21st Century Bible Hebrew -- the denouement

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַ֤ל אֱלֹהִים֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשָֽׂה:

ג וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ אֹת֑וֹ כִּ֣י ב֤וֹ שָׁבַת֙ מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֔וֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah  that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

So what do I mean when I say that everything in the narrative tends toward this denouement of Shabbat?

 

Here’s where I keep a promise I made some time ago about explaining what k’dmutenu means. Torah tells us that Gd observed Shabbat. You know that the Big Ten also require the Israelites (Jews) to observe Shabbat. The Exodus version specifically refers to creation as the reason for this. This is what makes humans ki-d’mutenu with Gd.

 

After the Babylonian Captivity, as angelology developed (admitted by experts like Rabbi Shimon Laqish), it was decided that angels lacked two things humans have. We won’t see one of them for some weeks yet, but the other was observance of Shabbat. Angels do not perform melakhah. People do. It’s reiterated over and over in Torah, particularly Leviticus with its references to m’lekhet avodah.

 

Now notice va-yishbot. Another version of this word will show up in Genesis 8:22, at the end of the flood story. It’s one of the things that makes the first two parshiyot of Torah (Breshit and Noach) a cycle unto themselves, along with the other things I pointed out already as having consequences in Parshah Noach. BH is the only ancient Semitic language with an attested connection between the root shbt and cessation of activity.

 

If you need evidence that Shabbat is strictly a Jewish observance, you can read my critique of Sayce.

 

If you need evidence that this story did not originate in the Babylonian Captivity, see the section of the blog on Documentary Hypothesis.

 

The question is, why do we also have la-asot at the end of that verse? You’re thinking in English. This is an aspectless verb with the purposeful prefix. This verse demonstrates that bara means “ex nihilo”, that is, Gd had to create everything out of nothing for the purpose of doing the melakhah.

 

And finally, why do I have “sanctified” in quotes? Because va-y’qadesh is a piel transitive verb and the problem with English “sanctified” is that it is causative, not transitive. In Narrating the Torah, in Exodus, I hit on every example of this word to show that it means, not to make something holy that wasn’t holy before, but to demonstrate the holiness of something that was already holy.  How does Gd demonstrate the holiness of Shabbat? By shabating from all the melakhah. 

Garden -- fiddleheads

So this is my fern, which you have seen before all feathery and green. It spored this spring and is now developing fronds.

I took this picture to show you the fiddleheads. They are circled in red. I think this might actually be a Matteuccia struthiopteris, fiddlehead fern. If I'm wrong, I hope somebody will say so. 

Here are the young mulberries on my tree. The mockingbird, catbird, robin and starlings will be after these once they ripen, with the mockingbird trying to take sole possession in between chasing crows off the block.

This is a descendant of something I planted a long time ago. I thought I bought seeds for celery, but I think my finger wandered and this is celeriac, which is related, but people use the roots, not the stems. Where it grows now is about 10 feet due south of where the original plant was.


It seeds every couple of years. The bees love the little yellow flowers and the sparrows love the seeds, all the more so because the tops of the stalks are sturdy enough to perch on. 







So they sowed this one next to a stump near the mulberry tree, about 10 feet due east of the parent. 

So all you naturalists, tell me, do sparrows naturally like to perch about every 10 feet or was it just convenient to them that I had perchable things at those distances?


So after four days of rain and three days of sunshine, here they are again.




This has grown about 18 inches above the fence line.

This shows the yellow flowers

.

 And here's a small guest.



Can you see the dark mulberries? I admit it, I stole some of these from the birds before I took this photo. Even at 9 in the morning before another full day of sun, they were sweeter than sweet.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik meets Cook

SWLT rule 2 says grammar communicates nuances. Nuances include what the speaker thinks, believes, or feels. This is the realm of the modality described by Dr. John Cook; it comes in three types: deontic (imperatives and volitive); epistemic (certainty or uncertainty about facts); and oblique, subordinate clauses of cause and effect, purpose and result, and conditions for an action to occur.

Torah’s certainty epistemic form first appears in the creation story, and it also appears in Kings.  In between, it shows up in the material about creating the tabernacle. 

The certainty epistemic is used in situations where the narrator couldn’t possibly have seen what happened.  It happened too long ago.  But the proof that the event actually happened is either a physical or cultural object or concept.  That is the link to Olrik’s term localization. 

A localization has to be a known geographical feature that the narrator points to physically or verbally as evidence that the tale is true, despite its fantastic content. 

The certainty epistemic reflects the fact that the audience’s culture currently has certain features or cult objects that wouldn’t be there if the narrative were false. The certainty epistemic only appears if the narrator has credibility; the audience would laugh him out of countenance for using a certainty epistemic, if the object were not visible or the concept was not part of the culture.

This use of the certainty epistemic appears in Exodus while Mosheh is overseeing the building of the tabernacle and the first sacrifices. There is a string of verses about a particular part of the building or sacrifices, saying “[He] made (va-yaas)….” (The “he” is B’tsalel most of the time.) The narrator did not witness it, but if Mosheh hadn’t done this, the Jewish culture as it exists in the narrator’s times wouldn’t be the way it is. The audience didn’t see these things happen, but the narrator can point to the tabernacle as evidence of the truth of what he is narrating. Without a physically present tabernacle, the audience would laugh the narrator out of countenance.

So the tabernacle had to exist at some time for the oral narratives in Exodus to work; that’s Olrik’s principle that oral narratives always represent some cultural reality. What’s more, the certainty epistemic in the narratives is good grammar only when the tabernacle is present to the audience. Without that visible proof of the truth of the narrator’s words, he would have to use the narrative past.

Biblical Hebrew examples, of narrative past when a certainty epistemic is inappropriate, appear at least twice in Torah. I document examples on the Bible Hebrew page.

In Numbers 32:31 it says that the Gadites and Reubenites “responded” to Mosheh, in the setting of promising to help the rest of the Israelites during the Ingress. The verb root is ayin nun heh and sometimes in Torah it appears as a certainty epistemic. Not here. Here it’s a narrative past.

At the point when the narrator adopted this grammar, there were no Gadites or Reubenites to point to as evidence of the truth of the narrator’s claim. They had taken up residence on the east side of the Yarden. Their next appearance in Israelite consciousness was the 600s BCE, when they fled ahead of the Assyrian invasion – actually, it’s in Jewish consciousness, this is recorded in Jewish Tannakh but not in Samaritan “Chronicle”. Nevertheless, Israelite culture recorded that Mosheh had set up three cities of refuge east of the Yarden. There’s no way for the westerners to enforce such a law. It had to be set up before the Israelites split up into east and west.

Use of the certainty epistemic and the narrative past are features of Biblical Hebrew. They existed in the language when it was the vernacular of the people who transmitted this material orally. Samaritan Pentateuch has the certainty epistemic in all the same verses in Exodus as in Jewish Torah. These are some of those 80% identical uses that I referred to.

Samaritan Pentateuch also has all the same localizations. That may seem like a contradiction to what I said about geographical information in SP a couple of weeks ago but the difference is this. In narratives, SP retains the names of the Cities of the Plain. In geographic information with a practical basis, SP copies known place names and eliminates what the Samaritans didn’t know. This copying shows up in other places in SP and I believe I have an upcoming post about it. I’ll check.

Next post I knock on the head another DH "pillar".

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:2-3, Shabbat

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַ֤ל אֱלֹהִים֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשָֽׂה: ג וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ אֹת֑וֹ כִּ֣י ב֤וֹ שָׁבַת֙ מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֔וֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah  that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

שְּׁבִיעִי	seventh
מְלַאכָה	melakhah
יִּשְׁבֹּת	He rested
שָׁבַת	He rested
יְקַדֵּשׁ	He sanctified

 

I italicized melakhah just like in previous lessons I italicized raqia.  I will keep on doing this when I know that the traditional translation doesn’t capture the real meaning of the word. 

 

Melakhah has a specific meaning in Jewish law.  It means the 40 less one or 39 categories of work prohibited on Sabbath.  You can’t do these things for pay on Shabbat, and you can’t do them for free; you can’t do it for yourself, and you can’t do it for others.  What’s more, if a non-Jew does something that is melakhah specifically to benefit a Jew, the Jew has to refuse the benefit. The only exception is when there is danger to the life of any Homo sapiens. 

 

Melakhah also appears in the Ten Commandments, in the commandment to observe Sabbath.  I won’t go into it further.  A whole tractate of Mishnah is dedicated to Shabbat laws and it has gemara in both Talmuds.

 

What I will say here is that Hebrew has more than one expression for the activity of people that earns their living but it is not melakhah.  Neither is it avodah, not in Biblical Hebrew.  As I discuss on the Fact-Checking blog, this word actually means an exclusive services contract, whether between Jews and Gd or between people. 

 

Biblical Hebrew uses maasayv, “his deeds”, for work assignments.  Yosef is doing “his deeds” when he is working for the jailer.  But he is doing melakhah when Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him for the last time and that has the connotation that he was working on a holiday; all the Egyptians were at their temples and he was the only one in the house except for her.

This is the denouement of the first narrative in Torah. This oral narrative was “about” creating a world in which Shabbat would exist. I’ll go into the other vocabulary next week and then show you how the denouement relates to the rest of the material in the narrative.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik meets SWLT

Narrators have to maintain their credibility with an audience thoroughly familiar with the sitz-im-leben of the narratives. There are several reasons for this.

One, of course, is that a narrative that survives long enough can survive the lifetimes of the actors in the narrative. They are no longer around to turn to for verification of the events; this is one of the defining features of oral narratives. Narratives also, obviously, may survive their original narrators. This was the status of some Israelite narratives by the time of the hilltop settlements.

Another reason is if the narrator can no longer tell exactly where something happened due to migration. It progresses from details of that horizon dropping out of the narrative, to complete loss of geographical data associated with the story. If the story has credibility problems at that point, some other form of “credibilizing” has to take place.

But the real issue requiring the narrator to work on credibility issues is fundamental to all oral narratives. They do not survive, they practically do not come into being, without containing fantastic elements. Olrik specifically states that between the everyday world of the opening, and the same everyday world of the closing, an oral narrative will always contain at least one incident that is not quite what happens in the everyday world. It is more or less fantastic. Such incidents, Olrik specifically states, mark the progress of the narrative toward its denouement.

So you will never find an oral narrative that survives multiple hops unless it has something in it that is out of the ordinary. This is the origin of Vera Cheberyak, at risk of having her apartment searched, keeping Andrey’s body there, rolled up in her own carpet, which she was about to sell to her landlord, for three days. This is why gossip flies. The fantastic is the fundamental constituent of urban legends and fish stories.  And it is the basis for all myths and fairy tales.

Narrators do things to maintain credibility while reciting these fantastic incidents. They use localization; they begin or end with a well-known geographical site which may be visible to the audience, as the place where the incidents occurred, because it has an association with the events in the narrative anyway.

They also use language cues. This is an issue of SWLT rule 2; grammar encodes nuances the bare words don’t express. What nuances?

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- pual, hufal and ... qual

Genesis 2:1

א וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָֽם

Translation:     The heaven and earth were completed and all their hosts.

Now to beat up another urban legend. There’s an urban legend that during the Babylonian Captivity, “Hebrew was losing its passives.” That’s wrong in two ways.

First, as I said, there are no passives in Biblical Hebrew. There are agentless verbs. In the transition to Mishnaic Hebrew, all these binyanim survived, even the relative of qal in the set phrase v’ki yutan.  I’ll discuss an example of that binyan in Genesis 3:19 and an important one in Genesis 4:26 that shows up later in Tannakh as well.

Second, why use agentless binyanim at all? 

If you ever took a writing class, you probably remember your teacher telling you to use active verbs, especially in creative writing. (It also helps scholarly writing but the passive scholarly tradition is so pervasive it’s hard to buck.)

The same is true in oral story-telling. Torah is a record of the Jewish oral tradition. The expert in formulation of oral traditions, Axel Olrik, showed that they delineate character features by telling about the actions that the characters accomplish (or not). That uses active verbs. Oral traditions avoid describing characters, for the most part. But “passives” are inherently descriptive.  As an oral tradition, therefore, Torah would avoid using “passives” even if that is what agentless verbs are.

There has to be an important reason to use an agentless verb in Torah.  With the most frequent one, nifal, the reason is the need to express a decree, usually a Heavenly decree. The most frequent appearance of nifal, or at least the most memorable, is the phrase nikhr’tah ha-nefesh. This is a Heavenly decree of death upon a person’s descendants, wiping them out prior to his own death. The first place it shows up explicitly is in relation to circumcision in Avraham’s saga.

And I just defined the use of pual in narratives. It only shows up here because it’s important that the material universe be in place before we tell the real end of the story.

The pual and other agentless binyanim show up only when there’s no way to put the point across without them. The qual (usually called qal “passive”) is a neon sign, a sort of spoiler alert. The hufal (related to hifil) goes with behavior that fits norms on which the narrative is in some way a commentary.  It shows up in Genesis 4:15 and 4:24 in the stories of Qain and his descendant Lemekh.

So Biblical Hebrew didn’t “lose its passives.” But for the rest of this page on the blog, I’m going to lose the term passive. I’ll point out the limited number of times they appear in the rest of Parshah Breshit and later do some posts on the usage of agentless verbs in legal formulations with examples from Exodus and Leviticus.

I'm just saying -- Corporate America scores again

That is, they score a big fat nothing.

The last score was worse: a company that used to be synonymous with kosher fish snacks turned out a lox that was rubbery and tasted like chemicals. So I went back to curing my own.

This one -- well, when I saw that the second ingredient was sugar, I should have just said no.

But I didn't.

Mayonnaise has more flavor than this stuff.

So a well known brand of bbq sauce goes on my list entitled Not While There's Breath in my Body.

I grated up leftover Passover horseradish root and mixed it with good apple cider vinegar and made a fresh batch of my own Worcestershire sauce.

I wanted to make biltong anyway, because it's 1/4 the price of commercial jerky even though I'm using rotisserie roast to do it.

-- Another SHAME ON YOU CORPORATE AMERICA --

Wanna have real good-tasting food in your house? The more you DIY, the better your chances.

I'm just saying...

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