North Dakota Air Ambulance Crashed En Route To Williston -- Three On Board Dead -- November 19, 2018

Updates

November 29, 2018: from The Bismarck Tribune --

The investigation so far indicates the airplane broke apart during the flight while the plane was about 12,000 feet above ground, Kirchmeier said. The National Transportation Board is investigating what caused the incident.

The plane was not struck by anything and there was no fire, he said. Weather also is not believed to have been a factor.

Original Post

Link here to The Williston Herald:

• pilot, paramedic, and registered nurse killed
• no information on cause of crash or location
• airplane, not helicopter

From The Bismarck Tribune:

• crash site is about 15 to 20 miles northwest of Mandan
• crash site located around 2:00 a.m. 

From the Minneapolis StarTribune:

• occurred about 10:30 p.m., shortly after take-off
• about 20 miles northwest of Bismarck
• there was no inclement weather in the area at the time, just light snow

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The Literary Page

For The Granddaughters

I am currently back in my "really, really, really early history" phase, reading and re-reading the Bible, Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, etc.

I have incomplete notes at these posts:

• The Bible, A Biography, Karen Armstrong, c. 2007 
• The Book of J, Translation by David Rosenberg, commentary by Harold Bloom
• Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic, Andrew Dalby, c. 2006
• The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, Fourth Edition, c. 2010
• The Wooden Horse, Keld Zeruneith, c. 2007

I maintain copious notes in handwritten journals, and additional notes in "word" documents on the hard drive. 

I'm getting a much better feeling for the "origin" of the Bible -- at least in my mind; we will all have different world views (myths).

The first thing one must do, is note the dates. Many of the dates are not known at all. Because of so much research, more and more, the dates for events after Joseph's life on Earth are "known." Most frustrating, in wiki, the entry's first mention of pharaohs by name is in the section "Pharaohs in the Book of Exodus." The entry does not mention any pharaoh by name in the book of Genesis. In fact, Genesis 47:11: "Joseph settled his father and his brothers, and granted them a holding in the land of Egypt, int he best part of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had instructed."

The scribes writing "in the land of Rameses" could be literal, and contemporary, suggesting that Joseph was in Egypt at the time of Rameses, or the scribes could have been using a literary tag, just as we often today still call Illinois "the land of Lincoln." 

The first Rameses, reigned for one year, founded the 19th Dynasty, 1292 - 1291, time-frame (which by the way is very, very close to time of Trojan War). The last Rameses, Rameses XI reigned in the 20th Dynasty, from 1107 BCE to about 1078 BCE.

Interestingly, it seems we have not come much farther along figuring out Homer's timeline. I like to think that he was most likely alive between 800 BC and 700 BCE (link here). But some suggest he may have lived during or soon after the Trojan War (around 1200 BCE -- probably around 1190 BCE).

The Babylonian Exile: probably somewhere between 598 and 538 BCE -- going into exile and coming out of exile spanning years if not decades, especially the return. It appears many experts suggest the early Torah had its written origins during the years of the exile.

8th century BCE: the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants -- wiki.

Consonantal writing used for Semitic languages in the Levant go all the way back to the second millennium BCE -- wiki.

The Torah is written in Hebrew, the oldest of Jewish languages -- BBC.

From wiki:

The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE.

Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family.

Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language.

Hebrew had ceased to be an everyday spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and to a lesser extent Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and immigrants. Hebrew survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry.

Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language. It became the lingua franca of Palestine's Jews, and subsequently of the State of Israel. According to Ethnologue, in 1998, it was the language of 5 million people worldwide. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population, with 220,000 fluent speakers, mostly from Israel.

This is quite interesting. Hebrew and Latin would have followed a similar path, with each language surviving among their respective clergy and liturgy. But then Latin as an oral language died out, never to return -- a dead language. Hebrew "rose from the dead."

When I put all this together, in my mind, Homer's writing of the two great epics was "contemporary" with the Bible in the big scheme of things. "Contemporary" -- spanning several centuries in the first millennium BCE.

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Watching The Wheels

Watching The Wheels, George Harrison