Turn it, and turn it, for everything is contained within it

[lethargic_man]

Ethics of the Fathers (or Foundational Chapters, depending on how you translate it) 5:22:

Ben Bag Bag said: Turn it, and turn it, for everything is contained within it.

What could he have meant?

Ah, all is clear now!

(Or actually not, because (a) הפך בה means turn it over, not turn it around, and (b) even if he was referring to the Torah in the widest sense, the above is Ben Sira, which narrowly missed the cut for the Biblical canon, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of a good joke.)

Comments

[liv]

That's a really cool piece of calligraphy, whether or not it fits Ben Bag Bag's advice. Where'd you find it?

[lethargic_man]

That's a really cool piece of calligraphy, whether or not it fits Ben Bag Bag's advice.

Yes, isn't it just? I'm tempted to print it out and put it on my wall, as I've got a soft spot for blackletter—it's a cooler example than this, which was on the wall in the room where I worked for the two months I lived in Berlin—but I'm a bit cautious because, for all that the blackletter (not to mention its archaic German) makes it very difficult for us to read, if you do read, it's a Christian translation^*. I'm toying with the thought of calligraphing the Hebrew text the same way and putting the two up on walls facing each other, but the problem is that the text on Wikisource says for Chapter 1 "המקור העברי חסר בפרק זה": In case you don't know, because the book failed to make the cut of the Biblical canon, Jews stopped copying it, and the Hebrew original was lost. The Hebrew text was discovered anew in the Cairo Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but obviously we don't have all of it, and this chapter must be a back-translation from the Greek.

I might do it even so, but it'll have to wait until my current Sekr1t Projeckt is done and dusted.

* When I was looking for a translation of this, I found this translation of the Vulgate rendering הוּא בְחָנָהּ as "He created her in the Holy Ghost". Though the German text appears not to have this particular problem (it renders it der hatt die weißheit geschaffen, at the bottom, on the third line out from the centre).

Where'd you find it?

Here.