View Message

The complication is that Elisabet is a substitution in the Septuagint for Elisheba or Eliʃeƀa. the final /þ/ appears in Gothic and Latin transcriptions (as � and th respectively). Since Latin has no /þ/ phoneme, this probably reflects actual Graeco-Jewish pronunciation, at least by the 4th Century CE. Possibly this form Elisabet/Elisabeþ is actually a different name (Eli-sabeth "God is my rest"?), in any case to Jewish communities at least as early as c 250 BCE it was a form more familiar than the 12-13C. Eliʃeƀa.

This message was edited 3/18/2021, 5:16 PM