealed Again, I probably would not put much stock in what happened. But I saw the look on his face and have no doubt that he recognized something he had seen before. At the same time, I struggled to process what I was witnessing. Everything in my training and upbringing taught me that God does not reveal His name in dreams to Christian pastors in shanty-towns. This was not consistent with the box I had created for God. Seeing the look on the pastor’s face when he recognized those four letters, the Litvak in me was shouting, “God! What are you doing? Get back in your box!” One thing I have learned from my adventures with Keith is that our Heavenly Father is far bigger than the manmade boxes we have created for Him.

After the incident in Khayelitsha I gave a great deal of thought to what happened. I thought about how God revealed His name to a Xhosa pastor in a dream, knowing this man would never be able to decipher it by himself. I also realized that although I had the Litvak erudition, I did not have the dream. God knew it would take both the knowledge and the dream—both the information and the inspiration—to reveal His name.

What happened in Khayelitsha is a snapshot of what Keith Johnson has done with the eternal name of our Heavenly Father. He has carefully examined the erudition of Jewish scribes who for centuries have preserved for the entire world the consonants, vowels, and accents of the Hebrew Bible in two key manuscripts: the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. The Aleppo Codex is considered so important that it is the only manuscript displayed alongside the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Shrine of the Book in Israel’s national museum in Jerusalem. The Leningrad Codex is considered the second most important Hebrew manuscript, and serves as the textual basis of the printed Bible used in every seminary and university in the world. During Keith’s visit to Israel last month we had the opportunity to confirm the validity of a third witness: the Cairo Codex of the Prophets. In this “little study” Keith takes the information from these sacred manuscripts, combines it with God-given inspiration, and produces a compelling witness to the importance, meaning, and pronunciation of the name of the Creator of the universe. Hallelu YAH!