Notes on the Structure of the Hebrew Verbal System

These really are just notes, not a full-fledged think piece.

The issue with the Hebrew (I mean Biblical Hebrew prose here) verbal system (HVS) is accounting for the different uses of qatal and yiqtol at the appropriate level of generalization. It's not that difficult to list all the different functions of these verbal forms, but finding a way to characterize the whole thing has proved controversial.

Everyone agrees at this point that the HVS is not a tense-only system. This can be demonstrated with one fact:

(1) If HVS were tense-only, then yiqtol could never receive a past interpretation. But it can receive a past interpretation in prose (with the past habitual use).

There is much less unanimity that HVS is not an aspect-only system. In fact, my impression is that this view is held by the majority. Nevertheless, this approach also fails, for the following reason:

(2) If HVS were aspect-only (e.g., perfective/imperfective), then qatal could receive a future interpretation. But in fact, it does not receive a future interpretation in prose.

Hence it seems that HVS is a combined tense-aspect system, with qatal being both past and perfective, and yiqtol being past imperfective (habitual), future (either perfective or imperfective), present (general, not actual) and modal.  Many languages of the world combine tense and aspect (e.g., Greek and English) so there's nothing weird or unwelcome about this. Nevertheless, there is still a hankering (in me, at least) to find some feature of the qatal/yiqtol opposition that licenses its several interpretations without any appeal to the arbitrary.

To me the most important clue lies in an argument made by Jan Joosten (in this JANES article), that yiqtol never indicates the actual present (similar to English present progressive), only the general present (gnomic or habitual). I find Joosten's argument convincing, although you can still find statements in the grammars to the effect that yiqtol can function to indicate the actual present. If Joosten is right, then there are not any functions of yiqtol where it refers to an actual, instantiated verbal action (event, state, or process); that is, it is non-referential in that there is no particular action that it picks out.

Here, then, I think is the opposition. Qatal is referential, yiqtol non-referential; again, by referential, I mean that it points to or picks out a particular instantiated action. If qatal is referential, then that entails past tense. The entailments of yiqtol are not as constrained as those of qatal; not having referentiality means that it can be used for a typical action in the past (habitual) or the present (general present) or for a non-instantiated action (such as the future or modal). Hence the wider range of interpretations or readings (in the semantic sense) that are available for yiqtol.

"Referentiality" is usually discussed in terms of nouns and noun phrases, and verbs are not considered in that context. Nevertheless, I think one can argue that verbs can be referential (like a definite noun phrase) or non-referential (like an adjective or an indefinite noun phrase).

This doesn't explain the workings of what I call the "secondary" HVS, that of wayyiqtol and we-qatal.  I'll discuss those at a later time. Also it leaves open the use of qatal and yiqtol in poetry, where some possible counter-examples to (1) and (2) above can be found. I don't believe that they are true "defeaters" of my proposal, because quite often, in my view, what seem to qatal and yiqtol in poetry are actually forms of we-qatal and wayyiqtol that vary because of the peculiar modes of coordination (and conjunction reduction) available in Hebrew poetry. Again, I'll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say that in the final analysis I think the HVS is ultimately uniform in prose and poetry.

Wow, the New York Times

Well, if that don't beat everything. "Ralph" is mentioned in the New York TImes, in connection with Bob Dylan, natch.

If you are interested in the posts about Dylan, then go here and here and here.

What's next? Osservatore Romano? The Sacramento Bee? Cool.

Fun with Popes and Presidents

One of the most obscure areas of human knowledge is the comparison in ages and terms of office between Popes and Presidents. It is arguably of no value whatsoever, and therefore eminently suited for scholarly research. Based on the studies of myself and my former colleague Matthew Jaffe, I offer the following tidbits in handy question-and-answer format:

Q. How many times in history has a president been inaugurated at an older age than the currently reigning pope?

A. Three times: In 1849, when Zachary Taylor was 64 and Pius IX was 57; in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was 70 and John Paul II was 61; and Reagan again, in 1985, when he was 74 and John Paul II was 65.

Q. Have the president and pope ever been the same age at inauguration time?

A. Yes, once when James Buchanan was 65 and so was Pius IX.

Q. What pope reigned through more presidential administrations?

A. Pius IX, through the terms of Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, A. Johnson, Grant, and Hayes.

Q. When was the youngest inaugurated president juxtaposed with the oldest reigning pope?

A. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was inaugurated at age 42. Leo XIII was then 91, 49 years older.

Q. What president has served through more papal reigns regardless of duration?

A. Jackson and Carter served through three each. Jackson: Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI; Carter: Paul VI, John Paul I, and the start of John Paul II.

"Loving This Book": Stative and Progressive

This semester our Hebrew seminar is considering the semantics of the Hebrew verb, and, as a foil to other treatments of verbal semantics, we are reading Waltke & O'Connor's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax with a view to assessing how they dealt with semantic notions.

The last time we met, our agenda was to discuss IBHS ch. 22 (on the Qal) in the light of current thinking about situation aspect, especially stativity. During the discussion, we got held up for a moment by an English example that they use:

[S]tative verbs in English do not occur in progressive forms. ... [For example], one cannot freely say 'I am loving this book.' Since 'love' describes a stative situation (in this case, a psychological state), one freely says 'I love this book.' (IBHS 22.2.1e).

The students unanimously felt that the example was poorly chosen, since in fact one can say "I am loving this book," or the like, as in the following example: "You know that book you gave me for Christmas? Well, I'm really loving it!" Or, "Dr. Cook, I'm really loving this class!" One of them suggested that the language was changing to allow statives to violate the aspectual rule. I suggested this was probably not the case, but was unable, on the fly, to satisfactorily account for the progressive use of "love" except by vaguely saying that it was being used in a different sense in these cases. We had to move on, and there we left it.

I kept thinking about the case, however, and have come to some further conclusions. First of all, I do think the example in IBHS was poorly chosen. A better example of stative+progressive illformedness might be something like *I am knowing the multiplication table or *I am having a new computer or *I am now owning my own home. These usages are indeed incompatible with progressivity, since these statives are not events and denote no action that can "progress" in terms of having some kind of internal temporal structure (like "I am walking the dog").

Second, the situation that IBHS likely envisaged in their sample sentence I am loving this book must have been like the sentences in the previous paragraph, indicating a non-event. For example, if someone pointed to a book on their shelves and said, "See that book with the red cover? Well, I am loving this book," that would be an example of the same kind of illformedness as "*I am owning this book."

Whence, then, the "event" reading of "loving" in I am loving this book? Under that reading, "this book" cannot mean "this object"; it has be taken as "the current process of reading this book." It can't even mean "this book that I finished last week." "Love" can only receive a non-stative reading, and be used in the progressive, when it has for its object (either explicitly or implicitly) another currently ongoing process that is itself progressive. Yet another example: consider the sentence "I am loving this week's episode of Glee." It can only be used of watching this week's episode of Glee (let's say you are on the phone with your friend), and not of the script or performances or plot. Not every stative can participate in this alternation, however.

The fact that Waltke & O'Connor say that the sample sentence cannot be "freely" uttered is unclear. It could mean that they were aware of counter-usages like the one discussed here (in which case they should have chosen a better example).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The original description of stativity as incompatible with the progressive can be found in Zeno Vendler's classic article, "Verbs and Times," The Philosophical Review, Vol. 66, No. 2. (Apr., 1957), pp. 143-160. By the way, this is not cited in IBHS.

Seventh Annual Ralphies

Here we go ...

Best TV Show: First, I have to say a few words about Lost, which has won this award for several years. By the time the last minute of the show ticked off, the method of the creators had become clear: for five seasons, go as far out on a limb as you possibly can, and then, in the sixth season, cut the limb off. Then, as we watch you drop out of sight, call out "It's better to travel hopefully than it is to arriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!" Um, no, it's not. This was not a year for successful TV. Not only did Lost end with a whimper, but Flashforward and Rubicon, both great and fun shows, were cancelled after one season. However, Fringe had a great year, and has already succeeded where Lost, Heroes, and X-Files all failed. The Ralphie goes to Fringe, with enthusiasm.

Best Movie: Didn't see that many, just the biggest of the big, viz., Toy Story 3 and Inception. Neither one of these highly praised movies stuck in my mind for even 5 minutes after viewing, which is kind of a test I have for a good movie. The only movie that really did that for me was one I viewed on pay-per-view, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It gets the Ralphie.

Best Record: A better year than last year, for sure. Although I didn't buy many records, thanks to YouTube, I heard a fair amount of new and good music. The Black Keys are great; the new Sufjan Stevens; a fictional group called Sex Bob-Omb (music by Beck) that was awesome. But the Ralphie goes to a song that, for 2 weeks this summer, I literally couldn't get out of my mind, namely Fireflies by Owl City. It was even there when I was dreaming, which just shows you that the music module of your brain is separate from the other modules. It took me a while before I finally figured out the song was actually about insomnia.

Best Non-Fiction Book: As you know, I read a truckload of linguistics books and articles; there's a lot of good stuff out there. I would have to put Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature at the top because of its accessibility and generally jaunty style.

Best Fiction Book: The award goes to Lev Grossman's The Magicians. The book is a compulsively readable fantasy that attempts to undermine the worlds of both Harry Potter and Narnia. Me, I love Narnia, but The Magicians is a tremendously fun read on its own terms (unlike, say, the works of the King of Boredom, Philip Pullman).

Now We Are Six

On November 30, 2004, the first post of this blog appeared. The first year or so was quite active, and coincided approximately with the birth of biblioblogging, of which this blog was one of the first. But "Ralph" has never sought, or received, any factitious badge of approval or value-ranking from the world of biblioblogging (now firmly part of the Establishment) and I now question whether my blog is a part of that increasingly self-conscious and contentious world.

The last few years have been less active, as other activities have crowded out daily, or even weekly, blogging. Most particularly, I consciously decided a while back to devote most of the time I had for writing to preparing scholarly books and articles; and, this, I think, was a wise choice.

Still, writing for "Ralph" is always one of my greatest pleasures. Looking back, I see plenty of ephemeral matter, but nothing that embarrasses me. Several of the posts have in the past developed into lectures, presentations, or articles, and some may still do so. And, as far as I know, "Ralph" is still the only blog ever to be cited in a scholarly footnote in Revue de Qumran.

This year especially has been quiet for "Ralph," although the most famous post in Ralph's history was cited in two books about Bob Dylan. One of them is Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday, 2010), pp. 303ff. Wilentz, professor of American Studies at Princeton, cites "Ralph," without giving the URL (how rude!) or the author (how clueless!). Indeed, he appears to believe that the name "Ralph" is my pseudonym, apparently without noticing that my name and email appear (and have always appeared) right there on the blog.

The other citation is in Alessandro Carrera, "Oh, the Streets of Rome: Dylan in Italy," which appeared in Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World (ed. C. J. Sheehy & T. Swiss; Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009), where the author refers to me as "very puzzled." Sure, if by puzzled you mean outraged. I also was interviewed by phone by yet another author who is writing a book about Dylan. Not bad for a philologist whose expertise is in a wholly different area.

"Ralph" will continue, probably at the same slow pace. And yes, the Ralphies for 2010 will shortly appear. Watch this space.

Scenes and Observations from SBL Atlanta 2010

In no particular order ...


Two huge ballrooms were assigned to a session attended by about 15 people.

My room, thankfully, was in a tower (Hyatt) where I didn't have to go up in one of those glass elevators.

Best meal: Atlanta Grill, with Marty Abegg and James Bowley. We planned the next volume of the Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance.

I bought two books: The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin and the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.

The good people at Accordance updated me and fixed me up with a ton of awesome software.

The most crowded session I attended was the one on Biblioblogging. I listened to Jim Davila's and Chris Brady's excellent papers on the state of the art, then had to go to another session. Chris suggested (as you can read here) that there be an SBL committee to provide peer-review insight on the tenure-relevant research found in online sources. I agree if the sources are research resources, but not if they are blogs. Blogs should resist "sivilizin'".

Jim Davila is still watching Lost.

Against all probability, the guy I sat next to at the Bloggers lunch lives only a few blocks away from me.

John Hobbins is really tall.

The HUC grad school survives.

I enjoyed discussing syntax with fellow UCLA alums Kirk Lowery and Randy Buth.

There will never be a time when most people know how to deliver a paper at SBL.

I met a man who had taken Hebrew from me over 20 years ago.

I enjoyed talking about Amazon's Kindle with Dean Forbes.

The number of religious books being published every year is inversely proportional to the number of actual Christians.

I worked on my paper the night before I gave it. At least I didn't write my paper the night before I gave it.

Air Tran advertises free Wi-Fi in their terminal. It's only free if you want to check your flight information. For anything else, you have to pay.

I enjoyed seeing some of my students at their first SBL.

The memorial service for Hanan Eshel was moving, with most major Qumran scholars in attendance.

MARTA is better than Metro. Cheaper, too.

The Brill reception was awesome, and the view from the 49th floor of the Peachtree Tower was spectacular.

The Fuller breakfast was great, but it's a little sobering to realize that I am now among the oldest attendees.

I'll add more as I recall more....

Old Dog, New Trees

Summers, for academics, are empty vessels waiting to be filled; not like the academic year, whose content is largely determined by others. During summer, to a certain extent, free will returns; and therefore each summer takes on a character of its own.

This summer for me was the summer of trees, in two senses. The first is the literal sense of our vegetable friends and neighbors. It was inevitable that trees should attract my attention, since the DC area has one of the largest tree canopies in the nation. Sooner or later I had to take some account of them. Probably it was on walks with the dachshund, whose interest in trees is of long standing, that I first said to myself "What about these trees?" I don't remember the moment, but there must have been one in which trees presented themselves to me as objects of worthy curiosity, and I found myself getting some books about trees, and how to identify them, and what was the nature of their leaves, bark, flowers, overall shape, and usefulness. I started taking note, and the diversity amazed me. In our neighborhood are many lindens (or basswoods) planted for shade, as well as many varieties of that handsome genus Acer, the maple. Silver, red, striped, goosefoot, the delicate little Japanese maple. Very common is the Eastern white pine, and kinds of spruce and fir that I have not yet gotten to. The great elms. The mighty oak — best of all. Near us the common type is the pin oak, but near the Capitol you can find the awesomely large Northern Red Oak. The cherry trees — of course! Lots of those. Two dogwoods in our back yard. The gorgeous and immense yellow poplar, with its tulip-shaped leaves. From the Metro you can see the catalpa, or indian bean, with huge leaves and long seed pods. On the CUA campus are many other varieties, including a cedar of Lebanon. Sycamores, ash, willow — where have you been all my life?

I don't have any desire to be an arborologist and my interest in the industrial use of trees is nil. I am only a watcher of trees, and this summer I have learned to take in my surroundings with more discernment. That's one feature of the summer of 2010.

The other kind of trees is the figurative, linguistic type. Originally I planned to do a not very intensive review of Greek, and duly began working through some grammars. It was not long, though, before I began to be distracted by the unsatisfactory way in which the grammars (which shall remain nameless) approached syntax — even in some cases, using the old grammar-school sentence diagrams. I gradually found myself searching for a better approach and abandoned Greek for technical linguistics, in fact, the severe formalities of the Chomskyan generative school. I devoured a good many textbooks of this approach, even reading Chomsky himself, and had the sensation of a keen intellectual pleasure as I delved into the system, which is powerful and elegant (although not perfect, which is the topic for another post). I filled many sheets of paper with trees, i.e., tree diagrams — and not your dull flat structures either, but the beautiful binary structures of the X-bar theory and its various epicycles. If I can, I will keep up this exploration into the fall, as time permits. But even with just a few short weeks of study, I feel braced by the austere rigor of the system. That's the second benefit of Summer 2010.

On Monday classes begin, and free will has to be put on a leash again. I don't really mind. The trees, all of them, will continue to be there, summer's gift, as duty returns.

Bob Dylan, Carl Sandburg, and the "Borrowing" Problem

One of the oddest things (among many odd things) in Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles is his narration of a conversation with poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish, who had commissioned him to write some music for a play. According to Dylan, MacLeish said that he, MacLeish, had been a classmate of Douglas Macarthur at West Point (Chronicles, p. 112). In fact, MacLeish, although he served in the Army, never went to West Point. So how did this misinformation get into Dylan's book?

It has already been established that Dylan incorporated expressions, phrases and entire sentences from other authors in the book. A little research reveals that the same practice underlies parts of the MacLeish conversation and is responsible for the misattribution of certain statements to MacLeish. In this case, the source is the preliminary material to the Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, (2002). This book has an introduction by Archibald MacLeish, and a preface (called "Notes for a Preface") by Sandburg himself. The remark about West Point comes in the Sandburg preface, not the MacLeish introduction:

Sandburg, p. xxx:
"At twenty-one I [Sandburg] went to West Point, being a classmate of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant III ..."

Chronicles, p. 112:
"MacLeish had been a classmate of Douglas MacArthur at West Point ..."

Confirmation of Dylan's borrowing comes from elsewhere in Sandburg's preface, such as this remark:

Sandburg, p. xxx:
"A few masterpieces last across the years. ... Perhaps no wrong is done and no temple of human justice violated in pointing out that each authentic poet makes a style of his own. ... I have forgotten the meaning of twenty or thirty of my poems written thirty or forty years ago."

Chronicles, p. 113:
"He said that he'd forgotten the meaning of a lot of his earlier poems and that an authentic poet makes a style of his own, a few masterpieces last across the years."

Sandburg (Preface, p. xxviii) also alludes to "Michelangelo saying in 1509, 'I have no friends of any kind and I do not want any,' and forty years later writing, 'I am always alone and I speak to no one.' " This too is picked up in Chronicles: "He also talked about Michelangelo, said that Michelangelo had no friends of any kind and didn't want any, spoke to no one" (p. 112).

Another possible allusion lies on p. xxvii of Sandburg's preface, where he says (italics added): "A well done world history of poetry would tell us of the beginnings and the continuing tradition of blank verse, rhymed verse, ballads, ballades, sonnets, triolets, rondeaus, villanelles, the sestina, the pantoum, the hokku; also odes, elegiacs, idylls, lyrics, hymns, quatrains, couplets, ditties, limericks, and all the other forms," and Dylan quotes MacLeish to the same effect: "Archie spoke about blank verse, rhyme verse, elegiacs, ballads, limericks and sonnets" (Chronicles, p. 112).

One final parallel: Sandburg writes of Stephen VIncent Benet (p. xxvi): "He knew the distinction between pure art and propaganda in the written or spoken word." Dylan says of MacLeish: "He also told me that there's a difference between art and propaganda and he told me the difference between the effects" (p. 112).

However, Dylan also attributes to MacLeish some expressions found in MacLeish's introduction to Sandburg, such as on p. xx, where the poet alludes to "... the comparative dimensions of ... Sappho and Sophocles, of Dante and Donne," which Dylan turns into this: "He asked me if I had read Sappho or Socrates. I said, nope, that I hadn't, and then he asked me the same about Dante and Donne." (Note the miscopying of "Socrates" for "Sophocles.") (I owe this observation to Scott Warmuth.)

It is now apparent what happened. Dylan, in the course of concocting (or reconstructing) a conversation with MacLeish, pulled from his shelves a copy of Sandburg's Complete Poems, Introduction by Archibald MacLeish, to get some ideas. However, he confused MacLeish's short introduction with Sandburg's long preface, and as a result wound up making MacLeish say a number of things that actually were said by Sandburg.

No doubt many Dylan-worshippers will now argue that this confusion is a sign of Dylan's genius. I think Bob just got his sources mixed up. It happens, especially when you're "borrowing" a lot from other writers.

Shoddy-Wall-Builders

When translating the Damascus Document for the Dead Sea Scrolls book I co-authored with MIke Wise and Martin Abegg, I took some pains not simply to translate mechanically the Hebrew words of the text, but to make explicit the nuances of certain enigmatic expressions that were important for a better understanding. One of these expressions is "Shoddy-Wall-Builders," which occurs four times in the Damascus Document (4:19; 8:12, 18; 19:31), and which is a rendition of Hebrew בוני החיץ.

Peter Flint and James VanderKam make generous use of our translation in their popular textbook The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2002). Nevertheless, in their discussion of Qumran history, they refer to this translation of mine as "curious," and they prefer to translate the phrase as "Builders of the Wall." I now want to make explicit the reasoning behind the choice of words I used, and suggest that it is not curious at all, but demanded by the context.

The persons designated as "builders of the wall" in the Document are portrayed as followers of a false teacher and a false law, and as such have earned the displeasure of God. But why are they called "builders of the wall"? It is agreed by all that the phrase is taken from Ezekiel 13:10: "Because, yes, because they have misled my people, saying, Peace, when there is no peace; and because, when one builds a wall (בנה חיץ), they smear whitewash on it." In the original context, the prophet is denouncing false prophets who give as a divine message something out of their own imaginations. Their message is false and unreliable.

The metaphor the prophet uses is of someone who builds a wall, which is then covered with white paint to hide its imperfections. For the metaphor to function properly, in fact, it is necessary that the wall be understood as one that is not solid or well-built. Otherwise, what would be wrong with whitewashing a wall? Note that the JPS translates this part of the verse as "daubing with plaster the flimsy wall which the people were building."

The word used for "wall" reinforces this interpretation. The word חיץ is not the ordinary Hebrew word for a city wall (חומה) or a building wall (קיר) or a fence (גדר). It only appears here in the Hebrew Bible, and in post-Biblical Hebrew, it seems to refer to a light temporary partition. Jastrow defines it as "a pile of loose and uneven material, a rough extemporised embankment, opp[osed] to earth-covered and finished." To build such a wall and then to paint it as if it were a dependable finished structure would be highly irresponsible.

The authors of the Damascus Document knew perfectly well the implications of the phrase. Their opponents were in every way comparable to the false prophets of Ezekiel's time; like them they built up an unreliable body of teaching – a "shoddy wall" – and like them they hid its imperfections (in 8:12 the same group is called "Whitewashers"). They were not "builders of the wall" – an expression that conveys little – but they were "Shoddy-Wall Builders."

BIBLIOGRAPHY: VanderKam, James C., and Peter W. Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity. San Francisco, Calif: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

Wise, Michael Owen, Martin G. Abegg, and Edward M. Cook. The Dead Sea scrolls: a new translation. San Francisco: Harper, 1996, rev. ed. 2005.

Olive Pits and Alef-Bets: Notes on the Qeiyafa Ostracon

There seems to be a general feeling that there is something about the Qeiyafa Ostracon that counts against a strong minimalist understanding of the history of the Israelite monarchy. I personally think that a strong minimalist position is highly unlikely even without the evidence of the ostracon, so evidence of this kind would not surprise me. Nevertheless it might be interesting, now that the ostracon has been officially published, to give it a brief assessment of its nature and significance.

One of the key tenets of a minimalist stance is that there is little evidence of a strong state in Israel from the 10th century BCE, the period when the United Monarchy is usually placed. Since Khirbet Qeiyafa is dated to the early 10th century BCE (based on the evidence of pottery and carbon-14 dating of olive pits at the site), this causes any finds from the site to have some bearing on the question of the situation in Judah at the time. Even without the ostracon, the fact that there was a strongly fortified town within the borders of ancient Judah at the time evinces some degree of organized building activity, suggestive of political unity. This is a point that the excavators themselves make.

Another trait of state centralization often said to be lacking during the crucial 10th century is literacy, or at least the evidence of a writing tradition in epigraphic artifacts. Here is where the ostracon comes in. The more the ostracon can be taken as evidence of literacy at some level, or as the product of a scribal culture, the more the idea of a centralized state and its educational system becomes probable. Can it be taken in this way?

The ostracon itself is hard to read because of the faded letters, and even the letters that are clear do not yield a connected text or even hint at a possible genre, at least in the readings contained in the official publication. (The interpretation of Gershon Galil, so far available only in a press release, seems to depend on restoring crucial letters or filling in key lacunae in a way that does not carry conviction.) Although the reading of Misgav and his associates agrees in several points with the alternate reading provided by Ada Yardeni, the two readings also diverge from each other in important ways, and neither reading is conducive to meaningful consecutive translation.

So what do we have?

(1) A text written from left-to-right. Although some may choose to withhold judgment at this point, the fact that the second line swerves upward at the right side of the ostracon confirms the general impression of left-to-right direction: a writer swerves upward when he runs out of room at the end of a line.

(2) A text written in the Old Canaanite form of the alphabet, the form that the letters took before (but more about this later) the evolution of national scripts. The closest analogue among previous discoveries is the Izbet Sartah Ostracon, also written left-to-right. But several of the Qeiyafa letters are still unidentified, and for others there are different opinions about their values. Even for those where there is agreement, there are some violent changes of letter stance within the text, which is more typical of earlier forms of this script but not of later (e.g. Izbet Sartah does not have the same variations in stance). My impression is that this would count against rather than for the idea that there was a widespread scribal culture: surely a guild of national scribes would regularize the letter shapes and stances?

(3) A text whose language, although North-West Semitic, is still undetermined. The key sequence of letters is the first five letters: אלתעש. This has plausibly been interpreted as Hebrew אל תעש, "do not do!" Among the NW Semitic languages, the verbal root עשה 'to do' is diagnostic of Hebrew (and its congeners, such as Moabite). Although HALOT gives a few other languages where the root may appear, in this location at this date, only Hebrew is a viable candidate, if the interpretation is correct.

However, the sequence may be interpreted otherwise, and I will come back to it. Other sequences that have been plausibly read are שפט, line 2, עבד, line 1, בעל, line 3, נקם, line 4, מלך, line 4, and possibly חרם, line 5. The roots give us no help for language identification, since all of them are attested throughout North-West Semitic (although נקם and שפט are less common in Aramaic). The lack of a clear text is a handicap, needless to say.

One key sequence is found at the end of line 4. Misgav et al. read the last few letters as יסד מלך גת, "YSD king of Gath," although the last letter is restored. Yardeni, however, reads it differently. Leaving the yod aside, the last five letters she reads as בדמלך. The letter she reads as bet Misgav et al. take as either samekh or ḥet. But the letter in question, although it does not look like the other bets of the text, does look like the bets of some other Old Canaanite texts. If Yardeni is correct, then this sequence is crucial, because בדמלך is a Phoenician name, Bōd-Milk, and the name element "Bod-" ("in the hand of") is not found in Hebrew.

If this is a Phoenician name, then we might explore, heuristically, whether the other readable sequences also suggest names. In line 1, we can take עבדא as Abda, a name attested in several Phoenician inscriptions (Benz 148), as is Bodmilk (Benz 75). The first three letters of line 2 are שפט and this can be taken as Shaphat, an extremely common Phoenician name (Benz 182-184). In Yardeni's reading, the sequence beginning line 3 is גרבעל which could be "Gerbaal," an attested Phoenician name (Benz 103). The letters נקמי in line 4, while not attested, could be a hypocoristic (shortened) form of a name with the verbal form naqam, "to avenge."

Finally, we may reconsider the form אלתעש in this light. The verbal root עוש has been identified in a number of Semitic names (including Biblical Yeush, Gen 36:5 and elsewhere). If the root does occur in the present sequence of letters, then we might take the letters אלת as the goddess Ilat; the name would mean "Ilat helps" or "Ilat, help!" Ilat is a component of some Phoenician names.

If the names are Phoenician, this might mean that the text is Phoenician, but it doesn't prove it. Phoenician names could be mentioned in a text of another language. But the text as a whole would have to be understood in a convincing way before this could be argued. Unfortunately, we are still far from understanding what kind of text the ostracon is overall.

(4) The most significant fact about the ostracon, in my view, is the date. If the dating of the level it was found in is correct – late 11th/early 10th century BCE – then the use of this Old Canaanite script is surprising. Within a century or less of the ostracon's writing, another inscription would be made in ancient Israel of a very different sort. I refer to the Tell Zayit abecedary, which dates at the latest to the late 10th century BCE. But unlike the Qeiyafa ostracon, the Tell Zayit text is written from right-to-left and already has many of the distinctive letter shapes that would characterize Hebrew inscriptions after that time. It is on the way to becoming the Hebrew national script. If any text by itself indicates the presence of a literate culture or scribal guild, it is not Qeiyafa, but Tell Zayit. The chronological gap between the two epigraphs is not very large, but the contrast is dramatic, and may indicate a correspondingly rapid dramatic change in the cultural situation in 10th century Judah. Was this change caused by the monarchy? That's too big a conclusion from this limited data, but the possibility is tantalizing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Misgav, H., Garfinkel, Y. and Ganor, S., "The Ostracon." In Garfinkel, Y. and Ganor, S., Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 1. Excavation Report 2007-2008 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2009), pp. 243-257; Yardeni, A. 2009. "Further Observations on the Ostracon." In Garfinkel, Y. and Ganor, S. Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 1. Excavation Report 2007-2008, pp. 259-260; Franz Benz, Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions (Rome, 1972).

Is Sin in Aramaic a Commercial Term?

I have not yet read Gary Anderson's Sin: A History, but Bruce Marshall, in discussing the book, attributes the following view to Anderson:

Before the Babylonian exile ... sin was sometimes described as a defiling stain but mainly as a burden to be borne. . . . Part of the reason all this changed after the Babylonian exile was linguistic. Aramaic became the primary tongue of the Persian Empire in which the Jewish people lived during the Second Temple period, and in Aramaic the language for religious transgression comes directly from the world of commerce. The word for a debt owed to a lender is the same as the word for a sin.

The Aramaic word that Anderson (or Marshall) refers to is ḥōb, which can indeed mean in many Aramaic dialects either a debt owed to a lender or a sin. However, this does not mean that Israel's view of sin changed because the nation adopted the Aramaic language.

1. The earliest occurrences of ḥōb in Aramaic sources – in this case, the Elephantine papyri – refer exclusively to commercial debt. The verbal/nominal root for "religious transgression" in the earliest sources is ḥṭʾ, as in Hebrew.

2. The single occurrence of ḥōb in the Hebrew Bible, in Ezek 18:7, also refers to commercial debt (apparently; the text is in some disorder). The post-exilic texts that Anderson (or Marshall) cite (Second Isaiah, Daniel) don't use the term (except Dan 1, which uses the verbal root metaphorically for "making something forfeit"). Therefore the Exile is not the key phase linguistically.

3. The use of the verbal root at Qumran does refer to religious transgression, but is not used very often either in Hebrew (CD 3:10, 4Q266, 4Q276 [?]) or in Aramaic (4Q534, 4Q537, 4Q550, 11QtgJob [2 or 3x]). (Note also the related word ḥōbā in 4Q162 [Hebrew] and 4Q534/4Q536, 4Q542 [Aramaic], which means guilt or obligation). The primary word in both languages is still ḥṭʾ (Hebrew and Aramaic), ʿwn (Hebrew), or pšʿ (Hebrew).

4. The great increase in the attested uses of ḥōb for "religious transgression" happens after the Second Temple period in both Hebrew (see the Mishnah) and in Aramaic (see Targum Onkelos). It is also used in these sources to refer to non-religious obligations or duties.

I infer from these facts that the Babylonian exiles did not encounter a form of Aramaic that used a commercial term for religious transgression, leading to a change in the concept of sin. Instead, the change in the concept of sin occurred first and then the commercial term was gradually adopted to express it. This may have happened to some degree in Second Temple Judaism, but the sources don't suggest a big terminological change at this time.

In fact, the idea of debt and sin are necessarily related, whether terms from commerce are used or not. Sin is necessarily understood as something prohibited; and, if it occurs, there is an obligation to seek a remedy (forgiveness or expiation) if one is available or undergo punishment if not. In any case, something is owed. The semantics of religious obligation are thus very close to the semantics of commercial debt; in both cases, a duty exists to make up for a lack that one is responsible for. It is not surprising or wrong that eventually the language of financial debt should eventually be adopted to express religious or moral obligation. But the idea that Aramaic facilitated this process is incorrect.

I'm not sure that the other conclusions Anderson (via Marshall) draws from this are warranted, but my concern in this post is to establish the philological facts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruce D. Marshall, "Treasures in Heaven," First Things (January 2010, no. 199), pp. 23-26.

Sixth Annual Ralphies

The Ralphies. "Are they still around?" Yes, they are, VIrginia. And you get to read them.

Most of the year my mind was on my work, for a change, and therefore I kind of lost touch with the outside world – which, as far as I can tell, is not a bad thing. But still, no one can totally cut themselves off. So, without more ado, here are the awards for ...

Best TV Show: It's Lost, OK? Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost! Only one more year to go, and I expect it to be good. I also very much like Fringe, and Walter Bishop is my new role model.

Best Movie: Ummmmmm, didn't see many movies this year. I saw a couple of blockbusters – Harry Potter and (on DVD) Star Trek. Not bad, I guess, but not great. Am I getting too old for this fanboy stuff? Gee, I hope not. But the movie I liked best (although I think it dates to 2008) was Gran Torino.

Best Record: Oh gee, here's another category I've lost touch with. Most of what I hear is unsystematically gleaned from the radio, not from buying records or downloading tracks. Via the radio I have to admit I always tapped my toe, or some other appendage, whenever Katy Perry's "Hot n Cold" came on. Another guilty pleasure was John Mayer, whose "Gravity" I first heard on an episode of House, loved it, and then was red-faced when I found out it was the work of that poseur. But the Ralphie goes to the recordings of a Washington state bluegrass group, Molly & Tenbrooks. Highly recommended.

Best Non-FIction Book: I read a ton of stuff for work, but I don't know what to pick out of that stack for higher praise than anything else. So this will have to lie fallow this year.

Best Fiction Book: Not a lot of new stuff came through; this year, the pleasure reading mostly was confined to old favorites. In London I bought a paperback copy of Stephen King's Under the Dome, which reinforced my impression that, although King knows how to start a story, he doesn't know how to end one. No, the best fiction book I read, though it was not new, was The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton, with notes by Martin Gardner. Although Gardner is not completely in sympathy with Chesterton's worldview, he does provide a lot of interesting information in his annotations.

Best Blog: I just wanted to tip my hat to a blog that everyone who is interested in Hebrew studies should read regularly, John Hobbins's Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I bet this guy preaches some interesting sermons.

OK, boys and girls! That's it for this year! Be very, very good and there will be more Ralphies in the years to come!

Poetic Tenses (cont.): Hidden Preterites and False Preterites

1. As I noted previously, the SC2 can appear in poetry without the waw which usually accompanies it in prose. The same is true (and this is more widely accepted) of the PC2, which can appear in poetry as the type wayyiqtol, as in prose, or simply as yiqtol. Examples are ready to hand, such as Ps. 24:2, כי הוא על ימים יסדה || ועל נהרות יכוננה , "for he founded it (the earth) on the seas, and made it firm on the rivers." The past orientation is clear from the context, which deals with the creation of the earth. Other examples are Deut 32:10-13, Ps. 18: 4-19; etc. (There is an excellent post here on this very verse, with stimulating discussion in the comments.)

Another example, precisely of the same sort, is found in Ps. 78:58: ‏‏ויכעיסוהו בבמותם ובפסילים יקניאוהו. "They angered him with their high places, and with their images made him jealous." Only the most captious or over-subtle interpreter could find a difference in the time reference of the two verbs here.

2. More controversial are examples of the opposite kind, in which verbs vocalized as preterites (PC2) must be understood as PC1 (imperfect) or jussive (PC3). This entails a rejection of the Masoretic vocalization, but the overall implicature of the poem, along with lexical and syntactical cues – in short, the context – make such a move necessary in many cases. An example is Ps. 94:23: ‏‏וישב עליהם את אונם וברעתם יצמיתם. "May he turn against them their sin, and destroy them for their evil."

In this case, the first verb wayyashev must be understood as PC3, not PC2. The LXX translates both verbs in the future tense (see the BHS apparatus). Another example is Ps. 29:9, where ‏וַיֶּחֱשֹׂף must be understood as PC1, in accordance with the sense and form of the verb ‏יְחוֹלֵל in the previous line. Here also the LXX translates the first verb as present participle, the second as future; note also that the targum translates both by participles.

To sum up: in Biblical Hebrew poetry, the form known as wayyiqtol (preterite) in prose can be simply yiqtol in poetry, but still a preterite. On the other hand, forms that the Masoretic text presents as wayyiqtol preterites must sometimes be understood from the context to be imperfect or jussive with conjunctive waw (and therefore the MT must be vocalized differently).

I think these principles are fairly uncontroversial. I'll try to get to more debatable ones (e.g., the prophetic perfect) sometime in the near future. In the meantime, comments are welcome.

Toward a Theory of Hebrew Poetic Tenses

A simplistic take of the Hebrew verbal system is that there are two conjugations, the prefix-conjugation (or imperfect), or PC, and the suffix-conjugation (or perfect), or SC. Formally, this is not far from the truth, but it is generally recognized now that there are actually three different PCs: the imperfect (PC1), the preterite (PC2) and the jussive-cohortative (PC3). All of these have diverse historical origins. Although formally they often fall together in Biblical Hebrew, occasional differences in morphological form are discernible between these three.

There are also two kinds of SC: the perfect (SC1) and a second form (SC2) sometimes called the "converted perfect," or just we-qatal (because in prose the SC2 is usually preceded by the conjunction ו). My impression is that the SC2 is currently the most discussed of these forms. Although SC1 and SC2 may have the same historical origin, they function synchronically in different ways, and should always be distinguished.

The workings of these five conjugations is pretty well understood now in prose texts: PC1 for future, general present, modal, or past habitual; PC2 for narrative past; PC3 for volitional mood. SC1 is also used for past tense when narrative sequence is not in view, while SC2 is used in the same way as PC1 with the added feature of sequentiality. There are various fine-tunings of all these functions, but the broad outlines are agreed upon.

As I said, this picture is valid for prose only. When it comes to Hebrew poetry, the outline is not so clear. Various conjugations appear in neighboring poetic lines without clear difference in function. PC1 appears to sometime be used for the past, SC1 for the future. Plus "odd" uses of SC1, such as the precative perfect or the prophetic perfect, are claimed to appear in poetry.

Without going into the whole history of discussion, I propose that Hebrew poetry is more like prose than usually thought, but with the difference that word order is variable and the usual conjunctive particles that in prose differentiate the conjugations are either absent or replaced with different particles. More particularly, I think that the "odd" uses of the SC1 are often actually "normal" uses of SC2. The reason this has been hard to notice is because usually SC2 in prose occurs with the conjunction ו, but in poetry the ו is optional. In other words, in poetry you can have the וקטל without the ו. This accounts for some anomalies in Hebrew poetry.

For instance, in Ps. 23, all the finite verbs are PC1 except for v. 5, ‏dishanta. (The questionable form veshavti in v. 6 I leave out). Although dishanta is SC, it is almost always translated in accordance with the presumed general present tense of the other verbs: "thou anointest (my head with oil)." Here it makes most sense to take this SC as SC2, continuing the tense of the PC1. In prose, the line would read as follows: תערך שלחן -- ודשנת בשמן וגו , "you prepare a table ... and anoint with oil," etc.

Another example is from Ps. 11:2: הרשעים ידרכון קשת כוננו חצם , "the wicked string the bow, they set their arrow (on the string)."** Most English translations again use the general present for both verbs, although the first is PC1 and the second is SC. In prose, the second verb would be וכוננו , "and then they set," etc. It is SC2, not SC1.

The picture is complicated, of course, by the fact that SC1 is also used in poetry, both in a past sense and, depending on the Aktionsart of the verb, as a present. Plus it should be asked whether there was some kind of suprasegmental differentiation (such as stress accent) between SC1 and SC2 in poetry. In a future post, time permitting, I might go into these issues and also the question of the prophetic perfect and the precative perfect as poetic usages of SC2, but this necessarily brief survey gives the general idea. Comments and reactions are welcome.

**Many translations obscure the fact that the idiom דרך קשת means "to string the bow" (by stepping on one end and bending the other end down to attach the string), not "to bend the bow (for shooting)." Hence stringing has to precede setting the arrow, and the second verb cannot be taken as past or as conceptually prior to bending.

A Note on the Translation of Gen 3:15

A Roman Catholic deacon, in a talk I heard yesterday, asserted that the usual English translations of Gen 3:15b, "He/it shall bruise your head," are mistaken. The proper translation, he said, was "she shall bruise your head," and refers allegorically to the Virgin Mary.

I checked this when I got home and the Hebrew clearly says הוא ישופך ראש, "he/it will bruise your head." Whence the good deacon's assertion? The Septuagint also clearly uses the masculine form. But the Vulgate says ipsa conteret, "she will bruise." A little research turned up a boatload of comment on this reading (a controversy of which I had been until yesterday completely unaware). The RC Douay Rheims translation follows this reading. However, the Nova Vulgata, the revised Latin version authorized by the Vatican now reads ipsum conteret, "it will bruise." This is no doubt correct in terms of the original text; nor can I believe that St. Jerome's original translation of the Hebraica veritas was anything but ipsum.

What amazed me in the literature was the fierceness of the opposing sides. Apparently in a previous age, up to the 19th century, the question of Gen 3:15 seemed to both RC and Protestant to involve crucial questions, and that to retreat amounted to surrendering a key point. But there could only be one outcome to the debate, and the RC church has accepted it, recognizing, I think, that its claims about Mary are not really at risk in the question of the translation of this verse. Nevertheless, I can tell you that at some levels, among the laity, the old debate is still very much alive.

UPDATE: Translation of ipsum corrected to neuter, with thanks to Scott Johnson.

Apposition in Biblical Hebrew

I've been going through Waltke and O'Connor's Intro to Biblical Hebrew Syntax with some students, giving it a detailed read and appraisal. It's been tremendously influential and is without question a magisterial work. However, I must admit I'm not wholly sold on everything in it.

An example is the treatment of apposition (Chapter 12). Apposition is described as a "sequence of nouns ... with the same syntactic function and agreement and with comparable reference" (p. 226). This is not very clear, as W&OC seem to recognize. I want to discuss a different set of criteria, without discussing all the details of the chapter.

The appositive phrase is basically of the structure N1 N2. This is similar to the structure of the construct phrase, but in the construct phrase the N2 cannot be omitted without disturbing the phrase structure. In apposition N2 can be dropped and the phrase structure is left intact. For instance in the construct phrase nehar Perat, "the river Euphrates", while notionally appositional, is syntactically a construct phrase and Perat cannot be omitted leaving only nehar. But in the phrase ha-melek Dawid, "king David," Dawid could be omitted leaving ha-melek to function as a one member noun phrase. So the first test is omission of N2.

The omission test doesn't work against adjectival phrases however. In the phrase N-Adj, Adj could be dropped, just like N2 in the appositional phrase, e.g., ish tov, "a good man" could be pared to just ish. We could say that tov has a "distinct sort of reference" (W&OC 12.1c) as an adjective, but not every word used attributively in Biblical Hebrew is morphologically an adjective, e.g., ish yoshev ba-bayit, "a man dwelling in the house," where Adj = participle + prepositional phrase.

In fact, it is not easy to find further tests to differentiate appositional phrases from adjectival, but I propose two possibilities. One is the reversibility test. One could conceivably reverse the order of N1 and N2 in apposition, e.g., ha-melek Dawid = Dawid ha-melek. One could not similarly reverse ish tov into *tov ish. Thus the adjectival phrase shares with the construct phrase the trait of irreversibility.

However, I am not sure this works all the time. My intuition (as well as W&OC) tells me that ishah almanah "woman, widow" in Hebrew is apposition, but it is not reversible. One could not say, I don't think, *almanah ishah just as well as ishah almanah. Perhaps this means we should actually understand this phrase and others like it as adjectival modification, and not apposition.

Another possible test is the repetition of the preposition test (or: "rep of prep"). In apposition, a governing preposition may be repeated before N1 and N2, e.g., livni le-Yitzxaq, "to my son, to Isaac" (Gen 24:4). The same could not happen in the adjectival phrase, e.g., ha-ish ha-tov "the good man" cannot become *la-ish la-tov "to the good man." But as W&OC point out (12.3f), the preposition or other particle is not repeated in apposition if N1 is a proper name. It is not clear why this is.

In any case, I think it is clear that some of the further cases mentioned by W&OC, e.g., shloshah banim, "3 sons," cannot possibly be apposition. The relation between numeral (or other quantifier) and the quantified noun does not meet any set of criteria for apposition, including W&OC's. Further discussion of quantifiers will have to wait, however. For now, I'd be interested in hearing comments about apposition.

Teaching Aramaic: Diachronic or Synchronic?

This note is more jottings for my own benefit --a form of thinking out loud -- than a fully considered proposal. Comments from scholars are welcome.

In teaching introductory Aramaic, the decision has to be made whether a synchronic or diachronic approach is to be used. The textbook I currently use (an unpublished text by another scholar) uses the synchronic approach, with the Aramaic of Targum Onkelos as the beginning dialect.

For a certain class of nouns, the synchronic approach leads to certain problems. Consider the two words gabra "man" and nahra "river." Although they are alike on the surface, a diachronic approach would discern historical etymons of a different shape, namely [gabr] and [nahar]. Because of differing processes of historical change, these forms have a similar outcome. Because of changes affecting monosyllablic nouns ending in a consonant cluster, [gabr] becames at a certain point [gabar] (with anaptyxis), and then [gbar] (with pretonic short vowel reduction in open syllables), although the base form for suffixes remains [gabr]. On the other hand, [nahar] was bisyllabic from the beginning, and only underwent the vowel reduction yielding [nhar] for the absolute, while the base form for suffixes also underwent vowel reduction, yielding [nahr-] out of [nahar].

But in the synchronic approach, is there any reason to posit different historical base forms? Can one come up with a set of rules that generates all the relevant forms, both absolute and determined, without appeal to historical forms?

Let's propose for both forms the underlying base forms [gabr, nahr]. The next rule would be:
A. CVCC bases must be changed to CVCVC in free-standing forms. This gives us [gabar, nahar]

Next rule:
B. Short vowels in open unstressed syllables reduce to shewa or zero. This gives us [gbar, nhar].

One could even reduce it to one rule, as follows:
A'. CVCC bases must be changed to CCVC in free-standing forms.

Does this work? Let's try it on two more nouns: sipra "book" and zimna "time."
A'. The rule rewrites [sipr, zimn] as [spar, zman]. These are the correct absolute forms.

But the rule should probably specify that the vowel in the rewritten form has to be /a/.
A''. CVCC bases must be changed to CCaC in free-standing forms.

Does this work? Let's try two more, malka "king" and laxma "bread." Application of A'' should yield [mlak, lxam]. However, these forms are not correct. The absolute forms are [málak, lxem]. Now what?

For malka, there has to be another rule modification, namely
A'''. CVCC bases must be changed to CCaC in free-standing forms, or else to CáCaC.

For laxma, the rule needs a further modification, namely
A'''''. CVCC bases must be changed to CCaC or CCeC or CáCaC in free-standing forms.

This rule might cover most forms. However, the rule has to be understood as predicting the parameters of possible lexical surface forms, and not as generating forms on its own.

I'm starting to think that the diachronic approach might just as well be introduced at this point. For instance, the diachronic approach will predict correctly that historical CVCC bases can become CáCaC or CCaC or CCeC, while historical CVCVC bases will become only CCaC or CCeC. This seems like a useful distinction to make.

Of course, this doesn't even start to deal with the question of spirantization. Maybe I'll deal with that in the next post.

More Dylan Thefts, II: Rollins, Pynchon, Hemingway, etc.

A while back I reported on some passages of other authors that Bob Dylan had re-used in Chronicles. I've continued to find more, as have others, especially the indefatigable Scott Warmuth.

Some of the more interesting borrowings I've found are the following:

The Portable Henry Rollins (1998), p. 131:
"Roads full of debris and sadness, old music shifting on the radio. The smell of gasoline on my hands."

Chronicles, p. 74:
"Radio sounds came shifting out of cafes. Snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline."

Hemingway, "The Battler," The Nick Adams Stories:
"Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive this all at once; he only saw the man's face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color."

Chronicles p. 75:
"His face was misshapen, looked queer formed, almost mutilated -- like putty in color."

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 529
"...cast-iron flowers on spiral vine all painted white..."

Chronicles, p. 58:
"There were some iron flowers on a spiral vine painted white leaning in the corner"


Jack London, "The White Silence":
"All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege ...."

Chronicles, p. 96:
"When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege."

"The Yellow Claw", Sax Rohmer:
"Through the leaded panes of the window above the writing-table, swept a silver beam of moonlight."

Chronicles, p. 166:
"From the far end of the kitchen a silver beam of moonlight pierced through the leaded panes of the window illuminating the table."

Scott has also uncovered a lot of other interesting material, which I'll leave to him to write about.

There are two ways to take all this. One is to say that Dylan is alluding, not copying; paying tribute, not ripping off; and conceivably playing a game with his readers, daring them to find (as he knows they will) the various authors whose words he has creatively re-used. This is part of his genius. This is a perfectly respectable point of view. The second perspective, however, is the one that I favor, which is to be disappointed that Dylan's descriptions, narrations, and word choices are, much of the time, not his. It seems like lack of imagination, and maybe a little distrust of his own abilities, to say nothing of the questionable ethics.

But whatever you think, isn't it better to know what his method is? Chronicles, it's now becoming clear, is comprised of some authentic reminiscence and some fiction (I take it that the characters Ray, Chloe, and Sun Pie, to name a few, are fictional). Within this mixture, typically when he is reaching for an eloquent description of the physical setting, or of his own tangled thoughts, he uses the words of others, sometimes heavily rewritten, sometimes only lightly retouched. Plagiarism or collage? It's your choice.

This is to be distinguished from the use of sources for the purpose of information. Scott has demonstrated that Dylan used an issue of Time magazine for his portrait of the early '60's. It can also be demonstrated, for instance, that Dylan's information about Balzac (Chronicles, pp. 45-46) is derived from Graham Robb's Balzac: A Biography (1995). (What, you thought Bob knew Balzac personally?) Nothing problematic about any of that. I would have cited these sources, but I'm an egghead, and Bob is not.

More of this stuff will come out. Eventually the palimpsest that is Chronicles will be as full of marginal glosses as the Talmud. Like his method or not, it is interesting to see what the dude has been reading. And if we didn't like Bob, it wouldn't matter, right?

Little Walter, Bob Dylan, and the Two Sonny Boys

Bob Dylan, in his autobiographical Chronicles, tells this story of Sonny Boy Williamson:

The only comment that I ever got [on my harmonica playing] was a few years later in John Lee Hooker's hotel room in Lower Broadway in New York City. Sonny Boy Williamson was there and he heard me playing, said, "Boy, you play too fast." [p. 257]

An interesting parallel is found in Blues with a Feeling: the Little Walter Story, by Tony Glover, Scott Dirks and Ward Gaines:

[Billy Boy Arnold] asked [Little Walter] if he knew Sonny Boy. Walter replied, "Yeah, I knew him. He was really good man, he was the best. He used to tell me 'you play too fast, you play too fast.' " [p. 89]

There are several possibilities here. One is that "Sonny Boy Williamson" really said that Little Walter and Bob Dylan played too fast and told them so. It is certainly true that the early Dylan occasionally played harmonica at a frantic, helter-skelter tempo.

On the other hand, since it is now clear that Chronicles contains generous helpings of fiction as well as fact, maybe Dylan appropriated this story to himself. It is a telling fact that the section in which Dylan's story occurs deals partly with Minnesota harpist Tony Glover, who is co-author of Blues with a Feeling. Also pointing to the fictional character of the story is the fact that the Little Walter anecdote refers to the first Sonny Boy Williamson, who died in 1948. Dylan's anecdote has to refer to Sonny Boy Williamson II, who died in 1965.

Therefore if both stories are true, then Sonny Boy I told Little Walter that he played too fast, and Sonny Boy II told Dylan that he played too fast. This is certainly possible. But I have to favor the idea that, given other evidence of Dylan's borrowing of sources, he also borrowed this one, without noticing that he assigned the saying to the wrong Sonny Boy.