[Avodah] Species, Genera, and Families

[Jay F Shachter]

On Sat, May 02, 2009 at 09:31:54PM +0300, Michael Makovi wrote:

>
> Oats: The Gemara says the five grains are all types of wheat or
> barley. However, oats are not a type of either.
> 

Neither is rye.  The categories of modern speakers of English are not
the categories of the Amoraim, just as biologists' categories are not
the same as farmers' categories.  Does it bother you that the Torah
categorizes a bat as a bird, in Leviticus 11:19?  A bat is a bird, in
the language of the Torah; a bat is not a bird, in the language of a
modern speaker of English who took biology in high school.

There is a certain kind of person who likes to say things like, "a
whale is not a fish".  Such statements are nearly meaningless.  It
would be more meaningful to say: a whale does not have gills, a whale
does not have a two-chambered heart.  In the former case you are
making a statement about words; in the latter case you are making a
statement about things.

In the language of the Amoraim, the five grains of Israel were either
in the wheat group or the barley group.  This translates best into
modern English as the wheat group and the nonwheat group.  Jews who
observe Jewish law, and whose native language is not Hebrew, are
accustomed to making such translations.  In English a rosebush is a
bush, not a tree, and a grapevine is a vine, not a tree, but we know
that we have to say "boreh `atzey vsamim" when we smell a rose, and
"boreh pri ha`etz" when we eat a grape.

Now, a far more interesting question, is not whether rye belongs in
the barley family, but why the Amoraim thought that it does, and
modern speakers of English think that it does not.  You can learn much
about a culture from its language.  For example, English (and Hebrew)
has one word for an African elephant and an Asian elephant, but
English (and Hebrew) has different words for a horse and a donkey,
even though the difference between an African elephant and an Asian
elephant is much greater than the difference between a horse and a
donkey.  The languages tell us clearly that elephants were of little
importance to the original speakers of English and Hebrew, whereas
horses and donkeys were of great importance, and must have been
domesticated since ancient times.  Anything you could do with an
African elephant you could also do with an Asian elephant, so you did
not need your language to distinguish between them, but you did a lot
more things with horses and donkeys than you did with elephants, and
you did different things with horses than with donkeys, so you did
need your language to distinguish between them.  For another example,
one can question how widespread was the observance of the Torah among
our Hebrew-speaking ancestors, but one thing that is clear is that the
aboriginal Hebrews at least observed Leviticus 22:24, because there
are no specialized words in Biblical Hebrew for castrated animals,
unlike English, which has words like "steer", "gelding", "barrow", and
"wether" that attest that castration was a common farming practice
among the ancient English-speaking people.  You may recall the scene
in The Thin Man (which didn't make it into the movie, although the
movie was remarkably faithful to the book) where Nick Charles was
asked, "is there much incest?" and he answered "there's some -- that's
why there's a word for it".  If it didn't need to be named, there
wouldn't be a word for it.  Moreover, if we can puzzle out why the
Amoraim considered rye to be a member of the barley group, we might
determine whether oats belong in that group too, or whether the word
must have denoted another grain, not oats.  So the question is of
crucisl importance to us.

Incidentally, a modern taxonomic classification of the five grains
of Israel and of the five fruits of Israel can be found at
http://m5.chicago.il.us/docs/tu.pdf.


			Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
			6424 N Whipple St
			Chicago IL  60645-4111
				(1-773)7613784
				jay at m5.chicago.il.us
				http://m5.chicago.il.us

			"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"