Wednesday, October 16, 2019

The Masorah on Genesis 19:2 and "my lords" and "LORD"



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)