number3

Quote from Mathew Chapter 1

And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram;

1:4
And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon;

1:5
And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse;


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Notice the line "And Salmon begat Booz or Rachab"

This made me think, how many people do i know in the world called "Booz". Answer none. An internet search brought no answers either. In fact it turns out 'Booz' as a name is as about as unique a name as you can get. In fact it must have a very unusual name of that time.

Which leads to the question - Why put 'Booz' or Rachab. Surely if this was his real name everyone would know who Booz was and there would be no need to tell everyone his was from Rachab.

But then I think there must have been lots of Booz's.

But how many were begat by Salmons? or any other fish for that matter?

GakuseiDon

Try "Boaz".

number3

Yeah because that makes all the difference!

GakuseiDon

You're welcome.

Haran

I don't know how serious your post actually is (since it is kind of funny with the whole liquor and fish thing...), but if you're really interested... The translators of the KJV (which you quoted from) used different manuscripts than more modern bibles and were simply trying to put the Greek letters on those manuscripts into English, therefore βόοζ becomes Booz.

However, modern scholarly Greek New Testaments use older manuscripts of the Bible such as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus that are probably closer to the original. These two important and early manuscripts read βόες or Boes, which is somewhat closer to the Hebrew. The sounds of letters in languages change over time, so transliterations of names never seem very accurate to me.

More modern English translations simply try to stay consistent and use Boaz in both Old and New Testaments.