Fact-Checking the Torah -- fact-checking Astruc

There will be another break for the next two weeks but today I’m going to start on one of three writers who tend to come up in reference to DH. They share one thing with the “four horsemen”: ignorance. Wellhausen names Jean Astruc early in his Prolegomena.  He thought he was giving credit where credit is due.  What he really did was lead the detectives straight to the smoking gun. 

Astruc’s work is available free online.

The first thing you need to know about Astruc is that he only dealt with Genesis.  His successors are the ones that used his ideas against the rest of Torah.

Astruc only said that Mosheh must have received written versions of the stories in Genesis.  He did not claim that all the material originated after Mosheh died, let alone after the Jewish monarchy came into existence.  That more extreme claim is down to his successors.

Astruc admitted that Mosheh wrote the laws as it says in Exodus: he had to write them on the tablets he had to cut from stone after the Golden Calf incident. (That’s all he says about books other than Genesis.)

The reason Astruc says that Mosheh received Genesis as a set of fragmentary written material, is because Astruc says it is impossible to transmit so much material orally without changing it.

We know that Talmud is called Torah she-b’al Peh precisely because, over the course of at least a millennium, it developed as orally transmitted material.  If you listen to the audio lectures on Talmud on the Resources page, you realize that both lecturers are repeating some of the information from memory, not from what is actually written on the page in front of them.

The Babylonian Talmud finally amounted to 2700 numbered folio pages when the numbering system was established in the Vilno edition; the Jerusalem Talmud had 1700 numbered pages with different Gemara.  What the lecturers say that is not on the printed page developed in the years of transmission since the Vilno edition was printed.

Yes, it changed. It expanded. There are also differences in the material that go beyond having different commentators and different styles. R. Yosef Gabriel Bechhofer discusses them in his audio lectures on  Jerusalem Talmud.  The fact remains that the material was transmitted orally, from the time that Mishnah began developing, right into the 21^st century.

Astruc may have been woefully ignorant about all this, but at least he did not invent the claim of “invention in writing.” We just don’t know where he thinks those bits came from that were passed to Mosheh. 

That’s not Astruc’s only problem with facts or even his only problem period. See ya on the other side of High Holy Days!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- nifal conjugation

Genesis 1:9

 

ט וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim yiqavu ha-maim mi-tachat ha-shamaim el-maqom echad v’teraeh ha-yabashah va-y’hi-khen.

Translation:     Gd said be the water gathered under heaven to one place and be the dry land revealed; it must have been so.

 

So here is the nifal imperfect of both qavah, a lamed heh verb with a strong letter at the start of the root, and raah, a lamed heh verb with resh at the start of the root.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶרָאֶה	נֵרָאֶה	First
תֵּרָאֶה	תֵּרָאוּ	Second/masculine
תֵּרָאִי	תֵּרָאֶינָה	Second/feminine
יֵרָאֶה	יֵרָאוּ	Third/masculine
תֵּרָאֶה	תֵּרָאֶינָה	Third/feminine

 

 

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶקָּוֶּה	נִקָּוֶּה	First
תִּקָּוֶּה	תִּקָּוּוּ	Second/masculine
תִּקָּוִּי	תִּקָּוֶּינָה	Second/feminine
יִקָּוֶּה	יִקָּוּוּ	Third/masculine
תִּקָּוֶּה	תְּקָּוֵּינָה	Third/feminine

 

Notice a weird thing in the middle of this second verb. It’s not only lamed heh, it’s ayin vav. The middle letter is identical to the one at the end in plural 2^nd and 3^rd masculine BUT it has to be pronounced “v” while the end letter has to be pronounced “oo”.

 

I won’t say memorize these. I will say that when you look up a verb and it turns out to be ayin vav, expect weirdness in the middle. It’s quite regular as you will see at some point, but it’s not what you see in other verb root classes.

 

Now, is v’teraeh narrative past? I don’t think so. I think imperfect aspect is needed here – and not imperative – for a reason which I will go into in the next lesson.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

DIY -- cheese

No, seriously. I wrote this post after my first try at making paneer turned out perfectly and I was able to make Jalfreezi paneer right away for 25% of the price some websites charge for the same amount of paneer. But read and heed the warnings at the end of this post. I will not take responsibility for your ignoring them and winding up in the hospital.

This is not exactly the paneer recipe I used but the ingredients and proportions are the same, and with a name like that he ought to know how it's done.  Took me about an hour and for 30 minutes of that, the paneer was under compression and I was prepping veggies for the Jalfreezi.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/paneer-homemade-indian-cheese-recipe-1927608

If you can make paneer, you can make cottage cheese and ricotta.
http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-homemade-ricotta-cheese-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-23326
http://homegrownandhealthy.com/homemade-cottage-cheese/

There are cottage cheese recipes that use rennet but I wanted you to get started without having to buy it. I get mine from
https://www.cheesemaking.com/cheeserennets.html

but here are two more.
https://www.getculture.com/yogurt-culture/
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/

Here's my next target, now that I have my vegetable rennet tablets. (I keep kosher and animal rennet is not kosher in cheese.) Are you a Caprese salad freak? Then you have to try this at least once.
http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-homemade-mozzarella-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-174355

And now the cream of cheeses. Most hard cheeses, like cheddar, need some kind of culture. Here are three recipes. Some people consider them "faux" and I'll show you why in  a moment.
Queso Blanco: https://bitofearthfarm.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/make-the-easiest-homemade-cheese/
Farmhouse cheddar: http://thecheerfulagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/homemade-press-less-raw-cheddar-cheese.html
One-hour faux cheddar: http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363349698/how-to-make-a-faux-cheddar-in-one-hour

The next recipe is from Amish country; it uses yogurt with live cultures, which means this is basically a thermophilic hard cheese. Your mold should be ceramic or glass and you can use the fake press below unless you decide to go the whole hog (sorry).
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/homestead-yogurt-cultured-hard-cheese/

Notice the promise that you will see moldy spots. If you can't stomach Stilton or Dana-Blue, this might turn you off and then you should probably stick with the quicker softer cheeses.  OTOH, the outside of your Muenster or Brie or Camembert is also mold so either be consistent and ditch those too or just accept that you've been brought up to be too antiseptic. (Which you have if you believe those 99% antiseptic cleaners are good things.)

This is the real deal, cheese press and all.  Unless you decide you want to really go for it, you might shy away from spending up to $300 on a press which, however, you can probably find on most websites that sell cheese-making products.
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/cheddar-cheese-recipe/

Now. You probably have heavy things in your house like coffee table books or large pots. For example, to compress the paneer, I put it on a dinner plate, put another dinner plate on top (painted side up), and stacked other dishes on top of that.

So here are some figures.  A two-gallon jug of vinegar weighs about 18 pounds (I keep a two-gallon jug around because I use it to kill grass and poison ivy) and a two-gallon jug of cooking oil weighs about 16.  An unopened bag of flour weighs five, of course, while nowadays bags of sugar weigh 4. Put a cookie sheet or one-pound book on the cheese and put your weight on top of that.

With cheeses other than paneer, I can save about 50%. Yeah, kosher cheese is expensive. The only cheese-maker that has both kosher and non-kosher product lines, is Tillamook, after Cabot bowed out. So there's a specialty clientele and less of a saving on scale of operation. There can also be issues with supervision but I won't go into that because this post is about cheese not Jewish law.

Now. You may remember my post on breeding my own sourdough yeast using just flour and water, so that I wasn't tied to buying packets of yeast. Wanna do the same with cheese cultures? Here it is.
https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/cheese/making-keeping-mother-cheese-culture/

Notice that this is a very exacting process and see the warning about disease-causing bacteria. But if you're willing to obey the instructions, it will be cheaper than constantly going back to buy more packets, paying for shipping every time.

Or to save on the shipping of your FIRST batch of culture, use yogurt. These instructions are for a thermophilic culture that you would use in Parmesan or Swiss cheese (but you also need another ingredient to get the holes). This works because yogurt incubates at about 110 degrees, like a thermophilic cheese culture. 
http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php?topic=16.0

I haven't found anything like this for a mesophilic culture (for cheddar, for example).

If you tried some of my ideas like making your own lox or corned beef or smoked turkey, cheese isn't much of a leap. TWO WARNINGS.

All of these recipes use PASTEURIZED MILK not raw milk. That's because raw milk is illegal in my state due to the serious illnesses it can cause. YMMV in your state. However, all the recipes say "don't use ultra-pasteurized milk". Pay attention to that. The flavor won't be as good as you expect.

Second warning. Your utensils must be more than squeaky clean. "That's as good as it gets" is NOT good enough. If your pot is old and there is cooked-on stuff even SOS pads won't get out, buy a new pot, and every time you use it, scrub it until your fingers almost bleed. If you're not willing to do that, forget about making cheese.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

The World is Coming to a Beginning!

It's been a tough year no matter who you are, no matter where you are.

Tonight we start a new year. We get a do-over, a mulligan, a  re-boot.

Don't leave everything behind in the old year.

Whatever you learned -- compassion, skills, information -- bring that with you.

You can build on it this year. 

Put differently, never rest on your laurels.  The future is not predictable. Your future may depend on things you didn't know or couldn't do last year. Learn and do them.

For example, an emergency can happen anywhere, any time. Prepare by stocking necessary goods, and also by training to be your own first responder.

Cook more, spend less on food, and get better variety and nutrition. Don't go out to eat with your friends, meet at each other's places for meals turn and turn about.
Exercise more, even if it's just staying on your feet while you cook. Take somebody with you, like your kids.
Exercise your brain: learn a language you don't know now, mess around with a musical instrument, do some painting. Get a buddy and inspire each other.
Get your sleep.
Quit sodas and other unhealthy convenience food.
Quit smoking or drugging.
Quit texting when you drive.

All of these are life savers in one way or another, and they are also quality-of-life savers.

Make a new beginning!

I'll be doing that for the next two days. 21st Century Bible Hebrew and Fact-Checking the Torah will be back next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- lace summary

I promise I'm done with this unless and until I actually make the Queen Susan Shawl or something like it.

But here are hints for newbies.

1.      Unless you have seriously good muscle control, start with a coarse yarn and large needles. Knit a worsted weight lace square that you can tack onto a square silk pillow cover for a sofa pillow. Re-do it as many times as you have to, so that you get it perfect. 

Then make yourself a scarf in sport weight, a summer blouse in Feather and Fan using DK weight, and a shawl in Fingering weight. You might stop there but at least you will be ready to make a Shetland wedding ring shawl in lace weight yarn and tiny needles without having to constantly fix breaks.

2.      I think it's a good idea to learn to use diagrams. They give you a look at how the design comes out, as well as what stitches to put where. If you transcribe them, some row transcriptions will end up so long that it's easy to lose your place and have to back up to fix a mistake. The page with the symbols is here.

http://www.planetshoup.com/easy/tips/yarnamts.shtml

3,      Always set markers between the horizontal pattern repeats, such as running a piece of waste yarn  between each repeat and looping it back and forth every Xth new row until you're done.

4.      Before you start a new repeat, count and make sure you didn't drop a YO somewhere. You may have to re-knit the previous row, or you might wait until you get to a specific repeat in that row before re-knitting it, or you may be able to adjust with a PSSO or a Make-1. You won't know until you count.

You can also thread a piece of wool called a safety line through the stitches of any given row to anchor them. Then if you make a mistake, you pull out your needle, pick up this row along the safety line, and unravel only that far. Crucial to large shawls especially when the pattern has double YOs.

5.      If you're going to design your own, or pick one from column A and two from column B in a pattern book like Sharon Miller's Heirloom Knitting, do the following.
A.   Based on the stitch count in the motifs, estimate how many stitches you need.
B.   Estimate how many yards of yarn you need. Here's a website to do the math for you.

http://www.planetshoup.com/easy/tips/yarnamts.shtml

I also have a table in my collection of patterns with each weight of yarn, the size needle I generally use with it, and how many rows I can make with one skein in my pullover pattern body. Since that has 200 stitches per row, I just do the multiplication.

C.   MAKE A SWATCH. Knit one copy of the motif in the yarn weight and size needles you plan to use.  Make sure the pattern comes out. Never be afraid to admit that your favorite designer messed up, and make a copy of the pattern with corrections, or you'll wind up with a messed up project.

D.  I recommend that when you make your swatch, you test how your border and edging go around corners. This will tell you how much filler you REALLY need to make things come out right. Add that to your stitch count. If you're going to do short rows around corners, count the stitches there.

E.   Now re-figure how much yarn you need so you can get enough of the same dye lot to finish the project. While my brown horseshoe stole worked out OK and the beige Saltire and green Leaf aren't too scary, the Old Shale in purples and blue is hard on the eyes and the blues of the Ocean Wave simply do not work, I did it just to use up leftovers and practice the pattern.

6.      The more complicated your lace pattern, the less distractions you want. For Old Shale or Feather and Fan, you might be able to hold a conversation with somebody once you have the pattern fixed in your mind. For the Queen Susan shawl and things like that, work in a nice quiet room and don't even play music.

On the other hand, one of the things I found online talked about Shetland women taking their "makkin's" with them. The women of Fair Isle supposedly also do this with their knitting. Personally I have so much trouble making sure to keep my hands clean, what with all my kitchen and yard work, that I would be afraid to do anything but work where I can wash my hands and then sit still to work. YMMV.

I hope this demystifies lace knitting a little for those of you who, like me, can't just look at things and immediately know how to do them. Maybe I've unleashed the designer in somebody, and we'll have an explosion of beautiful new work. I hope so.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- completeness

So we know that DH is not necessarily a hypothesis intended to be turned into real science. It might have just been a talking point to start with, which is the number 1 definition of hypothesis. Now we’ll look at its base claim of “completeness” in each of the four putative documents.

What does “complete” mean?

•           All four documents covered Jewish history from beginning to end, and therefore covered all the same historical issues. The final redactor(s) chose among them: eliminated the entire discussion from a given document; kept more than one version (pillar four); combined parts of the versions from multiple documents (pillar five).  

•           The four documents didn’t necessarily address all the same historical situations, but when they did, they did so completely. So if D didn’t have a creation story, the redactor had to choose between the ones in E, J, or P, each of which had complete information on the situations it addressed. Unfortunately the genealogies, which supposedly come from P, are not complete. Genesis 11 supposedly addresses the death and age at death of each of Avraham’s progenitors, BUT the “editor” had to add that information for Avraham’s father Terach because P didn’t have it.

•           Each document addressed its material according to the document’s individual characteristics, and they had some topics in common, and repetitions represent those common topics, but "completeness" only means that the redactor received an unfragmented document.

The word “complete” obviously has ambiguities. If they have been resolved and DH has a technical definition of “complete” that all its researchers accept, give me a link to the online article so that all my readers can examine it. 

But there’s a problem with the “completeness” doctrine besides the ambiguity of the term. Issues 1 and 3 above beg the question: if the redactor received complete copies, why would he pick them apart and enfilade them?

You might think that we have a historical example of enfiladement in what Rev. Brian Walton did when he reproduced Samaritan Pentateuch in his London Polyglot Bible. The evidence is not in his edition; it's in August Freiherr von Gall’s critical edition of the manuscripts.  Von Gall tagged most of the material in SP with designators for more than one of each of dozens of manuscripts of Samaritan Pentateuch that survive from medieval times and the Renaissance. Except for A and B, these manuscripts are all in fragments. However, this does not mean that A and B are the result of enfilading multiple manuscripts.  So Samaritan Pentateuch is a weak analogy for DH.

What I said about option 2 shows that P did not have all the information that should have been in it. That argues against option 1 as well as option 2, and I’ll have another argument against completeness later.

We are left with option 3. Notice that my statement of option 3 is a conjunction, any term in which may be false. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that option 3 might be a strawman argument, a claim that DH says something it doesn’t. We’ll know it IS a strawman argument, when somebody comes up with a standard definition for “completeness” that everybody in DH agrees on, and it’s different from option 3. Go for it.

On the other side of New Year I'll start discussing three authors who get favorable mention from Wellhausen.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- nifal binyan

Genesis 1:9

 

ט וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim yiqavu ha-maim mi-tachat ha-shamaim el-maqom echad v’teraeh ha-yabashah va-y’hi-khen.

Translation:     Gd said be the water gathered under heaven to one place and be the dry land revealed; it must have been so.

Letters in this lesson:

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

יִקָּווּ	gather (3rd s.)
אֶל	to
מָקוֹם	place
תֵרָאֶה	appear (3rd f.s.)
יַּבָּשָׁה	dry land

 

Now we are going to have some real fun because in this verse we have two examples of the nifal binyan. If you have studied Hebrew before, you were probably taught that nifal is the “passive” of the qal. That’s not true, “passive” was just a convenient label used by western clergy in the Renaissance who were trying to pretend they knew all about Hebrew when really, they only knew Latin.

 

Semitic languages don’t have passive morphology. They have two situations, a structure I will call “agentless”, and another that is reciprocal. Westerners are used to translating agentless structures as passives and that’s how nifal got its designator.

 

What nifal really does, according to my observations, is refer to a binding legal decree. 

 

Arabic has a comparable Form VII conjugation and, according to one of my sources, in Quranic Arabic this form has the connotation of submitting to a decree. It is not identical to nifal but it sure looks like it’s related.

 

Akkadian and Ugaritic had an N-stem, and Assyrian had a IV-stem, that took an “n” prefix the same as nifal and the Arabic Form VII. I have a reader of Assyrian with some examples of the IV-stem and sometimes it doesn’t even seem to have a passive meaning, but there are also verbs in Hebrew where the nifal is the only way of expressing action. Nishba, “take an oath”, is  one of them.

 

Aramaic dropped the nifal completely at some point in its history, probably well before the Aramaeans conquered Mesopotamia.  It did not re-acquire the binyan after the Aramaeans conquered Babylonia, when Aramaic and Babylonian merged.  Jewish forms of Aramaic did not re-acquire it, although they adopted words like Shabbat and numerous verbs from Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew.

 

One take-away from this comparison is that related languages don’t function identically.  If you studied more than one Germanic or Romance language, you already knew that.  While studying Biblical Hebrew may be a gateway to Aramaic or Arabic, don’t expect everything to work the same or mean the same.

So that's what it does. What does it look like?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved