So much He gives to His loved
ones in sleep. This whole verset is rather crabbed in the Hebrew. In the
Masoretic Text one finds a singular “loved one,” though two manuscripts and the
Septuagint and Syriac show a plural. The spelling of “sleep,” shenaʾ,
with an aleph instead of a heh at the end, is odd, and the word
lacks the prepositional prefix (“in”) that one might expect. The somewhat
conjectural meaning, which many interpreters propose, is that while people
labor long and hard to earn their bread, God gives just as much to those He
favors even while they sleep. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols.
[New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:298)
