Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Ian Hutchesson" <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

>Ian, your case is not as good as it seems.
>
>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.

You of course are a believer of the idea of ease of lightning striking twice
in the one place.

>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 ;-),

I have that problem. I was looking at both -- for strangely enough the top
half of each looks surprisingly similar in the epigraphy.

>and a damaged aleph
>could well look like a beyt,

Sorry, Peter, from the epigraphy this is not true. An alef can look a bit
like an X or an N, neither of which has much in common with a bet.

>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),

(As Josephus used the Vorlage of both Sam/Kgs & Chr, being after the
Chronicler's time may be extremely late. And when was the LXX versions of
these books done?)

>we don't know what letter shapes were in use at the time. Not
>necessarily just like the DSS ones.

There is a surprising diversity of letter shapes according to the different
scripts. It doesn't seem to change the basic problem.

>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. I know Koreans with surnames like Lee,
>Park and Song, all perfectly good English words, does that mean these
people
>cannot really be Korean? Also, for all we know the Philistines may have
>become Semitic speaking by the time of David.

The Philistine onomasticon has been growing with more finds of, recognitions
of, Philistine epigraphy. While lxmy is clearly to be found in Hebrew it
does not match what I have seen of Philistine names. (See Garbini: I
Filistei) To argue it being Philistine, one would have to show some
justification, otherwise it probably should be seen as suggested from byt
h-lxmy.


Ian