The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.

A song for Noah without Enoch

I've lately learnt about a genre of ancient Jewish poetry: the piyyuṭim. These are cantillated historical poems, like certain memrë in Syriac, and so haQallir and Yanni would compose for contemporary Byzantine-/Sasanian-era Jews. One subset of piyyuṭim, Jews have designated for the High Holy Days. Last week I fell in the deep waters, Vered Noam arguing for its deepest layer: these behave as a Levitic Heilsgeschichte better fit for their family-owned Temple than for the Moses-centred synagogue or even for the Hasmonaean temple.

To this Levitic basement-stratum, Noam went on that the figure of Enoch himself must belong. In my opinion this proposal is one that Noam needs to argue.

Noam already knows Ethiopic "1 Enoch" is a composite, so is only entertaining chapters 1-36 the "Watchers". "Watchers" might be composite even at the Qumran level. I think most scholars today, for 1E 1-16, allow - deeper - for an ancient Genesis 6 / 1E 6-11 reading as did without even Enoch. The only hero you need here is Noah, who lives to tell it.

Such scholars must admit if the piyyuṭ poems started early enough, some might never have noted Enoch in the first place. They would have vied with Ben Sira and 5Q13 in the Kippur rituals. On the other extreme we have Enoch as redeemer...

Suppose Judges was late

A few weeks ago I noted that the book of Judges remained subject to interpolation into the LXX / Qumran period. Yesterday morn, scrolling through the University of Arizona's "The Bible and Interpretation" blog, I ran across Niels Lemche.

Lemche is, I reckon, the thinking-man's Gmirkin. The Baghistan has had more interest in Yonatan Adler. We'll take some time to evaluate Lemche, today.

Lemche has marshalled parallels between the Abimelech and Jephthah stories, and events in Greek history and myth (respectively). Myth of course has no copyright, as witness the vast Etruscan and then Roman takings from those Greeks. But myth can be written, and when it is written it takes on a standard.

Take Jephthah. There were many stories of the reluctant sacrifice of the king's own child. For Greeks, the story with the most pathos was that of Iphigenia which they're still telling. Lemche points out that Jephthah is not such a telling; Judges here tracks closer, instead, the Cretan story of Idomeneus (except that here the sacrifice was his son).

Lemche further thinks Samson is simply Heracles, like Milton thought. The killstroke in Lemche's eyes is that Abimelech ended his career in a streetfight just like Pyrrhus was killed, brained by some woman hurling tiles from a rooftop. (Even if Pyrrhus was wearing a helmet, by then he was very old, so this might have been one concussion too many.)

Lemche's approach is similar to the approach other scholars take toward "Judith". "Judith" seems versed in Seleucid military concepts, its heroine follows Hasmonaean-era halakha (and political-theory), and the narrative may even track Eupolemus. Given that "Judith" doesn't know Thing One about Rome and that the Greek Additions to Esther borrow from Greek Judith, "Judith" in its original (now lost) Hebrew is unanimously dated ~100 BC.

In favour of Lemche's thesis, Judges does not much get cited in later stories. Judges famously concentrates on the northern tribes, in between introducing that cypher Othniel and generally trashing Benjamin in its latter movements. So let's look north: Jezebel knows enough of her adopted people to throw the case of Zimri at usurping Jehu. The prophets and CBH-to-LBH psalms are always referring to patriarchs Ephraim and Jacob, and sometimes villains Sihon or Og. I don't see where opponents to the various kings - we'll start with northern prophets Amos and Hosea - refer to the Bible's most cromulent example of a Man Who Would Be King. Judges doesn't even get cited much in the Samaritan Chronicle which has much lore on Joshua then Eli, but little in between. If the piyyuṭ genre be early, this seems not to have got around to Judges' heroes until ha-Qallir and Yanni in late-antiquity.

Against Lemche: the dialect of the prosaic portions of Judges, which the Samaritans (and Noth) would extend to 1 Reigns/Samuel 12, is CBH. Even some of the glosses therein look like they might better match Zionist use of Psalm 78, or precede it. By "Zionist" I mean the Joachim court's reaction to Jeremiah. Further, if Judith can be an observant Jew, and if 1 Maccabees and Esther (neither terribly religious) can talk about ancestral laws; how come none of the several villains of Judges are messing with the laws of Israel? The Hellenistic era was full of this ferment. It doesn't happen before the Persians, which - for most of us - points to a prePersian milieu for Judges. (Less-so Joshua perhaps.)

Lemche might counter that Joachim's court should have cited the Judges stories but did not. But then we don't really have this court's own words, like we have Nahum's own words and Isaiah 1-33 around Hezeqiah's court. In Jeremiah's book, we just have what scribe Baruch deigned tell us about that last independent court.

AI movie roundup

Over 2024 we got some competent AI-generated music. In 2025 we got hype, promises, and teasers done in various AI - we hear of "Sora" - for fullblown movies. I thought the trailer for the Narn i Hin Húrin was a standout, although in need of better editing. We are now in middle 2026.

Last Saturday I caught Oneiric, by Malik at Higgsfield. Up to then I suspect most of us were writing him off as a peddler of... hype, promises, and teasers. Oneiric, I concede, was advertised under a "goonbait" thumbnail; in 2016 we'd call it "malegaze". The actual video turns out to be legit. Watch it.

Interastrae is another author whose earlier stuff looked gooney. And his Alaran starts with the trope of the interstellar rogue crashlanding onto a jungle planet (jungle part of the planet anyway) with an athletic alien wench. Here too: it gets better. The second episode gets excellent.

Dark Fables is running Book of Shadows. We may or may not get to keep this one; it is set in Faerûn, like the Dungeons & Dragons movie a few years ago. Unlike Alaran, these episodes run shorter. But there are a lot of them by now.

My main suggestion is for improvements in the dialog, which can then be voiced by human actors. AI actors don't always rise to the occasion.

Apart from that, I get turned off of watching a scene when the characters blink from place to place on a set. Or, if the AI is smart enough not to do that: the camera doesn't need to be blinking around that set, because when it does it makes the audience think the characters aren't in continuity. A game author would say that this breaks mimesis. The videos I've linked keep that to a minimum.

Shadowing the poles

Among orbital nerdery ToughSF directs to Marco Bassetto and Alessandro Quarta, Solar Sail-Based Mars-Synchronous Displaced Orbits for Remote Sensing Applications. The notion is to orbit the Sun to shadow a planet, on the unstable positions of always-over-the-pole. Which means orthogonal to the ecliptic and all five its Lagrange points: "displaced nonKeplerian".

This is accomplished by solar-sails. The authors believe that Mars' 1/10 Earth mass and 1/3 surface-gravity allow a reasonably low-altitude as can map the poles. Of course Mars also gets less than half the Solar irradiance but space is cheap out there. Just unfurl twice the sail bro. If I read figures 11b and 13b correctly, they'd float about 0.01 AU above or below the Martian ecliptic plane which is 1.5 million-kilometers or, probably better, gigameters.

This would constrain a Mars mission not by propellant but by battery life and/or solar panel degradation. Like docking Deimos.

Injection into that orbit, from a base in high Earth orbit, is also handled here. There's a boost of 1 km/s deltaV to kick off to intercept the Martian DNKO. The sail takes it from there to bring the craft to where it needs to be. Minimum 949 days if the sail is mid-performance, 498 if high-performance.

These are functions of the "lightness number" β, the higher the... betta'. The paper knows of 2021-designed sails all β shy of 0.01. Bassetto & Quarta believe these rookie numbers can be improved. Lower perf does get you closer to Mars however.

There seems no plan to park these over Venus' poles. Six years ago I mooted a network of balloons perhaps angled against the vortex, per pole. From data-relays to polar mapping to weather observation, this does everything a gigameter-off sail could do.

Not your panther

A few Februaries ago I posted a couplet of comments about a genre of antiRabbinic satire which the Christian gospels might have ascribed to their hero. The narrative-gospels can use only those stories as serve the narrative, which culminates at the Cross. I found interesting that Rabbinic literature dares name some of these antiRabbinic "trolls": some are in fact "Jesus", some are associated with the "Jesus" name in commentary.

What I hadn't yet done on this blog, and perhaps should have done, was discuss Bar Pantera / Bar Panθera. Peter Schäfer made his name discussing possible references in, especially, the (Babylonian) Talmud. Schäfer figured that the 'Iraq/Χάραξ being ruled by nonAbrahamics would allow complete rein to anyone wanting to get some licks in at the Christians, especially after the whole Roman East became Christian.

That does not show where Jews took up that ?happy task however. Christopher Zeichmann, who seems like no Jew, last June posted the lack of evidence for any of that. Of all the trolls whose names later rabbis could possibly associate with the Gospel Jesus, none of these names - in the basis stories - seem to be doing anything as has Gospel parallel. Not even with the vignettes in "Thomas", whose living Jesus doesn't pass through the Cross.

If I can say that the Gospel Jesus incorporates a pastiche of antiRabbinic controversy, Zeichmann can say that the Talmudic Jesus-es are also pastiche. Some might be Bar Panthera. Some might be Bar Stada. None of them have to be of the Tiberius / Sejanus / Pilate imperium. Sure, some Jews may have made some connexion. But that seems to be later. It might even be more Celsus - pagan - than any Abrahamic who'd jammed these stories into the Gospel, most.

Lead BVDs

Tom Lehrer's old joke is now reality: the radiation shield bikini. Except it's polyethylene, which at high density marshals more hydrogen than a thin water or ice shield might.

NASA limits lifetime-total exposure to 0.6 sieverts. That was based on 1950s assumptions that sieverts to the big toe mattered as much as sieverts to the groin, which even Lehrer wasn't fool enough to believe. The body parts that need the shielding best, in practice, indeed cluster the pelvis. The head doesn't need it as bad, either; this might even be an ancient evolutionary hack.

Geometry is "hexagonal rods", I guess the 9-60mm of that rod being on the Z-axis. So the (unmanned) first Artemis mission successfully tested a 26kg version of this, just by blasting through our Van Allens. Although the results did not make the deadline for the Artemis II followup that just ran.

The plastic /rinkle/ is still, I think, not a solution for a trip to Mars which is further than Tampa. They admit that cosmic rays, as blast through Earth's own magshield, still got through. In a straight shot to our Moon an astronaut can laugh this off. Not in a months-long trip however (and then most want to come home). In our LEO sats we're all tired of running to the shielded part whenever a storm hits.

What this does give to long-term astronauts in orbiting ti[tanio]n cans is the ability to move around an unshielded station under solarflare conditions. Or - better - passing over the south-Pacific anomaly - or in permanent MEO between Van Allens, where I think the belts might shift. Or wandering those prefab corridors although there a magnetic solution could work as well.

Meanwhile they're targeting 16kg.