A Midrash on את

I presented my dissertation lecture yesterday afternoon (in lieu of a formal defense we present a public lecture and take questions), and I thought it appropriate to open with a midrash on את. The human mind is endlessly searching for patterns and meaning. Randomness is anathema. Potato chips look like Abraham Lincoln. The virgin Mary appears on grilled cheese. And so, both grammarians and interpreters have often felt that the use of את to mark an object phrase must have some meaning. The following is a midrash on את which I came across somewhat by random (HT: Davar Akher). 

Sefer HaBahir 1:32

דרש ר’ ישמעאל לר”ע מ”ד את השמים ואת הארץ אלמלא לא נאמר את היינו אומרים שמים וארץ אלהות הן א”ל העבודה נגעת אבל לא בררת כן דברת אבל את לרבות חמה ולבנה כוכבים ומזלות ואת לרבות אילנות ודשאים וגן עדן

Rabbi Ishmael expounded to Rabbi Akiva, “Why does it say את השמים ואת הארץ? Had it not said את, they would think that השמים and הארץ were gods!”

He replied, “Good Lord! You have laboured, but you have not sifted, and so you have spoken; however, את includes sun and moon, stars and constellations; את includes trees and vegetation and the Garden of Eden.”

The midrash concerns the use of את for the phrase את השמים ואת הארץ in Genesis 1:1. Rabbi Ishmael gives a reasonable grammatical argument: had השמים and הארץ not been overtly marked as direct objects, it would have been grammatically possible to read the phrase in apposition to אלהים as the subject. This is a common explanation for את; when it is used it must be necessary to distinguish subject from object. Its grammatical function is indeed to indicate the object, but when one considers the distribution of את broadly, this is not a likely explanation for the variation in its use. There are numerous examples where את is used when ambiguity between subject and object is low or where it is absent in cases where ambiguity may be high. 

Rabbi Akiva scolds Rabbi Ishmael for his interpretation, but not on grammatical grounds. Akiva’s midrash (see also Baba Qama 41b) plays on the fact that the object preposition את is a homonym of the comitative preposition את ‘with’. The idea is that wherever an object is marked by את, this also implies that there is something unsaid that should go along ‘with’ it. Here, את is alerting us that את השמים ואת הארץ should be taken as a hendiadys that includes all of the subsequent “structural” creation up to Eden (I assume his omission of birds, fish, animals, and humans was intentional). This is a good midrash, but a midrash nonetheless. 

I have argued in my dissertation that the distribution of את is not random, but I wouldn’t say that its presence is particularly meaningful in the normal sense of the word. Fundamentally, את is a grammatical marker of the direct object, and the variability in its use is largely a by-product of the way object marking systems develop. 

Dead Space

The last couple years have been extremely busy. My dissertation took a bit of a rabbit trail, but I am very pleased with the results of the extra year of research. The dissertation is now complete and has been accepted, so I will formally become Dr. Bekins this June. I have posted a link to the dissertation under the pages sidebar if you are interested.

In the meantime, I have also been participating in the Accordance Syntax database project, teaching 2-3 courses per semester at Wright State University, working up several papers for submission for publication, and doing all my duties as dad and husband. So…. the blog has been the one to suffer. I hope to begin posting periodically again, but don’t keep your fingers crossed. Until then, you can read about all the wonders of ʾet.

CAL seems to be back online

I just noticed that the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, which was offline for approximately six weeks due to a ‘hacker’, is now back on-line.

What exactly would a hacker want with an online Aramaic lexicon? Apparently to save a trip to Half-Price Books:

We apologize for the unavailability of our system during the six weeks between early May and mid-June, 2011. The CAL server was struck by a hacker from an ISP in London, UK precisely on the day that Dr. Kaufman left the country, apparently simply because he or she wanted a complete copy of our online version of Sokoloff’s DJPA and wanted to save the $100 for the second edition and received instead an early draft of the first edition, while totally comprimising the system

What’s the deal?

A few days ago, Chip Hardy (DailyHebrew) linked to an article by NT Wright discussing the KJV and the protestant theological basis behind translation of the Bible into vernaculars along with the issues that arise. In that article, Wright oddly states, “Jesus’ first followers were in any case already almost certainly bilingual. Their mother tongue was Aramaic (a language which developed from the classical Hebrew of the scriptures, a few hundred years earlier)” (emphasis mine).

What?

This was followed yesterday by an article on NPR concerning Karen Stern of Brooklyn College and Jewish Aramaic tomb graffiti (circulated by Jack Sasson circulated via Agade). The article begins as follows:

Aramaic is the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East, the
linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic. (Emphasis Mine)

“Once you understand Aramaic,” says Karen Stern, “you can read
anything. You can read Hebrew, you can read Phoenician. I always call
it the little black dress of Semitic languages.”

Again, I say, “What?”

Apparently, Classical Hebrew developed into Aramaic which then morphed back into Modern Hebrew and Arabic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English-to-Akkadian Dictionary

CDL has published a new English-Akkadian dictionary incorporating the CAD, CDA (Black et al), and the newer Assyrian-English-Assyrian dictionary edited by Parpola and Whiting.

Jim Davila quips “This will be handy for your Akkadian composition course.”

We actually have an old hand prepared English index to the CAD in our library. It was very useful for figuring out what word a scholar was reading in their English translation if there was damage or a break.

Also if you were tired and just worked backwards from the English to prepare your Akkadian text. Not that I ever did that.

More on ברא

Ellen van Wolde and Robert Rezetko have continued the discussion on the meaning of ברא with a new article in JHS. Overall, I remain unimpressed by the arguments for a meaning of ‘to separate’. I was particularly disappointed with the methodology. Writing a definition in all caps and putting it between brackets does not make it a semantic analysis. I have assorted notes on the issue, and if I ever have time I will post some of my thoughts.

The verb in poetry

I have recently had requests for a more manageable version of my series interacting with Niccacci’s attempt to apply a discourse approach to the verb in biblical poetry, titled DABHVS for short. I began to do some updating as I edited the posts into one document, but it became too time consuming. For those interested, here is a .pdf of the series with minimal editing to give it better coherence as a single document.

Some of my views have matured so take it with a grain of salt, but I still think that Niccacci’s approach is misguided. I am teaching a course on biblical poetry this semester and hope to publish some of my lecture notes here, so perhaps I will have a chance to return to the question.

MLK, ANE Scholar

One of my first posts at Balshanut was a link to a paper that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr wrote during seminary on the Bible in its ANE context under James Bennett Pritchard. In honor of MLK day, I went to read the paper again, but noticed that the link had been moved. Here is the new link for those who missed it the first time.

Of course, required reading for MLK day is Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I would recommend browsing some of the other documents housed at the Stanford King Project as well.

Is anything untranslatable?

Duane has hosted the most recent edition of Four Stone Hearth at Abnormal Interests. There were some very interesting posts from the world of Anthropology that I would recommend, but the most interesting to me was the last, Translating the untranslatable, in which Geoffery K. Pullam pokes some fun at the notion that languages have words which are “untranslatable”. Follow the link for the list, here are a few of Pullam’s comments:

“Who on earth ever argued that translatability only exists when source text words are mapped bijectively to target words, each with exactly the same shade of meaning as the corresponding source word? Does French jeune fille fail to translate English girl, and ne … pas fail to translate not? Does English fall down fail to translate French tomber, and look at fail to translate regarder? What kind of madness is this?”

“Your language may use a phrase where mine uses a single word, and vice versa. We can still come to understand each other perfectly.”

Now, his use of the adverb “perfectly” did make me cringe a bit, but you get the point. To the extent that languages code a common human experience, that experience can be mapped from one language to another reasonably well. One commenter made the interesting observation, however, that these “untranslatable” words are often suggested by native speakers (or perhaps researchers with a particular bond to the language) who see them as representative of a unique aspect of their own culture. Therefore, there is a certain degree of pride in the idea that the word is untranslatable.

What are some good candidates for “untranslatable” words from biblical Hebrew or other ANE languages?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rollston post on the invention of the alphabet

There has been some talk recently of the invention of the alphabet spurred by this article from the Atlantic and this exchange between Anson Rainey and Orly Goldwasser. In response to the latter, Chris Rollston has contributed a nice post to the ASOR blog. In sum, Goldwasser argued that the inventors of the alphabet were illiterate Canaanite miners. Rollston makes a strong case, however,  that the inventors of the alphabet were Northwest Semitic speakers who had a relatively high social status within Egyptian officialdom and who had probably learned to write Egyptian from Egyptian scribes.