Ben Hur, the novel, part 21

We are up to Book VIII and the date is 8 or 9 Nisan. Wallace makes one of many mistakes about Passover. Simonides, who is Jewish, says tomorrow is Passover. It starts at night, which is the 14^th Nisan on the Jewish calendar.

The only time that the 10^th Nisan was important for Passover was the very first one. That time, the Israelites were told to pick out a yearling sheep (or goat) and keep it for use four days later. Mishnah Pesachim 9:5 gives a list of differences between the first Passover and all others. There is no attribution of this Mishnah so it was one generally established by 50 CE and that means it could have been in place for as much as 15 centuries.

Skipping chapter 2, you may wonder why Amrah didn’t bring matso to Judah’s family. Passover has to be celebrated in a state of taharut and leprosy is a condition of tumah.

Skipping chapter 3-7 and now we get to Wallace’s terrible horrible no-good very bad depiction of Passover. In the very first paragraph, people at various fires invite Judah to join them. That ain’t how it works.

The Passover yearling sheep or goat has to be eaten between sundown and midnight. Even if everything from the 7^th lumbar vertebrum is cut off because of gid ha-nasheh, that’s still something like 35 pounds of meat and, in fact, except for not breaking the bones (so they don’t eat the marrow), everything edible has to be consumed – lungs, brains, things we don’t eat nowadays. To make sure of eating about 35 pounds of stuff, you figure how much a healthy adult would eat and invite enough people to finish it by midnight. Every person in your group has to eat at least an olive’s bulk, so you could host 100 people using that one sheep. You don’t invite more at the last minute or you risk not meeting the olive’s bulk requirement.

Second, it’s not just eating. By this time, a recital had developed that made sure to reference all the parts of the Passover story. Judah should not have been roaming the city; he should have been with his legion going through the recital. He was not observing Passover correctly, would not be able to say nirtsah at midnight, and would owe a sacrifice two days later (individuals do not bring their olah on days like Shabbat or Passover after transgressing a positive commandment). And the same is true for every Jew in the procession Judah “saw”.

Finally, Passover has to be observed inside a house. Things have to be carried around during the ceremony and meal and Passover requires observance of the rules of Shabbat, which includes carrying only inside a house or other specified limits. The house also separates the people invited for one sheep from another group and helps insure that the above two rules are observed.

Remember, Jewish observance was not given up by Christians until the time of Paul. Jesus himself observed this Passover according to all its laws. There was no excuse for Judah to do otherwise.

Knitting -- leftovers, a new stitch, and housewares

This isn't so much a new stitch as making a project with the double knit stitch I found in that 1892 Butterick book.

I had leftovers of Palette yarn from old projects. Palette is a nice fingering yarn and I thought I could get at least a couvre pied out of what I had. 

So I cast on 400 stitches to a size 3 needle with a 40 inch cable. The double knit is K1/Yarn to front/Slip 1 purlwise/Yarn to back and on the next row, knit all the slips (which  look like knits on the wrongside) and slip all the knits (which look like purls on the wrongside).

You do not need to do seed stitch or ribbing to keep the edges from curling.

A full skein of Palette does 27 of these double rows of 400 stitches each. 27 rows gives you just about 3 inches, so if you want a six foot long blanket, you need 24 balls of Palette or 5,544 yards of leftovers. With my leftovers, the blanket turned out to be 30 inches wide (400 stitches) and 36 inches long. All the white stripes are 9 rows. Everything else is what I could get out of what I had.

Double knit takes a long time to work. You actually have to work both sides of a row to get the pattern to come out right. But it's harder to make a mistake on than Eye of Partridge. The mistake I made most often was to pick up both the "purl" and "knit" stitch to wrap and sometimes it took me 20 stitches to realize what I did, depending on what I was watching on Youtube at the time.

Let me know if you can come up with any patterns other than stripes. I tried to do color work with a really simple two-stitch pattern and it was a disaster.

With its double layer, this stitch gives a VERY warm result, even warmer than the two-color work of Fair Isle because every stitch is doubled, unlike the base color parts of Fair Isle which don't have a second layer of yarn behind them. But if you need warmth, it's fabulous.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 20

So, Book VII.

Chapter 1 has a falsehood about the tribes of Israelites. Whatever tribes composed the Samaritans, it was not known at that time who they were, except for the kohanim. In the 21^st century, DNA testing has confirmed that Samaritan kohanim are descended in the male line from the same male forebear as Jewish kohanim. There are three other genetic entities among the Samaritans, two of which are more closely related to each other than to the third. We have no surviving members of any of the ten northern tribes to compare their DNA to, so as to see which ones the three are – except that while they are Israelites, they are not Judeans.

In fact, in Deuteronomy 34:1-3, where Mosheh looks out from Mt. Pisgah over the land and sees the territories of the tribes, each tribe is named. In Jewish Torah at any rate. In Samaritan Pentateuch, no tribes are named. All of that was swept away in the Assyrian conquest. The missing tribal names are an indicator that Samaritan Pentateuch transmitted orally for a long time, during which tribal distinctions were forgotten and evaporated out of the recital. This evaporation over time of geographical data is part of Olrik’s principles.

But of course if Wallace wasn’t bothering to read his own Bible, he wouldn’t have studied Samaritan Pentateuch.

Now, it’s Nisan and Wallace has forgotten part of his Christian scripture. He has said nothing about the moneychangers in the Temple. In fact, all the people with Judah would have known about this. Purim is the time of year when Jews pay their poll tax, which goes to fix roads so that pilgrims can get to Jerusalem for Passover. Villages can collect the tax and send it to Jerusalem with a delegate so as not to interrupt everybody’s springtime work.

The tax has to be paid as a half shekel. You cannot pay in Greek or Roman coin. Therefore everybody has to change what coins they have for shekels. That’s why there were tables set up in the Temple where the coins were being changed. Whipping these people out of the Temple disrupted people obeying a mitsvah, which contributed to upkeep of the temple and observance of another mitsvah, Passover.

Whichever Christian scripture discusses that tale was not written by anybody who knows about Judaism, let alone cares about Jewish observance.

Skipping chapters 2-4, I will note that we are up to about 8 Nisan, and Passover starts the 14^th.

DIY -- hankies redux

Some years ago I wrote about what happened when I bought cotton hankies instead of paper. 

Well, it's 8 years later and that first batch of hankies is wearing out. In the meantime, I have bought three, count 'em, three boxes of paper hankies because they are good for some things you don't want to do with your cloth ones. You can get 10 boxes at Costco for $25, x 9 years, is over $200. Because all the tissue makers hiked their prices toward the end of the pandemic.

I am replacing the original hankies at a price of $100. They will last me 9 more years. I am making out like the proverbial bandit.

Plus I'm not killing trees, I'm not adding to the landfills, and we all do laundry anyway.

But the real bonus was this. About one year ago, I had some terrible bronchitis or the mother of all asthma breakouts, I don't know which. I would have used ten times as much paper tissues as I used to do before I bought the cloth ones. I would have filled my trash about half with paper hankies and half with everything else I trash in the course of a week. I would have had so much lint in the air, it would have meant even more paper hankies to wipe my nose. I would have been one sad sad puppy.

Instead, I had to wash all my hankies about once a week, and the heavy use probably wore them out sooner, but I still made out like a bandit by not having to spend those $200 in one year instead of nine.

And whatever it was is tailing off like any other cold.

So if $100 sounds like too much of an investment for you, do the math again. We can all use an extra $100 in our pockets.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 19

We’re up to Book VII and things are going quickly because I’m skimming to find something that I need to comment on in this novel.

It is Tishri the year that Pilate robbed the temple treasury to pay for civic improvements. Judah has led a group of Galileans in attacking Romans. If you were going to write a more vraisemblable work about these times, this is what you should prepare Judah for from the start of the book: joining or starting the Sicarii, a group of Jewish rebels against Rome.

In fact, if Judah had been a real person, here’s how the story would go. At some point, he would become known as Judah the Sicarius. He probably knew a number of people named Joshua and he would have tried to recruit one or more for this band. Word would get out, the Romans might use one of them as a lure to capture Judah. It would fail and the Romans would crucify Joshua as an example to the Sicarii. Judah’s son Menachem would go on to be a leader of the Masada uprising.

Everybody who knew Judah’s Joshua would deny that he was a rebel. Then you would get the “he was a good boy” narrative we hear from mothers of so many suspects. There were a lot of people running around at this time preaching or prophesying the overthrow of Rome. Some of them had the reputation of miracle-workers.

Oral traditions studies show that characters in two narratives may be confused with each other over time, leading to fusion of stories about them. The preachers or miracle workers didn’t have to all be named Joshua, for their activities to be loaded onto the story of the good Joshua who was crucified for no reason, except that he knew Judah the Sicarius.

It doesn’t take long for these shifts to happen. It took two or three months for a GOP narrative about a (non-existent) whistleblower “proving” that Trump did nothing worth FBI investigation, to become a MAGA narrative about a hero hiding evidence that the FBI would try to exploit against Trump. Both narratives tar the FBI, which was tracking down the January 6 insurrectionists. In 1911, a rumor that a murder victim’s corpse was rolled up in a carpet in a Kyiv city apartment, took two years to morph into the corpse being stored in the apartment for three days (the number three shows up in dozens of oral narratives the world over).

So a hundred years after Judah the Sicarius, not only can Joshua the non-rebel turn into a miracle-worker persecuted by the Romans, but people with a good Greek education are promoting him to other people like themselves. Writing the first Christian scriptures in Greek would be a no-brainer. Latin works appeared as it became less dangerous to communicate with Romans.

I’m not saying this is how it happened. I’m not saying that Christian writings have everything wrong. I’m saying that they admit to the beginning of their faith in a low-income and probably low-literacy environment, and when you share information by word of mouth, it follows AxelOlrik’s principles of development. And what I have outlined above is exactly what Olrik says happens in word-of-mouth communications.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 18

We’re up to Book V chapter 9 of Ben Hur. Chapter 13 is the actual race.

Book VI chapter 3 has another mistake. Nobody can declare themselves to be lepers. Leviticus 13 and 14 are clear on this: a priest has to examine the person or the building and make the declaration. In the case of a building, Leviticus specifically says that the owner says literally “I think there might be something like leprosy in my house” and then clears his possessions and family out of the house before the priest comes to inspect.

For the owner to say “my house is leprous” is a case of paskening for yourself, which is prohibited in Jewish law. Judah’s mother should have gone to a priest to see if she and her daughter were leprous. Leviticus 13 lists some conditions that might seem like leprosy but are not. But Wallace did not read his Bible so he didn’t know his mistake.

Chapter 5 has Amrah going to market after nightfall. I already explained that there would be nothing in the market after nightfall, and no lighting to help her get there unless the moon was full. She would have needed a torch to light her way. And she still would have been at risk of robbers or rapists.

What’s more, meat was expensive in those days. Shochets did not slaughter until they had cash on the barrel head for every portion of an animal, including selling the unkosher parts to Gentiles. They could be forced to slaughter for Shabbat, but otherwise not. There were no coolers to put meat in and keep it from spoiling after slaughter; Amrah could only get meat before noon. But Wallace the Victorian male has to throw meat in there and pretend the butcher would still be open at night and have product to sell.

Chapter 6 opens with Judah transgressing. He should be in New Year’s services right now. On the 10^th he should be fasting at Yom Kippur services. He should even be fasting during the daylight hours on the 3rd, Tsom Gedaliah. But he’s not.

Wallace has no clue to Roman army operations. They didn’t just have leaders, they had training. Our word exercise comes from the Latin word for army, exercitus, because aside from making and maintaining camps, Roman armies practiced use of arms and maneuvers constantly. Each man knew his position and his role in every battle and performed almost without thinking about it.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 17

So Book V of Ben Hur.

Chapter 7 has a list of 3 people as Judah’s servants. Wallace means slaves but he’s wrong. Esther could only have been bound to him if Ithamar had written up for her to be Judah’s wife, and that bond ended when she reached the age of 12 years and 1 day.

In chapter 8, the texts that Simonides reads to Judah are all the favorite choices of Christians – and his list could only have been made after Christianity adopted the Jewish Bible ostensibly as its own. It’s not clear why the Bible was adopted except for one thing. In the Roman Empire the recognized faiths were the Roman cult, the Greek cult, the Jewish and the Egyptian. The druids of Gallia were persecuted; those outside this magic circle were ignored. (Mithraism, a Mesopotamian faith, became popular with merchants and soldiers later.) To become respectable, Christianity had to associate to itself one of the recognized faiths.

And all of them were pagan except Judaism. Two of the oldest church fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr, show that Greek had been rejected. Justin (d. 165 CE) connected Christianity to Neo-Platonism as the pure root which the Greek philosophers corrupted. Clement (d. 215 CE) tried to attract Greek pagans to Christianity as a better moral guide, purified from the examples in Greek mythology. They did not cite to the Septuagint, nor would they have reason to because they were not talking to people familiar with the Septuagint. The Septuagint wouldn’t convince Greek pagans of anything. Neither one of them spoke of Judaism because neither one knew anything about it.

But in the 200s CE, Origen the Greek geek compiled all the Greek translations of the Jewish Bible that he could get, into the Hexapla, including the Septuagint and Aquila’s translation from about 100 CE. Supposedly Origen’s father taught him the Bible, as well as Greek literature, but this is not certain and the father has been labeled a pagan by some writers.

At any rate, Christians developed the habit or policy of separating themselves from pagans and also from criticism, by claiming Judaism as a basis. After that, church fathers went to work proving the relationship by interpreting Jewish scripture as references to Christianity, much as Clement related pagan myth to Christianity.

This is a strawman argument, a fallacy claiming that the words don’t mean what they say. It’s also cherry-picking, using bits that are convenient and ignoring the inconvenient truths. It could happen once Christianity decided it wasn’t going to follow Jewish law, even if its earliest members were Jews. This happened by the time of Mark’s book of Christian scripture. He was a second generation Christian and he already knows nothing about Judaism. Satan has become a crucial element in the Jesus story; so has the working of miracles as events contrary to nature.

In Judaism satan is a servant of Gd, not an equal and opposing power. The things in the Tannakh that seem to be miracles, are not important for being exceptions to the laws of nature; they were part of creation, according to Pirkey Avot. They were important for their influence on Jewish culture, not on individuals.

It is a sad truth that ancient literature may not be as ancient as people want to believe. I can well believe that The Embassy to Gaius was a true production of Philo of Alexandria. I can’t say the same for the twelve books ostensibly about Judaism, but containing outright errors that make them useful only as an exercise in reading Greek. The Fulvia and Paulina stories in Josephus’ Antiquities are known to be forgeries because of their language; so is a supposed reference to Jesus, which was copied from Jewish Wars where it is known to be a forgery.

The “eschatological” material in Mark’s work may seem to some like a reflection of a battle in his own lifetime that lead to destruction of the Second Temple, but it could also reflect the Hadrianic persecution, which included Christians as well as Jews. That provides about a century for the contents of Mark to develop from the original events before his birth. The Antonine persecution came later but included only Christians.

There was a Mark in Rome whose name was attached to the Christian book, but that’s no proof that he wrote it, only that Christians of a given time knew about him and thought the world of work attributed to him.