Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Imperfect ASPECT

So Dr. Cook tells us that Biblical Hebrew is an ancient language with the same features as its relatives, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and so on, some of which are dead languages.  Biblical Hebrew has been resurrected as Modern Hebrew, but not in the same system.

 

Modern Hebrew is a tense-system with past, present, and future.

 

Biblical Hebrew is an aspect system with perfect, imperfect, and progressive.

 

“Imperfect” means  action that is not complete.  You can identify it because the markers of person and gender come before the  root letters.  The “aorist” and future “tenses” of Biblical Hebrew are identical because they are really imperfect aspect.

 

Imperfect is often used with a past meaning, but it requires a special prefix and is called the narrative past.   The narrative past has the syntax vav plus imperfect plus subject and so on.  This is Genesis 2:7.

ז וַיִּיצֶר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים וַיְהִי הָאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה:

 

The first word in this example is a narrative past. This action definitely occurred in the past, but we can’t use a perfect aspect because we are between the start and the end of the story and this situation is not yet over as far as the characters are concerned.  The narrative past is followed  by **** elohim, the grammatical subject.

 

That vav is an important issue.  It does NOT repeat NOT mean “and”.  It is part of the verb.  It is the indicator of the narrative past.  A verb that looks like an imperfect but doesn’t have vav, might be future, under one condition.

 

If the syntax is subject + imperfect, that might be a future tense usage.  This is Genesis 49:13.

זְבוּלֻ֕ן לְח֥וֹף יַמִּ֖ים יִשְׁכֹּ֑ן וְהוּא֙ לְח֣וֹף אֳנִיֹּ֔ת וְיַרְכָת֖וֹ עַל־צִידֹֽן:

“Zvulun will live by the sea shore…”

 

BUT if there is a vav attached to the subject, that’s actually the vav of the narrative past, with a twist.  This structure indicates a subordinate relative or coordinate clause, and the vav must be translated “that” (relative clause) or “but” (coordinate clause).  The imperfect verb must then be translated in the past unless there are clear indications in the context that it has a future meaning.  The following is Genesis 2:5-6.  Verse 5 is the main clause.  Verse 6 with the imperfect is the contradictory subordinate clause.

ה וְכֹ֣ל ׀ שִׂ֣יחַ הַשָּׂדֶ֗ה טֶ֚רֶם יִהְיֶ֣ה בָאָ֔רֶץ וְכָל־עֵ֥שֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶ֖ה טֶ֣רֶם יִצְמָ֑ח כִּי֩ לֹ֨א הִמְטִ֜יר יְהוָֹ֤ה אֱלֹהִים֙ עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וְאָדָ֣ם אַ֔יִן לַֽעֲבֹ֖ד אֶת־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה:

ו וְאֵ֖ד יַֽעֲלֶ֣ה מִן־הָאָ֑רֶץ וְהִשְׁקָ֖ה אֶת־כָּל־פְּנֵ֥י הָֽאֲדָמָֽה:

“But all plants….[did not yet] exist…[because **** had not yet caused rain]

“but a mist went up…”

 

What you have to fix in your mind from this post on is that the vav at the start of a verb does NOT mean “and” in most verses of Torah.  And so a huge number of the verses in all translations of Torah are mistranslated, because they always translate this vav as “and”.  Got it?

 

Go over all the verses you have of Genesis so far and read them, carefully making sure NOT to think “and” when you see vav+imperfect, and that will help train you out of a historic mistake.  Take the next week to work on this, a few verses a day.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

It shows!

My neighbor was polishing his wife's new car -- now that's love for you!  -- and I went out because we have different schedules and hardly ever talk.
Almost the first words out of his mouth were "You've lost weight."
I was stupefied.   "It  shows???"
Well, I had realized it before that but it hadn't occurred to me that other people could tell.
I could tell because my reference jeans, which needed lots of strength to zip 12 months ago, now zip with no trouble.
I can even tuck both a tee shirt and an Oxford button-down shirt into them.
And I can sit in them comfortably.
Was it drugs?
Was it Weight-Watchers?
Was it surgery?
No.
No.
No.

1.  Sleep.  I have been sleeping through the night for at least 6 hours and if I wake, I roll over for another couple.  As a result, my body has been making the appetite suppressing hormone leptin, not the appetite causing hormone ghrelin.  I'm more alert and better able to control how much I eat.

2.  Breakfast.  I eat 3 eggs, or a meat-based stew with vegetables and often beans or lentils.  Then I eat a vegetable lunch.   Then an afternoon snack of nuts or fruit.  Then a bedtime snack of a couple of ounces of cheese on bread.  YMMV if you are dealing with Crohn's, celiac, allergies, lactose intolerance, etc.  Also see below on cravings.

3.  Less alcohol.  One serving right before bed.  Sometimes more on Shabbat.  A little extra in champagne on New Year's Eve.  Alcohol is almost the highest-calorie (per gram) thing you can put in your stomach.  Alcohol also interferes with sleeping properly and with metabolizing food, and it lowers your self-control so you're more likely to pig out.

4.  Exercise.  At almost 60, I'm doing exercises to reverse osteoporosis and alleviate osteoarthritis.  Tai Ji Quan; wall pushups; basic Tae Bo; heavy housework which includes moving my bed for cleaning.  I do all my own yard work with hand tools.  YMMV.  Lots of communities have free or inexpensive exercise classes, or maybe your neighborhood is walkable or you have a mall you can get to on the bus so you can exercise when the weather is bad.  Do a web search on bikes or treadmills that generate power you can feed into your tablet.

5.  Fidget.  It used to be that when I sat down to work on a project, I sat there for hours at a time.  Not any more.  I get up on purpose about once an hour.  Most times I do a little cleaning -- dusting, floors, hand washing hankies or hand-knit clothes or dishes.  My house is cleaner, which is a psychological boost, and my BP is under better control.  Getting up is good for my arthritis, and I burn a few calories.

6.  Cravings.  Learn to deal with them.  I wrote about this before.  Buy your cookies, chips, or candy.  Keep them some place where you can't see them.  Make a bargain with yourself that you can eat them on a specific schedule, such as one cookie in the middle of the afternoon or one candy bar on your favorite day of the weekend.  My bargain was I could buy chips on Federal holidays, not every week.  8 times a year, not 52.  NEVER MISS THE SCHEDULE.  That makes a chore out of your cravings and eventually you'll feel about it just like you do about any other chore. 

If this doesn't work, try a different strategy.  If your cravings return before the scheduled time, try to control them for, say, one hour or day more and then eat only the scheduled amount.  After one month, try going back to the original timetable.  You'll slowly get control of your cravings without giving up what you love best.

7.  DIY.  One recent idea about why we are having obesity problems is, somebody else makes our food.  We eat too much that is pre-packaged.  It burns calories to prepare food -- some foods more than others -- so we lose out on a form of exercise. 

Bread is a perfect DIY: kneading is great upper body exercise; you have to get up off your, uh, chair to punch it down or shape the loaves; then you have to get up again to put it in the oven and take it out.  Pasta, noodles, and soba are also great, especially if you stick with the recommended serving size when you eat them.  Make your cookies from scratch by hand.  Find a basic quick bread recipe and throw in cranberries or raisins, dried blueberries or cherries, chopped up dried apricots or peaches or prunes, diced granny smith apples, and different nuts (assuming you don't bump into an allergy).  Make your pie crust and fillings from scratch by hand, and don't forget to try squash-and-grated-carrot filling as well as pumpkin.

NOTICE that all of these tactics are cheaper than pills, special pre-packaged food, or surgery -- except the money you would spend on the power-generating exercise equipment.  Some DIY solutions are going to save you money compared to how you eat now -- and eventually, that will pay for the power-bike or treadmill.

Along with all the money you save on gimmicks, drugs and other chemicals, and surgery, and all the extra pay you make because you live longer.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- What was that??!!

Avraham was in the Holy Land in time to see the destruction of the cities of the plain.

No literature of the area records this.  Egypt doesn’t report it.  Ebla doesn’t report it.  They don’t even report losing contact with these trading partners – or else the tablets saying so haven’t been identified or translated yet.  It all happens in a vacuum.  Except for Torah.

In the 2300s BCE one language was used all over the trading area that used Ebla as a hub: Akkadian.  There might have been local vernacular dialects.  By 2000 BCE, when Utu-Hengel was putting the Mesopotamian hegemony back together, the western part had developed a dialect that was hard to understand in Mesopotamia.  This was the genesis of the western Semitic languages.  Their descendants were Ugaritic/K’naanitic, and Hebrew.  The only dialect which preserved the story of the destruction of the cities of the plain is the dialect that developed among Avraham’s descendants.

It’s not that other locations didn’t know something had happened.  Ash layers in Syria and offshore of Oman date to about 2350 BCE and have similar composition, but they don’t necessarily represent an event that destroyed the cities of the plain.

They may come from a bolide impact in what is now Iraq, in what were swamps, and after millennia of desiccation now have the name Umm al-Bini.  But there’s no proof that this is a bolide impact.  Satellite images show a round sort of pothole, but it’s too dangerous to go in on the ground to see if there are tektites or other evidence that only a bolide impact could form.  I would love to believe that it was a bolide but I can’t support that from the geological data. 

What we don’t have are tablets from Ebla reporting the Umm al-Bini event, if event it was, not even a note about ash falling in Ebla’s streets.  Or the tablets have not yet been identified or translated.  But that would only happen if Ebla had still existed when Umm al-Bini formed.

And we don’t have tablets in Mesopotamia reporting the event, although they were closest to it.  It’s only 160 kilometers from the lake at Umm al-Bini to Babylon.

If somebody tells you that the Umm al-Bini bolide caused the destruction of the cities of the plain, you are hearing a 21^st century urban legend.

Torah as the sole source of a geologic event crops up related to the 1600s BCE and I’ll discuss that in its place.  In addition, I’ll show much  later on this page in the blog why neither story can reliably be called a complete fantasy.

Timing is everything and that leads to the next urban legend.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Traditions

And now for something most people don’t understand because Biblical Hebrew is such an old language.

 

In 2014 I read the 2002 doctoral dissertation of John A. Cook, posted at the University of Wisconsin website.  I also bought the draft of his grammar, written with Robert Holmstedt, posted on scribd.  (Dr. Cook now teaches at the Asbury Theological Seminary.)

 

The first thing that Dr. Cook’s dissertation explains is that Biblical Hebrew is a very old language.

 

Attempts to describe it using European concepts ran head-on into this fact but nobody thought of it as a thing until the 20^th century, after attempts to deal with all the features of Biblical Hebrew failed to fit the usual rules. 

 

Dr. Cook goes over all the failed attempts, and then tells us something that everybody knew, but that failed to shape linguistic studies: Biblical Hebrew is a surviving relative of the ancient Semitic languages and has similar features, just like the surviving relatives of your grandparents have similar features.

 

These features explain why the Bible uses what look like future tense in stories that obviously ended long ago.  They also explain why the prophets, who definitely refer to future times, sometimes use what looks like a past tense.  And they explain the truncated versions of those lamed heh verbs, and the ones with the nun sofit on the end which otherwise look like future tense.

 

The ancient Semitic languages preserved the verb system in proto-Semitic, which also existed in Ugaritic and the Canaanitic of the Tell el-Amarna tablets, in Akkadian and Assyrian cuneiform and in Modern Standard Arabic. 

 

Biblical Hebrew is not a tense-system like its descendant, Modern Hebrew, or modern European languages.  It is an aspect system.

 

What’s the difference?  A tense system describes actions relative to some point in time.  Usually there is a past tense, reserved for actions completed when the sentence is written or spoken; a present tense; and a future tense.  Never they shall meet, except that in a story, you do find characters speaking in the future tense because the actions they have in mind haven’t occurred from their point of view.

 

What’s the difference between that and an aspect system?

 

An aspect system has three types of verbs.  The perfect is something over and done with from the speaker’s or writer’s point of view.  In some systems it is called permansive because its effects persist, or stative because it emphasizes the state reached as a result of the action, which also leads to calling it resultative.

 

The imperfect is something that isn’t complete.  That doesn’t mean it’s going on now or will go on in the future; that just means that the speaker or writer feels like they are in the middle of the action – even if they were born after the action occurred.

 

There is also a progressive aspect which can be translated like the present tense, especially the “is Xing” format.  That makes it basically a gerund, which can be used like a noun, and even an adjective.  And so somebody can talk about a situation that “is/has been/will be Xing”, using the progressive.

 

Not past-present-future:  imperfect-progressive-perfect.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

I'm just saying -- New Year's

And once again, we have somebody who could not survive without putting an alarm in his car.  But he was too cheap to have the vendor set it, he said “I can do that myself.” 

Like all the other jerks who have said the same thing every year since car alarms were invented, he set it too sensitive.  So my block was just treated to its yearly car-horn serenade.  Now he’s going to have to turn it off until he figures out he should have set it where the manual told him to set it, or face the wrath of his neighbors tomorrow morning.  Anybody who dies at the hands of his neighbors for this reason shouldn’t even qualify for the Darwin prize, because that requires a unique and inventive cause of death.

 

A law was passed in this county years ago that if your car is stolen, and the police report shows your keys were in the ignition, you not only get a bump in your car insurance, you also get a fine from the county.   The cops are tired of stolen car reports when actually, the car owner literally gave the car to the thieves.  I heard about such a case on the radio one morning; I went to the store later in the day and some woman parked near me had done the same thing.  I told her about the law and the news story.  Don’t know if she fits the dictionary definition of stupid, haven’t seen her again.

 

And most times when your car is broken into in this region, you have left technology or other desirable things in the car in full view.  So there are news stories over and over telling you “don’t do that!”  Sigh.

 

You don’t need a car alarm unless you think it will save you from the consequences of being stupid. Which it doesn't, because most thieves are smart enough cover their faces if the place has surveillance cameras. So that takes us right back to the first thing I said.

I'm just saying...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- January 2016

Now.
Well, not right this minute.
Maybe not even the day you read this post.
But soon.
About the time the male robins come back to start their turf wars, about the middle of the month.
From then until about the middle of February is when you want to prune most shrubs.
Not azalea.  If you didn't prune azalea last June, pruning it now will mean minimal flowers this year.
But privet.  And once the robins have eaten the berries, euonymus.
And so on.
That's when the shrubs are dormant.
So are the insects, especially the stinging kind which are holed up in their nests, the ones who can kill you if you have developed an allergy to their venom.
And the birds haven't started laying eggs yet.
So between 15 January and 30 February is  when you want to prune the short stuff where birds like to put their nests and their eggs and their nestlings, to protect them against predators.
Remember, the people in the countries where migrating birds winter, can only do so much.
If you cut shrubs or trees at the wrong time and chase birds from their nests for spring and summer, you're a danger to the new generation of birds.
Think globally, act locally.

Speaking of acting locally, here's your lawn care program for 2016.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot-living/2016/01/resolve-maintain-healthy-lawn-2016/

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- where are we?

Because I know what you’re saying.  You’re saying that if Kush is Ethiopia, why does it say that Kush sired Nimrod who ruled in Mesopotamia?

There are three words in Torah which have confusing consequences but a common feature.

Kush is used for places both in the north and the south.  Genesis 10 uses it for a place in Mesopotamia, possibly the great city of Kish.  Jeremiah uses it for an Ethiopian, at a time when the Kushi ruled Egypt from their capital at Meroe.

Qadesh is used for places both in the north and the south.  Qadesh in the north, where Syria is now, is where Ramses II (TWO not three) fought a Hittite king to a draw (but claimed a victory).  Qadesh in the south is where Miriam died during the years in the wilderness in Sinai.

Chiti is used for places both in the north and the south.  Kings II says (in English translations) that King Shlomo married Hittite women.  Unfortunately that’s a bit late.  Shlomo’s times come about 200 years after the Sea Peoples destroyed the Hittite empire. 

Genesis refers to the people from whom Avraham bought Makhpelah as b’ney Chet.  The urban legend is that this is the Hittites, and the timing is not impossible, if you agree with me that Avraham lived in the Holy Land before 2200 BCE.  But there’s no sense puzzling your head about why people from an Anatolian empire would be in the south of the Holy Land.  From the other two examples, it’s perfectly obvious that Hebrew might spell things the same that aren’t the same at all.

The urban legend is that Nimrod is Gilgamesh.  The connection is “hunter” which is tsaid in Hebrew.  The urban legend relates this to a Hittite word (written in Akkadian cuneiform) that is read sai’idu.  But that means “roving, restless.”  So the urban legend jumps to Gilgamesh, to whom Enkidu was given as an opponent to control his restless, combative nature, plus the tale of Gilgamesh and Enkidu hunting the demon Huwawu in “the cedar forest” (Lebanon).  And in Akkadian tsayyadu means hunter.

Now, if Kush, who “sired” Nimrod, relates to Kish, we are right back with Lady Kug Bau.  She was from Kish, which was such an important city that Eannatum of Lagash called himself “king of Kish” when he took over all of Mesopotamia. 

But Gilgamesh was not king of Kish.  He was king of Uruk, and fought Aga the king of Kish.  So we’re probably wrong to think that Nimrod is Gilgamesh.

Further, the original five-tablet version of Gilgamesh dates from just after the Gutian defeat by Utu-Hengel.  That’s too late for Nimrod to rule over all of Mesopotamia.  The last king of all Mesopotamia known by the time of Utu-Hengel was either Sargon of Akkad or his predecessor, Eannatum, who was so pointedly left out of the king list.

And finally, of course, Gilgamesh was the standard “Dick and Jane” of the cuneiform schools, so even the five-tablet version was a closed book to the ancestors of the Jews. 

Setting Genesis 10 in the time of Ebla, before its destruction, means that if there really is a king of Mesopotamia whom Nimrod represents, it’s Eannatum.  And that puts us right after Kug Bau.  Which matches the 2350 BCE destruction of the cities of the plain.

But wait, there’s more.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved