Ben Hur, the novel, pt. 1

So a while back I said non-Jews should not write about Jews because they always get things wrong. Even if you’ve lived in Crown Heights NY your entire life, when you haven’t lived inside a Jewish home and gone to Jewish schools, you’ll get something wrong. It takes months of fact-checking and then you would want somebody to read what you write and tell you what to fix and how. The kind of person who would know, spends his time improving his Jewish education, not reading Gentile works. And he wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings so he might say “interesting idea” or something like that.

You can’t blackmail him emotionally by saying, “wouldn’t you want it to be right?” He doesn’t care what Gentiles read. His life isn’t about telling Gentiles what to think. His life is about living Jewish and teaching Jews to live Jewish. Plus, all the fact-based literature about Jewish living is out there for free, in libraries, on the Internet. Pretty much all the classic Jewish literature is out there, some of it with translations. But since translations are never right either, any Gentile who really wants to know the truth about Jewish literature should learn Hebrew and Aramaic.

It's not up to him. It’s up to you. If you had spent that research time learning Hebrew, you could be reading the Jewish Bible now – most of it. You could be reading Mishnah – almost all of it. You could be reading Shulchan Arukh and its later versions. Your fictional writing prevented your doing that.

And that’s the tragedy of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur. He should have done a lot of research to write his book, but he still got it so, so wrong.

I won’t speculate on what Christian scripture might have meant by what it said. I’m going to deal with what Wallace says about Ben Hur and the Jews he lives among.

So, Wallace.

It starts early, Chapter III. The Greek Gaspar says “he would come again”. The only antecedent for “he” in the text is Gd. Well, excuse me, but Gd does not need to come “again”, He never left. I checked a PDF of the book and there is nothing in it that the text transcription left out. Wallace was asleep at the switch and so was his editor.

Then it goes into “he that was to come would be King of the Jews”. The initial identification of Moshiach is a descendant of Yishai, David’s father, in Isaiah. But Moshiach will be a leader, not necessarily a king. The measure of him will be his faithfulness to Jewish law first, and his promotion of Jewish law. Jewish law itself says that it cannot apply to non-Jews. The first test for Moshiach is that he is a frum Jew; the second that he influences Jews to increase their frumkeit. All others need not apply.

The rest of Gaspar’s speech flows from ignorance of the test of Mosiach. Jewish law, like every reasonable code of law, deals with actions, not emotions. Even the 10^th commandment about coveting, turns out later to deal with taking action on the emotion, not the emotion itself.

Then Wallace makes a tragic mistake. Gaspar can’t worship Moshiach. Nobody can. Moshiach is a man, not Gd. Nothing in the prophets says Moshiach is Gd; that is impossible.  The Prophets of the Jewish Bible are there to reinforce Jewish Law, not change it. The Greeks might worship demi-gods like Dionysius or Heracles, but if Gaspar thinks the Jew told him he could worship a man, he wasn’t listening very closely.

Outdoors -- the midnight concert

A certain mockingbird of my acquaintance is making things very hard on me. 

He just can't sleep after midnight (solar time). He gets up and holds a concert. It lasts an hour at a time.

And I can't nap in the afternoon cos he's out there right now, whooping it up.

I haven't seen a mockingbird behave like this in years, but I think he has a chick and if he does, I know where it's stashed: the same place as last year.

Which I know about cos last year when somebody creamed my parked car, they pushed it up over the curb next to the hiding place. While me and the police and the other driver arranged things, Mr. Mocker sat in my holly tree and sang at us. That didn't help much so he moved to my roof and watched us intently. If any of us had gone too close to the hiding place, he would have attacked.

That was in April last year; now it's May and the baby might be ready to leave the nest.

I don't know why he has to sing at midnight. Maybe it's to protect against owls, which we do have here. If it was a roving cat, well, those are illegal and anyway he would just attack it until it ran. But it's getting on my last nerve.

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 4, indirect speech and the epistemic

To quote the Brittney Spears song, "oops I did it again." I'm writing this handbook, see, and I'm going over conditionals with a fine-toothed comb because Goodwin has some categorical statements in there and I have every reason not to trust him. This is going to be a long post because I'm repeating material I've used in other places, but I'll give links to the other places that say it more in depth. 

So on page 301, section 1410, Goodwin says the future optative (our imperfective conceptual epistemic) cannot be used in the protasis or apodosis of a conditional except in indirect discourse.  He makes that exception because of a screwy claim about being able to tell the grammar of an initial remark from how it is represented by the person who passes it along. So if X says something to Y, Y can report it using a future optative in a conditional (if it follows all the other screwy rules, see page 315 section 1481 ff), but no other conditional can use it.

So here is my citation: Xenophon Cyropaedia I 5.3.

οὕτω δὴ διαπέμπει πρός τε τοὺς ὑπ᾽ αὐτὸν πάντας καὶ πρὸς Κροῖσον τὸν Λυδῶν βασιλέα καὶ πρὸς τὸν Καππαδοκῶν καὶ πρὸς Φρύγας ἀμφοτέρους καὶ πρὸς Παφλαγόνας καὶ Ἰνδοὺς καὶ πρὸς Κᾶρας καὶ Κίλικας, τὰ μὲν καὶ διαβάλλων τοὺς Μήδους καὶ Πέρσας, λέγων ὡς μεγάλα τ᾽ εἴη ταῦτα ἔθνη καὶ ἰσχυρὰ καὶ συνεστηκότα εἰς ταὐτό, καὶ ἐπιγαμίας ἀλλήλοις πεποιημένοι εἶεν, καὶ κινδυνεύσοιεν, εἰ μή τις αὐτοὺς φθάσας ἀσθενώσοι, ἐπὶ ἓν ἕκαστον τῶν ἐθνῶν ἰόντες καταστρέψασθαι. οἱ μὲν δὴ καὶ τοῖς λόγοις τούτοις πειθόμενοι συμμαχίαν αὐτῷ ἐποιοῦντο, οἱ δὲ καὶ δώροις καὶ χρήμασιν ἀναπειθόμενοι: πολλὰ γὰρ καὶ τοιαῦτα ἦν αὐτῷ.

Accordingly, he sent around to all those under his sway and to Croesus, the king of Lydia, to the king of Cappadocia; to both Phrygias, to Paphlagonia, India, Caria, and Cilicia; and to a certain extent also he misrepresented the Medes and Persians, for he said that they were great, powerful nations, that they had intermarried with each other, and were united in common interests, and that if not someone attacking them weakened them, making war upon each one of the nations singly, [they were sure] to subjugate them. Some, then, entered into an alliance with him because they actually believed what he said; others, because they were bribed with gifts and money, for he had great wealth.

The first question to ask is, whether this is reported speech and in what sense. Did Xenophon make it up, as Thucydides did, from what other people told him? Did he rework something somebody said earlier in the material? Or did he make it up out of whole cloth? If you believe the latter, then this is not reported speech, it is fiction. It uses the future optative, and nobody can say it doesn't. It takes a lot of chutspah for somebody 2000 years later who is not a native speaker to tell Xenophon he can't do this. 

Case 2, Xenophon declares at the start that he is writing, not fiction, but history. And he has two kinds of reported (indirect) speech. In Book I chapter 2, he has things that the translator puts in quotes, the way Thucydides' translator puts things in quotes. Like Thucydides’ material, Xenophon’s might be made up based on his knowledge of Koresh.

The section I cited, however, has no quotes in the translation and doesn’t read that way in the Greek. This is down and dirty reported speech, X saying that Y said whatever it was, and that’s what Goodwin is talking about.

So Goodwin probably would agree that his two claims apply to this section, but now we run into another problem. The reported speech originated with the King of Assyria; his coming war with Koresh suggests that this is Belshazzar, also known from the book of Daniel. This is not reported from direct speech. Xenophon had not yet been born and could not have heard Belshazzar say this. So that fails the test of whether it's reported speech, and see above about chutspah.

To save their position, Greek scholars could say that however many hands Xenophon heard it through, that's ok. Even if we allow that, there's still a problem. Belshazzar did not speak Greek and so there's no future optative for him to use and for Xenophon to copy at whatever hand.

Belshazzar spoke Neo-Babylonian, a 21^st century name for what some experts also call Akkadian nowadays because it was written in cuneiform. It used to be known as Aramaic because Mesopotamia had been conquered by the Aramaeans, who imported their syllabary script. This script is also known as the “square” script; it is the only legal script for Torah scrolls to be used in synagogues, and it is the script of most mass-printed Jewish literature including modern Israeli work. There’s a quote in Talmud and I’ll fish it out if you want, that says there’s an Aramaic that has “no tongue”. I’m pretty sure that means the use of cuneiform to record Aramaic. The Jews never did learn to read it.

So, since Belshazzar didn't speak Greek, what does it mean if Goodwin accepts this section as reported speech when on page 315, section 1481, he says that reported speech retains (or not) the mood and tense of the direct quote. Xenophon cannot keep the mood and tense of the direct quote because Belshazzar did not speak Greek and Xenophon did not speak Akkadian.

So somewhere along the transmission line, somebody translated Belshazzar’s Akkadian into Greek. And translations are notoriously faulty. For Goodwin to imagine that the translation was exact requires a) that he know nothing about the problems of translation, a dangerously naïve attitude disqualifying him as a linguist and b) that he knows Akkadian and how to translate it exactly into Greek. The acknowledged expert on Akkadian, Gelb, wrote his landmark grammar in 1961, by which time Goodwin had been long dead. Gelb records a subjunctive but not an optative. It may be periphrastic instead of morphological.

Akkadian was deciphered a few decades before Goodwin published his grammar, but that doesn’t mean he read about it. It’s another sign of naivete to assume that just because something was published, everybody literate immediately read it, let alone was influenced by it. For classics scholars, the presumption is even weaker; they worked in a pipeline and didn’t go outside their field. I don’t believe even Smyth recognized the problem with thinking that Xenophon is reporting speech he heard in Akkadian. Or with Xenophon reading cuneiform. Or even Aramaic square script. Most likely both Belshazzar and Koresh hired people from Greek Ionia to translate between them and Greek ambassadors.

I can cover all the facts with a simple schema: my normal explanation of nuances.

Normally our imperfective conceptual is a dead cert and you would think it wouldn’t even have an epistemic, which means the speaker isn’t sure what he’s saying is true. But look at the context. Xenophon literally says that the King of Assyria was lying. Xenophon doesn’t believe him. Xenophon doesn’t want readers believing him. All by itself that’s reason to use the epistemic, like Thucydides used it for Korinthian speeches that he didn’t want readers to believe. We don’t care how many translations the material went through before it got to Xenophon because we're not going to go behind what he wrote.

It's like a contract. If there’s a contract dispute, and there’s a writing, the court never goes behind the writing to figure out what the parties meant by the contract. So too, we are not going to go behind Xenophon to figure out what other people meant when they transmitted this material. There’s a really good reason for that, besides the translation issue.

The more people who had their hands on this material, the more it changed. Each of them put his own spin on things, however slightly. The press does this all the time; every outlet has its philosophical background, and the stories reported by OANN or Fox that are also reported on MSNBC or Axios, are all different. If the material transmitted orally to Xenophon, it was subject to all the features of oral narrative, like gossip is. And that means that what Xenophon heard from the narrator was very different from what originally happened. Let alone what was originally said. Even in the 21^st century, with all our experience of historical and modern propaganda, far too many people believe that what they read or hear has to be accurate. It would be no surprise if mentally cloistered classics scholar Goodwin was similarly naïve.

Two more bits.

If the rule allowing future optative in reported speech was made up to cover this exact section, that is called special pleading. It violates the Test of Occam’s Razor by proposing a complicated schema to cover up a problem.

Two, given the definition of optative as referring to potentiality and wishes, you have to ask yourself how this passages expresses Belshazzar’s wishes. He can’t wish these nations to take over. If you claim he’s saying the takeover is a potentiality, well, epistemic says the same thing: something is possible but not probable. The difference is that “future” in Belshazzar’s situation is only future from his point of view, not from Xenophon’s. We don’t get into these timing arguments with an aspectual system, the same as we don’t get into arguments about whether Xenophon got a good translation of what Belshazzar said. We say “Belshazzar is trying to convince people that he’s talking about a dead cert, but Xenophon verbally and through grammar says he’s lying.”

The 2019 grammar retains both of Goodwin’s problems. This section is not among their citations, which they kindly list in an appendix. They did not go looking for examples that might contradict them, so as to give explanations and remain credible. They cherry picked their data. There is a page with a table showing what's called succession of tenses which is what Goodwin talks about in section 1481. None of it is copied from surviving texts by native speakers. It's all little snippets made up by the people who wrote the book. That's a strawman argument and that's a fallacy.

Xenophon did not have to know that Belshazzar spoke Aramaic to write this section. He used the grammar he used because it got his point across: Belshazzar lied for his own purposes and Xenophon wants to give him the lie, which he does in grammar as well as wording. You can't discredit a native speaker when you are operating from ignorance and bad logic. 

There's one section of Goodwin that I'm not going to cover in the handbook and in there, I say what it is. I have no confidence that it's correct because the rest of the book is so bad. I'm going to fill in some examples and probably add an appendix, exhaustingly analyzing the examples I used. That will show me if things hang together, or I have special pleading somewhere. Which would mean I have to tear everything down and go back to the drawing board. Oh well. Keeps me off the streets during the day.

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 3, negation

I didn't see this one when I wrote my last post but it's a doozy. I probably wouldn't have found it, except that I was writing this handbook and sequentially trashing whatever Goodwin said.

On page 346, section 1610, Goodwin says that inside a clause that starts with one of several particles, negation is always mi and never ou. This excludes neither...nor clauses with oude...oude... which I found in Xenophon's Cyropaedia; the disjunctive particles surround a clause, they're not inside it.

The particles are ὅπως, ὅτι, ἵνα and ὡς. You probably recognize them as "final clauses" but if you do your homework, you will find that the name is misleading because these clauses are not always in final position in their sentences or sections. If the grammars are going on another meaning of "final", they are responsible for documenting what they do mean. It would be a first.

Well.

Xenophon Anabasis II 4.3

τί μένομεν; ἢ οὐκ ἐπιστάμεθα ὅτι βασιλεὺς ἡμᾶς ἀπολέσαι ἂν περὶ παντὸς ποιήσαιτο, ἵνα καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις Ἕλλησι φόβος εἴη ἐπὶ βασιλέα μέγαν στρατεύειν; καὶ νῦν μὲν ἡμᾶς ὑπάγεται μένειν διὰ τὸ διεσπάρθαι αὐτοῦ τὸ στράτευμα: ἐπὰν δὲ πάλιν ἁλισθῇ αὐτῷ ἡ στρατιά, οὐκ ἔστιν ὅπως οὐκ ἐπιθήσεται ἡμῖν.

“Why are we lingering? Do we not understand that the King would like above everything else to destroy us, in order that the rest of the Greeks also may be afraid to march against the Great King? For the moment he is scheming to keep us here because his army is scattered, but when he has collected his forces again, it can’t be that he will not attack us.

The translation on Perseus “but that he will attack us.” This was probably done on purpose to hide the fact that ouk was used inside the clause that started with [h]opos when all the grammars say that can’t be done. The sign of an authoritarian field is that you never do anything to imply your seniors were wrong; you can even fudge your answers like this to protect their reputations.

Don't tell me this is an unusual case. Goodwin's statement is categorical. He uses the large font that makes his main points. He does not weasel-word with "may use" or contradict himself in his small font in a buried note. When you have one exception to a categorical claim, it is false. Anybody who doesn't know that, knows less than an elementary student in Classical Greek times who studied the trivium.

Check out the categorical statements in your Greek grammar. It is time-consuming but the computer does the hard part. Copy your text into a word processor. Find the first example of whatever you're working with, start your search and replace app, paste that into the Find function and also the Replace function, and set the format of the Replace function to highlight it as with a Magic Marker. Do a replace on the first couple of occurrences to make sure there's more than one, and then do a Replace All. If your word processor can't do this, you may want to switch to one that does, but at the very least, you can find every occurrence of the problem word. Before Microsoft Word could display and manipulate non-Latin scripts, a person could go blind trying to do this, and that's why some contradictions to the categorical claims escaped notice. (Others may have been victims of a scholarly fault and that might be for next week.)

This is why Greek scholars need to take advantage of digitized texts. They have to search for the exceptions to every categorical claim in their grammar books, because it only takes one exception like this to destroy such claims. This one example ruins like 3 pages of Goodwin and everybody else who has the same statement.

And the claims that the grammars weasel-word with "may use", etc., you don't need to memorize. Only the categorical ones that survive, tell you how Classical Greek works.

a new disappointment

So some people that I follow on Twitter have substack accounts and I thought I'd try it.

And I only lasted half an hour.

It imported the posts but it didn't import the pages.

As far as I could tell.

Because you can't sort things by date.

There's no such function.

And when you put your cursor over the navigation bar on the left, you don't get a nice little balloon telling you what it is.

So when I was looking for "delete" the Support page told me to look for something over there called Danger Zone.

There wasn't any.

When Support on the site can't get things right, what can they get right?

There's also nobody to contact to tell them this.

I'm not into manually recreating navigation pages with up to 300 entries.

I'm not into reading over 1400 posts to see if by chance the navigation page is there so I can get a URL to start a thread with.

There's nobody to email

There's no Contact form to fill out.

Thanks for nothing, substack.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Goodwin

So I went on with turning my notes into a handbook and I took the time to cross reference to Goodwin. Then I made a pass through and looked up his citations. And if you thought it was your fault that you had trouble learning Classical Greek, well, it's not.

This didn't take long. Goodwin only cites for about 1/3 of his claims. For the rest, he gives no examples or they are not cited to any author. That means we can't check 2/3 of his claims to see if any author actually writes like that. When you give no evidence or your evidence can't be fact-checked, your claims can't be accepted. It doesn't matter how many prior authors said the same thing, Goodwin doesn't tell us who they were so we can't go back and see if they made the same mistake. Academics must cite to sources or lose credibility. And besides, I've seen this before in ben Hayyim's work on Samaritan Hebrew. I have 13 pages of notes on how badly he messed up, so I was prepared for what I found in Goodwin.

Of the citations, only about 1/3 are the three authors I'm working with -- Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. So that saved me some more time. The problem is, Goodwin reaches as far back as Homer and as far ahead as Aristotle for his citations. Homer wrote an antiquated Ionic dialect so how the Iliad and the Odyssey use grammar is not how my three amigos work, and still less how Plato and his student Aristotle used grammar in the 300s BCE. A 300-year difference means the use of words changes, and so can the use of grammar. It's the difference between "is gone" in Jane Austen and "has gone" in Mary Roberts Rinehart. By the time Aristotle died, Classical Greek was replaced by Alexander's koine, which works differently. Writers who wanted to claim they were using Classical Greek might have copied models, but they didn't grow up speaking the language and that's what led to the decay of Greek scholarship in the west until the Renaissance.

The citations I looked at were a) misquoted b) miscited c) didn't support Goodwin's claim or d) contradicted Goodwin's claim. If he did use the same citations his sources used, his sources become discredited. If Goodwin did his own homework, then he should never have written a Greek textbook because he didn't know what he was talking about. It's not unusual for people to get books published and then have them debunked. Every diet book ever published has been debunked. You have to be writing real science, with validated evidence and peer review, to avoid debunking. Goodwin was not writing science. He didn't even get within smelling distance of it.

I've gone on from there, starting with conditionals, to compare my "live" authors to Goodwin's claims. I've already found conditionals using "infinitives" (my impersonal gerundives) in ways Goodwin never discusses. I've found conditionals using "future tense" (my imperfective conceptual) and Goodwin claims this is a version of the "subjunctive" (my oblique). That's false. Future tense is an indicative. There is no crossover between indicative and other modalities in definition. Languages do not have multiple grammatical forms just so scholars can get tenure. Thucydides and the rest wrote to communicate. You can't do that if you don't know how to use your own language correctly, as every English teacher you've ever had told you.

There's a place in uses of the tenses where Goodwin knows perfectly well that his "future perfect" is a passive but, 200 pages later, he pretends that it really is a perfect tense. Whether those 200 pages represent how his sources worked, or whether they were an attempt to keep the student from realizing Goodwin had made a boneheaded mistake is irrelevant. 

If you are a fan of Smyth, you owe it to yourself to fact-check him. His book was the source for the 2019 grammar published at Cambridge. Skip the phonology and paradigms in front, and the versification and rhetorical devices at the end, and see which citations Smyth uses. If they're all in Goodwin, then Smyth doesn't know what he's talking about, and the 2019 grammar is a waste of money.

Said it before, saying it again. People in liberal arts, especially classics, do not know their subject fields as well as they think. Peer review, if it fails to catch failures of the Test of Occam's Razor and fallacies, is worthless. They may believe they are engaging in academic freedom, but the truth is they're discrediting themselves, their departments, and their fields.