Masoretic Mistakes

But with an overflowing flood He will make a complete end of ^[a]its site, And will pursue His enemies into darkness.  Nahum 1:8  NASB

Of its site – As you know, virtually all contemporary translations of the Tanakh rely on the Tiberian Masoretic text.  This Hebrew text from about the 10^th century CE added vowel points and standardized the reading.  It is the common text in Judaism today.  But you also know that there are disagreements between the MT (Masoretic Text) and the DSS (Dead Sea Scrolls), and since the DSS is nearly 1000 years earlier, these discrepancies raise issues about the accuracy of the MT.  As Hoffman states:

“In the end, then, the Tiberian system seems to reflect some grammar that goes all the way back to early Biblical Hebrew, and some grammar that was invented later on.  The Tiberian system seems to capture roughly the proper Biblical pronunciation of the consonants, but, probably, not of the vowels; the system also probably does not capture Biblical syllable structure. . . . So when we look at current copies of the Bible, which follow the Tiberian Masoretic tradition, we see the consonants of perhaps 3,000 years ago and part of the grammar that may go back that far, but general pronunciations that go back only 2,000 years, and sometimes but 1,000 years.”[1]

Unfortunately, these aren’t the only issues.  In this verse in Nahum, the English translations follow the MT without regard to the nonsense it produces.  In fact, the little footnote in this verse has to offer an explanation in order to make sense of the mistaken word.  The actual Hebrew word in the MT is meqomah, which means “her place,” forcing the translation to read, “He will make a complete end of her place.”  So, the NASB has to tell the reader in the footnote that what Nahum really meant was “make a complete end of Nineveh.”  But Robert Altar offers a much better solution:

“The received text reads, incomprehensibly, meqomah, ‘her place,’ but both the ancient Greek and Latin versions used texts that evidently have beqamav, literally, ‘those who rise against him.’”[2]

Therefore, he translates the verse as “He puts an end to His foes.”  Much better.  The problem is that you would never know this if Alter hadn’t made a point of it in a footnote.  You’d go right on thinking that the NASB, NIV, RSV, NKJV, etc. had it correct.  In fact, in some translations the word meqomah is simply translated “Nineveh,” as if the explanation were obvious.  The ESV gets it right.

What do we learn?  Look deeper.  Read wider.  Ask questions.  What they told you might not be what it says.

Topical Index: meqomah, beqamav, her place, his foes, Nahum 1:8

[1] Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (New York University Press, 2004), p. 117.

[2] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 2, Prophets, p. 1322, fn. 8.