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Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Psalm 145:13
The LORD is faithful in all his words, and holy in all his works. Missing between this and the previous verse: an entire nun line, preserved outside the Masoretic Text.
Psalm 145:13, in every translation this tool compares.
An acrostic poem uses each letter of the alphabet in order to begin a new line, aleph, bet, gimel, and so on. Psalm 145 does this for twenty-one of Hebrew's twenty-two letters, but the line that should begin with nun, the fourteenth letter, is simply absent from the standard Hebrew text used for most translations, an acrostic with a missing rung.
Because Psalm 145 is an acrostic with one line per letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but the Masoretic Text is missing an entire line for the letter nun, a gap that the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, and the Syriac all independently fill with a preserved verse the Hebrew tradition somehow lost.
Older versions, including the King James, translate straight through the Masoretic Text's gap without any indication a line is missing, since the manuscripts underlying them did not preserve the nun line. Many modern versions now include a bracketed or footnoted nun line, following its recovery from a Dead Sea Scroll and its independent presence in the Septuagint and Syriac, typically rendered along the lines of the LORD is faithful in all his words, and gracious in all his deeds.
נ (nun), the fourteenth Hebrew letter, its acrostic line absent from the Masoretic Text
A Psalms scroll from Qumran Cave 11 preserves the missing nun line, and the Septuagint and Syriac translations, working from Hebrew manuscripts earlier or different from the later Masoretic tradition, both independently attest to a nun verse in roughly the same position, strong evidence the line was genuinely part of the psalm's original acrostic structure and dropped out of the specific manuscript line the Masoretic Text descends from, likely through a simple scribal skip between two similar-looking lines.
English readers of translations based solely on the Masoretic Text encounter what looks like a complete acrostic psalm, with no hint that one letter's line is missing, and that other ancient witnesses, independently of each other, preserve the very line the Hebrew tradition lost.
When a Hebrew acrostic poem is missing a letter's line in the Masoretic Text, check the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient versions before assuming the poem was always incomplete. An acrostic's own structure can help detect and even help recover a loss that occurred somewhere in the copying process.
Reading straight through the gap, as the King James and older versions do, preserves the Masoretic Text exactly as received but obscures that a line is missing at all. Including the recovered nun line, as many modern versions now do, restores the psalm's full twenty-two-letter acrostic structure using evidence outside the Masoretic tradition.
- The nun line preserved in the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 (11QPs-a)
- Independent attestation in the Septuagint and Syriac Peshitta
- Standard treatment of Psalm 145 as an acrostic with a Masoretic gap at nun
