in the vale of death’s shadow.
The intent of the translation here is not to avoid the virtually proverbial “in
the shadow of the valley of death” but rather to cut through the proliferation
of syllables in the King James Version, however eloquent, and better
approximate the compactness of the Hebrew—begey tsalmawet. While
philologists assume that the Masoretic tsalmawet is actually a
misleading vocalization of tsalmut—probably a poetic word for “darkness”
with the ut ending simply a suffix of abstraction —the traditional
vocalization reflects something like an orthographic pun or a folk etymology (tsel
means “shadow,” mawet means “death”), so there is justification in
retaining the death component. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols.
[New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:71)
