not from the desert is one
lifted up. The last two Hebrew words are mimidbar harim. In the
Masoretic vocalization, the last syllable of mimidbar shows a pataḥ
as the vowel, which would join it to harim as the construct state,
yielding “from the desert of mountains.” Many manuscripts, however, vocalize
this syllable with a qamats, which would introduce a pause after mimidbar
and thus make harim a verb in the infinitive, “to lift up.” This small
change gives the sentence an otherwise absent predicate and accords with this
poet’s fondness for pointed repetition of terms. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew
Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:183)
