Ben Hur the novel, pt. 5

So Lew Wallace. We’re up to Chapter 7 of Ben Hur and Lew isn’t doing very well. He’s about to do even worse.

He pretends that Nazirites were part of a despised sect, that they don’t obey Jewish law. In fact, not cutting their hair IS Jewish law. Nazirites were not despised. They were odd, but they weren’t despised. Queen Helena of Adiabene (in modern Kurdish territory) took on a nazirite vow; are you telling me a queen is despised? And Wallace tells only half the tale, although all the laws of the nazirite are in one place in Torah. So not only is he not reading Jewish law, he’s not even reading his Bible to write this story.

Second, Samaritans were avoided because they did not obey the laws of tahor/tameh. The statement of these laws in Torah is very general. When it came to court cases, the courts set standards for when you had to worry about this subject. The Jews had their set of laws, which are documented and available for free online. The Samaritans obey their laws which are documented in Arabic and not available free online. I wouldn’t know how to refer you if you wanted to buy a copy, like I could for the Arabic version of the Samaritan Pentateuch.

What Wallace could not know, which DNA has revealed, is that the Samaritans did not intermarry with Assyrians. The priest that came back from exile to train the Kuteans was supposed to put an end to a plague of lions. But he never let Assyrians marry Samaritans. The same is still true: Samaritans, unlike Jews, do not accept male converts. To try and increase their numbers (there are less than 1000 left), they have agreed to accept women who agree to follow Samaritan law. I’m not following the news but I would guess that there hasn’t been a rush of women competing for Samaritan men.

Also, at the time this story is set, there was no Samaritan temple. The Hasmoneans destroyed it about 150 BCE. That was after the Seleucid war when the events occurred which are commemorated in Chanukah. The Hasmoneans were fighting to keep the Syrians from invading Egypt; the Samaritans were helping the Syrians.

And then Wallace does something really dumb. He has just been saying how cold it was on this winter day, but he has a Greek running around without a cloak.

Wallace has a guy in the market reject figs. At this time of the year, the figs would have been dried; these were a staple of the diet in Imperial Rome because they kept well when dried. Here in the US we hardly know figs under any other form. The same for dates.

Then we get into the foolishness about Jewish practice. Wallace has a man walking through the market, a place where taharut is a problem, wearing his tefillin. You put on your tefillin in the synagogue before morning prayers, and take them off afterward, keeping them in a little bag to protect them.

Both Ts’dukim and P’rushim wore tefillin. There are claims that the Ts’dukim took the commandment figuratively, not literally, but given that they were stricter in their interpretations, that makes no sense. Tefillin have been found at Qumran, a sanctuary set up by Ts’dukim in Hasmonean times as a refuge when the Hasmoneans took on the high priesthood as well as the monarchy. The Ts’dukim got their name by holding that the high priest had to be descended from David’s priest, Tsadok. The Hasmoneans were of Aaron’s lineage, but not through Tsadok. They were acceptable to the Ts’dukim as priests, but not high priests.

Now, I keep having to say this. We can’t fault writers for not knowing things that weren’t known in their times. Wallace had no clue to the existence of Qumran; it was discovered almost 100 years later. What he’s doing is taking the word of Christian scripture that demonizes the P’rushim. In fact, the P’rushim made many rulings in court trials that made things easier on people. The standards for taharut are one. If you think something is no longer tahor, you go to the experts to see what they think, otherwise you are paskening for yourself and that’s “unconstitutional”.

The experts hold a court, which takes three judges. They could rule that if you use the item in some other way than its normal use, you’re good. They could rule that it’s too damaged to be used normally, and as long as you don’t repair it, you don’t have to worry about its status. They could rule that it’s smaller than an established minimum size, and you have nothing to worry about. Or when they hear the whole story, they might realize that there were intervening contacts between the cause of tumah and the item you’re consulting them about. There’s a maximum number of sequential contacts after which the last item is not considered tameh.

The Ts’dukim and P’rushim did disagree over taharut. A document at Qumran documents disagreements that the Ts’dukim had, and one of them is quoted in Mishnah Yadaim. And the Ts’duki ruling is stricter.

Again, Wallace didn’t do his homework. Neither do other Gentiles who try to write about Jews. They don’t do their homework. And they have to do today’s homework, not repeat stuff that was proved wrong 20 or 200 or 2000 years ago.

Knitting -- Dovrekofta

So a long time ago I posted about this pattern on Arne and Carlos' site and then I went looking for it on the web. I used Google Lens to find the actual pattern in an archive online. 

I had to finish some other projects first but I finally got around to it and I have several tips.

I worked it in Palette which is a fingering yarn.  Use a neutral color and a contrasting color. I used cream and rouge.

I changed it into a jumper instead of a sweater. The stitch count for the square-and-hexagon around the bottom is 28. Since this is like Fair Isle, you need more stitches than you normally would, because the fabric has less give than a one-color pattern. So cast on 308 not 280, which gives 11 repeats. For the sleeves, cast on 78, then increase to 84 when you're done with the cuff.

Work a 20 round K1/P1 rib; work 20 rounds above the cast on in the cuff as well.

Don't work steeking; work in the flat above the underarms for 60 rows. Don't do a mid-back elevation.. Work a K1/P1 neck for 14 rounds.

To stay in pattern when you make increases for the sleeves, you may want to add 8 stitches at a time. 

Increase 3 times in 160 rounds to get to 120 stitches at the top of the sleeve as follows:

In a "cream" round, after the marker, K1, KF/B, KF/B and work around. work KF/B, KF/B K1 before the marker.

Now it depends on what your last set of box/checkerboards was. You must have a checkerboard over a box and vice versa. So if there was a box in the last set it has to have a checkerboard above it, and you have to make a box.

Do it this way: K1 in "cream" after the marker; KF/B in "rouge", KF in "rouge", KB in "cream". The KB should be above the K1 in "cream" before the box. Now knit your checkerboard above your box.

If you have to have a checkerboard after the marker, K1 in "cream" after the marker, KF in "rouge", KB in "cream", repeat this, then K1 in "cream" and work the box above the checkerboard.

And do this in reverse at the other end of the round before the marker, except that you don't need the last "cream" because you are going to knit a "cream" at the start of the round.

It isn't pretty but it's on the underside of the sleeve. If you want to avoid this, you have to either increase like on Fair Isle with patches of "rouge" as you slowly increase, or you have to cast on extra stitches in the "rouge" round after the square and hexagon band. It's up to you.

You can do the cuffs with the rolled cuff or the cast on and straight to the K1/P1 rib. 

This is a pattern where you have to sew the sleeves to the body, as shown in the pamphlet.

IMPORTANT: If you think you see that the tops of the sleeves look darker than the body, you're right. I hadn't blocked this when I took the photo. That may help. But the BIG TIP is, make sure you always keep your color and your neutral in the same hand the whole time you work. If you start with your neutral in your right hand, always have the color in your left hand.

I'm working on matching socks because I wanted to try the eye of partridge stitch and I'll post when I'm done because I can give you tips on how to do the closed toe for a toe-up sock in the round.

Next month I'll have another old-fashioned pattern for you -- not an ancient traditional pattern but one that people used to knit tops for their kids in about 60 years ago.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 4

So Lew Wallace, chapter 6 of a work that is Victorian Protestant but pretends to write about Jews. Now he gives us a mythical date calculation. It has to accommodate Christian pretense that Jesus was born December 25, the holy day of Sol Invictus, Constantine’s personal god, who was still worshipped after Constantine made his deathbed conversion. But nobody knows what year to use and so it’s impossible to calculate the Jewish calendar date.

Because the Jewish calendar is lunar with intercalation. The fixed point is that the night after the Passover Seder, the first ripe wheat had to be harvested. One month before that is Purim, which moves so that it doesn’t conflict with Shabbat. But if calculations show that Purim will come too early, the calendar intercalates. It sticks in another full month; that is when Purim happens.

Rome was on the Julian calendar at the time. Rome never intercalated. When Caesar took over, he found that the consuls had screwed with the lunar calendar for political reasons. He changed to a solar calendar with a leap day. The priests screwed that up, and Augustus had to re-adjust. But even that was inaccurate and 15 centuries later the Gregorian calendar had to be invented.

So we can’t figure this out via the Roman calendar and Wallace bringing it up is useless.

Second, Wallace screws up the timing of the day. The Jewish calendar begins a new day at sunset, not at dawn. The Joppa gates would be open to let the farmers bring in produce and animals for sale, not because it was a new day.

And the farmers had to go home at evening because fuel was expensive. The usual lamp that you would have in a house would blow out in the wind of your passage if you tried to use it to light your road. Also, the town council would go to synagogue for evening prayers, and then home for supper. If you had a business dispute, you wouldn’t be able to call a court to settle it. So as dusk fell, the farmers would pack up the leftovers and take them home to their wives. The gates would close, a new day would begin at sunset, and the city would be relatively quiet for the night.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 3

So Lew Wallace is writing about Jews without knowing anything about them. And he’s pretending that two different Gentile cultures know about them. And the question is, how would that happen? Wallace’s answer is a revelation from Gd, and Gd is also making it so that a Greek and a Hindu can talk their own languages and still understand each other. Next we’re going to get an Egyptian doing the same thing – but what language is he going to speak? Wallace’s ploy only works if he’s speaking Egyptian – either Coptic or its forebear, the language of hieroglyphs and demotic – and not the Greek of the Hellenistic period introduced by Alexander’s conquest.

Wallace claims that Egyptian writing came first. It’s not true. There was something in the air around 3000 BCE when pictographs started to become cuneiform symbols for sounds of a language. It was probably happening in China as well; the bone oracles that survive come from around 2000 BCE but, since cultures make no leaps, the script had to begin developing around 3000 BCE.

Balthasar gets to voice the Christian pretense that there was one original revelation in ancient times that became corrupted into polytheism, and that this is the same revelation made to Mosheh on the mountain. This ignores 60% of Torah which is not revelation but law. What Gd revealed to Mosheh were a) how to make the tabernacle; b) the Ten Commandments; c) His 13-part Name of Mercy after the Golden Calf incident. Judaism recognizes 613 commandments, the standard list of which was drawn up by Maimonides.

Second, Balthasar gets to give a false picture of history. There were no Persians when the two kingdoms of Egypt united for the first time. The Ethiopians had a strong culture and army and they and their allies the Sea Peoples conquered Egypt.

But one thing rings true. It would be an Egyptian who believed first in Gd being revealed in the flesh of man. The Egyptian pharaohs were the living embodiment of Osiris, as their queens were the living embodiment of Isis. The Osiris cult was strictly Egyptian; the Isis cult made converts in many places, especially in Rome. Egypt contributed hermits and the Gnostic Gospels to Christianity; Athanasius conquered Arianism in Alexandria where Balthasar claims to be from.

Now let me go back. I’ve been rewriting Greek grammar starting with the idea that it is aspectual, like other languages arising in NE Anatolia. The complications in Greek grammar books dissolve when I ditch the tense system in favor of aspect. That means I pass, and the old grammars fail, the Test of Occam’s Razor. (They also fail for lack of citations to surviving material, citations that don’t support their claims, and citations that contradict their claims.)

Acknowledging the NE Anatolian origin of the Hellenes, which is borne out by DNA, shows why there are linguistic connections between the Deucalion myth and the Noach story in the Jewish Bible. But the stories have different details and play different roles in the cultures. When I was writing the Fact-Checking part of my blog I used the work of Axel Olrik on oral traditions, and his perceptions show that when two cultures identify themselves as “us” they are going to share oral narratives. As time goes on and that identity changes, often as the cultures migrate away from where they arose as “us”, the narratives will change. But the origin of the narratives is not revelation. It starts as stories about “us”, illustrating ancestors as setting cultural behavioral standards. As time goes on and each of the daughter cultures changes, the narratives change to mirror the new habits.

It works with the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, too. I wrote a book detailing this.

So yes, later generations had different versions of narratives that were told by the unified culture of their origin. But no, those stories don’t originate in revelation. They come from lifestyle habits and ancestral deeds.

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 5

Grammars will tell you that our -ous case, used with time, refers to an expanse of time while -on with time measures off a period of time. But what would you think of Thucydides III 92.1.

ὑπὸ δὲ τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον Λακεδαιμόνιοι Ἡράκλειαν τὴν ἐν Τραχινίᾳ ἀποικίαν καθίσταντο ἀπὸ τοιᾶσδε γνώμης.

About this time the Lacedaemonians founded their colony of Heraclea in Trachis, their object being the following.

Upo is the preposition in an ergative structure, which introduces the agent in -on case. But LSJ admits you can use it with the -ous case to mean under, pretty much the same as -on case. Based on that, it wants every use to mean physically under something or subordinated to something. And then it says with time, don't translate it.

Which would mean that the Perseus translator is wrong when he uses a perfectly normal English phrase instead of just saying "that time". 

The instruction not to translate it may be related to LSJ entries for verbs with the note "acc. loci". When the -ous case is used of a location, as opposed to movement, it confuses grammarians. They are thinking in Grenglish and they want it to use a preposition. There is absolutely no reason why people who speak a language on the street should not use it the same way, whether writing or speaking. But later grammarians couldn't cope with that so they made things up. 

Not only that, but for a point in time, the grammarians expect the -ois case. So if this bit in Thucydides refers to a point in time, that also confuses the grammarians. 

The point is that when a preposition can be used with more than one case, it often has similar meanings with each case. Nobody has done the homework to show what is going on. 

a) It  could be that past grammarians have not studied the surviving material closely enough to detect nuance, which I strongly believe after my last year of work. 

b) It could be that different writers favor different prepositions. 

c) It could be that there's really no distinction: what you should do is list all the possible prepositions with any nuances revealed by what class? right, the CONTEXT -- but again, this would take that comprehensive study of the material that nobody has done yet.

And it really does have to be a comprehensive study of the surviving material. In writing that handbook, I went through citations used by Goodwin. 

1/ About half of his examples have no citation so he can't prove any author used Greek that way. 

2/ Of the rest, at least 2/3 either a/ don't support what he tries to tell us or b/ contradict what he tries to tell us or c/ actually contain a different point of grammar than he uses them for. 

Goodwin can't prove that Classical Greek works the way he says it does, and neither can the 2019 grammar from Cambridge.

I used plain vanilla search tools with Greek text of the documents in Microsoft Word and I found citations Goodwin did not use that contradict him. You owe it to yourself, if you still have the grammar you used when you studied Greek, to prove to yourself whether you got ripped off by having to memorize things that weren't true. 

And if you really want to be a rebel, find out what your school is teaching from now, examine it, and tell them whether they are ripping off current students. We all have to stick together and protest when schools grade us on how well we learn lies.

Ben Hur the novel, pt 2

So a while back I said non-Jews should not write about Jews because they always get things wrong. That was when I was criticizing The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. Now I’m criticizing Lew Wallace’s book Ben Hur. We’re only up to chapter 3 and already, the “Greek” who claimed he talked to a Jew shows he didn’t listen very well. In Chapter 4 it’s supposed to be a Hindu. Let’s see how bad Wallace messes that up – and he has the opportunity to mess up Hinduism as well as Judaism.

What you have to realize, is that you have a Greek, an Egyptian, and a Hindu, each talking their own language, and you’re supposed to realize that miraculously, they can understand each other. Uh-huh.

Wallace published Ben Hur in 1880, one year after Max Mueller began the thirty year task of publishing his series of eastern scriptures translations. Wallace might not have read the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Baghavad Gita, the Vedas, Puranas, Aryas, and so on. He might be going by an encyclopedia article, which was likely bigoted in a Victorian kind of way. Don’t get me wrong, Victorians did a lot of research, but most of the work they left behind denigrated everybody east of the Urals or south of the Black Sea. And it’s not likely that Wallace read a lot of material and then picked out only what was obviously unbigoted.

The Hindu’s claim to have the oldest wisdom literature doesn’t pan out. Henry Layard had just discovered the ruins of Nineveh; Akkadian had just been deciphered. As I say in another place, it doesn’t mean Wallace knew about this, we exaggerate how quickly scholarly material disseminates. But Sumerian written wisdom literature goes back to the 2000s BCE and reproduced much older material that had stood the test of time. The Vedas were still being transmitted orally at the time – but they did exist.  Cultures make no leaps; both Sumerian and Vedic literature reflect centuries or millennia of cultural existence, just as the Jewish Bible does.

Then again, for the Hindu to praise invention is the Presentism Fallacy. In Wallace’s time, the Industrial Revolution was going full-blast, quite literally. Hinduism, like other cultures based on oral tradition, is of course not innovative; cultures make no leaps. Neither is the law. The Code of Ur-Nammu shows how long some human behaviors have been going on, and made it into the law code, and courts of law are still havens of oral communications and tradition despite Lexis/Nexus and Westlaw.

This chapter also brings up the concept of redemption. Redemption in Jewish law requires reform of one’s life, in obedience to Jewish law. The prophets agree. There’s a universally mistranslated verse in Jeremiah which non-Jews think rejects animal sacrifice. It doesn’t. These people confuse ratsah, which in Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew is an auxiliary for the volitive modality, with what it means in Biblical Hebrew, “accept”. Gd does not accept sacrifices, they are retroactively invalid, if the person bringing the sacrifice intends to go back and commit the same transgression that imposed the sacrifice on them.

Biblical Hebrew is different from later forms. They are tense languages. Biblical Hebrew is an aspect language, like all the ancient Semitic languages, like Arabic still is. I found a 21^st century dissertation about Biblical Hebrew online. When I had absorbed what it said, I could see that only by treating Biblical Hebrew as an aspect language and using 21^st century definitions of modality, could you see how Jewish law derives from Torah. I wrote a book about that which draws in other things I learned by 2015.

But the point is, you can’t understand Judaism if you can’t understand its laws, and Wallace screws it up every time.