And he [Lot] said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into
your servant's house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall
rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in
the street all night. (Gen 19:2)
The Hebrew
underlying “my lords” in the MT is vocalised as אֲדֹנַי the plural form of Lord (אד[ו]נ). One does find it interesting that there is a note on the
margins of the MT in case copyists were to confuse such with a similar form אֲדֹנָי (LORD, used of YHWH). As Page Kelley et al. noted in their work on the Masorah of the BHS for this verse:
Genesis 19:2: אֲדֹנַי, Mp Note ל̇
As mentioned above, the
note ל̇ indicates that this form is
hapax. An easy error to make here, particularly in copying, would be to confuse
אֲדֹנַי (my lords) with אֲדֹנָי (Lord), which occurs over 400
times. Thus, this Mp note preserves the minority spelling אֲדֹנַי and protects it from being
harmonized to אֲדֹנָי. By observing the Mp note in
the margin, the reader or copyist could be warned that there was something
unusual about this form, and a potential error could be avoided. The form אֲדֹנַי occurs only once. (Page H.
Kelley, Daniel S. Mynatt, and Timothy G. Crawford, The Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: Introduction and Annotated
Glossary [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998], 60-61)
