ABSTRACT
The text of the gospel includes no explana tory gloss, as is usual with foreign words that would otherwise have been unintelli gible to the Greek reader, and the majority of modern commentators understand the word as Semitic: iaka = Hebrew ieqa "empty, empty headed, brainless." Yet there is an alternative meaning proposed in 1922 by Friedrich Schulthess, an expert in Syriac and Palestinian Christian Ara maic: he equated the word with Hebrew rakh, "soft," which would thus be equiva lent to Greek malakos/malthakos, which denotes the passive-effeminate homosex ual. Further, in 1934 a. papyrus was pub lished from Hellenistic Egypt of the year 257 before the Christian era that con tained the word rachas in an unspecified derogatory sense, but a parallel text sug gests that it had the meaning kinaidos ("faggot"). It would thus have been a loanword from Hebrew in the vulgar speech of the Greek settlers in Egypt. A modern counterpartis the word lach, "tender, soft, effeminate, timid, cowardly" in the Gaunersprache, the argot of German beg gars and criminals, which has absorbed many terms from Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic because of social conditions that created a linguistic interface between the Jewish "fence" and the gentile thief.
