Got to see lots of great people, as per usual. Met Brother Guy Consolmagno, who is, in fact, every bit as cool, nice, smart, witty, funny, and just generally mensch-like as I'd been led to believe.

felis_sidus -- you'd really like him. I mean, if you were looking, and he wasn't a Jesuit monk, I'd totally try to set the two of you up. He's an astronomer for the Vatican, and is the curator of the Vatican's meteorite collection -- so, Mom, Dad, when we go to Italy and want to see Castel Gandalfo, he's the guy we want to contact. We asked him about it, and he said that Castel Gandalfo (where he lives and works six months of the year) isn't open to the public and that you have to be friends with someone to get in. Then he pointed out that he happens to be someone, and he's a pretty friendly fellow. So we'll email him later on and see what we can do.

He had a bunch of funny stories about being a religious scientist, and both the conflicts, but, more importantly, the utter lack of conflicts that he's encountered. He talked about how, just after he took up religious orders, he was talking to a fellow scientist who he'd known for a while, and mentioned that he was now a Jesuit, and the temperature in the room dropped about ten degrees. Okay, he'd be expecting this might happen, because of the anti-religious strain in science. After a while, the other scientist asked him if he'd always been Roman Catholic, and he said that, yes, his father was an Italian Catholic, hence "Consolmagno", and his mother was an Irish Catholic, and he'd, yes, ALWAYS been Catholic.

And the temperature in the room went right back to normal. See, the other scientist had always thought that Guy was Jewish, like him, so thought that "becoming a Jesuit" meant "rejecting Judaism". The whole "being a monk" thing, though -- THAT was totally cool.

In totally unrelated thoughts, except that they tangentially refer to religion and Italy, I was working more on my Purim Schpeil that I posted yesterday, and Lis mentioned the part of the Sistine Chapel which shows the Book of Esther has Haman being crucified, not hanged.

And I thought about this for a bit.

Now, I've always assumed that Haman and his wife and ten sons were hanged to death by the neck with a noose.

But does the language support crucifixion, as well?

I mean, it says that Haman had a fifty-cubit high (about 25 yards or 25 meters if you prefer -- those aren't the same, but "cubit" is a pretty approximate measurement anyway) "eitz" built on which Mordecai would be hung as an execution.

"Eitz" means, literally, "tree", but, in this case, means, "large wooden structure on which you hang someone in order to publicly execute him, or her." "Gallows" is a perfectly reasonable translation for this.

But would "crucifix" also be a reasonable translation for it? I don't have a Hebrew megillah, and my Hebrew's not good enough to tell, either. But what verb for "hang" do they use, and is it consistent with both being hanged from the neck until dead, AND with being hung off of a crucifix? What other usages of "eitz" do we have, and is it generally used, in this context, to mean "gallows"? Or could other execution styles be reasonable?

And, finally, what kind of execution styles were in vogue in the Persian Empire during that time?

My Hebrew is nowhere near good enough to tell, but I have a suspicion that Michaelangelo's interpretation may be a perfectly reasonable one.

If both interpretations of what "eitz" could be are plausible, it raises the question of why only the "gallows" interpretation has lasted in Jewish thought. Of course, a moment's thought provides a reasonable answer -- because if every year, Jews tended to portray an image of them having some guy crucified, it'd probably not end well for ANYBODY.