I like what Lynn Squire of “Faith, Fiction, Fun and Fanciful” (http://faithfictionfunandfanciful.blogspot.com/2009/03/yearning.html) writes,

“In the Hebrew language, the bowels were the seat of deep affection and strong emotions especially of love and compassion. What does our character value more than life? What does he want to have that he would give his all in order to attain or obtain? We need to find what affects our character “to his bowels,” the strongest part of his emotions.”

Makes sense to me. What do you think?

-MT

When these people resort to such deceptive and duplicitous tactics, they are only confessing the failure of their totem pole deity to give them the “new heart” that they claim to acquire upon being “born again”.

Anyone who witnessed that discussion clearly saw Pastor “Do The Right Thing” delete my posts when he and his minions could not answer them.

No skin off my back. Though, I’m sure their actions bearing witness against their own deity is a cause for far more consternation for them than it is for me

May God guide us all to His Truth.

“Finally, to Said I must exclaim, if we don’t turn to Arabic or Hebrew for help in interpreting an Aramaic word, what should we turn to? Chineese?!!!”

I am not aware of any “Chineese” language. Perhaps, you meant Chinese.

To answer your question: “..if we don’t turn to Arabic or Hebrew for help in interpreting an Aramaic word, what should we turn to?”

You turn to an Aramaic Lexicon to understand an Aramaic word. Not Arabic. Not “Chineese” (sic). We’re talking about Old Judean Western Galilean Aramaic.

To turn to Arabic which is a Nabatean offspring to understand Western Aramaic of the 1st century CE is just plain ridiculous to put it as politely as possible.

1. The owner of that blog instigates the hatred directed towards your faith.
2. On another blog he has referred to you as ‘pedeophile enablers’ and
3. On the same blog he actually brags about you being trounced by his religious right wing neocon friends over at his blog.

Just wanted to let you know the true face of what you’re dealing with over here. The pastor is duplicious in his dealings with anyone who doesn’t agree with his mindset.

There are only two possible alternates of the beginning consonant: either “sheen” (Arabic “ش”), or “seen” (Arabic “س”)
For the ending consonant, a number of alternatives can be considered:
a) “qaf” (Arabic “ق”),
b) “kha” (Arabic “خ”),
c) “ha” (Arabic “ح” — don’t confuse with “هـ”). The “ha” might seem an unlikely option at first, but it is a very valid one since the word usually is written “sabachtani” where the “ch” here can equally be referring to either “خ” or “ح” especially since the Greek tongue can not distinguish the two.
I will also include a forth alternative
d) the sound “k” (Arabic “ك”) although it is very unlikely because if it were a possibility it would have been the only possibility, because it can not be confused and would be clearly written with the letter “K” and won’t leave any room for speculation.

So, we now can expect the following possible roots:
1) seen-ba-kha … sabakhtani سبختني
2) seen-ba-ha … sabahtani سبحتني
3) seen-ba-qa … sabaqtani سبقتني
4) seen-ba-ka … sabaktani سبكتني
5) sheen-ba-kha … shabakhtani شبختني
6) sheen-ba-ha …. shabahtani شبحتني
7) sheen-ba-qa … shabaqtani شبقتني
sheen-ba-ka … shabaktani شبكتني

From my knowledge in Arabic I can give the meaning of only the following candidate combinations:
2) sabahtani = you swam me (verb: to swim)
3) sabaqtani = you outran me, or got there before me
4) sabaktani = you made me into a sabeeka (metal alloy)
6) shabahtani = you hung me on a stick, a pole, or a wall
shabaktani = you hooked me up

Finally, to Said I must exclaim, if we don’t turn to Arabic or Hebrew for help in interpreting an Aramaic word, what should we turn to? Chineese?!!!

Though, later Arabic etymological descendants of Aramaic etymons may have hints of their original root meanings, the interpretive taint they undergo through the ages renders them outright inadmissible as an evidence regarding the earlier Aramaic etymon’s actual meaning. Whew, that was a run-on and a half.