DIY -- New Year's

OK don't look at your scale like that.
And don't kick it either.
It wasn't your scale that put all that food in your mouth over the last five days.

And don't wait until New Year's to do something about it.
There are more foodie festivals coming and you know it.

So don't skip breakfast.
Beat up an egg.
Take some of those potatoes and mix them with the egg.
Cut up some turkey.
Get a couple of serving spoons of vegetables.
Put a little shortening in the frying pan.
Shape the potatoes into a hamburger and fry on one side.
Flip, put the turkey and veg in the pan.
Cover, turn the heat down, and let sit.
Start your coffee.
Pour your coffee, dish out your breakfast and eat.

Have a salad or other veggie dish for lunch, on a smallish plate.

Have a piece of fruit and a handful of nuts for afternoon snacks.
And one, count 'em, one cookie or piece of candy or scoop of ice cream or a small piece of cake or pie.

In between all these meals, you have things to do.
It was windy this weekend and I have leaves to rake.
Dishes to wash (I don't have a machine).
Clothes to wash, like hand-knit socks.
A new round of housecleaning to start.
Temps will be high enough for a walk to be comfortable, low enough for it to be refreshing.

Repeat every day to eat less and burn off what you do eat.
By New Year's, you will have made a habit of this.
By next New Year's, you will have lost a clothes size.
That's what I'm planning to do.
I did it last year and had to go looking through my closets for a new pair of reference pants.
I can get into them.
In twelve months I hope to be able to sit down in them without cutting off my circulation.
YMMV.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- bad commentaries

One urban legend about Philo, repeated in one Amazon review after another, is that his work about Torah is valuable for understanding Judaism of his period. 

OK, granted that not all the people reviewing books on Amazon are scholars of the Judaism of the period from 20 BCE to 50 CE when Philo lived.  And a sadly large number of reviewers on Amazon don’t know how to write a useful review.  But I digress.

The only thing that Philo’s work is good for is evaluating Philo.

Philo was a neo-Platonist.  He uses the catchphrases common to that group, theos logos and so on.  It would take an expert on the neo-Platonists, which I am not, to determine whether Philo goes with the flow of that stream of thought at all times.  It would take an expert on Plato, which I am not, to determine how far the neo-Platonists diverge from his ideas.

But the one thing Philo is not, is an expert on Judaism.  And the signs are the same as for Septuagint. 

He uses unsuitable words for concepts well understood in passages of Mishnah that date before his time.  He misinterprets phrases in Torah.  He lags behind rabbinical understanding of passages in Torah.  He over-specifies what Torah leaves vague. 

Philo contradicts Jewish law.  He misreports quantities of tithing.  He mis-describes sacrificial procedure.  He contradicts Torah on lending.  He misrepresents how Jewish law treats prostitutes.  He is one of the first, if not the first, to describe lo yirtsach as “thou shalt not kill,” which I discussed to death long ago.

Philo misrepresents historic context by claiming that the stones on the efod relate to the Zodiac.  First, Jews are prohibited by law from divining by the heavenly bodies.  Second, the Zodiac dates only a century before Philo’s own birth, to the work of Berosus the Astrologer (NOT Berosus the Historian, they were different people).  Philo must have known that the efod description is no younger than the time of Ezra.  Maybe he didn’t know the exact span of time, but he had the opportunity to know, if he studied Jewish history, that Ezra came before the Hasmoneans.  And in fact, tradition in Philo’s times said that the efod came from the time of the Exodus, long before Ezra.

I had a dustup on Twitter with somebody who objected to my rejection of Philo; he said that Judaism has to address contemporary issues.  I pointed out that “addressing” an issue is not the same as writing commentaries that pretend the primary document explicitly caters to an issue from an external culture that did not exist until centuries after Torah was put into writing.  The latter is what Philo did in his work, and he was wrong, and that’s why he’s irrelevant both with respect to Judaism, and with respect to the importance of Septuagint – which he disagrees with whenever it’s convenient for his program.

Which is a habit that will crop up again in the fourth part of this blog.

But that's not the only way a commentary can go wrong.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- through time

Now a lesson in diachronicity – the persistence (or not) of grammar over time. Unless you have read a large part of classical Jewish literature – or even if you have – you might not realize that one piece of Biblical Hebrew survived the Babylonian Captivity almost intact. The nun epistemic, in a slightly different format and meaning, persisted into Mishnah, Gemara, the middle ages, and later times.

 

I believe that’s because it was integral to the legal system, documented in over a millennium of material. The very first Mishnah has three examples. Each of them reflects some legal issue.

 

מֵאֵימָתַי קוֹרִין אֶת שְׁמַע בְּעַרְבִית. מִשָּׁעָה שֶׁהַכֹּהֲנִים נִכְנָסִים לֶאֱכֹל בִּתְרוּמָתָן, עַד סוֹף הָאַשְׁמוּרָה הָרִאשׁוֹנָה, דִּבְרֵי רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר. וַחֲכָמִים אוֹמְרִים, עַד חֲצוֹת. רַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל אוֹמֵר, עַד שֶׁיַּעֲלֶה עַמּוּד הַשָּׁחַר. מַעֲשֶׂה שֶׁבָּאוּ בָנָיו מִבֵּית הַמִּשְׁתֶּה, אָמְרוּ לוֹ, לֹא קָרִינוּ אֶת שְׁמַע. אָמַר לָהֶם, אִם לֹא עָלָה עַמּוּד הַשָּׁחַר, חַיָּבִין אַתֶּם לִקְרוֹת. וְלֹא זוֹ בִּלְבַד, אֶלָּא כָּל מַה שֶּׁאָמְרוּ חֲכָמִים עַד חֲצוֹת, מִצְוָתָן עַד שֶׁיַּעֲלֶה עַמּוּד הַשָּׁחַר. הֶקְטֵר חֲלָבִים וְאֵבָרִים, מִצְוָתָן עַד שֶׁיַּעֲלֶה עַמּוּד הַשָּׁחַר. וְכָל הַנֶּאֱכָלִין לְיוֹם אֶחָד, מִצְוָתָן עַד שֶׁיַּעֲלֶה עַמּוּד הַשָּׁחַר. אִם כֵּן, לָמָּה אָמְרוּ חֲכָמִים עַד חֲצוֹת, כְּדֵי לְהַרְחִיק אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעֲבֵירָה:

Qorin means that it’s halakhah to read the Shema. This mishnah is about the requirement to read it at night, not about an individual case that came before a Jewish court.

Chayavin means that the young men might be subject to the requirement for the nighttime reading. There’s a condition that applies – whether the dawn has begun – and the speaker (Rabban Gamliel, their father) can’t rule on the case. Why not?  There are no eligible witnesses.  He can’t do it, he’s a relative of the young  men so he couldn’t testify.  The young men can’t do it, they are parties to the case.  Also, the father can’t serve as a judge in the case, being a relative.  Supposing that dawn had not begun, the young men would be supposed to say the  Shema, but he can’t say chayavim.

Neechalin is nifal, meaning a legal ruling; a legal ruling exists that certain sacrifices have to be eaten in one day (it’s in Torah) but we’re not talking about an actual example of such a thing involved in the current case, we’re just talking about the class of things to which the legal ruling applies.

 

This grammar persists into the Kitsur Shulchan Arukh of the 1830s CE and appears in Midrash Halakhah (600-800 CE), Mishneh Torah (1100s CE), Caro’s Shulchan Arukh (1500s), and Shulchan Arukh ha-Rav (right about 1800).

 

Another example (this picks up on something I said a few weeks ago) is that, while there are ayin vav and ayin yod verb root classes in Biblical Hebrew, and peh yod, there is only one peh vav verb (viter, in only one binyan) and no lamed yod or lamed vav classes. Gelb’s grammar of Akkadian shows these forms.  Assyrian had all of these forms; Delitzsch, who wrote the basic grammar, shows that peh vav were dying out.  It’s easy to see why when you know that vav is the Hebrew version of a sound that was used at the start of verbs throughout the history of Semitic languages (whether it mean “and” or whatever). It’s easier to pronounce words if you change or suppress one of the vavs at the start.

 

Remember back when I discussed how some peh yod verbs drop the yod in part of their conjugation? If they drop it, they were originally peh vav verbs. You can tell by looking up their cognates in Akkadian or Assyrian (dictionaries  for these languages are available online). If they don’t drop it, they weren’t peh vav verbs (or they don’t have a cognate).

 

So yada, which drops the yod in imperfect, was a peh vav verb in Akkadian and Assyrian. So were yakhal, yaval, yalad, yashav, yarad, yaqar, yaraq, and yatsa. Not true of yatsar or yashar.

 

And no other Semitic language has the lamed heh verb root class, it’s only in Hebrew. Aramaic verbs that look like this have been adopted from Hebrew, as Jastrow’s dictionary shows, but non-borrowed verbs are lamed yod or lamed vav. In other Semitic languages, the cognate to a Hebrew lamed heh verb, is either lamed yod or lamed vav.

 

I let this post run on because it’s not crucial to understanding Torah, it’s just to expand your mind a little. Most of Hermann Strack’s Porta Linguarum Orientalium and Clavis Linguarum Semiticarum are available online for free and some are still useful. Use your search engine on the titles to find a list of them. Maybe you will discover your inner Assyriologist!

Almost there!

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

Knitting -- pullover redux

After some searches on my own blog, I can't find the complete instructions.
This is for Wool of the Andes worsted.
Chest: 40 inches.
Arm length: 20 inches.
Wrist: 7 1/2 inches around.
Neck goes over a head which needs a 7 1/2 size hat.

Using US size 5 circular needles with 24 inch tether:
Put on a slip stitch with a 6-7 inch tail.
Cable on 200 stitches.
For 8 rows, k2/p2 rib.
Switch to US size 7 circular needles with 24 inch tether.
For 90 rows, knit in the round.
At each underarm, put 10 stitches on holders; I tend to use a doubled-over length of a thinner yarn and loop the free ends through.
I center the underarms on the starting slip stitch  on one side and then, of course, halfway around to the other side.
Replace those 10 stitches with 10 cast-ons (not cable ons).
For 55 rounds, knit the armholes BUT
For rounds 1-3
after the underarm, K1, K2TOG
knit to the other armhole minus 3 stitches
slip a stitch, knit 1, PSSO, knit 1
knit across the armhole

For rounds 4-55, knit and don't decrease at the armhole.
Turn inside out and knit together 23 stitches at one shoulder.
Turn right side out and knit to other shoulder.
Repeat the knitting together at the other  shoulder.
Turn right side out.
Change to US size 7 circular needle with 16 inch tether.
Start k2/2 rib for 4-6 rows.
Bind off in rib.
Cut a 6-7 inch tail and sew the neck edge even with a tapestry needle.
Sew the bottom hem even with a tapestry needle.
Use duplicate stitch to fill gaps  in where the shoulders join the neck ribbing.

Sleeves:
Using US size 7 circular needles with a 16 inch tether, move stitches from the holder to one of the needles.
Put a slip stitch on the other  needle, knit the first stitch and pass the slip stitch over.
Now knit up the other 10 stitches of the under arm.
Cut up the middle of the armhole (the "steeking" to use a Fair Isle term).
Using a US size 4-6  crochet needle,
for every stitch around the armhole,
pick up yarn from the back to the front of the fabric and put it on your circular needle.
At the top of the shoulder pick one stitch through at the seam before continuing through the rest of the armhole.
Knit the first five stitches at the underarm.
Put a marker thread so you can do the decreases precisely in line.
Knit two rounds.
Knit 1, K2TOG, knit around to the underarm minus 3 stitches, slip stitch, K1, PSSO, K1.
Repeat the last two steps until you have knitted 84 rounds from the underarm.
Work your  marker thread in and out at the midpoint between the two K1s to keep track of where you put decreases.
Switch to US size 7 double point (sock) needles, at least 7 inches long, using 3 to hold stitches and knitting with  the 4th.
Knit 3 rounds and then decrease on the 4th round.
When you reach a total of 132 rounds from the underarm, count the stitches left on your needles.
You need 56 for your cuff.
If you have more than 59, do another 4 rounds and a decrease.
Then K2TOG as many times as needed for the 56 stitches of the cuff.
CHANGE TO US SIZE 5 DOUBLE POINT (SOCK) NEEDLES.
Do k2/p2 rib for 8 rounds on the cuff.
Bind off in rib.
Cut a 6-7 inch tail and sew the cuff edge even with a tapestry needle.

Wash, block and wear.
Working 6 hours a day, I can make a pullover in 2 weeks.

My back is about an inch shorter than normal, I learned that sewing tops for myself years ago.
The hem of this pullover sits a little below my hip bones when I stand and meets the back of my slacks when I sit.
I like  my sleeves a bit long; the cuffs get pushed over my wrists against my hands and I feel warmer.
YMMV; adjust the length accordingly.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- our first commentary

We still don’t know why it was important for Brenton to translate the Septuagint into English. You might think it was because Septuagint was important to Christianity – but Jerome realized in the 400s CE that the Septuagint was a bad translation from Hebrew.

Clement and Justin Martyr (100s CE) don’t quote from Septuagint. They say things that sound like Septuagint, but aren’t; as with Qumran, they are Greek versions of scriptural material, but they are not the version Brenton "translated".  Clement and Justin were trying to use Plato and other Greek writers to prove the value of Christianity to people who read classical Greek authors; the audience didn’t read Septuagint and quoting it would have meant nothing to them.

Then there’s Origen’s Hexapla. This collected six different Greek versions of Torah, with notes on the differences between them. Only the notes survive; in Field’s version (which is online), they are collated with the Septuagint to show what Origen was thinking about. Apparently the Hexapla wasn’t important enough to preserve intact.

Translators claimed to go back to Hebrew with both the English and French Geneva Bibles of the 1500s CE, and the King James Version, and so on. But since none of them had the faintest idea of modality or the other features of Biblical Hebrew known to 21^st century linguistics, they actually translated in accordance with the received knowledge about Hebrew. That includes mistranslations like Ohozath in Genesis, as well as “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14, and “and.”

As long as people read translations – of ANY work – they are vulnerable to the carelessness, ignorance, and even willful errors of translators. As long as people claim to be experts when all they know are translations, so long will these people generate urban legends or cling to them. These incorrect translations play a role in almost every urban legend documented on this blog.

So if translations, which pretend to come straight from the primary document, cannot give good results, what chance do commentaries have, especially if they take their stand on translations? That’s what we’re about to find out when we look at Philo.

The first urban legend about Philo says that he used Septuagint. That’s a bad thing. However, his relationship to Septuagint is not one of unqualified faithfulness to the Greek. In particular, in his essay On Dreams I, lines 216-218, he discusses Lavan’s bargain with Yaaqov over the colors of sheep and goats. Philo uses some terms Septuagint doesn’t have and uses other terms the opposite of how Septuagint uses them. So when his commentators claim that such and such a phrase in Philo comes from the Septuagint, it better be exact in text and meaning, and somebody would do the world a real service by totting up how often that happens. Then they ought to compare it to how often the commentators cite to Septuagint when Philo doesn’t really quote from it. I would not be surprised if Philo says things that sound like Septuagint but aren’t.

But that doesn’t mean Philo’s commentary is useful for anything else but understanding Philo, as I am about to show.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- aspect and law

When you have learned trop, you will learn how to punctuate Biblical Hebrew and the meaning of lots of verses will get clearer. Now I’m going to whip you back to aspect again and show you how the relationship between Torah and Mishnah, the basis of Talmud, gets clearer.

In Midrash Halakhah Sifre on Leviticus, the introduction gives 13 principles used in Jewish courts to help judges make decisions. They are attributed to Rabbi Yishmael who was martyred by Hadrian about 132 CE, but most of them were known to R. Hillel the Great over a century earlier.

One of them, qal va-chomer is called a fortiori in western legal systems. If somebody does X and gets punishment Y, then if somebody else does 2X the punishment ought to be 2Y.

Where aspect comes in is tort laws and rituals.

Most tort laws like Exodus 21:18 start with an imperfect aspect verb; this is an action which the law knows happens sometimes and has decided is worth paying attention to because it has had bad consequences enough times not to be accident or coincidence. In this case, it’s y’rivun which you also know is an uncertainty epistemic; we’re supposing that the fight is intense enough for the law to get involved.

Such an opener is usually followed by a perfect aspect verb, in this case hikah. As soon as hikah happens, the fighting men become subject to the law. When the hittee nafal (perfect aspect) onto his bed, the laws of damages for battery kick in.

In the 13 forensic principles, this is a k’lal u-prat, a generalization followed by details. There are also cases where the details come first and then the generalization. The details govern what happens, but the k’lal in imperfect aspect defines what area of torts we are talking about.

The same is true for sacrifices. Ki taqrivu using the imperfect is followed by things like zevach shlamim which distinguish the rules from those applying to a sin offering. Then follow perfect aspect verbs about what parts of this zevach belong to the owner or how long he has to consume them.

And finally, there is the k’lal u-prat u-k’lal, ein atah dan elah k’eyn ha-prat. This is in Deuteronomy 14:22 where a string of imperfect verbs in the k’lal identify that in general, the distance to the tabernacle might be so far that food would rot on the way. Verse 23 starts with a sequential natatah and then there are perfect verbs about what to do with the money. Verse 26 opens with another sequential natatah and includes a string of nouns detailing what to spend the money on and then there’s an imperfect aspect tishalkha, what your “soul” asks you for. That generalization seals off the list of permissible things. It is followed by a perfect aspect akhalta. In other words, this money has to be used for food and drink. If you use it for hotel bills, you’ve violated the law. You have to bring other money along for that.

When you can recognize the aspects, the aspectless, the agentless binyanim, the punctuation of trop, and the use of et, then you can see how these things play out in Mishnaic legal formulas. It shows that Jewish law, like other common law codes, is much less haphazard than you might think.

Jewish classical literature is comprehensible, but most people have to leave their comfort zone to understand it for what it is: the record of JEWISH ideas backed up by Torah and the rest of Tannakh, which are recorded in the ANCIENT Jewish language and not in something that westerners have mis-labeled and misdescribed for centuries.

Speaking of centuries...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

I'm just saying -- rating social media

So now I'm almost fully invested.

Blogger:  4 stars.  Google and Microsoft have settled some of their differences and now, as you have seen, I can post pictures, something I couldn't do after Nov. 2014.

Spotify: 4 stars.  Some of the functions are hard to figure out from the instructions but once you figure them out, they work.

Google+: 0 stars.  Our models of what we want social media to do are exactly opposite.  If you're following me on Google+, you'd be better off following me on Twitter or, since it appears to be merger bait, on Facebook or Blogger.

Pinterest: 0  stars.  Another "exactly opposite".  Clue for Pinterest users: when I google something, I  filter out or ignore every link from Pinterest.  It won't let you look at anything unless you have a Pinterest account.  There are enough websites that have non-Pinterest alternatives and offer info I want, that Pinterest has NO interest for me.

Facebook: 2 1/2 stars.  I'd be happier with Facebook if their help topic contents had kept up with how pages actually work. Everything I've used the Help function with, the instructions tell me to look for things that don't exist.  For example, when it tells you to right-click, fuhgeddaboudit.  You get the normal IE right-click menu. 

I'm also disturbed by the stupid stuff that FB expects its customers to suck up.   From bad security to an email dirty trick, and now being suckered into posting death messages for users who aren't dead, FB is behaving immaturely.

On FB I'm only posting links to Blogger, not full-up Blogger posts, because I can't find the Facebook instructions on how to control comments and I have no intention of feeding trolls and trash. 

The FB model of protecting copyright seems to force you to identify groups first.  I'm getting readership from all over the world, and I want it that way, so identifying groups is nonsense.

Twitter: 4 stars FWIW.  This helped me increase pageviews by putting out "ads" in a separate forum.  The text limitation hasn't hurt me; if I really want to let loose, usually on a news article, I go to the article.  They usually allow comments.  Twitter's biggest problem right now is fangirl bullies and trolls who need to be blocked until they grow out of it.  If ever.

Now that Blogger's photo links have been fixed, Blogger wins hands down.  I don't allow comments from anonymous readers, and I can turn moderation on and off at the flick of a button if the others get out of hand.  Then I have the function for deleting trash comments, which is legal for non-government bloggers to do. 

Lesson for using social media: know what you're after.  Social media can ruin your brand lickety split unless you know what you have to do to protect yourself and invest the time.

Case in point.  What was formerly the best news outlet with the widest interest and reach in the D.C. region, has slowly been turning into a victim of its own IT department.  The IT department loaded the articles with flashy trashy video nonsense that had nothing to do with the article.  The videos chewed up so much bandwidth that it was difficult to read the articles let alone comment.  Comments dropped off except for the dedicated crazy people who, having no lives, were the only ones with the time to waste. 

So the moderators were working overtime and there were still abusive, threatening posts, trolls and spam.  And the bean counters decided to put a stop to that.  They have switched completely over to Facebook with no moderation.  Instead of the moderators not being able to keep up with the crazy people, there will be nothing but crazy people. 

Another news outlet gets crazy people but there's a link to their help department.  In  recent attempts  of crazy people to eliminate comments they didn't like, it was possible to tell the help department what to watch for and the craziness was halted.  After that the discussion continued undisturbed. 

And finally there are still people, years after social media was invented, who don't realize that
a) they never know who their readers are distributing their info to  and
b) just  because they delete something so they can't see it, doesn't mean it automatically disappears everywhere. 
I have had to teach somebody I know that anything posted on FB can make its way to where it can ruin a career.  It never happens immediately; Murphy's Law says  it will always wait until it does the most damage. 

I'm just saying...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved