Biblical Hebrew Forum

[ben.crick AT argonet.co.uk (Ben Crick)]

On Tue  7 Jun 2005 (14:12:57), kwrandolph AT email.com wrote:
> How liver fits in there, I don't see the connection, only speculation.
> We can't rule out the possibility that it is a loan word that happened
> to have the same consonants as weighty.

 It may be that the liver is the heaviest of the various offals in the body,
 so it is the "weighty organ". It was also considered to be of importance
 in "reading the omens" in Hepatoscopy, "looking in the liver": as did the
 king of Babylon in Ezekiel 21:26, where  Ra'aH BaKKaBeD is seen as the
 equivalent of consulting the teraphim and other occult practices. He did
 this with some urgency LiQ:SaM-QaSeM; so it was a "weighty matter".

 Life, of course, depends on the liver...  ;-)

 Shalom
 Ben
-- 
 Revd Ben Crick, BA CF                                       ZFC Hf
 <ben.crick AT NOSPAM.argonet.co.uk>
 232 Canterbury Road, Birchington, Kent, CT7 9TD (UK)
*Acorn RPC700, RO4.03+Kinetic Card, 126MB, 4.3GB HD, x32CDROM
*Castle Iyonix X100, RO5.06, 600MHz XScale processor, 512MB DDR RAM,
 114GB HD, CD-RW, etc. *Ethernet networking.