▪ Jeffery1938: »The name refers always to the mother of Jesus, though in xix, 29; iii, 31; lxvi, 12, she is confused with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron. / Some of the philologers took the name to be Arabic, a form
maFʕaL from
rāma, meaning ‘to depart from a place’.
1
Some, however, noted it as a foreign word,
2
and Bayḍ. on iii, 31, goes as far as to say that it is Hbr. Undoubtedly it does go back to the Hbr
Miryām but the vowelling of the Ar
Maryam would point to its having come from a Chr source rather than directly from the Hbr. The Grk
Maríam, Syr
Maryam, Eth [Gz]
Māryām are equally possible sources, but the probabilities are in favour of its having come from the Syr.
3
There seems no evidence for the occurrence of this form in pre-Islamic times,
4
though the form
Māriy(y)aẗ, the name of the Coptic slave girl sent from Egypt to Muḥammad,
5
is found in a verse of al-Ḥāriṯ b. Ḥilliẓa, iii, 10 (ed. Krenkow, Beirut, 1922).«