Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Ishinan" <ishinan AT comcast.net>]

Previously [JIM STINEHART] wrote:

" To my assertion that "Seir" literally means "hairy", and hence " 
well-wooded", you responded:  "No, it does not. That is a fairy tale that 
you  made up."

I did not make that up.  I'm quoting BDB:  "the 'hairy', i.e. 'well-wooded 
'. Cf. [the Arabic word for] trees".  A site on the Internet gives the 
following Arabic for tree and trees:  "Tree = shajra;  Trees = shajar".  I 
also quoted Gesenius, who sees Seir as meaning "clothed, and, as it were, 
bristled with trees and thick woods".

So I most definitely did not "make it up".  Many analysts see %(YR as 
meaning "well-wooded".  Historically, the area south of the Dead Sea was 
never "  well-wooded".  But in Biblical times, the hill country of the 
Transjordan  was definitely "well-wooded".  The facts are all on my side, as 
usual.  You  can call my marshalling of objective facts "a fairy tale", but 
that's the identical lingo that the Biblical Minimalists use to characterize 
the Patriarchal narratives as a whole."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[GEORGE ATHAS] - Where do you possibly see ???? meaning 'forest'? You simply 
have not nailed this down. There is a big difference between 'hair' and 
'wooded forest'. Until you can produce a firm linguistic connection there, 
you are either speculating at best, or just making it up. Either way, that's 
NOT GOOD METHOD! If you were doing a research degree, you'd be panned by 
your supervisor for this and sent back to do some basic linguistics.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ISHINAN]- George, I thought the thread of this topic was officially closed. 
However, since you reopened it, I have to express my disagreement with your 
assessment of Jim's etymology of   ????

The accusations leveled at Jim on THIS particular point, in my opinion, do 
not hold water. I personally checked his assertion and this is what I found.

Based on Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon p. 973,  cf. Arabic 
cognate expressed is sha`Ar (with medial `ayn). It has the sense of tangled 
and/or dense trees, which Jim correctly interpreted as a forest. I am 
sending to both you and Jim, a JPEG with the pertinent etymologies from both 
Hebrew BDB and Arabic (Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, vol. 
ii, p. 1561) dictionaries side by side. In this respect, Jim's 
interpretation on this issue is technically sound.

However, in his assertion, Jim made two minute mistakes.  First, he 
neglected to give the page # of the entry in the BDB.  Secondly, in his 
Internet search of the Arabic example, he used an Arabic synonym, shajar or 
trees (written with a medial Jiym), instead of sha`Ar (dense tangled trees; 
written with a medial `ayn) as mentioned in Brown-Driver-Briggs.  Since the 
internet is notoriously famous for being imprecise therefore it is always 
advisable to go back to library references to double check the information.

Bear in mind, I personally have a totally different interpretation in mind 
for "seir", based on Sa?adiah ben Yosef Gaon's survived Arabic translation 
of the Old Testament  ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? ???????.

Sa?adiah's Arabic translation of the Bible is of a great importance as a 
means of religious enlightenment. His system of hermeneutics was not limited 
to the exegesis of individual passages, but treated each book of the Bible 
as a whole. In this respect, his translation takes a prominent place besides 
the Greek Bible-translation of antiquity and emerges as a valuable tool for 
comparison, though seldom made us of by modern Hebrew scholars.

But this would be a different topic of conversation.

Best regards to both of you.

Ishinan Ishibashi