Changes in 'Biblical' names

by Ozfeed

To what degree have biblical names mutated over the years? I mean names like Saul, Luke, Marc, Matt, John, Sampson, etc. Does the textual support help keep the pronunciation relativity consistent or would they move about as much as any other word?

ljak

Biblical names vary greatly from one language to another. There is no way to precisely determine how they were originally pronounced, but it was most likely similar to the Yemenite Hebrew pronunciation. The English forms of the names are among the farthest from the originals.

In English, names containing the letter J (Jesus, Joshua, John, Jacob) are a definite mispronunciations. The letter J was pronounced as a /y/ in the Latin alphabet, and only started being pronounced as [dʒ] in the last 500 years. The names mentioned would have been pronounced Yesus, Yoshua, Yohn, and Yacob prior to this shift.

The letter V sounded more like a /w/ in the original Hebrew (so, Dawid instead of David).

There was no distinction between the letters for the sounds /b/ and /v/ in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, so they are often used interchangeably (Abraham vs. Avraham).

Similarly, there was no distinction between S and Sh, turning Shaul into Saul.

Some names changed in more ways than just the letters when translated from one language to another. For example, Yohanan became John and Yehoshuah became Jesus.