21st Century Bible Hebrew -- What's it all about?

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַל אֱלֹהִים בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה:

ג וַיְבָרֶךְ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־יוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֹתוֹ כִּי בוֹ שָׁבַת מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

And now a cognitive dissonance. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 58b says non-Jews are prohibited from full Shabbat observance. But at the time Shabbat was established, there were no Jews at all.  So how could anybody share with Gd in observing Shabbat before Jews existed?

 

I don’t have a midrash for that. It would mean that as the universe was incomplete until Shabbat existed, so it was incomplete until there were humans who were allowed to observe Shabbat – the Jews. But first Gd went through lots of generations to get to the patriarchs. Why?

 

Because that’s the history experienced by the Jewish people. Axel Olrik says that oral narratives always are based on historical or cultural reality. When history got to the point that there were Jews, they did not retroactively change their history to pretend that it only began when they existed. They even glory in the fact that although their ancestors – like Terach – worshipped many gods and even images of those gods, the patriarchs changed all that.

 

So the first narrative in Torah not only made Shabbat inevitable, it made the Jews inevitable.

 

Final issue. Why seven days?

 

That’s another Olrik principle.  Oral narratives do not contain timing unless it is crucial to the goal of the narrative. If the narrative originated with a historical event, the narrative proceeds according to our sense of real time, that is, things take however long they normally take. After the denouement, the narrative wraps up and if it deals with the later history of the protagonist, it may kill him or her off almost immediately, even if the real historical character lived for decades after the crucial events of the narrative.

 

In this case, Shabbat occurs every seven days in the Jewish calendar, and the very first one, the prototype, also occurred on the seventh day – from the start of creation. It is perfectly conceivable that if Shabbat happened every three months, the narrative with the goal of specifying the first Shabbat in history would have taken three months to finish creation.

 

And now at last we’re done. Next week we’ll move on to the second narrative in Torah, and it will focus on a completely different issue.

Hat trick

So I knew this guy had three vehicles tricked out and I posted photos of two of them on Facebook:

The station wagon















The VW







Here's the third member of the family.  The sign at the top says Main.










The sign on the back is Seventh Avenue.

As we say in my town, you don't have to be crazy to live here but it sure helps.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Repetitions

And now for something completely different. I’m going to knock the “repetitions” pillar on the head.

Olrik confirmed from his studies that narratives which transmit orally and have more than one incident, may have duplicate incidents.  Olrik explored the roles that repetitions play in oral narratives, and they have several functions. Torah has a type specific to itself that Olrik did not discuss but then, he wasn’t studying Torah specifically.

Some repetitions help a narrator maintain credibility with the audience.  After telling the fantastic part of the narrative that is crucial to its denouement, he might add a less fantastic incident which has a similar result.  An example in Torah is the two incidents that lead to Yaaqov naming a given place Machanaim , “two camps.”  One is a camp of angels seen in the same place as the camp of humans that included Yaaqov’s family.  Another is the two camps into which Yaaqov split his family with the very rational explanation that he feared an attack from his brother and hoped that one camp would escape destruction.

A second form of repetition calls the audience’s attention to the importance of an incident.  Something that happens only once in an oral narrative is a throwaway.  Something that happens twice is part of the point of the narrative.  An oral narrative will never say “this is important”; that is descriptive.  What it does is repeat the action, which preserves vividness and avoids memory stress.  Yosef’s two sets of two dreams each is a tipoff that dreams will be important to his fate.

Another type of repetition has a direct connection to the fantastic incidents of an oral narrative.  If the narrative reaches its denouement in more than one episode, the later episodes may be more extreme. This is the Law of Ascents from the Epic Laws.  When Yosef, an ordinary boy in the Holy Land, has two dreams, that is nothing; when two court officials have dreams in Egypt, and Yosef interprets them, that is important; when Pharaoh has two dreams and Yosef interprets them, that is the signal for the denouement. 

A fourth type of repetition is the “derived doublet,” as the translators put it.  Olrik’s description is that incidents are repeated, in less “verbose” wording, to give a character more stage time.   The narrator will get to a certain point in the story and then remember an incident in another story that would give his character more stage time, so he tells about that incident next.  But since it isn’t an organic part of the current story, he tells it with less detail or vividness than its normal setting.  This “languishing” feature is the identifier for a derived doublet.  It also occurs within the cycle of stories for an individual character; an incident early in the cycle can be followed by one or more events, and then the derived doublet later in the cycle.  The “languishing” nature of the repeat episode distinguishes a derived doublet from the Law of Ascents and from an “importance” repetition.

The last repetitive element in Olrik’s principles (although the discussion comes somewhere in the middle of the book) is the parallel doublet.  Parallel doublets represent conflation, during oral transmission, of two narratives that originally had lives as oral narratives separately from the conflation and also separately from each other.  Two such narratives have the same goals, but they may reach them with different casts of characters, at different locations, and for different motives.  Both narratives might have the goal of making a person a king; the motive in one might be to replace a bad king, and in the other to restore a lost prince.

I’ll finish this discussion next week because I’m running long and parallel doublets have been misunderstood by people used to calling all repetitions “doublets”.  You have seen that Olrik does NOT regard all repetitions as doublets, and that he has strict definitions of what doublets are.  Next I’ll show that Olrik has strict definitions of how parallel doublets function differently from other repetitions, and I will also show that he has strict standards for determining whether a parallel doublet exists at all.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- the denouement

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַ֤ל אֱלֹהִים֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשָֽׂה:

ג וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ אֹת֑וֹ כִּ֣י ב֤וֹ שָׁבַת֙ מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֔וֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah  that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

So what do I mean when I say that everything in the narrative tends toward this denouement of Shabbat?

 

Here’s where I keep a promise I made some time ago about explaining what k’dmutenu means. Torah tells us that Gd observed Shabbat. You know that the Big Ten also require the Israelites (Jews) to observe Shabbat. The Exodus version specifically refers to creation as the reason for this. This is what makes humans ki-d’mutenu with Gd.

 

After the Babylonian Captivity, as angelology developed (admitted by experts like Rabbi Shimon Laqish), it was decided that angels lacked two things humans have. We won’t see one of them for some weeks yet, but the other was observance of Shabbat. Angels do not perform melakhah. People do. It’s reiterated over and over in Torah, particularly Leviticus with its references to m’lekhet avodah.

 

Now notice va-yishbot. Another version of this word will show up in Genesis 8:22, at the end of the flood story. It’s one of the things that makes the first two parshiyot of Torah (Breshit and Noach) a cycle unto themselves, along with the other things I pointed out already as having consequences in Parshah Noach. BH is the only ancient Semitic language with an attested connection between the root shbt and cessation of activity.

 

If you need evidence that Shabbat is strictly a Jewish observance, you can read my critique of Sayce.

 

If you need evidence that this story did not originate in the Babylonian Captivity, see the section of the blog on Documentary Hypothesis.

 

The question is, why do we also have la-asot at the end of that verse? You’re thinking in English. This is an aspectless verb with the purposeful prefix. This verse demonstrates that bara means “ex nihilo”, that is, Gd had to create everything out of nothing for the purpose of doing the melakhah.

 

And finally, why do I have “sanctified” in quotes? Because va-y’qadesh is a piel transitive verb and the problem with English “sanctified” is that it is causative, not transitive. In Narrating the Torah, in Exodus, I hit on every example of this word to show that it means, not to make something holy that wasn’t holy before, but to demonstrate the holiness of something that was already holy.  How does Gd demonstrate the holiness of Shabbat? By shabating from all the melakhah. 

Garden -- fiddleheads

So this is my fern, which you have seen before all feathery and green. It spored this spring and is now developing fronds.

I took this picture to show you the fiddleheads. They are circled in red. I think this might actually be a Matteuccia struthiopteris, fiddlehead fern. If I'm wrong, I hope somebody will say so. 

Here are the young mulberries on my tree. The mockingbird, catbird, robin and starlings will be after these once they ripen, with the mockingbird trying to take sole possession in between chasing crows off the block.

This is a descendant of something I planted a long time ago. I thought I bought seeds for celery, but I think my finger wandered and this is celeriac, which is related, but people use the roots, not the stems. Where it grows now is about 10 feet due south of where the original plant was.


It seeds every couple of years. The bees love the little yellow flowers and the sparrows love the seeds, all the more so because the tops of the stalks are sturdy enough to perch on. 







So they sowed this one next to a stump near the mulberry tree, about 10 feet due east of the parent. 

So all you naturalists, tell me, do sparrows naturally like to perch about every 10 feet or was it just convenient to them that I had perchable things at those distances?


So after four days of rain and three days of sunshine, here they are again.




This has grown about 18 inches above the fence line.

This shows the yellow flowers

.

 And here's a small guest.



Can you see the dark mulberries? I admit it, I stole some of these from the birds before I took this photo. Even at 9 in the morning before another full day of sun, they were sweeter than sweet.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik meets Cook

SWLT rule 2 says grammar communicates nuances. Nuances include what the speaker thinks, believes, or feels. This is the realm of the modality described by Dr. John Cook; it comes in three types: deontic (imperatives and volitive); epistemic (certainty or uncertainty about facts); and oblique, subordinate clauses of cause and effect, purpose and result, and conditions for an action to occur.

Torah’s certainty epistemic form first appears in the creation story, and it also appears in Kings.  In between, it shows up in the material about creating the tabernacle. 

The certainty epistemic is used in situations where the narrator couldn’t possibly have seen what happened.  It happened too long ago.  But the proof that the event actually happened is either a physical or cultural object or concept.  That is the link to Olrik’s term localization. 

A localization has to be a known geographical feature that the narrator points to physically or verbally as evidence that the tale is true, despite its fantastic content. 

The certainty epistemic reflects the fact that the audience’s culture currently has certain features or cult objects that wouldn’t be there if the narrative were false. The certainty epistemic only appears if the narrator has credibility; the audience would laugh him out of countenance for using a certainty epistemic, if the object were not visible or the concept was not part of the culture.

This use of the certainty epistemic appears in Exodus while Mosheh is overseeing the building of the tabernacle and the first sacrifices. There is a string of verses about a particular part of the building or sacrifices, saying “[He] made (va-yaas)….” (The “he” is B’tsalel most of the time.) The narrator did not witness it, but if Mosheh hadn’t done this, the Jewish culture as it exists in the narrator’s times wouldn’t be the way it is. The audience didn’t see these things happen, but the narrator can point to the tabernacle as evidence of the truth of what he is narrating. Without a physically present tabernacle, the audience would laugh the narrator out of countenance.

So the tabernacle had to exist at some time for the oral narratives in Exodus to work; that’s Olrik’s principle that oral narratives always represent some cultural reality. What’s more, the certainty epistemic in the narratives is good grammar only when the tabernacle is present to the audience. Without that visible proof of the truth of the narrator’s words, he would have to use the narrative past.

Biblical Hebrew examples, of narrative past when a certainty epistemic is inappropriate, appear at least twice in Torah. I document examples on the Bible Hebrew page.

In Numbers 32:31 it says that the Gadites and Reubenites “responded” to Mosheh, in the setting of promising to help the rest of the Israelites during the Ingress. The verb root is ayin nun heh and sometimes in Torah it appears as a certainty epistemic. Not here. Here it’s a narrative past.

At the point when the narrator adopted this grammar, there were no Gadites or Reubenites to point to as evidence of the truth of the narrator’s claim. They had taken up residence on the east side of the Yarden. Their next appearance in Israelite consciousness was the 600s BCE, when they fled ahead of the Assyrian invasion – actually, it’s in Jewish consciousness, this is recorded in Jewish Tannakh but not in Samaritan “Chronicle”. Nevertheless, Israelite culture recorded that Mosheh had set up three cities of refuge east of the Yarden. There’s no way for the westerners to enforce such a law. It had to be set up before the Israelites split up into east and west.

Use of the certainty epistemic and the narrative past are features of Biblical Hebrew. They existed in the language when it was the vernacular of the people who transmitted this material orally. Samaritan Pentateuch has the certainty epistemic in all the same verses in Exodus as in Jewish Torah. These are some of those 80% identical uses that I referred to.

Samaritan Pentateuch also has all the same localizations. That may seem like a contradiction to what I said about geographical information in SP a couple of weeks ago but the difference is this. In narratives, SP retains the names of the Cities of the Plain. In geographic information with a practical basis, SP copies known place names and eliminates what the Samaritans didn’t know. This copying shows up in other places in SP and I believe I have an upcoming post about it. I’ll check.

Next post I knock on the head another DH "pillar".

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:2-3, Shabbat

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַ֤ל אֱלֹהִים֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשָֽׂה: ג וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ אֹת֑וֹ כִּ֣י ב֤וֹ שָׁבַת֙ מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֔וֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah  that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

שְּׁבִיעִי	seventh
מְלַאכָה	melakhah
יִּשְׁבֹּת	He rested
שָׁבַת	He rested
יְקַדֵּשׁ	He sanctified

 

I italicized melakhah just like in previous lessons I italicized raqia.  I will keep on doing this when I know that the traditional translation doesn’t capture the real meaning of the word. 

 

Melakhah has a specific meaning in Jewish law.  It means the 40 less one or 39 categories of work prohibited on Sabbath.  You can’t do these things for pay on Shabbat, and you can’t do them for free; you can’t do it for yourself, and you can’t do it for others.  What’s more, if a non-Jew does something that is melakhah specifically to benefit a Jew, the Jew has to refuse the benefit. The only exception is when there is danger to the life of any Homo sapiens. 

 

Melakhah also appears in the Ten Commandments, in the commandment to observe Sabbath.  I won’t go into it further.  A whole tractate of Mishnah is dedicated to Shabbat laws and it has gemara in both Talmuds.

 

What I will say here is that Hebrew has more than one expression for the activity of people that earns their living but it is not melakhah.  Neither is it avodah, not in Biblical Hebrew.  As I discuss on the Fact-Checking blog, this word actually means an exclusive services contract, whether between Jews and Gd or between people. 

 

Biblical Hebrew uses maasayv, “his deeds”, for work assignments.  Yosef is doing “his deeds” when he is working for the jailer.  But he is doing melakhah when Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him for the last time and that has the connotation that he was working on a holiday; all the Egyptians were at their temples and he was the only one in the house except for her.

This is the denouement of the first narrative in Torah. This oral narrative was “about” creating a world in which Shabbat would exist. I’ll go into the other vocabulary next week and then show you how the denouement relates to the rest of the material in the narrative.