Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- hardcopy resources

I have left some things out because you won’t find them in standard grammar books.  Some  of them come from a doctoral dissertation I found in 2014 (it was approved in 2002).  Some of them I discovered after studying the dissertation, once it cleared up decades of misunderstanding.  That’s the next part of this course.  Take it very slowly because not only is it new, it adds layers of complexity to the Bible that it takes some time to appreciate.

 

There are two books you should try to get at this point.

 

501 Hebrew Verbs takes 501 roots which have high-frequency uses in MIH, and gives the full conjugation in every common binyan (as I said, not all verbs are used in all binyanim),  as well as examples and idioms that use them.  It also refers to Biblical Hebrew by giving the future tense feminine plurals of 2^nd and 3^rd person.  There are great indices in the back.  I can’t tell you how many times it has helped me find whether a verb is peh yod or peh nun much faster than a dictionary would.

 

The other is a dictionary.  Do NOT try to read Biblical Hebrew using a computer translator.  They are aimed at modern Hebrew, and they are pretty bad.  Google translate has wrong meanings for a number of high-frequency verbs.  I don’t know where they got their information, but that’s pretty bad.  If you’re desperate, go to www.mechon-mamre.org, find the exact same verse, copy the verb, and past in your search engine.  If you get a result pointing to “Student’s Gateway”, that is a good one to click on, but it’s not perfect; there are examples of hitpael that it labels as nifal.  “Strong’s” and “Biblehub” won’t get you the bang you’ll get from Student’s.

 

Harkavy’s Student’s Dictionary is available free online from Internet Archive.  It’s not 100% complete down to the last possible variation in a word.  Harkavy often gives traditional translations that don’t reflect the halakhic (Jewish legal) meaning of a word.  It IS organized by verb root, and under those it will show you which binyanim occur in Torah.  The best thing about Harkavy’s is that he cites to Bible verses for each of the subentries.  He may use the verse you got stuck on; very helpful. 

 

Harkavy’s is also modifiable in Acrobat X and up.  As soon as I downloaded it, I set bookmarks for the first page of each Hebrew letter.  Cuts way down on the time it takes to look up a word.

 

If the dictionary doesn’t help, email me.  It might mean that I didn’t realize how many problems there were out there, and I should write more entries on this topic.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Outdoors -- blackbird central

That's what my town was this weekend.
They started flowing in from the west Friday.
Sunday they flocked from the south.
There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands.
It took hours for the sky to clear.
They draped the trees, gossiping at the tops of their voices.
Once in a while they would drop down and carpet the grass.
A bunch of them even sat on the road for a moment until a car came through the intersection.
You want blackbirds in your neighborhood; they eat bugs and they are much better-mannered than starlings, who will try to nest in any relatively enclosed space.  Like the enclosure of your through-the-wall AC.  I've seen it happen.
What you don't want are crows, who have a body-image problem.
If these had been crows, the same number would have tried to perch on our trees and the trees would have broken under their weight.  I've seen it happen.
So welcome the blackbirds.

Next event: the return of the male robins.
In about two weeks.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Wow

In a little over two years your pageviews top 16,000.

I'm flattered.

Interesting thing happened recently: lots of hits on the Fact-Checking Bibliography.
There are almost 440 entries in that list.
It's incomplete. I should add some things I accessed during my Samaritan studies.

For 2016:
First Thursday in January, I start posting Hebrew lessons that start with information from Dr. John A. Cook's 2002 doctoral dissertation which taught me about verb aspect and modal morphology. It goes beyond that, however, into internal passives, use of the infinitive absolute, and pausal forms.

About July, the Fact-Checking page will change subjects. I'll finish the archaeology postings and turn to a subject I call "lost in translation". I'll repeat a little bit of what's on the Hebrew page, from another perspective.

Knitting: I'll try to get around to my argyle knitting; that's probably the only new thing for that page. In the meantime my old Cotton Fleece winter warmers are wearing out so most of what I'm doing is replacing them with WotA suites.

Gardening and DIY: I'm thinking hard about a couple of new gardening projects, one of which has a three month deadline. Both of them cross over into DIY.

Outdoors:  This may cross over into an old hobby of mine, drawing.  I might shove a sketch block and some pencils into a backpack and go out walking around the neighborhood, stopping to draw things that catch my attention.  Don't expect to see any shots.  Blogger won't let me upload graphics and besides, it's been so long since I did any drawing that I don't expect to produce anything presentable.

I've gotten hardly any comments so I don't know what you find interesting, or whether your blogs have used mine as a point of departure. What I do know is that flurries of pageviews from Ukraine coincide with flurries of pageviews on the Mendel Beilis material; and new posts on knitting coincide with pageviews from France. Plus you my faithful regulars on the Hebrew and Fact-Checking pages, either when they are posted or after Shabbat ends.

Thank you one and all.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Who's Who

Now let’s look at Cham’s descendants. 

The sons of Cham Kush and Egypt and Fut and K’naan.

The sons of Kush Seva and Chavilah, Savtah and Ramah, Savtekha and the sons of Ramah Sheva and Dedan.

Kush sired Nimrod, he began to be mighty in the land.

He was the mighty hunter before the Lord therefore they say “like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.”

The beginning of his kingdom was Bavel, Erekh, Akkad, and Khalneh in the land of Shinar.

From that land went forth Ashur and built Nineveh and the wide places of the city and Kalach.

Resen between Nineveh and Kalach, that is the great city.

Egypt sired Ludim, Anamim, Lehavim, and Naftuchim.

Patrusim and Casluchim from which went out the Pelishtim and Kaftorim.

K’naan sired Tsidon his firstborn and Chet.

The Yevusi, the Emori, the Girgashi.

The Chivi, the Arqi, the Sini.

The Arvadi, the Tsemari, the Chamati and after that the families of the K’naani spread out.

 

I’ll talk about Nimrod later.

Cham’s son Kush is Ethiopia, southwest of Egypt, known in ancient Egyptian as Kash.  It established a substantial presence in a period straddling the destruction of Ebla, when Kush was called Kerma.  By the time the Hyksos took over in northern Egypt, Kerma/Kush took over a substantial portion of Egyptian territory as far as the Nile.  Its Classic period ends about the same time as the Thera explosion.

Egypt as the ancestor of Pelishtim and Kaftorim has interesting consequences.  Kaftor is Crete, where Linear B Mykenaean tablets from the 1400s BCE refer to the Iawones.  Linear B is a known script of the Pelishtim in their language. 

Modern archaeology has found notched scapular bones near the old Pelishtim Pentapolis which are identical to finds on Crete.

As part of the Sea Peoples, the Pelishtim associated with the ancestors of the Greeks, whom most people probably think of as the Ahiyyawa.  That’s not quite accurate.  The Egyptians called the Mykenaeans Pelishtim.  The Hittites called the Mykenaeans Ahiyyawa, according to Singer.  (Remember that Agamemnon, the Achaean leader who attacked Wilusa, was king of Mykenae.)

The Iliad is not a Greek epic, it’s an epic of the Sea Peoples or at least of the Cretan contingent, and the written version records the dialect of the Ionians.

The objection, of course is that Wilusa was destroyed by 1190 BCE.  That is too late for any relationship to Ebla.  But that is level VIIb.  Troy/Wilusa existed in one form or another for 18 centuries before that time, and the heyday of Level II coincides with the great days of Ebla – and comes to an end at the same time.

Have I said this enough ways now?  Good, then we’ll move on.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- top verbs

Here is a list of the most common verbs in Genesis. They are sorted from least to most common.

If you have bought Bolozky’s 501 Hebrew Verbs, you can learn the conjugations in Biblical Hebrew – they are pretty much the same as in modern Hebrew, which is what the book focuses on. Learn the qal of these 29 verbs – except, learn the piel of “speak” – and the hifil of “come, go” and you will cut way down on how often you need to pull out the dictionary.

אהב Love
חלם Dream
אסף Add
עלה Go up
שים Place, put, set
קום Get up
דבר Speak
ירד Go down
ידע Know
מצא Find
שמע Hear
מות Die
ישב Sit, live
עשה Do, make
שוב Return
ילד Give birth
יצא Go out
ברך Bless
אכל Eat
יגד Tell
קרא Call, name, read
ראה See, look
הלך Walk, go
לקח Take, marry, buy
חיה Live
נתן Give, put, set in place
בוא Come, go
היה Be
אמר Say
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- I can do anything better than you ...

I said before that DIY is better than commercial versions of some things.
Is there an online list of things we buy in grocery stores that we could make ourselves? 
Well, not all in one place.  Here's my list; if you know of more things like this, post them on your blog.

Cookie dough -- use your search engine to find recipes for "icebox cookies".

Hot pockets -- these are a commercial version of empanadas.  You can fill them with finely chopped leftovers from Thanksgiving as well as fresh ground meat and seasonings.

MacDonald's apple pies -- turnovers or popovers or "hand pies", of course, have been made in homes for centuries.  Almost any filling you like in an 8-inch round crust is fair game in a turnover.

Energy bars -- I don't know if there's an online recipe but in the Little Irish Baking Book, I found "Hunting nuts", something foxhunters used to stick in their pockets for a pick-me-up.

Hostess products -- most of the Hostess products started as an Amish recipe.  (Hostess was founded in Philadelphia to the east of Pennsylvania Dutch territory.)  Dingdongs are small Whoopie pies, their coffee cakes are like crumb cakes, and so on.

Twinkies -- start with an éclair recipe, then use commercial banana pudding for a filling to get the real true original twinkie version.

Trail mix -- easy do: nuts, raisins and dried cranberries, carob chips, granola.

Danish -- find a recipe for Czechoslovakian kolache.  It's almost the same thing and there are Tex-Mex versions that are a cross with empanadas.

Crackers -- any time you make bread, you can save out some of the dough.  Roll little balls, let them sit 20 minutes, roll out thin, punch all over with a fork, and cut into the desired size, then bake 8 minutes at 375.  If you don't punch them, you'll wind up with pita crisps.

Pudding -- I have to say it.  There's no comfortable way of making pudding DIY.  The original recipes  all combined suet and flour and had to be boiled in a special cloth.  Modern recipes all use milk and cornstarch.  If you know of a scratch recipe that is kosher AND non-milchig AND doesn't use a lot of artificial ingredients, let me know.  Until then, you'll have to settle for something commercial with lots of chemicals in it.

Jello -- ditto.  Jello was originally calf's feet boiled down until the chemicals were so denatured that the proteins barely hung together.  This "jelly" was the basis of aspic, blancmangers, and food for invalids.   

Sandwich cookies  -- look for recipes for the French macaron.  It's expensive because of the almond flour, almond production being a victim of the collapse in bee populations.

Noodles -- you can find Youtube videos on the technique of making la mian, Chinese hand-pulled noodles.  That's aside from the obvious -- homemade pasta, egg noodles, and soba.

Pickles -- and how!  including things you never thought of, like marinated broccoli stems or okra.

Croutons -- if you're into making bread, find a good French bread recipe.  Then when the loaf starts to go stale, cut it into cubes and dry them in the oven.  Bag with seasonings for flavored croutons.

Shortbread -- forget your Lorna Doones and even your Walkers, there are scratch recipes for this that are easy to make.

Macaroons -- there are recipes for the original almond version and the coconut version.

Shortcake -- they won't have that convenient little dent in the top; you split them and fill them with sliced strawberries.

Sugar cookies  -- the online Amish sugar cookie recipe is something like shortbread.  So are the online recipes for heart cakes, Eccles cakes and Shrewsbury cakes, except they have currants in them.

Candies -- fudge, panocha, peanut brittle, imberlach or its Passover version farfelach, Turkish delight and toffee, as well as the mosie which I remember from high school.

Granola -- lots of varieties.

Tortilla and corn chips.

Almost anything you can pay an arm and a leg for in a store -- and notice how the weight keeps decreasing while the price stays the same -- you can make at home with fewer chemicals and sometimes cheaper. 

Notice that almost all of these are snacks, things you should only eat in small quantities or on special occasions, if you don't want to be a blimp or have diabetes.  The time and sometimes hard work they take will keep you from making them often.  Knock yourself  out.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Genesis 10

Now let’s look at some other things that fall out from setting Genesis 10 in Ebla’s times.

One of my favorite Torah commentators is Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitschaq of Troyes, France and Worms, Germany, mostly because we are both language geeks.  When Rashi glosses to other languages, it is mostly to Old French in his Torah commentary, to Old German in his commentary on the rest of Tannakh, and he throws in an occasional reference to Arabic or Greek.

But one thing Rashi wasn’t, is a scholar of Greek classics.

Rashi didn’t know anything about the Iliad.

His identification of Tiras (in Genesis 10) with Persia suited a lot of people. 

Those clergymen who read Greek were familiar with the Persians from histories like Thucydides and Herodotus, and familiar with the phrase “the laws of the Medes and the Persians,” and they knew that Cyrus (sponsor of the Second Temple) had Median origins, so they also tended to associate Madai with Media.

But Media and Persia were in Mesopotamia. 

The same people making this identification were also identifying Tuval, who like Tiras and Madai descended from Yefet, with the Anatolian Tibureni, famous through classical Greek and Roman times as iron workers.  They identified Gomer with the Cimmerians, another peri-Anatolian people.

With the results of 20^th century archaeology, we find that in Ebla’s times, Tiras was in the same region as Wilusa, known as Troy to the Greeks from an eponymous ancestor Tros.  And Tiras’ relative Yavan is the eponymous ancestor of the Ionians.  And iron-working had been in progress in Anatolia for a couple of centuries – more  if you count the obvious signs of human work on meteoric iron as far back as 4000 BCE.

Those Greek-reading clergymen didn’t have the archaeological perspective available now, including the perspective of the material in Ebla.  They couldn’t see into the future and they would not have predicted discovery of the Linear B tablets about Ionian merchants (or mercenaries) in Crete, referred to in Mykenaean texts of the 1400s BCE.  (Linear B was identified as a language about 1900 and deciphered in the 1950s.)

The other names in Yefet’s descendants can be associated with Anatolia, so there’s no reason why Madai wasn’t also in Anatolia, not Mesopotamia, even if we don’t know what later people called it.

With the march of archaeology, I think all of Genesis 10 has to be re-evaluated.

But wait, there’s more.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved