[The Avon Lady]

Originally Posted by Abd_von_Mumit

As you should know, the Bible very often refers to a 'nation' by using it's patronimical name, thus 'Aram' can mean Aram as a man name, a land OR the people that dwell in the land, lets call them the *Arams. Same exactly applies to Araw. Also remember that modern Hebrew has gone a long way from it's biblical form and you find forms that cannot be met in today's everyday language. This makes it a bit more complicated issue to be so asured about proper forms. Would you say nowadays "Vayyar Elohim ki tov"?

To answer your last question, it is perfectly valid and accurate in modern Hebrew, no less.

I failed to understand the relevance in this case of your point with patronomical names.

Oh, come on and don't try to be offensive. That doesn't help a bit in any discussion. And having an area on ones map doesn't mean that the area is explored.

But I never said it was.

Have you read any book of a Roman historian describing so called Arabia? You should, you'd be sure none of them was there, when he wrote about streets full of gold, precious stones etc. What Romans did know was existance of land somewhere there. Even the name they called it was unproper (Arabia Felix is a flawed translation of "Yaman", similar to flawed translation regarding Moses face 'with horns' ('bekarnaim', if I remember correctly)).

The verse states "ki Karan panav" - meaning because his face radiated. Otherwise, the Roman history is nice but why are we going off on this tangent?

So I should correct myself. The point is: in these times there was no such a name as 'Arab' to name all the nations/tribes/peoples/whatever that lived in the whole Arabic Peninsula.

Yet there it is staring at you in the verses I mentioned.

It's the dawn of Islam that brought the idea of 'one Arabic nation'.

Yes but it's the Islamic claim that the Arabs are the descendents of Yishmael that we're discussing and my claim that this is simply non-factual, which you actually agreed with.

Earlier they used to call themselves with a different names, for example "beduins", and almost every city/kingdom/large tribe had it's own identity, feel of being different from the other, who surrounded it.

Tangents. Tangents.

And, you know, I'd envy you the self-asureness in the matter, if not the fact, that I prefer to stick on knowledge that comes from scientifical research than on beliefs. In modern Hebrew the meaning is simple: 'Aravi' stands for 'Arab', 'Ivri' for 'Hebrew' and that's as simple, as it could ever be.

All you did was (re)state the English transliterized sounds of these 2 Hebrew words. So?

But the origin of these words is not such simple, thus we have very many efforts to find it's original, true meaning in the Bible.

"Eiver ha'Nahar" for "Ivri". "Erev" and "Ma'arav" for "Arav".

Ho hum.

As I stated above, I'll stick on the facts. The fact is that Talmud was written some one and a half thousands years ago, and the issues we try to discuss happened like four thousands years ago.

While this is when the Talmud was compiled, it was all compiled from oral sources, Just as the Mishnah was a few 100 years prior. Try again.

We have no further evidence of existance of these laws before, not mentioning the existance of Moses etc. Thus for me Talmud cannot be any source of information about ethnical origin of the Jews.

Whoopie for you.

It's not the matter of revisionism, it's a matter of being religious and believing in what Bible says, and being a sceptic. I'm the latter one, and as I said there is not a base we could share in this discussion.

So be it.

Laila tov.