Ben Hur, the novel, part 15

I’m ignoring chapter 7 of Book II and that means we’re up to Book III. Chapters 1 and 2 have an error. Quintus Arrius is called a tribune while he is in command of a military ship. The rank of tribune went out before the Republic ended. The commander of a ship was a centurion because ships had a hundred rowers, and he had a co-officer of unknown function called a trierarchus.

Skipping chapters 3-5, wherein Wallace invents the rescue of Arrius by Judah, we get to Book IV. Chapter 1 has Judah being raised for 5 years by Arrius and driving his horses in the circus. Arrius supposedly adopts Judah and bequeaths all his property to him.

While adoptions in the Roman Empire were as close as possible to an actual parental relationship, I believe this is another fiction. It benefits Judah by giving him riches and contacts in government, but it doesn’t do much for Arrius. The emperor could set aside a will if it did not follow the rules of piety: the heir had to owe a duty to the testator to offer to his manes upon his death. Jews don’t do that. Tiberius, who was always hard up for money (or greedy) would have set Arrius’ will aside in a heartbeat and surely some wise friend of Arrius would have told him so.

All the more so as Tiberius cleared Rome in 19 CE of Jews. Finding a Jew named as Arrius’ sole heir would have invited scrutiny.

Is it because there were no Jews in Rome that Judah let Arrius adopt him? Hardly. The book claims that the battle was in 24 CE. Tiberius’ expulsion included officials of Isis worship. Here’s what was going on.

Some Roman priesthoods required that the priests be born from the strictest form of Roman marriage, the confarreatio. Women had to enter this form of marriage if the paterfamilias ordered it. But there were two problems: Augustus noted and passed laws about a habit of marrying girls who were not old enough to give birth. Then the man left her to the care of the paterfamilias and went on his merry way. At any point, he could get the paterfamilias to agree to a divorce and then be free to marry the woman he really wanted. If the family had already eaten up the first wife’s dowry, and the new woman was rich, it was a no-brainer.

Jewish and Egyptian women were not eligible for confarreatio. They were not subject to a paterfamilias; they had more civil and physical freedom than Roman women, including the right to earn and keep money in their own name. Isis was a powerful, popular goddess with handsome rites, and anybody could understand why Roman women would join her cult.

But misconceptions about Judaism make it hard for Gentiles to understand why Roman women would convert to Judaism. Jews had businesses and farmed; they had legions in the Roman army. They could not serve in the government, which required oaths to pagan gods, but they did just about every other job you can think of, some of which were low-paying and others nasty, like leather-working which was smelly. Roman women would not be attracted by rich Jews, who would have been married by age 18; nor could they gain social glamor by marrying a Jew.

So why convert? Maybe stability. A Jewish marriage requires the man to settle a ketubbah on his wife for her benefit after his death, and he can also, as I said, make her a deed of gift. A Jewish divorce requires a finding of ervah or, in the man, impotence. A Jewish marriage requires that the man support his wife. A Jewish wife can say “not tonight, dear” and not have to complain of headache. A Jewish family does not have a paterfamilias who can push through a divorce or who has the right of life and death over those in his manus.

There might have been Roman men who converted. This would get them out from under the cult. Roman men who did not serve in the military could not achieve high government rank. But they were expected to serve in government and that was an expensive proposition; officials paid for religious ceremonies and public works and celebrations like games. If you had a business or property with good income, you could avoid all that if you were a Jew, and maybe even if you were part of the Isis cult.

Nobody is sure why Tiberius pushed Jews and Isis worshippers out of Rome, but it only means they left the city proper. The larger part of the Jews were settled in Trastevere (Cross-Tiber) where a Jewish graveyard has been found. It remained a Jewish quarter into medieval times. So there were Jews in Italy, close to Rome, for Judah to live with, find work, maybe find a wife. He might eventually move back to the Holy Land but, with his family and property there destroyed, it would take either economic disaster in Italy or a strong religious bent to draw him back.

And that would put his conversion back to the arrival of Paul in Rome, about 50 CE. That’s not the story Wallace wants to tell.

Hang loose

My computer tried to do an update last night and now it won't start so no post this week. Have a happy New Year and I'll get back to the Ben Hur posts when I can.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 14

We are up to Book II chapter 5 of Ben Hur and Wallace throws in a cheap bit of Victorian bigotry saying that Arabs and Egyptians are stupid. The Nabatean Arabs were Jews at this time, converted under the Hasmonean kings. The Egyptians had been allies of Judea through the Seleucid persecution down to Herod’s time.

Tirzah did not have an amulet inherited from a grandmother.

Amulets were little bags containing either written material or healing herbs. Now remember that at this time Jews did not use Biblical Hebrew as a living language. They spoke Aramaic. They had an Aramaic version of Torah, or at least in synagogue somebody would get up and translate the reading from the Torah scroll as it was read. Persians speak an Indo-Iranian language, not a Semitic language. It is highly unlikely that a Persian could write a kosher amulet.

Amulets were primarily used against epilepsy. If a person was healed three times, the amulet was defined as “effective”. If the maker took it back when the first person got well, and gave it to at least two other people who were healed of other illnesses, he was defined as “expert”. (Mishnah Shabbat 6:2, one of those without a name in it, so a standard Sanhedrin decision, and the gemara on Talmud Shabbat 61/62.) So Tirzah should not have an amulet; the maker should have taken it back.

And now about not being P’rushim. If the family were not P’rushim, they would not value the teachings of Hillel and his sons. These were the cream of the P’rushi ranks, and they argued against Ts’duki teachings.

There’s only one reason Wallace would pretend that the family were not P’rushim and yet think that they followed the School of Hillel. Ignorance.

And then another bit of ignorance. Judah could not train in a Roman camp. The Roman legions worshipped their eagles. This was prohibited to Jews. There were Jewish legions in the Roman army at the time. Judah could train with one of those, have kosher food, have rest on Shabbat, and so on. They were disbanded by Theodosius II in the 400s CE when he decreed other disabling legislation against Jews. You can say all you want that only assimilated Jews would have been in the Roman army, but they were there before Titus destroyed the Second Temple and they were there after the Hadrianic persecutions.

But Wallace being ignorant or careless made another mistake.

Ben Hur,, the novel, part 13

We are up to Book II chapter 5 of Ben Hur and you stayed with me!

I’m skipping chapter 5 because you would be better off spending your time reading your Bible and reading real history, not Wallace’s faked hash, and going to chapter 6 we meet a new character, Tirzah, the daughter of the house. 

And her clothing is all wrong. Jewish women did not expose their bodies, even at home. Her arms should be covered at least from shoulder to elbow.  And you should be going “say what?”

I just said a couple of posts ago that when a man dies and leaves a widow, sons and daughters, the mother and sons can join to marry off an underage daughter. They can’t do this for a grown daughter, but she must be supported from the income of the man’s property. The son gets a job or goes begging to have an income.

Except.

Judah’s father could have written a deed of gift to Judah either before his death or while on his deathbed. The deed was valid in either case, except that on his deathbed the father had to reserve some of the property to himself. Then if he recovered he had an income.

A prudent man should write three deeds of gift: one for his widow; one for his daughter(s); and one for his son, with the reservation of property in this last. All three should say “after my death” or “from now and after my death”. In this second case, they all have an income and it’s not tied up into a will, which only takes effect after death. But stuff happens.

If Ithamar wrote a deed of gift, Judah isn’t running a business for the benefit of his mother and sister; he’s running it so he has his own income. He may be managing the property covered by the other two deeds, or a relative is managing it.

But the real issue in this chapter is, both Tirzah and Judah should be married. In a world without scientific medication, where doctors functioned on anecdotal evidence, few infants reached the age of 5 and another tranche didn’t reach the age of 15. If Judah’s father was alive when Tirzah was 13, he would at least have started the search for a husband and written a deed to cover her dowry. Judah would have been 15 to 18 at the time, and Mishnah Pirkey Avot 5:21 says marriage happens at 18. Judah is 21. He should have a wife and at least one child, or one on the way.

Tirzah would be living with her husband, even if she’s 16 and just married.

The mother would be living in a dower house on the property covered by her deed of gift.

So again, Wallace is committing the fallacy of Presentism. He’s writing the classic Victorian melodrama where the widow and her children stay together. And it wasn’t so. Not in those times; not in Judea; not in Rome, so Messala should also not be a bachelor at this point. Oh, sure, he probably left his wife home with the paterfamilias, especially if there were children already. But his wife, like Agrippina, might follow the drum and bring the children along.

Ben Hur the novel, part 12

We are up to Book II chapter 4 of Ben Hur and I forgot something in chapter 3.

Amrah would not have a bowl of milk on the tray she brings to Judah. That’s not kosher. It was decided before 10 CE. She would have a goblet of vin ordinaire on the tray. Wallace wrote as the Temperance movement was gaining steam and members of that movement would be sure to approve and recommend his book if the only people who drank liquor were dissolute characters or at least those who were not on track for conversion.

So this is post 12 and you can bail here if you want. You could get some of the same information on this thread, from my Fact-Checking thread. It’s up to you whether to keep on or ditch me. If you leave, take with you the lesson that if you’re not Jewish and you’re not an educated Jew, you shouldn’t write fiction about Jews because you are sure to get something wrong.

But if you’re seeing this paragraph, you stayed. And immediately Wallace makes a mistake.

What language does he think Judah’s mother speaks?

If he thinks it’s Biblical Hebrew, he’s wrong. Jews stopped speaking it on the street during the Babylonian Captivity. Aramaic, aka Neo-Babylonian or Akkadian, became the Jewish street language.

Because of that, in my opinion, the elder Jews realized that their oral tradition was dying out. It was the basis for their entire culture. They decided to put it into writing. They got their experts together and transcribed the oral tradition.

Then they took down the words of the prophets which, in Jewish canon, starts with the book of Joshua and goes through Jeremiah. All these materials are also in Biblical Hebrew. The importance of these books is that they provide later confirmation of Torah law under new behavioral examples.

And finally, the Jews wrote down things like Psalms and Proverbs, which gave further examples of how Biblical Hebrew used words; historical books like Ruth and Chronicles; and the most important material that they knew in Biblical Aramaic like Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel.

The Jews learned Greek, no doubt, after the conquests of Alexander; they knew Latin after the conquests of Caesar. They claimed there were 72 languages stemming from the descendants of Noach, plus an “Aramaic without a spoken version” which I assume shows that they had seen cuneiform and knew it recorded Neo-Babylonian, but they learned the Aramaic square script for the language they spoke.

Now the next question. Who was Judah to be? I already said: he had taken his father’s position in business and in public affairs. The question is nonsense. Judah already had responsible employment and a public role. His father raised him to be a responsible Jewish adult, not an adrenaline addict like Messala. And so another false and nonsensical chapter goes into the record.

And the final blunder: the First Temple was burned down by the Aramaean rulers of Babylon. The Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom and were in turn conquered by the Aramaeans. This is in the Bible. Wallace is messing with the facts.

Knitting -- leftovers, a new stitch, and a plan

So I had leftover cotton yarn in fingering weight and there was a new stitch I wanted to try, plus I wanted to invent a frame for houseware projects.

So the stitch was the Eye of Partridge stitch, which is the traditional name for Johnnie Vasquez' "double knit". EoP was used on Arne and Carlos' video showing how to make a reinforced toe and heel to go with Dovrekofta socks, which are a lot like Fair Isle knitting.

Suzanne Bryan's video shows how to work EoP in one and two colors on the flat and I got two ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZAF6-7Qc3M

What if I use it with the fine cotton to make washcloths for the bathroom? It would provide a little texture to exfoliate my face, the same as the texture on my Dishie washcloths helps get food off plates.

I have that nice selvage pattern for the sides of the washcloth, but what do I do about the bottom and top? Can I do something that looks like the selvage? So I charted and experimented and here is the result. This makes a 14 x 14 washcloth from 3 25-gram packets of Cotona fingering.

1. do a long-tail cast-on for 100 stitches besides the initial slip knot.

2. K2, do seed stitch across, K2

3. P2, do seed stitch across, making sure to purl into what look like knit stitches and vice versa, P2

4. K3/P2, K across, P2/K3

5. P2/K1/P2, seed stitch across, P2/K1/P2

6. K3/P2, seed stitch across making sure to purl into what look like knit stitches and vice versa, K3/P2

You will do rows 2-6 at the top, binding off in the last row of seed stitch.

turn, do the purl side selvage, PURL across, and do the selvage on the other side.

EoP rows.

a. K3/P2, K1, slip 1 purlwise, repeat these two across, P2/K3 selvage. RIGHT SIDE

b. P2/K1/P2, purl across, P2/K1/P2. WRONG SIDE

c. selvage, slip 1 purlwise, K1, repeat across, selvage

d. selvage, purl across, selvage

It is VERY easy to get out of whack and then you ruin the EoP patters. Here's how you find out what to do first on a right side row. 

i.  Do your selvage.

ii. undo the first stitch, which you purled on the last row. 

iii. if the stitch below that is knitted, put the purl stitch back and slip that first stitch. If there's a floater below it, put the purl stitch back and knit that first stitch.

iv. the other way is when you purl the last 4-5 stitches, remember, where you slipped a stitch there is a floating thread in that place. You will knit that stitch on the next round, so count as you go Knit-Slip-Knit-Slip and then remember whichever you end up with before you do the selvage, because that's what you do after you turn the selvage. But if you forget, get interrupted, whatever, do steps i-iii as a backup.

Suzanne's video also shows how to work EoP in two colors, which could be kind of pretty.

The other idea from Suzanne's video is that if you use bulky yarn in EoP, you would end up with a waffle blanket like that thermal fabric. So there's another houseware. 

Ben Hur the novel, part 11

We are up to Book II chapter 3 of Ben Hur and I want to finish off something I said last time because it probably hasn’t occurred to most readers.

In chapter 3 we get to the exclusive services contract. I already said that a man could pay off a theft by getting somebody to buy his contract. The contract lasted 6 years, or 50, or ended when a yovel year came.

If the man refused the 6 year term limit, an awl was punched through his ear lobe. ONCE. He did not have to put an earring in it to keep it open. He did not have to get it punched again when it healed up. Those of us with piercings know that they do heal up and then we either try to re-open them ourselves or go get them punched again. Just went through this with a pair of favorite earrings.

The ear-punch rule did not apply to non-Jews. If a non-Jew took out a contract, he got paid the money as soon as he agreed to be circumcised. Then he became a Jew, and he had to learn to live Jewish for the smooth operation of the contract holder’s home. The contract terminated when this holder decided; he could bequeath the contract to his son. But if the holder hit the contractor and knocked out a tooth or his eye, THEN the contract ended.

No Jewish woman could be sold into one of these contracts. If you think it’s possible, you haven’t read your Bible. The case of Rebekah is instructive. First her father waffled about her marrying Isaac; he said let’s leave it overnight. We never hear from him again. The next day Rebekah’s brother and mother bargain for the marriage. Why?

Because in the culture that transmitted that story, if a man died leaving unmarried daughters, those daughters had to be supported from his property. It had to be kept together to provide the income for their support. The widow could not collect her jointure; the sons could not split the property up amongst themselves and, if the income wasn’t enough to support them and the daughters too, the sons went out to work or even to beg.

Meanwhile the husband was responsible for the girl’s food and shelter, and for clothing that reflected his status. If she was an adult, she could agree to take her conjugal rights but if she said “no” the husband had to leave her alone.

An underage girl was taught to say “no”. A pregnancy could kill her. Once she reached puberty, she could repudiate the marriage completely, if it was her mother or brother who married her off. And she was taught that she had this right. From then on she could never marry without her own free consent.

So when Wallace says that the female servant in Judah’s household had her ear punched, he shows his ignorance of what the Bible says, as well as what Jewish law says. Jewish law prohibits taking out an exclusive services contract on a Jewish woman. Jewish law also does not require punching the ear of a non-Jew who refuses to leave in the 6^th year, because his contract does not expire in the 6^th year. It can be terminated by the contract holder, or it can be terminated by the court for cause – battery. 

Amrah does not have a hole punched in her ear.