▪ Jeffery1938: »There was very general agreement among the Muslim authorities that the name was not Arabic, even Rāġib,
Mufradāt, 94 […]; cf. also al-Ǧawālīqī,
Muʕarrab, 46;
LA, ii, 325;
TA, i, 535. / Clearly
Ǧālūt is an attempt to reproduce the Hbr
Gālyaṯ of the OT narrative, of which the Qur’ānic story is obviously a garbled version.
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Hirschfeld,
New Researches, 13, suggested that the Qurʔānic / form is due to Muḥammad’s informant having misread the [Hbr]
Gālyaṯ of his MS as Gālûṯ, which of course it was very easy to do, and vowelling it [Hbr] Gālûṯ gave Muḥammad his
Ǧālūt. This is very ingenious and has in its favour the fact that the Goliath story occurs only in the late Madina period when Muḥammad was beginning to pick up more and more detailed information from the Jews. It is difficult, however, to think that any Jewish informant skilled enough to read the Hbr text would not have known the Biblical story well enough to have avoided such a mistake, unless indeed he deliberately misled Muḥammad. / Like the Aram
glwtʔ (Syr
galūṯā),
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the word [Hbr]
gālûṯ means an exile, and in the Talmud (e.g. Sukkah, 31a), the Exilarch is called
ryš glwtʔ, so Horovitz,
KU, 106, suggests that this
glwt, which must have been commonly used among the Jews of Arabia, may have become confused in Muḥammad’s mind with the
Gālyaṯ of the Biblical story, and so have given rise to
Ǧālūt. In any case we are safe in attributing the introduction of the name to Muḥammad himself, for no trace of it can be found in pre-Islamic days.
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