the-beginning-of-somewhere

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takeaway from the notes of this post

Image description: the handshake meme, where one arm is labeled "people with corn allergies," the second arm is labeled "people with milk allergies or lactose intolerance," and their handshake is labeled "why is it in my fucking medications" with "medications" in all caps. End description.

You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.

I’m a big fan of matzah lasagna, where you just use matzah instead of noodles :) also my roommate is going to make latkes this time since didn’t have the chance during Hanukkah!

Jumblr, I’m a potential convert and want to avoid chametz this pesach. I’m gonna make matzo ball soup and matzo brei, but not using condiments with vinegar feels daunting. What are some foods I can make?

Following up on the promised Jewish history for @misguidedandperplexed. This will be a brief history of the origins of the Israelites and Judaism from a secular, historical viewpoint. Sources will be linked, although some of them are behind paywalls.

Around the year 1200 BCE, there was a mass destruction of empires around the Levant and Mediterranean, known as "The [Late] Bronze Age Collapse." (a) The period after the Bronze Age Collapse until the 6th century BCE (500s), is called the Iron Age. It is in this time period that the Israelites emerge in the Levant.

Ann Killebrew, whose work I'm citing, defines the term "ethnogenesis" as "a coming together of peoples from diverse backgrounds into a single tribal group which shares a belief in a common descent and ideology" (b). What we want to establish is how and when Israelite ethnogenesis took place.

There are a few theories about this. One is that early Israelites were “seminomadic” people who spent summers in the Judean Hills and gradually developed a sense of community with the few Canaanites already living there, eventually permanently settling in the hills. This is perhaps the closest of the newer models to the biblical narrative, in that a people originally moving across a desert over a long period of time arrived in modern Israel/Palestine and built their own settlements, sometimes clashing with the people there as they expanded their territory. (b)

The most likely theory, in my opinion, is that early Israelite society was made of both Canaanite peasants and farmers and “displaced peasants and pastoralists”, including the peoples from the deserts surrounding modern Israel/Palestine. It also allows for small groups of slaves running from Egypt to have joined the people of the hills, which would provide an excellent basis for the Exodus story, despite it not happening exactly as written in the Bible. (b)

Whatever theory we use, we have to account for the missing Patriarchs. It seems unlikely that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's sons ever existed in real life, but their names refer to real tribes of the early Iron Age. The Israelite tribes of the early Iron Age don't match with the ones we know today, exactly. (c) Early texts, notably the Song of Deborah, include references to the tribes of Gilead and Machir, and exclude several of the usual tribes. This is evidence of a degree of “fluidity” in the early Iron Age I, as the tribes were still in the process of becoming distinct entities; the list of tribes seems to have solidified by the time the tribes came together in the 10th-9th centuries BCE. (d)

Okay we're out of the Joshua/Judges period! Next up: Monarchies.

You may have seen the claim that the first Israelite monarchy arose in 1047 BCE and lasted until it split into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, somewhere in the middle of the 900s BCE. The 1047 number is almost definitely untrue, but it's harder to say whether or not the United Monarchy (as the theorized first monarchy is known) really existed (e). It certainly did not exist in the grandeur that is depicted in the Tanakh. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to skip to the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel in the northern region of Israel/Palestine (called Cana'an at the time), which did occur sometime in the 800s BCE (f), and was followed by the Kingdom of Judah to the south shortly thereafter. In 722 BCE, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrian Empire, and the remainder of the Israelite population of the Northern Kingdom was absorbed into the Southern Kingdom. In 587-586 BCE, the Southern Kingdom was conquered by the Babylonians and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, which began the Babylonian Exile, in which the Israelites were carted off to Babylon. (g)

And now that we're in the Exile, it's finally time to talk about Judaism!

Up until the Babylonian Exile, the Israelites were henotheistic -- that is, they believed there were multiple gods, but worshipped only one. There is debate over which god they worshipped where and when, but to simplify, the god that emerged in Cana'an during this time was known as yud-hey-vav-hey (YHWH, in English letters). YHWH had merged with another god, Ba'al, from the Cana'anite pantheon, and had then merged again with the Cana'anite god El; we aren't sure where YHWH came from. Suffice to say, by the time of the Exile, the Israelites were a sacrificial cult that worshipped the god of the Israelites, YHWH, by sacrificing to YHWH at the Temple in Jerusalem. This is called Yahwism or simply Israelite Religion by modern scholars. (h)

And then, the Temple was destroyed, and the Israelites found themselves in diaspora, away from their sacred site. This is the period in which Judaism, as distinct from Israelite Religion, arose. The Exilic community saw the emergence of prayer and the start of mass observance of Shabbat, as well as the massive rise in importance of Yom Kippur, and the process of codifying the Torah began in earnest. (i)

In 539 BCE, many Jews returned to Judah under the rule of the Persians. From that point until 70 CE, the religion practiced is known as Second Temple Judaism (j). It was during this time that sects of Judaism emerged, like the Essenes (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame), and the Pharisees (the precursors to the post-70 CE rabbis). (k). After the destruction of the Second Temple, most of the Jews living in Eretz Yisrael were forced out into what is now called the Diaspora. It is in the Diaspora that Rabbinic Judaism (the kind almost-universally practiced today) emerged.

As a last note, I will say that there is a definitive through-line from Israelite Religion to Second Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism. Obviously there are political ramifications for all of this, which I won't get into now, and there's much more history after the Diaspora began that I would be happy to talk about elsewhere. But hopefully this is a satisfying explanation of the rise of Judaism from a secular standpoint. :)

Sources:

a. Mark, Joshua J. "Bronze Age Collapse." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified September 20, 2019.

b. Killebrew, Ann E., 'Early Israel’s Origins, Settlement, and Ethnogenesis', in Brad E. Kelle, and Brent A. Strawn (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible (2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 10 Nov. 2020).

c. “The Twelve Tribes of Israel.” (2013) Jewish Virtual Library.

d. Weingart, Kristin (2019) "'All These Are the Twelve Tribes of Israel:' The Origins of Israel’s Kinship Identity." Near Eastern Archaeology 82.1: 29–30.

e. Kalimi, Isaac (29 November 2018). Writing and Rewriting the Story of Solomon in Ancient Israel. Cambridge University Press. p. 32.

f. Master, Daniel M. “Phases in the History of the Kingdom of Israel.” Chapter. In The Social Archaeology of the Levant: From Prehistory to the Present, edited by Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline, and Yorke Rowan, 354–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

g. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Babylonian Captivity." Encyclopedia Britannica, January 31, 2025.

h. Brown, William. "Ancient Israelite & Judean Religion." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified July 13, 2017.

i. Silberman, L.H., Cohen, G.D., Vajda, G., Feldman, L.H., Greenberg, M., Novak, D., Gaster, T.H., Hertzberg, A., Dimitrovsky, H.Z., Baron, S.W., Pines, S. "Judaism." Encyclopedia Britannica.

j. Reed, Annette Yoshiko "Second Temple Judaism". In obo in Biblical Studies. Oxford Bibliographies.

k. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Essene." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 11, 2025.

a few days ago a coworker asked me to explain Hanukkah and I asked her if she knew what a menorah was. She said, “like the Northern Lights?”

I’m simultaneously haunted by and wild about this concept now. instead of aurora borealis, menorah borealis. menorah borealis

Masterpost of TLT metas

This is mostly for my own reference, as tagging doesn't seem to guarantee something being findable on Tumblr...but if you like wildly overthinking lesbian necromancers in space, enjoy!

Overthinking the Fifth House:

What is a "Speaker to the Dead"?

Actually, Magnus Quinn isn't terrible at sword fighting

Imperial complicity: Abigail the First

Pyschopomp: Abigail Pent and Hecate

Did Teacher conspire with Cytherea to kill the Fifth?

What does the Fifth House actually do?

The Fourth and the Fifth can never just be family

Cytherea's political observations at the anniversary dinner

Abigail Pent's affect: ghosts and autism

Were the Fourth wards of the Fifth?

Abigail probably knew most of the scions as children

Magnus Quinn's very understandable anger

Fifth House necromancy is not neat and tidy

Are Abigail and Magnus an exception to the exploitative nature of cavaliership?

"Abigail Pent literally brought her husband and look where that got her" (the Fifth in TUG)

The Fifth's relationship dynamic

The Fifth's relationship is unconventional in a number of ways

The queer-coding of Abigail and Magnus' relationship

Abigail and Palamedes, and knowing in the River

Was Isaac the ward of the Fifth?

Did Magnus manage to draw his sword before Cytherea killed him? (and why he probably had to watch his wife die)

How did Abigail know she was murdered by a Lyctor?

Fifth House necromancy is straight out of the Odyssey

The politics of the anniversary dinner (and further thoughts)

Was Magnus born outside of the Dominicus system?

Overthinking John Gaius:

The one time John was happy was playing Jesus

Is Alecto's body made from John's?

Are there atheists in the Nine Houses?

Why isn't John's daughter a necromancer?

The horrors of love go both ways: why John could have asked Alecto 'what have you done to me?'

Why M- may have really hoped John was on drugs

What is it with guys called Jo(h)n and getting disintegrated? (John and Dr Manhattan)

John's conference call with his CIA handlers

Watching your friend turn into an eldritch horror

Why does G1deon look so weird? (Jod regrew him from an arm)

When is a friendship bracelet not a friendship bracelet?

Why did John have G1deon hunt Harrow? (with bonus update)

The 'indelible' sin of Lyctorhood and John's shoddy plagiarism of Catholicism

Are John Gaius and Abigail Pent so different?

What was Jod's plan at Canaan House?

John and Ianthe tread the Eightfold path

The Mithraeum is more than a joke about cows

When was John Gaius born? (And another)

John Gaius and the tragic Orestes

John and Jesus writing sins in the sand

John and Nona's echoing chapters

John's motivations

Is Alecto just as guilty as John?

John's cult (and what he might have done to them)

The horror of Jod

Did John get bloodsweat before he became god?

Some very silly thoughts about John and Abigail arguing about academia

Overthinking the Nine Houses:

'No retainers, no attendants, no domestics'

Funerary customs and the violence of John's silence

Juno Zeta and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time

The horror of the River bubble

Every instance of 'is this how it happens' in HTN

Feudalism is still shitty even if you make it queer and sex positive

How do stele work?

Thought crime in the Nine Houses

The Houses have a population the size of Canada

What must it be like to fight the Houses?

You know what can't have been fun? Merv wing's megatruck on Varun day...

Augustine's very Catholic hobby (decorating skeletons)

Necromancers are not thin in a conventionally attractive way

Matching the Houses with the planets of the solar system (though perhaps the Fourth *is* on Saturn)

Why don't the Nine Houses have (consistent) vaccination or varifocals?

How would the Houses react to the deaths at Canaan House?

How does Wake understand her own name (languages over 10,000 years)

What pre-resurrection texts are known in the Houses?

Camilla and Palamedes very Platonic relationship (further thoughts)

The horrors the Cohort found at Canaan House

Do the Houses understand the tech keeping them alive?

The scions from an external perspective (sci fi baddies)

Cav cots

The Nine Houses and feudalism

The horrors of early necromantic education

ok i'm sleepy and having emotions and i'm not gonna grab my copy to pull the specific quotes but. you remember that scene in htn where mercy and augustine are arguing. i think it's the "you have rendered yourself unlovable" one. and augustine tells her that he could kill her if he wanted. he could do it without a second thought, could stub her out like a cigarette beneath his shoe, and john would forgive him? john would understand? augustine is his favorite, and they all know it, to such a degree that mercymorn ceases to matter in the slightest?

cool great. now remember that time when john killed mercy? without a second thought? stubbed her out beneath his shoe? and then he turned to augustine and he said, you understand why i did that, right? you know that you're my favorite? you know i love you? she doesn't matter. we can put this behind us. augustine, can't you forgive me?

and augustine says no, john. no, i can't.

cause i'm thinking about that and i'm tearing my hair out. i'm eating the drywall. her death was too far. it was too far and augustine couldn't forgive him. he was right about john, probably more right than he realized, but he could never have brought himself to do it. it was unforgiveable.

Nona the Ninth is one of my favorite books of all time. Not just because it's Locked Tomb, but it is the purest form of one of the big messages the series is trying to divulge.

The price of love is grief. We will never be free of it as long as we love anything at all. Our family, friends, our pets, even beloved media. Anything that connects that deeply to us that we love it will leave a gaping hole when it's gone.

But no one rejects loving to avoid grief. Every one of the characters holds on desperately to something they love, to levels that seem unhealthy to us. They want the perks without the cost.

John is holding on to a world and people that died 10k years ago.

The lyctors cling desperately to their cavaliers memories, to the point of being willing to end the 9 houses to honor them.

Cam held on to Pal, Pal held on to Dulcie. Harrow held on to Gideon so hard she disappeared her from her memory to avoid the grief she would pay for the privelege of caring for her.

But Nona loves indiscriminately. She loves the polluted sky, she loves the sad people, she loves the stray dogs and her friends and her teachers and Varun. She loves Pyrrhas lying ass, she loves Camilla and Palemedes, she loves crown and even cares about Judith. Nona isn't afraid of grief, because to her all that love balances it out. Nona is the only one in the end willing to pay the price for that 6 months of unconditional love. She knows from the beginning of the book that her own days are numbered, but she doesn't shy from it and avoid loving.

She loves all that much harder.

"If you could see your whole life, start to finish, would you change anything?" The movie Arrival (2016) approaches this same theme. If you knew what you'd lose, would you go back to avoid it? Would you keep away from the people and things you knew you'd lose? Would you shy away from experiencing love just because it hurts?

"Love and Freedom don't coexist, warden."

update: he was so pleased :D he says if you have any questions, you should ask me (me Anne, here on tumblr) and he (my roommate) will be happy to answer them in detail

making my way slowly through your roommate's biblical hebrew gtn translation. not a scholar of semitic linguistics but i am learning modern hebrew and trying to read the fic is absolutely breaking my brain, i understand maybe every fifth word at BEST. but i love it. and it's indirectly helping me study for an upcoming exam. tell your roommate i appreciate him very much

AWW anon thank you, I will tell him as soon as he wakes up!! I'm also learning modern hebrew rn so I'm having the same experience 😂 Good luck on your exam!! if you want any help practicing (or with understanding the fic) feel free to PM me :D this makes me so happy :D

making my way slowly through your roommate's biblical hebrew gtn translation. not a scholar of semitic linguistics but i am learning modern hebrew and trying to read the fic is absolutely breaking my brain, i understand maybe every fifth word at BEST. but i love it. and it's indirectly helping me study for an upcoming exam. tell your roommate i appreciate him very much

AWW anon thank you, I will tell him as soon as he wakes up!! I'm also learning modern hebrew rn so I'm having the same experience 😂 Good luck on your exam!! if you want any help practicing (or with understanding the fic) feel free to PM me :D this makes me so happy :D

My roommate has been translating Gideon the Ninth into Biblical Hebrew (and including notes that people like me, who do not speak Biblical Hebrew, can also enjoy)! And if you happen to be a scholar of semitic linguistics, I can put you in touch 😊

my mom bought me challah from the bakery today and said "i got you some of your 'chaw-luh' bread :)"

Gonna post this thing from comments because it’s too beautiful 😭🙏🏻

Once and a while I see a piece of tlt fanart where harrow is really wrapped around gideon and I love that a lot. I drew myself a little bit of it as a treat today:

and then got carried away

I was way too ambitious with these poses for drawing with pen and some shitty whiteout tape

An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.

rip guildford you would've loved therapy

my lady jane (2024-)

A poodle clipped and dyed to resemble a pony.

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

statler and waldorf aka the two old gay men from the muppets but what if they were old jews following me around and heckling me when I'm late for shabbat

is this anything

dear people with OCD: the next time you have spiraling & intrusive thoughts, what-ifs, or catastrophizing scenarios, I am sending a cardigan-wearing 46-year old NYU professor directly into your brain and he says "Aaaaand scene!!!" and he claps his hands slowly. and he says "Wow. Wow. Powerful stuff. Evocative imagery. A little bit post-modern, a little bit hysterical realism in the vein of Don Delilo but let's pause right here." and you will recognize your thoughts as a perplexing avant-garde film shown to an audience of 15 liberal arts students who are now trying to get a good grade and sleep with their professor.

i'm a reform jew and i'm more religious now than i've ever been. I never grew up marking Tisha B'Av and probably didn't even know what it was. I can't remember if I fasted last year or not, but I'm going to fast this year. I am also going to refrain from cannabis for the day which I usually struggle with but I think if I'm doing it for am yisrael and hashem i will be able to.

Concept: Depressing dystopian factory where everything is gray and samey and the workers are called by their employee numbers by an ominous deep voice.

But it's a really great place to work with high salaries, excellent benefits, and a flexible working schedule with plenty of paid leave. They just like the dystopian aesthetic.

It makes me happy when they listen

Okay folks, just want to remind you: The GOP is going to crank up the toxin over the next hundred days, because it doesn't know how to do anything else. This is going to cause a lot of people who were going to vote for them to stop and go "Whoah."

This is not the time to say I told you so. This is not the time to throw the past in their faces. Allow them to become better people.

Stuff my camp kids did during snack free time today from most to least expected.

1. Eat their snack (the primary thing they are expected to do)

2. Ships and sailors (normal camp game)

3. Big kids sang the National anthem in four part harmony while the little kids buried a tenth grader in leaves and grass. (I put these together because these events clearly were connected but I’m not sure how)

4. Held a “funeral” where the girl was resurrected by everyone singing “Love Story” over her dead body.

5. Turned on “fire ambiance eight hours” on somebody’s phone, buried the phone completely in sticks in the shape of a campfire, and roleplayed as monkeys/cavemen discovering fire for the first time.

something i've noticed while studying jewish history is how immediate it feels. it isn't history, not really—it dwells a half step behind us, an echo that redoubles and visits us again and again, as though it happened mere hours ago and not a thousand years. the collective memory of the jewish people is long, vibrant, and alive, a creature all its own with a deep, abiding loyalty to its people that has been cultivated through thousands of years of dedicated cultural transmission. red ochre handprints on the cave walls that we gently touch up every day with the materials we have nearby, keeping the imprints of our people alive. and i think that's beautiful.

Bochur fell asleep on his siddurim during shiur :,((

hey don’t cry. two nice jewish boys falling in love while studying talmud and homoerotically wrapping each other’s tefillin ok?