{"id":291,"date":"2007-03-05T08:38:15","date_gmt":"2007-03-05T16:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=291"},"modified":"2007-03-05T08:49:44","modified_gmt":"2007-03-05T16:49:44","slug":"hey-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=291","title":{"rendered":"Hey, man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Things I thought about during the Megilla reading this year, in no particular order. I&#8217;m not saying I thought of all this actually during the reading, some of it is expansions of the original ideas that are coming to me as I write it down<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure if this counts as a meme. <a href=\"http:\/\/renegaderebbetzin.blogspot.com\/2006\/03\/things-i-always-think-about-during.html\">RenReb<\/a> did a post with this subject last year, and <a href=\"http:\/\/dovbear.blogspot.com\/2007\/03\/magilla-meme.html\">Dov Bear<\/a> picked it up and repeated his post this year. <a href=\"http:\/\/adderabbi.blogspot.com\/2006\/03\/megillah-meme.html\">ADDeRabbi<\/a> had a good one too which I just saw because bloglines resyndicated it.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ancient Persians had really silly names. Sha`ashgaz. Karshena. Hharvona. Apart from Mordechai and Esther, which are Babylonian, the only sensible name in the whole book is Haman. Actually, Sha`ashgaz would be a rather cool name for a cat. Especially a Persian cat.<\/li>\n<li>How did Haman come to fall on Esther&#8217;s couch? Was he prostrating himself to her (which would be a nice dramatic irony considering that the driving motive behind most of the plot is that Mordechai refused to prostrate himself to Haman) or is it a slapstick thing, that he got up to beg for mercy after one too many cups of wine and just fell over?<br \/>\nEither way, the word &#8220;fall&#8221; is certainly dramatic irony (look at verse <a href=\"http:\/\/mechon-mamre.org\/p\/pt\/pt3306.htm#13\">6:13<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>OK, so the chiastic structure of the whole book is really obvious. But what about the little chiasmi (if that is the right word)? For example, in <a href=\"http:\/\/mechon-mamre.org\/p\/pt\/pt3305.htm#10\">5:10<\/a> Haman summons his friends and his wife, and in 5:14 his wife and his friends answer him. In <a href=\"http:\/\/mechon-mamre.org\/p\/pt\/pt3306.htm#13\">6:13<\/a> he tells his wife and his friends what happened, and his wise men and his wife answer him.<\/li>\n<li>I love the way Algerians pronounce a gimmel without dagesh, e.g. in \u05d0\u05b2\u05d2\u05b8\u05d2\u05b4\u05d9.<\/li>\n<li>What were the \u05e1\u05b0\u05e4\u05b8\u05e8\u05b4\u05d9\u05dd in which they sent out the proclamations? Clay tablets?<\/li>\n<li>I wonder if the Persian words in the Megilla are attested in old Persian texts. If they are, I could blog about it and put them in in Unicode Persian cuneiform and nobody without the right geeky fonts could read them. Like this: ??????? (that&#8217;s Ahasuerus&#8217; name, assuming that Ahasuerus is Xerxes).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Things I thought about during the Megilla reading this year, in no particular order. I&#8217;m not saying I thought of all this actually during the reading, some of it is expansions of the original ideas that are coming to me as I write it down I&#8217;m not sure if this counts as a meme. RenReb [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}