Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi all,

in an attempt to put some order to the many issues raised by Jim's theories
that he's been reiterating for about three years here I have singled out one
very problematic area of his theory in the hope that in this thread (with
the title of El-Paran) he will address that issue and manage to stay on
topic by addressing only that issue. He suggests that El-Paran should be
translated as 'the Great Desert'. Let's take his suggested translation and
put it in its context of the rest of the sentence:

as far as the Great Desert in the desert.

Does this translation strike anyone else as slightly odd? The Great Desert
in the desert? Surely if the Great Desert was in the desert then the desert
it was in was the greater of the two deserts (the smaller desert actually
being a subset of the larger). A bit like saying to the forest in the wood
or to the ocean in the sea or to the country in the field. El-Paran is
clearly a place name. The name of a place in the desert. There is no other
logically acceptable way of interpretting this and, in fact, it is this
interpretation that we find in the LXX:

τῆς *φαραν ἥ ἐστιν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ

James Christian