2023-Mar-15, Wednesday

dorchadas: (Death Goth)
I don't speak Hebrew, I can just read the text and know the meaning of a few words thanks to knowing the prayers. But a couple nights ago while we were lying in bed, [instagram.com profile] sashagee turns to me and shows me a picture on her phone from a webcomic, with a woman in fashionable clothes portentously saying:
הגדול‎ הנחש
ha-naḥash ha-gadol
and asked me what it was. I could read it, and while I knew that "ha-gadol" means "the great," I had to look up what the first word meant. It should have come to me immediately, though, because it's a rather infamous word:
וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה יְה אֱלֹהִים; וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל-הָאִשָּׁה, אַף כִּי-אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן
v'ha-naḥash hayah arum mikol ḥayat ha-sadeh asher asah YHWH elohim, v'yomer el ha-isha, af ki amar elohim lo toḥlu mikol eitz ha-gan
"Now the serpent was the most crafty of all the beasts the LORD G-d had made, and he said to the woman, G-d has said you shall not eat of every tree in the Garden."
-Genesis 3:1
It means "The Great Serpent."

I might start reading the comic [instagram.com profile] sashagee is reading, honestly. It's called The Last Bloodline and from what she said it's extremely Vampire: the Masquerade. All vampires descend back to an original vampire cursed by (a) god--Artemis in this case--and live throughout the world in different groups based on animals. She mentioned they were tied to specific animals, though the only ones I remember is that the Korean vampires are frog-themed and the Ghanaian vampires are locust-themed, and that they call themselves the Children of Lilith (בני לילין b'nei lilim I assume). She reads a lot of Webtoons. Maybe this one will be my in.

Oh, I almost forgot--hilariously she said that there were several comments saying that the Hebrew was backwards, and it had obviously been edited before she saw it. If I had seen the original version I would have been trying to read לודגה שחנה lodgah shaḥanah and would have gotten nowhere.