At Bruryah's request, here is Nir's post again. Yigal Levin
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nir cohen - Prof. Mat. Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2012 5:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [b-hebrew] xiram the middle Y in many semitic names, when used to fuse together two separate words, such as AX-Y-RM etc, should be interpreted firstly as a phonetic process, and only secondly as a grammatical process. the fact is that phonetically the lack of middle vowel may be inconvenient, viz. AX-RM, and Y is the obvious solution. this may create a dual interpretation of the name which, i assume, was not considered a problem at the time, when "grammar" was yet to be invented. once the innovation was introduced, it became a trend and, subsequently, the dual interpretation became fashionable. grammatically, it is assumed that in combinations such as )LY)B, )BYXYL, )BY(ZR, MLKYZDK, the first part seems to refer to god, and it makes sense to interpret it as "my god/my father/my king" etc. in case of AXY it might still refer to god as AXY (a general term of familiarity/friendship) or may be referring to a real brother, an associate, a friend etc. here, duality may be be more of a problem, as in AXYQM, AXYTPL, AXYRM. jim, the case of ABRM/ABRHM is indeed unique and probably debated to exhaustion in the literature. we may assume the original AB-RM referred to god as father, while in the biblical re-interpretation AB-RHM refers to the patriarch as father. if so, the added H was intended somehow to indicate exactly this change, being presumably a sign of SMIXUT. though i imagine there are several "explanations". but we may equally conjecture that ABRHM was the original and the rest is a story constructed around the original name, which was already enygmatic when genesis was written. the fact that ABYRM was NOT contemplated in genesis may be another indicator for the book's antiquity (??). ...covered by the dust of history. nir cohen _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
