14 August 2022 draft-bible
1. Negev. Hebrew Negev, which refers to a specific desert region to the south of Canaan, and which is still known as ‘the Negev’.
4. will you slay even a righteous nation? Hebrew hgwy gm ṣdyq thrg. A problem here is that ‘nation’ does not make a great deal of sense – God has threatened to slay Abimelech, not his whole nation. Speiser argues that one way or another, a textual error has occurred, and that the text at an earlier stage read simply hgm instead of hgwy gm as it does now. Thus one would read, ‘will you slay even a righteous person?’
6. God. Usually, the word is simply ʾelohim, but here it takes the article: ha-ʾelohim.
7. Now then. Hebrew wᵉʿattah.
8. ears. The Hebrew term is indeed plural.
13. when God caused. Unusually, the verb ‘caused’ here is plural, as if Abraham were saying, ‘when the gods caused’. And indeed, Driver allows that Abraham may be speaking ‘from accomodation to a polytheistic point of view’ (Driver, Genesis, 10th ed., 1916 [1904]).
14. cattle. Hebrew baqar. The term ‘oxen’, if one takes it to refer specifically to a bovine trained as a draft animal, would seem to be a shade too specific.
14. male slaves and female slaves. Hebrew ʿabadim u-šᵉfaḥot. There is no need to dance around the social status of people who could be given as a gift.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.