Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

to isaac, jim,

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to isaac: 

1. as usual, you start with modern, urban, degraded hebrew: 
zevel=garbage, manure, then you reach the conclusion that zebwlwn's 
parents would never give their son this name. but the root zbl has very 
positive connotations in ancient, rural hebrew (never as garbage), including 
the name of a queen (not sharing the same good connotations, i'm afraid); 
connotations which i am sure you can locate more easily than i would.  

i suspect ZBLWN (ZVUL=prime? best-of?) can be thought of as analogous 
to NPTLY (NOFET=nectar).

2. [picking up your line on the most original of biblical names (yours!),
and perhaps in line with jim's remarks]:
some names like isaac, jacob, benjamin, YSSKR etc] pose a problem to the 
skeptics because they basically have only one valid etymology: the 
biblical one. but the skeptics would still maintain that the etymology 
could be correct even though the family story around it is all made up.

n.c.
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to jim: 

3. we cannot ignore the fact that the sons of israel were arranged in 12
well defined tribes, perhaps already in the early, clearly in the 
classical period, a fact repeated hundreds of times in the text. 
denying this would require extensive rewriting of the bible. [though 
clearly a skeptic like us may not accept the story of a 12 member 
patriarchal family as factual.]

an immediate corollary of this would be that the names of these tribes should
go a LOOOOOOOng way back, much earlier than the biblical narrator. 

4. as to the plene, i think its biblical use is quite pragmatic. mostly, 
it is avoided only if one COULD (KNOWING BH!) safely complete it from the 
text. in the case of a final -WN, the waw is essential and could hardly be 
omitted here, nor is it omitted elsewhere: 

      AYLWN, MXLWN, KLYWN, QDRWN, GV(WN, LBNWN, GD(WN, (PRWN etc etc etc. 

(i am not sure about )RNWN). nor is it normally omitted on lexical words 
ending with WN.

 
nir cohen

P.S. ZBLWN does actually miss a waw (on the B).