May they fear you. The
second-person pronoun is anomalous. As the text stands, it makes better sense
to apply “you” to the king, with “they” referring to anyone who would be
tempted to be an oppressor. The Septuagint offers an attractive alternative
reading: by a simple reversal of consonants in the verb (yaʾarikh
instead of yiyraʾukha), the Greek translators render this as “May he
live long.” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019], 3:173)
The LXX uses the verb συμπαραμένω, which according to BDAG
means, “stay with someone to help.”
