No problem akhi. I have sent you my latest update to the section Evidence #1. This time I have added few articles and books written by scholars that confirms the spelling of Hira in its Greek transliterated form Χιρά. A very important info!
Did you actually opened the last file with my updates to Evidence #1 ?
Salam brother , i started a topic about this on FB and this brother Ijaz Ahamad, who is a debator with christians, tried to disprove your fiding, what can you say, can you get into the discussion on facebook with this brother if you have better argument than i have
our discussion on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/130763117665481/596541127754342/?comment_id=597107107697744&reply_comment_id=597152174359904¬if_id=1572896796394919¬if_t=group_comment_mention
Salam aleikum wa rahmatullah brother, I can't comment brother Idjaz's post since I'm not a member of this group. Anyway, here is a message to him:
"Salam aleikum dear brother Ahmed Idjaz, thank you for your comments and I appreciate your critical voice on the topic.
From what I understand, your disagreement is basically related to the phonetic problem of some Greek consonants, specifically χ (chi) and how it is properly vocalized in Ancient Greek. Thus, you say "...in English it is easy to get HIRA, but how would you drop the 'C' in the letter χ to get an English 'H' to get that sound and written text?" […] "χ does not give the sound of English 'h'. The sound of χ is equivalent to Arabic خ. Unlike removing the dot to get ح. There's no change to χ that gives an H sound." [...] "that's a false analogy, they are semetically related. χ and ح are not." [...] “Maybe if the text was ιρα it would make sense, but since the χ (even as said in that article) was originally there, the claim simply does not add up.” etc.
Honestly, I don't see any problem here brother. Just look at the example of Hiram, Phoenician king of Tyre from the historical books of OT (Samuel & Kings). In the Masoretic text, his name appears under the form
חירם (Ḥîrām). In the Arabic Bible and Arabic literature in general, the name of that king is always transliterated as
حيرام (Ḥîrām) clearly using
ح not
خ. The Hebrew ח represents an alphabetic equivalent for the Arabic
ح by which the name
حراء (Hira) is composed. Now, the transliteration of the Hebrew proper name
חירם (Ḥîrām) according to the Septuagint is
Χιραμ or sometimes
Χειραμ depending on the actual mss (refer to Hatch & Radpath’s concordance to the Septuagint, p. 158ff, here:
https://archive.org/details/HatchRedpath3/page/n161). Notice the use of the letter χ for ח, plus a surprising exchange of ι and ει between the two orthographic variants (its seems that scribes didn’t care whether this name is spelled with an additional epsilon or without it). One scribe felt the need to put an epsilon to the name while others not. And since in ancient times scribes didn’t have any dictionaries or spell check, in many cases, the iotacism errors were of a minor significance (or even almost insignificant). This is why I personally call the iotacism phenomenon an „illusionary problem”, something that doesn’t really matter because diphthong ει and vowel ι were pronounced the same (who cares right?). However, there are exceptions of course. We are so lucky that in the case of χιρας from Isaiah 29:12 (according to Sinaiticus) the variant with diphthong ει or vowel ι alone would affect the meaning since – by strange coincidence? – it turns out that there is a Greek word taking almost identical graphic form, that is χειρ (cheir), which functions as a noun with a lexical meaning „hand”, and the form χειρας (cheiras) is its fourth declination (noun plural masculine accusative).
My question to brother Idjaz Ahmed: why the authors of the Septuagint, which is written in Koine Greek, chose to use the letter Χ (chi) in order to conform to Hebrew ח (ha) if both of these letters are not “semitically” related (according to your understanding)?
As a person who tends to be more critical and cautious than most of our Muslim apologists (fully accepting my mistakes), I’ll go further and I offer the following possible objections – likely to be posed by critics – against the argumentation about the name Hira in Isaiah 29:12
OBJECTION #1:The critical apparatus in the official website of Sinaiticus indicates that sigma at the end of the word was original and not a later insertion made by Cb3. Thus, the previous form originally written by scribe B was χιρας (chiras) and it should be considered as a simple mistake for plural noun χειρας (cheiras) meaning “hands”.
OBJECTION #2:Scribe B (who is responsible for Isaiah and other prophetic books) is generally viewed by Greek scholars as a poor speller, imperfectly acquainted with Greek, and thus he has made many orthographic errors connected with the iotacism that were later corrected by Cb3.
OBJECTION #3: The syntactic construction of the verse (Isaiah 29:12) is generally problematic for the argument under question and should be disregarded on the following grammatical bases:
a) The preposition εἰς does not have the semantical value of „in” but rather „into” (indicating a direction of motion) and this would consequently make the literal rendition to be "into [the] Hira of a man…" which is implausible, unnatural and/or without sense.
b) The term Ἀνθρώπου is in the genitive, and the preposition εἰς always requires an accusative, otherwise, the grammatic rules of Greek would be violated in this case.
c) Proper names, especially those of foreign origin, almost always take a definite article which in the case of χιρας from Isaiah 29:12 is absent.
The answer to all of these objections will be included in my revision of the article about Hira. Alhamdulillah!
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