Ben Hur the novel, part 12

We are up to Book II chapter 4 of Ben Hur and I forgot something in chapter 3.

Amrah would not have a bowl of milk on the tray she brings to Judah. That’s not kosher. It was decided before 10 CE. She would have a goblet of vin ordinaire on the tray. Wallace wrote as the Temperance movement was gaining steam and members of that movement would be sure to approve and recommend his book if the only people who drank liquor were dissolute characters or at least those who were not on track for conversion.

So this is post 12 and you can bail here if you want. You could get some of the same information on this thread, from my Fact-Checking thread. It’s up to you whether to keep on or ditch me. If you leave, take with you the lesson that if you’re not Jewish and you’re not an educated Jew, you shouldn’t write fiction about Jews because you are sure to get something wrong.

But if you’re seeing this paragraph, you stayed. And immediately Wallace makes a mistake.

What language does he think Judah’s mother speaks?

If he thinks it’s Biblical Hebrew, he’s wrong. Jews stopped speaking it on the street during the Babylonian Captivity. Aramaic, aka Neo-Babylonian or Akkadian, became the Jewish street language.

Because of that, in my opinion, the elder Jews realized that their oral tradition was dying out. It was the basis for their entire culture. They decided to put it into writing. They got their experts together and transcribed the oral tradition.

Then they took down the words of the prophets which, in Jewish canon, starts with the book of Joshua and goes through Jeremiah. All these materials are also in Biblical Hebrew. The importance of these books is that they provide later confirmation of Torah law under new behavioral examples.

And finally, the Jews wrote down things like Psalms and Proverbs, which gave further examples of how Biblical Hebrew used words; historical books like Ruth and Chronicles; and the most important material that they knew in Biblical Aramaic like Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel.

The Jews learned Greek, no doubt, after the conquests of Alexander; they knew Latin after the conquests of Caesar. They claimed there were 72 languages stemming from the descendants of Noach, plus an “Aramaic without a spoken version” which I assume shows that they had seen cuneiform and knew it recorded Neo-Babylonian, but they learned the Aramaic square script for the language they spoke.

Now the next question. Who was Judah to be? I already said: he had taken his father’s position in business and in public affairs. The question is nonsense. Judah already had responsible employment and a public role. His father raised him to be a responsible Jewish adult, not an adrenaline addict like Messala. And so another false and nonsensical chapter goes into the record.

And the final blunder: the First Temple was burned down by the Aramaean rulers of Babylon. The Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom and were in turn conquered by the Aramaeans. This is in the Bible. Wallace is messing with the facts.