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.

Four Heavens

David Stuart the Mayanist has a book out, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. American Scholar has hosted Ilan Stavans' review. Nature since has posted Andrew Robinson's, but since it is not open access I'm not linking it.

Personally I had a problem with Dr Stuart turning his classmates out for Obama in 2008; which I saw in light of minority populations in central America not least the Chorti of western Honduras. I didn't think Obama would be good for them. I didn't think Stuart was good for our discourse (also see, McGaugh's "Triton Station" 2020 - or, indeed, Nature itself). But hey. For Stuart it's been eighteen years.

By this book Stuart has stepped forth as Michael Coe's heir. Although as Stavans points out, Stuart doesn't touch sociology - or, more worryingly, the economy. Coe, revising a 1966 text, initially started with material culture, since he simply could not then read the elites' words.

For sociology, I must be more lenient than Stavans. It might be that Stuart is not the man to do it.

I am unsure what Stavans wants from terms like "race" in a Maya context. One can imagine a local response to foreign leadership. The Maya endured a lot of that, starting with Striking-Owl from that land of reeds which Aztecs will name the "Teotihuacan". Some of Palenque's ahauob were Yucatec, from its north. Later classic-Maya kings are also western and depicted in foreign trappings, of course not then Teotihuacano. The true Maya in the north are, later, famously depicted like Toltecs. And as they all sometimes bore foreign lords, the classic- and postclassic-Maya all had neighbours, starting with Maya cousins whose languages may or may not be depicted in the hieroglyphs. We would love to know how the Chorti understood closely-related Tzeltal, or the more distant Mam up the hills. Or, for Copan, the Honduran Lenca, or what happened to the Xinca after the Ilopango eruption. Can foreigners be depicted as slaves?

Sex relations (we're not just talking the bedroom) might also be of interest. We have a real literature on that for Assyrians, Greeks, Hittites, Romans... Chinese, arguably the Aztecs if only via Gary Jennings. Can such an essay be written for the Maya? Hittites and Muslims have given us law-codes. The Spanish related one for the Aztecs. I don't know we have that for the Maya.

I'll throw in, the animal kingdom, as well. They raised dogs and rabbits, and tamed monkeys, and respected the jaguar; the owl, perhaps, was held in honour more elsewhere.

Such might have to come to us via the myths. Again, though, I am unsure to what extent we have those myths. It is like reconstructing the old Arabic creation-myth from graffiti-references, architecture and statuary. A "Popol Vuh" exists; but I see this as a reaction to the classic myths, like the Quran is to the (then mostly-Syriac) Bibles. Or, heavens, like our Bible reacts to... itself, and to the Canaanites before it.

Noah as the new Adam

Just this morning, a Lutheran posted about the Noah story. He points out (he's hardly the first) that Genesis 7-8 is a de-creation, along the lines of Genesis 1. What I didn't know is the further parallel of Genesis 9 with Genesis Two - the gan-'Eden.

For the Christian, or - I'll argue - the Jew: Noah follows Adam's footsteps in a way history repeats itself as farce. Noah barely has agency; the mover of the story is the Elohim of Heaven. When Noah is left to himself, he plants a vineyard - shadow of Eden - and gets drunk. Our youtuber points out that Noah isn't the hero. Someone like that was the hero of parallel Flood tales all over the Near East, but Genesis refuses to present Noah as him.

If there has to be a hero, he isn't onstage. James of Edessa would have it that the final editor of Genesis set up these stories on purpose, as failed Dispensations. Coming up is the Exodus. In the Haggadah interpretation, God is once more the mover of events, leaving Aaron and Miriam and even Moses as flawed implementors of His will. So: who'd read that sorry litany, if it weren't to end in a successful Dispensation?

The Deuteronomic History might say the hero were Moses, the Torah he divulged to the people, and the king Josiah who made it law. The Samaritans would say the hero was the spirit of YHWH in the Tabernacle, someday the Temple; Essenes and Sadducees agree, all differing on where exactly He resides. Somewhere around here was the righteous Messiah, and you know who Christians need that to be.

That Genesis 1+2 does parallel Genesis (6-)8+9 has Implications for the Documentary Hypothesis. TheTorah is saying Noah was the hero... of Genesis Two, as his vineyard redeems the land from the curse set upon Adam (and Eve). Noah's part in the Flood myth came later.