Fact-Checking the Torah -- they're all Greeks to me

Now let me go back and clear something up that looks like a puzzle in the archaeology.

The Medinat Habu inscription of Ramses III (1100s BCE, discovered 1859, definitive translation 1906) names the Ekwesh and the Pelishtim and some others as allies in the attack.  People looked at this inscription, saw the names of some of the Sea Peoples, and Libya, and they said, OH, the Ekwesh have to be the Ahiyyawa.

But in the fight with Ramses III, a strange thing happened when his troops were trying to count coup to collect rewards.  They usually cut off the foreskins of those they killed.

They couldn’t count coup on the Ekwesh this way.  The Ekwesh were already circumcised.  So they cut off the corpses’ hands.

Now, as everybody knows, the Achaeans did not practice circumcision.  So there’s something wrong with this identification.

Flip it upside down.  The Achaeans were a proto-Greek component of the Sea Peoples from Crete, and the Cretans were allied for centuries with the Pelishtim, to the point where “Creti and Pleti” was a common phrase for King David’s bodyguard.  The Pelishtim are commonly referred to as “uncircumcised” in the Bible.  At least one archaeologist has no problem with calling the Pelishtim “Greeks.”

In inscriptions put up by the Hittites (before the Sea Peoples steam-rollered them) there was also a list and on it was the name Ahiyyawa – but not Pelishtim.  And, as Singer says, the Hittites used Ahiyyawa for people in the region of Mykenae.

From Mykenae in the 1400s BCE we get Linear B, known to be a script the Pelishtim used, on tablets with words that look suspiciously like Greek.  One of these tablets refers to trader/mercenaries, the Iawones (is it coming together?). 

If these are the Ionians, we know that they lived for a while in a Peloponnesian region called Achaia, some time about the 1100s BCE, about the time the Pelishtim entered the Holy Land in force and founded their seaside Pentapolis; they also left remains at Deir ’Alla in Jordan.

Like the Hittites, the Egyptians didn’t distinguish the two, they called them all Pelishtim.  

I think that Ekwesh refers to Ethiopia, known by that time as Kush, who practiced circumcision.  This goes with Herodotus’ statement that the Ethiopians, like the Egyptians, practiced circumcision.  Now, he’s not reliable, because he says these are the only peoples who do it, except for the people of Kolkhis.  He also thought that the Kolkhians were descended from Egyptians.  In fact, the Tibareni (Tuval) lived in that region.  There’s no independent confirmation of Herodotus’ claims about the Kolkhians. 

Ancient writings have to be taken with large grains of salt when they refer to third parties (or even fourth or fifth) as with Herodotus, who did all his work from his armchair, so to speak.  It takes other data, such as modern studies, to firm up a claim – or disprove it.  I haven’t found anybody else saying that the Ekwesh must be Kush instead of Ahiyyawa, but I think I’m right.

And  next.... The Big One.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- perfect commandments

So Dr. Cook tells us that Biblical Hebrew is an ancient language with the same features as its relatives, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and so on, some of which are dead languages. Biblical Hebrew has an aspect verb system with perfect and imperfect. Both forms can have a future meaning, but that depends on the syntax and use of vav.

 

You now know about the narrative past, so you know that the vav at the start of a verse often doesn’t mean “and.” It might signal narrative past, it might signal a relative or coordinate clause.

 

You also know that an imperfect without vav might have a future meaning.

 

You know about oblique modality, so you know that vav with a perfect aspect verb is often a subordinate clause when followed by the subject.

 

Now I’ll give some information about use of perfect and imperfect that has gone under most people’s radar. Dr. Cook referred to one example but what I’m going to say now isn’t in his dissertation.

 

When you have vav plus perfect aspect verb in the 2^nd person singular (or maybe plural), you have a commandment. This happens in the laws of Passover, in the instructions for building the tabernacle, and so on.

 

Why do some commandments use perfect aspect?

 

It’s due to that permansive connotation of the perfect aspect, which it shares with other Semitic languages.

 

Other commandments use imperfect aspect, and there are two classes.

 

When a verse starts out ki or im, followed by a 2^nd person imperfect verb, this should be translated “if X”, where X is the verb for an action that kicks off consequences. It will be followed by the consequences, such as paying a fine. You see this a lot in Exodus 21 and 22.

 

If there is no ki or im, just a 2^nd person imperfect, this is a commandment included in the recitation from of old, BUT the Israelites and Jews never made a Federal case out of investigating it. There are two important examples.

 

One is the cities of refuge, with verses in both Numbers and Deuteronomy. The peculiar case of the cities of refuge is that three of them were on the east bank of the Jordan. The west-bank tribes only went there once, which is recorded in Joshua 22, to object to the eastern tribes building a copy of the cairn set up on the west bank using stones taken from the bank of the Yarden River. The westerners did not stay long enough to check up on the easterners’ implementation of Jewish law. Without evidence that the three eastern cities of refuge were being used in the manner prescribed by Torah, the westerners could not use perfect aspect in the related verses.

 

The other is circumcision. The law is in Leviticus and it uses imperfect aspect. To verify that this had been comprehensively implemented would have required physical inspection. There is no law in Torah requiring such an inspection at any point in a man’s life. There is the statement in Joshua 5 that he had to circumcise all of the generation of the Wilderness, who were not subjected to the procedure during the wanderings; there is also the constant description of the Pelishtim (who were actually Greeks, see the Fact-Checking posts on this blog for the last couple of months) as “uncircumcised” as a distinction from Israelites or Judahites. There are rulings in Mishnah about when a circumcision has been validly performed. But not until Shulchan Arukh in the 1500s CE is there a ruling about who is responsible for making sure that a circumcision takes place. It’s the father, if you want to know.

 

You can catch me out on this if you go back to Exodus 12 and read the Hebrew carefully, taking notes on where these verbs occur, and then research them out into Mishnah, Gemara and, as I said, Shulchan Arukh. I haven’t done all the work yet either. If you’re interested, we can work on it together, and put the results in a new page on the blog.

All right, onward!
 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- hours and hours

If you're not knitting, maybe it's because you don't know when you'll find the time.

Gloves -- about 12 hours per glove.
Socks -- about 12 hours per sock.
Hat -- 6-8 hours.
Pullover -- the body takes up to  40 hours and then each sleeve takes up to 20 hours.

I told you how many balls of yard it takes for the gloves, socks, and hat.
The body of the pullover takes between 5 and 6 skeins, 50 grams per skein.
Each wrist-length sleeve takes between 2 and 3 skeins.
A 3/4 length sleeve should be 2 skeins.

There are about 110 yards of yarn in a 50 gram ball of WotA worsted.
The sport weight is about 137 yards in 50 grams.

The following are approximate stitch counts for a long-sleeve pullover in WotA sport yarn.
240 stitches around;
90 rounds from hem to underarm;
12 stitches on the holder at the underarm and 5 rounds of decreases;
65 rounds from underarm to shoulder (60 rounds after you stop decreasing);
20 stitches to knit off at the shoulders (which may seem like too few but you're decreasing more at the underarm);
100 rounds in the upper arm of the sleeve with decreases every 3rd round;
35 rounds in the lower arm with decreases every 4th round;
use K2TOG in last round to end up with 60 stitches and then do the cuff as k2/p1 rib.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- who were they?

The next urban legend is that “Hebrew” or ivri, applied to Avraham, is the same word as Hapiru, from Mesopotamian documents.

Supposedly Hapiru is SA-GAZ in Sumerian, but the online Sumerian dictionary defines this as “robber” or “murderer” and relates it to Akkadian shagashu, “murderer,” or habbatu, “plunderer.”

Akkadian chapiru means a vagrant.  Chapiru was also used as a personal name.

The Hapiru are first referenced as rebels from Mari and Nuzu against their conquest by Sargon of Akkad.  His empire fell apart at his death and his son and grandson had to repeat his conquest of Mari and Nuzu.  The Hapiru originally date, therefore, to the 2400s BCE, early enough for the ancestors of the Jews to get to the Holy Land by the time of the destruction of the cities of the plain – but as I pointed out last week, they had to leave Mesopotamia before Sargon began his conquest.

There’s also a problem with numbers.  The enumeration of Terach’s group includes blood and marriage kin.  It would also have included the servants that lived with them, maybe 50 people.  It’s not nearly enough people to seriously threaten Sargon’s reign, it’s not even enough people for an army troop.  Such a small group of commoners doesn’t deserve verbiage in a royal chronicle.  Chapiru must refer to a group well beyond this in size, the vast majority of which did not leave Mesopotamia, even if Terach’s family were part of them.

The Hapiru come up in the time of Akhenaten.  The reference is in his diplomatic and political letters found at Tell el-Amarna – and this is the only occurrence of the Sumerian logogram, everybody else spells it out by syllables.  Tell el-Amarna – Akhetaten – was founded about 1345 BCE and Akhenaten died about 1330 BCE, a 15-year period when these letters were sent or received. 

Some letters refer to Labayu and a coalition of disaffected natives and outsiders in the region of Shkhem, who took Shkhem away from Egyptian control and shared the real estate among them.  Other letters complain about a Hapiru attack on Jerusalem.

This last sentence makes it sound as if the Hapiru might be the Israelites who were entering the Holy Land.  That’s a quote out of historical context.  It would mean the Exodus was prior to Akhenaten’s time, which is not when most people think the Exodus happened.  So to identify these Hapiru with the Israelites means throwing out the traditional date of the Exodus.

It also conflicts with the urban legend that Akhenaten was the source of Jewish monotheism.  If these Hapiru attacked Jerusalem during the reign of Akhenaten, then either they spent much less than 40 years in the Sinai, or they left Egypt before Akhenaten came to the throne, let alone adopted Aten as his tutelary deity.  The Israelites had to learn their monotheism somewhere else, to attack Jerusalem during Akhenaten’s reign and have the reports show up at Akhetaten.

Egypt has a reference to Hapiru from the 1400s BCE, before Akhenaten, and these Hapiru already live in the Holy Land.  They are contrasted with the Retenu (Pelishtim), Hurrians, and Shasu (Bedouins).  If the Israelites are Hapiru, they are not Bedouins and they speak neither the language of the Pelishtim that was recorded in Linear B, nor the ergative isolate Hurrian language, but an early form of Hebrew, a western Semitic language.

An Akkadian inscription at Tell Atshanah (Alalakh), dating to the 1550s BCE, was found about 1939 by Woolley.  It identifies Hapiru as people living in the Holy Land.  They helped Idri-mi reconquer the city of Alalakh which had once belonged to his father. 

None of the references indicate that the Hapiru were an ethnic or religious unity or that they originally came from Mesopotamia.  In the case of the conquest of Shkhem, the Hapiru were multi-ethnic. 

The logical conclusion is that the word Hapiru does not equate to ivri, or Israelite, or any term that exclusively means the ancestors of the Jews prior to the Egyptian Captivity.  It’s a case of how urban legends have linked a word in Hebrew to a word from another language, without taking the cultural and historical context into account.  Sayce did the same thing when he wrote about Shabbat.  I’ll say more about the problems of philology much later.

For now, one more ethnic identification and then I can move on to some timing issues.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- perfect ASPECT

So Dr. Cook tells us that Biblical Hebrew is an ancient language with the same features as its relatives, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and so on, some of which are dead languages.  Biblical Hebrew has an aspect verb system with perfect and imperfect. 
An imperfect with the vav prefix, in verb-subject order, is the narrative past.  It represents action that is still ongoing and incomplete from the point of view of the characters in the story, but is part of the past of whoever is narrating the story.
If a noun subject splits the vav from the imperfect, and the syntax is subject-verb, and the  meaning clearly points to a past action, the verb belongs to a subordinate relative (“that”) or coordinate (“but”) clause.  The main clause might be in a prior verse.
Other sentences with no vav and an imperfect verb in subject-verb syntax possibly have a future meaning.
Verses starting with adverbials require verb-subject order, regardless of almost any  other grammar in them.

On to the perfect aspect.  Perfect aspect has the person and gender signals after the root letters.  Its normal syntax is subject-verb.  When it’s not, it has special meaning.
Genesis 4:1 is a past tense use of a perfect verb in subject-verb order; you might translate  the  vav as “and” but I wouldn’t because good English grammar argues against starting a sentence with “and.”

וְהָאָדָם יָדַע אֶת־חַוָּה אִשְׁתּוֹ וַתַּהַר וַתֵּלֶד אֶת־קַיִן וַתֹּאמֶר קָנִיתִי אִישׁ אֶת־יְהוָֹה:

The perfect aspect here does something I call opening or closing a story or an episode.  This is the counterpart to using narrative past to indicate that the story or episode is still in progress.  An example of complete closure is the pairing of Genesis 1:1 and 2:3, using bara, “created,” a perfect aspect verb.

IF the syntax is perfect verb-subject AND a vav is prefixed to the verb, it could be a subordinate clause of condition, purpose, result, cause, or effect.  This has a special name: it is called oblique modality.  Genesis 3:18 has an example.

וְקוֹץ וְדַרְדַּר תַּצְמִיחַ לָךְ וְאָכַלְתָּ אֶת־עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה:

“… such that you eat wild plants” because what you sowed was choked out by weeds.
That’s not how I originally translated it, but at the time I wasn’t using Dr. Cook’s principles.  

Genesis 13:6 (which you haven’t seen in these lessons) is a better example.

וְלֹא־נָשָׂא אֹתָם הָאָרֶץ לָשֶׁבֶת יַחְדָּו כִּי־הָיָה רְכוּשָׁם רָב וְלֹא יָכְלוּ לָשֶׁבֶת יַחְדָּו:

The subject of the first clause in this verse is ha-arets, the land, and it comes after a perfect verb, nasa, “bear”, and there’s a vav before the lo, “not”.  The translation is  “So the earth could not bear them…” because Avraham and Lot had such big herds; this is an oblique modality in a subordinate cause of effect. 

The information about the big herds is in the previous verse, which makes it an excellent example of a general principle in reading Biblical Hebrew.
The verse endings may come where somebody has to draw breath to keep reciting or reading, but that doesn’t mean that the verses exist in a vacuum.  You have to first look at the context of the surrounding verses to detect things like main clauses or contradictions. 
That’s what makes Bible study hard, even when you understand Hebrew well. 

Do you understand the difference between imperfect and perfect at this point? 
1.  They can both express past time, but the imperfect will have a prefix for person and gender and, if it’s the narrative past, there will be a vav before the personal prefix.  The syntax will be verb-subject.  Never translate this vav as “and”.
2.  Often an imperfect with no vav will be future, and the syntax will usually be subject-verb. 
3.  Vav plus noun plus imperfect may be a relative or coordinate clause depending on the context.  The vav should be translated “that” or “but”.
4.  Perfect aspect normally will NOT have a vav and the syntax will be subject-verb.  This has a past meaning.
5.  Perfect WITH a vav will often come in verb-subject order, although sometimes the subject is understood from the previous clause or from the personal ending on the verb.  This is an oblique modality, a subordinate clause of condition, purpose, result, cause or effect.  

Next week I'll go over something even Dr.  Cook didn't realize about perfect aspect.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- back up

If you normally skip things that don't start with "Garden"
please back up and read yesterday's post.
It's about your timing for pruning.
It could save your life because it suggests pruning before the stinging insects come out.
There was a terrible story recently about a woman who pruned her azaleas at the wrong time.
She got a sting and it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
She went into allergic shock and died.
Allergies are not set in your DNA; you can acquire allergies.
People move into the DC region and suddenly start having plant allergies.
It's just because this region has such fine gardens and parks and arboretums.
Same with stinging insects; you don't know you're developing an allergy.
When you find it out, it's in the worst way.

Avoid the bugs.
Prune before the middle of March.

But not your azaleas; if you prune them now, you'll be pruning off the flower buds.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- two-month warning

The starlings and robins are back.  The starlings showed up yesterday and the robins today.
The males are here to set up their turf claims.
In the next 6 weeks to two months, their wives will come back.
The women will look things over and if they decide a particular male has picked a good spot,
the women will start building nests.
By March, they will be laying eggs.

Prune your privet and euonymus by February 7.
You will wind up with nice-looking hedges.
You won't get stung by bees or wasps.
And the birds will be able to nest and bring up their young in safety.

Do NOT prune azalea.  You'll cut off the flower buds.  The next time you can prune azaleas is in June after they flower.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved