Tsade

ץ צ
Words ending with tsade are not uncommon. Land or earth is present with us even as a 'borrowed' word in English in the phrase 'eretz Israel'. This letter has a formative potential in the sound of the story. It is repeated in some significant words. The anticipation of the 'ts' is in chapter 1, but it is the major sound of chapter 2 and after the first few verses of chapter 3 it ceases till the mention of Perez in chapter 4. I have not heard this in any reading I have heard but I am convinced it should be there. The reading at Mechon-Mamre is a little too monochromatic for my taste. Maybe some day I will record it in Hebrew. (but not for a while I assure you)

Here is the trailing 'ts' in the first verse, Ruth 1:1. I will leave the greening of the grammatical letters to you.

וַיְהִי רָעָב בָּאָרֶץ

and there was a famine in the land.

Again in Ruth 1:7,

לָשׁוּב אֶל-אֶרֶץ יְהוּדָה

to return to the land of Judah

and twice more in Ruth 2:10 - a related form

וַתִּשְׁתַּחוּ אָרְצָה

and bowed down to the earth

and Ruth 2:11

וְאֶרֶץ מוֹלַדְתֵּךְ

the land of your birth

Ruth 2:15 has another unique word - dipping in vinegar. This story lends itself to allegory. Do you think it will be revealed to me? Maybe I am old enough now not to consume the knowledge foolishly.

וְטָבַלְתְּ פִּתֵּךְ בַּחֹמֶץ

and dip your piece in the vinegar

Ruth 3:13 has the letter again in an allegorically significant word. When we get back to real story, we will hear it.

וְאִם-לֹא יַחְפֹּץ לְגָאֳלֵךְ

and if he is not pleased to redeem you

also 3 times in the proper name פָּרֶץ

There is only one word beginning with tsade in Ruth
Ruth 2:9

הֲלוֹא צִוִּיתִי אֶת-הַנְּעָרִים לְבִלְתִּי נָגְעֵךְ

have I not commanded the lads not to touch you

Ruth 2:15

וַיְצַו בֹּעַז אֶת-נְעָרָיו לֵאמֹר

and Boaz commanded his lads

Used again in Ruth 3:6 

אֲשֶׁר-צִוַּתָּה חֲמוֹתָהּ

as her mother-in-law commanded

There are a number of words that contain the sound, some of them key repetitions or concepts in the tale.
Ruth 1:7, 1:13, 2:18, 2:22 come out

וַתֵּצֵא מִן-הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר הָיְתָה-שָּׁמָּה

and she came out from the place where she was

Ruth 1:9, 2:2, 2:10, 2:13 find

וּמְצֶאןָ מְנוּחָה

may you find rest

Ruth 1:18 (once only, also the last letter of this root, אָמֵץ)

וַתֵּרֶא כִּי-מִתְאַמֶּצֶת הִיא

and she saw that she was determined

Ruth 1:22, 2:21, 2:23 harvest

בִּתְחִלַּת קְצִיר שְׂעֹרִים

at the beginning of the harvest of barley

Ruth 2:3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14 reapers - as with gleaning, Ruth has more of these in one place than any other book.

בַּשָּׂדֶה אַחֲרֵי הַקֹּצְרִים

in the field after the reapers

Ruth 2:5, 6 standing - a better gloss is called for

הַנִּצָּב עַל-הַקּוֹצְרִים

standing by the reapers

Ruth 2:9 thirst

וְצָמִת וְהָלַכְתְּ אֶל-הַכֵּלִים

and you thirst, and you go to the vessels

Ruth 2:14 beside and heaped - this is a key part of the story too - Boaz is smitten

וַתֵּשֶׁב מִצַּד הַקֹּצְרִים

 וַיִּצְבָּט-לָהּ קָלִי וַתֹּאכַל

and she herself sat beside the reapers

and he heaped her parched grain and she ate

Ruth 2:16 bundles

תָּשֹׁלּוּ לָהּ מִן-הַצְּבָתִים

draw out for her from the bundles

Ruth 3:3 wash

וְרָחַצְתְּ וָסַכְתְּ

so wash yourself and anoint yourself

Ruth 3:7 another preposition

וַיָּבֹא לִשְׁכַּב בִּקְצֵה הָעֲרֵמָה

and he came to lie down at the end of a heap

Ruth 3:8 and another preposition

וַיְהִי בַּחֲצִי הַלַּיְלָה

and it was the middle of the night

Then the sound stops till we find it in proper names in the middle and at the end.

פֶּרֶץ הוֹלִיד אֶת-חֶצְרוֹן

Perez bore Hetsron

10 Questions from Bishop Alan

This looked like an interesting meme to me so I thought I would try it.I have not read any of the book that Bishop Alan discusses nor will I. Too busy.

Here are the 10 questions

1. What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
2. How should the Bible be understood?
3. Is God violent?
4. Who is Jesus and why is he important?
5. What is the Gospel?
6. What do we do about the Church?
7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
10. How can we translate our quest into action?

My short answers

1. A love song - see the The Song of Songs
2. Literally but paying attention to all sources of information scientific, literary, cultural, and theological.
3. No, but we are. And we are very good at justifying violence and retribution and attributing such to God. That is even more a projection than the attribution of love. God has demonstrated non-violence definitively in the person of Jesus.
4. Jesus exhibits God's character. As Harold Bloom notes The Lord of the Old Testament is anthropomorphic and the Jesus of the New Testament is theomorphic. 
5. God is love - the anointing Spirit that God shares with us is the proof. Just take God seriously and ask the source of that love.
6. Rule in the midst of your enemies. (Psalm 110:2)
7. Yes. See point 1. The lovers are unmarried. Male or female, each of us can find the answer to the question through the anointing Spirit.
8. We need to work for hope and belonging as our local shelter 'Our Place' has as its motto. I don't know that the future is open to our gaze, but the present has need enough.
9. With respect. See point 1.
10. However we are called - so we had better be listening.

While I'm at this, a question that Mark Nanos asked me 4 years ago is still with me: If Jesus is the Messiah, why is the world still in such a state? I found a riposte to that question - not an answer. Why did prophecy cease in Israel? It is an equally loaded question of course and touches on the Muslim claim of Mohammad as the seal of the prophets. I may say I must respect other people's beliefs. But I don't agree with them. Is that possible? It is strange, because I have learned so much through the Jewish scriptures and so little through those of Islam. I often am angry at my own traditions of Christianity also. How can I even come to unity in myself and sing the Schema as I do every week in our Sunday School?

Take my ten answers as ten contradictions.

Habakkuk 3 - a second look

First look is here. How do different parts of Scripture look to me when I get out of the poetry of the writings and read other books? Not impossibly different, but there are variations in words and bits of grammar that are strangely different from what I have so far seen. John Hobbins is hoping for some discussion of Hebrew verb forms and what we would see in them related to tense, aspect, and mood.

Here is one question that I noted on the grammar: what is the personal pronoun at the end of this verse, Habakkuk 3:4?

ד וְנֹגַהּ כָּאוֹר תִּהְיֶה
קַרְנַיִם מִיָּדוֹ לוֹ
וְשָׁם חֶבְיוֹן עֻזֹּה

Another fascinating commentary

This week's commentary from JTS again has much to teach.

Rome and Greece

Beloved, the time has come to return to story. I pull a section from the youth of Gaius in which he tells us of his upbringing at the hands of a tortured man who worked in Seneca's school nearly 80 years ago.

It wasn't just one person or place that influenced me. There were many over many years. I wonder when it was that my ears opened or in some ways when they closed. Discernment is both taking in and refusing to take in. And what content! First Seneca and his school: nine years at an impressionable age - from the fifteenth year of Tiberias until the first of my namesake Gaius Caligula. Such strength of tradition - Roman tradition with its momentum of conquest; Just do the training and you will rise into prominence and power - an understated motto of what was expected - Recti cultus pectora roborant - Right learning would make you strong. The Empire - just born and already corrupt - and it was pretending to know what was right. Nonetheless, it was an influence, this training. It fostered my natural striving. And I had interests to protect - even if only my own self-interest. The stories of that time impress their ignorance on me.

There was some attempt to teach us the conquered cultures. Besides Livy and Virgil for History and Catullus for entertainment, we studied Euclid, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, and some of the Jewish and Babylonian writings. It was necessary to know our borders. These last areas came under the subject of religion - taught on Mondays and Thursdays if I remember correctly. And of course, we had to give lip service to the deity of the Caesars and attend the sacrifices. Such ignorance! You would have thought the teachers would know more than they did but it turned out that our generation had to discover everything for ourselves. I shouldn't be so hard on some of them. They had the same ignorance to deal with as I had and a few did well, better in fact than some of my own generation who reduce some human complexities to a throw of the dice.

Seneca himself was a Stoic and demanded the same considerable self-denial from his staff. If he had not, I expect we would all have been swallowed up by the libertine spirit of the age. But the staff had absolute power over the students and trained us in the use of the same power.

This is a dangerous situation - allowing physical coercion and repressing other powers within the person without an adequate basis for human decisions. Stoicism is no match for the Spirit. A philosophy of denial cannot enable a new creation on its own. Some of us did not escape our childhood. All of us knew that one should avoid - how difficult it is to think back over this - should avoid any semblance of wrong-doing in the presence of one man, a representative of all that can be twisted in this human flesh. I think that there were only a few in each year that he had his eye on - to find them at fault so he could punish them. It was not the beating that was the danger but the method. Punishment was always in the morning before anyone else was awake. You spent the night in fear. The one to be punished had to wake him, then wait in his antechamber while he emptied his bladder. When you are naked on a man's lap absorbing the pain in your behind, you don't notice that he is taking pleasure in the presence of your body.

Of course as boys will, we boasted of our stripes, though they should have been considered shameful. But when you know that the shame is in the one who wields power, even a slave's stripes could be considered a source of pride. We were proud if our welts lasted longer than four weeks.

What foolishness this is, yet consider the knowledge that was in the boys that the master was not aware of. I still wonder how any adult system of discipline can allow the right of punishment to foster such a perverse completeness in a tortured person. It allowed a man to exercise what might have been legitimate correction but did not see that his motivation was based only on his own need for tenderness. This is what conceals a self-justifying lust. There is no doubt in my mind that he was incapable of satisfying his need except through this scheme of punishing others. I expect he was himself produced by similar abuse - but it is certain that he was unaware of any salvation from his condition - though he was the chief tutor in both religion and music. Like most people, he knew only the external control of the force of physical power, not wholeness in a new relationship.

Eventually - when I was about fourteen - I insisted he use a stick with me standing for the punishment. I think he knew that my request was made in knowledge of his need. Though the hurt was worse and I nearly fell down, he never trapped me for punishment again. Perhaps this is too close to the truth, too near the mark for us to examine any further. I expect my experience is not as uncommon as I think. The greater gifts are subject to greater distortions. I know this man was not the only influence on me - and he did manage to teach me some music.

Fortunately for me, another man, Cornelius Ligneus, took his place in my last two years in Rome. He was as opposite to the former as day and night. His son also taught at the school. These two demonstrated that the generations could succeed each other without dysfunction and that life and learning could be enjoyable. I loved how the father taught us foreign tongues. We had to read them as if they were alive and in actual use by others. He drew no attention to this. He just did it. I did not change at the time, but the seed of change had been sown within me without my knowing it.

I would be more comfortable talking about Samuel's influence, you know. I would rather leave my school years in the past. But at this stage, I have to acknowledge some debt and in doing so perhaps allow redemption to work itself further back into my time. It was because of Samuel in his earliest visits to Corinth that my parents became god-fearers. They drew the line at this acknowledgement. Though we children were taught the Hebrew story from our youth, my parents declined full entry into the covenant. Now I can see of course why the sign of the covenant is appropriate - it is a kind of death to human desire, an acknowledgement that life is from God and not from ourselves.

Death - we pagans pursued this image too in our sacrifices but only the Hebrews knew its significance. We kill to read entrails and know the will of the gods. They too killed but as a substitution for their own death and to cleanse the altar with the blood. Of course, they don't kill any more. We kill to appease the gods and say that they feast on the offerings. They killed to feast with God. What a pair of primitive histories!

Samuel was well acquainted with the sacrificial tradition, but he was more inclined to recognize the temple of hearth and home and the sacrifice of thanksgiving than to want to do the rites. He stressed the counter balancing interpretations of the prophets. After all, if God were hungry, would he ask us? And as for us Romans, we worshipped what were no gods at all - just images of our own foolishness.

I was lucky in Samuel. He was a teacher in Israel and wanted us in the covenant so that our share in the world to come would be assured. His struggle with the true circumcision was long and painful - such a severing of the old tradition, yet its completion also, in the very same sense that circumcision completes a man, as he himself had taught us. Through this Hebrew tradition, I saw the potential for another way of life. My Roman heart was no longer satisfied with conquest and submission to our own power.

Besides Samuel, first Prisca and Aquila, then Paul, Sosthenes, Crispus, and many others - not least Tertius, my slave, taught me the working out of my salvation.

Who understands these things in advance? And who knows the results in another person? Anger has a long reach. How is it that grace can prevail in the place of so many faults and so much resistance - and how is it that some may fail or at least seem to fail?

That tutor had a poor ending. He was discovered. After he was dismissed for misconduct, he was killed on the road while travelling back to his native Spain. Strange, you know, he once told me that my school days would be the best of my life. Perhaps they were for him - but for me, the best is yet to come and the present always exceeds the past in joy. I think even that unfortunate man could have profited from our Gospel if he had known it. Perhaps he yet has. I would like to think that all souls in torment will find that health, but how will they if we do not find a way to tell them? As for him, it is clear to me that he needed the touch of my body. Though he stole from me, unknowing, perhaps even then, I was part of the fringe of the garment that made him whole. I expect his illness was a thousand years old.

Bearing Sin

This brief from JTS on the high priest is of interest to students of the cult in TNK and Hebrews. One day maybe I will have time to study this more.

Peh

ף פ
Find the peh's. I am beginning to wonder how useful this exercise is - but it will get my eyes working again after two weeks without looking at Hebrew. And I had better mind my peh's and qof's for I am so prone to error and incompleteness.  פ occurs somewhat rarely in the book of Ruth - about 42 times. We find it in the word for chapter, פרק and in the book or Ruth in some proper names: like אֶפְרָתִים Ephratites, עָרְפָּה Orpah and  פֶּרֶץ Perez. It begins our tale with its characteristic burst of air.(I had always thought it was an odd looking letter - an upside down G. No wonder I sometimes pick up a piece of paper with Hebrew text on it upside down.)

וַיְהִי בִּימֵי שְׁפֹט הַשֹּׁפְטִים

Now there was in the days of the judgment of the judges,

The word for family has two shared letters with the word for judgment. Worse than searching by etymology is my searching for relationships between words by letters alone!

מִּשְׁפַּחַת אֱלִימֶלֶךְ

from the family of Elimelek

This word for family (?) also occurs as handmaid in the phrase 'your handmaid' (Ruth 2:13), שִׁפְחָתֶךָ- more to investigate. Why are these two words seemingly related as to root?

Peh is the first letter of a few words in Ruth - like visit,

כִּי-פָקַד יְהוָה אֶת-עַמּוֹ

that יְהוָה had visited his people

and separate

כִּי הַמָּוֶת יַפְרִיד בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵךְ

for only death will separate me from you

and work

יְשַׁלֵּם יְהוָה פָּעֳלֵךְ

יְהוָה make full your work

and face

וַתִּפֹּל עַל-פָּנֶיהָ

And she fell on her face

(It's not Linus tripping on his blanket.)
and piece

 וְטָבַלְתְּ פִּתֵּךְ בַּחֹמֶץ

and dip your piece in the vinegar

For peh soffit, this letter at the end (סוף - hence soffit) of a word, we find a few also

כֹּה יַעֲשֶׂה יְהוָה לִי וְכֹה יוֹסִיף

this יְהוָה do to me and more

קְנֵה-לָךְ וַיִּשְׁלֹף נַעֲלוֹ

buy for yourself and he removed his sandal

Here are a pair of words identically spelled with reference to consonants but quite separate in their usage. The first (where) includes the word 'here', also used twice in Ruth 4:1-2. Where and here seem similarly related in English!

אֵיפֹה לִקַּטְתְּ הַיּוֹם וְאָנָה עָשִׂית

where did you glean today and where work

וַיְהִי כְּאֵיפָה שְׂעֹרִים

and there was about an ephah of barley

And there is a pairing of wings and spread - once relating to how Ruth has come to shelter under the wings of the Lord and once relating her invitation to Boaz.

וּפָרַשְׂתָּ כְנָפֶךָ עַל-אֲמָתְךָ

so spread your wings over your maidservant

נֶפֶשׁ is a common word with a peh but occurs only once in Ruth - in reference to the child Obed restoring the life of Naomi..

There are some rarer leftovers after this gleaning of words: Ruth 3:8

וַיֶּחֱרַד הָאִישׁ וַיִּלָּפֵת

and the man was afraid and turned himself

and Ruth 3:18

עַד אֲשֶׁר תֵּדְעִין אֵיךְ יִפֹּל דָּבָר

until you know how a thing will fall out

and Ruth 2:7

וְאָסַפְתִּי בָעֳמָרִים אַחֲרֵי הַקּוֹצְרִים

and gather among the sheaves after the reapers

Foolishly I found myself wondering if סוף and אסף were related (!) in that the soffit gathers the top of a wall to the roof as the wall and roof come to their respective ends. Lettrymology gone wild.
And there are a few more peh's: הַמִּטְפַּחַת - the cloak in Ruth 3:15

פְּלֹנִי אַלְמֹנִי - the coincidence in Ruth 4:1,

פֶּן - lest in Ruth 4:6

and לְפָנִים - before, in Ruth 4:7

and one final curious pair - Ruth 1:16 אַל-תִּפְגְּעִי-בִי do not force me and 

Ruth 2:22 וְלֹא יִפְגְּעוּ-בָךְ that none force you