Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Chavoux Luyt:
 
You wrote:  “I'm just not sure that the pun would have worked with the ancient
Hebrew pronunciation.”
 
1.  I agree with you that in Biblical Hebrew, a kaf without a dagesh did not 
have the exact sound of a heth.  But the sounds were similar.  A pun usually 
works on the basis of similar sound, not identical sound.
 
2.  Now consider how the Hebrews dealt with non-Semitic city names in Canaan. 
 LWZ/Luz became LY$/Laish, which means “lion” as a Hebrew common word.  
Ka-da-u-$a became QD$, which means “holy” as a Hebrew common word.  And 
L-KY-$ was likely pronounced/mispronounced either as LXY-$, where LXY means 
“jawbone”, or as L-XY-$, where L-XY means “of living” [though in this one 
case, the original spelling was retained intact].
 
Do you see the pattern?  An inexplicable non-Semitic geographical place name 
in Canaan got (deliberately) mispronounced by the Hebrews into sounding like 
something that made sense in Hebrew.
 
So when I see all of Hagar, Isaac and Samson as being in the Lachish Valley, 
in part based on puns involving either LXY or L-XY, one important part of my 
case is that the original name, L-KY-$, did not make sense to the Hebrews, 
and so some sort of Hebrew pun was almost inevitable in order to make sense 
out of that non-Semitic name.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois