I am curious about why the hard pe in the Hebrew names Pinchas (English Phinehas) and Peleg are spelled with a phi instead of a pi in the LXX.
Why did the LXX spirantize the pe when they transliterated the names? Does this reflect a different Hebrew pronunciation of the names or is there some other reason?
Yes, it probably reflects a different Hebrew pronunciation, and I
would ask the question the other way around. Given the LXX spellings,
is there any evidence that the Masoretic convention that gives us P is
right? I think it's more likely that the Greeks got it right ...
... and the
Masoretes (over a millennium later, after all) got it wrong, ...
... though in
the end probably neither group accurately reflects really ancient
Hebrew, and we also don't know exactly how the Greek was pronounced.
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