Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint's bad words

A translation is supposed to be a faithful reproduction of the meaning of the primary document. 

The Septuagint is not a faithful reproduction of the meaning of the Hebrew of the Torah.  Here are examples of problems it has with the meanings of words.

•           Genesis 4:7.  The Septuagint said, according to the translation in Brenton, “Hast thou not sinned if thou hast brought it rightly, but not rightly divided it? Be still, to thee shall be his submission, and thou shalt rule over him.”  That is not even wrong.  It has to do with a sacrifice while the Hebrew deals with sin in general.

•           Genesis 10:6.  Mitsraim was translated as Mesrain.  This is the only time that Septuagint fails to translate the term as “Egypt”, which is correct.

•           Genesis 11:12-13.  Septuagint has Arpachshad siring Qainan not Shelach.  That means it gives 11 and not 10 generations from Noach to Avraham.  (There’s a midrash for that.)

•           Genesis 14:21.   Septuagint has the king offering Avram the horses when the real meaning is the property.  However when translating Genesis 31:18, Septuagint translates the same word as “the things (he took away with him).”  In Greek “horse” is “hippos” (OK you Greek geeks, I know that’s not really an “h” but not everybody is a Greek geek.) for which the Hebrew is sus (about which more later); the word in Genesis 14:21 and 31:18 is r’chush.

•           Genesis 34:1-5.  Septuagint called Dinah a parthene after the rape whereas in Genesis 22:15 it uses parthene to translate betulah, a “technical” virgin, which Dinah could not have been after the rape.

•           Genesis 35:19. Rachel was buried next to the road to Efrat. Septuagint said she was buried at the hippodrome, a horse-racing track.  However in most places Septuagint translates Hebrew derekh correctly as odos.

•           Exodus 1:11.   Septuagint says among the treasure cities built by the Israelites was “Onn, that is, Heliopolis.”  That’s backwards; Septuagint also names Joseph’s wife as the daughter of the priest of Onn (Genesis 41:45) showing that the city existed before the Israelites were enslaved. 

•           Leviticus 22.  Septuagint uses the word allogenos for incompatible situations.  One is v. 12 where the priest’s daughter marries “an Israelite not descended from Aaron” (ish zar which is always used in this meaning), which cannot apply to a non-Jew because he falls into the category of prohibited husbands (Leviticus 19:29).  Septuagint also uses allogenos in verse 25, which prohibits accepting imperfect animals as offerings from non-Jews (ben nekhar which is always used in the meaning of non-Jews) for the tabernacle.

This is an extremely short list of mistranslations and missed connotations in Septuagint.  But wait, there's more.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- what that darned thing is

That darned thing that westerners have been calling an infinitive in Hebrew and Arabic for lo these many centuries now, is not an infinitive.  You can tell that by how it is used in Biblical Hebrew.

It’s a aspectless verb with gerundive properties.  Here’s an example: Genesis 4:13:

וַיֹּאמֶר קַיִן אֶל־יְהוָֹה גָּדוֹל עֲוֹנִי מִנְּשׂוֹא:

The first letter is mi, in this case meaning “beyond”.  So Qain says “my sin is great beyond  bearing.” 

Actually, the rabbis interpret it in Midrash Rabbah Breshit 22:11, turning it around on Gd:  If You’re omnipotent, why is my sin too great for You to bear with?  Why would You punish me?  Well, actions have consequences and sometimes they’re bad; Qain’s punishment is one of those consequences and he needs to put on his big kid pants and deal with it.   So “beyond bearing” is adverbial, modifying “great”.

The grammatical point is that using the aspectless verb avoids the connotations of any aspect, and it also avoids having a specific agent, allowing the midrash to work.

Next, Leviticus 11:31.

אֵלֶּה הַטְּמֵאִים לָכֶם בְּכָל־הַשָּׁרֶץ כָּל־הַנֹּגֵעַ בָּהֶם בְּמֹתָם יִטְמָא עַד־הָעָרֶב:

This is an example of “at the time of”: “at the time of their dying.”  Time expressions are always adverbial.  Progressive is only suitable to a generalized extended time, od, “still.”  In this verse the time period is specific to the action: the period it takes the vermin to die.

Now, why is it important to translate b’motam with a gerund instead of saying “when they died”?  This is the fussiness of Biblical Hebrew, especially when it comes to legal issues.  Define “when they died”.

Even in the 21^st century that definition is under debate.  TV shows regularly generate drama by having a character’s brain function flatline, while the machines are still making the heart pump and the lungs fill with air and empty. There’s always a debate after that as to what  the patient really meant by “extreme measures.”  We all have our own opinions on what’s right.

Five thousand years ago, they couldn’t debate the issue.  They didn’t have the monitors.  They definitely wouldn’t hook them up to vermin if they had them. There was no way to determine the time of death.  So a gerund works because if you think the vermin are dying, you get straight away from them so as not to become tameh.  Because, as you know if you read the Fact-Checking blog, that affects your ability to participate in society.

Because of the requirements of the progressive aspect relative to time expressions, we can’t use it for this more precise meaning.  The gerund steps in where other verb forms fear to tread.

Note the difference between b’motam and, say, va-y’hi b’et she-met.  In b’motam we’re not certain of the actual point of death.  The va-y’hi clause is the opening of a story, and we are certain that the death already has taken place; this is a temporal “localization” to be followed by events so important in themselves, that it’s also important to remember when they happened (as opposed to where they happened for a geographical localization). 

Torah has examples of several ways of saying things, but they don’t all mean exactly the same thing.  What they mean exactly, depends on the grammar.

And we owe it to the grammar to admit that it is what it is, not to slap on it convenient labels that apply only to other languages.  So from now on I’m going  to call the verb form in b’motam a gerundive when I describe its function, but remember for the next few lessons that it has this function because it is aspectless.  This coordinates with some things I will get into starting in lesson 145.  It all connects up, and it’s all different from what you were taught before.

And now another twist of the  knob.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- sun tea

Do it.  It's one of the best advantages you  can take of summer weather.

Get a big old glass jug with a lid.
Fill it with water, hot is good.
Stir in sugar to taste*.
Put in enough tea bags for the number of glasses of tea you  can get out of the jug.
Put the lid on.
If you use a jar that has a label, turn the label to the shady side or peel part of it off so the sun gets into one whole side of the jar.
Set it in a place that will get at least 6 hours of sun.
Bring it in, stir up the sugar, let it cool off, then put it in the  fridge.

Use any bag tea that you like to make iced tea from anyway.
I use Constant Comment, an orange-and-spice tea from Baltimore.
It works at least as well as the bags specially marked for sun tea, and which are more expensive.
Sun tea is way cheaper than buying gallon jugs of pre-made iced tea.
It has no added chemicals.
You control the sweetness.
It uses no electricity, unless you run hot water into the jug, and if you start a jug right after you wash dishes, you don't waste water getting it hot first, the pipes already have hot water in them.

*  My sister in Georgia gave me this tip. 
South of the Mason-Dixon line, people tend to like their sweet drinks VERY sweet.
It's one reason why fast food restaurants now offer sweet iced tea.
In Georgia, they tend to put malt syrup in their sun tea instead of hoping for the sugar to dissolve.
I haven't had a problem and I live in Maryland where we don't get quite so hot as Georgia does.
I always have sugar around anyway, but not malt syrup.
YMMV.

I have read about concerns about people getting food poisoning from sun tea.
If you use the same tea bags you use to make hot tea, but
you get the collywobbles after drinking sun tea,
I recommend getting your water tested for bacterial contamination and using a filter until the test results come back.
The water treatment plant or your pipes could be sub-standard.

Yes, it takes all day to brew. 
Use a big enough jug or enough big jars to suit your family.

Last year I stopped eating ice cream and cooled myself with iced tea.
It cut some fat out of my diet.
Probably even some sugar since I DON'T like my tea as sweet as lots of folks do here.

Do it.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint Intro

A definition.  A primary document is the document being translated from, a source document.  For this blog, the primary documents are mostly in Hebrew or Aramaic.

That gets around something somebody threw in my face once.  If I point you to Torah in “its original language” that isn’t precise.  We don’t know what language some stories were first told in.  As I pointed out earlier, some of the motifs go back to 4000 BCE when Akkadian might not have existed, let alone Hebrew.  So I have to talk about Torah as “the primary document,” meaning it’s the one all the translations ultimately come from; the written version existed only in Hebrew until about 23 centuries ago.

The other reason it’s important is that documents sometimes go through multiple drafts.  We know of multiple drafts of the Declaration of Independence.  All of them first appeared in English, and all of them are primary documents for purposes of translation.  There’s not a lot of use in translating the drafts, however, unless you are explaining the differences between them to people in a country where English is not the first language or even an official language.

The oldest translation of Torah that has survived is the Septuagint.  The definition of the Septuagint is the Greek translation about which there is an urban legend that it was created under Ptolemy II of Egypt, son of the general of Alexander II of Macedon.  When Alexander died, his will split up his empire among two generals and his posthumous son; Ptolemy got rich, storied Egypt.  Cleopatra was his descendant 7 generations later. 

The Septuagint is not just written in Greek.  It’s written in a Greek which uses words in different ways from all the Greek classics. The urban legend is that this is a Jewish dialect of Alexandria in Egypt, which had a large and influential Jewish community.  One of its best-known members was Philo the Jew, AKA Philo of Alexandria, who went on an embassy to the Roman Emperor Caligula to try and get his help stopping anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria.  I’ll get to Philo later.

At the time the Septuagint was written, the Ptolemies had control of Judea.  Because it was a rich province and a buffer between Egypt and Syria, the first two Ptolemies apparently felt it was expedient to know something about its culture.  So actually Ptolemy I commissioned the Greek Torah translation, and his son had the rest of the Jewish Tannakh translated later.

As a political expedient, the Septuagint might have been a good idea.

As a translation, it was a disaster.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- what is that thing?

I mentioned an important structure in Biblical Hebrew some time ago. It’s time to discuss mot yumat and its grammatical relatives. You saw this in the Garden of Eden story, Genesis 2:13:

וּמֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכָלְךָ מִמֶּנּוּ מוֹת תָּמוּת:

 

It also appears a lot in Leviticus 20 in a list of capital crimes. I already said that in the Genesis story, it introduces an expectation that Gd will follow due process and not kill Adam and Chavvah unless He has the right evidence.

 

Let’s look at the grammar. What is tamut?

 

Yep, it’s an imperfect aspect verb. Why?

 

Because there’s no guarantee that Gd can carry out the death penalty in this case. From the point of view of the story, it uses mot tamut because there’s no telling if Adam and Chavvah will even eat the fruit, let alone that there will be enough witnesses of the right kind and they can answer questions in such a way as to allow a death penalty. The usual phrase with the same idea is mot yumat and the second word is not only imperfect, it has another grammatical feature I’m not ready to describe yet.

 

The first component of the phrase is called the absolute infinitive, but I was studying Arabic this year for a different project and I learned some things that apply to Biblical Hebrew. The bottom line is, the grammatical terminology that you know and have been using to refer to Hebrew, was invented for other languages.  It doesn’t capture what Biblical Hebrew is really doing with the material.

 

Here’s the demonstration of what’s wrong with using terms from one language to describe another one. I have six sources for information about Arabic. Two of them deny that Arabic has infinitives. Three have sections on infinitives in Arabic. The sixth one is written specifically to help people understand Quranic Arabic, and it avoids using the term infinitive.

 

Are some of them liars?

 

Nope. The ones that talk about infinitives in Arabic are based on the grammatical terminology of the classics, Greek and especially Latin, which use the term “infinitive” for verbs that have no relationship to the time of the action they describe.

 

The Arabic grammars that discuss infinitives, talk about using them to look words up in a dictionary. This only works in Continental languages and Russian, where the base dictionary entry for a verb is the infinitive.

 

It doesn’t work in English. The “infinitive” in English is “to” plus some form of the verb. If the dictionary entry was sorted by infinitive, all the verb entries would be under “T”.

 

English does the same thing Arabic and Hebrew do. It selects a base form of the verb and uses that as the dictionary entry.

 

As with the so-called jussive, “infinitive” is a term imposed on Arabic and Hebrew grammar by westerners.  So what is that darned thing?

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- July 2016

More on grass: notice that Mike's first bullet is the one I pointed out was missing last time.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot-living/2016/07/summer-weather-calls-new-crops-lawncare/

We still don't need it with all the rain we've gotten in the last two weeks but the end is near!

I have pollinator blooms: Korean dill, chicory, and a plant that I think was celeriac.
It's a biennial, it gets about 5 feet high, it has yellow flowers that the bees love.
When the seeds mature, the sparrows will be all over them.
They came in squadrons to monitor  the progress last week.

Pokeweed flowers are on.  They're not pretty or aromatic but they'll make berries for the birds to eat this  winter.

Yes.  Grrrr.  I had more poison ivy this year.  I pulled it a couple of weeks ago after heavy rain and got a little bit skunked in spite of heavy flushing in cold running water within 10 minutes.
Ice cube poultice right away to kill the itch, check.
Lavender essential oil  -- on the blisters, not the healthy skin -- check.
Witch hazel in alcohol daily, check.
Aloe gel mixed with chickweed infusion to restore the skin after the blisters go, check.

I got out my herbal bug repellent to put on before I dump the birdbath at night. 
It's witch hazel in alcohol, plus several essential oils.
Citronella, of course; lavender; cedar wood; bunch of others.
I'm plotting to plant lemon balm and Oswego tea near the birdbath to scare off skeeters next year.

If  you look around, you should see blooming trees:
Virginia magnolia: there are two huge ones near my town library half a block away and a northerly breeze carries their magnificent citrusy fragrance straight to my house;
mimosa;
golden raintree;
some early crepe myrtles.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Lost in Translation

And one more early post since this is the time of year when FiOS traditionally craps out on me. 

If you have been reading this blog since I started posting to this page, I am awed because you  have invested that time in me.  The easy stuff is probably all behind us. The next part is pretty hard.

And I’m going to start with the preface you never read. What I say from now on is probably not going to be what you thought I would say. I am not writing this blog to say what people expect to be said. If you want to read a repeat of your own ideas, you have two choices: find a website that has those ideas (I know they exist); or write your own blog. This blog right here is about busting urban legends, not repeating them.

And the source of the urban legends was questions posted on an Internet discussion group about 20 years ago – and reposted by different people over a space of about 5 years – which shows you that I’m not making things up.  There are plenty of other sites where you can ask questions and get answers, too.  If you or somebody you know, has a question and wants my answer, check the Fact-Checking page listing to see if I already covered their issue;  email me to see if I’m going to cover it.  If I get a bunch of emails on a specific question, and I know I haven’t written a post for that (I’ve written all the posts that cover the old issues), I can always write a new one to post when I’m done.

I have a good reason for calling this section LOST IN TRANSLATION.

If you read a translation or commentary, you still don’t know what the primary (untranslated) document means.  Translation is not meaning.  Commentary is even farther from meaning.

Everybody has trouble getting this through their heads. Some people who can read and write more than one language don’t understand it. The vast majority of people in the world think that translating from one language to another means that the target (translated) document matches the meaning of the source document. The rest are language geeks.

Me, I’ve been a language geek since I was so high. All right, I’ve been so high for more than 40 years, keyn ahora, but I studied two non-English languages in high school, two more in college, and I use Hebrew and Aramaic every day due to prayers and the Daf Yomi Talmud study cycle. My first job involved the Russian which was my college major (for my first bachelor’s degree) and I still use it, as you can see if you read my Mendel Beilis page. Anyway, I’m a language geek.

Four issues allow room for error: the meaning of words; the nuances of grammar; the context of the wording; and the setting of the material. That’s aside from the translator’s or commentator’s knowledge or beliefs that affect their results.

This third section includes information about a debate that will either leave you cold or make you mad. That’s because what you think you know about it probably comes from incorrect translations, or commentaries incorporating fallacies or urban legends. One of the parties involved got laughed out of court and helped the Russian government lose a court case because of his ignorance of languages and subject material he pretended to know. I’ll warn you when we get there so you can skip it if you don’t want to suffer from high blood pressure.

I will also teach you some things you probably don’t know about Biblical Hebrew. They build on a 2002 doctoral dissertation. The author is so well-respected for just this one paper that when A reviewed B’s book which referred to the dissertation, A criticized B for not basing the book on the dissertation.  In other words, B included information from the dissertation but it was not fundamental to B’s thesis, which left B with less than solid support in A’s opinion.

Finally, this section introduces a subject you probably don’t know much about, one that is still developing, about the differences between material transmitted by mouth and the same information transmitted in writing, other than as a record of the oral version. I’m still learning about it myself, so I will try to stick with practical and hopefully obvious examples of the various facets. It has consequences that play out in the fourth part of this blog.

This section should help you understand why I keep telling you, you have to read it, and you have to read the source document not a translation. If you have spent the last three years working on that, what I say here should make sense, even if it isn’t clear as day.

We'll start with the Septuagint.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved