The book of Psalm 108-110

We have a few articles by Christians asserting that the early Church read the Psalter - which is our Psalter - as a unity, a single book. Lately: SD Ellison (which I haven't read) and James Hamilton Jr (pdf - have read). Maybe Jon Alan Ginn. Let us ponder unity as unification.

The Greek translation is pretty-much just the MT here except enumerated with some offsets. Qumran has some differences to be discussed (soon!). Our main topic is the Psalms triplet 108-110 in MT, 107-109 in Greek. If deliberate, the editor presented Psalm 109 as a royal work alongside 108 and 110.

Most agree the edition of this last fifth of the Psalter dates well after the exile, adopting Psalm 137 among others. The collection's motive would be that of Messianism: the people didn't necessarily have a king in those days, so - they wanted one. Note that this is the fifth where Qumran rates the collection as fluid-enough that variant orders can be ventured, secondary or not; Qumran does not venture this for Psalms 1-88.

I stress this does not mean all these Psalms were composed for that editorial purpose. Psalm 137 didn't expect any king but God. We are, for now, discussing the edition, which allows for angry strays like Psalm 137 to exist along more-hopeful work.

Psalm 109 would then be such an angry stray. It reads like a curse tablet. The man is going before the court with a satan at his right v. 6, an accuser human or otherwise. Instead the man requests YHWH at his right v. 31. Thematically it leads well into Psalm 110.

Somebody moved to the Chincha valley

When the Huari ruled, they dealt with postMoche coastal peoples without much conquering them. Then around AD 1100 the Huari collapsed. We next find people harvesting guano... much further south, in the Chincha vale. AD 1250 is about when they start advertising their birdey wares on pots.

The link between the Chincha of their guano era, and their northern postMoche origins, now exists from genetics.

As to: why the migration. Uh. We have evidence for rather a lot of upheaval around that continent, from the 1200s (thirteenth century) on.

Once having migrated, the Chincha jealously maintained their culture, some even being endogamous. The language of that coast when the Inca came was Coastal Quechua; "Chincha" itself means "ocelot" in that language. The homeland of "Quechua I" also lies north of Cuzco; which highlands today speak an archaic dialect called Huanca (no jokes plz).

I suspect the Huanca and the majority Chincha both descend from the Huari, who spoke Quechua. The bird-doo-doo people, as coastal... I doubt. Their ancestors had spoken something more Mochean-era in northern Peru, if not Mochic itself; further, I expect they maintained their nonQuechua language among the Chinca. This is difficult to tell because both the Inca and the Spaniards discouraged indigenous languages as weren't Quechua or Aymara.

What happened to Arab astrology?

Antoine Borrut has a book out, Astrology and History in Early Islam. You may read its introduction on academia.edu.

Several chronicles in the early centuries anchored themselves in astrologic observances... in Babylonia. The 'Abbasid moment was similarly Babylonian, at heart. So great astrologers invented mathematical tools... in London. Al-Khwarizmi had done so first. As Borrut points out, our modern disdain for astrology is postNewtonian. One is tempted to put a boldface over "post".

Devout Muslims like Ibn Jarîr Tabarî had disdained astrology before us, from a reading of sura 6 (the fifth for Ibn Mas'ud and Ubay). But old habits died hard. Christians like James/Jacob of Edessa were using astronomical tables to peg their annals; indeed the very annalistic form had come out of old Babylonian habits. This is in fact a major boon to us moderns, who can use their mention of eclipses, comets and even aurorae against what we know of the eclipse cycle and of visible comets, also lately tree-ring anomalies.

Perhaps universities should force history departments to install a mandatory astrology course. We could host it in the 200/2000 range.

Ancient liturgies

Short one for now: Philip Jenkins shows where to find lost text. Namely, embedded in other text, as the Didache is embedded in the Apostolic Constitutions, Jude in 2 Peter, and Aristides in the Life of Barlaam and Ioasaph. This blog has occasionally delved into Archaic Hebrew works in late Classical stuff like Habakkuk. Or maybe 2 Isaiah in the 1QIsa^a. Or all this stuff.

One fascinating thought is the ancient Christian liturgy. Paul in 1 Corinthians famously cites a formula of the Last Supper. Why would the Last Supper matter? Perhaps because everyone was already reënacting it. In fact the younger Pliny must report on a weekly ritual meal from Bithynia. The war of the Diaspora (mostly Cyprus and Cyrene) was approaching but Pliny's Christians were gentiles so wouldn't be affected. That liturgy was certainly the same as Ignatius was recommending at around that time.

But as Paul embeds some rituals of the, what, AD 50s; so other texts were embedding other rituals. Occasionally a gnostic text will involve people banding together to make some weird chant in a weird direction. Like the Acts of John section C chapter 94 - not just a hymn of Jesus, but stage-direction.

Proxima d

The inner planet of the closest stellar system to ours now has more evidence behind it. Kyplanet reports: interactions, with the chromosphere (above the photosphere which is the visible disc). Elsewhere reported: YZ Ceti, and the aging Sol-like HIP 67522.

Besides pretty-much proving that Prox d even exists, which I didn't rate obvious three/four years ago, we get some constraints on what d is. At M sin i of 0.26 M_⊕ it is rocky, with a magnetic field. The field isn't well constrained except that it's enormous. The sucker's enough to raise flares on a red dwarf. It's much greater than ours on Earth and might even be superJovian although Kyplanet doubts this.

Among the constraints we don't got, besides planetary inclination, would be a map of Prox' magnetic field. Zeeman Doppler Imaging has mapped such field for YZ Ceti - at 3.6pc: a sun's flares coincide with exoplanet crossings of the Alfvén surface as the planet orbit approaches the stellar magnetic equator. I suspect we can measure, by this, both the inclination of the stellar rotation relative to us; and that of the planet's orbit relative to the star.

Prox is closer us at 1.302pc. So that's a tool I'd suggest for the Prox team.

In addition: if some better-constrained nearby planets, like, oh, TRAPPIST-1 b, are not raising flares: is this because they are insufficiently inclined against their stars? I think resonant systems like this one might not be much so inclined.

As for Prox b, this may have a magnetic field too. It's too small and far to be inducing flares itself but the d-induced flares seem modulated by... something. The planet b is bigger than d so if d held onto a dynamo, why not b. Kyplanet is careful here to note that some of the outside interference might not come from b but from an "e" between d and b, or a retrograde capture inward of d (I find this unlikely).

The first Book Of Isaiah

Davila had posted the Isaiah Scroll commentary this very morn. He asserts, from evidence elsewhere, we should be thinking of an Isaiah of 1-33 and then an Extension To Isaiah 34ff. Our Isaiah 34-5 belong to the second Isaiah. The 36-9 drop-in would then be done by the Extender.

The Great Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa^a may be the very autograph of our Isaiah - and of the Greek.

I might explain the Peshitta thus: Oriental Jewish traditions stubbornly held on containing only 1-33, inasmuch Zionism mattered less to the Diaspora. The Isaiah-to-Syriac project was done by Christians juggling between a Hebrew (or Bavli-Aramaic) 1-33 / 34f tradition and a Greek 1-29 / 30f tradition... and by then also Jewish copies of the G.I.S. what we simply know as Masoretic.

That Greek translator, for his part, never had a tradition of Isaiah 1-33 by itself, or if he did he abandoned it so started from scratch.

Isaiah's sawmill

Most today put the second Isaiah from chapter 40 on. It's a nice round number and it follows Isaiah 36-9 which is an obvious narrative drop-in from the Deuteronomist. In antiquity, other splits existed. The Sahidic Copts split after 30:5 and 46; but that translation came from the Septuagint. From Hebrew the Peshitta split after 33 although at least the later translators worked across those bounds.

Rossella Tercatin last January reported on the Great Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa^a. This is, famously, Masoretic. Less-famously it comes from two scribes; which scribes tried to harmonise their efforts. But that's a curiosity not worth the blogging.

Marcello Fidanzio has raised a point worth the blogging. The first part of the scroll was preëxistent. It was an old parchment that had to be patched-up and corrected. The second part was simply copied anew from some other text, and affixed to the first part.

The kicker: the first part - which is a holdover from the first edition of Isaiah - goes up to chapter 33. Just like the Peshitta. The next part starts at 34 (and then gets 36-9 dropped-in).