parsha bit: Vayeira

[cellio]

S'dom and 'Amorah were destroyed because of their great evil. Rabbi Yehudah said that the leaders of S'dom made a proclamation that anyone who so much as gave a loaf of bread to a poor man would be put to death. He further says that Lot had a daughter who fed a poor man and was punished in this way.

(Source: Pirke d'Rabbi Eliezer)

Aside: can anyone reading this tell me how the translators got from 'Amorah (ayin, patach) to "Gomorah"? There's no gimel there. (The vowel change is less surprising, as random vowel changes in translation/transliteration aren't uncommon. But adding a consonant is novel.)

Comments

[sethg]

I think this happened when the Hebrew got translated to Greek.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Greek transcribed the glottal ayin pronunciation current among Jews at the time of the the translation (see above).

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the reason for this is that there was no sound like it in Greek. The Greeks "heard" it as a G sound because that was as close as they could get with their set of phonemes.

Incidentally, gamma has become a guttural sound in modern Greek, I believe due to the influence of Turkish. It's no longer a velar G but a guttural G, like the letter ghayn in Arabic.