Boid on Deuteronomy 32:6

Thanks for pointing out the anomaly in Deuteronomy XXXII: 6. I had noticed this years ago and then must have put the question aside because of distractions from other directions. Yes, there really is an anomaly pointing to something in the verse or perhaps in the content of the sequence of verses that follows. When you look at the distribution of forms in the mss. the question gets even harder. Words joined by a maqqef (hyphen) count as separate words, so the letter HE is a word on its own. Many mss. have the HE and LAMED together followed by the maqqef. As I remember, Christian David Ginsburg the Masoretic scholar and Wilhelm Gesenius the grammarian preferred this second form, but I will have to look again. Gesenius explains the particle HE-LAMED as one of the few survivals of the old form of the interrogative prefix, which in its usual form is ha- with doubling of the next consonant. This original form is to be pronounced hal. It is normal for the old form hal to be written as a separate word. (The form in Arabic is identical). When I first noticed this, I assumed an allusion to Exodus XXXIV: 5-7 (See the excursus on these verses in my monograph A Pair of Ancient Samaritan Eschatologies). The Divine Name in this verse of Deuteronomy stands ALONE with the HE-LAMED separate. Whatever hubris the Israelites have committed or are going to commit one day, they can do nothing against the higher YHWH. The worship of Ialdabaoth is the separation of the lower YHWH from the higher YHWH by failing to see that the personal God of Israel, the lower YHWH, was assigned by the higher YHWH which is the Most High, and that all these national Gods including the lower YHWH are simply the higher YHWH CONDESCENDING [This is a technical theological term: look it up in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary]. Separating the two is what the Talmud calls “pulling up the plants”. There is still probably something more explicit in these verses. See what you can find.

On the word bull. Benny like many others seems to think it a shortened form of bullshit. Not so. If it were that vulgar I wouldn’t use it. Look it up in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. It is an old word with two main sets of meanings. One is the meaning of the German word Ersatz in the sense of an inferior substitute, or otherwise something obviously not meant to be the original, e.g. bull-liquor is a flavouring in some kinds of fortified wine made by steeping water in casks that have contained brandy. The other meaning is a plausible but false concoction. The root meaning is artificiality. In Australasia, a person that slings the bull all the time or does it really well and therefore destructively is a bullartist.