What Does It Really Say?
Your people will volunteer freely on the day of Your power; in holy splendor, from the womb of the dawn, Your youth are to You as the dew. Psalm 110:3 NASB
Womb of dawn – Not to belabor the point, but if you read this verse in the NASB you will discover that it contains four footnotes, all indicating alternatives or issues with the translation. In fact, the real problems are with the text itself. I quote Robert Alter’s comments in full so that you can appreciate just how complicated it is to render this in English.
“Your people rally to battle. It is at this point that the language of this psalm begins to be cryptic, a problem that will persist to the end of the poem. The literal sense of the Hebrew here (just two words) is ‘your-people acts-of-volunteering.’ But the noun ‘am, ‘people,’ and the verbal root n-d-b, ‘to volunteer,’ ‘at act nobly,’ in conjunction are associated with volunteering to do battle, as in the Song of Deborah, Judges 5:9. So this translation assumes an ellipsis with that general sense here.
on the day your force assembles. The Hebrew says only ‘on the day of your force.’ Again, an ellipsis is assumed.
holy mountains. The Masoretic Text reads ‘holy majesties,’ hadrey qodesh, which sounds very odd in the Hebrew. But many manuscripts show harerey qodesh, ‘holy mountains,’ and the similar-looking letters dalet and resh are often switched in scribal transcription.
from the womb of dawn. The second of the two nouns here in the Masoretic Text, mishḥar, is doubtful in meaning. The translations follow the Septuagint in reading mireḥem shaḥar, ‘from the womb of dawn.’ A scribe may have inadvertently repeated the mem at the end of reḥem and at the beginning of shaḥar as well . . .”[1]
Perhaps this is all too technical, but it’s worth reviewing because it offers an important insight into reading the Bible in English (or even in Hebrew). Certainly by now we have learned to be cautious of translations. What we also learn is that the “original” text is sometimes just as difficult, with perhaps scribal mistakes, words that don’t make sense, grammatical oddities, and the persistent qere ketiv (what is read and what is written). Without tradition it would be difficult, sometimes impossible, to understand these ancient texts. For those who wish to claim that every word in the Bible is the word of God, examples like this require dogma, not evidence. For those of us who wish to understand the complexities of reading documents written thousands of years ago, verses like this one teach us that it isn’t simply a matter of recognizing the cultural differences. Finally, perhaps most importantly, we realize that our faith cannot depend on any written document because written documents are always subject to human interference. Biblical faith is a living faith, resting on relationship. If it ever becomes a faith in the “Book,” we will have lost the battle to believe.
Topical Index: emendation, translation, faith, belief, Robert Alter, Psalm 110:3
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3: The Writings, pp. 264-265.
