DIY -- had to happen

You've been working hard DIYing everything that makes sense for you.
Now all your storage is full. 
STOP!
There's no sense spending all that money you saved on a storage unit somewhere.
Especially since a lot of the DIY I've been talking about is food.
There's a novel, either Regency or Thackeray -- you email me if you know what it is --
where there's a comic character who preserves food much longer than anybody else.
And it's inedible when she finally serves it up.
You don't want to go there.
Fill your freezer,
fill your fridge,
fill your shelves if you buy a canner.
Then STOP.
Don't start up again until you only have enough left to get you until a batch is ready to eat.
Like a month for some pickles, 3 weeks for corned beef, a week for lox, 24 hours for yogurt.
And by the way, with pickles and canned veggies, you're best off waiting until you can get them fresh at the farmer's market or a pick your own farm.
Enjoy!


© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

The Anvil -- Rereading the Mendel Beilis transcript

What police official might have been able to solve the case March 21, 1911 -- but never testified?
Who really poisoned Zhenya Cheberyak?
Who was going to supply the 40,000 rubles to bribe Vera Cheberyak?
Which witness did the government allow to testify after giving orders not to release him from a prison camp?
What feature, common to more than half the witnesses, undermined the government case against Mendel Beilis?


If you have read the posts on my Mendel Beilis page, you still might not know the answers to all these questions and more.
Read The Anvil, which rereads the transcript and rewrites the information -- with additions from contemporary material -- to show why the government lost this case.
It took more than five brave defense lawyers and the help of dozens of conscientious people.


Email me about buying The Anvil.  $7 a digital copy.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Fourth Principle

We’re talking about leprosy from Leviticus 13 and the fourth great principle that is part of its laws.

The first principle was that leprosy is limited in how it conveys tumah, the condition of being tameh, because all situations that cause tumah have only a limited number of hops beyond which tumah is not conveyed.

The second is that tumah can be changed.  One way preserves the utility of whatever is tameh: a waiting period followed by a positive act.  The other requires damaging the tameh object until it is no longer useful for its normal purpose.  If the damage is ever repaired, it returns to its condition of tumah.

The third great principle is that paskening for yourself does more harm than good.  It can force you to sacrifice everything in your house if you decide that there’s leprosy in it, instead of getting an expert to tell you so.  You do not bear the burden of proof and paskening for yourself that you do flies in the face of Jewish law generally, not just specifically in the case of the leprous house.

The fourth great principle goes under the name safeq tahor tahor.  Literally, it means that if there’s a doubt whether something is tahor or tameh, it is tahor. 

More generally, this principle means there’s a presumption in Jewish law that if something was in a known status and there’s no evidence that the status has changed, then the status has not changed.

This goes hand in hand with the requirement that the burden of proof lies with whoever wants to change the ownership of property.

It also applies to capital crimes.  Until the burden of proof has been met, there is a doubt of guilt, so the accused must be considered not guilty.

As long as the priest has not ruled on the house, it is considered tahor and all the things in it are also tahor.

Another example is the statement that every woman is considered not to be in niddah until one of two things happen.  If she is always absolutely precise in when her period starts, then she is not niddah until that time arrives.  The other is that she can test whether she is niddah and until that test comes out positive, she is not niddah. 

And now I have busted the urban legend that Jewish law is punitive, not merciful; that it seeks to condemn people rather than to acquit them; and that priests could arbitrarily deprive Jews of their property or their lives.  Such things were common in later legal codes originating among Indo-Europeans, which had for their purpose keeping the king in power and not necessarily operating the society for the benefit of its members.  It’s a case of Freudian projection to pretend that this situation, against which most of the revolutions in history have protested, applies to Jews.

Next week I’ll finish off the concept that Jewish women were second class citizens to whom the laws of tumah applied, while they didn’t apply to men.  For that, read Leviticus 15.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Biblical Hebrew -- Genesis 2:12-13

Genesis 2:12-13

 

יב וּזֲהַב הָאָרֶץ הַהִוא טוֹב שָׁם הַבְּדֹלַח וְאֶבֶן הַשֹּׁהַם:

יג וְשֵׁם־הַנָּהָר הַשֵּׁנִי גִּיחוֹן הוּא הַסּוֹבֵב אֵת כָּל־אֶרֶץ כּוּשׁ:

 

Transliteration: v’-zahav ha-arets ha-hi tov sham ha-b’dolach v’-even ha-shoham.

  V’-shem ha-nahar ha-sheni gichon hu ha-sovev et kal-erets kush.

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 that surrounds all the land of Kush.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

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

 

I also didn’t translate Kush but apparently it is the ancestral land of the Kossaeans.  The Kossaeans seem to have called themselves galzu which came into Akkadian as kasdu and then turned into Chaldaean. 

 

Kush also refers to Moshe’s wife Tsiporah if the Midianites are considered to be somewhat related to the Kasdu, but that’s not what Torah says; it claims they are descended from Avraham.

 

What Tsiporah was not, was Ethiopian.  The Egyptian name for Ethiopia was Kash, related to its name for itself, Kush, which appears in Jeremiah 13:23, “shall an Ethiopian change his skin?”  There is a northern Kush, which is Mesopotamian, and a southern one, which is African.

 

I’m going to catch up on some pronoun declensions I should have done long ago.  Here’s “ablative,” “from me”.  This can be used both for “he went away from me” and “what do you want from me.”

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מִמֶּנִּי	מִמֶּנּוּ	First
מִמְּךָ	מִכֶּם	Second/masculine
מִמֵּךְ	מִכֶּן	Second/feminine
מִמֶּנּוּ	מֵהֶם	Third/masculine
מִמֶּנָּהּ	מֵהֶן	Third/feminine

 

Notice the dagesh in the middle mem of of the forms that have two.  Look back at the dagesh rules if you don’t understand why it’s there.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Thank You

Wow.  Over 9K pageviews! 
When I started this blog and posted all that stuff, I was just practicing.
The goal was to put up the Beilis translation without making too many mistakes.
Then to move on to the Fact-Checking and Biblical Hebrew pages.
I hoped people would read them.
A year and a half and 9000 views later, I guess you've been reading them.

Yes, I'm slacking off. 
I guess you don't need basically a rehash of last year's outdoors and gardening posts.
I've shown you things I am doing DIY, or what I know about DIY.
Some of you are up and knitting now even though it's time-consuming.
I'm trying to rant only when I think it's serious; you can get rants all over the web.
I'll let you know if I lose enough weight to fit into my reference chinos.

There are still many more posts for the Fact-Checking page; we're near the end of the legal stuff and this year I hope to move on to archaeology.
There are still many more posts for the Biblical Hebrew page, and by next New Year I hope to be sharing with you something I first read about in 2014.

Here's hoping you can achieve something in 2015, but enjoy your year no matter what.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

DIY -- knitting

I love knitting.  I've been knitting tops and socks for years.
There are ups and downs.
One down is the time it takes.  It takes a couple of weeks to make a pair of socks.
That's if you have an active life.
The up side to socks is, commercial socks either cut off my circulation,
or they're "one size fits all" which means they're too long in the foot and give me sock wedgies.

Tops take even longer than socks, and that's one down side for those.
They're also expensive.
But I like classic clothes: cable sweaters, Fair Isle, argyle, that sort of thing.
Those are expensive to get from a store, too.
They might not come in colors I like.
And just try to find perfectly matching socks.

Handknit clothes should be washed by hand.
It can take them a couple of days to air-dry.
That means you wear them when you want to look nice, not do heavy work.

So buy the cheap tees and sweaters to wear to work in your garden or paint your house.
Those you can throw in the washer and dryer.
But when you want a terrific looking custom made top or a top with perfectly matching socks,
Take a month of free time and knit something for yourself.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Outdoors -- the surge begins

You know I love all the signs of spring.
The first one happened late last week: the starlings came back from vacation.
I could hear their breezy whistle and see them sailing around among the trees.
They tried to mob my bird-feeder; all I had to do was open my back door to stop that.
Oh, sure, they're in black-beak.
After all, they're only here to prospect for good nesting sites.
They won't have their bright yellow mating beaks for about a month.
But the male starlings are back and now I have to be careful.
If I don't keep my gardening closet door shut, there's a 100% chance some starling will stake it out for nesting.

The male robins are also gathering.
My robin is definitely back; I've seen him early in the mornings coming for chokeberries.
Last week he had a scuffle with another robin for control of my turf.
Since then I've seen him posting watch on my back fence.
This week the robins are challenging each other right and left.
Only one can win a given turf.
Then the rest mob up and take out their frustrations beating up on crows.
You go guys!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved