Outdoors -- pity the poor squirrel

Yesterday for the first time in my life I  felt sorry for a squirrel, AKA tree rat, AKA as mockingbirds know, the scourge of the  suburban world.

I almost felt  sorry for one some weeks ago. 
I was driving down my street and in the shade of a tree, plastered flat on the asphalt as spread out as he could get, was a squirrel trying to cool off.
Never mind that cars sometimes drive down the asphalt and he could get creamed at any moment.
That was one desperate little squirrel.

Yesterday, I was alerted by squealing and piping that my birdbath was in use.
I'll say.
The starlings were throwing a pool party in my birdbath, as many as a dozen of them as usual.
They were splashing and pushing and chasing each other.
Meanwhile, my poor neighbor squirrel Tigger was sitting in the shady grass near my back porch looking at the splashing water with longing.
He moved toward it, back and forth across the lawn, keeping to the shady spots.
But the shade didn't stretch the whole way to the fence where the birdbath is.
If he wanted water, he was going to have to get out into the sunlight.

For nearly a week now we have been under what the meteorologists call a Bermuda High.
I remember one in 1988 that lasted quite two weeks.
The first evening that temperatures fell below 90 before the sun went down, people came out in the streets to get some fresh air.
This one is just as bad.  Over the  weekend temps were 101 with 45% humidity --  a heat index of 115.

Yesterday was a little better, temps and humidity both coming down.
Not enough for Tigger though.  And there wasn't enough  shade on my lawn for a squirrel to keep cool in while trying to get to water.
He wasn't going to get in, you understand.
There's almost nothing a squirrel hates so much as getting wet.
Not even hot crushed peppers and safflower seed mixed with the millet in my bird feeder.
That's why I can train them to stay off the feeder by shooting them with a toy water gun.

I'll bet Tigger's  just smart enough to know that he would be cooler if he could take his pelt off and run around in his naked skin.
Anyway he looked pretty miserable.
He finally slouched away.  Maybe he can get a mouthful after dark, if he has the guts to try it.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- what does it matter?

A translator should never omit, add, or transpose verbage.

Septuagint adds verbage in some places and leaves it out in others with no apparent rhyme or reason.

The most obvious examples are in Exodus 37 and 38 with the commandments and construction of the tabernacle.

Understand that much of these chapters seems repetitive (it isn’t but you’ll want to read my book Narrating the Torah to see why), but Septuagint doesn’t simply leave out the seeming repetitions.  It leaves out parts of them, and other parts it moves to different chapters.

Some of Septuagint’s omissions undercut Jewish law.  It leaves out Deuteronomy 7:26, which prohibits bringing into a Jewish home anything dedicated to paganism.  The omission makes no sense – unless the translators thought it was politically incorrect.  But in that case, what about Leviticus 18:3ff which says not to behave like Egyptians and giving examples like incest and magic?  Egypt was famous for magic for centuries after the Septuagint was done, but these politically incorrect verses are translated in Septuagint; the Deuteronomy verse is relatively mild by comparison.

When I say transposition, I always have in mind that the translation should use good syntax in the target language.

Understand that sentence syntax varies from language to language; what makes perfectly good sense in Russian might produce unfortunate misunderstandings when translated to English, by putting an appositive phrase after the wrong substantive.  On the other hand, I did get into the opposite situation while translating the transcript of the Mendel Beilis trial from Russian to English.  The word order in the Russian created the impression that the prosecutor believed Beilis was not guilty and I preserved it into the English, then added a footnote so readers wouldn’t think I had done what I just said a translator shouldn’t do.  (Actually, the government knew before they arrested Beilis that he was innocent, because they knew who was guilty.)

Syntax is often a victim of a “literal” or word-for-word translation, another reason for readers to avoid such things.

The transpositions in Septuagint do not try to produce good syntax in Greek from good syntax in Hebrew.  One of them moves the making of the ark of the covenant from Exodus 37 to Exodus 38.  In Narrating the Torah, I go through the reasons why the cultural setting of Torah makes its arrangement in Biblical Hebrew comprehensible, and transpositions disrupt its understanding.

I’ll show in the last part of this page how omissions, additions, and transpositions invalidate a long-standing interpretation of Torah.  Clue: it’s something I haven’t laid a finger on so far.  Until then, you have a lot to learn to help you understand why it’s invalid.  Read on.

One urban legend is that Septuagint represents an older text or version of Torah than what the standard version records, but there is no support for that claim in archaeology.  When somebody mentioned this issue to me, I asked for a reference to scholarly work on the topic.  It turned out the person was thinking of Septuagint relative to the Masoretic text and that brings up another urban legend which I will discuss next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Gam

This use of the aspectless gerundive comes from the fact that gerunds can be used like nouns. Gerunds bear up under substantive usage.

 

Gam is usually translated “also” but it really is an emphatic. It appears with substantives and their substitutes, such as pronouns and participles. It never appears with anything formed from imperfect aspect – not imperatives, not narrative past, not a duplicate conditional. Probably the best example is Genesis 31:15.

הֲלוֹא נָכְרִיּוֹת נֶחְשַׁבְנוּ לוֹ כִּי מְכָרָנוּ וַיֹּאכַל גַּם־אָכוֹל אֶת־כַּסְפֵּנוּ:

 

Lavan got consideration in forming the marriage contracts between Yaaqov and his wives.  Instead of setting that consideration aside to return to them in case they were divorced or widowed, he has consumed it one way or another.  Otherwise they would want  to stay in the  jurisdiction where the contract was filed so that the court with which it was filed could handle their divorce or the division of Yaaqov’s estate if he died.  They have no reason to stay,  and they say so.

 

Now, if this was a simple duplicate conditional, it would read akhol yokhal but that’s not what is going on here; there’s no question that the money is gone. Using gam to emphasize what has happened requires insulating it from that imperfect aspect verb. It takes an aspectless gerundive to do that. Numbers 23:25 is a more extreme example, using aspectless gerundives to insulate gam from two different imperatives which, as you know, are formed from the imperfect aspect.

 

The point seems to be that gam requires something currently existing, like in Genesis 27:33, gam barukh yihyeh. The participle barukh refers to the blessing that Yitschaq has already given Yaaqov, and it emphasizes that this blessing is permanent. Permansive. Stative. The imperfect aspect never captures those attributes even when it is used with a past meaning. It’s a historical thing with Semitic languages; it’s illustrated in Delitzsch’s Assyrian grammar that he wrote for Hermann Strack’s Porta Linguarum Orientalium series in the late 1800s, after cuneiform had been deciphered and translated.

 

So now, look at Genesis 46:4.

אָנֹכִי אֵרֵד עִמְּךָ מִצְרַיְמָה וְאָנֹכִי אַעַלְךָ גַם־עָלֹה וְיוֹסֵף יָשִׁית יָדוֹ עַל־עֵינֶיךָ:

 

We’re insulating gam from the certainty epistemic aalkha which, like all epistemics, is based on imperfect. This hasn’t happened yet. Yaaqov is still alive. Gam aloh, with the aspectless gerundive, ignores the timing factor completely.

 

Of course, from the point of view of the narrator and his audience, this has already happened. The narrator can use the certainty epistemic because if it weren’t for the coming back to the Holy Land after the oppression, the narrator and his audience wouldn’t be in the Holy Land at the point where this grammar was fixed in the record.

 

But Yaaqov isn’t there yet. He has 17 more years to live. He won’t die in the Holy Land, unlike his father and grandfather. Gd is reassuring him that he really will occupy his niche in Makhpelah, where he buried Leah. Gd uses gam for this, and using gam, He has to use it with the aspectless gerundive because, as I keep saying, there’s no other grammar that will work here.

 

This explanation also helped me with Exodus 2:19.

וַתֹּאמַרְן ָ אִישׁ מִצְרִי הִצִּילָנוּ מִיַּד הָרֹעִים וְגַם־דָּלֹה דָלָה לָנוּ וַיַּשְׁקְ אֶת־הַצֹּאן:

 

After I realized what the duplicate unconditional did, I puzzled for a while over why there would be one here, because there’s no Jewish law involved with drawing water. Once I figured out the grammar of gam, I could see that the daloh was the other part of the gam phrase, and the dalah was the perfect verb for something that was over by the time R’uel’s daughters came back to tell him what happened.

 

And now the last lesson on “infinitives”.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

I'm blowin' up!

I had a lovely message from R. Bechhofer who posted a couple  of comments here.
It explains why the blog is blowin' up today.
R. Bechhofer has a series of audio lectures on Jerusalem Talmud, a subject that has gotten less attention than its bigger cousin, Babylonian Talmud.
http://www.yerushalmionline.org/audio-shiurim/

The text is here with  a Hebrew interface that won't give you any problems if you're really ready for Talmud.  My experience is that you'd better spend at least five years with Torah and at least another five with Mishnah before you go there. 
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/b/r/r0.htm

Since Talmud is partly written in Aramaic, you  also want this.
https://archive.org/details/manualofaramaicl00marguoft

It focuses on Babylonian Talmud but it's a start.

One of R. Bechhofer's comments in his audio lectures opened my eyes to a common feature between Jerusalem Talmud and Torah.
I'll be discussing it, Gd willing, toward the end of the blog because for me it was the final  nail in the coffin on a subject I'll get into in, keyn ahora, about a year.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint dictionary?

The fourth issue in translation is using a dictionary.  Nobody knows the full vocabulary of their first language, still less the full  vocabulary of their second or third or…  And that’s why we need dictionaries.

Archaeologists have turned up dictionaries in cuneiform relating two and sometimes three languages.  These helped them recover the relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian, for one thing, and those languages died centuries ago.

What dictionary a translator chooses and how he uses it is crucial to the quality of the translation.

If the setting of your document is a highly technical physics paper, but you use a high-school level dictionary aimed at helping a learner master the most frequent words and idioms in spoken language, you will get wrong all the technical terms that most people don’t use in conversation.  Been there, avoided that.

If the setting of your document is the 17^th century, but you always choose the first entry in the dictionary as the translation of a word, you will wind up using some 21^st century meanings inappropriate for the 17^th century.  You might translate John Milton’s “buxom air” as “bosomy air” giving an impression that he thought of “air” as some kind of sexy goddess.

If you have a document written in slang or other highly idiomatic language, and you use a standard dictionary that ignores slang, or you try to do a “literal” translation or word-for-word substition,  you’ll wind up with garbage.  Seen it.

And finally there are the people who ignore dictionary meanings in favor of traditional ones, which may be based on any of the mistakes I have discussed in the last few posts.

It’s not at all clear that a Greek-Hebrew dictionary existed when the Septuagint was done.  Based on the results, it’s also not at all clear that the translators had access to anybody who understood Hebrew words or grammar other than superficially. 

But what is clear so far in my research, is that the people who translated from Hebrew to Greek used Greek words in ways that don’t match how they were used in the Greek classics that have survived to our days, and don’t match how Greek words were used 300 years after Septuagint was done.

And they also don’t match the simple meanings or the legal connotations of the Hebrew words.

And that is the essence of a bad translation.  But it's not the last of a translator's problems.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- aspectless action

The aspectless gerundive can also be used where we would expect a conjugated verb.

 

But we expect a conjugated verb because of how our language works.  Ever tried to learn Classical or koine Greek?  I’m reading Polybius right now and he uses “infinitives”  almost as often as he uses  conjugated verbs.  So manage your expectations.

 

There are a few examples in Torah where a normally aspectual verb carries connotations that the context won’t support. One of them is Genesis 41:43.

וַיַּרְכֵּב אֹתוֹ בְּמִרְכֶּבֶת הַמִּשְׁנֶה אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ וַיִּקְרְאוּ לְפָנָיו אַבְרֵךְ וְנָתוֹן אֹתוֹ עַל כָּל־אֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם:

Let’s go through the alternatives and see why they don’t work.

 

If this had va-yiten, the narrative past, then we would still be enumerating how Pharaoh treated Yosef. Instead, we’re sealing off that list of examples.

 

If it had v’natan, that could be oblique modality, as if believing this clause depended on the truth of the other clauses. This isn’t a possible future action which the speaker is trying to convince the listener to believe in. It seals that as a result of the things done, we know that Pharaoh set Yosef over Egypt.

 

Genesis 41:40-43 resembles a structure in Jewish law called k’lal u-prat u-k’lal, two generalizations divided by a list of details. The generalizations are the framework of the law, sort of like perfect aspect verbs framing a narrative. The law has only been carried out if the details have been applied, somewhat like the narrative isn’t over until you know all the gory details. In this case it emphasizes the end of the specifications by using an aspectless verb.

 

In Exodus 7:27 and 8:11, there are more aspectless gerundives in similar situations. In the first one, we have im maen, which looks like the start of a duplicate conditional. However, using a duplicate conditional would mean there are conditions under which Pharaoh might not refuse – to let the Israelites go – and so far that hasn’t happened yet. We’re only up to the frogs and he refuses to let go until the firstborn die.

 

In 8:11 we have hakhbed. The verse opens with an evidentiary epistemic, which should have a narrative past after it as the evidence. However, this evidentiary epistemic is not asking for evidence; it comes after the verse about the stinking frogs, so it functions like a final certification. The next part of the verse says “because there was a respite”. Then we have Pharaoh hardening his heart, a beautifully gerundive use of this form, but if we used perfect aspect, we would be implying that he did so permanently and, according to the rest of the narrative, that wasn’t true. In this episode, Pharaoh hardening his heart is a job that a conjugated verb doesn’t work for, so it goes to the aspectless gerundive.

 

Next week I’ll discuss another job that only the aspectless gerundive works for.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- August 2016

Read the story in Mike's article about the guy who got snookered into a poisoned lawn.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot-living/2016/07/tips-taking-care-august-lawn/

How do you avoid this?  It's not foolproof but...
NO LONG TERM CONTRACTS
If somebody tries to get you to sign a long term yard care or tree care contract, get the hardcopy.
Take it to a lawyer.
Look for a paragraph which lets you opt out of any job.
Without paying as if it had been done.
When the July or August drought comes, this means you won't have to let the contractor run a mower over grass that isn't growing.
And pay for it whether he did the work or not.
On days when he shouldn't be using the mower anyway due to bad air quality.

It's like a car.  When you take your car in for work, there should be a written form.
Somewhere on the form  it says "I DO     DO NOT authorize additional work."
If the landscape contract does not allow you to opt out of work, DON'T SIGN.

If somebody tells you your trees need work, get their business card.
Look for their state tree expert license number.
If it doesn't have one, email your State Ag agency with the name and contact info on the card.
If it does, have them provide you  with a written contract for the specific work.
MAKE SURE  THERE'S AN OPT OUT  FOR OTHER WORK  AND USE IT.
That  was the mistake of the guy in Mike's article who wound up with the poisoned property.

Make the contractor provide you with a list of every chemical he plans to use.
The list has to have the street name and the chemical name.
ASK FOR THE EPA REPORT ON EVERY CHEMICAL.

If the EPA says a landscape chemical is carcinogenic, don't sign the contract.
Example: if somebody wants you to pay them to use Roundup  on your property,
DON'T hire them.  Monsanto is facing lawsuits from farmers with cancer whom they forced to use Roundup as part of the warranty on GMO seeds.

Now the other problem Mike talks about, the lawn care product with the illegal nitrogen content.
STORES ARE IN BUSINESS TO MOVE GOODS AND GET MONEY.
They will tell you anything they have to.
They will tell  you uncomposted hardware mulch is good for trees; it's not.
They will sell lawn care products that are illegal in your state.
YES, ask for their recommendation.
Make them show you the bag.
Take pictures of the numbers on the bag and the name of the product.
GO HOME.
Look up Mike's article and also  his article on potash and phosphorus.
If the label has illegal numbers on it, email the state Department of Natural  Resources.
Send them the photos.
Send them the name of the store.
Use the store website locator to find the store number and address.
Put that in your email.
Stores selling illegal products need attention from the state DNR.

Mike has decades of experience with inexpensive ways of keeping your landscape  healthy and poison free.
Go to his You Bet Your Garden archives online, find the problem you have, and fix it.
Yourself.
There is no individual or company who will do things so cheaply or so poison free.
You will wind up paying more than you have to for work you didn't need done that uses illegal products or poisons your landscape, your pets, your children.
Do it yourself.
The right way.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved