before the oppressive sword.
The Masoretic Text shows “before the oppressive wrath,” but ḥaron,
“wrath,” is probably an inadvertent scribal duplication of that word in the
second verset here. Several Hebrew manuscripts as well as the Septuagint and
the Targum read ḥerev, “sword.” The word represented here as
“oppressive,” yonah, looks like the noun that means “dove,” which makes
no sense in the present context. Some Hebrew exegetes understood it to mean
“enemy,” but without much philological warrant. It is most plausibly linked
with the verbal stem y-n-h, which means to “oppress,” and the word here
would be a participle modifying “sword,” not a noun. (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:947)
