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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > December 1990

The Man Who Wasn’t There

Textual mysteries created by Hebrew spelling

By Harvey Minkoff

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.

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Footnotes

1.

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) is the scholarly alternate designation for B.C.

2.

For another example of alternate word divisions, see H. Neil Richardson, “Amos’s Four Visions of Judgement and Hope,” BR 05:02, where the traditional reading of Amos 7:4 lrb b’sû “contend by fire” is changed to lrbb ’sû “rain of fire.”

Endnotes

1.

See Geoffrey Sampson, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 89–92.

2.

Since the goal of this transcription is to approximate the format of written Hebrew, each HebËrew letter has been equated with one English letter; ’ represents aleph, s represents shin, h represents chet, and so on. However, like the letter c in English, several Hebrew letters may represent quite distinct sounds.

3.

NEB readings that depart from the traditional Hebrew text are found in L.H. Brockington, The Hebrew Text of the Old Testament: The Readings Adopted by the Translators of the New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge, UK: University Presses, 1973).