...Thank you, Yitzhak. I hadn't read this when I replied to Uri. While this is hardly an explanation of the chi, it shows that it is not unprecedented. Perhaps in certain dialects a word final aleph was pronounced a bit like a chi, perhaps because the alef sound was being lost and to maintain a distinction from a simple -a ending.
By the way, the guy's name was Sirach or Ben Sirach, so why do people
drop the final "ch"?
According to Moses Zevi Segal's The Complete Book of Ben Sira (1958), p. 1-3,
Rabbi Saadia Gaon calls him "$m(wn bn y$w( bn )l(zr bn syr)". The Genizah
fragment T-S 16.315 containing Ben Sira 50:39 also contains this spelling.
The Syriac spells the name ")syr)". The Greek chi is said by Segal to
vocalize
the vowel letter Alef at the end of the name and provides as equivalent the
names 'IWSHX in Luke 3:26 ("ywsy") and 'AKELDAMAX in Acts 1:19 ("xql dm)").
The word "syr" means "thorn" and the surname "the thorn" is found as a
Priestly surname in the Bible (Ezra 2:61, Nehemiah 3:4, 3:21, 1
Chronicles 24:10)
and as a name of a person in the tribe of Judah (1 Chronicles 4:8).
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