From Liam Shaw’s LRB review of Slime: A Natural History by Susanne Wedlich:
There does seem to be something universal about the feeling of disgust that slime provokes, even if its valences differ. That ‘slime’ is an easily translatable concept helps Wedlich’s case. She links it to the risk of contamination: our bodies use mucus as a barrier to soak up pathogens which are themselves slimy. Her translator, Ayça Türkoğlu, deploys an impressive and viscous vocabulary. Both German and English have slimy words for slimy things. The smack and suck of saliva make for squelching prose. Frogspawn looks like ‘slimy star snot’. Differences in translation do exist, however. German-speaking friends tell me that schleim is more neutral than in English; you can tuck into a warm bowl of Haferschleim, for example (‘oat slime’, or oatmeal). And even in English, slime has ebbed and flowed. Wycliffe’s 14th-century translation of the Bible has God creating Adam ‘of the sliym of erthe’. In most later versions, the first man emerges from ‘dust’. The imagery has stuck in modern Christianity. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ is an oddly desiccated summary of life’s viscous circle: a euphemism posing as a proverb.
It’s unclear why ‘sliym’ slipped out of the English Eden. Perhaps it made the account in Genesis too close to spontaneous generation.
From the next issue’s Letters column:
Slime v. Dust
‘It’s unclear why “sliym” slipped out of the English Eden,’ Liam Shaw writes, wondering why Wyclif’s word choice fell out of favour, while describing as a ‘euphemism’ the idea spread by later Bible translators that the first man emerged from ‘dust’ (LRB, 21 April). ‘Oddly desiccated’ it may sound, but these later translators were correct: the Hebrew word aphar, in Genesis 2:7 and elsewhere, is ‘dust’.
It’s clear how Wyclif’s slime slipped in: he was working from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, where man is indeed formed ‘de limo terrae’. Sixteenth-century Catholic scholars faced their own conundrum. Required by the Council of Trent to prefer the Vulgate to all other translations, Benito Arias Montano, the chief editor of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568-73), duly placed it in the column beside the Hebrew text. By turning to the next column, however, the reader could learn from a new Latin translation of the Greek text of the Septuagint that man was made from pulvis (‘dust’) – a fact made clear by Sante Pagnini’s Latin translation direct from Hebrew provided in the apparatus. Publishing their Pentateuch in 1609, however, the English Catholic translators of the Douay-Rheims Bible stuck with ‘slyme’.
Oren Margolis
University of East Anglia, Norwich
The OED doesn’t include the Wyclif quote, but these citations under slime 3.a. (“Applied disparagingly to the human body, to man in general, or to single persons”) seem to be allusions to it:
c1450 Mirk’s Festial 2 He ys not but a wryche and slyme of erth.
?1504 W. Atkinson tr. Thomas à Kempis Ful Treat. Imytacyon Cryste (Pynson) iii. xiv. 209 Lerne, thou erth & slyme, to humble the.
Incidentally, I enjoyed the following letter as well:
Oh for a Mint Cracknel
Andrew O’Hagan writes about his mother’s fear of pausing the TV while watching Coronation Street, in case she paused it for the whole nation (LRB, 21 April). In the early fifth century BC, when the new technology of writing was just taking off, the small Greek city of Teos set up on stone an inscribed oath of office, to be recited in public several times each year by the city’s magistrates. The stone listed various dreadful things that would happen to any official ‘who does not read out the things written on the stone to the best of his memory’. The elderly technophobe who drafted the text evidently wasn’t quite sure how this alarming modern invention was supposed to work.
Peter Thonemann
Wadham College, Oxford
Good for Oren Margolis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_the_Slime
Haferschleim disappeared over half a century ago und ward nie mehr gesehen. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but I’m sure it’s not simply oatmeal or porridge. And now I’m going to look it up…
Edit: yup, it’s quite literal slime. Haferschleim ist der nach dem Kochen von Haferflocken abgeseihte Schleim – the slime skimmed off the water after you’ve boiled oat flakes in it. I had read of it before as food for very sick people.
Adam was made from gradoo
The slime of the earth is very rarely red. (A creation myth in which man was made from Tubifera would be pretty cool though.)
@David Marjanović: I suspect that Haferschleim was actually traditionally what you got by boiling oat flour. To make proper porridge, you have to use larger pieces of the oat kernels, either rolled or cut. Boiling ground oat flour instead produces a broth that turns slimy, then gelatinous.
Seems that Latvian slienas and Croatian slina are also related to Germanic slime
Slime makes just three appearances in the KJV Bible:
RSV has only these:
I’ve never had a ‘slush puppie’, but I’ve always thought that the name sounds decidedly unappealing.
Of course, Serbian for phlegm is šlajm.
The Tower of Babel passage is traditionally one of the texts that conlangers present as part of a chrestomathy.
The Tower of Babel passage is traditionally one of the texts that conlangers present as part of a chrestomathy.
Thanks, who knew? Even Esperanto, or just newer ones?
Of the biblical appearances, the KJV for some reason translates חֵמָר ḥēmār as ‘slime’. It means ‘clay’. In the “snail” passage the RSV adds it as a garnish.
The expression in Job, רִיר חַלָּמוּת rîr ḥallāmûṯ contains rîr ‘slime, mucus’. In present-day Ashkenazi/Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, both ʀiʀ ‘mucus’ and ʀiʀi ‘mucous’ nicely associate the meaning with the sound.
The meaning of ḥallāmûṯ is naturally—Job—open to argument.
rîr occurs elsewhere in the OT once, in 1Sam 21:14, וַיּוֹרֶד רִירוֹ אֶל זְקָנוֹ wayyôreḏ rîrô ’el zĕqānô, ‘…and drooled into his beard.’
In the Mishna, rîr usually refers to bodily mucus, like thick saliva or the coating of a newborn, but occasionally also to vegetal slime.
Ah yeah, that’s actually the most common meaning in German.
Hebrew rîr doesn’t cover phlegm, even more strictly than English mucus. For that, there’s כִּיחַ kîaḥ.
BTW, Slurm.
Even Esperanto, or just newer ones?
There are no Bible texts in Zamenhof’s Fundamenta Krestomatio (1907). On the other hand, Z completed a translation of the whole Tanach in 1915, though due to the war it did not reach the outside world until 1919, after Z’s death. Z’s text was then revised (by Christians; Jesaja 7:14 reads virgulino) and published in London in 1926 along with the 1912 New Testament. Here’s Genezo 11:1-9:
Note that la Eternulo represents the Tetragrammaton. Etymologically it is etern- ‘eternal’ + -ul- ‘deadjectival’ + -o ‘noun’, thus ‘one who is eternal’. Quoth Wikt: “Zamenhof based the name on the etymological theory that Hebrew יהוה is an archaic irregular imperfect form of היה, translating roughly to ‘he who (always) is.'”
The text isn’t hard to read IMO; the verb endings -as, -is, -os are past/present/future; -u is the imperative; -i is the infinitive. For nouns, -j is the plural and -n is the accusative.
Just to clarify for LH readers the use of slime in the KJV versions of Gen 11:3 and 14:10 and Ex 2:3 (quoted above), חֵמָר ḥēmār is usually translated as ‘bitumen, asphalt’, and חֹמֶר ḥōmer as ‘clay’ or the like. In unpointed texts the two words appear identical: חמר .
In Genesis 11:3 (translated above), the two words occur almost side by side:
(Also Targum Onkelos for Gen 11:3:
with Aramaic חֵימָרָא ḥēmārā ‘bitumen’ for חֵמָר ḥēmār ‘bitumen’ and Aramaic שיָע šyāʿ ‘sealing clay’ for חֹמֶר ḥōmer.)
Although I love the sound of slimepit, it appears that a horrifying death in a tar pit is referred to in Genesis 14:10:
Also in Exodus 2:3:
Poor Moses if Jochebed had payed the reed ark with clay!
Right, as usual!
Said to mean “mud” and occurring in the taxonomic names of numerous ancient and modern swamp creatures.
I am curious why the KJV persisted in using slime here, when even the later versions (revisions) of Wyclif’s Bible had apparently changed earlier glewysch cley to tar in Exodus 2:3: And whanne sche myyte not hele, thanne sche took a leep of segge, and bawmede it with tar and pitch.
See the MED on gleuish and on clei ‘clay’, also ‘bitumen’.
(Also cf. Gen 11:3 in Wyclif’s version: And oon seide to his neiybore, Come ye, and make we tiel stonys, and bake we tho with fier; and thei hadden tiel for stonus, and pitche for morter. Further Gen 14:10: Forsothe the valey of the wode hadde many pittis of pitche; and so the kyng of Sodom and the kyng of Gomorre turneden the backis, and felden doun there; and thei that leften fledden to the hil.)
And Jerome’s Vulgate has Gen 11:3 Habueruntque lateres pro saxis, et bitumen pro caemento, Gen 14:10 vallis autem Silvestris habebat puteos multos bituminis, Ex 2:3 sumpsit fiscellam scirpeam, quam linivit bitumine ac pice; all with bitumen, not limus.
I am away from my OED subscription now. Is there a meaning “bitumen, pitch” given for Early Modern English slime?
The OED has “a. Soft glutinous mud; alluvial ooze; viscous matter deposited or collected on stones, etc.” from ca. 1000 AD on, and “b. Applied to bitumen” beginning with Tyndale’s 1530 translation of, and commentary on the Pentateuch: “That slyme was a fatnesse that issued out of the earth, like vnto tarre; and thou mayst call it cement, if thou wilte.”
Job 6:6 is more punning than anything I’ve seen anywhere in the OT.
The verse is הֲיֵאָכֵל תָּפֵל מִבְּלִי-מֶלַח | אִם-יֶשׁ-טַעַם בְּרִיר חַלָּמוּת hăyē’āḵēl tāp̄ēl mibǝlî melaḥ | ’im yeš ṭa‘am bǝrîr ḥallāmûṯ, literally, roughly ‘would.it.be.eaten unflavored.(stuff) for.lack.of salt? if there.is flavor in.mucus.of ḥallāmûṯ?’ ḥallāmûṯ is obscure. Each exegete and scholar interpreted it according to his kidney, some relating it to חֶלְמוֹן ḥelmôn ‘egg yolk’, some to various plants, some to the root ḥlm ‘to dream’.
The first pun was noted by Tur-Sinai, who was the most original commentator on Job, and who was often wrong, but probably less so than most others. He notes the Arabic root تفل tfl ‘to spit’ (Lane’s), though he takes it to mean that tāp̄ēl means ‘saliva’ and nothing more; however, Mishnaic Hebrew has several instances of tāp̄ēl unambiguously meaning ‘flavorless, unsalted’. Unless this is a coincidence, the writer of Job paralleled tāp̄ēl and rîr with a punning intention.
The other pun, which I don’t know if anyone has noticed before, is that the root ḥlm in ḥallāmûṯ is the reverse of mlḥ ‘salt’ (omitting the vowels). Either ḥallāmûṯ is a rare word, meaning a plant or something else, picked by the author for its punning value; or he coined it there and then, to mean ‘saltlessness’. Are there any other examples of reversed roots in Job, or elsewhere in the OT?
Ziony Zevit, in What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden, rejects both slime and dust.
Hm. Does anyone support Zevit’s translation, עפר=clod? A quick search suggests few do.
Apparently, the geological and archeological organic chemist Arie Nissenbaum has disputed that there could have been actual tar pits in the Vale of Siddim:
There certainly could have been Levantine folk tales of tar pits large enough to swallow people up, but they may have originated as travelers tales’, rather than locally. However, since the slime pits that Nissenbaum describes may have been black and sulfurous, they could possibly have perhaps been mistaken by sight (and even more easily in retelling) for true tar pits.
Nissenbaum seems to be an expert on near-Eastern asphalts, so I imagine he ought to have known what he was talking about—although he had also previously appeared in a borderline cranky Biblical archeology documentary shown by the BBC in 2001. You can seem him here, starting at 31:52, and he seems to stick to the science. However, even after reading the full article, it’s not clear to me where he stands on the veracity of the Genesis account, however translated.
Slime pits do also have one other probable point in favor of them for a Biblical literalist viewpoint. A fall into a tar pit seems less likely to be survivable, but the king of Sodom is still alive seven verses later, after Abraham’s intervention in the battle.
The elderly technophobe who drafted the text evidently wasn’t quite sure how this alarming modern invention was supposed to work.
Not knowing the context (it might kill all fun!) I suggest the following explanation. Imagine that the only text of the Constitution was deposited in the National Archives, maybe inscribed on a stone. Than, obviously, various officials who must use it as a working document would be compelled to run to the Archives every time they needed the text. Or alternatively, they would be required to memorize it word for word. How then the public could check that the relevant authorities follow the true Constitution? One way is to make them take periodic exams when the officials recite the Constitution from memory standing near the exact text on display and the public checking that everything is remembered as written.
To clarify myself: metathesis is a common device in Biblical Hebrew. I can’t think of any case, though, of an antonym constructed by reversing the order of the root letters.
@Owlmirror: See discussion of ‘āp̄ār / ’ēp̄er in TDOT. It looks like ‘āp̄ār is more general than ‘clods’, and refers to loose dirt in its various forms. ’ēp̄er can refer to ashes but also to fine dust (arguably 2Sam 13:19). ‘āp̄ār can refer to ashes (Numbers 19:17). The two words may be doublets: ‘āp̄ār the direct descendant, ’ēp̄er a loan from Akkadian, which merged /ʕ/ with /ʔ/.
@Brett: The root underlying ḥēmār may mean ‘to bubble up’, which could apply to sulfurous mud as well as bitumen.
That’s all fascinating, Y.
“Metathesis is a common device in Biblical Hebrew,” you say. Do you mean simply that the reversal of adjacent elements is common: like brid versus bird as we see in Chaucer, and French fromage versus Italian formaggio? Or can the elements ever have something in between, as in the uncertain case of your ḥlm–mlḥ? I gather that metathesis is a feature of the grammar; is it also known to be used to achieve a literary or rhetorical effect, as you conjecture for this uncertain case?
There are variants of the same word, like keḇeś~keśeḇ ‘sheep’, but as you say, they usually involve adjacent letters. That’s one reason why this example is so striking, if true.
Also, words differing by consonant order may be used in the same phrase for stylistic flourish.
Imagine that the only text of the Constitution was deposited in the National Archives, maybe inscribed on a stone.
See the movie The Book of Eli,with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. There is only one Bible in Braille, and Eli’s memory.
@Stu Clayton: I honestly don’t remember much about the movie, but the title itself is an allusion to the same idea. We know there was a Biblical “Book of Eli,” since it is referenced elsewhere in the Deuteronomistic history, but it has been completely lost.
@Brett: thanks, I didn’t know that ! It fits perfectly with the plot.
The “Book of Eli” has been lost, the protagonist Eli in the movie prevents the Bible from being lost. I won’t say how, because people might forget it.
You must have missed the last 30 minutes or so of the movie.
Elsewhere in scripture you get imagery like “But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.” (Is. 64:8, KJV, see also e.g. Rom. 9:21) I’m a bit confused about how similar clods of earth or mudballs etc are to the sort of clay an ancient potter would have worked with, and maybe it depends on what vowels are assumed in an originally vowel-less written text? Making pottery out of clay seems a little more sophisticated than making bricks out of mud, but I don’t know to what extent in the relevant ancient culture these were thought of as two distinct crafts or professions or different facets of the same one.
Coincidentally, I found a list of resources for conlangers which includes (pages 8-10) a list of Babel texts:
https://cpl.org/wp-content/uploads/conlangexhibithandout.pdf
Including Esperanto, by Zamenhof.
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babela_turo
(I suspect, as Cowan copy-pasted from the Esperanto Bible, so too did an editor of the Esperanto Babel WikiP)
The next verse in Job, 6:7, is מֵאֲנָה לִנְגּוֹעַ נַפְשִׁי הֵמָּה כִּדְוֵי לַחְמִי mēănâ lingôa‘ nap̄šî hēmmâ kid[ǝ]wēy laḥmî ‘my soul refused to touch, they are [??] my bread’. The meaning is obscure, but the last word, from leḥem ‘bread, food’ shows yet another permutation of the root in the previous verse.
There’s a recent book surveying this phenomenon, by Isaac Kalimi. I’ll take a look next time I’m at the library.
See the movie The Book of Eli
The Spirit of ’76 is also about finding the text of the US constitution. It takes time travel. It’s great fun, but you need to know the American ’70s (directly or indirectly) to fully get the ridiculousness.
I always* took Mark Twain’s** description of The Mysterious Stranger making living things out of clay to be a direct allusion to the fashioning of Adam out of red clay.
For a particularly meta depiction of Satan’s work in clay, you can have a look at The Adventures of Mark Twain.***
Later, the material of which mankind was made is discussed explicitly. (The “eleven girls and the old woman” are people who the narrator had seen burned at the stake for witchcraft.)
* When I say “always,” I thought that my memory went back to when I watched the 1982 television adaptation of The Mysterious Stranger on PBS. However, there are actually a bunch of different versions of Twain’s story—at least three of substantial length—since he was never sufficiently satisfied with it to publish it within his own lifetime.**** The 1982 television film was explicitly based on the Twain’s last version, which was the only one that was even plausibly complete; none of the earlier manuscripts had endings. In the final version, written between 1902 to 1908 (No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug, usually referred to as the “print shop version”), the title character is able (because of the book’s solipsistic viewpoint that the world is an illusion) to perform a number of miraculous acts, but the famous scene in which he makes people out of clay does not appear.
** i assume these passages were written by Twain, although the best known posthumously published version of The Mysterious Stranger is cobbled together from material, some of which was not actually authored by Twain. Twain’s literary executor, Albert Paine, started with the earliest substantial version of the story, The Chronicle of Young Satan, but extended it with the ending from print shop version, as well as connecting material that he seemingly wrote himself. The end product has therefore been called a literary fraud, although it does not seem clear to me whether Paine really intended people to believe that the entire thing was complete work from Twain’s hand.
*** One of the producers of this and a number of Will Vinton’s other Claymation films and television specials was my namesake David Altschul. Like my father, he had grown up in Chicago and subsequently moved to Oregon. However, we were not related. Apparently, back in the 1960s, all the Altschul listings in the Chicago-area phonebook were our relatives, except one—and he came from that family.
**** At the end of The Adventures of Mark Twain,*** as they are trying to lighten the load on Twain’s flying paddle-boat, so he can catch up with Halley’s Comet, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher are tossing unneeded items overboard. However, as they dump the books out through the portholes, Twain stops them from jettisoning The Mysterious Stranger, since the manuscript still needs to be published.
Disappointingly, the Teian inscription seems to have a more mundane meaning: ἐπὶ μνήμῃ is likely “as a reminder” rather than “to the best of his memory”, as argued here (see p. 731 for text and translation).
@Y: “That is a worship word, Yang worship. You will not speak it!”
More metathesis in Job 6. mēḥôl yammîm ‘than the sand of the seas’ (v. 3), yaḥmôl ‘will have pity’ (v. 10). Words (roots or clitic+root) with five of the possible six permutations of the three consonants are in the first 10 verses, none in the other 20.
This paper discusses biblical literary metathesis, but doesn’t include examples found by Y. I don’t know why. There is a book-length treatment of the subject by the same author, but I don’t have access to it.
i can say from writing a bit af yidish, which only has a scattering of triliteral-rooted-words, that metathesis and other kinds of root-echoing are almost irresistable as a piece of compositional play. i imagine in hebrew, ivrit, or arabic it would be even more so!
From Kalimi’s article, it looks like he goes overboard a little in looking for examples of metatheses, and some reviewers of his book think so too. For example, אֶל ’el ‘to’ and לֹא lo’ ‘not’ are common and short, and finding them near each other could be unintentional coincidence. Other examples are more convincing. The article gives a small sample of the supposedly more complete survey in the book.
My local university library doesn’t have it. I’ll have to get it from somewhere else.
Thanks for that reference on the inscription from Teos, TR!
It was worthwhile following up Herrmann’s original 1981 treatment. It seems that the interpretation of ἐπὶ µνήµῃ καὶ ἐπὶ δυνάμει as something like “damit es in Erinnerung und in Kraft bleibt” is due to Michael Wörrle (see note 29, p. 12, in P. Herrmann “Teos und Abdera im 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Ein neues Fragment der Teiorum Dirae”, Chiron 11, p. 1–30; doi: 10.34780/z7c9-r68l; in open access here).
Thanks for following up in the OED for me, Y!
I find it somehow disheartening that the KJV’s slime simply perpetuates Tyndale’s odd choice of word in translating חֵמָר “bitumen”, a choice that seems to have gone unquestioned and unexamined by his successors.
I got my hands on Kalimi’s book. It lists Job 6:6, but takes ḥallāmûṯ to be ‘mallow’, following an old interpretation, and doesn’t refer to the rest of the chapter. While useful, the book only looks at metathetic sibling words within a verse, not among nearby verses.
Interesting error for sulfides. OCR? Or thinking of surface?
That would even explain the vowels: /ʕ/ turned a into e, and when it was lost, e became phonemic. /ʕ/ must have been [ʢ] like in western Arabic today.
I wouldn’t describe this as a merger of /ʕ/ and /ʔ/, but as a loss of both. Evidence might come from Babel borrowed from *bab-ʔilu. Hebrew would probably insert /ʔ/ when faced with a vowel-initial word, or simply interpret any phonetic [ʔ] as phonemic.
So… angels reproduce by nepotism, like Disney figures. I should not be surprised.
Is Job poetic enough that verses can be defined without recourse to the much younger division of the Bible into verses?
That would even explain the vowels: /ʕ/ turned a into e, and when it was lost, e became phonemic.
That is so, and it’s a regular change in Akkadian, with the a either before or after the *ʕ. Two things I don’t understand are: why did the second vowel of *ʿapar change as well? There are other examples, e.g. *ʿaᵈzābum > ezēbum ‘to leave’, *ḥarāθum > erēšum ‘to plow’. Assimilation, I suppose? The second thing is, I’d think a pharyngeal would a-color a vowel, not raise it. For example, Hebrew inserts an excrescent a (“furtive pataḥ”) before a word-final ħ/ʕ/h.
I’m sure a lot has been written about this.
/ʕ/ must have been [ʢ] like in western Arabic today.
Why so particular?
Is Job poetic enough that verses can be defined without recourse to the much younger division of the Bible into verses?
Yes indeed, both meter-wise and meaning-wise. The poetic core of Job is almost all written in distichs. A glance anywhere in any translation will make it clear.
Reading a bit more, the second a changing to e by assimilation (Umlaut if you will) happened later, at different times in different dialects.
Precisely because pharyngeals (like uvulars) color towards [ɑ] while epiglottals color towards [æ]. Listen to this song in a language in a Sprachbund situation with western Arabic: /ʕbaʕmjər/ comes out as [æbææmjær] – actually [ʢæbæʢæmjær], but hearing the epiglottal approximants takes some practice. Then compare pharyngeals and epiglottals here.
Alternatively, vowel coloring is a very fuzzy process. As long as it’s not phonemic, it happens to varying degrees to vowels at different distances, not only to directly adjacent ones. Quechua is a good example: its vowel system is /æ ɪ ʊ/, colored by uvulars towards [ɑ e o], and pentavocalista spellings are a mess, even within the same dictionary. If the coloring becomes phonemic in such a situation, some vacillation is expected.
[æbææmjær]
How is /a/ normally realized there?
Assimilation
The more distant vowel changed long after the *a>e change and the loss of the guttural, in some dialects but not others, but all of which had changed the proximal vowel.
…mostly as a front-to-central [a] in the first song, now that I listened again, and mostly as [æ] in the second (in the same video), with some exceptions in both… :-S
But note how, in the first word, the /ə/ and the epenthetic vowel come out as [æ], too; it’s not just the /a/. The second song also contains examples of uvulars coloring in the general direction of [ɑ].
The Romans more sensibly posted their Constitution, the XII tables, on bronze in the Forum, after the plebeians forced the patricians (who had kept the text oral) to write it down. Three secessions of the plebs were needed: one for the first ten tables, one for the last two, and one to get the tables posted. But by Cicero’s time, memorizing them was part of a Roman education.