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.

The Avodah piyyutim as Levitic survivals

Vered Noam lately discussed the rabbinic abandonment of the Second Temple mindset. It is not reserved to TEH TALMUD!: the Palaestinian "Yerushalmi" Talmud and the Midrashim share in this (where they sometimes dispute Talmud elsewhere). I understand that Flavius Josephus wasn't much a fan of that Temple neither.

Noam gears up to this with (what I read as) the implicit lament that the rabbis' sourcing isn't what it could be. The rabbinate had imposed a rule to use orality for anything not in Tanakh. Daniel and Esther survive of course but they present themselves as Diaspora-lit. Ben Sira hung around the fringe. Otherwise very little is written. Jews had to beg the Christians for readings of Josephus, until writing their own "Yosippon"; the same holds for the book of Judith. 1 Maccabees was famously rejected until the recent Zionism. Ginsberg's "Legends of the Jews" records stories clearly not written until the Middle Ages (including a Judith). This may incidentally explain why Jewish records of the early Islamic era are so poor by comparison with Syriac-literate Christians.

I'll here raise an aside on one contemporary source: Judith. MS Copilot is telling me that Judith had been composed in Hebrew by the style of the Chronicler (with the DtrH behind him, especially Judges). It was translated into Greek using the וַיְהִי > kai egeneto trope, sometimes treating this as a conjunction which וַיְהִי is not. Copilot is raising several arguments for Judith's subsequent exclusion in any language.

Those two digressions done wit', Noam would add that Judith's book assumes Second Temple halakha. Maybe not as egregious as the Aramaic Levi / Tobit cluster on account Judith was, in fact, in Hebrew suggesting more alignment with Jubilees than with 1Q20 the Genesis Apocryphon. I'd say theologically Judith would side more with the latter given how sectarian is the former (we're not here to argue those two).

On topic of Aramaic, we've seen hints that Yom Kippur might have started as a mere preparation for the older holiday Sukkot. That was done under the Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, providing the month Nisan and its akītu. The Levides deemed Yom Kippur worthy of Aramaic. Second Temple veneration of Enoch, Noah, and Levi couldn't be retained to Aramaic, as we'll note from Jubilees' existence, and Ben Sira will literally sing their paean.

Where the rabbis dismissed the late figures Judith and Tobit, they didn't so alone. Noam notes they went as far as to wave off Levi, Enoch - even Noah (contrast R. Singer here). This goes to explain Ben Sira's eventual failure within Judaism as well.

Noam sees this as a deliberate repudiation of the entire Second Temple apparatus (Ezekiel should be proud). Esther, as a national novel bypassing overt piety, survived pious threshing. As perhaps-byproduct, this threshing undercuts the basis of Christianity which stems from a rival miqveh (Isaiah's translation > Mark+Matthew) and/or from Mary being a Levide (> Luke).

With a vital exception. On the High HolyDays the liturgy exalts these men. Most of them...

Noam notes these same figures had featured in the Qumran liturgi(es) for these Holy Days. He cites Menahem Kister that the 5Q13 fragments 1-2 present a draught of the (now-rabbinic) Avodah piyyutim, in which all Creation exists for the Yom Kippur. Ben Sira 42:15-50:24 is similar (NB. Ben Sira is also found in Qumran); 1Q20 in which Noah atones for the world should belong here as well.

This - say Kister and Noam - has subsequently gotten spliced into a summary of Mishneh Yoma. Unlike the Second Temple, the Mishnaists to their piyyut didn't bring Enoch, and further tried to freeze out the Enoch-associated Nephilim of Senîr. The latter effort didn't wholly succeed.

Another point in the piyyutim is how they don't bring anyone to replace Enoch... like, oh, Moses. This reminds of the Haggadah, as opposed to standard rabbinic veneration of Moses The Exagog and Lawgiver which is shared even with gentiles like Trogus. The Qahat / Amram works exist in the Aramaic Levi tradition precisely to bridge this gap; Ben Sira also praises Moses (and glides over anything Nephilish). To me this suggests extreme antiquity to the piyyut-genre core.

Now we are ready to interrogate Noam's assumption that Enoch belonged to this Second Temple Heilsgeschichte intrinsically. 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. Such scholars must admit if the piyyutim 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...

Priestly John, the jester

Olga Fabrikant-Burke asks after Jeremiah's false prophets.

Jeremiah exists in two versions, everyone-else's and the Greeks'. So his Divine word comes to us after much skub already. Even the pure-r Greek is, itself, a product of earlier skub because, if nothing else, not all those translators were on the level. OFB is excavating deep. But let's hear her out.

Jeremiah's foil was one "Hananiah". OFB is looking into "Hananiah's" speeches and finds them to depend on Jeremiah's own words. She believes the easiest solution is that Hananiah exists, only, to be the parody and ape of Jeremiah. Hananiah even acts as (malicious) exegete of the Divine Word. And the easiest solution to that, is that Hananiah never existed in the material plane; that he is a narrative character, of Jeremiah's narrative editor. Traditionally Baruch.

To back her up, somewhat, I propose that a court prophet shouldn't happen. I've noted here that the Zionist court by then owned plenty of homespun pious text: the Deuteronomist, his History up to Josiah, and a royal(ist) Psalter. Jeremiah would have inherited, in such courtly literature: YHWH's Rescue Of Jerusalem under Hezeqiah, and then the great religious restoration under Josiah. Josiah's thus-theocratic court could call upon its priests. The Deuteronomist, as OFB notes, had warned against false prophets. The priests would then call out Jeremiah as being the false prophet here exactly because he claims prophecy, which "we don't need anymore".

If Jeremiah's Hananiah didn't exist, his scribe Baruch has permitted to us critics a similar authorial-liberty. We may imagine our own character - as the court's fool. Maybe call him... "John". At least allied to that clumsy author of Psalm 78, if you read this blog.

Jeremiah, living in times of priestcraft, also inherited a prophetic tradition. But then so had the priests. At first Josiah's priests might have trouble with the (vast) antiAssyrian rantings of Amos, Hosea, and of Nahum and Isaiah 1-33 (latter who, might be the same guy). After Josiah though, all those rantings could be repurposed. The Syrians will tell Herodotus how Babylon may as well be Assyria's new capital. Jeremiah could look like he was preaching a gospel alien to that of Nahum, more like the position of weak king Ahaz and of puppet Manasseh (there was yet no "penance of Manasses").

In hindsight Jeremiah was proven right. If John existed, and I allow a clown like him could exist, his japes got reinterpreted in the light of False Prophecy. He got promoted, if you will, from the weapon of the loyal priests, to the mouthpiece of Melkor.

A chud rebuttal

Been a (checks) halfyear since I last checked in on Bulwark contributor and midwit extraordinaire Bret Devereaux. Last month he owned the chuds. He said the only history that we, who aren't signing up as Kristol's cabin-boys, know is Caesar and Alexander. Latter whom, Devereaux pompously styles as Alexander III.

Leave aside the truth of any of this chudbash; for Aurelian, especially, I suspect you could get a fair hearing on /pol/. Let's talk how come nobody is talking Seleucus I Nicator.

Well, yeah. Not everyone knows the full Seleucid story. (This blog has put in a good word for his calendar.) But... do they need to? The Seleucids after the eponymous founder started falling off. Antiochus III was a contender but not a permanent one. If we look further afield, we could drop several more names. But whom are we trying to impress by floating Suppiluliumas I, Trajan, Nabuchadrezzar II, Ashurbanipal, Tuthmosis III... these men although great didn't really leave much behind them.

Personally I wouldn't mind floating some of the beta people. Porcius Cato the Elder, Empress Livia or (maybe more so) Julia Domna, Agrippa, or freakin' queen-mother Olympia. Belisarius and Narses? Theodora? ...anyone?

It's not that the "chuds" can't drop names they got from skimming Wikipedia or Grok. It's that it's a waste of their/our time. We're trying to spread historical knowledge, however onesided as Devereaux might think it be. Devereaux is doing little more than dropping names and waving wingwang.

Which is a very Lincoln Project thing to do. Kinda gay tho'.

How the Internet became AOL

If you own an ancient DVD you may have seen reference, in movie teasers, to "AOL Keyword" in lieu of a website URL. This was Steve Case's bid to create his own private Internet based off his telephone-switchboard in Virginia. 16k bandwidth if you could get through. (Went up to the 50s by 1999 if you bought the bespoke phone modem but by that point, the Dot.Bomb was about to hit err'body. We now measure bandwidth in G.)

So Arctotherium's history dropped a few days back. Outgoing President Obama and his allies, in late 2016, chained the Internet. This made it close to AOL-by-cartel. The first excuse given was Russia. So we had to become Soviet. If people had any further questions they were directed to the Safe Edgy Store of "breadtube".

Arctotherium is an antivaxxer and they cannot help themselves from outing themselves as such. And he runs up against the same problem as other "free speech advocates": he has to allow for the likes of Jack Kerwick (laundered through JJ Sefton). We are now Askin'-Qwesschins about The Virus Assumption. And for 1980s-era televangelism.

There exist some gullible people and these are prone to scams. Scams will become only more profitable as more internet people get up in age, bringing their wealth with them. I am tempted to suggest that these people deserve it, especially boomers given their vast sense of entitlement. Except that wealth - and power - would shift to the scammers who, I dare say, don't deserve to profit. Privatised theft isn't better than government theft.

Given the fury being fanned by these personalities, who by the way have no problem shutting out anyone pushing back upon them, I fear for Anthony Fauci's life.

Middle Hunter Gatherers

A few days back we primitive European hunter-gatherers got some notes that, alongside the famed Spanish and Italian refugia, we should take seriously the Balkans 'fugium as well. Maybe foremost.

"Cro-Mags" got into Europe in the latter 40sKBC, for good this time, forever ending the Neanders. But then the Others returned and pushed everyone there into those refugia. These papers are talking about what happened when the ice melted.

The Balkan peoples went west, to mix with the Magdalenians in Italy and Spain. That's the Epigravettian replacement noted here. Likewise that Italy proved a poor refuge although some Italian DNA persisted. Here are your WHG, gentlemen.

Bacho Kiro remains none-of-the-above. They're IUP East Eurasians in Europe. They had perhaps brought a little (male?) DNA to the Magdalenians, earlier. Not on this scale.

This Balkan group further spread east, along the steppe. That branch might be the source of the EHG.