Author Topic: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!  (Read 34041 times)

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Offline Idris

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #30 on: November 11, 2019, 05:10:08 PM »

Wa aleikum as-salam wa rahmatullahi wa baraketuh,

I apologize for my late response! Yes, I will get to this discussion insha'Allah but from what I see, our brother Ijaz Ahmad either didn't understood well my research or he simply didn't read it entirely and/or didn't took into account all of the information related e.g. to the issue concerning the so-called "iotacism" which was a problematic one among the Septuagint experts themselves (like Alfred Rahlfs). According to traditional Islamic stories about prophets, it appears that this illiterate from Isaiah 29:12 was ORIGINALLY identified as "Ahmad" and he was connected directly with the character universally known as the "Servant of God" who is described in Isaiah 42 (Ibn Asakir recorded one naration from Ka'b al-Ahbar who found the name Ahmad being ascribed to this servant... in some Yemeni or probably Syriac version of Isaiah that available to him at that time). Besides that, there is a lot of other details which consequently lead in this direction supporting my argument about Ahmad who was originally mentioned in Isaiah as the ultimate redemptive figure but the last editors of the Hebrew Bible restructured the text and changed the whole prophetic narratives in favor of Israel (so they put Jacob/Israel insted of Ahmad!).

Anyway, perhaps the real reason Brother Idjaz Ahmad opposes my research is because he don't believe at all that Isaiah 29:12 is a prophecy about Prophet Mohammed (SAAW) because of the negative context in which the illiterate is put and because no early Muslim scholar ever has quoted the text of Isaiah 29:12 with respect to Prophet Mohammed (SAAW). The first one who started this argumentation was probably Ahmad Deedat.

I will try to enter the discussion in FB as soon as possible insha'Allah.

Offline Dawud

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #31 on: November 13, 2019, 04:38:36 AM »

Wa aleikum as-salam wa rahmatullahi wa baraketuh,

I apologize for my late response! Yes, I will get to this discussion insha'Allah but from what I see, our brother Ijaz Ahmad either didn't understood well my research or he simply didn't read it entirely and/or didn't took into account all of the information related e.g. to the issue concerning the so-called "iotacism" which was a problematic one among the Septuagint experts themselves (like Alfred Rahlfs). According to traditional Islamic stories about prophets, it appears that this illiterate from Isaiah 29:12 was ORIGINALLY identified as "Ahmad" and he was connected directly with the character universally known as the "Servant of God" who is described in Isaiah 42 (Ibn Asakir recorded one naration from Ka'b al-Ahbar who found the name Ahmad being ascribed to this servant... in some Yemeni or probably Syriac version of Isaiah that available to him at that time). Besides that, there is a lot of other details which consequently lead in this direction supporting my argument about Ahmad who was originally mentioned in Isaiah as the ultimate redemptive figure but the last editors of the Hebrew Bible restructured the text and changed the whole prophetic narratives in favor of Israel (so they put Jacob/Israel insted of Ahmad!).

Anyway, perhaps the real reason Brother Idjaz Ahmad opposes my research is because he don't believe at all that Isaiah 29:12 is a prophecy about Prophet Mohammed (SAAW) because of the negative context in which the illiterate is put and because no early Muslim scholar ever has quoted the text of Isaiah 29:12 with respect to Prophet Mohammed (SAAW). The first one who started this argumentation was probably Ahmad Deedat.

I will try to enter the discussion in FB as soon as possible insha'Allah.


name Ahmad or Ahmod is found in Isaiah in dead sea scrolls, look here


(click to enlarge)



hebrew bible


(click to enlarge)



Word Ahmad in bible

אחמד Ahmad

Bible in hebrew Isaiah 42
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1042.htm

DSS orginal manuscripts
http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah#42:1

freetranslation
https://www.freetranslation.com/


and i made this phtoo also, beacuse we need to compare word HIra with other words which corrector Cb3 tried to connect with, when you compare these obviosly it looks like he tried to correct it to match word Heiras


(click to enlarge)
« Last Edit: November 13, 2019, 06:16:36 AM by QuranSearchCom »

Offline QuranSearchCom

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #32 on: November 13, 2019, 06:18:20 AM »
As'salamu Alaikum dear brother Dawud and Idris,

Jazakum Allah Khayr for your research.

Brother Dawud, I have saved and uploaded your images to the website and re-linked them in your post to permanently preserve them with this website, insha'Allah.

Take care,
Osama Abdallah

Offline Idris

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #33 on: January 07, 2020, 08:00:05 PM »


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&notif_id=1572896796394919&notif_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!
« Last Edit: January 08, 2020, 08:33:31 AM by QuranSearchCom »

Offline QuranSearchCom

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #34 on: January 08, 2020, 08:36:58 AM »
Wa Alaikum As'salam Wa Rahmatu Allah Wa Barakatuh dear brother Idris,

Jazaka Allah Khayr for the response.  Amazing work, masha'Allah wa subhana'Allah. 

Brother, I have uploaded your image above to the website to preserve it.  Keep up the great work!!

Take care,
Osama Abdallah

Offline Idris

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Salam aleikum wa rahmatullahi wa baraketuh,

I haven't answered on my article for a long time. I just wanted to say that everything is going well alhamdulillah. In the next few days insha'Allah I will share here my critical evaluation of the above objections regarding the claim of the word Hira being mentioned in the text of Isaiah 29:12 according to Codex Sinaiticus. I take full responsibility for the claim and I will defend it with the permission and help of Allah.

I wish you blessed Ramadan, for all brothers and sisters.
Take care,
Idris (Ahmed)

Offline QuranSearchCom

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Wa Alaikum As'salam Wa Rahmatu Allah Wa Barakatuh,

Ramadan Mubarak to you and to your family as well, insha'Allah, dear brother Idris.  Welcome back akhi.

Take care,
Osama Abdallah

Offline Dawud

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@IDRIS

How can we tackle this verse in Hebrew


יב  וְנִתַּן הַסֵּפֶר, עַל אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יָדַע סֵפֶר לֵאמֹר--קְרָא נָא-זֶה; וְאָמַר, לֹא יָדַעְתִּי סֵפֶר.  {ס}   12

and the writing is delivered to him that is not learned, saying: 'Read this, I pray thee'; and he saith: 'I am not learned.

if we compare it to codex sinaiticus

we can clearly see word Hira, which corrector change into HEIRAS to mean hands


isaih in hebrew is older than codex sinaiticus in greek, so if someone say why do we not find word HIra or Hands/Heiras in hebrew bible isaih 29:12?

How do you respond to that?

Offline Idris

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Salam aleikum wa rahmatullah brother Dawud,

Currently I have some unexpected problems with my internet connection. Once I fix it (hopefuly this week) I will answer then insha’Allah to many objections (including yours) to the claim about Hira in Isaiah 29:12. I will explain among others that the form Hiras or even Heiras can well be understood as a proper name for Hira.

Eid Mubarak to you and to all our brothers and sisters!
Take care,
Idris

Offline Idris

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #39 on: January 05, 2023, 06:02:17 PM »
@IDRIS

How can we tackle this verse in Hebrew


יב  וְנִתַּן הַסֵּפֶר, עַל אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יָדַע סֵפֶר לֵאמֹר--קְרָא נָא-זֶה; וְאָמַר, לֹא יָדַעְתִּי סֵפֶר.  {ס}   12

and the writing is delivered to him that is not learned, saying: 'Read this, I pray thee'; and he saith: 'I am not learned.

if we compare it to codex sinaiticus

we can clearly see word Hira, which corrector change into HEIRAS to mean hands


isaih in hebrew is older than codex sinaiticus in greek, so if someone say why do we not find word HIra or Hands/Heiras in hebrew bible isaih 29:12?

How do you respond to that?

Salam aleikum brother Dawud,

Well, if by "isaiah in hebrew is older than codex sinaiticus" you mean the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a) of Qumran, then I would say don't be naive, and don't let them fool you! This Isaiah scroll is not really ancient as IAA claim to the world. In fact, Solomon Zeitlin (1886-1976) has already proved that it’s a medieval copy (produced sometime after Islam, possibly in the 7th-8th century). Solomon Zeitlin wrote many important publications. He was a distinguished Jewish historian, Talmudic scholar, and in his time the world's leading authority on the Second Temple period, thus he was a scholar whose reputation could hardly be denied (See e.g. Solomon Zeitlin: Scholar Laureate: An Annotated Bibliography, 1915–1970, With Appreciations of His Writings, ed. Sydney B. Hoenig (New York: Bitzaron; Philadelphia: Dropsie University, 1971). He was one of those few brave scholars who "dared" to question the supposed antiquity of DSS. See e.g. S. Zeitlin, "The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls." Jewish Quarterly Review 40/1 (1949), pp. 57-78; Idem, "The Propaganda of the Hebrew Scrolls and the Falsification of History." Jewish Quarterly Review 46/1 (1955), pp. 1-39; Idem, "The Fallacy of the Antiquity of the Hebrew Scrolls Once More Exposed." Jewish Quarterly Review 52/4 (1962), pp. 346-366

Such a well-known and highly reputed scholar certainly would not claim they are medieval fabrication unless convinced it was true. Internal-paleographical evidence from the scrolls themselves indicates toward a medieval production. Some have stressed the fact that many scrolls are written on vellum (about 90% of them), further confirms that these documents are indeed a medieval production. What is even more strange, scholars noted the lack of cinnabar-based metallic deterioration on the manuscripts which normally occurs after just 200 years on ancient materials. Additionally, many of the reading variants that 1QIsa-a shares, and that are not attested by MT, can only be found in the private collections of Kennicott’s and de Rossi's Hebrew medieval manuscripts, thus again potentially betraying the medieval nature of DSS.

Besides Solomon Zeitlin, few other biblical scholars of great reputation such as Louis-Hugues Vincent (1872-1960), a French archaeologist of the École Biblique, and Johannes Petrus Maria van der Ploeg (1909-2004), a Dutch Dominican specialist in Hebrew, Dead Sea Scrolls and Syriac manuscripts, also thought that DSS are medieval, not ancient. See John C. Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran (Chicago: F.H. Revell Company, 1965), p. 108

A couple of years ago, I had an email conversation with a Christian scholar Frederick Peter Miller (1931–2018) who confirmed to me that there are many strange editorial markings and traces of later revisions (altered shapes of letters, numerals, punctuation, etc.) observed in between different DSS publications that seems to be anachronistic since they are more consistent with the Middle Ages rather than the Macabbean or Hasmonean period to which the scrolls are said to come from. He and David Cooper told me about Neil Altman who is an independent researcher and expert on DSS, and who carefully studied the scroll of 1QIsa-a, and he was about to release his findings in a journal of El Paso. Scholars posed many questions to IAA with regard to the existence of these strange markings but they never answered them.

We can delve deeper into some of the "unspoken" controversies (and scandals) surrounding DSS but it’s not the right place to talk about it. However, I will insha'Allah write on it more in another occasion. In any case, this whole Israeli propaganda is a mere deceptive strategy to gain a pre-Islamic attestation (and attention) for the antiquity of biblical writings. They urgently needed a certificate to "back up" and/or predate their masoretic text (written in 10th century AD) by claiming to have found a much older copies, and one of the reasons is that they have realized that the Quranic accusation of corrupting the Hebrew Bible, sooner or later, will be inconvenient, unfavorable, and burdensome to their theo-political interest.

Take care,
Idris (Ahmed)

Offline QuranSearchCom

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #40 on: January 06, 2023, 03:32:43 PM »
As'salamu Alaikum dear brother Idris and Everyone,

Masha'Allah and may Allah Almighty continue to protect you and bless you with knowledge and skills, akhi, people care a lot about your research.  Your posts on this blog have 10s of thousands of hits, walhamdulillah.

Keep up the great work akhi.

Take care,
Osama Abdallah

Offline Idris

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #41 on: January 12, 2023, 10:57:09 AM »
As'salamu Alaikum dear brother Idris and Everyone,

Masha'Allah and may Allah Almighty continue to protect you and bless you with knowledge and skills, akhi, people care a lot about your research.  Your posts on this blog have 10s of thousands of hits, walhamdulillah.

Keep up the great work akhi.

Take care,
Osama Abdallah

Wa aleikum as-salam wa rahmatullahi wa baraketuh, thank you dear brother Osama for such kind words and dua. Amin! Same to you akhi.
Alhamdulillah, its realy good to hear that. Its certainly encouraging.

Take care
Idris

Offline Idris

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #42 on: January 12, 2023, 04:39:54 PM »

Salam aleikum everyone,

Being aware that the argument of Hira being mentioned in Isaiah 29:12, sooner or later, will have to face some criticism (especially from Christian apologists), I have figure out or typed several possible objections against this claim along with answers to each objection. I'll be insha'Allah gradually posting here my answers to these objections that will likely be posed by critics.


OBJECTION #1 The website’s inbuilt critical apparatus points to the originality of the sigma letter in the word χιρας

Some critics might say that the critical apparatus designed for the Codex Sinaiticus in the official website (attached to the transcription on the right window, see the link here: https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx) indicates that sigma (ς), at the end of the word χιρας (chiras), is original and not a later insertion made by the corrector Cb3. This means that the previous form originally written by scribe B was χιρας (chiras), not χιρα (chira).

ANSWER

First, it is important to ask: does sigma at the end of χιρας represent a lowercase final form, or is it a result of the „letter compression”?
 
Second, even if sigma was original (i.e. written by scribe B, not Cb3), it does not necessarily discredit the claim that χιρας (chiras) might still be reflecting a proper form name for Hira, and this is simply because in Ancient Greek the letter sigma was usually added at the end of place names. There are many examples in the Septuagint of transliterated proper names with a typical Hellenized ending -ας (as). Perhaps a perfect example is חִירָה (Ḥîrāh) from Genesis 38:1, a name of certain Adullamite person, which is transliterated in the Septuagint as Ιρας (Iras). Here, unexpectedly, for some unknown reasons, authors of the Septuagint chose ι (iota) instead of χ (chi) despite the fact that e.g. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, for example, has transliterated this name as Hiras (applying H not I). Later, in OBJECTION #4, I will show that the Septuagint has, in fact, transliterated many Hebrew names with initial letter ח (ha) using χ (chi) not ι (iota).

Now, as to the ending -ας added to place names, in the Book of Isaiah alone we find many examples: in Isaiah 8:4 we have שׁמרון (Samaria) which is transliterated by Septuagint as Σαμαρείας (Samareias), clearly having sigma at the end. The Greek text of Isaiah 11:11 mentions three place names (though they do not occur in the Hebrew text): Βαβυλωνίας (Babulonias = Babylon), Αἰθιοπίας (Aithiopias = Ethiopia) and Ἀραβίας (Arabias = Arabia), again having sigma attached at the end. Another example is Γομορρας (Gomorras = Gomora) in Isaiah 1:10. For instance, in Isaiah 11:13, the Hebrew personal name יהודה (Judah) is transliterated by the Septuagint as Ιουδας (Ioudas), with the sigma addition.

So yes, linguistically speaking, an ancient textual Greek form for the name Hira may well have had sigma at the end since it was something characteristic for Koine Greek to add this particular letter at the very end of proper names. In other words, the name Hira might well be written in ancient Greek as χιρας (chiras) or even χειρας (cheiras) since, surprisingly, there are orthographical variations of the same proper names, e.g. Χιραμ (Hiram) vs. Χειραμ (Heiram), and these variants are detectable especially when we collate/compare the so-called four great uncial codices: Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Ephraemi. Regarding the initially proposed text-form χιρα (without sigma), it may be considered as its post-biblical “modernized” version, exactly as it appears in modern Greek literature about Islam, which I already demonstrated in my research here in the blog.

On the other hand, it is equally possible that the variant χιρας (with the sigma ending) is just a declinable form since in Greek proper nouns changes depending on the gender, number, and case (inflection rules). Also, biblical scholars acknowledges certain instances where the Greek translator of the Septuagint employs declinable forms for some "obscure" place names he couldn't recognize.

Take care,
Idris

Offline Idris

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Re: The name "Hira" in Isaiah 29:12 and corrector's attempt to cover it up!
« Reply #43 on: January 13, 2023, 04:12:51 PM »

Examples of place names ending with -ra [Gk. -ρα; Hb. = רא] are especially supportive and helpful during a tactical analysis for verification of the Hira thesis. I presupposes that in the Hebrew Vorlage it was written almost certainly as חירא which corresponds to the Arabic form حراء

Now, it is interesting to note that the Greek translators of LXX (Septuagint) occasionally preferred a declinable forms of certain proper names. For example, the name Ἔσδρας (Esdras = Ezra) is an ancient Greek rendering of the Hebrew עזרא‎ (ʿEzra), and as we can note, the LXX translators clearly prefers a declinable form [i.e. Ἔσδρας], yet its indeclinable form is also attested in Nehemiah 7:7 as Εσδρα (Esdra).

Thus, based on this one example with the -ρα (= רא) ending, we can deduct (or at least assume) that χιρα (chira) is an indeclinable form, while χιρας (chiras) is its declinable form.

NOTE: if someone will spot other examples of Hebrew place names ending specifically with רא and then transliterated in LXX with -ρας, please let us known here.


Take care,
Idris

 

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