21st Century Bible Hebrew -- raqia redux

So I have done the homework on this subject after remembering something and looking it up. The question was why doesn't LSJ have any words about hammering, other than metalworking for weapons and body armor.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/08/21st-century-bible-hebrew-raqia.html

It's like they didn't know about the malleability or ductility of copper, silver and gold. But in the Trojan period about 1200 BCE, they had to to make masks of thin gold that Heinrich Schliemann found, the so-called Agamemnon mask and others.

https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/features/2011/mask-of-agamemnon#:~:text=The%20%22Mask%20of%20Agamemnon%22%20is,graves%20of%20a%20royal%20cemetery.

And the consensus is that if these are genuine, the gold was pressed or even hammered onto a wooden form, then dressed up and put in the grave. 

Later studies suggest that this mask dates to the 1500s BCE, and since radiocarbon dating in the region shows that conventional dates for that period tend to lag the actual date by 150 years, we can suppose the mask to come from -- class? -- the time of the Thera explosion. 

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/greekpast/4917.html

The maker produced thin gold leaf, used hammering to make it coagulate, and also raised some bas relief work for realism.

This being the same time period as the Exodus and the making of the tabernacle, it shows us that hammered gold work was known around the Mediterranean when Thera blew up. 

Fine metalwork could also have been produced by lost-wax casting, known in the region from nearly 5000 BCE. However, it turns out that early Hellenes turned out masses of bronze statues by hammerwork. The verb for this is σφυρηλατέω, and specifically refers to statues according to LSJ, although there's a lesser reference to wrought iron. Originally used for small votive statues, it turned into large statues with an iron armature.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grbr/hd_grbr.htm

The article shows that later the Hellenes adopted the hammered bronze technique from Syria in the 800s BCE, and later went to lost-wax casting. That leaves a big gap after the Agamemnon mask. 

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/72679/excerpt/9780521772679_excerpt.htm

Greek gold jewelry is rare, according to this site, and the earrings shown date to the 200s BCE.

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/story/recent-acquisition-pair-earrings-bull%E2%80%99s-heads

While Hellenic Greece didn't use hammered gold until the 200s BCE, they did have the verb ἐλαύνω, which LSJ says basically means drive. It refers to the lyrics of Mimnermus of the 600s BCE in part of the entry for elauno:

Ἡφαίστου χερσὶν ἐληλαμένη χρυσοῦ

This part of the entry for elauno says it means to strike or to beat into plates (compare to "laminate"). No wonder I didn't find it when I was searching for "hammer". Showing you can't give up just because one keyword fails you.

The question is still, why did Septuagint use stereoma for raqia and really, this is why asking "why" is a non-starter in linguistics. Knowing that Septuagint is a bad translation in just about every way possible, there's no getting inside the heads of the translators. 

But there was at least one word they could have used, and they didn't, and we have been living with the results ever since.