Fat-Tailed Sheep for Christmas!

Gastro Obscura has a very good article on the deliciousness of fat-tailed sheep.

Lots of pictures of said sheep.

Another article on fat-tailed sheep, with bonus alteration of Bible art. From an Instagram person called Anatomika Science, via Media Chomp.

Exodus 29:22 — “Then take the fat of the sheep, the fat tail, the fat covering the innards, the fat joining the liver and both kidneys, and the fat around them, and the right leg….”

A Chiasm about Dogs and Pigs

The whole Gospel thing with chiasms (a rhetorical structure shaped like an X or the letter chi, and which basically is like nested statements) really fascinates me. It’s non-obvious to us modern readers, so it’s neat to have them pointed out.

Laudator Temporis Acti has a post pointing out the chiasm in Jesus’ warning about giving things to dogs and pigs.

So it’s shaped like this:

Do not give what is holy to dogs

—— And do not throw your pearls in front of pigs

—– Lest [the pigs] trample [the pearls] under their feet

And [lest the dogs] turn around and rend you.

It just makes a lot of sense. My impression before was that it was just paralleling things, since both dogs and pigs are known to trample things or to bite people. But this chiasm is very satisfying.

Posts from Laudator that include the term KJV.

St. Jerome as a Kid in the Catacombs

When St. Jerome was young (he says he was a “puer,” a boy, and he was about twelve) and was sent to study in Rome, he used to go along with his Christian friends on Sunday afternoon trips to the catacombs, to visit and pray at the tombs of the apostles or the other martyrs (or just to test their courage and explore places, because they were boys). And we know this because he talks about it in his Commentary on Ezekiel (40, 5-13).

“Often we would enter those crypts which have been hollowed out of the depths of the earth, and which, along the walls on either side of the passages, contain the bodies of buried people. Everything was so dark that the Prophet’s saying, ‘Let them go down alive to the underworld’ (Ps. 55: 15) seemed almost to have been fulfilled.

“Here and there a ray of light, admitted from above, relieved the horror of blackness, yet in such a way that you imagined that it was not so much a window as a funnel pierced by the light itself as it descended.

“Then we would walk back with feet feeling our way, wrapped in ‘unseeing night’ (Seneca the Younger, Thyestes, 668: “nocte caeca”), with Virgil’s line recurring to us: ‘Everywhere the terror” in our hearts, “and silence itself at the same time” terrified us. (Aeneid, Bk. 2, 1, 755: “Terror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent.”)”

So… yeah, St. Jerome apparently did this a lot, even though it scared the dickens out of him and the other kids. Not exactly an advertisement for taking the Scavi tours in Rome, I gotta say!

I wish I’d known about this quote at Halloween time. It’s a good one for supporting spooky stuff.

(And immediately afterward, Jerome uses it to explain several Scriptural quotes about God dwelling in darkness as well as light, and the majesty and terror of darkness and silence.)

(Translation mostly taken from a footnote in Cain’s translation of St Jerome’s Commentary on Galatians. It is in the CUA Press Fathers of the Church series.)

Second Sunday of Advent, Already?

The first reading today is the famous Isaiah “Comfort, comfort my people.” Interestingly, the command by God is in the plural – “Y’all comfort My people.”

It’s kind of a weird moment to be comforting. In chapter 39, King Hezekiah just showed off all his treasures to the ambassadors from Babylon, thus giving Babylon an incentive to come conquer and take the goodies. Isaiah had just warned Hezekiah of this, and the king had just said, “Whatever, just don’t let it come in my days.” Argh!

So at this point, God tells Isaiah to tell multiple people (presumably the other prophets) to comfort His people and to speak comfortingly to Jerusalem.

The interesting thing here is that there’s a hidden Messianic prophecy. “Speak”, dabberu, has the root “dabar” that means a lot of things, including “word.” The phrase “the Word of the Lord” is “dabar YHWH.”

So the implied prophecy is that the Word will speak “tenderly” to Jerusalem. Which is really something more like “speak to the heart”, dabberu al’ leb, to Jerusalem. Leb is both the heart and mind, so it also means to speak wisely as well as to speak tenderly. (The Septuagint Greek is “eis ten kardian,” which literally means “to the heart.”) So the musical setting with the lyrics “speak to the heart of Jerusalem” is not wrong.

The “service” that is at an end is Jerusalem’s hitch in the army. The word is literally the same as the normal word for an army, saba, where the plural is sabaoth.

There is a LOT of rhyming poetry and wordplay in this reading, in Hebrew. For example, “a voice crying out” is qowl qowre, which is really not something that comes across in translation. (The root word is qol, a voice or a sound.)

Our reading skips over the three verses where Isaiah is told to proclaim that all flesh is grass and will wither, because the Lord’s Spirit breathes upon it; and that the people are the grass. Yeah, that’s kind of a downer. But it ends with a proclamation that God’s Word (dabar Elohenu) will stand forever, which is more Messianic stuff.

Back to the portion in the reading.

Now we have Zion and Jerusalem, feminine figures, commanded to act as prophets or heralds of God’s coming. Which is kinda cool, because Daughter Zion and Daughter Jerusalem are cool as foreshadowing Mary and the Church, etc.

The Hebrew phrase is “lak ma bassaret,” you with good news. The Greek is a lot more familiar-looking – “euangelizomenos”. (Try saying that one three times.) In fact, it’s “ho euangelizomenos Zion,” and “ho euangelizomenos Ierousalem.” So that’s pretty clearly Messianic, yuppers.

All the stuff about the Lord coming in might and bringing stuff with Him? It all rhymes and such, all the way to the part about carrying lambs in His bosom. So that’s also fairly different from the translations.

The interesting bit is that… “like a shepherd” doesn’t seem to be in the Masoretic Hebrew? It just says something like “Shepherding His flock, He feeds them” and so on. It’s the Greek that says “Hos poimen, poimanei to poimnion”, which is “like a shepherd, He shepherds His flock” or “like a protector, He protects His flock.” (Fun wordplay!)

Btw, “leading the ewes with care” in the Hebrew is actually more like “leading the nursing ewes with care.” I mean, yes, they are ewes, but the point is that He is making sure that they don’t get stressed and stop giving milk. It’s possible that this includes dairy sheep, but it’s more likely that we’re talking about ewes with lambs that are still really young and unweaned (sincel the Shepherd is having to carry them in His arms). So keeping their nursing mothers able to nurse is really, really life or death.

The Greek changes that a bit to “en gastri,” talking about the ewes with young still held “in the belly.” So that’s kinda interesting.

It also says that the pregnant ewes are “parakalesei” by God. This is an interesting word, because it means basically “to call,” but in a coaxing or encouraging way. So it’s like God calling His ewes not just with “Here, sheepy sheepy!” but more like, “Come on, sheepy girl, you can do it!” or “This way, sheepy girl, here’s a nice path for you, and there’s good grass at the end.” (So one of the other meanings of “parakaleo” is “to console.,” and another one is “to ask beseechingly.”)

And it brings us back to the beginning of the reading, in fact, because the Greek there was “Parakaleite, parakaleite ton laon mou.” (“Y’all comfort, y’all comfort My people.”)

And that’s the end of the reading…. and right after that, Isaiah tells us that God is mysterious and infinite. So it’s a very interesting place to put all that prophetic Messianic poetry.

Given all the possible variant Hebrew readings that existed before the Masoretic vowels got put in, it might be that the Septuagint Greek is closer to the original version of the Hebrew. Either way, it’s good to look at this stuff, for fuller understanding of what God is trying to tell us.

Also, this reading is a reminder that fat-tail Middle Eastern sheep are currently in one of their lambing seasons (which goes from December to January), which is why the Gospel shepherds have the sheep down in the warmer low meadows full of winter grass close to towns like Bethlehem, and why the shepherds were out in the fields all night watching the sheep.

Do not be fooled on this point! European sheep that aren’t fat-tail breeds have a whole different seasonal cycle, but we’re not talking about them!

(Awassi sheep and other fat-tail breeds can have a second lambing season in March/April, or even year round if there’s good weather and fodder (unlike being outside in the wild). But that would be the ewes that haven’t lambed already being bred a second time.)

(Interestingly, Awassi male lambs can sire lambs themselves, at the age of seven to nine months! So shepherds separate the male lambs from the rest of the flock pretty early on, at five months’ age or so when they start “getting interested”, when they just got weaned at the age of three or four months. The lonely baby rams are apparently pretty easy to train, and will answer to their names, whereas the ewes and ewe lambs aren’t quite as interested in their human shepherds.)

(All shepherd dialogue is my artistic impression. Probably real shepherds do not say “sheepy girl,” but who knows?)