Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- it's not nifal

So Biblical Hebrew has several ways of forming agentless statements and when it deals  with a legal decree or ruling, it uses nifal.  In Modern Hebrew, nifal is the “passive” of the qal with no such connotation.   Biblical  Hebrew also has what I call qual and which some resources call qal internal passive.  If languages never create or maintain morphology without a reason, what does qual do that nifal can’t?

The qual points to consequences. L’shet yulad a son; the consequence is that human life goes on after the flood, because Noach is descended from Shet. Sarah tuqach to Paro’s house; the consequence is that his house is plagued and Sarah is given back so she can go on and give birth to Yitschaq. L’noami yulad a son; the consequence is the birth of King David.

By the way, I just gave you two of the cases where the logical subject is in a prepositional phrase.  The logical subject is not the agent of the verb.  Shet’s wife is the agent in one case, and Rut – not Naomi – is the agent in the other case.

In legal material, a qual notifies the audience that the law has an unexpected or counterintuitive consequence. To show what I mean, I’ll ring the changes on the agentless binyanim. See Exodus 21:29-31.

כט וְאִם שׁוֹר נַגָּח הוּא מִתְּמֹל שִׁלְשֹׁם וְהוּעַד בִּבְעָלָיו וְלֹא יִשְׁמְרֶנּוּ וְהֵמִית אִישׁ אוֹ אִשָּׁה הַשּׁוֹר יִסָּקֵל וְגַם־בְּעָלָיו יוּמָת:

ל אִם־כֹּפֶר יוּשַׁת עָלָיו וְנָתַן פִּדְיֹן נַפְשׁוֹ כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־יוּשַׁת עָלָיו:

לא אוֹ־בֵן יִגָּח אוֹ־בַת יִגָּח כַּמִּשְׁפָּט הַזֶּה יֵעָשֶׂה לּוֹ:

In verse 29, a dangerous ox kills somebody; the term huad is a hufal in perfect aspect. It’s a legal definition of the ox’s status as “dangerous” (because it gored two days in a row) and uses the  perfect aspect because the conditions have been completely fulfilled. The owner has been given notice of this status (presumably by an official source authorized to do so).

The owner doesn’t guard it properly, and it kills somebody so the ox is stoned. This is nifal imperfect.   It’s the legal sentence imposed (presumably by an earthly court which is the only possible authority) to prevent the ox from killing again.  This is not a narrative past; it is a future use of the imperfect aspect.

The last word of the verse is yumat, another hufal definition. The owner is “a dead man” according to legal definition BUT this is not a capital crime so there’s no duplicate conditional.  This time the hufal is in the imperfect aspect.  I have a feeling this is there to get the audience’s attention because of its relationship to the death penalty, mot yumat.

In verse 30, we have yushat twice. This is qual and it is the imperfect aspect. Since the owner is now legally defined as a “dead man”, you might think he could be liable to the death penalty. In fact, counterintuitively, he is fined (presumably by an earthly court). The fine isn’t compensation for the death of whatever the ox gored. It’s redemption for the owner.

Verse 31 has the nifal yeaseh. This is another legal ruling. The fine is a dead end. The owner of the ox is not subject to capital punishment. The parents of the dead boy or girl cannot appeal to a court of 23 and get a death penalty, using the grounds that this was not an adult who was responsible for his or her own safety, but a child.

From what I just said, you can better understand the phrase mot yumat, the duplicate conditional. Yumat is a hufal legal definition: somebody is “a dead man”, he ought to die for what he has done. You also know that the aspectless mot functions as a command. You have to use it because in the situations where it applies, you are commanding somebody to look into using the death penalty. Verse 29 is not and never can be a command to investigate whether the death penalty applies.

One more agentless banyan to go.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- September 2016

I know, I'm late.  I had other fish to fry.

Toward the  bottom of this article  is what you should be doing to your veggies now.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot-living/2016/09/fall-great-time-build-new-garden/

Make sure you have some paper bags and apples.
With  your green tomatoes, make picallily  or fried green tomatoes or chow chow.
When you're tired of those, bag the tomatoes with an apple in each bag.
As the apple wrinkles, the tomatoes will ripen.
Check every few days and take out the ripe ones.

AFAICT you shouldn't be pruning anything  now.
Unless you want to cut off tree branches that got fall webworm.
Like my mulberry.
When I saw the gauze,  I didn't freak.
I did some research on the  Internet.
I found out almost right away that gypsy moth don't like mulberry, so it wasn't that.
Mike McGrath told me gypsy moth spin  gauze in the spring and what I had was fall webworm.
I left it alone, and my blue jay was eying it, probably drooling over the possibility of some nice fat grubs.

We're in a drought and I'm leaving my grass alone.
It's all curled up to retain moisture and I want it to shade its roots so they don't burn.

I'm pulling out Korean dill (or mint, I'm not sure which it is any more) and chicory.
They are spent for the  year.

My morning glories, however, are gorgeous.

 

And the bees are  now showing  up in the morning before the glories close and gettin' some.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved 

Fact-Checking the Torah -- {{who?}}

I am not alone in calling the Septuagint a bad translation. 

When Jerome did his Latin (Vulgate) translation starting in the late 300s CE, he started with the prophetical books in Septuagint.  By the time he finished, he realized that the Septuagint didn’t reflect the Hebrew well.  He did Psalms next; actually he did two translations of Psalms, one from Septuagint and one from Hebrew.  They are different.  So at the end, when Jerome translated Torah, he gave up on Septuagint as a source and translated directly from the Hebrew.

In the 1500s CE when Calvinists translated the Bible into French and English, they started with the Hebrew instead of the Greek, except for Christian scripture.

In the 1600s CE when James I of England commissioned a new translation of the Tannakh, he insisted that the translators ignore Septuagint and translate directly from Hebrew.

In 1994 when the American Catholic Bishops commissioned a new English Bible translation, one thing that happened was a change to Isaiah 7:14 that the King James scholars didn’t make.  Previously this verse was translated according to Septuagint, which uses parthene, “virgin” to translate Hebrew almah.  The Hebrew does not mean a technical virgin; that is betulah.  A priest must marry a betulah under Jewish law.  The fact that an almah might not be a virgin flows from Proverbs 30:19 where it gives a list of four things that leave no trace, including “the way of a man in an almah.”  For a man to have sex with a virgin does leave traces, eliminating her tokens of virginity, the subject of Deuteronomy 22 that I cited before.  But not when a man has sex with a non-virgin. 

The only excuse for Septuagint to use parthene in Isaiah 7:14 comes from a mistranslation in Genesis 34:1-5 where it calls Dinah a parthene after Shchem rapes her.  That’s a physical impossibility if parthene meant what we call “a technical virgin”, one who still has her “tokens of virginity.”  If it didn’t have that meaning in Septuagint times, two things fall out.  The translation of Isaiah 7:14 can be correct.  Also by 100 CE, three centuries later, the meaning had changed so that it did mean technical virgin. 

So when Matthew 1:18 copied the concept from Septuagint’s Isaiah, it ended up shaping Christian doctrine about the virgin birth but it didn’t represent the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 and it might have misunderstood what the Septuagint translators meant.

The change to the American English Catholic Bible eliminates the virgin birth except as a direct derivation from a translation.  And it admits that the translation does not accurately translate the Hebrew of Tannakh.

I think the Septuagint translators were people who didn’t consider Tannakh as holy but as a political tool, and they didn’t worry about perfect precision in their translation.

We know that Torah and most of Tannakh, existed in writing by the time Ptolemy I and II ordered the Greek translation, except possibly Esther.  And that leads to another urban legend.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- the passive Hebrew never got rid of

So if you haven’t given  up on me for messing with your head, you are here because you agree that Biblical Hebrew doesn’t  have “passive” verbs, it has binyanim that are used in agentless statements.

You are familiar with the names of three of them: nifal; pual; and hufal.  I have coined the name qual for the fourth agentless binyan.

Before I go on, I want to take care of those of you who are bouncing in your seats waving your hands in the air because I know what you want to tell me. The “passive” of qal is nifal.

That’s true in Modern Hebrew, but Modern Hebrew has dropped the qual and the connotations  that agentless verbs have in Biblical Hebrew. What you’re reading is a lesson about Biblical Hebrew, where the qual is alive and well, so to speak.

But since you are more familiar with the nifal, I’ll get it out of the way. Nifal has the connotation of something that happens because of a legal decision. See Genesis 17:14:

וְעָרֵל זָכָר אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יִמּוֹל אֶת־בְּשַׂר עָרְלָתוֹ וְנִכְרְתָה הַנֶּפֶשׁ הַהִוא מֵעַמֶּיהָ אֶת־בְּרִיתִי הֵפַר:

The term nikhr’tah ha-nefesh is a punishment at the Hands of Heaven called keret. It means all your descendants dying while you are still alive. The nifal in any context tells the audience that a legal decision applies in the given situation.  The agent in  a nifal can be understood as Gd or an earthly court, depending on the issue addressed by the ruling.  In the case of nikhr’tah ha-nefesh, it’s Gd.

The history of nifal is that every Semitic language has a comparable form with “n” in the prefix; in Arabic it’s Form VII and in Quranic Arabic it means submitting to a decree. Except Aramaic (Neo-Babylonian). It can make agentless statements, but it doesn’t have a form that takes “n” in the prefix or that only refers to legal rulings. I never looked into why that would be. There’s a doctoral dissertation in that for somebody, I’m sure.

My position is that languages don’t invent word forms for no reason, or preserve them when they have no use any more. So there has to be a reason why Biblical Hebrew has both nifal and qual, when Akkadian has no qual (as far as the fragments go) and Aramaic (Neo-Babylonian) has no nifal. Why do we find qual in Torah which also uses nifal?

That’s for  next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- anti-bacterial nonsense

So Friday I tripped, fell on my concrete walk, scraped my knees, and bled some.
Did I pull out an anti-bacterial soap?
I did not.
I washed with castile soap and rinsed carefully.
The FDA agrees with me.
http://patch.com/us/across-america/heres-19-ingredients-fda-just-banned-soaps

Anything you use on your hands gets into your body through the pores.
This has been known for years.
Doctors who use hand sanitizers have been testing positive for alcohol in the bloodstream.
http://www.livescience.com/14315-hand-sanitizer-drug-urine-alcohol-test.html

I highly recommend that you go through everything in your house that you get on your hands when you use it.
Check the ingredients against the list in the first article.
Throw out everything that has one of those ingredients.

Do you have anything left to wash with?
Are you freaking out because you think bar soap has too much bacteria on it?
Child, how often do you throw out your toothbrush?
You think there aren't bacteria on that?

If you are worried about antibiotics in food causing problems with health care,
you now have to look into the mirror.
If you have fallen for the sales pitch about anti-bacterial ANY house or body product,
YOU are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Stop being hysterical.
Stop buying products that breed super bacteria that can't be killed.
And read this last article.
https://gogreenhongkong.com/2011/09/20/the-truth-bar-soap-vs-liquid-body-wash/

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- understanding what you're saying

So the Septuagint could have been done by somebody reading the Hebrew from a written scroll – or rather scrolls, since the rest of Tannakh is not recorded on a Torah scroll and would have been written on separate scrolls. But there’s one more issue which complicates the question.

There are just under 6000 verses in Torah. Only 5% of them were marked up by the Masoretic scholars as having the wrong vowels, and the notes give the correct vowels. What does that mean?

The Masoretic scholars usually get credit for inventing the system of marks used to represent vowels in Biblical Hebrew. If they invented them, how did they get written versions that varied in how the vowels were used?

Go back to something I already said. There are four ways to represent an “a” sound in Biblical Hebrew vowels. Their use is not arbitrary. The grammar controls which one goes where. It has to do with the letter they are used with, the grammatical assignment of the word – such as noun or verb – the root class to which a verb belongs, the verb binyan, verb aspect (not tense, not in Biblical Hebrew), verb person number and gender.

That’s right. In Biblical Hebrew a verb is classified six ways from Sunday (sorry) and each of them plays a role in the vowel signs used when writing the verb out in context. The Masoretic scholars knew what vowels were required to record meaning correctly. They had various texts which differed from the rules, and noted the correct usage in footnotes of a text that had incorrect usage.

But the writing is only a representation of the spoken language, and it developed after  -- sometimes centuries after -- the spoken language.  People know what they're saying and what they mean as soon as they start talking. 

The Septuagint translators (or transcribers) could not have gotten the construct state 100% wrong if they understood Hebrew. 

A much-praised scholar named Deissmann did the initial work with papyri newly found in Egypt in the late 1800s (not the Nag Hammadi papyri, they weren’t found until 1945).    He helped bust the urban legend that koine was a dialect of Jews in Alexandria; the find he studied showed that koine was the language of the entire empire of Alexander and dealt with all kinds of humdrum issues  like business letters, wills, etc. 

He also addressed whether the Septuagint translators started with a Hebrew version that was much different from what the Masoretic scholars had. His conclusion, at the turn of the 20^th century, was definitely NO, the version they used in the 200s BCE was not much different from the one handed to the Masoretic scholars in the 600s CE. He could show that the Septuagint translation catered to Greek usage at the time, and if it seems out of line with either the Masoretic text or the cultural interpretation, that’s because the translators weren’t trying so much to reproduce the Hebrew as to let Greek speakers understand the results.

Yeah, that went well. 

I am not alone in calling the Septuagint a bad translation. That’s for next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- "getting rid of passives"

Slight change but it’s a good thing.  If you want to review these lessons, I’ve made it a bit easier.  Go back  to the  first post about Dr. Cook’s dissertation.

At the bottom of each post there is now a  link to the next one.

About January 2015 I started chasing a verbal form called the internal passive. It started because a scholar named Schorch, who specializes in Samaritan literature, tried to claim that it involved what I had just learned was the narrative past.

This is another subject where learning Arabic exploded what all my sources on Hebrew were teaching me. So here we go for another roller coaster ride.

In Biblical Hebrew, there are seven binyanim.  The qal, piel, and hifil get labeled as “active”, while three binyanim with “oo” as the vowel in the first syllable get labeled “passive”. This is different from a past participle, which has “oo” in the second syllable.

Translations have shoehorned onto them the label “passive”, a form that appears in Greek, Latin, French and so on. And so most grammars of Hebrew, both Biblical and otherwise, call these “the passive of X” where X  is one of the “active” binyanim.

I need to change the dialogue here and I have good reasons to do so that will help you, not only with Biblical Hebrew, but also with Arabic if you ever decide to learn it.

What Biblical Hebrew and Quranic Arabic both need sometimes is “agentless” statements.  Sometimes the agent is understood.  The verb can’t happen if Gd doesn’t take action.  In other cases the verb is part of a narrative and the agent is named elsewhere in the narrative. In half a dozen cases, the logical subject is given in a prepositional phrase but he (in one case she) isn’t the actual agent.

In legal material, use of an “agentless” structure identifies that it doesn’t matter who the agent is, the verb applies  to him, her, them, etc. no matter who they are. The law applies  to everybody.  The  agentless binyanim let us ignore issues like age or nonage, male or female, individual or group. 

They also let us ignore who issued the decree or made the determination. The appropriate authority may be identified in another part of the legal code and once somebody is part of that authority, who they are doesn’t make a difference in whether the law has to be carried out or not. 

That’s important in a culture that lasts for decades, centuries, or millennia.

It's also more of that both-ways-looking thing I’ve been talking about.

The most important thing to understand, is that at least two of these binyanim show up in Biblical Hebrew as a direct inheritance from proto-Semitic, and they have cognate forms in all the other ancient Semitic languages (with sort of one exception that I might get around to and might not). 

If the others haven’t been detected in other ancient Semitic languages, it’s probably because  their grammar books are morphological and not functional in nature.

I want you to absorb all that and I’ll get into specifics next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved