It rained the last two days...a lot yesterday afternoon...so much so the Angle/Red Sox game was cancelled...first time that has happened in like twenty years....
I follow the progress of Dawn and New Horizons, the two space probes going to Ceres and Pluto...the Ice Mountains of Pluto, as high as the Rockies, sets to rest my wondering what water does in cold airless vacuum of space...it freezes as hard as granite...and not likely much ablates, or evaporates out into the vacuum...
Bookends
In doing the previous posts, I happened on a quote from Exodus in the Bible that lays out how to organize...a hierarchy of tens...tens, hundreds, thousands, etc., and at each level God has it there should be leaders...let me go get that...Exodus 18:21...and I found a King James Version Bible on the web, and read that passage, and some before, and some after...Moses was up on Sinai gathering up a lot of laws, more than just the well known Ten...and for days there was thunder and lightning keeping the Israelites enthralled...the whole scene was borrowed in the Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie when the big alien space ship arrives and downloads through lights and sound information to our computers...a moving movie scene!...anyway, I got to reading about the Tabernacle...God gave directions for making the Ark to contain the Ten Commandments, and then gave directions for a elaborate tent, the Tabernacle, to house the Ark...and to keep the wayward Israelites attention God would appear, or make appear, a pillar of smoke by day, and a pillar of fire by night, over the Tabernacle...when the pillars moved, the Israelites gathered up the tent, hoisted the Ark on it's carrying poles, and followed...this all during those forty years in the Sinai wilderness after escaping Egypt...and what caught my eye was the instructions on how to make the Tabernacle curtain...
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Moreover thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet: with cherubims of cunning work shalt thou make them.
Exodus 26
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I got to wondering about this, and happened on mention that Josephus wrote a description of the curtain in the Second Temple (a bookend is Josephus description of the Temple to the Tabernacle and Ark being described in Exodus--just noticed this, as the subject I'm reaching for, "Bookends" is yet to come!)...so after some drilling down on the web, it was hard to find, I found Josephus' whole description...a marvel!...the Outer Curtain, and the whole Temple!
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212 Before these doors there was a veil of the same size, a Babylonian curtain, embroidered with blue and fine linen, scarlet and purple and marvellous in texture. This mix of colours had mystic meaning, as an image of the whole universe. 213 Scarlet signified fire, fine flax the earth, blue the sky and purple the sea. In two cases the link was based on their colours, but for the fine flax and purple it was based on their origin, one coming from the earth and the other from the sea. 214 The curtain was embroidered with everything in the heavens except the zodiac.
Chapter 05. [184-247]
Glowing description of the Jerusalem Temple and its artistic treasures
end quote
Now, when Jesus died on the cross the Curtain, maybe the inner one, or this outer one, tore in half from top to bottom, while the earth shook and the sky darkened...now, this is a 'hark back' to God on Mount Sinai with the thunder and lightning...
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To have origin in or be reminiscent of a past event or condition; recall or evoke: songs that hark back to the soul music of the 1960s
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(It's another post, but once a long time ago I wrote up my own list of over 100 things to consider when writing a poem, one of them was 'hark backs', another was 'bookends'...I was making my own vocabulary for things that likely can be found in old Greek rhetoric and poetry guides..)
Found this in same passages, maybe it will illustrate...
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Hanging from the fringes were were golden bells, mixed with pomegranates; the bells signified thunder and the pomegranates lightning
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Josephus describing priest's garment...
The Bible is an elaborate language...I don't speak it, or any religions, for that matter, very well...but those who do, see things in all kinds of things, clothing, gestures, objects, a word here or there, etc....poetry is like this too...it's a language, a lore...and I don't speak it very well either!...anyway...I was reading a thread about the curtains tearing, and someone pointed out that Josephus, in describing the curtains, makes no mention of them ever tearing, which is where I learned Josephus had described them....the inner curtain was more like a hanging carpet...very thick...well...that's all a back and forth...but it is in the Gospel of Mark that the curtain tearing happens, and in one poster's post, I learn there is a word for what I've been calling 'bookends'...
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The Heavenly Veil Torn: Mark's Cosmic "Inclusio"
by David Ulansey
In the past few years, several different scholars have argued that there was a connection in the mind of the author of the Gospel of Mark between the tearing of the heavens at the baptism of Jesus (Mk 1:10) and the tearing of the temple veil at the death of Jesus (Mk 15:38). [1] The purpose of the present article will be to call attention to a piece of evidence which none of these scholars mentions, but which provides dramatic confirmation of the hypothesis that the tearing of the heavens and the tearing of the temple veil were linked in Mark's imagination.
... ... ...
According to Motyer, the repetition by Mark of this cluster of motifs at both the baptism and the death of Jesus constitutes a symbolic inclusio which brackets the entire gospel, linking together the precise beginning and the precise end of the earthly career of Jesus.
http://www.mysterium.com/veil.html
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Bookends are Inclusios, I learn...:)
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While this may not be evident to many of the Bible's modern lay readers, the Hebrew Bible is actually full of literary devices, some of which, having fallen out of favor over the years, are lost on most modern readers. Inclusio, of which many instances can be found in the Bible, is one of these, although many instances of its usage are not apparent to those reading translations of the Bible rather than the Hebrew source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusio
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self quote
Rolling past the Donut Shop Pond on return from PetsMart (begg'n' bits and 2 chew toys), I sighted Goslings and Mama and Papa Canada Geese on the Ballfield Grass...a bookend to yesteryear's sighting!...
"Looking On" post back in June...
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DavidDavid
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