21st century Bible Hebrew -- telling words apart

Genesis 1:4

 

ד וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאוֹר כִּי־טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ:

 

Translation:     Gd must have manifested the light for it was good, for Gd separated the light and the darkness.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יַּרְא	manifest
כִּי	because, for, if, when
טוֹב	good
יַּבְדֵּל	divide, separate
בֵּין	between, from
חֹשֶׁךְ:	darkness

 

I’m going to give you raah in both qal and hifil imperfect. They are both good conjugations to learn. We’ll see the hifil several times more in Torah and we’ll see the qal in narrative past.

 

qal

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶרְאֶה	נִרְאֶה	First
תִּרְאֶה	תִּרְאוּ	Second/masculine
תִּרְאִי	תִּרְאֶנָה	Second/feminine
יִרְאֶה	יִרְאוּ	Third/masculine
תִּרְאֶה	תִּרְאֶנָה	Third/feminine

 

 

hifil

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אַרְאֶה	נַרְאֶה	First
תַּרְאֶה	תַּרְאוּ	Second/masculine
תַּרְאִי	תַּרְאֶנָה	Second/feminine
יַרְאֶה	יַרְאוּ	Third/masculine
תַּרְאֶה	תַּרְאֶנָה	Third/feminine

 

You’re saying, but teacher, how do we tell them apart? Well, it’s partly the vowel under the prefix that makes them different in writing. That vowel is there because that’s how these words were pronounced when there was no way to write Hebrew down, or when the vast majority of Israelites or Jews were illiterate. One paper I read estimated that 85% of Jews were illiterate in 100 CE, almost 1000 years after Hebrew had a writing system and over 500 years after Torah was put into writing officially.

 

But it’s also the context.  A prize-winning writer once claimed they couldn’t be told apart. Not in isolation they can’t. But the point of words is to be used with other words to express something meaningful (Torah came long before Dadaist literature, remember), and in this larger setting, you can usually figure out whether somebody is seeing or showing. (There’s a midrash for that.)

 

Midrash Rabbah Breshit 3:3 attributes to Rabbi Yehudah bar Simon, transmitted by Rabbi Berekhyah, that the created things already existed, Gd simply caused them to become perceptible. (Rabbi Berekhyah lived between 320 and 350 CE.)  That’s an even larger context than this verse, or chapter, or book, etc. And that larger context also helps determine whether you are seeing or showing,

 

If you have been reading my Fact-Checking blog, you  know that I’m just finishing up a section on language where I talked about context as determining meaning.  I have more examples there.  It’s a long blog and you can start at the beginning to learn more about how to read Torah.

For now, let's move on to the next verb.  
 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- think DARK

Bugs like light. Especially at night.

So, says Mike McGrath, if your rose leaves are turning into lace overnight, you can get a beetle trap.

But DON'T hang it near your roses.

Hang it far away and put a light on it.

Then turn out ANY lights that shine on your roses at night.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot/2017/06/14147221/

There are other tips in there but here's one more you probably don't know and it will save you big bucks.

Did you know that termites are also attracted to light?

So when your house exterior is lit up, you are calling termites to you.

And if you have mulch, especially hardwood mulch, cuddled up around your house, the termites love that even more.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot/2016/03/garden-plot-blueberries-horse-hockey-terminex-team/

You don't need poison to get rid of termites, you just need to know what Terminex knows, which is discussed in the article.

Bye bye, bugs.

And oh yeah, this will save money on that horrendous power bill of yours.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- AND Sampling Bias

The author’s next attempt at redefinition combines with the fallacy of ambiguity to propose that a certain phrase emended Talmud chiastically.

I can see how you would build Talmud chiastically. How you emend it chiastically is what puzzles me, and the author doesn’t explain it. Let me build from what he does say.

He says that there are directions for emendation in Talmud which the text says were accepted, but that the text as recorded retains the material that should have been emended.

So potentially the phrase he points at might be followed by something like “and that is the halakhah,” meaning that the emendation was accepted. He doesn’t say how he knows that his proposed emendation was accepted.

Unfortunately the phrase he labels as chiastic is qe-tani l’tsdadin (he reverses the words but this is how the expression reads in my digitized Talmud). Two new problems fall out of this.

First, the word tani as “tell, say” appears throughout Talmud, alone and in the selected phrase, and descends to the title of the Tanya by R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founding work of the founding father of Chabad/Lubavitch Chassidism. The author of my academic article is using the redefinition fallacy on this phrase so he can use it as what he claims is a huge number of phrases directing emendation of Talmud.

The phrase appears 14 times in the 2700 pages of Babylonian Talmud. This suggests why the author has to pile up such a large number of possible emendation phrases: if he wants to show that mass emendation went on, he has to show that a mass of material was targeted for emendation and he doesn’t get that from this one phrase. It also suggests why he uses a high redefinition of “I say” to make it not only a proposal but a direction for emendation. But it doesn’t necessarily reflect the function of those phrases in Talmud and he admits that he hasn’t done the research to show that they do prescribe emendation.

Talmud uses qe-tani l’tsdadin to mean that an issue has two sides and the ruling encompasses both of them. This is a proposed explanation for how the halakhah reads, not a direction to change the text of Talmud. Our writer cannot redefine a phrase well understood for over a thousand years by millions of people.

Then the author commits the fallacy of sampling bias. Out of the 14 occurrences of qe-tani l’tsdadin in Babylonian Talmud, 7 follow the existing halakhah (no emendation in sight); 4 are rejected (no emendation); 1 is followed by a counterargument (no emendation); 1 includes two propositions made in a prior discussion.

The 14th example is marked in Talmud with the word kashya, meaning that the difficulty/question remains unresolved. What’s worse, this example includes material from 4 rabbis, only one of whom used the phrase qe-tani t’tsdadin. Statistically, the author’s claim doesn’t work.

I fully understand that scholars are breaking down a large subject, Talmud, into smaller pieces for study. That’s perfectly scientific. But at some point results have to be fitted back into the umbrella topic, and it’s not worthwhile doing that with results that incorporate fallacies.

And now one final problem with this paper.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- evidentiary epistemic

Genesis 1:4

 

ד וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאוֹר כִּי־טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ:

 

Transliteration: Va-yar elohim et-ha-or ki tov vayavdel elohim ben ha-or u-ven ha-choshekh.

Translation:     Gd must have manifested the light for it was good, for Gd separated the light and the darkness.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יַּרְא	manifest
כִּי	because, for, if, when
טוֹב	good
יַּבְדֵּל	divide, separate
בֵּין	between, from
חֹשֶׁךְ:	darkness

 

Now I’ll go back and discuss this new binyan, the hifil.

 

Mostly it gets tagged as “causative”, that is, there’s a connotation that somebody made something happen.

 

That’s a label and it doesn’t match the function of this binyan in every context.  There are some verbs for which the qal is not transitive. Some of them use the hifil for their transitive form.   There are also verbs which have a transitive qal, but the hifil is not a causative version, it means something quite independent. There are even verbs with no attested qal that are attested in hifil.

 

The qal of the verb is raah, “see”.  But  since this isn’t qal, we have to find some other way of saying what it means. If we do fall back on “causative”, “causing to see” can be translated as “manifest”.

 

That’s what happened in this verse. Manifesting the light was how Gd proved to us, not only what He created, but also how He certified that it was He who created it.

 

So there’s that Janus effect again, looking both ways.

 

Now we come to a new feature of the certainty epistemic.

 

When it is at the start of several actions, usually in several verses, it usually introduces evidence that proves why we are certain of the initial situation.

 

When the certainty epistemic is followed by a narrative imperfect, the narrative imperfect is how we know the certainty epistemic happened. If you are going to translate it, you would say “X must have happened, for Y [in the narrative imperfect].” This Y often has consequences which will be immediately described; you’ll see this after the flood story. At any rate, we have it here.

 

Now think about that. Separating things often means that they were mixed together. Play with that in your head a little. The light and darkness were mixed together. Who knew? Well, Gd did. He’s the only one who would; anybody else would only have perceived the primal darkness.

And now for a little quirk about telling verbs apart.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- Vintage reproduction

Some day I'll be good enough at knitting lace to do this.  It's a modern reproduction of a Victorian Shetland shawl on display at a museum.  Gorgeous to the point of tears!

The pattern is FREE from Ravelry whose members combined to create the reproduction.

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-shawl

I wanted it because of the traditional motifs it uses.

I've been collecting Shetland motifs. I started with Elizabeth Lovick's paper, free online.
http://www.knittingbeyondthehebrides.org/lace/SameButDifferent.pdf

She has swatch photos and diagrams but no stitch counts or row numbering. According to reviews on Amazon, this is also true of some parts of her books. With the free paper, I went through and transcribed the counts for the Shetland versions of the motifs.

These are shared motifs among the traditions; the paper does not document all the Shetland motifs  there are, and that's why I was googling around leading to the Ravelry pattern. 

Then there are Frances Lambert's famous Twelve Patterns for Shetland Shawls. You may be able to see them here (Hathi Trust has a lot of books only viewable in the US).
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433006773919;view=1up;seq=388

I dug out my ancient Step by Step Book of Needlecraft, which first taught me to crochet and knit and has the original of my (slightly redesigned) pullover pattern. Published by Bantam, it is still available online.  I remembered that it had a Shetland shawl (page 100) and now I know that the center is worked in the traditional Ocean Wave motif, which I transcribed.

I had done about 3 repetitions and it was not working out, so I re-checked my transcript against the book and sure enough, I had a mistake. So I fixed it, printed a fresh copy, and unraveled everything to start over.  I worked it in leftover worsted weight yarn on size 9 straight needles. The only trick for this particular example is that you cast on 96 stitches, and the first row has a bunch of k3tog which reduce the stitch count to 88 which carries on through the rest of the knitting. Knitting it all by itself, I only cast on 88 stitches plus 5 on each side for an edge pattern.

Pinterest has lots of pages on knitted lace patterns from all traditions, many of them free.

If you're having trouble with symbols, try this page.
http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/chart_knit.html

And finally, if you have already worked some traditional lace and want THE reference book for it, this is recommended in Ravelry's writeup for the Queen Susan shawl pattern:
Miller, Sharon. Heirloom Knitting

It's about 300 pages of information for at least $150 with 37 5-star reviews. It's out of my price range and I'm not ready to use it yet but maybe you are.

If I have managed to get you all worked up about Shetland lace, now you have a number of resources to make your own!

Oh, just one more!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Quest for the Ring

The next step in showing that there can be ring structures in Talmud would be to show that Jewish culture uses ring structures in other material.

For that, we could point to the parallelism in Prophets and Psalms. But we would expect to find parallelism in Psalms because it is a common feature of poetry everywhere, as I suggested when I cited to the Victorian period poem “Bells.”

To really demonstrate ring structures in Jewish material, it’s a bit much to go through all 2711 pages of Babylonian Talmud, or all 1700 pages of Jerusalem Talmud. There’s an easier way to do it that would show an ancient habit of ring structures in Jewish material that for many reasons I have discussed, has a high probability of originating orally. Torah.

You don’t even have to use all of Torah, you can just use Genesis, almost all of which is narrative, part of the original concept for use of ring structures.

Try identifying what you think the ring structures are, by chapter and verse. Your students need to know what to memorize; you know that from your own classes whether you’re student or teacher.

Second, you test whether one or more narratives in Genesis that have ring structures are memorized better, when chiasmus is emphasized, than when memorized verse by verse.

You have at least two student groups. They all have to understand Hebrew. You haven’t proved anything by using a translation because Torah is the literature of Hebrew-speaking people. So your first choice of learners is Israelis.

You have to have a clean slate. You want young Israelis who haven’t been exposed to these narratives much. That means secularly educated Israeli children. Part of them will learn the narratives through chiasmus and part will learn them verse by verse. Which group learns them faster? Which group remembers them more accurately? Which group remembers them longer? That’s your experiment.

You also have a ready-made control group. In Israel ultra-Orthodox children know Torah by heart by age 13, so you catch them while they are learning it. You interview their teachers to find out how fast on average these children memorized the same narratives. You also have a built-in opportunity for testing remembrance. Do these children go to synagogue on Shabbat with their fathers, and do they remember the narratives of Genesis from one Simchat Torah to the next?

If you find that your ring structure learners do memorize faster, reproduce more accurately, and remember longer than your control group (the verse learners), you have shown that you’ve identified an advantageous learning mechanism for Genesis narratives. You may also have shown that the ancestors of the Jews could have used a similar technique.

But you haven’t necessarily proven that Jewish oral material originated as or developed ring structures as a tool for learning, because your control group learns the way their parents learned and so on, all the way back.

And the learning method is documented in Talmud (Babylonian, Taanit 27b); it says that the only time it is permitted to split Torah verses is when teaching it. Children were taught part of a verse at a time, to learn by heart, before learning to combine them into one whole that they remember. Which they do. For life. As proven by the expertise of millions of Jews for hundreds of years.

But the author of this paper hasn’t run the experiment. He didn’t even define ring structures for Talmud, his topic. What did he do? That’s for  next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- certainty epistemic vs. narrative past

Genesis 1:4

 

ד וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאוֹר כִּי־טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ:

 

Transliteration: Va-yar elohim et-ha-or ki tov vayavdel elohim ben ha-or u-ven ha-choshekh.

Translation:     Gd must have manifested the light for it was good, for Gd separated the light and the darkness.

Letters in this lesson: ט, ד, ח

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יַּרְא	manifest
כִּי	because, for, if, when
טוֹב	Good
יַּבְדֵּל	divide, separate
בֵּין	between, from
חֹשֶׁךְ:	Darkness

 

The first verb in this verse ought to look suspiciously familiar. Remember the verbs that are used in certainty epistemic? This is one of them! Let’s run it down:

 

Verb root class: ayin alef, lamed heh. First letter resh will do some odd things, too.

Binyan: a new one, hifil.

Aspect: -- I’m not going to assign one because although it  has a prefix, it’s not a straight-up imperfect.

Person, gender, number: 3^rd masculine singular. Actually, most of the certainty epistemics that I can think of are this but there are some 1^st person singular and plural.

 

Now I want to discuss something that probably didn’t occur to you but I want to save this new binyan for a different lesson.

 

Why use a certainty epistemic and not a narrative past while we are in the middle of the story?

 

This verse helps me explain it. How do we know light exists? Because it’s perceptible to us. Even with your eyes closed you can sometimes tell if a light is shining because it is warm. That’s going away now with CFL and LED lights but with all prior methods of lighting, it was true.

 

This verse uses a certainty epistemic because the existence of light is perceptible to almost all of us at least at some point in our lives. The light is the perceptible evidence of the truth of what the Bible is telling us.

 

In oral traditions, the narrator or reciter is expected to say things that agree with the culture. If she doesn’t, her audience loses interest or makes fun of her. At some stage of transmitting the narrative, whatever she is talking about has to be perceptible to serve as evidence before she can use the certainty epistemic. If it disappears or the culture turns it back on that thing, eventually narrators will have to change over to using narrative past for it.

 

So where almost always anah, “respond” is in the certainty epistemic, there is one verse which has the narrative past, Numbers 32:31. In that verse the R’uvenites and Gadites “answer” Mosheh about their desire to stay east of the Yarden River. The verb might have been in certainty epistemic early in Israelite history. But the easterners dropped out of sight and out of mind. There was a long-standing tradition that this discussion happened, but it wasn’t refreshed in the minds of the Israelites by seeing the easterners every year or every seventh year. So at some point the narrators had to start using narrative imperfect to get the story across without sounding crazy or stupid or something.

This verse also lets me discuss the other use of the certainty epistemic.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved