Kezayit.

From Alex Foreman’s FB post I learned the following wonderful word:

Kezayit, k’zayit, or kezayis (Hebrew: כְּזַיִת) is a Talmudic unit of volume approximately equal to the size of an average olive. The word itself literally means “like an olive.” The rabbis differ on the precise definition of the unit:

▪ Rabbeinu Yitzchak (the Ri) defines it as one-half of a beytza (a beytza is the volume of an egg).
▪ Rambam specified that a ‘grogeret’ (dried fig) was one-third of a beytza, making this the maximum size for a kezayit, which is smaller. Rabbeinu Tam made the argument explicitly, though, using a slightly different calculation came out with a maximum definition of three-tenths.
▪ According to some interpretations, including the Chazon Ish, the zayit is not related to other units by a fixed ratio, but rather should only be conceived of independently as the size of an average olive.

Stick that in your metric pipe and smoke it! Alex says “Somebody from Ashkenaz just told me that the size of an olive isn’t the size of an olive. Mobius strip in my brain now. What do?”

Unrelated, but I learn from this Baseball Hall of Fame page that there was an old “scruffy, worn out cowboy” character called Alkali Ike, “paired with Mustang Pete in a popular series of silent films in the 1910s,” and that this is the origin of both Ring Lardner’s Alibi Ike and Cardinals pitcher Grover Alexander’s otherwise mysterious nickname “Pete”:

Alex and his regular catcher, Bill Killefer, went on a hunting trip together and after a day on the trail, the catcher looked at his dirt-encrusted friend and hung the name “Alkali Pete” on him. Though hardly appropriate for a successful young athlete, the nickname stuck to the former Nebraska farm boy. Just before Alexander entered the Army in 1918 during World War I, Alexander’s teammates presented him with a wristwatch with that nickname engraved. As more players and reporters began to use the nickname, it morphed into “Old Pete.”

Comments

  1. Neither are all olives olive-coloured.

  2. I, and perhaps most people who know the expression, learned it from the Passover Haggadah. In the instructions for the ritual sampling of the Seder plate, each of the guests is to eat kezayit of this and that; not a precise unit, but an impressionistic one, like the English pinch.

  3. J.W. Brewer says

    Even more so than with eggs (where it seems like more smooth variation over a range), different sorts of olives seem to have different characteristic sizes. But maybe that’s the result of subsequent millennia of divergence and selective breeding or the arborial equivalent? Was there only one variety of olive extant where/when the Talmudic sages were doing their disputing and defining? Or at least only one sort that was considered the True Olive, with other varieties of different sizes able to be safely ignored?

  4. How is this olive different from all other olives?

  5. @JWB: This is the Talmud you’re talking about. Of course there are details. Kelim 17:8: “‘As much as the olive’ [kazzayyit], as they said: one neither big nor small but of intermediate size, that is the ’ĕgōri ~ ’ăgōri [אֱגוֹרִי in the Parma ms., אֲגוֹרִי in the Kaufmann ms.]”

    What kind of olive is this ’ĕgōri? Theologists don’t rest, and now they have more data to look at. This analysis (in Hebrew), argues as follows. There are three main groups of landrace olive varieties in Palestine, and analysis of 2000 y.o. olive pits, which are abundant in archaeological contexts, suggest that those three have persisted at least since then. The intermediate sized one, known as Souri, is particuarly rich in oil, and this may fit with the description of ’ĕgōri in the Yerushalmi Talmud, as one which maintains its olive content through the rainy season, and is hence (folk?) etymologized from the root ʔgr ‘gather, stockpile, hoard’.

    The Souri olive is typically 3 cc in volume. So there you are.

    Caveat: the quoted study of olive landraces is from 1960. Its threefold division of olive varieties may be outdated, and the archaeology may have been refined as well.

  6. Thank you, Y! That’s really interesting.

  7. “Somebody from Ashkenaz just told me that the size of an olive isn’t the size of an olive. Mobius strip in my brain now. What do?”

    Put your brain and an olive in a Klein bottle, then tell us how large that Klein bottle is. Problem solved.

  8. (I wrote “theologists” and didn’t even notice it until now. Oh, well, it’s kinda cute. The OED has it, but it is obsolete and rare.)

    I also meant to write ‘oil content’, not ‘olive content’.

  9. FWIW, the official international and US olive size standards:

    https://www.sizes.com/food/olives.htm

  10. The story I’m familiar with is that northern-european sages had no clue what size an actual olive is, hence the enlarged notions of the medieval Ashkenazi texts.

  11. I’m curious about the egg – is this something like a quail’s egg? Even the largest olive is nowhere near half the size of a hen’s egg.

  12. Here’s an interesting article about the history of the כזית: https://www.academia.edu/1491246/The_Evolution_of_the_Olive
    Slifkin also has a famous joke post about it: http://www.rationalistjudaism.com/2017/03/the-kezayis-post.html

    My brain actually *is* in a Klein bottle!

  13. Oh.
    So after years of occasional discussions of the Arabic word bayḍ I realized that it is cognate to now Russian Jewish бейцы.
    Just like цадик and rabbi are cognate to ṣadīq and rabbi…

  14. I wrote “theologists” and didn’t even notice it until now.

    I didn’t either! Seems like a perfectly fine word…

  15. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Deutsche Bahn have, or used to have, a rule saying that ‘Dogs smaller than a cat and in a carrier container travels for free but larger dogs or dogs not in a container count as a person.’

    Do they keep a standard cat?

  16. Jen, that reminds me of the “large boulder the size of a small boulder”, whose second anniversary was celebrated recently.

  17. Can anyone tell me about rabbeinu? My untutored sense is it means our rabbi in Hebrew, and it seems unusual to pull the possessive into English as if it were just a title. Is it used that way in Yiddish, where someone from a different congregation or competing sect would still refer to Rabbeinu So-and-so?

    I guess Monsignor is used similarly. That too struck me as odd once, but I internalized it long ago.

  18. PlasticPaddy says

    @jen
    I looked this up on the deutsche bahn site:
    https://inside.bahn.de/bahn-hund-katze/
    It says there
    “Leider gibt es dafür keine konkreten Maße, bitte handeln Sie nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen. Dann reisen Ihre Vierbeiner kostenlos.”
    So there are no legal size limits; the traveler is kindly requested to act according to their best judgment and their conscience.

  19. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Well, that’s better than letting some dogs be people and some not 😀

    I think it must have been for some kind of up-to-so-many-people ticket, but I only kept the rule and not the context!

  20. PlasticPaddy says

    Basically the dog counts as a person when not in a transport box. The box has to fit in the baggage rack or in the gap between two (rows of) seats, but the size of the box (or the animal inside) is not otherwise limited. I think you can find special rules for guide dogs on that page.

  21. So there are no legal size limits
    Well, that’s good. Although I liked the idea of a Bundesbahnstandartkatze, that would have been a very German thing.

  22. Here’s an interesting article about the history of the כזית

    Thanks for that! Here’s an excerpt:

    Aside from the mitzvah requiring a certain type of food, there is also a requirement of a sufficient minimum quantity to qualify as “eating.” This quantity is defined in the Midrash:

    There is no “eating” with less than a kezayis (equivalent to an olive). (Toras Kohanim, Acharei 12:2; Emor 4:16)

    How much is this quantity? R. Chaim of Volozhin (1749-1821) is widely revered as the father of the yeshivah world. Less known and certainly less popular in the yeshivah world is his view as to the size of the matzah that one is obligated to eat on Pesach. R. Chaim was of the view that this kezayis is actually the size of an olive—around three or four cubic centimeters. This results in a piece of matzah about half the size of a credit card.

  23. I always thought of kezayit as referring to two-dimensional size, not volume. I wouldn’t expect someone breaking off a piece of matza to do calculations accounting for its thinness, but rather eyeball the size. This may reflect the transition over recent centuries to an ever stricter interpretation of Halakhic law.

  24. David Marjanović says

    -standard

    Edit: the dash at the end is automatic, I can’t do anything to change it back into a hyphen. Even adding a non-breaking space after it doesn’t help.

  25. DM: What if you use an HTML entity name, i.e. ‐ or ‐? I use entity names to keep straight quotation marks from getting encurled.

  26. kezayis could be (should be?) a case study for an intro seminar in applied philology!

    its various definitions play an interesting role in haym soloveitchik’s Rupture and Reconstruction essay (which i know i talk about excessively). basically, no traditional community of practice has ever really been in doubt about what quantity kezayis means, since for any practical purpose it means the amount that the people you learned by watching ate at the appropriate moments. but as the site of authority in observance was shifted* from embodied practice to textual/institutional codification**, credentialed men insisting that your father (grandather, aunt, whoever: the reference-point practitioner in your circles) was wrong about kezayis (and other quantity markers) became a key part of consolidating institutional/credentialed authority against actual embodied tradition.

    that’s a lot of what drives the theologists’ (i love the word, Y!) search for more data about ancient olives, and insistance that the data they find matters for determining correct practice***. this goes against quite a few core principles of traditional practice, starting with the one that says minhag (local collective embodied practice through time) is authoritative! but authority figures promoting entirely new ideas that expand their authority under the guise of Stricter Adherence to Tradition isn’t exactly novel.

    .
    * i’m only using the passive here because i’m not clear on how the process developed: it clearly benefits rabbinical authorities and the yeshivas that produce and credential them, and the ruling institutions of observant communities (whether hasidic courts or misnagdish/yeshivish models), but i don’t know which elements of that stratum first started pushing the shift forward.

    ** transparently an absorbtion of christian (especially u.s. protestant) models of scriptural literalism / inerrancy and church/clerical control of orthopraxis.

    *** and, implicitly, that there is only one, fixed, eternal, and constant Correct Practice – which is also an adoption of a specifically christian (and especially u.s. protestant) notion.

  27. kezayis could be (should be?) a case study for an intro seminar in applied philology!

    Extremely interesting stuff, thanks! And speaking of philology, U. Weinreich gives two plurals, kezayesn and kezeysim.

  28. J.W. Brewer says

    I’m a bit unclear on the timeline of the various overlapping processes rozele is describing here, but as to the three rival theorists mentioned in the original post I am skeptical that the Rambam, in particular, was influenced by U.S. Protestantism. And almost as skeptical as regards the Chazon Ish, since I think of U.S-style-Protestantism as not having been much of a factor in the admittedly pluralistic religious culture of early 20th-century Vilna/Wilno etc. You would think as a matter of general historical/social dynamics that the earliest cohorts of rabbis to have been exposed via cultural osmosis to a Protestant sort of mindset about how to be a theologist would have been the Reform ones with no particular interest in keyazit-quantification.

  29. I don’t know about the Chazon Ish in particular, and I am talking off the top of my head, but I’d say the common factor to US Protestantism and modern Haredi Judaism is increasing fundamentalism in reaction to reformist movements.

    BTW, rozele, that is in addition to, and separate from your observation about religion in the service of the concentration of power, which is of course spot-on.

  30. J.W. Brewer says

    @Y: Sure, but group A and group B responding similarly to similar historical predicaments and/or incentive structures is not, by itself, any evidence that group B was influenced by or imitating group A, which is what I took rozele to be saying.

  31. two plurals, 𝓀𝑒𝓏𝒶𝓎𝑒𝓈𝓃 and 𝓀𝑒𝓏𝑒𝓎𝓈𝒾𝓂

    One is treated as a Yiddish word and another as Hebrew.

    I think that (almost) no Christian church ever tried to control their adherents’ everyday habits as much as (mainstream) Judaism. Certainly, not in the area of eating. Leaving aside Protestant influences on Rambam, the novel thing might be a desire to use objective facts about life in early CE Judea/Palestine to setlle kezayit debate.

    EDIT: What is “US Protestantism … increasing fundamentalism”? Are there any practices in which US protestants became more “fundamentalist” or is it just growing distance from the secular world? Kind of how slower train on a parallel track might seem moving in the opposite direction.

  32. One is treated as a Yiddish word and another as Hebrew.

    Clearly. I just thought it was interesting.

  33. Standartd
    Yes. One of the words where I’m more used to the English than to the German equivalent.

  34. For a while I felt absolutely crazy.
    “But English has d” thought I.
    “Does it?” thought I.
    “Not it does not. it has -t.”
    “But I remember, something was Wrong with the English word..” “But it has -t: Modern Standart Arabic – the word they use where Russians and French speakers would have ‘literary’. And yet I feel something certainly was wrong with the Englsih word”. “but it has -t. I can see it”. “But something was wrong” “And what? You remember that something was ‘wrong’ logically, but sensually you do not remember no -d here! You would remember it if there was a -d. You can even reproduce it visually. If there was -d it would have left visual memory. In that case only logic can be wrong, ”

    I convinced myself, and then I looked in up the dictionary . -d. Moreover, at the stage 1 my visual image and sensual memory also was -d.

  35. Anyway, English has -d.

    Russian has стандарт ‘Standard‘, but штандарт ‘Standarte‘.

  36. [warning: long, because i got interested in thinking about systematizers]

    @JWB:

    yes, clearly: reform, neolog, and other non-halakhic strains of jewish observance have their own (complicated) histories of absorbtion and rejection of various christian modes. but none of them care about how big “the size of an olive” is! and to the extent that they go in for applied philology at all, it tends to be kinda dull and mostly about biblical-textual-criticism.

    and it’s precisely because other strains do care that kezayis gets interesting in relation to the changes soloveitchik describes in how authority, text, and practice relate to each other in self-definedly “traditional” jewish communities° over the early 57thC.

    that process took a tradition of decentralized, non-institutionally-dictated practice (in which the function of text is to justify current existing community practice as it evolves, ex post facto – and then to do the same thing after practice changes*) and substituted a model nearly identical to the version used in the strains of protestant christianity that were becoming dominant in the u.s.**, in which practice is supposed to follow advance directives from specific institutionally credentialed men (justified by text, but fixed and unchanging dictates once announced). that change is just as transparently – and just as unacknowledgedly – an adoption of a christian model as ChaBaD’s missionary work***.

    now, thinking about how earlier systematizers like rambam (in a muslim maghrebi context) or the chazon ish (in the russian empire, and then in zionist palestine) relate to this gets into some fascinating cans of worms! the details are above my pay grade – i do not read responsa literature even in translation unless viciously provoked, and don’t have the hebrew, arabic, or ivrit to read the correspondence and journalism that would help with either context – but on one foot:

    systematizers never had the authority to direct practice – that’s precisely the innovation that soloveitchik documents. their success (in the geographies & times where a particular one of them got any) was a mix of how well their work reflected widespread existing practices and how easily their works lent themselves to being used to justify local practices. but fundamently, any influence systematizers had on practice was indirect, through the few community rabbis who could afford copies of their work (or get access to manuscripts), and, later, those who went to yeshiva (likely a minority down into the 20thC). but all of that would depend on their congregants letting them overrule established local practice, which is still the easiest way to be sure of getting fired from a rabbinical job, even with a reform congregation. there’s no uniformity, and that’s exactly the point!

    would some systematizers have liked to be directive authorities? i’m sure! but there was no such thing in a jewish context (beyond the scope of individual charisma, which tended not to be big for halakhic decisors, as opposed to wonderworkers like the baal shem tov), so they didn’t have a chance.

    i think the chazon ish might be a key bridge figure here, like the previous lubavitcher rebbe. he lived in places where the state tried to assert/invent the existence of centralized directive jewish authorities****, and during the early stages of the vast expansion***** of the class of yeshiva-educated and -credentialed men (a key part of the material base of the shift soloveitchik describes), though he himself wasn’t a product of a yeshiva. i don’t know how he talked about any of this, or how he as an individual or his work plays into the changes Rupture & Reconstruction describes in bnei brak. i’d read the hell out of a well-informed analysis of that!

    .

    ° from lineages tracing back to christian europe (he mainly writes about yiddish-lineage communities in north america and palestine, and his analysis definitely applies to german-lineage communities as well), though my less-informed sense is that the same processes have since affected at least some sefardi circles, at least in palestine.

    * the classic Big Examples being slavery and polygyny, because arguments about things that affect household structures and economies are more likely to lead to asking a posek for a decision than arguments about whether a piece of matzo is bigger than an olive (though not less likely to show regional variation, it turns out).

    ** and who the jewish right – including some in these “traditional” communities – would increasingly ally themselves with over exactly the same period.

    *** which is part of the lubavitcher rebbe’s overall americanization of much of his court’s approach in this same period. like his use of media, it shows how directly he was learning from his generation of protestant clergy.

    **** the russian “crown rabbinate”; the ottoman and then zionist “chief rabbi” positions.

    ***** soloveitchik gives the total ‘orthodox’ elementary & secondary day school population (the pool of potential yeshiva students) in that u.s. as under 6,000 in 1942, and ~170,000 in 1994. the overall jewish population in the u.s. was ~4.25M in 1942, and ~5.3M in 1994; there’s no reliable breakdown to tell us how many were in traditional communities of practice at either point.

  37. David Eddyshaw says

    I’d say the common factor to US Protestantism and modern Haredi Judaism is increasing fundamentalism in reaction to reformist movements.

    WRT Haredi Judaism I am unable to speak, but the striking thing* about (especially US) Protestant fundamentalism is how very far it deviates from traditional Christian belief (the dispensationalism that deeply permeates much of it is borderline – sometimes outright – heretical, for example, and its typical premillennial eschatology was the domain of marginal nutters up until the 20th century.) Pretty much the opposite of what it understands itself to be doing. I think the same (mutatis mutandis) is true of much of “fundamentalist” Islam.

    * To me. And (by definition) nobody is orthodoxer than I am.

  38. he lived in places where the state tried to assert/invent the existence of centralized directive jewish authorities

    Reminded me how in 90s I wondered who is that dude in a hat and that dude in a turban in the trio that meets our politicians during the “meetings with religious leaders”.
    I knew about nothing about religious structures (and still know nothing) but I knew that Russian Orthodox Church has some sort of hierarchy. And then “chief rabbi” and “chief mullah”:-/

  39. he lived in places where the state tried to assert/invent the existence of centralized directive jewish authorities

    The characteristically decentralised nature of Sunni Islam drives the French state absolutely crazy. Considerable efforts have been put into trying to create some Islamic equivalent of the Jewish Consistoire that could impose a state-friendly uniformity on mosques across the country; the closest they got was the CFCM, a federation too loose and diverse to satisfy Macron’s (oh so laïc) demands for a “Charte des principes de l’islam de France”, and which he therefore recently dumped.

  40. This does have one tangential language-related ramification, incidentally: Macron wants/wanted to increase the availability of Arabic teaching in state schools so that parents wouldn’t be tempted to send them to study at mosques on weekends. Because of course the only reason they might want to do that would be to learn the Arabic language.

  41. “mullah” – sorry, the man is “high mufti” (lit. “highest” in Russian). And Shaykh ul-Islam but this title they did not use in 90s.

    And now he wears something Tatar (like the hat of Russian tsars, but without gold), not a turban.

  42. David Marjanović says

    Are there any practices in which US protestants became more “fundamentalist”

    Oh yes. What comes to mind immediately is that today they’re absolutely against abortion under nearly all, or absolutely all, circumstances. Fifty years ago they were cool with it. Now they’re increasingly even against contraception. Soon they’ll be more Catholic than the Pope…

  43. Anyway, English has -d.

    Russian has стандарт ‘Standard’
    Of course, you’re absolutely right. I apologize for inflicting my own confusion on you all here.

  44. I’m not convinced more anti-abortion = more fundamentalist when we’re discussing textual fundamentalism.

  45. Yeah, I don’t find that convincing either.

  46. David Marjanović says

    Sorry, I was taking “more fundamentalist” as just “stricter”. Abortion is treated as a property crime or something in the Bible, arguably even as a test for adultery, definitely not as murder. I can’t think of a topic where American fundamentalism has moved closer to the text, off the top of my head at least.

  47. American fundamentalism historically focused on the historical accuracy of the Bible, the imminent and physical Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and Christ’s Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Atonement. Abortion came along in the last decades of the 20th century purely for political reasons.

  48. I am not sure if Y meant textual fundamentalism.
    People began using the word widely during the Iranian revolution: something that neither the West nor USSR supported and normally I understand it as: “religious police arrests girls who dress improperly or attend football games”.

    I understand that there can be other interpretations, but I do not see why “back to the Middle Ages” is not the “default” one.

  49. Because it’s meaningless in an American context, where “fundamentalism” has a specific sense.

  50. If it is actually better known in that sense, then fine.

  51. Fundamentalism is inherent in the roots of Protestantism, which argued that illiteracy and reliance on priests led to the corruptions of Catholicism. You needed to go back to the text. In the words of Common, back when he was still Common Sense, “you gotta read them boys, cant just skim ‘em.”

    Mainline Prots ultimately followed literacy in a different direction, leading to secularism.

  52. This emphasis on everyone having access to and returning to the texts also made Protestantism inherently a “Fuck the experts. I can read” religion or strain of religiosity.

    Sometimes that has served us very well…

  53. David Eddyshaw says

    back to the Middle Ages

    This pretty much exactly what Protestant fundamentalism is not; Islamic fundamentalism too. The idea of both is that we need to get behind the accumulated corruptions of time, back to the pristine faith of the first believers (clearly visible to us, of the One True Path, if not to those who do not have our advantages. Hypocrites all … of course, that is the only possible explanation for their denial of such evident Truth!)

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    Indeed, using “medieval” as a Western pejorative shorthand for “barbarous and ignorant” is itself a very Protestant concept. Although I suppose maybe the Reformation and Renaissance have to share credit and are at risk at falling out between themselves about exactly what the Middle Ages are being unfavorably compared to?

  55. This pretty much exactly what Protestant fundamentalism is not; Islamic fundamentalism too.

    Indeed. Both Salafism and Protestantism kick off with an explicit rejection of defining elements of the Middle Ages. Destroying saints’ tombs or monasteries is much more a modern phenomenon than a medieval one. That said, Salafism seems to show a clearer continuity with certain strands of medieval Islamic thought than Protestant fundamentalism with medieval Christian thought. Going back to the Salaf is not quite as ambitious as going back to the very first believers, and – given the necessary faith in hadith analysts – doesn’t permit quite as thoroughgoing an erasure of intervening authorities…

  56. (But my comparison is probably founded on ignorance of the inner workings of Protestant fundamentalism – I expect David can correct me.)

  57. David Eddyshaw says

    Although I gather that there are such things as Muslims who attempt to base their practice and doctrines on the Qur’an alone

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quranism

    wholesale rejection of the Hadith seems indeed to be much more radical a step than rejection of church tradition, given the vital role of right praxis and of law in general in mainstream Islam. I’m not surprised that it’s never formed the basis of anything analogous to Protestantism.

    Mind you, I think mainstream Protestantism tends to greatly overestimate the degree to which scripture is actually comprehensible at all (as a basis for doctrine, anyhow) without the benefit of tradition (for example, attempts to prove the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of sola scriptura strike me as either wildly overoptimistic or willfully blind to the degree to which they are reading stuff into the text which is only visible in retrospect, as it were.) The tendency of the more thoroughgoing kinds of tradition-averse Protestantism to spawn heretical sects tells its own story.

  58. David Eddyshaw says

    There seems to be some reason to think that Aaron ben Moses ben Asher himself was a Karaite.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_ben_Moses_ben_Asher

  59. Just got to this piquant passage in Yuri Buida’s 1996 novel Ермо [Yermo, the protagonist’s surname], which seems relevant to this discussion (my translation):

    But New England is not just a geographical or historical concept, it is a unique phenomenon in the spiritual life of North America. So when we say that Georgii Yermo-Nikolayev, George Yermo, was educated at Milton Academy and Harvard, we have to take account of the cauldron in which the future writer’s spirit was boiling. This soup was made by the Founding Fathers and their followers, who hardened their hearts toward creatures and loved only God; evidently they believed that love for man was the sin of God himself, and that hell was undoubtedly in the hottest place of God’s heart. Eventually they succeeded in accomplishing the Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the lands of New England, a marriage bound by ropes on which in 1692 fanatics in Salem hanged nineteen women accused of witchcraft.

    Но Новая Англия – не просто географическое или историческое понятие, это уникальное явление в духовной жизни Северной Америки. Поэтому когда мы говорим, что Георгий Ермо-Николаев, Джордж Ермо, получил образование в колледже Мильтона и в Гарварде, мы должны отдавать себе отчет в том, в каком котле варился дух будущего писателя. Эту похлебку заварили отцы-основатели и их последователи, ожесточавшие свои сердца к твари и любившие одного только Бога: они, видимо, полагали, что любовь к человеку является грехом самого Бога, а ад, несомненно, находится в самом горячем месте Господня сердца. В конце концов им удалось осуществить the Marriage of Heaven and Hell на землях Новой Англии, брак, связанный веревками, на которых в 1692 году фанатики в Сэйлеме повесили девятнадцать женщин, обвиненных в ведьмовстве.

  60. > overestimate the degree to which scripture is actually comprehensible

    Well, or it’s only too comprehensible, and the doctrines the church fathers have been hiding are patriarchalism, polygamy and the smiting of one’s enemies. Or to a few rare visionaries, tests of whether god really wants you to sacrifice your son.

  61. David Eddyshaw says

    Only very tangentially related, but in the course of disappearing down the rabbit-hole of WP links, I discover that

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anan_ben_David

    a (if not the) founder of Karaism, was saved from execution by the mediation or advice of no less a figure than

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Hanifa

    founder of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. They were both prisoners of al-Mansur at the time; Abu Hanifa himself was never freed.

    I love this sort of interconnectedness.

  62. J.W. Brewer says

    I don’t find the Buida passage “piquant.” Rather, I treat it as evidence that, quite understandably, someone who grew up in Soviet-occupied East Prussia during the Cold War is likely to be pig-ignorant about the history of New England and the rather dramatic shifts between the witch-hanging era and the era (late 1920’s into 1930’s) in which the fictional Yermo was being educated at posh schools.* The key difference (for Massachusetts in particular) is that a society founded by hardcore Calvinists experienced a complete collapse of belief in Calvinism, leaving behind a diverse range of crackpot beliefs, new syntheses, and (largely doomed) attempts to reconstruct the earlier traditions of Christian/Western civilization that Calvinism had sought to destroy.

    *Wikipedia’s current list of prominent Milton Academy graduates includes FWIW two individuals I knew at least casually in college and a third I knew at least casually in law school. Which I should perhaps find alarming, but the relevant point here is that none seemed like witch-hangers and/or dramatically haunted by a psychological need to grapple with the witch-hanging legacy. And I say that as a descendent of one the hanged ladies in question. One can debate how much the Milton of the 1980’s they attended had drifted from the Milton of the 1880’s or the halfway-in-between Milton the fictional Yermo attended. But the foundational Milton of the 1880’s, however posh and patrician it was, was already an artifact of post-Puritan, post-Calvinist New England rather than the original thing, which had proved in practice an unstable isotope.

  63. J.W. Brewer says

    To be more affirmative rather than negative, let me commend to you this wacky-yet-not-inaccurate description of the sort of social/cultural type (“Puritan” is really the wrong word, as the author grudgingly acknowledges) that blossomed in 19th-century New England (and its suburb of Upstate New York) in the wake of the collapse of the Calvinist regime.* “what happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs?”

    https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/

    *Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. famously dated the collapse to November 1, 1855 (at 9:30 a.m.), but that was both overprecise and too late …

  64. David Eddyshaw says

    Sadly, I score only 1 point (for having a relative with a weird* Biblical name.) I must be a Catholic without ever having realised it. They’re so sneaky, those Papists … (does that get me another point?)

    * Really weird, but it still seems only to count for one point.

  65. J.W. Brewer says

    David E.: the baseline against whom points are being scored here is the sort of generic modal 19th-century white American. So it may not be a competition you are well-prepared to enter. For example, I don’t know that “in college society with weird Classical name” was ever reasonably attainable by non-Americans, although it may have been easier, mutatis mutandis, in 19th-century America than 20th-century. (I can at least nominally claim points for that one, which gets me as many points as having 7+ siblings — achieved by one of my grandparents but not by me personally — would have.)

  66. David Eddyshaw says

    Kind words, JWB. I feel a bit better now. (Sniffs.)

  67. David Eddyshaw says

    Fundamentalism is inherent in the roots of Protestantism

    I don’t think that’s right (but then I wouldn’t, would I?)

    The works of the great Protestant reformers draw heavily on the Church Fathers and show a vivid awareness of church tradition, to which they often appeal to justify their own positions (Calvin passim, but think of Luther’s thing about St Augustine, too.) They inhabit quite a different intellectual world from the soi-disant Fundamentalists of 20th century America, with their amazing knack for missing the whole point, and teenager-like* ability to imagine that they are the very first ever to notice the questions that they are concerned about (in which they strikingly resemble the New Atheists.)

    I think there is much more of a theological gulf** between a contemporary Premillenial Dispensationalist Megachurch founder and Calvin or Luther than between Calvin or Luther and their contemporary Catholic opponents. The PDM people say the same words as the Reformers (sometimes), and recite the same formulae, but the words don’t mean the same thing any more. Some frog-boiling has occurred over the centuries …

    The issue is also complicated by a marked tendency of PDM types to ascribe their own beliefs, ahistorically, to the Reformers.

    * My parents are so stupid!
    ** And without doubt a much greater cultural gulf too.

  68. J.W. Brewer says

    The problem is that the Great Reformers ™, Calvin and his henchmen notably more than Luther and his, took extraordinarily damaging and nihilistic formal positions without, at least if one wants to be charitable, fully appreciating the long-term consequences of them. They played with ahistorical and atomizing “sola scriptura” rhetoric without realizing that they were themselves so marinated in the interpretative tradition of the Church (even in its debased and heretical and perhaps graceless Latin institutional version) that they were not in fact actually doing what they claimed to be doing. But that does not relieve them of moral/causal responsibility for what subsequent generations who understandably took their rhetoric at face value ended up doing.

    But we have now drifted considerably from the original topic, unless we want to know what Karaites think olive-sized means.

  69. I don’t find the Buida passage “piquant.” Rather, I treat it as evidence that, quite understandably, someone who grew up in Soviet-occupied East Prussia during the Cold War is likely to be pig-ignorant about the history of New England and the rather dramatic shifts between the witch-hanging era and the era (late 1920’s into 1930’s) in which the fictional Yermo was being educated at posh schools.*

    That’s rather as if you were to take Humbert Humbert as reflecting Nabokov’s views and knowledge. The faux-knowing narrator of the biography of the fictional Yermo cannot be identified with the man who grew up in Soviet-occupied East Prussia any more than the loquacious pedophile can be identified with the man who grew up in tsarist Petersburg.

  70. J.W. Brewer says

    I am happy to be corrected by hat, and willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Buida as having, no doubt for legitimate literary and aesthetic goals, created an unreliable narrator with a shaky grasp of the details of the social/intellectual history of actually-existing New England.

    Speaking of VN, I observed the 100th anniversary last week (2/2/22) of the first publication of _Ulysses_ (by Sylvia Beach in Paris) by pulling down from the shelf my father’s old copy (appropriated by me when I left home for college in 1983 and never reclaimed by him) that he bought for the “modern literature” class he took w/ Nabokov circa 1958 and letting it fall open at a random page with my father’s handwritten notes on it. Which however are sufficiently non-mindblowing that I fear he was annotating the text while reading it in his room before class rather than capturing whatever profundities VN may have uttered about it in the lecture hall.

  71. David Eddyshaw says

    @JWB:

    Ah. So (like Ryan) you feel that American-style Fundamentalism is an inevitable outworking of Protestantism?
    Yet there seem to be many of us Calvinists who have not (so far) succumbed. Are we inevitably doomed?
    (Lutherans are evidently in less danger.)

    The argument seems not altogether dissimilar to that of those (hostile to Islam) who agree with Muslim fundamentalists that their interpretation of Islam is indeed the sole truly authentic one …

    Truly it is said, that the onlooker sees more of the game.

  72. David Eddyshaw says

    unless we want to know what Karaites think olive-sized means

    As the Tanach is silent (I think) on the subject of the size of olives, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is no settled Karaite position on this subject. But I would be glad to be proved wrong. I think all sides should be heard.

  73. @David, I have a relative named Коздоя.
    It once greatly impressed my friend.

    In sounds approximately as “caprmulga”, where caprimulgus “goatsucker” is козодой.
    I used the Latin word to illurstrate
    – the mysterious disappearance of the connective vowel
    – feminine gender
    – the verbal stem “to milk”.
    I can’t use the English word for this.

  74. That’s rather as if you were to take Humbert Humbert as reflecting Nabokov’s views and knowledge.

    Comparing Buida to Nabokov seems a bit of a stretch. Maybe it is because I don’t have the context of the rest of the novel, but as a fellow New Englander I have to agree with J.W. – nothing about that passage is accurate or insightful. If the point is that Yermo is as arrogant in his ignorance as most expats, fair enough but that becomes interesting only after I know who Yermo is.

    In any case, it can’t be as bad as Joël Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, a book so awful i have to control myself from physically destroying it when I see it on a bookstore shelf.

  75. @Lameen, David Eddyshaw, I did not mean “the Middle Ages” literally. But:
    the Islamic Golden age — I am not using these words in the usual sense, I mean the period from 7th century to codification of law — is precisely the Middle Ages. The period before that is Antiquity.

    back to the pristine faith of the first believers” must refer to this period.

    Many different people are called “Salafi” and some try to imitate outward elements of life of the Salaf up to wearing medieval dress. I saw such people. They reminded me myself when I was helping my friend in a historical reenactment festival.

    And next the modern liberal line of defence of traditions is exactly that they made a lot of sense and actually improved lives of people in their original context. It establishes a link beetween between the Middle Eastern society of 7th century and the traditions and leads to “modernize the interpretation or go back in time”.

    Perhaps you have Saudi Arabia (and certain events in Africa) in mind. Arabia and Africa preserve many institutions that seem “ancient” to Westerners. Whatever change the Saudi state initiates, it is more likely to introduce something new.

    But claiming that someone builds (or tries to build) a comprehensive and veritable image of medieval society would be strange. Salafi are as close as one can get to a more resonable claim.

  76. David Marjanović says

    3 points just for being named Elizabeth? Seriously?

    в Сэйлеме

    Somehow it had never occurred to me that Salem might be pronounced the straightforward English way.

    I must be a Catholic without ever having realised it.

    Conversely, in America, even Catholics can be evangelical.

    I don’t know that “in college society with weird Classical name” was ever reasonably attainable by non-Americans

    Yeah. The closest things to college societies or Greek fraternities found in German-speaking places are 1) reactionary Catholic associations, descended from the liberal democratic ones of 1848 but stuck at that point while society around them has been drifting left, that involve parading in peculiar uniforms (“bearing colors”), heavily ritualized beer-drinking and exist mainly so that alumni can give all the important jobs in national administration to each other, and 2) totally not Nazi associations, descended from the nationalist ones of 1848 but drifted further right since then, that involve parading in peculiar uniforms (“bearing colors”), heavily ritualized beer-drinking and in many cases heavily ritualized dueling with sabers and supply politicians to Austria’s extreme-right party (probably Germany’s too now that Germany has one). Both kinds have Classic-oid names in -ia, the latter usually derived from the name of a Germanic tribe (but one that got so bad it was actually forbidden was called Olympia).

    They’re slowly dying out and are not being replaced.

  77. drasvi: I suppose one might reasonably say that the Salafi ambition is to rebuild an early-medieval society by ruthlessly stamping out the key innovations of late-medieval society. Such an ambition, however, strikes me as characteristically modern in its scope and its attitude toward time, reminiscent of the classicising fervour of the Enlightenment or the Renaissance.

  78. Comparing Buida to Nabokov seems a bit of a stretch. Maybe it is because I don’t have the context of the rest of the novel, but as a fellow New Englander I have to agree with J.W. – nothing about that passage is accurate or insightful. If the point is that Yermo is as arrogant in his ignorance as most expats, fair enough but that becomes interesting only after I know who Yermo is.

    Since I’ve read Buida and you haven’t, I’m pretty confident in saying you have no idea what you’re talking about and are reflexively exhibiting blind New Englander pride/exceptionalism, quite comparable to that of Texans. Nobody knows us, nobody understands us! Only us! (Except for those of us who disagree with me, and they’re not really us!) Talk about arrogance. But feel free to malign people you haven’t read but a bit of whose quoted writing (in translation) put in the mouth of an invented narrator about an invented author happen to set off your alarm bells.

    Also, Buida explicitly references Nabokov and compares Yermo to him. I wasn’t plucking the name out of my ass. And his Russian prose style is superb.

  79. They’re slowly dying out and are not being replaced.
    I wish I could share your optimism on that (I don’t mind the purely color-wearing and beer-drinking ones, but the ones with nationalist-fascist ideologies; those guys have already done too much damage in German history). While these associations stopped being a focal point of student life with the opening up of the universities in the 60s/70s and the swamping of the old “my grandfather already studied medicine / law here” kind of legacy students by the new mass intakes, they seem to survive tenaciously, using money from their alumni to entice new blood; one of their draws is that they often have old real estate near campus, where they offer recruits lodging for ridiculously low rents. They’re not aiming at mass appeal, just at maintaining a steady trickle of recruits that allow them to perpetuate their old-boys networks.

  80. The Russian text reads as a sort of a parody, it has a tone of what LH calls “fictional narrator” (of literary and stylistical game). Or so I read it.

  81. Exactly.

  82. I think someone (J1M I think) already mentioned here a game where players invent imaginary encyclopaedic articles (for words whose actual meanings they have no idea about).

    Then they compare it to the actual articles in a real encyclopaedia.

    And there is a memorable recording where 3 of my friends (19, 14 and 15 back then) improvise a radio [programme? I do not know what a show is called in English when it is radio. In Russian it is ‘transmission”] biography of a fictional composer. Perhaps they also improvise some of his pieces, because they are misitians and met exactly to improvise music together.

    Inspired by a line from an actual textbook of музлитература:
    “Как и все великие люди своего времени, Гендель был выходцем из низов немецкого общества. Отец его был придворным цирюльником, а мать была отцу под стать” (If I am not confising the composer).

    (A под стать B is marked in Russian, normally you expect it when A is, say, a “whore” or something liek that…)

  83. AH!!!
    They put it* online!!!

    Как большинство великих людей прошлого, Георг Фридрих Гендель – выходец из низов немецкого общества. Предки его были ремесленниками; отец Генделя, цирюльник-хирург, служил в различных европейских армиях (шведской, саксонской) и обосновался в родном городе Галле, добился должности придворного хирурга герцога саксонского и ко времени рождения сына достиг значительного материального достатка.

    Мать композитора была под стать своему супругу: не уступала ему ни в мужественной энергии, ни в душевном и физическом здоровье. Это были люди крепкой бюргерской закваски и передали своему сыну физическое здоровье, душевную уравновешенность, практический ум, не знающую усталость работоспособность.

    Пиздец, pardon my Kusaal. Facepalm, sorry.


    *it – the textbook, not the audioplay.

  84. “Как и все великие люди своего времени, Гендель был выходцем из низов немецкого общества. Отец его был придворным цирюльником, а мать была отцу под стать”

    The Russian means “Like all great men of his time, Handel came from the lower levels of German society. His father was a court barber and his mother was well matched with his father.”

    Edit: The longer textbook quote explains that she was his match in energy and health.

  85. Technically it is called a реферат – a sort of assignment where a student must write a summary of what she read, a particualrly popular assigment in crappy universities (and students never write them on their own, they just copy an already written реферат by someone else).

    The site where I copied it from is called “бесплатный банк рефератов без плагиата” (free bank of реферат’s without plagiarism). I do not know what they mean “without plagiarism” – first summary is a derivative work anyway, second the “bank” exists FOR plagiarizing. I guess “without copying it from a textbook”.

    But I think here the book is exactly coyed: I can’t imagine a student of a musical college capable of smoking enough ганджа to produce that. I am confident in the line I quoted… but I was quoting my friend. It is more likely that my friend shortened the paragraph (else he was reading a shortened version of the text above).

  86. @LH, I agree that “под стать” as used in the longer text is better than под стать in the line as my friend quoted it.

    I am still pleased to see that “most of great people of the past came fromt he lower levels of German society” (as opposed on “all great people of his time”).

    I still can see why ” Это были люди крепкой бюргерской закваски…” was deeply traumatizing for my friend.

  87. Since I’ve read Buida and you haven’t, I’m pretty confident in saying you have no idea what you’re talking about>

    Since I grew up in New England, have numerous friends and relatives who went to Milton and Harvard, and have at least a passing knowledge of what happened at the Salem Witch Trials, I’m pretty confident “Yermo” has no idea what he’s talking about. Let’s leave Buida out of it for the moment. The novel you are quoting from may well be superb. The paragraph reads fine as a pastiche of a certain type of Russian intellectual, prone to ridiculous generalizations and grand theories of history based on very little evidence. But as an ignoramus who has not read Buida I have no idea whether that was Buida’s intention, or whether you find Yermo’s thoughts actually accurate and compelling. Your responses to JW and me lead me to assume the latter.

    My point, once again, is that if you present a paragraph from a novel most of us have not read, completely out of context, you can’t take umbrage if people don’t understand what you are on about. However, if I truly am an arrogant ignoramus because I have not read Buida, I will take your word for it as I generally trust your literary taste.

    But feel free to malign people you haven’t read

    But I only maligned Yermo, not Buida.* Not having read Buida may be a sin, but when you attack me for maligning a fictional character and not having read his fictional works, that seems rather unfair.

    whose quoted writing (in translation)

    Интересно, а вы откуда решили, что я читал перевод? Не надо меня обижать, давайте сохраним дружеские отношения.

    *Saying someone may not be on Nabokov’s level is hardly an insult. If you really feel Buida is the equal of Nabokov then I very much look forward to your full review.

  88. My first exposure to New England was a picture in Scientific American (its Russian edition – there existed such a thing), a random image in yellow, red and orange produced on, I think, photographic paper by spilled chemicals. It was called by the not quite the author “Autumn in New England” and it was pretty enough for me to rememebr and get curious about the autumn in question.

  89. J.W. Brewer says

    I take it hat’s point is that not only is Yermo himself a fictional character but the third-party narrator of Buida’s novel about Yermo is also an (unreliable and per drasvi self-parodic) fictional character, who perhaps should not be identified with Buida himself. But I certainly agree with Vanya that you need more than that paragraph (maybe even more than that specific book?) to draw that inference. Unless perhaps the convention in Russian literature is that third-party narrators are presumed unreliable and non-omniscient absent affirmative intratextual hints to the contrary? Maybe my default expectations are not on the right setting?

  90. But I certainly agree with Vanya that you need more than that paragraph (maybe even more than that specific book?) to draw that inference.

    Well, sure. I wasn’t expecting anyone to draw any conclusions about book or author from one short snippet; I just thought the religious rant was amusing and relevant to this thread. I had no idea people were going to start ragging on Buida. I’m sorry now I posted it.

  91. >ragging

    Making no judgments, but simply observing that the word was ubiquitous in my high school, always referring to women. Its use here with a different pool of referents tames it a bit. But I doubt it’ll reenter my vocabulary.

  92. Huh. I don’t think I ever heard it used that way. There’s no such thing as a unitary language!

  93. Green:

    (also rag on) to annoy, to tease (esp. in context of school or university).

    1821–6 [UK] ‘Bill Truck’ Man o’ War’s Man (1843) 248: Truce with your ragging, Dick […] I’m not in the humour at all.
    1871 [US] L.H. Bagg Four Years at Yale 46: Rag, to overcome and entirely use up an opponent or rival.
    1888 [UK] N&Q Ser. 7 VI 38: To rag a man is good Lincolnshire for chaff or tease [F&H].
    1899 [UK] Sporting Gaz. (London) 12 Aug. 1002/1: Fortunately […] we rarely hear sweet young girls talk about being ‘beastly jolly hungry,’ or […] ‘it’s all jolly fine you men ragging me’.
    1905 [UK] A. Binstead Mop Fair 170: He so ragged the bear that it shouted, ‘Aisy, Mick, yue something fool!’.
    1914 [Scot] ‘Ian Hay’ Lighter Side of School Life 98: They will not dare to rag a prefect.
    1917 [UK] A. Brazil Madcap of the School 11: ‘You needn’t look so incredulous. I’m not ragging’.
    1923 [UK] ‘Sapper’ Jim Maitland (1953) 74: You’ve got guts; you’ve got nerve, and I want to apologise here and now for ragging you.
    1929 [US] (con. WWI) H. Odum Wings on My Feet 21: Well, boys pulled him up but sho’ did rag life out of ’im.
    1937 [UK] E. Garnett Family from One End Street 18: She got ragged as it was now she’d begun to go to school.
    1945 [UK] G. Fairlie Capt. Bulldog Drummond 105: Yours very sincerely […] makes up his mind to rag the stand-offish Drummond.
    1950 [UK] A. Buckeridge Jennings Goes To School 67: Mr. Wilkins could not stand being ragged.
    1963 [UK] K. Williams Diaries 2 Jan. 205: I was ragging Bett M[arsden] a lot, and felt v. guilty after.
    1974 [US] P. Gent North Dallas Forty 203: I loved to rag him.
    1986 [Aus] C. Bowles G’DAY 44: Darlene is nine months gone, and Mr Foster is […] really dirty on her for getting preggers and all his mates are ragging him about it.
    1984 [Can] Totally True Diaries of an Eighties Roller Queen 🌐 30 Apr. Kerrie wasn’t at school today and Gary was really ragging. Sometimes he can be a real prick.
    1990 [US] R. Campbell Sweet La-La Land (1999) 97: Otherwise he’d get on his ass and start ragging him and making small of him.
    1996 [Aus] (con. 1964-65) B. Thorpe Sex and Thugs and Rock ’n’ Roll 265: Bluey would rag Tony endlessly.
    2004 [US] Mad mag. Dec. 35: Think I want to see those fat, bald losers? I would. It’d be fun to rag on ’em.
    2016 [UK] Sun. Times (London) 16 Oct. 🌐 Seventy years later he watches ‘loutish Tories’ ragging Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons.
    2016 [US] T. Robinson Rough Trade [ebook] ‘[W]e’re not consciously ragging on gay people when we use those words?’.

    Doesn’t seem to be used with regard to women in particular. I guess your high school was an outlier.

  94. Интересно, а вы откуда решили, что я читал перевод? Не надо меня обижать, давайте сохраним дружеские отношения.

    Извините, я увлекся!

  95. I think that, at my high school, there were some people who thought rag on was some kind of P. M. S. reference. I don’t know how widespread that was though.

  96. J.W. Brewer says

    FWIW, this tweet by self-proclaimed authority dictionary.com claims there is no etymological relation between “to rag on” and “on the rag,” although IMHO it’s not hard to see why high school folk etymologists might have hypothesized or assumed a connection. https://twitter.com/dictionarycom/status/1109081412383195136

  97. Green says that rag ‘harrass’ might have come from rag ‘tongue’, although the latter is first attested in 1833, and the former in 1739.

  98. Stu Clayton says

    While looking for pretexts to get in a huff about gender-dissing, let’s not forget that “she’s on a roll” could be taken to refer to her jelly roll. Mr. Morton would approve.

  99. In the primary school I thought that блядь! is a corruption of блевать. Cf. “плевать!”. At my high school I did not know what is P.M.S. at all.
    Sigh.

  100. drasvi: I suppose one might reasonably say that the Salafi ambition is to rebuild an early-medieval society by ruthlessly stamping out the key innovations of late-medieval society. Such an ambition, however, strikes me as characteristically modern in its scope and its attitude toward time, reminiscent of the classicising fervour of the Enlightenment or the Renaissance.

    @Lameen, yes. I am sure, they are also stamping out some innovations of the first century of Islam too.

  101. There is no contraditction actually.

    If I were to recreate any ancient social system (or a religion) I would have to constanctly face the choice between preserving the spirit and ditching the letter or preserving the letter. Worse, preserving this part of the spirit and r ditching that part of the spirit (a religious person assumes that there is an universal element, of course).

    Of course theoretically it is possible to solve it as in jokes about mathematicians: return the world to the orignial state (convert everyone to paganism?) “…and the problem reduces to the previous one”.

  102. attempts to prove the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of sola scriptura strike me as wildly overoptimistic

    Datapoint: I never paid very much attention to attempts to be taught religion by my mother’s side of my family (to the extent that I don’t think I ever was a Christian in any meaningful way), but did attempt to read the Bible all by myself in my late teenage. Actual Sola Scriptura takeaways include:
    – Jesus clearly does not conceive of himself as the but rather a “Son of God”; indeed talks about “Our Father in Heaven”
    – the Yahweh character is a psychopath and if we are to consider the Old Testament as “his word”, a reasonable assumption would be that he’s frequently lying e.g. when claiming to be the Creator
    – the Holy Spirit effectively doesn’t even exist as a distinct entity in-text
    – the epistles? just Commentary By Some Guys, with no reason given to consider them as deserving especial attention

    This was at most a quarter-serious read so I don’t know what a Christianity actually built around this kind of Just Reading The Bible would look like; but surely extremely heretical anyway (I don’t even think any kind of salvation would be guaranteed to be built in).

  103. – the Yahweh character is a psychopath and if we are to consider the Old Testament as “his word”, a reasonable assumption would be that he’s frequently lying e.g. when claiming to be the Creator

    You basically just reinvented Gnosticism there. The Mandaic scriptures are still quite rude about Yushamin (Yahweh of the Heavens.) I would think that’s not so much sola scriptura, though, as scripture plus different background assumptions about morality; in the gospels, Jesus shows a fair degree of respect for the Torah, put in stronger terms than traditional Christian dietary mores might have led one to expect (“not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law”).

  104. That’s fair, I don’t think anyone goes into religious texts without background assumptions about morality. Or for that matter, e.g. about cosmology.

    I had, among other things, enough knowledge at this point to know of the set-theoretical category of ordinals, which has the property that there is no ultimate Largest Entity and only a succession of ever larger infinities, and even the knowledge that a number of theists have approached it with an additional assumption “but it all tops out at Absolute Infinity, which is BTW equal to God” patched on top, which however has rather little use within the system. (Sometimes I think the actual first religious text I read was, indeed, Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind.)

  105. David Eddyshaw says

    Not just background assumptions about morality
    Language itself lives within a culture and any individual language cannot be properly understood separately from the culture.

    This is something that immediately confronts all but the most grossly incurious when faced with a very “exotic” foreign culture and language; I think Biblical literalists often hugely underestimate the alienness of the cultures of the original writers of the scriptures and the potential for radical misunderstanding that this creates. It’s relatively easy to see that Kusaal (of course) has “no word for ‘soul‘” (just as English has “no word” for siig or win); it’s harder to bear in mind that Greek and Hebrew have “no word for ‘soul'” either. The Greek and Hebrew “equivalents” have a whole lot of quite different associations from the English “soul” (and from each other.)

    This doesn’t, of course, mean that communication is impossible or even that efforts to understand the BIble are doomed; but it does mean that the idea that the text can simply be left to speak for itself, and that it even necessarily always has a meaning plain to an untaught 21st century Westerner is – problematic.

    Traditionally, the fudge is that the text is comprehensible with the help of the Holy Spirit; while, as a good Protestant, I agree with this, I have no difficulty in believing that the Holy Spirit very often chooses to work through learned scholarship (much as it behooves someone praying to remember that the answer to the prayer may quite often involve the prayer getting up and doing something in their own person.)

  106. That’s fair, I don’t think anyone goes into religious texts without background assumptions about morality.

    True. One of the more difficult things about talking to Salafis is their insistence that one’s background assumptions about morality are simply irrelevant (except insofar as they may happen to match what they believe were those of the Salaf.) In this regard, they go rather further than mainstream traditional schools of Islamic thought, which give local custom a respectable if secondary place.

    Rucker wrote some good mind-openers for the mathematically inclined…

  107. John Cowan says

    much as it behooves someone praying to remember that the answer to the prayer may quite often involve the prayer getting up and doing something in their own person

    My favorite tale here is of the man threatened by flood, who climbs up on his roof and prays to be saved from drowning. When the waters rise over his head and he is drowned, he complains to God, “Why didn’t you save me?” God replies, “I sent you a fireman, a man with a boat, and a helicopter, and you turned them all down!”

  108. David Eddyshaw says

    An old but evergreen one, doubtless familiar to all Hatters already, but stiil:

    A pious soul prays to God every night:

    “God! God! Let me win the lottery! You know I’m a pious man. You know I’d use the money well. Let me win the lottery!”

    He keeps this up night after night for weeks. Eventually God gets worn down by it all, and says:

    “OK, OK! I’ll do it. But meet me halfway, OK? Buy a ticket!”

  109. Lars Mathiesen says

    Absolute Infinity: When using the von Neumann construction of the ordinals, each ordinal is a set, namely the set of all smaller ordinals, But the construction gives you a proper class of ordinals, or less succinctly stated: There is no set large enough to contain all these set-like ordinals. The proof of this does not use any very advanced logic, but I’ll spare you.

    How ever, it is possible within the confines of NBG set theory (valid in 9 out of 10 universities) to talk about what a (downward closed) class of ordinals would be qua ordinal, as long as you don’t expect it to behave like a real ordinal (like having a successor). In the field of surreal numbers, a more general kind of not-really-a-number is known as a gap and if you try to define something like Cauchy series, you will find some of them converging to gaps. (The elements of these Cauchy series are indexed by the class of ordinals, and while you can talk about one of them in NBG, the collection of them is too big for that}.

    So anyway, in the gap completion of the surreals to a linear continuum (also too big for NBG) there is a largest element, larger than all infinities.

    (As I remember Rucker, he didn’t do the general set-theoretic thing with the ordinals and in any case I think he was writing before the surreals were promoted from being just another Conway game to a useful universe for non-standard analysis).

  110. John Cowan says

    Similarly, the joke about the guy who prays for everyone he can think of every Friday, Saturday, or Sunday but ends up being sent to hell anyway? “God, why???” “Because all you did, week after week, was pester me!”

  111. @Lars Mathiesen: That’s not really any different than the observation that you can have the universe of all sets as a class, just not as a set. However, the size of your proper classes depends on what additional consistent axioms you want to append to the theory. Cohen showed that you can essentially “force” the model/universe to include as much additional consistent structure (including additional ordinals) as you want.

  112. Lars Mathiesen says

    @Brett, I have never spent the time to get an understanding of forcing, so I don’t have en intuition for how the maximal Conway gap is an instance of that. You don’t actually need to use forcing to talk about Conway gaps, though it sounds like you could, but the point to me is that it is constructed to be the least upper bound of exactly those infinite ordinals that Rucker was writing about, so the name Absolute Infinity is very fitting.

    (Also the ordinals are already a class and the order completion of the surreals is even larger, so it’s not quite the same situation as talking about the class of all sets).

  113. From a book of Jewish humor.

    Two Jews are fighting over a shipment of olives with which something appears to be wrong. The rabbi declares that he must see it for himself. The Jews hire a wagon and bring the entire shipment to the rabbi. He looks into one barrel, then into another, takes out one olive, looks at it for a long time and says: “I wish that I lived as well and was as healthy, like I have no idea what the olives are at all!”

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