The city of Peo

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Here's Genesis 36:39 in the KJV:^[1]

And Baal-hanan the son of Achbor died, and Hadar reigned in his stead: and the name of his city was Pau; and his wife's name was Mehetabel, the daughter of Matred, the daughter of Mezahab.

And here's the same verse in the 1927 American Translation:^[2]

After the death of Baal-hanan, the son of Achbor, Hadar succeeded to the throne, the name of his capital being Peor, and his wife's name Mehetabel, the daughter of Matred, the son of Me-zahab.

In the Appendix to the translation, the following note appears to explain the reading "Peor":

36:39b. So LXX; Heb. "Peo."

Let's take this apart piece by piece. "So LXX" means that the reading in the text ("Peor") is found in the Septuagint. "Heb.", according to the list of abbreviations at the beginning of the Appendix, means "Hebrew, meaning the official, so-called Massoretic Text."

So let us take a look at the official, so-called Massoretic Text. The image below is from C. D. Ginsburg's edition:^[3]

In that second line, the fourth word is paʿu -- in other words, "Pau", as the KJV has it. Not Peo.

Perhaps we should look instead to the Septuagint, and start from that end. Here's the relevant verse in the Cambridge Larger Septuagint.^[4]

I don't see "Peor" here, exactly, but I do see Phogor. Am I reading that right? Let's check the New English Translation of the Septuagint for this verse.^[5] Here it is:

Then Balaennon son of Achobor died, and Hadad son of Barad reigned in his stead, and his city's name was Phogor; now his wife's name was Metebeel daughter of Matraith son of Maizoob.

Sure enough. It's "Phogor".

So how can be explain that note in the American Translation: "So LXX; Heb. 'Peo.'"? The American Translation isn't just making things up here, although there are a few interpretive moves concealed in the terse note.

Let's first consider the Septuagint's Phogor. Another place we can find Phogor is in Numbers 23:28, where we read, in the New English Translation of the Septuagint:

And Balak took Balaam to the top of Phogor, which extends into the wilderness.

Here's the same verse in a translation based on the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917:

And Balak took Balaam unto the top of Peor, that looketh down upon the desert.

Notice that where the Greek-based translation reads Phogor, the Hebrew-based translation reads Peor. How can this be? Well, as it turns out, the jump is not quite so wide when the Greek Φογωρ ("Phogor") is compared directly to the Hebrew פְּעוֹר ("Peor"). Taking the Hebrew source, the first letter, פ, is for various reasons transliterated p or ph depending on its exact situation in a word: it is unsurprising to see it read as Φ in Greek. The vowel found after the "P" sound in Peor is the shva, a very short vowel-sound often represented in Latin transliteration as a small superscript ^e. Greek has no perfect equivalent for it, but in some cases an ο appears in Greek transliterations where we see a shva in today's Masoretic Text. The next letter in Hebrew, ע, or ayin, is a gutteral sound which does not exist in Greek or English. In English translations it usually disappears, but sometimes it is represented by a "G", as in Gomorrah or Gaza. So it is not strange to see it converted to a "g" in "Phogor". And then the -or ending of both names is basically the same.

And this continues to be a consistent equivalence. Where the Hebrew has "Peor" in Numbers 25:18 and 31:16, and in Joshua 22:17, the Greek has "Phogor". There is also a place-name "Beth-peor", or "house of Peor", which is translated into Greek as "house of Phogor" in Deuteronomy 3:29, 4:46, 34:6; and as "Baithphogor" in Joshua 13:20.^[6] There is also a deity known as "Baal-peor", that is "Lord of Peor" or "Baal of Peor", who appears in Numbers 25:3, 5; Deuteronomy 4:3; Psalm 106:28; and Hosea 9:3. In all cases Baal-peor appears in Greek as Beelphegor.

And so it is fair to say that Phogor is the biblical Greek equivalent of Peor. "So LXX".

So if the Greek expression "Phogor" is taken as an equivalent of the Hebrew "Peor", we can now turn to Genesis 36:39 and form a theory. Since the Greek here reads "Phogor", we may guess reasonably that the Septuagint translator of this verse had before him^[7] a Hebrew text which read פעור, "Peor". Now, suppose you drop one letter from the name, and by accident now have פעו. It would be reasonable to read this mutilated name as "Peo".

Now, as it happens, the vowels which were added to the Hebrew text toward the end of the first millennium of the current era read the word as "Pau". If the American Translation has this verse right, then "Pau" is a later mis-reading which has now become the "official" Hebrew text, while "Peo" is a better illustration of the error as it appears in the consonantal text.

So now we can explain the note in the appendix to the American Translation. But this does not justify the note. "Peo", however reasonable a theoretical reading of the Hebrew consonants, is not in fact the "official" Masoretic reading. It's a theoretical reconstruction.

The A.T.'s note would be less convenient, but more truthful, if it read:

So LXX; Heb. text likely derives from a loss of the final 'r' in 'Peor'.

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