Antiquities of the Jews, fit the twelfth

About the building of the new Temple, Josephus says (XI.4.81): ( Read more... )

But that's not what Ezra 3:10-13 says! It's really quite a touching moment in the Bible:

( Read more... )

Incidentally, this serves as a nice rebuttal to those who claim no one got beyond middle age in ancient times. ( Read more... )

On to the Esther story. ( Read more... )

I don't know how Josephus dates Ezra to Xerxes when the the Bible clearly says (Esther 7:1-8):( Read more... )

Moving on, in XI.6.184 Josephus identifies Ahasuerus with Artaxerxes, following the tradition of the Apocryphal Book of Esther. Most scholars disagree, though, and identify him with Xerxes. Now, all three names have been dragged through a linguistic hedge backwards, as Greek lacked many of the sounds in the Persian such as š (like "sh" in English).

( Read more... )

There are other odd names in the Greek: Hăthāch becomes Acratheus; Ḥarvonāh becomes Sabuchadas. Of course, these are Persian names, so possibly if you go to the Persian original it becomes more obvious how such different Hebrew and Greek forms can arise.

[Please comment at my collected Book XI notes post, on Dreamwidth for preference, or on LiveJournal.]

Josephus notes

What's a Ḫ when it's at home, anyway?

After my last post, it's occurred to me that some most of my readers are going to be left scratching their heads at many of the be-dotted letters I use in my transcriptions. So, a brief guide to sounds in Biblical Hebrew.

' represents a glottal stop, the sound of א. It's the brief silence in the middle of a word when a Cockney says "bottle" and leaves out pronouncing the Ts altogether.

I'll occasionally use GH and DH for ג and ד without dāgesh. The former is a voiced KH (the sound in "loch"), the latter like in English "this".

Semitic languages have, to a greater or lesser extent, a series of emphatic consonants; the ones represented in Biblical Hebrew are ח Ḥ, צ Ṣ̣ and ט Ṭ. According to my teach-yourself-Arabic book, the difference between S and Ṣ̣ is similar to that between the Ss in the English phrase "sin in the sun"—observe the position of your tongue in your mouth as you say them—with a bit more emphasis added. Ḥ is, says the same book, the sound you make when you breathe on a window to mist it up.

The last sound of Scottish "loch", is in Hebrew related to K, and written "ch", "kh" or "x". In non-Canaanite languages, however, it is related to Ḥ (in Arabic, the three letters are written ح and خ) and transcribed "ḫ" to convey this. In Hebrew the two sounds/letters coalesced into ח Ḥ.

` represents ע. Constrict the entrance to your throat as you say this, and if using this sound gives you a sore throat, don't apply for citizenship in an Arabic-speaking country just yet. Arabic also has a related letter غ ghayn, pronounced ɣ or GH (see above). In Biblical Hebrew these two sounds were both represented by the letter ע, but were still distinguished, as may be deduced from the way ע in some names has since ancient times been transcribed with a G, e.g. עֲמוֹרָה Gomorrah, or עַזָה Gaza.

Q represents ק. Make a K sound but pronounce it at the back of the throat rather than the roof of the mouth.

Sometimes I'll use š and θ to represent שׁ and ת (as opposed to תּ); the sounds are those in English "she" and "think". Using single-letters avoids the ambiguity of figuring out whether "th" is like in English "think" or "hothouse".

You'll occasionally see me using ś to distinguish שׂ from ס, though I think these were pronounced the same by Biblical times.

Finally, vowels. I use Ā to represent Hebrew ָ. Most people nowadays pronounce this like in English "cat"; I pronounce it like in "cot", but in Biblical times it was the sound in English "father".

Hebrew has three E vowels: ֶ , which I transcribe E, ֵ , which I transcribe ē or é (I pronounce this "ei" but am not sure how it was pronounced in Biblical times) and ְ , which is ə: the sound of the "a" when unstressed in English "about".

Hebrew also had what are called ḥaṭef vowels or compound shvas, ultrashort versions of the other vowels. I transcribe these with a breve: Ă, Ĕ and Ŏ.