"I am no Hebraist by any means . . . [I may be] a rather poor one, and that may show here."—Kerry Shirts
Recently, Kerry Shirts (“Philo Sofee”) made another dig at me and my blog on the Mormon Discussions forum:
Firstly, it should be noted that Kerry is relying upon very dated resources—for example, Strong's is seriously outdated, regardless of the edition one uses. Furthermore, there are much more scholarly and detailed lexicons of biblical Hebrew and Aramaic on the market. The best on the market would be the 5-volume The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament by Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner (HALOT).
Secondly, contra Kerry, it is true, as I stated, that the Hebrew suffix -on (ון) denotes places, such as Hebron ("place of the friend"); Gibeon ("place of the hill") and Ayyalon ("place of the deer").
Furthermore, it should be noted that, in the Hebrew, not all instances Kerry cites end in -on, such as "Babylon"; in the Hebrew Bible, it is simple *BBL (בָּבֶל) not *BBL coupled with –on.
As an aside, for those wondering about my experience with biblical languages—I studied biblical Hebrew and Greek in university (Pontifical University of Ireland, Maynooth) and try to engage in exegesis of the original language texts on a daily basis as part of my devotional reading and study of the Scriptures. Hopefully this blog and some of the posts reveal, I do have a good grasp of exegesis and original languages.
For a good discussion on "Jershon" and its etymology, see the article on Jershon at the Book of Mormon Onomasticon Website.
