H7794

• {"n":"Genesis 49:6","s":"They digged down a wall. Or: they hamstrung oxen. The consonants are the same; only the vowels, added centuries later, decide.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-49-6","r":"Genesis 49:6","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"The King James reads wall, following the Vulgate's murum and the Targums. Most modern versions read oxen, following the Masoretic Text's own vowel pointing and the Septuagint's tauron, bull."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Imagine a sentence in a language written without vowels, where the same three letters could spell either **wall** or **ox** depending on how you say it aloud. That is exactly the situation here: shr can be read shor, ox, or shur, wall, and the Hebrew text as originally written does not settle which."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"The consonantal text \u05e9\u05d5\u05e8 can be vocalized shor, ox, matching the Masoretic tradition's own pointing and the Septuagint's Greek, or shur, wall, matching the Vulgate and the Aramaic Targums. Since vowel points were added to the Hebrew text centuries after the consonants were fixed, this is a case where two ancient, respected translation traditions genuinely disagree on which vowels the unpointed consonants originally carried."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English wall and English ox are entirely different images, one a act of vandalism against property, the other a crippling act of violence against animals, so the translation a reader receives depends entirely on a vowel-pointing decision made centuries after the consonants themselves were fixed, a decision no English reader can see happening."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Remember that the earliest Hebrew text was consonants only; vowel points were a later addition, authoritative but not infallible. Where ancient versions split over the same consonants, as they do here, the ambiguity is genuine and older than any existing manuscript with vowels."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Wall follows the Vulgate and Targums and reads Simeon and Levi's violence as including property destruction. Oxen follows the Masoretic Text's own pointing and the Septuagint, reading the violence as extending to hamstringing livestock, itself a serious act of economic sabotage in the ancient world. Both are defensible from the same unpointed consonants."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e9\u05d5\u05e8 shor (ox) \/ \u05e9\u05d5\u05bc\u05e8 shur (wall) \u00b7 H7794 \/ H7791"}],"src":["Vulgate murum, wall; Targums Onkelos and Jonathan also read wall","Masoretic pointing and Septuagint tauron, bull, read ox"]}