Garden -- December

I have a question.  Did I see what I thought I saw this weekend?

I'm talking about you people out there in the DC region mowing your lawns.

What would you do if you were fast asleep and somebody suddenly starting using electric shears on your head?

You'd probably knock them on their butts.

So what are you doing mowing grass that is trying to get its winter sleep?

I don't care if afternoon temps are 50 or 60 degrees.
We've had half  a dozen hard frosts and the grass is dormant.
It's not growing. 
It doesn't need to be mowed any more than you need somebody to give you a buzz cut at 1 a.m.

Spend those warm afternoons getting yourself a winter tan.
But take your mower in and get the blade sharpened and when you get it back, put it in the shed or under a tarpaulin.
And let sleeping lawns lie.

 © Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Cities of the Plain

The motto for the next part of the program might as well be “cultura non facit saltus, but archaeology never stands still.”  In other words, without following the course of archaeological discoveries, people develop and perpetuate urban legends.

I had told you to read the flood story up to the Tower of Babel; that includes chapter 10.

The urban legend about chapter 10 is that it represents a picture of Mesopotamian relationships from the 600s or 500s BCE.

Except for one problem.  It describes “The boundary of the K’naani was from Tsidon as you go toward Grar, to Azah as you go toward Sdom and Amorah, Admah and Tsvoiim to Lasha.” 

The story of Sdom and Amorah, Admah and Tsvoiim is best known from Avraham’s times, and it was supposed to be a fairy tale.  A total fabrication.

Except for two things. 

One is the discovery in Numeira, now part of Jordan, of the sites of four cities that were abandoned in the 2300s BCE and not re-occupied until the 1200s BCE, as well as a fifth which was continuously occupied.

And the discovery of Ebla.

In the 2300s BCE when Naram-Sin destroyed Ebla, a fire baked archival tablets hard and they survived, some of them in fragments.  One lists trade partners, associated geographically.  Among them, associated with the Dead Sea region, are S’dom and Admah.

Not all four “cities of the plain,” but the two apparent major partners in two twin-city pairs.

The cities of the plain appear in only two places: Genesis, and the early prophets.  Amos refers to Sdom and Amorah; Hoshea refers to Admah and Tsevoiim.  Remember, these prophets worked in the 700s BCE.  They set a date when these references had to be well-known among Jews, a comment I will explain from another viewpoint near the end of this blog.

Think about it.  Amos and Hoshea use the cities of the plain as examples of total destruction.  They don’t tell the stories; they just make the reference.  Who is going to listen to that, except somebody who has been hearing the full story constantly from childhood up?

Let me give you a for-instance.  My nieces have been hearing all their lives about scandals called X-gate.  They had no idea why.  Then I told them the story of Watergate, which happened when I was their ages. 

It’s the same thing with Amos and Hoshea.  Nobody would have understood why they were nattering on about Sdom and Amorah, Admah and Tsevoiim, unless these were familiar from childhood up.  Amos and Hoshea would have to stop and explain what they meant, and that would have derailed the image they were trying to produce.  Not to mention the fact that people would have said, “How do you know?  This is the first time we’re hearing about it.”  The cities had been re-occupied by the time Amos and Hoshea referred to them – by the Moabites.  Nobody but a 20^th century archaeologist living 2800 years later would realize that the cities had been destroyed in the 2300s BCE.

The probability is vanishingly small that Ebla’s archives and Amos and Hoshea would have the same city names in them, let alone that the geographical association would be the same, because they were separated by 13 centuries of time.

So the issue of the cities of the plain goes back before the Assyrian captivity of the northern kingdom, Israel, by almost 100 years as a reference, and since cultura non facit saltus, there has to be an associated story even older than Amos and Hoshea.  Given the probabilities, the story comes from centuries before 2000 BCE, the time of Utu-Hengel and the Sumerian Kings List.

But wait, there’s more.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- hitpael binyan

Next, probably the easiest binyan to identify is also one of the least common.  If a verb form starts with hit or mit or has a tav after the future tense prefix, it might be hitpael.  This is a reciprocal verb form, with a special case where the reciprocity is with the subject of the verb.   This is called reflexivity and it’s a common use of hitpael -- “X oneself”  -- compared to reciprocity or mutuality – “X each other”. 

 

It also has a continuous repetitive meaning, so when the Bible says somebody hithalakh with Gd, that means he was continuously faithful to Gd. 

 

And  it has a passive connotation.

 

Hitpael has its own screwy issue.  Hebrew can’t stand to put certain sounds together in a certain order.  So it can be hard to identify the root of a verb that you are pretty sure is in the hitpael.  If the second letter of the entire verb is shin, sin, tsade or zayin, and the third letter is tav, tav, tet, or dalet, you are looking at a verb in hitpael and the root is peh shin, peh sin, peh tsade, or peh zayin.

 

Zamen, “invite” will be hizdamen,	הזדמן
Tsar, “trouble” will be hitstaer, meaning “regret” and the t sound will be supplied by a tet	הצטער
Shamer, “guard” will be hishtamer	השתמר

 

Now, if there are certain sounds Hebrew insists on changing, what about dalet, tet and tav?

 

No worries.  There is always a shva under the tav of the hitpael and in this case it will be a slightly audible shva.  Hebrew can tolerate a dalet after a tav so it doesn’t change the order.

 

As for the tav-tet and tav-tav combination, if you are looking at a text with vowels, you will find a dagesh in the tet or tav and then the other two root letters.  There’s one in Leviticus 14:4, mittaher, to become tahor. 

 

Present

Singular	Plural	Gender
מִתְהַלֵךְ	מִתְהַלְכִים	Masculine
מִתְהַלְכָה	מִתְהַלְכוֹת	Feminine

 

Past

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
הִתְהַלְכִי	הִתְהַלַכְנוּ	First
הִתְהַלַכְתָּ	הִתְהַלַכְתֶּם	Second/masculine
הִתְהַלַכְתְּ	הִתְהַלַכְתֶּן	Second/feminine
הִתְהַלֵךְ	הִתְהַלְכוּ	Third/masculine
הִתְהַלְכָה	הִתְהַלְכוּ	Third/feminine

 

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶתְהַלֵךְ	נִתְהַלֵךְ	First
תִּתְהַלֵךְ	תִּתְהַלְכוּ	Second/masculine
תִּתְהַלְכִי	תִּתְהַלַכְנָה	Second/feminine
יִתְהַלֵךְ	יִתְהַלְכוּ	Third/masculine
תִּתְהַלֵךְ	תִּתְהַלַכְנָה	Third/feminine

 

The mem at the start of the present tense can lead to confusion, which is next.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

DIY -- hot water urn

Strictly speaking, this is an appliance and not DIY.
Why did I buy it?
On Sabbath I have been keeping a stove burner on with a cookie sheet over it for what's called a blech.
I keep water hot on it for tea on Sabbath.
The burner uses 800 watts of electricity.
The urn keeps the water hotter, has a special mode for Sabbath, and uses less electricity.
It uses 750 watts of electricity.
I ran the numbers before I bought it, as I always do to make sure an appliance will pay for itself.
If it works for one winter and up to December of the next, it has paid for itself.
Most of you don't observe Sabbath like this so it won't work for you like it does for me.
But it's nice to find something that makes my Sabbath more comfortable
and also helps the environment.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the rest of the story

The second part of Noach’s story discusses an event from about the year 4000 BCE in the Lake Van region.  I told you to remember that date.

Noach “began to be a farmer,” and he planted wine grapes, made wine, and got so drunk he fell asleep.

I already said that wine grapes were domesticated in the Lake Van region about 4000 BCE.

Then something, we don’t know what, happens to him, something his youngest son did.

What the youngest son did is explicit in the Greek wars of the gods.  Kronos is the youngest son of Uranos and Zeus is the youngest son of Kronos, and both of these youngest sons defeat their fathers and become chief gods. 

Cham, the youngest son of Noach, does NOT become the head of the family.  He is made the lowest and the least and his descendants from his son K’naan are supposed to be bondsmen to the descendants of the elder two sons, Yafet and Shem.

The urban legend is that this justifies enslaving Africans but first, we’ve been all through the “bondsman” issue and second, we know that K’naan was not an African nation but a mighty Semitic nation of the Holy Land.  Their language shows up in marginal notes on the Tell el-Amarna tablets created for the diplomatic needs of Pharaoh Akhenaten. 

The wine motif in Atra-Hasis or Gilgamesh is limited to a party when the ark has been completed.  Atra-Hasis mentions the complaint of a goddess that since people have been destroyed, she can’t get beer any more.  In Gilgamesh, there’s a reference to Siduri, the “tavern keeper” or “ale-wife”, depending on whose translation you use.

And now we are right back to Kug Bau, because this is also her title, aside from her Anatolian name.

The cuneiform may literally mean “tavern keeper” or “ale-wife,” but obviously it’s an idiom for royalty or deity.  Not that Kug Bau and Siduri are necessarily the same people, but that they have similar ranks or importance.

Nobody falls asleep in Atra-Hasis.  In Gilgamesh, it’s Gilgamesh who falls asleep, after bragging that he won’t.  Utnapishtim plays a trick on him to prove how long he slept.

“Going Forth” has no sleep motif, just a major party with “drink”.  Supposedly the “storm god” curses the other gods, having already become supreme, but he is never named and is absolutely not Kumarbi.  No actions describe how he became supreme over Kumarbi, who gave birth to him.  But his supremacy is Anatolian in nature, not Mesopotamian where irrigation and not rainfall is the major source of water.

The same issue applies here as to the first aliyah of Torah.  The stories have some similar motifs, but some show up in stories one and two, but not three or four; make up your own table and assign your own designators.  As a result, except for the notable copying between Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh, the wording of the stories differs for the most part.  Something else is going on here that the urban legend doesn’t cover.  The Jewish story goes back as far as 4000 BCE, but the two Mesopotamian stories existed only in cuneiform as far as we know, and cuneiform developed a millennium later.  I’ll discuss what was going on toward the end of this blog.

For now, I need to show you why I told you to read everything up to the Tower of Babel.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- verb root class review

Before I go into the binyanim full blast, here’s a review of the verb root classes from two perspectives.

 

Peh verb classes: alef, nun, yod. Verbs that start with heh, chet, and ayin have similarities to peh alef verbs.

 

Ayin verb classes: vav and yod, alef/heh/chet/ayin.

 

You may have heard of ayin ayin verbs and wondered what difference there was between those and a verb like pal which has an ayin in the middle. The term “ayin ayin“ ought to be replaced with its name in other systems: Gordon called it an L-stem when he described Ugaritic. What it means is that the second and third root letters are identical. Note that this is not NOT the same thing as “gemination” which, in Hebrew, means putting a dagesh in a letter as described in lesson 17.  A geminated verb must have a short vowel before the gemination. An L-stem verb can take a long vowel under the first root letter. The third root letter is the starting point for a new syllable in conjugation and must not be considered the same thing as a gemination.

 

Lamed verb classes: alef/chet/ayin.  The lamed heh verbs are specific to Hebrew and combine two historic root classes, lamed yod and lamed vav. 

 

The second perspective on verb root classes is this: alef, heh, chet, and ayin are “guttural letters” and cannot take dagesh; they require different vowels than the strong letters in similar positions.  Resh also cannot take dagesh but otherwise is normal.

 

Vav and yod are “weak letters”.  The verbs with these letters in the middle are called “hollow verbs” because the middle letter disappears completely in some forms.  Initial yod also disappears for some verbs; I don’t know a rule for this so you have to just memorize them.  Historically there was a peh vav form but by the time of Akkadian, it began to disappear because it was easily confused with the initial “v” sound of the conjunction.  These verbs were absorbed into the peh yod class and sometimes it shows.  Hmmm.

 

Initial nun is a “weak letter.”  In some verbs, it is retained and in others it isn’t.  I don’t  know of a rule for how to distinguish which verbs will drop it and which won’t.  Initial lamed sometimes behaves this way, as in laqach but not lavash. 

 

Flash cards sometimes help people with their verbs.  Each time you come across a verb you  don’t have in your deck, copy it onto a new flash card  with all the vowels.  Sort the cards by root class, and you’ll soon get an idea of their similarities and differences.  I don’t think there’s an Anki deck for this yet;  try creating one and then share it on ankiweb.

 

Now.  I haven’t taken many swipes at Wikipedia on this part of the blog but I will now. The Wikipedia article entitled “Semitic Root” is actually a short discussion of the system of stems or binyanim, which are called “forms” in Arabic. Root classes and stem classes are different things.

 

The triliteral root system relies on the spelling of the root and relates to how to pronounce the verb under conjugation. Once Akkadian adopted cuneiform as its writing system, it standardized which symbols went with which root class – as much as it could, since there are documented indications that some people couldn’t spell even back then. Subsequently every Semitic language used basically the same verb root classes, until we got to Hebrew and the lamed heh verb class.

 

The stem or binyan system applies to verbs regardless of what letters are in the root or what vowels are used with the various indications of person, number or gender. Not all verbs use every stem or binyan, but this situation has no relationship to the verb root class the verb belongs to.   (If you know of a peer-reviewed paper that says otherwise, let me know.)  Also different languages have different sets: there is no nifal in Aramaic or Arabic, and at this point we know of the so-called “internal passives” only in Hebrew.  (There will be some posts on those in a few months.)

 

Verb root classes relate to conjugation. Stem classes or binyanim or forms relate to meaning in many ways. The Wikipedia article on the root confuses these two issues. Ignore it.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Outdoors -- the hawk is on the loose

Well, yeah, the weather front "Hawk" too, as I know from the migraine I had the other week.

But the broad-wing hawk made a pass through our back yards this morning,
and I've seen him sitting high in an oak tree on the other  side of the street.

The Cooper's hawk has also showed up once so far,
as I know from the bird panic that left a patch of bird-dust on my back window
when one of my birds bumped into it.

I believe it's a sure thing that the robin's wife took him south with her.

The mockingbird is still here; I saw him eating pokeberries when I was in the kitchen washing dishes.

Otherwise the weather has been two to four mild days and then a whole day of rain.

The mild days are great for taking a folded up blanket onto the south porch,
with a book and a mug of tea
a piece of cake and my house keys
and making some vitamin D.

The cold and rainy days are great for working on my blog or my books
and listening to the sparrows gossip in the bushes.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved