Knitting -- Adventures in Argyle

Argyle is a handsome pattern that deserves to make a comeback.  You can find it at a few stores, but if it's socks you have to wear them with a solid color top. You can't find matching sets.

Which is one thing that drove me to knit socks in the first place: so they would match the sweater.

If you suddenly dig up your grandmother's heirloom instructions for knitting argyle tops, I hope you follow along and when you find something that will help all of us, post it on your blog and send me a link to it.

There are three types of argyle sweaters. One is argyle all over; the second is argyle in the body with solid color sleeves; and the third has an argyle front and the rest is knitted in one of the colors.

The traditional way is to work in the flat and have a bobbin of each color of yarn, then sew seams when you finish knitting. Here's a vintage pattern. It needs some work.
http://freevintageknitting.com/free-sweater-pattern/cm736/ladys-argyle-pullover

For example, they tell you to get 5 skeins of the main color, and then told you to wind six bobbins from it. I'm sorry, how do I do that without unwinding the entire skein, measuring 5/6 of it, and without the yarn getting all tangled up? Not in my universe.

And then you have the 6th bobbin with all the spare pieces. I'm sure they think they're saving  you money but -- must have been a man wrote those instructions.

My position is, there's no such thing as too much yarn because you can always use it up for something else. So I had enough yarn, I just needed the bobbins to wind it on. Easy buy.  Here are two of them, one wound and one empty.  The central part is about 1 1/4 inch and the sides 2 1/2. Each bobbin winds 30 yards of yarn or so.

See those little slots that run parallel to the flanges? When you're done wrapping, you thread the tail through those to keep the bobbin from unrolling. Unthread the tail when you need more yarn to knit with and then stick it back in again.




The pattern tops out at a 16. Not for the womanly figure or the modern demographic. Also, the photo doesn't show the classical diamonds made of lines that most argyles have. I copied the chart into a spreadsheet and fitted it onto my standard pullover dimensions that fit me. I wound up with twenty diamonds around the body in two colors, (the original pattern uses three) so I should have bought 20 bobbins. Well, they came in packages of 6 so I bought 18 and did the last diamond from a yarn ball instead of from a bobbin. Then I messed around figuring out where to put the lines.



You have to knit the body before you can add the lines.  I had the idea of knitting in the round using my Fair Isle techniques, so I tried it.

Boy did I get a wrong number. You get dimples. You can't do the lines over these dimples in the required duplicate stitch. It just doesn't work. Don't go there.




I ignored the instructions in the pattern that didn't fit me and dug up videos on techniques I had to learn to work in the round for this pattern.  For example, you will need Fair Isle techniques for a couple of things and that's the next session.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- hard evidence

There is one case of hard evidence why the conjunction that is DH collapses, and it’s an archaeological issue.

DH proposes that somebody brought E south. That had to happen before the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom, or it had to happen afterward.

The idea that it happened earlier would be supported by evidence of refugees.

In an attempt to identify such a pool of refugees, Na’aman studied a residential area of Jerusalem that appeared “overnight” right before Hezekiah thickened the walls of the city. He threw walls around the new suburb too.

Na’aman found no evidence of a difference in culture compared to the old city. The pottery was all from Lachish, just like in the old city. The only way to get refugees out of that, is to assume that all their pottery broke and they had to get all new stuff. But the old pottery had to break on the way, not after arrival, or its sherds would have gotten Na’aman’s attention. You would be amazed how small a sherd an archaeologist can draw a reliable conclusion from. (See if you can find the Time Team videos on Youtube for 12 seasons of examples.)

The lack of difference in culture is crucial. In the hilltop settlements of the 1100s BCE, there is a difference between the pottery in the northernmost settlements and that in the southernmost ones. It's not a difference of materials, it's a difference in style. The lack of a difference 500 years later, 200 years after the split in the monarchy, strengthens the impression that there were no refugees in the "new" town.

The chances that the trip happened afterward are the third important factor.

Zertal discusses evidence of the iron curtain Assyria threw around its domains. He shows that the people brought from Kutah, to resettle Samaria, brought with them distinctive pottery about 689 BCE. None of this pottery has yet been found within the southern kingdom’s confines. Not “only a little,” but none. That’s an argument from silence so it’s not reliable, but the idea that all of it stayed in the north suggests no economic exchange in a popular trade item, pottery, which broke easier than metal and had to be replaced more often. 

What’s more, Na’aman reports that not only did the iron curtain prevent the passage of humans, but Assyria also had extradition treaties with its neighbors. If one of its subjects got outside the country, that individual had to be returned.

Before the Assyrian attack, the best opportunity to bring E south was when Athaliah came south to marry the king of Judah.  But she was a complete pagan and the people in her train would be like her in that.  The conspiracy against her was led by monotheistic Judeans who put her grandson on the throne, making southern adoption of northern literature a low-probability claim. 

Even if E existed at some point, the archaeological reports and the general trends of history make the probability of E getting south small, and its combination with J equally small.  But this is nearly irrelevant after finding so many fallacies and bad facts in DH.

I'm going to stop there because so far I have no takers on dig reports that state there is evidence for DH (Still true in December 2023.) Now I'll switch to language issues.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:18-19, that "ki-" thingie

Genesis 1:18-19

יח וְלִמְשֹׁל בַּיּוֹם וּבַלַּיְלָה וּלְהַבְדִּיל בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחשֶׁךְ וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב:

יט וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם רְבִיעִי:

Yes, you either know all the words here or you can probably figure out what they mean.  The only exception is possibly the last word, which means “fourth”.

I’ve done a lot of thinking since the start of this page in the blog and the word כִּי־ with the hyphen seems to be different from the כִּי without the hyphen. It’s not “which was X” as a description. The phrase כִּי־טוּב also shows up in a context which shows that it’s a noun not an adjective.

So I hate to use external linguistics for a clue, especially when it’s part of Greek philosophy, but I suggest that ki with a hyphen is a quasi-noun in every case. When Torah says ki-tov, Gd is manifesting the goodness of the nature of whatever was just created.

In Greek philosophy this was called the essence of something. The alternative was its accidence.

The point is that light being good is not just a matter of the situation. Light is good even if you have a hangover because it grows the food you will eat when you get over it.  The dry land is good even if you are dying of thirst, because there is water flowing over and under the ground, you only need to find it to survive. The heavenly bodies are good even though they will some day be the object of idol worship, because they also identify the seasons of the year when festivals are due, especially the oldest festival, which is coming up.

Now remember that ki-tov is never used of the raqia. Because it is not perceptible and does not contribute to the certainty of the creation story, it is not good in essence. The good it does – separating the waters – will be forgotten as soon as it ceases. Which is kind of a spoiler alert.

There, have I put myself far enough out on a limb? Anybody waiting behind me with a saw?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- peer-reviewed support for DH

The only piece of archaeological evidence cited to support DH work is the Mesha stele. If you know differently, give us links to the DH paper that cites to the dig report written by the archaeologists so that we can avoid commentaries and perhaps translations. Now, given my arguments a long time ago about archaeological claims that rest on weak analogies, you might think I wouldn’t care about that.

In Wellhausen’s time, it was a really good thing. And of course, he died before Gilgamesh was published.

How do archaeologists relate to DH?

The American Schools of Oriental Research posts publications on the Jstor server and I have checked their papers and bulletins for references to DH. They have been publishing since 1900. I have also checked issues of the University of Chicago’s Journal of Near Eastern Studies. They have been publishing since 1884.

DH references in UChi’s Journal are by textual critics, who presuppose the DH, and are not archaeologists. References by archaeologists in ASOR publications are in reviews which negatively critique books that use the conclusions of DH.

Except for one ASOR article from 1963 which discusses Shchem and uses “northern (Elohist)” to describe one tradition about the city. In other words, the article is trying to provide orientation for supporters of DH, but the article does not claim that the findings support DH.

In fact, William Dever and others wrote starting in 1995: “The simplistic proposition that the final editors of an ancient narrative simply ‘invented’ the history that supposedly gave rise to the tradition is demonstrably false.”

In other words, cultura non facit saltus. Cultures have long histories that precede their first reference in text, and those histories may also precede writings reliably attributed to the cultures.

What cultures record of their histories cannot reliably be attributed to invention at the time the record is dated to.

Late invention of ancient written texts that refer to earlier times, is categorically a false proposition and the archaeologists have evidence to support that claim.

Wellhausen’s claim that J “dates from” a specific point in time cannot be true.

Have I said that enough ways to make it clear?

Oh, pleeze, just one more.

DH falsely claims that the material in its four documents was not invented until the culture was up and running.

Think back to the history of the Celts and the Sea Peoples. If DH is going to claim that nothing in Judaism dates before 800 BCE, it ignores the Merneptah stele of 1227 BCE and the hilltop settlements, and makes a claim of unusual processes in the formation of one ethnic group as compared to the Greeks and the Celts, so it requires a large amount of reliable data for support. The claim that the Israelites, as an ethnic group with its own norms of behavior, existed and were known to the Egyptians before the Merneptah stele was cut, is simpler and fits the facts.

If you know of dig reports since 1995, published in peer-reviewed periodicals, that specifically say that the finds confirm DH, that’s important info. Please post links to them or at least give us the citation.

I have one -- well, two -- that go the other way.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:17, direct object pronouns

Genesis 1:17

יז וַיִּתֵּן אֹתָם אֱלֹהִים בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמָיִם לְהָאִיר עַל־הָאָרֶץ:

Translation:     Gd put them in the raqia of the heaven for the purpose of shedding light on the earth.

Hair is one of those verbs I warned you about. The root is spelled alef vav resh. You know that alef is a guttural, and if I didn’t say it before, I’ll say it now, resh often behaves like a guttural. But why do I say that the middle letter is vav?

In the qal imperfect, the 3^rd masculine singular is יָאוֹר. The vav drops out in some parts of the conjugation. In other parts yod is used instead of vav. There is a related verb root class called ayin yod which loses the yod in some parts of the conjugation.

This is not a high-frequency verb. When we get to one that is high-frequency in the same verb root class, I’ll give the conjugation then.

What is important in this verse is “them”, a direct object pronoun. It is based on et.

Singular	Plural
אוֹתִי	אֹתָנוּ	1st person
אוֹתְךָ	אֶתְכֶם	2nd masculine
אוֹתָךְ	אֶתְכֶן	2nd feminine
אֹתוֹ	אֹתָם	3rd masculine
אוֹתָהּ	אֹתָן	3rd feminine

Notice the 3^rd masculine singular never occurs in Torah with the long “o” after the first letter. I have no idea why not. It shows up almost 40 times in the rest of Tannakh, but not in Torah.

You will most often see these words if there is an et (אֵת or אֶת ) nearby but there are cases where those words aren’t there but these are.

Memorize this, it is a high-frequency set of words.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- The Archaeologist

I’ve hinted over and over again that archaeology might not support DH and now I’ll start giving examples.  But first I want to take care of a related categorical claim made by an author in the field.

In his Bible with Source Revealed, Friedman claims that everybody who disagrees with DH claims that Torah developed later than DH says it did, except traditionalists.

This is false.

Cyrus Gordon, who was “raised on” DH, said that when Gilgamesh was published – or when it was translated in 1936 – it made DH seem improbable to him.  Gordon was looking at the twelve-tablet recension from 1700 BCE, and he saw the resemblances with Noach’s flood, so he decided that Noach’s flood was not invented in the 800s BCE or later.  It must be older than that.

It only takes one data point to defeat a categorical claim, and Gordon is the data point defeating Friedman’s claim. 

Friedman could make that claim if he was talking about living persons, which is not what the claim says, and it is an unworthy quibble.  Gordon died in 2001, and Friedman’s book was published in 2003.  Can anybody tell me for sure that Friedman held back from publishing that claim until he knew Gordon had passed away?  I didn’t think so.

Or Friedman could make that claim if he only meant people inside his discipline.  That means Friedman walks directly in the tracks of Brightman, and we already know that Brightman used the redefinition fallacy, so if this is what Friedman meant, he was relying on a fallacy.

And there is a second data point from people who are still alive, and those are the archaeologists who worked on the Ketef Hinnom amulets.  These amulets contain the priestly blessing, which ought to be part of P.  It’s in Numbers 6:24-26, but as I said, DH attributes parts of Numbers to P.  This ought to be one of them.

Found in 1979, these amulets date before the Babylonian Captivity.  So along with the 1100s BCE hilltop settlements with no pigs, and Amos and Hoshea’s references to Shabbat (and to New Moon as well), some parts of P date not only before the Babylonian Captivity but centuries earlier.

This means that P is either older than claimed, or it is fragmentary, instead of complete at the time when it was supposedly invented.

But what if Friedman changed his mind about P dating before the Captivity?

In fact, that is what he said in his 1970s book.  But the Ketef Hinnom date was firmly established only in the early 2000s, so he can’t base his claim on that.

What does he base his claim on?  A circular argument.  Michael Heiser’s blog specifically says that it’s a circular argument, in a post about DH.  By definition, a circular argument is a fallacy.  Friedman has to prove that claim in some way that doesn’t incorporate a fallacy.

He could appeal to the archaeology.  In an appendix he lists the kind of evidence he used.  None of it is archaeological.  I would appreciate it if, in your DH textbook, you would cite currently accepted results of DH that build on archaeology.  And what about the reverse direction?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- qal of a strong verb

Genesis 1:16

טז וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־שְׁנֵי הַמְּאֹרֹת הַגְּדֹלִים אֶת־הַמָּאוֹר הַגָּדֹל לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת הַיּוֹם וְאֶת־הַמָּאוֹר הַקָּטֹן לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת הַלַּיְלָה וְאֵת הַכּוֹכָבִים:

Translation:     Gd must have made the two great lights, the great light for governor of the day and the small light for governor of the night, and the stars.

This is the qal of mashal, “rule, govern, have control”.

The first is the gerundive for prepositions and the second is the one that cannot take prepositions.

מְשׁוֹל

מָּשׁוֹל                                                                                               

This is the imperfect aspect.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶמְשׁוֹל	נִמְשׁוֹל	First
תִּמְשׁוֹל	תִּמְשְׁלוּ	Second/masculine
תִּמְשְׁלִי	תִּמְשׁוֹלְנָה	Second/feminine
יִמְשׁוֹל	יִמְשְׁלוּ	Third/masculine
תִּמְשׁוֹל	תִּמְשׁוֹלְנָה	Third/feminine

This is the perfect aspect.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מָשַׁלְתִּי	מָשַׁלְנוּ	First
מָשַׁלתָּ	מְשַׁלְתֶּם	Second/masculine
מָשַׁלְתְּ	מְשַׁלְתֶּן	Second/feminine
מָשַׁל	מָשְׁלוּ	Third/masculine
מָשְׁלָה		Third/feminine

This is progressive aspect.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מּוֹשֵׁל	מּוֹשְׁלִים	First
מּוֹשֶׁלֶת	מּוֹשְׁלוֹת	Second/masculine

Notice that none of these match memshelet. The two segol vowels in the last two syllables is a sign that this is a noun, not a verb.

Notice that while l’ is usually translated as “to”, and has misled people into calling memshelet an infinitive, that is old think. This preposition has a number of uses, and “to” is only one of them. You may have been taught that l’ is an indirect object marker, but that’s a label from Latin. Its use as “for” takes the genitive in Russian. Its use in hayah l’ requires a different verb with instrumental case in Russian. Let’s redd out your brain so you can see what Biblical Hebrew really is and does.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- so much for history

You are totally exhausted. You are saying “all right, already, you don’t like DH. Why shouldn’t other people hold onto it.”

You haven’t been paying attention. I showed that DH is a conjunction. That means that the truth probability of each of its claims has to be multiplied together to determine the truth probability of the entire concept. That includes every claim made for every verse: whether it splits or not; and which of JEDP it’s assigned to; etc. etc. etc. The product is infinitesimally small.

I showed that DH is based on fallacies, which means that every claim using those fallacies has a ZERO probability of being true. After multiplication, the probability that DH is true is ZERO.

DH also incorporates claims made out of bigotry, not fact. I recommend that you read Carla Sulzbach’s master’s thesis, which I give a link to in the Bibliography. Dr. Sulzbach’s work clearly shows the Protestant anti-Semitism underlying the illogic and false facts of DH.

Make sure to read her translation of R. Hoffman’s critique. If you know German, read the original German of Hoffman to which I also give a link. R. Hoffman’s work will leave you with the bewildered impression that the original DH scholars made things up as they went along, not to prove anything, but to simply turn Torah on its head.

If Wellhausen followed Vatke and Graf in considering the prophets to be a Hegelian antithesis which led to a later synthesis, this is a case of Presentism, imposing a much later viewpoint that didn’t exist when the material came into being. It’s like Philo pretending that the efod gems represent the zodiac.

If Wellhausen furthered use of Hegelian dialectics in DH, meaning for DH to be the antithesis leading to a synthesis, that fell through. Subsequent scholars retired behind Graf’s isolationism. For 140 years.

That doesn’t bother most fans of DH.  Some of them will continue to hold onto it even after every single detail in the concept is shown to be illogical, unfactual, unsupported, or even contradicted by physical and other data. That’s a fact of human nature which we are becoming very familiar with in 2017.

Nevertheless, I rely on some of its fans to be reasonable and that’s why I went into such detail. I wanted to paint big red X’s where they belonged so the fans could see where the holes are. Now they need to look at papers about it in the 21^st century and look for the false facts and fallacies. I feel confident that the people who wrote those papers will wind up discredited. (There’s more at the end of the blog.)

Anybody ready for more big red X's?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 15-16, hifil binyan

Genesis 1:15-16

טו וְהָיוּ לִמְאוֹרֹת בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמַיִם לְהָאִיר עַל־הָאָרֶץ וַיְהִי־כֵן:

טז וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־שְׁנֵי הַמְּאֹרֹת הַגְּדֹלִים אֶת־הַמָּאוֹר הַגָּדֹל לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת הַיּוֹם וְאֶת־הַמָּאוֹר הַקָּטֹן לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת הַלַּיְלָה וְאֵת הַכּוֹכָבִים:

Translation:    

            From then on they will be for lights in the raqia of the heaven to shed light on the earth; it  must have been so.

           Gd must have made the two great lights, the great light for the purpose of governing the day and the small light for the purpose of governing the night, and the stars.

In verse 16 we have the hifil of mashal, “rule, govern, have control”.

The first is the gerundive for prepositions and the second is the one that cannot take prepositions.

הַמְשִׁיל

הַמְשֵׁל                                                                                              

This is the imperfect aspect.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אַמְשִׁיל	נַמְשִׁיל	First
תַּמְשִׁיל	תַּמְשִׁילוּ	Second/masculine
תַּמְשִׁילִי	תַּמְשֵׁלְנָה	Second/feminine
יַמְשִׁיל	יַמְשִׁילוּ	Third/masculine
תַּמְשִׁיל	תַּמְשִׁילוּ	Third/feminine

This is the perfect aspect.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
הִמְשַׁלְתִּי	הִמְשַׁלְנוּ	First
הִמְשַׁלְתָּ	הִמְשַׁלְתֶּם	Second/masculine
הִמְשַׁלְתְּ	הִמְשַׁלתֶּן	Second/feminine
הִמְְשִׁיל	הִמְשִׁילוּ	Third/masculine
הִמְשִׁילה	הִמְשִׁילוּ	Third/feminine

This is progressive aspect.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מַמְשִׁיל	מַמְשִׁילִים	First
מַמְשִׁילָה	מַמְשִׁלוֹת	Second/masculine

Mashal is what is called a “strong verb”  and the hifil is perfectly regular. Memorize the structure. You’ll need it to be able to tell hifil apart from piel.  Oops, spoiler.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved