Introducing /r/AskBibleScholars

We, officially, announced the opening of the sub three days ago here.

Since then we have been growing our readership steadily and have been adding more approved scholars as well.

Approved scholars answer questions regarding the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Other subjects covered are non-canonical literature (the Dead Sea Scrolls, Flavius Josephus, etc.), Egyptology, theology, sociology, archaeology, textual criticism, linguistics, and history.

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I've fallen down the rabbit hole of researching medieval and Early Modern mustards after my answer about historical condiments with a traceable provenance. (Which wasn't even what the OP was looking for, I'm pretty sure -- the original question has been deleted.)

A 13th century cookbook from Muslim Spain gives a recipe for mustard with almonds -- I've seen a secondary commentator describe the presence of almonds as being for texture but I'm not so sure.

Take fresh mustard seeds and pound them a little in a mortar of stone or wood until they are crushed; wash it with hot water so the bitterness departs, and drain out this water. Then return it to the mortar and crush it hard, sprinkling with sharp vinegar little by little. Then squeeze it in a piece of thick cloth or a rough wool apron; then continue to pound it until it is disintegrated, and squeeze it until it comes out like fine talbîna [dissolved starch]. Then pound sweet, peeled almonds very hard, until they become like dough, and macerate until dissolved so that it moderates its bitterness, makes it white and lets it gain dregs and sweetness, because of the coolness and sweetness of the almonds; this is the benefit of the almonds, and their use to the mustard. When this recipe is complete, use it in kebabs and other heavy, fatty foods, God willing.

In addition to a lot of great scholarship on medieval condiments and the distribution of Brassica nigra in Europe, this is one area where I really appreciate people being willing to throw themselves on the grenade and document historical mustard recipes at home. Historical reenactment resources aren't necessarily good sources for hard facts, and casual resources especially run the risk of being "well, some guy I met one time told me that he read somewhere that people did it like this", but whenever I've found myself idly curious "what the hell was the consistency of these mustard recipes?" or "what were medieval salads like?" there's always somebody who researched and documented exactly that with extensive references to primary sources and I can benefit from their hard work as well as their bibliography. Next thing you know I'm going to be buying a mortar and pestle. (I already need to buy more than one mortar and pestle if I want to keep doing egg tempera painting. Those are two streams that must never cross, grinding mustard seeds and grinding a lovely Naples yellow.)

Have any of you folks ended up down a material-culture rabbit hole with respect to your areas of research? Whether that's meticulously hand-sewing and reinforcing hundreds of archaeological-replica pewter shank buttons or just getting really good at mulling wine.

EDIT: Also my reading on medieval child death has led me into not one but multiple cases of children dying from being bitten by pigs.

As can be seen in many of my previous posts in this subreddit, the U.S. Army's methods of procuring manpower from the notice to report for induction to the battlefield, as well as the replacement system, are of particular interest to me.

The subject of replacements was a matter upon which the 4th Division by this time could speak with some authority, for during the month of November the division received as replacements 170 officers and 4,754 enlisted men. Most commanders agreed that the caliber of replacements was good. "They had to be good quick," said one platoon leader, "or else they just weren't. They sometimes would take more chances than some of the older men, yet their presence often stimulated the veterans to take chances they otherwise would not have attempted."

Integrating these new men into organizations riddled by losses among squad and platoon leaders was a trying proposition. "When I get new men in the heat of battle," one sergeant said, "all I have time to do is...impress them that they have to remember their platoon number, and tell them to get into the nearest hole and to move out when the rest of us move out." That heavy casualties would strike men entering combat under conditions like these hardly could have been unexpected. Indeed, so unusual was it to get a packet of replacements into the line without incurring losses that companies noted with pride when they accomplished it. So short was the front-line stay of some men that when evacuated to aid stations they did not know what platoon, company, or even battalion and sometimes regiment they were in. Others might find themselves starting their first attack as riflemen and reaching the objective as acting squad leaders.

Most of the newcomers were reclassified cooks, clerks, drivers, and others combed from rear echelon units both in the theater and in the United States. Somewhat typical was Pvt. Morris Sussman:

From a Cook and Baker's School in the United States, Private Sussman had been transferred for 17 weeks' basic infantry training, then shipped overseas. Docking in Scotland in early November, he found himself in the Huertgen Forest by the middle of the month. At the Service Company of the 22d Infantry someone took away much of what was called "excess equipment." From there Sussman and several other men "walked about a mile to some dugouts." At the dugouts the men received company assignments, and their names and serial numbers were taken down, A guide then led them toward the front lines. On the way they were shelled and saw a number of "Jerry" and American dead scattered through the forest. Private Sussman said he was "horrified" at the sight of the dead, but not as much as he might have been "because everything appeared as if it were in a dream."

At a front line company, Sussman's company commander asked if he knew how to operate a radio. Sussman said no. Handing him a radio, the captain told him: "You're going to learn." Learning consisted of carrying the radio on his back and calling the captain whenever he heard the captain's name mentioned over the radio. For all his ignorance of radios, Sussman felt good. Being a radio operator meant he would stay with the captain and back in the States he had heard that captains stayed "in the rear." Subsequently, Private Sussman said, he "found out different."

The Army systematically conducted combat interviews during World War II, to find out how its soldiers actually operated in battle and responded to what the enemy was throwing at them. Divisions as well as other units had to adapt to the conditions they were fighting under in order to keep their replacements alive and integrate them successfully into their new units.

COMBAT INTERVIEWS

HURTGEN FOREST-Replacements and Non-Battle Casualties, 1st Bn., 22d Inf., 4Div

Interviews with:

Capt. Jennings Frye, S-1, 1st Battalion

Lt. George Kozmetsky, Asst. Surgeon, 1st Bn.

T/3 Harry I. Fingerroth, 1st Bn. Aid Station

Vic. Gostingen, Luxembourg, 20 December 1944; Interviews by Capt. K.W. Hechler, 2d Info & Hist Sv. (VIII Corps)

Replacement conditions were at their worst during the Hurtgen operation. It had been the custom to send up replacements to a company which had been pulled back into a reserve areas, but with all companies either committed or under intense artillery fire there was no such thing as a "quiet company" where the new men could be absorbed and acclimated in proper fashion. Large numbers had to be sent almost directly up to the fighting front-line troops.

The quality of the replacements received was better than average, according to Capt. Frye. However, very few had had previous combat experience. Some 25% of the men were reclassified cooks, clerks, drivers and others who had not seen line experience, while many had not served in the army over five or six month and had simply completed basic training and a little beyond; several had left the states as late as Hallowe'en and were fighting within three weeks.

Upon receiving a call from regimental services company, either the battalion S-1 or sergeant major proceeded to regiment where they assigned the men to companies. Efforts were made to keep men together in companies where they so requested, if possible. The men were sent in trucks from the regimental service company to the regimental CP, whence they walked to the battalion CP. At the battalion CP, where the company clerks stayed during combat, the sergeant major and the company clerks interviewed the men for the posts they could best fill on basis of their training or experience. A roster of the men and their qualifications was then sent forward with the men to the companies. 15 men in a group were walked to the battalion CP; from there five went to each company with a company guide. The replacements were ordered to dig in at the battalion CP, and did not go forward until the artillery had quieted down. The groups were kept down to five per company to avoid being wiped out by a few shells, to facilitate their more rapid assignment and absorption into the company, and to enable them to get into other men's foxholes if they did not have time to dig in. Generally, they were sent forward early enough in the day to give them time to dig in before dark.

Officer replacements were briefed on the tactical situation by the battalion executive officer at the battalion CP, given pointers on the general way the battalion was accustomed to operate during combat, and informed of the past record of the battalion and its standards of performance. The battalion commander then made the final assignment of the officers.

If a company was at fairly high strength of close to 100, the replacements assigned to that company were sometimes kept behind the front lines for a day or two and assigned to tasks such as assisting carrying parties to carry supplies, collecting dead, carrying litters, and odd jobs which would give them a little battle inoculation.

Of the non-battle casualties of the 1st Bn. (which constituted 17% of the total casualties), 9% were combat exhaustion, 4% trenchfoot, and 5% miscellaneous other diseases. There were 28 cases of trenchfoot in the 1st battalion, and 63 cases of combat exhaustion. The rain and sleet encountered throughout the forest campaign, the constant dampness and cold with which the men had to contend, their inability to dig deep and comfortable entrenchments because of the rocky rooted soil and almost constant (though slow) forward movement, the tendency to throw away overshoes which became heavy with mud, and lack of opportunity ever to get thoroughly dry all contributed to the trenchfoot cases. The combat exhaustion cases were not unusually high, according to Capt. Frye. A possible reason advanced by both Capt. Frye and Lt. Kozmetsky was that, with the high number of casualties suffered among the veterans in the battalion, the percentage of replacements was unusually high; newer replacements did not seem to be as subject to combat exhaustion as were the older men, many of whom had been on the verge of cracking in previous campaigns. The constant pounding suffered by the older men served to condition some and weaken others, but the latter seemed to be a more general rule.

It is unfortunate that figures do not exist on the relative number of combat exhaustion cases which occurred in reserve platoons or reserve companies which were subjected to the greatest volume of a artillery and mortar fire. Most of the men in the rifle companies agreed that it is far more trying on the nerves to sit motionless and try to get protection against artillery and mortar fire than it is to move forward in assault and be able to fire at where the enemy is known to be.

"The forest up there was a helluva eerie place to fight," said T/5 George Morgan (whose T/O position was armorer-artificer, but whose main duty was collecting bodies. "Show me a man who went through the battle of Hurtgen Forest and who says he never had a feeling of fear and I'll show you a liar. You can't get all of the dead because you can't find them, and they stay there to remind guys advancing to what might hit them. You can't get protection. You can't see. You can't get fields of fire. The trees are slashed like a scythe by artillery. Everything is tangled. You can scarcely walk. Everybody is cold and wet, and the mixture of cold rain and sleet keeps falling. Then they jump off again and soon there is only a handful of the old men left."

Confronting these conditions, it is a wonder that the combat exhaustion figures were not higher, according to Lt. Kozmetsky. However, the number and good caliber of the replacements probably kept the percentage from being higher, in the opinion of Capt. Frye.

And say — a tip on Science Wonder Stories. Lovecraft tells me Clark Ashton is hesitating over a contract for a series of interplanetary novelettes, because the management of the magazine is shady in money matters.

• Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, Sep 1930, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 2.69

Hope Miss Webber has been able to collect you something from Hugo the Rat—as she has for Mrs. Heald.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 29 Nov 1933, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 483

Pioneering science fiction writer and editor of Wonder Stories Hugo Gernsback was popularly known among Lovecraft's correspondents as "Hugo the Rat" for his tendency to fail to pay for stories from authors—to the point that New York lawyer Ione Webber apparently specialized in suing Hugo on behalf of his writers for payment! The apparent duplicitousness and stinginess of the practice elicited several of the anti-Semitic comments in the correspondence of Lovecraft, Smith, and others in their circle. Lovecraft revised/ghost-wrote "The Man of Stone" for Hazel Heald, which appeared in the October 1932 Wonder Sories—and apparently Heald insisted on being paid! Clark Ashton Smith would eventually resort to using Ms. Webber's services to reclaim the monies Gernsback owed him.

I'm currently working my way through a stack of various books on Islamic history, which I'm enjoying very much. Unfortunately I'm simultaneously distracted by the similarly sized stack of soul-killing relativistic quantum mechanical calculations I need to do.

Sometimes I question my choice of field...

I have caught a glimpse of the "new features" schedule and I believe I should post "week 17" Saturday in the new one instead of here on Friday. If I am mistaken, someone please let me know: I'd hate to miss a week, especially since we are getting into the good stuff and I have finished it already; for those who are curious, it deals with this.

Is Dan Carlin's' 4+ hour podcasts worth it?

(1/4)

Well I've covered the black pirate captain Diego el Mulatto and the Native American pirate Will the Indian and for this week's installment of "Interesting and Extraordinary Pirates and Buccaneers You've Never Heard of Or At Least Probably Don't Know Much About" I thought I'd do John Plantain who was a pirate who set up a small kingdom and ruled over much of Madagascar during the 1720s, serving as one real-life inspiration for the idea of "pirate utopias," although in reality his rule was extremely violent and despotic, and Plantain was more like Col. Kurtz than any benevolent ruler.

Part 1: The legend

The idea of pirate utopias is not a new one and the idea of them in Madagascar goes back to at least a time in which there really were pirate settlements there. When the pirate captain Henry Avery captured an enormously wealthy Mughal ship in the Indian Ocean in 1695 and then managed to escape and avoid capture with his stolen wealth, never to be heard from again, this gave birth to many stories and legends about him. Popular broadsides were published in England celebrating and romanticizing his feats as early as 1696, and some of these stories involved his supposed settlement in Madagascar as a "King of Pirates" ruling over the natives. In 1719, a popular fiction book possibly written by Daniel Defoe was published called The King of Pirates: Being an Account of the Famous Enterprises of Captain Avery, the Mock King of Madagascar; With His Rambles and Piracies. In 1726, the second edition of Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates was published which included many fictional or highly fictionalized biographies of famous pirates in the 1690s and early 1700s who were claimed to have set up small kingdoms in Madagascar, some even with idealistic visions of social and racial equality, abolishing slavery and owning land according the Lockean principle of labor and use. This was called Libertatia or Libertalia and it has been described as proto-socialist/anarchist, and the text also has a strong anti-government and anti-religious bent. It is no wonder that the author "Charles Johnson" was really a pseudonym for another whose identity isn't conclusively known, but was probably English publisher Nathaniel Mist.

The pirate historian Benerson Little writes:

Charles Johnson surely had fun inventing his mythical pirate utopia Libertatia or Libertalia and using it to challenge established beliefs about government and equality. He may even have intended it as an allegorical warning of what might happen if pirates actually did band together and form their own country. All of this having been said, there really were small pirate settlements at Madagascar, and they are probably the ultimate inspiration for Johnson's pirate utopia. As there is with nearly all myths, there is a kernel of truth behind the myth of pirate utopias, more interesting even than the myth itself.

Part 2: Earlier pirate settlements in Madagascar

Henry Avery really did visit Madagascar after plundering the wealthy Mughal ship in 1695, and likewise the famous pirate Thomas Tew stopped there in the early 1690s and William Kidd did in 1697. They didn't set up kingdoms or stay there longer than they needed to refit their ships and divide up their loot, but they did visit and trade with other pirates who had created more permanent settlements there.

A few years earlier, in 1691, the buccaneer and wanted criminal Adam Baldridge (he had fled Jamaica after killing a man in about 1685) jumped ship on St. Mary's Island off the northeast coast of Madagascar with two companions and set himself up to trade with passing ships. Impressed with his guns and other technology, a native king married Baldridge to one of his daughters and Baldridge then sailed to the mainland with an army of natives to attack the king's enemies. They won possibly due to Baldridge and his companions having muskets, and after spending a few months looting and pillaging the enemy country, Baldridge returned to St. Mary's where he was rewarded by the native king with land and cattle. When another buccaneer ship stopped at St. Mary's later that year, Baldridge used his new wealth to buy guns and begin constructing a personal fortress for himself mounted with dozens of cannons. By the end of 1692, Baldridge's fortress or "castle" was formidable and he made contacts with financiers in New York for good and supplies that he could then sell to passing ships at marked up but still reasonable prices. In 1699, the governor of New York Lord Bellomont wrote:

'Tis the most beneficial trade that to Madagascar with the pirates; that was ever heard of, and I believe there's more got that way than by turning pirates and robbing. I am told this Shelly sold rum which cost but 2s per gallon [something like $10 today] at New York, for 50 shillings [something like $450] and £3 gallon [something like $600] at Madagascar, and a pipe of Madera Wine which cost him £19 [something like $3,800] he sold there for £300 [$60,000]. Strong liquors and gun powder and ball are the commodities that go off there, to the best advantage, and those four ships last summer carried thither great quantities of those things.

In the years from 1693 to 1697, dozens of pirate ships and hundreds of pirates stopped at Baldridge's base on St. Mary's to buy and trade for Baldridge's supplies in exchange for their stolen wealth. Baldridge also acted as a middleman and fence for stolen pirate good and slaves through the New York merchant Lawrence Johnston. They would buy stolen goods and slaves from the pirates and then ship them back to New York on ships that pretended to have sailed to Madagascar solely to buy slaves.

By this time Baldridge had also developed a substantial harem for himself, and Benerson Little writes:

For Baldridge, it was the best of all possible worlds. At St. Mary's, pirates could careen, repair, and reprovision their ships, get new clothes, not to mention get drunk and have sex with women. They paid well and made Baldridge rich. He was treated as a king! He had many slaves, many head of cattle, doubtless a rapidly growing sum of money waiting in New York, and the regard of both the people of St. Mary's and the Red Sea pirates. Here was a pirate utopia! It was a place where a man could get rich, where he could have all the women he wanted, where no government would interfere with his theft! Pirate utopia was not a freethinkers' paradise, but a free traders' paradise and a hideout for those for whom the noose might await.

In 1697, despite Baldridge's success, he wanted to return to New York to enjoy the comforts of his newfound wealth in European society once again. As Baldridge left, he tricked a large number of natives who had been his longtime allies and friends on St. Mary's to board ship ship where he then captured them and sold them as slaves. When the rest of the natives at St. Mary's found out what had happened, they rose up and massacred the remaining pirates and traders who chosen to stay behind. After Baldridge returned briefly to rescue some of the survivors of the massacre, he returned to New York where he lived for a while, but soon he found himself indicted for piracy. He seems to have avoided trial by bribing corrupt officials, but he realized his days were numbered if he stayed if he stayed in New York and in about 1699 he seems to have convinced the governor to give him a ship and then turned pirate again. Benerson Little writes:

Baldridge, the "chief transactor and manager in carrying on that mischievous trade" at St. Mary's, had made the Grand Tour, so the speak, from murderer to pirate to pirate factor--even pirate prince!--to wealthy New York gentleman to pirate once more. Or perhaps it was not much of a grand tour after all, but rather the same wolf in different clothing.

Back in Madagascar, although Baldridge's fortified trading post on St. Mary's had been abandoned in 1697, another pirate base was quickly established in Madagascar at the abandoned French outpost of Fort Dauphin about 500 miles southeast of St. Mary's Island. It was run by a mulatto pirate named Abraham Samuel who arrived there in 1697 with a group of pirates who had escaped the native revolt on St. Mary's, but were then shipwrecked. They were soon joined by other pirates and set up an outpost with Abraham Samuel as ruler, but they were not nearly as well-connected as Adam Baldridge and when an English merchant ship stopped there in 1699, the pirates ended up attacking and robbing them. Few or no merchant ships came there after that, and in 1705 Samuel died and his pirate kingdom disappeared along with him, replaced by a native ruler.

Another pirate named Edward Welch also established another trading post on St. Mary's Island in the early 1700s but he wasn't nearly as successful as Adam Baldridge had been and died there in about 1708. Various other pirates would attempt to set up small outposts and petty kingdoms in various places along the coast of Madagascar in the early 1700s, but they were all eventually destroyed by native revolts, or forced to flee, or captured by navy vessels. However, Little writes, "within two decades another pirate would do much the same as Baldridge had, but on an even grander scale."

I got a whole pile of book for Christmas, including 'Introduction to Folklore'. I finally read it just recently. It was, unsurprisingly, a very solid read.

Admittedly, haven't read it yet, but I just picked up "The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" and I'm really looking forward to it. For those of you interested you may want to check it out.

Can we pin down a specific day of week after which the first world war became unwinnable under any circumstances for the Central Powers?

what's a good book written IN SPANISH on the spanish civil war?

Does anyone know of good books about the history of 15th/16th/17th century Holy Roman Empire?