spurned the witnesses. The
Masoretic Text reads “spurned the cities [ʿarim],” but cities would be
an odd object for the verb “spurned.” The Qumran Isaiah reads ʿedim,
“witnesses,” and the translation adopts that reading. (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:728)
[scholars] rightly argue on
behalf of the reading of 1QIsaa because it both strengthens the parallelistic
structure and is suitable in the passage’s context; e.g., “witnesses” or
“contracts” serves as a better parallel to “covenant” than does “cities.” So,
too, multiple translations— NEB, NIV, NRSV, RSV—accept the scroll’s reading
(but contrast JPS). (Donald W. Parry, Exploring the Isaiah Scrolls and Their
Textual Variants [Supplements to the Textual History of the Bible 3;
Leiden: Brill, 2020], 230)
