I'm just saying -- the sequel

Last week I wrote about how the chickadees' behavior may mean a harsh winter.

Yeah.  Winter is coming.  You're going  to see snow fly.  Get over it.
Seriously. 
If you have storage space in your home, you have no excuse not to be prepared for winter.
Stock up now on your canned food, crackers, bottled water, dry roast peanuts, dried fruit, jerky.
Stuff you don't have to cook.
Three weeks' worth. 
We've had back to back storms that kept the tractor trailers outside the Beltway that long.

Toilet paper doesn't go bad; get it.  Lots of it.  NOW.

Buy your calcium chloride and kitty litter.
Get a snow shovel.
De-icers don't work well on snow, they only keep pavement clean when they can get to it. 
You  have to shovel before you spread.

Get your batteries, your LED lamp, your battery powered radio.
Get some long johns, some ski gloves, some snow boots and thick socks, a hat and a scarf.
Get your chimney cleaned if you have a fireplace.
Keep up with your laundry, or buy extras because sometimes you can't get to the laundromat and sometimes a water main breaks.
Get a couple of Mylar emergency blankets for when the heat goes out.

Listen to the news and when it's going to snow, dress for it and drive for it.
Or stay off the roads.

Whining will not be tolerated.

I'm just saying...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- {{citation needed}}

In 1851 the Bagster edition of Brenton’s English translation of Septuagint included an introduction from the translator, in which he makes a claim about Samaritan Pentateuch – which I believe he never saw.

Brenton claimed that when Samaritan Pentateuch and Torah differ, Septuagint is much more like Jewish Hebrew than it is like Samaritan Hebrew.  Brenton weasel-words this claim by restricting it to “important and material points.”  He never defines what he means by important or material.

He also said that in “many” places where Samaritan Hebrew and Septuagint both differ from Biblical Hebrew, they resemble each other.  As you know, “many” is the classic weasel wording that earns the remark {{citation needed}} in so many places on so many Wikipedia pages.

{{citation found}}, I think.  After digging around online a while, I found an 1848 publication with an article on this exact subject.  The author of the article, Rev. Walter Fitzgerald, said that, taking both similarities and differences into account (my emphasis), he believes that it’s a wash (my phrase) as to which of Septuagint or Samaritan more closely resembles Jewish Hebrew.  Brenton didn’t quote that part. 

And Brenton sneers at the “crooked” letters of the Samaritan alphabet.  I have traced this sneer, I believe, to another 1848 publication which is available online.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Brenton copied this information – and he did it without attribution – and that he not only could not read Hebrew, but he had never seen Samaritan.

To do that, he would have to access Rev. Brian Walton’s Biblia Sacra, also known as the London Polyglot, published by Bagster’s in the 1600s, 2 centuries earlier.  This work had eight versions of the Torah, including the Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic, each with a separate Latin translation.  The polyglot is available free on Internet Archive in 10 sections. 

Not only would Brenton have to see this work, but he would also have to know how the Samaritans pronounce and interpret their Pentateuch to evaluate how much it was like Jewish Hebrew.  He could only do that in his time if he worked among the Samaritans to find these things out.  Apparently Ze’ev ben Hayyim was the first person ever to do this – after 1950 -- and his five-volume work was available only in Hebrew until 2000 CE when an English translation of Volume V was published. 

And so Brenton’s urban legend about the relationship between Torah, Septuagint, and Samaritan requires him to do work that he probably could do only if he could read both versions of Hebrew.  But if he could read Jewish Hebrew and wanted to do an accurate translation from the Greek, he failed abysmally. 

But it gets worse. 

In 2014 I discovered information that shows Rev. Fitzgerald was also wrong.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- et 1

Possibly one of the most misunderstood elements of Biblical Hebrew – now that we understand the vav prefix – is the particle et.  It seems to show up randomly.  As I keep saying, a language doesn’t invent or use things randomly.  It always means something by what it uses.

In Biblical Hebrew, direct objects of transitive action verbs, when they are definite nouns – they either start with the definite article or are in the construct state – sometimes are preceded by et, spelled alef tav, with either tseire or segol under the alef.  Not all definite direct objects are marked with this particle and a lot of ink has been spilled trying to figure out what’s going on.

Here are the easy rules for et that I have worked out so far.

Rule 1: et only appears after a transitive verb.

Rule 2: et only appears with definite nouns.

Rule 3: et only appears with nouns that are the direct object of a transitive verb AND are not governed by a preposition.

Rule 4: et which is marked with tseire always has a conjunctive trop connecting it to the other words in the accusative phrase, and follows a word marked with a disjunctive trop. (I’ll say more on trop later.)

Rule 5: et which is marked with segol never has trop with it and always connects to its accusative phrase with a hyphen. 

I think I have found two more rules.

Rule 6.  The tseire version appears in  et sarah  ishto and some similar phrases; with kal meaning “all”; with asher and a collective noun phrase, and with something that is being considered as a whole.

Rule 7.  The segol version appears in et achiv et hevel and some similar phrases; with kal meaning “every”; and with something considered as a part, in contrast to or distinction with with something else.  This includes situations with the demonstrative ha-zeh/ha-zot, “this”; ha-hu/ha-hi, “that”; or ha-eleh, “these, those”.  metimes the restrictive modifier is not expressed, such as in cases where the Holy Land is obvious.

Absorb the last two rules over the week and then I’ll show you some examples.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- it's complicated

The crickets and chickadees are sending me mixed messages about winter.

On the one  hand, my annual cricket count stands at three.
Those were in the August/September time frame.
Ought to mean a cold wet period this winter like in December.

On the other hand, the chickadees are never far from my bird feeder.
This is supposed to be a sign of a hard winter.
I found out that the chickadees aren't eating all that food.
They stash food in various places to get to in the winter.
So this bodes ill, especially in the DC region where people have this fantasy that if they make it home without a wreck one day, they're golden for the rest of the winter.
Tow truck operators and body shops are sure to make a killing this winter.
If the chickadees are right.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint, Samaritan and Torah

Now that I have brought up Qumran, I’m sure some of you are saying, “but Qumran proves that Septuagint is closer to the Hebrew than Samaritan.”  Class, what does that have to be?

Right, an urban legend.  When I finished my verse by verse comparison the first time through, it turned out that Qumran settles about 640 or less than 11% of the differences; it settles 55% of the differences in favor of Jewish Torah.  But remember, in places where Jewish and Samaritan agree, Qumran may have a difference.  And also remember that Qumran has Greek for only 7 of the 24 books in the Tannakh (the Jewish count), and it’s in such tiny fragments it isn’t even worth publishing a book about.  Since Qumran proves nothing about Septuagint, the claim has to be false.

This time, I know the source of the urban legend: it’s in the 1851 introduction to Lancelot Brenton’s English translation of Septuagint. 

The first thing you have to know about this English translation is that it’s bad.  It’s really bad.  It’s not clear how it got to be so bad.  Brenton lived in Victorian England, a period when studies of the Classics in both Greek and Latin were still required for admittance to a university.  We don’t know where he got his education or how well he did at it.  We don’t know what resources he had access to, except that we know he lived on the Isle of Wight but his publisher’s office was in London.  That is, to get published at all, he had to go to London to meet with his publisher, and this opened up to him all the resources available in London.

What is also clear is that he could have used Liddell and Scott’s famous Greek lexicon which was in its third edition.  Unless it was drastically re-organized in the last century and a half, it suggests that Brenton had all the faults of an inexperienced or careless translator.

He uses the first definition in the dictionary in cases where a later part of the entry works better.  He could have avoided this if he realized that Liddell is a lexicon of Classical Greek by and large, and Septuagint was not Classical Greek but koine.  This falls in that category I was talking about of using a dictionary with the wrong focus.

Sometimes Brenton uses meanings for one Greek word that apply to another Greek word.  He uses “ugly” for aoratos, a word that actually means “unseen, invisible.”  You can’t call an invisible object ugly; it’s a conceptual error.

Sometimes he seems to ignore the dictionary completely and make things up out of his head.  In Genesis 1:16, Septuagint uses arkhi for Hebrew memshelet and Brenton turns it into “regulate”, which Liddell & Scott does not have for arkhi at all.

Finally, Brenton sometimes translates according to a received meaning in English which the Greek doesn’t support.

And then, just in time for the 1851 edition of his translation, he added an introduction which is the probable source for your urban legend above.  Brenton claims that in “many passages” where Samaritan Pentateuch and Septuagint BOTH differ from the Hebrew, they resemble each other and Septuagint more closely resembles the Hebrew.

I think I have discovered Brenton’s source for this claim; it’s online and I’ll talk about it next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- participles

Some of you are screaming that I haven’t covered everything. No more I have. I haven’t talked about participles. That’s because I didn’t get a clue about them until I was going through Parshah Va-yechi for the second time after discovering Cook’s dissertation. Here’s the deal.

There are three verb forms in Biblical Hebrew that are gerundive, but apparently with different functions.  Two of them are quite rare so it’s no big deal that I didn’t  discuss them until  now.

One is the progressive. It often is used gerundively and therefore works substantively when prefixed with the definite article. See Genesis 48:5.

 וְעַתָּה שְׁנֵי־בָנֶיךָ הַנּוֹלָדִים לְךָ בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם עַד־בֹּאִי אֵלֶיךָ מִצְרַיְמָה לִי־הֵם אֶפְרַיִם וּמְנַשֶּׁה כִּרְאוּבֵן וְשִׁמְעוֹן יִהְיוּ־לִי:

Ha-noladim is a substantivized progressive from the nifal binyan. As such, it legitimizes Yosef’s sons. This might be the source of the midrash that their mother converted, because only the child of a Jewess can be considered a Jew. As a progressive, ha-noladim takes on the immediate past connotation in this context: “the sons who have been born.”

The aspectless gerundive is also naturally substantivized. One form takes object suffixes, as you see in Exodus 13:17.

וַיְהִי בְּשַׁלַּח פַּרְעֹה אֶת־הָעָם וְלֹא־נָחָם אֱלֹהִים דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּים כִּי קָרוֹב הוּא כִּי ׀ אָמַר אֱלֹהִים פֶּן־יִנָּחֵם הָעָם בִּרְאֹתָם מִלְחָמָה וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָיְמָה:

This pretty much means “at the time of their seeing”. It takes on adverbial functions the progressive refuses to take on.

The first participle I came across in Torah was Genesis 48:4 which goes like this:

וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי הִנְנִי מַפְרְךָ וְהִרְבִּיתִךָ וּנְתַתִּיךָ לִקְהַל עַמִּים וְנָתַתִּי אֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת לְזַרְעֲךָ אַחֲרֶיךָ אֲחֻזַּת עוֹלָם:

The bolded word is a hifil participle formed from the progressive, which most people would nowadays call an active present participle. Notice that it has an object suffix.  The reason we need a gerundive here is because of hin’ni, an emphatic which has to be followed by a substantive. If you could use a straight progressive with a personal suffix, this would use progressive. Apparently that’s not possible to get what the verse wants to say, so it uses a participle. Process of elimination, like with the aspectless gerundive.

The distinction between participles and actual verbs is a 20^th century development. Max Margolis’ grammar of Talmudic Aramaic (done for Hermann Strack’s Clavis Linguarum Semiticarum series) gives a number of functions for participles, some of which are taken on by Biblical Hebrew’s progressive aspect – a 21^st century development.   Arabic’s aism alfa’il gets labeled a participle, but it is really a way of converting the action of the verb into a modifier or a substantive.  Price gives a list of things that Arabic uses participles for and some of them overlap with  uses of progressive aspect in Biblical Hebrew.  Ancient Semitic languages work differently from western languages and slapping labels from one language on another language interferes with understanding it.

Finally, a subject where my conclusions are kind of shaky and you’re welcome to chime in with your understanding. If you know of a dissertation that covers my points, I’d love it if you could get permission to post it on the web and provide pointers to papers citing it. I’ll post a link to your page where you post this.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

The World is coming to a beginning!

Tonight is the beginning of the world!

Start all over.  Forget past "failures", but learn from them.
I did.

I always had trouble losing weight.
Then I got serious about getting my 8 hours of sleep a night.
It got easier not to pig out.

I cut portion sizes. 
I lost a clothing size.

I tripled how much I moved.
I lost another clothing size.

I eased up during the stinking hot spell in August.
I toughened up starting at 911.
I'm relearning Tai Ji using stuff on the net.
I prowl near my house taking snaps with my camera app on my cell phone.
Soon I'll be looking for photo ops all around my neighborhood.
And doing Tae Bo.

Do it.
When you're cooking, don't sit down while it browns, simmers, stews, bubbles or boils. 
Pace your place.
Dust.
Vacuum.
Clean stuff you don't usually clean.
Then wash your hands and dish up.

Get rid of sodas.
All sodas -- diet too -- contribute to Type II diabetes and fat around your middle.
Sales of diet sodas have dropped in the last couple of years.
The diabetes epidemic is slowing.
The fat epidemic is slowing.
It's like what happened when so many people stopped smoking --  lung cancer stopped being the #1 killer cancer.
Diabetes and obesity are killers, too. Learn how to fight them off, then do it.

Try try try again.
Never give up.

Start all over.
Tonight's  the night.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved