I’ve started reading a novel by my man Veltman that I had somehow missed when I was reading my way through the nineteenth century, his 1837 «Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию» [Virginie, or A Journey to Russia]; the protagonist, Гектор д’Альм [Hector d’Alm], is a Parisian who has had to move to Besançon because he bought property there and is terminally bored by provincial life. He goes to a solar festival, “праздникѣ солнца (Sauleou),” that involves families bringing fried eggs, and Veltman remarks:
Однакожъ этотъ праздникъ не казался
ни сколько замѣчателенъ Гектору, онъ
не видѣлъ въ немъ безотчетнаго уже
обряда одной изъ древнѣйшихъ религій;
онъ смѣялся бы, еслибъ ему сказали, что
яичница есть символъ jao, того перво-
бытнаго яйца, которое, по мнѣнію древ-
нихъ, носилось въ Хаосѣ, и изъ котора-
го произошла Вселенная.But this festival didn’t seem in the least remarkable to Hector, who did not see in it the inexplicable rite of one of the most ancient religions; he would have laughed if someone had told him that the fried egg is the jao, the symbol of that primordial egg which, according to the ancients, floated in Chaos and from which the Universe arose.
Does anybody have any idea what this “jao” might be? The j could represent any number of sounds — Veltman could have taken it from Sanskrit, Chinese, a Germanic language, or who knows what else.
I would bet good money on it being Ἰαω, the Koine rendering of the Tetragrammaton (with some currency in Gnosticism as well).
宙?
I would bet good money on it being Ἰαω
Very plausible — Greek didn’t even occur to me.
Sadly, the Dogon for “egg” is tárú …
Xanthe Tynehorne’s suggestion looks as plausible as anything we’re likely to come up with, I reckon.
If the Greek transcription went back to a Gnostic source, it would presumably imply a somewhat addled egg.
Louis Cyphre [Robert de Niro]: Some religions think that the egg is the symbol of the soul, did you know that?
Harry Angel [Mickey Rourke]: No I didn’t know that.
Louis Cyphre: Would you like an egg?
Harry Angel: No, thank you. I got a thing about chickens. [Sees Cyphre crunching an egg]
In his Светославич, вражий питомец (Svetoslavich, enemy’s ward) Veltman uses word Жупан for a leader of some political entity with an endnote: “ЖУПАН — господин, господь; jo-Pan или jao-Pan” (from Župan a chieftain in some Southern Slavic societies, which in Russian sounds funny because of the homophone, żupan, by my reconning the only form known to modern Russians).
Seems odd to me that a Russian would transcribe Greek into the Latin alphabet rather than Cyrillic. But not impossible obviously.
[Sees Cyphre crunching an egg]
What is involved in “crunching” an egg ?
“Crushing” an egg would have made sense.
Seems odd to me that a Russian would transcribe Greek into the Latin alphabet rather than Cyrillic.
Maybe Veltman got the specific form Jao — or Jao was generally in the intellectual air of the times — from Schiller’s Die Sendung Moses ? Here is the paragraph in which Jao occurs:
The passage in Schillers original publication in Thalia here, end of page 17. Beethoven wrote out a quotation from this passage and reportedly kept it near him while at work.
Looks like Xanthe Tynehorne wins her bet comfortably.
Maybe Veltman got the specific form Jao — or Jao was generally in the intellectual air of the times — from Schiller’s Die Sendung Moses ? Here is the paragraph in which Jao occurs
I’d bet good money you’re right. Well found!
I watched the scene, and he definitely bites the egg. Munching?
What’s the connection of “Jao” to the “Jah” form favored by Rastafarians? Seems unlikely to be pure coincidence.
“Crunching” to me would imply that maybe he hadn’t peeled the hard-boiled egg before biting it, but he clearly does during the conversation. There’s not enough sound for “crunch” to apply. I’d just say “biting into”, but I suppose that’s too boring.
https://youtu.be/FcGP4c3BXRc
Well, when he rolls the egg across the plate to crack the shell at about the 1:30 mark, there’s a definite crunching sound, but of course that’s considerably earlier than the quoted bit.
Just in the plate-o’-shrimp synchronicity department, the “Louis Cyphre” character is heavy-handedly supposed to be “Lou Cyphre” i.e. “Lucifer.” Presumably a cousin of A.I. Kuprin’s recently-mentioned “Mef. Is. Toffel” character.
“Jao, the Cosmic Egg” would be a great title for a children’s picture book. One would have to be careful to keep the protagonist away from the Very Hungry Caterpillar, though.
Greek magical papyri, which invoke Iao and others, have the sun as a cosmic egg.
I wanted to reply to “crunching” in order to say Don’t be a gazoolie, but everyone got there first.
Anyway, don’t know nothin’ about no egg. All I know is Two Sisters cocktails, pour me anotha one.
“Lew Siffer” appears as a rock impresario (or is he??) in the Jack Chick tract Angels?.
God, I love Jack Chick. Worth it just for “that cheap pastor”!
I can authoritatively claim, following my onetime housemate & teacher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tropp
that this must refer to the primordial wonton or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundun
of Chinese cuisine, familiar to Jewish and Chinese culture, cf collected works of J Needham somewhere…
Jack Chick tract
And it has a happy ending!
Also: “Read your Bible (KJV) every day …”
All other versions are snares of Satan!
Sadly, the Chick Tracts site search function does not work for me. I expect they used JehovaScript to detect my Satanic amillennial views and appreciation of Captain Beefheart.
.. and in his charm a cosmic egg
The tract also features the old meaning of jerk – twice.
FWIW IMHO Hjortsberg’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Matters_(novel)
is more interesting than his
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Angel
The tract also features the old meaning of jerk – twice
The new meaning is a Satanic deception.
I read Gray Matters as a teenager. It struck me as a quite exceptionally unpleasant novel (which is why I still remember it.) Stupid premise, too. Possibly reading it at that age produced a misleading impression.
It is indeed exceptionally unpleasant – I concur. But maybe there’s more to it than Falling Angel, which is maybe just a horrorshow…
“The book was serialized in Playboy, and won the Playboy Editorial Award” — it has to be good.
@David E.: I don’t know affirmatively that the late Cap’t Beefheart actually spent a period of time in the Seventies obsessed with Jack Chick tracts in a sincere and unironic way, but if one of his former sidemen made that claim in an interview along with a buncha other tales of the Cap’n’s varied eccentricities I wouldn’t suddenly become suspicious of the source’s credibility.
So if I ditch the amillennialism I might yet be saved?
John Crowley, in Dæmonomania, imagines a Gnostic sect hidden in the deepest part of Appalachia:
Radio WIAO! Comn at you through the ozone, it’s IAO, yow! The cry of the peacock is the name-a God! Where have you been that you couldn’t hear, where have you lain asleep? We can reach you throughout these lands, Egyptland where we are imprisoned. Let every ear open and every heart awaken. Now the news.
@ DE
Thinking back, what I remember of that book was the whale talk; it was at a time of whalemania, George Crumb and frinds. Stu Clayton and I encountered it somewhere around here re orangutans
Daemonomania is very well done (it also irritates me considerably, but that didn’t stop me reading the whole tetralogy.)
I think my favourite Latter-Day-Gnostic touch is the imagined Gnostic cartoon strip “Little Enosh and the Uthras.”
To follow up on my own prior question which no one picked up on, for reasons not known to me (although perhaps they are to specialists!), the King James Version translators decided to directly set forth the or a divine name as Jah in one place (Ps. 68:4 in their numbering, in pertinent part “extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH”). Pretty much everywhere else that the same Hebrew lexeme* appears, the KJV sticks with the Adonai/Kyrios tradition of euphemism and Englishes it as “the Lord.” But the exception definitely caught the eyes/ears of some folks in Jamaica.
*See, e.g. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3050.htm
@J.W. Brewer “To follow up on my own prior question which no one picked up on, for reasons not known to me (although perhaps they are to specialists!), the King James Version translators decided to directly set forth…”
In the Jewish Bible, that verse occurs in Psalm 68:5 (https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2668.htm), which contains the theonym spelled yod he. The rendition of that word in the King James Version is therefore expected and thus requires no explanation.
Jah love my brother
The shortened form Yah, which also occurs as a part of names, is used about 11 times in Psalms (according to the Köhler/Baumgartner dictionary); apparently unlike the full tetragrammaton it wasn’t considered to be a taboo word, so the masoretes didn’t give it the pointing of Adonai.
It should be noted that Luther nevertheless translated der HERR.
Jao, the cosmic egg? God in parts …
Thread won (as DM says.)
It’s just me, but I really, really don’t like the Mechon Mamre Bible. They came up with a system of mapping the five classes of cantillations into common punctuation marks (as in the example M linked to), and to me, reading it is like nails on chalkboard. It’s very popular, unfortunately, and shows up all over Wikipedia and other places.
@David E: And Little Enosh is of course a reimagining of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo. I suspect it was inspired by the sense (which I share) that Mandaean mythology, in particular, reads like a story of that sort. (And the Mandaean scriptures come with their own illustrations!)
Yes, the pictures are pretty cartoony …
Yes, ulr has the point – even if in earlier Jewish/Masoretic tradition the Digrammaton (“JAH”) was not thought so taboo as the Tetragrammaton, they have long been treated the same in translation: Luther consistently using “der HERR” is consistent with Jerome consistently using “Dominus” and the LXX (eventually?*) consistently using “Kyrios” for the Digrammaton. So the question is how come the KJV uses “the LORD” consistently in all those instances in the Psalms except for the one where it uses “JAH” instead, thus following that same tradition but not perfectly consistently. If M thinks the one “JAH” instance “requires no explanation,” then it’s the other ones that would require an explanation, but the explanation there (following the LXX and Vulg the same way Luther did) seems pretty obvious so the question remains why the instance in Ps. 67/68 was NOT handled that same way.
*Some wikipedia contributor suggests that there’s fragmentary evidence suggesting that early (and mostly lost) MSS of the LXX didn’t always use Kyrios in this context and that became uniform via later scribal tradition after the LXX text was largely-if-not-completely being maintained/transmitted by Christian scribes rather than Jewish ones.
the King James Version translators decided to directly set forth the or a divine name as Jah in one place
This was not an innovation on their part. The Great Bible of 1540 and the Geneva Bible of 1560 both render יָהּ as Jah / Iah. I spot-checked the other occurrences of independent יָהּ in these versions, and they are just rendered as the Lord.
The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 does not render it as Jah, but the name is given and explained in a sidenote. Coverdale 1535 does not give the name, nor does the Matthew Bible of 1537 (the completion of Tyndale’s work).
The Zurich Bible of 1531 doesn’t give the name either.
The rendering of this particular verse in early Western European vernacular versions seems like a topic on which someone must have written a good article somewhere, but I haven’t been able to locate it.
I don’t see any great mystery about the KJV translators only using “Jah” at that point: it’s the only case where “Yah” it is said explicitly to be the name of God, as opposed to being just used as his name in passing. The only case where it’s in quotation marks, as it were. Use versus mention.
…rendered Selah as Saͤla.
Maybe that’s connected to the rendering of Regen “rain” as raͤgen, showing the Swiss merger of /ɛ/ into /æ/… but, other than this, the language is very close to Luther’s and far from Züridüütsch.
The distinction between ü and uͤ is the same as in the Zürcher Narrenschiff.
I’ve fallen down Xerîb’s rabbit hole and dug up more translations of Psalm 68 (a.k.a. 67).
The Vulgate naturally has Dominus, but Pagnini (1528) has:
Seemingly more important for the subsequent English tradition, Münster (1535) has:
Suggestive evidence hints at Coverdale getting both God’s name and God’s horse from Münster, who curiously seems to have come up with the latter.
Coverdale (1535) still has:
which goes straight into Matthew Bible (1537):
But then the Great Bible (1539) switches to:
Most interesting, this sudden appearance of the name Ia did not go down easily. It appeared only briefly in the earliest editions of the Great Bible (1539-1540). Already in the second half of 1540 the text became instead (here from a 1541 edition):
This mistake—which I dare say makes the passage quite a bit easier for someone used to the older reading that God’s name is the Lord—was long lived, making it into the officially sealed 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Oxford printings have the mistake as late as 1700, though no later than 1704 they’ve started correcting to:
I hadn’t known and wouldn’t have guessed the Book of Common Prayer retains to this day Coverdale’s Psalter (and thus Münster’s horse) rather than switching to the Authorized Version.
Even if you buy David E.’s use v. mention distinction and also accept that all 88 (said one search) instances of “the name of the LORD” in the KJV version of the Hebrew-canon OT books are on the other side of that distinction from Ps. 68:4, you still have Exodus 15:3, which the KJV handles as “THe LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name,” where the second half is telling you what the divine name IS in very much the same way as the psalm verse is. So now I guess you have to say “but that was the Tetragrammaton Divine Name which is more taboo than the Digrammaton Divine Name.”
There’s at least one translation out there (Holman Christian Standard) which does the Exodus verse as “The LORD is a warrior; Yahweh is His name,” but it’s definitely well outside the mainstream of recent approaches. Quoth wikipedia re the HCSB’s most recent revision (circa 2010): “In the first edition Yahweh was found in 78 places; the update increased that to 495 instances (the tetragrammaton appears in over 6,800 places in the Old Testament.” I don’t know their methodology for picking those 495 out of that 6,800+.* (I also disagree with not using the traditional-however-etymologically-confused “Jehovah.” Saying “Yahweh” is not unlike calling Isaac “Yitzhak” in an English translation. Proper names can get translated too!)
*The HCSB’s publishers subsequently revised it again with what they call the Holman-less “Christian Standard Bible” which apparently largely reverts to just saying “the Lord.”
What’s in a name?
Note also the Douay-Rheims handling of Ex. 15:3 as “The Lord is as a man of war, Almighty is his name.” That’s a straightforward handling of the Vulgate’s “Dominus quasi vir pugnator, Omnipotens nomen ejus,” but it’s not at all clear to me whence (and why) Jerome got his “omnipotens.” LXX is just Κύριος συντρίβων πολέμους, Κύριος ὄνομα αὐτῷ.
O sing unto God, and sing praises unto his Mame
Holy Mother of God!
(Sorry)
Come now, everyone knows Mame is an auntie.
I guess Jehovah is so far from any reasonable phonetic rendering of the Divine Name that even pious Jews will not be very much troubled by it (though maybe put out by the attitude).
Nobody (including the aforementioned pious Jews) are squeamish about saying digrammaton out loud when it is attached to another word, like “halleluiah”, to say nothing about proper names. Speaking of which, Psalm 68:4/5 has this word as “b-yah” with prefix b- and everything is pronounced out loud. I don’t understand semantics of this prefix here. Pragmatics too.
Some Jews prefer to say “haShem” (the Name) instead of “Adonai” (my Lord) for 4g, don’t know whether they really say “the name is his name”.
There is a tradition of writing and pronouncing forms like יק and הללוקה for יה and הללויה (with ק q for ה h or י y) which dates to medieval times, I believe. See p. 802–803 here, for example. First hit for הללוקה on YouTube here. But I do not have any special knowledge of the matter, and I would like to learn more.
There’s no other variant of the Tetragrammaton that you can plausibly or idiomatically use in the fixed phrase “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” which to be fair is I guess little-used outside of historical narratives in this 21st century CE. (76th century for those who prefer Byzantine-style dating, of course.)
Yes, Xerîb, I’ve spoken too hastily. It seems to be on a radical side, though. I do not have an extensive personal experience and no statistics, but several devote people, who I listen to on internet, and who would never allow the full name to go across their lips were saying הללויה out loud and even enunciating it.
there’s such a wide and fascinating range of practice in how to avoid the Names, and the now-sanctified euphemisms! i’m partial to the forms like “adoshem/adoyshem”, that i hear from folks in (or from) hasidic worlds.
@J.W. Brewer: I think those should be “historical fiction narratives,” since that quote bears no resemblance to anything Ethan Allen actually said at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga. It’s a much later confection—as true as the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. (Allen’s actual demand for the surrender was something like: “Come out of there, you damned old rats!”) In any case, he was not acting in the name of the Continental Congress, which did not represent or claim authority over Vermont at that time. The only officer who who accompanied the Green Mountain Boys on that expedition who did have a commission in the Continental Army was Benedict Arnold. (And speaking of Arnold: Ethan Allen would also have been hanged for a traitor if his negotiations with the British to take Vermont out of the Revolutionary War had come to light during the war.)
@Brett: Surely fictional dialogue that is popular (“viral” we might anachronistically say) and strikes a chord with a mass audience is better evidence of period idiomaticity than what actual individuals might actually have said, with the only complication being the possible need to be clear about which “period” the evidence relates to. No doubt the late Prof. Labov explained this somewhere in one of his methodological works.
@Brett: Is it not also possible that fictional dialog could reflect neither what was said way back when the event in question occurred or is supposed to have occurred nor what was said in the writer’s day?
I have in mind, as a third possibility, fictional dialog that the author thinks was authentic for a certain time in the past but actually was not. See, for example, Spenser’s misinterpretation noted here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/derring-do
@J. W. Brewer: Surely fictional dialogue that is popular (“viral” we might anachronistically say) and strikes a chord with a mass audience is better evidence of period idiomaticity than what actual individuals might actually have said, with the only complication being the possible need to be clear about which “period” the evidence relates to.
Not at all. It might be the non-idiomaticity that makes it distinctive so it can strike a chord. We may be able to quote the speeches Shakespeare gave to Henry V. I think few if any of us can quote what commanders of Shakespeare’s time actually said, but we can be sure they didn’t say anything in iambic pentameter.