(04-13-2015, 10:44 PM)gbausc Wrote: "Gavra" as it occurs in Matthew 1:16 is actually "gavrah" (her man, hero, master, authority, leader, guardian, father, husband) as it has a personal pronoun enclitic attached, which is followed with "d'Maryam" -"of Mary". This is a normal Aramaic construction where the personal possessive pronoun enclitic is followed by the one letter preposition Dalet (of) to complete the connection of possession between the preceding noun (gabra) and the following noun (Maryam). It is hard to see why "awleth" (begot) is not used, but perhaps it is because in every other generation listed, each father begets a son, not a daughter. In fact, there are 180 "begats" in the Old Testament, and only one of them is predicated of a named daughter in a genealogy, and that is Rebecca: "And Bethuel begat Rebecca"- Genesis 22:23. There are other places where it says, "and he begat sons and daughters", but this is the only one in which it says a man begat a female who is named. So it may be that is why "gabrah d'Maryam" is used, to distinguish the uniqueness of Mary's name being included in a genealogy and as the offspring of a long line of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob & David.
I translated "gavrah d'Maryam" as "the Guardian of Maryam" in my interlinear and in my Original Aramaic New Testament in Plain English
translation.
Dave Bauscher
Thanks for your post Dave. I had been away for a while (health problems) and just read your post. You hit on the same nail that I had been posturing for a long while. Matthew's use of Gowra almost certainly had to do with the need to forewarn readers that his genealogy entry had to do with a female (very unusual!) in the genealogy. I know nothing of Aramaic and have garnered what I know from Younan's Peshitta transliteration and AGR's articles. The dual genealogies of Matthew and Luke always seem to be "redundant", yet dis-similar; and had long posed a problem for me. With the gowra explanation, it becomes clear that Luke wrote his genealogy after he had seen Matthew's; and he (as he insisted) explicitly stated it to be husband Joseph's (not Jesus') lineage. Like Eisenhower taking pictures of the German death camps, he wanted to make sure that later skeptics that might deny His Heavenly Conception could not lay claim that v19 Joseph could have been Jesus' father - because was not of the required Royal Line. I think your post puts some icing on that cake. Thanks much. TB