Plucking Grain on the Sabbath and Trespassing

Over on Laudator Temporis Acti, Michael Gilleland has an interesting post on Plucking Grain on the Sabbath (Matt. 12.1-2 // Mark 2.23-24 // Luke 6.1-2). He asks a question that hadn't even occurred to me before, which shows how much I've allowed myself to think of the pericope in terms of the form-critical "What were the Pharisees doing spying on the disciples?" hermeneutic, and that is: Who owned the corn and what did the owner think about it?

Update (Monday, 10.25): On Laudator Temporis Acti, Michael Gilleland has more: Penalties for Stealing Crops.

Liddell and Scott Poetry and Rhymes

Over on Laudator Temporis Acti today, Michael Gilleland has a post on Liddell and Scott, a poem by Thomas Hardy "Liddell and Scott On the Completion of their Lexicon". The post gave birth to a nice thread on b-greek in which James Spinti offered an unattributed:

Scott knew Liddell,
And Liddell knew less

I noodled around for a source, found none, but did find this:

Two men wrote a lexicon, Liddell and Scott;
Some parts were clever, but some parts were not.
Hear, all ye learned, and read me this riddle,
How the wrong parts wrote Scott and the right parts wrote Liddell

The latter is cited in Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., "How the Wrong Parts Wrote Scott and the Right Parts Wrote Liddell", The Classical Journal 84/1 (Oct. - Nov., 1988): 47-52 (51-2). In a follow up to Kitchell's article, William Calder III notes that Kitchell's ultimate source is Henry L. Thompson, Henry George Liddell, D.D. Dean of Christ Church Oxford (New York, 1899), and he goes on to explain that there is an alternative version preserved by Liddell's distant cousin, Augustus J. C. Hare, as follows:

Two men wrote a lexicon,
Liddell and Scott;
One half was clever,
And one half was not.
Give me the answer, boys,
Quick to this riddle,
Which was by Scott
And which was by Liddell?

This is from Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life II (London, 1896), 10, cited in William M. Calder III, "In Response to Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., "'How the Wrong Parts Wrote Scott and the Right Parts Wrote Liddell,'" The Westminster Epigram on Dean Liddell (in Responses)", The Classical Journal 84/3 (Feb.-Mar., 1989): 265-266). Calder gives reasons for preferring Hare's version (the second one above). Kitchell then responds to Calder in the same journal, giving reasons for preferring the first version, Thompson's, Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., "In Response to Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., "'How the Wrong Parts Wrote Scott and the Right Parts Wrote Liddell,'" The "Liddell Riddle": Some Further Thoughts (in Responses)", The Classical Journal, 84/3 (Feb.-Mar., 1989): 266-268.

This is still not the end of the story, though. Back on b-greek, Stephen Goranson notes the following source which gives the boy author's name:

Recollections of a Town Boy at Westminster, 1849-1855 by Francis Markham (London, 1903) p.57: the poem "was recited before Liddell by Edward Waterfield, a town boy (the man who fought with Old Slade)." After hearing it "Liddell took it well, gave his usual scornful sniff, and presented Waterfield with his silver penny...."

It's a fascinating little bit of trivia, all the more so as it relates, it seems, to differing oral traditions circulating about the same rhyme, and its circumstances, for over fifty years. Markham's text is particularly interesting since it comes from almost the same period as the Hare and Thompson versions above, and it provides a slightly different version again:

Two men wrote a lexicon--Liddell and Scott;
Some parts were right, some parts were not.
Now come, all ye wise men, and solve me this riddle:
Why the wrong parts wrote Scott, and the right parts wrote Liddell?

Markham also gives a little context that makes good sense of the rhyme,

The joke was, that often when at work with the Sixth, Liddell would object to the translation of, or use of, some word. The boy would reply, "Please, sir, I found it used that way in your lexicon," when Liddell would reply, "Scott wrote that part." (ibid.).

Pick of the day: Sigma

If I had a "pick of the day" feature, this would be today's, on Laudator Temporis Acti:

Sigma

Read about sigma, final sigma, lunate sigma and the lipogram.

Widow's Mite @ Laudator

Don't miss a useful post on The Widow's Mite on Laudator Temporis Acti.

Head on a Platter @ Laudator Temporis Acti

On Laudator Temporis Acti, Michael Gilleland points to the interesting parallel between Mark 6.17-29 // Matt. 14.3-12 and "a remarkably similar episode from the life of Lucius Quinctius Flaminius, consul in 192 B.C., expelled from the Senate by Cato the Censor in 184 B.C." The story is found in Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch and Michael has the texts handy:

A Head on a Platter

Michael notes that the parallel is not mentioned in the commentaries available to him. It is, however, occasionally mentioned in recent literature, e.g. according to Ross Kraemer, Kathleen Corley and John Dominic Crossan both claim that Mark invented the story on the basis of the one about Lucius. See Ross Kraemer, Herodias I in Carol Meyers, Toni Craven and Ross Kraemer, Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001): 92-4.

Gadarene Swine @ Laudator Temporis Acti

At Laudator Temporis Acti Michael Gilleland has an interesting post on:

The Gadarene Swine

. . . .There are passages from Greek and Latin literature in which petitioners beg the gods to transfer an evil from one place to another, or from one person to another. It's almost as if the amount of evil in the world is constant, and evil cannot be destroyed but can only change location . . . .

Michael has very several interesting examples of this underlying thought (read the post). The same assumption seems to underly Matt. 12.43-45:

43"When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation."

12:43 ὅταν δὲ τὸ ἀκάθαρτον πνεῦμα ἐξέλθῃ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου διέρχεται δι' ἀνύδρων τόπων ζητοῦν ἀνάπαυσιν καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκει 44 τότε λέγει εἰς τὸν οἶκόν μου ἐπιστρέψω ὅθεν ἐξῆλθον καὶ ἐλθὸν εὑρίσκει σχολάζοντα σεσαρωμένον καὶ κεκοσμημένον 45 τότε πορεύεται καὶ παραλαμβάνει μεθ' ἑαυτοῦ ἑπτὰ ἕτερα πνεύματα πονηρότερα ἑαυτοῦ καὶ εἰσελθόντα κατοικεῖ ἐκεῖ καὶ γίνεται τὰ ἔσχατα τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκείνου χείρονα τῶν πρώτων οὕτως ἔσται καὶ τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῃ τῇ πονηρᾷ

(Par. Luke 11.24-26).

Update (Thursday, 22.00): Michael Gilleland comments further on Laudator Temporis Acti.

Fishers of Men

Don't miss Michael Gilleland's post on Laudator Temporis Acti on the place where "Plutarch, in his Life of Brutus (30, tr. Ian Scott-Kilvert), tells a curious story about an incident in which some men were literally caught like fish":

Fishers of Men

Mirror Reading

I'm a regular consumer of Michael Gilleland's pearls of wisdom on Laudator Temporis Acti and I particularly enjoyed today's post on Reading:

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Sudelbuch E 215:

A book is a mirror. If a monkey peers into it, surely an apostle can't look back out.

Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt, so kann freilich kein Apostel heraus sehen.

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), p. 121:

What we see when we think we are looking into the depths of Scripture may sometimes be only the reflection of our own silly faces.

This reminds me of a misunderstanding I had as an undergraduate student. I remember people talking about "mirror reading" and I assumed for ages, before doing any reading on it, that "mirror reading" meant people seeing their own reflections in the text. I was actually a little disappointed when I found out that it meant the reconstruction of Paul's opponents' (etc.)'s views, which seemed to me to be less appropriate than my misunderstood meaning.

Physician Heal Thyself @ Laudator Temporis Acti

Don't miss Michael Gilleland's post, Physician Heal Thyself on Laudator Temporis Acti, which gives several interesting parallels to the proverb in Luke 4.23.