Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Raymond de Hoop <rdehoop AT keyaccess.nl>]

Peter, 

A few remarks in answer to your posting.

> Firstly, you assume a single copyist. Rather more likely is two generations
> of copyists who damaged the 2 Samuel text: the first who copied hurriedly,
> added a second )RGYM (that word starts with aleph, not ayin), and perhaps
> wrote BYT and )T unclearly; and a second who tried to make sense of the text
> he saw, which may have been damaged as well as written unclearly.

Isn't this hypothesis upon hypothesis?

> 
> Secondly, we are talking about an aleph, not an ayin, in )T as well (your
> `eynayim seem to see ayin's all over the place, Ian ;-), and a damaged aleph
> could well look like a beyt, with the yod being added to regularise the
> spelling. Anyway, since we don't know exactly what time these errors were
> made (except that they must have been after the Chronicler's time but before
> LXX), we don't know what letter shapes were in use at the time. Not
> necessarily just like the DSS ones.


The interchange of aleph and bet is very unlikely, not only with an
alphabeth of the DSS, but also with the ancient Hebrew alphabet. Just
compare the table of ancient Semitic alphabeths in ANEP, p. 88 (fig. 286).
 
> Thirdly, just because LXMY means "my bread" in Hebrew, that is no reason to
> argue that it could not be a Philistine name, especially as we know almost
> nothing of the Philistine language.

You're right.

Nevertheless, I just wondered what's wrong with assuming that one scribe or
the other (and very likely the Chronicler) _deliberately_ changed the text
by changing some letters from the text he used as a source inorder to get a
correct version?

Greetings,

Raymond

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Dr Raymond de Hoop          Tel.: ++31 50 553 0115
Boeiersingel 11
NL-9745 CA Groningen
The Netherlands             E-mail: rdehoop AT keyaccess.nl


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