All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
TWELVE FAIR KINGDOMS by Suzette Haden Elgin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/04/2003]
I started Suzette Haden Elgin's TWELVE FAIR KINGDOMS, the first of her "Ozark" trilogy, but other than the islands on this distant planet having names similar to Arkansas and Tennessee, and a geography that is basically a mirror image of the geography here (except with islands), there seemed to be nothing Ozarkian about the society. (Oh, there were "Grannies", but the social hierarchy and structure put them in a different position than the traditional Ozark "Granny".)
To order Twelve Fair Kingdoms from amazon.com, click here.
LIFE AND LETTERS by George Eliot:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/08/2005]
George Eliot's LIFE AND LETTERS (no ISBN) is an interesting attempt at autobiography edited by Eliot's husand J. W. Cross. (You did know that George Eliot was a pen-name for Mary Ann Evans, right?) It consists of close to a thousand pages of letters and extracts from letters, along with connecting and explanatory comments by Cross. I've seen similar collections of letters for other people, but I think Cross put in more additional material than is usual. Of course, if you are not a fan of Eliot's novels, this is not going to appeal to you, and even if you are, this is out of print. But it's still around a bit, and a research library might have a copy.
George Eliot's Life and Letters is long out of print, but used copies may be available at http://www.bookfinder.com. Note that the number of volumes in this work may vary.
A FIELD GUIDE TO MONSTERS by Dave Elliott:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/20/2005]
Dave Elliott's A FIELD GUIDE TO MONSTERS: THIS BOOK COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE (ISBN 1-592-58088-2) purports to be a serious book about monsters, in the style of field guides to poisonous snakes or mushrooms. It looked like it could be a humorous tongue-in-cheek book, but was so riddled with errors that I found it more annoying than humorous. For example, the location indicated on the map for the Amazon habitat of the Creature from the Black Lagoon is nowhere near the Amazon; the shark in JAWS was not a "mutated fish, lizard, or dinosaur"; sharks appeared as monsters in films before 1976; the Loch Ness Monster appeared first in THE SECRET OF THE LOCH in 1934, years before the 1996 film LOCH NESS Elliott gives as it first appearance; and Tyrannosaurus rex appeared pre-dates Elliott's citation of the 1996 JURASSIC PARK by over sixty years, having appeared in the 1933 KING KONG. And I only got as far as page 47. Not recommended.
To order A Field Guide to Monsters from amazon.com, click here.
MONSTERS OF THE SEA by Richard Ellis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/07/2008]
And speaking of the sea, MONSTERS OF THE SEA by Richard Ellis (ISBN-13 978-1-59228-967-7, ISBN-10 1-59228-967-3) is a study of "sea monsters"--the various historical sightings and an analysis of what they were (or might be)--as well as long sections on the biology and behavior of the actual creatures of the sea. This is basically a book of cryptozoology ("the science of 'hidden' animals"), an area which has become more popular of late, as technological developments have allowed scientists to probe deeper into the oceans, either with diving machines or with cameras.
To order Monsters of the Sea from amazon.com, click here.
"Ministry of Space" by Warren Ellis, Chris Weston, and Laura Martin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/12/2005]
Warren Ellis, Chris Weston, and Laura Martin (nee DePuy), "Ministry of Space" (ISBN 1-582-40423-2): There was a lot of debate as to which Sidewise category this graphic work belonged; eventually it was but in the Short Form on the basis of the average amount of time it took people to read it. (The version we got was two-volume work with no page numbers, but it's around eighty pages.) This is another in a current spate of alternate British space programs. I thought the denouement obvious, and the last frame did not seem to me to be consistent with the rest of the story, but I can't deny that the visuals make this a better story than it would be if told strictly in words.
To order "Ministry of Space" from amazon.com, click here.
A NARRATIVE OF A 1823 TOUR THROUGH HAWAI`I by William Ellis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/07/2006]
I bought A NARRATIVE OF A 1823 TOUR THROUGH HAWAI`I by William Ellis (ISBN 1-56647-605-4) while on vacation in Hawai`i (along with Mark Twain's LETTERS FROM HAWAI`I (reviewed in the 06/02/06 issue of the MT VOID). The Twain is from the late 19th century, while this is from a much earlier time, and a very different perspective. Twain was a cynic; Ellis was a missionary. As such, Ellis spends a lot of time talking about the religious situation: preaching to the natives, convincing them to abandon their heathen religion, and so on. (The old religion had been officially abandoned several years before the missionaries arrived, so in some sense they were a little late for that. But it is clear from Ellis's narrative that there was still a strong belief in Pele, even if the other gods were discarded, and in fact, this seems to continue into the present.) A few things caught my eye. At one point, the author is trying to convince a man not to weed his garden on the Sabbath, and it occurs to me that while there seemed to be very strict rules about working on the Sabbath, these rules defined work as something men did. When the author finished telling the man not to work on the Sabbath, he probably went back to his home and ate a special Sunday dinner prepared by his wife.
Ellis also talks about the legend of a giant named Mankareoreo, who supposedly could pick coconuts as he walked by the trees and could wade into water six fathoms deep without getting wet above his waist. Then Ellis says, "The Hawaiians are fond of the marvellous, as well as many people who are better informed; and probably this passion, together with the distance of time since Mankareoreo existed, has led them to magnify one of Umi's followers, of perhaps a little larger stature than his fellows, into a giant sixty feet high." [page 101] Of course, if you asked this missionary about whether Goliath was a giant (or whether Jonah was swallowed by a big fish, or whether Joshua made the sun stand still), he would probably have insisted that of course all those were facts.
Later when he is talking to people on the Big Island, I get the feeling that all the positive things they say about Captain Cook is more that they are being polite and telling the missionaries what they want to hear, than actually giving their account of what happened.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/21/2006]
Ellis met a woman claiming to be Pele, but when someone else attempts to discredit her by saying, "[it] is you that have destroyed the king's land, devoured his people, and spoiled all the fishing grounds. Ever since you came to the islands, you have been busied in mischief; you soiled the greater part of the island, shook it to pieces, or cursed it with barrenness, by inundating it with lava. You never did any good, and if I were the king, I would throw you all into the sea, or banish you from the islands. Hawaii would be quiet if you were away." To which the woman/Pele replied that even worse than her destruction was "the rum of the foreigners, whose God you are so fond of. Their diseases and their rum have destroyed more of the king's men, than all the volcanoes on the island." As Ellis says later on, "It was exceedingly painful to hear an idolatrous priestess declaring that the conduct of those, by whom they had been visited from countries called Christian, had been productive of consequences more injurious and fatal to the unsuspecting and unenlightened Hawaiians, than these dreadful phenomenon in nature, which they had been accustomed to attribute to the most destructive of their imaginary deities, and to know also that such a declaration was too true to be contradicted."
And in an amazing passage, Ellis writes that before Europeans arrived, the Hawaiians ate with their fingers, reclining on the ground. Now, however, "their] intercourse with foreigners of late years has taught many of the chiefs to prefer a bedstead to the ground, and a mattress to a mat, to sit on a chair, eat at a table, use a knife and fork, &c. This we think advantageous, not only to those who visit them for purposes of commerce, but to the natives themselves, as it increases their wants, and consequently stimulates to habits of industry"!
To order A Narrative of an 1823 Tour Through Hawai`i from amazon.com, click here.
OPTICAL ILLUSIONS: LUCENT AND THE CRASH OF TELECOM by Lisa Endlich:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/22/2004]
I also read Lisa Endlich's OPTICAL ILLUSIONS: LUCENT AND THE CRASH OF TELECOM (ISBN 0-743-22667-4). For anyone who worked for Lucent during the period covered, there will not be a lot of new information, and most of the book is about the higher-ups. There is some discussion of Bell Labs which those of us from Bell Labs might find interesting, but this is one I'd recommend you borrow from the library rather than buy (especially all of you who found yourself laid off or retired early and are now getting by on a tighter budget thanks to Lucent :-( ). (Another book I would like to read is Narain Gehani's BELL LABS: LIFE IN THE CROWN JEWEL (ISBN 0-929-30627-9) but none of the libraries around here seems to have it.)
To order Optical Illusions from amazon.com, click here.
"Newton's Mass" by Timons Esaias:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/25/2005]
Anyone who is aware of the book MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES will be
familiar with the idea of attributing incorrect meanings and uses
to objects. There is also a lot of revisionism going on, where
people try to find more politically correct interpretations of
practices. And "The Soldier and the Deck of Cards" (available at
SPELLBOUND: THE SURPRISING ORIGINS AND ASTONISHING SECRETS OF
ENGLISH SPELLING
by James Essinger:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/01/2008]
SPELLBOUND: THE SURPRISING ORIGINS AND ASTONISHING SECRETS OF
ENGLISH SPELLING by James Essinger (ISBN-13 978-0-385-34084-7,
ISBN-10 0-385-34084-2) is more a history of the English language
and less an explanation about spelling. Essinger also makes some
mistakes, or rather, has some misunderstandings. He refers to "a
holy book, such as the Christian Bible, the Muslim Koran, or the
Jewish Talmud" (page xxviii). The Talmud is not really a holy
book; it is more a set of annotations to the Torah, which *is* a
holy book. He says of "kosher" that it "has come to mean in
modern English not just food that is prepared according to Jewish
but also, more broadly, anything that is correct, genuine, and
legitimate" (page 26). The only problem is that that is what it
means in Hebrew; one speaks of a "kosher scroll" in a mezuzah,
for example.
And in writing about languages which do not use the Roman
alphabet, Essinger says, "where there is an accepted romanization
system, the writing of a foreign nonalphabetic name is fairly
straighforward. But a strange-looking name in a foreign language
that is written using Roman letters will not have any
standardized way of being written" (page 52). If it is already
in Roman letters, why change it at all?
On page 77 he gives a sample of text written in the International
Phoentic Alphabet (IPA). I found myself thinking how interesting
it looked. Then on page 78 he says, "purely phonetic writing
looks absolutely horrendous, as the physical appearance of
Hamlet's speech in the IPA shows all too well." Well, that
wasn't my reaction at all!
Essinger talks about how the English language became basically a
completely different language by 1500 from what it was in 1400,
and the "Great Vowel Shift", which made what had been pronounced
"Saw it is team to say the shows on the sarm fate noo," to our
present "So it is time to see the shoes on the same feet now."
Again, though, a lot of this is only marginally related to
spelling.
To order Spellbound from amazon.com, click here.
GRAPHIC CLASSICS
from Eureka Productions:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/13/2008]
Eureka Productions has a series called GRAPHIC CLASSICS, each of
which has six to ten short pieces by the featured author, each
done by a different person (or people). For example, the
H. P. LOVECRAFT volume (ISBN-13 978-0-9746648-9-7, ISBN-10
0-9746648-9-8) has "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" adapted by Alex
Burrows and illustrated by Simon Gane, "The Shadow Out of Time"
adapted and illustrated by Matt Howarth, and so on. This means
that if you do not like the style of one piece, you may like the
next. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" had (in my opinion) too many
panels that were almost entirely black and dark gray. "Dreams in
the Witch-House" has a very stark (one might almost say harsh)
black and white look. "Sweet Ermengarde" uses a much lighter
touch, with thinner lines and more detail. "The Cats of Ulthar"
is basically a text story with one large illustration on each
page. And so on. Similarly, the MARK TWAIN volume (ISBN-13
978-0-9787919-2-6, ISBN-10 0-9787919-2-4) has a variety of styles
as well. I would love to see GOTHIC CLASSICS (ISBN-13
978-0-9787919-2-2, ISBN-10 0-9787919-2-4), which features
NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen and THE MYSTERY OF UDOLPHO by Ann
Radcliffe, among others. How they manage to condense a full
novel down to forty pages or so is perhaps something I do not
want to see--even CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED had more pages than that,
I think--but I am still curious.
Of course, a large part of the attraction of both Lovecraft and
Twain is their language, and what the graphic form often does is
to sacrifice some of the text for pictures. As such, it's more
comparable to a film made from the story, rather than the story
itself.
Oddly, the Lovecraft volume is catalogued as fiction, but the
Twain appears to be given Dewey Decimal number 741. I have no
idea why, but it is no wonder that books go missing on the shelf.
It would not surprise me that someone might end up shelving these
two together, and then one becomes unfindable.
To order Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft from amazon.com, click here.
To order Graphic Classics: Mark Twain from amazon.com, click here.
TIME STATION LONDON
by David Evans (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00364-8,
1996, 249pp, mass market paperback):
This is basically a time travel story with alternate history
aspects, rather than an alternate history novel, and is very much
patterned on Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" series. (Here it's the
"Temporal Corps.") The story itself has some promise (renegade time
travelers are trying to assassinate Churchill and affect the
outcome of World War II). But Evans doesn't have the skill that
Anderson does (given that Anderson holds the record for most
fiction Hugos--seven--this is not surprising), and the story never
seems to take off. And perhaps more damaging is that Evans over-uses
the time travel idea, which makes the story very non-chronological
and also means that the reader soon realizes that it
is too easy to get around problems using time travel. If nothing
is permanent, why care about anyone or anything? And what tension
is there in such a story?
There are other problems. One is that Evans seems to be stuck on
the letter "S"; his three main female characters are Samantha,
Sandy, and Sally. (He has a male character named Steven as well.)
And he is sloppy with his history. For example, a character gets
his Elizabethan English module replaced with one for the 1940s and
also gets a smallpox vaccination for the latter period. Wouldn't
he have gotten one for the earlier period already? And a character
from the early 1950s trained in the 2700s refers to people in the
1940s as "you James Bond types."
Obviously, there will be other stories in this milieu. (For one
thing, the back cover says, "Don't miss this thrilling debut of the
all-new Time Station series!") But I found it rather flat and
uninteresting, and recommend you seek out Anderson's stories
instead.
To order Time Station London from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
by Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarate:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/25/2005]
Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarate's INTRODUCING EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY (ISBN 1-84046-043-1) is yet another in the Totem
graphic book series, but this one has an interesting backstory as
well. Apparently the first edition of the book had a caricature
of psychologist Steven Rose on page 155 with a word bubble
saying, "Whether you become a genius or an idiot depends entirely
on what environment you live in." Rose vehemently objected to
this, and the new version says, "Genes aren't everything; the
environment matters too". (
But page 117 is perhaps even more interesting. This has a
picture of a page of personal ads ("Beautiful, intelligent,
outgoing women ... seeks LTR with good-looking, sociable,
professional male" sort of thing. Evans's claim is that these
ads show that people are seeking the characteristics that would
make someone a good parent ("kindness, patience, generosity and
trustworthiness"). The illustration shows someone with a big
black pen has circled some of the ads. But curiously the same
black pen seems also to have crossed out certain words. The words
are "gay", "gay female", and "gay woman". Now why would they do
that? It seems unlikely it was done simply as censorship of
something people might find objectionable--there are drawings in
the book that are certainly more explicit. More likely they
actually contradict the author's' point about mating
characteristics, so they are simply and crudely crossed out.
Perhaps the authors' did not notice the ads on the first pass.
These ads could be pointed at as an example of looking for
partners without parenting in mind (though of course many gay
people are parents). But why include a page that has these ads
and then black them out? Why not find a page without
them? With all the pages of personal ads in the world, certainly
one page could be found that does not include references to gays.
The whole thing almost looks as though Evans and Zarate
*wanted* people to call attention to the existence of
contradictory evidence. Without asking the authors we may never
know.
To order Introducing Evolutionary Psychology from amazon.com, click here.
BLONDE ROOTS
by Bernadine Evaristo:
[From MT VOID, 03/27/2009]
I read BLONDE ROOTS by Bernadine Evaristo (ISBN-13
978-1-59448-863-4, ISBN-10 1-59448-863-0). Let me start by saying
that I may have been reading a different book than Evaristo was
writing (as they say). But there were problems in this book, and
it's not just something that requires a "willing suspension of
disbelief," but which undermines the entire premise.
Okay, here goes. The idea of this is (according to the jacket)
"what if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been
reversed, and Africans had enslaved Europe?" Now that may be a
sort of obvious premise, but it at least seems to have
possibilities. However, these are dashed on page -4 (that's "minus
4"), when one encounters a map of Evaristo's world. It contains
"Amarika", which looks and is positioned like "America" in our
world except for an archipelago of islands containing the cities of
"New Ambossa" and "New Londolo". So far, so good. But in the Old
World, she has swapped "Europa" and "Aphrika". And although
"England" is on the new Europa, there is a Britain-shaped island
northwest of of Aphrika called the "United Kingdom of Great
Ambossa" with a capital of "Londolo" (which explains "New
Londolo").
To avoid putting Europa in the tropics and Aphrika in the temperate
zone, everything has been moved south so that the equator runs just
south of what seems to be Greenland, the middle of Great Ambossa,
and what would be the Sahara region of your Africa. So when the
jacket says that the Africans enslave the Europeans, we *still*
have the situation of the people from the north enslaving those
from the south. (The map seems to have everything in the Southern
Hempisphere, which does move the slave trade a bit south.)
One problem, though, is that if one looks at the proportions of the
land masses on the map, Europa still seems to be in a tropical
area. Another is that the map does not show any land connection
between Aphrika and Europa which would account for a population
which evolved on one continent migrating to the other. (Okay,
maybe it's off the edge of the page.)
Almost lost in all this geographical confusion is the wholesale
adoption of European names, "Aphrikanized" a bit but still
recognizable: Voodoomass, Paddinto Station and the Bakalo Line on
the Londolo Tube, Edgwa, and so on.
This playing fast and loose with words extends to more mundane
expressions. Doris talks about being with someone "24/7". She
talks about clothing being size 4 or size 20. She even says things
like, "She's like totally spoiled, y'know?"
There are posters for films called GUESS WHO'S *NOT* COMING TO
DINNER, TO SIR WITH HATE, and LITTLE WHYTE SAMBO, ESQ. There's a
hymn titled "When the Saints Go Marchin' In".
And ultimately, the book undermines many of the basic premises of
what we "know" about the slave trade, and makes unclear what
Evaristo is trying to say. What we have in BLONDE ROOTS are
Aphrikans from the tropics with black skin enslaving Europanes in a
(more) temperate zone with white skin apparently only because
Aphrika is north of Europa. The culture of the Aphrikans seems
based on African culture, and the culture of the Europanes seems
based on European culture. There is no explanation of whether the
Aphrikans are more technologically advanced than the Europanes and
hence able to enslave them for that reason, or whether there was
some other reason. (One would think that living in a harsher
climate would force a culture to advance its technology at least
somewhat, but maybe not.) The technology is certainly
inconsistent: they seem to have a knowledge of DNA, as well as
highrises and skateboards, even though in transportation they
haven't gotten past trains. (The question of when this takes place
is never answered. It reminds me of the Universal horror films of
the 1930s and 1940s, which seem to take place in a central Europe
which is a mixture of the then+-present and sometime around 1890.
In any case, the technology levels in Aphrika and Europa don't seem
different enough to account for the widespread slave trade.
Actually, Annalee Newitz summed this problem up in someone's blog
by noting 1) the difficulty of maintaining paper documents and
wooden housing in a tropical climate, 2) the lack of stone for
building in Africa/Aphrika, 3) the tse-tse fly preventing the
effective use of calvary or farm animals in Africa/Aphrika, 4) the
heat of Africa/Aphrika precluding heavy body armor, and 5) the
scarcity of African/Aphrikan plants and animals suitable for
domestication.
Here's the problem, then: if Evaristo made just swapped Europe and
Africa, then all that would change would have been skin color--and
even that would not, because that is due in large part to climate.
But by keeping Aphrika tropical and Europa colder, she ignores that
these are among the factors that would have created the societies
or cultures that would make Europa capable of dominating Afrika
rather than vice versa.
But as it stands, an Aphrikan culture similar to our African one is
the slave-holding society. So it isn't culture that makes slavers.
(So much for the glorification of African cultures with the claim
that they would never have done such a thing--which of course they
did in our world, but that's another story.) And it isn't climate,
given that in Evaristo's world the hot climate people have enslaved
the cold climate people. And it isn't skin color (well, it
wouldn't be, would it?). Apparently it is pure chance.
And, as has been pointed out, in our world Romans enslaved Angles,
Turks enslaved Europeans, and even in some cases, Africans enslaved
Europeans.
And it is not as if Evaristo is the first author to do this black-
white reversal. There is the duology LION'S BLOOD and ZULU HEART
by Steven Barnes, and "Lion Time in Timbuctoo" by Robert
Silverberg, both of which rely on a much more severe Bubonic Plague
of 1348 than our world experienced.
Some think even this would be insufficient. Someone else said, "I
think to have an African dominated global civilization we'd have to
change history much earlier and then reverse events several times
again later on. I think the inflection point would actually be the
defeat of Twenty-Fifth Egyptian Dynasty at the Battle of Sile by
the Assyrians."
And my last complaint is aimed not just at Evaristo, but at a lot
of authors who, for whatever reason, decide to attempt to write in
dialect. Here is a passage which is a snippet of spoken dialogue:
"I been meaning to aks yu dis. I want mi bwoy Yao to have more
storee in his hed dan what go round in mine about dis damn place,
which, kwite franklee, give me flamin hedake all de time! Yao will
neva git outa dis hellhole exept to be sold to some odder
plantashun, but de wurld out dere will get into his hed if you help
him reed an rite. I have contakt in de big house who will git book
fe me."
Now, this is harder to read that the "correct" spelling would be.
The argument is that this reminds the reader that the person would
sound different. But all it does is remind the reader that English
spelling is irrational.
"I been meaning": This (and other examples) do actually represent
different grammar.
"aks", "dis", "dan", "dere", "odder": These actually represent
different pronunciations.
"yu": What is the point of this? It is pronounced exactly the same
way as "you".
"I want mi bwoy": Is "mi" pronounced "my" (in which case why change
it, or "mee" (in which case "mee" would be better)?
"storee", "hed", "kwite franklee", "hedake", "plantashun", "wurld",
"hed", "reed", "rite": Why not "story", "head", "quite frankly",
"headache", "plantation", "world", "head", "read", "write"?
"damn": And if one is going to change spelling to match
pronunciation, this should be "dam".
"hellhole": This just seems an odd word to find in this long
dialect speech.
This book has gotten good reviews from others, but I found it very
predictable, and cannot really recommend it.
To order Blonde Roots from amazon.com, click here.
THE MANLY MOVIE GUIDE
by David Everitt and Harold Schechter:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/14/2004]
David Everitt and Harold Schechter's THE MANLY MOVIE GUIDE (ISBN
1-57297-308-0, Boulevard Books) is incredibly politically
incorrect--but that's the idea. Sample from the comments on THE
BIG SLEEP: "Many critics have noted that this adaptation of
Raymond Chandler's mystery novel does not make any sense. And in
fact, there is at least one murder that goes completely
unexplained. All of which points up one of the great advantages
of being a man. Since small cinematic details like plot,
character motivation, and logic don't really matter to us anyway,
we're free to enjoy this movie as a pure exercise in wise-talking,
double-dealing, blackjack-slugging virility." The book also
includes some very specialized categories--one of my favorites is
"The Best Sci-Fi Creature Movies Of 1955 Directed By Jack Arnold
That Feature Clint Eastwood In Miniscule Roles" (hint: there are
two). "The Only Manly Merchant-Ivory Film" is THE DECEIVERS, and
for "Noteworthy Gladiator Movies That Do Not Feature Woody Strode"
they say, "We're sorry, but we can't think of any." Silly, but
fun.
To order The Manly Movie Guide from amazon.com, click here.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/09/2004]
In celebration of Passover, I just re-read the book of Exodus, and
have a question, an observation, and what I think is a radical
theory.
The question: Exodus 4:24-26 says, "And it came to pass by the way
in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then
Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son,
and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art
thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband
thou art, because of the circumcision." There are way too many
"he"s without clear antecedents here--what exactly is going on?
The observation: All those people opposed to same-sex marriage on
the "slippery slope" argument that it could lead to incest don't
seem to comment on Moses's parentage as related in Exodus 6:20
("And Amram took him Jochebed his father's sister to wife; and she
bare him Aaron and Moses: and the years of the life of Amram were
an hundred and thirty and seven years."). And while this is
before the explicit prohibition at Sinai, so was Lot and his
daughters, which they do consider wrong.
And finally, the radical theory: The general consensus seems to be
that the "Ten Commandments" engraved on the tablets are those
given in Exodus 20:3-17. But those first ten there are followed
by a bunch of others. And later in Exodus 34:1 we read, "And the
LORD said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the
first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in
the first tables, which thou brakest." And then in Exodus 34:10-
11 we get, "And he said, Behold, I make a covenant.... Observe
thou that which I command thee this day...." And finally in
Exodus 34:17-27 we get the following (my divisions, and my
numbering added in brackets):
[1] Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
[2] The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days
thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time
of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from
Egypt.
[3] All that openeth the matrix is mine; and every firstling among
thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male. ...
[4] Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt
rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.
[5] And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits
of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
[6] Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before
the LORD God, the God of Israel....
[7] Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven;
[8] neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be
left unto the morning.
[9] The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto
the house of the LORD thy God.
[10] Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.
And then Exodus 34:27 concludes with "And the LORD said unto
Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words
I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel."
Now, *that* strikes me as clearly stating that *these* are the
"Ten Commandments" engraved on the tablets, rather than the
earlier ones. Comments?
(I also wish those politicians who always want to point to the
various commandments would engrave *this* one in their offices:
"And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and
perverteth the words of the righteous" (Exodus 23:8).)
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]
A follow-up on my theory regarding the Ten Commandments:
Someone on another mailing list says that in the original Hebrew
the description given in Exodus 34 is not of commandments (either
"mitzvot" or "chu-kim u'mishpatim"), but simply words or things
("d'varim"). This is an answer of sorts, but I still don't know
why it says that *these* are what was written on the tablets--that
would seem to imply more importance than just plain words.
I'll assume you can find this one on your own. :-)
Go to Evelyn Leeper's home page.