21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:9, no "et"

Genesis 2:9

 

ט וַיַּצְמַ֞ח יְהוָֹ֤ה אֱלֹהִים֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה כָּל־עֵ֛ץ נֶחְמָ֥ד לְמַרְאֶ֖ה וְט֣וֹב לְמַֽאֲכָ֑ל וְעֵ֤ץ הַֽחַיִּים֙ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַגָּ֔ן וְעֵ֕ץ הַדַּ֖עַת ט֥וֹב וָרָֽע:

 

Translation:     **** Gd made sprout from the earth every tree pleasant for looking at and good for eating; the tree of life in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

נֶחְמָד	pleasant
לְמַרְאֶה	for looking at
לְמַאֲכָל	For eating
חַיִּים	life
בְּתוֹךְ	In the middle of
דַּעַת	knowledge
רָע	Evil, bad

 

The only way you won’t know how to pronounce “life” right off the bat is if you’ve never seen Fiddler on the Roof. L’chaim is a toast meaning “to life”.

 

Mareh and maakhal are verbal nouns. The verbs are raah, “see, look at” and akhal, “eat”. Why did I translate them as gerundives?

 

Because the verbal form that is used substantively is a gerundive. I’m trying to beat the infinitive concept out of your head, and saying “to eat” would undo all my hard work.

 

It’s also not appropriate to say “for food” because there’s no parallel way to word l’mareh. “For sight” is just clumsy. I can get parallel structure, and escape backtracking, and at the same time reflect how the language really works, with “for” plus a gerund. This is just one more example of how a good translation goes the extra mile instead of just grabbing the first convenient substitute.

 

Note kal-ets. There’s no et to tell you if this is “all trees” or “every tree”. The context leans in the direction of “every”. Which et would you use if there was one to get “every”? That’s right, the one with segol.

 

But why isn’t it there? Well, that’s a dangerous question to ask in grammar. What you have to ask is “does this context fit with the syntax or meaning that would use et?” And then you need to tick off why it does or does not fit.

 

Why would we not use collective et here? Because after the etnach two distinct trees are called out, and collective et would draw them into the context of food trees.

Why didn’t it use distinctive et to distinguish the food trees from these two trees? Well, we’ll see an example later of how the segolate et can hint that the noun it’s attached to fell short of standards. These trees can’t do that. At the same time, the fruit trees also are not sub-standard.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- flow of narrative

One conclusion Olrik drew from the huge disparity in format and content exhibited by oral narratives in contrast to material invented in writing, affects the claim that some archaeological discoveries were the origin of some parts of Torah.

The main evidence for the conclusion comes from work with ballads. The flow of information was that a folk ballad, sung among the non-reading public, would be picked up by people who overheard them. Amateur and professional musicians and scholars would popularize them among the literate. The material would be redeveloped, adding descriptions not in the original, or refrains that introduced a moral element.

These new versions would become popular and be recorded on broadsheets sold for pennies apiece at fairs. Thus they would get back into the hands of the people who sang the original songs.

What happened next was one of two things. Either the new version enjoyed a very short vogue and then disappeared. Or it morphed back into something resembling the original version. All the refrains, moralizations, and descriptions that were missing from the original version were stripped out of the “literate” version, otherwise it didn’t survive back in the original environment. This second fate was more common if the original song was still in vogue.

People who knew the original version knew it in a format that suited oral transmission. The “literate” versions could not duplicate that format because literate people had not yet studied oral traditions to find out how to reproduce the folk format. Literate people had different tastes, and songs only became popular among them by suiting those tastes, prompting redevelopment of the songs to add or substitute the favored material.

Lyrics invented from the ground up in the literate environment never survived in the “folk” environment at all.

Literate and non-literate classes communicate in different ways and the formats differentiate material into what originated orally, and what originated in writing.

This is what I meant when I used the laws of thermodynamics and invented a zeroth law of SWLT. It’s also what I mean by inventing a zeroth addition to Ginsberg’s theorem. You have to play the text as you find it, oral or written. “Drawing a card” from the written environment is as wrong for analyzing oral material, as analyzing a translation and inserting the answer into a discussion of the source document. If you have already agreed with me that DH produces nonsense by analyzing a translation of Torah, then you should agree with me that archaeologists produce nonsense by claiming that a culture with low literacy nevertheless accessed written material and adopted it.

And remember, one of the barriers to adoption was the cuneiform in which the “adopted” text was written, something illiterates would not have read even when they spoke something like the same language either before 2350 BCE or after 580 BCE.

In the interim, the Jews had developed their own language which expressed their own norms. Even if Enuma Elish or Gilgamesh survived into the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews would not have recognized them as stories about “us”. “Us” was the people of the Ingress, the Shiloh period, the hilltop settlements, the Davidic monarchy, and the Jewish culture since then.

And in the interim, a lot of time flowed under the bridge....

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- grammar and context

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.

So last time I said that you morphological grammarians are in trouble because the form of the 3rd masculine and feminine singular in perfect aspect of ayin yod verbs is identical to the masculine and feminine singular of the progressive aspect, and the normal word order is also identical.

You can only tell them apart if you know how they function in a sentence.

I said that there were exactly eight ways to use progressive and here they are. Memorize them. Because there are lots of perfect aspect verbs in Tannakh, and lots of ayin yod verbs in perfect aspect, but there won’t be many in progressive aspect – but there are other progressive aspect verbs in Tannakh, some of which we will see soon.

a.         present tense.
b.         action in progress.
c.         descriptive.
d.         immediate future, “about to X”.
e.         immediate past “has [just] X’d”.
f.          habitual.
g.         the sense in which an imperfect tense is used, that is, an action that was ongoing when something else happened.
h.         locative situations.
j.          X is “still” happening.

OK I lied: nine. However, progressive aspect as present tense is so extremely rare in Tannakh that you will mostly use one of the others.

You saw function (h) in Genesis 1:2: m’rachefet al-p’ney t’hom. It was also (b).

Now think back to Genesis 1:27 and naaseh. What that verse meant related to three things. One was that the verb was nifal, not the related but more common qal binyan. Another was the grammatical context of the narrative; naaseh as a singular verb coordinated with use of a singular verb in the next verse. A third was the cultural context: there is only one Gd in Judaism, which owns this narrative. The idea that naaseh referred to plural gods would never have come from inside Judaism.

Never think that you know what a word means without its sentence, a sentence without its episode, an episode without its narrative, a narrative without its culture.

In any literature of any culture. If you stop short of the full culture, you’re cheating yourself.

Understand; no natural languages would ever have existed if they didn’t facilitate communication in some culture, and the culture in which they were used had to distinguish between identical forms in order to communicate.  Communication is always about something in the culture. What a language means by what it says, is all about the consequences to the culture of whatever is said. So the meaning is about how the culture understands words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

Here’s a place to make trouble if you ever have a Hebrew class in your bucket list. If your teacher gets up and tells you that you can’t tell the progressive and perfect of an ayin yod verb apart, ask about the sentence, the episode/paragraph, the narrative, and the culture. You have a legitimate gripe to the department if a full professor has too limited a perspective on a language she/he is teaching.

Knitting -- sweaters

Huh? Ain't I been teachin' you how to knit sweaters?

This is where us Yanks differ from the British. I taught you a pullover; the British call that a jumper a lot of times.  When they talk "sweater", they mean what Yanks mean by "cardigan". Which isn't really accurate either because you can make a sweater or cardigan with raglan sleeves.

A sweater or cardigan buttons up the front, usually in the middle although I think I've seen designs that button up off-center.

Anyway. There are two ways to do this. One is to do steeking up the front Fair-Isle fashion and attach a separate button band. I like to do as little sewing as possible and the shoulders fill my quota. YMMV.

I knitted some sweaters a long time ago and I stopped because I didn't like how the buttonholes turned out. They were too stretchy. But I found a video online which shows how to make nice neat sturdy buttonholes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEgiHQrrg-k

What it does is basically the same thing you do if you make buttonholes in woven fabric. There, you stitch bars at the end to make them sturdy; here, we're going to wrap yarn like we did with the argyle pattern.

1. Your hem is the usual except -- add six stitches, four of them to overlap and center the buttonhole and two so that the ribbing comes out the same on both ends. You will not be joining them and working in the round, you will work rows, probably in stockinette.
2. Work 4 rows of rib.
3.  Buttonholes are usually on the right side in ladies' wear. When you start to work row 5, which is on the RIGHT SIDE, work the first 5 stitches of rib and then start the first buttonhole.
4.  You are going to wrap the ends of the buttonhole to stabilize them.
    Bring the yarn to the front, slip the next stitch purlwise to the righthand needle, take the yarn to the back, and slip the stitch back to the lefthand needle.
5. Now bind off 4 stitches: slip the next stitch purlwise and pass the previous stitch over it. When you have slipped 4 times, put the last stitch that has a slipped stitch over it onto the lefthand needle and do the next step.
6.   Your working yarn has been left back where you wrapped stitches and you have to go back and get it.
      Turn to the wrong side and do a cable cast on for the top of the buttonhole. Put the needle between the last two stitches on the lefthand needle and knit the working yarn through the gap between those stitches, then put it back on the lefthand needle. Do that four more times for the top of the buttonhole, total of 5 stitches cast on.
7.   Turn the work back to the right side. Slip 1 stitch purlwise from the left to the right needle, pass the last (5th) of your cable-on stitches over it, and return it to the left needle.  Now you have the working yarn back at the body of the knitting and can finish the ribbing in that row.
Now work the other four rows of ribbing.

Make sure you are on the side with the buttonhole. Now do the following at that end to start the buttonhole placket: K2/P2/K2/P2/K2 and then P1, a total of 11 stitches.
Knit to the end of the row.
Turn to the wrong side, K2 and purl to the placket, K1/P2/K2/P2/K2/P2.
Repeat these two instructions to the next row where you need a buttonhole, then repeat the above steps to make the buttonhole.
Finish the buttonhole placket, then knit. Work this sweater in stockinette.

Four rows below the last buttonhole, stop working the buttonhole placket and work k2/p2 rib to the shoulder. Turn inside out and knit it together, then work to the other shoulder and do the same, then finish the row.

Now work in rib for 3 rows. Your next row after that will be worked on the rightside; make your last buttonhole, and then do 5 more rows of rib, binding off the last row.

Do your sleeves and sew on your buttons, and you're done. Imagine this in a multicolor yarn with 10 different buttons and you have something eye-catching.

Here are the rules.
a.  Usually there are 10 buttonholes up a sweater. The last one will have 5 rows of neck ribbing above it. Calculate how many rows to work between buttonholes so they are evenly spaced.
b.  How large a button you can use depends on the yarn weight. For fingering weight yarn like Palette wool or Lindy Chain linen/cotton blend, binding off 4 stitches will give you room for a 3/8 to 9/16 inch button. The heavier the yarn, the larger the button that the hole will fit, as well as the larger the button you probably want.
c.  If you want a larger button than 4 stitches will allow, bind off more stitches. In step 5, bind off that number and in step 6, when you cable on, cable on the number of stitches you bound off plus 1. So if you bound off 5 stitches, cable on 6.

So I was working in a fingering weight wool using size 3 needles, and I cabled on 286 stitches. Then
10 rows of hem rib with a buttonhole in row 5,
110 rows and the armpits in row 111,
bound off a total of 14 stitches at the underarms and cast on steeking.
I started the neck rib and knitted the shoulders together (30 stitches) in row 90. (Yes, that's a purl row.)
10 rows of neck rib with 5 rows above  the last buttonhole, which was in row 195.
The other buttonholes go in rows 27, 49, 71, 93, 115, 135, 155, and 175.

Notice that there are only 20 rows between the last 5 buttonholes. That's because I only worked buttonholes in knit rows. The video also gives you hints on putting them in purl rows, which should allow you to have them exactly evenly spaced.

Here are the top two buttonholes, marked with darker pink yarn bows. 




It will take you only a little longer to do a sweater than it does to work a pullover and so the dreaded "curse of the sweater" goes away now that you are an experienced knitter.

Lindy Chain will be comfortable in warmer temperatures, Palette in cooler ones. You can add lace inserts in either yarn or do Fair Isle color work in Palette's gorgeous 150 colors. The possibilities are endless, especially when you realize that you can embroider in duplicate stitch. Your wallet may curse me, but your friends will envy your gorgeous new clothes.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Great Oral Divide

The fact that Torah has the same high-level features as Talmud, renowned for its oral origin, and the same fine-level structure as Olrik found in his studies and codified in the Epic Laws, strongly suggests that Torah had an oral origin instead of a written origin.

Why?

I hinted at it earlier. Oral tradition studies grew up at the end of the 19^th century CE with Olrik’s mentor, Grundtvig, and studies of ballads, preserved in great number and variety in Denmark. What Grundtvig discovered for ballads, Olrik also found in his study of Saxo Grammaticus compared to another broad and deep field, Danish oral narratives. (The work of the Grimm brothers before their time, was mostly dismissed and the tales they collected were classed as fairy tales, strictly entertainment and more suitable to children than adults.)

One result is that, over the millennia prior to Olrik’s work, nobody knew how to imitate oral narratives in the terms he used They might imitate the choice of words, such as copying proverbs into their work, but they could not reproduce the traditional attitudes. People who do not read much, even if they can read, relate differently to the history of their culture and to its activities, than do those who can read, and who read regularly for data gathering or formation of artistic taste.

The two groups can hardly communicate clearly. I saw this illustrated in the Beilis trial transcript. People who could not or did not read had only a hazy idea of the passage of time. When they gave depositions or testified in court, they remembered the timing of what happened as it related to church holidays. But some of those are moveable feasts, and in court it was important for the literate authorities to nail events to actual calendar dates. The prosecution spent hours trying to hammer illiterate witnesses into agreeing that certain things happened on certain dates. It never worked.

Olrik’s principles codify that the structure of oral material is almost diametrically opposed to the format or formulation of written material. He describes this difference as so well-defined and pervasive that it is hardly necessary to find a narrative still being transmitted orally, to distinguish its recorded version from something invented in writing. The difference between Norse tales and Hans Christian Anderson’s tales is not just the difference between pagan and Victorian cultures. It is the difference between non-writing and writing cultures.

Torah can be transmitted orally. Talmud can be transmitted orally. It occurs now, every day. I believe that both were recorded from people who could recite them, and not edited together from people’s personal notes, both because this is how Talmud was recorded, and because of the long millennia of Jewish culture preceding the first writing system for Hebrew.

The great oral divide has consequences for material flow between the two reservoirs.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- ayin yod verbs

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.

 

The verb yita is unusual in that, like nagash, the qal and nifal are alike. The nun assimilates and disappears, and the middle letter takes dagesh. While Gd might decree this, He might also do the work himself.

 

Make sure you understand that this means to plant something. There is another verb, natah which is peh nun and lamed heh, and it means to set up a tent or spread something out. In English you might sometimes see “plant a tent” but that only uses “plant” in the meaning of “set up”. In BH they are two different verbs.

 

And now our first ayin yod verb, sim, “put, place”. LEARN THIS VERB. It is fairly common and a good paradigm for the other ayin yod verbs.

 

The aspectless gerundive is the same no matter how you use it.

שִׂים

This is the imperfect aspect.
 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אָשִׂים	נָשִׂים	First
תָּשִׂים	תָּשִׂימוּ	Second/masculine
תָּשִׂימִי	תָּשֵׂמְנָה	Second/feminine
יָשִׂים	יָשִׂימוּ	Third/masculine
תָּשִׂים	תָּשֵׂמְנָה	Third/feminine

 

This is the perfect aspect.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
שַׂמָתִּי	שַׂמְנוּ	First
שַׂמְתָּ	שַׂמְתֶּם	Second/masculine
שַׂמְתְּ	שַׂמְתֶּן	Second/feminine
שָׂם	שַׂמוּ	Third/masculine
שָׂמָה		Third/feminine

This is progressive aspect.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
שָׂם	שָׂמִים	First
שָׂמָה	שָׂמוֹת	Second/masculine

Oh man. What is going on with the masculine and feminine singular?

 

If you were a morphological grammarian, you would be in hot water. Even experts complain they can’t tell the progressive from the perfect. (If they use that terminology….)

 

What’s worse is that the normal word order is the same for both aspects, SVO.

 

Here is where functionality comes in. Progressive is always used differently from perfect aspect. When you know how the verb is functioning in the sentence, then you know which aspect you have. This is something morphologists always ignore, if they know it, and then they can argue  over it until the cows come home. Next week I’ll show you how to bring those cows home.

Garden -- wasps

Been there, done that twice.

Any time you have something sit out for a long time that provides good cover, wasps will build nests there. Concrete blocks, an old drop cloth, whatever. If it will hide them and their colony, they will take it over. They will build nests in the ground, too, and they get very nasty toward the end of the summer.

Mike McGrath, my go-to guy, has ways of fixing this on his YBYG website. GO THERE AND FIND OUT.

It wouldn't have worked in my case, but what I can do is pour horticultural oil on the stuff that they nested in. Of course, it only kills the ones it touches, but enough got touched to break up the colony.

Then I had to deal with the ones floating around where the colony had been, foragers who came home and found that everything was gone. Here's a helpful site.

https://plantcaretoday.com/natural-ways-get-rid-wasps.html

I had two of the essential oils they talked about because I mix them with rubbing alcohol and witch hazel for bug repellent that I put on before doing work in my back yard.

I also had borax and a recipe for boric acid.

So I sprinkled the porch brick with essential oil to drive off the last homeless wasps, and then I loaded my water gun with boric acid and sprayed it all over the brick to poison it for new wasps -- and also ants. The homeless wasps will die in less than three weeks. No other colony will take them in and they are workers, not royalty who can start a new colony.

You do not want to spray boric acid into wasp nests in the ground. It does not wash out of the soil. Use McGrath's solution instead.

And by the way, ice poultices do a good job of stopping wasp stings from burning. Just don't get too courageous, because the effects are additive and the next sting you get could create an allergic reaction that can be deadly. It happened to a woman within 100 miles of where I live who pruned her azaleas at the wrong time of year, not knowing that she was at the tipping point.

And let this be a lesson to you to keep your property clean, to shift everything and groom around it at least once a year, to put stuff in the trash as soon as you know you're not going to need it any more, or to shut it up where wasps and other things can't get at it, and to do your landscape maintenance at the correct time for the plants instead of when it's convenient for you.