Ben Aliv
| Ben Aliv | |
|---|---|
| City | |
| Country | Nouvelle Alexandrie |
| Region | Wechua Nation |
| Historic region | Israat, Anglia & Israat |
| Foundation | Undocumented |
| Cult center | Standing lamp of the Judahite rite |
| Liturgical language | Haifan |
Ben Aliv is a city of the Wechua Nation, a Region of Nouvelle Alexandrie. It was the older of the two historical cities of Israat, the eastern region of the former Commonwealth of Hamland whose people were of Yehudi descent, and the cultic seat of the Judahite rite native to that region.[1][2] While the senior court of the rite sat at the neighboring city of Judah, the rite's central object, a standing lamp of twelve mouths, was kept at Ben Aliv, and the households of the city tended it in unbroken rotation.[1]
The city is called the older of the two in the Israati sources, though no foundation date is recorded for it or for Judah.[1] Its distinction within the tradition was the lamp and the community that kept it. The rite held that the flame had never gone out and had never been carried, so that its continuity belonged to the place and to attendance at it rather than to any succession of persons, and the keepers were the households of the town, who stood the lamp's watches in turn and held no clerical rank for doing so.[1]
Ben Aliv passed through the same sovereignties as Israat itself: the Israati cities of the eastern marches, the Commonwealth of Hamland in whose region of Israat it stood, and the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, whose state of Anglia & Israat was governed from Judah.[2][3] On the dissolution of Caputia on 30.XV.1668 AN the Judahite rite ended as an organized body and the fate of the lamp went unrecorded.[1] Like neighboring Judah, the city lay unclaimed for a time before it was drawn into the expanding Wechua Nation, within which it lies as of 1760 AN, where the Faith of Inti is established.[2] In the football of the region it was represented by Hapoel Ben Aliv, a workers' club drawn from the same households that had kept the lamp.[4]
Name
The name is Haifan, the language in which the rite kept its liturgy and its reckoning tables, and carries the element ben, "son" or "child", the same word the rite used of its own members when it called one come of age a child of the obligation.[1] The Israati sources gloss that first element and leave the second unfixed, so that the city's name is read as a descent and its full sense is not recorded.
The standing lamp
The lamp of Ben Aliv is a standing vessel of twelve mouths, each tended in turn for two days, so that the twelve complete a month of twenty-four days under the Norton calendar and the vessel keeps the month as it burns.[1][5] The rite holds two things about it that admit of no proof, that it has never gone out and that it has never been carried. Its continuity rests on the testimony of the keepers, and the formula recited when the watch passed from one keeper to the next claimed no more than a keeper could attest, that the flame was burning when the keeper came to it and burning when the keeper left.[1]
What set the lamp apart within the wider Yehudi tradition was that it was fed and not passed. In the neighboring Yerenist usage every believer's candle was lit from another's, in a chain the church traced to a single fire kindled by its prophet, so that continuity traveled with persons.[6] The Judahite lamp was renewed in place, its oil replenished and its mouths trimmed, and its flame was never divided to kindle another; the obligation it imposed fell on the community of the town rather than on any believer.[1] From that difference between the fed lamp and the passed candle came the rite's claim on the two flames, that the prophet Yeren, passing through the east, had lit his own candle from a lamp already burning at Ben Aliv, so that the Yerenist succession began at the city and not at its prophet.[1][6]
The keeping was the work of the households of Ben Aliv. They stood the lamp's watches by a rota that named the household answerable for each turn, and a keeper who had finished a watch returned to the foot of the rota to await the next.[1] The keepers were not an order and held no rank, and the office conferred nothing beyond the duty to perform it. When a Hammish governor, wanting a standing body he could address, proposed to constitute the keepers as an office, the court at Judah refused him, and the keeping stayed with the households.[1] Among these households the rota did more than assign the watch, for it recorded a life: a birth added to a household's future turns, a coming of age made a member fit to stand them, a marriage joined the turns of two houses, and a death returned a turn to those who survived to keep it, so that events elsewhere marked as passages of the person were entered at Ben Aliv as changes in a household's liability to the lamp.[1] Of these the coming of age weighed most in the keeping town, for the watch it opened was the rite's central duty, and where other congregations marked the passage only with a name set down in their rolls, the households of Ben Aliv marked it by admitting a keeper.[1]
The completion of the round was kept as the month's close, a small assembly at which the households that had stood the month's watches were named and the rota for the coming month was read, the nearest the rite came to a standing congregation.[1] The rota was kept because the obligation required it, and its surviving fragments are the earliest population record of Israat: through the Alexandrian Flu of 1650 AN to 1652 AN the turns fell to fewer and fewer households, and at the close the community heard its own losses as the roll of names shortened from one month to the next.[1]
Not every year used the lamp alike. Under the Norton calendar the fifteenth month varies in length and is dropped altogether in a Qarbinion year, and only in an ordinary year do the lamp's round and the civil year close together.[1][5] In a long year the round is completed and begun again within the month, and in a Biternion year it is cut off at the sixth mouth; in a Qarbinion year the vessel stands unfed and unlit, the rota does not sit, and the town keeps the interval by attending nothing, so that a community whose whole obligation is attendance is required, once in the cycle, to attend nothing.[1]
The lamp stood at Ben Aliv and the court that governed the rite sat at Judah. The separation of the holy place from the seat of authority was held by the Israati writers to be deliberate.[1] Hammish administrators found it inconvenient and made several attempts to move the court to Ben Aliv or the lamp to Judah. Both were refused on the same ground, that the lamp could not be carried and the court would not sit where it could not be contradicted.[1]
A question the lamp raised was what would remain if it were lost, and on this question the city divided from the court. The dominant answer, associated with Judah, was that the lamp was a witness and not a source, so that its extinction would end the community's testimony without touching its obligations.[1] A minority at Ben Aliv held otherwise, that the flame was itself the thing kept and not a sign of it, and that a community out of its reach had lost the rite and not only its symbol.[1] The question stopped being academic when Israati families began to leave the region.
History
The recorded history of Ben Aliv runs through the successive sovereignties of Israat: the Israati cities of the eastern marches, the Commonwealth of Hamland in whose region of Israat the city stood, the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia whose state of Anglia & Israat was governed from Judah, and the Federation of Nouvelle Alexandrie into which the city was at last drawn.[2]
Origins and the older city
The origins of Ben Aliv are undocumented, and the Hammish surveys that first record the Israati cities give no foundation date for either it or Judah.[1] The tradition of the Judahite rite places the lamp at Ben Aliv before the Hamlanders reached the eastern marches, tended by a community already established when the first settlers arrived, and on that account the Judahite congregations were the older population of Israat rather than settlers in it.[1] No external source corroborates the claim and none contradicts it. The earliest Hammish notices already treat the Israati temples as established institutions with recognized officers, which fixes a lower bound on their age without setting an upper one. Against the rite's account stood a migration hypothesis, advanced by Yerenist and Benacian writers alike, that the Israati had come from Benacia in an early and unrecorded movement and that the antiquity of the lamp was a later construction.[1] Historians of Hamland have not arbitrated between the two.[1]
Ben Aliv and Judah stood as the two cities of Israat, the one older and the seat of the cult, the other administratively senior and the seat of the court.[2] Israat was the original territory of the eastern marches, and the neighboring region of Anglia grew up to its west as Hamlanders settled the land toward the river.[3]
Under the Commonwealth of Hamland
Under the Commonwealth of Hamland, Israat was administered as a region, and Ben Aliv stood within it as the older of its two cities while the senior court sat at Judah.[2] The character of the city was set by the lamp and the community that kept it, a close and observant population from whose households the keepers were drawn. Its learning was preserved in the Israati collections, the body of commentary and responsa accumulated by the courts at Judah and Ben Aliv, and the city was the source of many of the rite's calendrical disputes and of the scholars who argued them.[1] Chief among these scholars was Eliav of Ben Aliv, remembered for his part in the disputes over the reckoning and for the observation, preserved in later hostile quotation, that a congregation will tolerate an obscure doctrine but not a feast kept on the wrong day.[1] The worst of those disputes is remembered as the divided feast, named by its consequences and left undated in the sources, when rival courts announced the correspondence differently and congregations kept the same festival on different days.[1]
During these generations some Israati families left the region in successive waves and settled the shores of Lake Morovia, joining the founding population of the Free State of Haifa.[2][7] The tradition of the rite remembered them as the lampless, and at Ben Aliv their going out was felt more sharply than at the court. The keepers of the lamp and the rural congregations of the interior held the stricter view, that a community placing itself beyond the reach of the lamp had abandoned the rite, against the Judah court's ruling that the observance could be carried; the schism was never resolved, only outlived.[1]
The Hammish Civil War and the Alexandrian Flu
The collapse of the Commonwealth brought the Hammish Civil War to the eastern marches, and Israat was contested ground through it. The disturbances in Israat were settled by mediation under the interim premier Donat Ravaillac, where the unrest in the Haifan lands was not, so that the two halves of the rite were handled differently in the same year.[1] The Israat Loyalists, drawn mostly from the rural populations of Anglia and Israat, fought as one component of the National Salvation Front, a Pallisican-backed umbrella that also gathered the Order of Rochefort and the labor syndicates.[2][8] The Alexandrian Flu of 1650 AN to 1652 AN, which killed between thirty and sixty percent of the population of the eastern Commonwealth, fell heavily on the Israati communities.[1] In these years the Israati collections began to disperse.[2]
Under Caputia and after
Out of the collapse of Hamland arose the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, and Israat, joined administratively with the neighboring region of Anglia, was constituted as the state of Anglia & Israat with its capital at Judah.[3] The established church of the kingdom was the Church of Caputia, and under it neither the Judahite rite nor the Yereni Church of the Anglian interior held standing.[2] The rite, already thinned by the emigration of the lampless and the mortality of the flu, declined through the years of the kingdom.[1]
Caputia was dissolved on 30.XV.1668 AN, and with the kingdom the Judahite rite ended as an organized body; the fate of the lamp is not recorded.[1] The city and its region lay unclaimed for a time thereafter. As with neighboring Judah, the Wechua Nation, expanding eastward after the Great Restoration of 1673 AN, in time brought Ben Aliv within its bounds. When the Wechua Nation joined with Alduria to form the federation that became Nouvelle Alexandrie, the city passed with it.[2][9] There the Faith of Inti is established, and the Yehudi-descended inhabitants of the city fall within the residual category of the regional census returns.[2]
Geography
Ben Aliv lies near Judah in the far west of the Wechua Nation, the two cities together forming the historical core of Israat.[2] The Wechua Nation is the most inland of the Keltian regions and reaches the sea only around Judah, near the lands of the former Caputia.[2] Beyond the two cities lay the rural districts of the Israati interior, from which the rite drew its more austere congregations and, in the years of the civil war, the Israat Loyalists.[1][8]
Sports
The football of Ben Aliv reflected the Yehudi inheritance of Israat. The city was represented by Hapoel Ben Aliv, a founding member of the Regional League Championship, the third tier of the Hammish league system.[4] Its Hapoel name, meaning "the worker," marked it as a laboring and trade club, set against the Maccabi name borne by Maccabi Judah at the regional seat. Its following came from the working households of the town rather than the professional families of the capital.[4] The club drew from the same close community that had tended the lamp, and its name and its rival's were themselves relics of the rite, for Maccabi and Hapoel are the only Judahite vocabulary to have outlasted it.[1] The town's most prominent footballer, the Hammish international midfielder Hillel Antar, came up not at the club but at Hamlet O'Groppa United and never played for Hapoel Ben Aliv.[4][10]
Notable people
- Eliav of Ben Aliv, scholar of the Judahite rite, remembered for the disputes over the reckoning
- Hillel Antar, association footballer, a Hammish international born in the city
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj Judahite rite.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Judah.
- ^ a b c Anglia & Israat.
- ^ a b c d Hapoel Ben Aliv.
- ^ a b Norton calendar.
- ^ a b Yerenism.
- ^ Free State of Haifa.
- ^ a b National Salvation Front.
- ^ Wechua Nation.
- ^ Hillel Antar.
