Eccl 9:1:
All before them is mere breath.
The Masoretic Text reads “All before them,” followed by a full stop, and then
begins the next verse with “all.” Neither “all before them” standing alone nor
the second “all” makes much sense. This translation follows the Septuagint and
two other ancient versions in reading instead of the second “all,” hakol,
“mere breath,” hevel, a difference of one consonant. The sentence then
is coherent. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019], 3:699)
Eccl 10:20:
Even on your couch. The
Hebrew noun madaʿ generally means “knowledge” (in modern Hebrew it is
the term for “science”). Many modern interpreters construe it as “thought” or
“mind”—an understanding already registered in the King James Version. But if a
person is merely thinking nasty thoughts about the king without speaking them,
how could the fowl of the heavens carry the sound? The parallelism between the
two clauses here invites the emendation of madaʿakha, “your thought,” to
matsaʿakha, “your couch.” Perhaps an emendation is not even necessary:
Seow proposes that the “knowing” reflected in the root of the word is knowing
in the sexual sense, which could make this an otherwise unattested term for the
place where sexual intimacy is consummated. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible,
3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:703-4)
Eccl 11:5:
into the limbs within the full
womb. The “limbs,” ʿatsamim, are the body of the fetus. The
Masoretic Text reads “like the limbs,” kaʿatsamim, but many Hebrew
manuscripts as well as the Targum have, more plausibly, baʿatsamim,
“into the limbs.” The received text also reads “the womb of the full one [that
is, the pregnant woman],” which could be correct, but a change of the initial
vowel from be to ba yields “the full womb” and enables
the translation to reproduce the play on “fill” in verse 3. This may be the
more likely reading because there are no other biblical instances of “the full
one” as a synonym for a pregnant woman. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible,
3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:704-5)
