Rail

Last month Casey Handmer attacked highspeed rail from the Left. This got a rebuttal. Meanwhile we all got to see at least the trailer for that fine movie Bullet Train (and we lucky few saw the actual film), showing us what a real choochoo looks like in a real country. Without taking a side on generalities, I'll propose a use-case.

One issue with highspeed flight is shared between supersonics and rockets: noise. Few people want to live near a Concorde. No people want to live near a SuperHeavy who's not actively working on one. But if we relocate our aeroport to the middle of New Mexico (or to Las Vegas for that matter) this takes away the time-savings for passengers, as they now have to waste time getting over there.

But if those Concorde passengers have taken the Bullet Train from a reasonable city at a reasonable distance, they've taken a few hours in luxurious comfort before boarding their highspeed flights to ... well, to some other desert. Where another Bullet Train is waiting to whisk them to their destination.

Meanwhile [h/t Zim] at the rocket / aeroport, service workers dwell underground. This might be a good place to train the Moonbound workforce, too; they'll be underground for much time as well.

Spacefaring

Today I finished Christopher Wanjek's Spacefarers. It was published 2020; it still holds up as we close 2022.

For travel to/from LEO, we're doing a bit better. The United States can once-more deliver astronauts to ISS, where at end of 2020 the Dragon capsule and competitors weren't yet rated to do that. Also the Chinese have started their station. Although, yes; Starship / SuperHeavy haven't flown, and the private-company stations aren't up there either.

As to accuracy the book is great, almost excellent. Although lunar helium-3 is stupid, and was stupid in 2020, after the stupid movie Moon got out to the Atomic Rockets side of the 'sphere.

I did wish an editor had flagged opportunities to introduce definitions earlier in the text. We get the definition of an "Astronomical Unit" somewhere around Saturn where I'd have liked it in the near-earth asteroid region. Also when the synodic period is noted (not by that name) it is in terms of opposition/conjunction (not by their names). The Hohmann, introduced later, does not work on those relative positions. The interorbital cycler trajectories aren't well handled, either; the orbits (where non-Hohmann) are adjusted not at the destination planet but at the start planet. And we're stuck with Earth/Mars. Although, yes, Aldrin's cycler isn't worth adjusting anywhere and "S1L1" is still where it's at.

Plenty of ideas floated here in this blog since 2019 were noted in that book already, which makes me wish I'd had it earlier. This does mean we get the Hall thruster although theory in the meantime has proposed alternatives; and the VASIMR which now has the Ibrahimi-Alfvén upgrade.

For politics the book is solidly Zubrinist: the government is a hindrance and private-enterprise has been doing better. Even in 2019 we could see the results.

Wanjek is no Zubrinist (or Muskist) on Mars. This book sides more with Hop David as to which world to colonise first - we need a stronger presence in orbit, and a Moon base, both for tourists, and also because supply is better from the Moon than from down this well. Mercury isn't taken seriously and Venus' cloudcities, neither. Nobody is considering Nyrath Chung's recommendation for moon Deimos.

The book is very good on the How To Live On Mars question, often glossed by Zubrin. Some might excuse that Zubrin wrote a decade earlier, at least for the perchlorate thing; but that doesn't excuse his ignorance of lavatube cities nor of growing plants for textiles.

Pseudo-Classical Hebrew

Jan Joosten has a fine article in academia.edu, "A Pseudo-Classicism in Esther". That's the quasibiblical book in our Bibles but not Qumran's. The article isn't just about Esther but about all the texts in the various dialects in Hebrew as of the Qumran / Hasmonaean era.

As asides, we learn that Qohelet is in its own Hebrew, which assuredly is not that of the First Temple (nor of the Valediction) but also is not that of the Second Temple. Esther, by contrast, is more Chronicles / Nehemiah in language - although, unlike Chronicles / Nehemiah, Esther doesn't try to ape the real Hebrew of the olden days. But there is one exception: the word for "except".

There was in Torah a Hebrew term for "besides". This is lbd mn. It looks like lbr mn in Imperial Aramaic; in fact, I'd wager that Aramaic had spawned this from lbd mn in the Late Bronze Age. Problem (for later Jews): these look the same in Herodian Script, which has transcibed Hebrew and Aramaic from 50 BC to the present freakin' day. Actually they looked too much alike in the Hebrew of the earlier, Ptolemaic period: so we see Hellenophone scribes translate lbd mn to plhn. But those same scribes weren't idiots and didn't like how, say, Exodus 12:37 looked; so instead of the real meaning "not counting children" the LXX has "excepting baggage".

Behold a blessing and a curse

Psalm 136 makes reference to the great wars between Israel and the transjordanian kings, Sihon and Og. Similar reference is also reminisced in Deuteronomy's incipit. The stories "had been" told in Numbers... in order of Torah, by order of Torah's scribes. Most assume Deuteronomy used Numbers.

Jonathan Ben-Dov questions if this was so. These chapters were loci of later transposition for the sake of harmony: for instance the Samaritans have as plus to Deuteronomy 2:1-7's take on Edom, an "envoy report" which we read from Numbers. Ben-Dov floats that Numbers 21:33-35 be, in reverse, an older copy from Deuteronomy 3:1-3. Deuteronomy 2:26-9 is also an early-added envoy-report (as memory), for Sihon.

The motive - says Ben-Dov - was to ensure that when G-d or His Prophets said that a certain event happened, that this event was narrated appropriately. Deuteronomy in its original form drew from memory, written or not; once our Torah because that store of memory, it had better back up Deuteronomy's words. Ben-Dov flags the Jephthah speech but dismisses it UPDATE 12/7 so we'll deal with it later.

So: h/t Ross Nichols, Shapira's Valediction of Moses. Idan Dershowitz presents a truncated story of Sihon, exactly without this envoy-report and also without the despoliation. All Shapira got is 2:24a then vv.32-4a, 36 (not 37). Deuteronomy's version has been interpolated from the lawcode, 20:10-14 in our text.

Carrying on, after the ouster of Sihon, and the capture of Jazer and all the Amorite cities - Og of Bashan arrays his force for battle. He loses, of course. But Next we turned and went up along the road toward Bashan, the name of Edrei, and all YHWH's word Deut 3:2 / Num 21:34 is absent from V.

The Shapira text is a major rabbithole. Ancient Jew Review has some takes on it; Chanan Tigay may have found the very (mediaeval) parchments reused to concoct the book. (Although in this case, why the "bitumen"...?) An irony here is that Dershowitz was known, prior to all this, for pondering that ancient scribes used to cut pieces out of Torah with iron-age scalpels and rearrange them.

Case closed: Nehemiah in Qumran

Esther was not a Qumranian book; we all know this, just like Judith was not Qumranian - but we're not here to discuss this. Today I'd discuss that other Not-Qumran book: Nehemiah.

It's worth here to pre-discuss what we might mean by NonQumranian. For instance: copies of Ruth and Jonah were stashed in those Qumran caves. But these two went uncited in Qumran literature when, say, Jubilees, much of Daniel, and the 4Q380 Prophetic hymn all got widely disseminated.

So far Nehemiah has got "asterisked". Most schooltexts just say that Esther was excluded. Some expand the exclusion to Nehemiah. It happens that Ezra, which is Qumranian, exists in two forms: one contains Nehemiah, the other doesn't extend that far. The form which omits Nehemiah also omits our Ezra 4:6 - which verse does exist in Qumran's Ezra. Also (you'd think) the Yahad should have approved Nehemiah, over the diaspora-ish legend in the Greek. It's been conjectured that this Dead-Sea scroll could have gone on to Nehemiah. But it's not been proven.

So: now, Michael Segal on 4Q365. Besides its notorious inclusion of the "full" chanson de Marie this takes the 11Q Temple Scroll's festival of new oil to append it to Leviticus 23:42-4. Segal points out that people were always injecting Odes into Torah and, indeed, shuffling laws between Torah books. Nobody is arguing that 4Q365 preserves the best text of Leviticus. Segal's consideration is the wood-offering which Nehemiah 10:35 claims is in "Torah"; another plus to 4Q365.

One could surmise that as 4Q365 depends upon the Temple Scroll, Nehemiah depends upon this expanded Leviticus - Torah for him, if not for us. But Segal does not see this particular addition to Leviticus as from the Temple Scroll alone. Segal thinks the wood-offering comes from Nehemiah 10.

The Chronicler's psalter

I'd take some time over Psalm 135 and the Chronicler. Matthew Lynch proposes a division between Psalms 1-88 (+89?), and the rest. These are now Five Books; on the example of Torah, and maybe of 1 Enoch also. Chronicles is a brief for Reigns with the Psalter as soundtrack, the second part of that Psalter specifically. We're here enumerating according to the Masoretes, for simplicity.

1 Chronicles 16 might witness to Psalm 105-106 as the Davidic capstone of Psalter Book IV. Lynch argues that Psalm 135 was vital to Solomon's reign, in the Chronicler's perception. Psalm 135 had, for its part, borrowed not just from the obvious Psalm 136 but also from 115 and 134. Any student of Psalm 135 could have been aware of all four of these. Lynch argues that the Chronicler was, indeed, aware of all four and more: also Psalm 132, maybe of the 120-136 bracket which Jews term "The Psalms Of Ascent".

This, yes, stretches our evidence. Although: maybe not all that hard. If some readers of Books IV-V see a limitation to the respect due to Levites, which as Lynch points out obviously excepts Psalm 135; perhaps this is why Psalm 135 and the Chronicler came to exist, exactly to support those Levites against the murmuring of a fourth-century-BC demotic Jewry.

Barsauma of Palaestina

On account the T'day guests called in sick, I have some time to spend with you, dear readers. I missed this book last year (or: earlier this year) so: The Life of Bar Ṣawmā. Including a collection of essays.

This figure isn't the Nisibene. Its subject was one of those West Syrian holy men; a big figure in the second robber-synod held at Ephesus. He'd got himself sidelined from Chalcedon so his hagiographers are, accordingly, had-qnoma. Barsauma's career was mostly Palaestinian; but I take it that his native Aramaic was for Melkites and Jews, so it is to Syriac we needs turn. Simon Corcoran argues for an entire remove to Edessa and Antioch. There, per Drijvers and others, the Vita accumulated a legendarium.

Hahn argues is that this Life is, nonetheless, early. Barsauma works among Samaritans, considered friendly to Christians. The Samaritans will rebel in AD 484 against Zeno, and more-seriously under/against Justinian. West-Syrians in the centuries afterward will consider the Samaritans contemptible and will calumniate Saint Maximus for arising amongst them.

This implies Edessa Callirrhoë wasn't yet consecrated to Theotokos, either [UPDATE 7/24 Ibas?]. But it's coming, soon after the Samaritan revolt. I wonder if this Vita is bubbling around monasteries not far from Edessa, earliest 480s.

Jacobi at Venus

To carry on from Jacobi: where Venereans come in, is where we orbit the smaller body to consider how to get across to other orbits. Like the Hohmann to Earth - which is sideways, so may be crossing the Hill Region. Or: how to get from orbiting Venus over to the Trojan Haloes.

As with Luna we may assume the planet orbits exactly in the frame-of-reference.

RESTORATION 12/25 - Finally we've found some maths to work this. Single-precision floats, sorry.

var xy = new Vector2() { X = 1F - 0.009315F, Y = 0F };
var muSmall = 0.815 / 332946;

J is 3.0007826, if at SVL1. That's the keyhole whither those escaping/approaching Venus inward must target. Note that these units be in Venereal AU with that planet's sidereal year.

I am more-partial to SVL2. To/from that and Venus (and inbound): X = 2 - 108.21/109.22 for J = 3.0007795 a tiny bit less. Every gram, nu?

Biological evolution as catastrophe

ToughSF: It seems like every innovation in the history of life's evolution triggers some sort of catastrophe or extinction event. / The introduction of oxygen, the expansion of methane producing bacteria and now: the appearance of tree roots. This points to a 15 November piece.

For awhile we were pondering its sequel, lignin-digesting fungi - and we still see some "white rot" lingering in the 'web - but a 2016 study raised some flags around that. The most recent study I can find on this topic is here. Probably why ToughSF doesn't mention it.

A more salient event must be the Cambrian explosion. The development of a photon-processing module in animals must have knocked off many many species who were doing fine before that Blink Of An Eye.

Khazaria

Eurogenes over a week back has endorsed khazaria.com.

I used to accept the Khazarestan hypothesis - but not so much for Kevin Brook's geocities-tier site, I must concede (or, confess). I figured him for an amateur like, well, like late-1990s me. A book existed Dictionary of the Khazars which played off some of the legendarium. I got more-excited about Elhaik's thesis, which got more play in mainstream media. But then Elhaik's methods and priors were debunked. And we found preSephardic remains of Jews in Norwich and... well.

Brook is now growing on me.

Brook dismisses Elhaik; which one might put down to rivalry, but time has proven Brook right on Elhaik's poor scholarship. Also Brook has doggedly kept up with the research, and has been willing to take the L where needed. Contrast Graham Hancock.

Jacobi's escape-velocity

I found a constant over the weekend, which I may as well backdate to "today" on account all I can really do is summarise it. This is a constant in a three-body problem, involving escape energy for the third body.

In a two-body system where one body exerts all the gravity, the second body has an Escape Velocity. Depending upon where the second body starts - usually the surface, so 6000-some kilometers from the barycentre - a given Delta-V will get that body off the system entirely. This doesn't depend upon the second body's mass. It's just a speed; plus the angle, which is the right-angle to the planet. For better results we prefer Vinf but still: a constant.

How nice if you are in your own orbit around the Sun. Over Earth, however, arise some complications. Most bodies we care about are the other planets, in our ecliptic. To these... something rolls in our way: our Moon.

This 19th-century mathematician Jacobi turned Escape Velocity around. In a three-body system, with that third body being the rocket, is a total energy. Say the rocket drifts in a cislunar ellipse around the Earth without propellant. At any point in its trajectory, the constant is constant: say, -1.7. It'll be there forever.

Yes that's a minus-sign. This explains it: much like I_sp measured in seconds but really a forceratio times seconds; we have here Ω - v². Or, it's negative H². Anyway we can measure it with [minus-](m/s)² not so different from Escape Velocity; the Ω massratio is a ratio of the two major bodies, such that the third - craft's - mass doesn't figure.

So: let's dock with the hulk as to transfer some propellant to it, or just to give it a push. The craft remains stuck down here until/unless -1.6 is reached. At this point the rocket can (potentially) get across the TLL1 boundary, to enter a Lunar orbit. This still isn't escape-velocity for the whole system but maybe we WANT to-the-Moon (...Alice). Over there we might request more propellant (or a cushion) not to rake regolith; or else to escape a new permanent orbit around that other body - but hey, progress.

Over the -1.5's we can get to the moon and swing by it, skating close to L1 thence, on the farside, L2. In practice we might open more of L2's region by heisting some Lunar momentum to assist us to those other planets; but this isn't in Jacobi's scope. In the -1.5's something else interesting happens: although the potential energy exists to run through that L1-Moon-L2 keyhole, it won't get us to any other Libration like - say - TLL4/L5 Trojans. L3 opens up at -1.51ish and we only get to L4/5 slightly over -1.50. The (thick) walls around our range are Earth's "Hill’s Region [of constant J]"; not to confuse with the Moon's Hill Sphere relative to Earth which is just L1/L2.

UNITS 12/25: Gereshes wins on account I was able - on this day of our Lord's birth, not 20 November nor 10 December - to get my code to work. So: never mind the orbital-mechanics.space negative values, which values I couldn't verify. Instead the values will be circling around the number three (3). Happy Hanukkah!

Boosted lightsails should be bi-elliptic

As usual with morning astro-gonzo, I took some time to walk to the gym and back. I've decided I disfavour Caryn Bailer-Jones's Crazy-Hermann. I'm not picking on her; the same applies to any two-stage proposals passing the Sun. And since 18 March 2021 such has competition, in the solar-assisted VASIMR, whose rocket is in use the whole journey.

My concern is the tank and engine used to boost the sail or the plutonium-electric-drive or whatever. Whither goeth ye booster? Say we can time the alignments such that an Earth station railguns all our stuff down to a Venus-intercepting trajectory, which then uses Venus' gravity to pull it further sunward, maybe even aerobraking. Let's say we're packing that sail which, itself, may adjust the perihelion near the Sun. The whole caboodle runs then in a nonenergetic trajectory with that Solar perihelion and aphelion, what, at Venus. At the Solar well the rocket burns the bulk of its propellant - to punch out the cargo and its own means of propulsion whatever that is. I don't think we're seeing the rest of that rocket again.

Luckily CBJ mooted an alternative: biëlliptic, which may or may not be the same as Theodore Edelbaum's three-pulse Oberth 1959. This equally works for high-to-low transfers; and she wants that 1/12 or even 1/16- AU perihelion at a near-Earth orbital energy. It's not like she plans to stay down there. I do have to warn that the chromosphere is 700000 km so 0.00468 AU. 0.0625-0.083 AU be skatin' corona.

The deal here is that the contraption before separation has an aphelion higher than its starting orbit, here Earth's. This suggests that after separation, we can see our initial now-spent rocket at 1 AU again. And if it goes from, I dunno, 0.06 to 1.94 AU then that is the same semimajor at Earth therefore the same period. We'll catch that craft the next Julian Year.

The boosted lightsail

Lightsails and ionsails [pdf] are not subject to Tsiolkovsky. They are proposed for "Starshot" missions for low-mass cargo toward a 0.1C speed to shoot past another solar-system, or maybe past a Kuiper object. They might also work for long-term course-correction, like Venus / Earth Hohmann - again, if low mass. Or for stationkeeping. This post mainly considers fast-track to deep space.

McGill Interstellar Flight Research Group thinks they can do a Mars-and-back mission with sails. This expands Jeff Greason's idea; it looks like they'd be using magnets as sails, against solar plasma - so, ionic. In related news we just lost the Planetary Society's physical sail around the same time the SLS-launched Near-Earth Asteroid Scout has been lost (according to ToughSF).

Caryn Bailer-Jones a couple years ago floated "The sun diver: Combining solar sails with the Oberth effect". This article talks "photons" so addresses the lightsail. The arithmetical constant she (I assume) proposed was the Light Number λ. This is a ratio between the sail's mass, reflectivity, geometry, and proportions; against our Sun's luminosity (or perhaps a laser-beam's). CBJ noted that as long as λ < 1/2, we have an ellipse; if greater than that, it's a hyperbola to infinity and beyond. Light Sail 2 was 0.01; one starshot proposal would run 0.78. CBJ suspects initial λ might not get that good with a decent cargo, so wants a boost. She's further assuming these missions are unmanned.

With those constraints, CBJ argues for Tsiolkovsky as that booster. If she can get the sail-plus-cargo close to the Sun and running hot (as it were), she can then and there detach the propellant-tank and hoist sail to make the most of low-ish λ. Hey: maybe it can be an R^-1.17 ionsail. As for the booster: that's Elon's problem.

Her first proposal was, as the title suggests, Crazy Hermann. UPDATE 1:55 PM - which Elon is going to absolutely soak her for. But she floats a better trajectory.

The Enochian reading of Isaiah

Dr Oklatubbee who has a PhD you know has Thoughts about the Isaiah higher-criticism: The belief in multiple authors has some merit, but it denies the prophet’s ability to speak about and predict future events.

I'd thought that as of 2022 any doctorate-class Thoughts on Isaiah would have been answered already. I have mine own Thoughts - about how Oklatubbee can imagine he can get away with poasts like this; but I'll save them to the end.

We're here to discuss the difference between a prophet like Isaiah (or Micah, or Jeremiah); and a seer like Enoch. It all comes down to this: the prophet comes to the generation of his own time and place, to warn them, what will happen if they disobey the word of G-d. Although I (like the Yachad around Qumran) do not hold the book of Jonah to be Prophetic, that book did work amongst the Prophets so knew what Problematics to counter.

Enoch, by contrast, is a fraud - at least, the Dream Visions ascribed to him are so fraudulent. The main Dream Vision claims temporal precedence over Torah(!) but, in fact, addresses a Maccabean-era society. And to the extent pseudoËnoch might warn the present (postHellenic) people, the book steals momentum from its purported antediluvian antiquity for its miraculous predictive powers.

Oklatubbee not being Ethiopian and owning a PhD you know certainly knows all this. But he's here to steal the same momentum for Isaiah, fl. early 700s BC; where the chapters 40f. now ascribed to that prophet handle events centuries later.

Imagine if the real Isaiah, or let's say Micah or Amos, after delivering his warning had then gone on (and on): well, then we'll get Manasseh as King, who'll do it all wrong, and will rule a prosperous pluralist Judah; but later we will be in a tug-o'-war between Pharaoh Psamtik and the Babylonians; which, you know, we're screwed either way; but we'll come back due to the - I guess you'd call them Medes? This isn't a warning. This dilutes the warning! The Jews would just dismiss this rambling Nostradamus and keep on keepin' on.

Also to be pointed out is the intertextuality in our Bible itself. The books of Reigns quotes Isaiah 1-39; Jeremiah MT 26 quotes Micah. Beyond Isaiah 40, there's 4Q380 which by roundabout means ends up in 1 Chronicles 16. The same tools, by the way, which show that; also show that 11Q11 altered Psalm 91, which is then demonstrated as early.

Supposedly hidden texts do suspiciously appear in our Biblical record, as the Book of Torah which King Josiah conveniently found in the Temple (classically this was supposed to be Deuteronomy). In the case of Isaiah 41f, some might ask how even tendentious Bible authors didn't know to "discover" those lost oracles - somewhere, anywhere. These chapters have no record at all before the Iranian domination. The most-likely reason is that those chapters were written under Iranian dominance, and it hadn't occurred to anybody to ascribe clearly-Persian-era oracles to a prophet centuries before. I mean: until the Enochian scribes started their work, and lost oracles started popping up all over Judaea.

And yes we Christians may deny from a Prophet his ability to predict events centuries ahead of him and of his audience. I am aware that Daniel 7 exists; to Hell with that. This is of the same thesis we deny from G-d Himself, not that ability so much; but His willingness, to remove from Man, whom He loves, our free will.

And if a Christian can't see that, he has no business ministering to Christians.

No amnesty for murderers of poor old working-class

Republican activists, having offed their own voters, followed this up by a loud campaign against Democrats' attempt to meet them halfway (to Hades).

There was talk about Nuremburg Trials for CoVID vaccinators (never mind that the main claim was nonsense and, by the way, retracted).

I'll remind my readers of Scott Adams' coprophilic ex-friend. Thing is: when you creep someone out, you might not be able to count on that one's support. The people chanting against THE MASK and then against THE VAXX came across as, objectively, pro-disease; because those who took this advice disproportionately died of disease. (Derp.)

Cerno has noted in recent tweets that, firstly, the concentration on THE MASK (even before THE VAXX) was classic stray-voltage; these activists weren't concentrating on fixing the election-system (for one). Also deaths of Suddenly among apparently-healthy athletes were happening, and documented, up to 2017 (The Haywire Heart). Turns out that Zone 3-4 is hazardous to your health if not adequately prepared-for.

I must add, the excitable promises that there will come "Nuremberg" hearings and general persecution of those who got CoVID "wrong" (actually, right) didn't endear the Repubbies to the normies either. Sun Tzu recommended always offering the enemy an exit-route (even if a false one), because failure to do so will encourage the enemy - literally, he'll fight to the death. What choice he got?

Well: enjoy a RINO House and a Democrat Senate, is all I have to say. I'd prefer a stronger resistance against our Current Year but, if the alternative is NO MASK NO VAXX plague-rats then I'll accept the result.

4Q380

As I was looking around for Psalm 106 I found it was one of the psalms missing from the Cave 11 Psalter. Which is strange given that the Chronicler quotes it. Mind, the Chronicler's psalm did not make the Odes among the Christians as did, say, the Prayer of Manasses...

Eventually I turned up Mika Pajunen's 2011 work on 4Q380 (pdf). Strangely not many scholars unassociated with Pajunen have bothered since then; I think she made a good case, but hey. Also Pajunen tends to date DSS to postBiblical times, like 11Q11's Psalm 91 and 4Q381's Manasseh; 4Q380 is an exception to her rule.

4Q380 is a collection of odes which parallel the Prophets, and not the Psalms. One of them is attributed to Obadiah. Another - the one we care about - parallels Isaiah from chapters 60 on, which wax Zionist. Whether or not this likewise-Zionist ode now in 4Q380 was ascribed to Isaiah doesn't matter; it was ascribed to the Zionist Prophet and that was Prophetic enough. Psalm 106 took that Zionist paean, forced it into a Diaspora context, and did whatever else it deemed good to do. The Chronicler (or postChronicler) then took the frame for this new Psalm 106; which 11Q5 did not do.

This constrains TritoIsaiah or at least its source-prophet > 4Q380 > Psalm 106 (with or without vv. 6-46) > 1 Chronicles 16. Also by the way the Zadokite Fragment concerning "Damascus" treated 4Q380 (and not Psalm 106) as Scripture.

All this has clear implications for, say, Habakkuk 3 (which will get into the LXX Odes). Jewish poets felt free to compose paraProphetic hymns on Obadiah's and ?Isaiah's behalf. Most such extranea wouldn't get into the main Prophetic books. But as we see of Manasses: some did get into (say) Chronicles, at least for the Ethiopians. For Irenaeus' part, Baruch was a legitimate extension of (LXX) Jeremiah.

Heavy neutron-stars have hard surfaces

Over a week ago we had something about magnetars having a solid surface. Magnetars are a subset of pulsars are a subset of neutron-stars. I didn't pay much attention to the article; I didn't know what questions it answered, nor if if I should quest after the questions.

We do know that magnetars are fairly Big Deals. As of December 2020 they numbered 24-30. It's a hypefest when we hear of a 31st - or of a a 32nd in-making.

Today we got that question: models on neutron-star composition, based on mass. If over 1.7 solar masses, the noot has a hard surface; if under - like ZTF J1901+1458 is becoming - its surface is soft.

So magnetar masses, I think, trend over 1.7 M_☉. And aren't accreted gradually.

Badly-composed psalms

Having looked at "historical psalms", I'll submit a few impressions.

We started with the Chronicler. I'll carry this to Psalm 135: it is bad and its psalmist should feel bad. Psalm 135:1-14 / Psalm 136 are about the same thing but Psalm 135 as we have it appends some nonsense about idols vv. 15f. And it includes a lot of encapsulating schmutz about the Levi/Aaron priesthood. Those constructions of stone and precious-metal are bad but this glorious Temple is different because IT IS, OKAY?!.

This leads me to wonder about Psalm 78. It is a product of redaction; some say, Hananiah, in the last days of Jerusalem. Having given it some thought I have to wonder if Psalm 78 was, itself, the Psalm 135 of its day. We have Psalms 105 and 106 (and maybe 136); these read like someone took some effort to compose them. Psalm 78 reads like several songs-of-praise and songs-of-repentance got spliced together.

The question I'd reopen, for Oded Tammuz, is: did Psalm 78 redact an already-redacted psalm, or did it compile its material from two psalms (now-lost?) already? Which option would Ockham prefer?

Settling Haumea

Having laid out some basic on Haumea, I was planning some Kepler on it. (You probably saw this coming.) We start with the gravitational parameter: 6.67430(15)×10⁻¹¹ × 4.006±0.040)×10²¹ = 2.674E+9 m³/s² [rounded up].

At an orbital period 3.915341 h = 14095.2276 s; for haumeasynchronous radius calculate the following: Math.Pow(14095.2276 * 2.674E+9 / (4 * Math.PI * Math.PI), 1.0/3). This is 9846 m [round down]. Which is underground. Not just under ice but under silicon. Well; okay, we could have guessed this, just from its lobes being spun out from the rocky(-er) centre.

This implies we can have haumeastationary satellites if we chain them to the surface. Here the first equation would be where freefall gravity is canceled by the centripetal acceleration. Spin velocity (Math.PI+ Math.PI)/ 14095.2276 = 0.00044576685708711694 rad/s. By F = mrω²; if we want gravity, we can have this by a = rω². On the other side Newton says a = GM/r². So: r = cube-root of GM/ ω² = 238 km. Again: underground. Again: this accounts why Haumea has lost so much material and still has a ring.

Now I’d ask the altitude at which we from Earth can enjoy pseudogravity by centrifuge. This radius plugging 9.8 m/s² into a/ω² = 49,320 km from the centre just below moon Hi’iaka. Compare GEO 42,164 km. The tether alone is science-fiction over Earth and, anyway, the ring starts from 2200 km up. That tether not happenin’ at Haumea.

To sum up: chaining stations over Haumea is the only way anyone is getting onto its surface, rather to burrow into it. Hosing ices from the lobes up into those stations should keep the stations self-sufficient. The stations need supply their own artificial gravity, by rotation. They do get to rotate less the further out they are; unfortunately they will be limited below 2200 km and (depending on station mass) by tether-strength. Other stations at Hi’iaka and, below that, at Namaka would join Haumea to the rest of Kuiper.

Longer-term, Haumea’s rocky interior might be spun even faster as to make it an O’Neill; as The Expanse claimed of the remnant of Ceres.

Haumea

I stumbled upon some Haumea hype lately in Youtube. Most lately Anton Petrov links to Jessica Noviello et al. (pdf).

The aim is to survey this 40ish AU iceball for colonisation, in advance of the Taurian invasion.

Haumea formerly 2003 EL₆₁ is one of our Kuiper-Belt ladies, in this case in intermittent 7:12 libration with Neptune - slower than the 2:3 (8:12) Plutini so exterior. Haumea spins 234-minutes-55.116-seconds so almost four hours. It has two moons. Those moons, assuming they are near pure iceballs and that Kepler hasn't taken an off day, allow a Haumea mass-estimate of 4.006×10²¹ kg. It lately occulted a star which has given us a peek at the ring and at the main body's dimensions: 1050×840×537 km. Larger diameter than Orcus; likely smaller volume.

Going back to Haumea's orbit, it shares that with a dynamical family. In fact (19308) 1996 TO₆₆ was found before Haumea itself. I mentioned Plutinos. Haumeans are unlike Plutinos inasmuch as Plutinos (and Triton) are independent captures, and that Haumeans are in other resonances although, not always Haumea's anymore. Haumeans exist in their near-Haumea orbit because something smashed their parent body. This smash is what Noviello's paper describes.

Having smashed, Haumea proper redifferentiated its core. The sinking of silicates in the mush both spun its rotation - its day - faster (so shorter), and warmed up a water ocean. This ocean eventually froze and the core partially dehydrated.

Haumea now should have a hydrated silicate core of density 2700 kg/m³, with its lobes a more icy 2008.

The Chronicler's psalm of Asaph

Next to Asaph's Psalm 78 as an "historical" Psalm, or at least one with historical content, is the psalm the Chronicler has him sing on the occasion of installing the Ark... in Jerusalem. (And not Shiloh.) Per Streeter Stuart in a paper I've not been able to read:

The hymn found in 1 Chronicles 16:8–36 contains portions of Psalms 105:1–15; 96:1–13; and 106:47–48. Since the hymn occurs in a context which focuses upon placing the Ark of the Covenant on Mt. Zion, it is noteworthy that the verses from Pss. 105 and 106 say nothing about the Exodus, since the other verses of these two Pss. are heavy in the Exodus tradition, the primary location of the Ark narrative in the Pentateuch.

As the first sentence goes, we should start thinking of "parallels" rather than "containment"... as Stuart will continue, as he muses on other slices-and-dices of these four psalms in other literature, here The Exodus Tradition in Psalm 105 and the Wisdom of Solomon. Of those earlier parallels: Psalms 96 (nonhistorical), 105, and 1 Chr 16:8-36 all share a mode of triumph; Psalm 106 of humilation and penitence.

Psalms 96 and 106 share in common that they exist internationally. The former exults in a world united under one God, sharing its "new song" incipit with [2] Isaiah 42:10 and carrying on to vv. 12 and 17 as both evangelise the Lord's glory to all nations; albeit Psalm 96 drawing them to (as later understood) Zion. The Chronicler's setting does not involve such a drastic change of fortune as was experienced by 2 Isaiah and Psalm 96, so omits the "new song" incipit. And if Psalm 96 has its origin in a Mazdaean hymn to the khwarrah, such was not found anymore by the Chronicler.

In Psalm 106, perhaps an older song, the people live scattered so must sing for themselves. In this light 1 Chr 16:35 / Ps 106:47 grates in 1 Chr 16:8-36. I must follow Stuart so far that Psalms 96 and 106 both exist pretty-much as the Chronicler found them, that the Chronicler has quoted Psalm 106's doxology in an adaptation of Psalm 96.

Psalm 105 looks to own some internal integrity as well, as I compare it with Psalm 78 - more exactly vv. 1-55 (78:13-16, 24-28 // 105:39-41, 78:54-55 / 105:44-45). Psalm 78 jolts the reader even more than does Psalm 106 as God is praised for giving Israel all good things, with Israel then backsliding. Psalm 78 meanders from Egypt to the wilderness back to Egypt. Psalm 105 is here more even.

One point I must make about Psalms 105 and 106, as Stuart and I are tracking omissions, is that those two Psalms in covering Exodus and the Law and God's Covenant, do an Enochian Dream Vision as to glide over the Ten Commandments. Psalm 105 brings Israel out of Misr v. 38 immediately to dine upon miraculous quail vv. 39-41, finally to inherit the lands of the Gentiles. Psalm 106 at least mentions Horeb v. 19, but only inasmuch as the Golden Calf was worshipped there. For their own reasons neither mentions the Ark. You'd think Psalm 105 would have continued to 78:61.

I imagine all this struck an off-note to the Chronicler's ear, as well. So he alluded to relevant texts without raising, in his audience, the questions he himself was asking.

Hananiah's supercessionist psalm

Jeremiah is a Prophet, however his opus has been mutilated in the Hebrew tradition. He had replyguys in his own time, too; where Jeremiah thought resisting Babylon was foolish, his detractors - chief of them Hananiah the Prophet - wanted resistance. Jeremiah proved correct. Which is why we own Jeremiah's oracles and know of Hananiah only through the conflict.

Hananiah had inherited a pro-war, pro-Israel library. This was King Josiah's library, or so Frank Moore Cross famously argued. This "Deuteronomic History" incorporates the Song of Miriam, the Song of Deborah, and several narratives in Joshua and Judges in which Israel (and not just Judah) had seen off threats to ha-Eretz. The earlier accounts, this narrative associates with collections like "The Wars of YHWH" and "Jashar" mostly poetic. One might also look to oracles now in Isaiah and Nahum.

So, the Historical Psalms: 78, 105, 106, 135, 136. I've come across these in Mass, which parallel the narrative of Torah. As always with parallel, we must ask in which direction. The Psalms after Psalm 88 MT are scrambled in Qumran, so raise suspicions as postexilic (Psalm 137, immediately beyond 136). Earlier, some Psalms look ancient - even northern, like Psalm 45 which everyone agrees is the marriage-song for Jezebel and Ahab. I'd look at Psalm 78.

This pulse-check has turned up Oded Tammuz from Beer-Sheva, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 79.2 (April 2017), 205-21, deeming Psalm 78 A Case Study in Redaction as Propaganda. Tammuz argues that Psalm 78 should be read alongside Judah's use of the Northern legends now in Judges. That is: it has been repurposed, with interpolations, to make it useful in a contemporary argument, which was Hananiah's argument.

The original had been a Psalm of God's mercy to Israel despite its failings. The canon version still has that theme, but now the "true Israel" is Judah in Jerusalem. God will not abandon Judah as He abandoned Israel because Judah is just that much more wonderful.

I cannot but imagine that Jeremiah, knowing the history of Israel and knowing his own people, would have detected an irony in this.

As for Tammuz' argument: this starts by recognising a generally pro-Israel text (as are most Asaph psalms) but interspersed with anti-Israel passages (which Asaph doesn't do). A glaring example, noted by earlier scholars, is vv. 67-71. Where the Lord had redeemed v. 60's abandonment of Shiloh vv. 65-6 and shamed Israel's enemies forever; from vv. 67f the Lord simply switches to the Davidic line and shrine. Whether that last pericope be a full interpolation or a reworking, Tammuz doesn't care; he simply flags the whole of it.

Tammuz translates v. 57 they recoiled like a qashit ramih, which in Assyrian times meant a loosened bow. The term is exactly GISHBAN ramîti or qashtum ramît in those transpotamian texts: a letter from Babylon and a hymn-commentary. I wonder if this qashtum ramît be an Aramaism, which can account for being shared in eighth-century Israel-Judah but not by any East Semite before Tiglath-Pileser III. Tammuz believes the term was also rare, known mainly to bowyers and archers. If the term were rare, and especially if the Near East had forgotten it (say, if the Israelites and Assyrians had both lost their kingdoms); an interpolator feeding off that term in a legacy Psalm would misunderstand that verse. Thus an interpolation, Tammuz considers vv. 9-10.

Tammuz associates these verses which he has flagged, with Jeremiah 7:1-15 and MT 26-27 / LXX 33-34. Here the Prophet cites Shiloh as a warning to Jerusalem. Here Tammuz defers to the scholarship of Anthony Chinedu Osuji's Where Is the Truth? (2010): that 27:1a/34:1a at the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim ben Josiah should be renumerated the last verse of ch. 26/34, that chapter's footnote; or simply omitted as many Greek MSS omit it. John Goldingay's New International Commentary (2021) accepts this too. With this renumeration, Osuji argued, 26-7/33-4 is of one piece; moreover, 26:1/33:1 is a mistake, such that the whole double-chapter needs redating to Zedekiah's reign.

Aztec philosophy

Gary Jennings knew that the Nahua of the Valley had a philosophic tradition. Jennings told Aztec through a son of Fred Flintstone, Dark-Cloud; this authorial avatar could then interface with the tradition from the outside. Jennings was aware that the Athens of the Valley was Texcoco; so Texcoco is where Jennings had Dark-Cloud learn his scribal and cultural lore.

That much, I'm fine with. Tenochtitlan to Mesoamerica was Rome to the Hellenistic Mediterranean. The Tlatoani / Imperator / Amir was a practical man working within the worldview of the people he commanded. How could a Divine Speaker not use the tongue of his charges? Dara Shikoh inherited Islamicate India and proposed to rule it in a nonIslamic style. Didn't work well for him. Dark-Cloud works with this same political realm, so never much engages with the philosophy.

Some might defend Jennings such that he lacked the time to immerse himself in the Valley's priors. But as I read this book and others, I have to conclude Jennings didn't see a difference between one philosophy and the other. It was all Organised-Religion and mumbo jumbo to him (the author was working through some Issues, one suspects). So if readers hoped for any reason one system failed as the two systems collided: Jennings failed.

Interested parties can now read a true summary of what the Nahua-speaking Valley understood as the Good and the True: stone age herbalist. ht Barsoom and, er, Vox Day. This was not just one gaggle of dirty violent priests against the other; this was materialism-as-animism, against the cross and grace of Christ.

The Pharaoh of Memphis

Having gone over the etymologies surrounding "Egypt", I figured that "Pharaoh of Egypt" although clumsy in pure Middle-Egyptian makes some protoCoptic sense: as a title applied to a ruler of Memphis. Yesterday I assumed most such rulers would take it as a black joke and as an insult. After sleeping on it, I recalled one exception. A very important exception.

Earlier dynasties venerated Ptaḥ and some ruled from his city. "Pharao", however, applies only to the palace of the Empire and later - as the Quran teaches. Pharaonic kings venerated the Sun - as Amun or Aten or Ra. By then, Ptaḥ was no solar deity.

After the failure of the Theban / Amarnan XVIIIth dynasty, the Ramessides moved their seat to the Delta - needing more concentration over Canaan and then the Sea Peoples and Libyans. Among them we find a pharaoh calling himself "Merneptaḥ": he bestowed to posterity a vital res-gestae at Karnak. How did it happen that this king rediscovered his national roots?

The famous Pharaoh Rameses II "Ozymandias", one of those Justinian / Aurangzeb sorts, in his advanced age identified one of his sons as sufficiently competent to groom for succession. Already elderly on succession, our man took the name Mernetjeru, "Beloved of the Gods" but mostly of Ra (Banre). The Karnak record relates that in his reign, Mereye the Libyan invaded the Delta with 16000 Sea-Peoples.

Mernetjeru met Mereye at Memphis and routed him. Thus the victor proclaimed himself "Beloved of Ptaḥ" in particular: such that he set his throne at the god's holy city.

Move over, xenon

My posts here have assumed xenon for propellant, at least up and down our own well. Xenon is expensive even if we buy it from a disused sensor.

Why not argon? Xenon has heavier molecules, but so does mercury which is cheap. Argon is also cheap; what you lose by buying this gas from Air Liquide rather than getting the quicksilver for free, I imagine you save in accident-insurance.

Storage seems to me more serious. Xenon currently gets stored in supercriticality 75-300 bar in ambient Florida summer temperatures. Argon would boil at temperature below 87.302 K where xenon boils 165.051 K [Antarctica: 173.15 K]. There's ongoing research in xenon-storage. Have we considered this research for argon? But we're already good at keeping oxygen liquid (90.188 K) on a launchpad. Is liquid-argon more fluid than -xenon?

As to their use as propellant: Kazunori Takahashi is writing about conversion efficiency, between radio-frequency power to thrust energy. Basically xenon molecules (which are just atoms-with-electrons) won't react but a xenon plasma of ions (lacking the electrons) will. The energies in the usual electric thruster, like a Hall, burn out the electrodes. The magnetic-nozzle rf plasma "helicon" thruster solves this by removing the electrodes, using radio-frequency instead. Problem: 20% efficient under the xenon. Since nobody wants the xenon helicon, we all take the hit on shipping up electrodes we know won't last, instead.

Takahashi used argon and boosted this efficiency to 30%. His paper didn't say if his method would work with xenon; but a xenon solution's not really up to him, since he has beaten all the xenonians already. If it all pans out, Takahashi's plan is best, one imagines, for the long term as mission-duration returns to how Tsiolkovsky intended, with propellant-duration. (And the power-source; but that might just be Sol here.)

The house of Ptaḥ's ka

Every now and again I ponder the word "Egypt". Not "Miṣr"; I view that name as an exonym, like "Ukraine". (The Arabs likely took this from the Bible.) Aiguptos is where we get our word. It's Greek. But... it's a specific name applied to the whole Nile Delta, like Psalm 78 applies "Ṣōʕan" - Tanis - to the whole Delta. One wonders why the Greeks didn't call this country Zonithia or something similar.

Everyone agrees that Aiguptos transcribes ḥwt kꜣ ptḥ which is usually translated the House of the ka of Ptaḥ, but is best simplified "Ptaḥ's Temple". Ptaḥ might grace other structures around the Two Lands, as YHWH might bless a synagogue in Cyrene; but Ptaḥ's spirit "rested" - took its seat upon the throne - only here. This Temple featured in the city Mennefer, known to Greeks as "Memphis" and to the Arabs as "Manf" or maybe "Manuph". Hosea was aware of the site as "Moph". As the Temple Scroll considers all Jerusalem to be an extension of the Lord's Temple; so Memphians likely came to consider their city ḥwt kꜣ ptḥ.

Linear B records a local worker as an ai-ku-pu-ti-jo "Aegyptian". Something between ḥwt kꜣ ptḥ and *Aikupt_os appears in Ugarit hymnody (to god Kothar) as ḥkpt. So the pointer existed in the Late Bronze, probably (assuming hymns tended conservative, especially in formulae like bʕl ḥkpt or ḥkpt arṣ nḥlth). Both times the scribe applied the term to people of this house; so, was the Aegyptian a general Nilotic, a specific Memphian, or a high-level devotee of Ptah? If Linear B or Ugarit give up another name for another Delta town, like Tanis, we might retire the assumption that these terms refer to the whole realm.

Genesis 10's genealogy seems aware of an ethnonym for the Memphians, "Naptuḥim" (pdf). Genesis interestingly does the Nile the favour of not applying Memphis or Ptaḥ to the whole country; which Psalm 78 did not grant, with Ṣōʕan.

As for "Copt": the Copts did themselves no favours by taking on the Greek alphabet and too many loanwords. But I cannot rule out that some Genesis-savvy Ptolemaic-era Memphians, or perhaps Memphists, might have started out calling themselves neither houseboys-of-Ptaḥ nor Na-Ptaḥ; but Na-Ka-Ptaḥ: the People of Ptaḥ's Soul, translated as Koptakhioi. As Memphians the Coptachii'd have spoken Bohairic, and been followers of the old gods; so the Christian Sahidis upriver would count as cultural-appropriators, I guess...

Cool countersemitic theories (bro)

Everyone was out at my company except for me, so I've had time to collect some thoughts. I was considering some recent countersemitica - I can't think of a better word for these weirdnesses. We'll start with Palamedes, who's been cropping up on my Google Scholar searches.

Kosmas Theodorides floated revisiting the tradition of Palamedes as inventor of the alphabet. This Academia Letter claims that although a mixed abecedary was in use in Egypt as Hieratic, and although Ugaritic took that idea and ran with it; the first true alphabet was done when Palamedes adapted Linear B. The epic poets including Homer remembered Palamedes. There's a proto-Canaanite alphabet at Serabit el-Khadim in southwest Sinai but that's the far side of the desert.

But then one Madeleine Mumcuoglu, tilting this ivory lice comb with an older iPhone, detected Canaani writing. The comb had been found at Lachish but that doesn't mean it was carved then - or there.

The inscriber had a sense of humour: he imagined this as the "tusk" of an elephant now doing its job against we remember as the Third Plague, of כִּנָּם. You'd think a modern Jewish wit might refer to that plague instead (as Psalm 105:31 עָרֹב כִּנִּים, tho' not Psalm 78:31). Hence: not Hebrew, but Canaani. Also the script itself parallels the Sinai alphabet presently dated from 19th century BC on. I don't know if the Canaanite Shift was in play yet, or if the language be ancestral to Aramaic too. But that doesn't matter for Greece.

What we are seeing is a wider range for the Canaani script, as far as Lachish. Given other inscriptions in Late Bronze Lachish, under Egyptian rule; it's Theodorides' burden to show that the comb was both inscribed and brought to this city after the Greek Age Of Heroes. Til then, the standard textbooks remain in force as far as Greeks having direct access to Canaan's merchants in the Iron Age, not just being "inspired" by Ugarit in the Late-Helladic-IIIB archaeology and adapting, I dunno, Cypriote Linear C.

And then there's... sigh... Russell Gmirkin. This rests on the idea that some Ptolemaic Platonist wrote Genesis in Hebrew and Greek, before allowing it forth into Judaea. But then I read Ron Hendel. Hendel agrees that Genesis One in the Greek relies upon a Hebrew Vorlage. Hendel further agrees that the Greek translator, not being a sixth-century-BC mercenary sergeant in Naucratis-Heracleion, but in fact being a subject of the Ptolemies, owned some grounding in Greek philosophy. Maybe the Hebrew source owed something to post-Hellenistic thought. But.

Comparing the Greek version, even as extrapolated, to the MT/4QGen texts, show that the Greek version has altered the meaning. Walton was right; Gmirkin and Vridar and TOO are wrong.

We appear to be in yet another, modern, phase of an ancient argument: Greeks claiming priority against those darn Phoenicians. At least Greeks have the excuse of national pride. What's everyone else's excuse?

Molniya

On topic of the ultrathin solar-cells, or just perovski; obviously this is great for reducing launch-mass and, if constructed in space, cargo mass; ultimately, station-keeping requirements. They're more talking protection from radiation.

Venus' orbit does indeed have an ion-problem. So these cells might be good for Venus orbit. In the meantime the researchers were talking orbits as cross Van Allen. I didn't know we did that.

The article points to the Молния trajectory. As the name suggests, 'tis Russian - for "lightning". The USSR wanted regular observation of a point on Earth without the expense of a massive GEO-ward rocket. Also, GEO wasn't (and isn't) good for the poles - and the Soviets didn't know about muons. The Comrades at OKB-1 figured they could observe high-latitudes not continually but at least consistently, if they ran a sat in an inclined orbit with period resonant with Earth's rotation.

Molniya further wanted to take its time when observing the high latitudes. So: elliptic. Thing about an ellipse is that this would have a high apogee and cut through the Van Allens. With clunky 1970s-era electronics the Soviets didn't mind radiation fluxes, like our Apollo programme didn't mind them.

In 2017 Molniya was raised for a Mars mission (pdf). This inclination could be simply elliptic; it was mooted purely for its eccentricity. The notion was not to bring oxygen on the trip. The oxygen instead would be taken from the CO₂ at mid-atmo. Only then, use that oxygen to burn the fuel for a soft-landing on Mars (or a dock at Phobos tho' they don't say it).

Luke according to Marcion (and to Tertullian)

To continue the Marcion theme, lately the Westar lads like BeDuhn have pointed out some skips in Tertullian's argument. Tertullian goes line by line through Marcion's gospel, pointing out where his gospel differs from Luke's. Tertullian's Contra IV.25 deals up to Luke 10:27 and .26 just... talks Luke 11:1. IV.32 talks about the lost sheep and the lost silver-coin which is Luke 15:1-10 and then .33 goes to Luke 16:11f. Tertullian and Marcion agree not to talk about the Helpful Samaritan nor about the Prodigal Son. Epiphanius, for his Scholion 42, reports positively that Marcion "falsified" the Prodigal Son narrative.

Does Marcion have reason to omit these parables?

Maybe Tertullian and Marcion, both schismatics at heart, agree that the Prodigal Son is a problematic for a community rife with apostates. The Prodigal Son posed, further, a proof-text for the Prophets as sent from the same Father as sent Christ. Except... both Marcion and Tertullian own the lost sheep and the lost coin; so, from the Prodigal Son, why wouldn't Marcion just delete that one line that offended him?

This looks like Tertullian and Marcion own, together, copies of Luke which omit the Prodigal Son. Just like they owned a copy as didn't have the First Stone (which is now, mostly, in John 7-8).

On the other hand the Samaritan should be up both mens' alley as supporting non-Jews against Jews. And you'd think Epiphanius would notice its omission. Roth prefers to punt on this one: it is currently-unattested in Marcion's gospel, which is not proof of absence.

Marcion, between Tertullian and Epiphanius

Waaay back in the late 1990s and maybe even before that, in the Gopher years, someone took upon himself to provide us with Marcion's reconstructed Gospel. This was based on Luke of course, with some emendations which Tertullian's fourth Contra Marcionem book ascribed. Maybe Epiphanius.

Von Harnack listed the divergences and several websites summarise them, such as here. Since then Frank Williams has given us a full Panarion in 2009; and, in 2015, Dieter Roth has done The Text of Marcion's Gospel.

Epiphanius' strategy was to quote or maybe paraphrase Marcion, as "Scholia", and to provide an "Elenchus" either refusing Marcion's text or (more often) showing how Marcion's text (often just Luke's text) doesn't help Marcion's dogma. Tertullian does much the same. Although, of interest - sometimes Tertullian sees a textual discrepancy as Epiphanius doesn't.

Where Luke 10:27 talks of eternal life from the Jewish Books: Marcion just said "life". Tertullian pointed out (accurately) that eternal life is the only reading that makes sense on account Jews already figured (and figure) their worldly lives are better for following Torah; so this guy questioning Jesus must be looking for more and better. On the other hand... the word eternal doesn't need to be here. Compare Egerton P2. And eternal life will show up in Luke 18 not to be contested by Tertullian.

And Tertullian claims that Marcion dropped the soldiers' bartering for Jesus' robe at the Cross. Epiphanius doesn't dispute Marcion's text; instead concentrating on the fact of Crucifixion, which proves Jesus' mortal form.

A more-serious list of Marcion / Christian divergences, Vridar provided back in 2008. Much reference to Judaism is excised but (as Tertullian famously noted) not enough of it, such that Marcion's gospel testifies to Tertullian's Lord. In particular the "son/seed of David" stuff which matters to Paul and to the (probably-earliest) version of Mark which depends on Paul, is gone, from here and from Marcion's edition of Romans.

Some of Marcion's differences might refer to an earlier Luke or to a Luke-driven Paul. Some smell like orthodox-corruption. But Marcion has made some changes, so cannot be trusted overall.

The quantum telescope

Quantum computing might remain a problem; largely from the difficulty of error-correction. But by that token, much work has been done on error-correction. h/t Reynolds, here's the quantum telescope.

To be exact: this is the quantum-corrected visible-wavelength interferometer. So far interferometers tend to the radio, no lower-frequency / higher-wavelength than a microwave (let alone "red").

Mind, higher wavelength than blue - like red, again - gets subject to Rayleigh-scattering. So this 'scope is probably best for an airless environment like, oh, the dark side of Luna (when actually dark).

A Marcionite Epistolary... by Jerome?

This is an antiMarcionite blog but our enemies did direct me to a Latin translation of maybe-Marcion's New Testament.

As reminder: Marcion's enemies (like me) have ascribed to the heretic's Epistolary only Paul's better letters, absent a chapter here and there. The Vulgate associated with muh boi Jerome doesn't use that heretic's collection. The Vulgate uses a Pelagian Epistolary.

It seems that some Latinx collector merged some actual-Jerome writings with a mishmash of classic Pastorals and Hebrews... along with the Paulines ascribed - by the Vatican - to Marcion di Sinope.

So: was Jerome's intent to translate Marcion's Epistles as to discredit them among fellow Latins? Unlike Marcion (and I think Luke), Pelagius had at least taken seriously Paul's intent, translating accordingly.

Incoming!

ToughSF brings up a point about Scholz and other past flybys of small stars. By his maths, a 52 kAU flyby of 0.15 M_☉ (implicitly total) should acquire a Hill of 31.8 kAU from Sol. Even if the system didn't scrape Oort (Wikipedially considered 0.79 ly / 50 kAU), its L1 is well within limits; such as to bring down the sky.

Some Oorts from 31.8(ish) kAU would become comets with an orbit apoapsis 32 kAU and periapsis ≤ 1 AU. ... Their orbital period would be 16000.5^3/2 = 2,023,952 years. Oorts from further out will get here later.

Now: for the Scholz binary itself, ToughSF's prior is wrong - and I'm not talking about the vagueness nor about whether the passing star's mass be 0.15 or 0.158 M_☉. Scholz just didn't get this close. By the converter, 1.08 ly = 68.3 kAU. To that Hill, which has to be in the high 40s kAU, does Oort even extend? Beyond 0.79 ly / 50 kAU, all matter of other passing stars might have taken material away faster than the Sun can collect it. For instance: HD 7977 which is 1.07 M_⊙ had already swooped by 2.788 Mya at 0.429 pc / 88.5 kAU; that one's Hill is low-40s kAU from us. I'll add that as a heavier star, it should have taken away more of our Oort than it bestowed to us. (h/t Phil Plait although he needs to learn the difference between a parsec and a lightyear.) So best not to speculate on Scholz. HD 7977's comets should have period 3 Mya, by the way, so have been to the Jupiter-range and gone by now.

... unless HD 7977's comets were perturbed by something else.

Unlike Scholz and HD 7977, UCAC4 237-008148 did come 0.8ish ly to us. The latest data I find says 0.259 parsecs so 53.4 kAU. Its mass is dangerous too: 0.82 M_⊙. That L1 would cut deeper than 30 kAU, although not as far as the Hills torus 20 kAU. Worst of all: UCAC4 flew by 1.162 Mya. Some of these comets might be showing up, er... now.

Enoch's first dream

Ethiopic Enoch is, famously, a collection of five books ending ch. 105, plus an appendix chs. 106-108. Of the main five books, four have Aramaic traces in Qumran, as well as citations from such Yachad literature as Jubilees. Enoch 8:4-9:4 is also found in Hebrew, as is 106:13-107:2. The second book - the Similitudes - is found only in Christian sources, but not just Ge'ez.

Other patches absent from Qumran are chs. 94f from the fifth book; although there seems no reason this bit should be deliberately excluded (Chester Beatty Papyri XII in Greek has 97:6 to 104... and then chs. 106-107; Latin ch. 106 also exists). chs. 79:6f. is absent from the Astrological third book, again, for no known reason. Then there's chs. 83-88:2 off the start of the book after that.

That last gap bypasses, in Ethiopic, a dream-vision and then a prayer. From chs. 85f is the famous Animal Apocalypse, wherein Edna is named so is considered known to Jubilees. This leaves chs. 83-84. Wikipedia is unaware of any translations before Ge'ez. Did anyone cite it? Does Enoch need it?

Loren Stuckenbruck last January proposed: no. The paper was "Enoch’s Prayer for Rescue from the Flood: 1 Enoch 83–84, with a New Translation and Notes" DOI:10.5040/9780567701299.ch-021, in a "conversation" with Charlesworth who had done so much to advance the translation overall. Apparently on ResearchGate you can ask the author for a PDF, but until then we must read Google Books' snippets.

Stuckenbruck uses additional Ge'ez MSS for his edition. Matthew Black and George Nickelsburg argued that the Animal Apocalypse (and Watchers) were double-translated, to Greek thence to Ge'ez. Although: some examples, like ch. 90 ראמא (wild-ox, auroch) > *ῥῆμα (word) > nagar, could have happened via Coptic whose script is Greek and whose vocabulary heavily-swapped with Greek. But we are short on Greek and Coptic translations of chs. 85-90, much less 83-84 [UPDATE 4/9/23 but hey - Barnabas!], so: Ge'ez it is.

Here, Knibb is acknowledged as finding parallels between 4Q203 "Book of Giants" ll.9-10 and at least Enoch's prayer ch. 84. Stuckenbruck finds additional parallels with Aramaic Levi and Jubilees 1:19-20, whose text is better anyway. Conversely Enoch imputes a different motive to God than did Genesis 6 in MT/LXX. There, God (or the Elohim?) feel regret, and (especially in LXX) reach a decision. In 1 Enoch 84:4, Enoch perceives that God is "wrathful".

If I may: the Hebrew analogues for God's wrath tend to show up only after Moses receives the Law at Sinai. 1 Enoch 84 again reminds of Jubilees, which transplants post-Sinai regulations back to Patriarchal times in Genesis. Obviously Levi precedes Moses as well.

Stuckenbruck considers 1 Enoch 83 a pure midrash, with little in common with the general Enochian agenda as Qumran knew it. Where Aramaic Enoch has little respect for Torah as it actually existed (to which Torah-disrespect, we should add 1 Enoch 84), 1 Enoch 83 exists to plant 1 Enoch 84 in its Torah context. Enoch here doesn't dream the Maccabean Apocalypse; he dreams the Flood.

If I were to speculate, as I suppose I must because nobody can find any reader of 1 Enoch 83-84 until the Ethiopians got it, I should agree with the Ethiopians that at least 1 Enoch 84 was already there when they found it. Free-floating prayers are known in the Jewish and early-Christian tradition at least since the Psalms and also the Prayer of Manasseh. Here, I gather that somebody who couldn't inject this prayer into Genesis 6 nor even Jubilees instead did it to the next best thing, which was one of those Enoch books. 1 Enoch 83 was composed or possibly rewritten accordingly, as was 1 Enoch 85:1. I'd pin the interpolation to upper Egypt.

The transmission of Torah

Zwinglius' "Carnival" roundup included a pointer to an upcoming Hila Dayfani paper. And now it's on academia.edu: The Scope of the Transmission of the Pentateuch in the Second Temple Period.

This deals with scribal errors. This 2TP precedes the Masoretic checksums and synagogues which froze the text of Genesis in time for Qumran and other texts in time for Masada and Wadi Murabba'at (and Peshitta, and Vulgate, and . . .). If you know Imperial Aramaic or the postBiblical Hebrew which its script often transcribes, you know you need glasses and a kickstart of coffee. Earlier generations didn't much have access to either. Telling one set of blocky characters from others is... well, it's like Arabic.

The most complete texts we got of earliest Hebrew are the Torah of the Masoretes (MT) and the Torah of the Samaritans ("SPentateuch" for her but I'm going with ST here). Famously, they differ. Some differences involve a text which harmonised Torah books with one another; these harmonies are first seen in Qumran so not (yet) Samiri. Other differences boost the Samarian temple which was on Gerizim up north, near Shechem which the locals now call Neapolis. But others look like honest differences in opinion on what the consonants looked like. That is: somebody goofed.

Dayfani doesn't care who goofed. She's not considering any texts outside MT / ST - so, no Jubilees or Peshitta or 4QDt (pdf). She's looking at the distribution of MT / ST goofs as to suss out when those two goofers quit consulting one another. She identifies 121 instances of consonantal dissimilarity.

First, this points to an era in Samaritan piety when they were still using the Imperial Aramaic script rather than their own script, which was truly Hebrew. But we kind of already guessed at this period, given the use of true Hebrew in some Qumran scraps and the existence of proto-ST harmonies there. Still, nice to have the confirmation.

More on-point is that archaic scripts differed over time to make graphic blunders different over time. Take Y and W, where they look more similar in Herodian times. This includes the ST write-o hkw [sic] at Genesis 27:36; correctly hky in MT and indeed for both 29:15. By contrast - I didn't know this - the scripts for B and M look wholly different today and in Herodian times, but under the last Ptolemies they could be mutually confused. Orthographic evolution for 200-0 BC is where Qumran excels.

Sometimes a difficult reading encouraged a tendentious rewrite. For a D/R interchange: Exodus 23:17 / 34:23, where the h'dn "face" of God is effaced in ST h'rwn. (D/R gets ridiculous still later, in Syriac.) Dayfani calls these "complex".

The vast majority of interchanges are Y/W, mostly "complex"; followed by D/R, mostly noncomplex. Dayfani concludes: The MT and SP thus appear to evince limited scribal activity from the third century BCE. This increased after the middle of the second century BCE, reaching its peak in the middle of the first century BCE.

Alternatively: the Torah community crossed sectarian bounds, such that most Torahs were similar - until the middle of the second century BC. The Maccabean / Hasmonean rebellion, then, posed a break. With the Jerusalem Temple in Hasmonean hands, under the Samaritan Temple roof formed a separate scribal shelter.

The Twelve Prophets in Qumran

I've been looking into the later Hebrew Scriptures as received at their latest, pre-Qumran state. This, because they're in the state most-accessible to scholarship. So far we've checked Ezra, Habakkuk, and Obadiah. Somewhere around here I've been considering Daniel and various pieces of Enoch. All of these texts appear in Qumran and were used by the Yachad there.

Today I was pondering Jonah. Jonah is part of the Hellenophones' official "LXX" collection of Twelve. The Masoretic collection is also a Twelve, if in slightly-different order. The Murabba'ati collection in Hebrew is paraMasoretic and, also, certainly a Twelve. You'll recall I didn't insist a Twelve / LXX for Rahlfs 943 at Nahal Hever cave 8.

Modern scholarship sees Jonah as a book like Ruth, a fan-fiction. Where Ruth subverts the Ezra-Nehemiah and (more so) Levi-Amran-Tobit side of Second Temple Judaism, Jonah takes on the oracles-against-the-nations. Jonah presents its prophet as a contemporary of Jeroboam II therefore Nahum, although I don't know the intertext. A setting with Assyria might be safer, in the Achaemenids' Jehud province, than Babylon or Edom whose memories were fresher. Also the Achaemenids (as opposed to Cyrus) might even be Assyrische in that generation's eyes, such that Nineveh stands in for Hamadan or Persepolis.

I'd suspected that the Yachad wouldn't think much of Jonah. Jonah's text is among the Cave 4 scraps, alongside other Minor Prophets. It has been assumed Jonah's scraps came from Twelve MSS, on account the 4Q76 Jonah and Malachi scraps were written by the same hand. Philip Guillaume has doubted this: “A Reconsideration of Manuscripts Classified as Scrolls of the Twelve Minor Prophets (XII)”, The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 7 (2007), 2-12 also “The Unlikely Malachi-Jonah Sequence” (pdf). Well: Ruth probably wouldn't agree with the Yachad either but someone stored that one in Cave 4. Likewise Jonah, though stored, goes uncited in Yachad documents, unless we count 4:8 in 1QH^a / Thanksgiving which not everyone does. I am told the same neglect for Haggai although this I cannot explain - Haggai's hero Zerubbabel is commended also in Ben Sira, Zechariah 1-8, and Ezra all of which enjoyed some Dead Sea prestige.

Ben Sira and the Damascus / Zadokite Document do mention a collection of "Twelve". Could it be that Zechariah 1-8 and 9-11 were divided into two books...?

The Dopple World is back, baby

On topic of Gaia BH1, it occurred to me - hiking to the gym and back - whether the G star could support a planet. Maybe if the ten-solar-mass black hole was three times bigger.

If your first instinct is to laugh then, yeah - I've beaten you to it. We don't even have to do any maths to realise that the G star's first Libration point - the Hill Sphere - is (much) less than 0.5 AU. I don't even think it can get away with a Mercury. If this star formed more AU away and was a K type, then we'll consider it. Although if the star's a capture with an eccentric orbit, internal tides should make it warmer, constraining the habitable-zone again.

So then I considered Dopple World. I've generally dismissed the 1 AU equilateral Trojan haloes when Doppling an Earth-mass planet, due to mutual tides again. But here we got a Solar-mass anchor.

We don't really care, here, how a Sun orbiting a black hole has happened; but we do know that it has happened, 1600 light years away/ago. Lagrange (not just Hill) steps in when the mass-ratio exceeds 24.96, so BH1 itself - maxing at 10 - isn't a candidate.

But suppose BH1's central mass be about 25 M_☉. Could a G star form at 1 AU around it? If so, I assume that star quite metallic, if only because forming that monster of a hole would blast out volatiles far far away. Likewise the matter in its orbit. Dopple World will have an iron core like we do. The freakin' magnet should help as its planet oscillates to and from the star. Averaging 1 AU from a G means, well, Earth.

One exception: I expect its day/night cycle to fall into resonance with its orbit around the point because, once more, tides. Here's our Mercurylike, Queen fans.

One serious issue will be comets. Asteroids, meh; I expect Dopple World has cleared the Libration halo in forming. And if our snow line is 4 AU [Ceres forming outside it] then this system's snow line should be 5 AU from the hole. But everyone's got an Oort Cloud and if one of those iceballs gets perturbed, that central mass is going to pull it with absolute Hammer Of Thor force into anything in its way.

Gaia BH1

Black holes are normally found when they pull matter inward at an accelerated rate which beams out radiation, like the one in Cygnus. That "first Cygnus X-ray source" X-1 is draining its orbiting star. If the companion is far enough away, then it won't be drained; we'd have to look for that (visible) companion orbiting something invisible... which might take years for us to notice, given Kepler. It looks like we've noticed one, 1600 light years away: 4373465352415301632. h/t Science Daily and this release UPDATE 7:20 PM MST and Bad Astronomy and Nyrath.

We're lucky that Gaia found this, its first black hole; score another W for the DR3. Incredibly lucky, some might say...

The 185.6-day period is such that the orbiting star, which is a G class 1 M_☉ like our sun, is estimated at 1 AU from an 11-sol-mass barycentre. The just-under-10 M_☉ black hole, when it was an O star, should have been 20 M_☉. So how did it die without going supergiant in between? Our own dwarf Sun is supposed to puff out to about 1 AU!

I don't think the G star is a capture, since its orbit would be madly eccentric if so (and they'd tell us). Maybe the dying star puffed out most of its hydrogen before going supergiant, such that it only got to, oh, 0.5 AU radius. Maybe the central hole wasn't from one star but from two very heavy stars which merged - a neutron-star devouring a companion whose mass was just enough to erect an event-horizon, but quietly. Although there too I'd have to ask how the G star got here in a circular orbit.

The neutron-star scenario opens a hypothesis: secondary formation. The black hole after implosion left behind it a lot of gas. Neutron-stars (like classic black holes) always form from young stars so still own primordial plasma. This plasma might, post-implosion, even contain the ripped-up remnants of the companion. The debris, then, whirled around the black hole in an accretion-disc perhaps pushed to 1 AU by the gravity-waves and gamma-rays of said implosion. As normal systems form planets like Jupiter, this system - so much more massive - formed a star like our Sun. Computer-modeling might tell us if this is possible.

Rocket Lab takes a bath

I didn't pay attention to Rocket Lab's "Electron" launch but it looks like the helicopter-catch is still a wash - literally. They didn't even bother sending the 'copter after the falling stage.

It may be that the carbon-fiber chassis of this light rocket is protecting the engine sufficiently, from seawater, that they don't, strictly speaking, need to catch it.

Obadiah's synoptic-problem

Among the Biblical texts given credence by the recent magnetic discoveries in ruined Israeli[te] cities, is Obadiah. This "servitor of YHw" is among the Twelve Minor Prophets.

In Greek form, Obadiah was likely always in that collection (pdf). The Nahal Hever fragments witness a collection of Minor Prophets in Greek, although we're unsure if Rahlfs 943 was truly a "8HevXIIgr" since our book isn't in it. Also the overall "Septuagint" collection was translated by one person (or by a very tight committee). Questions remain about the author's familiarity with the Greek Jeremiah.

Obadiah owns thematic parallels with the full text of Psalm 137 (136 in Greek) inasmuch as both encapsulate an antiEdomite polemic. It owns text parallels with Jeremiah 49 (in MT edition; 'tis 29 in LXX) such that it's a Synoptic Problem. Most assume that Obadiah used Jeremiah.

Obadiah does have an agenda and has likely inverted a text, here Semitic treaty boilerplate. Psalm 137's parallels with Obadiah can be explained as sharing this subversion of the treaty topos, in the psalm's case Aramaic. Both would then react to a perceived betrayal of Judah from Edom. I find this plausible.

Whether we assume that Obadiah has likewise riffed on the future Jeremiah 49 is another matter. Some (mostly evangelical) argue for Joel's use of Obadiah which would put Obadiah's polemic 801 BC, long before Jeremiah. Wikipedia prefers Ehud Ben Zvi's 1996 argument that as Obadiah imposes his views upon the shared text... so does Jeremiah. Behind each is, then, a "Q".

Misusing scripture

Zwinglius a few weeks ago poasted this announcement of a bad book. Yesterday he posted a "carnival" aggregation of blogposts - I hadn't seen one of those since the early 2000s when the blogosphere was still cool. In it he linked his own October post, as a link to that book.

The book's Jeopardy-style title is Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible?. I disclose: I, too, bear little love for biblical-inerrantists or for HillFaith or for the rest of them. These days however I see a focus on these hucksters and their dupes as a means to tie them with popular Christianity as a whole, in service of a generally antiChristian agenda.

As example Tony Keddie proposes "Second-Amendment Exegesis of Luke 22:35–53: How Conservative Evangelical Bible Scholars Protect Christian Gun Culture". It's bad when Christians seek means of self-defence, see. Christians aren't supposed to notice when the world despises them. As for guns not owned by Christians - like those owned by Sikhs (as a literal divine commandment) - not Keddie's department.

I'd argue, with Hobbes and - incidentally - with Darwin, that some laws of Nature exist whether or not a Divinity commands them. One law is: the unarmed man is the slave of his armed companions. Some Christians do misread Luke 22 (disclosure: I don't care for Luke). But we can see an antislavery subtext throughout early Exodus, and a skepticism against kings in Judges and 1 Samuel; the Israelites are happiest when free, and in that time and place this meant they were armed, with slings and arrows as well as with swords. Christians today, and not just the conservative-evangelical bogeymen, dispute that our time and place be so different from theirs.

I'm leaving aside Susanne Scholz' wordsalad "Essentializing “Woman”: Three Neoliberal Strategies in the Christian Right’s Interpretations on Women in the Bible"; I'll just assume it's as bad as its title.

Overall the book looks like it's set up some massive strawmen. Other contributors might have something useful to say, noting in particular William Dever; but they are lending their weight to an overall flawed product. Consider if Russell Gmirkin contributed to a book about Jewish self-presentation in literature... edited by Kevin MacDonald and published by The Occidental Observer.

Back to Zwinglius, I find some irony in his complaint about misuse of Scripture where he cites this: Andrew M. Mbuvi destabilises dominant white Euro-American approaches to biblical studies, positing the need for biblical interpretation that is anti-colonial and anti-racist. "Anti-racist" tends to mean anti-white and anti-European; and in any case it will be difficult to extricate the Bible from its context, which is Levantine with some spillover across the Mediterranean into Hellas and Italia. BACKTRACK AUGUST 2023: Zwinglius' actual-ego points out that, indeed, progressives do it too. I vaguely recall his blog has rapped some lefthand knuckles before 1 November 2022; but on this day, Mbuvi presented him with the duty, which duty he failed.

Barnes and Noble, our free-speech publisher*

*... for now. But until then:

Contra Robert Spencer, who discloses himself a personal friend of Ibn Warraq, I've had mixed reviews of Ibn Warraq's work over the decades. As of, oh, 2020 I'm more nuanced about Islam than I once was. I do however think that Ibn Warraq is interesting and that his works deserve a hearing, especially his more-mature works, of which The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology appears to be one.

I'll note that Barnes and Noble still stock this book. I hear they've been based lately what with stocking Sowell and Limbaugh as "Heroes of Liberty". That hedge-fund might actually have done some good.

But... for how long? When Amazon block a book, other sellers consider it Extreme. Because when you own 70% of the market, you become the Moderates by sheer bodyweight.

Falcon Heavy

The big bird has flown. All the way to GEO.

I missed the launch stream but I did review the highlight-reel maybe thirty minutes late. If you were checking out the runup to this launch, you know it was ambitious for the parameters. Direct-to-GEO is a major win for SpaceX especially given Merlin's kerosene/oxygen. If our government has any brain at all, SpaceX should be good for the SuperHeavy / Starship test later this month or next month.

Note there is still no successful retrieval of the central Falcon Heavy rocket. (The side-boosters are back in South Padre, chilling with margaritas.) It happens this mission was government-sponsored, so the client agreed to expend that core and to accept the charges for its loss. Personally I'd be interested in a core retrieval just so more heavy-lifting can be economical - read, privately-funded.