Two Systems. One Name Caught Between Them.
Yeshua never confronted Moses. He confronted the fence around Moses.
The tradition has never named the difference.
Part 3 of 7
What a Fence Law Actually Is
The Torah of Moshe (Moses) contains 613 commandments, 248 positive and 365 negative. These are the written commands, given by YHWH, recorded in the five books. They constitute the covenant between YHWH and his people. They are not the fence.
The fence is something else entirely. In Hebrew it is called a gezerah, literally, a fence or hedge. A gezerah is a rabbinical decree, not a Torah command. It is a law created by the rabbinic authorities to prevent people from accidentally violating a Torah commandment. The logic is: if the Torah says do not do X, the fence says do not even come close to the circumstances that might lead to X.
The Torah says do not work on the Sabbath. The fence says do not carry any object outside your home on the Sabbath, because carrying might lead to work. The Torah says do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. The fence says do not mix any meat with any dairy in any context, because mixing might lead to the prohibited cooking. The Torah says honor the Sabbath. The fence says do not touch a tool you might use to perform prohibited work, because touching might lead to using.
This is the gezerah. A fence around the Torah. Built by human authority. Claiming to protect the Torah while systematically replacing it as the governing framework of daily life. And the prohibition on speaking the name of YHWH is exactly this, a gezerah. A fence law. Not a Torah command. Not in the five books of Moshe. Not given at Sinai. A rabbinical decree layered on top of the covenant, claiming to protect the holy name while actually silencing the declaration the holy name contained.
YHWH said at the burning bush, this is my name forever, to all generations. The fence said do not speak it. One of these is Torah. One of these is the fence. They are not the same thing.
The prohibition on speaking the name YHWH is not in the Torah. It is not in the five books of Moses. It is a gezerah, a rabbinical fence law, that contradicts the explicit command of Exodus 3:15. YHWH said speak it. The fence said silence it.
The Fence Presented Itself as Moses
The fence law system did not announce itself as a rival to the Torah. It presented itself as the Torah’s protector. As its necessary complement. As the practical application of what Moses had given in principle. The Mishnah, the first written compilation of the oral Torah, claimed that the fence laws had been given to Moses at Sinai alongside the written Torah, transmitted orally from generation to generation, and were therefore equally authoritative.
This claim is the heart of the problem. Because if the oral Torah was given at Sinai, then the fence is Moses. And attacking the fence is attacking Moses. And this is exactly what tens of thousands of Jewish believers in Yeshua in Jerusalem believed, which is why they told Paul that he was teaching Jews to forsake Moses when he was actually dismantling the fence around Moses. They could not see the difference because the fence had presented itself as Moses for so long that Moses was invisible behind it.
But the written Torah itself contradicts the claim. Deuteronomy 4:2, you shall not add to the word I am commanding you, nor take away from it. Moshe wrote everything YHWH commanded him. He left no oral supplement. He left a written covenant and the explicit instruction not to add to it. The fence laws were additions. Precisely what Deuteronomy 4:2 prohibited. They were not Moses. They were additions to Moses, claiming to be Moses, and eventually replacing Moses in the daily religious life of the covenant community.
And the name of YHWH, declared forever to all generations in Exodus 3:15, written into the text 6,828 times, embedded in the names of every prophet and vessel across the covenant history, was silenced by an addition that Moses never authorized, claiming the authority of Moses to do it.
Every Confrontation Yeshua Had Was With the Fence
This is the distinction the tradition has never made. Every conflict Yeshua had with the religious establishment of his day, every accusation, every debate, every woe declaration, was a confrontation with the fence. Not with Moses. Not with the Torah. Not with the covenant. With the human structure that had been built around the covenant and was suffocating it.
The evidence is in the specific content of every confrontation. Look at what he was actually challenging in each case.
Mattityahu (Matthew) 12:1-8: Disciples eating grain on the Sabbath
Fence issue: Plucking grain while walking was classified as harvesting, prohibited Sabbath work under fence law categories.
Moses said: The Torah said rest on the Sabbath. It did not define plucking grain while walking as harvesting. Yeshua cited David eating the showbread, Torah precedent for human need overriding ritual restriction. He was not attacking the Sabbath. He was attacking the fence category that had made the Sabbath a burden.
Mark 7:1-13: Eating with unwashed hands
Fence issue: Ritual hand washing before meals was a fence law, not a Torah command. The Torah’s washing requirements were specific to priestly temple service. The fence extended them to all Jews before every meal.
Moses said: The Torah said nothing about washing hands before ordinary meals. Yeshua said explicitly, you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. He named the distinction. Tradition of men versus commandment of God. Fence versus Torah.
Mark 7:9-13: Corban
Fence issue: The fence law of Corban allowed a person to declare their assets dedicated to the temple, thereby exempting themselves from using those assets to support aging parents.
Moses said: The Torah said honor your father and your mother, Exodus 20:12. The fence created a legal mechanism that voided the Torah command. Yeshua said, you make void the word of God by your tradition. The Torah commanded. The fence overrode it. He named the inversion precisely.
Luke 13:10-16: Healing a woman on the Sabbath
Fence issue: Healing on the Sabbath was classified as work under fence law categories. The woman had been bent double for eighteen years.
Moses said: Yeshua asked, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey and lead it away to water? The fence permitted caring for animals on the Sabbath but had constructed a category that prevented healing a human being. He did not challenge the Sabbath. He exposed the inversion, the fence had valued livestock over a daughter of Abraham.
Yochanan (John) 8:58, Before Abraham was, I am
Fence issue: Speaking the divine name, the I am of Exodus 3:14, was the ultimate violation of the fence law prohibition on pronouncing YHWH.
Moses said: The Torah said this is my name forever, to all generations. The fence said do not speak it. Yeshua spoke it. Directly. Applied it to himself. They picked up stones not because he claimed to be old but because he spoke the name the fence had silenced and declared it his own.
Every confrontation Yeshua had was with the fence, not Moses. The Sabbath debates were about fence categories, not Torah commands. The hand washing debate was explicitly named, tradition of men versus commandment of God. The Corban debate showed the fence voiding Torah. And when he spoke the divine name, he broke the fence law that had silenced what YHWH declared should be spoken forever.
What Yeshua Said About Moses
If Yeshua had been attacking Moses and the Torah, the evidence would be in his statements about Moses. But his statements about Moses are unambiguously honoring.
Mattityahu 5:17 — do not think I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Not one jot or tittle will pass from the Torah until all is accomplished.
Mattityahu 23:2-3 — the scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do. He told his hearers to observe what Moses commanded. His critique was not of what was commanded but of those who commanded without obeying, they say and do not do.
Mark 1:44 — after healing a leper, he told him to go show himself to the priest and offer what Moses commanded. He sent the healed man back to the Mosaic covenant process. He did not dismiss it. He honored it.
Yochanan 5:46 — if you believed Moses you would believe me, for he wrote of me. Moses was not Yeshua’s opponent. Moses was his witness. The Torah was not the problem. The Torah was the road that had been pointing toward him across a thousand years of covenant history. The fence was the problem, the structure that had made the Torah unreadable behind it, that had occupied Moses’ seat while abandoning Moses’ God.
He honored Moses. He demolished the fence. The tradition has spent two thousand years reading those two actions as one action — and calling it the abolition of the law.
The Name and the Fence
The Direct Connection
The silencing of the name YHWH is a fence law. This is not a peripheral observation. It is the center of what this series is establishing. The name YHWH, declared by YHWH himself to be forever, to all generations, was silenced by the same kind of human authority structure that prevented a woman from carrying her child on the Sabbath, that allowed a son to void his obligation to aging parents through Corban, that classified healing a bent woman as prohibited Sabbath labor.
All fence. All claiming to be Torah. All contradicting the Torah they claimed to protect.
The fence that silenced the name did so by claiming reverence, the name is too holy to speak, speaking it risks blasphemy, silence protects the sacred. But reverence was not what YHWH asked for at the burning bush. He asked for proclamation. This is my name forever. This is my memorial to all generations. Tell them. Speak it. Carry it forward.
The fence turned a command to speak into a prohibition on speaking. And in doing so it accomplished what both the fence law system and later Christianity needed, a name that pointed nowhere, that declared nothing, that could not be followed back to its source and ask the question it always asks when spoken in its full covenantal weight.
Who is this?
The fence silenced the name because the name pointed. And where it pointed, through Yeshua (Joshua) who crossed the Jordan, through Yeshayahu (Isaiah) whose vision Yochanan (John) confirmed was a vision of Yeshua’s glory, through every YHWH-bearing vessel across the covenant history, was the one the fence system and the religious establishment had just executed. The name kept pointing at the cross. And the fence could not afford for the name to keep pointing.
So it was silenced. As a fence law. Presented as reverence. Functioning as suppression. And the declaration embedded in the oldest script, behold the hand, behold the nail, went quiet with it.
Yeshua never said a word against Moses. He said Moses wrote of him. He told the leper to follow what Moses commanded. He said not one jot or tittle would pass from the Torah.
Every confrontation he had was with the fence. The tradition of men. The gezerah. The human decrees that had occupied Moses’ seat and made the Torah invisible behind them.
And when he spoke the divine name, I am, before Abraham was, he broke the fence law that had silenced what YHWH declared should be spoken to all generations.
The name was not silenced by Moses. It was silenced by the fence around Moses. And Yeshua, who was the name in human flesh, spent his entire ministry tearing the fence down.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams