Fact-Checking the Torah -- Elements of Murder

What do the witnesses have to say to show that a murder is not manslaughter?  They have to prove the same elements as American law: means; motive; and intent/opportunity.  We’ll go back to Torah for this because it’s all laid out clearly in Numbers and Deuteronomy: 

Means: Numbers 35:16-19 and 23;

Motive: Numbers 35:19-22, Deuteronomy 4:42 and 19:4, 5, 11;

Intent and opportunity: Exodus 21:13-14 and Exodus 22:1.

Means means whatever is sufficient to kill the person.  A stone two inches around might kill a baby but it takes a stone 5 inches around (I’m pulling these out of the air because it’s the proportion I want you to understand, not the measurements) to kill an adult.  If A throws a 2-inch  stone at B and B dies, that’s not murder if B is an adult.  The stone wasn’t enough to kill B; he must have had some physical problem that made the stone deadly to him, but A probably didn’t know that.

Intent and opportunity are that fight you already saw.  This is one reason why witnesses are responsible for stopping a fight before it ends up killing somebody; fights lead to motive that leads to murder.

Motive uses an interesting phrase that relates backward and forward in Torah and connects up to a verse we’ve seen before.  “If he did not hate him yesterday and the day before”, mitmol shilshom.  This phrase is in:

Exodus 21:29: “If it was an ox notorious (huad) for goring yesterday and the day before”;

Exodus 21:36: “Or it was notorious that it was a goring ox yesterday and the day before”;

Deuteronomy 4:42: “who murdered his neighbor without intent and he didn’t hate him yesterday and the day before”;

Deuteronomy 19:4:  “this is the law of the murderer who shall flee…whoever struck his neighbor without intent and he didn’t hate him yesterday and the day before.”

Now notice the other place that the ox and the man are linked up: Leviticus 19:21.  OK, it says “beast” but it’s a word that means “domestic animal,” behemah.  Just because you kill somebody’s ox doesn’t mean he gets to kill your ox.  Just because you strike a man dead doesn’t mean somebody gets to strike you dead.  NOT if there was no motive, which is “hating him yesterday and the day before.”

The words huad and nuad mean warned. If the ox or the man was involved in trouble more than once, the community has been warned that more trouble is possible.  If “more trouble” happens, due process having been followed and community policing having been accomplished, the utmost rigor of the law may be imposed by the court if it sees fit. Another place this word appears is in the story of the recon party sent into the Holy Land; Gd calls the people noadim, warned, because of all the times they complained.  So He condemns those who came out of Egypt to stay in the Sinai until they become bleached bones.

The term etmol shilshom is strictly interpreted to mean three days in a row.  If two men can’t see each other on the street without getting into it, there’s a murder coming and if they refuse to pay attention to two warnings, the one who kills the other deserves to be tried for murder.

For next time, read Deuteronomy 19 carefully because it includes a number of verses we’ve already looked at.  Also read Deuteronomy 4:41-45 which have important information.

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Bit at a time Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:9

Genesis 1:9

 

ט וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim yiqavu ha-maim mi-tachat ha-shamaim el-maqom echad v’teraeh ha-yabashah va-y’hi-khen.

Translation:    Gd said let the water gather under heaven to one place and let the dry land appear and it was so.

Letters in this lesson:

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יִקָּווּ	gather (3rd s.)
אֶל	to
מָקוֹם	place
תֵרָאֶה	appear (3rd f.s.)
יַּבָּשָׁה	dry land

 

You should be able to tell me why the qof of yiqavu has dagesh in it.  Go back to lesson 19 if you forget.

 

You should also be able to tell me the gender of maqom and yabashah.

 

All right, I guess it’s time to get down and dirty with verbs.  Let’s take the ones with heh as a last letter since it involves “be” and two verbs in this lesson.

 

Qof vav heh means collect or gather in some binyans and “hope” in others. 

Resh alef heh means mostly “see” although here it means “appear” and as you saw before it meant “manifest, show, display”. 

Heh yod heh is “be”.

 

You saw the past tense of “be” in the feminine singular.  Here is the past tense 3rd person.

 

Plural	Singular	Gender
הָיוּ	הָיָה	Masculine
הָיוּ	הָיְתָה	Feminine

 

The plural is the same in both masculine and feminine.

 

Now try to do the same for “collect” and “see”.

That’s pretty close but I threw you one curve.  “See” has alef in the middle, which is another letter that has its own way of being regular.  You should put a chataf  patach under it, which looks like this:

רָאֲתָה

 

Sorry about that.

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights. Reserved

Outdoors -- Do I know my birdcalls?

For a couple of years I've been hearing a call and saying, how could we have red-wing blackbirds around my block?
Red-wing blackbirds love perching on reeds at lakes.  The lake in my town is a good half hour walk away.
But I was hearing their "Booker TEE!" no more than five minutes away.
This morning I was looking out to make sure squirrels weren't stealing bird food and a black bird landed on the snow.
And turned to one side.
And I could see the two bars near the top of the wing, the red one and the yellow one, that mark the red-winged blackbird.
I was glad to see him because he reminded me of living on a farm in my teen years.  We had a big pond and we heard these birds all the time.

Also heard a woodpecker tapping this morning.  We have both downies and pileated around here, with all the trees.  My sister in Ohio complained she didn't hear them any more and I pointed out that with all the panic about trees disrupting power, communities are cutting back all the deadwood where woodpeckers find their bugs.
I also hear their "whinny" call sometimes, so even when they aren't actively hunting, I still know they're around.
© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights. Reserved

Outdoors -- I knew it

I knew the mourning doves were just messing with me.

You think doves are nice kind quiet creatures.  Well, I've know them to drive away smaller birds with an evil hiss when it's a question of food.

And no matter how much food you put down for them, all you have to do is open the door and they go off with that whistle of wings as if they thought you were going to eat THEM.

But now, it's the other way around.  The newly returned blackbirds can't find much to eat given our latest snowfall, so they're picking up some of the bird food. 

All I have to do is let my head be seen through the window of my back door and the blackbirds take off.

But the doves, who have been here all winter, play it cool and keep eating.

Like it's the last food they'll ever see.

When I specially made a trip to the store to get more.

OK I got the car out of the snow to make sure the battery was still charged and the air I put in the tires the other week was still there, and fill the gas tank.  But I did go to the trouble of stopping at the co-op for bird food.

OTOH the March sun is strong and the air temps are below freezing but the snow is melting fast.

Melt, snow, melt.

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- that yeast

I realize that I already gave you instructions on making that yeast into hard cider with apple juice.

What else can you do with only one package of yeast?  Well, unfortunately, you want more flour to do it.  You can start sourdough for bread with it. 

The recipe is in George Greenstein's Secrets of a Jewish Baker.  With sourdough bread at higher prices than regular bread, this is a really good book to have.  I paid about $10 for mine and it has saved me so much money.

But don't go into sourdough with your eyes closed.  To do it right, you need at least 24 hours to build the starter into sour.  That makes sourdough bread something you would only make on a weekend at home, but the build goes in steps and you have at least 8 hours per step.  I sometimes start the last build before I go to bed and let it go longer than 8 hours.

And if you keep your starter between batches, you should stir it down every few days. So use up your starter before you go on vacation.

Plus every couple of weeks you have to take out half of it and feed the rest with a new handful of fresh flour.  The up side of that is that you can use the starter you take out to make sourdough pancakes from a recipe in the book.

On the other hand Greenstein's book doesn't just have sourdough recipes, it also has sweet dough recipes and cake recipes and a croissant recipe.... His "wine loaf" is something like old-fashioned madeira cake, but you can throw in dried fruit like cherries and nuts like walnuts and have something that is not only rich but somewhat healthy.

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

OB -- Unhappy with the neighbors

"We retired, sold our house, moved to a new neighborhood and it was wonderful.  Then we found out our neighbors had a different lifestyle and didn't do things the way we do.  Now we feel uncomfortable.   Help!"

I'm going to take at least one glove off for this one.

Just because you paid money for a house in a particular place doesn't make you the local rule-maker.  Unless it's a brand-new development, the community already had its own ordinances and customs. 

What's worse, you moved in among a bunch of people who have already established their personal habits and you expected them to conform to what YOU think their habits ought to be.  You don't get to make that choice.  It's an invasion of personal liberty.

You won't know the ordinances of your new community unless you look them up online -- most localities have their ordinances online now.  But once you move into that community, you are bound by its ordinances. 

And you won't know the habits and characteristics of your new neighbors until you live among them a while.  You have no right to judge them until you know who they are -- and you have no right to judge them after you know who they are, because they are the same people you thought were so nice when you first moved in.

Another version of this is the person who moves in and starts landscaping and gets in trouble with the community because it violates city laws or Home Owner's Agreements or changes the nature of the neighborhood from what it was.  I know about somebody whose favorite landscaping was actually harmful to the property and another who was destroying a State Bird Refuge before the locality put a stop to it.  A third wanted to cut down 100 beautiful mature trees saying they were nut trees and his kids were allergic to nuts; he got stopped by the science that points out the kids would have to actually eat the nuts to have an allergic reaction.

If you live among people who all seem to think the way you do and that's the only way you can be comfortable, STAY WHERE YOU ARE, don't move just because you are retired and have the money for a new house.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fair Isle Knitting -- Sparkles

In her book of Fair Isle Knitting, Ann Feitelson says that one feature of Fair Isle is how it "sparkles."

What she means is that between the rows of "normal size" motifs, there will be rows of tiny motifs in different colors.
Fair Isle patterns may have a geometric motif, then a naturalistic motif, then a different geometric, then a different naturalistic.
After finishing each set of motifs, the pattern usually has a row in the background color.  In fact, there may be several rows before the naturalistic motif, to let the eye rest.
But Fair Isle doesn't like blank rows.  So the interim rows may have tiny motifs -- little squares and plus signs.
These tiny motifs should contrast with the rest of the pattern and also with the background color, but they shouldn't glare, they should sparkle.

So if your background color is white or off-white, and your pattern uses warm colors, your sparkles should be pale cool colors -- pale greens, blues, purples or grays.
If your background color is white or pale gray, and your pattern uses cool colors, your sparkles should be pink, pale yellow, and pale orange.
If your background color is black or dark brown, and your pattern uses cool colors, your sparkles should be in dark red because "dark orange" is almost brown and there's really no dark yellow.
If your background color is dark and your pattern is warm, your sparkles should be purple, forest green or dark blue but not navy.

Warm colors are red, yellow and orange.
Cool colors are blue, purple, and green.

Because the sparkles are tiny, and they are surrounded by background, you can probably get away with using something on the opposite side of the color wheel from your pattern colors.
Red and green are opposites.
Blue and orange are opposites.
Yellow and purple are opposites.

It's all a matter of taste.  Just remember, Fair Isle uses contrast well, but it never tries to startle.

Next week I'll show you the pattern I'm going to use in a pullover sleeveless vest made in Brown Sheep Cotton Fine.  This is a lovely yarn I've been using for years.  It's NOT a real Shetland 2 ply jumper weight, so the end result will be heavier than a real Fair Isle sweater.  But it is much cheaper than the real Jamieson & Smith Shetland wool and will give me a thorough workout on techniques.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved