Outdoors -- the agitator

With all the rain we had early in the month, I had the chance to see a funny thing.

So within half an hour of an absolute downpour, a bird that had been flying through it to feed nestlings, plunked down in my bird bath and splashed around.

The rain had been sluicing off its feathers whenever it took a break, sitting on my fence.

Some of you might know the reason.

All I can figure is that the rain sluices OFF the feathers, it doesn't penetrate to where the pests are.
To get rid of the pests, the bird has to get into some water about halfway up to its back,
and then thrash around to get the water up under its feathers.

It's the difference between soaking clothes and putting them in a machine with an agitator.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- weak analogy

Why look at 17^th dynasty depths for evidence of the Exodus at all? Why isn’t the 19^th dynasty good enough?

There are two reasons. One is something the archaeologists have said and the other is a fallacy.

Some of the archaeologists who have worked at Tell el-Maskhuta say they’re pretty sure something happened that produced the story of the Exodus. They have support from a different field of study, but that comes at the end of this blog and they might not have known about it when the statement was made. At any rate, they are not accepting the false argument from silence because they know that without a complete dataset – which they know they will never have – they cannot absolutely rule it out. And they are the people who give a low probability that the 26^th dynasty site of Pi-Tum historically hosted a city of similar population in the 19^th dynasty.

The fallacy that goes with this is something called weak analogy.

The more like the facts your analogy looks, the more likely your analogy will help you with your proof. The converse is true for the period of Ramses II as the time of the Exodus.

·         The absence of a treasure city where Pi-Tum was known to have existed in the 26^th dynasty;

·         The absence of reports of natural disturbances and mass emigrations;

·         The fact that Hapiru either doesn’t mean Hebrews, or the fact that the Hapiru were still living in Egypt all during the reign of Ramses II.

Now, you’re going to say that’s a false argument from silence and you’re right, but things stack up positively for the 17^th dynasty.

·         The volcanic eruption and its geologic evidence in the capital of the Hyksos explaining some of the plagues;

·         The explanation of “the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph” when the Hyksos took over, ignoring previous history;

·         The fixed residential nature of part of Tell el-Maskhuta in the 17^th dynasty;

·         The mass movement of the Hyksos out of Egypt;

·         The explanation of why the Israelites went southeast instead of northeast where they would have experienced war;

The end of Hyksos rule allows 5 centuries for development of a culture in the Holy Land that would produce the pigless hilltop settlements. The 19^th dynasty barely gives Merneptah time to realize that there are Israelites living in the Holy Land.

Now you’re going to point me to Bronk, Ramsay, et al. who provided radiocarbon dates about some 37 pharaohs which buck the conventional dates. GOOD FOR YOU!!!

The radiocarbon dating pushes almost all pharaonic reigns earlier than the conventional dates; Ramses II began his reign about 20 years earlier than we thought. The start date for Ahmose I is 50 years before the conventional date, but 1570 is still 50 years after the pumice fell on Avaris due to the Thera explosion.

Nevertheless, the Tempest Papyrus produced in Ahmose’s reign records abnormal weather which might be associated with atmospheric disturbances relating to the explosion. Either Ahmose knew about this firsthand before he took the throne, or it’s a record of a tradition.

The Egyptians had no reliable history of their own pharaohs, except possibly the Turin king list of which Column 10, which covered the Hyksos period, is damaged. The Abydos inscription lists pharaohs up to Amenemhat IV, and then it skips from the 12^th dynasty, completely over the Hyksos, to Ahmose I, founder of the 18^th dynasty. It skips Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, and Ay. In other words the Abydos inscription says “these are the only legitimate pharaohs.”

We might find data that will close that 50-year gap.  I’m not going to wait for that miracle.  I’m going to point out that we don’t know how old Ahmose was when he re-united Egypt, we just know the best-established date of his first regnal year.  I suggest that the north experienced an interregnum while they tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered economy and deal with the usual outcomes: famine; epidemic; loss of trade and inability to import enough food to make up for the crop disasters. It might have just started to work when Ahmose decided not to allow the north any more time to recover; he attacked, and took it back, and saved himself tons of grief because some of the repairs had already been made and the workforce had already been re-stocked through  enslavement and reproduction.  (The Israelites were already in the Holy Land.)

Nevertheless, this all happened over a century before the dates that Bietak reported, and his extremely late dates cannot be accepted because he didn’t provide radiocarbon dating.  There is also evidence that the stratigraphy he relied on was badly done and attempts to reproduce his stratigraphic results have failed.

Next week I’ll give another example of a weak analogy that produced an urban legend about the Exodus. First I want you to read Numbers 22:2-24:25.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- the end of Deuteronomy 5:7

So we were looking at Deuteronomy 5:7 and I said that you have two uses of the imperfect because they represent pagan worship, no ifs ands buts or maybes.

כִּי אִם־כֹּה תַעֲשׂוּ לָהֶם מִזְבְּחֹתֵיהֶם תִּתֹּצוּ וּמַצֵּבֹתָם תְּשַׁבֵּרוּ וַאֲשֵׁירֵהֶם תְּגַדֵּעוּן וּפְסִילֵיהֶם תִּשְׂרְפוּן בָּאֵשׁ

 

The other two subjects are an asherah and a pesel.

 

An asherah is a live tree that was the target of pagan worship. But not every live tree was the object of pagan worship. What’s more, there’s a commandment NOT to cut down fruit trees that you didn’t plant because you can eat from them and they aren’t people to fight against you.

 

That’s why there’s an uncertainty epistemic. It might not be an asherah. If you don’t cut it down, and it turns out later that it was an asherah, you might not be in trouble because you might successfully plead ignorance, and ignorance is always an excuse under Jewish law.

 

A pesel is something man-made used in worship. You might remember the story in Judges 17 where Mikayahu gave some silver back to his mother and she had a pesel made. But the verse here says “their pesels.”

 

That’s why there’s an uncertainty epistemic. It might not be a pagan pesel. It might be a Jew’s pesel, and then you’re into a whole other can of worms because now you have to investigate whether this Jew is subject to the death penalty for pagan worship. But you can’t prove that without the pesel, so the person who finds the pesel might not be in trouble with the law for not destroying it.

 

(Does that remind you of a Danny Kaye routine?)

 

Now let’s go back to Avraham pleading for the cities of the plain. I want you to notice that what Gd says each time is a neder vow, a promise to perform or not to perform an act. Everybody has to keep their neder vows, with certain exceptions. One exception is that if the vow is wreaking havoc in the home or in society, the rabbis can get involved.  They question the guy who made the vow. If they can get him to a point where he says “If I had known that, I would never have made the vow,” then they can annul it and he doesn’t have to keep it.  Ignorance is an excuse in Jewish law.

 

Avraham using the uncertainty epistemic not only allows as how he doesn’t know how many righteous men are in the cities, it also lets Gd out of His vow if there aren’t that many people. Avraham trusts Gd to keep the vow, no matter what, but he’s letting Gd off because he, Avraham, is the one who is ignorant and he might have asked Gd to do something that shouldn’t be done.

 

And one more verse that shows how important the uncertainty epistemic is in Jewish  law.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- leftovers

I haven't posted anything about this topic for a long time.

I've been using up the remains of old projects.
I had enough Perly Perle for sleeveless boleros in every color.

Don't throw leftovers out right away.
Especially if you overbought.
If the leftovers aren't enough for a pair of socks or gloves,
it might be enough for a spare sock or glove.

Another thing I did was granny squares, also known as American squares.
There are patterns on the web.
Multiple shades for a big shaded square.
Multiple colors for a multicolor square
or a patchwork of small squares.

They make nice splashes of color in a room.
They make nice foot warmers on a cold winter night.

I hear that warming your feet at night will help you get to sleep in winter.
I have trouble sleeping sometimes, so I'm all over that.
That's what I use my granny patchworks for.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-checking the Torah -- realistic expectations

The problem with the false argument from silence and the Exodus rests on a basic truth of archaeology.

Archaeologists cannot dig everywhere on the surface of the earth or for an unlimited distance below it.

They don’t have the time.  They don’t have the funding.  They can’t hold up agriculture or construction indefinitely so they can do their work.

So I believe it was William Albright who stated that archaeologists can only look where they think they’ll find something.

Since the finding of the Merneptah stele, the looking has only gone down to the 19^th dynasty of Egypt.

But now that we know that Tell el-Maskhuta was not a treasure city in the 19^th dynasty, and was inhabited in Hyksos times, we have to figure out should we look down to 17^th dynasty levels in Goshen?

And here we run into the same problem as with Umm al-Bini.  We can’t get in there.  Egypt is very violent just now.  What’s more, it has sort of a dual personality.  While it realizes that most of its tourism comes from Pharaonic material, as a Muslim state it has severe scruples about hanging onto those remains and may ignore the economic benefit of the people working at archaeological digs due to the same scruples.  They’re a sovereign nation and they have every right to run their country that way.  The result is that it’s going to be a while before an archaeological expedition can get to Goshen and dig.  And no way am I going to recommend that some Indiana Jones wannabe go in and rob heritage sites in a sovereign nation. That’s bad archaeology as well as insulting on an international basis, and dangerously stupid.

And again, what are you going to look for?  It would be wonderful if the pigless trash dumps also exist in Goshen – but Goshen supposedly was about 2300 square kilometers in size and so where do you dig?

Or it would be nice to dig at Mt. Sinai where the Israelites lived for about 2 years while creating the tabernacle.  The location currently associated with Mt. Sinai is 37 kilometers around at the base.  And then what would you look for?

There’s a report from an archaeologist who went through Tell el-Maskhuta a few months after one season of digging ended, and the fresh wood used to block off the sand had already been consumed by insects.

So with the fragility of pottery and the edibility of wood, we’re left with stone and metal.  In spite of what I wrote some weeks ago about iron, the metal most likely to be found is bronze or brass.  Numbers 31:22 says that the Israelites were going to get other metals from the spoil of the Midianites, including iron and tin. 

Metal detectors don’t pick up brass or bronze so well, especially at 17^th dynasty depths, and they have more trouble picking metal up in hot dry conditions like the ones the Sinai has now.

In other words, we’d love to do the work, but it’s going to be expensive and difficult both in terms of the work itself and in terms of the political and military situation.

But that’s no reason for accepting a false argument from silence.

Next week I'll demonstrate the other fallacy that makes trouble for archaeological claims.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at at Time Bible Hebrew -- are you sure?

What’s the other epistemic?

 

Well, it’s an uncertainty epistemic. The speaker is allowing as how his statement might not work out due to missing information.

 

The format is imperfect verb ending in i for feminine, and u for masculine, followed by nun.  (OK, nun sofit.  There, are you happy?)

 

The best example is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Gd tells Avraham what’s about to happen and why, and Avraham feels like it’s not fair that everybody should die, good and bad.  So he starts off, what if there are 50 people who are good, will You destroy the cities then?  Gd says “No.”  “And what if five of the fifty are lacking?”  And the form he uses is yach’srun.  It starts in Genesis 18:28.

אוּלַי יַחְסְרוּן חֲמִשִּׁים הַצַּדִּיקִם חֲמִשָּׁה הֲתַשְׁחִית בַּחֲמִשָּׁה אֶת־כָּל־הָעִיר וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא אַשְׁחִית אִם־אֶמְצָא שָׁם אַרְבָּעִים וַחֲמִשָּׁה:

 

Avraham doesn’t know for sure there are 45 good people in the cities; he doesn’t know if there are any.  He’s using “lacks five” as an opening wedge to reduce the number.  He stops at 10.  (There’s a midrash for that.)  And then when he gets up the next morning, he sees that the cities have been destroyed.  He can see the smoke from where he is, miles to the west of where the cities were.  Well, he tried.

 

Another good example is in the “tree” story, see lesson 74 on Genesis 3:3-4.  The woman says “lest we die,” and uses this form.  She’s not sure she’ll die, or whether Adam will die at the same time she eats or what.  She’s never seen it happen.  The serpent also uses t’mutun, but he’s not sure he’s right about them not dying.  He too has never seen it happen. 

ג וּמִפְּרִי הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִמֶּנּוּ וְלֹא תִגְּעוּ בּוֹ פֶּן תְּמֻתוּן:

ד וַיֹּאמֶר הַנָּחָשׁ אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה לֹא־מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן:

 

The speaker doesn’t know enough to be sure he’s right or that things will come out his way, so the nun epistemic has to be based on an imperfect verb.

 

Now let’s look at Deuteronomy 5:7 because it has a slam-bang impact on the understanding of the uncertainty epistemic that I need two posts to explain.

כִּי אִם־כֹּה תַעֲשׂוּ לָהֶם מִזְבְּחֹתֵיהֶם תִּתֹּצוּ וּמַצֵּבֹתָם תְּשַׁבֵּרוּ וַאֲשֵׁירֵהֶם תְּגַדֵּעוּן וּפְסִילֵיהֶם תִּשְׂרְפוּן בָּאֵשׁ

Read this several times and notice that it has two verbs in imperfect aspect in a future sense as well as the two uncertainty epistemics.  Now read it again and notice that there’s a different object for each verb.

 

The reason that’s important is that Jewish law treats each of the four situations differently. 

 

When you get to the Holy Land and see an altar, you know that it’s a pagan altar.   How?  Because you know from Genesis that in his own lifetime, Avraham had to rebuild an altar which he was the first to build.   Altars don’t necessarily last long.   People steal the stones for building.  So if you find an altar, it’s pagan, and you have to tear it down.

 

When you get to the Holy Land and see a matsevah, you know it’s a pagan matsevah.  How?  Because Yaaqov set up two on the east bank of the Yarden and the Holy Land is on the west bank.  Moshe set up twelve but that was at Mt. Sinai.  So if you find a matsevah, it’s pagan and you have to overthrow  it.

 

Next week I’ll get into the rest of the verse and then go on to the thing about epistemics that will really give you a headache.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- June 2016

NOW prune your azaleas.
OK, well, as soon as the blooms drop.
Finish by mid-July or you'll cut wood that would produce blooms next year.

NOT hydrangea.
They are getting ready to bloom -- if they survived the late frosts.

NOT sweet privet.
Mine is starting to bloom, the heavy sweet scent was everywhere yesterday.
That's going to be some good food for the bees over the next few weeks.
And we all want to feed our bees.
If you prune now, the bees already going after those blooms might sting you.
We don't want that.
So leave the privet alone.

You should be eating green peas and snow peas.
Your dark leafy greens are about to bolt.
So is your cilantro; ask me how I know.
Let them.
If you used open-pollinated seeds, you will get more greens next year from these.
Hybrids not so much.
Hybrids do not breed true.
The seeds for them have to be produced every year from the root stock.
If you are serious about sustainable gardening, you have to go back to open-pollinated seeds.
Luckily there are at least a couple of dozen sites that sell them.

Your warm veggies could have gone in the ground a week or two ago.
If you planted them before that in the DC region, you probably lost them to some of those late frosty nights.

Cut that grass -- three inches.
I still have ground ivy, in  shady areas. 
I am taking revenge by pulling it out and composting  it.
Next year or so, that will go right back on the garden.
Along with your shredded composted leaves from your trees.
I'm planning to ask a neighbor with oaks to let me have his leaves this autumn.
I'll do the raking.
Maybe he'll buy a clue and then I'll have to rake somewhere else.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved