Fact-Checking the Torah -- the denouement

So the part of TTB that is like TYMW, is less than half of what the papyrus records, and has differences from TYMW. The other part of TTB reflects Egyptian culture only in the use of magic. Castration was not, as far as I know, a cultural trait in ancient Egypt. It was a trait of Cybele’s attendants. The Sea was not noted for playing trickster in Egyptian tales. The pine tree was not a noted motif in ancient Egyptian tales. The idea of living in a valley is not normal in surviving Egyptian tales. What’s going on here?

Let’s use Olrik’s procedure which starts with the goals. The goals of the two narratives are not the same. TTB has the goal of putting Bata’s son on the throne, a very normal concern in Egyptian culture for carrying on the theocracy – without worrying too much about biological descent. TYMW is part of a saga with the ultimate goal of bringing all the descendants of Israel to Egypt, a prologue to the Exodus, the foundational event of Judaism.

You can stop now. It’s a weak analogy to claim the stories are related, and a weak analogy is a fallacy.

The urban legend that TTB and TYMW relate to, is a dictum from Wellhausen that nothing can prove the ancestors of the Jews ever lived in Egypt. Thus there was never an Exodus from Egypt. We know this is a false argument from silence, a fallacy, and fallacies are a key ingredient of DH and other urban legends. That’s aside from the fact that Wellhausen basically claimed he was omniscient, a sign of insanity.

Let’s have a little sympathy for Wellhausen. He stopped publishing before 1907 when TTB was discovered let alone translated. He died in 1918, long before archaeologists stumbled over the truth about Thera. He had no idea that he was writing bunk.

But just because he was writing bunk does not authorize me to write more bunk by claiming what Olrik’s principles contradict – that there’s a relationship between TYMW and TTB – let alone that it proves the ancestors of the Jews were in Egypt.

The proof lies in the horizon of the Exodus, and to get to the Exodus, the Israelites had to be in Egypt. Something got them there. One of Olrik’s principles is that oral traditions don’t make up backstories (which puts Olrik in line with William Dever’s comment about DH); narratives arise close to and resembling actual events, however much they may change to accommodate themselves to the Epic Laws, and other features Olrik described as facilitating their transmission.

I haven’t written this blog for five years just to pick and choose which urban legends I’m going to bust. It’s an urban legend that the ancestors of the Jews picked up TTB and changed it into TYMW. The reverse is also an urban legend.

The false rape episode in TYMW is important because it fits with Olrik’s principles. It’s part of a Law of Three about sexual behavior, counting R’uven sleeping with Bilhah and the Yehudah/Tamar episode; it’s part of a Law of Cascading Contrast example, between Yosef, R’uven and Yehudah; it’s part of a Law of Ascents that puts Yosef in jail where he can deal with the second of three sets of dreams.

A false rape story also occurs in Greek mythology, attached to the Ionian (Ahiyyawa/Pelishtim) hero Theseus, his Cretan wife Phaedra, and his son from an Amazon. Phaedra commits suicide; Theseus curses his son who dies in an attack from a sea monster. The point of the story seems to be, it’s not smart to offend Aphrodite, which Hippolytus did by vowing to Artemis never to love. With a different goal from the other two, this is a third way a false rape story can be thrown into a mix. It’s a multi-cultural motif, not a sign of a relationship.

The motifs in TYMW and TTB that are similar are narrative equivalents of what I talked about some time ago for languages: “false friends” that doom philological studies. You have to look at how a word is used by the language as a whole – and you have to look at how motifs are used by a narrative as a whole – to do a valid study. And that is what has not happened with these two narratives – until now.

Now let's tie Olrik to archaeological material...

21xt Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:12-13, geography

Genesis 2:12-13

יב וּֽזֲהַ֛ב הָאָ֥רֶץ הַהִ֖וא ט֑וֹב שָׁ֥ם הַבְּדֹ֖לַח וְאֶ֥בֶן הַשֹּֽׁהַם:

יג וְשֵׁם־הַנָּהָ֥ר הַשֵּׁנִ֖י גִּיח֑וֹן ה֣וּא הַסּוֹבֵ֔ב אֵ֖ת כָּל־אֶ֥רֶץ כּֽוּשׁ:

 

Translation:     The gold of that land is good; there is the b’dolach and the shoham stone.

The name of the second river is Gichon; it is the one surrounding all the land of Kush.

 

The reason I didn’t give meanings for the two stones is that there’s no agreement on what they are.  Online dictionaries of the languages of Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian, don’t have cognates.

My personal guess is that they are ruby tin and diamond tin, two forms of cassiterite which are found in alluvial soils downstream of tin deposits. I get this from two facts but I have no idea if I’m right. One is that b’dolach resembles b’dil, which is generally agreed to be tin. The other is that the shoham stone is used in the efod and is engraved. The hardness value of diamond is 10 but that of diamond tin is about 8, like ruby.

 

I also didn’t translate Kush but it might be Kish, the great city of Mesopotamia. When a leader wanted to show how important he was, he called himself King of Kish. There was even a queen of Mesopotamia who called herself King of Kish.

 

This is not Ethiopia, which was once known as Kush. We are in Mesopotamia, not Africa. There’s no doubt that at some point, the Jews and Ethiopians were in contact; Ethiopians are mentioned in Jeremiah (from about 600 BCE) and that refers to the culture that partly ruled over Egypt and was known in Egyptian as Kash. At the point in archaeological time I’m talking about now, which is before 3000 BCE, the Kerma culture of Ethiopia was just starting to take shape.

 

The names Pishon and Gichon are not known in any other source. If you know of a publication about cuneiform that comes up with something like them, give me a link to it. Which gets me into dangerous territory but I’ve covered it on the blog.

DIY -- frozen food

So in a very rocky part of the winter, and anticipating our usual hot summer, I made some frozen dinners.

I cooked up some of my less-used recipes, ate half, and froze half in nice little square plastic (no BPA) boxes. The boxes are multi-use and microwaveable, for those of you who have a nuker.

Well, instead of a long heat wave, we had frequent rain amounting to nearly 20 inches by the middle of August. I started eating up my frozen food.

Because summers and winters often mirror each other. I expect the winter to have mild temps but if we get as much snow as we got rain, it's Katie Bar the Door: some of us will be snowed up for weeks. I wanted to empty those boxes and re-fill them.

And here are my lessons learned.

Never never never never freeze potatoes. Not fresh, not cooked, unless they are mashed. Chunk potatoes get mushy. Now you know why most frozen dinners have mashed potatoes. Frozen fries need special treatment with chemicals to not get disgusting.

Never freeze things with eggs or mayonnaise in them, like tuna and other salads. Yolks of eggs will freeze but the whites crumble. The mayonnaise will separate and you'll have to whip it again to homogenize it.

Cheese and other milk products freeze well -- you know this from buying frozen pizza and yogurt.

Stews work extremely well. This includes things like couscous, tagine, chili, veau pique, petit sale, cholent (without potatoes), hoppin' john, and so on. I even froze some chao mian.

If you want frozen burgers or slab meat, buy the meat. Make the burgers up for yourself, it's cheaper, or cut the meat into portion-sized slabs.  Then tear off a big piece of freezer paper and some smaller pieces. Lay a burger or slab of meat on the big piece, then put on the small piece, then another burger or slab and so on. Wrap the sides of the paper around the meat and put in a plastic freezer bag. Label it with a sharpie. When it's time to use, slightly thaw and take off the end portion.  The rest will still  have ice crystals in it and can be put back in the freezer.

Same thing with boneless chicken breasts and other things you can buy family packs of.

Vegetables mostly need blanching before you freeze them and it's more convenient to buy them in the freezer section of the grocery except for kale or collards. The commercial frozen ones are mostly stem. So I buy them fresh at the farmer's market or in the store, strip the leaf off the stem, blanche and freeze, and put the stem into the compost. I buy my artichoke hearts, for tagine or marinating, already stripped and frozen.

Now. If the power goes off your frozen food is at risk. If you leave the frozen food in the freezer, and the freezer is at least half full, the frozen food will do the job of ice. When my power went off for three days during a hurricane, I had a full freezer and everything was still frozen when the power came back. BUT you can't open the freezer. So always have non-frozen things to eat in an emergency.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- TYMW to TTB analysis

Wanna do an Olrik analysis? What better target than that urban legend of urban legends which probably helped support another urban legend but at the same time has consequences for DH? It doesn’t get much better than that.

Probably everybody reading this post has heard that the Tale of Yosef and His Master’s Wife and the Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers have some kind of relationship. I’ll call them TYMW and TTB from now on. (And didn’t you wonder why I didn’t discuss them before, hmmmm?)

TYMW says that Yosef was running the house for his master who bought him in Egypt. The wife lusted after Yosef but he kept refusing her so she falsely claimed rape and got him thrown in jail. It was the setup for the second set of dreams and thus part way to the goal of the narrative. Traditionally, being at least 200 years before the Exodus, this is sometime in the 12^th dynasty.

TTB is called a folk tale in one collection of texts related to Tannakh; the papyrus containing it dates to 1225 BCE (in the 19^th dynasty) First we have to assume that folk tale and oral narrative are roughly the same thing.

Pritchard’s book (listed in the Bibliography) doesn’t have the whole TTB; a full form is posted online. Second, we have to assume that it’s correctly translated for purposes of this comparison. After reading part 3 of this blog, do you have a feel for how difficult it is to prove these relationships?

TTB records that the two men involved were brothers, not master and slave. The wife was caught by her husband washing off makeup used to simulate bruises, a detail that is not in the Torah story. He kills her; we don’t know what happened to the wife in Torah. The younger brother castrates himself to prove he’s not lying when he denies the rape. That, too, is not in Torah. Couldn’t be. Yosef had not yet sired the tribes of Efraim (ancestor of Joshua) and Menasheh (ancestor of Gideon).

After that TTB goes on to say that Anubis, the older brother, helped Bata get away to a valley where he could live. The Egyptian love goddess (or goddesses, it says “the seven Hathors” which points at the Law of Three) creates a wife for Bata and he warns her not to leave the house when he is out hunting. That’s a classic motif in fairy tales, and of course she disobeys.

The Sea sees her and manages to get a curl of her hair and send it the whole way to Pharaoh who falls in love with her because of its fragrance. He sends soldiers and they kill Bata and take the wife (does this sound familiar?). Anubis, through magic, realizes Bata is dead, and Bata has told him of a reviving magic to use; it works but Bata is transformed into part of a pine tree. He makes three attempts to get his wife back; she realizes that it’s him each time and tells Pharaoh, who takes action. But eventually she becomes pregnant with Bata’s son, and he becomes crown prince with Anubis as his vizier This entire episode is missing from TYMW.

And now the big reveal...

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:11, subject pronouns

Genesis 2:11

 

יא שֵׁ֥ם הָֽאֶחָ֖ד פִּישׁ֑וֹן ה֣וּא הַסֹּבֵ֗ב אֵ֚ת כָּל־אֶ֣רֶץ הַֽחֲוִילָ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־שָׁ֖ם הַזָּהָֽב:

 

Translation:     The name of the one is Pishon; it is the one surrounding all the land of Chavilah which there is the gold.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

שֵׁם	name
הוּא	He, it
הַסֹּבֵב	That surrounds
זָּהָב	gold

 

You have probably noticed that hu is the first pronoun you’ve seen so far that is a subject, AKA nominative. That’s because the conjugations of verbs include indications of the person. Here are all the subject pronouns.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֲנִי	אֲנָחְנוּ	First
אַתָּה	אַתֶּם	Second/masculine
אַתְּ	אַתֶּן	Second/feminine
הוּא	הֶם	Third/masculine
הִיא	הֶן	Third/feminine

 

I have to warn you that you will usually see hi, “she/it”, spelled with a vav in the middle. Look under it; you’ll see the chiriq for “ee”.

 

You would think there would be rabbinical arguments about why this happens because they seem to discuss almost everything, but you will notice that in every case, the word is accompanied by feminine adjectives and verbs. Also when most people were illiterate, they only heard this material recited and it was always pronounced hi, “she”. So there was never anything to argue about. The only people who argue about it are the ones who didn’t speak BH and only know it from text.

 

Which brings up an interesting point about the Samaritan Pentateuch. In almost every case, it changes the vav to yod. I have a book in progress called The Real Difference which focuses on Samaritan Pentateuch, and I discuss issues that show Samaritan Pentateuch has the same origin as Jewish Torah in the oral tradition. But there are other issues which show that even if Samaritan Pentateuch was originally written down from recitation, the manuscripts don’t always reflect BH. All of the surviving manuscripts were produced in medieval to Renaissance times, when all the Samaritans lived in Arabic-speaking territory. A number of the differences between Jewish Torah and the manuscripts of Samaritan Pentateuch look like ways for speakers of Arabic to represent the material without freaking out over the grammar. You’d have to read the book to see what you think.

Garden -- my big fat

Collard plant

I did not plant collards this year. I didn't plant them last year. Or the year before. Several years ago I didn't clear the bed well enough, and this root survived and has been throwing out greens ever since. This year with nearly 20 inches of rain since the start of May, it has gotten to nearly a yard across. Each leaf is more than a foot long, not including the stalk.

Next year it will flower, attracting bees, and then go to seed, which the birds will get. Some of the seeds will germinate because the original was planted from open-pollinated seed.

It's edible now. I cut a leaf a few days ago and cooked it up with smoked beef, potato, and some seasonings. It was as good as anything I would have bought in the grocery store at the same time -- only no pesticides.

The pesticide chlorpyrifos is banned by law starting some time in October. The chemical is related to deadly sarin gas and it kills bees. Starting in November, watch your grocery stores and garden stores and ask lots of questions before using an exterminator. The chemical is used in mosquito and cockroach sprays and bait traps. Terminix, for one, lost a court case almost 20 years ago after exposing a family to chlorpyrifos. If your landlord informs you they are going to treat your place for bugs, call your health department so the exterminators can't get away with using a banned chemical.

And of course check your garden store; if they have this after October, report them to your state Department of Natural Resources or equivalent.

Also get rid of your Roundup. Monsanto just lost the first of about 2,000 cases claiming Roundup causes cancer. This is made from the same chemical as Agent Orange, which was used for defoliation in Vietnam, resulting in high rates of cancer among troops who served there.

Canada has just banned bee-killer neonicotinoid pesticides, which you will find in Bayer products. Bans on these pesticides have not become widespread in the U.S.; I have been using Twitter to push people to start movements in their neighborhoods to get it banned locally. This is about our food supply, people. Some food crops don't reproduce at all without bees -- almonds are an example -- so your choice is losing a percentage of the crop to other insects and having no crop at all.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- analyzing narrative relationships

So how would you, an archaeologist, demonstrate a strong analogy between a newly discovered text and a narrative in Torah?  Olrik's principle: by doing multi-variate analysis on a top-down basis. At each level, if the comparison fails, you bail because a failure means you have a weak analogy.   Remember, any claims you make based on a weak analogy are based on a fallacy.  And remember to deal with all the facts, or you fail the test of Occam’s Razor.

First you start with the goals.  If those are different, forget about deciding the stories resemble each other.  There’s a fundamental difference between putting a king on a throne or getting him a wife unless they are episodes in a saga – in that case each one is the goal of the episode, not necessarily of the saga overall. Remember that the goal has to be some concept or feature specific to the culture transmitting the narrative, not just something convenient for the researcher to hang a thesis on.

Next examine the characters.  Not their names but the actions they perform and what that says about their natures, how those actions contribute to achieving the goal and how they express cultural values.

Third, look at the motifs involved.  What are they and how are they used?  Yosef’s divining goblet is a motif for restoring the unity of scene by bringing his brothers back into his presence the last time (Law of Unity), leading to the recognition scene.  A narrative that sets up a recognition scene using a goblet might be reminiscent of, but may not actually be similar to Yosef’s saga depending on whether the higher-level details match. A motif has to be relevant to the culture: I'll show in a future post how motifs can be out of place.

We’re getting toward the bottom.  Examine the sequence of the actions.  If they are identical, the stories probably are related.  Differences in sequence don't mean the narratives aren't related, but one might be languishing relative to the other.  If you have three narratives with similar goals and characters, and the events of one of them come in a different sequence than the others, this one might be a languishing narrative.  It has fallen out of favor, is no longer being told as often, is being forgotten, and the narrators no longer keep the events in sequence.

Look at the horizons or the localizations and the distance between the ones that differ in the different narratives. Utnapishtim's ark landing in the Zagros mountains is pretty close to Noach landing on Ararat, but not as near as Tendurek Dagi from the Song of Coming Forth.

Names of characters have no place in the analysis. If Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh’s floods originated as oral narratives, they are the same story regardless of the difference in names.

This also applies to “The Song of Coming Forth” and Hesiod’s Theogony, despite the difference of names, if both originated as oral narratives.  All the more so because we can point to the region where they likely originated, and that the ancestors of the Greeks lived there, as shown by linguistic research, as did the ancestors of the Hittites and their empire.

The name Balaam, on the other hand, does not mean the Balaam inscription at Deir ‘Alla is a version of the Balaam narrative in Torah. The events in the two narratives are not the same.  On the other other hand, the likeness of events between the Balaam at Deir ‘Alla, and Marduk receiving information about Tiamat from the council of the gods, shows that if both of these episodes originated as oral narratives, possibly they were related.

I'd like to hear from archaeologists who know anything about Olrik's principles aside from the Epic Laws. The report about the Deir 'Alla text makes me think that author, for one, would not be able to answer up. But don't take it badly; people who publish in Oral Traditions Journal also seem to know nothing but the Epic Laws 25 years after the translation came out.

And now let's practice this on a narrative I haven't discussed before.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:10, yatsa

Genesis 2:10

 

י ווְנָהָר֙ יֹצֵ֣א מֵעֵ֔דֶן לְהַשְׁק֖וֹת אֶת־הַגָּ֑ן וּמִשָּׁם֙ יִפָּרֵ֔ד וְהָיָ֖ה לְאַרְבָּעָ֥ה רָאשִֽׁים:

 

Translation:     A river went out from Eden for the purpose of watering the garden; from there it separated and became four heads.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

נָהָר	river
יֹצֵא	Goes out
לְהַשְׁקוֹת	To water
שָּׁם	There (location, not “there is”)
יִפָּרֵד	separated
אַרְבָּעָה	Four (masculine)
רָאשִׁים	heads

 

Yatsa is a peh yod verb that drops the yod in imperfect; it is also lamed alef. It is a high-frequency verb so memorize this conjugation.

 

Progressive

Singular	Plural	Gender
יוֹצֵא	יוֹצְאִים	Masculine
יוֹצֵאת	יוֹצְאוֹת	Feminine

 

Perfect

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
יָצָאתִי	יָצָאנוּ	First
יָצָאתָ	יְצָאתֶם	Second/masculine
יָצָאת	יְצאתֶן	Second/feminine
יָצָא	יָצְאוּ	Third/masculine
יָצְאָה	יָצְאוּ	Third/feminine

 

Imperfect

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֵצאֵ	נֵצֵא	First
תֵּצֵא	תֵּצְאוּ	Second/masculine
תֵּצָאִי	תֵּצֶאנָה	Second/feminine
יֵצֵא	יֵצְאוּ	Third/masculine
תֵּצֵא	תֵּצֶאנָה	Third/feminine

I'm just saying -- another one-two-three-NOOOO

I know Flippity for Google has a bunch of bells and whistles but that doesn't matter when it doesn't WORK.

So I started three different worksheets with different things in them, saved, published, I checked out the cool Flippity flash cards using the link.

Then I added some stuff.

Things were never the same again.

Every time I tried to use them, there was a problems. Either I waited four hours without the save ever clearing, or it LOST MY DATA, or it didn't give me the link you need for seeing the flash cards.

After multiple complaints with no action, I deleted all my sheets.

Flippity doesn't necessarily support your browser. I'm tired of techies who try to dictate my architecture. You children need to get over it.

Flippity doesn't do images. Anki does but I couldn't get custom fonts and there's no standard audio.

There is a flash card add-in for Excel at Techwalla.  Do NOT go there.  It makes you use Comments. You have to type the Comments.

There is a free add-in for Excel at a different site. IT WORKS.  You can copy from an existing spreadsheet. You can export existing Anki cards as text, copy and paste into this one, and IT WORKS. You can copy tables from existing Word documents and paste into your flash card Excel and IT WORKS. You can customize the fonts.  It won't support graphics or audio, but it's easy to get data into and IT WORKS.

I even copied my Flippity cards into it and IT WORKS.

So Mr. Flippity, you haven't done your job and if you say "well what do you expect for free" I EXPECT THE DAMNED THING TO WORK without throwing attitude about what browser I'm using. Grow up.

I'm just saying....

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Timing is meaningless

Timing is everything. At least in written material. We expect the events of a novel to take a reasonable period to come to completion, and we expect events depending on other events to proceed accordingly. There’s something annoying about a novel that has everything happen with split-second timing when our normal experience says it doesn’t work like that. The novel might “yadda yadda” what happens in the interim, but that interim period has to be there.

With oral material it’s different. It may leave out any timing indicators.

Some narratives, especially those originating with a historical event, may state how long events lasted, or the intervals between them will compare reasonably to actual history. But after the goal is reached, timing issues become irrelevant. Olrik gives the example of an oral narrative about a historical event which closes with the death of the protagonist soon after the event is completed, when historical records show he lived for years or decades after that.

When people object to claims that events in Torah occurred at certain historical periods, on the basis of the stated ages and genealogy of the patriarchs, this demonstrates the disconnect between the oral culture that gives those ages, and literate cultures which demand that events occur in realtime.

When the description of events or cultural environment resemble a known period of history, that is the situation that affected the ancestors of the Jews enough for transmission as a narrative. It is a chronological equivalent to a horizon. The fact that the named individuals involved couldn’t have lived “back then” because when you add up the ages of their ancestors, it doesn’t come out right, is the response of a literate culture to an oral narrative.

It’s irrelevant that calculating Jewish history back from historically recorded times produces an anno mundi on the order of 4000 BCE. Or that calculating backward from the explosion of Thera places the life of Avraham after the destruction of the cities of the plain. Or that the patriarchs are stated as living to impossible ages. The chronology in Torah is that of an oral narrative, which doesn’t necessarily relate to realtime.

Literate people don’t like to be told that timing is irrelevant, but in oral narratives it sometimes is so.

Now let’s take on the ancient question of whether the world was created in six days as Genesis says. As an oral narrative, the creation story doesn’t necessarily need timing. The issue of timing in that story is the occurrence of Shabbat.  Shabbat occurs every seven days. So of course the first Shabbat occurred on the seventh day after creation began. If Shabbat happened every three months, I have every confidence that creation would have taken three months. The timing depends on the needs of the narrative and is inseparably linked to the cultural issue that the narrative expresses.

That’s besides the fact that arguments over the age of the universe are totally human, as somebody once pointed out on a Google discussion group. Gd is infinite in time as well as space, so that it’s all one to Him whether six days or 600 billion years go by. I’ll give you an analogy: if you’re on the moon, the size of a Queen of England as compared to the size of a queen ant is irrelevant. You can’t see either of them. In the same way, six days or 600 billion years are indistinguishable to Gd – except that He is also omniscient.

It’s nothing to do with Gd if you argue the age of the universe until you’re blue in the face. The seven days of creation have to do with an oral narrative about the origin of Shabbat. The 14 billion years of the universe have to do with scientific studies that have practical effects in every facet of our lives. You pick the one that’s important to the situation you’re in – whether it’s time to go to weekly synagogue sessions, or whether you’re using GPS which has to deal with relativistic time dilation in communicating with a satellite way out in earth’s gravitational well.

But timing clues have nothing to do with the relationships between narratives.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:9, no "et"

Genesis 2:9

 

ט וַיַּצְמַ֞ח יְהוָֹ֤ה אֱלֹהִים֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה כָּל־עֵ֛ץ נֶחְמָ֥ד לְמַרְאֶ֖ה וְט֣וֹב לְמַֽאֲכָ֑ל וְעֵ֤ץ הַֽחַיִּים֙ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַגָּ֔ן וְעֵ֕ץ הַדַּ֖עַת ט֥וֹב וָרָֽע:

 

Translation:     **** Gd made sprout from the earth every tree pleasant for looking at and good for eating; the tree of life in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

נֶחְמָד	pleasant
לְמַרְאֶה	for looking at
לְמַאֲכָל	For eating
חַיִּים	life
בְּתוֹךְ	In the middle of
דַּעַת	knowledge
רָע	Evil, bad

 

The only way you won’t know how to pronounce “life” right off the bat is if you’ve never seen Fiddler on the Roof. L’chaim is a toast meaning “to life”.

 

Mareh and maakhal are verbal nouns. The verbs are raah, “see, look at” and akhal, “eat”. Why did I translate them as gerundives?

 

Because the verbal form that is used substantively is a gerundive. I’m trying to beat the infinitive concept out of your head, and saying “to eat” would undo all my hard work.

 

It’s also not appropriate to say “for food” because there’s no parallel way to word l’mareh. “For sight” is just clumsy. I can get parallel structure, and escape backtracking, and at the same time reflect how the language really works, with “for” plus a gerund. This is just one more example of how a good translation goes the extra mile instead of just grabbing the first convenient substitute.

 

Note kal-ets. There’s no et to tell you if this is “all trees” or “every tree”. The context leans in the direction of “every”. Which et would you use if there was one to get “every”? That’s right, the one with segol.

 

But why isn’t it there? Well, that’s a dangerous question to ask in grammar. What you have to ask is “does this context fit with the syntax or meaning that would use et?” And then you need to tick off why it does or does not fit.

 

Why would we not use collective et here? Because after the etnach two distinct trees are called out, and collective et would draw them into the context of food trees.

Why didn’t it use distinctive et to distinguish the food trees from these two trees? Well, we’ll see an example later of how the segolate et can hint that the noun it’s attached to fell short of standards. These trees can’t do that. At the same time, the fruit trees also are not sub-standard.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- flow of narrative

One conclusion Olrik drew from the huge disparity in format and content exhibited by oral narratives in contrast to material invented in writing, affects the claim that some archaeological discoveries were the origin of some parts of Torah.

The main evidence for the conclusion comes from work with ballads. The flow of information was that a folk ballad, sung among the non-reading public, would be picked up by people who overheard them. Amateur and professional musicians and scholars would popularize them among the literate. The material would be redeveloped, adding descriptions not in the original, or refrains that introduced a moral element.

These new versions would become popular and be recorded on broadsheets sold for pennies apiece at fairs. Thus they would get back into the hands of the people who sang the original songs.

What happened next was one of two things. Either the new version enjoyed a very short vogue and then disappeared. Or it morphed back into something resembling the original version. All the refrains, moralizations, and descriptions that were missing from the original version were stripped out of the “literate” version, otherwise it didn’t survive back in the original environment. This second fate was more common if the original song was still in vogue.

People who knew the original version knew it in a format that suited oral transmission. The “literate” versions could not duplicate that format because literate people had not yet studied oral traditions to find out how to reproduce the folk format. Literate people had different tastes, and songs only became popular among them by suiting those tastes, prompting redevelopment of the songs to add or substitute the favored material.

Lyrics invented from the ground up in the literate environment never survived in the “folk” environment at all.

Literate and non-literate classes communicate in different ways and the formats differentiate material into what originated orally, and what originated in writing.

This is what I meant when I used the laws of thermodynamics and invented a zeroth law of SWLT. It’s also what I mean by inventing a zeroth addition to Ginsberg’s theorem. You have to play the text as you find it, oral or written. “Drawing a card” from the written environment is as wrong for analyzing oral material, as analyzing a translation and inserting the answer into a discussion of the source document. If you have already agreed with me that DH produces nonsense by analyzing a translation of Torah, then you should agree with me that archaeologists produce nonsense by claiming that a culture with low literacy nevertheless accessed written material and adopted it.

And remember, one of the barriers to adoption was the cuneiform in which the “adopted” text was written, something illiterates would not have read even when they spoke something like the same language either before 2350 BCE or after 580 BCE.

In the interim, the Jews had developed their own language which expressed their own norms. Even if Enuma Elish or Gilgamesh survived into the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews would not have recognized them as stories about “us”. “Us” was the people of the Ingress, the Shiloh period, the hilltop settlements, the Davidic monarchy, and the Jewish culture since then.

And in the interim, a lot of time flowed under the bridge....

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- grammar and context

Genesis 2:7-8

ז וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים וַיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה:

ח וַיִּטַּ֞ע יְהוָֹ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים גַּ֥ן־בְּעֵ֖דֶן מִקֶּ֑דֶם וַיָּ֣שֶׂם שָׁ֔ם אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֖ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָצָֽר:

Translation:     **** Gd formed the man dust, from the earth, He breathed into his nose the soul of life; he must have become a living soul.

**** Gd planted a garden in Eden toward the east; He placed there the man whom He had formed.

So last time I said that you morphological grammarians are in trouble because the form of the 3rd masculine and feminine singular in perfect aspect of ayin yod verbs is identical to the masculine and feminine singular of the progressive aspect, and the normal word order is also identical.

You can only tell them apart if you know how they function in a sentence.

I said that there were exactly eight ways to use progressive and here they are. Memorize them. Because there are lots of perfect aspect verbs in Tannakh, and lots of ayin yod verbs in perfect aspect, but there won’t be many in progressive aspect – but there are other progressive aspect verbs in Tannakh, some of which we will see soon.

a.         present tense.
b.         action in progress.
c.         descriptive.
d.         immediate future, “about to X”.
e.         immediate past “has [just] X’d”.
f.          habitual.
g.         the sense in which an imperfect tense is used, that is, an action that was ongoing when something else happened.
h.         locative situations.
j.          X is “still” happening.

OK I lied: nine. However, progressive aspect as present tense is so extremely rare in Tannakh that you will mostly use one of the others.

You saw function (h) in Genesis 1:2: m’rachefet al-p’ney t’hom. It was also (b).

Now think back to Genesis 1:27 and naaseh. What that verse meant related to three things. One was that the verb was nifal, not the related but more common qal binyan. Another was the grammatical context of the narrative; naaseh as a singular verb coordinated with use of a singular verb in the next verse. A third was the cultural context: there is only one Gd in Judaism, which owns this narrative. The idea that naaseh referred to plural gods would never have come from inside Judaism.

Never think that you know what a word means without its sentence, a sentence without its episode, an episode without its narrative, a narrative without its culture.

In any literature of any culture. If you stop short of the full culture, you’re cheating yourself.

Understand; no natural languages would ever have existed if they didn’t facilitate communication in some culture, and the culture in which they were used had to distinguish between identical forms in order to communicate.  Communication is always about something in the culture. What a language means by what it says, is all about the consequences to the culture of whatever is said. So the meaning is about how the culture understands words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

Here’s a place to make trouble if you ever have a Hebrew class in your bucket list. If your teacher gets up and tells you that you can’t tell the progressive and perfect of an ayin yod verb apart, ask about the sentence, the episode/paragraph, the narrative, and the culture. You have a legitimate gripe to the department if a full professor has too limited a perspective on a language she/he is teaching.