Fact-Checking the Torah -- Modal continuity

The other thing we discover by understanding 21^st century grammar for Biblical Hebrew, is cultural continuity. One of the modals Dr. Cook discusses morphs for use in later writing of the same culture.

This nun-final modal appears in Torah in Avraham’s negotiation with Gd over the cities of the plain (Genesis 18:17ff), which happened about 2350 BCE. Five times he uses the nun-final form, which Dr. Cook defines as an uncertainty epistemic; it shows that Avraham isn’t claiming that he absolutely knows there are less than 50 righteous people on Sodom, he’s saying “just supposing?”

This form appears throughout Tannakh. It’s in the rest of Torah; it’s in Ruth and Samuel (in feminine gender!); it’s in Yeshayahu and Yermiyahu; it’s in Yehezqel.

After the Babylonian Captivity, a slightly different version of the nun-final form shows up over and over again in both Mishnah and Gemara. Why? The very first Mishnah is a perfect test case.

First, Mishnah Brakhot 1:1 says “From what time are they supposed to read the Shema.” “Read” is this nun-final version, qorin. This is not a commandment  to read the Shema (that it is required in Jewish law is a given here), qorin means something that is supposed to happen, along with the fact that it is supposed to happen at a specific time.

Second, a rabbi’s sons come to tell him they haven’t read the Shema yet; have they violated Jewish law? He says “maybe,” chayavin. Why does he use this morphology? Because, as the complete paragraph shows, he is only supposing they did wrong. He probably doesn’t have two colleagues with him so as to constitute a court that can rule on the subject for sure, leading to a penalty.  (And he’s a relative who can neither testify in nor judge the case.)

Third, the Mishnah continues with a reference to ha-neekhalin, things that are supposed to be eaten by priests from the sacrifices. Again, this might not happen, and  the rest of the statement gives a timing issue related to the timing of reading the Shema.

The nun-sofit form is used to report what the law says.  When Mishnah reports the facts of the case, in the story about the rabbi’s sons, it uses what we think of as the “normal” masculine plural endings, for something that actually happened.

The nun-sofit form appears in Midrash Halakhah about the time of the Muslim conquest;

in Mishneh Torah by Maimonides during the Crusades;

in Shulchan Arukh by Caro in the Renaissance;

in R. Shneur Zalman of Liady’s Shulchan Arukh ha-Rav in the Enlightenment;

and in Shlomo Ganzfried’s Kitsur Shulchan Arukh in early Victorian times.

They all use it the same way Mishnah does, and they use it when they are not quoting from Mishnah.

This has consequences far beyond proving what a bad translation Septuagint is, but that goes in another part of the blog so for now, I will move on to something else.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- punctuation

I’m almost done but I want to cover two more features. I mentioned the trop on et a few lessons ago; “trop” are marks guiding cantillation of the Tannakh.  To understand this section, get familiar with this page

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/hr/intro.htm#purp

and the table here

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/hr/tables.htm

 

The important column in the table is named “Shape”.

 

You can see the text marked up with the trop here and also listen to it.

http://bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp?ACTION=displayid&id=7

You can copy this text off and paste it into Word for study but you can’t download the audio.

 

It’s also on the Mechon Mamre site but it’s not as neat.

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/cu0101.htm

 

In the war against “and”, the important mark is the bottomless triangle called etnach.  It marks the main division inside a verse.  It’s not in every verse.

 

When I rewrote Narrating the Torah based on Dr. Cook’s dissertation and replaced all the “and”s that represent a vav of narrative past, oblique modality, and so on, with an accurate translation, I still had a lot of “and”s  in there, mostly inside the verse instead of at the start.

 

So I went back through it and found that a lot of the “and”s coincided with the etnach in that  verse, and usually were part of a narrative past.  In most of those places (maybe 70%) I replaced the “and” by semi-colon and not only did the verses still make sense, they made better sense.  (I used colon in some places with the same result.)

 

So then I checked the trop in other places, and behold! Punctuating in coordination with the trop, made better sense in English. 

 

I haven’t learned to sing it.  (You don’t want me to sing it.  You really don’t.)  What I’m saying is what that first link says; trop are a method of orally punctuating the material to mark changes in thought, separation of phrases, and important words.  Punctuation is just as important to the meaning of Biblical Hebrew as it is to English, and that’s what trop is – punctuation.  Looking at the trop is a last resort when you have tried everything and the verse still doesn’t make sense.

 

But if I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it now.  There is no such thing as a perfect translation.  No two languages have words for all the same concepts because no two language record identical cultures.  Every culture has concepts that mark it off from all the others.  No two languages express the same features using the same grammatical structures – they don’t all have the same cultural nuances requiring special grammar. 

 

Translating is always tricky because it’s easy to make mistakes; it’s complicated because you can’t do a word-for-word substitution and get the idea across accurately.  That’s part of why I did this page on the blog.  I wanted people to understand that understanding Torah requires understanding it in Biblical Hebrew to avoid all the mistakes and complications of translations.  And as I hope I’ve suggested in the discussions, sometimes understanding requires understanding the entire culture,  not just isolated words.  Go to the Fact-Checking part of the blog and start reading at about post #130, called Lost  in Translation; it starts a section about translations and commentaries that makes this same point from a different perspective. 

 

It’s up to you.  How close to the meaning do you want to get?

One more thing about trop and we're almost done.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

DIY -- new favorite dessert

I've made cheesecake from scratch but this is better.

1 9 inch crust, either a short pie crust or a graham cracker crust

1 package cream cheese, softened
1 egg
1 TBSP lemon juice
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt

1 21 ounce can pie filling

Preheat oven to 350.
Mix cream cheese with  next 4 ingredients.
Pour into crust, bake 20 minutes.  It might be lightly brown on top.
Take out, turn oven up  to 400.
Spoon pie filling to cover cream cheese.
Put back in and bake another 20 minutes.  If the  crust is starting to burn, put a ring of foil over it.
Let cool and enjoy!
Keep in the fridge.

This is better because there's fruit with it. 
OK, the fruit is heavily sugared; you're not going to eat the whole thing in one day right?
My preference is berry pie fillings, not apple, peach or apricot.
The berries give more of a color contrast with the cream cheese.
YMMV.
I found this online.

Another suggestion is put 2/3 of a 15 ounce  can of pie filling in a yellow cake,
or especially raspberry or cherry in a chocolate cake.
You can use the leftovers in oatmeal.

I have a recipe by George Greenstein for  something called wine loaf.
It makes two large loaf cakes.
I love it with plumped dried fruit and nuts in various combinations.
I'm  going to try layering the cake with pie filling.

Dessert is back!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Septuagint and "and"

The 21^st century way of looking at Biblical Hebrew has other important fallout besides identifying modality that Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch have in common, but which Septuagint never reflects.

First, it shows that Septuagint gets translations more wrong than anybody realized, even in the 20^th century. The main fact in the proof of this is the simple word “and.”

Every time a vav shows up in Biblical Hebrew prefixed to a verb or any other word, Septuagint translates it as “and”. The habit has persisted ever since, and that’s why so many verses in your Bible start with “and.”

Dr. Cook shows in his 2002 dissertation that in most cases, the vav prefix does not mean “and”.

In a large number of cases, it’s a prefix for a grammatical form called “narrative past.” In Biblical Hebrew, the narrations have verbs in them that until now have mostly been classed as “aorist”. This comes from the model of Greek grammar, which uses the same stem for the aorist past tense and for the future tense. It was a convenient label for scholars in the Classics who turned their attention to Hebrew, but it has nothing to do with how Biblical Hebrew really works.

In Biblical Hebrew, what really happens is that the vav is attached to an imperfect aspect verb, not to a tense-conjugated verb. With a vav, and in verb-subject order, this narrative past reflects an action in a narrative before the narrative is over, but which happened in the past relative to the person telling the story.

The second largest number of situations where vav does not mean “and” is with a 2^nd person verb, in either imperfect or perfect aspect, which indicates a commandment. It also shows up with a 3^rd person verb, in either imperfect or perfect aspect, in descriptions of rituals which, therefore, turn out also to be commandments.

On the Hebrew blog I discuss why deontic imperatives are inappropriate in these situations, and also the difference that the verb aspect and person make in the significance of the commandment. I go into more detail in Narrating the Torah.

The next example of why Septuagint was wrong is that, with perfect aspect verbs, in verb-subject syntax, vav signals a subordinate clause of condition, purpose, result, cause or effect, called oblique modality.

And there are situations where the vav should be translated “but” or “[so] that,” or even “for” because it is the linchpin of a coordinate or relative clause or a subordinate clause that uses an imperfect aspect verb, not perfect aspect.

I know this is all very new to you. As I said, I discussed it all step by step on the Biblical Hebrew page. In Narrating the Torah I discuss examples in excruciating detail.

But what it means is that the habit of translating vav as “and”, which began in the Septuagint and has continued to the present, is proof that the translation of a word is not its definition. And that all translations which don’t take 21^st century grammar into account, are wrong to some extent. Which is why I insist that you can’t understand work in translation, only in the source document for the translations. And for Torah, that’s in Biblical Hebrew.

Which had an effect on Hebrew in later times.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- dagesh redux

Call this an advanced lesson on dagesh. I told you previously that one of the rules governing dagesh is using it after a short vowel. I also told you that it occurs in piel and hitpael verbs. You have seen it in other places, or you will see it, as you keep reading Torah.

There are three situations which some writers refer to as gemination and there’s a lot of history behind that. I don’t agree with some of what I’ve read on the subject. My classification is this.

True gemination in verbs occurs only after a short vowel. It is marked by dagesh in Hebrew. Arabic does a similar thing; its sign is called shadda. Verb gemination in Hebrew applies regularly throughout the conjugations in the binyanim UNLESS it would fall in a guttural (alef, heh, chet, ayin) or resh.

The piel, pual, and hitpael binyanim are famous for gemination. Other Semitic languages function like this.  Akkadian geminates in the middle of its II-stem, cognate to piel, and the related stem which is much like the hitpael. Assyrian has the II-stem like its parent Akkadian. Arabic does it in Form II and Form V which is cognate to the hitpael. Ugaritic does it in the D-stem and the related stem that uses a t-infix.

Assimilation is the disappearance of a letter in one or more binyan, with dagesh in the following letter. This happens in nifal in Hebrew, and in the cognate Akkadian and Assyrian IV-stem. It also happens in hitpael, quite rarely; the premier example is Numbers 22:25 where the ass pushes herself into the wall.

Arabic has an “assimilated” verb root class but it does not use dagesh.  These are verbs starting in waw, not nun.

Contraction is where two identical letters appear in sequence, and they contract into one. This happens in some parts of the conjugation of polel verbs in Hebrew.  A polel verb has a root with the second and third letters identical. One example is bishesh, “was embarrassed.”  Some polel verbs drop the third root letter in nifal, if they have that binyan, but there’s no dagesh in the remaining letter because it is deduplicated. There are some examples in Torah.

There’s a problem between what is a stem (or Form in Arabic) and what is a verb root class. The polel is a verb root class in Hebrew. Its appearance in various binyanim is the evidence that it is not a binyan (or Form). Arabic has the “doubled” verb root class which is cognate to the polel and the various Forms in Arabic show up in verbs of this root class.

Cyrus Gorden mistakenly labeled his “L” class (in Ugaritic) a stem; it’s the same thing as polel.  Likewise, he mistakenly named his “R” class a stem; it’s a quadriliteral verb root class, both halves of  which  are identical.  Hebrew has them:  hitmahmeah.  Arabic has  them, and they conjugate in more than one of the Forms.  Gordon made his mistake due to a historical concept which some scholars of Semitic languages disagree with.

One more subject, something people wrestle with in their street language which  is also complicated in Biblical Hebrew.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- et 2

If you didn’t see that title coming, you need to read more Shakespeare.

Here I’ll demonstrate some cases illustrating rules 6 and 7 from last week.

Leviticus 7:2-4 rings the changes, as Exodus 29 rang the changes on “passives”.

ב בִּמְקוֹם אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁחֲטוּ אֶת־הָעֹלָה יִשְׁחֲטוּ אֶת־הָאָשָׁם וְאֶת־דָּמוֹ יִזְרֹק עַל־הַמִּזְבֵּחַ סָבִיב:

ג וְאֶת־כָּל־חֶלְבּוֹ יַקְרִיב מִמֶּנּוּ אֵת הָאַלְיָה וְאֶת־הַחֵלֶב הַמְכַסֶּה אֶת־הַקֶּרֶב:

ד וְאֵת שְׁתֵּי הַכְּלָיֹת וְאֶת־הַחֵלֶב אֲשֶׁר עֲלֵיהֶן אֲשֶׁר עַל־הַכְּסָלִים וְאֶת־הַיֹּתֶרֶת עַל־הַכָּבֵד עַל־הַכְּלָיֹת יְסִירֶנָּה:

In verse 2, the olah is referred to here in contrast with the asham and they both take the segol version of et.  The blood is being considered as a specific part of the sacrifice so it does the same.  Same thing for the chelev at the start of verse 3; there is more than one place to get chelev and the et kal shows that each one of them is meant.

The alyah, the “fat tail” is considered as an entire entity, separate unto itself, and there are halakhot that specifically address component parts of it in Mishnah and Gemara.

The kidneys are another entity, like the alyah, and require the tseire version; the segol version is used with the chelev because it is considered in contrast to the actual kidneys and also to the other kind  of chelev.  The yoteret is listed in contrast to the liver of which it is part.

Test yourself.  Go through Torah and watch for the word erets.  I’ll give you the main examples that demonstrate my point.

Genesis 1:1 deals with heaven and earth as wholes.  This is part of the basis for the midrash that the creation story isn’t about the exact order in which things happened.  We don’t get the details.

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ:

Exodus 20:11.  Notice the contrast with the tseire version in Genesis 1:1; this verse is dealing with the four different parts of the creation – actually five when you get to yom ha-shabbat.  There is no definite article with yom, but it is understood because this is a construct phrase.

כִּי שֵׁשֶׁת-יָמִים עָשָׂה יְהוָה אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֶת-הַיָּם וְאֶת-כָּל-אֲשֶׁר-בָּם, וַיָּנַח, בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי; עַל-כֵּן, בֵּרַךְ יְהוָה אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת—וַיְקַדְּשֵׁהוּ

When there’s a restrictive sense to erets, we get the segol version as in Deuteronomy 3:8:

נִּקַּח בָּעֵת הַהִוא אֶת־הָאָרֶץ מִיַּד שְׁנֵי מַלְכֵי הָאֱמֹרִי אֲשֶׁר בְּעֵבֶר הַיַּרְדֵּן מִנַּחַל אַרְנֹן עַד־הַר חֶרְמוֹן:

It’s pretty obvious that the only land concerned here is that of Sichon and Og.  It can’t possibly mean all of the world.  That’s why it has segol. 

We have a problem in Leviticus 26:42.  We have three contrasted covenants using the segol version, and we also have erets as a definite noun with NO et.  Why not?  Beats me.  Unless the emphasis  of the topic order clause  means et  shouldn’t be  used.

וְזָכַרְתִּי אֶת־בְּרִיתִי יַעֲקוֹב וְאַף אֶת־בְּרִיתִי יִצְחָק וְאַף אֶת־בְּרִיתִי אַבְרָהָם אֶזְכֹּר וְהָאָרֶץ אֶזְכֹּר:

Just a few more dogs and cats to cover.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

Slight change

The look of Twitter posts is going to change a bit.
The  automatic feed app is going away at the  end of the month.
I'll be posting manually.
This won't affect you as a follower or other Twitter user.
It's the link between Blogger and Twitter that changes.
If somebody publishes another way of  doing this automatically I'll try it  out.
But  my Facebook posts are done manually so this is no big deal.