The Man Who Wasn’t There

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Who was Masek?

Where is Calneh?

What do Adam, Satan, Malachi and Shiloh all have in common?

What did Adam say when he saw Eve for the first time?

The answers to this little quiz may be disconcerting to some students of the Bible.

Masek, according to the Septuagint, a third-century B.C.E.^a Greek translation of the Bible, is the mother of Abraham’s servant Eliezer (Genesis 15:2):

“The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, ‘Fear not, Abram. I shield you; your reward shall be great.’ And Abram said, ‘Master, Lord, what will you give me? I will depart without a child, but the son of Masek my home-born female slave, this Eliezer of Damascus.’ ”

Calneh, according to the King James Version (KJV) is a city in Shinar (Genesis 10:10), part of 027the realm of Nimrod, the “mighty hunter before the Lord”.

“And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”

The disquieting aspect of these simple answers is that when we look at other translations we find neither Masek nor Calneh—nor, for that matter, Damascus. Thus, in the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) translation, Abraham’s response to God’s promise is:

“O Lord God what can You give me, seeing that I shall die childless, and the one in charge of my household is Dammesek Eliezer.”

And in the New English Bible (NEB), the description of Nimrod’s realm is as follows:

“His kingdom in the beginning consisted of Babel, Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar.”

How did Masek become a nonperson and Calneh disappear? The explanation is that modern scholarship considers the appearance of these names in the Hebrew Bible to be misunderstandings of Hebrew spelling conventions, and new translations therefore read them out of the text. And the same is true for many—if not all—of the occurrences of Adam, Satan, Malachi and Shiloh. They are among the numerous textual mysteries created by ancient Hebrew orthography, a writing system very different from what we take for granted when reading modern English.

First of all, the Hebrew alphabet does not contain capital, or upper case, letters. Hebrew spelling, therefore, does not allow the visual contrast between “He tells the truth” and “He tells the Truth.” Consequently, the translator into English must decide what to capitalize. In the Song of Songs, for instance, there is a recurring phrase (2:7, 3:5, 8:4) that the NEB translates:

“I charge you daughters of Jerusalem: Do not rouse her, do not disturb my love until she is ready.”

But the NJPS reads:

“I adjure you, O maidens of Jerusalem: Do not wake or rouse Love until it please!”

The first translation interprets the Hebrew word ’ahavah to be a common noun, “love,” while the second understands it as proper noun, “Love.”

Second, most proper names in the Hebrew Bible are readily understood as meaningful words, like the English family names Bush and Baker or the place names Green Bay and Little Rock. Thus, when Jephthah was driven from his home in Gilead and settled beÔeres tob Judges (11:3), he was either “in the land of Tob” or “in a good land.” Still another example: Is it “a voice was heard in Ramah” or “a voice was heard on high” that precedes “lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children” (Jeremiah 31:15)?

So too, David fled Jerusalem during the rebellion of his son Absalom and stopped at bet hamerhak (2 Samuel 15:17). The 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation has him tarrying at “Beth-merhak,” taking the two words as a place name. Seizing on the root RHK, meaning “far,” in the word merhak, the more recent NJPS and the Jerusalem Bible (JB) have him stopping at “the last house.” The NEB, taking a middle approach through creative capitalization, has him halting at a place called “the Far House.”

This brings us to the name Malachi. The only reference in the Hebrew Bible to a prophet named Malachi is found—perhaps!—in the first verse of the book that bears his name: “The word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi.” But in the absence of other occurrences of the name, in this context we cannot be sure that the Hebrew word mal’akhi is a name at all; a note in the NEB offers the alternate reading “The word of the Lord to Israel through my messenger.” Like the disappearing Masek, then, Malachi becomes a man who wasn’t there.

Ambiguity also arises because ancient Hebrew manuscripts—like most modern Hebrew books—do not indicate vowels, The absence of vowels does not usually bother a reader fluent in Hebrew.

Vowels in Hebrew commonly carry grammatical 028nuances, like the tense differences in take/took. Vowels alone rarely distinguish Hebrew words—as in, for example, English Joan/Jane/Jan or bat/bet/boat/bait. Significantly, if we omit the vowels in the English sentence Jn tk th bt t th prk, only Jn and bt are ambiguous. A reader who knows English will expect Jn to be the subject of the sentence; since it is clearly not the article the or a noun in the plural it must be a name. But whether Joan, Jane or Jan is unclear. Given a singular subject, tk must be a verb in the past tense, Since it does not end in –s: only took is possible. After a verb, th must be the. And so on. Because Hebrew has very few sets of the Joan/Jane/Jan type, not writing vowels causes less difficulty than in this English example. An analysis of Hebrew words chosen at random from a modern advertisement finds that only 30 percent have more than one possible reading even in isolation; in context none was ambiguous.¹

But problems do occur, especially in poetry, with its rare words, innovative images and poetic license. For example, in Jacob’s death song, the section about his son Naphtali reads in Hebrew (Genesis 49:21): rp yrma ÷tnh hjl hlya yltpn and like this when the Hebrew components are replaced by equivalent English letters: nptly ’ylh sûlhh hntn ’mry sûpr.² The traditional reading of the vowels is naptaliy ’ayalah sûeluhah hanoten ’imrey sûaper, which the KJV renders:

‘Naphtali is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words.”

But the NEB reads ’ylh as ’eylah not ’ayalah, and ’mry as ’amirey rather than ’imrey, that is, keeping the same consonants but hypothesizing different vowels.³ It consequently translates the verse:

“Naphtali is a spreading terebinth putting forth lovely boughs.”

Similar disagreements occur with unfamiliar names. In 1 Chronicles 6:28 (6:13 in the Hebrew text), the sons of the prophet Samuel are listed as hbkr wsûny w’byh, which the KJV takes to be habekor waûsniy wa’abiyah, “the firstborn Vashni, and Abiah.” But since Samuel’s elder son is called Joel just five verses later (and in 1 Samuel 8:2), the NEB reads these words differently, inserting Joel as a name implied even though absent. NEB reads wsûny as wesûeniy, “and the second.” The entire phrase then becomes habekor [yow’el] wesûeniy ’abiah, “[Joel] the eldest and Abiah the second.”

Similarly, given the letters klnh in the description of Nimrod’s domain in Genesis 10:10, the KJV sees a city named Calneh. The NEB and JB, in contrast, using different vowels than the KJV, take the word to be kulanah, “all of them.” By this change the city named Calneh disappears.

Another example. Ignoring several occurrences of the Hebrew prefix ha– (the), the KJV introduces a heavenly being named Satan, hasatan in Hebrew, into the famous opening chapter of Job (1:6–12):

“Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, 029and Satan (hasatan) came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan (hasatan), Whence comest thou? …”

Since, however, the definite article “the” does not normally precede personal names, there is nobody named Satan in the NJPS rendering; hasatan is taken as a title, not a name:

“One day the divine beings presented themselves before the Lord, and the Adversary (hasatan) came along with them. The Lord said to the Adversary (hasatan), ‘Where have you been?’…”

Ignoring ha– affects another passage as well. “To” in Hebrew is the word ’el or the prefix le-. This prefix is a single letter, l, attached to the word that follows. The combination le– ha– “to the” is contracted to the prefix la-, also indicated by the single letter l. What then is the correct reading of l’dm? Assuming the pronunciation le’adam and over looking ha– in Genesis 2:19–20, the KJV tells a story about a man named Adam:

“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam (’el ha’adam) to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam (ha’adam) called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam (ha’adam) gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam (le’adam) there was not found an help meet for him.”

The NEB, however, posits reading la’adam as “to the man,” and therefore no Adam appears in this version of the story:

“So God formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of heaven. He brought them to the man (’el ha’adam) to see what he would call them, and whatever the man (ha’adam) called each living creature, that was its name. Thus the man (ha’adam) gave names to all cattle, to the birds of heaven, and to every wild animal; but for the man (la’adam) himself no partner had yet been found.”

In addition to lacking capital letters and vowels, many ancient manuscripts do not have spaces between words. The reader must recognize prefixes and suffixes, and hypothesize meaningful words and phrases.

Surprisingly enough, this is not very hard. But as a popular experiment in psychology illustrates, there is room for seeing what you expect or want to find. GODISNOWHERE is either “God is now here” or “God is now here.”

In the case of Hebrew sûylh, this ambiguity allows the reading sûiyloh (Shiloh), as in the KJV rendering of Genesis 49:10, a poetic passage from Jacob’s death song:

“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”

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But it also allows the division into sûay loh (tribute to him), as proposed by the translators of the NEB:

“The sceptre shall not pass from Judah, nor the staff from his descendants, so long as tribute is brought to him and the obedience of the nations is his.”

The reading sûay loh also seems to underlie the JB rendering “until he come to whom it belongs,” which a footnote explains as referring to the Messiah or “to David as a type of the Messiah.”

Coupled with the absence of periods and commas, equivocal word division creates uncertainty in Genesis 20:16. Because Abraham and Sarah have passed themselves off as brother and sister, King Abimelech has taken Sarah into his harem. God appears to Abimelech and tells him to return Sarah to Abraham. Abimelech does so, and also gives them generous presents. In the KJV, the story continues (Genesis 20:16):

“And unto Sarah he said, Behold, I have given thy brother a thousand pieces of silver: behold, he is to thee a covering of the eyes, unto all that are with thee, and with all other: thus she was reproved.”

In the NEB this sentence reads:

“To Sarah he said, ‘I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver, so that your own people may turn a blind eye on it all, and you will be completely vindicated.’ ”

The crux here is that the KJV separates the Hebrew words into w’t kl wnkht (pronounced ve’et kol venokhahat) “and with all [other]; and [she was] made right.” The NEB reads the same letters as w’t klw nkht (pronounced ve’at kulow nokhahat) “and you will be completely made right.”^b

This passage also contains another textual conundrum: Where does Abimelech’s statement end? Manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible do not contain quotation marks. The KJV presents the last clause in the sentence as the narrator’s comment; the NEB makes it part of Abimelech’s remarks. Since the Hebrew verb nkh agrees with an unnamed feminine subject but does not specify first, second or third person, the KJV inserts “she” and makes it a statement about Sarah, while the NEB reads w’t as ve’at, “you,” and makes it a comment to Sarah.

Where a quoted speech ends is a problem also in Adam’s reaction upon seeing Eve. According to the KJV, when Adam rejects all the animals of the earth as partners and finally finds Eve “an help meet for him,” he makes an observation and a prediction (Genesis 2:23–24):

“This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be on flesh.”

But in the NEB and JB, the man (ha’adam) says only the first sentence; the second is the narrator’s comment. In the NEB, the verses read:

“[A]nd the man said:

‘Now this, at last—

bone from my bones,

flesh from my flesh!—

this shall be called woman,

for from man was this taken.’

That is why a man leaves his father and mother

and is united to his wife, and the two become

one flesh.”

Sometimes even a favorite quotation is called into question as equivocal. The Hebrew of Isaiah 40:3 can be rendered word for word into English as “a voice calls in the wilderness prepare a path for the Lord.” Because of the absence of quotation marks, however, the question is: What is in the wilderness? According to the time-honored phrasing of the KJV, following the interpretation popularized by the Septuagint, it is a lone, outcast voice that is in the wilderness:

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“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.…”

But almost all modern translations, recognizing the poetic parallelism with the following phrase, place the adverbial phrase “in the wilderness” in the quoted speech. When this is done, it is the way of the Lord, rather than the voice that is in the wilderness. The JB thus has:

“A voice cries, ‘Prepare in the wilderness a way for Yahweh. Make a straight highway for our God across the desert,’ ”

And the JB—which is not averse to finding messianic prefigurations, as we saw in Jacob’s death song—is moved to comment on the loss in a footnote:

“The evangelists quote this text in its LXX [that is, Septuagint] form: ‘A voice of one who cries in the wilderness.…’; for them this is the voice of John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Messiah.”

As the JB translation shows, however, in this verse John the Baptist is another man who wasn’t there.

Who was Masek?

Where is Calneh?
What do Adam, Satan, Malachi and Shiloh all have in common?
What did Adam say when he saw Eve for the first time?

The answers to this little quiz may be disconcerting to some students of the Bible.