Fact-Checking the Torah -- scholarly writing

There’s a basic problem with all academic work that came out in papers I ran across while researching this blog.  Sources.

When academics write for other academics, part of that work has to be a review of the literature.  If you leave out a source, your peers will send you comments such as “why didn’t you include the seminal work of X?” 

One of the problems of doing academic work is getting access to all the sources.  Some of them are only in the stacks of a university on the other side of the country, the ocean, or the globe.  Sometimes you can get them through interlibrary loan.  Sometimes you can get them by travel.

What also happens is that your peers haven’t read some of your sources and can’t get access to them.  They can’t check on whether you understood the conclusions or how the conclusions were supported.  They have to accept that you did good work.

Posting your work on the internet is a good technique to encourage peer review.  It also gives access to your work for average people.

And average people not only won’t have access to all your sources, they will have access to hardly any of them.  The vast majority of people with internet access don’t live near your university, and the majority don’t live near any university.  Those who do, have lives and they have no time to go to the stacks to review your sources.

Academic work plays to academics.  The rest of us ignore it.  Sometimes with good reason.

The sources may be full of fallacies such as quoting out of context, using translations as if they prove something about the primary document (this will come up again soon), using refuted “authorities”, and so on.  An academic has to do more than just collate snippets of information from this book and that study.  He has to drill down and make sure that his sources don’t have problems of these types BEFORE he cites them.

If he understands that they are problems.  Finding fallacies in academic work suggests that not all academics understand how to put together a logical basis for their claims. 

And that, ultimately, is why I have been encouraging you to study Hebrew and Aramaic, and giving you links to primary documents that are free online.  When you can access them directly, you can ignore all the academic work produced, which piles up an exponential amount of pages compared to the primary documents.  You don’t have to use your local university library.  You don’t have to try to get an interlibrary loan.  You don’t have to budget for travel.  You can stay home and learn the material more accurately than anybody who relies on translations and commentaries, which is what academics sometimes have to do if they think their reviewers don't know the language.

And as I have shown, the meaning of a primary document easily gets lost in translation, and still more so in commentary.

You have the power.  Use it.

Next week I start posting on the subject I have been leading up to for almost exactly four years. If you have read the other posts on this blog page, the direction I take will not surprise you.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- idioms

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.

 

Idioms. Translators hate idioms. They are usually multi-word, and until you get used to the language, they can be hard to look up in a dictionary. First you have to pick a word to look them up under. Then you have to find the part of the entry that gives the idioms.

 

The one you are looking up might not be there.

 

This verse should be a test case for any translation you are thinking of buying.

 

What it should have is “between X and Y”.

 

If it has “between X and between Y”, it is probably touted as “literal” by the publisher.

 

In English we never say “between X and between Y”. X is one thing, and we can’t say between one thing. Y is a different thing and we can’t say between one thing, even if it is different from something else in the sentence.

 

The English idiom is “between X and Y”. Physically, it means there’s a space between them, and what we’re talking about falls somewhere in that space.

 

Here, we’re creating a space between them.

 

Actually, you know as well as I do that there’s no physical barrier between light and dark; there’s a perceptual barrier. Here it’s light; there it’s not light.

 

It’s a standard aphorism in many cultures that you cannot have a single thing without its opposite. You would not know what light is, but for the contrast with darkness. So while Gd manifested the light ki tov, the fact is that we can’t perceive light except as a difference from darkness. There’s nothing bad about darkness, not inherently; it’s just that light was selected as evidence of creation and how it came about – and Who did it – because, having originally been mixed with the darkness, there was only one Person who could perceive that and make the distinction manifest.

 

Ki-tov is another idiom. It appears in other places than the creation narrative. It’s hard to tell whether manifesting the light was the good thing, or whether the light was the good thing. Most commentators say it was the light that was good, but obviously, the manifesting had to be good too because without it, we wouldn’t perceive the light.  Modifiers usually refer to whatever is closest to them so I’ll say it’s the light.

And now a new take on an old word.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

I'm just saying -- tools

I have a new sympathy with guys and their tools and their complaints about tools.

Tools have been dumbed down for people who don't bother to read the manual or take classes on how to use them.

So the tools have become  useless for people with real work to do.

It has hit the kitchen, too, and that's where I come in.

I replaced a peeler/corer with a grocery store product. It was marginal at peeling and broke in a year. The old one lasted like 15 years under the same workload.

So I went looking for a new replacement on a website (not Amazon) that has been reliable.

They had something that looked right from a reputable company, Ekco, famous for nonstick cooking sheets and pans.

Nah.

It's marginally better than the grocery store peeler and looks sturdy enough to last.

But it's too blunt to work on eggplant. I love eggplant. I pickle it, fry it, stew it, etc.

It's like trying to use children's blunt scissors to make a dress.

It's a sad day when real cooks can't cook because the companies making the tools are catering to people who shouldn't even be in the kitchen since they won't learn how to do the job right.

How many carpenters, electricians, and remodelers have said the same thing in the last thirty years or so?

I'm just saying...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Ginsberg's Theorem

It seemed pretty obvious to parallel SWLT with the laws of thermodynamics.  Now I’ll summarize.

Rule 1 says, in a way, that cultures can’t operate without expression, but they sometimes get trapped in a no-win situation by how they express things.  Because “he” was the default pronoun, it took centuries for women to obtain equal rights under the law.

Rule 2 says that it’s impossible to use a language without understanding the grammar, which has to control your behavior as well as your words.  Words alone won’t get you to the table. 

Rule 3 says nothing means anything in isolation from the rest of it.  You can’t get out of the culture and still fully understand the language or the material that uses the language.

There’s an old joke about the laws of thermodynamics called Ginsberg’s Theorem that this reminds me of:

1.  You can't win. (restatement of first law of thermodynamics)

2.  You can't break even. (restatement of second law of thermodynamics)

3.  You can't even get out of the game. (restatement of third law of thermodynamics)

 

As far as the zeroth law, maybe there should be an amendment to Ginsberg’s Theorem that says that there are no wild cards and no draws; you have to play the hand that you are dealt.  That would equate to my zeroth law of SWLT; you have either written communications or oral communication. 

I said you can’t redefine words and you also can’t pick meanings out of the dictionary that suit what you want to say, you have to use the words according to their meaning in the given context.

But that means using the words in the language of the source document, in the meaning they had for the people who operated based on that document and transmitted it to posterity, as evidenced by the entire context of the culture using that source document. I’ll discuss another dimension to “draws” in another post.

You can’t prove anything from translations or commentaries because they are so error-prone.

You can’t prove anything if there are fallacies in your claims.

Memorize these last two issues.  They are the basis of the rest of this blog.

One last post before I change subjects.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Rare verb forms

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.

 

Now, I have not been ignoring va-yavdel. I wanted to give you the regular-type material before I got to it. Yavdel is almost a hifil but not quite. I’ll show you.

 

Verb root class: STRONG, that is, none of the letters do any fancy tricks.

Binyan: almost hifil

Aspect: narrative imperfect

Person/gender/number: well, look at the subject and you tell me. Don’t peek at the table!!

 

hifil

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אַבְדִיל	נַבדִיל	First
תַּבְדִיל	תַּבְדִילוּ	Second/masculine
תַּבְדִילי	תַּבְדֵלְנָה	Second/feminine
יַבְדִיל	יַבְדִילוּ	Third/masculine
תַּבְדִיל	תַּבְדֵלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

The yod inside the verb is the classic sign of the hifil. This yod is all that distinguishes the progressive of hifil and piel when written without vowels.

 

The problem is, it’s missing from the verb in this verse. What’s more, you don’t see a dagesh in the middle root letter in the table, just in the verse. Here’s what the piel looks like:

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֲבַדֵּל	נְבַדֵּל	First
תְּבַדֵּל	תְּבַדְּלוּ	Second/masculine
תְּבַדְּלִי	תְּבַדֵּלְנָה	Second/feminine
יְבַדֵּל	יְבַדְּלוּ	Third/masculine
תְּבַדֵּל	תְּבַדֵּלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

In piel we have the dagesh in the dalet and the right vowel under it, but the first two vowels are wrong.

 

The answer is, I don’t know what binyan this is supposed to be. This and one other in the creation story are the only examples in Jewish scripture.

 

But that’s no reason to call it either hifil or piel.

 

And it’s also no reason to call this a scribal error or anomaly.

 

I’ve found plenty of forms in Torah and Tannakh that I couldn’t classify according to what we currently know about Biblical Hebrew.

 

When I think of an anomaly, I think of things that have a notation on them in a standard print copy of the Tannakh. Those notations were made by Jewish scholars between 500 and 1000 CE, that is, right after the Talmud was put into writing and nearly at the same time that the commentaries called Midrash were collected. The annotated version of Tannakh is called the Masoretic text. I discuss it on my Fact-Checking blog.

 

When I think of a scribal error, I think of the fragments in Cave 4 at Qumran, which seems to be storage for scrolls that weren’t kosher for study. I also wrote about those on the Fact-Checking blog.

 

YMMV. 

Now a little about the translator's bete noire.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- more lace

Two more finished projects from  my leftover yarn.

Here is the finished ocean wave pattern. I know there's a mistake in it, and I know if you're going to knit this you'll use colors that at least work together.

 

Here is the other pattern I worked from leftover yarn. It's Lovick's saltire with cat's paws, two repeats, separated by New Shell. The motifs are in her paper on northern lace-knitting traditions, which is online. It took me five tries to get this right. There was a mistake in the diagram for New Shell. It had a symbol for a k2tog, but there were two YOs in that row. When I did a K3tog, it came out right.

The edging on both pieces is the same one published in my Bantam needlecraft book for use with its Shetland shawl that uses the ocean wave center. I saw the same edging on a baby's christening shawl designed by a knitter from Unst and published by Paton's in the 1940s. This was part of the clue that the Bantam shawl was a real Shetland pattern as the writer claimed.

There's a concept called the "safety line" which I haven't used yet. You can see it toward the start of the leaf pattern video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_OuQnSlOeo

Working on the saltire scarf, I wished at times that I had put in a safety line even just at the start, but also between each repeat.  What I actually did was end each vertical repeat with a purl row instead of a knit row. Then I could retreat to the stockinette stitch region if I messed up a lot. YMMV.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- who did what?

Since Talmud doesn’t show signs of the claimed textual emendation, and halakhah did not change as a result of those 14 cases of qetani l’tsdadin, I have to ask what the author means by “emend”. The everyday meaning of emend is to change something, in order to improve it or fix a problem.

In the article under discussion, the author used Rashi’s comments on Talmud as an example of emendation. In the actual Talmud, however, Rashi’s comments are marginal notes in the classic Vilno edition. They repeat part of the text which appears on the page, and then they explain it as Rashi understands it. The famous Adin Steinsaltz himself refers to Rashi’s commentary as proposed emendations, so pre-Rashi editions would not have his notes and also would have the same text as what he commented on.

If this is the meaning of emendation that the author is working by, he failed to support it in his writing.

The author claims that a descendant of Rashi says Rashi’s viewpoint did result in changes to the text of Talmud. The paper I’m talking about does not, however, go to the lengths of finding a manuscript of Talmud from before Rashi’s time that differs from the Vilno edition. Instead, he cites to an authority as reporting what Rashi’s descendant said. We can’t check the cited authority; it’s still under copyright and it’s not online courtesy of the author or publisher.  So we can’t be sure that this descendant actually saw both pre- and post-Rashi manuscripts with different texts.

But online resources tell us that Rabbenu Tam, a descendant of Rashi, had a problem with emendations by R. Meshullam b. Natan of Melun, and possibly R. Ephraim b. Isaac of Regensburg, to Rashi’s own commentaries, not to the actual Talmud. So we aren't getting a true picture of who did what to whom when, and nobody told our writer “hey, you got this wrong.”

It took a lot of work to find these things out. I didn’t even find the Steinsaltz thing until about a week before I posted this. A writer should not be satisfied just to borrow an idea here and there. An author has to suppose that her source might have abbreviated for space, misunderstood, or just plain misquoted to suit a viewpoint.  It takes experience with all these issues to develop the suspicious sort of mind that looks behind the sources to the primary documents.

And it’s the job of peer review to teach young writers how to develop a suspicious mind – but only if the advisor has been put through the same kind of training. Apparently the writer we’re talking about didn’t have that kind of advisor.

But first, both of them would need the tools to access the primary documents. The author of this paper didn’t have the tools to know that  a) he was quoting the phrase backward, let alone b) that the primary document didn’t support his claims about the phrase. Neither did those who performed his peer review.

Or else he was relying on his “peers” not to check up on him. Understand, the great rule of writing is “know your audience.” Know what they are interested in, know how to phrase things so that they can understand or accept what you say, know what they know so that you can either cater to it or extend it.

If the author intended to extend his peers’ knowledge of Talmud, he failed to give them accurate information. If he was catering to them, he relied on their lack of knowledge, tools, or willingness to check up on him, to let his work pass for acceptable. 

Which is a pretty sad thing to have to say about a scholarly writer and his peers. This topic will come up again in the last part of this blog.

In the next post I'll give an illustration of what this whole section means and prep you for the final part of the blog.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved