Ezekiel with the rabbis

Ezekiel was a proponent of the Babylonian approach to Temple; opposed in his life to the Levi family, the latter more Egyptian. At some point the "Zadoq" faction within Levi injected themselves as an exception to Ezekiel's rules, such that the book got readily spread around the Jews. Daniel and 11QT the Temple Scroll adopt it; New Jerusalem tries to work with it.

Despite Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, which could support Daniel, rabbis seem to have appreciated the base text a good deal less. Tova Ganzel summarises the Rabbinic (prose) tradition. I find most-dramatic how Ganzel n. 6 raises the mishnaic ruling Megillah 4:10 against bringing his content into the haftorah. I suspect that the Babylonian Prophet rarely found much welcome in the tents of meeting.

A major issue giving to the rabbis headache was, indeed, that Ezekiel did not come from the same place as the mainline Bible had come. As mutually-aware rivals, contradictions between Bavli and Masri halakha were the whole point, of both. With both in the canon, people would have to reconcile their rivalry. The Zadokites had done this, sort of, but their attempts (like 11QT, New Jerusalem, Damascus Document et al.) went out with the Temple, any Temple.

Ezekiel's imagery proved too popular for the poets to ignore. Elʿazar's anti-Roman piyyuṭ notes the throne-chariot in all her shining glory, and Copilot tells me others bring up Ezekiel 37's dry bones. If I am reading this right, Elʿazar found a dodge around Mishnah: do it in piyyuṭ.

As to the core of how Ezekiel was nonetheless allowed to be widely read even if Jews couldn't directly utter from it at the services, this surrounds Hananiah ben Hezeqiah. He was a man of the Tannaim (up to 220 CE) who did the Mishnah. Hananiah stood forth as the one rabbi who wanted to keep Ezekiel "in circulation". The question wasn't if Ezekiel would remain canon, nor booted to join Daniel in the third-rate scribblings. Much of the tradition believes that Ezekiel owned real power - in fact, so much power it was dangerous, like Raiders of the Lost Ark dangerous. Ezekiel would instead have been locked in some secure chest like the Zohar. Christians have parallel experience with the Gnostics. Ganzel must warn that these traditions are not in Mishnah nor even Tosefta; they appear first with the Amoraim = the Talmud era, mostly complete by 540 CE. Which leads to Elʿazar's era.

A deflated idea

0II∞ has a website.

Over the late 2000s they sneered at "the odd billionaire", along with governments, having a monopoly on spaaace. Their plan was to raise a balloon and launch roggets thence. A successful test was had in 2017.

Balloon-to-orbit is the only way to retrieve a crew from Venus' 55 km altitude off that hellpit back into orbit and home. So this poast comes a little late in this blog's career. Sadly it remains ahead of any real implementations here over Earth.

0II∞'s Bloostar aimed for 70-100 kg payloads launched with methalox, like what the Raptor drinks. I'd mooted maybe something like spinlaunch for such dumb cargo although spinlaunch is a lot of overhead to "bloon" up to the strato'. A strato-runway might work for jet-to-orbit. To get real counterweight in 22 km, they'd likely need rotors wired to a modular reactor; but that's a problem for later.

It seems they shifted to tourism. For odd millionaires.

Maybe the issue was that they dreamt all this up back when the Merlin engines looked sooty and unworkable. The Merlin remains sooty, but the Falcon 9 works. Cargo-to-orbit is now a lot cheaper than was then envisioned. And the Starship is coming.

Loonybins

Paul Johnson was the great Tory historian of that great reactionary decade 1980s. Everyone read Intellectuals and Modern Times. Private Eye, which was not a Left mag, read through his work and honoured him with a nickname: Loonybins.

Johnson has now been factchecked, by Claude AI. h/t Richard Hanania; Bryan Caplan relays this, against interest he'd asked after it in 2010. (If I may, this speaks well of Caplan's humility.)

Some reviewers had already hit it for instance in this review which is floated in Caplan's old comments.

Looking over the list, several of these mistakes look like typoes (like a misplaced decimal) or like an error brought over from Johnson's own sources (the 135k toll at Dresden was all over the place, I think I saw it first in Vonnegut). But there are others and they all go in Johnson's direction. It is also a pity that Loonybins did not take the time in 1991 to correct these.

Looking around, historians of the early American era don't like Loonybins either.

But hey. The selenical binface helped win the Cold War, right? Like how PizzaGate, Vox Day, and other fakenews helped push Trump in 2016! Unfortunately Johnson left behind a time-bomb. Since he's discredited, and not in the way Cofnas and Murray be "discredited" - but on his actual ethics - all nonLeft historians have to scramble that they're not like Johnson.

The great equatorial glacier

The boring-billion ended 825-765 Mya when pancontinental Rodinia split. One daughter-craton, we call "Laurentia". North America now.

Thomas M. Gernon and five coauthors argue that the split caused a rift. Rifting might dip a deep valley below but it also raises a highland escarpment at the rim. They have inherited the term Cordillerian, for a rim of (later) sedimentary fallout in the Ediacaran era. That forms the northern rim of the escarpment, which escarpment they propose bent south at its western edge following the then-new continent.

Between 765 Mya and the Ediacaran, at 717 Mya came a Snowball Earth episode: the Sturtian event of "Cryogenian". The paper says the escarpment had by then risen eight kilometers. Maybe this occidental himalaya averaged "only" seven above present sealevel but that still would be a great place to collect ocean moisture (tides were higher then too). This water froze up there, glaciating just about all Laurentia and lowering the ocean. Most the uplifted rock got scoured down to the "Vishnu Supercyst" laid down long before 1.6 Gya; although some intervening rock survives in gaps. New sediment won't be laid down to stay, until the narrow Cordillerian; the Grand Canyon region must wait longer, for the "Tonto" known to Brits as Cambrian. Thus, the Unconformity. (We're not missing much, we're assured.)

For those pondering if glaciers might end up halting their flow and ceasing erosion, allow me to supplement: the Sturtian was never a uniform freeze and it formally melted 660 Mya. The paper doesn't name the Sturtian but it does know the Marinoan when the glaciers returned 650-635 Mya. These climate shifts might not have mattered in higher latitudes but they assuredly mattered near the equator.

The ghost of this super-escarpment seems to have held. The Old Rocky Mountains perhaps guarded our flank in the Permian, although we don't get a map. We do get a map of postapocalyptic 65 Mya. By that point everything here is rotated and, of course, wholly northern. Here the then-new Rocky Mountains butt up against that once-north-now-west boundary, and the Mexican Peninsula's altiplano from the now-south. (Central America, then, was an archipelago, like the Greater Antilles; both also-then-new.)

The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.

A song for Noah without Enoch

I've lately learnt about a genre of ancient Jewish poetry: the piyyuṭim. These are cantillated historical poems, like certain memrë in Syriac, and so haQallir and Yanni would compose for contemporary Byzantine-/Sasanian-era Jews. One subset of piyyuṭim, Jews have designated for the High Holy Days. Last week I fell in the deep waters, Vered Noam arguing for its deepest layer: these behave as a Levitic Heilsgeschichte better fit for their family-owned Temple than for the Moses-centred synagogue or even for the Hasmonaean temple.

To this Levitic basement-stratum, Noam went on that the figure of Enoch himself must belong. In my opinion this proposal is one that Noam needs to argue.

Noam already knows Ethiopic "1 Enoch" is a composite, so is only entertaining chapters 1-36 the "Watchers". "Watchers" might be composite even at the Qumran level. I think most scholars today, for 1E 1-16, allow - deeper - for an ancient Genesis 6 / 1E 6-11 reading as did without even Enoch. The only hero you need here is Noah, who lives to tell it.

Such scholars must admit if the piyyuṭ poems started early enough, some might never have noted Enoch in the first place. They would have vied with Ben Sira and 5Q13 in the Kippur rituals. On the other extreme we have Enoch as redeemer...

Suppose Judges was late

A few weeks ago I noted that the book of Judges remained subject to interpolation into the LXX / Qumran period. Yesterday morn, scrolling through the University of Arizona's "The Bible and Interpretation" blog, I ran across Niels Lemche.

Lemche is, I reckon, the thinking-man's Gmirkin. The Baghistan has had more interest in Yonatan Adler. We'll take some time to evaluate Lemche, today.

Lemche has marshalled parallels between the Abimelech and Jephthah stories, and events in Greek history and myth (respectively). Myth of course has no copyright, as witness the vast Etruscan and then Roman takings from those Greeks. But myth can be written, and when it is written it takes on a standard.

Take Jephthah. There were many stories of the reluctant sacrifice of the king's own child. For Greeks, the story with the most pathos was that of Iphigenia which they're still telling. Lemche points out that Jephthah is not such a telling; Judges here tracks closer, instead, the Cretan story of Idomeneus (except that here the sacrifice was his son).

Lemche further thinks Samson is simply Heracles, like Milton thought. The killstroke in Lemche's eyes is that Abimelech ended his career in a streetfight just like Pyrrhus was killed, brained by some woman hurling tiles from a rooftop. (Even if Pyrrhus was wearing a helmet, by then he was very old, so this might have been one concussion too many.)

Lemche's approach is similar to the approach other scholars take toward "Judith". "Judith" seems versed in Seleucid military concepts, its heroine follows Hasmonaean-era halakha (and political-theory), and the narrative may even track Eupolemus. Given that "Judith" doesn't know Thing One about Rome and that the Greek Additions to Esther borrow from Greek Judith, "Judith" in its original (now lost) Hebrew is unanimously dated ~100 BC.

In favour of Lemche's thesis, Judges does not much get cited in later stories. Judges famously concentrates on the northern tribes, in between introducing that cypher Othniel and generally trashing Benjamin in its latter movements. So let's look north: Jezebel knows enough of her adopted people to throw the case of Zimri at usurping Jehu. The prophets and CBH-to-LBH psalms are always referring to patriarchs Ephraim and Jacob, and sometimes villains Sihon or Og. I don't see where opponents to the various kings - we'll start with northern prophets Amos and Hosea - refer to the Bible's most cromulent example of a Man Who Would Be King. Judges doesn't even get cited much in the Samaritan Chronicle which has much lore on Joshua then Eli, but little in between. If the piyyuṭ genre be early, this seems not to have got around to Judges' heroes until ha-Qallir and Yanni in late-antiquity.

Against Lemche: the dialect of the prosaic portions of Judges, which the Samaritans (and Noth) would extend to 1 Reigns/Samuel 12, is CBH. Even some of the glosses therein look like they might better match Zionist use of Psalm 78, or precede it. By "Zionist" I mean the Joachim court's reaction to Jeremiah. Further, if Judith can be an observant Jew, and if 1 Maccabees and Esther (neither terribly religious) can talk about ancestral laws; how come none of the several villains of Judges are messing with the laws of Israel? The Hellenistic era was full of this ferment. It doesn't happen before the Persians, which - for most of us - points to a prePersian milieu for Judges. (Less-so Joshua perhaps.)

Lemche might counter that Joachim's court should have cited the Judges stories but did not. But then we don't really have this court's own words, like we have Nahum's own words and Isaiah 1-33 around Hezeqiah's court. In Jeremiah's book, we just have what scribe Baruch deigned tell us about that last independent court.