▪ Jeffery1938: »It occurs only along with the Ethiopic word
ṭāġūt in the sentence “they believe in Jibt and Ṭāghūt”. The exegetes knew not what to make of it, and from their works we can gather a score of theories as to its meaning, whether idol (
ṣanam), or priest (
kāhin), or sorcerer (
sāḥir), or sorcery (
siḥr), or Satan, or what not. It was generally agreed that it was an Ar word. Bayḍ., e.g., claiming that it was a dialectal form of
ǧibs, a theory that was taken up by Rāġib,
Mufradāt, 83, and others.
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Some of the philologers, however, admitted that it was a foreign word (cf. Jawharī, sub voc.,
LA, ii, 325),
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and from al-Suyūṭī,
Itq, 320, we learn that some of them even knew that it was Ethiopic. / Margoliouth in
ERE, vi, 249, suggested that it was the γλυπτά of the LXX from γλύφω ‘to carve, engrave’, which is used to translate Hbr
fsl in Lev. xxvi: 1. This assumes that its meaning is very much the same as Ṭāġūt, i.e. ‘idol’, and this has the weight of evidence from the Commentators in its favour. It is a little difficult, however, to see how the Grk word could come directly into Arabic without having left any trace in Syriac. It is more likely that al-Suyūṭī’s authorities were right for once, and that it is an Abyssinian word. This has been recognized by Dvořák,
Fremdw, 50, and by Nöldeke,
Neue Beiträge, 48, who shows that [Gz]
ʔamlāk gəbt = θεός πρόσφατος [‘new, recent god], and in [Gz]
gəbt we have the form we need.«
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