Robert Alter's Conjectural Emendation to 1 Samuel 30:20

Alter renders 1 Sam 30:20 thusly:

 

And David took all the sheep and the cattle. They drove before them that livestock and said, “This is David’s booty.” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:303)

 

Alter explains his conjectural emendation to the text:

 

They drove before them that livestock. The Masoretic Text has the syntactically problematic “before that livestock” (lifney hamiqneh hahuʾ). This translation is based on a small emendation, lifneyhem (“before them”), assuming a haplography—an inadvertent scribal deletion of repeated letters, since the last two letters of lifneyhem (heh and mem) are also the first two letters of hamiqneh. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:303)