360
What expression did his words, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” provoke?
Matthew: “Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias” ([xxvii, 47]).
This is additional proof of Matthew’s ignorance of Hebrew. He supposes a similarity of sound between the two words, whereas they were utterly unlike in pronunciation. Eli was pronounced Ali (long a), while Elias was pronounced Eleeyahu. But even had they been so much alike in sound that one might have been mistaken for the other, as Matthew supposes, the alleged incident is disproved by the fact that the Jews were not allowed to attend the execution, while to the Romans the words were meaningless.