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re: orion purview



	Thanks to Greg for his comments and for the bibliographic
reference, which I had not seen.
	The subject which I raised--perhaps not as well as possible--was
methodology. This was in response to Fred Cryer making comments about the
second column of Hexapla and then declaring that what I wrote was "not how
scholarship is done," and other, even less apt, words.  I have tried to
note that:  there are lively questions about who wrote those
transliterations; how systematic they are; how representative of all
ancients they are; how relevant to our case they are; how to explain chosen
rendered as esshn; whether all ancient etymologies are agreed on by all
ancients (cf., e.g., Strabo who, on occasion, would question Posidonius);
whether all ancient name-formation occurred in a manner designed to please
modern philologians; how to account for the so-called "inexact" form of the
Greek to which Philo alludes; the relevance of osios to a Semitic not a
Greek Vorlage; how to account for Epiphanius' spellings; why the Essene
self-designations in Qumran mss could have met the conditions historically
attested as not accepted by their opponents; and so on. Such posts were met
with derision from Dr. Cryer. (It was not clear from your post whether you
regard Dr. Cryer's language on orion appropriate.) If a simple, mechanical
retroversion were sufficient, this subject would not have generated so many
proposals. Now that the long-popular Aramaic proposals are losing support,
an open-minded approach will allow discussion of other observations.
	I would welcome a return to civil exchanges, whether the subject is
etymology, or radiocarbon, or En Gedi, or 4Q246.
	While I agree that the Tel Dan inscription and comments on it by T.
Thompson, N. P. Lemche, J. West, R. Gmirkin, you, or I are not per se
relevant to orion--I noted only the methodological question--now that you
gave a reference, I'll give a fuller version, on the chance that some
orionites, like me, may be interested, and because different libraries list
such serial proceeding subsets differently:
Giovanni Garbini, "L'iscrizione aramaica di Tel Dan," Rendiconti,
dell'accademia nazionale dei lincei, classe di scienze, morali, storiche e
filologiche, ser. 9, vol. 5, fasc. 3 (1994) 461-471.
sincerely,
Stephen Goranson
goranson@duke.edu