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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gary Waddingham, post: 3237241, member: 73648&quot;]The first letter (the one farthest right)&nbsp; is an ayin which is originally a voiced pharyngeal fictive but nowadays is voiced like the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, an alef.&nbsp; In other words it is voiced like what you do at the beginning of the word &quot;apple&quot; when you constrict your throat.&nbsp; Sometimes in English it is portrayed by double A&#039;s.&nbsp; The next letter is of course a Z.&nbsp; These two letters have to be taken as the object of the next three which spell &quot;bal&quot; or more commonly &quot;baal.&quot;&nbsp; This is &quot;lord&quot; and always comes with a geographic designator such as in this case AZ.&nbsp; The numerous coinage of Tarsus often has on it &quot;BLTRZ&quot; for&nbsp; baal of Tarsus, or Lord of Tarsus.&nbsp; Many people assume that baal is the name of a pagan diety but without the geographic designator it doesn&#039;t mean much. Thus this king is named after the lord of a certain place in the same way someone might have &quot;St. John&quot; as a family name.&nbsp; &quot;MLK&quot; is still a popular name for people both as surnames and family names such as the actor Rami Malek&#039;s last name. Of course it means king. Remember that Hebrew and other semitic languages for the most part have vowels that are understood and not written down.&nbsp; The Hebrew Bible has diacritical markings put there by the Masoretes a long time ago because it was felt that the pronunciation of Hebrew was being lost.&nbsp; The last work is GBL or Gebal, the name of a town we more commonly call by its Greek name Byblos.&nbsp; Phoenician coins are often the easiest semitic coins to translate.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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