The Talmud in Late-Antiquity

It wouldn't be a Talmud without mutual arguments, so - Noah Benjamin Bickart versus Monika Amsler, on the Bavli / Iraqi compilation. Bickart seems less prickly than (say) Jacob Neusner.

Current Talmud scholarly-consensus is that Bavli is mostly Sasanian, with some sprinkles of post-Islam; much like that Iliad consensus that this epic-poem is mostly Archaic, with a few chapters spliced in later ?adulterated, like book 10.

Bickart points out that if the Iraqi Jews had the Talmud, they weren't using it. Hey, much like Yonatan Adler is arguing for the Torah itself, under the Ptolemies! Although, I'd add to Bickart (I haven't read Amsler): the Talmudists were drawing from the same interpretive-tradition and popular-culture, as we see in Iraqi divination-bowls and ostraca.

Some of the pericopae are constructed according to Aristotelian norms, even Cicero. I didn't know they had Cicero or Seneca or other Latins in the 'Iraq. It is well known that the Syriac world had Aristotle in Edessene Syriac, which along with its Hatrene predecessor was intelligible to Iraqi Jews. Admittedly our copies come from Qenneshre which was the region around Antioch, the westernmost reach of Syriac and Miaphysite at that. But the political limes had been erased by then if not the religious ones.

These Jews also had medical texts. The Qinnashrin Christians had Galen in translation; Masarjawayh was an Iraqi Jew who had Ahrun's Pandects, from Egypt. Amsler dares reconstruct a medical text from its excerpts in Talmud.

This blog has long argued for crisis, as motive, for the Jewish sages to compile what "Judaism" even meant anymore. Much like those Zoroastrian texts, among the Aryans. It's just that we've pinned it on the AD 530s-40s solar blackout. Amsler would have me pull back the clock by a century, before the middle of the fifth century. This Talmud was done after the Jerusalem Talmud; Amsler says, in response.

That means: before Yazdegird II. A writing around the time of Yazdegird I would put it alongside the Christian synod of 410 which brought the Church of the East in full communion with the Roman Church (until Theodosius II and Pulcheria ruined everything). So the "crisis" would simply be competition.

If fifthcentury maybe that's exactly why Iraqi Jews didn't at first accept it. They deemed it a me-too and an exercise in scribal hometown-spirit. A work of vanity, in effect.

Of interest (to me) is the Talmud's arrangement of text by keyword. The same phenomenon Neil Robinson has noted in the Quran, sura-internally and across suwar throughout the "'Uthmanic" text. Thus the McDowell-ish arguments to which Raymond Farrin has subjected us, and to a less-annoying extent Michel Cuypers. I've argued keywording holds for Ibn Mas'ûd and Ubay as well, also the Sana' 1; which suffices to refute such apologetics, but remains a valid observation and technique, as Robinson had intended in the first place. Were the Jerusalem Talmudists doing the same?

BACKDATE 3/14

A Scar is made (not born)

Patric Gagne (should be "Patrice" en française, non?) writes about being a snake from toddler-age. This seems like opposite of the Gamma. The Gamma isn't born; he's spoiled.

And it's hard to unspoil something. It's likely impossible to alter a sociopath; her settings are Factory. By contrast the Gamma isn't a sociopath. The Gamma wants approval, in all senses of "want".

But the Gamma has a hard time getting that by merit. It isn't (anymore) natural for the Gamma to behave as people respect. And the Gamma likely has had a history of failing-at-it, thus ensuring he's been cold-shouldered early-on. How's he fixing this? If he's been ousted from the Cool People Table, with the Alpha and his Bravo betae (bayût?), naïfs imagine he could try another table; but now all the other tables see him as an upstart loser. Any attempt to rise above is getting snapped back, even by those he thought might be his friends.

So Can't Buy Me Love, if a real story, would frontload Dempsey's fall to the first day of school; like The Karate Kid did. The former film works mainly as parable cautionary for the Bravo-curious Delta (until the ending which is copout and Cope). Most Deltas don't dare that journey to Bravo, because they instinctively know to hit up the lower-status table first. And Omegas... well, whatever.

The Gamma has a ready solution against resigning himself to Omega status or trying harder with the Deltas: he can retreat into fantasy. He's Alpha in his own mind. He's Aragorn, just living out his Sigma phase. He interprets sympathy, or at least indifference, as friendship - that's as close as he gets. He convinces... himself. Everyone else knows (miles) better.

As to whether it's easier to fix the sociopath or the Gamma: who knows. They have to do it themselves. They have to desire it. The sociopath can at least fake caring for others, although not always longterm. The Gamma has to fight the urge to retreat or to overstep, every single day.

BACKDATE 3/14: not my bravest slot of poastage, mayhap.

Mary as living relic

As I was looking into Daniel for the AD 740s, I peeked over at what the Romans were up to. The first thing they were up to, was crowning a son of Leo as "Constantine V". This man remembered his forebear Constantine III, also from an unpopular family, who got unalived when he stayed home. So the younger Constantine, figuring himself healthy-enough, marched out on campaign.

This guy got coup'ed anyway ("damned if you do..."). So Constantine had to embark upon a civil war to get his throne back. Which gave the Arabs their opportunity to raid Anatolia as usual.

We own several sources for this; which reach back to sources we don't own, but can surmise. There's that "Syriac Common Source" but also Nicephorus, implying a Greek iconodoule history (now lost to us) up to AD 775.

These sources tell that Constantine, home again, enacted upon an iconoclastic purge. Meanwhile he'd called the blessed Mother an "empty purse", so they say. How does the policy align with this comment?

I hold Mary's status more to that of relics, than of icons. But "Artifacts and Relics", per AD&D, are similar inasmuch as to Christ (and God) alone is the glory. Icons are physical matter. Mary, after birthing Jesus, became physical matter. Not much point in venerating either, say some. Especially since there aren't any Marian relics on account of Dormition.

Constantine grew up aware of iconodoules who disliked that his father Leo had disassembled the Pantocrator from the main gate, along with his other disregard of "graven images". Said iconodoules could also look across the border to Yazid II, with horror. Saecular iconoclasm incidentally provides a ready excuse for a government to raid churches, for metals (and maybe artwork).

I would be unsurprised if the plotters in the capital had reached out to the old guard of churchmen, promising to reverse Leo's policies. The antijubilee! The plotters of course would announce all this as "veneration of our blessed saints" and other such tommyrot. Which would go up to Mary herself.

We're not here to side with one side or th'other. The whole of Constantinople is gone now. I confess a bias toward not starting chaos at home whilst a hostile caliphate sits next door (there'd come time for that when the caliphate is having its own little problems, in a few years...). And I generally agree with jubilee whatever motives are offered. The Blessed Virgin, I expect, can take care of herself.

Upload #210: signs of the times

Over the last fortnight-and-change, which seems longer than it was because February ends earlier than most, I was pondering chronology. So: new project, "Daniel's Main Points". Overall I don't have much to add to the (fine) essay by the authorial duo, except speculations; but I figure the speculations don't hurt, here.

To find chronological references relevant for that, I dove back into "The Rebel's Wind". I wasn't happy with the number of uploads I'd done on that, up to three years ago; so I hadn't bothered uploading more, since. All that put me in hock for changes made locally. So that's uploaded now.

"The Camel of Sacrifice" now has its second edition - although, here, I'm glad I waited those four years. Brought here, are Athanasius of Balad and James of Edessa; and Athanasius' Syriac correlation with Tur-'Abdin 819. I haven't yet read Animal Sacrifice and the Origins of Islam, at its $110 pricetag.

"The Suras of the Women", an older project from 2012, I just realised hadn't ever taken into account the 2015 publication of the Disputation of the Monk. Oops! That definitely needed in there.

And there's another new project, to balance out the project I summarily deleted last time: "Without Peer". Just the usual (boring) collection of sources of sura, here sura 30.

Madrassa.

HDMI considered harmful

I'm still on this elderly laptop with outdated USB support. So I am stuck with HDMI for a bigscreen (and I only get one). If I were to spring for a new machine, it is looking like I should do without HDMI entirely. HDMI charge royalties, are not open-source, and now the HDMI Forum is saying open-source have to pay up.

Linux... can't. That's not how any of this works. So AMD, who do Linux (of their own) aren't supporting it. Because HDMI Forum won't let them.

USB to its credit is using DisplayPort which actually is open source.

I worry a bit that I can't override this thing with a Linux distro but, maybe I don't have to. If we get to the point I'm buying a new box then I'll just be toting the old one on-the-road anyway.

UPDATE 4/5: Oh, and HDMI is an "ad" injection vector. I assume they can send HTML and script so - perfect for hackers' wateringhole attacks.

Notes on star and system formation

The astro news as came out the last few days concerned system-formation. Neural-networks are helping this along, since Google hasn't yet ordered the researchers to hire Sweet Baby Inc.

First up, we learn that in high-energy environments, like where Sagittarius A* and others are gathering matter, stars don't even form. This extends to large planets where O/B stars are forming like at Disc d203-506; ultraviolet is driving that process. Of course these yeet out the helium and hydrogen first. As to smaller bodies weighted to the C and S and iron - I dunno. But honestly, these rocks won't have long even to coalesce into planets before the whole thing implodes again. Overradiation might, further, explain certain of the youngest (visible) galaxies; the ones which quit creating new stars after a few hundred My. No gas, no stars!

For the rest of us, T Chamaeleonis has a solar wind. T Cha is ∼70° inclination to us; visible matter - dirt - is under 1 AU and at ∼20-50 AU. The inner matter is gathering into rock and/or spiraling into the star, but is not our direct question here.

The question here is how the gas and ice leaves an inner solar-system (defined here under 20 AU), where not locked into iceballs like Ceres or giants like Saturn. They are looking at neon and argon, which as noble-gas can't bind into ices; I expect these as a fair proxy for helium, before them. T Cha is ionising so expelling the free neon and argon out of the system; these gasses won't be seen from here for much longer. The force of the wind over time and the concentration of volatiles over time are hereby constrained, excellent data for modellers elsewhere.

And here is a survey of 86 young stars - from Taurus and from that aforementioned Chamaeleon I, both around 600 ly, and Orion at 1600 ly. The survey points to binary stars not having much material, here because they're double-teaming. I don't blame high-ultraviolet; we're looking at dust (infrared), not gas (spectral-lines). Respectable planets can form within binaries but maybe not so much where the stars be under 200 AU apart.

A plea to Fundamentalist Christians

Danusha Goska offers a sprawling post: in part a eulogy for late folklorist Alan Dundes, in part a summary of Quranic scholarship as typical by some first-time reader of 1990s-era Ibn Warraq (hey, I used to be one of those too... in 1999). I here request of Goska only the following: if you are taking Joslin McDowell's tack on the two volumes of Luke, then you should not opine upon the Quran. At all. Please. (h/t Sefton, who should know better.)

Goska quotes Merrill Unger on Luke's accuracy in the second volume; and then links... someone else. She didn't tell us so I must: it's Kyle Campbell... among the McDowell plagiarists. I suspect someone in Goska's editorial chain knows that McDowell is a disaster and that's why her post's giving him the Elias treatment. I pin more of this on FrontPage, which failed her as editors but, well... FrontPage. Was it they who suggested, to her, laundering McDowell through Campbell?

As to Luke's "incredible accuracy", indeed I give Luke little credence - as do more-or-less serious scholars like Richard Carrier or philosophers like James Still. The more serious scholars know that his Acts is no guide to Paul's thought - like any good historical-fiction author, Luke takes pains on the saecular background to get that correct and... different pains, on the ecclesiastic side.

Goska for bête-noire, instead, has fixed upon Bart Ehrman. I concede to McDowell's party: Ehrman sometimes fails, and where he fails sometimes the Dispensational side has the better argument, like on Rapture. But if anything Ehrman is experiencing more trouble on his Left flank, such as by Carrier and by the Morton Smith mystics.

As for Israel Finkelstein versus Kenneth Kitchen, back in the Old Testament: Finkelstein's side has been winning this one. If Goska was keeping up, she'd know to read Yonatan Adler (hey, when's Yom Kippur first noted?). If Kitchen hasn't backtracked yet it's because he is committed to the bit. Sadly. Tragically.

I worry about Goska's tendency to take names, often obsolete and/or controversial names. There exist Creationists who can't into biology so complain about "Darwinism", personalising a dispute. A few years ago I had to read an enormous tome purporting to explicate the history of Biblical text-criticism which was structured as a series of biographies about heretics. I suppose committed Communists might complain if you call their sect "Marxist" rather than "the dialectic" or "the material causes of history" or something like that; Objectivists dislike being called Randians. This personalisation is a tactic: not everyone can be right about everything, as witness Ehrman or indeed Marx or Darwin or Rand or even Carrier or McDowell, and we can always point to a (wo)man's mistakes whilst ignoring the overall point. The effect is to tar everything the original person said, thereby to discredit any succeeding argument, even if it came from one of the correct statements.

I rate that tactic as bad. If you suspect a serial liar, prove the pattern: like for Marx, or for McDowell (or for Luke or the final Quran for that matter).

But I'll give Goska more credit. I don't think she's a bad person. Anyway I should be a hypocrite if I proposed here to refute the whole of goskaïsme.

Goska is simply... credulous, as is her right as a human. She's certainly got motive; she owns a soul and she hopes to protect it (which I suspect otherwise for the McDowells). But, inasmuch Goska remains a naïf on the texts of religion A, wilful or not: Goska has little standing to critique the texts of religions B, C... or of Islam. I think I may be permitted to narrow my focus, thus.

Maybe Goska could do morals or philosophy. Gell-Mann Amnesia has existed since Socrates was pointing it out; but Socrates himself was wrong on occasion, such as on the Creation dispute.