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93-533: Urim ( אוּרִים ‎) traditionally has been taken to derive from a root meaning "lights"; these derivations are reflected in the Neqqudot of the Masoretic Text . In consequence, Urim and Thummim has traditionally been translated as "lights and perfections" (by Theodotion , for example), or, by taking the phrase allegorically, as meaning "revelation and truth" or "doctrine and truth." It appears in this form in

186-444: A 'three-fold' ordeal. The distinction between the one-fold and three-fold ordeal appears to be based on the severity of the crime, with the threefold ordeal being prescribed for more severe offences such as treachery or for notorious criminals. The ordeal would take place in a church, with several in attendance, purified and praying to God to reveal the truth. Afterwards, the hand was bound and examined after three days to see whether it

279-514: A more likely explanation; if the holy water causes miscarriage, it is proof of guilt). Some cultures, such as the Efik Uburutu people of present-day Nigeria , would administer the poisonous Calabar bean ( Physostigma venenosum , known as esere in Efik ), which contains physostigmine , in an attempt to detect guilt. A defendant who vomited up the bean was innocent. A defendant who became ill or died

372-416: A physical test of whether the accused would float, rather than an ordeal invoking divine intervention to prove or disprove guilt, i.e., a witch floated by the nature of a witch, not because God intervened and caused her to float, demonstrating her guilt. According to a theory put forward by economics professor Peter Leeson , trial by ordeal may have been effective at sorting the guilty from the innocent. On

465-487: A procedure based on the premise that God would help the innocent by performing a miracle on their behalf. The practice has much earlier roots, attested to as far back as the Code of Hammurabi and the Code of Ur-Nammu . In pre-industrial society , the ordeal typically ranked along with the oath and witness accounts as the central means by which to reach a judicial verdict . Indeed, the term ordeal , Old English ordǣl , has

558-567: A river. If the accused man survived this ordeal, the accused was to be acquitted. If the accused was found innocent by this ordeal, the accuser was to be put to death and the accused man was to take possession of the then-deceased accuser's house. An ordeal by cold water is mentioned in the Vishnu Smrti , which is one of the texts of the Dharmaśāstra . The practice was also set out in Salic law but

651-528: A sign from God against him. The Inquisition arrested him shortly thereafter, with Savonarola convicted of heresy and hanged at the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Ordeal by fire ( Persian : ور ) was also used for judiciary purposes in ancient Iran . Persons accused of cheating in contracts or lying might be asked to prove their innocence by ordeal of fire as an ultimate test. Two examples of such an ordeal include

744-464: A sinner by repeatedly splitting the people into two groups and identifying which group contains the sinner. In the version of this passage in the Masoretic Text , it describes Saul and Jonathan being separated from the rest of the people, and lots being cast between them; the Septuagint version, however, states that Urim would indicate Saul and Jonathan, while Thummim would indicate the people. In

837-401: A society where people lived in close quarters and there was little centralized power. In a world where "the sacred penetrated into the chinks of the profane and vice-versa" the ordeal was a "controlled miracle" that served as a point of consensus when one of the greatest dangers to the community was feud. From this analysis, Brown argues that the increasing authoritativeness of the state lessened

930-426: A stone from a boiling cauldron. Gregory said that it took Hyacinth about an hour to complete the task (because the waters were bubbling so ferociously), but he was pleased to record that when the heretic tried, he had the skin boiled off up to his elbow. Legal texts from the reign of King Athelstan (Lived: c.  894 – 27 October 939, Ruled: 924 – 939) provide some of the most elaborate royal regulations for

1023-1020: A tendency to have words that are identical to their roots. However, such forms as in Spanish exist in English such as interrupt , which may arguably contain the root -rupt , which only appears in other related prefixd forms (such as disrupt , corrupt , rupture , etc.). The form -rupt cannot occur on its own. Examples of ( consonantal roots ) which are related but distinct to the concept developed here are formed prototypically by three (as few as two and as many as five) consonants. Speakers may derive and develop new words (morphosyntactically distinct, i.e. with different parts of speech) by using non-concatenative morphological strategies: inserting different vowels . Unlike 'root' here, these cannot occur on their own without modification; as such these are never actually observed in speech and may be termed 'abstract'. For example, in Hebrew ,

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1116-419: A tradition known as sassywood . In it, a poisonous brew of erythrophleine , extracted from the bark of the "Ordeal Tree" ( erythrophleum suaveolens ), was administered to the defendant. While it has largely been outlawed, the practice is still in sporadic use by local communities. The "penalty of the peach" was an ancient ordeal that involved peach pits or their extracts. The pits contain amygdalin , which

1209-624: Is in the Book of Hosea , where it is implied, by reference to the Ephod, that the Urim and Thummim were fundamental elements in the popular form of the Israelite religion, in the mid 8th century BC. Consulting the Urim and Thummim was said to be permitted for determining territorial boundaries, and was said to be required, in addition to permission from the king or a prophet, if there was an intention to expand Jerusalem or

1302-505: Is metabolized into cyanide . In early modern Europe, the Mass was unofficially used as a form of poison ordeal: a suspected party was forced to take the Eucharist because they would be eternally damned if they were guilty, and thus their unwillingness to take the test would give an indication of their guilt. An Icelandic ordeal tradition involves the accused walking under a piece of turf. If

1395-458: Is morphologically similar to the production of frequentative (iterative) verbs in Latin , for example: Consider also Rabbinic Hebrew ת-ר-מ ‎ √t-r-m ‘donate, contribute’ (Mishnah: T’rumoth 1:2: ‘separate priestly dues’), which derives from Biblical Hebrew תרומה ‎ t'rūmå ‘contribution’, whose root is ר-ו-מ ‎ √r-w-m ‘raise’; cf. Rabbinic Hebrew ת-ר-ע ‎ √t-r-' ‘sound

1488-510: Is no description of the form of the Urim and Thummim in the passage describing the high priest's vestments, and a number of scholars believe that the author of the passage, which textual scholars attribute to the priestly source , was not actually entirely aware of what they were either. Nevertheless, the passage does describe them as being put into the breastplate, which scholars think implies they were objects put into some sort of pouch within it, and then, while out of view, one (or one side, if

1581-532: Is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology , a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word , and of a word family (this root is then called the base word), which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes . However, sometimes

1674-654: Is the motto of Indiana University and the University of Montana . Similarly, Northeastern University 's motto is Lux, Veritas, Virtus ("Light, Truth, Virtue"). Urim and Thummim itself is emblazoned in Hebrew across the open book pictured on the Yale University coat of arms , and the translation Lux et Veritas appears below on a banner. The Urim and Thummim are also mentioned in some modern fiction: Root (linguistics) A root (also known as root word or radical )

1767-459: The 6th-century Salic law , the ordeal of hot water required the accused to dip their hand into a kettle or pot of boiling water (sometimes oil or lead was used instead) and retrieve a stone. Assessment of the injury was similar to that of the fire ordeal. An early (non-judicial) example of the test was described by Bishop Gregory of Tours in the late 6th century. He describes how a Catholic saint , Hyacinth, bested an Arian rival by plucking

1860-629: The Arabic language : Similar cases occur in Hebrew , for example Israeli Hebrew מ-ק-מ ‎ √m-q-m ‘locate’, which derives from Biblical Hebrew מקום ‎ måqom ‘place’, whose root is ק-ו-מ ‎ √q-w-m ‘stand’. A recent example introduced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language is מדרוג ‎ midrúg ‘rating’, from מדרג ‎ midrág , whose root is ד-ר-ג ‎ √d-r-g ‘grade’." According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann , "this process

1953-541: The Assize of Clarendon in 1166. Prior to then, compurgation was the most usual method of proof, and the ordeal was used in cases where there was some presumption of guilt against the accused or when the accused was bound to fail in compurgation. A distinction was made between those accused fama publica (by public outcry) and those accused on the basis of specific facts. Those accused fama publica were able to exculpate themselves by means of compurgation, whereas those accused on

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2046-452: The Code of Hammurabi . Under the Code of Ur-Nammu, a man who was accused of what some scholars have translated as "sorcery" was to undergo ordeal by water. If the man were proven innocent through this ordeal, the accuser was obligated to pay three shekels to the man who underwent judgment. The Code of Hammurabi dictated that, if a man was accused of a matter by another, the accused was to leap into

2139-526: The Devil 's service. King James VI of Scotland claimed in his Daemonologie that water was so pure an element that it repelled the guilty. Jacob Rickius claimed that witches were supernaturally light and recommended weighing them as an alternative to dunking them; this procedure and its status as an alternative to dunking were parodied in the 1975 British film Monty Python and the Holy Grail . The ordeal of

2232-551: The Hebrew alphabet , and only 12 jewels on the breastplate); two Talmudic rabbis, however, argued that the jewels themselves moved in a way that made them stand out from the rest, or even moved themselves into groups to form words. The first reference to Urim and Thummim in the Bible is the description in the Book of Exodus concerning the high priest's vestments; the chronologically earliest passage mentioning them, according to textual scholars,

2325-543: The Latter Day Saint movement , said that he used interpreters in order to translate the Book of Mormon from the golden plates . In early accounts, Smith described the interpreters as "spectacles", described as two transparent stones set in silver bows. The earliest association of the spectacles with the biblical term "Urim and Thummim" occurred in 1833 and Smith appears to have adopted the term in subsequent descriptions. The Urim and Thummim were said to have been found with

2418-547: The Temple in Jerusalem ; however, these rabbinical sources questioned, or at least tried to justify, why Urim and Thummim would be required when a prophet was also present. The classical rabbinical writers argued that the Urim and Thummim were only permitted to be consulted by very prominent figures such as army generals, the most senior of court figures, and kings, and the only questions which could be raised were those which were asked for

2511-461: The Urim and Thummim was a single object) was chosen by touch and withdrawn or thrown out; since the Urim and Thummim were put inside this pouch, they were presumably small and fairly flat, and were possibly tablets of wood or of bone. Considering the scholars' conclusion that Urim essentially means "guilty" and Thummim essentially means "innocent", this would imply that the purpose of the Urim and Thummim

2604-527: The Vulgate , in the writing of St. Jerome , and in the Hexapla . The latter use was defended in modern Catholic interpretations by connecting Urim and Thummim to the roots ירה "to teach" and אׇמַן "be true". Thummim ( תוּמִים ‎) is widely considered to be derived from the consonantal root ת.מ.ם ‎ ( t-m-m ) "innocent". Many scholars now believe that Urim ( אוּרִים ‎) simply derives from

2697-616: The "king's counselor" (1 Chr. 27:33–34). Meanwhile, Zadok, of the house of Eleazar, had been made High Priest. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia Abiathar was deposed from office when he was deserted by the Holy Spirit without which the Urim and Thummin could not be consulted. Although Josephus argues that the Urim and Thummim continued to function until the era of the Maccabees , Talmudic sources are unanimous in agreeing that

2790-539: The Babylonian conquest, probably as a result of the growing influence of prophets at that time. Maimonides states that in the Second Temple the Urim and Thummim actually existed but no longer functioned in the practical sense since the priests no longer possessed the Holy Spirit. Rabbi Abraham ben David disagrees and maintains that during that era, the Urim and Thummim were completely absent. Joseph Smith , founder of

2883-529: The Hebrew אּרּרִים ‎ ( Arrim ) "curses" and thus that Urim and Thummim essentially means "cursed or faultless", in reference to the deity's judgment of an accused person; in other words, Urim and Thummim were used to answer the question "innocent or guilty". Assyriologist William Muss-Arnolt connected the singular forms— ur and tumm —with the Babylonian terms ūrtu and tamītu , meaning "oracle" and "command", respectively. According to his theory,

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2976-490: The Hebrew words use a pluralis intensivus to enhance their apparent majesty, not to indicate the presence of more than one. Along these lines, the Urim and Thummim are hypothesized to derive from the Tablet of Destinies worn by Marduk on his breast according to Babylonian religion . 1 Samuel 14:41 is regarded by biblical scholars as key to understanding the Urim and Thummim; the passage describes an attempt to identify

3069-555: The Normans, but the only notable innovation of the ordeal by the conquerors was the introduction of the trial by battle. There were, however, minor conflicts between the customs of the Anglo-Saxons and the customs of the Normans that were typically resolved in ways that favored the Normans. In a famous story from Eadmer 's Historia novorum in Anglia , William Rufus expresses skepticism about

3162-457: The Pious in 819 and a decree of Lothar I , recorded in 876, abolished the ordeal so as to avoid the mockery of Christ. Franconian law prescribed that an accused was to be given dry bread and cheese blessed by a priest. If the accused choked on the food, they were considered guilty. This was transformed into the ordeal of the Eucharist (trial by sacrament) mentioned by Regino of Prüm ca. 900:AD;

3255-462: The Sanskrit root " √bhū- " means the root " bhū- ". English verb form running contains the root run . The Spanish superlative adjective amplísimo contains the root ampli- . In the former case, the root can occur on its own freely. In the latter, it requires modification via affixation to be used as a free form. English has minimal use of morphological strategies such as affixation and features

3348-459: The Septuagint, a previous verse uses a phrase which is usually translated as "inquired of God", which is significant as the grammatical form of the Hebrew implies that the inquiry was performed by objects being manipulated; scholars view it as evident from these verses and versions that cleromancy was involved, and that Urim and Thummim were the names of the objects being cast. The description of

3441-541: The Urim and Thummim stopped functioning much earlier, when Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians . In a passage from the part of the Book of Ezra which overlaps with the Book of Nehemiah , it is mentioned that individuals who were unable to prove, after the Babylonian captivity had ended, that they were descended from the priesthood before the captivity began, were required to wait until priests in possession of Urim and Thummim were discovered; this would appear to confirm

3534-610: The accused having to pass through fire, or having molten metal poured on their chest. There were about 30 of these kinds of fiery tests in all. If the accused died, they were held to have been guilty; if survived, they were innocent, having been protected by Mithra and the other gods . The most simple form of such ordeals required the accused to take an oath, then drink a potion of sulfur ( Avestan : saokant , lit.   'sulfur', Middle Persian : sōgand , lit.   'oath', Persian: سوگند , romanized:  sowgand , lit.   'oath'). It

3627-422: The accused parties are ordered to retrieve an item from a container of boiling oil, with those who refuse the task being found guilty. In the other, both the accused and the accuser have to retrieve an item from boiling oil, with the person or persons whose hand remains unscathed being declared innocent. There were different types of trials by water: trial by hot water and trial by cold water. First mentioned in

3720-598: The accused sank, they were considered innocent, whereas if they floated, this indicated witchcraft . The ordeal would be conducted with a rope holding the subject so that the person being tested could be retrieved following the trial. A witch trial including this ordeal took place in Szeged , Hungary as late as 1728. Demonologists varied in their explanations as to why trial by water would be effective, although spiritual explanations were most common. Some argued that witches floated because they had renounced baptism when entering

3813-557: The accused was made to plunge their right hand into a boiling cauldron and pull out a ring. As Frankish influence spread throughout Europe, ordeal by cauldron spread to neighboring societies. The earliest references of ordeal by cauldron in the British Isles occurs in Irish law in the seventh century, but it is unlikely that this tradition shares roots with the Frankish tradition that is likely

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3906-494: The accused was to take the oath of innocence. It was believed that if the oath had been false, the person would die within the same year. Numbers 5:12–27 prescribes that a woman suspected of adultery—one called a Sotah in later commentaries—should be made to swallow "the bitter water that causeth the curse" by the priest in order to determine her guilt. The accused would be condemned only if 'her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot'. One writer has recently argued that

3999-462: The advice is not described as given by visions, scholars think that Urim and Thummim were the medium implied. In all but two cases ( 1 Samuel 10:22 and 2 Samuel 5:23 ), the question is one which is effectively answered by a simple "yes" or "no"; a number of scholars believe that the two exceptions to this pattern, which give more complex answers, were originally also just sequences of "yes" or "no" questions, but became corrupted by later editing. There

4092-424: The assumption that defendants were believers in divine intervention for the innocent, then only the truly innocent would choose to endure a trial; guilty defendants would confess or settle cases instead. Therefore, the theory goes, church and judicial authorities could routinely rig ordeals so that the participants—presumably innocent—could pass them. To support this theory, Leeson points to the great latitude given to

4185-456: The basis of specific facts and those who were thought to have bad character were made to undergo the ordeal. The Assize of Clarendon declared that all those said by a jury of presentment to be "accused or notoriously suspect" of robbery, thievery, or murder or of receiving anyone who had committed such a wrong were to be put to the ordeal of water. These juries of presentment were the hundred juries and vills , and these groups, in effect, made

4278-400: The benefit of the people as a whole. To uncover the sin of Achan the sacred Lots were used by Joshua . Abiathar joined David, who was then in the cave of Adullam (1 Sam. 22:20–23, 23:6). He remained with David, and became priest of the party of which he was the leader (1 Sam. 30:7). When David ascended the throne of Judah, Abiathar was appointed High Priest (1 Chr. 15:11; 1 Kings 2:26) and

4371-417: The biblical Urim and Thummim. Smith extended the use of the term "Urim and Thummim" to describe the dwelling place of God, the earth in a future state, and the white stone mentioned in the Book of Revelation . In accordance with the belief that Urim and Thummim translates to "Light and Truth", the Latin equivalent Lux et Veritas has been used for several university mottoes. For example, Lux et Veritas

4464-439: The building blocks for affixation and compounds . However, in polysynthetic languages with very high levels of inflectional morphology, the term "root" is generally synonymous with "free morpheme". Many such languages have a very restricted number of morphemes that can stand alone as a word: Yup'ik , for instance, has no more than two thousand. The root is conventionally indicated using the mathematical symbol √; for instance,

4557-410: The category-neutral approach, data from English indicates that the same underlying root appears as a noun and a verb - with or without overt morphology. In Hebrew , the majority of roots consist of segmental consonants √CCC. Arad (2003) describes that the consonantal root is turned into a word due to pattern morphology. Thereby, the root is turned into a verb when put into a verbal environment where

4650-517: The clothing of the Hebrew high priest in the Book of Exodus portrays the Urim and Thummim as being put into the sacred breastplate , worn by the high priest over the Ephod . Where the biblical text elsewhere describes an Ephod being used, scholars presume that it is referring to use of the Urim and Thummim in conjunction with the Ephod, as this seems to be intimately connected with it; similarly where non-prophets are portrayed as asking God for guidance, and

4743-455: The community. The laws of Canute distinguish between "men of good repute" who were able to clear themselves by their own oath, "untrustworthy men" who required compurgators , and untrustworthy men who cannot find compurgators who must go to the ordeal. One of the laws of Ethelred the Unready declared that untrustworthy men were to be sent to the triple ordeal, that is, an ordeal of hot iron where

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4836-525: The cross was apparently introduced in the Early Middle Ages in an attempt to discourage judicial duels among Germanic peoples . As with judicial duels, and unlike most other ordeals, the accuser had to undergo the ordeal together with the accused. They stood on either side of a cross and stretched out their hands horizontally. The first one to lower their arms lost. This ordeal was prescribed by Charlemagne in 779 and again in 806. A capitulary of Louis

4929-436: The forms derived from the abstract consonantal roots , a major Hebrew phonetics concept ג-ד-ל ( g-d-l ) related to ideas of largeness: g a d o l and gd o l a (masculine and feminine forms of the adjective "big"), g a d a l "he grew", hi gd i l "he magnified" and ma gd e l et "magnifier", along with many other words such as g o d e l "size" and mi gd a l "tower". Roots and reconstructed roots can become

5022-503: The golden plates, a breastplate (to which the silver bows were attached in some descriptions), and the Sword of Laban. Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith , described these Urim and Thummim as being like "two smooth three-cornered diamonds." Smith and others also referred to individual seer stones also associated with Smith's dictation of the Book of Mormon as Urim and Thummim, although his wife, Emma Smith , in her later accounts distinguished between

5115-400: The head bears the "v" feature (the pattern). Consider the root √š-m-n (ש-מ-נ). Although all words vary semantically, the general meaning of a greasy, fatty material can be attributed to the root. Furthermore, Arad states that there are two types of languages in terms of root interpretation. In languages like English, the root is assigned one interpretation whereas in languages like Hebrew,

5208-724: The hundred jurors and the vills as to the defendant's suspicion was required to send him to the ordeal. However, the intermediate accusation of the juries could still be considered final in some sense as any person who was accused of murder by the juries was required to leave the realm even if he was exonerated by the ordeal. In 1215, clergy were forbidden to participate in ordeals by the Fourth Lateran Council . The English plea rolls contain no cases of trial by ordeal after 1219, when Henry III recognized its abolition. Popes were generally opposed to ordeals, although there are some apocryphal accounts describing their cooperation with

5301-415: The intermediate decision of whether an accused person would face the more final judgment of the ordeal. These bodies rendered "verdicts" of either suspected or not suspected. In cases where the defendant was accused on the basis of one or more specific facts, the defendant was sent to the ordeal upon the verdict of the hundred jury alone. In cases where the defendant was accused fama publica , the agreement of

5394-414: The interplay of canon and common law was such that a clear anathema on the practice given in 1215 would have unintended consequences and overstepped the bounds of ecclesiastical authority. Secular authorities might deem someone guilty if they relied on clerical authority to avoid an ordeal, and certain "occult" crimes (those to which there would not normally be witnesses) could not be effectively prosecuted in

5487-418: The iron is three times heavier than that used in the simple ordeal, unless his lord and two other knights swear that he has not been accused of a crime recently, in which case he would be sent to an ordinary ordeal of hot iron. Unlike other European societies, the English rarely employed the ordeal in non-criminal proceedings. The mandatory use of the ordeal in certain criminal proceedings appears to date from

5580-409: The legal system of the time by any other means than ordeal. Innocent III's prohibition of clerical participation in trial by ordeal was essentially a call to action for secular authorities to move away from it, a process which took centuries to complete. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries some kinds of ordeals were once again used in witch-hunts , although these were actually intended more as

5673-542: The loser of the fight or the party represented by the losing champion was deemed guilty or liable. Champions could be used by one or both parties in an individual versus individual dispute, and could represent the individual in a trial by an organization; an organization or state government by its nature had to be represented by a single combatant selected as champion, although there are numerous cases of high-ranking nobility, state officials and even monarchs volunteering to serve as champion. Combat between groups of representatives

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5766-588: The meaning of "judgment, verdict" from Proto-West Germanic uʀdailī (see German : Urteil , Dutch : oordeel ), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *uzdailiją "that which is dealt out". Priestly cooperation in trials by fire and water was forbidden by Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Council of the Lateran of 1215 and replaced by compurgation . Trials by ordeal became rarer over the Late Middle Ages , but

5859-443: The ordeal after 50 men accused of forest offenses were exonerated by the ordeal of hot iron. In this story, Rufus states that he will take judgment from God's hands into his own. However, this skepticism was not universally shared by the intellectuals of the day, and Eadmer depicts Rufus as irreligious for rejecting the legitimacy of the ordeal. The use of the ordeal in medieval England was very sensitive to status and reputation in

5952-403: The practice was not discontinued until the 16th century. Certain trials by ordeal would continue to be used into the 17th century in witch-hunts . Ordeal by combat took place between two parties in a dispute, either two individuals, or between an individual and a government or other organization. They, or, under certain conditions, a designated "champion" acting on their behalf, would fight, and

6045-427: The practice. At first there was no general decree against ordeals, and they were only declared unlawful in individual cases. Eventually Pope Innocent III in Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) promulgated a canon forbidding blessing of participants before ordeals. This decision was followed by further prohibitions by synods in thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250)

6138-438: The priests in administering the ordeal and interpreting the results of the ordeal. He also points to the overall high exoneration rate of accused persons undergoing the ordeal, when intuitively one would expect a very high proportion of people carrying a red hot iron to be badly burned and thus fail the ordeal. Peter Brown explains the persistence and eventual withering of the ordeal by stating that it helped promote consensus in

6231-437: The procedure has a rational basis, envisioning punishment only upon clear proof of pregnancy (a swelling belly) or venereal disease (a rotting thigh) (unless of course the woman was impregnated by her own husband; and of course even historical people were well aware that pregnancy would manifest itself in a very obvious fashion without bothering with rituals and drinking of special potions. Other scholars think an abortifacient

6324-557: The root can form multiple interpretations depending on its environment. This occurrence suggests a difference in language acquisition between these two languages. English speakers would need to learn two roots in order to understand two different words whereas Hebrew speakers would learn one root for two or more words. Alexiadou and Lohndal (2017) advance the claim that languages have a typological scale when it comes to roots and their meanings and state that Greek lies in between Hebrew and English. Trial by ordeal Trial by ordeal

6417-480: The roots' vowels, by adding or removing the long vowels a , i , u , e and o . (Notice that Arabic does not have the vowels e and o .) In addition, secondary roots can be created by prefixing ( m− , t− ), infixing ( −t− ), or suffixing ( −i , and several others). There is no rule in these languages on how many secondary roots can be derived from a single root; some roots have few, but other roots have many, not all of which are necessarily in current use. Consider

6510-472: The sacred breastplate. Most of the Talmudic rabbis, and Josephus , following the belief that Urim meant "lights", argued that the rituals involving Urim and Thummim involved questions being answered by great rays of light shining out of certain jewels on the breastplate; each jewel was taken to represent different letters, and the sequence of lighting thus would spell out an answer (though there were 22 letters in

6603-571: The seer stones and the Urim and Thummim. Smith also said he used the Urim and Thummim to assist him in receiving other divine revelations , including some of the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants and portions of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible . Only Oliver Cowdery is claimed to have attempted to use them to receive his own revelation. Many Latter Day Saints believe that Smith's Urim and Thummim were functionally identical to

6696-763: The source of trial by fire and water among the Anglo-Saxons and later the Normans in England. The laws of Ine , King of the West Saxons, produced around 690, contains the earliest reference to ordeal in Anglo-Saxon law; however, this is the last and only mention of ordeal in Anglo-Saxon England until the 10th century. After the Conquest of 1066 , the Old English customs of proof were repeated anew and in more detailed fashion by

6789-467: The statements in the Talmud that the Urim and Thummim had by then been lost. Indeed, since the priestly source, which textual scholars date to a couple of centuries prior to the captivity, does not appear to know what the Urim and Thummim looked like, and there is no mention of the Urim and Thummim in the deuteronomic history beyond the death of David , scholars suspect that use of them decayed some time before

6882-551: The syntactic environment. The ways in which these roots gain lexical category are discussed in Distributed Morphology and the Exoskeletal Model . Theories adopting a category-neutral approach have not, as of 2020, reached a consensus about whether these roots contain a semantic type but no argument structure, neither semantic type nor argument structure, or both semantic type and argument structure. In support of

6975-479: The term "root" is also used to describe the word without its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter , but the lexical root chat . Inflectional roots are often called stems . A root, or a root morpheme , in the stricter sense, may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem. The traditional definition allows roots to be either free morphemes or bound morphemes . Root morphemes are

7068-434: The tools of etymology . Secondary roots are roots with changes in them, producing a new word with a slightly different meaning. In English, a rough equivalent would be to see conductor as a secondary root formed from the root to conduct . In abjad languages, the most familiar of which are Arabic and Hebrew , in which families of secondary roots are fundamental to the language, secondary roots are created by changes in

7161-460: The trumpet, blow the horn’, from Biblical Hebrew תרועה ‎ t'rū`å ‘shout, cry, loud sound, trumpet-call’, in turn from ר-ו-ע ‎ √r-w-`." and it describes the suffix. Decompositional generative frameworks suggest that roots hold little grammatical information and can be considered "category-neutral". Category-neutral roots are roots without any inherent lexical category but with some conceptual content that becomes evident depending on

7254-480: The turf falls on the accused's head, the accused person is pronounced guilty. The ordeals of fire and water in England likely have their origin in Frankish tradition, as the earliest mention of the ordeal of the cauldron is in the first recension of the Salic Law in 510. Trial by cauldron was an ancient Frankish custom used against both freedmen and slaves in cases of theft, false witness and contempt of court, where

7347-469: The use of the ordeal in Anglo-Saxon England , though the period's fullest account of ordeal practices is found in an anonymous legal text written sometime in the 10th century. According to this text, usually given the title Ordal , the water had to be close to boiling temperature, and the depth from which the stone had to be retrieved was up to the wrist for a 'one-fold' ordeal and up to the elbow for

7440-478: Was abolished by Emperor Louis the Pious in 829. The practice reappeared in the Late Middle Ages : in the Dreieicher Wildbann of 1338, a man accused of poaching was to be submerged in a barrel three times and to be considered innocent if he sank, and guilty if he floated. Ordeal by water was associated with the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, although an inverse of most trials by ordeal; if

7533-572: Was accused of adultery with Bishop Ælfwine of Winchester but proved her innocence by walking barefoot unharmed over red-hot plowshares. During the First Crusade , the French mystic Peter Bartholomew allegedly went through the ordeal by fire in 1099 by his own choice to disprove a charge that his claimed discovery of the Holy Lance was fraudulent. He died as a result of his injuries. Trial by ordeal

7626-638: Was adopted in the 13th century by the Byzantine successor states the Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus ; Michael Angold speculates this legal innovation was most likely through "the numerous western mercenaries in Byzantine service both before and after 1204." It was used to prove the innocence of the accused in cases of treason and use of magic to affect the health of the emperor. The most famous case where this

7719-454: Was an ordeal to confirm or refute suspected guilt; if the Urim was selected it meant guilt, while selection of the Thummim would mean innocence. According to classical rabbinical literature , in order for the Urim and Thummim to give an answer, it was first necessary for the individual to stand facing the fully dressed high priest, and vocalise the question briefly and in a simple way, though it

7812-402: Was an ancient judicial practice by which the guilt or innocence of the accused (called a "proband" ) was determined by subjecting them to a painful, or at least an unpleasant, usually dangerous experience. In medieval Europe , like trial by combat , trial by ordeal, such as cruentation , was sometimes considered a "judgement of God " ( Latin : jūdicium Deī , Old English : Godes dōm ):

7905-673: Was believed that fire had an association with truth and hence with asha . In ancient India , the trial by fire was known as agnipariksha , in which Agni , the Fire God, would be invoked by a priest using mantras . After the invocation, a pyre would be built and lit, and the accused would be asked to sit on it. According to Hindu mythology , the Fire God would preserve the accused if they were innocent, if not, they would be burned to ashes. Trial by boiling oil has been practiced in villages in certain parts of West Africa , such as Togo . There are two primary versions of this trial. In one,

7998-428: Was considered guilty. Residents of Madagascar could accuse one another of various crimes, including theft, Christianity, and especially witchcraft, for which the ordeal of tangena ( Cerbera manghas ) was routinely obligatory. In the 1820s, ingestion of the poisonous nut caused about 1000 deaths annually. This average rose to around 3000 annual deaths between 1828 and 1861. Ancient Liberian cultures practiced

8091-579: Was employed was when Michael Palaiologos was accused of treason: he avoided enduring the red-iron by saying he would only hold it if the Metropolitan Phokas of Philadelphia could take the iron from the altar with his own hands and hand it to him. However, the Byzantines viewed trial by ordeal with disgust and considered it a barbarian innovation at odds with Byzantine law and ecclesiastical canons. Angold notes, "Its abolition by Michael Palaiologos

8184-404: Was healing or festering. This was still an isolated practice in remote 12th-century Catholic churches. A suspect would place their hand in the boiling water. If after three days God had not healed their wounds, the suspect was guilty of the crime. The ordeal of cold water has a precedent in the 13th law of the Code of Ur-Nammu (the oldest known surviving code of laws) and the second law of

8277-406: Was less common but still occurred. A notable case was that of Gero, Count of Alsleben , whose daughter married Siegfried II, Count of Stade . Ordeal by fire was one form of torture . The ordeal of fire typically required that the accused walk a certain distance, usually 9 feet (2.7 metres) or a certain number of paces, usually three, over red-hot plowshares or holding a red-hot iron. Innocence

8370-699: Was not necessary for it to be loud enough for anyone else to hear it. Maimonides explains that the High Priest would stand facing the Ark of the Covenant with the inquirer behind him, facing the Priest's back. After the inquirer asked his question, the Holy Spirit would immediately overcome the Priest and he would see the letters protruding in a prophetic vision. The Talmudic rabbis argued that Urim and Thummim were words written on

8463-576: Was sometimes established by a complete lack of injury, but it was more common for the wound to be bandaged and re-examined three days later by a priest, who would pronounce that God had intervened to heal it, or that it was merely festering —in which case the suspect would be exiled or put to death . One famous story about the ordeal of plowshares concerns the English King Edward the Confessor 's mother, Emma of Normandy . According to legend, she

8556-423: Was the first king who explicitly outlawed trials by ordeal as they were considered irrational ( Constitutions of Melfi ). In England, things started to change with King Henry III (1220). From the twelfth century, the ordeals started to be generally disapproved and they were discontinued during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although papal authority had stood against ordeals generally since Innocent III,

8649-417: Was universally acclaimed." In 1498, Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola , the leader of a reform movement in Florence who claimed apocalyptic prophetic visions, attempted to prove the divine sanction of his mission by undergoing a trial by fire. The first of its kind in over 400 years, the trial was a fiasco for Savonarola, since a sudden rain doused the flames, canceling the event and taken by onlookers as

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