Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint and Hebrew

This is a replacement for a post that I could not find today. I'm not sure how that happened because there's an entry for it in the TOC.

In 2014 I discovered a doctoral thesis (approved in 2002) online that explained several points of grammar in Biblical Hebrew, about one of which I had a hypothesis on the meaning.  They show that Brenton is wrong in his claim about the resemblances between Torah, Samaritan Pentateuch and Septuagint, and so was Rev. Fitzgerald.  There is no better demonstration of how crucial grammar is to a good translation.  Be prepared to have your head turned around, unless you have been following my Biblical Hebrew lessons.

All languages have ways of reflecting the attitudes of the “speaker.”  Some languages use auxiliary verbs to do this.  Some use special verbs or descriptive words and phrases.  Some use modifications to the morphology of nouns or verbs.  Linguists call them modalities and divide them into three classes, oblique, deontic and epistemic.

Oblique modality covers subordinate clauses expressing condition, purpose, result, cause and effect.  They ask you to accept as true a subordinate clause, based on the previously accepted truth  of the statement in the main clause.  This is like saying “It’s sunny today, so my clothes will dry quickly on the clothesline.”

Deontic modality is about how the world should be, in the “speaker’s” opinion.  Imperatives fall into the class of deontic modality, because speakers issue commands to change things to the desired situation.  Another form of deontic is called volitive, which reflects how the speaker wishes the world was when clearly it is not.  An example of volitive is “I would like to buy that dress,” when you know you don’t have the money.

Epistemic modality is about the speaker’s investment in the truth of a statement.  In English, we say things like “I think he went to Marrakesh.”

Biblical Hebrew uses morphology to reflect modality in some cases.  It has not only the imperative of deontic modality, but also a volitive modal morphology.

It has an epistemic for absolute certainty, using current conditions as evidence of the factuality of a past action, or introducing the evidence for the truth of what is being said. 

And it has an epistemic for a fact, the truth of which the speaker is not quite certain of, and which may let people off responsibility for what they do or omit to do.  I will call this the nun-final form for a discussion which shows it has significant consequences throughout Jewish literature.

Besides the discussion on my Bible Hebrew page, I discuss examples of modality in depth in Narrating the Torah.

My interlinear comparison shows that Samaritan Hebrew has all the same forms.  In fact, Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch has them in 80% of the exact same places that Jewish Torah has them. 

Septuagint never translates the nuances of modality.  Not with morphology and not with auxiliary verbs. 

And that’s why Rev. Fitzgerald was wrong, and why Brenton was not even wrong.

But wait, there's more. 

I'm just saying... the problem with Librivox

Tens of thousands of audio recordings. I spent a couple of days going through 1500 of them posted on Internet Archive in the last 18 months, picked out 40, and didn't finish one of them. It was "painful to the ear".

Isn't that a sad commentary on reading?

Lots of people love to read.

Hardly any of the ones volunteering for Librivox are any good at reading out loud.

The biggest problem is people who can't pronounce words. Some of the readers with American accents can't pronounce English words. I'm not talking about using a  BBC accent. I'm talking about saying common words wrong in an American accent. Aside from that, there are people who make the mistake of pretending to speak in a BBC accent when they haven't studied it. An actor in an interview warned against doing that in an audition. Nobody should do it in an audiobook either.

Then there are the readers who mangle common phrases, putting stress on the wrong words, as if they never heard those phrases spoken out loud let alone used them in their own conversation. I'm not talking about the strained syntax of Victorian melodramatic works or the unfamiliar phrasing of Regency novels. I'm talking about plain straightforward writing that loses meaning because it doesn't sound like somebody talking, it sounds like somebody being careful  to say every word. Even mispronounced or mis-stressed.

Or readers recording the words, not telling a story. I've heard two different readers who sounded like machines; they should have saved their voice. Another reader sounded like he was going through a vocabulary list in the back of a students' version of a German work.

There are people who insist on reading material with French or German phrases or something other language, who don't bother to find out how to say them properly. If you haven't studied French, you are going to screw up the liaison every time, so don't record it

Some try to produce drama to their own taste, and the result is ummmm what is the word I want?  Well, the best example is the woman reading Camilla who gave Mr Dubster a southern accent. Anachronistic much? She did the same thing to a character in another English novel. These people  might think they are bringing out new features in the material; all they are is a pain to listen to.

This includes the people who race through the text as if they have a bet on. Are you reading this, Christine? Christine has a habit of swallowing the ends of words so you aren't sure if it was a past or present participle, besides the word going by so fast you hardly even hear it.

At this point all I have to do is listen to the Librivox opening statement to know which type of reader I have. OK, the intro doesn't allow any dramatization. But you can tell if people read in a monotone or are simply reproducing the words vocally instead of trying to communicate with the listener.

It's also true that lots of books are not meant to be read aloud. The ones with lots of exposition and description, for example. There's a reason that people who teach writing tell you to use action verbs. Or the ones that repeat a phrase, like the book that tells you fifty times in two pages what a dead loss the protagonist is. You know, Victorian material. Both are boring. It doesn't matter if it is your favorite book, if the first page or page and a half are like this, don't inflict it on listeners.

There are a very few professional dramatizations on Librivox. I don't expect people who have had no training in acting to come up to that level. I just want them to sound as if they understand what they're reading, but they don't. I wish they had been able to get a stranger to listen to their recording before they sent it in. They probably wouldn't send it if they got an honest review first. Sure, there wouldn't be as many recordings on Librivox as there are. But what there was wouldn't be "absolutely frightening", as Henry Higgins would say.

I'm only talking about prose. When the prose is that bad, listening to people's attempts at reading poetry is not a punishment I'm willing to put myself through.

I'm just saying....

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- that weird thing with hitpael

Next, a screwy thing about hitpael.  The spelling can change if certain letters are at the start of the root.

Hebrew can’t stand to put certain sounds together in a certain order.  So it can be hard to identify the root of a verb that you are pretty sure is in the hitpael.  If the second letter of the entire verb is shin, sin, tsade or zayin, and the third letter is tav, tav, tet, or dalet, you are looking at a verb in hitpael and the root is peh shin, peh sin, peh tsade, or peh zayin.

Zamen, “invite” will be hizdamen,	הזדמן
Tsar, “trouble” will be hitstaer, meaning “regret” and the t sound will be supplied by a tet	הצטער
Shamer, “guard” will be hishtamer	השתמר

Now, if there are certain sounds Hebrew insists on changing, what about dalet, tet and tav?

No worries.  There is always a shva under the tav of the hitpael and in this case it will be a slightly audible shva.  Hebrew can tolerate a dalet after a tav so it doesn’t change the order.

As for the tav-tet and tav-tav combination, if you are looking at a text with vowels, you will find a dagesh in the tet or tav and then the other two root letters.  There’s one in Leviticus 14:4, mittaher, to become tahor. 

The universal equation that fits on a coffee mug

Read about it here:

https://home.cern/news/news/cern/sit-down-coffee-standard-model#:~:text=The%20Standard%20Model%20of%20particle,t%2Dshirts%20and%20coffee%20mugs.

Watch the videos here. Sorry about the audio quality of some of them. Captioning helps but isn't perfect. You may need to brush up your calculus before diving in but Susskind's explanations were pretty clear even for me, though I didn't know what a Lagrangian or a Hermitian was.

https://home.cern/news/news/cern/sit-down-coffee-standard-model#:~:text=The%20Standard%20Model%20of%20particle,t%2Dshirts%20and%20coffee%20mugs.

Read Todd Susskind's book The Theoretical Minimum.

Know more about your universe.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- verb root classes

Now the verb root classes.

A strong verb root has letters that are not guttural, vav, yod, or initial nun. If two of the letters are the same, it is the first and last, not the second and third (the latter is a separate root class). The vowels are considered as the standard and the vowels of other root classes are adjustments to the presence of gutturals, or to the disappearance of a root letter. Mashal is an example of a strong verb.

Polel verbs are like strong verbs, except that the second and third root letters are the same. Most polel verbs have only piel, pual, and hitpael but there are a few that have qal, nifal, or hifil. In nifal and hifil, the last root letter sometimes drops off. In other binyanim, the two root letters can contract to one and take dagesh.  Bishesh is an example.

Guttural letters in any position in a verb root change the vowels because gutturals cannot take dagesh and, at the start of a syllable, cannot take shva. The chataf vowels often appear instead of shva.  These include akhal, shaal (“ask”), qara, chayah, hayah, asah, and so on.

Vav and yod in any position have a habit of dropping out of at least part of the conjugation. Yod at the start of the root may be replaced by vav for historical reasons (it has a cognate peh vav verb in Akkadian).  There is only one peh vav verb left in Hebrew, viter.

Medial vav verbs often conjugate in the piel, pual, or hitpael by doubling the final root letter, making them look like polel verbs.  These verbs are called “hollow” in Arabic; a “hollow” class exists in all Semitic languages.  Qum and sim are classic examples of the hollow class. 

There are no lamed vav or lamed yod verbs in Hebrew; these classes exist in all the other Semitic languages (they are called  “defective verbs” in Arabic) but they have merged into lamed heh in Hebrew.

Peh nun verbs sometimes assimilate the nun to the second root letter, which then takes dagesh.  There doesn’t seem to be an historical connection for this like there is for the yod, although Akkadian and Assyrian had n-initial verbs that assimilated and duplicated like this.  (In Arabic, the “assimilated” verb root class assimilates waw.)

Lamed heh verbs are high-frequency and are the only verbs that appear in the certainty epistemic.  They are unique to Hebrew.

Four-letter roots are of two types. Some have XYxy with a shvah under the Y. These used to be considered a trace of the proto-Semitic verb root system which had only two letters per root, but this concept is losing support. Four-letter roots adopted from other languages, like tirgem or tilpen, do not repeat letters.

There are only 2 posts left for this part of my blog. I will then start with another form of insanity on Tuesdays.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- "passive"

Agentless binyanim in Biblical Hebrew have had the Latin label “passive” shoehorned onto them. Their names derive, not just from their similarity to the agentive binyanim, but also to the old-fashioned notion that they are the passives of those binyanim. Instead, they have quite different connotations. 

All but one, the nifal, have the common feature that they take “oo” as the vowel of the first consonant. Like other binyanim, these inflect in aspect, person, number and gender.

The point of an agentless statement is, not who took the action, but what happened. This is very useful in law because such statements apply to everybody covered in the legal system under every administration over the centuries and millennia. Each form has a characteristic use in legal situations, and a different one if it appears in a narrative, except for nifal which, even in narratives, hints at a legal decree.

Qual. In narratives, indicates an action with important consequences later in the oral tradition. In legal material, it indicates an unexpected or counterintuitive legal directive.

Pual. In narratives, it indicates an internal denouement and also that while a specific action is important to the progress of the story, the real denouement cannot take place without some other action which is unrelated. In legal material, it indicates a situation that falls short of the definition that requires legal action, when there are multiple ways of falling short.

Hufal is a legal definition which requires applying the law; huad meaning an animal whose owner is on notice that it is dangerous and the owner is responsible under the law for further harm it causes. Very rare in narratives, it may indicate that the action follows cultural norms. Examples include hugad, information arriving from an official source.

Western grammarians used to say that “Biblical Hebrew was losing its passives”. There are two problems. First, you now know that “passive” is the label not the function of this morphology. In fact the only binyan in this group that did not survive the Babylonian Captivity was qual.

Second, western writers were not aware, and later denied, that Tannakh existed in any form except writing. I have done this to death on my blog. For now, the most important thing to remember is that, as orally transmitted material, Tannakh had to take a format that supported oral transmission. Olrik points out that orally transmitted material prefers action to description; this turns out to be true of the grammar as well as of the contents or structure. It was natural that verbs in Tannakh mostly use agentive binyanim. When it uses something else, there is always an important reason for it.

The same is true for legal material. It is a method of dealing with the actions performed by the members of the culture, and with the consequences of those actions. Descriptions, a function of “passive”, are important in legal codes, but something defined is defined forever and can then be cited in cases where different actions took place.

Arabic has similar “oo” morphology in every Form except Form VII which is cognate to Hebrew nifal, and Forms IX and X, but most Forms V and VI verbs don’t have it. They are translated as passives, as are the t-infix Forms. I’m trying to learn Arabic. I would like to hear from anybody out there with a solid understanding of Arabic who goes through the Quran and figures out if these forms really are just passives or take on meanings of their own. I already know that Latin labels have been shoehorned onto Arabic in the west, such as using “jussive” and “subjunctive” for the majzum and mansub respectively. Now I’d like to hear from somebody who has become uncomfortable thinking of the “oo” verb morphology as strictly a passive with no life of its own. I came to this realization for Biblical Hebrew pretty late; some of you Arabic scholars might have gone through the same thing.

DIY - one thing you might want to not do

So while improving my emergency stash, I looked up the idea of drying lots of foods. There are plenty of electric dehydrators out there, and you can dehydrate some things in your oven.

Eggs are probably not one of them due to the risk of salmonella. If you are raising your own free range organic chickens, it might be lower than for the egg factories. Nevertheless, there are better things to do if you, like this blogger, have multi-dozens of eggs coming in daily.
https://www.backwoodshome.com/dehydrating-eggs-at-home/

The number one thing I can think of to do with those eggs other than dry them, is make pasta.

Yes, you have to have plenty of flour for this. I was able to score shipments of both white and whole wheat flour online and even share some with a fellow baker.

But what makes this so great is, you dry pasta anyway. The egg in it is a binder, one egg per pound of egg noodles and two eggs per pound of pasta.

And then you NEVER (as I said in a recent post) eat flour products that are not completely cooked. Cooking in boiling water for 20 minutes should kill the salmonella bacteria as well as what comes naturally on the flour.

What's more, you don't have to bother cutting all that pasta dough into spaghetti. You can make lasagna noodles. They are great, not just for veggie lasagna, but also for kugel. You can make skillet lasagna or dutch oven lasagna. And you can make a lasagna frittata, which is a two-fer because you use up some of your surplus eggs besides the ones in the noodles.

There are deep-fried frittas like the ones at Olive Garden; there are lasagna noodle rollups.

You're saying, how do I reproduce the flutings on the sides of the lasagna noodles. Well, in Italy, they don't mess with that stuff. Lasagna noodles are completely flat in Italy.

So instead of buying a noisy dehydrator that uses electricity, you can go off grid and noodle until your eyes fall out. You may be able to barter your chemical free noodles for things you need, like flour. You can make 5 batches of noodles per bag of flour and that ought to be the maximum exchange rate in barter since you put your sweat and eggs into the noodles; if you are tuff enuff you might get a bag in exchange for 4 batches of noodles by pointing out how much work it is.

My town won't let me keep chickens, not even bantams, which would be no more dirty than the mourning doves that are all over our town and line up 20 deep in winter to eat off my porch. But I can still noodle with cheap fresh eggs instead of stocking unheard of amounts of expensive powdered eggs.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- agentive binyanim

I’m following the order in which I discuss grammar in a prequel to Narrating the Torah, and at this point I give a resume of the binyanim.

Agentive binyanim are those that apply in a specific instance, actions which specific people perform. The binyan combined with the aspect and the verb root letters drive verb conjugation.

Qal. Called “simple”, this is the source of the dictionary entry for a verb, which is masculine 3rd singular. Some verbs in qal equate to a verbal form of adjective. Others are used in transitive contexts. Some verbs are not attested in qal. Comparable to Arabic Form (or Family) I, to Akkadian and Ugaritic G (Ground) stem, and Assyrian I-stem (that’s a Roman numeral as you will see).

Piel. The middle root letter is geminated with exceptions discussed under verb root classes later.

            a.         It may be the transitive form of a verb which uses the qal only with intransitive meaning.

            b.         It may be the base binyan for a verb which has no attested qal.

            c.         Connotes punctuated repetition and often the capability to do something; this leads to its use in the subordinate clauses of tort laws because they express consequences of the main clause which have been known to happen with some frequency.

            d.         Connotes unintended consequences, which influences its use in tort law.

Comparable to Akkadian and Ugaritic D (Doubled) stem and Assyrian II-stem. Arabic Form II uses shadda over the middle letter similar to use of dagesh in piel, but it is functionally comparable only if the Form I Arabic verb is intransitive. Arabic Form IV also has transitive meaning in some cases and does not use shadda.

Hifil.

            a.         The transitive of some verbs for which qal has a strictly intransitive meaning.

            b.         The base binyan for some verbs which have no attested qal.

            c.         Causative in many contexts.

Comparable to Akkadian and Ugaritic Sh-stem (named for first sound in perfect aspect) and Assyrian III-stem. Arabic Form IV is often functionally comparablee to hifil but Form II may have a similar function to hifil if the Form I verb is transitive.

Hitpael.  I’m classing this here because of its active use, although most discussions class it as a passive.

            a.         Reciprocal or mutual action, with reflexive meaning as a special case.

            b.         Continuously repetitive or shows repeated action in alternate directions.

The “t” is sometimes suppressed in hitpael which can lead to confusion with nifal. The middle letter takes dagesh except in some verb root classes.

Comparable to II(2) as Delitzsch designates Assyrian morphology, and to Form VIII in Arabic in meaning.

This is the only remaining “t” infix form in Hebrew. Other Semitic languages have “t” infix variants with reciprocal/mutual/reflexive meaning, for all their binyanim.

Nifal is cognate to Arabic Form VII, Akkadian and Ugaritic N-stem, and Assyrian IV-stem in having an “n” in the prefix. It is translated passively but see next week for its function.

Neo-Babylonian (“Aramaic”) has no nifal. I suspect that this was lost from Aramaic before the Chaldean period; the hybridization with Akkadian did not restore it.