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Anonymous
ON THE IDOLATRY OF THE NINIVITES: AN
UNPLUBLISHED CRITIQUE IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES AND
LITERATURES

When Hebraica transformed into The American Journal of Semitic

Languages and Literatures in 1895, partly to more fully comfort a
philanthropic widow revolting against the indifference of heaven, now mere
Newtonian space, and partly to flee from what was once a vocational pastime
beginning in Baghdad which in the end became a looming specter pursuing him
even until his last moments, the chair of the Hebrew and the Language Cognates
Department in the Baptist Union Theological Seminary at the University of
Chicago stepped down from his position as Managing Editor of the prestigious
academic project he founded primarily to preserve the rigor of Biblical and
Talmudic philology. In the last few years of his life, before his most untimely
death, however, he sporadically spat out crumbs of philosophical reflections
concerning findings he deduced throughout his studies in Iraq. In 1901, he died of
lung cancer. The following obituary note, written by a critical rival who shall
remain unnamed, remained unpublished for years because his proposal was
rejected by The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures
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for going against the wishes of the deceased professor’s family. The author of the
unfinished obituary note has finally given us permission “to plagiarize” this lost
elegy, as he has dubbed our endeavor—which includes what are believed to be the
professor’s last, authentic Assyriological meditations—via our perfect
“republication,” but only under the condition that this disclaimer be made. It is
presented here in its original form, with certain emendations so as to not conflict
with the wishes of the family of the deceased, now also granting us permission to
publish this piece. –1904

On January 10, 1906, [the deceased professor] died in agonizing

pain. No one knows what he saw as he rattled out his last breaths.
His home physician found two carefully designed clay coins on his
desk, as well as a Latin translation of Theaetetus, which the same
professor calls an abyss on counterfeiting and death elsewhere, as is
well-attested1. The inside of the front cover of the dialogue contains
the following note, not permitted by his family to be published
verbatim since they contain plagiarisms which were intended to be
properly revised and organized when finally published in The American
Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures: 2

1
No such assertion by the deceased professor has been verified by The American
Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures.—1904
2 The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures confirms that it
intended to publish a polished version of the findings because of the vital, revolutionary
philosophical musings on ancient polytheism and idolatry it furnishes. The findings were
rejected by the editors of the journal at the time on the grounds that its empirical
information was intermixed with metaphors and other “dangerous” manipulations of
language.—1904
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On the morning of November 3, 1876 in Bagdad, a Young Turk split the

Al Sinak bridge in two in a continual effort to instigate a military coup against
ever-modernizing Ottoman policies. As rescuers fished out bodies from the Tigris
River, a fortuitous archeological find was unearthed deep in the belly of the ancient
waters: two coins (labeled C1 and C2 by colleagues and myself) made of iron pyrite
and dating back to approximately the 8th century BC.
Sides A of C1&2 (C1-A and C2-A) circumscribe a seven-pointed star with a
dying gourd-tree in its middle. Some claim that these are poor imitations of
Ishtar’s symbol, perhaps crafted by an apprentice or child. Others claim that they
are an equivalent of Lelwani’s ὀβολός amongst a secret class of Assyria’s
intellectual and religious elite. But these claims neglects sides B of the coins (C1-B
and C2-B): the image of a man, one hand touching the circumference of the coin,
the other hand holding a small circle. The circle in the man’s hand is so small and
time-worn that its content is controversial. I myself first thought it was a single
seed of an undisclosed crop sporting unfortunate scratches at the hand of time.
Upon closer inspection, however, I discovered that C1 and C2 are identical, except
in this way: the circle held by the man in C1-B circumscribes either a seven-
pointed or an eight-pointed star. In C2-B, the circle held by the man, most
certainly circumscribes a seven-sided star.
I agree that the ambiguity of the star on C1-B is a chance corruption by time.
For only then do the two coins make sense together: the small circle in both C1-B
and C2-B is also a coin, in fact the very same coin that circumscribes the man, the
very same coin that I too hold in the palm of my hand. (I denote these coins-
within-coins as C1.i-B and C2.i-B).3 And so, I declare that I too am the man

3 A chart explaining the thoughts of the departed: C1-A: seven-pointed star with gourd,
and C2-A: seven-pointed star with gourd; C1-B: a man holding either a seven- or eight-
pointed star (C1.i-B), and C2-B: a man holding seven-pointed star (C2.i-B). Thus the
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bearing in his hand the very coin that bears him. That is to say, C1 and C2 are
Pascalian in nature, together depicting man as being both outside and inside of
infinitely redoubling narratives. Man is fractilized in all directions. Man finds
himself nowhere because he can only see exact and self-similar echoes of himself
everywhere. Thus, C1 and C2 herald the birth pangs of man’s awareness of the
irresolvable problems of perspective and infinity, an awareness which is at the same
time a prerequisite for Newtonian geometry, founded on the idea that the
derivative of a dimensionless point is indeed not impossible, and that in fact a
Euclidean point is pregnant with an infinity of infinite sets of structures.
Many find this conclusion unprofessional, but that is because they do not
understand the conclusion. Judging from the craftsmanship, the C1 and C2 are
from ancient Nineveh. Their technological and ideological superiority over other
artifacts before them signal the arrival of one of man’s first collective recognitions of
Being which, as religious history has shown, brought mankind out of his primitive
state of pagan idolatry. Furthermore, while I do not deny that the coins are
counterfeit pieces of money, they were nevertheless most certainly accepted and well-
circulated forms of currency in their time. And so, C1 and C2 also mark the
moment that man understood both that all of money is counterfeit by nature and
that all of nature is itself a counterfeit. In short, C1 and C2 prove…4
[The deceased professor] believes that the ambiguity of the
seven- or eight-sidedness of C1.i-B is the work of chance—when it is
in truth a manifesto. He anachronistically thinks the coins are a take
on Cervantes: just as the characters of Part 2 of Don Quixote hold in

man holds the coin that holds the man that holds the coin, and so on ad infinitum.—
1904
4 At the request of [the deceased professor’s] family, the author’s conclusions have been

omitted.—1904
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their hands Part 1 of the same fiction held is also in the reader’s
hands—thus bringing the true world of the reader into the author’s
fiction, and vice versa—so too, the coins C1&2 that I hold in my
hands are the same ones inside of the coins, C1.i&2.i-B. Therefore, for
[the deceased professor] the world is but an image.
But [the deceased professor] erroneous conflates the act of
idolizing with the act of idolatry. Idolizing, the seminal act of
paganism prior to the counterfeit coins, is not the conflation of image
with Being. On the contrary, it is the willful representation of what is
known to have no visible referent. Thus, the Ninevites’ earth-crafted
gods are the humble admission that man is but a flickering spark on
the surface of the raging Sun, mementos of the idol’s failure to
contain the uncontainable within understanding. The gender case in
some modern tongues faintly preserves this mythological take on
representation from times past. Its removal in modern language
systems is a symptom of our idolatry: that is, the puzzling belief that
representation is co-extensive with the represented, and the puzzling
belief that man’s eyes can pierce beyond the curtains of appearance.
The Abrahamic tradition’s refusal to represent Being is the post-
pagan attempt to trap an ocean in a river by believing it can know the
unknowable by naming it the unnamable. Such ideas are dangerous,
for they lead man to forget that the value of naming is the value of a
compass amidst an infinite ocean: in such pilgrimages, the only point
of orientation is the compass entrenched in the pilgrim’s hands.