Ezekiel's Greek translators

Yesterday we discussed the Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah. Today, we'll address van der Meer's extension of the argument to Ezekiel.

Unlike Greek Isaiah, and more like Syriac Isaiah or indeed Greek Jeremiah: Ezekiel was translated in committee. Present consensus has Ez 1-24, 28-39, and 40-48 by three different editors. Van der Meer handles 28-39; so is unconcerned with the Babylonian canal or that floating chariot. He also isn't touching the Ez 25-27 gap. This blog has raised an additional question about whether someone parasailed into Ez 28-39 to attach our 38-39 in there, somehow; van der Meer's project takes some sides on that, which we'll have to get to.

Van der Meer sees the first and third parts of the main translation-groups as more-faithful (we'll get to that); whatever the Jews might have been doing before them. The middle part - which is where the Greeks couldn't decide on Ez 38-9 - is different, earlier, as well. Van der Meer discusses Ez 28:1-19, an oracle against Tyre. With the assumption that the Ezekiel committee is all on the same page, as it were.

In Hebrew, Ezekiel has your typical Iraqi interest in gemstones. So too his translator into Greek... but in Greek, this guy has spliced in the gems from the Septuagint. That's right: from the Greek Torah, Exod 28:17–20 and 39:10–13 (LXX 36:17–21). The effect is to make of the Tyrian jabbâr - the mlk king - a blasphemer.

Except he's not the king in Greek. He is consistently the "archon". To this, van der Meer notes a Hasmonaean tweak back in Ezekiel 21 vv. 30–32(25–27). In Hebrew, this mocks the man with a crown, which as royal should be a "diadem" in Greek. This well befits the bitterness of the exiles against their last kings who'd... not exactly got to keep that crown. But the translator didn't use this word, instead using "turban" and the stephanos-crown. Those are for priests, not kings. So: a high-priestly figure [has] abused his position and for that reason is discredited. The Greek translator of Ezekiel 28 has associated this abuser with Tyre, van der Meer says; which is best ascribed to a Jew - better, Judaïst - who has observed Antiochus IV from his Tyrian base making a hash of Jerusalem's priesthood.

As noted van der Meer builds his argument from Johan Lust; but from Lust's earlier work, which van der Meer prefers over, say, "King/Prince of Tyre" 2012. Also brought is Maria V. Spottorno [Díaz-Caro]... 1982. This is in van der Meer's fourth section. That whole line of argument is problematic nowadays, at least for the later side of this middle translation-group; now vide Tracy McKenzie. The project in my opinion doesn't even need to discuss the placement or nature of our Ez 38-9. As to why van der Meer insisted on butting in, it may be that the assumption of a team all working together would be strengthened if the whole text was assumed intact at the time of translation.

And if I may inject an unhappy aside, Egyptologists will shudder at this line: the nearly fifty-five years rule of king Ptolemy VII Euergetes II (170–116 BCE). Wiki points here instead to Ptolemy VI Philometor 180-145 BC - and Cleopatra II; overlapping Ptolemy Physcon, 170-164, who will return to rule under this Cleopatra from 145 BC on. As Ptolemy VIII and second Euergetes... not VII. (Some other Ptolemy seems to have been raised posthumously as VII. It gets confusing. Greeks remember Pt. Physcon as "Cacergetes" although maybe Jews and Copts think better of him.)

Incidentally we are not yet at Philometor's last years with Cleo'. Those are the (Physcon-free) years the Egyptian Jews are building their new "Isaiah" - or, at least, Ezekiel's translator(s) presented their case otherwise. Unlike Greek Isaiah: Ezekiel's translator supports the Hasmonaeans, as did the books of Maccabees; van der Meer points mainly to 2 Maccabees. 1 Macc and Daniel perhaps hadn't made it out of Hebrew yet; and of course as a Hasmonaean he has no love for the Aramaic Levite literature including "Enoch".

Ezekiel's translator makes further appeal to some Greek Torah we might still own, which I don't see in (say) the contemporary translation of Isaiah. What I don't know, is to what degree Ezekiel's translator supports the LXX as-such (Egyptian as it was) or some "Lucianic" edition of Judaea.

The Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah

I argued last month, if on slender evidence, that Isaiah, in Greek, was taken from 1QIsa^a itself. For more evidence, Michaël N. van der Meer summarises the Greek Isaiah in the course of "Prophecy and Politics in the Old Greek Version of Ezekiel 28". We'll address Ezekiel later.

The "translator" of Isaiah which Christians have inherited is no translation. It updates the text; for instance changing Aram > Syria, the Philistines > Greeks (Hellenes, not "allophyles"), and Tarshish > Carchedon i.e. Carthage. On the surface such is mere geographic gloss, to aid "the modern audience" as we'd put it. Narratively the effect is to insinuate "Isaiah" (already encompassing chs. 34+, remember) into the role of a predictive prophet.

The Isaiah 8:23b-9:6 oracle had concerned the historical Isaiah's king, the young Josiah. In Greek, not so much. Its focus is no longer the king. In fact he's not any king: he is "the herald of the Divine Council", never a royal title. Such title does, however, match an angel like Gabriel or a prophet - or a priest. Van der Meer relays his homeboy Arie van der Kooij, against other scholars, that Isaiah intends some chief priest of the Hellenistic age. Specifically Onias IV; who had to serve out his priesthood in Leontopolis from the early 140s BC.

Onias is, then, the once and future High Priest in Jerusalem; and the suffering servant. It was in Leontopolis and other Ptolemaic cities that Isaiah was interpreted, for that Jewish community. Ptolemy VI Philometor (and Cleopatra II, please don't forget her) kept these priests around in case the Ptolemies (and Cleopatrae) could ever reclaim the Judaea.

Well... they couldn't, and this is one reason Jews today justly dismiss Onias' pretensions for a load of cods. It seems to have gone little better for this sore loser in his own day; Jews elsewhere entertained rival translations of other books. Eventually the Jews as a people would get so disgusted they embarked upon real translations of the Hebrew, here and elsewhere (although not in time to save the MT from, say, the injections into Jeremiah - nor to save Isaiah itself!). One does, however, hope the Aramaic communities kept shtum on this, because they were (famously) floating their own targums.

Other evidence that Isaiah is late is the practically CS Lewis word "terebinth". The Septuagint proper retains the Attic "terminth". Elsewhere the two lower-Egyptian texts mostly share a language, for instance the oddly male parthenos for the female Hebrew alma "damsel" (if the Greeks ever implied a not-yet-a-woman, LXX didn't restrict it to physical virgins). I posit here that the Isaiah translator, living after this Torah, should have had access to such. If so, it looks like our man simply ignored the text. Isaiah's reactionary priestly translator may have preferred the Levite corpus, some of which also survives in Greek; which in early HasMaBean times was downplaying Torah.

We do not eat ze bugs

Manuel Peñero and Pablo Librado set out to show how their European ancestors ate land arthropods. Owen Lewis has got to the core of it: they quit.

At least they quit in "Northern Eurasia". These are the ancestors of us Indo-Europeans on the one side; and the Huns, Manchus, Turks, and Mongols on the other. We can certainly add the Koreans and Japanese to this.

Our ancestors could eat ze bugs - chitin at all - and the Neanders assuredly did. Until 7000 BC, the two authors (through Lewis) say; at that point we lost the ability to process chitin, a enzyme-family called chitinase. So small shellfish were still possible if we just peeled the shell off (I suspect some of these have been aquacultured in prehistory). Note that some coastal populations simply imposed a taboo against the last, although even some of these could be talked into munching a cricket or locust.

I don't know if larvae have chitin (I think little). Either-way some Neolithic populations did attract larvae to eat, infamously the Sardinians (early Levantine farmers) with their cheese.

Anyway as the Neolithic trundled along, I expect that insects attracted some taboos of their own, because people who lived near insects got malaria, and breads and puddings (and beer) were getting less expensive. A family that couldn't eat chitin would naturally have zero reason to live anywhere near ze bugs.

New Punjab

Fifteen years ago seven Hindu-and/or-Sikh monotheists from Punjab got together and designed a space (kilo)station. They called it "Hyperion" in homage to their Greek cultural roots. The basic design is the torus; which they stack, so as to keep it from tumbling chaotically like the Saturnine moon of that name. They had clearly thought deeply on the topic, and the NSS agreed awarding their proposal a grand prize.

The plan was to put this station at TLL4. As to scale: 900m radius (=1.8km dia), staffed by 18000 people.

As to L4 and not L5: interplanetary dust. We call this the Kordylewski Cloud after its 1961 discoverer and, yes, it is more visible in L5. The authors did not know this at the time but a Magyar crew has verified that L5 captures more dust than L4. This is caused by Terra-Luna-particle not being a perfect Lagrangian system, as the Sun also hits the particle; and that Terra-Luna orbit their barycentre with an eccentricity (Brave AI sez: 0.026 to 0.077, higher than Earth's own) and inclination relative to the Sun. For my part I don't rate this dust-delta as so important.

If we must have a megastructure at our own L4 or L5, and I repeat I am very skeptical, a trio of Japanese evaluated the cost: 20MT of material. If they brought it from Earth even with that fancy Starship they'd be looking at ten million million 2025 dollars and over fifteen millennia (Egyptian history is said to be five of these/a third of that). But the Punjabis probably figured as much which is why they wanted to feed their station from Luna... maybe by coilgun. Nitrogen and phosphour might have to be fed from ambient passing asteroids.

I hadn't noticed Hyperion being referenced much since 2011. Janhunen's dumbbell is smaller so cheaper and safer, for TLL4 (or L5; but not L1). Same holds for Orion Ruzicka's reinforced torus if they keep the mad lad in check. Miklavcic's spinning bag of dirt and since-then Jensen's various schemes were always meant for in-situ mulching of asteroids... somewhere else.

Doctor Moreau

I have recently finished HG Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau which I supplemented with a viewing of Island of Lost Souls. The latter is to-date the best cinematic rendition we've had from the book, and might structurally be better than the book itself - I might get to that.

Wells had - famously - burst out the gate with six books 1895-8, five of them SF including our topic the third. They were, I understand, all big sellers, if not at the time then certainly in their reprints. Wells may have felt guilt over his newfound wealth and fame, as he became a socialist. At least four of the SF books remain classics to this day including (I repeat myself) our topic. The man kept writing - which has proved a problem, because it doesn't look like his later projects (which were many) have fared so well. Although there remain apologists for, say, Kipps.

Moreau - I must report - presents "early work" problems to the modern reader. The book wasn't Wells' first; but he may have felt that he needed to put in as many ideas as he could, so he could force them upon a readership which he feared might abandon him. The movie, at a trim 70ish minutes, slashed out a good deal of Wells' philosophical ramblings, and dared have one of the Lost Souls feel an attraction to the character "Perkins" who is, uh, Prendick in the book. Wells could not dare this in late Victorian England, so postpones such "anthro" after Moreau's (sorry) end as remote-observation.

Wells was writing before genetics, and in anycase was not writing a genetic book. If you are looking for Jurassic Park, you should read Jurassic Park. Moreau at heart may or may not be a "Darwinist", but what he absolutely refuses is eugenics. Moreau believes instead in the medical biology: in Biblical terms, that you can change the leopard's spots, right now. Moreau, Londoner, has made excellent strides in this "endeavour", uplifting several species into humanoid form. He's got into their brains, too. And into their minds: to which end, he's instilled a cult.

Wells would become a(n) eugenicist. Wells, I suspect - darkly - didn't really believe that a man, even a genius of a man, could turn an actual @#$% puma into a catgirl waifu. (Indeed, we learn, here Moreau failed; although he does do fairly well with a dog.) Moreau is, Scott Alexander would say, Wells' steelman. Sake Of Argument.

No. Our text is a parable. Wells was more thinking of British idiots, of American Negroes, and of all the tribes for which London had (somehow) ended up responsible as of 1896. He thought that the British might indeed be able to dress up a Kenyan and make a passable Christian of him. But it would end up a shell of Christianity, and that the Kenyan would revert within months of British neglect. Christianity was a joke to Wells at the time - and in all the time G-d provided to him. If a bear could become like a man it would have to take place over the same millions of years as it took the apes.

Second contact

In AD 1022ish, a tree surrendered its life to build a Scandinavian-themed home in Markland. Map Myths reports a possible Danish attempt to reëstablish contact. With the help of a couple of German pirates and the Portuguese.

As you may imagine this has run up against 1930s German nationalism and general we-wuzzery around Europe about "who discovered the Americas". (The answer is "the Navajo". Because screw you.)

Frankly all this is the wrong question for the last decades of the AD 1400s, on account of a few factors long mooted here on this blog. tl;dr everyone already knew about the "Markland" for at least a century. Few in the 1400s cared about cold worthless islands. The great powers - which did not then include Denmark nor England - cared about bypassing the Ottomans and getting to the Indies. Whatever these privateers were doing well north of all that, didn't figure. No northwest passage, no cities of gold in Labrador, nothing but cod.

I do however find this of interest for several other, if I may say better, reasons. Cod wasn't worthless in this Catholic age. And the fisher fleets were improving. Perhaps the Danes were starting to care about those "islands" again.

It may witness the fifteenth century in Greenland; when the old towns were abandoned. The island might not have been abandoned. These Danes coming toward the end of the century thought some "pirates" might have lingered there. If so: what was their prey? Basque fishermen? the Welsh and Cornish?

Evaluating the large temporary laboratory

ToughSF's actual link, for which we were planning those mammoth toroidal habitats, was to "Tackling a Mars Cycler Design Head-On" (pdf but badly encoded). Let's abstract it out.

These habitats aren't asteroidal mines. For the trio who wrote that paper, they're temporary housing - shuttles. That allows them to be designed smallest, first. The smallest torus they'll allow fits maybe high-fifties of people. There's a lot of room per person, because this is a 180 day mission until the cycler drops them off at Deimos. Once at Deimos they're Mars' problem; their emptied shuttle then cycles back to Earth where it's Earth's problem.

The trajectory this paper assumes is the classic Aldrin, maintained by solar-electric propulsion. They want to build it in LEO where the SEP paper proposed much higher: TLL1. I'd rather the far-side lunar base with assembly at TLL2... but that might be harder now.

This doesn't have to be a T/M cycler. It could be Hohmann, with less outgoing delta-V. But to Mars/Deimos that takes longer and then it would have to brake and stay there. It could also be a temporary lab in space but then, why not just use a Janhunen or an asteroid-colony to be worked indefinitely. So, we hohmann it out to Deimos or some isolated nearby rock, which we then dock and exploit.

The lab of 55 dudes isn't a colony. Whether it stay there or cycle back, its crew-and-cargo are not staying at Deimos or Atíra or wherever. This is a mission to say they were there. What they might be able to do is patch together some infrastructure for the next shuttle - which will host hundreds.

The design overall might be better for shifting into other orbits. As noted the outgoing Hohmann is less delta-V than the insertion into Aldrin. If the shuttle can take that, it can certainly take the deceleration to dock Deimos. Can you do that with a Janhunen or a big rolling bag of Bennu? I am pretty sure once you have an orbiting Janhunen, it's not going anywhere else.