Back to the Mesolithic

For Mardin / Tur Abdin: the 10000s-8000s BC. Scholars slot these millennia into the Mesolithic-now-called-Epipaleolithic, and beyond. In Turkish, since this language has displaced the native Syriac, the complex is "Şika Rika". We don't know what the locals then spoke, maybe Hurri.

The Şika Rika culture, or cultures, number about twenty nearby villages. Cities wouldn't be a thing until later. Their existence looks to start with Younger Dryas 10900 BC, which they outlasted past 9600 BC. Their tools were flint and whatever pottery they had was aceramic. Among this pottery were stone pestles; some mortars were carved from the bedrock directly.

This means the culture made porridge, maybe even tortilla. It also means they were sedentary, at least seasonally, when cereals could be gathered. This is all too early for millet and I don't think they were farming, as such; plucking local barleycorn seems likely (and avoiding rye, that weed). Herding goat be possible.

For reference, Göbekli Tepe sprouts up ~9500 BC after the Earth warmed back up. This is what kicks off the Neolithic.

For the Younger Dryas epoch, though... might we be seeing the term "Mesolithic" return to grace? One (reasonable) argument for knocking it off was that we simply didn't have the data for that timespan leading to the Neolithic agriculture. Now, we might.

The New Jerusalem

Since the DJD deigned publish Aramaic content from Qumrân 2001 and 2009, over the last couple decades scholars have gathered a genre. This genre gathers "Aramaic Levi" and "Tobit". Among these texts as did not escape Qumrân is the "New Jerusalem".

People like to say that the Aramaic literature is not "sectarian". This holds for this literature's relationship with the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll and the Community Rule - sectarian, all. More-correct would be to assert the Aramaic content for its own sect. These were Levides (not just "Levites"!), making the case for their Divine vocation as an inbred priestly caste. It is just that this sect invited other Jews to join them - in the laity; the Qumran sect had given up on wider Jewry.

Yesterday I brought Predo for Babylonian Jewry's dismissal of the Levi case, who rallied around Ezekiel. But Ezekiel's book got interpolated, to except the Zadok clan (or "exempt" maybe). "New Jerusalem" hits Ezekiel's beats on the new Temple. Admittedly the Aramaic text is in fragments, but I don't know that it mentions Zadok.

It may be that the Levi tribe wrote this text to steal from Ezekiel's own case. If it were revealed to, oh, Noah or to Levi himself; the Levites / Levists could turn around to accuse Ezekiel of conducting the plagiary.

Thus saith the Lord

Since we've mooted ol' Zeke, Dr Lenny Predo for TheTorah reports on the controversy over the Levites. Ezekiel relayed a command כֹּה אָמַר יְ־הוָה: the Levites had failed. They should not hold any priestly authority upon the return of the Temple.

Readers of Torah will be perplexed to hear this, on account Levi were the great stalwarts, the Phineas Priests avant-la-lettre, at the Sinai.

Ezekiel used the Holiness Code now in Leviticus 17-26; Ezekiel was also a Deuteronomist in his view of history (which to me makes sense; the HC was Deuteronomist itself). Although Ezekiel may have read all of these texts; these texts may not have (yet) been assembled into one Torah, in which case Ezekiel was resisting that assemblage. Nathan MacDonald is writing that Ez 44 takes time to trash our Isaiah 56 as well; again, all "Isaiah" might be open to him, but Ezekiel refuses their assemblage.

Somewhere around here, Predo brings Ez 44:15-16. This exempts the Zadok clan from the Lord's ban against the Levite tribe. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not extend to chapter 44 - except when they quote it. Papyrus 𝔊967 is a Greek translation of a different edition (Ez 36-40 are scrambled; although 41-8, with which we deal, seems not, and readers could still use 37 and 38-9 by any other enumeration).

As a Zadokite, the famous Damascus Document cites Ez 44:15. I think this may be the first external reference to our Ez 44.

The Levites clearly survived the Exile and felt no real desire to canonise Ezekiel. The Maccabees, aiming to usurp the priesthood from them toward their own (Hasmonaean) family, had more motive to raise Ezekiel's profile. I wonder if, however, some Levites pondered the utility of appealing to the cheap-seats in a play for primacy within that priesthood, against the Hasmonaeans. Ezekiel with these verses' interpolation could serve.

Charles Cutler Torrey a century ago suggested that our Ezekiel is just that: a post-Maccabean production to lay claim to the Temple. For Torrey, our "Ezekiel" adapted an earlier Ezekielian apocryphon, which we no longer own.

I dunno. The rabbis used to warn against studying Ezekiel too hard until we got to our forties. (Kind of like how Catholics warn about John's Revelation.) Ez 44:15-16 does look sus tho'.

Chabad, and stuff

Chabad, which means "Chariot" in Ezekiel, has been coming under some scrutiny. Some would see it as something of a gurdwara for Jews, which Semitic subgroup would include me by their own law. We may ignore Tucker Carlson; I am unsure we may ignore Vrillium.

These guys came out of mediaeval messianism, and feel alien to me. But if, like me, you prefer ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪; the two of us may have to step back and ponder if Christianity itself is some outgrowth - of Roman-era messianism. Suppose a parallel Europe had embraced, oh, the Mandaeans. If you were some basic Episcopalian or megachurch evangelical dropped into that world; would you fare better than a Chabadnik would?

I feel somewhat bad for my brethren-by-blood, as compared against the Catholics (or Orthodox). My brethren-in-faith haven't changed all THAT much since Ignatius of Antioch, architecture aside. When some holy man (or woman!) shows up, we tend either to recognise him(/her) as a saint or to kick it out, like Mani. Jews have followed some supreme weirdos, like Shabtai Svi.

The Valediction defended

In 2022 when I first heard of Shapira's Valediction of Moses, I didn't want to touch it. Back then, Na'ama Pat-El was defending her touch of it. The battle was hashed on Academia.edu; I take it that this be Pat-El's last word.

Pat-El is a serious scholar, whom we cannot dismiss as some crank blogger... not that we have many of those around here.

Perhaps Idan Dershowitz has saved Shapira's personal integrity. That just pushes the crime anterior to Shapiro himself; he may have been duped. Along similar lines: his "Valediction" might be false, whoever did it; but Benjamin Suchard the wrong scholar to make that judgement.

Likewise where Jeffery Stackert argues that the "Valediction" comes from the Pentateuch more-or-less as the 72 found it in Alexandria, or even protoMT; Friedburg and Hoppe are lately pointing to the Valediction's "Midianite episode" as pulling from Numbers 25's source and not from that chapter in our text.

Ex-Presidencies

Against Matt Mehan, Yglesias yesterday about 6 PM UTC: Most ex-presidents are either old (Reagan, Eisenhower) or unpopular (W, GHW Bush, Carter, Nixon, LBJ) or both (Biden) but it’s normal for a young and popular ex-president (Clinton) to stay in the mix.

I'd add here Carter (especially) but even Nixon stayed in the mix. Nixon didn't much defend himself over Watergate as I recall; but he absolutely defended his decision to prop up South Vietnam. He was kind of a Pournelle in that regard. In retrospect, I suggest Nixon should have hit Watergate, harder; it might have given some pause to the later excesses of Obama and Biden.

Really the model for the ex-presidency is Carter. I used to argue for Clinton 1993-4 as Carter's third term. After the loss of Congress we couldn't say that anymore as Clinton shifted Right (to save his Party; but I don't need to ramble on past-1995). But Carter was constantly injecting himself and continued to do so after 1995, most-egregiously over "Palestine".

Should linguists drop in on exorcisms?

With due apologies for titling a post with a question, which I rarely approve for others; here's Shawn Ryan's interview with Fr. Chad Ripperger. Father Chad is a local boy, up here (Casper-to-Denver) where the oxygen is 5/6. The bishop of Tulsa chartered? ordained? this priest to exorcise demons.

Father Chad is also a Trump guy. On the minus side, Chad has run up against Trent Horn who questions whether these demons are, like, real even if they don't approve this Administration. "Extraordinary claims" and all that. There's also the anti-evolution stuff.

We are here for the claim that one of the demons spoke a 1500 BC form of "Phoenician". Chad got this from some kid who wasn't even much for high-school. So how would such a one know Canaanite from before Amarna? I can think of a few "shibboleths" - no a>o shift, no ha- article (or, it's still han-), Aramaic-like 'abd connotation...

Recordings of post-Thera Canaanite would be a true gift for the Northwest Semitic linguists. I am not being facetious:

I believe that this poor kid was going schizophrenic and, as they do, look up Secret Knowledge. If he's smart, which I concede is rare for schizophrenics (as opposed to us autists); he might be reading old prayers in Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian. The human brain might make interconnexions. Intuitively, the young brain is plastic for that.

To be remembered, language isn't a cipher. Language is used for daily interaction with peers. Language is not supposed to be hard for the in-group, and we have a pleasantly large dataset for Bronze Age Semitics what with the Ugaritic archive.

Professional linguists tend not to be overly-impressionable sixteen year olds anymore (David Stuart aside). Perhaps the pros should listen in. It might even give these kids some help.