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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: "Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Gen22:13 YHWHYiReH
  • Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 13:08:23 +0100

On 15/08/2005 12:18, Read, James C wrote:


Hi Peter,

I usually pay little attention to the word separations which are arbitrary to say the least. ...


They are not arbitrary especially if we are referring to the Masoretic pointing and pronunciation of anything. The word divisions are fundamental to the Masoretic system of pointing and accents, as is clear from the rule that there is one accent (or sometimes a pair of accents which go together) on each word (or group of words separated by maqqef). This implies that the Masoretes, when writing down the text as they heard it pronounced, heard word divisions in the accepted pronunciation, which was an ancient tradition. And aside from this ancient tradition and the Masoretes' recording of it, we have very little information about ancient Hebrew pronunciation. Also the Masoretic word boundaries correspond to the word boundaries marked explicitly (with dots) in early inscriptions like the Siloam Tunnel one. So there is no reason to doubt that these word divisions do represent ancient phonological word boundaries.

This was a name and I see no reason for it to be split up into two words as place names are
generally considered to be one word even though they may be composed of two (rather like
English bookshelf etc.). ...


Many Hebrew (and for that matter English) place names consist of two or more words, although sometimes this is obscured in English translation e.g. Bethlehem is Beyt Lexem, two separate words (often written joined with maqqef) meaning "house of bread".

... I was theorising that if we were to recover the original pronunciation of this place name we
could also gather more clues for the YHWH pronuniciation.


Fair enough, in principle this is possible. But LXX has KURIOS EIDEN "Lord saw", so this is not much help. Are there any ancient transliterations, as distinct from translations, of this name?

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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