Talk:Final Letter of Rabbi Tarphon

Chris: If Tarphon was dictating, who was he dictating to? Is that important?

Noah: Er... well, he seems to have lost his eyes, so one presumes it would be tough for him to write it himself. He does refer to ". . .we, the only remaining members. . ." so presumably there were others down there with him. The mermen said they saw, 800 years prior, "humans breathing water were seen entering an underwater cave, and then leaving the cave, after which there was a great tumult on the surface, and blood flowed into the sea." So I think we can gather that there were a couple of guys down there, but they didn't make it very far...

Chris: So, you're saying it's not important...?

Noah: Important, how? It might very well be important who was in his retinue, but, uh, I don't see any way for us to know who it was at the moment. At least now we know how the Earthly Beauty's hair came to end up in Can's trousers.

Scott: Gershom read the text of the letter to the jug while under the influence of a Detect Magic spell in order to figure out whether any of the phrases were, in Hebrew, Power Words. They weren't, quite-- upon reaching Tarphon's rhetorical question about money, the jug answered "no" and the numeral changed to "19". So apparently the jug plays 20 questions, explaining Tarphon's reference to "Simon bar Kokhba's Game". That could be all there is to it, but:

• we don't know whether the questions pertain only to opening the jug safely, or to anything at all,
• we don't have a clue what's in there, if the 20 questions thing is only for opening the jug, and hence don't know whether what's there is being kept in or whether we're being kept out (weal or woe!)
• we really want to go off to Samothrace

... so we're leaving it behind, sealed in a wall in a portion of the basement or somewhere equally safe. Gershom can barely articulate how much he does not want to waste those questions, including by foolish people who ask rhetorical questions nearby, like he did.

Gershom thinks it should be safe for him to open it-- the reference to Simon bar Kokhba was a coded encouragement to a fellow Jew to use "20 Questions" to open the jar, rather than a discouragement or a failure to pass any information.

Answers:

1. words required
2. person?
3. thing
4. tarphon's letter
5. not of religious significance
6. inorganic
7. not man-made
8. bigger than jar
9. bigger than mansion
10. not proper noun
11. not the world
12. bigger than a mountain
13. bigger than the world
14. not the sky, but maybe
15. not referred to in the first five lines of the torah
16. not used
17. not used
18. not used
19. not used