Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear James,

A very good source that illuminates the 
correspondence and lack of correspondence between 
Hebrew and Greek letters is: E. Brönno. "Studien 
über hebräische Morphologie und Vocalismus". 
Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 
xxvii, 1943.  This is a study of the Mercati 
manuscript of Origen's Hexapla.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




> Hi all,
>
> recent discussions have led me to take a closer look at transliteration
> patterns from Hebrew to Greek. I share my preliminary observations below:
>
> > From Genesis 2:8 we see Eden in MT as ÚՓ‘Ô however, in Greek we see EɬɈÉ
> (edem) thus highlighting two features.
>
> 1) Ayin has no correspondent in the Greek and so it moves straight on to the
> following vowel.
> 2) A confusion between the similarly pronounced phones of n and m.
>
> In Genesis 2:11 we see the river Pishon in MT as 
> Ù¦È÷ÂðÔ while in Greek É"É«É-É÷ÉÀ
> thus highlighting other interesting features:
>
> 1) A confusion between aspirate p and unaspirated p (Greek uses phi).
> 2) We see Greek omega (long o) stading in the place of holem waw as we would
> ordinarily expect
>
> In Genesis 2:13 we see the river Gishon in MT as ’¦ÈÁÂðÔ while in Greek we
> see ɡɉÉ÷ÉÀ thus highlighting more interesting features:
>
> 1) Despite Greek having a letter chi kh sound is completely omitted. We only
> see its trace in the middle of an unusual combination of Greek vowels ɉÉ÷
> 2) Long /i:/ vowel transliterated with ɉ
> 3) Again Greek omega stands for holem waw as we would expect (we haven't
> gone far into the Torah but we are already starting to notice a consistent
> pattern here)
>
> We see in MT ýÀ“ÀÌ but in LXX we see AɬÉøÉ 
> again highlighting an already seen
> feature:
>
> 1) Impossible to represent consonant aleph is dropped from transliteration
> and its following vowel is the first letter we see (i.e. alpha)
>
> In general, we see that problem consonants are omitted and their nearest
> vowels are used instead. This pattern is considerably evident and well
> testified for the Hebrew holem waw combination which is consistently
> transliterated with Greek Omega (if there are counter examples I would be
> delighted to see them).
>
> James Christian
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