Soooo history: the Journey of Man is a myth

So once again, you cannot just take a video as the last word in anything. The book was published in 2002; the video was made the next year. And you guessed it, in the 20 years since then, an awful lot of what the video says has been overturned. This is a loooong post so you can stop there or you can skim on down for the links to the new evidence. Or you could read the whole thing and shake your head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_xTG6VXlIQ

Now. About minute 7:50 Wells makes a classic misstatement. Humans did not evolve from apes. Humans and apes have a common ancestor which was neither a human nor an ape. Once you have a life form with the genetics of an ape, it is not going to develop the genetics of a human.

Secondly, that 50,000 year thing. That can't be true. The oldest identifiable human artifacts in the Americas go back 20,000 years and they are in Pittsburgh, PA, on the other side of the continent from either Alaska or California. Remember that about 1 hour 39 minutes into the video. Kennewick Man in Washington State goes back 9,000 years. Nowadays, we have remains showing that humans left Africa 60,000 to 90,000 years ago, almost twice what the narrator says.

Third, they were not superhuman. I’ve observed birds for a long time and when it comes to food, they can be very smart and very inventive. It’s a matter of life and death. Humans moved out of Africa, not to prove they were super-human, but because they had used up the territory where they were. 

At 20:39, he makes another mistake. We have found the hyoid bone in Neanderthals, the first homo sapiens; it is the bone in our larynx that makes speech. We know that primates use sound to communicate. Neanderthals have more than twice the brain capacity of the nearest non-human primate. They had the FOXP2 gene that we have, which is related to speech. They have a well-developed Broca’s region, and you don’t get that without many generations of the same type of communication that modern humans use it for. There’s little doubt that Neanderthals spoke, and Neanderthal DNA has been identified in Africa. It’s not an issue of Europeans with Neanderthal ancestry producing children with Africans. Instead, people migrated back and forth out of and into Africa, before the migrations that carried humans permanently into the rest of the world. When you realize that Neanderthals lived 500,000 years ago, but humans didn’t leave Africa until after 100,000 years ago, it only makes sense to say that Africans spoke long before the existence of the Homo sapiens sapiens peoples called the San. Human speech predates the San by 200,000 years or more.

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/01/30/new-study-identifies-neanderthal-ancestry-african-populations-and-describes-its

At 22:50 there is another mistake. All primates hunt. They use communications if they hunt cooperatively: to convene the group, declare what they’re after, tell where it is, and arrange who does what. This is part of bonobo life, chimp life, and it was part of the lives of early humans like Lucy and Rudolf. The real benefit of speech is something hardly anybody thinks about and is part of a subject called oral traditions studies. Without writing, information has to transmit by word of mouth. In the earliest generations of humans, information could be demonstrated by mother to child, teaching tool making and how to use the tools, a process that was complete by the time the child no longer needed the mother to nurse it or chew food for it. The more complex the tools become, the slower and more careful the demonstrations have to be.

And along with the demonstrations, the teacher says things like, “this is how my mother/father did it.” Then may follow statements of other things the parent did. Each generation has another generation in the past to tell about. It’s a sign of belonging to the family, to know what the ancestors did. And extraordinary events go with this: eruptions, earthquakes, floods, droughts. As culture gets more complex, the number of subjects for these stories expands. They become fireside tales that reinforce community. And at last they determine how every generation of that culture is supposed to live. They become laws.

The founder of this study, AxelOlrik, knows that the Fjoort African tribe has a set of tribal lays. Roger Abrahams reveals that they tell these tales when they are sitting in judgment on some violation of tribal behavior. The reason is to rehearse tribal customs so as to know if the accused deserves punishment, and what punishment.

The same thing informed Jewish behavior for thousands of years. The surviving tales were finally put into writing during the Babylonian Captivity to keep them from being lost, as the basis for existing court rulings that were later documented in Mishnah. And then important court discussions were recorded as gemara, one set in the Holy Land and one in Babylonia.

Culture like the Oldowan toolkit or use of fire, offers advantages over instinctive behavior. You don't have to wait for the genes to change; you change your behavior without that. Once the ancestral tale developed, culture took on a new meaning. All humans of a given era might use the same toolkit, but every clan had its own set of ancestral tales. Originally identical, they changed as people left the homeland. But only the details changed. All oral traditions share some of the same features as the Mwindo epic of Africa, and those same features show up in Sumerian tales, Hindu tales, Chinese tales, the Popul Vuh of the Americas, the Jewish Bible, Greek myth and German fairy tales. That is what comes of Axel Olrik’s work. And even people working in the field of oral traditions for the most part know only a fraction of what Olrik said.

27:46 is an expression of something supported by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould could never quite grasp that you can’t have a complete paleontological dataset on a world where life forms decay when they die and then the chemical traces are subjected to geological activity. In fact there is a phrase used by paleontologists that I paraphrase. Paleontologists say natura non facit saltus, nature makes no leaps. When you find a fossil, any fossil, you know that millions of generations stand behind it, and just because they left no trace in the fossil record does not mean they didn’t exist.

My paraphrase is cultura nonfacit saltus. There is no cultural evidence that does not have generations of humans behind it, and just because we don’t have every generation of stone tools from Oldowan to American Clovis points doesn’t mean that humans suddenly stopped using tools at some point, then invented a whole new style out of nothing. It doesn’t happen. Even Newton and Einstein stood on the shoulders of older researchers, as Bill Gates stood on the shoulders of Ada Lady Lovelace. So when a professor babbles on about a dark ages in a given culture, it’s not that nothing was happening. It’s just that the interim products were destroyed in various ways – wars, fires, burials, and so on.

At 30:40 the narrator repeats the old Victorian idea that all food came from hunters. This is disproven by modern human physiology. We still don’t need to get more than 12% of our calories from animal food to be healthy. Chimps and bonobos likewise have a mostly plant diet. Females don’t sit around and wait for heap big hunter to come home. They go out with the kids and pick fruit, dig up tubers, find nuts, and so on. When they come across termite mounds they can exploit them. When they come across bird nests, they can exploit them. Anything that doesn’t eat them first and doesn’t poison them, they eat.

So you have humans moving in and out of Africa. The evidence is in the caves at Carmel in Israel; there are millennia of layers of remains and dirt, and we find Neanderthals there as well as more modern types, one layered over the other. Humans had already been doing this for the history of Neanderthals and it continued after Cro magnon man developed. Just because we don’t have evidence of every last settlement doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Pretending otherwise is a case of the false argument from silence.

There is a true argument from silence. If you have a complete dataset, you can say that X did not exist. If you have a bus schedule and there are blanks on it, you know there will be no bus at that time. The bus company has a complete dataset which says there’s no bus at that time. But paleontology and archaeology and history don’t work like that. They have gaps. Any time a professor says that X didn’t exist at some point in past time because we don't have samples of it, challenge that statement.

And so the idea that somehow humans flew from Africa to Australia is ludicrous. The question “how did they do it” shows that the narrator is not thinking logically.

38:00 And in fact there’s an answer for why the Australians say they originated there. It’s in Axel Olrik’s work. When people migrate, the stories they tell change. The old stories don’t apply any more and they dissolve out of the tradition. The new stories that reflect the new environment take over and record the new culture. This applies both to Australians and to the Native Americans later in the video. Over the millennia since speech began, billions of people told billions of stories, and most of them dissolved before anybody wrote them down. It’s the same thing as physical fossils. The surviving stories record the surviving cultures. That is not equivalent to science which is based on mathematics and physical evidence.

52:35 The data in the video is misleading. The crossing happened, therefore it must have been possible using artifacts of the times. The fact that it happened 50,000 years ago refutes the narrator’s timing claims and puts the migration out of Africa closer to 90,000 years ago. As you now realize, the fact that no remains of watercraft have been found is irrelevant. It’s a case of a false argument from silence.

Now look at the success percentages in the Results section of the following paper. Each of those percentages is for one person in one year. You have a chance for a thousand people to cross in a thousand years. If they can see Sahul, the name for ancient Greater Australia, and they want to find out if they can live there, the crossing would be intentional not random, and once one person succeeds and brings back word, others can try it. The Discussion section gives an estimate of 1300 people minimum, intentionally crossing, before 50,000 years ago. They didn’t do it because they were adventurous. They did it thinking of food.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42946-9#:~:text=The%20route(s)%20these%20first,expanded%20shelf%20of%20northwestern%20Australia.

55:35. There’s a misstatement. Animals were not pushed out of Africa by drought due to the Ice Age. Animals evolve to survive in a given environment. If animals were pushed out of Africa, why are there no chimp remains in Sinai and Arabia and so on, which were moister and had more food? Again, that’s a false argument from silence. Instead, what happened is that people migrated farther than their normal feeding grounds – say, 30 miles instead of 15 – and in the new place they found food. The further they got away from the Ethiopian homeland the less familiar the animals were, but that makes little difference since they ate 3/4x as much plant food as animal food. As long as the strange animals didn’t eat them first or poison them, the humans ate them. There were elephant-like animals in Europe during Neanderthal times – but they weren’t mammoths of the Ice Ages. And they existed in the Middle East, where we know Neanderthals lived – and hunted these same animals. So humans did not leave Africa “following their game animals”. They left Africa and found different game animals to eat.

56:20 The Chinese were not the first peoples in China. The Denisovans were discovered 8 years after the book was written. They were related to but not descended from Neanderthals. They interbred with the later people who brought in the classic Chinese features, but they never migrated into Sahul. There is no Denisovan blood in Australian aborigines.

57:10 is false. Neanderthals lived in Europe 500,000 years ago as far north as Kent in England.

57:35 is also false. The ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge, and of the Basques, left northeastern Anatolia about 8000 BCE or 10,000 years ago. They did not speak Indo-European languages; they probably spoke ergative languages descended from some ancestor that also produced the ergative Hurrian and Sumerian languages. In the millennia between the Carmel Caves and this migration, humans in the Middle East were exploiting grain and harvesting it with sickles. By 7800 BCE one variety of wheat could no longer sow itself; people had to sow it. By 4000 BCE wine grapes were domesticated, and this is about the time that the earlier emigrants reached the extremes of Europe.

58:30 in 2018 Neanderthal art was discovered in Spain that dated back nearly 70,000 years. This used radioactive dating, not just stratigraphy, so it’s a firm date.

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/neanderthal-art-discovery/

59:00 There was almost no physical difference between Neanderthal and Cro magnon. The one was not stout and stooped and the other thin and tall. People in Africa were not thin because of a genetic predisposition; it was because getting food was thermodynamically expensive. Despite resting more than half the time, they still worked off every calorie they ate. The adaptations to cool weather were cultural and took thousands of years to develop as Neanderthal and Cro magnon migrated back and forth through the Levant. There was no need to develop large body size to survive, unlike animals which don’t make or wear clothing. The guy who reached over six feet up to do a cave painting, could have been standing on somebody’s back or sitting on somebody’s shoulders.

1 hour 2.  another falsehood. Blacks can get skin cancer; dark skin does not protect against UV. What dark skin protects against is the body making too much vitamin D. Too little and soft bones bend. Too much and brittle bones break. You can’t perform sustenance activities with broken limbs; you can die from broken ribs. You can’t eat when you have a broken jaw. That woman should have been ashamed of herself for spouting an old wives’ tale. 5700 years ago a woman in Denmark still had dark skin, although she had blue eyes; she was part of that migration from NE Anatolia I wrote of just now. Again, this discovery was made in 2019.

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2019-12-17/ty-article-magazine/.premium/5-700-year-old-chewing-gum-reveals-danish-woman-had-dark-skin-blue-eyes-and-stds/0000017f-f833-ddde-abff-fc7730a10000

1 hour 10. The Siberian R1 Y chromosome haplogroup genetic contribution is real. A Siberian wave swept west, into Europe – well part of it. It washed up in the Basque region. It penetrated down into Greece. Its descendants were the Mykenaeans who built the Palace Culture, used Linear B, and form the characters of the Iliad. But it did not affect the Minoans; it did not get down into Italy. The low percentage of this DNA in Italy could well come from Greeks who settled Sicily and Sardinia. The Greek language is the descendant of the Siberian wave – but Latin is not. But this was not a delay in migration. It was a substantial genetic contribution after the ancestors of the Basques but before the Indo-European migration. The Anatolians were still domesticating wheat at the time.

1 hour 27 that woman is back again with another of her myths. The abstract alone proves she’s wrong.

https://jphysiolanthropol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40101-022-00287-z#:~:text=The%20physiological%20principle%20is%20that,heat%20retention%20in%20a%20mammal.

1 hour 35 the estimate of original population is too low.

http://news.ku.edu/2018/04/27/dna-sequences-suggest-250-people-made-original-native-american-founding-population

The Na-Dene and Inuit populations have a different haplogroup from other tribes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100622001311/http://www.genebase.com/tutorial/item.php?tuId=16

If you get a sad feeling that academics don’t have any common sense, you’re right. If you have a feeling they never learned any logic, you’re right. About the time that Immanuel Kant showed that Aristotle’s categories were not a priori or inherent in the world, but an artefact of Greek culture, it went out of fashion to study logic. It only picked up again in the second half of the 1800s when symbolic logic developed. But that’s higher mathematics; few people in the liberal arts study that. I only learned probability calculations because I saw it would help me prove something I had wanted to prove for 40 years. And damned few academics know when they are committing fallacies. As I know from reading their work. But the narrator is a scientist and for him to go down the rabbit hole of illogic is really sad.

When I write these critiques I constantly say, we can’t blame somebody for what nobody knew until after their work was published. But I also keep saying that these videos are always a starting point for research, not something to rely on forever, and what you just read is a perfect example that I’m right.

Ben Hur the novel, part 8

So we’re up to chapter 10 of Ben Hur and right above it Mary says “the place is sanctified.” Have you ever thought about what that is supposed to mean?

I did the first ever complete English translation of the transcript from the 1913 Mendel Beilis trial on a charge of ritual murder, the blood libel that falsely says Jews need children’s blood at Passover to put in matso. That is false, but the connection to Ben Hur is about consecration of land and buildings.

Late in the trial a government official takes the stand. Beilis’ bosses were building a hospice on one corner of their property. In autumn of 1910 they got the plans approved. Then this little twerp Merder gets involved and makes them change the plans. He sees things in the plans that look like part of a Christian church so he decides this isn’t really a dining room, it’s a prayer house. Well, the Zaitsevs had already examined Kyiv laws on building new Jewish prayer houses and the site fit the requirements, but they decided to use it only as a dining hall for the doctors. But supposedly the blood of the murder victim would be used to consecrate this ground.

Judaism does not require consecrated ground for synagogues. There is no consecration ritual for any real estate that Jews use. They put up mezuzot, and that’s it. The proper place to initiate Shabbat, or hold the Passover seders, or light the Chanukiyah, is at home, not in a synagogue. Still less do you need a consecration ritual for a place where a woman is going to give birth.

Next, there is no “sacred ninth hour”. Sacrifices were offered morning and evening in the Temple, according to the ritual specified in Exodus.

The rest of the chapter is Christian stuff and I promised I would leave that alone. Same for chapters 11, 12 and 14, but in chapter 13 he tries to drag in Rabbi Hillel. Rabbi Hillel never got involved in “the Christ” being born. That is a Christian phrase; it is meaningless in Judaism. Herod would never ask such a question; Hillel would never take it up seriously.

The phrase was unknown to Jews for at least a century after Herod’s death; the King of the Jews after him was his grandson Agrippa, about whom there are stories in Mishnah, Tacitus and Suetonius as well as Josephus. In between, Augustus and his governors ruled Judea, and a bad lot they were, too, raping the lush province to enrich themselves. At last, patience worn out, the Jews rebelled and killed off three Roman legions before the Second Temple was destroyed.

In the next 30 years Josephus became client of the Flavians and wrote his War of the Jews. One of the surviving copies has a forged insertion about “the Christ” which is also copied into his Antiquities. The forgery is in very bad Greek; I checked out one thing I didn’t understand with a professor of Greek at Cambridge and he said it was nonsense. Between 400 and 1453 CE, knowledge of Greek declined in Europe and was rediscovered when Christian scholars fled Constantinople ahead of the Muslim conquerors. That’s the setting for the bad forgery in Josephus.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 7

So Lew Wallace has gotten everything wrong about Jews so far and has even thrown in some racial slurs. What sin is left for him to commit? From this point I’ll keep focusing on his ignorance of Jewish culture.

And in chapter 9 he shows his ignorance of kashrut. Mishnah Chullin 8:2 tells how a hostess at an inn or fundak behaves or how to deal with customers. Joseph and Mary are not going to stop where they can’t get kosher food, and somebody who knows what they’re doing has to run the kitchen instead of leaving it up to ignorant slaves.

Of course, the most frum Jews would bring food with them, probably non-perishables like bread and dried fruit. But if two different people are eating at one table, and one ordered chicken and the other cheese, can you serve each of them separately?

There’s no question in the Mishnah that the one who ordered the chicken won’t eat the cheese, and vice versa, which is treif; you can’t eat both meat and milk at one meal. You have to eat one and then let hours go by before you eat the other. The issue is, all right, you can’t put them on the same plate because the guests won’t share plates, but can you put each on a separate plate on the same table. Rabbi Shammai (the strict one) said it’s OK; Rabbi Hillel (the lenient one) said no.

But there’s a more subtle issue. Jews are prohibited from eating untithed plant food. To avoid transgression, Mishnah Demai 3:5 says if you give your hoteliere food to cook for you, you have to take tithes before you give it and again when you get it back, because she might mix it up with her own produce which, if she was ignorant, might not be tithed.

It even affects family relationships. Demai 3:6 asks whether a mother-in-law can be trusted if her daughter’s husband gives her tithed produce. The answer is yes, even if the daughter’s family is not as frum as the husband’s.

This is another barrier between Jews and Samaritans. Samaritans cannot tithe properly. When the kingdoms split, the Levites who were still in the north went south to Judea. The kohanim cannot get their tithes except for what is taken from the tithe belonging to the Levites. The inability of the Samaritans to tithe properly means Jews should not eat their produce.

On the other hand, Demai 3:4 says if you give tithed grain to a Samaritan miller to grind for you, you don’t have to worry that he’ll give untithed grain back.

And then there’s something even more subtle. Leviticus 11:38 says if you intentionally put water on produce of any kind that is intended for eating, and later find an insect carcass on it, you have to dispose of it. It’s not tahor. It can’t be modified for another use so that you don’t have to worry about its status. The preceding verse says if you have seed that you already intended to sow, and this happens, don’t worry about it, go ahead and sow it. But you can’t prepare food and repurpose it for sowing in the case of verse 38, a situation called v’ki yutan.

The verb form refers to the purposeful putting of fluid on the produce, such as grain. The problem is that wetted grain is easier to mill. Do you have to mistrust a Samaritan miller that he will put water on the grain? You only mill grain so that you can eat it; you can’t sow it after that.

There’s nothing in Talmud about this. The Mishnah is Machshirin 1:1, from a division of Mishnah called Taharot, and there is no gemara on it; what you get in Mishnah is all there is. Talmud only has commentary on one tractate out of Taharot, which is Niddah.

And don’t forget, Mishnah is a Jewish product, not a Samaritan one. Samaritan observance of v’ki yutan went according to their own Mishnah. But Machshirin never questions whether Samaritans are untrustworthy. Perhaps it was standard practice not to put water on grain for milling, all the more so at Passover when water must not touch grain or flour until 18 minutes or less before baking, or the matso will be unuseable.

So Joseph and Mary had to have food with them, or put up with relatives or at an inn run by a trustworthy hoteliere. They would not stop at some random place. Wallace has another chapter with a similar situation and I’ll talk about it when we get there.

21st Century Biblical Hebrew -- pausal forms

I posted this text on another thread and now I have an update.

And now that problem about trop. There’s an old concept called “pausal forms”.

Trop generally consist of disjunctive and conjunctive forms. The disjunctive ones divide verses. Etnach is one of them; so is sof pasuk, the trop at the end of a verse.

The conjunctive trop, conversely, mark sets of words that are included together as a subunit of a verse. Conjunctive trop, for example, are used with the words or phrases emphasized by et when it takes the vowel tseire.

The pausal forms concept says that disjunctive trop are associated with anomalous word forms. That is, the anomalous word forms in Torah appear where there are disjunctive trop.

Modern computerized tabulation shows this isn’t so. The so-called anomalous forms appear sometimes with conjunctive trop. It’s also true that not all occurrences of disjunctive trop are assigned to anomalous forms.

Now that you know more about Biblical Hebrew, you should be asking what words are called anomalous in Torah?

For example, Gesenius once categorized the word maen in Exodus 7:27 as a piel present tense that for some reason had been written without the usual prefix of mem. Surely that ought to qualify as an anomaly. But it’s an aspectless verb, used to avoid the nuances of the various aspects.

Likewise, since Gesenius said that the Jews didn’t know why they put nun sofit on the ends of some verbs, those ought to be anomalies. You know that they are uncertainty epistemics.

I’ve been going through Torah word by word for years now, digging into new concepts. I’ve kept track of words that really seemed to be anomalous. Out of about 80,000 words in Torah, I’ve come up with maybe 200 that are anomalous – not just “hapax legomena”, like mesheq used of Avraham’s servant, but grammatically different and impossible to analyze into any of the binyanim or other forms we use now, and with no clear pattern of use.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Torah has some words that are scribal errors, that the Masoretic scholars didn’t pick up on and include in their notes, but I doubt it.

Given that the ancestors of the Jews started developing Hebrew by 2000 BCE, it’s more than likely that they had ways of saying things that were perfectly meaningful to them, not at all anomalous in the context of a millennium and a half of vernacular – but which turned up only once in the written record. It’s analogous to Axel Olrik’s recognition that in the history of any ethnic group, their narrators might have told any number of stories over their fires in caves and tents and huts – but a relatively small number survived the centuries to be put into writing.  

With the apparent anomalies in Biblical Hebrew, we might be looking at something as rare in the spoken language as pual is in Torah, but with just as distinctive a function – and we can’t tell what that function is because we only have one example.

Now I have a new bottom line. In Arabic there are pausal forms (the technical term is waqf), and they modify normal grammar at a pause like a break in thought (where English would have a comma for example) or the end of a sentence. Pausal forms are changes to nouns that are declined. 

That fact should have been a warning sign to anybody who was trying to apply Arabic grammar to Biblical Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew does not decline nouns. It can change them into adjectives with the suffix -i, but however much that might remind scholars of the Arabic jarr case with its kasrah, it is not the same. 

For one thing, there are no suffixes for other uses of nouns, no final fatha such as Arabic uses for the nasb form. 

For another thing, Hebrew does not have nunation such as Arabic uses for indefinite nouns; there is nothing to delete to produce a pausal form. What might have looked like nunation in Hebrew to past grammarians, was in verbs and it is a marker of the uncertainty epistemic. Past grammarians didn't know from epistemics, but it takes a terrible state of confusion to think that a situation applying to Arabic nouns also applies to Biblical Hebrew verbs. But we saw terrible states of confusion on the Greek thread, now didn't we?

And considering how confused scholars were about Classical Greek, I have to say that waqf is not discussed in a two-volume text on Quranic Arabic that I found online. All my Westernized texts discuss it: Wright, Price, the FLAMRIC course. If you were taught Arabic in an Arabic-speaking nation by somebody who grew up using the language, ask them what the difference is: is waqf a post-Quranic development?

Anyway, if you're taking a class in Biblical Hebrew and your professor starts babbling about pausal forms, pull up this post on your phone and share it with them with a note "don't test us on something that doesn't exist." Which sadly enough has been happening in Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek for centuries now. 

Ben Hur, the novel -- pt. 6

So Lew Wallace. We’re up to Chapter 8 of Ben Hur and he gets into something he should have left alone.

Joseph and Mary are in Jerusalem talking to somebody who knows that Joseph is descended from David. So Joseph’s children of his body could be candidates for Moshiach. But Jesus was not the son of his body. Every Christian will tell you that. It means that Joseph’s ancestry is irrelevant. But Christian scripture wants to claim that Jesus was descended from David. Seriously, how many people do you know who have read Ben Hur and of them, how many know that Moshiach must be a genetic descendant of David?

But it’s worse. Almost none of the people who read Ben Hur know that Talmud discusses two Moshichim. One is descended from Joseph ben Yaaqov, the ancestor of Joshua who was Mosheh’s aide-de-camp and led the Israelites when they began to occupy the Holy Land. This Moshiach will come first and “will die”. The other, descended from David, “will not die”.

This could be a metaphor. It could be a tacit recognition that the Samaritans do not have a viable culture. Persecution of Samaritans under Hadrian impacted them differently from Jews; you have to be born a Samaritan but you can be a convert to Judaism.

This is like the situation in Greece, which the Talmudic rabbis didn’t know or care about. You had to be born a Spartan, one of the Equals. You had to belong to a mess club, and if you were expelled you were no longer an Equal. The birth rate was low and weak children were killed at birth; some died during the brutal training regime. When 300 Equals died at Thermopylae, that was a disaster but it was not felt for a hundred years. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athinaians captured 142 Equals, that pretty much ended the Spartans as a force.

But Athins gave citizenship to its colonies and to some slaves, so it could always recruit its population. In Athins, military service was compulsory across the ten tribes, and they had no trouble recruiting as long as the population stayed steady or increased. And it did increase, up to the plague in the Peloponnesian war, and then recovered afterwards.

Whatever Talmud means by “moshiach ben Yosef”, it is also a nod to the northern kingdom which did go down to disaster under the Assyrians, and a recognition that in Talmudic times the Samaritans underwent great persecutions after about 200 CE, after the death of their great sage Bar Rabbah. The Jews went out into the Diaspora, collecting converts along the way, until the disastrous decrees of Theodosius II, but Christians and later Muslims decimated the Samaritans.

So. The other mistake in this chapter is that Mary’s descent is also irrelevant. As with priests, descent in the male line is required for moshiach.

And then the bigoted “Jews all look alike”.

People banned Huckleberry Finn because it used a word that Sam Clemens grew up hearing all the time. Wallace grew up hearing about “the hook-nosed Jew”; have any of you looked at a photo of the painting of the Duke of Wellington lately? He was known to his troops as “Old Beaky”, among other things. Or “the long-nosed Jew”, like the recent caricature of Zelenskyy about which one person on Twitter said “I didn’t think he had a nose like that” and I tweeted a reply pointing out that this was a classic anti-Semitic slur.

And it’s a European Christian slur, as you ought to realize if you know what the term “Roman nosed” means, whether you’re talking about horses or people. So if you’re going to ban an American book that happens to record an American reality, what are you going to do about an American book that is woefully ill-informed and repeats European racial slurs?

On my Gibbon thread I pointed out that he pretends to write history when he really writes tabloid trash, and we have good reason for kicking him to the curb because 200 years of research makes him irrelevant. Wallace is writing fiction and he knows it. Are you going to treat him equally with Mark Twain or not? That’s what you have to decide.