Joel's Zionism

This blog hasn't much looked in on the prophetic oracles of Joel - directly. It is in CBH excepting six examples of the "LBH" second-Temple cant of the Chronicler. It may or may not cite 'Abd-JehovahObadiah. To this end, John Dunne may offer a helpful project, looking in on the synopsis with Amos (pdf).

Joel looks forward to a new Eden, flowing with wine, focused upon Zion and her Temple. Amos, which is an elder text, has about the same except here the focus is on David's tent. Now: Amos is assuredly a northern text with Amos 6 being in dialect. But "David" as totem shows up in the words of outside opponents: in the north (Dan stele, of Hazael) and against the north (Moab stele, of Mesha). Tents, we should note, are mobile. Also Dunne argues that Amos bears real eyewitness reports of the earthquake in Jeroboam II's time.

We're not really here for Amos. We're just placing him early. He was a popular prophet in the CBH-speaking world, Isaiah and Jeremiah both using his work as to apply to the Jerusalem area. Dunne would add to that list, Joel; as another citer of Amos.

The Old Greek order of Prophets follows that scheme, where Joel "reflects" back on Amos. The MT has rather the order Joel-Amos; so promoting Joel as the prequel, if you like. (Also the Greek merges MT Joel 2+3.) For those who deem 4 Ezra to be originally Hebrew (and based on its connexion with the Pseudo-Philo, I'm one of those): the MT order seems debatable up to Bar Kokhba.

In Old Greek also, Amos himself was interpreted, where David's tent is David's σκηνή which is "built", comparable to Moloch's σκηνή earlier in that book and also to the LXX-Torah tabernacle. In the Greek Tobit 13:10/11 also-also, the Lord has a σκηνή to be "built". I've suspected the Greek project to translate the Prophets was generally a priestly project, in Isaiah's case by exiled dissidents and in Ezekiel's case by Zadokites. Tobit had been composed in the first place by the "Aramaic Levi" crew, which stands to reason would be translated by sympathisers.

Dunne contrasts Joel, Greek-Amos, and Greek-Tobit on the one side; with the late-antique Targum on the other. On the latter side, Amos was still read as referring to David's dynasty. The Damascus Document, in the same lineage as Aramaic Levi and the Zadokite version of Ezekiel, and a citer of Joel 2, takes a third path: that David's tent is now the qahal - soon to become the Qumran yahad community. (On this much, I'll ding Dunne, because his footnote does not support that this be regal, especially given how equivocally Qumran understands "messianism".)

For Dunne, Joel should be read alongside this Greek priestly translation project before the Damascus Document. Dunne would stick this composition before all of that. Since here he doesn't argue the point, I'll give it a go: it was not "back-"translated from Greek to Hebrew, and it's low in the "LBH". Early second-Temple seems safest, like 2 Isaiah.

Queerying Harry Tanner's book

Dr Harry Tanner published something in a London press, on hate versus love. Tanner is on the side of love (just ask him); if you disagree that homosexuality counts, you are hate.

Lest you think I am being harsh: here is (or, yesterday... was) a published review, from one Eleni Avdoulou at the University of Pisa. That reviewer is on Tanner's side such that I really can't see her misinterpreting Tanner's point. Avdoulou's publisher? - Bryn Mawr, an semi-femme university in the US (they bundle up with Haverford). I see today the whole site is down, so uh. I'll be adding links to other reviews.

I find failures up and down this entire asânid chain. Tanner has a bias, against basic biology and the need for a society - British in his case - to propagate itself. His publisher Bloomsbury did not call him on this bias. His reviewer Avdoulou didn't either; and by extension neither did Bryn Mawr. So now we gotta do it.

Just look at all this cant from the review: The chapter concludes by arguing that Cleon’s anti-gay agenda and the increasingly homophobic climate in Athens prompted prominent queers such as Euripides and Agathon to seek refuge.... We can accept this from, oh, Bent Spines (or from Lobo or whatever). From a purported university press all three words need flagging as ingroup-jargon. Especially since Tanner trades on his PhD.

More: 'phobia medicalises an opposition likely political in nature (even then). As Donald Kagan reports, Cleon was a leader of Athens (we'll leave aside how effective for now). It is likely that Cleon from 450 BC to his death in battle had specific targets in mind. And Cleon wasn't acting alone, given that Pericles was hardly a "queer" (Tanner and Avdoulou demand we use this term) himself.

Tanner is a midwit who does not understand, say, Judaism outside his Christian filter. I suspect his dim view of Cleon likewise depends upon university (read: midwit) acceptance of Thucydides in the canon. Thucydides - writing after the war, as something of a revisionist - made Cleon out as the great villain. It happens that after Pericles' death, Thucydides and Cleon fell into rival factions. Even then I don't see Thucydides objecting to Cleon's social programme; only to his military grand-strategy (Kagan would interject here, Cleon was winning until his death). Neither, I think, did Pericles object.

Tanner and Avdoulou read like Christian apologists finding a figure that their caste hates because their professor told them they need to be hated. For Tapscott it's Darwin; for Ravi Zacharias it was Nietzsche. This makes further difficult to take Tanner seriously that opposition to homosexuality be an outgrowth of the Gini Coëfficient. Tanner doesn't buck the midwit wisdom that Greek homosexuality was an aristocratic pastime with clear Top and Bottom roles - rather undercutting that chapter of his thesis. I doubt that Tanner even knows what Gini is.

Tanner, I get. He wants to keep chasing after cute young boys like when he was a young boy (the Kirkus reviewer makes this clear... citing Tanner's own book). Avdoulou seems less like a natural ally than like a university drone. Can't risk tenure.

Offworld Resources Workshop, 4

Space Twitter is dribbling out the results of a "workshop" last week at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. The fourth such held by that Agency.

Some releases are out, like this one from Pulsar Helium (perhaps distinct from the Sunbird guys). It's restricted, although I don't know how. Nor - since the interdicted regions include Australia and Japan - why. (South Africa, I could grok.)

The report notes the supply / demand curve for Helium-3. Demand is set to spike due to quantum computing, operating at the centiKelvins; even leaving aside the Sunbird roggets. Presently the supply is decay of tritium which is had at the DoE's Savannah River. It turns out He-3 can also be extracted from certain natural-gas deposits. Most-accessible to Americans is one "Topaz" field in rocky Minnesota, the "Jetstream #1" well. We just haven't much tried said extraxion, by this point. I expect the Australians and South Africans, owning Minnesota-like geology, would love so to try.

Another company, Lunar He-3 Mining, has a technology for extracting this gas. Despite the name, the tech isn't just for the moon.

The Inca started earlier

The Quechua-speaking Huari had an empire, and Tiahuanaco a kingdom; both failed. From these ashes, new kingdoms arose. One came from Cuzco, near the Titicaca. Their incas became emperors. We're mainly quibbling over dates, also spelling because nowadays the sorts of idiot talking about ancestral-wisdom make a point of rejecting Spain's spelling.

We owe our account of events to Miguel Cabello de Balboa. By "we" I mean John Rowe in the 1940s. Radiocarbon wasn't a thing then; and, as we all know, radio-all-of-it got (badly) adulterated after those late 1940s - 1960s radiation bursts. Rowe was still adamantly pro-de-Balboa up to 1997, when radiocarbon recalibration started to work against him.

Frankly I don't consider Rowe to be in the same rank, in archaeological hell, as Thompson for the Maya. Rowe had every right to question radiocarbon. I do that here on this blog all'a-time.

"Lizzie" Wade is relaying that our calibrations have been getting better, even for the understudied Southern Hemisphere. Dendrochronology is coming online. It can peg New Zealand eruptions with world-spanning Carrington events. The Incas had access to vast quantities of wood from the upper Amazon and their northern and southern trade-partners.

Also, I'll have to concede here, de Balboa's account of events reads a lot like Livy. Rah-rah, our people fought these people, we won; on to the next battle. Also it is north-focused. The Spaniards could appreciate this on account those are the provinces they reached, first; also those regions had the most-recent experience with the Inca. The main languages up there were Quechua dialects. Cuzco - the Inca hometown - is about where begins another language, of the Aymara.

One large difference here is that South America didn't really have a Tlaxcala, or even a Texcoco, to record rival versions of events. Also - as Wade notes - nobody could write over there (can't really say "down there" for an Andean society); Mesoamerica was intensely literate.

Rowe, I think, could have stood to shown (if that's grammatic) more humility. He had no reason to defend the honour of de Balboa, which was really the honour of the Inca court; save inertia. If anything Rowe was too solicitous of ancestral-wisdom. Wade is pointing out that the incas were colonialists too, just like the Mexica "Aztec" hoped to be.

The new map has the Inca concentrating south of Titicaca. A rampage occurred in the south over the last decades AD 1300s: the far south, as in present Santiago. Then, the Inca turned north: around ~1400 (same time as Chincha), they hit Saqsaywaman. They did major construction at an exact date 1418 (dendro?). That's about when serious Inca remains also make serious inroads into the old Tiahuanaco environs. Over the ensuing 1400s the Inca faced a stubborn resistance at (southern) Copiapó, which - Wade says - got resolved when the Inca took the copper-mines and left alone the villages. The northern push against old Huari / Quechua homelands did happen, but (to me) that looks like it happened over the 1440s.

From 1450 on, I suppose the Tahuantinsuyu was being consolidated, in particular a new focus on Quito. Perhaps, as Bayes might suggest, the Spaniards found peoples who indeed had only recently joined the Inca Empire. That made easier to peel them off.

I have to admit, I find the new map difficult to interpret. Warrior-caste of Aymara hardened at the Mapuche frontier? Summoning the old Tiahuanacis out of caves?

Out Of Israel

With the h/t to Moldbug (for the title): David Reich floats a hypothesis. Not co-written unless he used AI, which I suspect he didn't. This claims a strong modern-human presence in the Levant that never ventured east, but led to 3%-7% of the resultant Neander genes found not only in Iberia but also in the Neanders they'd replace.

Because it was that early: 300kya. That'd be the long downslope from the MIS 9 Purfleet peak before MIS 8's false subpeak. I'd assumed some modern humans mixed n' mingled but, if Reich is right, they did this well before Eemian MIS 5.

This wasn't intuitive to me. We are aware of Neanders roaming the Levant before the modern-human expansions of the 60s kya (and the contemporary Iberian Neander expansion). Reich's conclusion implies all the Neanders would have pushed into the Levant since MIS 8 (and Eemian).

I don't know how this accounts for the ghost lineage of "modern" Eurasians which avoided all Neander contact until finally reuniting with their modern kin (us). Said modern kin meanwhile subsumed the Neanders of the Levant.

But most of Reich' conjucture seems to be cluster the 300kya horizon. When we hear of modern-modern humans (including subsaharans) being 80/20: the 80% - for Reich - is east Africa ("Kush"), Nile, and north Africa. That's what spilled into the elder Neanders. The 20% was... erectus, pretty-much.

There may have been a green-sahara at the Purfleet peak. This would have dried out pushing the hunter-gatherers there southward, maybe northeast too.

Habakkuk's song

Earlier this year I looked into Joshua Henson's look at Habakkuk 3's language, which he claimed for ABH. I figure it might be worth extending that to theology. The chapter has one. It is highly ancient, even Canaanite. I ask if it's truly ancient or just reactionary...

The consensus ABH corpus includes Psalm 18 (which might have come from the pre-Psalter "Jashar"), Psalm 68 (presently elohist), Exodus 15:1-18 (maybe with l. 19), Judges 5, and Deuteronomy 32-33. In ABH, YHWH is recalled as coming from the south.

Various projects as venture beyond ABH bring also Psalm 29. This is notable, or notorious, for treating YHWH as the god who assails the forces of death and violence at a sacred mountain, striking them with a storm, which storm restores life to the dead land. As is too well known to repeat here, these tropes trend northern. They are rife in Ugaritic lore (where the mountain is Zaphon) and in various stelae of the neoHittites (spread around the Cilician plain). Psalm 29 is I think considered CBH (it shares its mabbul flood with P/Genesis 6-11) but this may reflect the Canaani/Punic syncretism of preDeuteronomic Carmel (since the psalm is otherwise hardly Priestly).

Psalm 77 is also brought, despite also not itself being ABH; as to be read alongside the ABH Exodus lore. Habakkuk 3 (I think) evokes a canon CBH-era assemblage. These would assume the Deuteronomic Moses cycle and the coming of the House of David.

Gert Prinsloo has taken the above dataset, which I suspect most will agree is relevant; to deliver a highly spicy conclusion, that the author deliberately composed a ABH-style poem as reaction to Habakkuk 1-2. The chapter is "Towards an Intertextual Reading of Habakkuk 3" in Intertextuality as Reinterpreting. (We also learn here of the non-Septuagintal alternate translation of Habakkuk 3: "Barberini".) Habakkuk 1-2 leans upon Isaiah 1-39 (perhaps already assembled as such); Habakkuk 3 - for Prinsloo - leans mainly upon the ancient ABH core and some exceptions like that Punic song, as well as upon those first two chapters.

Henson might object that we can see scars of the archaist process in Psalm 78 which is properly CBH although pretending not to be. Henson didn't find such scars in Habakkuk 3.

But... this may be less that Habakkuk 3 was truly ABH, and more that Habakkuk 3 relied on so ABH-weighted a collection of poetry. Our poet might postdate MT's Psalm 78 but rejected it as a clumsy and unworthy effort. Other non-ABH had crept into the collection like our Psalm 29 and, Prinsloo adds, 74 (post-exilic!) and 77. Our poet allowed these because, let's face it, they're awesome.

It follows that Habakkuk 3 would have read the old songs in accordance with a Deuteronomic proto-history, which history consensus already suspects of existing, just without the Joshua and Judges we know, and of course without the Holiness content. Prinsloo sees his subject as an "inset poem" but in a prophetic book and not, as usual, the narratives. Mind, other prophetic books have included their own psalmic content that doesn't read like the usual oracles.

More Neolithic maths

Earlier we had attempts to apply Gini - social inequality - to Neolithic states. Here, Ukraine and Germany are looking into their potter(ies): diversity versus standards.

The maths here are Shannon. Enough pots have been dug out and (reasonably) dated that the paper can watch them change over time. In Germany, that's Linearbandkeramik LBK; in Ukraine, it's western Trypillia aka Region C (more on the Cucuteni side). The former ended ~5000 BC (soon after 5040 on the chart) and the latter featured almost a full millennium afterward, before declining itself. They skip, say, Achenheim and the arrival of the rodent.

Luckily they do use BCE (here-on, "BC") rather than "BP" which has always been a pain in my ... neck.

Start with LBK. This enjoyed a rise in social complexity over the 5000s. As that happened, the ceramic styles proliferated. It would appear that the artisan behaved as an artist, such that his customers purchased accordingly. Also I recall that LBK towns were internally diverse, perhaps on a model like mediaeval Central Asia where herders might even speak different languages from the farmers, but more-or-less getting along in the market-place. At Vráble one group ended up walling itself off from the other(?) plebeians 5075 BC.

Trypillia was already important 4800 BC; the paper discusses the 4100-3600 BC half-millennium, because data fall away over the 3500s. There they at least got the ox which they could use for plowing rather than, one suspects, making women and serfs do it. At first, 4100-4000 BC, they had six local styles. Here social complexity led to the opposite of old LBK: ceramics were made standard, like in a factory. The paper marks the century 3950-3850 BC as a cultural, or political, era when locals' choices got limited. The paper says that the pottery, being simplified, would have been faster and cheaper to make. This - further - would have allowed for standard rations, and easier identification of foreign imports. These towns - cities really - might not have had cultural (or national) diversity, and if any did show up (like, a trader from Anatolia) the city leveled it.

The "megasites" like Maidanetske (region A, well to the east) were generally egalitarian, best they can tell, and given that some Gini did exist. Mind, those cities were abandoned and/or downsized 3750 BC (one ponders architectural disease mitigation). Smaller sites carried on that ideal before the 3500s BC general collapse. That was probably plague-driven. I don't think the cat had been domesticated; although the culture may have been aware of arsenic as a pest-control.