Yitzhak:
I originally noticed this pattern while reading through Ezra and Nehemiah. I
do not have access to later writings, so I don’t know how they treated the
pronunciations. But I can speculate (with the best of them :-( ).
I first noticed it with the transliteration of Artaxerxes: the first Xi in
the name corrosponds to the Hebrew and Aramaic X$, which to the Greek ear
probably sounded like an /x/, but the second one in Hebrew, such as all the
times in Nehemiah and in Ezra 7:7, 11 were written with a samekh, while Ezra
in his Aramaic portions, e.g. Ezra 4:4, 7:21 transliterated the /x/ with a
sin/shin.
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