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cryptotheism · 5 months

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How many languages do you speak?

You are always talking about alchemist that lived all around the world in very differente time periods. And you have mentioned several times that there's a ton of numerology hidden in their texts, counting syllables and letters of certain words and paragraphs. So one would assume you need to read them in the original language it was written, right?

That's a really good question! As with most really good questions, the answer is "kinda, it depends!"

So! Most alchemical texts are written in some form of coded language, but the nature of that code depends on the era and culture the text is being written in. Depending on how its written, modern scholars have a lot of different tools for cracking open alchemical esoterica.

Most ancient Greek/Byzantine texts are written in postclassical Greek. But, they're often written in dense philosophical prose. The reader needs to be familiar with the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and the early Neoplatonists, to make sense of them. Luckily for us, people have been studying postclassical Greek for nearly 2000 years. There are many excellent translations into English.

Late Egyptian alchemists wrote almost entirely in pictograph code. Not as in hieroglyphics, mind you. Egyptian alchemical recipes often made use of custom character sets and symbols that represented alchemical concepts. (One famous example, the Formula of the Crab, uses a complex diagram that looks like a centipede to represent a particular gold compound.) These are damn near impossible to read without expert help.

At the same time, Jewish and Syriac writers of the era could get by on the fact that not everyone could read Hebrew and Syriac lol. The language barrier itself acted as a sort of copyright system for protecting their ideas. Luckily for us, many of these texts were preserved and translated by medieval Arab scholars!

Speaking of Arabic, once you hit the Islamic Golden Age, the amount of alchemical literature increases by a factor of ten. Thing is, the Islamic Polymaths weren't all that interested in obscuring their work. The Islamic Golden Age was all about copying and translating older works, and compiling them into big textbook/dictionaries. They're not intentionally encoded, they're comparatively easy to read once you get a good translation. Thing is, you gotta know your Neoplatonism. Medieval Islamicate scholars love Neoplatonism.

Then we get the reintroduction of alchemy to Europe around the 10th century. What you get is about 400 years of monks painstakingly translating medieval Arabic into Latin. A lot of these texts are very well preserved, and have good translations into English.

Then, around the late 14th century, European entrepreneurial alchemy kicks into high gear, and THIS is where we get all those fancy numerology encoded alchemical texts. Renaissance alchemists loved themselves some puzzles. This would be fine if they were all just writing in Latin, but the printing press meant they could write in any damn language they please. You get a lot of French, German, Dutch, Italian, and antiquated English alchemical texts, and they can be a bitch to read without help.

BUT the introduction of the printing press also gave us something useful: cheap picture books! Late renaissance alchemists loved writing in word games and coded metaphor, but they also loved including esoteric diagrams. And the thing about esoteric diagrams is --if you know your stuff-- you don't need to speak 15th century french to read a picture. Which isn't a replacement for reading the original translation, not even close, but the explicit purpose of these images was to prove to other alchemists that the author knows what they're talking about. So if you can read them, you can get a damn good sense as to what the text is about.

This was fun to write so I'm gonna plug my patreon if you wanna see me write more about alchemy.

#alchemy #patreon

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max1461 · 6 months

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Thinking about this post. "The only way to make a cell is from another cell" is somewhat of a troubling fact to me. I mean, not for any practical reason, just because it underscores the precarity of *gestures broadly*.

It's like, some people talk about trying to de-extinct the mammoth. And people are trying to sequence the genome of the mammoth, I don't know if they've done it yet. But even if they do, one of the problems with the idea of de-extinction is... to grow a baby mammoth, you need another mammoth! Last time I heard people talking about this, I think they were talking about using an elephant as a surrogate mother. But imagine if elephants were extinct too.

The point is that information is often tied to the systems that transmit it; even if you know everything in the mammoth genome, once all the mammoths are gone there's nothing capable of reading and using that information. Like when you can't read the data on a perfectly good floppy disk because your computer doesn't have a floppy drive.

This is related to why language death troubles me so much. Even the most well-documented languages aren't actually that well understood; linguists have produced more pages of work on English syntax than maybe any other specific descriptive topic and yet still the only reliable way to get the answer to any moderately subtle syntactic question is elicit native speaker data. We know almost nothing, we can barely extrapolate at all! And every language is like this, a hugely complex system that we know basically nothing about, and if the chain of native speaker transmission is ever broken it's just gone.

"Language revival", I mean from a totally dead language, is kind of a myth. It's like the "came back different" trope. In Israel they revived Hebrew, but Modern Hebrew is really not the same thing as Biblical Hebrew at all. I mean in a stronger sense even than Modern English isn't Old English. All the subtleties of Biblical Hebrew that a native speaker would have had implicit competence with died without a trace. All they left is a grainy image, the texts. The first generation of Modern Hebrew speakers took the rough grammatical sketch preserved in these texts and imbued it with new subtleties, borrowed from Slavic and Germanic and the speakers' other native languages, or converged at by consensus among that first generation of children. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would be inaccurate to imagine Biblical Hebrew surviving in Modern Hebrew the way Old English survives in Modern English. For instance, you can discover a great deal that you didn't know about Old English by comparing Modern English dialects. There is nothing you can discover about Biblical Hebrew by comparing Modern Hebrew dialects in this way.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. I'm not like, judging Modern Hebrew. I'm just making a point.

Mammoths died recently, so we still have (some of?) their genome. Something that died longer ago, like dinosaurs, we have traces of them in the form of fossils but we could never hope to revive them, the information is just gone. Even if we're not aiming for revival, even if we just want to know stuff about dinosaurs, there's so much that we will never know and can never know.

We imagine information as the kind of thing which sits in an archive, because this is the context most of us encounter information in, I think. Libraries, hard drives. Well obviously hard drives don't last. And most ancient texts only survive because of a scribal tradition, continuous re-writing, not because of actual archival. So I think that imagining archives as the natural habitat of information is sort of wrong; the natural habit of information is in continuous transmission. Information is constantly moving. And it's like one of those sharks, if it ever stops moving it drowns. And if the lines of transmission are broken, the information is gone and can never be retrieved.

Very precarious.

#navel gazing

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a-s-fischer · 10 months

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One of the things I hear a lot from Gentile witches and neo-pagans who want to work with Lilith or claim to work with Lilith, is that she is actually a Mesopotamian goddess, usually either Ishtar/Inanna or Erishkigal, and that it was the Jews, with their horrible patriarchy juice, who slandered her and cast her down, and so the Jews do not deserve to say what happens to her and it isn't antisemitism to work with her, or to completely ignore what the Jews say about what she is in a Jewish context.

Lilith is not Ishtar or Erishkigal. However, there is a Mesopotamian figure that is pretty stinking analogous to Lilith, and is probably her folkloric ancestor, by which I mean the idea of Lilith probably comes from this Mesopotamian figure. In fact, Lilith almost certainly is either a Jewish version of this figure, or, they are both descended from the same Near Eastern and Mediterranean basin folkloric figure. That figure is Lamashtu.

Lamashtu is, much like Lilith, the supernatural embodiment of maternal and infant mortality, a figure of power and terror, who functions as a way to embody and cope with the profound dangers that are pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy without effective medical care. the Mesopotamians never worshiped Lamashtu, but they did seek to appease her, including making symbolic gifts to her, to keep her from visiting them, and killing them or their children.

An interesting side note is that there is also a Mesopotamian figure who specifically opposes Lamashtu and functions as the protector of pregnant women and infants, and that figure is Pazuzu, a wind spirit, who ruled over other wind spirits, including ones called the Iilu in the Akkadian language. Akkadian is a Semitic language, related to Hebrew, and this word is probably a cognate of Lilith, but the Iilu probably have no relationship to the figure of Lilith except her name. You might know Pazuzu as the demon featured in the movie, The Exorcist, and ironic fate for a mythological protector of women and children.

Anyway, if you'll remember, I implied above that the Lamashtu/Lilith figure, was present in various guises throughout the Mediterranean basin and the Near East, so there are of course figures analogous to both of them throughout the region, such as Lamia of Greece, and the Strix of Rome.

So if you really really want to work with a figure who functions as the supernatural embodiment of maternal and infant mortality, Lamashtu, Lamia, or the strix would all be excellent options that don't come from an extant closed religious practice. All the baby killing, none of the antisemitism and cultural appropriation.

While all three figures are almost certainly descended from the same folkloric root, they're all subtly different, because as stories and characters travel, they change. as such, they all have particular good points about them as figures of veneration.

Lanashtu is the OG bad bitch, who commanded fear, respect, and offerings, like a mythological mafiosa, collecting protection money.

Lamia has attached to her the story that she was one of Zeus's dubiously willing lovers, who was screwed over first by Zeus, the embodiment of patriarchical rule, then by a jealous Hera, the embodiment of patriarchal marriage, so if what attracted you to Lilith was the story from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, about a victim of the patriarchy getting her own back through violent vengeance, Lamia might be the girl for you. With her however, the emphasis is less on her murder of children, then on her seducing and eating men, though she does also get strongly associated with killing children, especially boys.

And the strix is particularly interesting, because the word comes down to us in the modern Italian word for witch, striga. Indeed, one of the theories as to where the witch figure came from in Early Medieval, and then Early Modern Christianity, was as the strix demon made human. This might explain the close association between Early Modern Witchcraft and infant mortality, including Italian stories of witches causing infants to die seemingly natural deaths, so that they could dig them up and eat them after their funerals, something that ties these human supposed witches very closely to demonic folkloric antecedents. If you are looking for a figure of unfairly maligned female power, the strix and her close association with later human witches, might be the one for you.

All three of these figures, much like Lilith herself, are reflections, both of the power women wielded even within patriarchal societies, over the process of pregnancy, birth, and childrearing, and also the powers of death and loss that everyone was subject to. There is something powerful, transgressive, and even healthy in acknowledging the fears and dangers presented by this death and loss,and for some people, that might take the form in venerating the underlying powers. If this is something that would be spiritually meaning for you, and you wish to work with such a figure, and you are not Jewish, please respect the fact that Lilith is part of a closed religious practice, and remember that Lilith has sisters, in other parts of the Mediterranean basin and the Near East, who are not from extant closed cultures, and who might serve your needs better anyway.

#a s fischer original #Lilith #jewish #jumblr #witchcraft

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fdelopera · 6 months

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Exposing an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory from TikTok

If I see one more Jew-hating idiot with TikTok brainrot saying shit like, "the Palestinians are descended from the ancient Philistines from the Bible lolol"...

You Jew-haters are exhaustingly stupid. And in this post, I'm going to show you why.

As I said in my post yesterday, there are some really bad actors (both in the conspiracy sense, and in the literal "drama" sense) on TikTok who are trying to erase Jewish history by spreading conspiracy theories that somehow Philistines and Palestinians are "the same".

These idiots are doing this so they can claim that "Jesus was a Palestinian/Philistine."

It gives me a headache even to write something as stupid as that.

No, ya dumb-dumbs. Jesus was not a Philistine. Jesus was a Judaean Jew. He was from Bethlehem. In Judaea.

You know, Judaea. The place where the Jews are from.

It is actually really offensive to a lot of Christians to claim that "Jesus was a Philistine" like this. If you've never read the Bible (and I'm guessing none of these TikTokers have), calling someone a "Philistine" is an insult. In common use, it means an uncultured or crass person.

In Hebrew, the word for Philistine is "Peleshet (Plishtim, plural)". It is related to the Hebrew word, "Polesh". Polesh in Hebrew means "invader".

So by calling Jesus a Philistine, you're calling him an uncultured invader.

And I am here, as a Jew, telling you to stop insulting Jesus like this!

Now, saying "Jesus was the same as modern day Palestinians" is also unhistorical.

The region was called Judaea when Jesus was alive. So he was a Judaean Jew.

It would be just as unhistorical to say, "Jesus was a modern-day Israeli".

So, why are antisemites spouting this bullshit?

Unfortunately, these Jew-haters think they're "protecting" the Arab Palestinians by spreading conspiracy theories and lies about Jewish history.

They think they're making a "case" for Arab Palestinian indigeneity in Judea by telling these lies.

Because Arabs aren't indigenous to Judea.

And let me tell you, Tumblrinies who went to the Tumblr school of world history are even trying to rewrite Arab history! Some of them have even tried to tell me, "but Canaanites were Arabs lolol!"

Do you want me to show you a map?? No, dumb-dumbs. Canaanites were NOT Arabs. Canaanites are the ancestors of the Jewish People. Not the ancestors of Arabs.

Arabs come from the Arabian Peninsula.

OMG do you guys not even study geography anymore??

These Jew-hating idiots are literally willing to try to rewrite the history of the Arabian Peninsula just so they can fuck with Jewish people. You antisemites are absolutely unhinged!!

Okay, deep breath.

Here's the other thing. Our educational system is broken. And people don't study history (clearly).

Because if they did study history, they would realize that attaching Jesus to the Philistines doesn't confer ANY indigeneity to the Palestinian people.

(G-d, you conspiracy theory idiots are so dumb!!)

Because, you see, the Philistines were GREEK!!

They weren't indigenous to the Levant AT ALL!!

So in claiming that the Palestinians are the "same as" the Philistines, you have actually WEAKENED the case for Palestinian indigeneity!

And none of this matters!

YES, the Jewish people ARE indigenous to Judea.

And NO the Palestinian Arabs are NOT.

BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER.

IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT ARABS ARE NOT INDIGENOUS TO JUDEA.

BECAUSE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE DESERVE HUMAN RIGHTS AND SELF-DETERMINATION NO MATTER WHAT!!!

Do you see what spreading conspiracy theories and lies about Jewish history does? All it does is make you look like FOOLS, and it HURTS the Palestinian people!!!

And YES, these conspiracy theories mainly hurt Jews. But I know y'all don't give a single SHIT about Jews. You've proven to us just how antisemitic you are.

So PLEASE for the LOVE OF G-D, STOP spreading these fucking LIES, BECAUSE THEY HURT PALESTINIANS TOO!!

Okay. Deep breath. Some history.

The Philistines were ancient Bronze Age Mycenaeans, aka they were Greeks. The Torah is consistent with this. It records them as being from Crete, which during the Late Bronze Age was under Mycenaean control. They also had some genetic admixture from Southern Italy. We know this both from DNA evidence from their skeletons, and also from their pottery, which looks similar to Mycenaean Bronze Age pottery.

And regardless, Israel and Jerusalem are both in the archeological record, and in Egyptian records, LONG BEFORE the Greek Philistine people appeared in Egyptian records. The ancestors of the Jewish people were there long before the Philistines arrived.

And you would know all this if you STUDY JEWISH HISTORY! Here's my Jewish history masterpost. I recommend that everyone read it.

The Philistines were invaders in Canaan, and they clashed often with the native Canaanites, which are the people that Jewish people are descended from. Jews ARE Canaanites. Read my post here on Jewish origins.

The cultural memory of these clashes is recorded in the story of David and Goliath in the Bible. The Israelite David felled the much larger Philistine Goliath with a slingshot, and then chopped off Goliath's head with his own iron sword.

The Greek Philistines were a small people group living in Judea. The last of the Philistines in Judea were slaughtered in 604 BCE by the army of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II when he besieged Jerusalem. This is the same siege that resulted in the Babylonian Exile of the Jewish people. Nebuchadnezzar dragged many of the Judeans (the Jewish population) as captives to Babylon (modern day Iraq). Then in 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Jewish Temple and dragged many more of the Jews into captivity in Babylon.

In 539 BCE, the Persian King Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians in battle, and in 538 BCE, the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judea. The Jews came back to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple on the site where the First Temple had stood, which they completed in 515 BCE. But when the Jews returned, they found that the Greek Philistine community had been decimated by the Babylonians.

So, where did the Philistines come from?

As I stated above, the name "Philistine" is a Greek version of the Hebrew word Peleshet, and the Peleshet were likely the same as the Mycenaean Greek Peleset tribe known to Egypt. The Greek Peleset tribe were part of a people group that are today called the "Sea Peoples."

At the end of the Bronze Age (aka the Late Bronze Age Collapse), the known world was going through a period of terrible drought, famine, and earthquakes. Various people groups from areas that are now part of Italy and Greece, including the Greek Peleset tribe, formed a rough confederation and went around to various cities, sacking and plundering the cities for resources. In 1175 BCE, the Sea Peoples invaded Egypt, and King Ramesses III defeated them in battle. He commemorated their defeat on a wall of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu.

So why is Palestine called Palestine, a name that does derive from the name Philistine?

To find out, you have to fast forward from around 604 BCE (when the Babylonians wiped out the last of the Greek Philistine people) to around 135 CE to get to the next time that the name of the "Philistines" becomes important.

That's a span of around 740 YEARS!

At that point, the Second Temple in Jerusalem had already been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. The Romans were doing ethnic cleansing on the Jews in Judaea, after the Jews tried to get Jerusalem back from Roman control in the Bar Kochba revolt (132 - 135 CE).

After the Roman Empire defeated the Jews in Judaea and squashed the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 CE, the Romans RENAMED the region Syria-Palaestina. It was a vain attempt to remove the Jewish presence in the region. The Romans literally tried to wipe the Jews "off the map."

Guess what, motherfuckers! It didn't work. Jews came back to the region not long after.

The Romans named the region after the GREEK Peleshet/Philistines (who, again, by then were LONG GONE).

So the name "Syria-Palaestina" is basically the Romans trying to erase Jewish identity. Which again, DIDN'T WORK.

WE JEWS ARE STILL HERE.

So tl;dr "Palestine" is NOT the same as the Greek Philistines/Peleshet.

The Romans just went through the Hebrew Bible and looked for a name they could call the region that would be painful to the Jewish people. So they named the region after one of the Jewish people's Biblical rivals.

Philistia was also a name that was in use in the Greek world because, again, the Philistines were ancient Greeks.

But there's no actual connection between the region called "Syria-Palaestina" and the Greek people group called the Philistines.

This is why (let's say it all together kids) you need to LEARN JEWISH HISTORY!

And here's the worst part of this conspiracy theory.

Again, I know why Jew-haters tell this lie. And by now, so do you.

Jew-haters say this shit in a completely misguided attempt to "protect" the Palestinian people.

But, let's say it all together, the Palestinian people don't need to be backed by LIES in order to defend their human rights and their right to self-determination!

The Palestinian people DESERVE PROTECTION. THEY DESERVE TO HAVE FULL HUMAN RIGHTS.

THIS IS NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME, with one "winner" and one "loser."

YOU DON'T NEED TO TELL LIES ABOUT JEWISH HISTORY TO DEFEND THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE.

Jews and Palestinians are not "pawns" for you Jew-haters to use in your pretend game of war. You're acting like you're in some sort of video game fantasy.

JEWS AND PALESTINIANS ARE NOT YOUR PLAYTHINGS!

If you tell lies about Jewish history in a stupid attempt to "defend" the Palestinian people, you're not helping them at all. You're just being an antisemitic bigot steeped in Jew-hatred.

And taken to its extreme, the real conclusion of your antisemitic LIE is actually a really weird, unhinged blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad!!

So if you ACTUALLY want to HELP the Palestinian people, and not just be a Jew-hating bigot, I would recommend that you put your money where your mouth is.

Stop telling easily disprovable LIES about Jewish history, and start donating to organizations and charities that are helping Palestinians. The organizations that I recommend are:

ANERA

Palestine Children's Relief Fund

Doctors Without Borders

Standing Together

#jumblr #judaism #jewish history #jewish #jewblr #stop spreading conspiracy theories and lies about Jews and start donating to help the Palestinian people #NOTE: I report and block antisemites. If any antisemites comment on this post you will be reported and blocked. You have been warned.

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just-late-roman-republic-things · 12 days

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A map of languages of Iron-Age Italy and its surroundings. A small glimpse of how diverse and complex the region already was, before the Romans even got started!

The Italic languages on this map include Latin, Faliscan, South Picene, Umbrian and Oscan. They all descended from the same language, now called Proto-Italic. Venetic and Sicel may also be Italic, but we aren't sure.

Between 200 BCE and 100 CE, Latin gradually replaced all the other Italic languages (and Etruscan). Later, Latin itself would split into the Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, Portuguese, and many more.

Proto-Italic was part of the massive Indo-European language family. If the Italic languages are Latin's siblings, then other branches of this family are Latin's cousins, more distantly related. They are all descended from Proto-Indo-European!

(Map of Eurasian countries where Indo-European languages are spoken. See source page for details on color coding. This does not include the Americas, Australia, or anywhere else colonialism has carried these languages even farther!)

Some of these branches also appear on the ancient Italy map: Greek in the south, the Illyrian language(s) in the east, and Celtic languages including Gaullish and Lepontic in the west. Messapic was probably also an Indo-European language. Of these, only Greek is still spoken today, in its modern form. But Gaullish and Lepontic have living Celtic cousins in the form of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic.

However! Not all languages in Iron-Age Italy were Indo-European. The Proto-Indo-European language was spread across Eurasia by migrating people, who encountered other peoples and languages as they went:

(Possible migration routes of Indo-Europeans galloping all over the bloody place. See source for details of who went where.)

On the Italy map, Etruscan and Raetic are probably descendants of a Tyrhennic language that predates the Indo-European arrival.

We know little about ancient Ligurian, Nuragic, North Picene, and Liburnian, and which families they would fall into. In fact, it's not clear whether Liburnian was a separate language at all.

For many of these languages we have very little evidence, and scholars disagree about how the language should be classified. There is also no hard line between a language and a dialect, and sometimes languages influence each other so much that you can't tell where one begins and another ends. So, put a big old "...hypothetically" on everything pre-Roman in this post.

On thing we are sure of, though, is that the Punic language comes from somewhere else entirely - what's now modern-day Lebanon! Punic is descended from Phoenician in the Afro-Asiatic language family. This makes it a distant relative of Egyptian, Hebrew and Arabic.

I love languages. I think every one of them is beautiful and weird in its own way, and it's fascinating to see how people's historical movements and culture gets imprinted into the words we speak.

#jlrrt essays #linguistics #maps #partially described

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tanadrin · 5 months

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The Gish Gallop was a term coined I think on the 2000s internet for a rhetorical maneuver where to buttress an argument you provide a ton of low-quality evidence; that the evidence is bad means it should be easy to refute, but the very large volume means it will take much longer to explain why it's all wrong than it did to copy-paste a bunch of links, and to a certain kind of very naive onlooker, it looks like the galloper is winning--after all, the one interlocutor has presented a ton of evidence! The second interlocutor has to spend so much time bending over backwards to refute it! Surely the first guy is more knowledgeable and authoritative. You aren't going to look at all that evidence yourself, of course--who has the time?

But listening to Dan McClellan talk about the Gospel of John this morning, it occurs to me that I don't think this is disingenuous. Not entirely. I think this is just the style of argumentation a lot of Christians (of a particular religious flavor) are used to. And I'm not just talking about in non- or para-religious matters like evolution. This is how Christianity understands the Bible.

This week's Data over Dogma is about the theology of John, and why it is non-trinitarian (because the Trinity is a much later doctrine developed as a kind of political compromise, maintained only because it had state backing) and does not actually identify Jesus with God (the theological developments are more complicated here; but suffice it to say it was not at all a given that "authorized bearer of the divine name" and "actually God" were the same being in 1st century Hellenistic Judaism, and indeed the distinction between the two had developed in Jewish thought precisely to avoid the awkwardness of anthropomorphic figures proclaiming themselves God in some of the older sections of the Hebrew Bible).

The funny thing is, there are a ton of passages in John that get trotted out as proof texts that Jesus is God. There are very good reasons in the case of each one to doubt that that is actually the correct reading; but of course, if you don't know anything about Greek, all you have are modern translations produced under the assumption of the dogma of the Trinity--mostly for devotional readers of the Bible who would be outraged if the Trinity wasn't in the New Testament--and you have been raised in a cultural and/or educational milieu where it is simply a default assumption about the way the world works that the Trinity is a timeless concept that has been in the Bible from the beginning, it sure looks like one side is spinning up tendentious arguments based on silly semantics that have nothing to do with the religion you learned as a kid.

But this exegetical approach (really, eisegetical) is common to many topics in traditional Christian theology. There are a ton of passages from the Septuagint that the Gospels warp to be about Jesus, even though, in their original context, this doesn't make any sense; sometimes even they're based on obvious mistranslations, like having Jesus ride into Jerusalem on the back of two animals simultaneously because you don't understand appositives. And you can poke holes in any individual bit of this exegesis, but psychologically having a ton of low-quality evidence for a thing is a pretty effective bulwark against thinking critically about that evidence; for every individual argument you knock down, the person you are arguing against is probably thinking, "yeah, but what about all that other stuff," even if they can't actually name all that other stuff in the moment.

And it's not mendacious! This is the stuff of true belief; this is how you get breathless Christian commentators saying the Bible couldn't possibly be written by human hands, because it so perfectly predicted Jesus even in the Old Testament--and the evidence they point to is, to anyone not steeped in traditional Christian exegesis, and especially to Jews who have their own exegetical traditions, absolutely barmy. Like really pants-on-head crazy stuff. But of course even now it is still being processed, in many parts of the world, through a two thousand year old tradition trying to reconcile it all and to normalize it all, and--to bring it back to discussions of evolution on the internet in the 2000s--I can't help but think of all those people who talk about the experience of thinking evolution was so obviously nonsense, because all they were exposed to was the fundamentalist strawman of it. When they finally sat down and began to read about it on their own, from unbiased sources--often with the intent of criticizing it--they realized how distorted their understanding was, and how limited their supposed outside view.

(If there are general lessons to be wrung from this situation, I think it's simply "beware of echo chambers." Social consensus in a bubble can make bad arguments feel much stronger than they really are, especially if you are not exposed to the actual opposing view. Be on guard against mistaking "quantity of evidence" for "quality of argument," especially if you're not gonna evaluate that evidence yourself. Also all religious traditions are fundamentally eisegetical, because in order to keep holy writ relevant to the community its meaning has to be constantly renegotiated. So, uh. If you want high-quality exegesis, ask an academic, not a theologian.)

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room-surprise · 3 days

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do you know or have thoughts on why the dm characters sometimes reference ‘hell’ (as in ‘what the hell?’) given how the series handles religion? is that an anime thing or translation thing or…???

This is such a great question, and fun to answer, so thank you for writing to me!!! I think there's two things happening at the same time: What does hell really mean in English, and what are the characters actually saying in the original Japanese?

If the characters say hell in the original manga or in any translations, I think it is pretty safe to assume that they aren't referring to the Christian hell specifically, since it doesn't appear to exist in the Dungeon Meshi world. They are instead referring to the generic concept of a hell.

NON-CHRISTIAN HELLS

Hell is a word that can refer to a "bad afterlife" in many different world cultures. Obviously all of these cultures have their own names for these places, but when they are translated into English they are frequently referred to as "Buddhist hell", "Hindu hell", "Nordic hell", etc.

The word "hell" was adopted by Christians to describe something in their religion, but does not originate with them.

The modern English word hell is derived from Old English hel, to refer to a nether world of the dead. The word has cognates in all branches of the Germanic languages, and they all ultimately derive from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic feminine noun xaljō or haljō ('concealed place, the underworld'), and can be traced back even further to Proto-Indo European.

When the Germanic peoples were converted to Christianity, the word "hell" was adopted to refer to the Christian underworld. Before that time, hell was called many different things by the Christians, including "Sheol" (grave, death, pit, underworld), "Gehenna" (valley of wailing), "Hades" or "Tartarus." (The first two are Hebrew words, and the latter two are Ancient Greek. All of these words are attempting to describe similar things, a bad afterlife.) These Germanic cultures (most of Northern, Western and Central Europe) are the primary cultural influence of Dungeon Meshi's Eastern and Northern Continents, where the story takes place, and where most of the characters are from. So the word hel/hell would be native to the region, and logical for the characters to use both as a swear word, and also as a reference to whatever afterlife they might believe in.

WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY SAYING THOUGH?

Dungeon Meshi is, for better or for worse, written in standard, contemporary Japanese, without any particular emphasis or attempt to sound "old fashioned" or like it is "fantasy", so any changes or additions made in translation to make the dialog or narration sound that way are just that: additions and changes. The changes made during translation aren't inherently bad, but the original text is very neutral, and open to interpretation. For example, Yaad calls Laios "tono/dono" in Japanese, which is an honorific that has no direct English equivalent, but is used between two people of similar social status, when one wants to be extra polite to the other. It does not imply nobility, but respect higher than "mister" and lower than "lord." Most English translations have rendered this as "Sir Laios" which isn't literally what Yaad says, but conveys the idea with something that "feels right" for the setting. It may be that in Dungeon Meshi the characters are literally saying the English word "hell/heru" in Japanese (ヘル), the word jigoku (地獄), which is the Japanese word for Buddhist hell, another word for a specific different underworld or afterlife, they are saying a Japanese swear word, or just using casual/impolite language that doesn't have a direct translation into English, and so needs to be localized into something that will make sense in English.

The last one is most likely what is happening, and I can think of a couple of common phrases that would most likely be translated into "What the hell?":

The polite, neutral way to say "What's that?" or "What [should I] do?" is "Nan-darou? (なんだろう?) or "Nani?" (何), which just means "What?"

The more casual, aggressive, masculine way of saying it is "Nani-kore?" (なにこれ？) which doesn't mention hell in any way, but translates to something like "What the hell?" or "What the fuck?" It's more rude because it's casual speech, but doesn't literally use words for hell or fuck in it. It technically means the same thing as "Nan-darou?" or "Nani?" But translating it the same way would be ignoring the context and tone of the words.

Another thing that's often said in Japanese is "Uso!" (うそ！) Which literally means "lie" or "not true", but in conversation it’s often used to say things like "you're lying!", "For real?!", "really?", or "No way!"

Often these exclamations of "Uso!" don't have anything to do with lying or untruths, they are meant to express surprise (this can't be happening!) or a response to someone talking about an outrageous and terrible event they experienced, like saying "No way! I can't believe that happened to you!" It's also sometimes translated as "What the hell…" or "Unbelievable…"

If the translators tried to keep this sort of thing literal, the manga would be full of lines like:

CHILCHUCK, running for his life from a mimic: What's this?! (Nani-kore?!) (He isn't literally asking what the mimic is, he is expressing surprise, so he should shout some curse words in English like hell, fuck, shit, etc.)

MARCILLE, horrified by the chimera: Lie! (Uso!) (She isn't just saying the word "lie" with no context, she is expressing shock, horror and disbelief at what she sees, so she should say something like "No, that can't be..." or "Impossible...")

I am not an expert in Japanese, but I hope that all of this is helpful to you, anon, and anyone else that's interested in this sort of thing!

#dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #talking mushroom #dungeon meshi research

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matan4il · 6 months

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Hello. This is a rather mundane question considering all the things, but I got curious. Does Hebrew have accents? How do they vary in and out of Israel?

I understand if you choose not to reply as this is a difficult time for you. In any case, take care🩷🩷🩷

Hi Nonnie! No, don't worry, all questions that are truly interested in Jewish culture are welcome! ^u^

TBH, something to remember about Hebrew is that it has quite a unique history. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only language that was used on a daily basis as the lived in language of a native population, then "died" as a result of Jews being exiled. As they found themselves in other countries, they had to speak the local language. They didn't abandon Hebrew, but it stopped being the langauge in which they lived their daily lives. Hebrew became the language of prayer, of scripture study, and terms from it bled into the local languages Jews spoke, creating Jewish versions of these languages (Yiddish being the Jewish version of German, Ladino being the Jewish version of Spanish, Yevanik being the Jewish version of Greek, and there are also Jewish versions of Arabic and other languages, too), so Hebrew still had an impact on Jews, and they were still connected to it... but it was no longer a "living" language. It was closer to what Latin is today. A language in which religious ceremonies are conducted, that theologians study, but not a language that anyone conducts their daily life in.

Then, as a part of the project of reclaiming and reviving the Jewish native life in Israel that came to be known as Zionism, people set out to revive our native language, too. There was a realization that it had to be adapted to modern life, give it terms for things that didn't exist 2,000 years ago, so it would be useful for people who wanted to conduct their daily lives in Hebrew again. And that's how the last of the Canaanite languages became the only "dead" language to be revived, and return to be the lived in language of its native people.

I mention this unique history, because modern Hebrew isn't the same as biblical Hebrew (though about 60% of modern Hebrew IS biblical). It means if there were different Hebrew accents during biblical times, we don't know it for sure.

At the same time, the fact that Jews were spread out in the diaspora, and their pronunciation of Hebrew (as a dead language) came to be influenced by the local languages they spoke while in exile. So a Jew who returned to Israel from the diaspora in Germany, a Jew who returned to Israel from the diaspora in Argentina, and a Jew who returned to Israel from the diaspora in Yemen do not have the same accent when speaking Hebrew.

But these are not considered regional accents of Hebrew in the same way that you can find different regional accents of English when traveling across England... If we put aside the accents of Jews returning to Israel, and instead we look at the accents of Jews born in Israel, the ones born into speaking modern Hebrew, there's a myth of a Jerusalem accent. I say myth, because you'll hear all over Israel people swearing, that Jerusalemites pronounce a few words differently. The most common example is the word 'mataim' (which means two hundred), and many Israelis insist Jerusalemites pronounce it ma'ataim, with the first vowel prolonged and emphasized. I have lived in Jerusalem since 2002 and I have never heard it. I think in this sense, regional accents are usually, at least in part, a product of geography. It determines how far apart people live, how much they interact, how much they hear others speaking the same language as they do. The smaller a country, and the easier travel in it is, the fewer accents it's likely to produce. And I think that's the main reason why there aren't really accents in Israel (other than those of people who came to speak Hebrew as a second language), because it's a very small country, and because today, it's pretty easy to travel in it (you can cross it from the most northern point to the most southern one in slightly over 5 hours).

I hope that kind of answers it? Thank you for the kind words, I hope you're well, too! xoxox

#ask #anon ask #israel #hebrew #jewish history #jewish #jew #jews #jumblr #frumblr #native israeli #native history #cultural revival #language revival #native revival

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cryptotheism · 6 months

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do you think the term “lilit” in isaiah 34 was actually intended to be a reference to the mesopotamian she-demon “lilith”? or was this retroactively made up by a cabal of middle ages misogynists?

Huh! Chabad.org seems to translate the Hebrew into English as "Lilith" but most of the Christian translations seem to go for "The night."

I know "misogyny" is a meme answer here, but there are many, many reasons why Christian authors might have chosen to interpret 34:14 as a more general malevolent force, rather than a literal demon. (Or sheyd in this case.)

For instance, many protestant sects criticized Catholic translations of the Bible as being superstitious or overly supernatural. Their translations skewed more towards the grounded, anti-supernatural. I would bet that many Rabbis take a similar non-supernatural reading of the line.

This is a fun thing to think about, but the point is I have no idea. The context of this reference to Lilith could be many things!

I will say though, "cabal of misogynists" is a very modern interpretation, and while I know what you're going for, I would caution against the use of the word "cabal" in these contexts. It can get antisemitic.

All this to say that misogyny COULD have been a factor, but I doubt it was the PRIMARY factor. This is definitely one of those "I would have to ask several priests and rabbis about this" type questions. Fun to think about though!

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piratecaptainscaptainpirates · 25 days

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You know Stede is going to be sooo picky while he and Ed shop around for their ketubah (very pretty Jewish marriage contract that you sign at your wedding, modern ketubot especially are not just compliant with Jewish law but also an awesome way to keep and display some of your wedding vows). Ed's going to be pretty easy to please, there's no shortage of amazing designs out there, and Stede's been so amazing about him wanting to incorporate a lot of Jewish wedding traditions into their wedding that his only firm line is he's going to want one with both Hebrew and English script so Stede can read it, too.

But Stede is going to take this sooo seriously. It's going to be the first thing they hang up in their home after they get married! It's a big deal, EDWARD! His shortlist is twenty-five design options, and that's even before they look into customizing the text on their design, especially now that so many websites offer ketubot written for queer couples in addition to the traditional text. He's always loved Ed's Jewishness but now he's so anxious about getting the Hebrew dates right and everything. And Ed knows this is just a manifestation of Stede's nerves about the wedding in general so his strategy is to just let him work himself out, but eventually Stede starts getting super nitpicky about the Hebrew font choice too

So Ed has to sit him down and be like. "Stede. Babe. Love and light of my life. You cannot read that no matter what font it's in and I promise it looks fine"

#ofmd #our flag means death #stede bonnet number one goyfriend

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creature-wizard · 2 years

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On telling the difference between a thoughtform and a "real" spirit

You may have encountered people claiming that a lot of the spirits people run into are actually thoughtforms. In essence, a thoughtform is supposed to be a kind of artificially-made spirit, kind of like an imaginary friend with actual autonomy and agency. You may have heard people saying that it's very important to know the difference between thoughtforms and real spirits, and you may have been left utterly clueless as to how you might do such a thing. You may have been given some impression that there's some special knowledge or technique that you just weren't told about. I have good and/or bad news for you, depending on how you look at it: there really isn't one. People have all kinds of different methods they use for spiritual discernment, and a lot of the time it comes down to "does the spirit confirm the belief system I already subscribe to?" This one's been around for ages, as shown in 1 John 4:1-3. (Not that Christians have all stuck to it - they've been accusing each other of following false spirits over all kinds of doctrinal differences since the earliest days of Christianity.) New Agers often claim that true messages from Spirit will uplift you and make you feel good, but considering how often those messages affirm dangerous pseudoscience and racist pseudohistory, I think we can see where this method has flaws. Some modern pagans take the approach that spirits should behave in ways that align with old myths. The problem here is, which old myths? Mythology has always been evolving and changing, and varied between regions and social strata. Most of the stuff we have is what wealthy people decided to write down. Another issue is that most of us just don't understand historical perspectives as well as we think we do, so we frequently measure our experiences against a past that never actually was. Sometimes people try to compare their experiences against old magical manuals (EG, Renaissance books for summoning demons) but fail to realize just how much of the information in them is incredibly questionable. Books like these often contain pseudohistory (often by way of people projecting their own beliefs onto the past), mangled to even fake Hebrew, and all kinds of stuff that falls apart under any serious scholarly examination. These books often expect us to believe that Satan was just always in command of all these demonic dukes and princes with their legions of demons beneath them, but the reality is that this is a concept that evolved gradually, and every point of change can easily be connected to what was going on in the time and place it emerged in. Sometimes people compare their experiences against what other people are currently experiencing, but this only tells you what kind of experiences are common. It doesn't actually confirm the origins of an entity. Personally, I don't think "is this a real spirit or a thoughtform?" is a particularly useful question to ask, because there's just no surefire method of vetting a entity's origins. I think it's more useful to take a practical approach: Are you benefiting from this relationship? Are you being treated fairly? Are you minding cultural boundaries? Are you making sure you aren't getting swept into pseudohistory or something? I think as long as the answer to these questions is "yes," the rest really doesn't matter.

#witchcraft #witchblr #thoughtforms #spirit work #entity work #deity work

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prismatic-bell · 2 months

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ok so this is less a zionism question and more one related to judaism as a whole, but: the hebrew calendar is currently in the year 5784, yeah? but of course, that doesn't necessarily mean jewish history is necessarily over five thousand years old- jesus's birth precedes christianity in its current form by at least a couple of centuries.

but here's the thing- one post, whose actual content i don't recall, happened to mention that jewish history is three thousand years old. This is where my question gets specific enough so that you'd be able to answer it in a tumblr ask.

you see, the author of one of my favourite books of all time, Sun Tzu, is rumored to have served under Hu Lu of the Wu kingdom, which would put his life at about 500-400 b.c.e. Did judaism exist during that time? could Sun Tsu have credibly met a rabbi in his lifetime (ignoring the Huge distance between the levant and china, of course)?

(also, i know like. Very Little about the history of that area so sorry if my question is stupid or offensive in some way. was the Temple already built there and stuff? were there already people keeping kosher? that sort of stuff)

So let’s start here: that post is incorrect. It’s closer to 3500 years, and the reason it’s not more than that is because before that we were still Canaanites. (Torah claims we defeated the Canaanites. The truth is more like “we were a small sect of Canaanites who out-babied all the other Canaanites.”)

As for whether Sun Tzu could have met a rabbi…no, but not because we weren’t around then. Sun Tzu’s life falls smack in the middle of the return to Jerusalem; Judea had an extremely small population at this point (the whole country is estimated at no more than 30,000 people, with only a single city—Jerusalem), but it did exist as a Jewish nation under Persian rule. We were very much around. But rabbinic Judaism—which is the modern form of Judaism, and what people usually mean when they say “Judaism”—didn’t exist until after the fall of the Temple in 70CE led to the end of blood sacrifice, and the beginnings of the concept of what we today call “rabbis” didn’t exist until the mid-100s BCE. We do have some men older than that who we call “rabbi” sometimes in modern discussion, but this isn’t any kind of official title—it’s more a mark of respect for their great wisdom and learning (like having an honorary doctorate degree). Far more commonly, these men are called the sages, or were kings.

That isn’t to say there’s no chance of Sun Tzu having met influential figures in Judaism, however. Torah was first being written down right around the time he lived, and it so happens that a lot of Jews were in Babylon at the time. Depending on how far he traveled (if he did), he could absolutely have met some of the Jewish figures codifying Torah and the Mishnah, and since some of our earliest fragments of Torah are written on papyrus rather than parchment, it’s even possible he read portions of it. This is doubly true because Israel-Judea is a linchpin between three separate continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia-by-way-of-the-south (nobody was crossing the Alps in 400BCE). That’s why our particular patch has been so fought over throughout history—for most of history, he who controlled Jerusalem controlled international trade. Could some of our writings have been included in a trade headed east? Absolutely. It wouldn’t even be that weird for a few stray copies to have not survived—keeping in mind how many more forms of media and record we have today than we’ve had throughout history, and how much easier it is to make those records, it is still estimated that over 99% of all media and records made in human history are permanently lost. Yeah, totally, Sun Tzu could’ve been like “are there wise men in these western countries? Bring me their writings” and read them and gone “huh, neat, I’ll have to think about that” and then because his scrolls got eaten by bugs and he didn’t use MLA format nobody would ever know. It’s extremely likely that’s happened with many writings from many places throughout history. And yes—it’s equally possible that a few stray Jews became merchants or great travelers and made their way to China and we don’t know because their publicity agents sucked. That is, unfortunately, the case with most of history. We find half a dozen puzzle pieces from a picture we know must contain at least five thousand pieces and we’ve got to reconstruct what it looked like and hope a seventh piece turns up somewhere. So is it likely Sun Tzu met Jews? Not at all. Is it impossible? Absolutely not.

Now as for what Jews were doing at the time…first, I’m going to say the idea that ancient Jews all did exactly as Torah said to do all the time is a lovely fairy tale. I think those of us who did most of our study of the ancient world in sixth grade during our Egypt phases tend to forget that then as now, people were people everywhere you went, and “the [insert ancient race here] people believed ________” is a convenient oversimplification. There would have been varying degrees of observance just like there are today, and I suspect that’s even more true in the peasant class; you’re not making your kids go hungry so you can sacrifice an expensive calf. But this WAS the period when we started getting a unified “this is what we are supposed to do, here, we wrote it down for you” practice, so here are some examples:

1) this is the period when the Jewish pantheon—yes, that was a thing—got collapsed into a single god, the one we now call the One G-d, Adonai. (Yes, the one with the Y-name, no, I’m not saying it.) This is why in some portions of Torah G-d is referred to as Elohim—El was originally another god. The “im” ending is a plural.

2) the rules of Temple sacrifice were formally codified. This isn’t to say it was a free-for-all before this time, but your options were…squishier, so to speak.

3) THE RULES OF KASHRUUUUUUUUUT this is when all of that stuff got written down and formalized. Before this things like not eating pork would have existed, but they would have been more of a cultural taboo than a religious law. This probably reflects why some parts of kashrut, or kosher, laws are so weird in Torah. Like—it tells you some birds are kosher and some aren’t, but it’s super vague on which is which. That makes a lot more sense if “everybody knew” what was and wasn’t taboo. Sort of like how if you open a cookbook and see a recipe asking for two eggs you automatically look for a chicken, not a goose.

4) a lot of laws just didn’t exist yet, or didn’t exist in their modern form. For example, the law against mixing meat and dairy at this point applied only to mammals, and it referred only to how it was cooked. You couldn’t cook an animal in its own mother’s milk. If the ancient Judeans had had ancient chicken alfredo, that would’ve been fine. The rabbis of Talmud (by that point they were actual rabbis) expanded this law due to a superseding law whose name I can’t remember at the moment but the idea of that law is “don’t do anything that could look like you’re breaking Jewish law even if you’re not.” Since you can’t necessarily tell what a meat is without tasting it, or what kind of milk a dairy product has come from without tasting it, the expanded law says “just don’t eat meat and dairy together at all, it looks bad.” Other laws that exist now but didn’t then include the creation of an eruv and all laws surrounding Chanukkah, which celebrates events that didn’t occur until the 300s.

So TL; dr: yes, in theory Sun Tzu could have met Jews, or at least read our earliest writings; the Temple existed (although at that precise moment in time it was very small and not at all grand); and the laws of Judaism-as-we-know-it were just being formalized after a thousand years of oral tradition, so we were doing some stuff and not other stuff.

#you ask nina answers #Nina blogs Judaism

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fdelopera · 6 months

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ok that's it. tomorrow i'm gonna publish my longer piece on why the modern day Arab Palestinians are NOT the same as the Ancient Greek Philistines (who all died out around 604 BCE when the Babylonians sieged Jerusalem).

Edit: Click here to read the longer version, with links!

but the tl;dr version is this:

we know that the Philistines are Ancient Greeks based on DNA-testing that's been done on their skeletons, and based on their pottery and artifacts, which are Ancient Mycenaean Greek. (the Torah is consistent with this -- it records them as being from Crete, which at that time was under Mycenaean Greek control)

also, being Greeks, the Philistines were not indigenous to the Levant. they were interlopers. the native Israelites fought with the Philistines over and over. the story of David and Goliath is likely a cultural memory of this conflict.

in Hebrew, the Philistines are called Peleshet, and they are likely the same as the Peleset tribe -- one of the tribes of "Sea Peoples" who tried (and failed) to conquer Egypt at the end of the Bronze Age.

and like, duh. obviously the Arab Palestinians and the Greek Philistines are not the same people.

but there are some really bad actors (both in the conspiracy sense, and in the literal "drama" sense) on Tiktok who are trying to erase Jewish history by spreading conspiracy theories that somehow Philistines and Palestinians are "the same". (omg the people who believe this shit are so dumb!!)

they're doing it so they can claim that "Jesus was a Palestinian".

ugh, it gives me a headache even to write something as stupid as that.

no, ya dumb-dumbs. Jesus was a Judaean Jew. he was from Bethlehem. in Judaea.

you know, Judaea. the place where the Jews are from.

deep sigh.

and like, clearly these people have not read a Bible ... ever ... because being associated with the Philistines was NOT a good thing!! they were literally the worst!

the Philistines were Ancient Mycenaean Greeks from Crete.

and the Palestinians are modern day Arabs.

and there is zero connection between them.

the only "connection" is that after the Romans tried to murder all the Jews in the Levant, following the Jewish Bar Kochba revolt in 135 AD, the Romans renamed Judaea, and gave it the name "Syria-Palaestina". they did this to try to wipe the cultural memory of Jews "off the map". they literally went through the Torah, found the name of one of the Judaeans' historical enemies (the Philistines), and renamed the region using that name.

so by claiming that "Jesus was a Palestinian", not only are you calling him a Philistine (ew), you're also giving him the name that the ROMANS WHO CRUCIFIED HIM renamed Judaea after trying to murder LOTS OF OTHER JEWS.

G-d these people are so dumb!!!

#jumblr #judaism #jewish history #jewblr #i can't believe that there are people who are so stupid that they actually believe this conspiracy theory - but here we are #some people are dumb and they believe dumb shit #it's no different than the QAnon cult believing hillary clinton and a bunch of 'jewish globalists' are drinking children's adrenochrome #the problem is that - like the antisemitic QAnon conspiracies - this conspiracy theory HURTS JEWISH PEOPLE #so stop spreading this FUCKING LIE for fuck's sake

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nehardeia · 10 months

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ok so here's the thing. here's the thing. Aziraphale has lots of insanely old books in his shop, and he is a fan of religious works, right? Like prophecy books and Bibles etc. Also we know he can read and speak Hebrew and Aramaic, since he was in the middle east during the time those were colloquially spoken. Conclusion: Aziraphale definitely has some Tanachs* from like the 14-1800s, likely a few from the middle ages, probably a couple as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I'm guessing some of the supposedly burnt pages of the Aleppo Codex.

He also, I'm certain, has at least one full first edition Vilna Shas** (1800s), a Bomberg (first printed edition, 1500s), and probably a few handwritten ones from the Geonic*** period as well.

And might even learn a few pages with you if you asked very nicely and promised not to buy any of his books.

*books containing the full Hebrew scripture, what is called the Old Testament by Christians

** a set of the 37 volumes of the Talmud, the foundational work on which modern Jewish law is based, consisting of compiled legal discourse and a wide range of heated arguments civil discussions about various aspects of Jewish life in Babylon and Judea from around 100-500 CE (with several layers of footnotes dating from 11th-18th century). AKA the world's oldest forum thread.

***~500-900 CE. Texts from this period reference the Talmud a bunch, but the earliest editions of the Talmud we have copies of are from the 12-1300s.

#talmud #jumblr #good omens #aziraphale #a z fell #jewish texts #gemara #judaism #this is what it is like to be a jewish good omens fan #dear lord i would love to learn talmud with Aziraphale and his squirrely squirrely brain #he is so suited for it too this guy loooooves his loopholes #also he was probably there for some of it #can you tell I went to jewish day school?

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transmascpetewentz · 2 months

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Welcome to my blog! 🤍💙🤍

Hello everyone, I'm sure you already know me, but for the new people: I'm Lou, I'm a fem gay trans man, I'm white/slavic, and I'm converting to Judaism. There isn't really a theme to my blog, I just find sideblogs too hard to keep track of so I keep everything in one spot. Politics, my personal life, and fandom will be posted here all as one stream of consciousness.

Here's my old pinned post if you ever need it, though the information on there may be outdated and probably doesn't reflect my current views if I've said something contradictory more recently. You can find my tagging/filtering system and more about me under the cut.

To all the lurkers on my page, kiss the meowzuzah on your way in!

(all credit goes to @the-catboy-minyan)

Longer About Me

I'm converting to Judaism. Currently, I'm working on observing Shabbat and beginning more serious Torah study. We'll see where this goes; I would say that the journey > the destination, if the destination wasn't so good. You'll see me shitposting about this a lot, because it's something that's important to me and my brain likes to make up jokes about everything I think about for a prolonged period of time.

I'm also learning Hebrew. Currently, it isn't very good, but I can understand a few words and some basic grammar. I had to re-learn nikud because of reading the Siddur and Tanakh. I'm not very commentary-literate, though I've attempted to get into reading some for the Torah. Also, I keep mostly kosher!

Tag Filtering

So, I'm not very good at tagging, but one that I use pretty frequently is #ask to tag and it's a catch-all for anything that you might want to proceed with caution in. I also use #long post and #arguing a lot, for long posts and arguing respectively. Other than that, I'll tag most things about a certain bigotry with #[bigotry], including examples of that bigotry. If you're affected by said bigotry, you can and should filter the tag for your mental health!

Frequently Asked Questions

Are you a Zionist?

It depends on how we're defining Zionism. If we're defining Zionism as "support of the modern state of Israel," I am a post-Zionist because the state exists. If we're defining Zionism as "the right of Jews as a native people to live and have self-determination in their native land," (which is also my personal definition), I am a proud Zionist. If Zionism means "support for the murder of innocent Palestinian people," then I am anti-Zionist, but that is a definition that divorces Zionism from its historical context.

Can you reblog my donation post?

Probably not, unless we already know each other. Due to the amount of donation scams that have popped up on tumblr recently, I don't feel safe giving money to random people that ask.

#wentz.txt #pinned post #intro post #long post

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