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.

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).

The cursed Creation

Paleojudaica is pointing to Andrei Orlov, Cursed Creation. This argues that Job 3 and Job 38 parallel the Enochian myth, not the Biblical.

The parallel is that something proposes to corrupt Creation, by a curse. Required is to heal the land. In Job, God tells the protagonist how He created all things. It turns out Job - mortal - can't curse the world, not by his own say-so anyway. The narrative circle is closed by Job admitting as much.

In Enoch - we are speaking of 1 Enoch 1-36 - the demons come to teach mortals how to spoil everything. God's loyal angels give Enoch a tour of the afterlife such as to make an implicit promise: restoration is coming.

Our books of Ruth and Jonah are known subversions of the mainline Biblical narrative. Jonah is sometimes called a parody of prophets-against-the-goyim; Nahum, against Assyria, being the root of the tree. Job hits the apocalyptic genre, says Orlov. 1 Enoch 1-36 made a major inroad into the Jewish canon. If Job is being ironic, such would put Job's authorship somewhen in the late Persian or Ptolemaic eras.

Orlov thus reinforces James Harding, "Divine Knowledge" (T&T, 2012).

Not all Job is parody. It still relies upon origin-myths. Perhaps Eden and the Serpent, in Genesis Two, is such a one; the Satan already substituting for the Serpent. But we don't see Genesis One. Instead we hear of Tiamat / Leviathan.

The coming of the Anasazi

Our family visited the Chaco Canyon "Anasazi" ruins a long time ago, like summer 1991. My brother went to college around there, later. I don't remember much about the 1991 visit - probably the usual rot about peaceful natives living in harmony with nature until climate chanzzz*snore*. By the late 1990s, some of the shine had come off and we got Serious Discussions. Cannibalism in the valley. Migrations to the Pueblos. Hints that that Navaho/-jo term "Anasazi", which term is hostile, may have been earned honestly - at least by the elite.

Let's revisit. There's a youtube with a Something Was Very Wrong With - series; it looks like a slop account, "Thoughty2" being the origin of the phrase. Still. This notes Mesoamerican influence. If "New Mexico" (and various reference to "Aztecs" in the region) remain insalubrious; something came here to make of the place at least a New Chichen Itzá.

This YTer is arguing that Mesoamerican influence wasn't all chocolate and ballgames. It entered the place in the AD 1000s and then, 1130-50, got to a fever pitch. This coincided with a climate downturn. Starting 1180ish the locals, who were not Mesoamericans, did what the Maya had done in the 900s. They said - this isn't fun anymore, let's get out of here. Several "pueblos", as the Spaniards call them, exist to this day claiming ancestry from the region, some even able to tell you which ruined town they'd left. They don't find "pueblo" offensive but they don't like "anasazi".

They assuredly have some motive to say they dindu nuffin and if there was ever some cannibalism or an "evil spirit" or any of that, it wasn't them doing it. Unfortunately for them, somebody was doing it. They may not have been born anasazis but anasazis were there. People can lie, but forensics can't. And I am loath to call the Navajo, invasive as they are, liars - in this event anyway. They got there well after-the-fact, such as to lack a dog in the fight. (I vaguely recall that they did arrive in time to watch some of the closing festivities or at least to hear some locals deliver some hair-raising tales.)

The Navajo, further, are not those who introduced any of this - too late, remember. So, let's look at the ethnic groups as might have been there before the Navajo showed up. Best I can tell they are three: Hopi, Tiwa, and Keres.

Keres are an isolate. I take them for the true natives here until I can be convinced otherwise.

Tiwa and Tewa look like branches as different as East and (former) West Baltic. The Slavs of that group would be the... Kiowa. Who live very far from there. Some nomadism happened here, like how Apache are the nomadic branch of the Navajo or, better, the Navajo the settled para-Apache. The Kiowa tell no tradition of coming from this desert; instead they say they came from the north. It looks, then, like the Tiwa, Tewa (and we can throw in the Jemez) migrated off the plains into this region, where people were growing food.

Then... are the Hopi. These are related to the Comanche as fellow north-Uto[-Aztecans], but are not Comanche (these also came later) nor Ute. This language family is also intrusive to, really, anywhere northeast of Puerto Penhasco.

However: we are talking about "intrusions" on a potential scale of millennia. How long ago was the Kiowa / Tiwa split? or Hopi / Ute? I don't see these splits as late as AD 1100.

Compromise: the Hopi, speaking the closest language to the Nahuatl Mesoamerica, would have been the choice vector for Anasazic thought into the region.

LHS 1903

Thomas Wilson and-Co. published DOI 10.1126/science.adl2348 last February. Science Daily, late as ever, has delivered the ESA' press release. Adam Mann at Science News might have the better summary.

The LHS 1903 system is 116 ly away, a red dwarf half Solar mass. Its four planets are all too hot as well as tidally-locked. The outer planet e is raising the hype because it is 1.7 Earth radii. Up to now, we tend to get Earthlikes up to 1.6 and then the "superEarths" from 1.8 up, more like miniNeptunes.

LHS 1903 e turns out to be Earthlike in density, not a Neptunian at all. It could have held onto a Venereal cloudy Sudarsky II layer but, it seems, not.

Wilson posits that the system simply ran out of gas, if I may: the "Gas Depleted Formation" / G-DF. The planets formed from the inside, outward. The fourth, and whatever might exist in the habitable zone on out, did not have anything left.

That G-DF model assumes planetary migrations at least for e. And yeah: no migrations for systems like this tend, I think, to produce orbital resonances. The periods are 2.2, 6.2, 12.6, and 29.3 days. Perhaps for b:c:d, 6:2:1 be close-enough (libration?). Planet e as the literal outlier, like Callisto outside Jupiter, demands a different theory. They ponder if it got smashed up early, such that on its final formation out there the ices weren't available.