Ben Hur the novel, part 8

So we’re up to chapter 10 of Ben Hur and right above it Mary says “the place is sanctified.” Have you ever thought about what that is supposed to mean?

I did the first ever complete English translation of the transcript from the 1913 Mendel Beilis trial on a charge of ritual murder, the blood libel that falsely says Jews need children’s blood at Passover to put in matso. That is false, but the connection to Ben Hur is about consecration of land and buildings.

Late in the trial a government official takes the stand. Beilis’ bosses were building a hospice on one corner of their property. In autumn of 1910 they got the plans approved. Then this little twerp Merder gets involved and makes them change the plans. He sees things in the plans that look like part of a Christian church so he decides this isn’t really a dining room, it’s a prayer house. Well, the Zaitsevs had already examined Kyiv laws on building new Jewish prayer houses and the site fit the requirements, but they decided to use it only as a dining hall for the doctors. But supposedly the blood of the murder victim would be used to consecrate this ground.

Judaism does not require consecrated ground for synagogues. There is no consecration ritual for any real estate that Jews use. They put up mezuzot, and that’s it. The proper place to initiate Shabbat, or hold the Passover seders, or light the Chanukiyah, is at home, not in a synagogue. Still less do you need a consecration ritual for a place where a woman is going to give birth.

Next, there is no “sacred ninth hour”. Sacrifices were offered morning and evening in the Temple, according to the ritual specified in Exodus.

The rest of the chapter is Christian stuff and I promised I would leave that alone. Same for chapters 11, 12 and 14, but in chapter 13 he tries to drag in Rabbi Hillel. Rabbi Hillel never got involved in “the Christ” being born. That is a Christian phrase; it is meaningless in Judaism. Herod would never ask such a question; Hillel would never take it up seriously.

The phrase was unknown to Jews for at least a century after Herod’s death; the King of the Jews after him was his grandson Agrippa, about whom there are stories in Mishnah, Tacitus and Suetonius as well as Josephus. In between, Augustus and his governors ruled Judea, and a bad lot they were, too, raping the lush province to enrich themselves. At last, patience worn out, the Jews rebelled and killed off three Roman legions before the Second Temple was destroyed.

In the next 30 years Josephus became client of the Flavians and wrote his War of the Jews. One of the surviving copies has a forged insertion about “the Christ” which is also copied into his Antiquities. The forgery is in very bad Greek; I checked out one thing I didn’t understand with a professor of Greek at Cambridge and he said it was nonsense. Between 400 and 1453 CE, knowledge of Greek declined in Europe and was rediscovered when Christian scholars fled Constantinople ahead of the Muslim conquerors. That’s the setting for the bad forgery in Josephus.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 7

So Lew Wallace has gotten everything wrong about Jews so far and has even thrown in some racial slurs. What sin is left for him to commit? From this point I’ll keep focusing on his ignorance of Jewish culture.

And in chapter 9 he shows his ignorance of kashrut. Mishnah Chullin 8:2 tells how a hostess at an inn or fundak behaves or how to deal with customers. Joseph and Mary are not going to stop where they can’t get kosher food, and somebody who knows what they’re doing has to run the kitchen instead of leaving it up to ignorant slaves.

Of course, the most frum Jews would bring food with them, probably non-perishables like bread and dried fruit. But if two different people are eating at one table, and one ordered chicken and the other cheese, can you serve each of them separately?

There’s no question in the Mishnah that the one who ordered the chicken won’t eat the cheese, and vice versa, which is treif; you can’t eat both meat and milk at one meal. You have to eat one and then let hours go by before you eat the other. The issue is, all right, you can’t put them on the same plate because the guests won’t share plates, but can you put each on a separate plate on the same table. Rabbi Shammai (the strict one) said it’s OK; Rabbi Hillel (the lenient one) said no.

But there’s a more subtle issue. Jews are prohibited from eating untithed plant food. To avoid transgression, Mishnah Demai 3:5 says if you give your hoteliere food to cook for you, you have to take tithes before you give it and again when you get it back, because she might mix it up with her own produce which, if she was ignorant, might not be tithed.

It even affects family relationships. Demai 3:6 asks whether a mother-in-law can be trusted if her daughter’s husband gives her tithed produce. The answer is yes, even if the daughter’s family is not as frum as the husband’s.

This is another barrier between Jews and Samaritans. Samaritans cannot tithe properly. When the kingdoms split, the Levites who were still in the north went south to Judea. The kohanim cannot get their tithes except for what is taken from the tithe belonging to the Levites. The inability of the Samaritans to tithe properly means Jews should not eat their produce.

On the other hand, Demai 3:4 says if you give tithed grain to a Samaritan miller to grind for you, you don’t have to worry that he’ll give untithed grain back.

And then there’s something even more subtle. Leviticus 11:38 says if you intentionally put water on produce of any kind that is intended for eating, and later find an insect carcass on it, you have to dispose of it. It’s not tahor. It can’t be modified for another use so that you don’t have to worry about its status. The preceding verse says if you have seed that you already intended to sow, and this happens, don’t worry about it, go ahead and sow it. But you can’t prepare food and repurpose it for sowing in the case of verse 38, a situation called v’ki yutan.

The verb form refers to the purposeful putting of fluid on the produce, such as grain. The problem is that wetted grain is easier to mill. Do you have to mistrust a Samaritan miller that he will put water on the grain? You only mill grain so that you can eat it; you can’t sow it after that.

There’s nothing in Talmud about this. The Mishnah is Machshirin 1:1, from a division of Mishnah called Taharot, and there is no gemara on it; what you get in Mishnah is all there is. Talmud only has commentary on one tractate out of Taharot, which is Niddah.

And don’t forget, Mishnah is a Jewish product, not a Samaritan one. Samaritan observance of v’ki yutan went according to their own Mishnah. But Machshirin never questions whether Samaritans are untrustworthy. Perhaps it was standard practice not to put water on grain for milling, all the more so at Passover when water must not touch grain or flour until 18 minutes or less before baking, or the matso will be unuseable.

So Joseph and Mary had to have food with them, or put up with relatives or at an inn run by a trustworthy hoteliere. They would not stop at some random place. Wallace has another chapter with a similar situation and I’ll talk about it when we get there.

21st Century Biblical Hebrew -- pausal forms

I posted this text on another thread and now I have an update.

And now that problem about trop. There’s an old concept called “pausal forms”.

Trop generally consist of disjunctive and conjunctive forms. The disjunctive ones divide verses. Etnach is one of them; so is sof pasuk, the trop at the end of a verse.

The conjunctive trop, conversely, mark sets of words that are included together as a subunit of a verse. Conjunctive trop, for example, are used with the words or phrases emphasized by et when it takes the vowel tseire.

The pausal forms concept says that disjunctive trop are associated with anomalous word forms. That is, the anomalous word forms in Torah appear where there are disjunctive trop.

Modern computerized tabulation shows this isn’t so. The so-called anomalous forms appear sometimes with conjunctive trop. It’s also true that not all occurrences of disjunctive trop are assigned to anomalous forms.

Now that you know more about Biblical Hebrew, you should be asking what words are called anomalous in Torah?

For example, Gesenius once categorized the word maen in Exodus 7:27 as a piel present tense that for some reason had been written without the usual prefix of mem. Surely that ought to qualify as an anomaly. But it’s an aspectless verb, used to avoid the nuances of the various aspects.

Likewise, since Gesenius said that the Jews didn’t know why they put nun sofit on the ends of some verbs, those ought to be anomalies. You know that they are uncertainty epistemics.

I’ve been going through Torah word by word for years now, digging into new concepts. I’ve kept track of words that really seemed to be anomalous. Out of about 80,000 words in Torah, I’ve come up with maybe 200 that are anomalous – not just “hapax legomena”, like mesheq used of Avraham’s servant, but grammatically different and impossible to analyze into any of the binyanim or other forms we use now, and with no clear pattern of use.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Torah has some words that are scribal errors, that the Masoretic scholars didn’t pick up on and include in their notes, but I doubt it.

Given that the ancestors of the Jews started developing Hebrew by 2000 BCE, it’s more than likely that they had ways of saying things that were perfectly meaningful to them, not at all anomalous in the context of a millennium and a half of vernacular – but which turned up only once in the written record. It’s analogous to Axel Olrik’s recognition that in the history of any ethnic group, their narrators might have told any number of stories over their fires in caves and tents and huts – but a relatively small number survived the centuries to be put into writing.  

With the apparent anomalies in Biblical Hebrew, we might be looking at something as rare in the spoken language as pual is in Torah, but with just as distinctive a function – and we can’t tell what that function is because we only have one example.

Now I have a new bottom line. In Arabic there are pausal forms (the technical term is waqf), and they modify normal grammar at a pause like a break in thought (where English would have a comma for example) or the end of a sentence. Pausal forms are changes to nouns that are declined. 

That fact should have been a warning sign to anybody who was trying to apply Arabic grammar to Biblical Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew does not decline nouns. It can change them into adjectives with the suffix -i, but however much that might remind scholars of the Arabic jarr case with its kasrah, it is not the same. 

For one thing, there are no suffixes for other uses of nouns, no final fatha such as Arabic uses for the nasb form. 

For another thing, Hebrew does not have nunation such as Arabic uses for indefinite nouns; there is nothing to delete to produce a pausal form. What might have looked like nunation in Hebrew to past grammarians, was in verbs and it is a marker of the uncertainty epistemic. Past grammarians didn't know from epistemics, but it takes a terrible state of confusion to think that a situation applying to Arabic nouns also applies to Biblical Hebrew verbs. But we saw terrible states of confusion on the Greek thread, now didn't we?

And considering how confused scholars were about Classical Greek, I have to say that waqf is not discussed in a two-volume text on Quranic Arabic that I found online. All my Westernized texts discuss it: Wright, Price, the FLAMRIC course. If you were taught Arabic in an Arabic-speaking nation by somebody who grew up using the language, ask them what the difference is: is waqf a post-Quranic development?

Anyway, if you're taking a class in Biblical Hebrew and your professor starts babbling about pausal forms, pull up this post on your phone and share it with them with a note "don't test us on something that doesn't exist." Which sadly enough has been happening in Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek for centuries now. 

Ben Hur, the novel -- pt. 6

So Lew Wallace. We’re up to Chapter 8 of Ben Hur and he gets into something he should have left alone.

Joseph and Mary are in Jerusalem talking to somebody who knows that Joseph is descended from David. So Joseph’s children of his body could be candidates for Moshiach. But Jesus was not the son of his body. Every Christian will tell you that. It means that Joseph’s ancestry is irrelevant. But Christian scripture wants to claim that Jesus was descended from David. Seriously, how many people do you know who have read Ben Hur and of them, how many know that Moshiach must be a genetic descendant of David?

But it’s worse. Almost none of the people who read Ben Hur know that Talmud discusses two Moshichim. One is descended from Joseph ben Yaaqov, the ancestor of Joshua who was Mosheh’s aide-de-camp and led the Israelites when they began to occupy the Holy Land. This Moshiach will come first and “will die”. The other, descended from David, “will not die”.

This could be a metaphor. It could be a tacit recognition that the Samaritans do not have a viable culture. Persecution of Samaritans under Hadrian impacted them differently from Jews; you have to be born a Samaritan but you can be a convert to Judaism.

This is like the situation in Greece, which the Talmudic rabbis didn’t know or care about. You had to be born a Spartan, one of the Equals. You had to belong to a mess club, and if you were expelled you were no longer an Equal. The birth rate was low and weak children were killed at birth; some died during the brutal training regime. When 300 Equals died at Thermopylae, that was a disaster but it was not felt for a hundred years. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athinaians captured 142 Equals, that pretty much ended the Spartans as a force.

But Athins gave citizenship to its colonies and to some slaves, so it could always recruit its population. In Athins, military service was compulsory across the ten tribes, and they had no trouble recruiting as long as the population stayed steady or increased. And it did increase, up to the plague in the Peloponnesian war, and then recovered afterwards.

Whatever Talmud means by “moshiach ben Yosef”, it is also a nod to the northern kingdom which did go down to disaster under the Assyrians, and a recognition that in Talmudic times the Samaritans underwent great persecutions after about 200 CE, after the death of their great sage Bar Rabbah. The Jews went out into the Diaspora, collecting converts along the way, until the disastrous decrees of Theodosius II, but Christians and later Muslims decimated the Samaritans.

So. The other mistake in this chapter is that Mary’s descent is also irrelevant. As with priests, descent in the male line is required for moshiach.

And then the bigoted “Jews all look alike”.

People banned Huckleberry Finn because it used a word that Sam Clemens grew up hearing all the time. Wallace grew up hearing about “the hook-nosed Jew”; have any of you looked at a photo of the painting of the Duke of Wellington lately? He was known to his troops as “Old Beaky”, among other things. Or “the long-nosed Jew”, like the recent caricature of Zelenskyy about which one person on Twitter said “I didn’t think he had a nose like that” and I tweeted a reply pointing out that this was a classic anti-Semitic slur.

And it’s a European Christian slur, as you ought to realize if you know what the term “Roman nosed” means, whether you’re talking about horses or people. So if you’re going to ban an American book that happens to record an American reality, what are you going to do about an American book that is woefully ill-informed and repeats European racial slurs?

On my Gibbon thread I pointed out that he pretends to write history when he really writes tabloid trash, and we have good reason for kicking him to the curb because 200 years of research makes him irrelevant. Wallace is writing fiction and he knows it. Are you going to treat him equally with Mark Twain or not? That’s what you have to decide.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 5

So Lew Wallace. We’re up to Chapter 7 of Ben Hur and Lew isn’t doing very well. He’s about to do even worse.

He pretends that Nazirites were part of a despised sect, that they don’t obey Jewish law. In fact, not cutting their hair IS Jewish law. Nazirites were not despised. They were odd, but they weren’t despised. Queen Helena of Adiabene (in modern Kurdish territory) took on a nazirite vow; are you telling me a queen is despised? And Wallace tells only half the tale, although all the laws of the nazirite are in one place in Torah. So not only is he not reading Jewish law, he’s not even reading his Bible to write this story.

Second, Samaritans were avoided because they did not obey the laws of tahor/tameh. The statement of these laws in Torah is very general. When it came to court cases, the courts set standards for when you had to worry about this subject. The Jews had their set of laws, which are documented and available for free online. The Samaritans obey their laws which are documented in Arabic and not available free online. I wouldn’t know how to refer you if you wanted to buy a copy, like I could for the Arabic version of the Samaritan Pentateuch.

What Wallace could not know, which DNA has revealed, is that the Samaritans did not intermarry with Assyrians. The priest that came back from exile to train the Kuteans was supposed to put an end to a plague of lions. But he never let Assyrians marry Samaritans. The same is still true: Samaritans, unlike Jews, do not accept male converts. To try and increase their numbers (there are less than 1000 left), they have agreed to accept women who agree to follow Samaritan law. I’m not following the news but I would guess that there hasn’t been a rush of women competing for Samaritan men.

Also, at the time this story is set, there was no Samaritan temple. The Hasmoneans destroyed it about 150 BCE. That was after the Seleucid war when the events occurred which are commemorated in Chanukah. The Hasmoneans were fighting to keep the Syrians from invading Egypt; the Samaritans were helping the Syrians.

And then Wallace does something really dumb. He has just been saying how cold it was on this winter day, but he has a Greek running around without a cloak.

Wallace has a guy in the market reject figs. At this time of the year, the figs would have been dried; these were a staple of the diet in Imperial Rome because they kept well when dried. Here in the US we hardly know figs under any other form. The same for dates.

Then we get into the foolishness about Jewish practice. Wallace has a man walking through the market, a place where taharut is a problem, wearing his tefillin. You put on your tefillin in the synagogue before morning prayers, and take them off afterward, keeping them in a little bag to protect them.

Both Ts’dukim and P’rushim wore tefillin. There are claims that the Ts’dukim took the commandment figuratively, not literally, but given that they were stricter in their interpretations, that makes no sense. Tefillin have been found at Qumran, a sanctuary set up by Ts’dukim in Hasmonean times as a refuge when the Hasmoneans took on the high priesthood as well as the monarchy. The Ts’dukim got their name by holding that the high priest had to be descended from David’s priest, Tsadok. The Hasmoneans were of Aaron’s lineage, but not through Tsadok. They were acceptable to the Ts’dukim as priests, but not high priests.

Now, I keep having to say this. We can’t fault writers for not knowing things that weren’t known in their times. Wallace had no clue to the existence of Qumran; it was discovered almost 100 years later. What he’s doing is taking the word of Christian scripture that demonizes the P’rushim. In fact, the P’rushim made many rulings in court trials that made things easier on people. The standards for taharut are one. If you think something is no longer tahor, you go to the experts to see what they think, otherwise you are paskening for yourself and that’s “unconstitutional”.

The experts hold a court, which takes three judges. They could rule that if you use the item in some other way than its normal use, you’re good. They could rule that it’s too damaged to be used normally, and as long as you don’t repair it, you don’t have to worry about its status. They could rule that it’s smaller than an established minimum size, and you have nothing to worry about. Or when they hear the whole story, they might realize that there were intervening contacts between the cause of tumah and the item you’re consulting them about. There’s a maximum number of sequential contacts after which the last item is not considered tameh.

The Ts’dukim and P’rushim did disagree over taharut. A document at Qumran documents disagreements that the Ts’dukim had, and one of them is quoted in Mishnah Yadaim. And the Ts’duki ruling is stricter.

Again, Wallace didn’t do his homework. Neither do other Gentiles who try to write about Jews. They don’t do their homework. And they have to do today’s homework, not repeat stuff that was proved wrong 20 or 200 or 2000 years ago.

Knitting -- Dovrekofta

So a long time ago I posted about this pattern on Arne and Carlos' site and then I went looking for it on the web. I used Google Lens to find the actual pattern in an archive online. 

I had to finish some other projects first but I finally got around to it and I have several tips.

I worked it in Palette which is a fingering yarn.  Use a neutral color and a contrasting color. I used cream and rouge.

I changed it into a jumper instead of a sweater. The stitch count for the square-and-hexagon around the bottom is 28. Since this is like Fair Isle, you need more stitches than you normally would, because the fabric has less give than a one-color pattern. So cast on 308 not 280, which gives 11 repeats. For the sleeves, cast on 78, then increase to 84 when you're done with the cuff.

Work a 20 round K1/P1 rib; work 20 rounds above the cast on in the cuff as well.

Don't work steeking; work in the flat above the underarms for 60 rows. Don't do a mid-back elevation.. Work a K1/P1 neck for 14 rounds.

To stay in pattern when you make increases for the sleeves, you may want to add 8 stitches at a time. 

Increase 3 times in 160 rounds to get to 120 stitches at the top of the sleeve as follows:

In a "cream" round, after the marker, K1, KF/B, KF/B and work around. work KF/B, KF/B K1 before the marker.

Now it depends on what your last set of box/checkerboards was. You must have a checkerboard over a box and vice versa. So if there was a box in the last set it has to have a checkerboard above it, and you have to make a box.

Do it this way: K1 in "cream" after the marker; KF/B in "rouge", KF in "rouge", KB in "cream". The KB should be above the K1 in "cream" before the box. Now knit your checkerboard above your box.

If you have to have a checkerboard after the marker, K1 in "cream" after the marker, KF in "rouge", KB in "cream", repeat this, then K1 in "cream" and work the box above the checkerboard.

And do this in reverse at the other end of the round before the marker, except that you don't need the last "cream" because you are going to knit a "cream" at the start of the round.

It isn't pretty but it's on the underside of the sleeve. If you want to avoid this, you have to either increase like on Fair Isle with patches of "rouge" as you slowly increase, or you have to cast on extra stitches in the "rouge" round after the square and hexagon band. It's up to you.

You can do the cuffs with the rolled cuff or the cast on and straight to the K1/P1 rib. 

This is a pattern where you have to sew the sleeves to the body, as shown in the pamphlet.

IMPORTANT: If you think you see that the tops of the sleeves look darker than the body, you're right. I hadn't blocked this when I took the photo. That may help. But the BIG TIP is, make sure you always keep your color and your neutral in the same hand the whole time you work. If you start with your neutral in your right hand, always have the color in your left hand.

I'm working on matching socks because I wanted to try the eye of partridge stitch and I'll post when I'm done because I can give you tips on how to do the closed toe for a toe-up sock in the round.

Next month I'll have another old-fashioned pattern for you -- not an ancient traditional pattern but one that people used to knit tops for their kids in about 60 years ago.

Ben Hur the novel, pt. 4

So Lew Wallace, chapter 6 of a work that is Victorian Protestant but pretends to write about Jews. Now he gives us a mythical date calculation. It has to accommodate Christian pretense that Jesus was born December 25, the holy day of Sol Invictus, Constantine’s personal god, who was still worshipped after Constantine made his deathbed conversion. But nobody knows what year to use and so it’s impossible to calculate the Jewish calendar date.

Because the Jewish calendar is lunar with intercalation. The fixed point is that the night after the Passover Seder, the first ripe wheat had to be harvested. One month before that is Purim, which moves so that it doesn’t conflict with Shabbat. But if calculations show that Purim will come too early, the calendar intercalates. It sticks in another full month; that is when Purim happens.

Rome was on the Julian calendar at the time. Rome never intercalated. When Caesar took over, he found that the consuls had screwed with the lunar calendar for political reasons. He changed to a solar calendar with a leap day. The priests screwed that up, and Augustus had to re-adjust. But even that was inaccurate and 15 centuries later the Gregorian calendar had to be invented.

So we can’t figure this out via the Roman calendar and Wallace bringing it up is useless.

Second, Wallace screws up the timing of the day. The Jewish calendar begins a new day at sunset, not at dawn. The Joppa gates would be open to let the farmers bring in produce and animals for sale, not because it was a new day.

And the farmers had to go home at evening because fuel was expensive. The usual lamp that you would have in a house would blow out in the wind of your passage if you tried to use it to light your road. Also, the town council would go to synagogue for evening prayers, and then home for supper. If you had a business dispute, you wouldn’t be able to call a court to settle it. So as dusk fell, the farmers would pack up the leftovers and take them home to their wives. The gates would close, a new day would begin at sunset, and the city would be relatively quiet for the night.