Is it "Anatoli" or "Anatole"?

Question:

Please could you tell me if St Matthew used "Anatoli" or "Anatole" in his account of the star in the east, and is there a difference. What do these words mean please?

Submitted by MV on January 16, 1999.

Answer:  (Given by Bro. Brian Tipton)

I assume by your question concerning the spelling of a word in the Greek Language that you are somewhat familiar with Greek. I will, however, try to be as thorough in my explanation as I can in case you are not very familiar.

The account of the 'Star of the East' in Matthew 2:2, reads in the KJV as: "Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him."

Before answering your question, let me say that the original Greek language in which the Bible was written, did not use Arabic letters, as does the English language. The Greek language used Greek letters. For ease of writing Greek words on Typewriters, etc., a scheme was developed to 'transliterate' the Greek word into an English word. For example, the Greek letter 'alpha' is represented as the English letter 'a'. The Greek letter, 'Beta', is represented as the English letter 'b', and so on. Some Greek letters to not have single letter English equivalents. For example, 'Theta' is represented in English as 'th'. Some Greek letters do not have ANY English equivalent. Such is the case with the Greek letter, 'eta'. For transliteration purposes, Strong ascribed the
letter 'e' with a bar over it. That is, the transliteration looks like a lower case 'e' with a long vowel mark. Since I cannot type this letter in this message, for 'eta' I will use a capital 'E'. This will distinguish it from 'Epsilon', 'e'. BTW, the Greek letter, 'iota' is transliterated 'i'.

I will be taking my Greek text from Nestle-Aland's 27th Edition of Novum Testamentum Graece, the standard Greek Text. The phrase 'star in the east' in the Greek is written as 'astera en tE avatolE'. The phrase translates directly, 'star in the east'. The word anatolE is the word you had the question about.

The correct spelling of the word is not 'Anatole' or 'Anatoli', but 'AnatolE'. The word ends in the Greek letter Eta. In my electronic, transliterated versions of the Greek text, the transliterators used an 'h' to represent Eta. This is because the letter 'h' on the English computer keyboard is usually assigned the greek letter 'eta' on most Greek fonts. There is no Greek equivalent to the English 'h'.

Anyway, the confusion about the spelling of the word 'AnatolE' probably stems from the authors of the transliterations you are looking at not being able to write an 'e' with a bar on top. They chose to use either 'e' or 'i' instead. Whoever used the 'i' was in poor judgment particularly. The 'eta' does not sound like an i at all. It is closer to an 'e', but that still doesn't give it justice.

The proper spelling of the word is therefore, 'AnatolE' with an 'eta' on the end. There are no know variations of the spelling of this word in this verse, nor are there variations at all in the text of the verse.

All manuscripts agree.

As for the definition of the word, 'AnatolE', Thayer's Lexicon gives the proper definition of 'East'. Thayer's does not have definitions for 'Anatoli' or 'Anatole'. Probably these are merely misspellings and not actually different words at all. Rest assured, however, that the word only means East. There is no difference or discrepancy.

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me.

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