Fact-Checking the Torah -- Qumran and the 6,000

You might think that at least Qumran would settle when the two Hebrew versions of Torah – the Samaritan, and the Jewish – existed and which is more accurate.

More statistics.

The canonical number of differences between Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch, which I’ve seen quoted in forums like Tabletmag, is 6000. In 5845 verses.

The question is, differences between what and what? The original count was done in the 1600s, based on Rev. Brian Walton’s Biblia Sacrorum or “London polyglot” which has both Samaritan Pentateuch and Samaritan Targum (in Neo-Babylonian).

In 1918, when Augustus Freiherr von Gall published his compendium, he compiled the texts of dozens of manuscripts, and they are not identical. He has a main compilation, but at the bottom there are footnotes showing variations and which of the manuscripts have them. 

Dr. Emanual Tov realized that the count done in the 1600s can no longer be considered accurate, although he doesn’t specify what was wrong with the first one, not in the book I read. He recommended using Zelig Metal’s 1979 work, which is now out of print but supposedly supported the count of 6,000. It is hard to see how Metal could enumerate them, because his work is a booklet of 80 pages and supposedly covers Talmud and midrash as well as Tannakh. Von Gall’s compendium is 436 pages long.

I have a project that compares Torah interlinearly with SP and other Samaritan material. There are 31 verses in the first chapter of Genesis. Out of that, 23 verses are identical between von Gall’s main compilation and Jewish Torah. But there are 13 textual differences that clump into 8 verses.

Von Gall’s footnotes show that 6 of the manuscripts he had access to, covering 7 of these 13 differences, do not agree with the main body in von Gall’s work. That’s more than half. I haven’t finished this project so I don’t know if this statistic holds up.

For 7 of the differences in Genesis 1, Qumran agrees with Jewish Torah. (It’s not all the same 7 on which the Samaritan manuscripts disagree with each other.) For the other 6, it does not provide any text.

The Qumran manuscripts are fragmented. The text that would come down on one side or another falls in the gaps.

I have been through the entire Torah and recorded what Qumran says about all the differences I found, and it’s a much worse situation than whether there are holes in the Qumran parchments. The Qumran text sometimes disagrees with BOTH Jewish Torah or Samaritan Pentateuch, even when these two modern versions agree. It may agree with one on one word in a verse and with the other on another word in the same verse.  There may be multiple fragments for a given verse, and each of the fragments may go a different way. 

And finally, there are parchments written in the “paleo” script, usually thought of as Samaritan, which agree with Jewish Torah in places where our two modern versions differ. There are also  parchments written in the “square” script still used in Jewish Torah scrolls, which agree with Samaritan Pentateuch in some places where our two modern versions differ.

If anybody ever makes up a grid to diagram all this, it will be as complicated as the fragments themselves.

Qumran is not going to settle anything There is too much variation in the texts, as well as too much fragmentation in the parchment.

So the 6,000 differences are a myth when you take all the Samaritan manuscripts into account. And Qumran isn’t going to settle anything because it doesn’t have text for everything. Another urban legend – or maybe two – bites the dust.

Or three.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- agentless, not passive

The agentless verb in Biblical Hebrew appears in both legal material and narratives. It lets us focus on the action and ignore the agent, in critical situations that may have deadly outcomes, and the type of verb tells us the role of the action in the law or the narrative.

Agentless verbs are rare and there’s a reason for that.

First, much of the material in Tannakh was transmitted orally for centuries or millennia. Up to the Babylonian Captivity, when it was put on record, Torah was transmitted orally in a population that was probably over 80% illiterate, so its narratives had to take a specific format that supports oral transmission.

When people transmit material orally, according to Axel Olrik, they tend to transmit action. The characters in the narratives reveal themselves through specific actions that delineate their natures and their roles in the narratives. So the majority of narrative material in Torah is going to use action-oriented verbs that relate to a specified agent – even if that agent’s name is not expressed in some of the verses.

Second, the situations in a legal code arise because of actions; it’s the purpose of the legal code to identify actions that society needs to deal with explicitly. The legal code prescribes actions that discourage or encourage whatever happened. Agentless structures capture definitions important to the legal code, and show that the law doesn’t care about the name of the individual performing the action or judging the case. But the actions that occur that invoke the law have to be performed by a specific entity – individual or collective – and that requires binyanim that take agents.

There’s an urban legend that “Hebrew was losing its passives over time”. You can now see that it’s not true.  What happened is that Hebrew transitioned from the Biblical form, which had the qual agentless binyan, to Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew which don’t.

The agentless binyanim in Biblical Hebrew had connotations that the passives in Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew don’t.

The agentless binyanim in Biblical Hebrew provide capsules of important issues both for narratives and legal material, something that passives don’t do in Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew.

Grammar is crucial to understanding a language because it encodes nuances that the bare words don’t convey, something I will soon go over in detail on the Fact-Checking page. The grammar of Biblical Hebrew is inseparably bound up with the culture in which it was used. While you try to understand Biblical Hebrew, you will keep coming up against places where you don’t understand why the grammar is what it is – unless you are deeply familiar with the culture.

The translation of a word is not its meaning, not just because no two languages have the same concepts, and can’t express alien concepts in one word, but also because no two languages have the same grammar.  Trying to pretend that grammar is universal by slapping labels from one language on a different language, is no way to understand the target language. The label is not the meaning of the grammar, and it does not necessarily relate to how the grammar functions.

If you’ve been having trouble learning Biblical Hebrew, it’s probably because you’ve been forced into a labeling system that doesn’t have anything to do with the nuances of meaning that the grammar embodies. 

Hopefully I’m giving you the key to really understand Biblical Hebrew.

And now to fill in a gap.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

DIY -- care for bleeding wounds

So a couple of weeks ago I wrote about using castile soap on a bleeding injury.
Some of you freaked because I didn't use an anti-bacterial soap.
Then I explained to you that the FDA has banned 19 ingredients in those soaps.
That's because the ingredients don't produce better results than plain soap.
They also are implicated in harm to the human body.

Meanwhile, using castile soap on the injury did not cause pain.
That's important because castile soap is a real lye-containing soap and you would think it would  hurt.

Later in the day when the bleeding had stopped, I applied an aloe-based ointment to it.
I have been using this same mixture of
aloe, lavender essential oil, and olive oil infused with comfrey,
on my skin for over a year now.

The new scrape is clearing up beautifully with the aloe treatment.
I think I might end up with not even a scar.
That's important because I still have 50-year-old scars on my knees from falling off my bike when I was a kid, and surgical scars more than 20 years old.

This is only anecdotal evidence, not a clinical study.
But  aloe has  been known for centuries to be good for skin.
And comfrey is the natural source of the allantoin you find in commercial skin care products.

The difference, however, is the other chemicals in the commercial products.
One is propylene glycol, an ingredient in anti-freeze for your car radiator.
Here is a list of products containing propylene glycol:
https://www.smartpracticecanada.com/spcanada/pdfs/all-allergens/CL441.pdf

Ugh.  I don't use any of these.
The Crest that I use on my teeth is not on this list.
The Ivory soap (bar) that I use is not on this list.
The Aveeno calamine lotion that I have used (no longer, I have other treatments) is not on this list.
Haven't worn makeup in decades.
I use an herbal mix for hair cleaner.
I make my own ranch dressing.

Propylene glycol can make your pets sick.
My niece's dog once had severe -- um -- dirt problems and I suggested he had gotten hold of some cosmetics.  She  agreed.
So I don't see why you would use the pet products in this list.

Just one more step in telling manufacturers that we don't like being guinea pigs
just because their chemists have come up with something new
and they want to profit from the salaries that they paid the chemists.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint and Qumran

As you will see if you look at the bibliography, the DJD work was edited by Dr. Emanuel Tov.  He has also published his own studies of the scrolls and I want to call out one of them for a number of reasons.

The first reason is that when I was googling around for material on the Greek fragments found at Qumran – and it took several iterations of different searches – I came across Dr. Tov’s article.  A first reading seemed to show it was more detailed and so I read it carefully.

The article evaluates several Greek fragments from Qumran as “close” to Septuagint.  Both Dr. Tov and scholars to whom he refers were excited to find such material.   The article fails, however, to quantify some important information and that is the second reason.

One piece of information it does quantify is that 7 books of Torah have Greek fragments at Qumran.  It’s not clear whether that is in addition to the 225 scrolls I mentioned last week or among the 225, but it is not a large number.   It suggests that the Qumranists were not interested enough in Greek to collect Greek versions of all the books of the Tannakh.

The fragments are from Jeremiah, Psalms, Numbers, Samuel, Deuteronomy, Exodus and Leviticus.  That doesn’t allow a comprehensive conclusion even for Torah.

Tov reports that these 7 scrolls are not whole but fragmentary.  He does not quantify the amount of fragmentation.  Fragments of Qumran Greek cannot support the categorical urban legend that Qumran proves Septuagint is closer than the Masoretic text, to the Hebrew.   Too much material from Tannakh is  missing.  That’s the third reason this article was important.

Tov admits that in places the Qumran Greek texts disagree with Septuagint.  He doesn’t quantify this either, but it shows that the Septuagint was not the only Greek version around at the time.  It suggests that Septuagint did not eclipse all other Greek works about Jewish scripture from before 100 BCE.

Tov does say that the scholars who have worked on the issue give no objective definition for what they mean by “close” and neither does he say what he means by it.  Without that objective definition, and without quantification, we have no idea how close “close” is to the modern Septuagint, and so there’s no validity to the urban legend that Qumran shows that Septuagint is close to the Masoretic Hebrew we now have.

After I found Dr. Eugene Ulrich’s book on Qumran Hebrew texts online, I emailed him and asked if there was (or was going to be) something similar to his book for the Greek from Qumran.  He basically said that there would be no book, because the fragments of Greek are not large enough or numerous enough to justify an entire book.  Long journal articles, maybe.  People interested in the subject and issues are better off going to the Leon Levy archive website and studying the Greek fragments in the photos there, than waiting for those articles, let alone a book.

Qumran is never going to prove anything about Septuagint as a whole.  It won’t even prove anything about Septuagint in part, because there is too little Greek material and what relates to Jewish scripture does not all come from Septuagint.

But there is one thing you still might think Qumran would settle, since it contains a lot of material in Hebrew.  And that is for next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- are we there yet?

When Biblical Hebrew needs an agentless statement, it has several options, but each of them has a specific meaning.  Nifal reports legal decrees.  Qual reports unexpected or counter-intuitive legal situations, and narrative incidents with important consequences.  Hufal is used for legal definitions which imply that a court will rule a certain way or, in narratives, official or customary actions.

There’s one more agentless binyan I haven’t talked about, and I left it for last because it is the least common, and I didn’t get much of a clue to it until I had thoroughly worked over Leviticus.

When Yosef is talking to Paro, he says this:

כִּי־גֻנֹּב גֻּנַּבְתִּי מֵאֶרֶץ הָעִבְרִים וְגַם־פֹּה לֹא־עָשִׂיתִי מְאוּמָה כִּי־שָׂמוּ אֹתִי בַּבּוֹר:

That’s a duplicate unconditional using the pual. Yosef is telling a story. This is a climactic point in the story, but by no means the end; if the kidnapping had been the end of the whole narrative, Yosef would not be talking to Paro’s chief butler in jail now. But there’s more to it in two ways.

One is that the kidnapping is not the central issue of the narrative. It was crucial to the situation, but using the pual says “but wait, there’s more” that is required to get to the real point of the narrative.

Because it is used in a duplicate unconditional, it also cuts off a consequence in Jewish law. Yosef was 17 years old and legally an adult and nobody but him or a Jewish court has a right to take out an exclusive services contract on him. Yosef is saying that  he’s not working in the jail because he was contracted out by a court, which can happen if he committed a theft but couldn’t make restitution. He’s there because somebody else committed a crime – the capital crime of kidnapping for sale – BUT the pual also means he doesn’t have the evidence to convict. And anyway, that’s not what the narrative is about; it’s about saving Egypt from starving.

There’s another example in Genesis that shows what I mean even better.

 וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָם:

You can see that the verb is in imperfect aspect, and in fact it’s the narrative past. The point of it being in pual is that while the material part of creation is finished, one more thing has to happen. What is it? Shabbat. The pual points out that while it feels like we’re finished, and the verb says “they were finished,” nothing is finished until Shabbat exists. (There’s a midrash for that.)

All the same, while the point of the story is establishing Shabbat, that wouldn’t mean much if there was no material creation including people, and so this verse is not a throw-away.

When it comes to laws, pual has a different role. Here’s one example, Leviticus 27:26.

אַךְ־בְּכוֹר אֲשֶׁר יְבֻכַּר לַיהוָֹה בִּבְהֵמָה לֹא־יַקְדִּישׁ אִישׁ אֹתוֹ אִם־שׁוֹר אִם־שֶׂה לַיהוָֹה הוּא:

“BUT a firstborn that y’vukar…” Now, if it’s a firstborn, why would it use pual?

The pual in laws is on the road to being a hufal. There’s a stopping point for a discussion about whether it really is a firstborn that qualifies for the consequences. Mishnah Bekhorot chapter 1 is all about the situations that disqualify it. If it falls into one of those classes, it isn’t treated as a firstborn no matter how much evidence exists that the dam never gave birth before.

And so everything works out. These forms don’t show up where they show up just for variety. They each have a special application. They make us stop and pay attention, in the legal sense all the more so as there are consequences to acting hastily with incomplete facts. Some of the consequences are deadly, as you saw with mot yumat. 

Just as aspectless verbs have a reason for being, so do agentless verbs.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- newbie

So there's a new kid in town.  The horizontal white thing in the middle of this shot is the sign for the court where my townhouse is.

 

Zoom in on it if you can, and you'll see my mockingbird sitting on it.  I got like 7 pictures which was surprising.

This is a shy bird and in past years I haven't noticed mockingbirds being shy.

It's also a quiet bird.

Maybe it's a female, or an adolescent who hasn't started vocalizing yet.



It's sitting here  because the tree on the right is a holly and mockingbirds tend to build their turfs around a holly tree.
Also because on the other side of the green fence under the sign, there are two ginormous pokeweed plants.
I've seen this bird getting berries off the pokeweed, and chasing away other birds.

As you can tell, I'm not good with a camera.  I'll try to get better at it.
One thing you won't get a lot of this season, though, is autumn color.
We haven't had a decent rain in 3-4 weeks so this year's color in my town is going to be pretty sad.
I'm not planning a drive out to the  Alleghenies just for shots of autumn leaves, you can find those anywhere online.
But nobody else is posting shots of my birds.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- why are we here?

It’s that “except for Esther” thing.  Reports on the finds at Qumran say that it contains basically the Tannakh, except Esther.  The urban legend that has been repeated to me is that Qumran confirms Septuagint.

Qumran was founded by ultra-conservative Jews.  They documented their reason for establishing themselves at the site.  They gave 20 specific ritual disagreements with mainstream Judaism of the time.  One of them is exactly the Sadducean position cited in Mishnah Yadaim 4:7.

The Tsadokites founded Qumran and then they wrote something called the Temple Scroll.  This scroll organizes Jewish law by subject.  The language in it reflects the time when the Hasmoneans were first consolidating their power, taking on the high priesthood as well as the kingship in the person of Jonathan, brother of Judah Maccabi, about 150 BCE.  The Tsadokites objected because this removed the priesthood from the descendants of Tsadok.  (Tsadok was high priest during King David’s reign and anointed Shlomo as David’s successor.)  The 150 BCE timing agrees with carbon-14 dating performed on material from Qumran and also with analysis of the lettering.

The urban legend is that the Septuagint found at Qumran is close to the Hebrew found at Qumran, closer than the Masoretic text is.

Let’s get some statistics, like I did with the Masoretic annotation.  There are some 981 scrolls known from Qumran.  225 of them are books found in the Tannakh, and there are multiple copies of 13 of the books of the Tannakh, including some of the “minor prophets” like Amos and Hoshea.  So lots of the scrolls at Qumran are not Jewish scripture.

Between 1950 and 1992, a limited number of people had access to the material in the scrolls, either curating the manuscripts or preparing the first publication, Discoveries in the Judean Desert.  It was completed about 2009.  Each volume costs hundreds of dollars, shutting out access for everybody except patrons of libraries with the right funding level.

Up to about 1990, the scholars who published claims about Qumran, based on access to the scrolls, could not be refuted except  by people who had access to the bare data, and that is not how science works.  Science relies on providing access to the data as well as the method.

All this has changed.  The millennium and the Internet provided new ways of dealing with the fragments for the masses to evaluate the scholarly work to that point.  And the evaluation has barely begun as I will discuss next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved