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.