Clothes Make the Man
Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily, and he went down to Ashkelon and killed thirty of them and took their spoil and gave the changes of clothes to those who told the riddle. And his anger burned, and he went up to his father’s house. Judges 14:19 NASB
Spoil – Dictionaries make mistakes. That might sound unreasonable. After all, dictionaries are supposed to tell us the meanings of words as they are used, so how could they be mistaken? But biblical dictionaries are often influenced by theological and philological considerations and that causes the authors to create definitions that don’t actually fit usage. We have known for a long time that the Hebrew word ish (ʾîš) is misunderstood as “man,” even though virtually every biblical dictionary says that “man” is the meaning of the term.[1] Robert Alter points out several other mistranslations in his book, The Art of Bible Translation. One in Judges is particularly interesting since the mistake changes the point of the entire story:
A striking case is the universal mistranslation of a rare Hebrew term, ḥalitsot, in the Samson story (Judges 14:19). All modern translations labor under the misapprehension that the reference is to a garment—the Jerusalem Bible: ‘what they wore’; the Jewish Publication Society: . . . ‘sets of clothing’; the Revised English Bible, quite fancifully, with no philological warrant, ‘their spoils.’ Now, this Hebrew word is followed immediately in the text by another that sounds a little like it, ḥalifot, which unambiguously means ‘change of garments.’ Samson’s wager with the Philistine wedding guests had been that if they solved his riddle, he would give all thirty of them ḥalifot begadim, ‘changes of garments.’ The translators all assume that ḥalitsot also must mean some sort of garment. Instructively, ḥalitsot as something worn, but not really a garment, appears just one other time in the Bible [2 Samuel 2:21] . . . Infuriated by the trick they have played on him, he goes down to Gaza and kills not ordinary men in perhaps fancy robes but thirty warriors, and as a provocative gesture, he brings their armor . . . as payment to the thirty wedding guests.[2]
Alter demonstrates that we just don’t get the subtleties of the text in English translation. And it’s not just mistakes in translating the words. We’ll examine a few other pearls from Alter in the next couple of days, but for this tiny example, we discover that Samson incites and offends even in keeping his promise. That tells us something important, about Samson and about his view of the Philistines. Think about the difference it makes to know that Samson kills thirty soldiers, not thirty ordinary men. When he dumps the armor on the floor in front of the wedding guests, how do you suppose they reacted? The man is a wild beast, untamed and unpredictable. And that sets the stage for the rest of our stories about Samson—even with respect to God.
A simple little mistake? No, I don’t think so. The translators certainly could have determined the meaning of ḥalitsot, just as Alter has, but I don’t think they wanted to. After all, Samson is a Christianized hero. What happens to that icon when we discover that he indiscriminately murders thirty Philistine warriors in order to insult the wedding guests in the fulfillment of his promise? Forget the morality about murder. Ask yourself what kind of character he exhibits.
Topical Index: Samson, garments, armor, ḥalitsot, Judges 14:19
[1] See the article by Rabbi David Stein, THE NOUN (ʾîš) IN BIBLICAL HEBREW, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures
[2] Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation, pp. 13-14.
