Knitting -- V-neck in houndstooth in the round

So before I get to the last two buckets on my list, here's one that doesn't require any new techniques.

Here's a houndstooth chart; there are others on the web. According to my research, they all seem to be flipped right to left compared to commercial fabric designs; so sue me, at least I'm not violating a corporate trademark.

Get two colors of yarn with high contrast that don't actually make your eyes bleed, and do a swatch to see how this works. Start with worsted, then do another swatch in a lighter yarn to see which you prefer. This can be worked using Fair Isle weaving-in techniques so it can work in the round. You'll want to block it carefully; remember those dimples in my first Argyle attempt?

This chart will fit 4 times each, front and back, on 192 stitches. However, using Fair Isle weaving in to avoid floaties, there will be less give. Cable on at least 208 stitches, which makes 13 per side of the little 8 x 8 motifs, and then make sure to center one of the motifs on the front.

If you're making a vest, use the dark or neutral color for the edging of the V, the armholes, the hem ribbing, and the neck.

If you're making a coat or jacket in bulky, I would say do houndstooth on the sleeves but if you're making a pullover, do just the body. You can do steeking across the armholes of a pullover but I would work them without steeking in a coat or jacket.

When you get to the armpits, for a vest, work the armholes like you did for the sleeveless top, except that you want to work them, not in houndstooth, but in your neutral or dark color. Do the back first and get that out of the way so you can concentrate on doing the front correctly.

First run a yarn from outside to inside in the middle of the front. Now work the first 30 rounds with the selvaged armholes, drawing your marker with you so you don't lose track of it. End on a purl row.

Now on the knit row, do the armhole, then knit toward the center marker. Stop 7 stitches before it. Do slip 1/k1/psso, then work the edging as p2/k3.

Turn, work the edging as k2/p1/k2, then slip 1 purlwise/p1/psso, and work back out to the armhole. Keep going like this to the shoulder and stop decreasing when you have 25 stitches counting the armhole but not the vee edge stitches.

Turn inside out and knit together the edging of the armhole and the shoulder up to but not including the edging of the vee. Put the edging stitches on the holder where you have the stitches from the back with the active edge. Finish the other side of the front and do the other shoulder the same way.

Now you have 5 stitches of the vee edging from one side on one needle, and the active back stitches and vee edging from the other side on a different needle. We're going to work with this second needle first.

Use the technique for attaching a border to a live edge of lace. Cast on 5 stitches to the needle with your back stitches, work k3/p1 back to the active stitches at the neck and p1 into the stitch.

Now flip this up, knit into the next active stitch and k1/p1/k2 out to the end of the vee. Turn and work k3/p1 back, and so on.

Keep working back and forth, picking up each active stitch of the neck in turn, until you've worked together all the stitches of the back. Now sew together the edging of the neck on each side with the edging of the vee.
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When you're done, take a couple of stitches at the base of the V to stabilize it. If you made a vest, do the same at the bottom of the edging for the armholes.

So here's my dove-and-red vest in worsted with dove around the hem, armholes, V and neck. And yes, the bottom rib is flipped up in this photo.

And so another classic clothing pattern goes in the books for knitting yourself tops, scarves, socks (if you dare) and even coats if you use a bulky yarn (and make it a Superwash while you're at it).

Fact-Checking the Torah -- vivid, action-packed

Back to Olrik’s definitions, standards, and principles.

Olrik realized that oral narratives cannot survive if they overly stress the narrators’ memories, and therefore they have to be expressed in ways easy to remember.  This is the basis of the Epic Laws and strictly delineates orally transmitted material from what originates in writing.

First, oral narratives at their fullest have a pictorial quality that isn’t necessary for written narratives.  Written narratives survive as long as the medium, and the tale can be put aside and returned to many times before the reader finishes with it.  An oral narrative stresses the audience’s attention, and the narrator’s voice, and has to be wound up before everybody falls asleep or the narrator gets a sore throat.

So it has to be brief and active, not long-winded and descriptive.  Oral narratives have to be told during the short time that the listeners can spare from subsistence activities and sleep.  The narratives involve behavior related to the culture, and thus record actions.  As the culture shaped the narrative to satisfy the audience, it imposed the audience’s expectations on the story.  A character in an oral narrative always acts in culture-specific ways, an example being Gd obeying due process after Adam and Chavvah disobey a negative commandment which has the death penalty attached to it.

This feature coordinates with SWLT Rule 1 which says that a culture shapes its language to service the culture, and shapes its behavior around the expressions it uses.  The Gan Eden story not only embodies the principle of due process, it teaches the audience that due process has an ancient history and applied in the ancient past just as it applies “now” when the story is being repeated.  The term mot yumat (and its variants) is the key to this commonality.  It is a narrative illustration of the stare decisis beloved of judges, apparently thousands of years ago as well as now. 

Olrik refers to the Fjoort of Africa holding meetings where traditional stories are told.  Abrahams extends this to say that the Fjoort tell these stories when the meetings seem to be dealing with court cases, and Abrahams couldn’t understand why. 

What neither one seems to have realized is that if such stories are long-standing survivals, they embody cultural values that bear on the court cases.  Thus a story-telling session is a way of teaching and reinforcing values to be used in deciding the court cases. 

So oral narratives are short, vivid, almost pictorial, and embody ideas critical to the culture, acted out by characters who, sometimes in superlative degree as with heroes, embody the features the culture finds important enough to transmit.  Since they have to be short, oral narratives have to get to the point quickly and avoid anything that doesn’t influence the plot.  Besides, these details take up memory and don’t necessarily interest the audience, so both narrator and audience cooperate either to stop telling them or to stop demanding them, or the details get shunted off into another story that may then take on a life of its own.

But over the passage of time...

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Food for humans

Genesis 1:28-29

כח וַיְבָ֣רֶךְ אֹתָם֘ אֱלֹהִים֒ וַיֹּ֨אמֶר לָהֶ֜ם אֱלֹהִ֗ים פְּר֥וּ וּרְב֛וּ וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ וּרְד֞וּ בִּדְגַ֤ת הַיָּם֙ וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וּבְכָל־חַיָּ֖ה הָֽרֹמֶ֥שֶׂת עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ:

כט וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים הִנֵּה֩ נָתַ֨תִּי לָכֶ֜ם אֶת־כָּל־עֵ֣שֶׂב ׀ זֹרֵ֣עַ זֶ֗רַע אֲשֶׁר֙ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י כָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וְאֶת־כָּל־הָעֵ֛ץ אֲשֶׁר־בּ֥וֹ פְרִי־עֵ֖ץ זֹרֵ֣עַ זָ֑רַע לָכֶ֥ם יִֽהְיֶ֖ה לְאָכְלָֽה:

Translation: Gd blessed them, Gd said for them fruit and multiply and fill the earth and take control of it and subjugate the fish of the sea and the flyer of the sky and all the wild animals that creep on the earth.

Gd said Now I have given you every plant making seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree that has fruit making seeds, it is yours for food.

Notice that instead of lemor, the purposeful speech, Gd simply says to people that they have everything that makes seed for food.

Well, what plant doesn’t make seed?

That depends on your definition of plant. In Blackman’s commentary on Mishnah Brakhot 6:3, he says that the phrase “growth is not from the ground” means, among other things, mushrooms. So you make a different blessing over mushrooms than over grain products, tree fruit, and vegetables. R. Blackman does not cite to Talmud or Mishneh Torah in saying this and so I have no clue how early Jews realized that mushrooms are not plants, but the Iyun Daf ha-Yomi site helped me find the citation in Babylonian Talmud Brakhot 40b. It is attributed to “rabbanan” which means it was of long standing by Talmudic times.

That was millennia later than this story.

Basically the permission applies to angiosperms, and to gymnosperms like the stone pine which has been used for food since Akkadian times. The provenance of the creation story might be in proto-Semitic times.  (If you want to argue Documentary Hypothesis, you need to see my blog first. Don’t want to? Blog your opinions on your site and send me a link.)

Science tells us, however, that the idea that humans originally ate only plant food dies a horrible death when you realize that a number of non-hominid primates eat animal food. Chimpanzees even hunt down animals cooperatively, much as the australopithecines probably did. Humans cannot make their own vitamin B12, unlike herbivores such as cattle; animal food is still our only bioactive source of this essential nutrient, which prevents dementia. Humanity’s most concentrated source of bioactive iron is also animal food, and it is essential to the health of breeding females who lose iron during menstruation.  (Only bats and elephant shrews menstruate; except for nectar/fruit bats, they eat animal food.)

We are not in the Garden of Eden yet, at this point in Genesis. 

Knitting -- ditching the plastic, saving the earth

Being a Jewish Princess, I got annoyed when I couldn't count on my local store to have the right color sponges for my kosher kitchen. So I decided to ditch the plastic sponges, the way I ditched paper hankies four years ago.

We color code our kitchens to make sure we keep them kosher; the colors help us avoid mixing meat and milk, and we always keep some dishes free of both meat and milk residue for flexibility. My bread-making utensils are in this last class.

So I'm knitting all-cotton dishcloths.

My color choices are going to make you nuts, though, if you keep kosher.

The yellow is standard for the neutral dishes.

But my meat dishes are Corell with a green pattern so I made green for those.

And instead of using the standard blue for dairy, I used red which is standard for meat. I was using pink because my every day china has a pink rose pattern, but my fancy English bone china is Royal Doulton Old Country Roses, with red roses on them.

Anyhoo.  Use a 100% cotton yarn for dishcloths; there are free patterns online. I used Dishie, which is worsted weight.

I picked a bunch of textured patterns hoping they would help with light scrubbing. Then I wove my free ends into the corners to use on intermediate scrubbing. I have steel wool pads for the hard stuff.

It took about 3 hours to knit a dishcloth. I bought 3 190-yard skeins in each color. Different patterns use different size needles, but with size 7 straight needles I got 5 stitches and 5 rows per inch, so on a 10 x 9 inch dishcloth, there are 51 stitches x 58 rows or about 2,960 stitches per dishcloth, nearly 6,000 stitches per skein. The point was to have 6 cloths, one for each day of the week, leaving plenty of time to wash and dry them. I don't wash dishes on Shabbat.

Dishcloths are a great way to learn knitting. The first pattern I used started out with five rows of knitting, then a row of mostly purl stitches. One of the things I did with this pattern was improve my ability to purl with the yarn in my left hand, continental style.

For towels, use Dishie with designs that have limited patterns of lines, or texture, or are flat and plain.

Use size 4 needles for 7 stitches and 7 rows per inch, 15 x 27 inches, 105 x 190 stitches. Work the selvage as for a sleeveless tee and do k1/p1 rib at each end.   Or use size 3 needles with a 100% linen or 50/50 cotton/linen fingering or DK yarn.

With the lighter yarns, you could take advantage of Mary MacGregor's Fair Isle Knitting Patterns, with reproductions of scores of 1920s motifs collected by Robert Williamson; work the motifs in the central 95 x 188 stitch space. The weaving in will make the towel thick and less flexible than a plain or textured pattern.

Don't use Dishie with Fair Isle motifs. Fair Isle works with worsted wool like Wool of the Andes, because it's soft and lofty -- and remember, I said, my Fair Isle tops are a more solid fabric than when I knit plain or argyle, without that weaving in.  Dishie has no loft at all.

So this goes with my switchover years ago away from paper products. I'm not killing trees by switching to cloth hankies (only the box is made of recycled paper) or by using paper towels to dry dishes or my fingers.

Now I'm cutting back on plastic by not buying commercial sponges to wash dishes.

Yes, you have to wash dishcloths and towels and hankies every time you use them and you need to boil them out once in a while. Then you let them air dry. Remember, I can hang them out on my portable umbrella clothesline like my mom did when I was little.

I have to toss sponges after a month, even though I let them dry thoroughly between uses so they don't smell skanky. They toughen and eventually so much dirt gets into the nooks and crannies that they stop being safe to use.

My hankies have worked just fine for four years now and the dishware will do the same. Once the dirt won't come out of them any more, I can downgrade them for other uses like scrubbing floors or polishing the car. In the meantime, there are other projects to accomplish.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan sources

Samaritan Pentateuch is a beautiful candidate for E due to the timing of Hoshea’s death as well as the geographical situation of the people who preserved it. But that means it should have elohim everywhere and the Tetragrammaton nowhere.

From working with Walton’s version in the Gezer script, and von Gall’s version in the square or Aramaic character set used by modern Hebrew, I can see that almost everywhere (two examples to the contrary) that Torah has the Tetragrammaton, so does Samaritan Pentateuch. Except for places (plural) where SP replaces elohim with the Tetragrammaton, which should NEVER happen in E; it should always go the other way.

SP also imports into Genesis and Exodus material that shouldn’t be there, if DH is correct; Jewish Torah has it in “D”, which only existed in Judea, or it’s part of “P” which “was invented” in Babylon. DH has no way to explain why SP has this material. It could not happen at the time when DH says the material was invented. The original barrier was the Assyrian iron curtain, the later one the enmity between the Jews and Samaritans from the time the Jews returned to the Holy Land. This enmity is expressed in Samaritan “Chronicle,” as well as in Tannakh.

It is possible that the DH scholars of the 1800s did not know about Samaritan Pentateuch. Walton’s work from the 1600s probably disappeared into English university, church, and museum libraries and much of the original work on DH was done in Germany. Bruell did not publish his Aramaic-letter Samaritan Targum until 1875, after Graf ordered DH to isolate itself, and von Gall published his Aramaic-letter collation of Samaritan manuscripts only in 1918.

It’s impossible for two traditions from the BCEs to be invented with features in common, in a climate of political isolation from each other, and yet have the same narratives and 90% of the same words, when one of the populations originated speaking a different language. That’s a figment of somebody’s imagination.

But when a set of story-telling patterns used in oral narratives all over the world, shows up in the literature of two cultures, who also share 100% of the same narratives in what looks like the same language for the most part, and all the ancient literature in both cultures says “we have the same roots”, then the simplest explanation of what happened is that the cultures transmitted their norms orally when they were identical, and the literature changed in oral transmission after they parted ways.

And now back to stating Olrik's principles instead of applying them.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- vocabulary review 3

Remember, what's above the line are the most frequent words from this set of lessons.

Vocabulary Review 3

בְּהֵמָה	Domestic animal
אֲדָמָה	Earth, dirt, land
וַיִּתֵּן	He put
אֹתָם	them (direct object)
יְבָרֶךְ	He  blessed
לֵאמֹר	saying
פְּרוּ	Be fruitful
רֶמֶשׂ	Creeper
יִרֶב	Multiply
מִלְאוּ	Fill
יִּבְרָא	He created
תַּנִּינִם	Serpents
גְּדֹלִים	Big, great, large
רֹמֶשֶׂת	Creeps
כָּנָף	Wing
יִשְׁרְצוּ	they shall swarm
שֶׁרֶץ	Swarm
נֶפֶשׁ	Soul
חַיָּה	wild animal, living thing
עוֹף	flier, bird
יְעוֹפֵף	fly (v)
רְבִיעִי	Fourth
לִמְשֹׁל	controlling
נַעֲשֶׂה	It is decreed to be made
אָדָם	Man, people
צֶלֶם	Image, form
דְמוּת	Likeness, similitude
יִרְדּוּ	They shall subjugate
דָג	fish
זָכָר	male
נְקֵבָה	female

Garden -- lessons learned

I've done a lot of preaching about gardening. Now it's time for some lessons from the last 18 months or something.

As Mike McGrath has said many times, trees should not be planted in spring or summer.

I know somebody who planted trees in spring. The cicadas ate them up.

I know somebody who planted trees in summer. The sun burned them up.

Second, just say no to drive-by services. Actually, this is true for all services, but here's how it applies to gardening.

Find the website for your state extension service. Look at their licensing programs.

Also find the website for your state Department of Natural Resources or whatever it's called. Look at their licensing programs.

In Maryland, the extension service has a Master Gardener certificate program. The DNR has a Tree Expert license program.

Ask any drive-by service provider for their certificate or license. If they hesitate for so much as a second, just say no. You should say no anyway, but this way you scare them off and your neighbors might not have to deal with them.

Third, make sure every service provider knows what they are doing even if they are long-established.

Mike McGrath documented a service provider that serviced a lawn illegally. Six times a year they charged the poor homeowner for feeding the lawn. It put illegal amounts of nutrients on the lawn and ruined it into the bargain. It may have also put down nutrients which are illegal in any amount but we can't tell now. 

Ask your service provider what they are putting on your lawn and how much. In Maryland, potash (potassium) and phosphorus are illegal on lawns and there are strict limits on nitrogen. You should also say no to Roundup which contains the carcinogen in Agent Orange and to Bayer bee-killing products. (Both of these are illegal in two towns in Maryland; start a movement in your town.)

Also, any time your service wants to plant something, ask them if it's deer-proof. If they hesitate for a minute, fire them.

I know somebody who paid a service to plant hydrangeas. The state extension service has posted online that deer will browse hydrangea.  Need I say more?

Cheating yourself or paying for illegal products is one thing. Paying somebody to do something illegal or ruin your lawn is crazy.

Know what you're doing. Know what they're doing. And sometimes, you will have to just say no.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan narratives

The issue of sharing narratives only between cultures that are “us” has important consequences for Samaritan Pentateuch, which I already discussed in Lost in Translation from a language viewpoint. There I trashed the “6,000 differences” urban legend.

There are differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah. But they have 100% of the same narratives. This is the converse of what I just said about different cultures not sharing narratives.

I’m sure there are people who believe the Samaritans literally copied Jewish Torah. Two problems with that.

They would have to wait until there was a text to copy. That means waiting until after the Babylonian Captivity.  At the time, the Jews did not consider the Samaritans “us” and would not let them help build the Second Temple. About the time of the rejection, the Samaritans built their own temple near the Twin Peaks. When the Seleucids of Syria tried to attack Egypt through the Holy Land, the Jews supported the Ptolemies of Egypt; the Samaritans supported the Seleucids. After the Hasmoneans defeated the Seleucid Antiochus Epiphanes, they razed the Samaritan temple. Enemies don’t generally copy texts from each other during centuries of conflict.

Second problem. It’s not an exact copy. Some of the differences are the exact kind of things Olrik predicts and I’ll discuss them later. Others reflect how text gets homogenized a) as it transmits in an oral environment and b) as the culture transmitting it loses contact with its roots. This is part of the work of Angel Saenz-Badillos. In other words, once again, linguistics agrees with Axel Olrik, and this time it identifies that Samaritans adopted the narratives in an oral environment. (There’s a third issue in the changes that I discuss in a project called The Real Difference.)

Remember the literacy issue I brought up over a year ago. It would have applied to the Samaritans as well as the Jews. It’s natural to assume that the priest who went back to teach the Samaritans (Kings II 17:24-28) had to teach them orally, because he and they spoke Assyrian, but they neither spoke nor read Hebrew.  And as we know, it didn’t completely work. In fact, it didn’t work to the extent that the Samaritan male lineages now contain only genes they got from their Israelite progenitors. The Samaritans eventually rejected everybody with a male Assyrian ancestor, unlike Jewish culture which has long accepted male converts. (In fact scuttlebutt has it that Shemaiah and Avtalion, both heads of the Sanhedrin in the late BCEs, were descended from Assyrian converts to Judaism.)

So while Samaritan Pentateuch has 100% of the same narratives as Jewish Torah, it has about 90% of the same words. I’ll discuss some of the differences later because of common features that are examples of Olrik’s principles. And when it comes to modal morphology, a feature that distinguishes Biblical Hebrew from its post-Captivity descendants, Samaritan Pentateuch is about 80% identical with Jewish Torah. This is 100% the opposite of the Septuagint, which never gets modal morphology.

Now the counter-example. Remember the discussion of Enuma Elish which said the text would not have been read by the ancestors of the Jews and that says the Jewish creation story is not a copy of Enuma Elish. The wording in the two narratives is also 100% different. A 100% difference is not the same story. Whereas a 90% identity in words alone reinforces that Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah have shared roots in an oral environment.

When I get to the other discussion about wording, you’ll see that once again, Olrik rules. Meanwhile, everything I just said has implications for DH.

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21st Century Bible Hebrew -- meaning vs. translation

Genesis 1:26-27

כו וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּבְכָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶ֖מֶשׂ הָֽרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ:
כז וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם:

Translation: Gd said It is decreed that man be made in our image, according to our likeness; they shall subjugate the fish of the sea and the flyer of the sky and the domestic animal and all the earth and all the creepers that creep on the earth.

Gd created men in His image, in the Image of Gd He created him, male and female He created them.

Hopefully you are over the shock of what naaseh really means.

Next vexing question. What does “in our image, according to our likeness” mean?

Well, it can’t mean physical likeness. Verse 27 specifically says that Gd created both male and female in His own image. Tselem can’t mean a physical image or it would mean that Gd takes on both masculine and feminine physical form and we all know that’s impossible because Gd is incorporeal. So how are Gd and man/woman alike?

The answer comes at the end of the narrative and I will go over it when I get there, but I’ll give you a hint. This narrative is going to establish the existence of Shabbat. How it does that, is the meaning of b’tsalmenu, ki-d’mutenu.

Later, during and after the Babylonian Captivity, up through the time of R. Yochanan, commentaries also used this narrative to contrast the difference between humans and angels. One of the contrasts also speaks to the goal of this narrative, so I’ll talk about  it there. (Resh Lakish, a contemporary of R. Yochanan, said that everything in Judaism about angels, except the bare references in Tannakh, developed in or after the captivity. See Jerusalem Talmud Rosh Hashanah 5a.)

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Outdoors -- the watchtower

I don't know what this was all about but these are not crows.

Crows are cowards and you can chase them off by clapping your hands as you walk toward them.

Not these guys.  These three waited until they were good and ready and then they left. They even did a wing display while I was out watching them.
It revealed silver along the feathers, not at the tips of the wings, so these are not black vultures. Also that gray in the sky is clouds, not sun, and the bird closed its wing again. Black vultures sometimes take up a "horaltic" pose in sunlight to expose the maximum wing span and soak up the sunlight for warmth. Not the day I took these shots!

We get lots of vultures wheeling around our skies. If a deer had found its way among the houses and died, I could understand why they were here. I couldn't smell it. In the yard under this set of three, a Cooper's Hawk had brought down two doves and eaten them, but that was weeks ago; there's nothing left for these guys.

After a couple of hours I looked again and the vultures were gone. I haven't seen this in the 27 years I've lived on this quad and that's why it seemed so weird.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Sharing Narratives

Oral narratives exist because the people of a culture value an event, which may be the first observance of some cultural tradition. They pass around information about it by word of mouth, person to person, to others who value the same event because they are part of the same culture. Slowly a standard formula for passing this information develops. From one generation to the next the formula is repeated, specific both to the event and the culture. It changes due to the limitations of human memory, which also means that when the culture changes and the event is no longer valued, the narrative changes, decays, and ultimately vanishes.

Because oral narratives are about in-culture events or norms, narratives do not transmit to other cultures because those other cultures want to hear about themselves, not about strangers.

Olrik says that for two cultures to share a narrative, first there has to be a path for communication. The idea that Judeans of the 900s to 200s BCE and the Danes, living 7,000 miles away between the 200s BCE to the 1200s CE, had a direct connection contemporary with each culture, is improbable and so they must have developed independent sets of stories.

It would also be expected that they had different culturally-affected ways of expressing those stories. Their oral narratives could have similar fine-structure features if they share a story-telling tradition.

But it would have to be a tradition common to their roots in ancient times where their ancestors came from. That includes Africa a million years ago, as well as northeast Anatolia from Neanderthal times down to 5,000 BCE.

Second, there must be, not just communication, but long-term exposure during which the cultures merge to some extent so that both of them are “us”. The specifics of a narrative that mean something to one culture will be meaningless and unimportant to another culture. The audience in the second culture won’t pay much attention to the story, even if repeated accurately, unless it already has some of the same concepts. A story told in a bar by a traveling stranger from another country is a curiosity, not a driving influence for cultural change.

When cultures merge, their narratives change in ways fitting the new normal. This is the same process as the creolization that produces a new language like English out of its parents. The grammatical or phonetic “survivals” in the new language that indicate its parents have their analog in the survivals of merged cultural narratives. It’s easy, however, to fall into “false friends” situations like the ones I discussed with philology: motifs have limited importance in comparing narratives in the same way as individual words have limited importance in comparing languages.

This goes with my previous discussion of “The Song of Going Forth” relative to Hesiod’s Theogony. The claim that the one disseminated into the culture of the other requires long association in one location and some commonality in culture. What I think happened is that the Hittites came to Anatolia and, over some centuries, adopted a Hurrian Anatolian story as their own. During this same time period, Anatolian Semitic culture seeped into Mesopotamia and produced the Tiamat battle in Enuma Elish, and Anatolian Indo-European culture seeped west as the pre-Greeks migrated, carrying the bones of the story with them. All of the names changed as each culture adapted the story, except among the Hittites, and so did the relationships between the characters. Some of the actions changed. Enough remained that as soon as the “song” was discovered, its resemblance to other material was obvious.

Before claiming that anything in Torah derives from a foreign culture, it is necessary to identify what the source culture was, when and how long and closely it was in contact with the ancestors of the Jews, whether the contact was oral or only in writing (which will come up again in a couple of months), and then the claimed source material needs analysis to avoid a weak analogy or a “false friends” mistake. I’ll say much more on the analysis later.

On the other hand, the concept of "us" has important consequences.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:26-27, a shocking binyan mixup

Genesis 1:26-27

כו וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּבְכָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶ֖מֶשׂ הָֽרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ:

כז וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם:

Translation: SEE NOTES

Vocabulary in this lesson:

נַעֲשֶׂה	SEE NOTES
אָדָם	Man, people
צֶלֶם	Image, form
דְמוּת	Likeness, similitude
יִרְדּוּ	They shall subjugate
דָג	fish
זָכָר	male
נְקֵבָה	female

Verse 26 above has been translated the same way for many centuries, and we don’t know who did it first.  The horrible Septuagint did it, for one thing. Later in Talmud (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 38b) Rabbi Yochanan said “whenever you’re told there’s a reference to polytheism in Torah, the answer is right next to it.” He was talking about verse 27 with its opening singular verb.

But the people using verse 26 to claim polytheism were committing a mistake that inexperienced translators easily make.

Biblical Hebrew spells and pronounces some words the same, when they have different grammatical categories.

For millennia, naaseh has been categorized as a qal 1^st plural imperfect.

But the same spelling is used for the nifal masculine singular progressive aspect of this verb.

When nifal is viewed as simply the passive of qal, it is far more likely for a translator to grab the qal and ignore the passive. But as I will show (Verse 2:1 will be another example), Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have “passives”, it has “agentless verbs”, each with a specific use.

Now that naaseh has been identified as a nifal, you can see that verse 26 parallels verse 9. Verse 9 has yiqavu, a nifal plural. Why a plural? Because the grammatical subject, maim, is grammatically plural.

Verse 26 has naaseh, which has a grammatical subject of adam, which is a masculine singular noun. 

There are other examples of this pattern in Exodus and Leviticus. I’m in the middle of rewriting Narrating the Torah and I’ll probably find examples in Numbers and Deuteronomy, now that I’m sensitive to it.

It’s no surprise to me that the Septuagint would make this mistake. The Aristeas letter that claims it was done by 72 rabbis, 6 from each tribe, is not only a forgery but a fraud. There were not 12 tribes in the 200s BCE. There were mostly four, the kohanim/Levites, the Judeans, and the two lineages among the Samaritans which are probably Efraim and Menasheh. Other things I’ve read in the last ten years lead me to think that Septuagint was a product of political hacks. I have an essay on that which I can let you read if you want.

Rabbi Yochanan lived around 200 CE.  That leaves about four centuries of experience with non-Jews (let alone enemies of the Jews) misunderstanding Jewish scripture and trying to get rabbis to “teach them the Torah while they stood on one leg”, in the phrase of a famous story.

By Rabbi Yochanan’s time, Biblical Hebrew had not been spoken for over 500 years and no grammars were left to point out what the agentless verbs really do. It’s also no surprise, therefore, that he wouldn’t come back with “you’re translating it wrong.”

This is why translations of Torah always miss the point. The same is true with Quran and probably other ancient literatures. But we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that translations really are the equivalents of the source document, and so the urban legend keeps getting passed along.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- Aran

It took a bunch of googling but I found it. An aran jumper knit in the round. And I completed the project but it took at least a week longer than it should have, besides my losing track and having to unravel and redo some of it. Here it is spread out on my rustic wooden bench on the back porch.

Here's something all of you know but I didn't think I was going to have to say. When you are doing a project, READ THE WHOLE PATTERN FIRST. The one that I was using and on which I am commenting, is a right old mess and if I hadn't read it over five or six times and posted questions to the website, I wouldn't have an Aran sweater today.

The people who posted the pattern know it's a mess, because they have seven or eight questions, one of which led to a correction. Once they realized they needed a correction, they should have reposted the entire pattern. Instead, what they did was insert one line about the correction.

But they just made more problems. They inserted it under the materials and tools section. It tells you, basically, that one of the charts is wrong. It's not a big problem. It's just the chart for the center of the front and back and sleeves, and it's the nexus for every repeat of that chart. (that was sarcasm)

This correction is not with the chart it belongs to. It's two pages away on the print version and I don't know how many screens away. I was too depressed to bother to count.

The correction involves a cable. The pattern has raglan sleeves and usually that means working top down, starting from the middle of the back. You can't do that cable in the middle of the back, if you work top down. Once you read the pattern a few times, you realize it has to be worked bottom up because it tells you to decrease for the raglan shaping. This could have been solved by a simple phrase at the start of the pattern: "bottom-up".

Great, so working bottom up, I'm used to putting the join of the cast-on at an underarm. It solves the problem with that cable. It's also the only way that their statement of the pattern works, since it starts with motif 5 at the underarm. Unless you work it that way, you can't work the correction as stated. 

Unfortunately they had another problem with the correction. It was inserted in 2006. In 2011, somebody else asked a question about it and was told the opposite of what was in the correction. My email to the site got the answer that you could do it either way.

But there was still a problem because the correction was inadequate. The correction wanted you to cable, but it didn't tell you how many stitches or in which direction. The answer was, do it the same as other cables in the same motif. But it's now 2018 and that should have been in the 2006 correction, if the poster knew what they were doing.

Next is another formatting problem. Obviously nobody running the site ever looked at a print preview of the pattern or cared about the result. There are diagrams of how to do the cabling. They are on a separate page from the diagrams of the motifs. In between them is a diagram of the size variations in the sweater. That's just plain bad presentation design. You either have to carry the entire pattern with you (it's 4 pages long) if you're going to travel while working the sweater, or you can have the cable diagrams on your computer screen while you have the printed motif diagrams next to it. So then you have to be next to your computer while you work. My laptop made this easy; YMMV.

The website boasts "We have videos to help you with this." BUZZER. There is no audio on the videos. (I think I complained about this somewhere else but just in case.) Also you can't see everything the videos show because the pause button is IN THE FRIGGING MIDDLE OF THE VIEW. Don't post videos that are useless.

Why did I go through all this grief? The first and most obvious problem was that the smallest size in the pattern was still too big for me! While I like to layer sweaters, four inches of extra chest space is really overkill. The only thing that saved this pattern from the very start, was the fact that m5 at the underarms was easy to adjust and still keep the more interesting parts of the design. It also kept the sleeves from being outrageously puffy.

Aran sweaters have two CATCHES however.  First, all those cables and things pull it in and you need more stitches in your starter rounds so it fits the same as your usual pullover. I used my normal stitch count at the hem and added 10% of that number of stitches in the first round above the hem. Start with that calculation, and then make sure you have enough stitches to fit the pattern into.

Second those extra stitches as well as the cables take more yarn than a plain pullover. My basic pattern uses a total of 13 skeins with leftovers. However, the pattern says you need what turns out to be an equivalent to 13 skeins for the smallest size; it did indeed work out that way.

One more tweak; they wanted you to do some fancy stitching when you join the sleeves to the body. It might be traditional (I wouldn't know) but I wasn't having any of it. So I just bound off the underarms, finished the raglan shaping, then picked up for the sleeves and worked in the round down to the cuffs the same way as I do on other sweaters.

Just like with argyle, Aran patterns have to be worked with obsessive care. I made some mistakes that I caught quickly enough to fix, but others are unavoidable because there's no way to avoid decreasing (or increasing) the sleeves to fit my measurements without futzing up the motifs.

Which is a sign that the designer(s) should have gone back to the drawing board. The site sells yarn-plus-design kits. How many women are going to pay that money when the designer didn't make the pattern adjustable for them?

Aran is another type of knitting that can either be diagrammed or transcribed. As with lace, learning  to read the diagrams lets you see the pattern before you transfer it to fabric.

As long as the pattern is properly written of course.

I stuck this one out because the same site has lots of yummy Nordic designs and if they were as badly written as this one, I wanted to be prepared. The result is as cosy as it looks. I ticked one more off my bucket list of making classic British knits. There's one left but I won't do it until next autumn because I have old projects to clear the decks of. Including one other classic pattern that apparently originated in Germany but is usually associated with Britain.

Keep watching this space. I plan to work this pattern again, top down, so I have a replacement ready. I am famous (with myself at least) for getting indelible stains on some of my favorite clothes. This gorgeous thing will probably be no different.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved