Biblical Hebrew Forum

[lizfried AT umich.edu]

Dear Peter,
I don't have Porten's book Archives here with me. But
in his TAD, he doesn't know what it refers to exactly, and just
translates it "officials." 
I don't think there was a city Tripoli in the Persian period
because each city was minting its own coins separately. There are
coins for each of them: Arvad, Tyre, Sidon. There are no
coins labeled Tripoli.
Liz 

Quoting Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>:

> I realise that this may be technically off topic for the b-hebrew list
> because it relates to an Aramaic section of the Hebrew Bible, but maybe
> someone can help anyway:
> 
> The word +AR:P.:LFY") (tarpelaye') in Ezra 4:9 seems debatable. As it occurs
> after a list of offices but before a list of ethnicities, it could be either
> an office or an ethnicity. So RSV translates "officials". But BDB suggests
> that this is a gentilic and probably derived from a Persian form of (:ABA
> NAH:ARAH "beyond the River" (v.10). This seems plausible, cf. KJV
> "Tarpelites". But NIV translates "of Tripolis" and The Message as "from
> Tripolis", presumably referring to ancient city (mentioned in 2 Maccabees
> 14:1), now Tripoli or Tarabulus in Lebanon. (Also apparently using
> "Tripolis" are the Easy to Read Version,
> http://www.wbtc.com/articles/downloads/bible_downloads/ERV15Ezr.pdf)
> 
> My question is, is this understanding plausible? And if so, does it depend
> on a dating to the Hellenistic period of these words recorded by Ezra,
> quoted as from a letter by a Persian officer? For the name Tripolis is
> clearly Greek. Did the city already exist and have this Greek name in the
> Persian period? According to http://phoenicia.org/history.html, the city was
> founded only in the early 4th century BCE, so after the time of Artaxerxes I
> who is probably the king to whom this letter was addressed; certainly there
> is no clear record of its earlier history, even according to the modern
> city's own website, http://www.tripoli-lebanon.com/.
> 
> But it seems odd that conservative Christian translations like NIV and The
> Message would choose an interpretation which seems to depend on a late
> dating of the text, and which appears to conservative readers to be an
> anachronism.
> 
> Peter Kirk
> peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
> http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
>  
> 
> 
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