The Moon swings to her crescent quarter place.
She is the measurer of roads in space.
Our spinning planet was where she is now
Only a seventh of a day ago.
The Moon’s first-quarter moment comes on May 9, only minutes past at the beginning of the Universal Time day, so it is 5 hours earlier by clocks on Daylight-Shifted Time in the central North American time zone, and the evening of May 8 is the nearest evening for seeing the Moon near to this cardinal phase. I choose a time for the sky scene 4 hours after sunset (which is after midnight) only so as to bring the Moon down nearer to the horizon, for a more compact picture. You could of course look hours earlier, which would be nearer to the first-quarter moment. Notice the point marked “antapex of Earth’s way.” We came from there three and a half hours ago.
The Eta Aquarid meteor shower was a few days ago, and when writing about it I found myself rehashing what I had written about it a year ago, and a year before that. There is an irksomeness about this, and among the ideas that occurred to me as I went to be – a fertile though inconvenient time for ideas – was that composing this blog in verse could be liberating.
Palyanytsya
May 9 is also Russia’s Victory Day, anniversary of the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany. There will be parades in every Russian city. Führer Putin is desperate to be able to boast that there is one success in his Nazi-like war of conquest, the surrender of one major Ukrainian city. Mariupol, reduced to a carpet of ruins by two months of bombardment, most of its people dead or fled, its last defenders being deliberately starved out in their underground stronghold. There is to be the obscenity of a Victory Day show even here. Rubble and dead bodies are being hastily cleaned from the empty streets. Russian television will show grateful residents joyfully greeting their liberators.
One of the responses of Ukrainians to the invasion is increased demand for tattooing with defiant slogans and national symbols. One such tattoo shows a loaf of hearth-baked wheat bread called palyanytsya.
Why? Russian and Ukrainian are closely related languages, of the East Slavic group that also includes Belarusian, but Russians trying to say this Ukrainian word almost inevitably mispronounce it. So Ukrainians “joke that the bread is an unofficial national ‘password’ to catch potential Russian spies.”
It’s a remarkable example of a shibboleth.
The Old Testament story (in the Book of Judges, chapter 12) is that the tribe of Ephraim launched an invasion across the Jordan river into Gilead. Their reason was a flimsy one: the Gileadite leader had reproached them for not helping in defence against an outside foe. Defeated, the Ephraimites tried to escape back across the river, but at the ford the Gileadites stopped each man and made him say the word for the head of a stalk of wheat, shibboleth. If he said sibboleth he was an Ephraimite and was killed. And that day 42,000 Ephraimites were slain.
We stress the word on the first syllable; in Hebrew the stress is on the second. There were three sibilant consonants, called shin, sin, samekh. I’m not sure that I understand, or that anyone does, what exactly was the difference between them. In modern Hebrew the first is pronounced as sh, the other two as s. Evidently in the Ephraimite dialect the first also sounded as s.
Ephraim and Manasseh were the Joseph tribes, descended from his two sons, and were the largest tribes of the northern half of the Hebrew people. Gilead was not a tribe but a region, east of the Jordan, and had been added to the territory of Manasseh. So the bitter story is even more poignant: a feud between close relatives.
But what is it about palyanytsya that is so difficult for Russians? Again with help from Slavic linguist and human-rights activist Wayles Browne:
In Ukrainian, there is a close front vowel i as in English machine, and a more open front vowel y as in our gym. But Russian has only the first of those, so a Russian would give the second also the machine sound. To complicate our description, in both languages ya is a single letter (it looks like a backward R). Also, Russian and Ukrainian, like many other languages, such as Irish, have palatalized versions of consonants; that is, the front of the tongue squeezes up behind the teeth. But in this word a Russian couldn’t stop himself from palatalizing the n (because it’s before a front vowel) and non-palatalizing the ts (because Russia doesn’t have a palatalized version of that consonant).
We can hope this Ukrainian shibboleth is a joke. Many Russians are committing atrocities in Ukraine – a newly reported kind is raping of males as well as females – but they should be captured and put pm trial, not butchered like the Ephraimites.
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When you mentioned Ephraim and Manasseh in your post, I was reminded of a theory on human migration.
Israel split in into 2 nations about 800 B.C. The north retained the name Israel and was populated by 10 northern tribes of Israel. The southern nation was called Judah and was composed of the tribes of Benjamin and Judah. They named their nation Judah, since the tribe of Judah was much larger than the tribe of Benjamin. The word Jew comes from Judah.
The Philadelphia Church of God contends that the ten northern tribes of Israel were defeated by the Assyrians (from modern day Syria) and so the tribes migrated to different parts of the world. Ephraim’s tribe migrated north to become Britain. The tribe of Manasseh somehow became the USA. Dan’s tribe took up residence in Ireland. Ruben’s tribe settled in France.
The southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin stayed in the area. That region was under control of Turkey and its Ottoman Empire but was ceded to Britain on May 9, 1916 after the Turks were defeated in WW1.
The British gave autonomy of the area to the Jewish people in 1948. Leaders of the new nation considered naming the new nation Judah but instead chose Israel, even though the tribes of Israel were no longer there.
These ethnic ramifications are endless, and I’ve had reason to immerse myself in them in the past, having lived in Arab countries and in Israel. Assyria, by the way, was in northern Iraq, not northern Syria. The tracing of remote nations back to tribes of Israel is rather like the mediaeval desire to trace them back to fugitives from Troy. At least some of the northern Israelites stayed on, as the Samaritan community; I was once at a Samaritan Passover near Nablus, a wild event. And are the Palestinians descended from the vanished Philistines or from all the ancient populations, including Canaanites, Hivites, Amorites… Israelites? – don’t let’s get started.
Indeed but we usually date events by the place where they occurred. The conflict actually ceased at 23:01 on May 8th. May 9th is a Soviet invention to make it seem like only Russians were fighting fascism. Stalin in fact engineered a second signing of the surrender documents on May 9th to reinforce the illusion.
Your post made me wonder about the word shibboleth. Hebrew had different letters for sh and s, but Ancient Greek didn’t have any sh sound. So, I wondered, how did the translators of the Septuagint, the Ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, render that passage (Judges 12.6)? Answer: they had problems with it. One manuscript of the Septuagint says “Say stakhýs.” where stakhýs is the Greek noun meaning “ear of grain.” Another manuscript says “Say sýnthēma.” where sýnthēma is the Greek noun meaning “agreed-on word, password.” But either way, the reader has to accept without evidence the writer’s statement that “he/they couldn’t pronounce it.”
Yes, this is an outstanding instance of a problem for translators can run into. If the point made in the text depends on phonetics, what to do when translating into a language that does not have a similar phonetic feature?
But you’ve told us only how the Septuagint represents the password that the Gileadite demands. How does it try to represent the Ephraimite’s reply, with its s instead of sh?
Wayles has been trying to reply to that, but something has prevented his reply from appearning. So I will paste it in here. Guy
“How does it represent the reply? It doesn’t. Here is the passage in two of the main ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint. (The third, Codex Sinaiticus, has gaps in it, and doesn’t have this passage.) If the Greek doesn’t come through, you can try following the URLs that I’ve included.
Judges A (Codex Alexandrinus) https://en.katabiblon.com/us/index.php?text=LXX&book=JgsA&ch=12
5 καὶ προκατελάβοντο ἄνδρες Γαλααδ τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου τοῦ Εφραιμ καὶ ἐγενήθη ὅτι εἶπαν οἱ διασεσῳσμένοι τοῦ Εφραιμ διαβῶμεν καὶ εἶπαν αὐτοῖς οἱ ἄνδρες Γαλααδ μὴ ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ Εφραιμ καὶ εἶπαν οὔκ ἐσμεν
6 καὶ εἶπαν αὐτοῖς εἴπατε δὴ σύνθημα καὶ οὐ κατηύθυναν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως καὶ ἐπελάβοντο αὐτῶν καὶ ἔσφαξαν αὐτοὺς ἐπὶ τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου καὶ ἔπεσαν ἐξ Εφραιμ ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ δύο τεσσαράκοντα χιλιάδες
My rough translation:
‘5 And men of Galaad [Gilead] took the river crossings of the Jordan [earlier than] Ephraim, and it happened that the fugitives of Ephraim said “let’s cross” and the men of Galaad said to them “Aren’t you from Ephraim?” and they said “We are not.”
6 And they said to them “Now, say the agreed-on word”, and they didn’t make straight to speak thus, and they grabbed them and slaughtered them at the crossings of the Jordan, and at that moment there fell from [the people of] Ephraim two and forty thousands.
Judges B (Codex Vaticanus) https://en.katabiblon.com/us/index.php?text=LXX&book=JgsB&ch=12
[5] καὶ προκατελάβετο Γαλααδ τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου τοῦ Εφραιμ καὶ εἶπαν αὐτοῖς οἱ διασῳζόμενοι Εφραιμ διαβῶμεν καὶ εἶπαν αὐτοῖς οἱ ἄνδρες Γαλααδ μὴ Εφραθίτης εἶ καὶ εἶπεν οὔ
[6] καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῷ εἰπὸν δὴ στάχυς καὶ οὐ κατεύθυνεν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως καὶ ἐπελάβοντο αὐτοῦ καὶ ἔθυσαν αὐτὸν πρὸς τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου καὶ ἔπεσαν ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ ἀπὸ Εφραιμ τεσσαράκοντα δύο χιλιάδες
My rough translation:
5 ‘And Galaad [Gilead] took the river crossings of the Jordan [earlier than] Ephraim, and the fugitives of Ephraim said to them “let’s cross” and the men of Galaad said to them “Aren’t you an Ephraimite?” and he said “No.”
6 And they said to him “Now, say ear of grain”, and he didn’t make straight to speak thus, and they grabbed him and sacrificed him near the crossings of the Jordan, and at that moment there fell from [the people of] Ephraim forty two thousands.’
‘Make straight to’ is a literal translation; presumably it means ‘be able to’.”
As much as we might dislike Vladimir Putin I don’t think that he’s like Hitler as he hasn’t singled out certain ethnic groups out for elimination,well not yet at least.More like Stalin as the groups Stalin singled out tended to belong to a certain economic group for example Kulaks,sort of farmers.Plus Putin claims that the Ukraine is full of Nazis suggesting he doesn’t like them, Nazis,so he certainly can’t regard himself as one.As best I can tell his philosophy is one of Russian nationalism but with Soviet nostalgia probably based on a realistic observation that without the USSR Russia would have remained a backward peasant style economy and certainly wouldn’t have put the only human made spaceships on Venus.Yeltsin seemed to have wanted to skip the USSR and not acknowledge that the Czar was a pretty unpleasant fellow,well as a product of his upbringing.I wonder what would have happened in Russia had the governments of Kerensky or Trotsky prevailed?
Attribution of blame by a disinterested third party is historically correct … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-faLoCQU8w4 … Amazing how western media ignore these facts, actually.
Given this site’s preference for Universal Time, it is worth noting that WW2 actually ended on May 8th which was celebrated for a while as VE Day until we wanted to reintegrate the Germans into the West.
It’s quite complicated because several of the German top brass signed at different times and places.
The statement signed by Jodl on May 7 said that operations were to cease on May 8 at 23 Central European Time, which was into May 9 by Russian time.