From mjoseph1@socal.rr.com Sat Jun 1 00:13:56 2002 Received: from mailscan4.cac.washington.edu (mailscan4.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g517Drw3048508 for ; Sat, 1 Jun 2002 00:13:54 -0700 Received: FROM mxu2.u.washington.edu BY mailscan4.cac.washington.edu ; Sat Jun 01 00:13:52 2002 -0700 Received: from orngca-mls03.socal.rr.com (orngca-mls03.socal.rr.com [66.75.160.18]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g517DqhR019408 for ; Sat, 1 Jun 2002 00:13:52 -0700 Received: from [24.165.95.94] (sc-24-165-95-94.socal.rr.com [24.165.95.94]) by orngca-mls03.socal.rr.com (8.11.6+Sun/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g517DkL15657 for ; Sat, 1 Jun 2002 00:13:46 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:16:35 +0100 Subject: Re: Natural purgations From: Mark Joseph To: Classics mail list Message-ID: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Thanks as always to the collective erudition of the list, I now know much more than I did and, of course, have more questions. On-list, David Lupher presents: > BJ 2.8.13 (161): "They give their wives, however, a three years' probation, > and only marry them after they have by three periods of purification given > proof of fecundity" - The Greek of the last part is "epeidan tris katharthwsin > eis peiran tou dynasthai tiktein, houtws agontai." Thackeray's note ad loc. > reads: "The texts can hardly be right; the Lat. has 'constanti purgatione'." This ends up being the main, if not only opinion expressed on list. It is, for me at least, a little hard to see what the connection is between "by three periods of purification given proof of fecundity" with "a three years' probation." George Pesely adds: > Since this is an old Loeb volume, there is no apparatus; I don't know if any > emendations of "tris" have been proposed. What would be plausible? "aei"? > "pollakis"? I wonder if there is any reasonable emendation which would explain the origin of the Latin translation "constanti"? Off-list, however, one well-known and well-respected list member wrote to me: > please note that by "year" (haven't handy to check the Greek) > Josephus (likely) meant the "lunar cycle" (or about "month"). > That is a usual confusion with Jewish historiographers. This seems very strange to me--after all, if Josephus had meant months, he could very well have written "months." On the other hand, this makes the passage much more sensible, and fits in extremely well with what another well-known and well-respected list member wrote to me off-list: > I don't have the Greek, but surely he is referring to menstruation. Girls just > starting out can be extremely irregular, & fertility is not necessarily > coincident with the first occurrence. Replacing "years" with "months" and "periods of purification" with "menstrual periods" in "They give their wives, however, a three years' probation, and only marry them after they have by three periods of purification given proof of fecundity" gives excellent sense (whether or not it was what Josephus wrote!), and also fits in with something I "learned" somewhere, that Jewish women at that time married very young, about the age of 14 or 15 (incidentally furnishing a very unofficial answer to June Samaras' query, "And an unanswered question would be exactly how OLD would these brides be ?? Pre-pubertal ???"). Of course, the word "years" can be preserved, and a reasonable sense still extracted, as was done in the Penguin translation as quoted and commented on by Ralph Hancock: > 'However, they put their brides on probation for three years, and do not marry > them until the regularity(1) of their periods proves them capable of > child-bearing.' > Footnote: (1) So the Latin: the Greek text is unintelligible. > Essene women may well have suffered from amenorrhoea, and consequent > infertility, as a result of their ascetic lives. What think ye? Is the translation as "months" and the idea of regular menstruation as a sure sign of fertility possible in the text? Or should we keep the word "years," and look for a looser sense and/or use the Latin? Mark Joseph .