My brother's keeper

This expresses what I thought every time I saw those blue fingers. It reminds me a little of the story of Qayin (קין) and Hevel (הבל) - Cain and Abel.

וַיֹּאמֶר קַיִן אֶל הֶבֶל אָחִיו
וַיְהִי בִּהְיוֹתָם בַּשָּׂדֶה
וַיָּקָם קַיִן אֶל הֶבֶל אָחִיו וַיַּהַרְגֵהוּ
וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל קַיִן
אֵי הֶבֶל אָחִיךָ
וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא יָדַעְתִּי
 הֲשֹׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹכִי

Vayomer qayin el hevel ahiv
Vayhi bihyotam basade
Vayaqam qayin el hevel ahiv vayahargehu
Vayomer H' el qayin
Ey hevel ahikha
Vayomer lo' yada`ti
Hashomer ahi anokhi

And Cain spoke to Abel his brother
When they were in the field
And Cain rose up against his brother and killed him
And the Lord said to Cain,
"Where is Abel your brother?"
And he said, "I don't know,
Am I my brother's keeper?"

Genesis 4:8-9

We are all our brothers' keepers. When the Iraqis went out and voted, they were keeping their country.

When Cain is punished, he complains:

הֵן גֵּרַשְׁתָּ אֹתִי הַיּוֹם מֵעַל פְּנֵי הָאֲדָמָה
וּמִפָּנֶיךָ אֶסָּתֵר
וְהָיִיתִי נָע וָנָד בָּאָרֶץ
וְהָיָה כָל מֹצְאִי יַהַרְגֵנִי
וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ ה'
לָכֵן כָּל הֹרֵג קַיִן שִׁבְעָתַיִם יֻקָּם
וַיָּשֶׂם ה' לְקַיִן אוֹת
לְבִלְתִּי הַכּוֹת אֹתוֹ כָּל מֹצְאוֹ

Hen gerashta oti hayom me`al p'ney ha'adama
Umipaneykha esater
V'hayiti na` vanad ba'ares
V'haya kol mos'i yahargeni
Vayomer lo H'
Lakhen kol horeg qayin shiv`atayim yuqam
Vayasem l'qayin ot
L'vilti hakot oto kol mos'o

Thus you have expelled me today from the face of the earth
And from your face I will be hidden
And I will be a roamer and a wanderer of the earth
And anyone who finds me will kill me
And the Lord said to him,
"Therefore anyone who kills Cain will be punished sevenfold"
And the Lord put on Cain a mark
So that nobody who finds him will hurt him

Genesis 4:14-15

The mark of Cain is usually thought of something bad, but actually it was given to him in order to protect him. Like those blue fingers...

ADDENDUM: The ha- in hashomer ahi anokhi (am I my brother's keeper) is not the ha- which means 'the'. This ha- has a different vowel, and it introduces a question. It is a short form of the word ha'im (האם).

Speaking of marks of Cain

Mark Steyn (via Hatshepsut):

According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" - which is an unusually robust formulation for a multiple-choice questionnaire, but at least has the advantage of leaving us in no confusion as to how things stand in this week of pan European Holocaust "harping on". The old joke - that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz - gets truer every week.

I have some sympathy for that 62 per cent. Killing six million people is a moral stain on one's nation that surely ought to endure more than a couple of generations. But, on the other hand, almost everything else about the Germany of 60 years ago is gone - its great power status, its military machine, its aggressive nationalism, its need for lebens-raum. The past is another country, but rarely as foreign as the Third Reich. Why should Holocaust guilt be the only enforced link with an otherwise discarded heritage?

"Enforced" is the operative word. If most Germans don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, there's no point pretending they do. And that's the problem with all this week's Shoah business: it's largely a charade. The European establishment that has scheduled such lavish anniversary observances for this Thursday presides over a citizenry that, even if one discounts the synagogue-arsonists and cemetery-desecrators multiplying across the Continent, is either antipathetic to Jews, or "sick of all the harping on", or regards solemn Holocaust remembrance as a useful card to have in the hand of the slyer, suppler forms of anti-Semitism to which Europe is now prone.

From time to time, the late Diana Mosley used to tell me how "clever" she thought the Jews were. If you pressed her to expand on the remark, it usually meant how clever they were in always keeping "the thing" - the Holocaust, as she could never quite bring herself to say - in the public eye, unlike the millions killed in the name of Communism. This is a fair point, though not one most people are willing to entertain from a pal of Hitler. But "the thing" seems most useful these days to non-Jews as a means of demonstrating that the Israelis are new Nazis and the Palestinians their Jews. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has told the Home Secretary that his crowd will be boycotting Thursday's commemorations because it is racist and excludes any commemoration of the "holocaust" and "ongoing genocide" in Palestine.

Ah, well. He's just some canny Muslim opportunist, can't blame the chap for trying it on. But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."

Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street's gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin' an' a-wailin' about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis. According to Arafat's official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there'd still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, the Yanks perpetrated another Auschwitz?

Comment:

I think it's fine for a young German, that is, somebody who didn't personally participate in WW2 not to feel personally responsible for the holocaust. But the fact that not only do the 62% (at least) not feel the obvious moral stain on the nation (in other words "don't care"), but show that their anti-semitic feelings still haven't left them (even after they practically erased the Jewish population), by expressing their extremely negative attitude towards the state of Israel. I may be sounding harsh and bitter here, but I don't think these people have changed all that much.

Posted by: Hatshepsut at February 2, 2005 01:29 PM Permalink

Comment:

It is obvious to me that this sudden piousness about the Holocaust on its 60th anniversary (what did they do on the 50th?) comes about as an alternative to doing something substantial.

Posted by: David Boxenhorn at February 2, 2005 01:39 PM Permalink

The Pianist

Some time ago my wife bought the video of The Pianist. It's been sitting on the shelf since then, and somehow we were never able to make time to see it. We just saw it tonight.

I don't see many movies these days, and when I do I'm not in the mood for a Holocaust movie - I've never seen Schindler's List, for example. But I'm glad I saw this one. I'm not sure how I feel about it, though. It's definitely a good movie on its own terms, but a Holocaust movie is never judged simply on its own terms, but on how well it illuminates its subject matter.

The Pianist is the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist. He survives the war by avoiding the death camps - the story of many survivors. Unfortunately, if you come expecting a broader point of view, you won't get it in this movie unless you are already very familiar with the subject matter, and can see it operating in the background. On top of this, Szpilman is a very passive character throughout most of the movie. He spends a lot of time hiding, which is not unrealistic for those who managed to survive. (At one point he is hiding in a small apartment with a piano, which he cannot play for fear of being found. There's a very beautiful scene based on his predicament.)

Roman Polansky describes why he made the film:

This book describes the events I remember from my childhood. For many years I've been planning to make a film about this period, but I couldn't find the right material. Szpilman's book isn't just another chapter in the book of martyrdom we all know. In his memoirs, he describes these events from the point of view of a man who experienced them. The book was written shortly after the war and maybe this is why it is so fresh, unlike the accounts written later, 20-30 years after the war. Reading the first few chapters, I knew it was going to be my next film.

You know, many times I read things that I could more or less make a movie on that subject, but they were usually too close to my own personal experiences of the war. I didn't want that. Here, however, we are dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto - I was in the Krakow Ghetto. I could use my own experiences in the script without making it an autobiography. It was easy for me to work on this script because I remember that period all too well.

Adrien Brody describes playing Szpilman:

When I found I had gotten the role I had already discussed with Roman that I would need to lose a lot of weight...

When I arrived in Europe, I went on a diet where I lost 30 pounds in six weeks. I'm 6 foot 1 and I was 130 pounds. That was very difficult, but what it did was that it provided me into an insight of deprivation I had never experienced. The cravings end up going beyond hunger and open your thought processes into being more receptive to loss and emptiness. One thing we take for granted is sugar, caffeine and carbohydrates. All these things give us something to get through our boredom, our tiredness. When you omit them for a long period of time, there is a metamorphosis that takes place and you feel very different.

It forced me to conserve all energy unless I was doing something productive. It kills your motivation for other things. You have to be strong enough to make it through a long workday. Since we shot the film in reverse order, the first day I showed up on set I had to be the most destroyed. When I am climbing over the wall and seeing Warsaw's devastation, which they recreated, my reaction is real. I told Roman that I don't have any energy. He said "What do you need energy for? Just do it." I had to just climb over the wall and I could hardly do it. Essentially, I'm not acting and perhaps that's what Roman wanted.

The one thing the film is missing is a depiction of the destruction Szpilman returned to after the war. There are plenty of destroyed buildings in the movie, but no depiction of the human destruction, and specifically the destruction of the Jews. Warsaw was one third Jewish at the start of the war. At the end of the war there were twenty Jews left in the city - one of them was Szpilman. There were three million Jews in Poland before the war, after the war only about 100,000 remained. Szpilman lost his entire family in the war. Yet, the movie depicts him returning victorious to his musical career. Yes, we see his sadness, but not a sense of emptiness at what remained.

Comment:

I also wrote about watching this films a few months back. Like you I hardly ever watch a film. This one if exceptionally good.

Posted by: Hatshepsut at February 4, 2005 01:03 AM Permalink

Comment:

I don't understand how he could just keep living in Poland though. I just can't..

Posted by: Hatshepsut at February 4, 2005 01:06 AM Permalink

Comment:

David, you make a really interesting point about the film missing the depiction of what was left, or rather not left, after the war. I saw the film and this never occurred to me.

For the record, my mother is a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. She survived in hiding and was not in the camps.

My father also survived in hiding under different circumstances. He once said the hardest thing about the war was not surviving it (hard as that was), but once it was over, to find out the extent of the destruction and that the hope that he had during the war of being reunited with his family could not be fulfilled, because they were all dead. That is when depression *really* set in for a lot of survivors.

60 years later the war is not over for *me*. Because of that devastation.

I'm with Hatshepsut. I just don't understand how he could continue to live in Poland, or why he would have wanted to.

Posted by: miki at February 4, 2005 03:43 AM Permalink

Comment:

It was quite an accomoplishment for Roman Polansky, considering all he has been through.

Posted by: muse at February 5, 2005 06:17 PM Permalink

Comment:

As I recall, the film was appropriately and effectively claustrophobic and catastrophic - with the feeling of impending doom and horror closing in. I think it was very well done in that respect. Compare and contrast to Life is Beautiful, which the more I think about, the less I like, especially the more I encounter the phenomenon of Holocaust-Denial Lite - Holocaust Minimization - which that latter film feeds.

Posted by: Solomon at February 5, 2005 06:31 PM Permalink

Comment:

I saw this movie a while back. At the time, an old friend from high school asked me how I felt about it. I told her I thought the movie was pretty good, but the ending offended me. Why, she asked, somewhat surprised. The fact that the protagonist remained in Poland bothered me greatly. Fine, he avoided the death camps, and yes, he had help from sympathetic Poles. But there were pogroms in Poland AFTER the Holocaust was over! The fact that he remained, despite the pogroms, well, I found it incredibly offensive and disgusting. I thought that, of all the possible material available, Polanski had to pick this questionable character?! Her reaction? She had never heard of the post-Holocaust pogroms, which I wasn't surprised about, since I too had never heard of them growing up. After getting over her initial shock of this bit of under-publicized history, she did her own research and understood why I didn't like the movie.

Posted by: Scott Weisman at February 8, 2005 01:11 AM Permalink

Comment:

I, too, don't understand how Szpilman could stay in Poland after the war, but I don't think that it diminishes the power of the story.

For any movie (or any story, for that matter) to work, its events have to validate its conclusion. In this case, the events which were so well depicted would validate the conclusion: "I am victorious, but what is the meaning of my victory when my world is destroyed?" This is an important conclusion, for it is one that every Holocaust survivor must feel. The only way that I can see to work in the post-Holocaust pogrom is to end in its midst, the conclusion would then be: "it could happen again." Personally, I prefer the first conclusion. Trying to get both together wouldn't work story-wise, in my opinion it would then be a weak movie, which would defeat the purpose of making a good movie about the Holocaust that people would want to see.

Posted by: David Boxenhorn at February 8, 2005 10:17 AM Permalink

Comment:

The comment above referred to the ending that I would have liked to see. As it is, the movie has what I think is a very weak conclusion: "I am victorious, but I'm sad."

Posted by: David Boxenhorn at February 8, 2005 10:21 AM Permalink

In The Beginning

John Ray comments on the opening line of the Bible - how should it be translated? I thought I would contribute one thing that Rashi has to say about it (for more go here). Rashi is the foremost and most normative of Jewish biblical scholars, he lived in the 11th century.

ולא בא המקרא להורות סדר הבריאה
לומר שאלו קדמו
שאם בא להורות כך היה לו לכתוב
בראשונה ברא את השמים
שאין לך ראשית במקרא שאינו דבוק לתיבה שלאחריו
כמו בראשית ממלכת יהויקים
ראשית ממלכתו
ראשית דגנך
אף כאן אתה אומר בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים
כמו בראשית ברוא
 ודומה לו תחלת דבר ה' בהושע
כלומר תחלת דבורו של הקב"ה בהושע
ויאמר ה' אל הושע

V'lo' ba' hamiqra' l'horot seder habri'a
Lomar she'elu qadmu
She'im ba' l'horot kakh haya lo likhtov
Barishona bara' et hashamayim
She'eyn l'kha reshit b'miqra' she'eyno davuq l'teyva shel'akharav
K'mo b'reshit mamlekhet y'hoyaqim
Reshit mamlakhto
Reshit d'ganekha
Af kan ata omer b'reshit bara' elohim et hashamayim
K'mo b'reshit b'ro'
V'dome lo t'hilat d'var H' b'hoshea`
K'lomar t'hilat diburo shel haqadosh barukh hu b'hoshea`
Vayomer H' el hoshea`

And the Bible doesn't mean to show the order of creation
To say that these preceded [those]
For if it meant to show this it would have been written thus:
In the beginning (barishona) He created the heavens
For you don't have 'reshit' (beginning-) in the Bible that is not attached to the word after it
As in: At the beginning (b'reshit) of the kingdom of Hosea
The beginning (reshit) of his kingdom
The beginning (reshit) of your grain
Thus here you say: At the beginning of God's creation of the heavens
As in: At the beginning of the creation (b'ro')
And similar to it: The beginning of God's speaking to Hosea
That is to say: The beginning of the speaking of the Holy one Blessed be He to Hosea
The Lord said to Hosea

Rashi, B'reshit 1:1

The first word of the Bible is: b'reshit. The: b' is usually translated into English as 'in', 'at', or 'with', depending on the context. Reshit is in a form that can only appear as the first part of a compound word, meaning: "beginning of". Therefore, Rashi wants to translate the first verse of the Bible as: At the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth. The only problem with this is the second word of the verse: bara'. As far as I know, this word is never used as a noun, only as a verb: (he) created. Rashi says that we should understand bara' as if it were written: b'ro' - which would be the expected form of the word.

Note also that Rashi says explicitly that these words are not meant to show the order of creation. Follow the link above for more evidence, and more of his reasoning on the matter. (Unfortunately, I can't find an online source for the original Hebrew.)

UPDATE: Amritas links. I probably should have mentioned that Rashi is not only the foremost and most normative Jewish biblical scholar, he is also the foremost and most normative Talmudic scholar. These two are very closely related: to be a Jewish biblical scholar, you have to take into account Jewish tradition and the precedents set by previous Rabbis - all of which is recorded in the Talmud. And of course, the Talmud is a commentary on the Bible. Related posts: here, here, and here.

Comment:

You can play with the letters of the word, bereishit. The first three, bet resh alef, spells bara, created,
then resh, alef, shin = head
alef shin = fire

--have fun!

Posted by: muse at February 5, 2005 06:14 PM Permalink

Translating in the beginning

Amritas posts:

I think John Ray and David Boxenhorn (who's updated his post on the opening line of Genesis) would be interested in what reader Ian M. Slater had to say about "Br'shyt".

I can't speak for John, but Amritas is certainly right about me! Here's an exerpt:

The Septuagint seems to have read the unvocalized Hebrew text as ba-reshith, "in the beginning," and ignored any problem with the construction with the following verb. And so most Christian translations, up to the present, and, following them, the 1917 Jewish Publication Society version. The New Revised Standard Version is an interesting exception.

Rashi, as noted in the link, explained that the Masoretic (official traditional) vocalization as be-reshith avoided the problem of the verb, and interpreted it as indicating only "at the time when..." This has its own problems, but, coincidentally or not, corresponds rather nicely to the opening of Mesopotamian creation narratives, like Enuma Elish (When above) and Enuma Anu Enlil (When Anu (and) Enlil [created the stars and planets]). This understanding is used, in one or another variation, in a number of recent Jewish translations. (When in doubt, a conjunction of Rashi's authority and Assyriological precedents is a good defense against attacks from almost any direction! )

The New Jewish Publication Society version (originally 1960) has "When God began to create." Everett Fox (1983, 1995) has "At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth." The New Revised Standard Version (1989) offers "In the beginning, when God created," with "When God began to create" and "In the beginning God created" as alternatives in fine print.

The Targum (Jewish Aramaic translation) actually seems to have dodged the grammatical issue entirely, offering bkdm (sorry, I don't remember the vocalization), "in the past." (Or, I think, by etymology, "in the east," but any geographical reference is excluded by context!) This could be translated, rather roughly, "A long time ago, God created...."

Here's the Targum of Genesis 1:1 - b'reshit is translated b'qadmin (בְּקַדְמִין). I might add Ian is referring to Targum Onqelos (תרגום אונקלוס) - the word 'targum' means simply 'translation'. Targum Onqelos is an ancient translation of the Bible into Aramaic, circa 1-300 CE. At one time it was read in the synagogue alongside the original Hebrew. In most communities the practice died out when the Hebrew became more readily understandable than the Aramaic, but Yemenite Jews preserve this tradition: the ba`al qore' (בעל קורא) - 'master of the reading' - reads a line from the Tora (תורה) - the first five books of the Bible, then a child reads the translation in the Targum.

Another thing: I've been doing a fair amount of translation since I started this blog, and I want to point out that this is not a typical translation problem. In this case, it really is unclear how the text should be read. More typically, it is perfectly clear how a text should be read, but it is impossible to translate it precisely, concisely, and fluently, into the target language. As a result, you are forced to choose between the possibilities. On this blog, I have also given myself another goal: to translate in a way that will help readers understand the original Hebrew - I therefore also want to maintain as much as possible the original structure of the text, so readers can figure out which word goes with which (are there any readers who do that?). Also, I don't want to spend more than a few seconds on each line. Put these goals together and you get compromises everywhere - not to mention mistakes (I almost always find mistakes in my transcriptions when I go back and read them, since I don't have a spell checker to help me out). I apologize for my sloppy translations and transcriptions!

So, what is going on here? Clearly there is something strange about the text: Either you accept b'reshit as 'In the beginning' without a following noun, or accept bara' as a noun, neither of which have any corroborating evidence. A big part of the problem is the limitation of the historical record: the fact that we have no evidence of a certain usage does not mean that it didn't occur, only that it wasn't recorded. So it is certainly possible that one of these exceptional usages did occur. If I had to bet, I would go with Rashi - not just because of his credentials, but because it conforms better to my instincts. I suspect that part of the problem is that the opening of the Bible was as famous in ancient times as it is now, and therefore preserves either archaic features, or features of a different dialect, that are not preserved in most of the Bible. There are clear instances of this occurring in other places, for example in the cohanic blessing.

Trackback from Soccer Dad, Havei Havalim Edition #9:

Jewish Super Heroes Fred Lapides, a former co-poster at Israpundit now has his own site Israelpundit where he introduces us to some new Jewish Superheroes. Though the characters he created were not necessarily Jewish, Stan Lee definitely is. He talked...

Comment:

So, what is going on here? Clearly there is something strange about the text: Either you accept b'reshit as 'In the beginning' without a following noun, or accept bara' as a noun, neither of which have any corroborating evidence.

That is, if you're looking for the "correct" literal translation of the text. There is another possibility, though, one particularly attractive to a religious believer: That this text was never meant to have a single, definitive "correct" translation.

In the spirit of both the rabbinical exegetical tradition and modern deconstructionist theories, one can certainly posit that this text, referring to the ineffable event of Creation, is a deliberate composition of internally-inconsistent grammatical forms to render impossible the determination of its precise meaning. All the variant readings exist simultaneously, even in the realm of "pshat" - simple translation.

Some language, like some events, cannot be reduced to simple explanations.

Posted by: Zman Biur at February 13, 2005 11:37 AM Permalink

Hebrew and Aramaic

In the previous post I linked to Targum Onqelos. This gives me a good excuse to blog about the similarity between the two languages, something I've wanted to do for a long time. Hebrew and Aramaic are very closely related, so much that Hebrew speakers who study the Talmud (which is mostly written in Aramaic) are expected to jump in with no formal language training. For the most part, they are expected to pick up Aramaic as they go along. Let's compare a passage from the Bible with its Aramaic translation from Onqelos. Here's the Hebrew:

וּלְכָל חַיַּת הָאָרֶץ וּלְכָל עוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם
 וּלְכֹל רוֹמֵשׂ עַל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר בּוֹ נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה
אֶת כָּל יֶרֶק עֵשֶׂב לְאָכְלָה
וַיְהִי כֵן

Ul'khol hayat ha'ares ul'khol `of hashamayim
Ul'khol romes `al ha'ares asher bo nefesh haya
Et kol yereq `esev l'okhla
Vayhi khen

And for all animals of the land and for all birds of the heavens
And for all things that crawl on the earth that have a living soul
[I have given] All herb greens for eating
And it was thus

Genesis 1:30

Here's the Aramaic translation:

וּלְכָל חַיַּת אַרְעָא וּלְכָל עוֹפָא דִּשְׁמַיָּא
 וּלְכֹל דְּרָחֵישׁ עַל אַרְעָא דְּבֵיהּ נַפְשָׁא חַיְתָא
יָת כָּל יָרוֹק עִסְבָּא לְמֵיכַל
וַהֲוָה כֵין

Ul'khol hayat ar`a ul'khol `ofa dishmaya
Ul'khol d'raheysh `al ar`a d'veyh nafsha hayta
Yat kol yaroq `isba limeykhal
Vahava kheyn

Now, let's compare them. The following is a chart of all the morphemes in both the Hebrew and the Aramaic, in order of appearance in the Hebrew. (Repeats not included.) For Semitic roots I'll use the conventions of this chart.

I think it should be clear from this just how similar the two languages are. Notice that there is only one content word in which the two languages use words from different roots: romes/raheysh. However, even in this case, the root used in Aramaic is also found in Hebrew as a synonym of romes (the word in Hebrew is rohesh).

Comment:

I studied talmud at a modern Orthodox day school.

I found your page only a few days ago, as a result of the Israeli blog awards.

Your translations and explanations mean so much to me in such a short time. Your page is now a daily priority check for me.

No one seems to comment on these translations/explanations of yours, so I just wanted to say, they are wonderful. "Best of the net" in my book.

Posted by: miki (female) at February 7, 2005 10:35 AM Permalink

Comment:

Thanks for the comparison. I was baffled when I tried reading the Aramaic part of the Book of Daniel. It seem far less like Hebrew than I expected, probably due to the fact that I knew less about both languages at that time. Your mention of the Onqelos made me wonder, is there a Hebrew translation of the Aramaic part of Daniel? Since then, I dabbled in several textbooks for Aramaic and Syriac (Syrian Christian dialect of Aramaic) to figure out which ones were worth getting my own copies of. Their Aramaic seemed much more like Hebrew than my blurred recollection of Aramaic Daniel. Several years ago I took a look at a targum, probably an addition of the Onqelos. It had a different system for marking vowels. The marks weren't dots or lines like in Hebrew, they looked like little forked twigs over the consonants. I found a reference book which explained them. They are much simpler than Hebrew vowel marks. From my sketchy notes, I think the other form of vowel marks was called Babylonian pointing.

Posted by: Bryan Ashcroft at February 10, 2005 06:45 AM Permalink

Jewish / Israeli Blog Awards - Finals

The final voting round for the Jewish / Israeli Blog Awards has come! You can vote for all categories at once here.

Rishon Rishon has been nominated for the following categories:

Best Overall Blog

Best New Blog 2004
Best Jewish Religion Blog
Best Jewish Culture Blog
Best Post by a Jewish Blogger (Maladapted to our Habitat)
Best Series by a Jewish Blogger (Valleys)

Oddly enough, judging from the results of the semifinals, Rishon Rishon has the best chance of winning in the Best Jewish Religion category! So, if you have energy to vote only for one category (and you think I deserve it) vote there. If you have energy for just two, then add Best New Blog. Otherwise, vote for them all!

Since the real purpose of this contest, at least in my opinion, is not to win, but to publicize good blogs, I want to encourage all of you to visit them. Here they are: