Reynald: The letters Sadhe/Sad and Seen/Semkat

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 3, 2020 at 07:09

Reynald, you wrote:

>Another people I overlooked were the Sabeans.

It depends on what you mean by the word "Sabeans" My starting point is reading what the word really means. In Syriac/Aramaic as well as Arabic the letter "S" could be س or ܣ (Seen in Arabic and Semkat in Syriac and Aramaic) and the letter "S" could also be a ܨ (Sadhe in Syriac and Aramaic) and ص (Sad in Arabic)

Why is this important? Because we have the kingdom of سبا (or Saba and this is the rasm of the word in the Qur'an and it is سبأ with an added hamza in today's Qur'an) so if by Sabeans you mean the people of سبأ or ܫܝܒܐ (Shiba) in Aramaic and Syriac then you are not correct. The people of Shiba (Notice that the Aramaic letter Sheen becomes Seen in Arabic) have their own languages and yes they are Semitic languages but these languages are not Arabic. As a matter of fact al-Tabari in his Tafsir makes it very clear that these were different languages and it is not Arabic and he calls these languages اليمنية or those (languages) that belong to Yemen. This group of languages is called "Old South Arabian languages" Here is a link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_South_Arabian

So we are not talking about Arabs here.

Next the name Sabeans with the letter Sad/Sadhe): Now the word الصابئة is the name of a very old Mesopotamian religion and the followers are called الصابءيون (notice the letter Sad) or the Sabeans. The etymology of the word is from the Aramaic word for baptism (Masboughata and preserved in the Qur'an as Sabgha). Those Sabeans' language is a dialect of Aramaic and they are not Arabs.

BTW: Muhammad and his God promise the الصابءيون or the Sabeans will go to heaven. It is interesting to know that some of the people around Muhammad used to call him الصابءي

Sorry, but neither the people of Saba' nor the Mesopotamian Sabeans are/were Arabs

PS: You might be interested in names of cities in the OT preserved in the native language of the locale. Let me know if you are interested. I have a very interesting example from Egypt

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