Fact-Checking the Torah -- Genesis 2:4-3:24

For this week, your assignment was to read Genesis 2:4 to 3:24.

There is no archaeological find matching this episode, which I will refer to as the “Gan Eden” episode or narrative.

There are plenty of finds about creating humankind.  One is in Enuma Elish; humans are created by Marduk out of the blood of Kingu, whom Marduk vanquished.

In Atra-Hasis humans were made by sacrificing the god Geshtu-E and mixing his blood with clay, then bringing “the goddesses” into play.  The purpose of humans was to take on the terribly hard work of irrigation imposed on the minor gods.

The scientific material that relates to the Gan Eden episode includes satellite imagery showing that in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates confluence, are a dry riverbed and an intermittent river.  I don’t know what the names of the latter two are, or were.  The episode gives Gichon and Pishon as the names of the two rivers that met up with the Tigris and Euphrates in Eden.

Another scientific tidbit is that edin is a Mesopotamian word for areas east of the current Euphrates bed.  Once they were irrigated and productive.  The Euphrates course changed westward, however, and the work of keeping up the eastern irrigation canals became more expensive than the government could pay for from the produce.  The eastern lands were abandoned and the name for them was edin.  This was in about the 3000s BCE, the Jemdet Nasr period, when desiccation resulted in consolidation of political power in city states which then governed the work of irrigation.

Nothing in the Gan Eden episode discusses irrigation.  It assumes that rain waters things.

The Gan Eden episode is not “about” agriculture at all.  In its 42 verses, agriculture never comes up.  It talks about eating bread “in the sweat of your brow.”   But “bread”, Hebrew lechem, means food in some contexts, “bread” being the base food in Jewish culture.  In similar contexts, some Western narratives use a word that translates as “meat”.  This underlies the translation of the last word of Luke 17:7 from Greek as “sit down to meat,” when what it really means is to go to a triclinium somewhere for a meal at which the servant will recline on a couch.  The “meat” translation suits Victorian westerners, while the Greek refers to giving a servant the same leisure for a meal as his master.

Anyhoo.

Humans ate seeds of all kinds long before agriculture started, including picking and then reaping and finally planting seeds of wheat, spelt, barley, rye, and oats.  By 18,000 BCE humans in southwest Asia were using sickles to collect the seed-bearing grain heads.  There’s no sense inventing a special tool to cut off the heads of grain unless they had long been part of the human diet, contrary to what the “Paleo” diet people will tell you.  By 7800 BCE, the stalks of grain show strong heads that could not simply fall apart in the wind or as animals brushed through.  By 3000 BCE, humans in Mesopotamia were organizing to ensure a supply of water to irrigate their main food source, which also produced the famous Mesopotamian beer.  (Hmmmm.)

But it was hard sweaty work for tens of thousands of years before anybody used a stone mattock to turn over virgin sod and put seeds into the ground on purpose, planning to reap the full-grown crop.

The Gan Eden episode is not mainly, let alone exclusively, about agriculture.  It mainly revolves around use of the term mot yamut, which you first saw in the posts about the death penalty, and that usage set up an expectation that controlled the narrative.  That is next week’s lesson.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 3:22·24

Genesis 3:22-24

 

כב וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהִים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע וְעַתָּה פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם:

כג וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהִים מִגַּן־עֵדֶן לַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח מִשָּׁם:

כד וַיְגָרֶשׁ אֶת־הָאָדָם וַיַּשְׁכֵּן מִקֶּדֶם לְגַן־עֵדֶן אֶת־הַכְּרֻבִים וְאֵת לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת לִשְׁמֹר אֶת־דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים:

 

Translation:    **** Gd said behold the man has become like one of us to know good and evil and now lest he put out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever…

**** Gd sent him from Gan Eden to work the earth that he was taken from.

He pushed out the man and He established, away from the east of Gan Eden, the keruvim and the flash of the sword that revolves to guard the road of the tree of life.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

עַתָּה	Now, at this time
יִשְׁלַח	He put out
יָדוֹ	His hand
גַּם	also
לְעֹלָם	forever
יְגָרֶשׁ	Push out, divorce
יַּשְׁכֵּן	establish
לַהַט	flash
חֶרֶב	sword
מִּתְהַפֶּכֶת	revolves
דֶּרֶךְ	Road, path

 

Can you identify what binyan mithapekhet is?  Can you tell me why it is used?

 

Notice that Gd wouldn’t have to worry about people suddenly being able to live forever if He had created them to be immortal. 

 

Notice that I didn’t translate keruvim.  The only thing we know about them, from Exodus, is that they had wings and a front and back, and that the keruvim on the cover of the ark faced each other.

 

In the next lesson I’m going to give you the whole text for chapter 3 and a link to the audio.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- July

Gardener nirvana!
If you have a flower garden, you have hosta, lilies, gladioli, and in my yard, it's hydrangea.
They survived Snowmageddon and I did as Mike McGrath said and did not prune in 2014.
This year my hydrangea are gorgeous!
Veggies:  ZUCCHINI!  You should be seeing those huge golden blooms.  Don't forget to look under the leaves.  If you don't pick the zucchini while they still stick up from the plant, they will hide under the leaves and by the time you see them, they'll be as long as your arm.
Beans should be showing pink flowers -- if you have been watering in the morning.  If not, your beans have been eaten by slugs.
Herbs should be going to seed.
Tomatoes should be showing flowers and you might have some cute little green tomatoes.
Cukes -- if these survived the bunnies -- bunnies like nothing better than tender cuke shoots -- should be flowering and you might even have some baby gherkin pickle sized fruits.
Notice how most of these things flower yellow.  Bees love them.  Plant these and calendula and golden cosmos to attract and feed the bees, which will then thank you by fertilizing your stuff so you get the fruits.  DON'T USE PESTICIDES OR FUNGICIDES.  Creating death traps are a horrible way to say "you're welcome" to bees. 
And best of all: in July you should be ordering your non-hybrid, non-GMO, open-pollinated seeds from reliable vendors so you can plant annuals next year.  Even if you bought these this year, and they are going to seed, you still want new seeds for new genes.  What's more, some plants are biennials.  If you left some cabbage or their relatives in the ground to go to seed, they won't flower until next year.  You need new seeds to grow new food or flowers from biennials, let alone to create a healthy gene pool.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- why philology doesn't work

About 1905 a famous cuneiform scholar named Sayce wrote a pamphlet claiming that Shabbat developed out of Mesopotamian practice documented on cuneiform tablets from the time of Cambyses II.  (Remember what I just said about cuneiform.)

About 1910-1915 two other famous cuneiform scholars showed that Sayce misrepresented what the Cambyses-era tablets said.

The first three verses of Genesis 2 tell about the first Shabbat and Gd’s rest from the melakhah that He performed.  The usual translation of melakhah is “work,” but that’s far too vague a term.

In Jewish law, melakhah is the forty less one, or 39, categories of things that are prohibited to be done on Shabbat, either for pay or for free, for oneself or for others, whether it’s your normal occupation that you get paid for or not.  The only time this prohibition can be violated is to save any human life that is in imminent danger.

The one thing that is not prohibited on Shabbat is avodah, the sacrificial service in the temple or tabernacle.  Torah requires avodah on Shabbat.  The confusion is that in modern Hebrew and in some places in the Bible, avodah is indeed used for something that falls in the category of melakhah.  That doesn’t change the fact that the “m” word not only appears in the creation story, but also in the Ten Commandments where Shabbat is discussed.  Melakhah and Shabbat are almost indissolubly linked.

Sayce looked at an inscription that discussed a prohibition on work and claimed that it was equivalent to Shabbat.  The inscription doesn’t use anything even approaching the “m” word; it also did not use a cognate of shabbat that meant a cessation from work.  There was no such word in Sumerian, Akkadian, or the Aramaic used in Babylonia in the time of Cambyses.  (Note that restriction on provenance.)  Except what was introduced into Aramaic from Jewish culture, by for and about Jewish culture.  A concept I will bring up again much later.

Clay and Barton showed, within 5 years, that the cuneiform text limited the prohibition to kings, seers, and physicians, and didn’t apply it to the entire population.  Sayce committed the famous “quoting out of context” fallacy, both textual and cultural, that I used in summing up urban legends about Jewish law.  In fact Shabbat applies to all Jews.

The tablets with such prohibitions applied them to specific dates of the Mesopotamian month: 7, 14, 19, 21, and 28.   Sayce performed sampling bias by ignoring the 19^th.  He also ignored the legal definition of Shabbat, which has nothing to do with specific days of the month but with every 7th day, no matter what day of the month it falls on.

Sayce probably combined the dates of the prohibitions with a tablet which prescribed sacrifices on the same specific days of the month, except for the 19^th.  This tablet prescribed sacrifices at specific phases of the moon; the Mesopotamian religious calendar was based on the lunar cycle.  The 19^th is not the date of a specific lunar phase.  Again, the requirement for avodah on Shabbat is tied to the seventh day, not to specific days of the Jewish month, even though the Jewish month is tied to the lunar cycle.

Clay and Barton pointed out that no known Mesopotamian legal system prohibits work by commoners on specific days.  The code of Hammurabi had just been discovered and translated when Sayce wrote; it, too, does not record a prohibition for commoners to work.

Clay and Barton pointed out that the Mesopotamian term shabbatum to which Sayce cited, strictly applied to the full moon on the 15^th day of the month.  No relationship exists between shabbatum and words for stopping work in the languages I referred to earlier. 

The oldest known references to Shabbat in Jewish literature, ignoring arguments about the age of Torah itself, are from Amos and Hoshea.  Amos and Hoshea wrote in the Holy Land 2 or 3 centuries BEFORE Cambyses II ruled.  Whatever the Jews of their time thought about the origin of Shabbat, the reference precedes the provenance of the Cambyses tablets and presumes that the audience is familiar with the term, otherwise there’s no point in bringing it up.  (I’ll say more about this concept much later on the blog.)

What Sayce did was common for the times and involves the study of philology, which still leads researchers to draw false conclusions from words taken out of verbal or historical or cultural context.  But we’ve seen that before, so it should not surprise you.  And you’ll see it again much later.

Since the rest of the argument about Enuma Elish involves material I’m not ready to present to you yet, I’m going to move on to the second episode in Torah.  For next week, read Genesis 2:4 to 3:24.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 3:19-21

Genesis 3:19-21

 

יט בְּזֵעַת אַפֶּיךָ תֹּאכַל לֶחֶם עַד שׁוּבְךָ אֶל־הָאֲדָמָה כִּי מִמֶּנָּה לֻקָּחְתָּ כִּי־עָפָר אַתָּה וְאֶל־עָפָר תָּשׁוּב:

כ וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁם אִשְׁתּוֹ חַוָּה כִּי הִוא הָיְתָה אֵם כָּל־חָי: כא וַיַּעַשׂ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים לְאָדָם וּלְאִשְׁתּוֹ כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם:

 

Translation:    In the sweat of your face you shall eat food until your return to the earth for from it you were taken for you are dust and to dust you shall return. 

The man named his wife Chavvah because she was the mother of all life.

**** Gd made for Adam and his wife cloaks of skin and dressed them.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

זֵעַת	sweat
לֶחֶם	Bread, food
שׁוּבְךָ	Your return
אֵם	mother
כָּתְנוֹת	cloaks
עוֹר	skin
יַּלְבִּשֵׁם	Dressed them

 

1.  Can you identify what zeat is?

2.  Can you guess what the root of shuvkha is?

3.  Note that em is plain “mother,” while “his mother” was imo a few lessons back.

4.  “Dressed them,” yalbishem is hifil which has what connotation?

 

Notice that the only situation in which the first verse can be about baked bread, is if you assume that this episode has to do with agriculture.  If you realize that it comes from a time long before agriculture, as I discuss in the Fact-Checking article, then you have to translate lechem as food.  In fact people invented sickles by 18,000 BCE but it took until 7,800 BCE for remains to be left of grain stalks that there was no other way to get the grain from except by human hands or tools.  There’s no sense inventing sickles unless people had been eating the ancestors of wheat and so on for a long time.  If it took 10,000 years for the wheat to change so that it needed human intervention, then you can estimate that people ate wheat for at least 10,000 years before they invented sickles.   Probably longer.  So much for the “Paleo” diet.

 

Now notice that Adam and Chavvah did NOT die.  See the Fact-Checking lesson.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

DIY -- under the quilt

This post will help you get ready for winter -- and goes with my last DIY posting.
What do you put under your quilt?
Well, since mostly you need a quilt in winter, you probably want a blanket under it.
What about under that?
I find it saves a lot of money if you have flannel sheets.
The same flannel you might have bought for quilt backing makes great sheets all by itself.
They are soft.
They are warm.
They wash well.
They last long.
You can turn your heat down to 60 degrees Farenheit at night and still be cosy with flannel sheets. You might even become a sack rat if you aren't one already.  And that 60 degrees will save you money compared to the heat you're paying for now.
Best of all, if you DIY you can save $30 a set.
Buy 5 yards of 108 inch wide flannel.
Cut straight across the exact middle so that you have two pieces, 2 1/2 yards by 108 inches.
Fold over no more than half an inch at the raw ends, and then once more to put the raw ends on the inside; pin them.
Sew across the inside fold -- not the one at the very edge of the top and bottom or the hem will come unfolded -- but the other fold of the hem.
One important thing: this makes two flat sheets.
How you make the bed with a flat sheet is you lay the sheet on the bed, making sure it's even all around.
Now you lift up the bottom of the mattress and fold the sheet flat under it.  Do the same thing at the top.
Now package the mattress in the sheet the way you package a gift box in wrapping paper, with the diagonal corners.  Here's a video.  It's military and you don't have to do the dust cover because you're going to have a quilt, but it makes nice crisp corners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbJFNrg2G_4

There used to be a saying that when you make a military rack, the sheets should be so tight you can bounce a quarter off them.  I don't go that far.
I almost prefer a flat sheet to a fitted sheet because there's one thing you can do with a flat sheet that takes extra work with a fitted sheet.
If your flat sheet wears out in the middle, you can sew the two selvages together for a seam.
Then cut from top to bottom at the exact center, through the hole.
Now make new hems where the hole was.  You may have to sacrifice a little cloth to get a straight edge to hem, but since the original flannel was 108 inches wide, that will only be a problem if you have a super-king-size mattress.
This is called a "sides to middle" sheet.  You might recognize the term if you watched enough episodes of Upstairs Downstairs.  It will get another year or two of wear out of the flat sheet.
If you try this with a fitted sheet, you will find you first have to get rid of the elastic.
Then you will probably have to hem all round instead of just at the sides.
The flannel sheets I bought shrank.  Now I only use them as added blankets in the depths of winter.
The ones I made were so large they'll never shrink enough to be a nuisance.


© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- can't get there

Besides getting access to Enuma Elish, which was always written in cuneiform, there’s a problem with how to turn it into the Jewish creation story in Genesis 1 plus 2:1-3.

The Jewish creation story has seven days of creation.  On the seventh day the first Shabbat was instituted, with its concept of melakhah.

The three verses about Shabbat are part of the first aliyah in Torah.  The aliyot are divisions of Torah used for the regular reading of Torah in the synagogue.  Torah is divided into 54 sections, one for each week of the Jewish leap year (short ones are combined when it isn’t a leap year) and each section is divided into 8 aliyot.  The first aliyah in Torah is the Jewish creation story, ending with the first Shabbat.   This is all discussed in Mishnah, Gemara, and halakhah.

Part of the urban legend that says the Jewish creation story comes from Enuma Elish ignores the aliyah structure. 

The urban legend requires existence of a structure set up by Steven Langton, the archbishop named to the see of Canterbury by the pope and opposed by John “Lackland” of England, leading to an interdict being placed on England so that no church services could take place.  But I digress.

The current “chapter 1” of Genesis ends at the division imposed by Langton.  It cuts off the verses about Shabbat.  That means chapter 1 discusses only six days of creation. 

Because six generations of gods are named in Enuma Elish, says part of the urban legend, these six days were derived from Enuma Elish.

The hidden assumption here is that the Jews originally had only six days of creation and later, when Shabbat became part of Jewish culture, they tacked on three verses to pretend that it was part of creation.  I’ll give a really good argument much later in this blog about why such a thing doesn’t happen.

But for now, the most important fact is that Enuma Elish doesn’t have six days of creation.  It doesn’t say when those six generations of gods came into being.  It doesn’t show how many days Marduk took in his act of creation.  Granted, the tablets have missing text and experts in cuneiform are always updating our understanding from fragments.  It’s been 170 years and the cuneiform scholars have not yet posted the timing of creation in Enuma Elish on the internet.

What happened here is that people who were familiar with Langton’s chapter divisions, and ignorant of the Jewish aliyot, viewed Langton’s division as inherent in what the Jews passed along for centuries before Shabbat existed and for millennia before Langton existed.

At the same time, it ignores the entire history of the Bible that the archaeologists inherited.  In Langton’s time and for centuries afterward, the Catholic church (the only Christian church in Langton’s time) discouraged people from reading the Bible for themselves.  The average person couldn’t possibly know about the “chapter 1” division until he read a Bible that was divided that way.  The number of people who knew about that, was restricted to those who could read, who could read Latin, and who had access to a Bible.  Until the printing press started turning out cheap copies of the Bible in the national language, that meant clergy and rich people.

By the time archaeologists discovered Enuma Elish, the mass of Protestant nations and some Catholic and non-established ones potentially had a Bible in every home, and the concepts of the archaeologists had been conditioned by Langton’s divisions.  It’s a case of Heisenberg uncertainty.  The claim that Genesis and Enuma Elish are related relies on the Bible structure people had learned all their lives without even thinking twice about it.  The Jewish aliyah structure doesn’t allow the conclusion they reached.

In fact there are no common phrases between the Jewish creation story and Enuma Elish.  Commonality of phrases frequently identifies concepts inherited by one school of thought from its predecessor; this will come up again much later on the blog.  The only concept common to Enuma Elish and Torah is the idea of creation.  Enuma Elish is closely tied to the polytheism of Mesopotamia; the Jewish creation story is monotheistic and incorporates a completely Jewish, absolutely non-Mesopotamian concept, Shabbat, which I will discuss in the next post.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved