Calvin has been bugging me to post more, and since I have a series of ready-made posts in my exegesis paper from the spring, I really have no excuse. As much as I’d love to jump to the topics that most interest me, I should probably start where I actually started in my paper: textual criticism.

For my fully reconstructed text, you may refer to this post.

My text criticism for this passage was pretty long, so I’m going to split it up into two posts. One caveat: this is from a paper I submitted for a class, so it’s in a more formal style than I usually employ when blogging. Enjoy!

Verse 18

צעק לבם
     The first two words are puzzling. The difficulty lies in determining to whom the 3mp pronoun on לב refers. Normally, one would look to the immediately preceding context. However, the most recent 3mp antecedent would be the איב or צר of verses 16-17, which unfortunately lacks sense in the context of 18-22. Many therefore choose to emend the text in some fashion, since there does not appear to be another obvious referent. Those who choose to emend these two words agree almost across the board that צעק should be emended to צעקי, changing the verb to a 2fs imperative from a 3ms perfect, on analogy to the two other 2fs imperatives in lines 2 and 3 of verse 18. Various proposals¹ have then been suggested on how to deal with לבם. However, the versions agree in every instance with the MT reading. Due to the lack of alternate textual evidence, the MT reading has been followed here.²

חומת
     There is some question of sense with this word as well. Many commentators choose to emend in various ways in conjunction with the final two words of the line (18c-c). The main difficulty appears to lie in an assumption that it would be nonsensical for the poet to address a wall.³ Some LXX manuscripts translate this word in the plural, Τειχη, rather than singular, which could be taken as evidence of some type of corruption.⁴ However, the majority of the evidence, including the Syriac and Aramaic versions, lies on the side of the MT, therefore the singular has been maintained here.

בת ציון
     The Greek equivalent of בת is missing in the earlier LXX manuscripts. While some have attempted to devise convoluted proposals as to how to how this is part of the corruption of חומת, a more simple explanation seems likely. Given that both חומת and בת end with ת, the lack of θυγατρος could be explained easily by haplography via homoeoteleuton. Either a Hebrew manuscript had experienced haplography prior to the Greek translation, or the word was in the Hebrew manuscript, and the LXX translator skipped over the word in his translation. It seems over the top to try and reconstruct a way that בת could have found its way into the text, where it was not originally, through a series of labyrinthine corruptions, simply because one has trouble understanding what could be meant by the address to the חומת

אל תדם בת עינך
     The LXX understands בת here as a vocative rather than as the head noun in a construct relationship with עינך. This is not a consonantal variant but either a misunderstanding of the Hebrew idiom בת עינך, or merely an interpretational choice, since the consonantal text is ambiguous.

Verse 19

בלילה
     The consonantal MT reads בליל. The final ה has been restored here, to match the Masoretic vocalization.

אשמרות
     Early LXX manuscripts read φυλακης σου, a singular noun with a second person singular possessive pronoun, versus the Hebrew plural noun lacking a possessive suffix. This most likely does not reflect a different Hebrew text but a stylistic choice on the part of the translator.⁵

< העטופים ברעב בראש כל חוצות >
     This line is most likely not original and has been removed. Verse 19 is a four-line stanza in the MT. This is the only four-line stanza in chapter two; the rest have three lines. On its own, this would not be enough of a reason to delete the final line, since there is no evidence among the versions as to a textual corruption. To delete a line on this basis alone seems to presuppose a greater understanding of Hebrew poetry than perhaps we really have.⁶ However, on a closer analysis of the structure of the stanza (as opposed to a cursory survey of how many lines each stanza has), this line sticks out rather pointedly, and doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the context of the verse. The content seems to serve no poetic function, is unnecessary to the meaning of the passage, and does nothing to move along the poetry, nor does it fit with the previous three parallel lines. It has the feel of a targumizing expansion, a line added to explain a little bit more about the עולל from the third line in the stanza. Of course, without textual variants one cannot be certain, but a side must be chosen one way or the other. Here, the decision has been made to cut the line from the reconstruction.

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