Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

Karl, the problem with your hypothesis is that the text you are reading is
taken mostly from MSS of the 12th to 14th centuries CE. A large number of
MSS of the same text survive from the 3rd to 5th centuries CE, and all or
most of these attest to a different set of spellings e.g. KAFARNAOUM for
Capernaum and MAQQIAOS for Matthew - F being phi, Q theta - though again
NAZARET, with tau, for Nazareth. While it is not impossible that your late
MSS preserve an original set of readings for which the early MS tradition is
lost, it is surely more likely that the late MSS in fact reflect a late,
Byzantine spelling standardisation - from a period when phi, theta and chi
were certainly fricatives, as was beta (not sure about gamma and delta).
This might go back to the time when Judea and Galilee were part of the
Byzantine empire and so reflect regional pronunciations from that time. Or
it might be later still.

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-hebrew-
> bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Karl Randolph
> Sent: 03 June 2003 07:23
> To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] Are peh, taw and kaf aspirated in Biblical Hebrew?
> 
> I noticed when reading the Majority Text of the New Testament that place
> names in Judea were almost constantly written with the kaf written with a
> chi, peh a phi, and the taw with a theta, while those names from Galilee
> were sometimes written as in Judea, sometimes with kaf as a kappa, peh as
> a pi and taw with a tau. For example, Nazareth’s taw is written with a tau
> and not a theta, Capernaum the kaf with a kappa, the peh with a pi, the
> two taws in Matthew, the first with a tau, the second with a theta. (This
> raises a question for me: if the Majority Text is accurate enough as to
> preserve something as inconsequential as indications of a difference of
> pronunciation between Judea and Galilee, while the Nestlé / Aland text
> does not, could it be more accurate where it differs in other areas as
> well? But that’s off topic for this board.)
> 
> Is it not true that when spellings are fluid, that letters tend to remain
> stable in pronunciation, as when the German city of Stratteburg changed to
> Straßburg, but when spellings are static, the letters change
> pronunciations? So Hebrew, when it was no longer spoken by the majority of
> Jews, its spelling froze while the pronunciations changed, a change masked
> by the static spelling?
> 
> Karl W. Randolph.
> 
> 
> > Thanks for the information about Greek.
> > But I guess that people of that period transliterating
> > Hebrew into Greek, if peh, taw and kaf were at that time pronounced as
> > fricatives, would have chosen phi, theta and chi as the best fit. And it
> is
> > certainly not out of the question that the changes in Greek could have
> > prompted changes in how Hebrew was pronounced, but all the more so if
> Hebrew
> > was in fact dying as a spoken language.
> >
> > Peter Kirk
> > peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
> > http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
> >
> --
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