In other news

Not sure what to do with this except post it. Yesterday I was talking with Yair about kids' books and I learned the Hebrew word for Vampire, Arpad. I was immediately curious, since it is a good Hebrew-sounding word and not a loan word from a European language. The word arpad, it turns out, is a hepax legomenon (sole usage) of the Babylonia Talmud, maybe an aramaic word. ("Arpada" is used as an Aramaic translation for the Hebrew "atalef" or "bat" in the Aramaic translation of the Bible called Targum Yonatan. But the Targum Yonatan on the five books of Moses, according to Wikipedia, should more properly be called "pseudo-Yonatan" or the "Yerushalmi Targum" and, probably, does not date any earlier than the 8th Century of the Common Era, therefore the Targum may be using the Talmud's word and not the other way around. Got it?)
The very cryptic and wonderful use of the word arpad in the Talmud comes as the rabbis are trying to figure out what another animal is, a bardalis, and are running through various possibilities. Could it be a hyena (tsabua)? Could the word bardalis mean the female hyena? (BK 16a)
"The male tsabua after seven years turns into a bat, the bat after seven years turns into an arpad, the arpad after seven years turns into a kimmosh (species of thorn?), the kimmosh after seven years turns into a thorn, the thorn after seven years turns into a demon. The spine of a man after seven years turns into a snake, so shouldn't he (the man?) bow while saying the blessing 'We bow to You.'"
I just love the idea of these hard desert creatures transmuting until finally they are refined down into a thorn which has one job alone and does it very well, and then into pure, incorporeal malevolence, a demon. And that the redactor tacked on to this associative serpent the hallucinatory vision of our spines becoming snakes (!!) makes it all the more twisted.
It reminds me of the Kimya Dawson song "treehugger" that my kids love. "In the sea there is a fish, a fish that has a secret wish, a wish to be a big cactus with a pink flower on it."
Who knows what the Talmud meant by an "arpad" but the fact that it ends up after all its shapeshifting as a desert demon is suggestive. In my quick search of the relevant dictionaries I couldn't find arpad used to mean anything other than a species of bat until the twentieth century when some Gothic-minded Hebraist with a really heavy duty Talmudic education wanted a word for "vampire" and pulled "arpad" nearly out of thin air. It would be interesting to know if there were Hebrew vampire stories prior to the twentieth century and if so what word was used.
Now, I should go write some fiction though I can't imagine writing anything better than
"The male tsabua after seven years turns into a bat, the bat after seven years turns into an arpad, the arpad after seven years turns into a kimmosh..."