Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik's Epic Laws

The only thing that most people know about Olrik’s principles, is the Epic Laws, which were published in German in 1908.  So far I’ve only identified a few of the Epic Laws as having examples in Torah. Twenty sections of Olrik’s work express these principles.  Section numbers are according to the English translation of Olrik’s work.

§58, Clarity. Focus, focus, focus. Spin off sidebars that concentrate on important issues, then return to concentrate on the main line of the narrative.

§59, Two to a scene. Yosef always addresses his brothers as a group. Qorach’s 250 elders are never treated as anything but a group.

§60, Schematization. No depth to characters, sketchy reports of incidents.

§61, Lack of description. Verbosity requires vivid actions or words, not descriptions. (This is also one reason “passives” have relatively few examples in oral material in a source document.)

§62, Repeated episodes to approach the goal, reflecting its importance. This goes along with the Law of Last Stress and Law of Ascents.

§63, Actions, not descriptions, demonstrate a character’s nature or motives. Another reason for verbs that are not “passive”.

§64, Unity in which actions and motives agree, and form a contrast to every day life. While living people have conflicting impulses and motives, characters in oral narratives never do. What’s more, protagonists almost never deal with their counterparts at a distance, they are united in location. Paro had to have Yosef brought into his presence to interpret his dreams.

§65, Internal logic. Nothing in an oral narrative is useless, but its contribution is not necessarily direct. The outcome of sexual situations in the Yosef saga is legal trouble in every case, as stated in the action. Each situation is crucial to the culture, but only one actually contributes to the denouement.

§66, Unity of plot and goal, and omission of extraneous details. The plot always contributes to reaching the goal and leaves out material that would distract from that unless and until it becomes important. We don’t even realize that Reuven has children until he offers them to his father as hostages to his success bringing Benjamin back from Egypt.

§67, Epic and ideal unity of plot. The first incident that contributes to resolution of the plot telegraphs how other incidents will contribute. Yosef’s first pair of dreams telegraphs that dreams will be important to his fate.

§68, Single-stranded plot. This is crucial to all three types of narrative. However, sagas will often have what I call sidebar narratives that finish up before the goal is reached, and that contribute to the goal. Without Yehudah’s sons from Tamar, there never would have been a Kalev to back Yehoshua up in arguing against the slanderers.

§69, Concentration on the leading character. There is a Yosef saga because the narrative focuses on him, not on Reuven, the eldest and son of the first wife, although Reuven plays a role in Yosef’s fate.

§70, Two main characters, or a secondary character almost as important as the main character. Yehudah has this secondary importance, combined with his echo in Reuven.

§71, Contrast between paired characters. Reuven and his pair Yehudah get different outcomes from their illegal liaisons (it is illegal in Jewish law for a man to have sex with his daughter-in-law).

§72, Law of contrast. All the other characters contrast with the main one, having some of the same characteristics in lesser degrees. Reuven and Yehudah’s sexual escapades contrast with Yosef’s, although Yosef’s is the one that moves the narrative to its goal.

§73, Law of twins. Two characters who must work together to accomplish their goals because individually they are too weak to do so. Shimon and Levi have to sack Shchem together.

§74, Law of Three. This is actually a “Law of Magic Numbers.” Three is the most common. Five is the magic number for – well, magic and mystery; seven is the magic number for religion (seven days of creation, not six); twelve is the magic number for people linked by a common factor (sons of Yaaqov). Qorach’s 250 don’t (at first glance) relate to any magic numbers and may reflect a historical situation, as does much else about that narrative.

§75, Law of Ascents and Final Stress. It should be obvious that a narrative will end after the last episode, and for that the goal has to be reached in the last episode. This law also results in the youngest child accomplishing the goal and the exaggerated features of the last incident compared to the prior versions of it.

§76, Law of opening where a narrative begins calmly in the real world with one character. As the narrative progresses things get more emotional or strange and characters multiply because they are needed to help the main character reach the goal.

§77, Law of closing. The fantastic elements drop off as soon as their contribution to the goal is done and the narrative ends with one character returning to the real world.

If you go through the Yosef saga, you will find illustrations of almost all of the Epic Laws.  But they exist throughout Torah and give the fine-structure evidence that Torah originated orally and not in writing. It's not the only evidence.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:7-8, from (?)

Genesis 2:7-8

 

ז וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים וַיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה:

ח וַיִּטַּ֞ע יְהוָֹ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים גַּ֥ן־בְּעֵ֖דֶן מִקֶּ֑דֶם וַיָּ֣שֶׂם שָׁ֔ם אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֖ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָצָֽר:

 

Translation:     **** Gd formed the man dust, from the earth, He breathed into his nose the soul of life; he must have become a living soul.

**** Gd planted a garden in Eden toward the east; He placed there the man whom He had formed.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

וַיִּיצֶר	He formed
עָפָר	dust
מִן	From – (?)
וַיִּפַּח	He breathed
יִּטַּע	plant
גַּן	garden
מִקֶּדֶם	To the east
קֶּדֶם	east
יָּשֶׂם	Placed, positioned
שָׁם	there
יָצָר	Had formed

 

Mi (miqedem) has several meanings, especially “toward” and “from”. In some places it is debatable which it means. It can also mean “beyond,” “than”, and in a few cases “because of”, “out of”, “as a result of”.

 

When mi takes an object suffix, things happen. You saw this in the creation story when Gd said “the man has become like one of us…”

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מִמֶּנִּי	מִמֶּנּוּ	First
מִמְּךָ, מִמֶּךָּ	מִכֶּם	Second/masculine
מִמֵּךְ		Second/feminine
מִמֶּנּוּ	מֵהֶם	Third/masculine
מִמֶּנָּה	מֵהֵן	Third/feminine

 

Notice the dagesh in the second mem. What is going on?

 

Well, there’s a full-up version of this preposition, min. It’s in verse 7.

                                                                                       

For some reason, a mem has to go between that and the suffix. We’ll see that again with another preposition.

 

The final nun of min changes to “m” for euphony, then the two mems contract and one takes dagesh.

 

When the suffix requires nun before it, apparently there is also a nun intervening. Apparently in some forms, the suffix is understood to carry a nun at the front, the two contract, and the one that remains gets dagesh. The second person doesn’t have this restriction.

 

Finally, notice that only the feminine singular 2^nd person has tseire under the middle mem. All the others have segol. Segol is a short vowel. I’m not sure what’s going on here.

 

The missing form is not attested in Tannakh but obviously it would be miken by analogy with all the verbs in 2^nd feminine plural. Take a look back and you’ll see it.

DIY -- jammin'

This summer I'm trying to eat more fresh fruit in season and leave the dried fruit for winter when all I can get fresh are apples and oranges.

Except.

I have a recipe for jam with no water and no pectin.

Basically you sugar the fruit down. Remember to take the stones out of cherries. Mash up your grapes, berries, or cherries.

For apricots and peaches, you need to take the skin off. There's a neat way to do this. Cut an X at the top and bottom of every apricot or peach, or cut the top and bottom off the tomato. Leave potatoes alone.  Put them in a large bowl and boil enough water to fill the bowl up. Pour that over your stuff and let it sit at least a minute, up to 5 minutes. Now pour it off and fill the bowl with ice and water. It's called an "ice shock".  Now use a paring knife to scrape the skin off.  Cut them up, throw away apricot and peach stones, and continue.

Measure your fruit in a cup measure and put it in your pan, then add the same measure of sugar.  Put the pan over 2 1/2 heat. The sugar will melt; stir so it mixes well with the fruit, which will release its juice. When all the sugar is melted, turn the heat up to #4 setting and get the mix to a rolling boil. Now use a digital candy thermometer and start testing the temperature on all sides and the middle of the pan. When it gets to 220 everywhere, turn the burner down to 2 and let it simmer about 10 minutes.

Now turn the heat back up and get it bubbling and boiling again, and stay with it because if it tries to burn over, you want to snatch it off the heat. When it's bubbling, turn the heat off, and let the pan cool on the stove.

Now put it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, if the jam hasn't jelled, boil it again. Three times will do it.

Pour into sterilized glass jars and put on the lid. If you have a pressure canner, you can make this shelf-safe but if not, keep it in your fridge.

I know this is not what you want to be doing on a hot afternoon, so do it early in the morning if it will be hot. I watch the weather closely and so far I've managed to get it done in cool weather.

This will work with large dried fruit like apricots, peaches, apples and figs but not with dried berries or cherries; they dry up to more skin than fruit. Also, the larger fruit has already been skinned. Just make sure and simmer it a long time until you can fork-mash it, let the rest of the fluid cook off, and then put in the sugar.

Can you imagine anything more simple and delicious to use on homemade English muffin or bagels?

Fact-Checking the Torah -- anthropomorphisms

Here's my little homily on anthropomorphisms in Torah.  Most people take them as a sign of primitivism.

But remember, an oral narrative has to be vivid. 

I can imagine Torah narratives with anthropomorphisms originally saying something like “it was as if the hand of Gd did X.” But “it was as if” is extra words to remember, and as the story survived, it could have increased in vividness by dropping those words.  Olrik specifically states that narratives floresce as well as languish.  Think about it. 

What’s more, “the hand of Gd did X” is more fantastic than the original wording.  Gd is unseen but results are still attributed to Him because it takes a Supreme Being to make things happen at points in history crucial to Israelite survival and development.  Saying that His actual hand did it is more fantastic; rationalists down through time have recognized that.  It’s one basis for their objection to the anthropomorphisms.  But it’s what makes an oral narrative tick.

Anthropomorphisms are nothing more than a natural feature of a narrative that transmitted orally for some period before being recorded.  They were retained for reasons internal to the life and survival of oral narratives. 

This answers the idea of splitting P off because it is strictly legalistic material and doesn’t contain anthropomorphisms (if such a claim exists in DH, which I don’t know, and so this might be a strawman argument).  “P’s” legalistic material is fundamental to operating the Israelite culture, everyday happenings like which animals can be slaughtered for food, as well as requirements of avodah. People perform these actions; no anthropomorphisms needed.  But we can’t analyze it by Olrik’s principles specifically because it’s not strictly a set of narratives. (This feeds into my alternate explanation later.)

Now let’s look at a contrary example.  The “Aramaic” (Neo-Babylonian) version of Torah was written by Unqlus, a convert to Judaism who was sister’s son to Titus, destroyer of the Second Temple and Emperor of Rome.  The Targum, as it is known, comes from the time of R. Akiva and avoids anthropomorphisms.  It derives from a written version of Torah, but it’s not a translation because it doesn’t reproduce the meaning of the original.  

So in Exodus, when the elders eat in Gd’s presence at Sinai, that’s a sign of the fantastic in an oral narrative.  And later when Mosheh can only see Gd’s “back,” that’s an anthropomorphism typical of the verbosity of an oral narrative, as is the repeated phrase in Exodus, “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”

Unqlus was one of the first who insisted on writing for literate people who did not require the fantastic to promote transmission. How the in-synagogue targumim (translators) handled the material, we don’t know, because it is not on record.  Can somebody build us that time machine, please?

Next: the thing you're wondering why I didn't talk about before.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- intro to oblique modality

Genesis 2:6

 

וְאֵ֖ד יַֽעֲלֶ֣ה מִן־הָאָ֑רֶץ וְהִשְׁקָ֖ה אֶת־כָּל־פְּנֵ֥י הָֽאֲדָמָֽה:

 

Translation:     But a mist went up from the earth; it watered all the surface of the earth.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

אֵד	mist
יַעֲלֶה	Went up
הִשְׁקָה	Water (v)

 

“went up” is conjugated exactly like “to do, make”. These are both important words so learn this conjugation very well.  Alah is one of the verbs that show up as certainty epistemics just like asah.

 

Now an important point about vav. In the last verse as well as this one, I translated it “but”. As with Genesis 1:2, vav in these verses corrects a mistaken impression you might get from the preceding verse. So it has to be translated “but”, not “and”.

 

Now notice we have an imperfect aspect verb here. The noun splits it from the vav.

 

Remember that narrative past is vav plus the verb plus the subject. So this is not narrative past.

 

The other possibility with this verb conjugation, as you have been taught in older courses, is future.

 

But there’s no way this is future.

 

This is another classic use of imperfect, for something repeated or iterated. The mist went up over and over again.

 

Now find the etnach and notice what happens after it.

 

Hishqah is a perfect aspect verb in hifil. You would think, if the mist went up over and over again, the earth would be watered over and over again, so why perfect aspect?

 

This is a modality I haven’t discussed before called oblique modality.

 

The syntax is vav plus a perfect aspect verb plus the subject if expressed.

 

It never occurs alone; this is always a subordinate clause. The main clause may be in the same verse but sometimes it is in a separate verse.

 

It can indicate cause, effect, purpose or result. Dr. Cook says it can reflect a condition; this will be a resultative situation typical of perfect aspect verbs.

 

It is not a done deal. The audience is asked to believe this happened on the basis of something known to happen generally or specified in previous material. It tends to be restricted to narratives; vav plus perfect in legal material is something quite different.

Here the effect of the mist going up is to water the world. But like the certainty epistemic, it looks both ways. Everybody knows plants can’t survive without water.  We just said that there were plants. How did they survive without water, given that we just said Gd had not yet caused rain? So this verse explains that by means of a mist.

 

This is an example of how you can't understand any single thing in Torah without the rest of it. The meaning of this verse relies on everything surrounding it, and that will be true of the rest of this narrative.
 

Knitting -- toe up socks

So I was very frustrated with patterns posted online for this sock variety and started to create my own.

One of the frustrations was I tried doing the toe increases with an m1 as some patterns showed. It created a lacy effect. If you are making lacy summer socks, go for it.

But mostly I go barefoot in summer and I want warm socks in winter. The other way to do increases is to knit into both the front and back of the same loop. So I tried it with some leftover yarn. The effect is much less lacy than with the m1, and so it is going to be much easier for the yarn to hackle when you wash it the first time so that your foot keeps warm.

This is for a size 7 1/2 foot.

So cast on 16 stitches to your size 5 dps and divide them up 4 on N1, 8 on N2, and 4 on N3. Join and knit one round.
Knit 2 stitches of N1, KF/B on the next stitch, knit the last stitch.
K1 on N2, KF/B, knit across, KF/B, K1.
K1 on N3, KF/B, knit 2, k1.
Knit the next round.

Now you have 5 stitches on N1 and N3, and 10 on N2.
Next increase round on N1 you will K3, KF/B, K1; and on N3, K1, KF/B, K3, K1.
Then you knit a round.

Keep alternating increase and non-increase rounds until you have 10 stitches on N1, 20 on N2, and 10 on N3, and knit one more round.
Your increases will make a nice neat line, and there will be 2 knit stitches between them.

Now knit around for 32 rounds.
Now chart how many increases you need to fit around your leg, using your spreadsheet. I'm pretty heavy and so I need a lot of increases.

But before that, you have to do the heel. So watch this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVVveGqrUCI

The real action starts early, about minute 2. Once you finish your heel, start a marker thread in the middle of the heel to carry up the back of the leg.
When you increase on the legs, you will do K1, KF/B after this marker and KF/B, K1 before it.

Once you finish the heel, make sure you have 40 stitches for the ankle, and do 13 rounds of ankle.
Then increase 4 evenly around and do 8 rounds.
Now increase on both sides of the back seam, and follow your chart, doing all your increases at this back seam.
Switch to size 3 dps and do 10 rounds of k2/p2 rib, and bind off in rib.

Closing the toe means turning the sock inside out and grafting it closed. Wrap in the tail end of the yarn that you started with. 

I am not going to use this pattern. I don't like German short rows. The woman who did the video has a right to be proud of learning them because they're complicated; if you had trouble following her video that's why. It's complicated. But it's the best video out there so if you don't like it and you really really really want to do German short rows, see if you can find a good book or even a person who can teach you to do it live.

Personally I think knitting should be as easy as possible and still have a good result. I won't be knitting kneesocks because they aren't easy compared to crew socks and they take twice the time. I have other fish to fry and other designs to try.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- doublets, anybody?

Are there any doublets in Torah? I think there are possible candidates for derived doublets – or rather triplets – but again, the comparison to Olrik’s standards and definitions doesn’t necessarily confirm that.

The wife-stealing stories in Genesis are the candidates.

Avraham and Sarah in Egypt, due to a famine, turn Sarah over to Pharaoh, whose country immediately experiences a plague. Pharaoh finds out somehow that Sarah is Avraham’s wife, not his sister, and gives her back. Over 25 years later Yitschaq is born.

Avraham and Sarah in Grar, no famine involved, turn Sarah over to Avimelekh. Gd tells Avimelekh he’s done something wrong and he returns Sarah. The next episode is Yitschaq’s birth.

Yitschaq and Rivqah in Grar, due to a famine, turn Rivqah over to Avimelekh. We only find this out because Avimelekh looks out a window and sees Yitschaq and Rivqah m’tsacheq. Avimelekh calls in Yitschaq and complains, giving the first hint that he has taken Rivqah into his house. He returns Rivqah. Esav and Yaaqov are already born at this point in time.

The Avraham-in-Grar is the longest and most detailed form of the narrative, but it ignores the famine issue present in the other two. It also has the teasing denouement of whose son Yitschaq really is, Avraham’s or Avimelekh’s. Compared to that, the other two stories are tamer because there’s no suspicion that the king who took the wife fathered the child.

The most likely candidates for the pair of derived doublets are the Grar stories, because of one more detail. Both are followed by incidents in which the protagonist conflicts with Avimelekh and his general, Fikhol, about wells, and both end in a reason for the name Beer Sheva. But in this case the Yitschaq incident is the longest and most detailed, and it refers to wells (plural) that Avraham dug. That suggests that the Avraham episode is the derived doublet. Without considering this, it seems as if the Yitschaq episode of the wife swapping is the derived doublet.

The Grar episodes are also surrounded by a theme of laughter. Avraham laughs first, but not until after the Egyptian incident; Sarah laughs next, immediately after the angel announces that she will give birth. These are dual reasons for Yitschaq’s name. After they return from Grar and Yitschaq is not only born but weaned, the world laughs together with Sarah. But she sees Yishmael m’tsacheq, which can mean “joke around” but also “fight”, and as a result orders Avraham to throw him away. And in the Yitschaq story the marriage is discovered when the king sees him and his wife m’tsacheq, which can also mean “flirt”. It seems to me that from the annunciation to Avraham of Yitschaq’s birth, to the return of Rivqah, is a story cycle.

Olrik specifically states that there is no one path for how narratives change. They can languish and then re-floresce, with differences related to but not dictated by interim changes in the culture. One narrator can take a narrative in a rational direction and another can develop a subordinate character into the protagonist of a related but separate cycle. To know which of these stories were the originals and which were derived and how, we would have to have a time machine and go back and drop in on different periods to see when they arose and in what format. But they seem to be the best candidates in Torah for derived doublets.

And now for something completely different...