Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 17/11/2004 00:26, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Yitzhak:
>
> I originally noticed this pattern while reading through Ezra and Nehemiah. I 
> do not have access to later writings, so I don’t know how they treated the 
> pronunciations. But I can speculate (with the best of them   :-(  ).
>
> I first noticed it with the transliteration of Artaxerxes: the first Xi in 
> the name corrosponds to the Hebrew and Aramaic X$, which to the Greek ear 
> probably sounded like an /x/, but the second one in Hebrew, such as all the 
> times in Nehemiah and in Ezra 7:7, 11 were written with a samekh, while Ezra 
> in his Aramaic portions, e.g. Ezra 4:4, 7:21 transliterated the /x/ with a 
> sin/shin.
>  

The name is of course Persian. The Greek forms probably derive from the 
Persian, possibly through an Aramaic form as Aramaic was the court 
language of the time. It is very unlikely that the Greek spelling 
derives from the Hebrew.


--
Peter Kirk
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peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
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