Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik meets SWLT

Narrators have to maintain their credibility with an audience thoroughly familiar with the sitz-im-leben of the narratives. There are several reasons for this.

One, of course, is that a narrative that survives long enough can survive the lifetimes of the actors in the narrative. They are no longer around to turn to for verification of the events; this is one of the defining features of oral narratives. Narratives also, obviously, may survive their original narrators. This was the status of some Israelite narratives by the time of the hilltop settlements.

Another reason is if the narrator can no longer tell exactly where something happened due to migration. It progresses from details of that horizon dropping out of the narrative, to complete loss of geographical data associated with the story. If the story has credibility problems at that point, some other form of “credibilizing” has to take place.

But the real issue requiring the narrator to work on credibility issues is fundamental to all oral narratives. They do not survive, they practically do not come into being, without containing fantastic elements. Olrik specifically states that between the everyday world of the opening, and the same everyday world of the closing, an oral narrative will always contain at least one incident that is not quite what happens in the everyday world. It is more or less fantastic. Such incidents, Olrik specifically states, mark the progress of the narrative toward its denouement.

So you will never find an oral narrative that survives multiple hops unless it has something in it that is out of the ordinary. This is the origin of Vera Cheberyak, at risk of having her apartment searched, keeping Andrey’s body there, rolled up in her own carpet, which she was about to sell to her landlord, for three days. This is why gossip flies. The fantastic is the fundamental constituent of urban legends and fish stories.  And it is the basis for all myths and fairy tales.

Narrators do things to maintain credibility while reciting these fantastic incidents. They use localization; they begin or end with a well-known geographical site which may be visible to the audience, as the place where the incidents occurred, because it has an association with the events in the narrative anyway.

They also use language cues. This is an issue of SWLT rule 2; grammar encodes nuances the bare words don’t express. What nuances?

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- pual, hufal and ... qual

Genesis 2:1

א וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָֽם

Translation:     The heaven and earth were completed and all their hosts.

Now to beat up another urban legend. There’s an urban legend that during the Babylonian Captivity, “Hebrew was losing its passives.” That’s wrong in two ways.

First, as I said, there are no passives in Biblical Hebrew. There are agentless verbs. In the transition to Mishnaic Hebrew, all these binyanim survived, even the relative of qal in the set phrase v’ki yutan.  I’ll discuss an example of that binyan in Genesis 3:19 and an important one in Genesis 4:26 that shows up later in Tannakh as well.

Second, why use agentless binyanim at all? 

If you ever took a writing class, you probably remember your teacher telling you to use active verbs, especially in creative writing. (It also helps scholarly writing but the passive scholarly tradition is so pervasive it’s hard to buck.)

The same is true in oral story-telling. Torah is a record of the Jewish oral tradition. The expert in formulation of oral traditions, Axel Olrik, showed that they delineate character features by telling about the actions that the characters accomplish (or not). That uses active verbs. Oral traditions avoid describing characters, for the most part. But “passives” are inherently descriptive.  As an oral tradition, therefore, Torah would avoid using “passives” even if that is what agentless verbs are.

There has to be an important reason to use an agentless verb in Torah.  With the most frequent one, nifal, the reason is the need to express a decree, usually a Heavenly decree. The most frequent appearance of nifal, or at least the most memorable, is the phrase nikhr’tah ha-nefesh. This is a Heavenly decree of death upon a person’s descendants, wiping them out prior to his own death. The first place it shows up explicitly is in relation to circumcision in Avraham’s saga.

And I just defined the use of pual in narratives. It only shows up here because it’s important that the material universe be in place before we tell the real end of the story.

The pual and other agentless binyanim show up only when there’s no way to put the point across without them. The qual (usually called qal “passive”) is a neon sign, a sort of spoiler alert. The hufal (related to hifil) goes with behavior that fits norms on which the narrative is in some way a commentary.  It shows up in Genesis 4:15 and 4:24 in the stories of Qain and his descendant Lemekh.

So Biblical Hebrew didn’t “lose its passives.” But for the rest of this page on the blog, I’m going to lose the term passive. I’ll point out the limited number of times they appear in the rest of Parshah Breshit and later do some posts on the usage of agentless verbs in legal formulations with examples from Exodus and Leviticus.

I'm just saying -- Corporate America scores again

That is, they score a big fat nothing.

The last score was worse: a company that used to be synonymous with kosher fish snacks turned out a lox that was rubbery and tasted like chemicals. So I went back to curing my own.

This one -- well, when I saw that the second ingredient was sugar, I should have just said no.

But I didn't.

Mayonnaise has more flavor than this stuff.

So a well known brand of bbq sauce goes on my list entitled Not While There's Breath in my Body.

I grated up leftover Passover horseradish root and mixed it with good apple cider vinegar and made a fresh batch of my own Worcestershire sauce.

I wanted to make biltong anyway, because it's 1/4 the price of commercial jerky even though I'm using rotisserie roast to do it.

-- Another SHAME ON YOU CORPORATE AMERICA --

Wanna have real good-tasting food in your house? The more you DIY, the better your chances.

I'm just saying...

Copyright statement

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan locations

Olrik’s decaying horizon is one of the things we find in Samaritan Pentateuch.

Genesis 10:19 is one example.

In Jewish Torah, this verse identifies the boundaries of the K’naani as including the cities of the plain, Grar, Azah, and Lasha. That derives from the period when the cities of the plain still flourished, the time of Ebla and Troy II. The Assyrians destroyed Grar.

Samaritan scripture completely rewrites this verse. It copies the boundaries in Genesis 15:18 promised to Avraham and his descendants. Then it copies a phrase, yam ha-acharon, which appears in Deuteronomy 11:24 and 34:2 as part of the boundaries of the territory that the Israelites took control of when they entered the Holy Land. 

We can understand this as the effect of the Kutean importation. As newcomers, the Kuteans had no idea where the cities of the plain or Grar had been. To make them understand the boundaries, the priest sent back by the Assyrians used landmarks they could understand. Repeating text from other parts of the same material did that.

Another example crops up after Deuteronomy 5:18. Verse 18 is the last of the Ten Commandments. Samaritan Pentateuch follows this with a stretch of text that basically comes from Deuteronomy 27:2-8, except for one thing.

OK, five things. At the end, it specifies where the whitewashed stones will be set up, the ones with the law written on them. Part 1 says this site is west of the Yarden; part 2 says in the Aravah; part 3 says next to Gilgal. So far, so good; the book of Joshua tells about the first camp at Gilgal, east of Y’richo, where he circumcised all the generation born in the wilderness after crossing the Yarden (traveling west of course). This is where Jewish Joshua says the stones were set up.

Parts 4 and 5 are the problem; they both identify locations near the twin mountains, Grizim where the Samaritans had a temple and Eyval, where Deuteronomy says to put up the whitewashed altar with the law written on it. That is kilometers northwest of Y’richo.

Again, the Kuteans had never been near the Aravah; it was conquered by the Assyrians before they deported the Israelites and even the priest might not have known where it was. There was no way to explain to the nascent Samaritans that there were two Gilgals.

Third example. Deuteronomy 34:1-3 lists place names shown to Mosheh from the top of Pisgah before his death. In Samaritan, most of the details are missing. Gilad is missing; it was conquered by the Assyrians before they imported the Kuteans to Samaria. Dan, Naftali, everything but the end of verse 3 naming Tsoar (the smallest of the Cities of the Plain, the one that survived) is gone. It is replaced by text that also appears in Genesis 15:19. By the time the Kuteans were imported, this was all Assyrian territory and the tribal divisions had been swept away. It was easier to understand and easier to remember text that was repeated elsewhere in the material.

Von Gall identifies no deviations in the manuscripts or fragments that have these verses; none of them have the information that Jewish Torah has, although they might have divergent spellings. The same is true of the Samaritan Aramaic Targum and Prof. Haseeb Shehadeh’s edition of Abu Said’s Arabic Version.

All three divergences are perfectly understandable when you read Kings II 17:24-28 and realize that the Kuteans had no clue to the geo-history south of Assyria. The differences are also perfectly understandable if the northerners carried on an oral tradition, which languished over the centuries, such that the priest sent to Samaria could not explain these details of the tradition he brought with him. If they were still in there and had not been forgotten already.

But there's another dimension to geographical information in oral narratives, and that's next week's post.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:1, agentless verbs

Genesis 2:1

א וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָֽם

Translation:     The heaven and earth were completed and all their hosts.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יְכֻלּוּ	They were completed
צְבָאָם	Their host

All right, back on Genesis 1:26-27 I said that Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have passive binyanim, it has agentless verbs. Now that you are over the shock of what I said about nifal there, I’ll talk about agentless verbs a little more.

Typically, the first verb in this verse is called pual by which people mean the passive of piel.  Let’s analyze that.

The piel binyan has a number of uses. Mostly it is something that is known to sometimes happen, that is, frequentative, like m’daber, speak, but obviously not continuous. It can lead to expertise, hi m’daberet ivrit means “she speaks Hebrew [more or less well].”

Things that happen sometimes are sometimes the target of a law. When something only happens once, people shrug their shoulders and say “Stuff happens.” When it happens more than once, and people notice that it’s associated with a specific set of circumstances, and it has a bad outcome, that’s a reason for making a law against it. This comes out in Exodus 21 and 22, and you’ll find piel used for some verbs about the bad outcome.

A third use is an unintended effect of something that was done. The best example is in Genesis where Yitschaq sends off Yaaqov and it impacts Esav’s behavior, and I’ll discuss that in a separate post.

Now. If pual is only and always a passive of piel, then what does it mean to use it in this verse? Where is the frequentative concept behind finishing creation, or the skill that it leads to (yeah, right, Gd was in training here! – that was sarcasm), or the lack of intention? What were the bad consequences against which we need to pass a law?

The idea of passives as poor cousins of other binyanim does not work in Biblical Hebrew.

What pual does in narratives is show that a sort of denouement has been reached, but it’s not the final denouement nor is it the actual goal of the narrative. The actual goal of the narrative has not been reached until further actions occur, and they express the goal. You’ll see what they are next week.  At the same time, pual says that the actual goal could not be reached unless this internal denouement had first been accomplished.

In this situation, the material universe is the necessary condition for the real denouement of the narrative.

Also note that despite the definite nouns in this verse, there’s no et. Why? Because the grammatical subject and logical object of the verb are the same thing. That’s how agentless verbs work.

Now let’s do a reverse on the play. If pual is an internal denouement but not the final outcome, then its piel counterpart shows up in laws because the real final outcome, is sanctions for the action with the bad outcome. Piel is a verb with unintended consequences which are the actual outcome of the episode. Piel is frequentative, and the actual outcome is the expertise resulting from practice.

So they are related, but not in an obvious straightforward way for people who believe pual is the poor cousin passive of the important binyan, piel.

The most important thing this pual says historically is, that the chapter division is in the wrong place. It should be two verses after this. The division was done by a non-Jew in the 1200s CE, when the Torah culture had been up and running for at least 17 centuries – more than 20 centuries according to the archaeology. Stephen Langton wrote tons of material about the Bible, but even if he “read” Hebrew, he didn’t know or he ignored the nature of pual and he’s the one who put the chapter division where it is.

copyright statement

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- catchup

I apologize, I got distracted by car trouble on May 3 when I failed to post this.

Genesis 1:30-31

ל וּֽלְכָל־חַיַּ֣ת הָ֠אָ֠רֶץ וּלְכָל־ע֨וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֜יִם וּלְכֹ֣ל ׀ רוֹמֵ֣שׂ עַל־הָאָ֗רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ֙ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֔ה אֶת־כָּל־יֶ֥רֶק עֵ֖שֶׂב לְאָכְלָ֑ה וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן:

לא וַיַּ֤רְא אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־כָּל־אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֔ה וְהִנֵּה־ט֖וֹב מְאֹ֑ד וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם הַשִּׁשִּֽׁי:

Translation: and for all the wild animals and all flyers of the heavens and for all that creeps on the earth that has the soul of life, all green plants, for food; it must have been so.

Gd manifested all that He had made, behold its very great goodness; there must have been evening, there must have been morning, the sixth day.

Verse 30 helps me argue what I said about verse 29. We all know there are animals that now don’t eat grass; they may use it for a sort of medicine to clear gastric obstructions, but they get their best nourishment by eating other animals.

There is related material in the next narrative which relates these two verses to two verses in Parshah Noach. I’ll point it out when I get there, and then I want you to think back to here.

This is where chapter 1 ends in most Bibles and, for cross-reference purposes, also in Jewish Bibles. But Jewish Bibles also cross-reference to readings in Ashkenazic synagogues, and the cross-reference is to the 8 honorary readings on Shabbat. Somebody in the congregation is called to stand with the person reading the week’s portion out loud, and a fixed section is read in honor of that person. The first one is supposed to be for a kohen, the second for a Levite, and all the rest for other congregationists.  They are called aliyot because the reader is usually standing on a bimah, a stage, with steps leading up to it and aliyah means going up.

The first weekly portion is Breshit. We are not yet at the end of the first aliyah. The very next verb tells us that and shows us why the chapter division is in the wrong place.   More on that next time, because it illustrates an important point about nifal and other binyanim in a related class.

Until then, go here:

https://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm

And then run this audio while you read the chapter.

https://www.mechon-mamre.org/mp3/t0101.mp3

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Location location location 2

The converse of Olrik’s description of the oral narrative, vivid as a picture, has another facet in his studies. As narratives decline toward disappearance, the problems of human memory hasten this devolution.

The translators of Olrik’s work used “verbosity” to translate Olrik’s term for the pictorially vivid story. When it is going out of fashion, its vividness decays; the translators used the word “languishing” to describe a story losing its vividness as the story goes out of fashion.

This same disappearance of vividness also applies to individual features of the story. Olrik described two types of geographic information.

One is the horizon. It has several subdivisions. The location where the narrative first arises appears in it in detail. If the culture has contact with other locations, narratives describe them in decreasing detail with distance from the locale of the narrating culture. Olrik distinguishes four broad horizons all the way from “home” to – well, to “a galaxy far far away.”

Time affects the vividness of the horizon. Olrik specifically says that if a culture migrates while a narrative survives, then over time it is possible for the original horizon to dissolve out. A narrative with no horizon therefore can be among the oldest in the repertoire of a culture that has lived a long time in places other than where the narrative arose.

The other type of geographical information in a narrative is translated as “localization”. This is a specific locality attached to the story. Olrik says that at the time the narrative begins its history of transmission, a localization is probably visible to the audience. Localizations have two functions.

A localization at the beginning of a narrative marks an origin narrative. It tells about the inception of some tradition and the localization is where the tradition originated. The localization of Avraham’s circumcision near where he and Lot split up -- the cities of the plain –is one example in Torah. The vividness of the destruction of the cities of the plain forever fixed their names in the memory of the ancestors of the Jews, names that would not resurface until archaeology rediscovered Ebla, but which were still familiar when Amos and Hoshea used them as paradigms of total destruction. It is no accident, Olrik would say, that the cultural and historical events occur together in the narrative.

The other function of a localization, when it appears at the end of a story, is to make something otherwise incredible seem credible. This is the issue of “Lot’s wife” turning into a salt pillar.  This is the usage of the phrase “and you can see it to this very day” found a number of times in Joshua.

While there are plenty of locations and some horizons in Torah, we really get a bang for our buck out of Samaritan Pentateuch.