Chavoux Luyt: You wrote: “I'm just not sure that the pun would have worked with the ancient Hebrew pronunciation.” 1. I agree with you that in Biblical Hebrew, a kaf without a dagesh did not have the exact sound of a heth. But the sounds were similar. A pun usually works on the basis of similar sound, not identical sound. 2. Now consider how the Hebrews dealt with non-Semitic city names in Canaan. LWZ/Luz became LY$/Laish, which means “lion” as a Hebrew common word. Ka-da-u-$a became QD$, which means “holy” as a Hebrew common word. And L-KY-$ was likely pronounced/mispronounced either as LXY-$, where LXY means “jawbone”, or as L-XY-$, where L-XY means “of living” [though in this one case, the original spelling was retained intact]. Do you see the pattern? An inexplicable non-Semitic geographical place name in Canaan got (deliberately) mispronounced by the Hebrews into sounding like something that made sense in Hebrew. So when I see all of Hagar, Isaac and Samson as being in the Lachish Valley, in part based on puns involving either LXY or L-XY, one important part of my case is that the original name, L-KY-$, did not make sense to the Hebrews, and so some sort of Hebrew pun was almost inevitable in order to make sense out of that non-Semitic name. Jim Stinehart Evanston, Illinois
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