Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dr. Joel M. Hoffman" <joel AT exc.com>]

>>>> I devote considerable attention to the topic of LXX transliteration of
>names and what it teaches us about Hebrew (and Greek) pronunciation in
>my 2004 NYU Book (_In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew
>Language_), which by now is available in most libraries.
>
>
>Joel,
>
>Thank you for your response, and thank you for the reference to your
>book, _In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language_.  I
>use the UMCP library, and when I checked just now to see if they have
>it (they do), I also found your thesis listed. _In the Beginning_ is
>onshelf, so I hope to check it out later this week.

Just to be clear, my thesis enjoys the title _Syntactic and Paratactic
Word Order Effects_.  (It's almost hard to believe that it didn't
become a best seller with a title like that.)  And it's available from:

       http://www.exc.com/JoelHoffman/Publications

though not much of my thesis is relevent to anything we discuss here.

>Very interesting. I look forward to reading about this in more detail
>in your book. So, in general, you do take the LXX orthography to
>reflect an accurate pronunciation of the Hebrew of the 3rd century
>BCE?

Actually, no.  One of the things I point out in the book is that
transliterated names are in general a very poor indication of the
original pronunciation of a name.  We have but to consider modern
examples such as the English "Paris" for the French "Paris" (silent
's' in French), the English "ISrael" for Hebrew "Yis-ra-EL," and
others to see that.

My point is that we have little evidence for how Hebrew was
pronounced, but even the little evidence that we have fails to confirm
the Masoretic understanding of the ancient language.  Barring any
intervention from God or Dumb Luck, then, and in light of the many
centuries separating the Masoretes from the Hebrew they were trying to
capture, I think our best guess is that the ancient pronunciation has
been lost (along with that of nearly every other ancient language).

-Joel Hoffman
 http://www.exc.com/JoelHoffman