Why is "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" transliterated with a Chi in Matthew and Mark?

Question

In Matthew 27:46 (Mark 15:34), Jesus says "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (σαβαχθανί)", which is translated "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?".

Why is this supposedly Aramaic word transliterated into Greek as σαβαχθανί, with a Chi (χ), rather than as σαβακθανι with a Kappa (κ)?

The Aramaic word is said to be "שְׁבַק" ("to leave, depart; abandon; permit" - Daniel 4:23, Ezra 6:7). Is there any other example of the Hebrew letter Qoph (ק) being transliterated into Greek which could support this convention?

When I read it, it suggests the Hebrew "שיבח \ שִׁבֵּחַ" ("to praise"), with a Heth, (presumably?) cognate with Arabic سَبَحَ "to swim, to float; to praise, to glorify". About the Tasbih it is said "The phrase often has the connotation of praising God for his total perfection". So Jesus could be asking why he was praised, glorified, or perfected. Not that this makes sense, because in the aforementioned New Testament verses it is later translated as the Greek εγκατέλιπές, meaning "abandoned"; obviously the listeners in the crowd heard it as a different word. I guess I'm just curious about the choice of transliteration.

Answer 1

The Aramaic word שבקתני would probably have been pronounced /ʃabaqtani/. Usually, as you note, the /q/ of Aramaic is transliterated as κ, so σαβακθανι /sabaktʰani/ would be expected. However, in Greek, the cluster χθ was pronounced /ktʰ/, so the spelling σαβαχθανι is only an orthographic convention for the same pronunciation /sabaktʰani/ by putting two aspirated letters next to each other.

Your connection to the Arabic word سَبَحَ is problematic, because χ is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew ח only when it was pronounced /x/, not /ħ/. The Arabic cognate sound is written خ /x/, not ح /ħ/. Furthermore, the root שבח in Aramaic is used in the pa''el form, so we should expect gemination. The proper Greek transliteration of שבחתני would probably be something like σαββαθανι.

Answer 2

Like everything in the Bible, this is the subject of an enormous mass of scholarly and non-scholarly literature. The question at issue here is whether Jesus is supposed to be speaking Hebrew or Aramaic, and if the latter, what sort of Aramaic. In Middle Aramaic (e.g. Syriac) one would expect šβaqtān (as it is in the Pshitta of Matt. 27:46: ܫܒ݂ܰܩܬ݁ܳܢܝ), but this is obviously not what underlies σαβαχθανί. Klaus Beyer argues that final unstressed long vowels were lost in all forms of Aramaic around 100 BCE. σαβαχθανί looks rather like a Hebraising spelling of šβaqtān. The writing with χθ suggests a form with the assimilation of -qt- to -qṭ-. (In the oldest stratum of Semitic loan words in Greek ϑ and χ are used for the emphatic stops ṭ and q, while in later borrowings they are used for aspirated non-emphatic t and k respectively.)

Answer 3

Dov Lerner's article on σαβαχθανι is quite interesting. He argues that this word is a transliteration from the Hebrew סבכתני "you have tangled me up" which may then be a link to the ram in the Sebak (סבך)-tree in Genesis 22:13.

Answer 4

I was first going to ask whether Ἠλί, Ἠλί, λιμὰ σαβαχθανί contains the Aramaic root שׁבח - to glorify. Having noticed that the Biblical Greek word can have quite different Aramaic or Classical Hebrew origins, I would also recollect that J.R. Skinner, a 19th century cabalist, wrote, "... while lama is why, or how, as a verbal it connects the idea of to dazzle, or adverbially, it could run "how dazzlingly,"..." (https://archive.org/details/keytohebrewegypt00skin/page/300/mode/2up, p. 301). I wonder if he was correct about this "lamah" meaning, which altogether led him to believe that the real meaning was "My God, my God, how thou dost glorify me?" Also it is stated elswhere that מה (mah) instead of למה (lamah) means "What ...!" or "How much!", whereas in Codex Washingtonianus (Mt. 27:46) there's mah instead of lamah: