21st Century Bible Hebrew -- noun-verb relationships

Genesis 1:20-21

כ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם:

כא וַיִּבְרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֔ים אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים וְאֵ֣ת כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה ׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת אֲשֶׁר֩ שָֽׁרְצ֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם לְמִֽינֵהֶ֗ם וְאֵ֨ת כָּל־ע֤וֹף כָּנָף֙ לְמִינֵ֔הוּ וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב:

Translation: Gd said the waters will swarm with swarming things, soul of life; and fliers will fly over the earth against the raqia of heaven.

Gd created the large taninim; and all souls of life that creep that swarm the waters for their kinds, and all the fliers of wing for its kind, Gd manifested its goodness.

We’re going to focus on the first three words.

יִשְׁרְצוּ	swarm, imperfect aspect, 3rd plural
שֶׁרֶץ	swarming thing, noun, singular
שָׁרְצוּ	swarm, perfect aspect, 3rd plural

The root is sharats, swarm, things that reproduce in large numbers. The noun, as you can see, has two segols for vowels. The plural is שְׁרָצִים .

Now you can understand the relationship between two other words in the verse, except for one thing.

עוֹף	flying thing
יְעוֹפֵף	flies, imperfect aspect, hollow verb

Of is a verb with a central vav.  A similar verb root class in Arabic is called “hollow” because in some parts of the conjugation, the central vav disappears. In Arabic one of three things might replace it but in Hebrew, it’s either replaced by a qamats for “a”, or the verb sprouts a second copy of the last letter.  That’s what we have for the related verb.

This feature marks that this is the piel binyan for punctuated repetition. Flying things do not fly 24/7. They have to land to mate and lay eggs, for example, and birds and bats have homes in trees and caves as well as bees having their hollow trunks and hives.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- Adventures in Argyle 2 changing colors -- or not

No, you haven't missed anything. I posted about starlings last week.

So how many of you have already finished your Argyle top?

I'm serious. If all you were waiting for was a pattern, you got it last time and if you went old-style and have your seams all sewn up, that's terrific. Comment on this post with a link to a photo of your work. Encourage some others to try it.

Me, I ran into some issues that I'll tell you about in a couple of weeks and I got backed up, so for those of you who want to knit your argyle pullover in the round, let's keep going.

So here are instructions from my basic pullover to start us off.

1.  Cable on your hem and join leaving a long tail.  You'll see why you need that in the next part. 

2.  Do your rib and knit one round above that.

3.  Get a bobbin of the diamond color and knit one stitch of that right above the tail, then knit your rib color around to where the next diamond goes. For every diamond in your pattern, you need to add in one bobbin in that color and make a single stitch for the base of the diamond. Make sure these are evenly spaced.

Now you are back at your tail where the first diamond is. In the second round, the diamonds need 3 stitches.
Knit into the base stitch of the diamond in the same color. Knit one more stitch in that color.

Now use a Fair Isle technique to lock the colors together so there aren't any gaps around the diamonds.
Pick up the next stitch knitwise.
Wrap the diamond color around the needle THEN
Get a bobbin of the rib color, put a loop around the needle THEN
Unwrap the diamond color so it locks in the rib color but disappears to the back of the work AND
Pull the rib color through.

Knit to the next diamond.
At the last stitch before the bottom of the diamond, use the same technique to lock in the diamond color, drop the rib color yarn, and do the other two stitches for this round of the diamond.
Add a rib color bobbin to get you to the next diamond.

Keep this up for the whole round.  When you get back to your first diamond, make the third stitch in the round.
When I finished, I had ten diamonds, and 9 bobbins of each color, plus a ball of yarn in each color that I was using instead of buying any more bobbins.

At this point you will need two more techniques.

You are going to turn and purl the next round, and I will show you how to not leave a gap.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and grammar

When DH splits up Noach’s flood between J and P, and Numbers 16:37 between four different sources, it goes with a claim that some stories in Torah are composites; that is the “fifth pillar”. I’m going to discuss a claim previously examined by Cassuto in the 1940s, but from an SWLT point of view that Cassuto could not have because SWLT developed after Cassuto published his “eight lectures”.

Genesis 27 is the story of Yaaqov obtaining Esav’s blessing by following his mother’s orders to take goat stew to Yitschaq as consideration for the blessing. One of the pivots of the DH claim was that Rivqah used the same phrase to give orders to Yaaqov, that Yitschaq used to tell Esav to go hunting and bring deer stew to him as consideration for the blessing.

The phrase is hineh…v’atah…, “behold…and now…”. DH used to divide each of these phrases before v’atah and then it claimed that the first part of what Yitschaq said came from E and the second part from J, while the reverse is true for what Rivqah said.

There is a really good SWLT reason not to split that clause; it is a standard structure in Hebrew. It appears in Exodus 32:9-10, and in Samuel I 18:22. It’s an idiom.

An idiom may look like separate words to somebody from outside the language, but it’s not, and that’s why using a dictionary to look up the individual words in an idiom always produces a bad translation. Every competent translator knows that, and it’s why the phrase “literal translation” should tell you not to buy a bad translation.

Here, too, splitting up the idiom as if it were just separate words can’t be a successful strategy unless there’s evidence that the same thing works in other languages and other texts. Without that evidence, it becomes another extraordinary claim, etc. etc. etc.

Somebody needs to go back through all of DH, compare all the splits to Biblical Hebrew idioms, and eliminate every split that comes in the middle of an idiom.

BUT they have to examine splits compared to the 21^st century understanding of the grammar of Biblical Hebrew. The following splits have to be eliminated:

·         Between an evidentiary epistemic and the narrative past verb that is its evidence, which sometimes spreads over two verses. Genesis 13:1-3 is an example of this spread.

·         Between the va-y’hi that introduces a time expression and the narrative past which names what happened at that time, which sometimes spreads over multiple verses. The start of Genesis 14 is probably the best example of this type of spread.

Most of all, however, all splits need to be re-examined if they coordinate with the chapters. The chapters are an invention of the 1200s CE. I showed how they disrupt the information flow. There's more coming on that issue ahead, but for now, understand that the understanding of Hebrew available in the 1200s CE is woefully outdated.

Pretending to use Biblical Hebrew for the analysis, but using outdated grammar, is the linguistic version of clinging to archaeological dates that radio-carbon dating does not support.

And then there's more sampling bias...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- verse vocabulary

Genesis 1:20-21

כ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם:

כא וַיִּבְרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֔ים אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים וְאֵ֣ת כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה ׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת אֲשֶׁר֩ שָֽׁרְצ֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם לְמִֽינֵהֶ֗ם וְאֵ֨ת כָּל־ע֤וֹף כָּנָף֙ לְמִינֵ֔הוּ וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב:

Translation: Gd said the waters will swarm with swarming things, soul of life; and fliers will fly over the earth against the raqia of heaven.

Gd created the large taninim; and all souls of life that creep that swarm the waters for their kinds, and all the fliers of wing for its kind, Gd manifested its goodness.

This lesson has the new vocabulary.

יִשְׁרְצוּ	swarm, imperfect aspect, 3rd plural
שֶׁרֶץ	swarming thing, noun, singular
שָׁרְצוּ	swarm, perfect aspect, 3rd plural
נֶפֶשׁ	soul
חַיָּה	life, wild animal
עוֹף	flying thing
יְעוֹפֵף	flies, progressive aspect, hollow verb
הַתַּנִּינִם	see discussion
הַגְּדֹלִים	large (you tell me the number, gender, and state)
הָרֹמֶשֶׂת	creeps (you tell me the number, gender, and state)
אֲשֶׁר	that, which (relative clause)
לְמִינֵהֶם	for their sort/kind, 3rd plural
לְמִינֵהוּ	for its sort/kind, 3rd singular
אֵת כָּל	all
כָּנָף	wing

Ha-taninim is not whales. We get that from the horrible Septuagint which uses kiti, related to “cetaceans” used for dolphins porpoises and whales.

What are taninim and why do they get special billing?

In Exodus we will find Mosheh and Aharon producing taninim and the magicians of Egypt do the same. This is generally agreed to be serpents, especially as the same word turns up in Deuteronomy 32:33 it is used in parallel with a word meaning “cobra”.  No, there is no rage of whales in Deuteronomy. In fact, there, Septuagint uses the genitive plural of drakon, which might seem to mean “dragon” but actually, it means snake.

Or tanin means crocodile, and that would fit here since these are water creatures. But imagine Mosheh and Aharon turning their staffs into crocs, or the magicians of Egypt hiding crocs up their sleeves!

But why are they special compared to other things that live in the water? Well, if tanin means a crocodile, we know for a fact that they live in water, but they need dry land to lay and hatch their eggs. Snake eggs incubate for 62 days.

Why do we care? well, I think this is kind of a spoiler alert, like with the imperfect aspect verb and the waters withdrawing from the land. A time is coming up when these creatures might not survive, and they are called out separately because they did survive. So all on their own, they are evidence of Gd in his works.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- The Birds 2018

They're heeere!

The starlings are back and getting ready to start families.

A flock of them invaded my neighborhood and all the males with their bright yellow mating beaks came to my birdbath to freshen up.  Half a dozen at a time, they took a drink and then splashed vigorously.

I'd post a short video but the bird bath is too far from the house to get a good picture. Trust me.

Or test it for yourself. I used an old plastic trash can lid turned upside down. It  holds about 2 gallons of water. I put a brick in it and on cold days like today, I fill a watering can with hot water. I pour it mostly onto the brick and that keeps some of the water liquid for a while.

But you have to do it today because tomorrow, these guys will be looking for sturdy enclosed places for nesting. They'll advertise. Some female will come to inspect. If she likes what she sees, she'll move in and there will be eggs in the nest before you can say jack robinson.

Oh yeah. Now that the starlings are back, I have to keep the door of my outdoor trash closet tightly closed. One time I found it open and when I closed it, I heard a lot of bumping around. I had trapped a starling who was building his nest there. I don't need the mess. I don't need the rotten eggs.

You've been warned.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and SWLT

Now I’m ready to discuss SWLT issues for DH and my first point is usage of words to distinguish between component parts of a complex document edited together from separate parts.

SWLT says words are used by cultures to express that culture, its needs, its interests, its activities.

Words used to express the needs and interests of a culture will only be used to identify multiple sources when such a concept becomes a need of the culture. The idea that the Torah-based culture had such a need is a projection by university scholars, who did have to identify their sources. It incorporates the Presentism Fallacy, which says that people had the same attitudes centuries ago that we have now. It’s popular in romantic (AKA historical) fiction because it avoids dealing honestly with attitudes or customs that are now considered disgusting.

But the idea of using words to identify multiple sources assumes (dangerous word!) that there were multiple written sources like the ones university scholars rely on, and that’s a circular argument, another fallacy. Whybray points out the use of this fallacy in multiple parts of DH.

Now, there are researchers who try to determine the origin of a given document, such as by attributing it to a given author. They also test to determine whether a document really was produced by a reputed author.

These researchers start with a known sample of the author’s material and study whether it uses similar language and expresses similar ideas compared to the document they are testing.

The research takes the author as a small subculture that consistently uses words the same way, the same as a larger subculture and the whole over-arching culture do. That’s why this kind of research is valid under the rules of SWLT.

The DH claim of special words identifying P as a source is an attempt at doing the same thing. I’ve already discussed fallacies and factual contradictions behind this claim.

When performing the same task as other researchers, DH has to follow the same procedures in order to prove that they have achieved results that are as true as anybody else’s work. If they have no document for comparison, they can’t follow the same procedures and cannot support the claim.

If they can’t do the work the same way, the DH claim is another example of extraordinary claims without a sufficient quantity of reliable results for support.

For now, DH has no data to test the hypothesis against. The Ketef Hinnom amulets contain the priestly blessing, but there is no corresponding trace of a fragment of J or D without the same words, to confirm that the words on the amulets didn’t exist before the amulets were put in the ground. (However, we know that this is part of the mischsprache mishegas so it’s pretty irrelevant.)

We can’t rely on a false argument from silence to say that prior written records of Torah didn’t exist. What we can say is that the claims DH makes about the contents of their four documents and the way they divide Torah up are based on translations, outdated information and fallacies as well as improper procedures and inconsistent application of axioms. And that the number of terms in the conjunction of claims is so large that the lack of support makes the probability of their truth infinitesimal, or zero due to fallacies.

But the words are only part of SWLT...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Hebrew -- your first trop

Genesis 1:20-21

כ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם:

כא וַיִּבְרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֔ים אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים וְאֵ֣ת כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה ׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת אֲשֶׁר֩ שָֽׁרְצ֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם לְמִֽינֵהֶ֗ם וְאֵ֨ת כָּל־ע֤וֹף כָּנָף֙ לְמִינֵ֔הוּ וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב:

Translation: Gd said the waters will swarm with swarming things, soul of life; and fliers will fly over the earth against the raqia of heaven.

Gd created the large taninim; and all souls of life that creep that swarm the waters for their kinds, and all the fliers of wing for its kind, Gd manifested its goodness.

These two verses will take a lot of lessons to go over.

I am not giving the vocabulary here because I want to start teaching you about punctuation. The native form of punctuation developed its own notation, called trop. I’ll do more lessons on this later because in the legalistic parts of Torah, punctuation will help us figure out why Jewish law reads the way it does.

The first two punctuation marks to learn are the sof pasuq, that sort of colon at the end of verses, which is mostly equivalent to a period in English. There are a very few verses that don’t end in sof pasuq.

There is also a triangle pointing up, with an open bottom.  It’s under chayah in verse 20 and ha-g’dolim in verse 21. In most cases it works like a semi-colon, which we use in English to separate the two parts of a compound sentence. Its name is etnach.  Again, there are a very few verses that don’t have an etnach in them. In future verses, I will be asking you to find the etnach until I feel like you ought to be familiar with it.

If you want practice, go to this page on Mechon Mamre. Go over the first 19 verses in the right-hand column.  You can email me with the list of words that had etnach under them and I’ll let you know how well you did.  Ignore the left column; that is “Aramaic” (Neo-Babylonian) and doesn’t have trop.

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

This page shows two tables at the top. These are the 30 different trop markers for Torah but don’t choke up. I’ll teach you less than half of them by the time I’m done showing how they relate to Jewish law.

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

They also are used to indicate how to chant Torah. I’ll say more about that in a later lesson.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved