#hanucah

Scholars have discussed the primary and secondary sources of the dreidel (dreidelology) to discern 4 separate traditions behind the present composite representations of the Thanksgiving/Hanucah gambling device that caused civil unrest on November 28 2013, and was banned from further Thanksgiving celebrations for a further 79,043 years. 

 In antiquity the N-source (nesh), claiming to be the first letter of the quadronymic - n-g-h-p/s (see Atbash 2003 for the metathesising p/s sybillant/percussive variant) was a late but usurpative tradition, focusing on the Neronian/Claudian persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Rome in 54 c.e. The euphemistically proposed Nes - miracle was substituted for "Nero". 

 The G- source (gadol) was (according to Schlumpfelpeter, R., and Clooney, G., "The inner workings of Dreidelism: Gravity Defiance in Early Jewish Gyroscopy”, Journal of Spin, August, 2014) an accretion of palaeo-greek in the light of the Maccabean revolt and the reaction against Hellenism. The gimmel of gadol ('great') stands for gyne - "woman" - but of course the inclusion of women in the story of the Maccabean revolt is notably lacking, and feminist scholars Phyllis Dribble and Paula Shmendrickson have championed the earlier reading.

 The H of hayah has been identified with an H-source, the hochmah or wisdom tradition. The personnification of wisdom again signals a sapiential - mystical approach to the dreidel, which von Rod has linked to apocalyptic and eschatological streams. The hidden wisdom revealed through the spinning of the one-sided dreidel not only confounds our perception, but catches us in the luminosity of a menorah revealing the inner nature of the dreidel - fire, wood and turning upon oneself - a clear prefiguration of ecstatic union with the Ein Sof. That this tradition has yet to be anchored with texts of the time and not the 12th century promulgation of the Zohar has raised suspicions of over-interpretation, but the case of a unique H-source is persuasive for many scholars on H-Net.

The S/P metathesis continues to puzzle scholars. The wording from the Cairo Car Park Geniza suggested an original P, but new discoveries in the Qumran kibbutz gift shop suggest a "made in India" S (mistyped for @) as a marginal reading. Based on the lectio difficile potior principle, the orginal "@" reading has been favoured by Briggs, Briggs and Briggs (the Brown-Driver lexicon of numismatic computation) as an early anticipation of @HGN - the twitter account of Haganah, the IDF precursor.

 Scholar are largely agreed on the conflation of four one-sided dreidels into the present composite four-sided version. Awaiting further study are the economic and social consequences of using chocolate money as a system of finance and taxation.