Sooo history -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 2

So the Canaanites have reared their heads in current urban legends about the population of the Holy Land over time, and I posted some history.

You can see from that history that the Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites. On the Fact-Checking thread, I specifically wrote about the old genocide urban legends. I've tweeted about it too.

What's more, we know there were Canaanites in the 1220s BCE, three centuries after the Israelites came to the Holy Land.

Now there are new urban legends that pull in the Canaanites. The fact is, they are still with us. The people of Lebanon have a Canaanite inheritance.

And lol and behold, it is the same J2 Y chromosome haplogroup found in many Jews. It originated in NE Anatolia during the Neolithic and domestication of wheat, wine grapes, and animals, close to the Caucasus. You know. Near Ararat. Genesis 10 in the Bible gets another confirmation. 

So a) the Israelites did NOT kill off all the Canaanites b) the Canaanites were known to the Egyptian New Kingdom as living in the Holy Land and c) the Canaanites had descendants who are still with us.

I'm just saying -- hand-wringing not accepted

I finally saw that stupid tweet that said "what are we supposed to do as American Jews in this situation".

I don't think that person understands Jewishness because the answer is obvious.

IT'S CHANUKKAH. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT CHANUKKAH IS IMPORTANT FOR. RISING UP AND SHOWING PEOPLE WE ARE HERE.

You don't need a fancy setup. Go to your grocery and buy enough packs of birthday candles to get you through, and some matches.

Wrap a box in aluminum foil.

Find a window that looks out onto the street, and into which people on the street can look.

Melt the bottom of a candle enough for it to stand upright on the foil.

LIGHT ONE CANDLE AND USE IT TO LIGHT THAT DAMNED STANDING CANDLE AND PUT IT IN THE WINDOW WHERE PEOPLE CAN SEE IT AS IT BURNS

The proper place for Chanukkah candle lighting is in the home. We all of us need to stand up and be counted. That is what Chanukkah is about. Not hand-wringing. Not hiding. 

And then play this, standing up while you listen to the anthem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-y12LJlFkU

Here you'll find instructions on what to do after tonight.

https://www.chabad.org/holidays/chanukah/article_cdo/aid/102911/jewish/What-Is-Hanukkah.htm

Sooo history -- clearing up a lot of ignorance

In light of the false information going around on the web, mostly with anti-Semitic screeds, I thought it was time to give some information I didn't give on my Fact-Checking blog. The supporting data is in the bibliography. 

There are two reasons for most of the ignorance. One is simply that schools don't teach Jewish history, even in AP courses, and that history is never a required subject. The other is that courses dealing with Jewish history do not use post-1995 data like I did, ignore DNA evidence, and know nothing about the intersection between the Bible and Olrik's work. That's aside from the fact that academic writers are so ignorant about Biblical Hebrew and Jewish classics.

So here's the real deal.

By 4000 BCE the Semitic language parent had developed in eastern Anatolia south of the Caucasus mountains, distinct from the nearby ergative isolate Hurrian or its ancestor, and also the Indic languages. A Jewish ancestor is set in this location at this time, when wine grapes were being domesticated and meteoric iron was being used. The J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome subclades begin to develop at this time in NE Anatolia, and they are the main subclades in men descended from Jewish males.

The Jewish culture begins about 2500 BCE with a small nucleus of people who move west, after environmental changes dessicate the edin which used to be watered by four rivers, of which only two survive today. At the time smelted iron was coming into use. 

About 2350 BCE, the Hebrews of Ur have migrated west to the crossroads trading city of Haran, then southwest along the trade routes to the region of Numeira which is now in Jordan. Akkadian was used in diplomacy and trade all over southwest Asia. 

By 2000 BCE, after the destruction of Ebla and the Gutian takeover of Mesopotamia, ties between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coast weakened. Communities in southeast Anatolia dissolved along with the trade routes that had supported them. Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and Hebrew began to develop and, coincidentally, the Indic Sea Peoples began to differentiate from each other, carrying the R1a Y-chromosome subclade of the Indo-Europeans (which also originated in NE Anatolia). Carbon steel and war chariots hitched to horses appeared by this time.

The patriarchs acquire land at Chevron and Shkhem, but have to migrate away from the latter after destroying the city’s men. The narrative behind the migration has similar elements to Greek saga, and the Achaean Greeks were partners with if not identical to the Pelishtim who settled in the Holy Land.

In the reign of Amenemhet III, the patriarchs migrate to Egypt, but are (illegally) forced into servitude when Canaanitic immigrants take over north Egypt, forming the 17th dynasty,which the Egyptians called Hyksos. 

In 1628 BCE (a radiocarbon date) Thera erupts, part of a swarm of troubles during which the Israelites escape while their Hyksos oppressors try to pick up the pieces. 

The Israelites roam the Sinai Peninsula for 38 years; they consolidate a legal system that subsequently survives 35 centuries of oppression and murder and proves the advantages of common law, which reconciles local tradition with culture-wide law, over civil codes like the Roman one. Not until the reign of Henry II, in England in the 1100s CE, will another common law code arise. Radiocarbon dating places the start of the reign of Ahmose I over a reunited Egypt at about the time of the Ingress. 

Between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Israelites begin to adapt one version of Ugaritic cuneiform to Hebrew, an easy job because Ugaritic is also a Semitic language and has already adapted cuneiform into a representation of its sound system, dropping logograms and determinants. 

Between 1400 and 1100 BCE, the Aramaeans settle in the territory that takes their name, the Ionians (Achaeans) settle in a part of the Peloponnese known as Achaia, and they also colonize the western coast of the Holy Land where they are known under their Egyptian name of Pelishtim, leaving writings in Linear B. 

About 1300 BCE is the middle date for the Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor of the Jewish kohanim according to 21st century genetics. This is the period of the central shrine at Shiloh, with a tabernacle and an ark of the covenant. Before this, people sacrificed in their settlements which were under frequent attack; that was the time of the bamot, which were prohibited in the Shiloh period.

About 1230 BCE (radiocarbon date) in a period of dessication, Merneptah of the Egyptian 19th dynasty sends soldiers to raid the Holy Land for grain, impacting both the Canaanites and Israelites. He puts up a stele about 1227 BCE which identifies them as distinct peoples living side by side.

Between 1200 and 1100 BCE, the Sea Peoples destroy Ugarit, Wilusa, Hattusas, and other cities. In the previous centuries, the Indo-European Greek/Pelishtim contingent have replaced the Linear B writing system adopted from the Palace Culture, with an adapted version of Ugaritic cuneiform they picked up during their residence in the Holy Land. 

By 1100 BCE the Pelishtim bring the Shiloh central shrine cult to an end and Israelite settlements spring up on bare ground on the hilltops. They refuse to trade with the lowlands, making their own pottery and excluding wild pig, which was part of diets of the Holy Land from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE. Wild pigs survive in the highlands of Israel into the 21st century CE. Bamot are again established. Pottery styles in the north and south differ, hard evidence of cultural differences that will lead to the split monarchy.

By 900 BCE, the Israelite hilltop settlements dissolve. After the First Temple is built, the bamot are again prohibited forever. A previously united kingdom splits into Judea and all the rest of them. 

By 800 BCE, the Jews have developed a distinctive system of writing seen on the Gezer calendar. Aramaic has replaced Akkadian as the language of trade and diplomacy. The Ionians colonize the western coast of Anatolia, unknowingly returning to their homeland, and begin shaping the Sea Peoples epic of the war they took part in that destroyed Wilusa. 

By 690 BCE, the Assyrians take over the northern (Israelite) kingdom. They deport about 22,000 of the northern nobility, then import Assyrian-speaking people to whom the Israelite priests have to adapt their oral tradition. 

By 600 BCE, the Aramaeans conquer Babylon and develop Neo-Babylonian, a hybrid of Aramaic and Akkadian. They conquer Assyria and Judea and deport about 22,000 of the Judean nobility. 

By 500 BCE, the Jews return to the Holy Land and, with authorization from Persian rulers Daryavesh and Koresh, rebuild the temple. They now have a written version of the oral tradition in the wording that developed over the preceding 35 centuries. Its language is Biblical Hebrew, their pre-Captivity vernacular. Their current vernacular is Neo-Babylonian and they will adopt its non-cuneiform script for scrolls that can legally be read from in synagogue. They use Mishnaic Hebrew when running their courts and recording its enactments. 

Jews continued to live in the Holy Land for the next 25 centuries, although they spread out worldwide. Two particular infusions were the medieval creation of the kabbalistic community in Tsfat, and the purchases of land from the Ottoman Empire after 1850. The latter is known as The Old Yishuv.

The New Yishuv happened, of course, in 1948. Immediately thereafter, the Jews of Yemen were brought to Israel, and later the Jews of Ethiopia. The Jews of India also immigrated to Israel.

The sad part is that all this information is out there on the web and nobody accesses it. A lot of it is on Jewish Virtual Library. The people who want to smear Jews refuse to learn the truth. But as I said the other week, people who don't hate Jews are equally ignorant because they, too, refuse to use the resources on the Web. We all of us need a better education and as the old saying goes, it's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. Keep your tongue between your teeth if you refuse to study up.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 22

So what do we say about Wallace and Ben Hur.

Wallace did not respect his readers. He did not teach them anything by doing good research. Instead, he pandered to all the worst tendencies of Victorian melodrama.

He stole material from every cheap novel and play of the previous couple of centuries, except that he got the name Iras for Balthazar’s daughter from Shakespeare.

He pandered to every bigoted Victorian concept.

Only about 10% of what’s in this novel got into either of the two films made from it. The big thing in both of them was to get to the chariot race somehow because both filmmakers realized that it had everything – sports, excitement, death, and revenge.

It’s pretty sad to say that a novel this long is only 10% worth passing along to posterity, but that’s the case, unless you want to pass along myths and bigotry. They have their place in novels, but it’s not a good place unless you’re writing for an audience of liars or bigots.

Put it another way. I’ve been bingeing Burt Lancaster movies and came across one where he plays a trapper who is forced at arrow point to accept a black man as trade goods in exchange for an entire winter’s furs. While the movie has lots of humor in it, you can’t admire Lancaster’s character because without hating the black man, he is still cruel to him and minimizes the past sufferings of blacks. You probably wouldn’t watch that movie just from my description, even though I can throw in that they become allies in the end.

But it shows how non-haters have nothing to congratulate themselves on if they buy into the lies. Which is partly what my Fact-Checkingblog is about, and why this string of posts belongs there.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 21

We are up to Book VIII and the date is 8 or 9 Nisan. Wallace makes one of many mistakes about Passover. Simonides, who is Jewish, says tomorrow is Passover. It starts at night, which is the 14^th Nisan on the Jewish calendar.

The only time that the 10^th Nisan was important for Passover was the very first one. That time, the Israelites were told to pick out a yearling sheep (or goat) and keep it for use four days later. Mishnah Pesachim 9:5 gives a list of differences between the first Passover and all others. There is no attribution of this Mishnah so it was one generally established by 50 CE and that means it could have been in place for as much as 15 centuries.

Skipping chapter 2, you may wonder why Amrah didn’t bring matso to Judah’s family. Passover has to be celebrated in a state of taharut and leprosy is a condition of tumah.

Skipping chapter 3-7 and now we get to Wallace’s terrible horrible no-good very bad depiction of Passover. In the very first paragraph, people at various fires invite Judah to join them. That ain’t how it works.

The Passover yearling sheep or goat has to be eaten between sundown and midnight. Even if everything from the 7^th lumbar vertebrum is cut off because of gid ha-nasheh, that’s still something like 35 pounds of meat and, in fact, except for not breaking the bones (so they don’t eat the marrow), everything edible has to be consumed – lungs, brains, things we don’t eat nowadays. To make sure of eating about 35 pounds of stuff, you figure how much a healthy adult would eat and invite enough people to finish it by midnight. Every person in your group has to eat at least an olive’s bulk, so you could host 100 people using that one sheep. You don’t invite more at the last minute or you risk not meeting the olive’s bulk requirement.

Second, it’s not just eating. By this time, a recital had developed that made sure to reference all the parts of the Passover story. Judah should not have been roaming the city; he should have been with his legion going through the recital. He was not observing Passover correctly, would not be able to say nirtsah at midnight, and would owe a sacrifice two days later (individuals do not bring their olah on days like Shabbat or Passover after transgressing a positive commandment). And the same is true for every Jew in the procession Judah “saw”.

Finally, Passover has to be observed inside a house. Things have to be carried around during the ceremony and meal and Passover requires observance of the rules of Shabbat, which includes carrying only inside a house or other specified limits. The house also separates the people invited for one sheep from another group and helps insure that the above two rules are observed.

Remember, Jewish observance was not given up by Christians until the time of Paul. Jesus himself observed this Passover according to all its laws. There was no excuse for Judah to do otherwise.

Knitting -- leftovers, a new stitch, and housewares

This isn't so much a new stitch as making a project with the double knit stitch I found in that 1892 Butterick book.

I had leftovers of Palette yarn from old projects. Palette is a nice fingering yarn and I thought I could get at least a couvre pied out of what I had. 

So I cast on 400 stitches to a size 3 needle with a 40 inch cable. The double knit is K1/Yarn to front/Slip 1 purlwise/Yarn to back and on the next row, knit all the slips (which  look like knits on the wrongside) and slip all the knits (which look like purls on the wrongside).

You do not need to do seed stitch or ribbing to keep the edges from curling.

A full skein of Palette does 27 of these double rows of 400 stitches each. 27 rows gives you just about 3 inches, so if you want a six foot long blanket, you need 24 balls of Palette or 5,544 yards of leftovers. With my leftovers, the blanket turned out to be 30 inches wide (400 stitches) and 36 inches long. All the white stripes are 9 rows. Everything else is what I could get out of what I had.

Double knit takes a long time to work. You actually have to work both sides of a row to get the pattern to come out right. But it's harder to make a mistake on than Eye of Partridge. The mistake I made most often was to pick up both the "purl" and "knit" stitch to wrap and sometimes it took me 20 stitches to realize what I did, depending on what I was watching on Youtube at the time.

Let me know if you can come up with any patterns other than stripes. I tried to do color work with a really simple two-stitch pattern and it was a disaster.

With its double layer, this stitch gives a VERY warm result, even warmer than the two-color work of Fair Isle because every stitch is doubled, unlike the base color parts of Fair Isle which don't have a second layer of yarn behind them. But if you need warmth, it's fabulous.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 20

So, Book VII.

Chapter 1 has a falsehood about the tribes of Israelites. Whatever tribes composed the Samaritans, it was not known at that time who they were, except for the kohanim. In the 21^st century, DNA testing has confirmed that Samaritan kohanim are descended in the male line from the same male forebear as Jewish kohanim. There are three other genetic entities among the Samaritans, two of which are more closely related to each other than to the third. We have no surviving members of any of the ten northern tribes to compare their DNA to, so as to see which ones the three are – except that while they are Israelites, they are not Judeans.

In fact, in Deuteronomy 34:1-3, where Mosheh looks out from Mt. Pisgah over the land and sees the territories of the tribes, each tribe is named. In Jewish Torah at any rate. In Samaritan Pentateuch, no tribes are named. All of that was swept away in the Assyrian conquest. The missing tribal names are an indicator that Samaritan Pentateuch transmitted orally for a long time, during which tribal distinctions were forgotten and evaporated out of the recital. This evaporation over time of geographical data is part of Olrik’s principles.

But of course if Wallace wasn’t bothering to read his own Bible, he wouldn’t have studied Samaritan Pentateuch.

Now, it’s Nisan and Wallace has forgotten part of his Christian scripture. He has said nothing about the moneychangers in the Temple. In fact, all the people with Judah would have known about this. Purim is the time of year when Jews pay their poll tax, which goes to fix roads so that pilgrims can get to Jerusalem for Passover. Villages can collect the tax and send it to Jerusalem with a delegate so as not to interrupt everybody’s springtime work.

The tax has to be paid as a half shekel. You cannot pay in Greek or Roman coin. Therefore everybody has to change what coins they have for shekels. That’s why there were tables set up in the Temple where the coins were being changed. Whipping these people out of the Temple disrupted people obeying a mitsvah, which contributed to upkeep of the temple and observance of another mitsvah, Passover.

Whichever Christian scripture discusses that tale was not written by anybody who knows about Judaism, let alone cares about Jewish observance.

Skipping chapters 2-4, I will note that we are up to about 8 Nisan, and Passover starts the 14^th.

DIY -- hankies redux

Some years ago I wrote about what happened when I bought cotton hankies instead of paper. 

Well, it's 8 years later and that first batch of hankies is wearing out. In the meantime, I have bought three, count 'em, three boxes of paper hankies because they are good for some things you don't want to do with your cloth ones. You can get 10 boxes at Costco for $25, x 9 years, is over $200. Because all the tissue makers hiked their prices toward the end of the pandemic.

I am replacing the original hankies at a price of $100. They will last me 9 more years. I am making out like the proverbial bandit.

Plus I'm not killing trees, I'm not adding to the landfills, and we all do laundry anyway.

But the real bonus was this. About one year ago, I had some terrible bronchitis or the mother of all asthma breakouts, I don't know which. I would have used ten times as much paper tissues as I used to do before I bought the cloth ones. I would have filled my trash about half with paper hankies and half with everything else I trash in the course of a week. I would have had so much lint in the air, it would have meant even more paper hankies to wipe my nose. I would have been one sad sad puppy.

Instead, I had to wash all my hankies about once a week, and the heavy use probably wore them out sooner, but I still made out like a bandit by not having to spend those $200 in one year instead of nine.

And whatever it was is tailing off like any other cold.

So if $100 sounds like too much of an investment for you, do the math again. We can all use an extra $100 in our pockets.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 19

We’re up to Book VII and things are going quickly because I’m skimming to find something that I need to comment on in this novel.

It is Tishri the year that Pilate robbed the temple treasury to pay for civic improvements. Judah has led a group of Galileans in attacking Romans. If you were going to write a more vraisemblable work about these times, this is what you should prepare Judah for from the start of the book: joining or starting the Sicarii, a group of Jewish rebels against Rome.

In fact, if Judah had been a real person, here’s how the story would go. At some point, he would become known as Judah the Sicarius. He probably knew a number of people named Joshua and he would have tried to recruit one or more for this band. Word would get out, the Romans might use one of them as a lure to capture Judah. It would fail and the Romans would crucify Joshua as an example to the Sicarii. Judah’s son Menachem would go on to be a leader of the Masada uprising.

Everybody who knew Judah’s Joshua would deny that he was a rebel. Then you would get the “he was a good boy” narrative we hear from mothers of so many suspects. There were a lot of people running around at this time preaching or prophesying the overthrow of Rome. Some of them had the reputation of miracle-workers.

Oral traditions studies show that characters in two narratives may be confused with each other over time, leading to fusion of stories about them. The preachers or miracle workers didn’t have to all be named Joshua, for their activities to be loaded onto the story of the good Joshua who was crucified for no reason, except that he knew Judah the Sicarius.

It doesn’t take long for these shifts to happen. It took two or three months for a GOP narrative about a (non-existent) whistleblower “proving” that Trump did nothing worth FBI investigation, to become a MAGA narrative about a hero hiding evidence that the FBI would try to exploit against Trump. Both narratives tar the FBI, which was tracking down the January 6 insurrectionists. In 1911, a rumor that a murder victim’s corpse was rolled up in a carpet in a Kyiv city apartment, took two years to morph into the corpse being stored in the apartment for three days (the number three shows up in dozens of oral narratives the world over).

So a hundred years after Judah the Sicarius, not only can Joshua the non-rebel turn into a miracle-worker persecuted by the Romans, but people with a good Greek education are promoting him to other people like themselves. Writing the first Christian scriptures in Greek would be a no-brainer. Latin works appeared as it became less dangerous to communicate with Romans.

I’m not saying this is how it happened. I’m not saying that Christian writings have everything wrong. I’m saying that they admit to the beginning of their faith in a low-income and probably low-literacy environment, and when you share information by word of mouth, it follows AxelOlrik’s principles of development. And what I have outlined above is exactly what Olrik says happens in word-of-mouth communications.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 18

We’re up to Book V chapter 9 of Ben Hur. Chapter 13 is the actual race.

Book VI chapter 3 has another mistake. Nobody can declare themselves to be lepers. Leviticus 13 and 14 are clear on this: a priest has to examine the person or the building and make the declaration. In the case of a building, Leviticus specifically says that the owner says literally “I think there might be something like leprosy in my house” and then clears his possessions and family out of the house before the priest comes to inspect.

For the owner to say “my house is leprous” is a case of paskening for yourself, which is prohibited in Jewish law. Judah’s mother should have gone to a priest to see if she and her daughter were leprous. Leviticus 13 lists some conditions that might seem like leprosy but are not. But Wallace did not read his Bible so he didn’t know his mistake.

Chapter 5 has Amrah going to market after nightfall. I already explained that there would be nothing in the market after nightfall, and no lighting to help her get there unless the moon was full. She would have needed a torch to light her way. And she still would have been at risk of robbers or rapists.

What’s more, meat was expensive in those days. Shochets did not slaughter until they had cash on the barrel head for every portion of an animal, including selling the unkosher parts to Gentiles. They could be forced to slaughter for Shabbat, but otherwise not. There were no coolers to put meat in and keep it from spoiling after slaughter; Amrah could only get meat before noon. But Wallace the Victorian male has to throw meat in there and pretend the butcher would still be open at night and have product to sell.

Chapter 6 opens with Judah transgressing. He should be in New Year’s services right now. On the 10^th he should be fasting at Yom Kippur services. He should even be fasting during the daylight hours on the 3rd, Tsom Gedaliah. But he’s not.

Wallace has no clue to Roman army operations. They didn’t just have leaders, they had training. Our word exercise comes from the Latin word for army, exercitus, because aside from making and maintaining camps, Roman armies practiced use of arms and maneuvers constantly. Each man knew his position and his role in every battle and performed almost without thinking about it.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 17

So Book V of Ben Hur.

Chapter 7 has a list of 3 people as Judah’s servants. Wallace means slaves but he’s wrong. Esther could only have been bound to him if Ithamar had written up for her to be Judah’s wife, and that bond ended when she reached the age of 12 years and 1 day.

In chapter 8, the texts that Simonides reads to Judah are all the favorite choices of Christians – and his list could only have been made after Christianity adopted the Jewish Bible ostensibly as its own. It’s not clear why the Bible was adopted except for one thing. In the Roman Empire the recognized faiths were the Roman cult, the Greek cult, the Jewish and the Egyptian. The druids of Gallia were persecuted; those outside this magic circle were ignored. (Mithraism, a Mesopotamian faith, became popular with merchants and soldiers later.) To become respectable, Christianity had to associate to itself one of the recognized faiths.

And all of them were pagan except Judaism. Two of the oldest church fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr, show that Greek had been rejected. Justin (d. 165 CE) connected Christianity to Neo-Platonism as the pure root which the Greek philosophers corrupted. Clement (d. 215 CE) tried to attract Greek pagans to Christianity as a better moral guide, purified from the examples in Greek mythology. They did not cite to the Septuagint, nor would they have reason to because they were not talking to people familiar with the Septuagint. The Septuagint wouldn’t convince Greek pagans of anything. Neither one of them spoke of Judaism because neither one knew anything about it.

But in the 200s CE, Origen the Greek geek compiled all the Greek translations of the Jewish Bible that he could get, into the Hexapla, including the Septuagint and Aquila’s translation from about 100 CE. Supposedly Origen’s father taught him the Bible, as well as Greek literature, but this is not certain and the father has been labeled a pagan by some writers.

At any rate, Christians developed the habit or policy of separating themselves from pagans and also from criticism, by claiming Judaism as a basis. After that, church fathers went to work proving the relationship by interpreting Jewish scripture as references to Christianity, much as Clement related pagan myth to Christianity.

This is a strawman argument, a fallacy claiming that the words don’t mean what they say. It’s also cherry-picking, using bits that are convenient and ignoring the inconvenient truths. It could happen once Christianity decided it wasn’t going to follow Jewish law, even if its earliest members were Jews. This happened by the time of Mark’s book of Christian scripture. He was a second generation Christian and he already knows nothing about Judaism. Satan has become a crucial element in the Jesus story; so has the working of miracles as events contrary to nature.

In Judaism satan is a servant of Gd, not an equal and opposing power. The things in the Tannakh that seem to be miracles, are not important for being exceptions to the laws of nature; they were part of creation, according to Pirkey Avot. They were important for their influence on Jewish culture, not on individuals.

It is a sad truth that ancient literature may not be as ancient as people want to believe. I can well believe that The Embassy to Gaius was a true production of Philo of Alexandria. I can’t say the same for the twelve books ostensibly about Judaism, but containing outright errors that make them useful only as an exercise in reading Greek. The Fulvia and Paulina stories in Josephus’ Antiquities are known to be forgeries because of their language; so is a supposed reference to Jesus, which was copied from Jewish Wars where it is known to be a forgery.

The “eschatological” material in Mark’s work may seem to some like a reflection of a battle in his own lifetime that lead to destruction of the Second Temple, but it could also reflect the Hadrianic persecution, which included Christians as well as Jews. That provides about a century for the contents of Mark to develop from the original events before his birth. The Antonine persecution came later but included only Christians.

There was a Mark in Rome whose name was attached to the Christian book, but that’s no proof that he wrote it, only that Christians of a given time knew about him and thought the world of work attributed to him.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 16

We’re in Book IV of Ben Hur. I have said that there’s no benefit to either Arrius or Judah for the one to adopt the other; it was a plot device to make Judah rich because it takes a rich man to work the un-Jewish vengeance that Wallace wants Judah to wreak on Messala.

Skipping chapter 2 and going to chapter 3. When a Jew holding the exclusive services contract on another Jew dies, the contract expires. Even if Simonides signed on for the extra term, he is not Judah’s slave. If he had been a non-Jew when he signed the contract, he would have received cash for agreeing to circumcision, making him nominally Jewish. If Judah is asking whether Simonides is still his slave, then Ithamar did not leave a will that bequeathed Simonides to Judah, who would have known it from the will. So Judah can’t demand all that Simonides owns.

In chapter 4 Simonides misrepresents his own status. No Jew can be bound to serve forever.

The important thing in this chapter is that we learn Ithamar died 10 years before Judah’s arrest. A guardian for the estate would have been named in the will, to cover the 2 years until Judah became bar mitsvah. This guardian would have seen to Judah’s education in both business and culture – and Simonides not being bequeathed to Judah (etc.), he became free at that moment.

Chapter 5 is a throw-away. In chapter 6 we get another misrepresentation. Being born in Jerusalem did not mean you were a Jew. You could be a Roman, a Greek, a Syrian, an Egyptian, an Arab, or any other nationality by parentage and they would raise you in their culture.

Chapters 7 through 17 bring together the characters Wallace needs for the rest of the book and now we are up to Book V.

head's up -- Twitter

An announcement has been made that Twitter will start charging everybody including content creators for Twitter.

If you are government or business you may be able to pay for your Twitter account but the people who need to use it won't be there because of how many of them will refuse to pay for it.

I will not use it either and so there will be no more notices on Twitter of new content on this blog.

Bookmark this site now for future use.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 15

I’m ignoring chapter 7 of Book II and that means we’re up to Book III. Chapters 1 and 2 have an error. Quintus Arrius is called a tribune while he is in command of a military ship. The rank of tribune went out before the Republic ended. The commander of a ship was a centurion because ships had a hundred rowers, and he had a co-officer of unknown function called a trierarchus.

Skipping chapters 3-5, wherein Wallace invents the rescue of Arrius by Judah, we get to Book IV. Chapter 1 has Judah being raised for 5 years by Arrius and driving his horses in the circus. Arrius supposedly adopts Judah and bequeaths all his property to him.

While adoptions in the Roman Empire were as close as possible to an actual parental relationship, I believe this is another fiction. It benefits Judah by giving him riches and contacts in government, but it doesn’t do much for Arrius. The emperor could set aside a will if it did not follow the rules of piety: the heir had to owe a duty to the testator to offer to his manes upon his death. Jews don’t do that. Tiberius, who was always hard up for money (or greedy) would have set Arrius’ will aside in a heartbeat and surely some wise friend of Arrius would have told him so.

All the more so as Tiberius cleared Rome in 19 CE of Jews. Finding a Jew named as Arrius’ sole heir would have invited scrutiny.

Is it because there were no Jews in Rome that Judah let Arrius adopt him? Hardly. The book claims that the battle was in 24 CE. Tiberius’ expulsion included officials of Isis worship. Here’s what was going on.

Some Roman priesthoods required that the priests be born from the strictest form of Roman marriage, the confarreatio. Women had to enter this form of marriage if the paterfamilias ordered it. But there were two problems: Augustus noted and passed laws about a habit of marrying girls who were not old enough to give birth. Then the man left her to the care of the paterfamilias and went on his merry way. At any point, he could get the paterfamilias to agree to a divorce and then be free to marry the woman he really wanted. If the family had already eaten up the first wife’s dowry, and the new woman was rich, it was a no-brainer.

Jewish and Egyptian women were not eligible for confarreatio. They were not subject to a paterfamilias; they had more civil and physical freedom than Roman women, including the right to earn and keep money in their own name. Isis was a powerful, popular goddess with handsome rites, and anybody could understand why Roman women would join her cult.

But misconceptions about Judaism make it hard for Gentiles to understand why Roman women would convert to Judaism. Jews had businesses and farmed; they had legions in the Roman army. They could not serve in the government, which required oaths to pagan gods, but they did just about every other job you can think of, some of which were low-paying and others nasty, like leather-working which was smelly. Roman women would not be attracted by rich Jews, who would have been married by age 18; nor could they gain social glamor by marrying a Jew.

So why convert? Maybe stability. A Jewish marriage requires the man to settle a ketubbah on his wife for her benefit after his death, and he can also, as I said, make her a deed of gift. A Jewish divorce requires a finding of ervah or, in the man, impotence. A Jewish marriage requires that the man support his wife. A Jewish wife can say “not tonight, dear” and not have to complain of headache. A Jewish family does not have a paterfamilias who can push through a divorce or who has the right of life and death over those in his manus.

There might have been Roman men who converted. This would get them out from under the cult. Roman men who did not serve in the military could not achieve high government rank. But they were expected to serve in government and that was an expensive proposition; officials paid for religious ceremonies and public works and celebrations like games. If you had a business or property with good income, you could avoid all that if you were a Jew, and maybe even if you were part of the Isis cult.

Nobody is sure why Tiberius pushed Jews and Isis worshippers out of Rome, but it only means they left the city proper. The larger part of the Jews were settled in Trastevere (Cross-Tiber) where a Jewish graveyard has been found. It remained a Jewish quarter into medieval times. So there were Jews in Italy, close to Rome, for Judah to live with, find work, maybe find a wife. He might eventually move back to the Holy Land but, with his family and property there destroyed, it would take either economic disaster in Italy or a strong religious bent to draw him back.

And that would put his conversion back to the arrival of Paul in Rome, about 50 CE. That’s not the story Wallace wants to tell.

Hang loose

My computer tried to do an update last night and now it won't start so no post this week. Have a happy New Year and I'll get back to the Ben Hur posts when I can.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 14

We are up to Book II chapter 5 of Ben Hur and Wallace throws in a cheap bit of Victorian bigotry saying that Arabs and Egyptians are stupid. The Nabatean Arabs were Jews at this time, converted under the Hasmonean kings. The Egyptians had been allies of Judea through the Seleucid persecution down to Herod’s time.

Tirzah did not have an amulet inherited from a grandmother.

Amulets were little bags containing either written material or healing herbs. Now remember that at this time Jews did not use Biblical Hebrew as a living language. They spoke Aramaic. They had an Aramaic version of Torah, or at least in synagogue somebody would get up and translate the reading from the Torah scroll as it was read. Persians speak an Indo-Iranian language, not a Semitic language. It is highly unlikely that a Persian could write a kosher amulet.

Amulets were primarily used against epilepsy. If a person was healed three times, the amulet was defined as “effective”. If the maker took it back when the first person got well, and gave it to at least two other people who were healed of other illnesses, he was defined as “expert”. (Mishnah Shabbat 6:2, one of those without a name in it, so a standard Sanhedrin decision, and the gemara on Talmud Shabbat 61/62.) So Tirzah should not have an amulet; the maker should have taken it back.

And now about not being P’rushim. If the family were not P’rushim, they would not value the teachings of Hillel and his sons. These were the cream of the P’rushi ranks, and they argued against Ts’duki teachings.

There’s only one reason Wallace would pretend that the family were not P’rushim and yet think that they followed the School of Hillel. Ignorance.

And then another bit of ignorance. Judah could not train in a Roman camp. The Roman legions worshipped their eagles. This was prohibited to Jews. There were Jewish legions in the Roman army at the time. Judah could train with one of those, have kosher food, have rest on Shabbat, and so on. They were disbanded by Theodosius II in the 400s CE when he decreed other disabling legislation against Jews. You can say all you want that only assimilated Jews would have been in the Roman army, but they were there before Titus destroyed the Second Temple and they were there after the Hadrianic persecutions.

But Wallace being ignorant or careless made another mistake.

Ben Hur,, the novel, part 13

We are up to Book II chapter 5 of Ben Hur and you stayed with me!

I’m skipping chapter 5 because you would be better off spending your time reading your Bible and reading real history, not Wallace’s faked hash, and going to chapter 6 we meet a new character, Tirzah, the daughter of the house. 

And her clothing is all wrong. Jewish women did not expose their bodies, even at home. Her arms should be covered at least from shoulder to elbow.  And you should be going “say what?”

I just said a couple of posts ago that when a man dies and leaves a widow, sons and daughters, the mother and sons can join to marry off an underage daughter. They can’t do this for a grown daughter, but she must be supported from the income of the man’s property. The son gets a job or goes begging to have an income.

Except.

Judah’s father could have written a deed of gift to Judah either before his death or while on his deathbed. The deed was valid in either case, except that on his deathbed the father had to reserve some of the property to himself. Then if he recovered he had an income.

A prudent man should write three deeds of gift: one for his widow; one for his daughter(s); and one for his son, with the reservation of property in this last. All three should say “after my death” or “from now and after my death”. In this second case, they all have an income and it’s not tied up into a will, which only takes effect after death. But stuff happens.

If Ithamar wrote a deed of gift, Judah isn’t running a business for the benefit of his mother and sister; he’s running it so he has his own income. He may be managing the property covered by the other two deeds, or a relative is managing it.

But the real issue in this chapter is, both Tirzah and Judah should be married. In a world without scientific medication, where doctors functioned on anecdotal evidence, few infants reached the age of 5 and another tranche didn’t reach the age of 15. If Judah’s father was alive when Tirzah was 13, he would at least have started the search for a husband and written a deed to cover her dowry. Judah would have been 15 to 18 at the time, and Mishnah Pirkey Avot 5:21 says marriage happens at 18. Judah is 21. He should have a wife and at least one child, or one on the way.

Tirzah would be living with her husband, even if she’s 16 and just married.

The mother would be living in a dower house on the property covered by her deed of gift.

So again, Wallace is committing the fallacy of Presentism. He’s writing the classic Victorian melodrama where the widow and her children stay together. And it wasn’t so. Not in those times; not in Judea; not in Rome, so Messala should also not be a bachelor at this point. Oh, sure, he probably left his wife home with the paterfamilias, especially if there were children already. But his wife, like Agrippina, might follow the drum and bring the children along.

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.

Knitting -- leftovers, a new stitch, and a plan

So I had leftover cotton yarn in fingering weight and there was a new stitch I wanted to try, plus I wanted to invent a frame for houseware projects.

So the stitch was the Eye of Partridge stitch, which is the traditional name for Johnnie Vasquez' "double knit". EoP was used on Arne and Carlos' video showing how to make a reinforced toe and heel to go with Dovrekofta socks, which are a lot like Fair Isle knitting.

Suzanne Bryan's video shows how to work EoP in one and two colors on the flat and I got two ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZAF6-7Qc3M

What if I use it with the fine cotton to make washcloths for the bathroom? It would provide a little texture to exfoliate my face, the same as the texture on my Dishie washcloths helps get food off plates.

I have that nice selvage pattern for the sides of the washcloth, but what do I do about the bottom and top? Can I do something that looks like the selvage? So I charted and experimented and here is the result. This makes a 14 x 14 washcloth from 3 25-gram packets of Cotona fingering.

1. do a long-tail cast-on for 100 stitches besides the initial slip knot.

2. K2, do seed stitch across, K2

3. P2, do seed stitch across, making sure to purl into what look like knit stitches and vice versa, P2

4. K3/P2, K across, P2/K3

5. P2/K1/P2, seed stitch across, P2/K1/P2

6. K3/P2, seed stitch across making sure to purl into what look like knit stitches and vice versa, K3/P2

You will do rows 2-6 at the top, binding off in the last row of seed stitch.

turn, do the purl side selvage, PURL across, and do the selvage on the other side.

EoP rows.

a. K3/P2, K1, slip 1 purlwise, repeat these two across, P2/K3 selvage. RIGHT SIDE

b. P2/K1/P2, purl across, P2/K1/P2. WRONG SIDE

c. selvage, slip 1 purlwise, K1, repeat across, selvage

d. selvage, purl across, selvage

It is VERY easy to get out of whack and then you ruin the EoP patters. Here's how you find out what to do first on a right side row. 

i.  Do your selvage.

ii. undo the first stitch, which you purled on the last row. 

iii. if the stitch below that is knitted, put the purl stitch back and slip that first stitch. If there's a floater below it, put the purl stitch back and knit that first stitch.

iv. the other way is when you purl the last 4-5 stitches, remember, where you slipped a stitch there is a floating thread in that place. You will knit that stitch on the next round, so count as you go Knit-Slip-Knit-Slip and then remember whichever you end up with before you do the selvage, because that's what you do after you turn the selvage. But if you forget, get interrupted, whatever, do steps i-iii as a backup.

Suzanne's video also shows how to work EoP in two colors, which could be kind of pretty.

The other idea from Suzanne's video is that if you use bulky yarn in EoP, you would end up with a waffle blanket like that thermal fabric. So there's another houseware. 

Ben Hur the novel, part 11

We are up to Book II chapter 3 of Ben Hur and I want to finish off something I said last time because it probably hasn’t occurred to most readers.

In chapter 3 we get to the exclusive services contract. I already said that a man could pay off a theft by getting somebody to buy his contract. The contract lasted 6 years, or 50, or ended when a yovel year came.

If the man refused the 6 year term limit, an awl was punched through his ear lobe. ONCE. He did not have to put an earring in it to keep it open. He did not have to get it punched again when it healed up. Those of us with piercings know that they do heal up and then we either try to re-open them ourselves or go get them punched again. Just went through this with a pair of favorite earrings.

The ear-punch rule did not apply to non-Jews. If a non-Jew took out a contract, he got paid the money as soon as he agreed to be circumcised. Then he became a Jew, and he had to learn to live Jewish for the smooth operation of the contract holder’s home. The contract terminated when this holder decided; he could bequeath the contract to his son. But if the holder hit the contractor and knocked out a tooth or his eye, THEN the contract ended.

No Jewish woman could be sold into one of these contracts. If you think it’s possible, you haven’t read your Bible. The case of Rebekah is instructive. First her father waffled about her marrying Isaac; he said let’s leave it overnight. We never hear from him again. The next day Rebekah’s brother and mother bargain for the marriage. Why?

Because in the culture that transmitted that story, if a man died leaving unmarried daughters, those daughters had to be supported from his property. It had to be kept together to provide the income for their support. The widow could not collect her jointure; the sons could not split the property up amongst themselves and, if the income wasn’t enough to support them and the daughters too, the sons went out to work or even to beg.

Meanwhile the husband was responsible for the girl’s food and shelter, and for clothing that reflected his status. If she was an adult, she could agree to take her conjugal rights but if she said “no” the husband had to leave her alone.

An underage girl was taught to say “no”. A pregnancy could kill her. Once she reached puberty, she could repudiate the marriage completely, if it was her mother or brother who married her off. And she was taught that she had this right. From then on she could never marry without her own free consent.

So when Wallace says that the female servant in Judah’s household had her ear punched, he shows his ignorance of what the Bible says, as well as what Jewish law says. Jewish law prohibits taking out an exclusive services contract on a Jewish woman. Jewish law also does not require punching the ear of a non-Jew who refuses to leave in the 6^th year, because his contract does not expire in the 6^th year. It can be terminated by the contract holder, or it can be terminated by the court for cause – battery. 

Amrah does not have a hole punched in her ear.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 10

We are up to Book II chapter 3 of Ben Hur and I want to finish off something I said last time because it probably hasn’t occurred to most readers.

There was no reform or conservative Judaism in the Roman Empire. There were no Chassidic Jews or Reconstructionists. You had the P’rushim like Rabbis Hillel and Shammai; you had the Ts’dukim who evaporated after the destruction of the Second Temple. You had the Samaritans who were on a downhill slide because you had to be born a Samaritan, you couldn’t convert. And you had the common people who couldn’t afford the time to get a solid Jewish education and might not know about new enactments of the Sanhedrin. In a good edition of Mishnah there will be an index of rabbis linked to sections that report their decisions, so you can go through and see what they ruled and get an idea of when it happened from their biographies.

Everything in Mishnah that isn’t cited to an individual rabbi is an agreed position of the Sanhedrin by 50 CE. At least 50% of Mishnah falls into this category. And because Judaism is a culture, everybody grew up living by these rules. So you didn’t have to stop in the middle of the day and say, now, what did my teacher say about – let’s say, finding a dead bug on the greens I just sprinkled with water to keep them fresh. You knew from growing crops every year that you had to throw out the greens that the bug touched.

Judah ben Hur, a rich boy, should have been brought up first to read Torah and live by it. Judah should have accompanied his father Ithamar in his business dealings and also, since the father was a rich and important man, in his attending Jewish courts.

That’s because he was eligible to be a witness in business cases, such as testifying to signatures and seals on documents. (Judah was eligible to testify to his father’s signature and seal even before bar mitsvah.) He was also eligible to be a judge. In a civil case, each of the two parties chooses a judge and then they agree on the third, which gets them part way to agreeing about the case.

If a case reached an impasse, anybody observing the case could speak up about it. If what he said was relevant, probative, and exculpatory, he joined the judges’ bench and then another person was chosen to make sure there was always an odd number of judges. The father would have wanted Judah to be ready to join the judges’ bench as an adult, and he would have taken the boy to court with him every time he attended.

Judah was minimally eligible for a witness or a judge as soon as he passed the age of bar mitsvah, 13 years and one day. He was not running around with a Gentile boy or reading Greek philosophy; he was living his culture, learning or running the family business, and attending the courts where he learned and maybe participated in applying or formulating Jewish law. There was no 8 years of idly waiting for his majority before Book II opens.

Judah running wild with a Gentile boy is a plot device Wallace needs to carry out his work. It is not realistic, any more than the idea that Judah was a self-hating Jew, uneducated and vulnerable to conversion. So a major component of Wallace’s plot dissolves in the face of reality.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 9

I apologize for last week but we had a power bump and my router crashed. It took all morning to get somebody on the phone to tell me what to do. But at least I did get somebody.

We have finished Book I of Ben Hur and almost nothing that Lew Wallace said about Jews, their beliefs or customs, has been true. Onward.

We are now past the reign of Augustus and into the reign of Tiberius. Tiberius was nothing but a soldier; he didn’t want to rule. His wiser brother Drusus died of a fall from a horse before Tiberius came to the throne. His nephew Germanicus, says gossip, was poisoned in Syria about 19 CE. Germanicus’ sons died, except for little Gaius, who became Tiberius’ heir.

Herod’s grandson was raised in Rome by Augustus, one of several ethnic princes raised in Roman ways so that if they get to go home and rule, they will impose Roman ways on their homelands. Agrippa will later marry his second or third cousin Cypros, a love match, with four surviving children. One will become the mistress of the man who destroys the Second Temple.

And in Book II chapter 2 we get more false history. Hillel and Shammai were dead by this time. Rabban Gamliel ben Hillel followed him, and then Shimon b. Gamliel. And we get a false evaluation of Jewish logic.

Jewish logic is very like modern American legal reasoning. It has stare decisis in the form of gezerah shavah, when two phrases are alike, cases using them should be judged similarly. Also when cases are alike enough, the new case should come out the same as the old one.

It had a fortiori, known as qal va-chomer, and Jewish law also reasoned in the reverse direction.

It had due process for all.

It had fines for civil cases as well as compensatory and punitive damages for battery. Lex talionis is not part of Jewish law. You can’t award damages in a culture where some people don’t have money. It is a given that all Jews have or can get money for civil damages, or for the poll tax at Purim, or to buy meat for Shabbat.

The man who does not have enough money to pay compensation for a theft can take out an exclusive services contract on himself. Under this agreement, the buyer of the contract has to support the contractor, his wife, and his children at the buyer’s own level. He can’t assign menial tasks. He has to give up the contract at six years or at 50 or whenever the yovel year comes. He can’t destroy the sanctity of marriage. If he commits battery, the damages he pays go toward paying off the contract.

In European culture with its serfdom, serfs didn’t have money. If they committed crimes, they were punished corporally and sometimes capitally. When jails were instituted for the commonalty, they went to jail, sometimes along with their families. The only jails in Jewish law were places where you kept somebody on trial for a capital crime, while you waited for a witness to come forward who could exonerate him.

Jewish law did not allow ex post facto. The law was documented in Torah, exemplified in Prophets, and explained in Mishnah.

A person was innocent until proven guilty, part of a presumption that a condition persists without proof that it has changed. Thus safek tahor tahor, if you have no evidence that an object has been rendered tameh, it is considered tahor and so too a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Civil cases for damages required 3 judges, capital cases required 23; these were bench trials at the hands of experts in Jewish law. If they couldn’t decide, they added two judges. If the town wasn’t large enough to increase the bench, the venue changed to a larger town, the whole way up to the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.

Evidence required witnesses who were Jews, not under exclusive service contract, and of known probity. They were questioned to make sure that they knew what they were talking about, and that they were talking about the same incident. But if somebody could stand up in court and say that the witnesses couldn’t have seen the incident because they weren’t present at the place and time of the incident, the accused was acquitted.

He was also acquitted if all the judges voted to condemn. That was “a bloodthirsty” court and its judgments were not acceptable. The only judges allowed to speak on the case were those who gave reasons for acquittal. If there weren’t enough, the case was recessed 24 hours (or over Shabbat if necessary) and then the only judges who could speak were the ones who had not yet spoken for acquittal.

Jewish law is a civil code that allows judges to create new law, as long as it does not overturn Torah prohibitions or requirements. It is a common law system which accommodates local custom: “all goes according to the custom of the land” as long as it does not contradict Torah. After the Talmudic period, there would not be another civil code or common law system until Henry II of England, which is the basis of American law.

And in Judah ben Hur’s time, Jews were not allowed to learn Greek philosophy as a consequence of the Seleucid persecutions.

It would take an uneducated self-hating Jew to think that Jewish reasoning wasn’t as good as Greek reasoning. I know that Maimonides insisted you had to learn Aristotle to understand Maaseh Breshit or Maaseh Merkabah but that is irrational. These two concepts dig into the heart of Jewish mysticism. Aristotle knew nothing about Jews. And Maimonides specifies Aristotle’s Physics, to boot, which we know is not even a valid description of the material world let alone of Jewish mystical belief. Maimonides’ antagonists, the Mutakallim, believed in atomism and that a vacuum could exist; both are part of modern physics. Maimonides’ idea is the same fallacy as thinking that translations are valid representations of their source documents: a strawman argument.

So Wallace gives Judah ben Hur an unrealistic attitude for a Jewish hero. It’s the one Wallace needs for his denouement; missionaries to Jews start with the ones who don’t know much about their culture and are therefore vulnerable to misrepresentations about it.

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.