Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:52 am
The question should be
since we know ish was rendered into Greek as iota sigma what would be its expected declension in this language IF THE NOMEN SACRUM WASN'T AN ABBREVIATION and IF IT WAS AN ABBREVIATION why is one more likely to be the original "source" for the abbreviation when Justin acknowledges both man and Savior = iota sigma.
I do not know that ΙΣ (Iota Sigma) ever circulated as a word for 'man' in ancient Greek.
We have Origen's statement in his letter to Africanus:
12. I had nearly forgotten an additional remark I have to make about the prino-prisein and schino-schiesein difficulty; that is, that in our Scriptures there are many etymological fancies, so to call them, which in the Hebrew are perfectly suitable, but not in the Greek. It need not surprise us, then, if the translators of the History of Susanna contrived it so that they found out some Greek words, derived from the same root, which either corresponded exactly to the Hebrew form (though this I hardly think possible), or presented some analogy to it. Here is an instance of this in our Scripture. When the woman was made by God from the rib of the man, Adam says, "She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of her husband." Now the Jews say that the woman was called "Essa," and that "taken" is a translation of this word as is evident from "chos isouoth essa," which means, "I have taken the cup of salvation;" and that "is" means "man," as we see from "Hesre ais," which is, "Blessed is the man." According to the Jews, then, "is" is "man," and "essa" "woman," because she was taken out of her husband. It need not then surprise us if some interpreters of the Hebrew "Susanna," which had been concealed among them at a very remote date, and had been preserved only by the more learned and honest, should have either given the Hebrew word for word, or hit upon some analogy to the Hebrew forms, that the Greeks might be able to follow them. For in many other passages we can, I find traces of this kind of contrivance on the part of the translators, which I noticed when I was collating the various editions.
Origen botches the etymology of woman, trying to derive it (mistakenly) from the Hebrew word for 'taken', but he gets the word for man right אַשְׁרֵי הָאִישׁ 'blessed the man' (found as the first two words in the first Psalm and elsewhere) and he renders it as ΙΣ for his Christian reader, Africanus.
Then we have the case of proper nouns that contained the word אַשְׁרֵ, such as Ishbaal, that were transliterated into Greek beginning with the letters Iota Sigma.
Do we have any examples from the LXX, or from any Hellenistic Jewish text, of ΙΣ ever being used for the word 'man'? Or does Origen's rendering of אַשְׁרֵי as ΙΣ and the letters Iota Sigma being used to transliterate parts of names that contained the word אַשְׁרֵ constitute the whole of the evidence?
