Half-Baked Reinterpretations

It may surprise the Colorphilia subscriber that I have a lot of half-baked ideas I've been thinking about and researching. In other words, I'm not even pretending to have a central thesis this week.

The title "half-baked" is in honor of my gluten-eating Jewish subscribers who are eating matzah this week, and my marijuana-enjoying subscribers who are celebrating 4/20 this weekend.

As children, we tend to divide the world into the elementary concepts of light and dark, and the older we get, we begin to notice the subtle different shades of gray and all the colors which comprise the spectrum of light.

This is not to say that truth is relative, rather many different things can be true at the same time. There is no one single meaning for a word, there are myriad. And the instant we become most cocksure is the moment before we realize how much we can never know for certain.

And that is when we are able to best appreciate the art of reinterpretation.

What Color Is An Egg Yolk?

While researching something this week, I noticed that something was described as the color of an egg yolk. We would immediately think yellow, but orange may be more precise, and maybe even red could be possible. I've already written about how golden was a similar spectrum, until the color wheel was invented and had to take away all the fun.

This has practical implications, namely that even if we are certain that an object was a specific shade or color, a different source of chicken feed on an author's archipelago could result in our unwitting projection of our own preconceived conceptions.

We see that with wine. It is virtually impossible to think of a world in which the color of wine is not red, and yet, that entire idea of red wine comes from less than 1500 years ago. That is not to say, for example, that wine as not associated with blood before that time, but that association would have not been caused by the reddish tint.

But now that wine is red, as is blood, we begin to reinterpret all earlier references through the prism of our current understanding. In fact, the question could be posed (for a different time) as to when and why vintners began the maceration process. Could it have been because they wanted to experiment with the wine's hue for external reasons?

Misinterpreting Roosters

It has been said that every translation is an interpretation. This is true, even when the translator tries to stay true to the source.

This past week, I came across the Aramaic Peshitta, which was a very early translation of the New Testament. The word peshitta is derived from the word pshat meaning "simple" or "laid flat out".  I'm happy to report that the Aramaic word used by both Matthew 6 and Luke 12, in the "consider the lilies" was the shoshana flower, as I had assumed.

I also spent a lot of time reading various Targumim, which was the genre of Biblical translations into Judeo-Aramaic. Targum is also usually considered to be a more literal translation, compared to sources considered more interpretative in nature, like commentators, and what I call reinterpretations, like Midrash. 

The commonality between the Targum and the Midrash is that both of them would have been read publicly on a weekly basis. The Targum was a translation of the Torah reading for the masses, while the Midrash would have been more akin to a sermon.

The word Targum comes from Assyrian word for interpreter, targumannu. It sounds very similar to another word we've come across, tarlugallu, the word for rooster. I began to hypothesize a connection between the two words. The rooster announces the light of daybreak and the interpreter also enlightens the text for the listener. 

That connection reminded me of the daily Jewish blessing, reinterpreted from a verses in the Book of Job 38:36, which is commonly translated as "giving rooster (sehkhwi) the difference between dark and light." The same word is also translated as "brain". However, that verse is a hapax legomena, the only place where the word sekhwi is ever mentioned. I have no idea if this is a translation or an interpretation. Someone in the Talmud explains that it was a term for rooster in Rome, which I could not find any source of.

In many languages, the rooster is associated with masculinity. In Hebrew, for example, a word for man is "gever", which was originally the word for rooster. In English, one of the colloquial terms to describe the male organ similarly originates in the another term for rooster.

I'm sure that it's completely unrelated, but a common euphemism for the same organ, which is also a nickname for men named Richard, happens to be a word for rooster in Arabic.

It wasn't the only time I've been curious about a rooster-related translations recently either. In addition to my etymology of turkey as blue-colored fowl, I noticed that the OED had also explained the etymology of poppycock as something Dutch, instead the more obvious translation of "red fowl", as the poppy is a red flower. And of course, the poppy anemone in Arabic was called the saqiq al-neeman, which was linguistically similar to the word for the color scarlet.

Carnivals and Crowns

Part of the problem is that many words are etymologically related, and it is possible to provide multiple highly plausible translations for most words.

Last year, we saw the word carnation being the red "flesh-toned" flower, like the word "carnal". Which came first – the color descriptor or the connection to meat? Is it even possible to know?

It was during the tulip research that I noticed a number more terms which all seemed to be related the same root, in a number of languages, from Assyrian to English. Somehow, crown, corner, carnival, and crime and criminal are all from the same root. I noted previously that the word for tulip in Greek was krinon, and assumed the connection with the red-colored flower. 

But the more I went back, the more I saw that they all seemed to be connected in one way or another. I also noticed that quite often, the evolution in meaning was similar in different languages. For example, in the Talmud, the word "crown" and the word shoshana comes to mean the crown of fruits, for example.

This makes me question what the basic meaning of Dioscorides' Royal Crinon meant – what it referring to the color, the flower, or even the word crown? 

That was the flower associated with kings from Solomon, which I contend became the highly stylized fleur-de-lis, and would be a symbol on coins from the Maccabees to the florin in Medieval Florence. Even the coin known as the "crown" featured two fleurs-de-lis on the depiction of the crown, but the coin known as the "kroon" featured a harp and lions.

Corinthian Mountain Goats

The word originated in the Ancient Near East, with the Assyrian qaranu meaning "horn", and evolving through different associations from there. 

While reading some random Targum this week, I noticed that a translation of crown or capital in Aramaic related to the word "corinthian". Vitruvius' Corinthian Order of architecture, like I hypothesized, was actually based on the krinon, and likely related to King Hiram in I Kings 7. 

I did notice that part of the description of a Corinthian column is a design called akanthon, or thorns, between the petals. That also happens to be the word the Septuagint translated "khukh", which completed the mistranslation of "the lily between the thorns". This theory is still only half-baked, so who knows.

We know that helmets were one of the derivations of the word qaranu, like as in the "Corinthian helmets". Going from a solid horn on an animal's head to the a solid protective helmet on a human head makes sense that they'd be connected.

But we also know that there was a midpoint between being a horn to being a helmet. Alexander the Great famously wore horns after he visited Egypt, and was depicted as such on a coin. There seems to be precedent of military men wearing helmets with horns, which likely started as a bayonet type weapon.

First Sermon on the Mount

And here is another half-baked idea, which the more I look into, the more utter poppycock it sounds like. And the more it makes sense.

In my newsletter about all things golden, I had included an addendum about the Michelangelo's Moses with the horns on his head. And I noted that the phrase keren 'or on his face was Exodus 34:29, literally meaning a "leather horn".

Commentators, interpreters, and translators alike consider this to be rays of light, somehow, albeit with a misspelling. Which would indicate for this to be the pshat, or the simple meaning of the word.

To remind the reader, I wrote this line at the end:

All of this is a roundabout way to say that Moses wasn't being compared to the Devil, Jews don't have horns, and I have no idea what the actual words mean.

The horns go on the head, not on the face. It seems weird to say "a horn of leather on his face". Until one realizes that it could be connected to a Corinthian helmet, and it would be a leather helmet, including a face mask.

But why? And then it hit me. Moses was coming with the Word. From God.

In Ancient Egypt, we know the association between the terrestrial representation of Gods as people with animal heads. This is not to be confused with Pan, who had horns, a face and body, and goat-legs. Also, he had a famous concert on a mountain, not a sermon.

While we now see evolution as the way we got to Homo Sapiens, for the ancients, celestials were the ones who were midway between the human and the animal. And they were used to viewing intermediaries or interpreters between these gods and man, one who likely wore an animal head as a mask on his head.

What if Moses did the same? Isaac on the mountain was connected with a ram, so Moses wearing a ram head would be the logical connection. Note, this didn't mean they thought rams were God, but it was their association.

Again, I don't know whether this is the simple explanation or a reinterpretation, but it sure changes the visual.

High on a mountain

A few years ago, I saw an ancient engraving which celebrated the Canaanite goddess Asherah, an original green goddess, who preceded Astarte and Athena (who brought the olive tree to Greece). On this engraving, there was a depiction of a plant. But it wasn't like the common three-petaled flower, which I contend was the tulip. That plant had five leaves. That plant was marijuana. Again, they didn't think she was weed. But the way they worshipped her was through using marijuana.

Which brings me to a verse in Proverbs 3:18, "She is a tree of life to all who hold her, and who that support her are happy." It's contextually referring to the Torah, but, that's likely a reinterpretation. I've contended that this was borrowed from an earlier ancient Near Eastern text.

Cinematic Dogma and Sinners

Next month, it will a quarter century since worshippers of Asherah released the film "Dogma" which could be described as a modern day reinterpretation. High Priest Kevin Smith chose Canadian chanteuse Alanis Morissette to depict God.

Linguists are notoriously offended by Alanis Morissette, not for her taking part in such a blasphemous movie, but because four years earlier, she released "Ironic", a song in which she lists items she deemed "ironic", which likely would not be categorized as irony. 

(After being unavailable for years due to unrelated crimes by its executive producers, Smith will be re-releasing the movie in both theaters and in online streaming.)

This weekend, Ryan Coogler, whose "Black Panther" films are a masterclass on the art of reinterpretation, is releasing "Sinners", in which he cast Michael B. Jordan in not one, but two different roles. A glowing review in the LA Times features the headline "Ryan Coogler's gory and glorious 'Sinners,' a Southern vampire horror-musical, is a hell of a high".

Have a happy (whatever holiday you observe)!