Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

I was about to put finger to keyboard to answer Dave and Joe 
concerning Greek syntax. Then I realised, this is b-hebrew not 
b-greek, what are we doing discussing Greek here? OK, it may be 
relevant if it sheds light on the meaning of the underlying Hebrew, 
but this can hardly be the case with late variant texts of the Greek 
NT, where a LXX quotation has been adapted.

So just one point in reply to Dave: If the author of Mark was indeed a 
Palestinian Jew, he would have known the then traditional 
pronunciation of this phrase, as well as (or very likely rather than) 
its written form. Probably, though of course not certainly, the 
pronunciation he heard would have been the same as the Masoretes later 
wrote down. How that would relate to the author's intended meaning of 
the phrase is less certain - especially as in poetry, for metrical 
reasons, there is commonly a mismatch between semantics and rhythm.

Peter Kirk