The Life of Adam and Eve - in Syriac, or not

Gavin McDowell has The Rewritten Bible in Late Antiquity. We can read it legally; thank you Brill. This concerns the Pirqe ascribed to rabbi Eliezer, and its contacts with good ol' Jubilees and that Cave-of-Treasures. I haven't read all of it yet. I just got to it.

One point worthy of mention is that the Cave, Syriac itself; relied upon the Life of Adam and Eve, which is not. McDowell does not think that this Life was ever translated into that language. I deem that statement in want of a footnote - better, a paragraph.

Yes yes, I know: proving a negative is a mug's game, don't do it, so don't demand of others to do it.

What can instead be done is some hint that the Cave had access to Greek lore directly elsewhere.

Movses Khorenatsi and John bar Penkaye each can be tagged as men who did not read languages beyond Armenian and Syriac, respectively; unable to cite lore outside what had been translated into their languages already. I say "can be" because, I mean, this is just a blog; but I am pretty sure most Movses forewords, and Yulia Furman, can be brought to back me up here.

McDowell is not writing a blog. If I needed him in hardcopy, I'd have to front $110 minus a penny, plus a tax and shipping.

If the Cave could read Greek, we are good. If not... then the Life had to exist in Syriac. In this case the reason it ceased in Syriac is simply that the Cave supplanted it.

Enclitic -na

TheTorah is discussing Hebrew נָא. The Rabbis treat it as a "please", as does mah boi Jerome. Steven Fassberg thinks it is a consecutive.

That it is a suffix hints at something like how Greeks use de or oun, or maybe Latins with -que. Among the Semites, Arabic doesn't use it at all; but if Fassberg be right then fa- is bearing this weight over there. Some Arabic Jews, not yet accepting Talmud, thought it was like Arabic alân "now".

The נָא examples brought are all in dialogue segments. The Bible treats it as spoken Hebrew, not literary. God uses it Micah 6:5 (I had to hunt this up; Micah 6-7 may be Persian-era); usually it is the people using it, for requests. This may explain the Rabbis.

The examples cluster 1-4 Samuel/Reigns, Genesis, and Judges; we also have Micah (elsewhere), Deuteronomy 3 ("Moses"), and Ezekiel. In language, these contexts are later stages of Classical. Micah's king Hezeqiah also uses נָא; its Greek (in narrative passages) is kaige, so the translation is late, but the story is I think considered ancient and near-authentic.

Perhaps נָא is an archaism. It is common in all languages for dialogue to be constructed as if it were "authentic".

Ezekiel v. Trito-Isaiah

Let's talk Ezekiel 40-48. Whatever we may or may not say of Ez 36 or Ez 38-9; this proposal for the Temple follows up Ez 37.

Lenny Prado's bit - that Ez 44:15-16 does not belong to Ezekiel - assumes Joachim Schaper, Priester und Leviten im achämenidischen Juda: Studien zur Kult- und Sozialgeschichte Israels in persischer Zeit, FAT 31 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). Schaper went on to argue that the rest of Ez 44 indeed belongs to Ez 40-8 and that Trito-Isaiah (Is 56f) is based upon that.

I recently got hold of Nathan MacDonald, Priestly Rule (de Gruyter, 2015). This argues the reverse of Schaper: that Ezekiel 44 used Isaiah 56 - actually, rebutted it. Overall it is a development of Michael Fishbane: Ezekiel 44 is an exegetical oracle. If it's that late then maybe vv. 15-16 isn't intrusive.

MacDonald would shift the intrusions mostly elsewhere than Schaper - and far more thoroughgoing. Immediately before, chapter 1.2.5 argues Ez 44:10-14 has blended Numbers 18 and Ez 14. MacDonald sees a core instead within v. 15: But the Levitical priests, ... will come near to me to minister to me and they will stand before me to offer to me fat and blood – declaration of Lord YHWH. The Zadokites since intrude into v. 15 and then inject the whole of v. 16. As well as vv. 8, 10-14.

The core, for MacDonald, had constructed its anti-Isaiah-56 rebuttal from Lev 1-7 and Deuteronomy. As to the canon: the expansion's use of Numbers is suggestive of a very late date, for which MacDonald cites Achenbach, Die Vollendung der Tora as published (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003) unavailable to his colinguist Schaper in 2000.

That assessment of Numbers runs against the ABH language of the Balaam poems' language, and the Josiah-era dating of the poem of Sihon. On the other hand... ABH poetry elsewhere lingered until Habakkuk, and Wellhausen had proposed Numbers 13-14 for the "J" source.

Lord of the Rings is not pagan

Jack Posobiec has revived a scholarly argument about the paganism of Tolkien's work. It is not entirely a stupid argument. Posobiec (and del Arroz) should know, however, that this argument has already been had. The pagans lost.

Lord of the Rings is to be understood as Mel Gibson intended Apocalypto. This is a world before Christ, and before the Flood; a Hyborean age if you will (the canon Unwin maps even look similar to Howard's). Gibson's "Icon" production-company, in the Maya world, had a pregnant character appeal to a blessed Mother-Virgin. She does not know Mary, but she still knows deep down she intercedes.

As such, no Tolkien character can refer to Scripture - unless that Scripture be the Silmarillion. The characters can, however, prefigure Douay-Rheims and the Vulgate. Aragorn heals the sick of Gondor as will the secret Markan messiah. Samwise calls upon Elbereth to retrieve the elven rope. One can go on and on here: down to Mairon's presence as the twentieth-century war engineer, doing Melkor's will perhaps against his own instinct. (Mairon - Sauron - consciously had spread a Melkor cult in Anadûnê; but I suspect that from malice, because Númenor stood in Sauron's way.)

As to del Arroz, he has shifted to defending Posobiec from himself. My thought is that Vox Day needs to wrangle his 'tard.

Here comes the Neander diversity

HBDChick alerted us to Charoula M. Fotiadou, Jesper Borre Pedersen, Hélène Rougier, and Cosimo Posth: a "diversification" event within the Neander community of Europe ~63kBC during Marine Isotope ("MIS")-3. That doesn't mean their genetics were becoming more diverse, through intermarriage with their neighbours. Oh no.

This is a demic replacement of mtDNA lineages, in favour of one lineage: an Aquitanian lineage, to be exact.

That means the Neanders of Aquitaine went out to conquer those neighbours' land, after which that group's women followed their warriors. What happened to those ex-neighbours, seems about what happened to the Omanis of Zanzibar in Africa Addio. Nice to know it's not just us "sapiens" doing it - to our Neander relatives, or to each other this time.

The victorious Aquitanians - "Mousterian", in material culture - carried on carryin' on for another 20ky. They saw off the Neronian colony and, 43kBC, even Bacho Kiro. But also 43kBC, came the Laschamps flip and the Châtelperronians; the Neanders subsequently endured three millennia of population decline. Generally thought to be Sapiens' first (successful) "Cro-Magnon" intrusion.

Ge'ez and Armenian

Armenian in typescript today looks like it could be modern Cyrillic. But it is not. Cyrillic is pretty much an update of Byzantine Greek to fit the Slavic voice, with maybe a few nods to Latin (like the Cyrillic D), and (some say) old-school takings from runes and Glagolitic. Armenian by contrast looks like a cypher.

Apparently - I didn't know - some observers thought old Armenian looked like Ethiopic. But false-friends abound; even some Linear B can be abused to look like Greek with sufficient wishful-thinking. But lately announced, someone's run it through AI.

If we are to believe this, we must ask: why. The Hayots "Armenian" language is enough like Greek (or like old Bactrian for that matter) you'd think that, if you lived there and you were sick of the Pahlavi system, you'd just use some assemblage of Greek and Bactrian, analogous to what the Slavs would use. Like the Copts abandoned their serviceable-for-centuries Demotic, for that Greek alphabet; and Egyptian was nothing like Greek or Bactrian or Armenian in-between.

Here is one point: politics. The Iranian overlords REALLY did not like Greek, nor Latin for that matter. Armenians seen writing in the western scripts would be accused of western sympathy. The Sasanians further made a push to Aryanise the culture; they tolerated the 'Iraq as Aniran but not Armenia. Bactria kept its Greek alphabet basically because it's Afghanistan, which half the time the Sasanians abandoned to the Huns. The Romans when and where in charge simply didn't care as much; they'd just say "learn Greek bro".

For Armenian patriots, a None Of The Above script had to do. Aramaic scripts were available, like that used for Hebrew; but they went in the wrong direction and were designed for Semitic languages which do not include Armenian. As none-of-the-above, anyone looking for inspiration might have to go afield. Hey, like to where Glagolitic was used! - except by now these Armenians were Christians. To the Holy Land it was, then.

I do wonder if we are talking about Ge'ez proper, or to South Arabian and/or "Thamudic" scripts. I understand that Safaitic and Hismaic were no longer in use, but the musnads were still running strong in Saba.

Sumerian bacon

Abu Tbeirah was probably Sumerian, south of Lagash and Ur as it was. I don't know if it was a canal city, but I am pretty sure it had a wharf until 3500 BC. What we do not know, yet, is what these Sumerians named their own city.

The period is 2900–2350 BC, which is called "Early Dynastic". They don't have documents, but they do have a menu. Usually we get some clue from bones - carbon and nitrogen isotopes get skewed for seafood-eaters (which famously annoys carbon-daters); ideal would be coprolites. But marshy lower Iraq tends to be bad at preserving either; and in a city context, likely the honey wagon is taking potential copro's back to the fields. So the scholars're looking at zinc in the teeth. Of course cereals were a big part of their diet, why else live here.

A surprise, to me, is that they didn't eat fish. They ate pork, and imported other meats from the hills. As to why no fish, uh. Maybe the swamps had been drained and the only fishwater was irrigation-water, which got fertilizer-runoff. Whatever fish could survive in what is basically a sewer, I'd not recommend frying up.