Good point. A couple of thoughts on the other hand. First, I don't know that we could rule it out on this basis, since it's possible that there were different ways of pronouncing it. Second, regarding your suggestion yesterday about a furtive patach, I wonder how the evidence shapes up for Greek rendering. The most obvious example that comes to my mind is IHSOUS from yeshua, which doesn't seem to preserve the furtive patach. Is there any evidence of a Greek preservation of this sound? For that matter, I would think we'd want specific evidence of Greek epsilon for furtive patach, if we're going to suppose that Liz's pronunciation is correct.I thought of an example surprisingly quickly: Greek NWE from Hebrew NOXA, furtive patah. Also, conveniently on the same page of BDB, Greek MANWE from Hebrew MFNOWXA. But, oddly, YFNOWXA becomes ANIWX or IANWX. Also, according to BDB, Y:HOW$U(A becomes WSHE or IWSHE in some Greek MSS in 1 Sam 6:14,18, 2 Kings 23:8 when not assimilated to the more regular IHSOUS.
(I don't know if this is at all relevant, but segol in Tiberian pointing often corresponds to patach in Babylonian, which has no equivalent to segol. On the other hand, it's Tiberian pointing that gives us the furtive patach, so if it was a Western tendency to pronounce this glide element closer to epsilon, I would think they'd have rendered it that way.)
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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