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

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