Textual Corrections

Reprove your son while there is hope, and to his moaning pay no heed.  A very hotheaded man bears punishment, try to save him—you will make things worse.  Proverbs 19:18-19  Robert Alter

You will make things worse – What do translators and scholars do with biblical Hebrew words or phrases that don’t make any sense?  They correct them—with the best guess possible.  You might object, “But wait!  Aren’t they altering the word of God?  How can they imagine to do such a thing?”  No, they are not trying to deliberately alter what the text says.  The problem is that some Hebrew words in the text just aren’t really words and some phrases just don’t make any sense at all in any language.  These two verses are an example.

Robert Alter comments:

A very hotheaded man.  The translation follows the Masoretic marginal correction, gedol, instead of the unintelligible gerol of the consonantal text.  try to save him.  This is another instance in which each Hebrew word of the received text is comprehensible but they make little sense together, so the translation is conjectural.  A very literal rendering would be “but if you save and you still would add.”[1]

In cases like this, biblical translations are more like paraphrases than literal renditions.  Alter makes note of this in his comments.  Unfortunately, most English translations don’t tell you that the translators are guessing at the meaning of the text.  And let’s not forget the hapax legomenon, those words in the text that occur only one time and so we have no way to really understand what they might mean.  “Give us this day our daily bread” is a good example of that problem, as we’ve mentioned before.

Why would Alter suggest an emendation, from gerol to gedol?  If you look at the Hebrew, you can easily see why?  I’ve highlighted the unintelligible word.  Notice that the middle consonant, resh, is very similar to the consonant daleth.  The only subtle difference is the curve of the letter.

גְּֽרָל־גְּֽדָל־חֵ֖מָה נֹ֣שֵׂא עֹ֑נֶשׁ כִּ֥י אִם־תַּ֜צִּ֗יל וְע֣וֹד תּוֹסִֽף

The Masoretic text notes this, and reads the text as gedol, while the NASB tries to read the unintelligible word, gerol, as somehow connected to gôrāl (“lot, portion”).  Proverbs 19:19 is the only place where the spelling gerol occurs out of 77 occurrences of gôrāl.  It makes much more sense to suggest that the scribe simply got the wrong letter than to try to force-fit  gerol into another semantic frame.

Now that we understand a bit about the textual issues, what about the meaning of these two verses?  Well, that appears obvious—although not always applied.  The wisdom of Proverbs says that you should let your unruly children experience the consequences of their actions.  Don’t try to save the one who is a “hothead.”  Chabad reads, “A hot-tempered man incurs punishment, but if you save you will increase,” in an attempt to handle the literal text.  But we know what it means, don’t we?  The natural instinct of the parent is to protect the child, but if the parent keeps doing that, over and over, what does the child learn about life’s choices?  Nothing good.  And that’s the point of this mangled verse.  No consequences—no development—no change.  If only the government would learn this lesson.  Now that we understand the basic principle, we should notice the context of this hands-off approach.  “While there is hope.”  If you don’t apply this lesson to your children, then you’ve robbed them of hope.  How, exactly, that happens is the subject of the next investigation on Proverbs 19:18-19.

Topical Index: gerol, gedol, daleth, resh, emendation, hope, Proverbs 19:18-19

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3: The Writings, p. 411, fn. 19.