Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>]

There could be more to it than just not hearing right:
 גן אדן = the garden of the lord אדון
גן אדם = the garden of man אדם

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Jan 18, 2010, at 10:00 AM, James Christian wrote:

> 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 עֵדֶן however, in Greek  
> > we see Eδεμ
> (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 פִּישׁוֹן  
> while in Greek φισων
> 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 גִּיחוֹן  
> while in Greek we
> see γηων 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 ηω
> 2) Long /i:/ vowel transliterated with η
> 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 אָדָם but in LXX we see Aδαμ 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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