21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:13, "do" perfect aspect

Genesis 1:13

 

יג וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם שְׁלִישִׁי:

 

Transliteration: Va-y’hi erev va-y’hi voqer yom shlishi.

Translation:     There must have been evening and there must have been morning, a third day.

Letters in this lesson:

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

שְׁלִישִׁי

third

 

There’s nothing new here, folks.  Remember that the va-y’hi is a timing expression and notice that we are halfway to the end of this narrative.

 

Let’s move on to the perfect aspect of asah, “make, do,” in qal. Memorize this because you will see it a lot.  

 

Singular	Plural	Number/Gender
עָשִיתְי	עָשִינוּ	First person
עָשִיתָ	עֲשִיתֶם	Second person/masculine
עָשִית	עֲשִיתֶן	Second person/feminine
עָשָה	עָשוּ	Third person
עָשְתָה	עָשוּ

 

An easy pop quiz next time.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

I'm just saying -- it's not your fault

You know how you pick out a size 10 and it doesn't fit? Well, it's not your fault.

A retailer admitted to me something I suspected for decades.

Clothing manufacturers do not sew to standards.

They do not say ok we're going to label this size 10 so it has to come out to x inches in the (bust/waist/hips).

They just parcel it out and get it sewn up as fast as possible.

They don't even test random items and retrain or fire whoever did the sewing.

That's only one third of the problem.

The next third is the wholesaler who buys this crap. They have a contract with retailers to accept so many items at such a price. No standards enforcement.

The retailers are the third  part of the problem. Their buyers don't give a hoot how small a  percentage of purchases actually wind up in the customer's closet.

They are selling an image and it doesn't look anything like American demographics.

One retailer near me went out of business decades ago. They consistently had sales racks full of sizes 2-8 but almost nothing for sale either full price or less, in the actual size demographic of 12-16. At last they couldn't stand the shoddy work their buyers, wholesalers, and manufacturers were doing.

So first with brick and mortar stores, and now with Internet sales, it's a crapshoot whether that size ten will fit you.

But it's not your period, the doughnut you had for breakfast, the time you decided you were too tired to work out.

Yes, work out, yes, eat right, losing the weight this way will keep you from getting diabetes and having other deadly health problems.

But if you're doing it to fit into a given size clothing, it will never work because the clothing makers don't care if it fits.

It's not your fault.

I'm just saying....

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- walling in DH

Karl Heinrich Graf gets credit from Wellhausen for fundamental work in DH, although neither called it that at the time.  Graf’s introduction to his Historical Books of the Old Testament suggests a number of reasons why DH has gone so wrong.

While claiming to extract Biblical study from monocular shackles of both Judaism and Catholicism, Graf claims his Protestant perspective is the only way to find the truth.  He claims the other two have been stymied; this is an example of the general ignorance of Judaism previously demonstrated by Astruc.  In the 1860s, when Graf wrote, two trends were continuing.  One was migration of Jews to America, the forerunner of migrations which brought challah and bagels to the American kitchen.  Another was purchases of parcels of the Holy Land from the Ottomans, the foundation of the modern State of Israel.  At this time conflict between Orthodoxy and Chassidism died down, allowing both of the more traditional movements to use their energy in other ways. 

Graf’s standpoint marks a written version of DH’s isolationism.  Whybray credits Wellhausen for thickening the walls around DH. This is one more thing that locks DH into its conjunction, without the mutual support of which real sciences, soft or hard, take advantage.  Perhaps DH proponents intended it to become a monolithic empire of religious thought, which  is borne out in  the 1918 work of Edgar Brightman. He performs the redefinition fallacy to say that “scholar” only applies to those who agree with DH.  Using a fallacy discredits Brightman. 

Graf was relying on an ancient connotation of “science” as meaning study.  Herodotus called his work archaeologos, but there’s no way that in the 400s BCE, he meant the kind of work done by Cyrus Gordon or William Dever in the 20^th century CE.  What Herodotus meant was studying the history of nations.  He did it from his armchair, through the reports of others.

Graf views his work as study and that’s why he says Wissenschaft.  Unfortunately, as with “hypothesis,” he was crashing into a new world where ambiguity in the understanding of Wissenschaft misled his successors to believe that they were building on a scientific foundation.

This is an SWLT issue.  The people who think DH is a science, or that it is a proven theory, don’t understand how science works and that they are failing the test of Occam’s Razor or using fallacies at every turn, on top of rejecting the support of other fields.

The problem is not that Graf was a product of his times.  The problem is that he could not see outside his own times, that he was blind to the implications of what he said, that he didn’t even have the wisdom to see that everything he criticized in other scholars, he was about to impose on his own branch of studies.  The problem with Graf is that he was a product of his prejudices.

But he did say one thing that could have made DH less of a problem – if his successors had recognized him as the authority he thought he was.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved 

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- progressive habitual

Genesis 1:12

 

יב וַתּוֹצֵא הָאָרֶץ דֶּשֶׁא עֵשֶׂב מַזְרִיעַ זֶרַע לְמִינֵהוּ וְעֵץ עֹשֶׂה־פְּרִי אֲשֶׁר זַרְעוֹ־בוֹ לְמִינֵהוּ וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב:

 

Transliteration: Va-totse ha-arets deshe esev mazria zera l’minehu v’ets oseh-pri asher zaro-vo l’minehu vayar elohim ki-tov.

Translation:     The earth brought out grass, herbs seeding seed of its kind and tree making fruit that has its seed in it of its kind; Gd must have manifested, ki-tov.

Letters in this lesson:

Vocabulary in this lesson:

תּוֹצֵא	brought forth (v)
עֹשֶׂה	make (v)

Here is the progressive aspect of asah. What you see happening in this verse is another use of progressive: what the trees are doing is habitual with them. This is an adjectival use of the progressive, comparable to “the baking pan” where “baking”, a gerund, modifies “pan,” a noun.
 

Plural	Singular	Gender
עֹשִים	עֹשֶׂה	Masculine
עֹשוֹת	עֹשָה	Feminine

Now look at totse. The root is yatsa, but this is partly a hifil; I know that because of the long “o”. However, if it was the hifil imperfect, it should look like the table below, and you will see these forms in later verses.
 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אוֹצִיא	נוֹצִיא	First
תּוֹצִיא	תּוֹצְאוּ	Second/masculine
תּוֹצִיאִי	תּוֹצֶאנָה	Second/feminine
יוֹצִיא	יוֹצִיאוּ	Third/masculine
תּוֹצִיא	תּוֹצֶאנָה	Third/feminine

 

You might think that totse would be an imperative but that starts with heh. I will discuss a permissive/prescriptive form in a later verse. If that’s what’s going on here, I suggest that this verse is permitting/requiring the dry land to bring forth plants and that’s why Gd had the seas withdraw to reveal it.

An important verb next time.
 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved 

Garden -- illegal lawn service

You have to read this Mike McGrath post to believe it. See the guy with the fescue about halfway down.
https://wtop.com/garden-plot/2017/11/mulching-time-protect-bulbs-shrubs-winter-arrives/slide/1/

So basically this lawn service was charging money to break the law.

If your lawn care service feeds your lawn more than McGrath indicates, fire them now.

If they create mulch volcanoes against your tree trunks, fire them now.

If they put down mystery mulch instead of composted leaves, fire them now.

If they want to prune your trees or hedges now, fire them.

Before you hire anybody to work on your lawn or landscaping, ask for their credentials.

In Maryland, you can insist on hiring only licensed tree care experts.

You can also insist on hiring only a Master Gardener -- you can even become one yourself,  see the University of Maryland extension service website.

But don't get cheated into breaking the law.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved  

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Graf in Graf-Wellhausen

Karl Heinrich Graf gets credit for establishing J and E beyond a doubt. At least, Wellhausen gives him that credit. Graf’s book The Historical Books of the Old Testament is on the web. The introduction is a beautiful indicator of why DH has gone so wrong.

Graf says that Torah has to become divorced from Jewish culture to be properly understood.

Because you have been reading this blog, you know that it has been a divorce from Jewish culture that has led to urban legends which I have debunked.

Graf says that it is the insistence on a single perspective that has tied Jewish commentators up in shackles (his word), the same as the Catholic church has been tied up in shackles. That demonstrates Graf’s prejudices. He writes as if Protestantism is the only possible correct perspective for any research into the Bible.

Graf says that a single school of study which claims for itself all rights to judge what is correct, will later find itself stymied.

No truer words were ever spoken. That is the position where DH now finds itself. Claiming that it knows THE truth about Torah, and ignoring advances in archaeology as well as in our understanding of how language develops and operates, has created a paradigm with an infinitesimal probability of being true. But true to Victorian scholasticism, Graf believed that his own work will never be overturned by later discoveries or trends.

Graf specifically rejected Astruc’s (and later Hermann Gunkel’s) idea that Torah came together out of fragments.

This is the essence of the doctrine of completeness and invention ab initio, one of which is too ambiguous for proper proof, and the other of which I will deal with some time from now.

I don’t know how Graf could believe that manuscripts survive centuries without scribal errors. He surely knew about the Masoretic annotations I discussed in the Lost in Translation section.

The problem of variations in manuscripts was well known in his time to people studying Samaritan scripture; it was known to Rev. Brian Walton who produced the London Polyglot Bible in the 1600s, incorporating both Samaritan Pentateuch and Samaritan Targum. It was known to the collectors of manuscripts of Samaritan “Chronicle” starting in the 1500s and continuing into Graf’s times, according to Turnbull.

The problems of manuscripts are even better illustrated in the Qumran scrolls. Of course Graf didn’t know anything about  Qumran.

But wait, there’s more.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- noun/verb relationships

Genesis 1:11

 

יא וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים תַּדְשֵׁא הָאָרֶץ דֶּשֶׁא עֵשֶׂב מַזְרִיעַ זֶרַע עֵץ פְּרִי עֹשֶׂה פְּרִי לְמִינוֹ אֲשֶׁר זַרְעוֹ־בוֹ עַל־הָאָרֶץ וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim tadshe ha-arets deshe esev mazria zera ets p’ri oseh p’ri l’mino asher zaro-vo al-ha-arets va-y’hi khen.

Translation:     Gd said let the land sprout sprouts, plants having seed, fruit tree making fruit of its kind that its seed is in it on the earth; it must have been so.

Letters in this lesson: ז

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

תַּדְשֵׁא	sprout (v)
דֶּשֶׁא	sprout (n)
עֵשֶׂב	grass, plant, herb
מַזְרִיעַ	making seed
זֶרַע	seed (n)
עֵץ	tree
פְּרִי	fruit
מִין	kind, sort, type

 

Remember that I said I was going to watch for another example like va-yavdel?  Well, we have it here.  Tadshe has the same vowels in the same places.  What it does not have is a dagesh in the  shin in the middle.

 

Also notice the relationship between two pairs of words in this vocabulary: tadshe, deshe; mazria, zera.

 

In English, we do all kinds of things to nouns to get verbs and vice versa. Television becomes televize, compute becomes computer, telephone can be either noun or verb, etc.

 

In Hebrew the root letters of the verb are always in the noun, and then some of the same prefixes and infixes will be used as in the verbal binyanim, to get the necessary sense. If you remember mavdil, you can see that mazria is from the same binyan,  but zera doesn’t look anything like the verbs we have already seen.

 

That said, we have esev here, which is green plants, and it makes a good example of what happens to a noun when the first letter is a guttural: alef, heh, chet, or ayin.

 

Which should make you think back to the conjugation of aseh and rachaf. So here is a chart for esev which is masculine, and for a feminine noun that starts with a guttural.
 

indefinite	construct	Person/gender
עֵשֶׂב	עֵשֶׂב	Masculine singular
עֲשָׂבִים	עִשְׂבֵי	Masculine plural
הֲלָכָה	הֲלָכַת	Feminine singular
הֲלָכוֹת	הִלְכוֹת	Feminine plural

 

Notice the “i" in the construct plural.

 

Halakhah means Jewish law and, as you might have guessed, it has the same root as halakh, “walk”.

 

Esev, on the other hand, has no known verbal counterpart that I know of. Harkavy’s dictionary says the verb would mean being bright green, but he has no examples in Tannakh of its use. Neither are there any examples in Mishnah, or in Jastrow’s Talmudic dictionary. So Harkavy has an entry based on the relationship between verbs and nouns in Hebrew but it’s never used.

New verse, new verb form next.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved  

Fact-Checking the Torah -- quick note

This just in from our "turn it over and over" department. I added a comment to the following post.
http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/06/fact-checking-torah-quest-for-ring.html

Couple or three points.

First, the Babylonian and Jerusalem schools of Torah do things different ways. However, they have the same basis, Torah amplified and explained by Mishnah. Babylonian Talmud simply reports the conclusion, and by tagging it to a specific scholar, might be rejecting it.

Jerusalem Talmud is much more pegged to the actual text, and narratives like this are illustrations. I'll come back to that after I finish demolishing Documentary Hypothesis.

Second. You can never rest on your laurels if you want a rep for knowing Judaism. Once you know something about Torah, you have to also know something about Tannakh.  You have to know Mishnah.  You have to know Gemara. The more you know about BOTH Gemaras, the more you know about each of them. And so on.

"The more you know" means how they connect back into Mishnah, and Mishnah back into Torah, and how Tannakh relates to them.

So get on the stick, use the Fact-Checking Resources page to find free resources, and start working on your rep or bucket list or chops or whatever you want to call it.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- cheese again

I owe all of you an apology. The mozzarella recipe I posted some time back does NOT work. I'm not clear on why, but I think it's the temperature. This recipe uses a higher temperature and it probably works or it wouldn't have such good reviews.
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/30-minute-mozzarella-cheese/

Now the hard stuff.  Here is the hard cheese recipe I use. It uses yogurt for a thermophilic culture.
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/homestead-yogurt-cultured-hard-cheese/

It takes less time than cheddar and I have gotten several nice cheeses with it. Tips.
1.  DO buy a plastic BPA-free mold with follower. The follower compresses the curds; the mold should have holes or something to let out the remaining whey.
If you are only going to process one gallon of milk per batch, buy several. You will want to put the follower of one that you don't need at the moment, on top of the follower on top of the cheese, and then put weight on top of that to press the cheese. I was in this position because I used a gallon pot for warming the milk. If you have or can buy a larger pot, you'll get a bigger cheese out of each batch.



Here is a cheese fresh out of the mold starting to dry.

2.  Be patient after you add the rennet. The recipe doesn't say this (a different recipe does, see below),  but it takes up to an hour for the rennet to do its job.

3.  Tap water is good for the bath. You should set it on the warm burner where you warmed the milk, but turn the burner OFF. Yes, it will cool, but not enough to jeopardize the curding.

4.  Don't forget the vinegar wipe. This retards growth of mold.

5.  A little chemistry. The wax you use, if you are going to age the cheese a long time, is a hydrocarbon. So is the butter you spread on this cheese during the initial aging period. They do the same thing but it's easier to get the butter off when you go to eat that first cheese because you can't stand to wait any longer.

I used some of one of my first cheeses in an omelet when it had aged a couple of weeks. Not bad. It will age some more & I'll try it again.

Here is a cheddar cheese recipe. I bought annatto especially for this, so I would know which was which. You can use cultured buttermilk for mesophilic cultures; use the same amount as you used yogurt for the hard cheese.
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/cheddar-cheese-recipe/

I made several batches of this without buying a press and I used stuff I had around the house, added up to get the right weight.  The cheddaring means that getting into press takes longer with more intervention, and the press needs to stay on longer.

I bought cultures and made yogurt and buttermilk to use for cheesing. You can also use the buttermilk to make sour cream and cream cheese. My first two tries at cream cheese were a bust so I will have to  go to a store near me that sells Trickling Spring lightly pasteurized half and half. The heavy and light cream and half an half in your store are probably ultra-pasteurized and all the recipes say DON'T USE THAT. So my first sour cream was nice and firm but didn't have much flavor.

Don't use store-bought yogurt as a culture unless you check the ingredients for food starch and pectin. I was going to use Dannon for this but they had started adding food starch one year, after adding pectin the year before. Another manufacturer putting profit ahead of food quality. The culture I bought to make yogurt with tells you how to make sure it's thick, if that's what you want. But the mfg doesn't have time to waste on doing things right.

Now you know I don't DIY if there's nothing in it for me but there is. This link gives the ingredients of Kraft American cheese.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/kraft-singles-kids-eat-right_n_6879658.html

Notice the gelatin. If you keep halal or kosher, you need a guarantee from Kraft that they ONLY use plant gelatin.  If they won't commit to that, you can't eat this cheese because some gelatin still comes from animals, and you can't be sure the animals qualify for halal or kosher.

Some of the other stuff goes under "can I buy this on the shelves of the grocery where I buy the cheese" and the answer is "no". It's additives meant to preserve the product or make it cheaper to manufacture. But cheese freezes well for up to a year and if you make sure to thaw it  in the fridge it won't come out crumbly.

The down side to making your own cheese is, as I said, that YOU MUST COMMIT to keeping your instruments/utensils scrupulously clean. You cannot use chlorine, this is not about disinfecting and anyway, as you know, the recipes assume some mold will grow in or on the cheese. You should not use detergents, especially those that are bad for the environment. This is where my switch to all-Castile soap has been a benefit,  BUT I must wipe the pot and things down with vinegar and towel them off to remove the salts.

That said, as long as you get the temperature of the milk TO the right value before adding cultures or rennet, and you don't stray too high when using a mesophilic culture, cheese is pretty forgiving.

And pretty tasty.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Astruc and the Neuchatel

Jean Astruc ignored contradictions to the facts he claimed as the basis for his analysis and the actual contents of the text he chose to support his claims, and he incorporated illogic that survives in DH to this day. What’s not to like?

Well, he also gave a disingenuous reason for using the translation he used.

Astruc used the French Bible translation carried out at Geneva at the same time as the English Geneva Bible was being translated. Astruc claimed he chose the “Neuchatel” because it supported his claims, when in fact it doesn’t. Some of Astruc’s claims ignore what it says.

Why did Astruc really use the Neuchatel? It was a matter of readership.

Astruc could never have gotten an imprimatur, permission to publish, from the Catholic church. It would have claimed he was misusing scripture. Astruc wrote in the middle of a renewed swell of the Counter-Reformation, during which his own father, a Protestant minister, converted to Catholicism.

Without that imprimatur, Astruc could never have developed a readership among good Catholics, except those who felt they could read his work with impunity for one reason or another.

His only other readership would have been Protestants. But Protestants would not have read material incorporating the Vulgate, or maybe they couldn’t. Latin was a requirement of the universities, and the universities to a large extent were still dedicated to turning out clergy.

Astruc’s work would not have made its way into non-clerical circles in Latin. He wrote in the French of the 1700s, familiar to women from the romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery, as well as to men who needed it as the lingua franca of European politics during le grande siecle. He needed material in French to illustrate his writing.

There were other French translations of the Bible. He admits that. But they were all produced under Catholic auspices. Geneva was thoroughly Calvinist.

I found the Neuchatel online and give a link to it in the bibliography. Astruc does not reproduce it accurately. One of the places I cited earlier, Genesis 28:1-4, reads dieu tout puissant in the Neuchatel. Astruc claims it reads dieu fort, tout-puissant. So Astruc is changing the data to support his case – and at the same time this particular set of verses undercuts him even when accurately cited, because it does not contain the right name of Gd for his B (DH’s J).

Astruc’s work does not support DH. It is based on false facts and fallacies. Everything in DH based on his work, whether directly or through subsequent authors, has to be ditched.

And some of them did ditch some of it....

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:10, noun plurals

Genesis 1:10

 

י וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לַיַּבָּשָׁה אֶרֶץ וּלְמִקְוֵה הַמַּיִם קָרָא יַמִּים וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב:

 

Transliteration: Va-yiqra elohim la-yabashah erets ul’miqveh ha-mayim qara yamim vayar elohim ki-tov.

Translation:     Gd called the dry land earth and the gathering of waters he called seas; Gd must have revealed that it was good.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

מִקְוֵה	gathering, collection
יַמִּים	seas

 

If the first word of the vocabulary looks familiar, you have good eyes. It’s a noun form of the verb you saw in the last verse. Yes, it’s true, Hebrew builds nouns and adjectives out of three letter roots, sometimes the same roots as it uses for verbs. This is a verbal noun.

 

In Jewish law,a miqveh is a natural collection of at least 40 seahs (22 liters, 5.5 gallons) of water, that renews itself. It is used for immersion for various reasons. You can see that an ocean should be eligible for this use, and that is indeed what Jewish law says, and it includes rivers and permanent lakes. The Chabad organization runs a miqveh near the Yam ha-Melach (Dead Sea) but it is in a building set back from the shore. This is to preserve the modesty of people using the miqveh.

 

See if you can tell me the difference between the following words.

 

Plural	Singular
יַמִּים	יּוֹם
יָמִים	יָם

 

Somebody once told me that without the vowels, Hebrew was a free-form language. According to that argument, if the plurals above were used without the vowels, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether the text mean “seas” or “days”.

 

That’s not true. Come up with a context in all of literature in which you could read “seas” where you should read “days,” and not get confused. I will be very interested to see what you come up with, but right now, without going through all of literature that has ever existed in the world, I have a lot of trouble believing that you would be able to make sense out of a book that discussed ships sailing the days of the ocean, or setting a record by making a trip in two seas instead of three.

 

A written language is a recording of how people express themselves in their language, and with exceptions such as dadaism or the failed Russian formalist school, the written language will use the same concepts and idioms as when people speak out loud. Writing is not at all free-form.

 

Thiis verse is where we get the possibility that the manifestations were good in and of themselves – but only the manifestations, and since the raqia was not revealed, Torah had to separately say va-y’hi khen.

Next time: more on nouns.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- terribly retro

I got this idea while watching a Constance Bennett movie where she worked as secretary to a playboy lawyer. The movie was first-run in 1930 so this was ladies' business wear the year of the market crash. 

Here's a screen shot of the sweater from the front.

Antique Pattern Library has a PDF of a Corticelli booklet from the 20s that calls this a tuxedo sweater, see below.

There are two ways you can do this. Either do a cardigan with no button holes, which from a later scene this apparently is, or knit the bottom nine inches as a pullover and then at the natural waist start a V-neck cutaway with that little binding stitch I showed you on the pattern for the sleeveless top.  Another variation would be  to start the V on the round where you start the armholes.

Use steeking on the armholes and then add the sleeves. At the bottom of the sleeves, work a k1/p1 rib for just one row to keep them from curling, although working them in the round will lessen the problem. Don't make wrist-fitting cuffs; you can see they are more like jacket sleeves.

Use a DK or lighter weight yarn. Cashmere would be good. Rowan, The Fibre Co., Sublime, and Lana Grossa among others, make cashmere blend DKs, and Valley Yarn and Jade Sapphire make 100% cashmere DK.  You'll need US size 4 needles or maybe size 3 depending on how fine you want the gauge to turn out.

You can jazz this up (get it -- jazz? -- it was a jazz age movie) with wide ribs, cables, horizontal stripes or zigzags halfway between the shoulders and armpits, with duplicate-stitch designs (use old cross-stitch charts), even with Fair Isle motifs.


Here's a leaf-and-berry motif that struck me as very retro the first time I saw it. I think my mom had an old top with a design like this. Make sure the motif count works with the stitch count you need under the shoulders.

See if you can find a match between the color of the  yarn and a thin leather belt that fits at your waist. With the V starting at the armpits, you could fit a wide patent leather belt at the waist. Both are shown in the movie.

You also want a matching, contrasting, or coordinating skirt or slacks. Knitpicks has a free skirt pattern sized for use with Lindy Chain DK yarn which is a cotton-linen blend. The pattern includes a lace border but you can leave that off and make sure to work a couple of rows of k1/p1 at the bottom. The same stitch counts would work for a DK cashmere if you can find one.  Takes a horrible long time to knit a skirt, and the wear and tear could be bad for cashmere. Your other alternative would be, try to find a yarn that works with the color of a skirt or pants that you already have.  

More vintage patterns are available here
http://freevintageknitting.com/women.html

And here, from Antique Pattern Library.
http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/pub/PDF/6-JA038Corticelli18.pdf

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Astruc and Language

This is the post I told you about some time back when I said I could show that DH is not based on the Biblical Hebrew.  I gave part of the data a couple of weeks ago, but I have Astruc’s own admission of the fact.

He says that he did not use the Vulgate Latin.

He chose the French Geneva Bible, also known as the Olivetain or Neuchatel Bible.

Why?

Because, Astruc says, the Latin did not sufficiently demonstrate the differences between the names of Gd to support Astruc’s claims. This is another case of the fallacy called sampling bias, pre-selecting your data source based on whether it supports what you want to prove, instead of admitting you could be wrong if some data disagrees with you.  It is often the basis of fraud, and its use in scientific work has resulted in the discrediting of scientists who operated this way.

Because Astruc’s work rests on a fallacy, it is false and later work relying on it is discredited.

What’s more, it’s nonsense, as I said a few months ago, to analyze Torah in any language except  Biblical Hebrew. That practice was based on the concept of mischsprache, however, which comes from the 19^th century. Astruc was writing in the 18^th century and he simply didn’t know enough to analyze the Hebrew.

Astruc claims that the French Geneva Bible was translated directly from the Hebrew. That is the claim of its authors. But Astruc claims that the Neuchatel is a literal translation of the Hebrew. “Literal” is a red herring, as I said nearly a year ago,  because of such things as idioms and the nuances of conjugations, as well as the difference of meaning in different contexts. That’s another fallacy.

Astruc does not follow his own criteria in analyzing his chosen material. He claims Genesis 28:1-4 comes from his B (precursor to J). But this text does not contain the combined names at all. It contains the name El Shadai, and it contains elohim, which the Neuchatel translates as Dieu. This latter fact ought to mean that Astruc puts this fragment into A.

So Astruc’s use of the Neuchatel is riddled with fallacies and is based on linguistic nonsense.

I always suspected that DH had its basis in a translation. Now I know it’s true, because Astruc admits it. But while Astruc used it to illustrate his work, he did not perform his analysis based on Neuchatel or he would have known it didn’t support his claims.

Now, why would Astruc tout Neuchatel? That’s for next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved