Missing “Faithful Words”
Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Your dominion endures throughout all generations. [b]The Lord is faithful in His words, and holy in all His works. Psalm 145:13 NASB
[b] – Did you notice the footnote in this verse? Ah, maybe your Bible doesn’t have such a footnote. Maybe your Bible translates verse 13 like this:
Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
And Your dominion endures throughout all generations. (NKJV)
Or with a notation like this (NIV):
- Psalm 145:13 One manuscript of the Masoretic Text, Dead Sea Scrolls and Syriac (see also Septuagint); most manuscripts of the Masoretic Text do not have the last two lines of verse 13.
The NASB includes the second phrase in verse 13 on the grounds that this poem is an acrostic (each line starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, except that the line for Nun, letter 14, is missing). Robert Alter explains:
“The Hebrew ‘aromimkha shows an initial aleph, marking the beginning of an alphabetic acrostic. Nun, the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, is missing, so the psalm has twenty-one verses instead of twenty-two. But most of the ancient translations as well as a text of this psalm found at Qumran and also one medieval Hebrew manuscript have a verse for nun. . . The evidence strongly suggests that this line was in the original psalm and somehow was dropped in the tradition of scribal transmission that became the Masoretic Text.”[1]
Translations that stick to the standard MT (Masoretic Text) don’t include this line. Translations that recognize the anomaly use source documents from outside the standard to supply what was in all probability a missing line in the MT. This is simply a case where the authorized MT is defective, for reasons unknown to us.
Why should we care? What does it matter? The answer to both these questions is straightforward. If we want to know what the psalmist really wrote (particularly if we believe his words were inspired), then we will have to look at more than the MT as our source. And if that’s true, then we will have to look at other sources for all the verses in the MT. Canonization might have fixed the text, but it also fixed the errors and the missing pieces. Canonization is not a guarantee that we have exactly what was inspired by God. It is only a guarantee that we have what men decided was inspired—and men make mistakes.
Topical Index: acrostic, Masoretic Text, canon, Psalm 145:13
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 3 Writings, p. 328, fn. 1.
