Ethpathakh versus Ephphatha

[SteveCaruso]

Let's get a bit more basic here as this conversation has strayed way off base. Back to the original question that Lawrence had.

I agree. The OP is about Greek transliteration and we've gone all over the place. :-)

Firstly, you have claimed (and I'm paraphrasing) that Jesus' "Galilean Aramaic" is attested to well enough in a vast corpus of text....so much so that you are able to definitively know that He could not have used the root "r-g-sh" as a nickname for dear friends, because no one would have understood it (despite the fact that is is a primitive Semitic root used both in the OT and widely in Aramaic texts.)

I do not think he would have chosen a word outside of his mother dialect such as ragash (as "tumult/rage") to use as a nickname for some of his closest followers, especially given that in his own dialect it had a very different meaning (as in my "boot" example). It would be like a Syriac speaker using khesda in place of taibutha, in other words, very unlikely.

Your argument boils down to this: despite the fact that Moses, King David, Isaiah, Ezekiel all knew and frequently used both of these roots with the very meaning we are talking about...that Jesus couldn't have, despite the fact that even later Hebrew and Aramaic texts still use the words. You base this bold assumption on an argument from silence rooted in a handful of selected sources.

I believe that characterization of my argument isn't accurate. This, categorically, isn't an argument from silence. If this was an argument from silence, it would be "these words don't exist simply because we do not see them." My argument is "these words were not used because we consistently see other words used in their normal places."

I brought up as examples of the same phenomenon:

- Som, which is ubiquitous in Syriac for "to put" or "to place" (it occurs about ~200 times in the Peshitta NT alone), found in the Babylonian Talmud (even the oldest portions), and Mandaic texts (all Eastern dialects), but is not found anywhere in Galilean. Not once. However, when we look over Galilean texts, where we would expect to see som, we find nathan and yahab instead and used in the same ubiquitous manner (with some differentiation between them depending on context, but that's not for this discussion). This is positive evidence for the use of those words over their counterparts by dialect, not an argument from silence.

- Various English shibboleths, such as "boot"/"trunk", "flat"/"apartment" etc. Looking over British media vs American media we find "boot" used in the same place as "trunk" ubiquitously. This is positive evidence for the use of those words over their counterparts depending on what side of the pond you are, not an argument from silence.

To re-iterate: These are not simply lacking in references (which is what an argumentum e silentio requires), but are instead rife with counterexamples in common use.

In other words: Could they have known about these words? Certainly. Did they use them when given the ample opportunity? 0% out of all extant examples (of the words in question).

Then, when pressed on exactly what you meant by "Galilean Aramaic", you point as your primary sources such a wide variety as SA, CPA, JPA. I think we ruled out CPA and SA as preposterous, but please correct me if you still feel either of these two meet your criteria.

JPA - now you went on in the last post to suggest that "Galilean" is considered to be a subset of this dialect. But JPA sources are late and represent a wide spectrum of geography.

CPA is not "preposterous," but is late. SA is closer to contemporary and an important piece of the puzzle. These two vis a vis Galilean/JPA are important to note because they all share a number of vocabulary, grammatical and phonological choices that other dialects outside of their family lack.

In truth, there is no one monolithic Galilean dialect that everyone spoke just as much as there is no one monolithic Syriac dialect that everyone spoke. These are both designations of smaller spectra of the whole of Aramaic languages that share enough attributes to be grouped together for convenience sake. Where many of those attributes are the same and shared by all Aramaic dialects, we group them this way due to significantly shared differences. Because of that, there is no word-for-word corpus of Jesus' dialect. He, himself, did not write anything that has survived to date, nor was he directly transcribed.

What we do know is that they didn't speak Syriac in Galilee, and we have documents written in Aramaic from Galilee that are a bit younger than he is. Looking at the earliest portions of the greater Jewish Palestinian Aramaic corpus first, and relying on the later portions only for comparison sake, we can start with parts of the Talmud Yerushalemi, Targum Yerushalemi, things like Maasim il-bne Erez Israel, inscriptions directly from Palestine (although they are few), and uncorrected manuscripts of Bereshit Rabba, etc.. This yields an amazing amount of information about trends in the dialect of Galilee, and therefore what Jesus would have likely used. This cannot simply be brushed off as irrelevant. :-)

I'm going to press you on this, not because I'm trying to be difficult, but because I strongly feel that your position exemplifies precisely what is wrong about modern day reconstructionalism.

I don't think you're trying to be difficult, and I'm simply trying to ensure that I'm being articulate. :-)

Even though I do work with reconstruction it's not really a matter of "reconstructionalism" (or do you mean "reconstructionism"?). If a dialect family is known to have a number of demonstrable features in common, then we should be using those features in our assessments. Will we attain certainty? Never. But will we will get closer than we would have otherwise, sometimes very close with only a few details left to speculate upon.

So, going back to the OP with some more detailed analysis about this particular epithet:

The Koine of the Greek NT has boanerges which likely represents buh-ney r'ges or buh-ney r'gez.
(It's well established by Greek scholars that sigma followed a similar voicing pattern to "s" in English [ex. "goes" "Jesus", etc.] where zeta was for geminate "z." How they figured this out, you'll have to ask them, but it's in all the literature.)

The Peshitta has b-n-y r-g-sh-y -- b'nai r'gesh(i) -- b'nai r'geh-sh(ee).
There is a diphthong, a substitution (s->sh), and a different ending.

From what we see exists in Galilean phonology and available, common words, we get b-n-y r-g-y-z -- b'ne r'gez -- b'ney r'geyz, a very snug fit.

Peace,
-Steve

(Yikes... looking back at the growing size and scope of each post, we may wish to break this down into smaller threads if we want to continue the conversation on separate topics.)