Revisiting the Camel and the Needle: A Philological Recontextualization of Phoenician Letter Nomenclature

This article reconsiders a canonical New Testament metaphor in which Jesus declares that transforming a rich man into a man of God is as simple as passing a camel through the eye of a needle (see [1], [2], [3]). Traditional translations have rendered this expression as hyperbolic or allegorical imagery; (cf. [6], [7]) however, a closer philological analysis - drawing on studies of ancient scripts indicates that the metaphor directly refers to the names of ancient Phoenician letters. The altered rendering found in the Peshitta - where the imagery is substituted with a more “logical” metaphor lacking any letter reference (cf. [15]) - serves as evidence that the original allusion was grounded in the Phoenician alphabet. Given the shared heritage of Old Phoenician and Old Hebrew (cf. [8], [9]), and considering Jesus’s deep engagement with Jewish history and ancient texts (cf. [4], [5]), this interpretation gains further plausibility. Notably, the divine name YHWH appears inscribed in Phoenician letters on certain Dead Sea Scroll fragments which are otherwise written in other scripts (see [11], [13]), highlighting the retention of early Phoenician orthography in later textual traditions.