And the seer shall call out.
The received text reads: “And he shall call out: A lion!” This is problematic
if the danger is cavalry. The Qumran Isaiah has instead of “lion,” ʾaryeh,
“the seer,” haroʾ eh, which is merely a reversal of consonants, and that
looks more likely. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:686)
רְַיהֵ MT | 1 הרא ה QIsaa Syr |
Ουριαν LXX | αριηλ θ′
א רְַי ה —The beginning of this
verse in MT reads either “and he called, a lion” or “and a lion called.” The
first of these two expressions makes better sense in the context of a sentinel
watching for danger from his tower. But Gray (following a long line of critics)
states that “the word אריה is probably corrupt.” Some have argued that during
the history of the transmission of this passage in the MT tradition, a copyist
inadvertently transposed the reš and ʾālep, thus reading ארי ה .
Or, a copyist inadvertently wrote the ʾālep (from the preceding word)
twice, thus reading ויקרא אריה . MT is followed by Vulg Tg “lion,” but this
word is set in an interpretative phrase (“The prophet said, the sound of armies
coming with their standard of a lion”). LXX attempted to make sense of MT’s
reading by transliterating the name Ourias (“and call Ourias to the watchtower”).
In my judgment, based on the
evidence, 1QIsaa has the primary reading with הרא ה “the seer,” thus
reading “And the seer cried.” Already, long before the Qumran scrolls’
discovery, Lowth (and others) had emended the text to read הרא ה instead of .א רְַי ה According to Weingreen, “the lion
crying out is sheer nonsense…. The Qumran text has the correct word.” And
Wildberger wrote that the scroll’s reading “has resulted in almost universal
acceptance (Fohrer, Eichrodt, Young, Auvray, Schoors, Kaiser, et al.).” The
reading of Syr approximates that of the Qumran scroll, with “Then the watchman
cried into my ears.” (Donald W. Parry, Exploring the Isaiah Scrolls and
Their Textual Variants [Supplements to the Textual History of the Bible 3;
Leiden: Brill, 2020], 163)
