Baal to Rosanne, Baal to Rosanne
Have you noted that Ba’al worship is probably related to ogham order (BLFSN), not Hebrew (BGD etc.)? Which came first, Baal or ogham? I would ‘guess’ that the name Ba’al arose from the letter-calendar and perhaps personified it (but then I take letters as having been around, in various oral and written manifestations, since the old civilization ended in destruction). Perhaps the Semitic letter-order came from Ba’al’s method of shaving:
Ba’al sitting on his house throws his
boomerang which then recoils and shops off his
pointed fish tail beard, whereupon he
raises his hand in blessing so people don’t think he himself was hurt by it... (and so on). (Yes, I’m being facetious.)
I start with reaction to the
wikipedia articles referenced. At this address—
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age —
wikipedia states: “No written language existed in the nordic countries during the Bronze Age.” Are they kidding? This statement is absurd: it ignores the epigraphic evidence completely. (Disappointing.) They had two written forms, evidently, tifinag (survives only amongst Berbers of N.Africa) and ogam consaine (consonants-only ogham). What is with the ‘educated classes’ that they have such huge blinders and areas of shadow, while on other issues they shed much light with such careful scholarship? It is a recurrent source of disappointment and bafflement to me.
And at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets it says: “...the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs.” This is stated as fact yet completely
ignores all scholarship on the subject
before Alan Gardiner roiled the waters and destroyed the clear image that was emerging on the reflective surface of the water. (From context, it is apparent they are not merely referring to the few two-sound signs, used in transcribing foreign words, incorporated into the alef-bet.) Again, disappointing.
However, to its credit the same article states: “Note that all proposals for Egyptian prototypes of the alphabet remain controversial. For example, a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that resembles the hieroglyph
djet (snake) is identified with the letter נ Ν here, and has been ever since Gardiner, because the name of the corresponding Ethiopic letter is
naħaš (snake). However, Peter Daniels states,
it seems very likely that the modern Ethiopic letter names date no further back than the sixteenth century C.E., and so are irrelevant to the investigation of Proto-Sinaitic.” Bless their hearts, as this puts the Proto-Sinaitic theory of origin completely out of business once the much more
complete (and soundly constructed, with broad agreement) theory of the 19th-century scholars is taken into account (which it evidently almost never is).
The “Colless reconstruction” (at
(Colless reconstruction) ) does not have much to recommend it, obviously: most of the shapes bear no relation whatever to the Semitic letters. And in “the Albright identification of the Egyptian prototypes,” at
(Albright identification),
digg "fish" bears no relation to dalet, obviously, whereas
haw / hll "jubilation" relates in shape to S.Semitic and has a meaning that actually
could be stretched to fit the heh I know, though how it relates to Hebrew ‘the’ (letter heh) or the oft-assumed meaning ‘window’ (from the square-Hebrew shape) I know not. I don’t ‘get’
zen /ziqq "manacle" for two horizontal parallel lines, and neither
yad "arm" nor
kap "hand" bear any relation in shape to Phoenician that I can see, and
naḥš "snake",
piʾt "corner", and
ṣad "plant" (for tzaddi) bear no relation in shape
or meaning, apparently. I also don’t get reysh, shape-wise.
Rosanne, I make a heartfelt appeal to your objectivity: I know little is to be found online concerning 19th-century scholarship on the alphabet, but you really need to study this, as it is a
much more plausible theory even
with its gaps (and I have filled those). Both 19th-century and modern scholars, to be sure, bore (bear) the disadvantage of studying the artifact in a symbolic vacuum, whereas I have benefit of some notion of the evolution of the symbolism related to each sound, since I look at the overall development of writing (including New World inscriptions) as if there might actually
be rampant interconnexion. In other words, I do not think all scholars dufuses, only too narrow in their vision (and perhaps lacking some in imagination, an important tool academics tend to shun).
[The problem of S.Semitic (S.Arabian) writing is an interesting but complicated one: I think many of the letters are shifts in sound, judging by the shapes, and it was a later development than Phoenician (circa 5th century B.C.E.). But there is an interesting shape for
s that looks exactly like the later (Northumbrian) runic Ng, and indeed Ng’s counterpart in Phoenician is samekh. The interesting thing about this is that this character and the later rune are closer than Phoenician to the original
hieroglyph (whose hieratic form
led to samekh), Gardiner’s ‘wick of twisted flax’. The only ‘explanation’ I can come up with for this is the connexion Graves insists on between British bardic tradition and the Ethiopian
Enoch (etc.)... but this is inadequate.
]
Once again: even given a century of
trying to get their act together (I presume), the proto-Sinaitic theorists
still cannot make a convincing case! If they had true scholarly humility (a necessary quality in finding truth), they would at least begin again to
consider the sound work done in the 19th century. After all, the 19th-century theory derives Semitic letters from
already existing (and much used) forms, Egyptian hieratic (priestly writing), and these forms resemble their descendents
both in shape and in sound, a claim that cannot even begin to be made for these more modern musings. (I blame Gardiner, fine scholar that he was, for starting this ridiculous trend.)
Study, Rosanne,
study, as I know you want to know.
(The following is my reaction to your “The Literary Life of Deity” site, though I skipped the Christian stuff.)
(It says, about a third of the way through, “...his divine name Yah was unspeakable,” which is surely false: this was the male part of the Name and thus
could be ‘pronounced’, it being the full Name, YHWH, that was ineffable.)
I take the demiurge to be the desire, in man, that duality (distinction one from another)
not be included in unity.
This is the source of whatever ‘symmetry-breaking’ is at the root of things, according to the bardo-Qabbalistic paradigm.
You could say it was man’s own high self (knower-and-thinker) that withdrew most of the Light (read “kicked us out of
gan eden”) when desire’s attention was drawn (by feeling) to the outer horizon
exclusively. But as can easily be seen from this, this was not revenge but rather ‘retribution’ in the Buddhist sense: only possible result from disharmony of seeing only one horizon, the outer. For it is the inner horizon that is the source of the Light.
[This makes the inner horizon east, which in teepees is the direction the sun always shines from (its opening)... which makes the outer horizon west (limitation). In other words (and I’m only working this out as we speak), whatever is
out (without or outer) will
end up west (being temporal), and only inner inspiration—the mere spark (yod) that’s left of the Light (faith in the existence of an inner horizon?)—remains, as when something ‘dawns’ on one. For
inner is out of reach of the (outer, temporal) change that causes
outer to decay, to ‘end up west’.
Thanx. I needed that. (Them Ba’al war-shippers was some’m, huh.)
]
By the way, though the northern Elhim (god as the sexes) ended up in Yahweh country and this mixing affected Judaism, it should be pointed out that the reason the Name ‘YHWH’ itself couldn’t be pronounced was that it took two, a man and a woman, to ‘pronounce’ it... for it is the creative power we lack as individuals but invoke in the form of procreative force when we mate for that purpose. The ‘W’ (vav) is the root of the female half of the Name, and if you look at the various Phoenician-era forms, you’ll realize that whether it derives as the expert-textperts say from proto-Sinaitic ‘nail’, or as I (and 19th-century scholars) say from hieratic for ‘horned viper’ (
f), its shape is most definitely a breast pouring forth milk, however crudely this may be scratched into rock at times. Yod, the root of the male half, is two arms drawing a line in the dirt with a stick, in imitation of the plow (get it?)... this whether
its source is academia’s ‘hand’, or my ‘two reeds’.
I leave you with an interesting quote from that website (roughly 2/5 in) which reinforces my ‘poetic-tradition’ model: “One point which can never be repeated too often in this context is that the visionary tradition soars in poetic allegory and dives to earth like the smoking firebrands of Shaar Yishuv (Isa 7:13) when appreciation for poetic allegory transforms into literalistic fundamentalism. While the prophetic tradition lives on the such poetic writings as Isaiah, the editors who have shamelessly concatenated the works of many centuries under the authorship of one prophetic ancient inject hypocr[is]y into the very tradition they espouse.”
PS. In the second article there, it says, “"For I hate divorce...” (God speaking): boy, does he! For example, I blame the ‘God’ of the Baptists for my mother’s death at 57 from cancer, she having forsaken him to marry an atheist (my dad). By the way (to correct the author’s misinterpretation), it does not necessarily indicate any “uniformly subordinate and disparaged character of women in ancient Israelite society” to merely lament the sad state of affairs that can ensue when women rule: just look at the inner city in America, ‘ruled’ by welfare workers and by single moms whose gangster sons can therefore do as they please (the family having been destroyed by welfare to moms being dependent on them
not naming or marrying the father)... And how Abimelech’s attitude towards women is at all relevant escapes me, as he is the worst villain IN the Old Testament practically. As for a goddess being included in the Hebrew god, I can say with some authority that YHWH, in his most powerful form, is
neither sex and is divided
into a male part and female part only by man’s transgression, the degeneration of the original, sexless Adam Qadmon into the sexes and the conversion of creative power into the procreative: the El linked to Asherah is a mere
aspect of God, according to Kabbalah. And association of Asherah with trees reinforces Graves’s idea of broader influence of tree-letters than just Britain and Ireland. (And I concur that Islam is little more than a mechanism for the enslavement of women, the ‘little more’ being an encouragement of sobriety, but I do not agree “that matrimony is the immortal condition,” the article’s concluding words.)
(My apologies in advance for all in this post that may offend, though I will probably not take any of it back.)