Sooo history -- clearing up a lot of ignorance

In light of the false information going around on the web, mostly with anti-Semitic screeds, I thought it was time to give some information I didn't give on my Fact-Checking blog. The supporting data is in the bibliography. 

There are two reasons for most of the ignorance. One is simply that schools don't teach Jewish history, even in AP courses, and that history is never a required subject. The other is that courses dealing with Jewish history do not use post-1995 data like I did, ignore DNA evidence, and know nothing about the intersection between the Bible and Olrik's work. That's aside from the fact that academic writers are so ignorant about Biblical Hebrew and Jewish classics.

So here's the real deal.

By 4000 BCE the Semitic language parent had developed in eastern Anatolia south of the Caucasus mountains, distinct from the nearby ergative isolate Hurrian or its ancestor, and also the Indic languages. A Jewish ancestor is set in this location at this time, when wine grapes were being domesticated and meteoric iron was being used. The J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome subclades begin to develop at this time in NE Anatolia, and they are the main subclades in men descended from Jewish males.

The Jewish culture begins about 2500 BCE with a small nucleus of people who move west, after environmental changes dessicate the edin which used to be watered by four rivers, of which only two survive today. At the time smelted iron was coming into use. 

About 2350 BCE, the Hebrews of Ur have migrated west to the crossroads trading city of Haran, then southwest along the trade routes to the region of Numeira which is now in Jordan. Akkadian was used in diplomacy and trade all over southwest Asia. 

By 2000 BCE, after the destruction of Ebla and the Gutian takeover of Mesopotamia, ties between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coast weakened. Communities in southeast Anatolia dissolved along with the trade routes that had supported them. Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and Hebrew began to develop and, coincidentally, the Indic Sea Peoples began to differentiate from each other, carrying the R1a Y-chromosome subclade of the Indo-Europeans (which also originated in NE Anatolia). Carbon steel and war chariots hitched to horses appeared by this time.

The patriarchs acquire land at Chevron and Shkhem, but have to migrate away from the latter after destroying the city’s men. The narrative behind the migration has similar elements to Greek saga, and the Achaean Greeks were partners with if not identical to the Pelishtim who settled in the Holy Land.

In the reign of Amenemhet III, the patriarchs migrate to Egypt, but are (illegally) forced into servitude when Canaanitic immigrants take over north Egypt, forming the 17th dynasty,which the Egyptians called Hyksos. 

In 1628 BCE (a radiocarbon date) Thera erupts, part of a swarm of troubles during which the Israelites escape while their Hyksos oppressors try to pick up the pieces. 

The Israelites roam the Sinai Peninsula for 38 years; they consolidate a legal system that subsequently survives 35 centuries of oppression and murder and proves the advantages of common law, which reconciles local tradition with culture-wide law, over civil codes like the Roman one. Not until the reign of Henry II, in England in the 1100s CE, will another common law code arise. Radiocarbon dating places the start of the reign of Ahmose I over a reunited Egypt at about the time of the Ingress. 

Between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Israelites begin to adapt one version of Ugaritic cuneiform to Hebrew, an easy job because Ugaritic is also a Semitic language and has already adapted cuneiform into a representation of its sound system, dropping logograms and determinants. 

Between 1400 and 1100 BCE, the Aramaeans settle in the territory that takes their name, the Ionians (Achaeans) settle in a part of the Peloponnese known as Achaia, and they also colonize the western coast of the Holy Land where they are known under their Egyptian name of Pelishtim, leaving writings in Linear B. 

About 1300 BCE is the middle date for the Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor of the Jewish kohanim according to 21st century genetics. This is the period of the central shrine at Shiloh, with a tabernacle and an ark of the covenant. Before this, people sacrificed in their settlements which were under frequent attack; that was the time of the bamot, which were prohibited in the Shiloh period.

About 1230 BCE (radiocarbon date) in a period of dessication, Merneptah of the Egyptian 19th dynasty sends soldiers to raid the Holy Land for grain, impacting both the Canaanites and Israelites. He puts up a stele about 1227 BCE which identifies them as distinct peoples living side by side.

Between 1200 and 1100 BCE, the Sea Peoples destroy Ugarit, Wilusa, Hattusas, and other cities. In the previous centuries, the Indo-European Greek/Pelishtim contingent have replaced the Linear B writing system adopted from the Palace Culture, with an adapted version of Ugaritic cuneiform they picked up during their residence in the Holy Land. 

By 1100 BCE the Pelishtim bring the Shiloh central shrine cult to an end and Israelite settlements spring up on bare ground on the hilltops. They refuse to trade with the lowlands, making their own pottery and excluding wild pig, which was part of diets of the Holy Land from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE. Wild pigs survive in the highlands of Israel into the 21st century CE. Bamot are again established. Pottery styles in the north and south differ, hard evidence of cultural differences that will lead to the split monarchy.

By 900 BCE, the Israelite hilltop settlements dissolve. After the First Temple is built, the bamot are again prohibited forever. A previously united kingdom splits into Judea and all the rest of them. 

By 800 BCE, the Jews have developed a distinctive system of writing seen on the Gezer calendar. Aramaic has replaced Akkadian as the language of trade and diplomacy. The Ionians colonize the western coast of Anatolia, unknowingly returning to their homeland, and begin shaping the Sea Peoples epic of the war they took part in that destroyed Wilusa. 

By 690 BCE, the Assyrians take over the northern (Israelite) kingdom. They deport about 22,000 of the northern nobility, then import Assyrian-speaking people to whom the Israelite priests have to adapt their oral tradition. 

By 600 BCE, the Aramaeans conquer Babylon and develop Neo-Babylonian, a hybrid of Aramaic and Akkadian. They conquer Assyria and Judea and deport about 22,000 of the Judean nobility. 

By 500 BCE, the Jews return to the Holy Land and, with authorization from Persian rulers Daryavesh and Koresh, rebuild the temple. They now have a written version of the oral tradition in the wording that developed over the preceding 35 centuries. Its language is Biblical Hebrew, their pre-Captivity vernacular. Their current vernacular is Neo-Babylonian and they will adopt its non-cuneiform script for scrolls that can legally be read from in synagogue. They use Mishnaic Hebrew when running their courts and recording its enactments. 

Jews continued to live in the Holy Land for the next 25 centuries, although they spread out worldwide. Two particular infusions were the medieval creation of the kabbalistic community in Tsfat, and the purchases of land from the Ottoman Empire after 1850. The latter is known as The Old Yishuv.

The New Yishuv happened, of course, in 1948. Immediately thereafter, the Jews of Yemen were brought to Israel, and later the Jews of Ethiopia. The Jews of India also immigrated to Israel.

The sad part is that all this information is out there on the web and nobody accesses it. A lot of it is on Jewish Virtual Library. The people who want to smear Jews refuse to learn the truth. But as I said the other week, people who don't hate Jews are equally ignorant because they, too, refuse to use the resources on the Web. We all of us need a better education and as the old saying goes, it's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. Keep your tongue between your teeth if you refuse to study up.

Ben Hur the novel, part 12

We are up to Book II chapter 4 of Ben Hur and I forgot something in chapter 3.

Amrah would not have a bowl of milk on the tray she brings to Judah. That’s not kosher. It was decided before 10 CE. She would have a goblet of vin ordinaire on the tray. Wallace wrote as the Temperance movement was gaining steam and members of that movement would be sure to approve and recommend his book if the only people who drank liquor were dissolute characters or at least those who were not on track for conversion.

So this is post 12 and you can bail here if you want. You could get some of the same information on this thread, from my Fact-Checking thread. It’s up to you whether to keep on or ditch me. If you leave, take with you the lesson that if you’re not Jewish and you’re not an educated Jew, you shouldn’t write fiction about Jews because you are sure to get something wrong.

But if you’re seeing this paragraph, you stayed. And immediately Wallace makes a mistake.

What language does he think Judah’s mother speaks?

If he thinks it’s Biblical Hebrew, he’s wrong. Jews stopped speaking it on the street during the Babylonian Captivity. Aramaic, aka Neo-Babylonian or Akkadian, became the Jewish street language.

Because of that, in my opinion, the elder Jews realized that their oral tradition was dying out. It was the basis for their entire culture. They decided to put it into writing. They got their experts together and transcribed the oral tradition.

Then they took down the words of the prophets which, in Jewish canon, starts with the book of Joshua and goes through Jeremiah. All these materials are also in Biblical Hebrew. The importance of these books is that they provide later confirmation of Torah law under new behavioral examples.

And finally, the Jews wrote down things like Psalms and Proverbs, which gave further examples of how Biblical Hebrew used words; historical books like Ruth and Chronicles; and the most important material that they knew in Biblical Aramaic like Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel.

The Jews learned Greek, no doubt, after the conquests of Alexander; they knew Latin after the conquests of Caesar. They claimed there were 72 languages stemming from the descendants of Noach, plus an “Aramaic without a spoken version” which I assume shows that they had seen cuneiform and knew it recorded Neo-Babylonian, but they learned the Aramaic square script for the language they spoke.

Now the next question. Who was Judah to be? I already said: he had taken his father’s position in business and in public affairs. The question is nonsense. Judah already had responsible employment and a public role. His father raised him to be a responsible Jewish adult, not an adrenaline addict like Messala. And so another false and nonsensical chapter goes into the record.

And the final blunder: the First Temple was burned down by the Aramaean rulers of Babylon. The Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom and were in turn conquered by the Aramaeans. This is in the Bible. Wallace is messing with the facts.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 3

So Lew Wallace is writing about Jews without knowing anything about them. And he’s pretending that two different Gentile cultures know about them. And the question is, how would that happen? Wallace’s answer is a revelation from Gd, and Gd is also making it so that a Greek and a Hindu can talk their own languages and still understand each other. Next we’re going to get an Egyptian doing the same thing – but what language is he going to speak? Wallace’s ploy only works if he’s speaking Egyptian – either Coptic or its forebear, the language of hieroglyphs and demotic – and not the Greek of the Hellenistic period introduced by Alexander’s conquest.

Wallace claims that Egyptian writing came first. It’s not true. There was something in the air around 3000 BCE when pictographs started to become cuneiform symbols for sounds of a language. It was probably happening in China as well; the bone oracles that survive come from around 2000 BCE but, since cultures make no leaps, the script had to begin developing around 3000 BCE.

Balthasar gets to voice the Christian pretense that there was one original revelation in ancient times that became corrupted into polytheism, and that this is the same revelation made to Mosheh on the mountain. This ignores 60% of Torah which is not revelation but law. What Gd revealed to Mosheh were a) how to make the tabernacle; b) the Ten Commandments; c) His 13-part Name of Mercy after the Golden Calf incident. Judaism recognizes 613 commandments, the standard list of which was drawn up by Maimonides.

Second, Balthasar gets to give a false picture of history. There were no Persians when the two kingdoms of Egypt united for the first time. The Ethiopians had a strong culture and army and they and their allies the Sea Peoples conquered Egypt.

But one thing rings true. It would be an Egyptian who believed first in Gd being revealed in the flesh of man. The Egyptian pharaohs were the living embodiment of Osiris, as their queens were the living embodiment of Isis. The Osiris cult was strictly Egyptian; the Isis cult made converts in many places, especially in Rome. Egypt contributed hermits and the Gnostic Gospels to Christianity; Athanasius conquered Arianism in Alexandria where Balthasar claims to be from.

Now let me go back. I’ve been rewriting Greek grammar starting with the idea that it is aspectual, like other languages arising in NE Anatolia. The complications in Greek grammar books dissolve when I ditch the tense system in favor of aspect. That means I pass, and the old grammars fail, the Test of Occam’s Razor. (They also fail for lack of citations to surviving material, citations that don’t support their claims, and citations that contradict their claims.)

Acknowledging the NE Anatolian origin of the Hellenes, which is borne out by DNA, shows why there are linguistic connections between the Deucalion myth and the Noach story in the Jewish Bible. But the stories have different details and play different roles in the cultures. When I was writing the Fact-Checking part of my blog I used the work of Axel Olrik on oral traditions, and his perceptions show that when two cultures identify themselves as “us” they are going to share oral narratives. As time goes on and that identity changes, often as the cultures migrate away from where they arose as “us”, the narratives will change. But the origin of the narratives is not revelation. It starts as stories about “us”, illustrating ancestors as setting cultural behavioral standards. As time goes on and each of the daughter cultures changes, the narratives change to mirror the new habits.

It works with the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, too. I wrote a book detailing this.

So yes, later generations had different versions of narratives that were told by the unified culture of their origin. But no, those stories don’t originate in revelation. They come from lifestyle habits and ancestral deeds.

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 4, indirect speech and the epistemic

To quote the Brittney Spears song, "oops I did it again." I'm writing this handbook, see, and I'm going over conditionals with a fine-toothed comb because Goodwin has some categorical statements in there and I have every reason not to trust him. This is going to be a long post because I'm repeating material I've used in other places, but I'll give links to the other places that say it more in depth. 

So on page 301, section 1410, Goodwin says the future optative (our imperfective conceptual epistemic) cannot be used in the protasis or apodosis of a conditional except in indirect discourse.  He makes that exception because of a screwy claim about being able to tell the grammar of an initial remark from how it is represented by the person who passes it along. So if X says something to Y, Y can report it using a future optative in a conditional (if it follows all the other screwy rules, see page 315 section 1481 ff), but no other conditional can use it.

So here is my citation: Xenophon Cyropaedia I 5.3.

οὕτω δὴ διαπέμπει πρός τε τοὺς ὑπ᾽ αὐτὸν πάντας καὶ πρὸς Κροῖσον τὸν Λυδῶν βασιλέα καὶ πρὸς τὸν Καππαδοκῶν καὶ πρὸς Φρύγας ἀμφοτέρους καὶ πρὸς Παφλαγόνας καὶ Ἰνδοὺς καὶ πρὸς Κᾶρας καὶ Κίλικας, τὰ μὲν καὶ διαβάλλων τοὺς Μήδους καὶ Πέρσας, λέγων ὡς μεγάλα τ᾽ εἴη ταῦτα ἔθνη καὶ ἰσχυρὰ καὶ συνεστηκότα εἰς ταὐτό, καὶ ἐπιγαμίας ἀλλήλοις πεποιημένοι εἶεν, καὶ κινδυνεύσοιεν, εἰ μή τις αὐτοὺς φθάσας ἀσθενώσοι, ἐπὶ ἓν ἕκαστον τῶν ἐθνῶν ἰόντες καταστρέψασθαι. οἱ μὲν δὴ καὶ τοῖς λόγοις τούτοις πειθόμενοι συμμαχίαν αὐτῷ ἐποιοῦντο, οἱ δὲ καὶ δώροις καὶ χρήμασιν ἀναπειθόμενοι: πολλὰ γὰρ καὶ τοιαῦτα ἦν αὐτῷ.

Accordingly, he sent around to all those under his sway and to Croesus, the king of Lydia, to the king of Cappadocia; to both Phrygias, to Paphlagonia, India, Caria, and Cilicia; and to a certain extent also he misrepresented the Medes and Persians, for he said that they were great, powerful nations, that they had intermarried with each other, and were united in common interests, and that if not someone attacking them weakened them, making war upon each one of the nations singly, [they were sure] to subjugate them. Some, then, entered into an alliance with him because they actually believed what he said; others, because they were bribed with gifts and money, for he had great wealth.

The first question to ask is, whether this is reported speech and in what sense. Did Xenophon make it up, as Thucydides did, from what other people told him? Did he rework something somebody said earlier in the material? Or did he make it up out of whole cloth? If you believe the latter, then this is not reported speech, it is fiction. It uses the future optative, and nobody can say it doesn't. It takes a lot of chutspah for somebody 2000 years later who is not a native speaker to tell Xenophon he can't do this. 

Case 2, Xenophon declares at the start that he is writing, not fiction, but history. And he has two kinds of reported (indirect) speech. In Book I chapter 2, he has things that the translator puts in quotes, the way Thucydides' translator puts things in quotes. Like Thucydides’ material, Xenophon’s might be made up based on his knowledge of Koresh.

The section I cited, however, has no quotes in the translation and doesn’t read that way in the Greek. This is down and dirty reported speech, X saying that Y said whatever it was, and that’s what Goodwin is talking about.

So Goodwin probably would agree that his two claims apply to this section, but now we run into another problem. The reported speech originated with the King of Assyria; his coming war with Koresh suggests that this is Belshazzar, also known from the book of Daniel. This is not reported from direct speech. Xenophon had not yet been born and could not have heard Belshazzar say this. So that fails the test of whether it's reported speech, and see above about chutspah.

To save their position, Greek scholars could say that however many hands Xenophon heard it through, that's ok. Even if we allow that, there's still a problem. Belshazzar did not speak Greek and so there's no future optative for him to use and for Xenophon to copy at whatever hand.

Belshazzar spoke Neo-Babylonian, a 21^st century name for what some experts also call Akkadian nowadays because it was written in cuneiform. It used to be known as Aramaic because Mesopotamia had been conquered by the Aramaeans, who imported their syllabary script. This script is also known as the “square” script; it is the only legal script for Torah scrolls to be used in synagogues, and it is the script of most mass-printed Jewish literature including modern Israeli work. There’s a quote in Talmud and I’ll fish it out if you want, that says there’s an Aramaic that has “no tongue”. I’m pretty sure that means the use of cuneiform to record Aramaic. The Jews never did learn to read it.

So, since Belshazzar didn't speak Greek, what does it mean if Goodwin accepts this section as reported speech when on page 315, section 1481, he says that reported speech retains (or not) the mood and tense of the direct quote. Xenophon cannot keep the mood and tense of the direct quote because Belshazzar did not speak Greek and Xenophon did not speak Akkadian.

So somewhere along the transmission line, somebody translated Belshazzar’s Akkadian into Greek. And translations are notoriously faulty. For Goodwin to imagine that the translation was exact requires a) that he know nothing about the problems of translation, a dangerously naïve attitude disqualifying him as a linguist and b) that he knows Akkadian and how to translate it exactly into Greek. The acknowledged expert on Akkadian, Gelb, wrote his landmark grammar in 1961, by which time Goodwin had been long dead. Gelb records a subjunctive but not an optative. It may be periphrastic instead of morphological.

Akkadian was deciphered a few decades before Goodwin published his grammar, but that doesn’t mean he read about it. It’s another sign of naivete to assume that just because something was published, everybody literate immediately read it, let alone was influenced by it. For classics scholars, the presumption is even weaker; they worked in a pipeline and didn’t go outside their field. I don’t believe even Smyth recognized the problem with thinking that Xenophon is reporting speech he heard in Akkadian. Or with Xenophon reading cuneiform. Or even Aramaic square script. Most likely both Belshazzar and Koresh hired people from Greek Ionia to translate between them and Greek ambassadors.

I can cover all the facts with a simple schema: my normal explanation of nuances.

Normally our imperfective conceptual is a dead cert and you would think it wouldn’t even have an epistemic, which means the speaker isn’t sure what he’s saying is true. But look at the context. Xenophon literally says that the King of Assyria was lying. Xenophon doesn’t believe him. Xenophon doesn’t want readers believing him. All by itself that’s reason to use the epistemic, like Thucydides used it for Korinthian speeches that he didn’t want readers to believe. We don’t care how many translations the material went through before it got to Xenophon because we're not going to go behind what he wrote.

It's like a contract. If there’s a contract dispute, and there’s a writing, the court never goes behind the writing to figure out what the parties meant by the contract. So too, we are not going to go behind Xenophon to figure out what other people meant when they transmitted this material. There’s a really good reason for that, besides the translation issue.

The more people who had their hands on this material, the more it changed. Each of them put his own spin on things, however slightly. The press does this all the time; every outlet has its philosophical background, and the stories reported by OANN or Fox that are also reported on MSNBC or Axios, are all different. If the material transmitted orally to Xenophon, it was subject to all the features of oral narrative, like gossip is. And that means that what Xenophon heard from the narrator was very different from what originally happened. Let alone what was originally said. Even in the 21^st century, with all our experience of historical and modern propaganda, far too many people believe that what they read or hear has to be accurate. It would be no surprise if mentally cloistered classics scholar Goodwin was similarly naïve.

Two more bits.

If the rule allowing future optative in reported speech was made up to cover this exact section, that is called special pleading. It violates the Test of Occam’s Razor by proposing a complicated schema to cover up a problem.

Two, given the definition of optative as referring to potentiality and wishes, you have to ask yourself how this passages expresses Belshazzar’s wishes. He can’t wish these nations to take over. If you claim he’s saying the takeover is a potentiality, well, epistemic says the same thing: something is possible but not probable. The difference is that “future” in Belshazzar’s situation is only future from his point of view, not from Xenophon’s. We don’t get into these timing arguments with an aspectual system, the same as we don’t get into arguments about whether Xenophon got a good translation of what Belshazzar said. We say “Belshazzar is trying to convince people that he’s talking about a dead cert, but Xenophon verbally and through grammar says he’s lying.”

The 2019 grammar retains both of Goodwin’s problems. This section is not among their citations, which they kindly list in an appendix. They did not go looking for examples that might contradict them, so as to give explanations and remain credible. They cherry picked their data. There is a page with a table showing what's called succession of tenses which is what Goodwin talks about in section 1481. None of it is copied from surviving texts by native speakers. It's all little snippets made up by the people who wrote the book. That's a strawman argument and that's a fallacy.

Xenophon did not have to know that Belshazzar spoke Aramaic to write this section. He used the grammar he used because it got his point across: Belshazzar lied for his own purposes and Xenophon wants to give him the lie, which he does in grammar as well as wording. You can't discredit a native speaker when you are operating from ignorance and bad logic. 

There's one section of Goodwin that I'm not going to cover in the handbook and in there, I say what it is. I have no confidence that it's correct because the rest of the book is so bad. I'm going to fill in some examples and probably add an appendix, exhaustingly analyzing the examples I used. That will show me if things hang together, or I have special pleading somewhere. Which would mean I have to tear everything down and go back to the drawing board. Oh well. Keeps me off the streets during the day.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Cecil B. deMille

I think you already know where I'm going. The Ten Commandments. It looms large in movie history. And like anything else about Jews by Gentiles, it has mistakes.

The most obvious one is the first Passover. What is Aaron handing out at the first Seder ever? Pita! Pita is not unleavened, it is leavened flatbread such as many cultures have. 

The second one is painting the blood on the outside of the door frames. Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael 12:7:1-4 assumes that the blood is supposed to go on the inside, thus it's a warning not to go out of the house. Halakhah is that whereever you eat the Seder, there you stay until you go to shul the next morning. Gd doesn't need to see it, He knows which house belongs to Israelites and won't send the Destroyer to it.

The third one is a little more hairy. Joshua did not need to paint the lintels for Lilia. Everywhere that firstborns have the law applied to them, they are males not females. Exodus does not specify that the Egyptian male firstborns died, but it is added in brackets on Sefaria. Nevertheless as an Israelite, Lilia was not at risk. Dathan on the other hand, as the leader of his part of the Reuvenites, might have been at risk. But his role in the movie was invented by deMille.

And now to the fourth mistake. I realized this when I saw some still shot of Moses (well, Charlton Heston) holding the tablets of the law. The writing is in the Gezer script, which dates to the 800s BCE.

Now, if you read this blog, you know that one of my mantras is "culture makes no leaps". We know the Gezer script had to be older. How much older?

Well, if it developed out of Ugaritic cuneiform, Ugarit was destroyed by the Sea Peoples just after 1200 BCE. Most people think the Exodus was in the 1200s BCE but I've already tackled that. My claim allows the Israelites to have contact with Ugarit for 300 years before its destruction, plenty of time to start using Ugaritic cuneiform, and then 300 years to morph it into the Gezer script. This is similar to the destruction of Ebla and of Naram-Sin setting the west adrift and letting Ugaritic and Hebrew develop out of the western dialect of Akkadian. Which also happened by 1200 BCE.

Aha, you're saying, what about the Tell Amarna cuneiform tablets? Well, look at them here, at the Met. They come from the 1300s BCE when Akhetaten was the capital of Akhenaten for about 30 years. This is plain old straight-up cuneiform, not something that is halfway to being the Gezer script. This is what the Canaanites used in diplomatic and trade exchanges with Egypt. If the Israelites didn't arrive in the Holy Land until the 1200s, they still had 300 years to develop the Gezer script from what they learned from the Canaanites. And that would have happened during a period of isolation.

Which, as I said, did happen. But not until a century after Akhenaten, at a time when Merneptah knew of Israelites living in the Holy Land and sent raiders to get grain. The Israelites were isolated on their hilltops developing the Gezer script a century after most people think the Exodus happened, and they refused to communicate with the Canaanites in the lowlands. So Charlton Heston could not have written the tablets in the Gezer script.

The question is always, could X have known about this subject, and the answer is yes. The Amarna tablets were published 40 years before deMille made the Charlton Heston movie. The Gezer script was published about the same time. That was shortly before deMille made his silent film of Ten Commandments. If he had time to look up the Gezer script, deMille had time to look up the Amarna tablets. He might have done, and rejected it because he wanted something Israelite, not Canaanite. 

But he still got it wrong.

If stuff like this matters to you, let me know cos I can also do Ben Hur the book, but I'll have to do it from the start and you know, it's pretty long.

21st Century Classical Greek -- perfective!

Book I 3.3 is another long section to parse out.

τεκμηριοῖ δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος: “the best evidence is Homer” (notice that this is an equational clause with no verb for the copula)

πολλῷ γὰρ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ τῶν Τρωικῶν γενόμενος  “for much later yet, the Trojan [War] happening…”

οὐδαμοῦ τοὺς ξύμπαντας ὠνόμασεν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλους ἢ τοὺς μετ᾽ Ἀχιλλέως ἐκ τῆς Φθιώτιδος,

οἵπερ καὶ πρῶτοι Ἕλληνες ἦσαν, “the whole had no name, except that those with Achilleos from Phthiotis, who were the first Hellenes…”

Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι καὶ Ἀργείους καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. “Danaans in the epics and Argives and Achaeans was the name…”

οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ βαρβάρους εἴρηκε διὰ τὸ μηδὲ Ἕλληνάς πω,  “not truly [that there] was no barbarian but because there was no Hellene yet…”

ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, ἀντίπαλον ἐς ἓν ὄνομα ἀποκεκρίσθαι. “as it seems to me, oppositely by name to be set apart.”

Yes, that’s Homer in that first line. Thucydides knows that his audience of educated men have Homer at their fingertips. Nowadays we would cite to Herodotus, if he said anything about the Trojan war that we could use at a place like this, but for Mr T, Herodotus was not hallowed by time, being only a couple of decades older than Thucydides. Herodotus also drew on Homer so Thucydides, even if he had read Herodotus, would have gone for the writer both of them accepted as an authority.

Learn polus from which we get pollo here; see White, page 230, section  753. You might as well learn megas while you’re there.

Click on apokekristhai. Just from inspection you know it’s an impersonal gerundive in base voice. The word tool will tell you it’s “perfect tense”; that means it goes in our perfective conceptual slot in our aspect table. The -ke- is the reduplication used in Attic Greek in perfective aspect. It does not appear in any other Greek dialect.

The use of perfective aspect is to talk about something with permanent results. In this case, the distinction between Greek and barbarian persisted to Thucydides’ time. He regards the distinction as something that simply came about, instead of being deliberately adopted.

Modern archaeology tells us that “Achaeans” is a version of Ahiyyawa, the Hittite name for the people who were not autochthonous Cretans but lived in the Palace Culture and went a-viking around 1200 BCE. To the Egyptians, this same people were known as Peleshet, and they are listed on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscription about the Sea Peoples. If you’re wondering why that looks so much like Pelishtim in Biblical Hebrew, well, yes, they are the same people. Their immersion in Kretan culture led to Linear B being their writing system, until they settled on the west coast of the Mediterranean and learned Ugaritic cuneiform. About 1180 BCE, they helped destroy Ugarit.

“Danaans”, on the other hand, refers to an element of the Sea Peoples listed as Denyen on Ramses III’s inscription. Other elements were the Sikila, the Sherden (Sardinians), Weshesh (Oscians), and Teresh (Etruscans). The Sikila and Sherden settled north of the Pelishtim and, with the indigenous people, formed the Phoenicians.

Argos was inhabited by “Pelasgians”, showing that the Peloponnese adopted and adapted the Egyptian Peleshet. By Homer’s time, the term “Cretan Iaones” was also used and invocations are made to Pelasgian Zeus in the Iliad. The original god of the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa, however, was Apaliunas (Apollo), according to a reference in one of the Hittite letters that dates before the destruction of Wilusa (Ilion, Troy) by the Sea Peoples.

Fact-Checking the -- Tannakh -- what about those hemorrhoids?

 If you remember, on the Fact-Checking the Torah page, I posted this, identifying the Pelishtim with the Ahiyyawa, that is, the Pelishtim were pre-Hellenic Greeks known to the Egyptians, and known to the Hittites as Ahiyyawa. As such, they lived in the Peloponnese as part of the Palace Culture which used the undeciphered Linear A script, while the Pelishtim are known to have written in Linear B which represents an Indo-European language.

They're all Greeks to me

Now another part of the puzzle. Read Samuel I 5-6, the story of what happened to the Pelishtim after they captured the ark of the covenant.

Everybody will tell you that the five capitals of the Pelishtim were struck with hemorrhoids. Now that we know who the Pelishtim were, we know something nobody in the history of Bible studies knew, and that nobody now has connected up. Except me. Again.

The main god of the Pelishthim/Ahiyyawa was Apaliunas. He was also the patron of Troy, a city founded by the Gutian Teucer:

Philology

Teucer, according to a Greek poet of the 700s BCE, also founded a temple in the Troad to Apollo Smintheus, usually translated as "Mouse Apollo". The Greeks did not understand the word smintheus but said it was a Pelasgian word. How it got to mean "mouse" is tortuous; Teucer's people were told to build their temple where they were attacked by the "earth-born". There is a long-standing tradition in ancient Anatolian culture that makes its way into Talmud, that mice are born from earth and if you catch them at the right point in their "development", you will find them to be half mouse, half earth. The poet goes on to say that mice ate all the leather of the military equipment and that's where the temple was built.

But the ancients were also fond of bad philology and false friends. "Earth-born" also means "autochthonous", like the warriors born of the earth in which Qadmos planted the teeth of the dragon he slew. Qadmos (cognate to Semitic words for "eastern") founded Thebes in the Peloponnese, a city of the Palace Culture. IOW Teucer was going to be attacked by Anatolians already living in the Troad and he would have to conquer them to be able to build a temple. Which he did.

So how does the story in Samuel relate? Well, the Pelishtim who worshipped Apaliunas had settled in their famous Pentapolis, before attacking the famous Troy VIIb layer. They worshipped Dagon, which closely resembles the Hebrew word dagan, which relates to a word dagah meaning be fruitful, the way grain reproduces manyfold. So basically the Pelishtim were adopting the west Semitic Ugaritic language and adapting its cuneiform to their language, and they helped destroy Ugarit at about the same time as Troy.

Now, mice are also something that dagahs a lot, something else that has been known for millennia, and they will swarm into your grain bins and clean you out if you don't catch them first. So you need somebody to guard you against them, and apparently this was one of Apaliunas' roles. His statue at his temple on the Troad had a mouse underfoot.

But the way the Iliad brings Apollo Smitheus into it, is that when the Greeks refuse to give up the daughter of his priest, the priest invokes a plague on them. And a plague also falls on the Pelishtim who capture the ark. And Apollo was responsible for a plague that struck down Phrygian (Anatolian) Niobe's seven pairs of children when she slammed Apollo's mother for having only one pair. 

The Pelishtim were struck bafolim in Samuel I 5:1-12, and afolim is spelled starting with ayin, a letter that shows up at the start of a number of Hebrew names borrowed from foreign languages. Amorah, the sister-city of S'dom, is another example. So is efron, the man who eventually sells Makhpelah to Avraham.

The letter b' is a preposition meaning "by means of" in some cases. So the Pelishtim were struck by means of their patron god Apaliunas for trying to import a foreign Gd's artifact, the ark, into his temple. At the same time, that foreign Gd struck the Ugaritic/K'naani god Dagon whom the Pelishtim had also adopted.

But Apollo is also the healer god who taught Cheiron the centaur, who taught Asclepius the famous healer, and his son Podalirius who was physician to the Greeks  in the Trojan War. 

So the next part of the narrative is that after three (remember Olrik's Law of Three) of the cities in the Pentapolis are struck by Apaliunas in the same way, the Pelishtim decide to get rid of the ark in chapter 6. They put it on a cart and on the cart they also put five (a magic number for magic and mystery) golden statues of Apaliunas and five golden mice. They yoke to this cart two heifers who have never been used for work and set the heifers wandering to wherever the god directs.

This following of a cow to a god-designated place is also part of the Qadmos story. Apollo's oracle at Delphi tells him to follow a cow to exhaustion and build a city where she lies down. The city was Thebes. He wanted water but a dragon kept destroying his water-bearers. Qadmos killed this dragon, sowed its teeth, and saved himself from the warriors who sprang up except for five who became his guardians. 

Now, how did afolim get to be glossed as hemorrhoids by so many commentators? Babylonian Talmud Masekhet Megilla 25b says it, with an attribution to rabbanan, meaning that it was a widespread ancient opinion; it is repeated in Tosefta 3:20 for that page, as well as Rashi's Talmud commentary. Tosefta dates to the 100s CE and Rashi lived in the 1100s CE. Rashi connects it to the mice saying they created disease in the Pelishtim. 

The connection to mice no doubt comes from chapter 6, not from chapter 5. None of the Jewish commentators knew anything about Apaliunas or Apollo Smintheus. Neither did non-Jewish commentators know anything about the connection between the Pelishtim and the Achaean attackers of Troy. It only comes together when you know 21st century archaeology.

And that's why you can't rest on outdated archaeology if you want to understand Torah or its extensions into Nakh.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 5:25-27: Metushelach

I apologize for not posting yesterday, I put my brain in backward when I got up and worked on a future blog thread instead.

You know M’tushelach; he lived the longest time of anybody in the Bible.

כה וַיְחִ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח שֶׁ֧בַע וּשְׁמֹנִ֛ים שָׁנָ֖ה וּמְאַ֣ת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֖וֹלֶד אֶת־לָֽמֶךְ:

כו וַיְחִ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֗לַח אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הֽוֹלִיד֣וֹ אֶת־לֶ֔מֶךְ שְׁתַּ֤יִם וּשְׁמוֹנִים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּשְׁבַ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֥וֹלֶד בָּנִ֖ים וּבָנֽוֹת:

כז וַיִּֽהְיוּ֙ כָּל־יְמֵ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח תֵּ֤שַׁע וְשִׁשִּׁים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּתְשַׁ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיָּמֹֽת:

M’tushelach must have lived 187 years -- he sired Lemekh --

M’tushelach must have lived, after his siring Lemekh – 782 years – for he sired sons and daughters.

All the years of M’tushelach were 969 years; he died.

Now for another urban legend. Some people will tell you that these genealogies are copied from the Sumerian kings list.

Not even close.

The kings list is available on line. There is no match in any of the names or ages.

The history of the Sumerian kings list is this: about 2000 BCE, when Utu-Hengel shoved the Gutians out of Mesopotamia after they had ruled for a century or two, he commissioned that the kings lists of all the cities be collected and consolidated. The result was found early in the 20^th century and it had two puzzles in it.

One is that all the kings seem to have reigned consecutively, but an additional tablet turned up later which showed that some of them had reigned concurrently, each in his own city. The scribes fudged the dates to fit the concept of consecutive reigns.

The second was that the great city of Lagash had no representatives in the final list. We don’t know why. It certainly was an important city; one of its rulers, Eannatum II, took over all of Mesopotamia about 2500 BCE and appropriated the name “King of Kish”  to show how important he was. He was defeated by the grandson of a woman king of Mesoptamia, Kug Bau. Her grandson was followed by the famous Sargon of Akkad.

About 1700 BCE, the kings list was expanded with a prequel. In the prequel were names from Mesopotamian literature, like Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh and Dumuzi.

The kings list was first composed when the ancestors of the Jews were already living in the Holy Land, more than three centuries after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain.  When the prequel  was added, they lived in Egypt, about a century before the Exodus.  I discuss this timing on the Fact-Checking page.

What’s more, the kings list originated and was maintained in cuneiform. The Jews didn’t read cuneiform. Their ancestors didn’t read cuneiform. Heck, the scribes didn’t read cuneiform very well. Cuneiform scholars point out problems in the second kings list that identify changes in the understanding of the language since the first kings list, such that the scribes didn’t understand what they copied and made mistakes.

These are the same sort of mistakes that would have occurred if Jews living at the end of the Babylonian Captivity had tried to compose new material using the Biblical Hebrew that they knew only from scripture, not from speaking it on the street: spelling errors, fractured idioms, and so on.

The Jews who wrote Neo-Babylonian at the end of the Babylonian Captivity used the “square” lettering now known as the Hebrew alphabet. The Mesopotamian scribes wrote Neo-Babylonian in royal decrees and religious texts, using cuneiform. The standard “Dick and Jane” for cuneiform was a pagan work, Gilgamesh. The only way Jews would have known Gilgamesh was to get accepted to cuneiform school. There’s plenty of room to doubt that, in an up-and-running monotheistic culture, Jews applied to cuneiform school, where they would be exposed to paganism. It was much easier to learn the square script which had the same number of symbols as the “paleo” Jewish script and recorded the same sounds.

The same argument applies to all Mesopotamian literature that has been found only in cuneiform so far, and that includes Enuma Elish and Hammurabi’s code, as well as Gilgamesh and the kings list.  For a more detailed discussion, see the Fact-Checking blog.

21xt Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:12-13, geography

Genesis 2:12-13

יב וּֽזֲהַ֛ב הָאָ֥רֶץ הַהִ֖וא ט֑וֹב שָׁ֥ם הַבְּדֹ֖לַח וְאֶ֥בֶן הַשֹּֽׁהַם:

יג וְשֵׁם־הַנָּהָ֥ר הַשֵּׁנִ֖י גִּיח֑וֹן ה֣וּא הַסּוֹבֵ֔ב אֵ֖ת כָּל־אֶ֥רֶץ כּֽוּשׁ:

 

Translation:     The gold of that land is good; there is the b’dolach and the shoham stone.

The name of the second river is Gichon; it is the one surrounding all the land of Kush.

 

The reason I didn’t give meanings for the two stones is that there’s no agreement on what they are.  Online dictionaries of the languages of Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian, don’t have cognates.

My personal guess is that they are ruby tin and diamond tin, two forms of cassiterite which are found in alluvial soils downstream of tin deposits. I get this from two facts but I have no idea if I’m right. One is that b’dolach resembles b’dil, which is generally agreed to be tin. The other is that the shoham stone is used in the efod and is engraved. The hardness value of diamond is 10 but that of diamond tin is about 8, like ruby.

 

I also didn’t translate Kush but it might be Kish, the great city of Mesopotamia. When a leader wanted to show how important he was, he called himself King of Kish. There was even a queen of Mesopotamia who called herself King of Kish.

 

This is not Ethiopia, which was once known as Kush. We are in Mesopotamia, not Africa. There’s no doubt that at some point, the Jews and Ethiopians were in contact; Ethiopians are mentioned in Jeremiah (from about 600 BCE) and that refers to the culture that partly ruled over Egypt and was known in Egyptian as Kash. At the point in archaeological time I’m talking about now, which is before 3000 BCE, the Kerma culture of Ethiopia was just starting to take shape.

 

The names Pishon and Gichon are not known in any other source. If you know of a publication about cuneiform that comes up with something like them, give me a link to it. Which gets me into dangerous territory but I’ve covered it on the blog.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- flow of narrative

One conclusion Olrik drew from the huge disparity in format and content exhibited by oral narratives in contrast to material invented in writing, affects the claim that some archaeological discoveries were the origin of some parts of Torah.

The main evidence for the conclusion comes from work with ballads. The flow of information was that a folk ballad, sung among the non-reading public, would be picked up by people who overheard them. Amateur and professional musicians and scholars would popularize them among the literate. The material would be redeveloped, adding descriptions not in the original, or refrains that introduced a moral element.

These new versions would become popular and be recorded on broadsheets sold for pennies apiece at fairs. Thus they would get back into the hands of the people who sang the original songs.

What happened next was one of two things. Either the new version enjoyed a very short vogue and then disappeared. Or it morphed back into something resembling the original version. All the refrains, moralizations, and descriptions that were missing from the original version were stripped out of the “literate” version, otherwise it didn’t survive back in the original environment. This second fate was more common if the original song was still in vogue.

People who knew the original version knew it in a format that suited oral transmission. The “literate” versions could not duplicate that format because literate people had not yet studied oral traditions to find out how to reproduce the folk format. Literate people had different tastes, and songs only became popular among them by suiting those tastes, prompting redevelopment of the songs to add or substitute the favored material.

Lyrics invented from the ground up in the literate environment never survived in the “folk” environment at all.

Literate and non-literate classes communicate in different ways and the formats differentiate material into what originated orally, and what originated in writing.

This is what I meant when I used the laws of thermodynamics and invented a zeroth law of SWLT. It’s also what I mean by inventing a zeroth addition to Ginsberg’s theorem. You have to play the text as you find it, oral or written. “Drawing a card” from the written environment is as wrong for analyzing oral material, as analyzing a translation and inserting the answer into a discussion of the source document. If you have already agreed with me that DH produces nonsense by analyzing a translation of Torah, then you should agree with me that archaeologists produce nonsense by claiming that a culture with low literacy nevertheless accessed written material and adopted it.

And remember, one of the barriers to adoption was the cuneiform in which the “adopted” text was written, something illiterates would not have read even when they spoke something like the same language either before 2350 BCE or after 580 BCE.

In the interim, the Jews had developed their own language which expressed their own norms. Even if Enuma Elish or Gilgamesh survived into the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews would not have recognized them as stories about “us”. “Us” was the people of the Ingress, the Shiloh period, the hilltop settlements, the Davidic monarchy, and the Jewish culture since then.

And in the interim, a lot of time flowed under the bridge....

Fact-Checking the Torah -- grammar

DH proposes that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache, that Hebrew developed in layers through collision with other cultures. The second pillar of DH says that this development left traces in the language and style of each of the documents. DH says that while the four documents were ripped apart and then enfiladed back together so that nobody realized for centuries what their origin was, nevertheless the language layering features and style of writing were preserved and that clever men figured it out centuries later.

This runs smack into contradictory evidence about the history of Hebrew and other languages.

The true description for how new languages develop under the mutual influence of multiple languages is sometimes called creolization. Not just the word usage but also the grammar changes. (Notice how the two base rules of SWLT are addressed in this description.) There is always an interim point where the creole language looks like it has a deviant grammar compared to its contributors; if it survives it develops a different characteristic grammar.

English is a creole language with its origin in the Celtic languages used in Britain preceding the Roman and Germanic invasions. It gathered material from the Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norse languages. The Norman invasion brought French influence, including “hard” and “soft” versions of the letters c and g, and then we watch it go through its grammatical changes through Wace and Malory to Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Georgette Heyer, etc.

Yiddish is also a creole with its roots in the Old High German of Europe. Brought to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, it acquired Russian particles and suffixes, among other things. Emigres to America further produced the creole Yeshivish, which adds technical terms from Talmud study and also re-imagines their meaning. After its bearers passed through Ellis Island, it acquired English words spoken in a New York accent, but grammatically Yeshivish tends to resemble Yiddish. You can hear Yeshivish spoken in R. Dovid Grossman’s recordings of his lectures on Babylonian Talmud at the Harvard website.

The main issue of creolization is that grammar thing. While a creole develops, its grammar changes. If Biblical Hebrew creolized between 800 and 400 BCE, its grammar would have changed and this would show up in JEDP. The grammar is, however, consistent throughout the Hebrew material in Tannakh, with modal morphologies and use of the narrative past as defined in Dr. Cook’s dissertation.

The only way DH can explain the consistent grammar throughout Torah is that their incompetent editor was a competent grammarian and rewrote deviant forms to agree with the language that he spoke. However, redactors would not have known how to produce good grammar in Biblical Hebrew unless they learned it as a first language.  The people who transmitted Torah down to post-Captivity times probably did not have grammar books.

The same is true of every writer responsible for some Hebrew post-Torah book in Tannakh. They all had to speak and think in Biblical Hebrew to write using the same grammar that Torah uses, which they do.

Using external evidence, we can understand this in the light of the succession of cuneiform texts that have survived. In Jacobson’s discussion of how we found out that the Kings List was a compilation with fudging of the numbers, he points out grammatical differences in the city king  list sources, and the compilation made by Ur III scribes. The vernacular of the post-Gutian period didn’t use the same grammar as the pre-Gutian period. The same thing happened in the 1700s BCE when the prequel was added.

We have word lists in cuneiform for multiple versions of ancient Semitic languages. But if there were any grammars, they did not survive that I have heard of to date; tell me if you know of one that was compiled back then, as opposed to Cyrus Gordon’s grammar of Ugaritic from the 1960s. Such a sharp contrast in preservation suggests there were no grammars. The bad grammarians of the kings list could not produce the right text because they hadn’t learned it on the street, neither had their teachers, and so on for decades into their history. This same argument works with the grammar of Amos and Hoshea.

The DH pillar of style and language has to drop the concept of language layering because it is based on a fallacy and also makes extraordinary claims that don’t jibe with studies in linguistics.

Now let’s look at the consequence of the mischsprache concept, which has implications for some of the oldest work done on DH.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- tying up Anatolia

And now let’s wrap some things up with a nice pink bow.  About a year ago I pointed out that the likeness between “The Song of Going Forth” and Hesiod’s Theogony is a puzzle because one time when the Hittites were in contact with the ancestors of the Greeks, they were at war and the next time that Greeks lived in Anatolia, the Hittites had been gone for almost 4 centuries.  Van Dongen’s book assumed the material passed in writing but couldn’t explain how that would happen, since the Hittites used full-up cuneiform, the ancestors of the Greeks used Linear B, and the Greek alphabet was completely different from both.

The answer now is, the ancestors of the Greeks picked up that material in Anatolia after 6000 BCE but before their motion into Aeolia, Achaia, and the rest of the Peloponnese about 2000 BCE.  After 4000 BCE, the material migrated into Mesopotamia, probably with the Akkadians, and shaped the battle of Tiamat and Marduk in Enuma Elish.

The actual Greeks differentiated out of the ancestral Indo-European tree between 1200 BCE, near the time of the attack on Wilusa that destroyed Troy VIIb, and 1000 BCE, the time when the Pelishtim occupied their marine Pentapolis in the Holy Land.  The Italics differentiate out about the same time or a little before. 

This corresponds to the joint nature of the Ionians and Pelishtim, the Teresh/Weshesh as other members of the Sea Peoples different from the Pelishtim, and the differences between Latin and Greek, as well as the separation between Ahiyyawa and the Italic Etruscans and Oscians.

The conclusion is that the Hurrian, Hittite, Akkadian and Hesiod texts are alike because they are based on Anatolian material predating the cultures, and they differ naturally as the various cultures differentiated out of the Anatolian background.

These coordinate with the results that show an Anatolian locale for the origin of both Semitic and Indo-European languages. 

Remarkably enough, right away you can see that the ancestors of the Greeks did not flee quickly ahead of an invading army.  They filtered west over several millennia, while behind them the ancestors of the Hittites immigrated into their old turf.  Then it took several more centuries for the Greek language to develop, during almost the identical period as K’naani and Hebrew differentiated .

The fact that Greek uses an alphabet ultimately derived from Ugaritic cuneiform, the same as Hebrew does, and developed over the same period, shows that both cultures were in contact with Ugarit long before the Greeks/Pelishtim destroyed it.  Maybe they were all in contact from the 1500s BCE – just before Linear B (the language of the Pelishtim) shows up in the Holy Land and the Israelites entered after their stay in the Sinai Peninsula. 

And now back to my fallacy.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Orality of Torah

There’s another reason why I believe Torah originated orally, or rather there are two interconnecting reasons.

First, we know that Hebrew didn’t have a writing system until some centuries before 800 BCE, the date of the oldest confirmed Hebrew writing.  I said long ago that cultura non facit saltus, so there had to be generations or centuries of development before 800 BCE and the first recognizably Hebrew written text.

But as I said a long time ago, the northwest Semitic languages began to break away from Akkadian by 2000 BCE. That’s at least a 1000-year gap from speaking a Semitic language that was incomprehensible in Sumero-Akkad, to a Hebrew language that also had a writing system.

In the interim, we have two mileposts. We know that Hebrew writing developed out of one form of the Ugaritic syllabary, itself an adaptation of Akkadian cuneiform to a western Semitic language.  Ugarit was destroyed not long after 1200 BCE by the Sea Peoples.  The generations of adaptation that produced the Hebrew syllabary had to precede that.  Luckily we know that the Israelites spent centuries in the Holy Land before then, providing the time for development.

By 1100 BCE we have evidence in the hilltop settlements that there was indeed a separate Israelite culture that not only differed from the lowland K’naani culture, but deliberately held itself aloof, and that culture had at least one common feature throughout its settlements. That implies a system of laws.

The Israelites might have had a syllabary for writing those laws down, but archaeology has not found samples of them yet. Because the hilltop settlements were built on bare ground and not tells, and because of the evidence of isolation represented by the pottery, there’s no chance of confusing such samples with other cultures of the time. They would be a marvelous find – but we haven’t found them as far as I know (December 2020).

Humans have had language for dozens of thousands of years and writing only for thousands. In the interim, they had to communicate their laws somehow. Before the Jews had a writing system, their ancestors had to transmit laws orally, not in writing. And they had to do it in their own language because by rules 1 and 2 of SWLT, no other language could catch the nuances of their culture.

And I just hinted at the other reason why Israelites had to transmit their laws orally. That’s for next week.

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Gam

This use of the aspectless gerundive comes from the fact that gerunds can be used like nouns. Gerunds bear up under substantive usage.

 

Gam is usually translated “also” but it really is an emphatic. It appears with substantives and their substitutes, such as pronouns and participles. It never appears with anything formed from imperfect aspect – not imperatives, not narrative past, not a duplicate conditional. Probably the best example is Genesis 31:15.

הֲלוֹא נָכְרִיּוֹת נֶחְשַׁבְנוּ לוֹ כִּי מְכָרָנוּ וַיֹּאכַל גַּם־אָכוֹל אֶת־כַּסְפֵּנוּ:

 

Lavan got consideration in forming the marriage contracts between Yaaqov and his wives.  Instead of setting that consideration aside to return to them in case they were divorced or widowed, he has consumed it one way or another.  Otherwise they would want  to stay in the  jurisdiction where the contract was filed so that the court with which it was filed could handle their divorce or the division of Yaaqov’s estate if he died.  They have no reason to stay,  and they say so.

 

Now, if this was a simple duplicate conditional, it would read akhol yokhal but that’s not what is going on here; there’s no question that the money is gone. Using gam to emphasize what has happened requires insulating it from that imperfect aspect verb. It takes an aspectless gerundive to do that. Numbers 23:25 is a more extreme example, using aspectless gerundives to insulate gam from two different imperatives which, as you know, are formed from the imperfect aspect.

 

The point seems to be that gam requires something currently existing, like in Genesis 27:33, gam barukh yihyeh. The participle barukh refers to the blessing that Yitschaq has already given Yaaqov, and it emphasizes that this blessing is permanent. Permansive. Stative. The imperfect aspect never captures those attributes even when it is used with a past meaning. It’s a historical thing with Semitic languages; it’s illustrated in Delitzsch’s Assyrian grammar that he wrote for Hermann Strack’s Porta Linguarum Orientalium series in the late 1800s, after cuneiform had been deciphered and translated.

 

So now, look at Genesis 46:4.

אָנֹכִי אֵרֵד עִמְּךָ מִצְרַיְמָה וְאָנֹכִי אַעַלְךָ גַם־עָלֹה וְיוֹסֵף יָשִׁית יָדוֹ עַל־עֵינֶיךָ:

 

We’re insulating gam from the certainty epistemic aalkha which, like all epistemics, is based on imperfect. This hasn’t happened yet. Yaaqov is still alive. Gam aloh, with the aspectless gerundive, ignores the timing factor completely.

 

Of course, from the point of view of the narrator and his audience, this has already happened. The narrator can use the certainty epistemic because if it weren’t for the coming back to the Holy Land after the oppression, the narrator and his audience wouldn’t be in the Holy Land at the point where this grammar was fixed in the record.

 

But Yaaqov isn’t there yet. He has 17 more years to live. He won’t die in the Holy Land, unlike his father and grandfather. Gd is reassuring him that he really will occupy his niche in Makhpelah, where he buried Leah. Gd uses gam for this, and using gam, He has to use it with the aspectless gerundive because, as I keep saying, there’s no other grammar that will work here.

 

This explanation also helped me with Exodus 2:19.

וַתֹּאמַרְן ָ אִישׁ מִצְרִי הִצִּילָנוּ מִיַּד הָרֹעִים וְגַם־דָּלֹה דָלָה לָנוּ וַיַּשְׁקְ אֶת־הַצֹּאן:

 

After I realized what the duplicate unconditional did, I puzzled for a while over why there would be one here, because there’s no Jewish law involved with drawing water. Once I figured out the grammar of gam, I could see that the daloh was the other part of the gam phrase, and the dalah was the perfect verb for something that was over by the time R’uel’s daughters came back to tell him what happened.

 

And now the last lesson on “infinitives”.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint dictionary?

The fourth issue in translation is using a dictionary.  Nobody knows the full vocabulary of their first language, still less the full  vocabulary of their second or third or…  And that’s why we need dictionaries.

Archaeologists have turned up dictionaries in cuneiform relating two and sometimes three languages.  These helped them recover the relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian, for one thing, and those languages died centuries ago.

What dictionary a translator chooses and how he uses it is crucial to the quality of the translation.

If the setting of your document is a highly technical physics paper, but you use a high-school level dictionary aimed at helping a learner master the most frequent words and idioms in spoken language, you will get wrong all the technical terms that most people don’t use in conversation.  Been there, avoided that.

If the setting of your document is the 17^th century, but you always choose the first entry in the dictionary as the translation of a word, you will wind up using some 21^st century meanings inappropriate for the 17^th century.  You might translate John Milton’s “buxom air” as “bosomy air” giving an impression that he thought of “air” as some kind of sexy goddess.

If you have a document written in slang or other highly idiomatic language, and you use a standard dictionary that ignores slang, or you try to do a “literal” translation or word-for-word substition,  you’ll wind up with garbage.  Seen it.

And finally there are the people who ignore dictionary meanings in favor of traditional ones, which may be based on any of the mistakes I have discussed in the last few posts.

It’s not at all clear that a Greek-Hebrew dictionary existed when the Septuagint was done.  Based on the results, it’s also not at all clear that the translators had access to anybody who understood Hebrew words or grammar other than superficially. 

But what is clear so far in my research, is that the people who translated from Hebrew to Greek used Greek words in ways that don’t match how they were used in the Greek classics that have survived to our days, and don’t match how Greek words were used 300 years after Septuagint was done.

And they also don’t match the simple meanings or the legal connotations of the Hebrew words.

And that is the essence of a bad translation.  But it's not the last of a translator's problems.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- wrapping up the digs

When you read archaeological material – from the original report not the mass media or a fringe website – and it claims to relate to the Bible, you have to be skeptical.

First, you have to make sure it’s not a weak analogy.  It has to deal with all of the Biblical words and details, not just pick out useful parts.  In the next two parts of this blog, I’ll show why it has to deal with the Biblical words in Biblical Hebrew, not in translation.

Second, you have to make sure that the writer doesn’t deny something happened just because the data don’t say it did.  The dig has to be at the right place and go down to the right level, look for culturally relevant material and evaluate it accurately compared to the situations cultures normally find themselves in.

Third, you have to make sure the material evaluates the provenance reasonably.  A report that doesn’t go through the provenance of a find but tries to claim that it relates to something in Bible cannot be relied on.  The week this post goes up, there was a follow-on to the story about the papyrus that supposedly talked about “Jesus’ wives”.  In fact, the original study did not have that phrase; it was an invention of mass media to gain attention.  Second, there was absolutely no information about the provenance from archaeology; it came from the possessor and his story keeps shifting.  The next thing that has to happen is a radiocarbon test, just like the one that proved the fabric of the Turin shroud was made in the 1400s CE.  I’m sure the possessor of the “Jesus” papyrus doesn’t want that but if he refuses, there’s no there there.   Without  provenance information from archaeology, you don’t  really have an archaeological “find” and you may not have an antiquity.  At best, you might have a curiosity, but it could also be a forgery.

The chronology of the Torah goes something like this:

Noach’s wine grapes come from about 4000 BCE in a location later known as Urartu; we don’t know what it was called in 4000 BCE, its oldest known name is Urashtu.  This is in Anatolia, where and when proto-Semitic first developed, and also near where meteoric iron was in use, and where smelted iron and carbon steel show up over the next 2000 years.

Gan Eden relates to the 3000s BCE, the Jemdet Nasr period of Mesopotamia, somewhere to the east of where the Euphrates flows now, and where it joined up with the Tigris and two minor rivers, one of which vanished from human memory and one of which is permanently dry now.

The destruction of the Cities of the Plain had to be observed by the ancestors of the Jewish people when they were near Numeira, Jordan, about 2350 BCE.  This places them far from Mesopotamia prior to the time of the Sumerian Kings List, Gilgamesh, Atra-Hasis, and Enuma Elish in the written forms we know of.  It coordinates with the end of Ebla, which traded with the Cities.  All writing in Mesopotamia was in Sumerian or Akkadian cuneiform at this time; reading and writing cuneiform had to do with royal decrees and religious material; archives were royal property, not freely open to anybody who chose to browse in them.

The Israelites migrated to Egypt in the 1800s BCE and were familiar with the conditions there at the end of the reign of Amenemhet III, the end of the Middle Kingdom.

The Israelites left Egypt about 1630 BCE, heading southeast.  The Hyksos rulers of the delta were trying to recover from the effects of the Thera explosion.  Before they had completely recovered, Ahmose I attacked and took back the north.  He chased the remains of the Hyksos rulers of the Delta northeast to Sharuhen.  Torah has the only written record currently known, relative to the Thera explosion, except for the Tempest Papyrus from the start of Ahmose’s reign.

This leaves 400 years for the period of the Judges and the cult at Shiloh.  About 1100 BCE, the Israelites established settlements throughout the Holy Land, more than 200 feet above sea level, and refused to trade pottery with the lowlands, showing that they had to be self-supporting.

They remained self-supporting, engaging in mixed agriculture, to about 900 BCE, the time of Shlomo.

The Israelites were not descended solely from the Hapiru; the two groups were not identical.

The Israelites did not copy their monotheism from Akhenaten.  Even his son didn’t copy it; Tutankhamen changed back to the original Egyptian polytheism.

The Israelites did not invent the Exodus after their culture had been up and running for centuries; it was so well known that 100 years after the hilltop settlements dissolved, Amos could talk about it to the southerners and Hoshea could reference it to the northerners, without going into a song and dance about what they meant.

Cultures like the Celts and Sea Peoples began developing 300 to 400 years before they first appeared in text from another culture.  It is no stretch to accept that the culture of the Israelite hilltop settlements goes back to at least 1500 BCE, but the geological evidence in Torah is that their ancestors originated nearly a millennium before that.

Those assigning a late date to every characteristic of Jewish culture, religion and law, are almost certainly wrong.  I’ll give more evidence for this in the next two sections.  Starting with evidence from the language itself – Biblical Hebrew.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved