A couple of years ago, I hung a bird feeder over the deck and attracted the neighborhood sparrows. I loved wathching them in the morning. One bird would come check things out, fly away, and a flock would return to feed. They threw bird seed all over the deck and into the planter under the feeder. Then the pidgeons took over. The sparrows fought valiantly and lost. The pidgeons took over the deck, flew into my apartment to be chased out and finally brought baggage and tried to move in. One walked through the open door and tried to face down the cat. I took down the feeder, and I still miss the birds. But last spring all sorts of foreign, anonymous stuff sprang up in my planter, some of it lovely in wildfower way. I got some spontaneous sunflowers, too. The plants died and dried up and left some lovely seed pods. I took pictures. I brought some in and put them in vases along with things left over from the occasional husband bouquet. They are mostly gone now, and I have lettuce and succulents.

Algebra and the Fourth Grader

Schools across the country are introducing material earlier and earlier in some sort of race for test scores. The brain is a developing organ, and teaching Algebra in fourth grade is probably premature. Ten year old brains are not able to grasp concepts that abstract. They can memorize a+b=c, but they simply cannot understand it, much less corollaries like a-c=b. They need concrete numbers with the concepts implied. I studied algebra in high school, and it was a revelation for me. I fell in love with math. I am not a mathematician, but my understanding of abstract math concepts made my thinking richer. It might be better for young minds to study a second language.
Learning language is a skill small children are very well eqipped for. Babies unconciously learn grammar and apply it consistenly. Language expresses culture, and every culture has its own approach to the world. Children who grow up speaking two or more languages have a more complex approach to the world, and their brains approach thinking with more flexibility and complexity. There are millions of bilingual children and adults in the world, and for the most part, they are unaware of their own sopisticated views because language is an unconcious skill.
Translation is the art of making new literature out of the original. No translation is a perfect expression of the original. This fact frustrates me no end. I really would like to read Hesse's Magic Mountain in the original. The English translation is breathtaking, but I do not know what Hesse really did, and without pretty advanced German, I cannot find out.
Try this. Go to the library and take down the King James Bible and Robert Alter's translation of the Psalms from the original ancient Hebrew. Pick your second favorite Psalm and and read it in King James. Then read Alter's translation. The men who wrote the King James Bible were wonderful poets, but they did not translate from the original Hebrew. They read Hebrew, and used it for inspiration. The two pieces of literature have nearly no relationship. A child of three can unconciously know this, and his thinking is richer, but his brain is concrete, and abstract math concepts are beyond him. They are beyond the average fourth grader, too. I'm afraid we are creating a generion people seriously blocked against math. Where will we get our scientits and mathemeticians? The average fourth grader is not deeply invested in academic achievement to begin with. To teach and test her on concepts she cannot grasp creats failure and frustrated, angry teachers. The kids hate school, and the teachers don't want to teach failure.

Cain and Abel

Adam and Eve were, according to "Genesis" the first people. Eve ate from the tree of "Knowledge of good and evil." They were immortal and perfectly good and happy. However, the only choice they actually had was to eat from this tree. Everything else was permitted. They had no other opportunities to offend God. Eve, with feminine curiousit,did eat of the tree. The serpent told Eve that she would be equal to God if she ate that fruit. When she ate it, she became equal to God in that she now had knowledge of evil. She had one single opportunity to know sin, one single choice, one act of free will available to her, and she took it. She then introduced Adam to this fruit, and he exercised free choice, ate of the fruit, and knew evil. All moral choice involves the potential for evil, and God tried to spare us this knowledge and leave us immortal and happy in His favor, but the first people exercised the only choice they had and knew defiance of God and evil. God gave humans free choice and curiousity. We can exercise our free choice to fulfill God's will for us, or we can choose to defy God and exercise our human desire to know. Thus evil entered the world. The Greek gods tied the god who gave man fire to a rock to have his liver eternally eaten by birds, and grown back. Taming fire was probably man's first great scientific achievement, and it infuriated the gods because God desires perfect happiness, and humans cannot just leave it alone. We have to see how it works, why it's forbidden, how we can use it. As a result of this sin, Eve was condemned to bear children in pain. Adam is condemned to earn his food by "the sweat of his brow."
The story of Cain and Abel has always puzzled me. Cain is the older brother and a shepherd. Able, the younger, a farmer. Each sacrifices his first fruit to God. God rejects Cain's offering and accepts Able's. Cain then kills Able with a rock, and God expels him to wander the earth with a mark on his forehead to protect him from attack from the people he wanders among. In the first place, if Cain and Able are the sons of the first people, where did the people Cain wandered among come from? Why did God reject Cain's offering of desirable meat and accept Able's offering of less desirable crops? If Adam and Eve are the first humans, and one son killed the other and is exiled and the other son is dead, who are our ancestors? Clearly Eve bore other children in suffering.
Some cultures refer to themselves as "the people" and all other people have some other name or names. I suspect that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of the Jewish people who created the story. This is clearly a creation myth. There are other people, but we don't mix with them. Cain was forced to find a home and a spouse outside the community. But why would God reject the more desirable offering of the older son? There is no suggestion that Cain was evil or not performing the sacrifice correctly. I think this story may be as old as agriculture. Animals were domesticated long before we thought of clearing land and planting land. However, when a culture that relies on herding begins agriculture there is usually a land war. The shepherds need the land for grazing, and the farmers need it to grow things. The two occupations are incompatible. The herders are usually forced to take land farther from the settlement. Also, animals can move with the tribe, but farmers are land bound. When a culture starts farming, they settle down, and the grazers lose the opportunity for new grazing areas as the tribe moves. They are forced to move with their herds away from the village and live alone with their animals. I think this story is as old a human agriculture and is about the beginnings of agriculture. The Jews sacrificed animals to God for another 5,000 years, but they also sacrificed bread. Able had the less desirable occupation of farmer, and Cain, being the older brother was the herdsman. God threw his favor to agriculture in a conflict that may have torn the culture apart.
Human beings invented agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Prior to the domestication of plants, women hunted and gathered plant food from the areas surrounding temporary settlements. The people moved with the animal migrations, plant seasons, and the weather. Men hunted. Some women noticed that some plants returned the same time every year in particular places and circumstances and experimented with planting and harvesting them themselves. Women farmed for prehistory and still do in some cultures today, and men hunted meat and cared for domesticated animals like sheep and pigs. Meat could not be stored, so when an animal was killed, offerings were made to the gods, and the meat was shared among members of the tribe. It was a fairly rare treat. Animals were sacrificed for important occasions, offered to God and shared among the people. Vegetables and plants were the daily staples of cultures. When plants became domesticated, humans formed settlements and moved the animals away from the village. I think this story is as old a civilization and is about human conflict. God decided that humans would have settled villages, crops, and animals. It seems from the story of Cain and Able that this was a serious and life threatening conflict that God himself settled in the minds of the people.

Sodom, Gomorrah and the rain of fire

Some 5,000 years ago, God's wrath at the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah was such that it could only be appeased by destruction of the towns and all the residents, except one just man, Lot. God calls Lot and tells him to take his family and flee to the hills to avoid certain destruction. Lot pleads with God that there must be 50 good men living in the two towns. God replies that if Lot can find 50 good men, He will spare the towns. Lot argues God down to 10 men, and sets out to find 10 just residents in the towns. While Lot is still seeking, God sends an angel to Lot"s town in the form of a young stranger. Jewish courtesy required that the stranger be treated better than one's own family, so Lot invites the stranger to stay in his home.
That evening, the men of the towns come to Lot's door to demand that he present the stranger so that they may know him. Lot responds from his doorway that he cannot do that, but the men may have his virgin daughters to know in his place. The men demand the stranger and not the girls. I don't remember how the story ends, but the stranger and Lot's daughters are spared. Lot finally accepts that this situaltion cannot be allowed to go on. He has searched diligently and found not one other just man in the two towns. He takes his family and flees to the hills as fire rains down and Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed. The story is strange and very disturbing. It is hard to imagine a place so vicious that the entire male population would band together to violate a visitor in the home of a resident merely because he was there.
Archeologists have recently discovered two towns in close proximity that seem to be of the right age and in the right place . The site is very ancient, and the towns were destroyed by fire from the sky. They were buried in a volcanic eruption.
I have been reading the ancient Hebrew stories in literary translation by Robert Alter because I am interested in very ancient civilizations and cultures. I came to the brillian insight that the Jewish Bible is full of ancient stories that can legitimately read as stories of a culture that claims to go back 5,000 years. And the stories are right there in the Bible on one's shelf. The one with the family tree. No one knows how old these stories are because they were transmitted orally in prehistory. I need to say here that History is commonly definend as written history. Homer's stories, Gilgamesh and stories from all over the world have been told to and memorized by one generation of people after another before they are written down. Details of the stories change over generations, and morals have been added. Stories have passed from one culture to another so that stories that have been taken as literal truth or morality tales turn out to have almost exact paralells in say Assyrian or Babylonian culture. Many people, including me, think that these stories contain factual truth disguised and buried under primitive science and cultural influence.
I am going to add a note here about science. The human brain has not changed much in millions of years. The same mind that figured out black holes and string theory was applied to volacnic eruptions in prehistory. Those minds had a real interest in knowing why fire rained from the sky ,and mountains exploded with rock, ash, and fire. They actually had a real interest in why rain rained from the sky. However, they did not have much information and a man might very well live his entire life within five miles of the place in which he was born. Some of those people were authors and made stories to explain why home was now a pile of rubble, and these stories were passed down by old men to young men in school and over the fire at night. Eventually, Homer told his stories to a scribe and we have The Odyssey. We also have this very strange story about towns so evil that the men of the town demand the body of a stranger because he is a stranger.
In the first place, it really was Jewish custom to treat the stranger with extreme courtesy, so these men were violating and important cultural law. In the second place, a town where the male population was preoccupied with the rape of male visitors would probably not have lasted very long. Life was hard, and people for the most part were preoccupied with keeping God happy to avoid certain destruction and providing for the needs of themselves and their families. I was lying on the couch staring at the ceiling wondering about this story for some reason when a solution came to me. The towns absolutely existed and were fairly prosperous. Fire did rain from the sky obliterating the towns and the people. This horror was so terrible that it could only have been caused by a very angry God. If God is that angry, then the people deserved to die in this horrific way. What could they possibly have done to deserve such a fate? So the story. Ancient Hebrew literature is full of stories of people who find out they have grievously offended God when he smites them, and they are always very sorry. The ancient Hebrew God is loving, angry, unpredictable, and unfair. He exists complete in himself, and man exists to please him. The story is part of an ancient cultural tradition that makes it clear that God does not tolerate inhumane treatment of the stranger. Now I'm waiting for Dr. Alter to translate Job.