" To my assertion that "Seir" literally means "hairy", and hence "
well-wooded", you responded: "No, it does not. That is a fairy tale that
you made up."
I did not make that up. I'm quoting BDB: "the 'hairy', i.e. 'well-wooded
'. Cf. [the Arabic word for] trees". A site on the Internet gives the
following Arabic for tree and trees: "Tree = shajra; Trees = shajar". I
also quoted Gesenius, who sees Seir as meaning "clothed, and, as it were,
bristled with trees and thick woods".
So I most definitely did not "make it up". Many analysts see %(YR as
meaning "well-wooded". Historically, the area south of the Dead Sea was
never " well-wooded". But in Biblical times, the hill country of the
Transjordan was definitely "well-wooded". The facts are all on my side, as
usual. You can call my marshalling of objective facts "a fairy tale", but
that's the identical lingo that the Biblical Minimalists use to characterize
the Patriarchal narratives as a whole."
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[GEORGE ATHAS] - Where do you possibly see ???? meaning 'forest'? You simply
have not nailed this down. There is a big difference between 'hair' and
'wooded forest'. Until you can produce a firm linguistic connection there,
you are either speculating at best, or just making it up. Either way, that's
NOT GOOD METHOD! If you were doing a research degree, you'd be panned by
your supervisor for this and sent back to do some basic linguistics.
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[ISHINAN]- George, I thought the thread of this topic was officially closed.
However, since you reopened it, I have to express my disagreement with your
assessment of Jim's etymology of ????
The accusations leveled at Jim on THIS particular point, in my opinion, do
not hold water. I personally checked his assertion and this is what I found.
Based on Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon p. 973, cf. Arabic
cognate expressed is sha`Ar (with medial `ayn). It has the sense of tangled
and/or dense trees, which Jim correctly interpreted as a forest. I am
sending to both you and Jim, a JPEG with the pertinent etymologies from both
Hebrew BDB and Arabic (Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, vol.
ii, p. 1561) dictionaries side by side. In this respect, Jim's
interpretation on this issue is technically sound.
However, in his assertion, Jim made two minute mistakes. First, he
neglected to give the page # of the entry in the BDB. Secondly, in his
Internet search of the Arabic example, he used an Arabic synonym, shajar or
trees (written with a medial Jiym), instead of sha`Ar (dense tangled trees;
written with a medial `ayn) as mentioned in Brown-Driver-Briggs. Since the
internet is notoriously famous for being imprecise therefore it is always
advisable to go back to library references to double check the information.
Bear in mind, I personally have a totally different interpretation in mind
for "seir", based on Sa?adiah ben Yosef Gaon's survived Arabic translation
of the Old Testament ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? ???????.
Sa?adiah's Arabic translation of the Bible is of a great importance as a
means of religious enlightenment. His system of hermeneutics was not limited
to the exegesis of individual passages, but treated each book of the Bible
as a whole. In this respect, his translation takes a prominent place besides
the Greek Bible-translation of antiquity and emerges as a valuable tool for
comparison, though seldom made us of by modern Hebrew scholars.
But this would be a different topic of conversation.