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The Names Have No Fixed Spelling

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The Names Have No Fixed Spelling

Yeiayel appears in print as Yeiayel, Ieiaiel, Jeiaiel, Yeyayel and several other forms. This is normal for the seventy-two, and it has a specific cause.

The chain runs: a Hebrew consonantal text, from which three letters are extracted; a suffix added; the result transliterated into Latin letters by a Renaissance scholar working with the conventions of Latin; then recopied, printed, translated into French, translated from French into English, and reproduced across a century of books that mostly did not consult the Hebrew.

At each stage the same choices recur. Hebrew yod can become i, y or j. Vav can become v, u or w. Heh may be written or dropped. Ayin has no Latin equivalent and is usually omitted, which is why some of the seventy-two lose a consonant entirely in their English forms.

The last of these has a real consequence. Where two different Hebrew letters both vanish or both become the same Latin letter, distinct names collapse into identical-looking English ones, and the reverse, where one Hebrew name acquires half a dozen English spellings that look like different angels.

The rule for a reader is to treat the number as the identifier. The twenty-second of the seventy-two is unambiguous. Its name is not.

This also disposes of a family of arguments found in popular sources, in which a resemblance between one of the seventy-two and some other angelic or divine name is presented as significant. Such resemblances need to be checked in Hebrew before they mean anything, and a surprising number of them do not survive the check.

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