In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver encounters various creatures speaking fictional languages long thought to be mere gibberish. Irving Rothman, a scholar of English literature, now contends that Swift, who learned Hebrew while a university student, employed variations of that language to create his invented tongues. Hayah Goldlist-Eichler writes:

One piece of evidence is straightforward: the alphabet in the land of giants—the Brobdingnags—consists of 22 letters, as does the Hebrew alphabet. . . .

[But] Rothman says his strongest evidence is his interpretation of the book’s use of “Yahoo,” [the name of] a human-like species described as wild and irrational. “[The Yahoos] represent . . . the bestial element in man—the unenlightened, unregenerate, irrational element in human nature,” according to Rothman.

He noted earlier interpretations suggesting the word comes from the four-letter holy Hebrew name of god, written YHWH and pronounced Yahweh. . . According to Rothman, [however,] the Yahoos . . . are referred to as “Hnea Yahoo,” and the word Hnea, if read right-to-left, as Hebrew is read, is the word “eyn“—the Hebrew word for “not.”

“Those beasts are the opposite of God and the antithesis of God,” explained Rothman.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.