Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

For my 2¢ in this discussion:

In my dictionary, I have two roots listed for NX$—one for to become
powerful, one for to divine. Copper and its alloys including bronze under to
become powerful, snake under to divine. There could be a connection in that
knowledge is power, but did that ancients make that connection?

Also in Hebrew there were three different spellings for “copper”: NXW$ (used
once, in Job 6:12), NXW$H (used in Isaiah 48:4, Micah 4:13 and other
verses), but by far the most common spelling is NX$T.

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com> wrote:

>   ISHINAN,
>
> …
>   As for the mention of the other Arab. root,unfortunately
>  I didn't understand your transliteration, and
>  nothing similar was in dicitionaries at hand.
>  Is it possible for you to mail it to me off list in
>  Arabic script?
>
>   Uri Hurwitz
> Great Neck , NY
>
>
> [ISHINAN] - Uri,  naHHAs is indeed copper or brass in Arabic, while nahhA$
> in Arabic is a biting snake  (see LisAn al-`Arab vol. vi, p. 730) hence the
> apparent confusion in Hebrew. They are from totally different roots, the
> former is from nHs root while the latter is from nh$ .
>
> (Arabic phonology: "h" is a voiceless glottal fricative consonant, IPA -
> number 146.   While "H" is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative consonant, IPA
> -
> number 144  )
>
> I hope this helps
>
> If you list letters by numbers, could you list them by unicode or UTF-8
numbers? Those are international standards and at least those of us who use
Macintoshes (I think Windows™ has a similar feature) can tell which are the
different letters. Another option is to write the letters themselveș—most of
us have email servers that will allow us to read the Arabic (Hebrew,
Chinese, etc.) scripts directly.

Karl W. Randolph.