Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Ionians in Anatolia

I’m sure those Greek-reading clergymen noticed the similarity of Iapetos to Yefet.  What they may not have realized is that Ion is just another version of Yavan, a grandson of Yefet. 

Iapetos is listed in the Theogony of Hesiod, who wrote at the same time as “Homer” was developing the Iliad, the 600s BCE.  The Theogony ends where Enuma Elish has its middle – the battle of the gods.  In fact, Greek myth has two battles of the gods, the Titans against Uranos with Mother Earth’s help, and the Olympians against the Titans.

Hesiod’s father arrived in Greece from the Ionian city of Cyme on the west shores of Anatolia.   Cyme was founded by people from Locris.  Locris is a place in Greece described (in Roman Emperor Hadrian’s time) by Pausanias as the origin of wine-growing in Greek-speaking regions, and Pausanias identifies the first man to grow wine grapes as the son of Deucalion.

Now notice where Noach was when he started growing wine grapes.  In Anatolia.  In the Lake Van region.  Archaeology shows that wine grapes were domesticated in this region.  It happened about 4000 BCE. 

I told you to remember that date.  It’s almost in the middle of the period when proto-Semitic was developing.  It’s the same period when Anatolians were messing with meteoric iron. 

The Iliad uses the word sideros for “iron”; sideros is related to Greek for “star”, suggesting that originally the Greek language mostly knew of meteoric or star-generated iron.  However, the text of the Iliad seems to identify two other types of iron in use.  One is the “bloom” that settles out of smelting when ores contain iron as well as the copper wanted for bronze.  The other is “gleaming” iron which might refer to carbon steel.  (Remember, carbon steel developed by 1500 BCE and appeared in the Holy Land by 1000 BCE.)  The Iliad describes arrowheads as being iron.  These three points of information might seem to be later additions adopted for audiences who could not imagine weapons of war made of anything besides iron, but Agamemnon is accused of greed even though his huts are full of bronze and the Achaeans are described as “bronze-greaved.” 

The Iliad is not a story of Bronze Age people.  It is the story of a people on the crossroads using and valuing both bronze and iron.

Or peoples.  The people who destroyed Wilusa by 1160 BCE came from a loose association lumped together as the Sea Peoples based on their description and enumeration on an inscription of Ramses III at Medinat Habu, erected some time after 1175 BCE when (he claimed) he defeated them.  The components, who fought alongside Libyans, were: Ekwesh (part of a puzzle I will discuss later); Pelishtim (the Pleti of King David’s bodyguard, along with the Creti or Cretans); Teresh (ancestors of the Etruscans); Sikila or Shekelesh and Sherden (ancestors of the Phoenicians who founded Sicilian and Sardinian colonies); Weshesh (ancestors of the Oscians); Lukka (Lycians of Anatolia); and Denyen (Danaans). 

The Sea Peoples destroyed Wilusa, then moved inland and destroyed the Hittite capital of Hattusas, and then to the coast and destroyed Ugarit, all within a 40 year period.  The Denyen and Ionians had traditions which were Anatolian in origin, including the wars of the gods referred to in Theogony and later Greek material.  I’ll give more information about this Anatolian connection later.

Oh, just one more urban legend, pleeeze!  I think you will find in most books on the subject that the Sea Peoples are described as Bronze Age.  From the dates and previous posts, you know that by this time, steel was in use throughout southwestern Asia.  So Bronze Age is a hangover (urp!) from old archaeology books.  Scrub your brain and come into the 21^st century, OK?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- verbs starting with alef

All right, let’s deal with some verbs that have peh alef.  One reason for starting here is not just that alef is the first letter in the alphabet, but also that it has one extremely common verb, alef mem resh, “say.”   This is the qal or plain simple binyan.

 

Present

Singular	Plural	Gender
אוֹמֵר	אוֹמְרים	Masculine
אוֹמֶרֶת	אוֹמְרוֹת	Feminine

Past

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אָמַרְתִּי	אָמַרְנוּ	First
אָמַרְתָּ	אֲמַרְתֶּם	Second/masculine
אָמַרְתְּ	אֲמַרְתֶּן	Second/feminine
אָמַר	אָמְרוּ	Third/masculine
אָמְרָה	אָמְרוּ	Third/feminine

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אוֹמַר	נֹאמַר	First
תֹּאמַר	תֹּאמְרוּ	Second/masculine
תֹּאמְרִי	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Second/feminine
יֹאמַר	יֹאמְרוּ	Third/masculine
תֹּאמַר	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Third/feminine

 

Now, first, with a weak letter, usually it disappears in the “future” first person singular.  But we still have an alef here in first person singular.  What’s going on?

 

That alef is the sign of the “future” form.  What normally happens is that in the future tense, the alef is followed by the first verb root letter with a shva under it.  But you can’t use shva under alef.  That only works when the letter has a sound of its own, and alef doesn’t.

 

When you have a form that starts with alef like a normal future tense, but it only has two more root letters, you have five possibilities.  You have a peh alef, a peh yod, a peh nun, an ayin yod, or an ayin vav.  How do you eliminate any of them before you use the dictionary? 

 

The first clue is that vav with the cholem on top.  Or just the vav if there are no vowel markers.  That is the sign of a peh alef verb.  It might be omer, “present” or it might be omar, “future”, but it’s none of the other possibilities. 

 

However, as you know from past discussions, it’s possible to drop vav as part of a conjugated verb.  Then you have either omer, omar, amar (“past”), or emor, imperative.  At that point all you know is you look it up in the alefs, and then you use context to figure out which of the four you have.  But the sample verb here you should learn by heart because it’s extremely common in Torah and memorizing it will save you a lot of dictionary time.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Ionian flood story

Clergymen used to have to study Greek and Latin in college so that they could read primary documents of Christianity.  They might also read Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius, Pausanias, Pseudo-Apollodorus, and Ovid (in Latin), all of whom say something about a flood.  The only one of these that has a complete flood story is Ovid.

The provenance of Ovid is 8 CE; the story is in his Metamorphoses.  Pindar wrote in the 400s BCE; Apollonius in the 300s; Pausanias in the 100s CE, and the same for Pseudo-Apollodorus.  Pindar implies that Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only survivors of the flood, by saying that they started a new human race which arose from stones.  Pausanias refers to the flood when describing Attica.

We don’t know where Ovid got his story.  We don’t know how much of it reflects a story handed down from antiquity and how much he invented.  What we do know is that all of these references come two millennia after the Shuruppak flood and over a millennium after the twelve-tablet version of Gilgamesh.

Until the discovery of Gilgamesh in 1932 and its translation in 1936, westerners might marvel that two cultures, seemingly so different as Judaism and Hellenism, and so often at odds in their histories, would both have a flood story.  The discovery of Gilgamesh seemed to support ideas popular at the time, that all culture disperses from a center, but the center seemed to be Mesopotamia, a revolutionary idea, because up to then all the men at the universities thought Greece was the font of culture. 

What the scholars of Gilgamesh ignored, however, is that each of the stories had its own localized landing site: Omar Gudrun in the Zagros for Utnapishtim and a mountain in Anatolia for Noach.  Greek stories give various places as the landing site for Deucalion and Pyrrha: Mount Parnassus above the shrine of Delphi, sacred to Apollo; Mount Etna in Sicily; Mount Athos in Chalkidiki in the northeast of modern Greece and just across the Aegean sea from Wilusa; and Mount Othrys in Thessaly, slightly southwest of Chalkidiki.  Mount Othrys was traditionally the site of the battle of the gods recorded in Hesiod’s Theogony.  Parnassus is south of Thessaly and was also sacred to Dionysius.

Deucalion was grandson of the Titan Iapetos.  Deucalion’s grandson was Ion, eponymous ancestor of the Ionians, who lived in Achaia in the Peloponnese for a while, and then by the 800s BCE migrated to the west coast of Anatolia, south of Wilusa, where the Iliad developed in an Ionian dialect.  The Iliad says Hector attacked Iaones while fighting among the Achaian camp (Book XIII, line 686); the context differentiates them from Locrians and Boeotians. 

The Ionians are mentioned in a Linear B tablet in Mykenae from the 1400s BCE as Iawones.  And remember that Agamemnon, one leader of the Achaean forces against Troy, came from Mykenae while his colleague, Diomedes, was Cretan.

Iapetos has one more association with Anatolia besides his mythological relationship to the Ionians.  That’s for next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- strong verbs

We’re going to start with a verb I already conjugated for you.  It doesn’t belong to any of the three classes I named last time.  It is said to have “strong” root letters and it will contrast with verbs that have “weak” root letters which I will discuss soon enough.

 

Present

Singular	Plural	Gender
מֹשֵל	מֹשְלִים	Masculine
מֹשֶׁלֶת	מֹשְׁלוֹת	Feminine

 

Past

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מָשַׁלְתִּי	מָשַׁלְנוּ	First
מָשַׁלְתָּ	מְשַלְתֶּם	Second/masculine
מָשַׁלְתְּ	מְשַלְתֶּן	Second/feminine
מָשַׁל	מָשְׁלוּ	Third/masculine
מָשְׁלָה	מָשְׁלוּ	Third/feminine

 

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶמְשֹׁל	נִמְשֹׁל	First
תִּמְשֹׁל	תִּמְשְׁלוּ	Second/masculine
תִּמְשְׁלִי	תִּמְשֹׁלְנָה	Second/feminine
יִמְשֹׁל	יִמְשְׁלוּ	Third/masculine
תִּמְשֹׁל	תִּמְשֹׁלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

First, the roots of this verb are mem shin lamed.  They are present in every tense.  That is what makes this a strong verb.  Verbs with “weak” letters may lose them in conjugation. 

 

Second, notice that the “past” has no prefixes.  That suggests that this is the qal or binyan.  For purposes of looking in a dictionary, when you have a strong letter as the first root letter, you look under that in the dictionary.

 

So if you had a root of qof tet lamed, you would look under qof.

 

Now notice that the “future/aorist” has prefixes before the mem.  They will often appear with a vav at the start, for reasons I’ll discuss later.  But you see here all three root letters expressed after a prefix which shows person, number and gender. 

 

Notice the prefixes alef, nun, and yod.  Those are the ones we have to address when we have verbs with weak roots in this tense. 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

 

Outdoors -- they were right

My  crickets were right.  We had a frost last night.

My pair of mated cardinals are still alive and they remember the protocol we set up last year.
They are already benefiting from the sunflower seeds I bought before hitting the farmer's market.

I don't know if my pet robin is still here.
He got married this year.  His wife might have made him migrate with  her.

The mockingbird was vocal for about a month but has gone quiet.
I know where his nest is.
Mockingbirds are very independent; I haven't been able to coax him to take chokeberries or blueberries.

I partly filled the feeder for small birds and had a visitor.

Later I'll go out and check on something.
Somebody in OH told me the acorns were dropping without their caps.
I said I'd check here but I haven't done it yet.

I probably won't get any more cricket counts.
I had a new storm door installed and it perfectly abuts the threshold put in for my new exterior door.
I doubt the crickets can get in any more.

Now I only have to watch out for slugs.
One night  when we had a heavy storm of rain, I had the exterior door open.
A slug got in through  some sort of crevice to get away from the rain.
It was spread over the bottom of the outside of the door.
I got rid of it  without  killing it but ---- yuck!

I just need a bag of calcium chloride -- melts ice, doesn't  kill grass -- and I'm ready for winter.
I hope.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Jewish flood

All right.  The urban legend is that the Biblical flood story is a version of Gilgamesh.  By now, you know that I wouldn’t bring it up if the provenance supported the urban legend.

The original Mesopotamian flood story is a fragmented tablet naming Zidusura, king of Shuruppak, one of the original five cities of Sumer.  Archaeology shows that Shuruppak experienced a terrible flood in 2900 BCE but recovered and survived until it was destroyed by the Gutians by 2100 BCE.  You can access a translation here.

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.7.4#

The Gilgamesh epic on the same site is here:

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/catalogue/catalogue1.htm#gilgamesh

Notice that this narrative includes only 5 stories.  This is the version of Gilgamesh that existed for centuries.

About 1700 BCE we find a new version of Gilgamesh, in twelve tablets.  The last three tablets are about Gilgamesh’s expedition to find Utnapishtim “the far away” who survived the flood.

Utnapishtim tells his story, and it is almost identical to the flood story in Atra-Hasis, our copy of which dates to the same period.

About this same time, the name Gilgamesh was added to the Sumerian kings list.

Gilgamesh’s flood was published in sections, first by Thomas Fish in 1935, then more parts by Maurus Witzel in 1936 and finally by Samuel Kramer in 1949.

The twelve-tablet version of Gilgamesh has turned up in the Hittite capital 1500 kilometers away, before 1500 BCE; in Megiddo about 1300 BCE (the period of Akhenaten); in Ugarit (which was destroyed about 1190 BCE); in Nineveh between 1300 and 1000 BCE; in Ashurbanipal’s library of the 600s BCE.  All of these finds have slightly different texts.  The story was still evolving in the millennium after the oldest known find of the story about Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim, kind of like the changes in the King Arthur epic from the Mabinogion through Chretien de Troyes to T.H. White’s Once and Future King.

For those who believe that the ancestors of the Jews copied their law from Hammurabi, the 1700 BCE twelve-tablet recension of Gilgamesh seems like a great find.  For those who believe that the ancestors of the Jews copied monotheism from Akhenaton, the fact that Gilgamesh was popular in the Holy Land in that period seems like a great find.  But remember, tablets means cuneiform means low probability that the Jews or their ancestors ever read those tablets.

And what about the Greeks?  That’s next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

 

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- verb root classes

Now I’m going to get into the verb system for two reasons.  The big reason is so you can look them up in dictionaries.  The other has to do with a later subject very important in the Bible and also affecting later Jewish literature.

 

It’s fairly easy to look up nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns in a Hebrew dictionary.  Take  off the definite article if there is one.  Then aside from number suffixes and a couple of internal changes, you look up the first letter and then the second, and you try to find a dictionary entry matching the vowels. 

 

Verbs are different.  Very different.  And they work very differently from Indo-European languages.

 

Hebrew is described as having a triliteral verb root system.  Most of the verbs have three root letters which the language manipulates in various ways to achieve different meanings.  The few verbs with two or four root letters sometimes are based on verbs with three root letters.

 

The Hebrew verb for “do, act” has the root letters peh ayin lamed.  This is used as a paradigm for classifying verbs: peh stands for the first letter of the root; ayin stands for the second letter; lamed stands for the third letter. 

1. A peh alef verb has alef as the first letter of its root: alef mem resh for “say” is an example. 
2. An ayin vav verb has vav as its middle root, such as qof vav mem for “get up.” 
3. A lamed heh verb, which will be very important in some later lessons, has heh as its third root letter and heh yod heh is the most important example because it means “be”.

Hebrew also has, as I said long ago, a system of regularized changes to verbs that achieve the various meanings.  They are called binyanim, singular binyan.

 

Hebrew verbs can incorporate their subject and object pronouns.  Given a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, it might have only one word, a verb with the appropriate prefixes and suffixes for person, gender, and number of the subject, and a suffix indicating an object.  When the verb incorporates the pronouns, it will often add nun and then the pronominal ending.  (The technical term for this nun is “energic” because it shows that the ending is the object of an action verb.) 

 

Hebrew verbs also have three forms which I have been calling past, future/aorist, and present, because those are familiar verb terms and have historically been used to describe them.  Soon I’ll show why they are inaccurate.  But for now, we’re just trying to get you to the dictionary.

 

Next time I’ll remind you of a conjugation we already did and show how these definitions apply.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

 

DIY -- the pie crust debate

I finally made decently flaky crust for a pie and there are things some of the "experts" don't tell you.
First, I use non-dairy, non-lard shortening.  Mother's Passover Margarine is perfect, although it comes in a block and you have to cram it into a measuring cup FOR SOLIDS to make sure you have the right amount..
Second, the Inglenook Cookbook says each crust should be 1 cup flour, 1/3 cup shortening, and a pinch of salt, plus up to 6 tablespoons COLD water.  This makes one crust for a 9 inch shallow-dish or deep-dish pie.
The water MUST be COLD.
I always make 2 crusts, and THE TRICK was I put an egg yolk in 1/4  cup (equals 6 tablespoons) cold water, beat that up pretty well, and dumped it into the bowl after cutting the shortening into the flour.   The dough came out nice and soft, rolled beautifully, didn't need much extra flour to firm up for transfer to the pie dish, and baked up flaky.
Third, they tell you to chill the crust after rolling out. 
You MUST do this if your shortening is butter.  Pastry made with butter ALWAYS  has to be chilled before use to let it age a little while the flour absorbs the butter properly.
You don't have to do this with my margarine.
Another option is, once you get the dough rolled out to the right size the first time, brush half of it with the white of the egg, fold over, and roll out again.  Do this one more time.  Then use any leftover egg white to brush the top crust before baking.
To transfer the dough, roll it partway around your rolling pin, lift and move. 
And then of course you need to make some cinnamon sugar, because you will always have leftover scraps of crust which make nice sugar cookies.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- what's the holdup?

Well, I decided to work off a lot of old stuff, like a quilt that needs to be quilted and bound off.
I'm working a pullover in Wool of the Andes and when I'm sure I have the counts right, I'll publish them.
In the meantime, here is a website  that will make needleworkers go ape.
http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/
When it says "antique", it means "antique".
Some of the patterns and pamphlets in here are well over 100 years old.
I'm using one of them to use up some crochet thread making housewares for a young relative who will soon be out of college.
There are knitting patterns, tatting patterns, cross-stitch patterns, and old embroidery designs.
For the house, for the church, for clothing, for kids' toys.
Knock yourself out.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

 

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Genesis 5

Now we are back to Genesis 5 and the ten generations from Shet to Noach. 

We know that the urban legend says it is a version of the Sumerian Kings List and we know that the Kings List originally dated to about 2000 BCE when Utu-Hengel commissioned it, sealing his victory over the Gutians by asserting how many native Mesopotamian kings ruled before the Gutians came in and messed things up.  The names came from the kings lists kept by various cities in Mesopotamia, with the exception of Lagash, whose king at one previous point had taken over Mesopotamia.

Then after 1700 BCE a prequel was added which goes back to “pre-diluvian” kings which appeared, not in the city kings lists, but in other Mesopotamian literature.

The fact that all the cities of Mesopotamia kept kings lists suggests a common custom of recording one’s forebears.  That’s what Genesis 5 does.  Records the forebears of Noach. 

The ships list in the Iliad is another example of the same thing: the men who captained each ship were claimed as ancestors by later Greeks.

It would be amazing if the ancestors of the Jews had NOT kept a list of their forebears. 

But what about those exaggerated lifetimes?  Again, the later version of the Sumerian kings list shows that such a thing happened in other cultures.  An additional fact is that ancient heroes in Greek mythology have tales told about them which imply longer than human life spans.

So exaggerated lifetimes of ancient progenitors is not unique to Torah.

The ancestors of the Jews – and the Jews of the Babylonian Captivity – had a low probability of accessing the royal archives, and a low probability of learning to read cuneiform, a skill limited to the upper classes and possibly to a hereditary class of scribes.  If the probabilities are both low, then the probability of both of them is their product (remember this because it will become important much later), and the likelihood that the Jews copied the Sumerian king list doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

The genealogies in Genesis 5 do not mimic the Sumerian kings list.  They are a natural cultural custom – recording one’s forebears – and long lives are imputed to the most ancient ancestors.

For next week you can read the flood story, but make sure and read the whole thing right up to the Tower of Babel.  And since you know that quoting out of context is going to cause trouble, make sure and read every verse.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved