You know how annoying it is to watch people flail about helplessly?

[xiphias]

So, I was poking around online looking for a list of what Hebrew letters were orignially what pictograms. And I come across an evangelical Christian website with a web discussion.

And they're trying to figure out what "eit" in Hebrew means -- aleph tav.

They end up deciding it is a name of God.

IT'S A FREAKIN' GRAMMATICAL MARKER! IT JUST TELLS YOU WHICH WORD IS THE DIRECT OBJECT!

See, Biblical Hebrew doesn't really have word order, not real strongly. So, if you have two nouns and a verb, there's not necessarily any way to tell which noun verbed the other.

But if the direct object of the sentence is definite -- that is, it is THE whatever it is, or it's a proper noun -- then you can stick aleph tav in front of it, and that means it's the direct object.

I've registered for the site so that I can log in and explain what it is and how it works. I just can't stand to see people flailing about this helplessly. It hurts.

Comments

[redbird]

How did they get far enough to be wondering this, and still have so little grasp on the language?

Doesn't this remind you

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

of Motel of the Mysteries? It also reminds me of a story an archaeology prof of mine used to tell. He worked on a site once where they kept digging up lots of little ceramic objects they couldn't identify. They had no idea what they were, and so they were piling them up on a table, and the ceramicist was tentatively labeling them as "ritual objects" when one of the village women came up to bring lunch to her brother, who was a worker at the site. She stopped by the table and looked at the objects curiously. "Hey," she said, "Where did you get all those dirty old spindle whorls?"

Re: Doesn't this remind you

[papersky.livejournal.com]

In the Irish National Museum in Dublin there's a large unlabelled glass case full of brass things that look like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. They're loom weights. It doesn't say so anywhere, and the reason for this is that nobody figured it out for a long time, and some of the other guesses are very embarrassing.

[(Anonymous)]

hehe, i love reading your rantings ^_^

~Sami

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you don't want to dignify them by linking to them... but I really hope you'll post a link to your response when you put it in. :-)

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

By their *cough* logic, the band The The is truly godlike, indeed.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

On wonders how they got as far as they did without a Hebrew English dictionary, or a book of hebrew gramer or something.

[goljerp]

I hate to say it, but they're not the first loonies to postulate meaning to "eit". Take Genesis, chapter 4 for example:

(Genesis 4:1-2) 1. And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain (eit cain) and she said: I have gotten a man with [the help of] God. 2. And again (vetosef) she bore his brother (eit achiv) Abel( eit hevel)...

The three instances of eit indicate augmentation teaching that a twin sister was born with Cain, and with Abel there were born two [others]; therefore it is said, vetosef "and she increased" [i.e., more than previously]

The quote is from Rashi[1], and in turn he cites Bereshith Rabbah[2]. (Sorry, my edition of Rashi doesn't give any more details of the citation.)

As to their decision that eit is a name of G-d, it seems to me to be crazy. So crazy, maybe it's not. I mean, here's a word that those pesky Jews refuse to translate! What else could it be? H-shem knows Jews do lots of nutty things when writing the name of the L-rd!

[1] Rashi: The biblical commentator par excellance, from the middle ages.
[2] Bereshith Rabbah: part of a set of 5th- and 6th- century midrashic collections of homiletical and narrative material.[3]
[3] That definition is from the Etz Hayim. I don't usually work "homiletical" into my LJ comments.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I am now possessed with a mad desire to write about Cain's twin sister. I can see her. Does she have a name? I mean, if she's actually deduced from a grammatical marker, probably not, but someone might have elaborated on that commentary.

If she doesn't have a name:
a) Is there a Hebrew convention for twin-naming that would suggest something she ought to be?
b) Is there a feminine form of Cain?

(Gosh, what an interesting new perspective on the world's first dysfunctional family.)

[goljerp]

Good questions. I don't think that she has a name in the traditional commentaries; however I'm not sure about modern writings. (The cool thing about this kind of thing is that you needn't find yourself limited by the names other people have come up with - after all, since it's not in the Torah, it's not cannon, and your guess is as good as anyone's.)

As far as twin-naming in the Bible, most instances that I'm aware of are same-sex fraternal twins (usually both males).

Since I'm not sure about the answers to your questions, I asked an expert. I'll let you know what she says.

The response

[goljerp]

So I asked Rabbi Jill Hammer about this, and she responded:

1) In the book of Jubilees, Cain's spouse and sister (maybe his twin)is named Avanni (or Awani). I am not sure what this means, but it might be related to Chava.
2) In a story I wrote about the three daughters of Eve, I named Cain's
sister Tomer because it says: "Eve/Chava bore Cain and said..." which can also be read, "Eve bore Cain and Tomer."
3) There are no twin-naming conventions I know of except that sometimes words are pulled out of narratives to name "invisible" daughters. Abraham's daughter (assigned to him in one rabbinic midrash) is called "Bakol" because God blesses Abraham "in everything/bakol."
4) The feminine of Kayin? Maybe Kayenet? Kayanit? Konah means "she acquires" or "she creates," and "Kinah" means "lamentation," which would be an interesting pun. "Ken" is a nest. Keniah?

(Just FYI, I think she just knew this stuff, because she responded to me within half an hour of when I wrote her. The delay has been due to my making sure it was OK with her that I quoted her in a public place. And the fact that I'm at work. :-)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Good. Thank you for taking the time to spread enlightenment.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

I came across this when reading a zachkessin's friends' page. I'm afraid that this idea could just be based off of some tiny point I read in a Hasidic text for class, it was somewhere in Menahum Nahum of Chernobyl's The Light of the Eyes I think, in which he uses 'eit' to reference that all the world is contained in that one word, because everything can be named with a word, and words are made up of letters, and 'eit' being the first and last letters of the alphabet contains all the letters, and thus all the words, and thus everything. From that, I suppose you could argue that it's some sort of name for G-d...

[neven.livejournal.com]

Oi vey.