Written and Red

the waters which were flowing down from above stood and rose up in one heap, a great distance away at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan;  Joshua 3:16a  NASB

At Adam – As you know, sometimes the text of the Tanakh is written one way but read another.  Here is an example (in red):

וַיַּעַמְדוּ הַמַּיִם הַיֹּרְדִים מִלְמַעְלָה קָמוּ נֵד-אֶחָד, הַרְחֵק מְאֹד באדם (מֵאָדָם) הָעִיר אֲשֶׁר מִצַּד צָרְתָן

The word in parenthesis is the way the text is read even though it is written differently (look at the Hebrew word above without vowel pointing).  The difference is the prefixed preposition.  It is read with מֵ but written with ב.  As far as I can tell, no English translation of this text even mentions this change.  Most English versions follow the spoken text, not the written one.  Why?

It’s more than just convention.  The word with a bet doesn’t make any sense.  You can see this in the awkward translation of the NASB.  We would expect “away from Adam,” not “away at Adam.”  But the bet means “in, at, by,” which the NASB attempts to capture.  It’s just not the way we would speak this connection in English, so the other translations opt for a different preposition, meaning “from.”  This raises two interesting points.  The first is our usual belief that the written text is the word of God.  What we discover is that even orthodox Judaism makes exceptions.  It should be obvious that the written text did not include both versions of the word.  The second version was added to the text by men who wished to correct the sense of the sentence.  Clearly the original audience didn’t read the text with the second word choice.  But we do.  Somewhere along the line, the marginal note “correcting” the written text became the accepted spoken text.  Do you really think that God made the “correction”?

The second point is that the phrase (a great distance away at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan) only makes sense if we use our own cultural interpretation.  If we didn’t read “Adam” as a city, then we wouldn’t need to struggle with the change in preposition.  Adam in Hebrew can also mean “mankind” or “men.”  In this case, the verse recounts what happens to people other than the Israelites who are in the vicinity of the Jordan crossing.  We would read, “a great distance away by men who are beside the city Zarethan.”  It seems to me that this possibility is strengthened when we ask, “Is it reasonable to imagine that the name of a city in Mesopotamia would be the Hebrew word אָדָם (Adam)?”  This is particularly disturbing when we consider that Hebrew was spoken only within the tribes leaving Egypt.  The absence of Hebrew among the people of the Sinai for hundreds of years suggests that this is not the name of a city but rather the narrator’s word choice for occupants nearby.  At any rate, we are left with a particularly vexing verse.  What was the text of the original audience?  What did it mean?  Thousands of years later, human “correction” leaves us with questions that probably can’t be answered.

Topical Index: Adam, at, מֵ, ב, from, at, Joshua 3:16