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The name of Sodom’s biblical doppelganger is עמרה (Genesis 13:10), which under the “typical” English transliteration rules would be rendered *Amorah, *Emorah or possibly *Omorah (cf. Genesis 25:4 עֵיפָה וָעֵפֶר  “Ephah and Epher”).  In a stroke of maverick augmentation, however, this profligate city-state is known to the world as “Gomorrah.”  The double “r” aside, how did a guttural with a short vowel become the letter “g”? 

 

Let us surmise a solution.

 

The initial letter of the name “Gomorrah” is the Hebrew letter ע (‘ayin).  In a strange parallel to high school physics, the beginning Hebrew student is told that no Hebrew word begins with a vowel; only later to find out with the college physics student that he has been party to a cruel cosmic joke filled with imprecision and spurious truth.  Sine qua non, there are a few exceptions.  These exceptions occur when a Hebrew word begins with a weak consonant and/or a so-called historically long vowel (e.g. sureq, hireq-yod, holem-waw).  The question, therefore, is whether initial ‘ayin plus a vowel is pronounced as a “pure” vowel (like a historically long vowel) or as part of a consonant-vowel syllable.

 

‘ayin or ghayyin that is the question

 

Answering this question requires some background on the letter ‘ayin.  This letter, the sixteenth of the Hebrew alphabet, belongs to a class of consonants called the gutturals (consonants produced by stopping the airflow in the back of the mouth) combined with a pharyngeal sound (sounds made by the contraction of the back of the throat at the pharynx).  In the continuum of Hebrew gutturals, ‘ayin is stronger than aleph but weaker than het.  Exactly how strong a consonantal pharyngeal is can be only speculated.  Suppositions range from a simple unvoiced glottal stop to a soft g sound (like an English nasal “ng” ; cf. GKC 6e).

 

Since the original pronunciation of biblical Hebrew has been lost, we must base its recreation on the Hebrew cognate languages, modern Jewish pronunciation tradition and transliterations of Hebrew words into Greek using the LXX.  Upon examination of these three criteria, one finds a mixed bag of solutions. 

 

Criterion 1: Cognate Languages

 

Most scholars suggest that Proto-Semitic contained two separate phonemes for the voiced (ghayyin) and unvoiced (‘ayin) letter, ġ and ‘ respectively.  Sometime in the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., the two distinct sounds began to be represented by a single grapheme in some northwest Semitic languages.  Like the letter “c” in English witnesses two distinct sounds /s/ and /k/ with only one grapheme (also, the letter “g” also represents the /j/ sound as in “George” and /g/ as in “God”) so too did ‘ayin.  Not all Semitic languages represented these two phonemes as one grapheme.  For example, at Ugarit two distinct letters were used to represent the different sounds.  Even though the phonemes merged into one grapheme, one need not conclude that the pronunciation had also merged–this only demonstrates the writing practices and plausibly that the writing system was borrowed.  As the English example above establishes, two phonemes can be represented by one grapheme, particularly when the writing system was not natively developed (the English system as is well know is borrowing from Latin).

 

Criterion 2: Modern Pronunciation

 

Modern Jewish pronunciation treats ‘ayin as a glottal stop (much like the separation of the words “we are” in English or the initial sound of “awful”).  In Yiddish, it is merely the vowel /e/.  Yet, the closest extant cognate to classical Hebrew, Arabic, demonstrates the conservative Proto-Semitic ‘ayin and ghayyin as two different letters ‘ayn (pharyngeal fricative) and ġayn (voiced velar fricative).

 

Criterion 3: LXX Transliteration

 

The Septuagint (LXX) portrays a helpful picture of this obscure letter by witnessing the pronunciation tradition of Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria a century or so before the time of Christ.  Examining the transliteration of the Hebrew proper nouns therein provides insight into generally accepted first millennium B.C.E. pronunciation. 

 

A comparison of the transliteration of names with initial ‘ayin demonstrates that the LXX translators differentiated between a vocalic and consonantal pronunciation of ‘ayin.  For example, in the same verse (Genesis 25:4) the names, עֵיפָה וָעֵפֶר, are transliterated with an initial gamma, Γαιφα, and the initial vowel alpha, Αφερ.  The LXX transliteration system is consistently applied to these, and other, proper nouns, but its basis is obscure (Joüon 5l).  The consistency is demonstrated in that a name with initial ‘ayin is translated either with a vowel or with a gamma.  It does not vacillate randomly depending on the book or chapter.  In a translation rot with inconsistencies, this static spelling (transliteration) points to a systematic pronunciation tradition.  However, attempting to systematize the data without witness to the aural tradition is difficult at best. 

 

Some observations concerning the LXX transliteration are as follows:

 

1.  The ‘ayin with a u-class vowel is transliterated as vocalic (exceptions 1 Chronicles 9:4 and 1 Samuel 27:8)

2.  ‘Ayin with the historically long vowel, sere-yod, is transliterated consistently as a gamma (i.e. as ghayyin).

3.  No apparent system with a-class vowels was found.

4.  ‘Ayin preceding gimel, kaf, mem (except with Gomorrah ), nun, qof, tsade, resh (except Gen 4:18; a possible textual problem confusing resh and daleth) and sin/shin is transliterated vocalically.

 

Conclusion

 

The argument for one combined phoneme cannot be substantiated based on these criteria.  In fact, the only evidence of one phoneme seems to be the use of one grapheme (Blau 9-10).  This information also indicates a standard pronunciation tradition in the first few centuries B.C.E. upon which the LXX translators depended; thus, the system was not developed arbitrarily but suggests an inert pronunciation tradition which witnesses two distinct phonemes for ‘ayin. 

 

Why then is the locality Gomorrah pronounced with an initial consonantal “g” and not a vocalic “o” sound; because it begins with the phoneme ghayyin.

 

 

Please Note: 

The asterisk symbol * indicates a non-extant form.

 

Short Bibliography

Blau, Joshua.  On Polyphony in Biblical Hebrew (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1982).

Murtonen, A. Hebrew in its West Semitic Setting, Part 1 Section A (Leiden, 1986) pp. 5n, 171-9. 

Wevers, J. W. “eth in Classical Hebrew.” In Essays on the Ancient Semitic World, eds. J. W. Wevers and D. B. Redford (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1970) 101-112.

 

 

See also R. David Freedman’s discussion of the two homonymous roots of עזר, ‘ezer and ġezer (“Woman, a Power Equal to Man,” Biblical Archeological Review [Jan/Feb 1983] p. 1-2)