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Shapira Affair thread on Languagehat - includes Simonides
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Steven Avery
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The Shapira Affair.
March 18, 2021 by languagehat 414 CommentsYesterday in this comment Y linked to two sources about a Biblical forgery scandal I’d never heard of, the Shapira affair. Jennifer Schuessler’s NY Times story is a lively account that begins:
It’s a very nice web presentation, with maps and images. The other link Y provided is the Academia.edu pdf of Dershowitz’s book, with his detailed arguments and an Annotated Critical Edition, English Translation, and Paleo-Hebrew Reconstruction of the text he calls V. It’s quite a story, even if we’ll probably never be sure of the truth. Y said “Maybe Hat would want to make a whole posting out of it,” and here it is.
Comments
Brett saysMarch 18, 2021 at 5:14 pm
The evidence that the fragments were forgeries is extremely strong. None of the experts who saw them at the time thought they were real, and since the physical pieces of leather were (probably) destroyed in a fire, it is very easy to throw out unfalsifiable proposals regarding the actual origins of the fragments. I read the first couple chapters of Dershowitz’s book yesterday, and he hangs a lot on his highly dubious conclusion that Shapira himself thought the fragments were genuine. He bases this conclusion largely on the finding of an apparent transcription/translation that Shapira probably made himself. However, Shapira was a known purveyor of fake Jewish antiquities (the best that can be said about him in this regard is that there is no proof that he was not himself a dupe in those cases), and he also clearly aspired to be known as an significant contributor to the study of Masorah and provided some hesitant transcriptions to some of the experts he presented the fragments to. So Dershowitz’s argument in Shapira’s genuineness appear pretty unconvincing.
A good treatment of modern thinking about the situation was given in this collection of articles from 1997. One of the shorter, more technical articles points out a number of reasons to think that the source of the physical parchment can even be identified—that it was cut from the bottom of a medieval Megillah, possible from Yemen.
languagehat says
March 18, 2021 at 5:30 pm
From the Times story:
There are knowledgeable people on both sides of this; it’s not just Dershowitz’s crackpot theory.
Brett says
March 18, 2021 at 5:59 pm
Obviously, this isn’t my field, but the textual history of the Tanakh and other Biblical writings is something I’ve followed for a long time. There only appears to be one significant person who actually believes Dershowitz’s theory is right, and that’s his dissertation advisor, Shimon Gesundheit, whose own theories (especially about the development of the Iron Age Hebrew calendar) are, while not crackpot, fairly well outside the mainstream. The remainder of his support seems to be extremely lukewarm. There are a number of experts (quoted in the New York Times article, for example) whose attitude seems to be that it would be fascinating if it were true, but there is no way to verify that without access to the physical fragments.
And frankly, while Dershowitz’s theories about the Shapira texts may not be total crackpottery, his earlier work—stating that the attitude of Leviticus was originally one of toleration toward men who have sex with men—really is crackpot stuff.
(There is also a purely statistical reason to believe the fragments were forged. The vast majority of such relics are forgeries, and when we have them physically in hand to be studied, this can frequently be verified—for example, by carbon-14 testing for organic materials like skin. It just so happens that Shapira’s texts have not survived, which means that we cannot subject them to modern scientific tests that could easily prove or disprove their age and provenance. The fact that the samples did not survive to be tested should not be counted as an effective point in favor of their genuineness. In fact, a big part of the reason that the texts did not survive is that they were considered such obvious forgeries in the nineteenth century, that there was very little interest in preserving them!)
languagehat says
March 18, 2021 at 6:03 pm
Why exactly? Is it so impossible/unthinkable that the prohibition was added later?
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languagehat says
March 18, 2021 at 6:08 pm
As for the loss of the original, the same argument was used to attack The Lay of the Host of Igor as a forgery, but it was proved to be genuine by linguistic arguments; Dershowitz is using the same sort of arguments here. Obviously I’m not competent to judge them, but if they hold up, then that’s a strong argument for genuineness.
David Eddyshaw says
March 18, 2021 at 6:25 pm
I am in no way an expert in these matters, but FWIW I found Dershowitz more convincing in his arguments that Shapira did not himself forge this document than his attempts to establish a very early date for it; the latter seem to involve a great deal of outright speculation, and indeed special pleading.
I’ll be very interested in what our local Hattic experts think about that aspect in particular.
Y says
March 18, 2021 at 6:47 pm
Expert opinions: Na’ama Pat-El wrote or co-wrote the linguistic analysis section in the book; that counts as an endorsement. The “maybe”s quoted in the NYT don’t explain why they’re only maybes. Perhaps because they did not feel qualified to pass judgment on the textual criticism part?
Dershowitz addresses the paleographic objections well: almost all of them were based on unreliable copies. The one partial copy, made by an artist ignorant of, and thus unbiased by the forms of Paleo-Hebrew writing, recorded an odd form of the yod, unknown at the time but later observed on Samaritan ostraca.
I do have two issues. Dershowitz has argued well that the text is old, but he keeps calling this “the oldest biblical manuscript”. I haven’t seen any argument as to why it couldn’t be a late copy, as old as Qumran or such. Secondly, it’s recorded that the manuscript darkened considerably during the time Shapira was showing it around Europe. I’d like to see some expert opinion as to whether that is consistent with leather taken out of a dry Transjordan desert cave and brought to damp Europe, or consistent with some known of antiquing leather by forgers, or both.
Dershowitz’s paper on homosexuality prohibition is not crackpottery. He argues that the text in Deuteronomy, with close parallels elsewhere, is primarily against incestuous sex, heterosexual or homosexual, and that by giving them equal footing, it presents sex between males as unremarkable and therefore presumably not prohibited per se. This has been written about before, too. He is careful to delineate well what is possible and what is certain.
Likewise, his paper about Noah, where he suggests that the flood story was grafted onto an earlier story about a drought, rests on suggestive but even thinner evidence. He does not seek to upend current views, just call attention to an intriguing alternative, and it’s a worthwhile paper.
January First-of-May says
March 18, 2021 at 7:13 pm
his dissertation advisor, Shimon Gesundheit
Apparently a real person. I wonder how he ended up with that kind of name, and/or whether he had to deal with jokes about it all the time.
Y says
March 18, 2021 at 7:21 pm
Nah, all European Jews have funny names. We accept it and create MAD magazine, or we change our funny names to other funny names.
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David Marjanović says
March 18, 2021 at 8:30 pm
Me, I find it amazing that there’s already this much reaction to a book that came out this year.
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D.O. says
March 18, 2021 at 8:31 pm
Yes, most powerful arguments of Dershowitz is about things that Shapira wouldn’t know he had to forge. The most interesting point is that the grammar of the fragment is different from Biblical Hebrew in Masoretic text. An early critic suggested that the forger didn’t quite learn Hebrew grammar, but surprisingly, the grammar of “V” is more complicated. I don’t know what to make out of it.
As for homosexuality, everyone including Dershowitz knows that it is unambiguously prohibited in Leviticus, but the idea that it was not in the earliest version doesn’t mean it was allowed or tolerated
J.W. Brewer says
March 18, 2021 at 9:25 pm
I’m not sure I’m following the earlier Shapira theory, but what’s generally taken to be the only reference to homosexual matters in Deuteronomy is usually interpreted as specifically limited to the context of prostitution (possibly “cultic” prostitution) where the homosexual kind is condemned in parallel with the heterosexual kind, no more and no less. No explicit position is taken in Deut on homosexual acts in a non-prostitution context although such a position is taken elsewhere in the Pentateuch. FWIW, the LXX is οὐκ ἔσται πόρνη ἀπὸ θυγατέρων Ισραηλ καὶ οὐκ ἔσται πορνεύων ἀπὸ υἱῶν Ισραηλ, and Brenton translated that w/o any hint of homosexuality as “There shall not be a harlot of the daughters of Israel, and there shall not be a fornicator of the sons of Israel.” The one NT occurrence of πορνεύων (in First Corinthians) is usually taken to refer to the heterosexual sort of misconduct. I don’t know whether it’s plausible that the LXX translator was looking at a different Hebrew word than the one the Masoretes handed on, or used a vaguer Greek word for a more specific Hebrew word, or whether the Masoretic word itself (קָדֵ֖שׁ) is itself much vaguer than “male (cultic) prostitute for male customers” but has usually been taken to mean that in the specific context.
Y says
March 18, 2021 at 9:27 pm
It’s not just that the early critic “suggested that the forger didn’t quite learn Hebrew grammar”:
(Pat-El, in Dershowitz, p. 96, n. 3)
As Pat-El shows, the supposed grammatical blunders have parallels elsewhere in the Bible. That is a matter of knowledge which was available in Shapira’s time. It’s another illustration of a running theme, the passionate bias against accepting the manuscript that existed then, and as Dershowitz seems to hint, still persists. (Sayce’s comment about the “humid climate” of Palestine is another such comment. Of course, that bias says nothing about the authenticity of the material, but it makes one distrust the mere opinions of experts on the matter, unless they supply good reasons for their arguments.
The rest of Pat-El’s analysis shows that by all indication the language is pre-exilic, and in that she relies on quite recent research (including her own). In some ways the language of the MS agrees more with current knowledge of the Hebrew of that time than with what was thought of it back then.
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Brett says
March 18, 2021 at 9:42 pm
@J.W. Brewer: Dershowitz’s dissertation claiming there was tolerance for homosexuality was talking about early redactions of Leviticus (a book which is much more obsessed with bodily and spiritual purity and condemns homosexual behavior in a couple places). I think Y just mistakenly typed “Deuteronomy,” because that was the book the Shapira fragments were allegedly from.
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J.W. Brewer says
March 18, 2021 at 9:49 pm
I would be at least as interested in reactions to Dershowitz’s other new work The Dismembered Bible, summarized by its publisher thusly: “It is often presumed that biblical redaction was invariably done using scribal methods, meaning that when editors sought to modify or compile existing texts, they would do so in the process of rewriting them upon new scrolls. There is, however, substantial evidence pointing to an alternative scenario: Various sections of the Hebrew Bible appear to have been created through a process of material redaction. In some cases, ancient editors simply appended new sheets to existing scrolls. Other times, they literally cut and pasted their sources, carving out patches of text from multiple manuscripts and then gluing them together like a collage. Idan Dershowitz shows how this surprising technique left behind telltale traces in the biblical text – especially when the editors made mistakes.”
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Y says
March 18, 2021 at 10:02 pm
Brett: thanks for catching it.
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marie-lucie says
March 18, 2021 at 11:02 pm
“Biblical homosexuality”
From time to time Academia.edu sends me texts it thinks I would be interested in, usually about historical linguistics, classification, Nostratic, etc. Most recently I was surprised to receive an article about male homosexuality in the Bible. It is rare that I read anything about Hebrew, so I am not familiar with the relevant scholars, but the author’s name was not Dershowitz. After numerous quotes from the Bible and from various exegetes over the centuries, the conclusion was that the earliest texts considered the practice in the context of “incest”, prohibition of sexual activity between kin, whether “by” or “on” males or females, and the more general prohibitions were added much later, sometimes with textual additions which commenters have long struggled to interpret. I am not competent to comment on Biblical Hebrew, but the article was certainly not “crackpotty”.
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Stephen Goranson says
March 19, 2021 at 3:45 am
Here’s the comment I sent on March 14 to [Christopher] rollstonepigraphy.com (where there are other comments):
People more familiar with Devarim than I will decide whether the Shapira ms will ever be accepted as ancient or not. A few observations.
“It would surely be unusual for a forger to labor to understand a text that he himself had devised or inscribed.” (ZAW 19). In my opinion “Secret Mark” is a fake text, and Morton Smith in a learned, detailed book may be an example of such labor, including changed opinion about the liturgical setting.
The article (1) names him Wilhelm Moses Shapira, though he went by Moses Wilhelm.
The book bibliography has an article by Fred N. Reiner in in BAR, but not his “C. D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair…,” British Museum Journal 1995 109-27.
Also missing: Truly Fake: Moses Wilhelm Shapira, Master Forger, the Israel Museum catalog from 2000.
The purple ink pages (book ch. 2) are quite welcome. But are they transcription attempt or draft composition?
Shapira’s letter to “Dear Dr. Ginzberg [sic]” said he was not yet convinced the ms is a forgery “unless M. Ganneau did it!” Not proof, but odd.
The writing surface has been characterized as “thick” (7) and “stout” (8) and, though I can’t be sure, apparently more tanned than one might expect for writing. If one turns to try to compare the Shapira ms to Qumran mss, the closest matches appear to be to the claimed ones sold mostly after 2002—the thick hide, fake ones.
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Stephen Goranson says
March 19, 2021 at 4:08 am
As noted in comments at Christopher Rollston’s site, another very recent book also argues for authenticity: Ross K. Nichols, The Moses Scroll (Feb, 24, 2021). I haven’t read it (beyond ch. 1), but apparently it usefully includes texts and translations of several 1880s evaluations.
I mentioned that I think “The Secret Gospel of Mark” is not ancient, neither the Mark verses part nor the Clement of Alexandria letter part. But at a U. Texas Austin zoom conference (maybe recorded online) a book was announced, which will claim that, while not written by Clement, because they [rightly, imo] conclude it was written after Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church History, it dates before Morton Smith:: Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Rogue Scholar, A Controversial Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (forthcoming 2021).
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Stephen Goranson says
March 19, 2021 at 4:38 am
From the cited NY Times article:
“Qumran was a massive shift,” Na’ama Pat-El, an expert in classical Semitic languages at the University of Texas in Austin, said, referring to the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. “What Idan is offering is something that’s at least equivalent, if not more. It’s pretty incredible if he’s right.” [….]
Pat-El, the University of Texas linguist, said she went into the seminar “pretty neutral” on the question of authenticity, but left thinking the case for forgery was “weak.” Since then, she has collaborated with Dershowitz on an analysis of the lexicon and syntax, included in his book.
The language, she said, is “standard biblical Hebrew, similar to 7th-6th century B.C.E. texts.” There are few of the anomalous features that are common in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts from later in antiquity, to say nothing of the howlers in many modern forgeries.
Maybe compare the statement reported also in the New York Times (May 5, 2014) from Roger Bagnall, surely one of the greatest living papyrologists, on the soon-after debunked “Gospel of Jesus Wife”:
But Dr. Bagnall said, ”I don’t know of a single verifiable case of somebody producing a text that purports to be an ancient text that isn’t. There’s always the first.”
SG: The Coptic of “Jesus’ Wife” seemed familiar—though anachronistically handwritten with a brush (?) not reed pen–as it was largely lifted from the Gospel of Thomas (online, with a typo).
Maybe Valediction seemed familiar by largely lifting from Devarim?
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Stephen Goranson says
March 19, 2021 at 6:24 am
Speaking of potential forgeries, Elijah Hixson has proposed that NT papyrus 50, now at Yale, was forged by a Prof. at Harvard.
Possible markers of inauthenticity in a New Greek Testament Papyrus: Genuinely Bad or a Very Good Fake?
U. Birmingham conference, Jan. 2021
… e=youtu.be
Speaking of a *for-sure* forger:
Malcolm CHOAT (Macquarie University, Sydney)
A Forger, his models, methods, and motives: The papyri of Constantine Simonides
Abstract. From the so-called “Gospel of Jesus Wife” to the post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments, fake ancient manuscripts have been risen to renewed prominence in the past decade. Yet while there is a plentiful supply of fakes to deauthenticate, examples of known papyrus forgers are more rare, as most such figures are anonymous. By far the largest corpus of fake papyri which survive is that produced by Constantine Simonides in Liverpool in the early 1860s. In this case, not only do over 30 fake papyri survive in the World Museum Liverpool, but archival and published material allows a much clearer view of Simonides than is possible with most forgers. By assessing the Simonidean papyri, reflecting on their possible models, the methods Simondies used to forge them, and his motivations in doing so, this paper aims not only to better identify Simonides’ techniques and motivations, but contribute to better understanding the sociology of forgery.
Video:
https://ucloud.univie.ac.at/index.php/s/pGdZkYPLrX5ggn9
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David Eddyshaw says
March 19, 2021 at 6:50 am
I was particularly interested to read Pat-El’s remarks on orthography, especially about matres lectionis. As she says in the MT, yod and vav are not written when the vowels are “long by position”, but only when the vowels actually derive from older diphthongs (although she does not say so, this is in fact more characteristic of earlier than later parts even of the Tanach itself.)
Now the document in question seems to omit yod and vav word-medially even in cases where the vowels do arise from older diphthongs; I believe this is seen in Phoenician but not in older epigraphic Hebrew. There is an interesting discussion of the omission of yod in -yw representing the 3rd masculine sg possessive suffix after a plural noun (where it is consisently written in the Masoretic text, but not pronounced in the Tiberian reading tradition.)
I wonder if a simpler explanation might be that the composer of the document (not Shapira), intending to adopt an archaising spelling consistent with the choice of Palaeo-Hebrew script, having noticed that in many cases where later Hebrew orthography writes yod and vav as matres lectionis they are absent in the older parts of the Tanach, in fact simply hypercorrected and omitted them across the board? (This would, of course, imply that the composer of the document was in fact accustomed to the later orthography, which used yod and vav comparatively freely to mark long vowels.)
As I say, I am in no sense an expert in these matters, and this may well be nonsense.
Pat-El herself attributes all this to dialect mixture; while there is no dispute but that Hebrew had dialects, I’m always slightly dubious when the all-too-easy explanation “dialect mixture” is invoked to explain odd forms. Sometimes, of course, it is unquestionably the right answer, but it’s nice to have some corroborative evidence about why the supposed dialect form might have been expected to appear in that particular context.
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D.O. says
March 19, 2021 at 12:36 pm
I’ve now read Prof. Rollston’s rejoinder to Dershowitz and found it unconvincing (he promisses full treatment in the forthcoming article). Basically, the argument consists of two parts: 1) there were and are a lot of forgeries around and 2) most authoritative people at the time thought it was a forgery. There is no engagement with any particular arguments of Dershowitz. Maybe it’s an ok approach to a situation where there are no available artifacts, but at least it would be an interesting intellectual game. The comments to Rollston’s post are good, including by main protagonists themselves, but I didn’t have time to look at them closely. My fool’s golden mean tells me that without the strips themselves there is no way to authenticate the text (there would be a roundabout way if a lot of genuine texts with similar features were ever found) and that the compelling arguments for forgery do not look very compelling. In other words, maybe.
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languagehat says
March 19, 2021 at 1:17 pm
Sounds about right. The argument about “authoritative people at the time” is silly; authoritative people thought all sorts of crap at the time.
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Mark S. says
March 19, 2021 at 1:33 pm
Brett
> the physical pieces of leather were (probably) destroyed in a fire
This was an academic hypothesis from the ’90s now known to be false. They were bought by P. B. Mason and displayed for a public lecture he gave in 1889. Mason died in 1903, I think, and it is thought that his wife later auctioned off this and other material. He was not generally a collector of antiquities of the Levant, but of natural historical and some British historical items.
> his earlier work—stating that the attitude of Leviticus was originally one of toleration toward men who have sex with men—really is crackpot stuff.
There is no reason to characterize the view as ‘the original attitude of Leviticus’. The thesis is more that some earlier codification affected what comes to us as Leviticus — and that the earlier assemblage was interested in the degrees within which sexual combination was forbidden. It explicitly excluded specific male-male combinations. What follows is that this assemblage of prohibitions would not itself have prohibited remote male male combinations, or not in the same way. This might not tell us much about the ambient society in which the earlier assemblage arose – which might e.g. have contained other forms of ‘prohibition’ that were not codified in that text.
In most times and places one takes a great interest in some form of remoteness requisite for sexual combination. The un-remote combinations are always abhorred strongly (by cultivating the clear and measurable natural disgust that impedes sexual attraction to those one lived with as a child). Whole ‘primitive’ social orders are organized around this and they can take very surprising routes to getting the requisite effect. (The hidden rationale is of course genetic and was not generally known by humanity.)
By contrast, what men might be up to while hunting in the forest doesn’t rise to the surface of discussion and one doesn’t speak of anything as forbidden or permitted; if one does speak of it, it is likely to attract the all-important remoteness criteria, which are also likely to affect the men anyway.
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David Marjanović says
March 19, 2021 at 2:15 pm
If they’re draft composition, why are they neither already in Paleo-Hebrew, for him to copy, nor in modern Hebrew handwriting? We’re shown a sample of Shapira’s Hebrew handwriting in a margin; it’s not like print letters are the best he could manage. And yet the purported transcription attempt is in print letters. It looks like he wrote those letters down one at a time, slowly, as he tried to see the dark brown letters on the slightly less dark brown leather.
The thicker the hide, the less like parchment it is, so the lower the quality of production, right? That could obviously indicate a fake, or it could just mean that the ancient scribe couldn’t afford the good stuff.
That’s awesome.
I haven’t yet reached the part of Dershowitz’s book about the language. I’m still in the part about which parts of the text are shared with Deuteronomy and which aren’t. Exactly those verses and half-verses that have been identified as post-Priestly redactions (i.e. in P language but presupposing P parts of the Pentateuch) in the last few years are missing in V, and there’s just no way any forger could have gotten that right almost 150 years ago.
Sure, but the obvious alternative is that the document dates from a time when the diphthongs had already become long monophthongs but the later orthography was not yet established, so long vowels were not written no matter their etymological source. After all that must be what happened in Phoenician, right?
I mean, their assessment was pretty reasonable given what was known at the time: the Qumran-like preservation of the fragments had never been seen before, the existence of dry caves was apparently unknown in England, for various language features see above, and the text didn’t fit any idea about how Deuteronomy came to be. It was a bit much all at once.
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J.W. Brewer says
March 19, 2021 at 2:31 pm
So if the physical pieces of leather may still be out there but their whereabouts are unknown after they were auctioned off by Mason’s widow a century or so ago, we have the interesting problem that if someone claims to have found them and they show signs of being a modern forgery we won’t know for sure if they are the “original” 19th century forgery or a more-recent-than-that forgery pretending to be, but not actually being, the items once in Shapira’s possession. (At least if we assume a competent 21st century forger can readily avoid using materials that can be proven not to have existed before 1883.)
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languagehat says
March 19, 2021 at 2:35 pm
I mean, their assessment was pretty reasonable given what was known at the time
Yes, of course; I’m not saying they were silly, I’m saying it’s silly to treat their judgment as definitive. You might as well judge continental drift theory by the reactions to it of scientists when it was first proposed. At least they didn’t drive Wegener to suicide.
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D.O. says
March 19, 2021 at 3:02 pm
I think the idea of forging a forgery is a very productive one. And underexplored by fiction writers. In Dina Rubina’s “The white dove of Cordova” two art students fake a painting by some old master (Northern Renaissance, maybe) and then have an art expert to authenticate it. Which he does confidently stayting that it is a 19c. fake. And then they pawn it for that, a very good 19c century fake. I might have shifted some details, but the basic idea is there.
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David Eddyshaw says
March 19, 2021 at 3:11 pm
Sure, but the obvious alternative is that the document dates from a time when the diphthongs had already become long monophthongs but the later orthography was not yet established, so long vowels were not written no matter their etymological source. After all that must be what happened in Phoenician, right?
I don’t think that is viable: how could the writers of the later time represented in the Masoretic text (prior to the still later period where all /e:/ /o:/, regardless of origin, could be written with matres lectionis) have known which long vowels should be written like diphthongs if they had all in fact become monophthongs at that point? The writing convention must surely antedate the monophthongisation.
Phoenician is different: in that language the diphthongs were monophthongised early, and there never was a phase where original-diphthong long vowels were written differently from others. IIRC, the same was probably true of northern Hebrew (which would be what underlies Pat-El’s invocation of dialect; that is not a bad idea, but it would be nice to have an independent reason for supposing that the text was of northern provenance, apart from the orthography itself.)
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Y says
March 19, 2021 at 3:16 pm
One point in the Rollston discussion D.O. linked to: the scrolls were supposedly found in a cave on the east side of the Jordan valley, in Moabite territory; that’s a strange place for them to be.
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Dmitry Pruss says
March 19, 2021 at 3:35 pm
Anthon Transcript is a real meta-forgery, a forged analysis of a lost forgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthon_Transcript
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Brett says
March 19, 2021 at 4:02 pm
“Rumpole and the Genuine Article” has a painter trying to pass off a genuine work by a better artist as a fake he produced himself.
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Y says
March 19, 2021 at 4:05 pm
I read an old Japanese folktale once: a nobleman writes a seditious haiku in the guestbook of a temple. When he gets word that it was discovered, he hurries there, gets the book, scrapes out the offending word and then rewrites it as it was. When he is brought to trial, he says he wrote another word: when the book is shown to him, he points out that the original had been scratched out and written over. The emperor, who is presiding over the trial, figures out what he had done, but can’t prove it. He rewards the nobleman for his cleverness by exiling him instead of executing him.
David Eddyshaw says
March 19, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Undermining my own argument (always a worthwhile exercise):
Firstly:
I think you could make a case that the use of yod and vav as matres lectionis in the period underlying the Biblical consonantal text was not triggered by vowel length but by closeness (which happens to correlate quite well with length because of the historical development of the Hebrew vowel system.)
Right up until Origen’s Hexapla, the reflexes of Proto-Semitic short *i *u in Hebrew were /ɛ/ /ɔ/, whereas the corresponding long vowels remained close /i:/ /u:/. It’s not clear at what stage exactly /ɛ/ became “long by position” in open syllables preceding stress and in singly-closed final syllables of nouns*, but regardless, it seems reasonable to suppose that this lengthening would initiallyhave created /ɛ:/, which ex hypothesi would not be written with yod. On the other hand, if *ay monophthongised to /e:/, this would then be written with yod.
The story with /ɔ:/ and /o:/ is a bit different: /ɔ:/ is almost always the outcome of Proto-Semitic *a:, and the /ɔ/ representing Proto-Semitic *u is not subject to lengthening “by position” at all (except in pausa) the following consonant is geminated instead. (The Hexapla and other Greek transcriptions show that in cases like segolate nouns the vowel was in fact short, not “long by position.”) But once again, if *aw monophthongised to /o:/, not /ɔ:/, this would explain the writing with vav.
The path is then clear to assume monophthongisation prior to the development of the Biblical consonantal orthography, as DM suggests: and the creators of that orthography would have “known” which cases of long e,o to write with yod or vav without needing to know anything about preceding sound changes or monophthongisation, because the sounds were still distinct in their day. The creators of the orthography would have innovated only in that they introduced yod and vav for the writing of /e:/ /o:/ alongside the existing cases of /i:/ /u:/.
Secondly:
I don’t think there are actually a huge number of unequivocal test-case words, given that there are not a huge number of Hebrew inscriptions from the pre-exilic period. No cases with vav are likely to help (for the reason I noted above), so I suspect that one is talking largely about cases like the construct *bayt of “house.” There may well be other explanations for whether such words are written with yod or not, and it might not be wise to draw sweeping conclusions from them one way or the other. Moreover, Pat-El doesn’t actually claim that there is a regular patter, really: only that yod, vav are sometimes absent where the Bible text regularly has them.
*There are a few other cases, for example in ayin-vav verb participles, but the same principles apply: one just needs to assume that the vowel was /ɛ:/ and not /e:/. To me (at any rate) it’s not clear what the underlying form of a word like /mɛ:t/ “dead” would have been (*miwt?) but at any rate it can scarcely have been *mayt.
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David Eddyshaw says
March 19, 2021 at 5:08 pm
It occurs to me that I may have confused the issue above in talking about Hebrew /ɔ:/.
I meant long kholam, which I am hypothesising was open at the time the consonantal orthography of the Bible was stabilised, and derives from Proto-Semitic long *a:.
I did not mean qamatz (which of course ends up as /ɔ/ in Ashkenazi pronunciation), which represents the /a:/ resulting from lengthening “by position” of Proto-Semitic short *a, and also the short /ɔ/ which derives from Proto-Semitic *u.
For some reason (boredom?) Akismet swallowed my preceding post without giving me a chance to edit it.
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David Marjanović says
March 19, 2021 at 7:25 pm
That makes perfect sense, then: /i:/ was always written with yod, /ɛ:/ never was, and for /e:/ the situation might even be inconsistent in pre-Masoretic texts, especially between different scribes. Testable hypothesis right there!
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Y says
March 19, 2021 at 8:45 pm
A comment (at ac.ed.) by Harvard biblical scholar Maria Metzler, contra Rollston’s critique. She basically says that Rollston ignores Dershowitz’s arguments, and raises ones which D. has already addressed. Yep.
This and other links come from a post on the Paleojudaica blog.
More: D.O.’s question about Dershowitz’s The Dismembered Bible is briefly discussed in this tweet. You have to have a special kind of mind to do what he does, which I don’t. You need to hold the Old Testament in your mind well enough to reverse putative ancient cut-and-pastes in your head. It’s like W.C. Fields doing block juggling.
Benjamin Suchard’s Twitter account (he’s another rising star of early Hebrew philology) is full of interesting nuggets and is fun to read.
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David Eddyshaw says
March 19, 2021 at 9:52 pm
To complicate matters further (why not?), I wonder if I can extend the idea of /ɛ:/ versus /e:/ to account for another mystery of Biblical Hebrew morphology …
A handy rule (invented by David Qimḥi, no less) is that vowels written with matres lectionis are unchangeable in flexion, whereas those without matres, which typically go back to Proto-Semitic short vowels, are prone to change to schwa in unstressed open syllables.
The Tiberian vowel point tzere thus usually marks an e-vowel which is “long by position”, i.e. prone to change to schwa in unstressed open syllables, unless it falls on the mater lectionis yod, in which case it is “long by nature” and invariant in flexion; here it represents Proto-Semitic *ay.
However, the long-by-nature vowel is not written with yod in two cases: ayin-vav participles like met “dead”, and in the first syllable of the imperfective of Pe Vav verbs, like yered “he goes down.” This would make sense if these forms go back to mɛ:t, yɛ:rɛd from earlier mɛwt, yɛwrɛd, and the /ɛ:/ fell together with /e:/ after the period when the consonantal orthography of the Bible was settled (Greek transcriptions already represent them all with η.)
Qimḥi’s rule is an odd one, inasmuch as although it makes perfect sense in terms of Proto-Semitic forms, the Masoretes actually apply it with remarkable accuracy, despite the fact that the consensus seems to be that they didn’t actually have emic vowel length in their own pronunciation of Hebrew*, and that even LXX shows η for the “long by position” outcome of Proto-Semitic *i, so that this implies a preservation of the correct flexion of the great majority of words for a millennium without any phonological cues to distinguish “by position” from “by nature” length in vowels. Even though the Masoretes were undoubtedly very good at what they did, that seems remarkable even for them.
I think you could probably make most of the rules work with quality differences alone, if you undo some of the changes that had taken place between the Hexapla and the setting up of the Tiberian system, such as the change of short /ɛ/ /ɔ/ to short (sic) /e/ /o/ in stressed syllables. It would be interesting to see if there are significant patterns in the cases where the Masoretes didn’t get it right.
*I have some doubts about this, myself: the rules for stress sandhi in the Tiberian system seem to suggest very strongly that length was still contrastive in stressed syllables; perhaps it had only recently ceased to be contrastive.
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Stephen Goranson says
March 20, 2021 at 6:29 am
I think it a good point (from Y. and likely others) that the Shapira (or Valediction) ms is suspect because it was (said to be) found in Moab. If so old, what Hebrew writer was available there then (or why would it be sent there?)? Later on, Hebrew writers were in Peraea, to the north, and Zoar, to the south.
Other mss that in my opinion are forgeries said to be from that general area–besides those sold by Shapira–are the more recent (in both senses, announced and claimed) “Angel Scroll” and the “Gabriel Vision.”
I haven’t yet seen, maybe or maybe not indirectly (paleographically?) relevant, Ran Zadok, “On a Recently Found Moabite Inscription,” Z. f. d. alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 132.3 (2020) 469-70.
William H. Morton (1915-1988) dug at Diban and reportedly found some (very brief?) Moabite writing, reportedly not yet completely published. I think a scholar has probably recently asked Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminaries, where he last taught, and had donated a teaching collection of artifacts, if they know more or have his papers.
Matthew Hamilton of Australia was the one who found out about the Shapira strips display at Burton on Trent and has done further research, not yet (to my knowledge) published.
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Rodger C says
March 20, 2021 at 11:59 am
The protagonist of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions is a young art forger (Northern Renaissance, in fact) who’s devastated when he’s told that a Bosch painting he forged at the beginning of his career was itself a forgery. A major plot turn occurs when he learns that it was the original after all.
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Y says
March 20, 2021 at 12:17 pm
Stephen G.: I was referring to a comment by Michael Nosonovsky, at the end of Rollston’s discussion. That wasn’t my insight. In any case, that’s a minus, not a fatal flaw. Some dealer could have wanted to gild the lily, or to keep other explorers off the trail if the scroll had come from Judea Desert.
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David Marjanović says
March 20, 2021 at 1:25 pm
Read the whole thread!
And just one click away is…
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