Fact-Checking the Torah -- Cecil B. deMille

I think you already know where I'm going. The Ten Commandments. It looms large in movie history. And like anything else about Jews by Gentiles, it has mistakes.

The most obvious one is the first Passover. What is Aaron handing out at the first Seder ever? Pita! Pita is not unleavened, it is leavened flatbread such as many cultures have. 

The second one is painting the blood on the outside of the door frames. Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael 12:7:1-4 assumes that the blood is supposed to go on the inside, thus it's a warning not to go out of the house. Halakhah is that whereever you eat the Seder, there you stay until you go to shul the next morning. Gd doesn't need to see it, He knows which house belongs to Israelites and won't send the Destroyer to it.

The third one is a little more hairy. Joshua did not need to paint the lintels for Lilia. Everywhere that firstborns have the law applied to them, they are males not females. Exodus does not specify that the Egyptian male firstborns died, but it is added in brackets on Sefaria. Nevertheless as an Israelite, Lilia was not at risk. Dathan on the other hand, as the leader of his part of the Reuvenites, might have been at risk. But his role in the movie was invented by deMille.

And now to the fourth mistake. I realized this when I saw some still shot of Moses (well, Charlton Heston) holding the tablets of the law. The writing is in the Gezer script, which dates to the 800s BCE.

Now, if you read this blog, you know that one of my mantras is "culture makes no leaps". We know the Gezer script had to be older. How much older?

Well, if it developed out of Ugaritic cuneiform, Ugarit was destroyed by the Sea Peoples just after 1200 BCE. Most people think the Exodus was in the 1200s BCE but I've already tackled that. My claim allows the Israelites to have contact with Ugarit for 300 years before its destruction, plenty of time to start using Ugaritic cuneiform, and then 300 years to morph it into the Gezer script. This is similar to the destruction of Ebla and of Naram-Sin setting the west adrift and letting Ugaritic and Hebrew develop out of the western dialect of Akkadian. Which also happened by 1200 BCE.

Aha, you're saying, what about the Tell Amarna cuneiform tablets? Well, look at them here, at the Met. They come from the 1300s BCE when Akhetaten was the capital of Akhenaten for about 30 years. This is plain old straight-up cuneiform, not something that is halfway to being the Gezer script. This is what the Canaanites used in diplomatic and trade exchanges with Egypt. If the Israelites didn't arrive in the Holy Land until the 1200s, they still had 300 years to develop the Gezer script from what they learned from the Canaanites. And that would have happened during a period of isolation.

Which, as I said, did happen. But not until a century after Akhenaten, at a time when Merneptah knew of Israelites living in the Holy Land and sent raiders to get grain. The Israelites were isolated on their hilltops developing the Gezer script a century after most people think the Exodus happened, and they refused to communicate with the Canaanites in the lowlands. So Charlton Heston could not have written the tablets in the Gezer script.

The question is always, could X have known about this subject, and the answer is yes. The Amarna tablets were published 40 years before deMille made the Charlton Heston movie. The Gezer script was published about the same time. That was shortly before deMille made his silent film of Ten Commandments. If he had time to look up the Gezer script, deMille had time to look up the Amarna tablets. He might have done, and rejected it because he wanted something Israelite, not Canaanite. 

But he still got it wrong.

If stuff like this matters to you, let me know cos I can also do Ben Hur the book, but I'll have to do it from the start and you know, it's pretty long.

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 1

I have been turning this part of my blog into a regular handbook by going through Goodwin, pages 196-347, sections 890-1619, and examining the grammar of the examples. As you saw in the summaries, I already reduced conditionals (pp. 294-304, sections 1381-1424) to about 1 page. From what I see, the section on final and object clauses (pp. 290-294, sections 1362-1380) and indirect discourse (pp. 314-322, sections 1475-1504) are as full of mirages, inaccuracies, and bad examples as anything I already discussed on this blog and that's another 11 pages that can be eliminated because there's nothing in them that I can't explain through use of aspect and modality. Occam's Razor says there's no use multiplying hypotheses.

So then I turned back to the earlier material, which I left room for but didn't examine, and I've already found my first mirage. It's the "accusative adverbial"; first, it misuses the term "adverbial" and, second, one of Goodwin's examples wouldn't be there except for a mistranslation.

An adverb modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb. Goodwin says (page 225-226, sections 1058-1061) that the "accusative adverbial" can modify nouns or whole sentences as well as verbs, adjectives or adverbs. That right there should tell you that somebody got their doctorate through a fallacy called redefinition. A high redefinition restricts a word from its ordinary meaning when the author has no other support. A low redefinition broadens the meaning of a word to bring under its umbrella things that it normally doesn't include. Then the author can glom onto a fad in scholasticism. I have several blog posts on redefinition, which is a form of strawman argument.

Goodwin says that the -ous case can be the predicate of a verb and limit the action of the verb in some way: being on, depending on, being about a topic, being “in terms of” some feature. This resembles the -on case (genitive) used with a noun in a limiting way. One of the examples, Xenophon V 5.14, shows that Goodwin relied on a source, which created the notion based on a translation that is inaccurate. LSJ supports a translation that takes a direct object without any issue of limitation.

ἀλλὰ μὴν κἀκεῖνο οἶμαι ὑμᾶς θαρρεῖν, τὸ μὴ παρημεληκότα με τῶν θεῶν τὴν ἔξοδον ποιεῖσθαι: πολλὰ γάρ μοι συνόντες ἐπίστασθε οὐ μόνον τὰ μεγάλα ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ μικρὰ πειρώμενον ἀεὶ ἀπὸ θεῶν ὁρμᾶσθαι.

“But truly this I think encouraging for you, the fact that by my not disregarding the gods, making this departure: for you, being much with me, know that not only the great but also the small [things] I attempt ever beginning from the gods.”

The translation Goodwin uses says "in [terms of] great but even in small things", and that's a strawman argument and an example of how misleading Grenglish is. So the first thing to do with any examples you have, is look them up on the Perseus site and examine every word in the Word Tool. Make sure to look up the verbs using the LSJ link. If it says that "c.acc." with this verb always includes one of the ideas Goodwin lists (being on, depending on, being about a topic, being “in terms of” some feature), then that's a normal issue of having an accusative predicate and not something outside the normal grammar. There's no use multiplying hypotheses.

This is one of my complaints about saying "a verb of category X takes a predicate in case Y". The truth is that the verb means X when it has a predicate in case Y; with a predicate in case Z the verb might mean something quite different. That's why I also say to wipe verb categorization out of your brain.

A translation is a strawman argument for analysis, grammatical or otherwise. It has historically produced terrible analyses of the Bible, mostly because the majority of English translations owe a heavy debt to the horrible Septuagint. I have several blog pages about how horrible the Septuagint is.

Likewise Goodwin’s source created a mirage by pretending that the “in” of the translation is inherent in the Greek. It is not. It’s something that the translator read into the material and, since the grammarian mistakenly believes translations are exactly equivalent to their sources, he got a doctorate under the false pretense of finding a new point of grammar. 

If your Greek grammar has sections on the accusative adverbial, look up all the citations and see if LSJ supports that they too are normal accusative predicates of the verb. If you're taking a class in Classical Greek, ask the professor for citations that he relies on and examine those. Otherwise, I would say wipe this concept out of your brain. 

So 15 pages of Goodwin's 151 are not reliable due to mirages, mistranslations, and other misbehavior, or the paradigm shift to aspect and modality makes them unnecessary. I think that's pretty cool.

Knitting -- rolled cuff on bottom up sleeve

Most of us do ribbing in sleeve cuffs. One big reason is it keeps the sleeve from curling up. You can get the same thing with seed stitch on a fine yarn like linen. 

When I was looking for info on Lopapeysa I ran into this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ss8VxLNqlY

Here's what she does.

Use the long-tail cast-on for half the stitches you want at the bottom of your sleeve, plus one. Use a contrasting color to what the bottom of the sleeve will be. When you untwist the stitches and are ready to join, slip a stitch over.

Now purl 3 rows with your normal color.

Now purl the first stitch. Then watch at 10:09 where she goes down to the first row of the normal color and picks up the loop that is between the two hyphens of the contrasting color. She puts that loop on her needle and KNITS it. She purls the next stitch that is already on her DPs, picks up the next stitch from the bottom, and KNITs it. When she finishes with this round, she will have double the stitch count that she cast on. 

There's a trick to this. You have to be careful and pick up a stitch that is between that stitch you just purled and the next one. Otherwise the bottom of the cuff will be offset a little. It's not easy but once you get the first pickup right, the rest will go fine.

So if you are working with fingering weight and the total count you want is 76, you cast on 39, split onto 4 DPs, move the first stitch to your last needle, slip the last stitch over, purl your first 3 rounds, and then start picking up that first row which is marked with your contrasting color.

When you finish your ribbing, cut out the contrasting yarn.

So here are three cuffs. The sand colored one is my normal cuff. You can see the line where I used the long-tail cast-on and then started doing the rib.

The orange one is the first rolled cuff I did, and I think you can see the slight twist at the very bottom. That shows that I picked up the wrong stitch to knit. 

The brown one is from a sweater where I was careful to pick up the correct stitch. It's a dark color but you might be able to see that it's not offset.

The rolled-hem is fiddly, as the British say; it takes a while to get that pickup round done. It's a little hard on the fingers. You have to do the sleeve from the bottom up, and then you choose between knitting it onto the armhole, doing a normal raglan sleeve, knitting it up with a yoke, or doing faux set-in sleeves. I think it looks a lot like the cuffs of my long-sleeve sleep tees, that is, it looks commercial more than hand-made. It's up to you what look you prefer.

Twitter again

If you use Twitter from a laptop (and probably a desktop, cos both use browser apps), you probably can't use the Reply button. It's being reported both ON Twitter, and on Downdetector. You can still tweet and you can still quote tweet with a tag to the person you want to see it. Whether notifications are working I can't tell. I usually get them on replies I send.

So try going to one of my tweets on my account page and using Reply. If you're on a smart phone it should still work -- but I've known changes to show up on my phone app days after they show up in my browser.

Of course this is part of the Twitter dumpster fire that a certain man baby has created; it will cut interactions, especially if it's going to get pushed out to phones. This is no way to get advertisers back or force people to pay for a worthless symbol on their account. They are leaving for Post and Substack and other places.

Again, if you want to see my future posts, you want to subscribe to this blog, not hope to see tweets about new posts.

21st Century Greek -- gerundives plus?

So you can call this post “gerundives plus or not.” From the 2019 grammar of Greek, it turns out that what used to be called the genitive absolute is just another one of those labels that covers up thinking in Grenglish.

For centuries, students of Greek have been taught that participles in Greek work like participles in English (or whatever the native language is) and, if they are in a phrase or clause, they should have a reference to their antecedent in the phrase or clause, or they should match it in case as well as number and gender. Cases where this doesn’t happen get a new label, “absolute”. That is the essence of teaching Grenglish. English does not have case markers; case is periphrastic and uses prepositions most of the time. Greek does have cases and uses them as it will. You simply cannot tell an educated author writing in his own first language “you can’t do that” just because that’s not how you do things in your language (which didn’t exist at the time he wrote).

So for genitive absolute, the book’s example is Xenophon Hellenica 7.5.20 BUT IT IS EXCERPTED. Here is the full section.

καὶ γὰρ ὅτε τὸ τελευταῖον παρήγγειλεν αὐτοῖς παρασκευάζεσθαι ὡς μάχης ἐσομένης, προθύμως μὲν ἐλευκοῦντο οἱ ἱππεῖς τὰ κράνη κελεύοντος ἐκείνου, ἐπεγράφοντο δὲ καὶ οἱ τῶν Ἀρκάδων ὁπλῖται ῥόπαλα, ὡς Θηβαῖοι ὄντες, πάντες δὲ ἠκονῶντο καὶ λόγχας καὶ μαχαίρας καὶ ἐλαμπρύνοντο τὰς ἀσπίδας.

This is not a genuine absolute. It has a pronoun, ekeinou. The antecedent of ekeinou is the commander; the personal gerundive keleuontos is the verb for the clause. You have to go back to 5.19 to find out who the commander is. What does this remind you of, class? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Yes, the fact that verb conjugation does not incorporate timing, you have to find it periphrastically expressed in the surrounding context, which means you may have to go outside subsection 20 to find it. Likewise in Greek antecedents of personal gerundives may have to be understood from the surrounding context.

Now let’s go back to our old standby, Thucydides 1.1.1:

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

What is the antecedent of kathistamenou, which is in the “genitive”? it isn’t named in that phrase, is it? And kathistamenou is not the same case as ton polemon, its antecedent. That should make this a genitive absolute. But it’s actually more like an ablative, “from the establishment” of the war. So is the phrase in Xenophon: “from his order.”

This is what Wegener calls the instrumental/ablative case in Hurrian: “out of some cause”. Smyth already tells us that there is a genitive of cause. But just because participles do it, they have to be dressed up in a new label. We aren’t going there. It’s like a ring in mathematics: we don’t change the name “ring” just because one example of a ring has real or imaginary numbers, while another has terms of polynomials, derivatives or integrals, or matrices.

Personal gerundives operate as adjectives or substantives, and whatever applies to case with adjectives or substantives, applies to personal gerundives being used in those ways. Discuss the case and you have discussed everything that can take that case. Making up new labels and expecting learners to memorize them is a waste of the learners’ time.

So now let’s look at the accusative absolute. Smyth and the 2019 book both say that an accusative participle is used with impersonal verbal expressions. Russian does this with the dative: mnye kholodno, “I’m cold.” (If you said ya kholod you are equating yourself with the abstract noun cold.)

A little trip into linguistic evolution. There once was a little case called the allative, for motion to or toward something. In some languages, it no longer has its own morphology; it morphs like the dative. As in Russian. But in others, it morphs like the accusative. And indeed I found more than one source that equates the accusative and allative.

So we don’t have an accusative absolute. We have a personal gerundive in the -ous case, in a language that no longer has an allative, used with an impersonal verbal expression.

Neither Smyth nor the 2019 book discuss dative absolute, but some older works believe it’s a thing. If you see a personal gerundive in the -ois case without a nearby antecedent, don’t call it an absolute. Look up the normal uses of the -ois case, including agency of an inanimate object.

And that gets rid of like 10 pages in Smyth that try to pretend personal gerundives work differently than the adjectives or substantives they function like.

So there still is no grammar book on Classical Greek that does not teach Grenglish, or that takes other languages into consideration. Not in all the 800 years since English became the language of officialdom in the UK. Not in the 100 years since Smyth. Greek scholars are still wearing blinders.

And this really is my last post on this thread. If it’s new to you, go to pajheil/blogspot. If you use your mobile, go to the bottom of the page for the website version. I’ve been blogging since the middle of 2013 and there’s tons of stuff out there. Knock yourself out.

21st Century Classical Greek -- a new book

So.

It’s been three years and if you read the whole blog, you are probably saying “But then I have to start over again from the beginning.”

We all do.

Including the authors of a grammar published by Cambridge in 2019. These guys were teaching Greek and they looked at their stack of handouts and decided there was a book in there somewhere.

I’ve seen this before. A guy teaching about fallacies published his slides on Amazon. There’s a there there, as I know only too well from writing the Fact-Checking posts. But a) he cites to no sources and if you don’t know anything about the subject, it’s just one person’s opinion and b) there’s not enough there there.

The other example is a guy who got interested in the Samaritans after he moved to Israel to escape Hitler. He took lots of notes and turned out a five-volume set called Literary and Oral Traditions of the Samaritans. I found an English translation of volume 5 which is supposed to be about the grammar of Samaritan Pentateuch. The book reads like somebody walked into the author’s study, saw all his notebooks, leafed through them, and said, “you have a book in here somewhere.” The result is not impressive. I have about 13 pages of objections to his claims based on my own study of Bible, Aramaic, Assyrian and Arabic; they’re part of my book The Real Difference.

But I ordered the 2019 grammar published at Cambridge to see what they did with their departure from Smyth. Well.

The authors are trying to “ride Roman” with one foot in the tense world and one in the aspect world. Such acrobatics suggest that they don’t understand the test of Occam’s Razor but are trying to preserve old sources. That’s far too Aristotelian; we are living in a Galilean world now and we don’t teach crystal spheres or cosmic ether in physics classes any more.

I was able to read a couple of reviews of the book. They mostly discuss formatting and references like the indices. That’s damning with faint praise. About the content, most are non-specific; there’s no reason to prefer this work over Smyth just because some people say “it’s new and improved” like an ad for a TV dinner.

One showed that this “Roman riding” caused confusion. This doesn’t happen if you pass the test of Occam’s Razor. Nothing requires that an Indo-European language have tenses. Russian and Polish do very well without them. Appealing to Latin doesn’t convince me; there are too many differences. For one thing, Latin requires a conjugated verb, even in equational sentences. For another thing, Latin has only one imperative, like French or German; Greek has one for each aspect (and voice). Greek retained all the Anatolian gutturals that are eliminated from Latin (and Tocharian B with its yakwe equivalent to equus). That’s not an exhaustive list but it will do to go on with.

When I got the book, I looked at the index. There’s nothing on modality. The authors are not in the 21^st century yet as far as their linguistics go.

There’s also nothing on ergativity. You may think it’s a bee in my bonnet, but at least I don’t go on about “anti-causative” formations which are basically about things happening to inanimate objects without ascribing a cause.

But at last this book has sold me a clue about something I argued against before, and that’s for next week.