Mangled

Let a righteous man strike me—that is a kindness; let him rebuke me—that is oil on my head. Psalm 141:5 NIV

That is a kindness – The basis for most English translations is the Masoretic text (MT).  However, occasionally the MT just doesn’t make any sense.  It might have been slavishly copied from older documents, but that only means the errors were copied as well.  In this psalm there are so many unexplainable sentences that our English versions are just guessing.  Robert Alter notes:

It is at this point that the coherence of the Hebrew text breaks down, and grave textual problems persist until the end of verse 7.  The Masoretic Text appears to say literally, “May the righteous man strike me kindness.” Attempts to rescue this by interpreting hesed as “with kindness” or “in loyalty” are strained.  The translation reads instead of ḥesed the noun ḥāsîd, meaning “the faithful person” and making it the subject of “rebuke me,” dropping the waw (“and”) before the verb.[1]

Can we resolve this issue?  Probably not.  We’ll have to live with the proposed translations in English and the mangled text in the MT.  In other words, we’ll never actually know what these verses were.  So, why consider them?  There’s another lesson here despite the textual issues.  That lesson is about our uncomfortableness with a messed up text.  We want to believe that our Bibles are an accurate rendition of God’s instructions.  We want to believe the words are true.  So, when we come across verses where no one can be sure what was meant, we feel the certainty of our beliefs being assaulted.  Our confidence begins to wane.

Of course, we can claim that the original was perfectly clear (how could we ever know?).  Then we can just ignore all these “technical” problems and content ourselves with the general idea.  Basically, we can just pretend these problems don’t exist.  After all, we still have our faith in God’s oversight of the text, even if we’re not sure about it today.  Our faith stays intact.  The Bible is secure.

Or—we can pay attention to the remark of Sidnie White Crawford: “in Second Temple Judaism, there is neither a finally closed canon of scripture nor a finally fixed text of what became the Jewish canon.”[2]

The followers of YHVH didn’t seem to have too much trouble with a fluid text, even a text with scribal and grammatical errors.  We might want to ask, “Why?”  Do you suppose that their faith wasn’t based in the text, that the text was supplementary to their faith-experience, seeped in tradition and community?

Topical Index: ḥāsîd, textual corruption, inspiration, faith, tradition, Psalm 141:5

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3 The Writings, p. 322.

[2] Sidnie White Crawford, “Biblical Text – Yes or No?”, in What is Bible? (Peeters, 2012), p. 113.