Sunday, May 17, 2026

Robert Alter on Jeremiah 3:9

  

from all her whoring. The received text seems to say “from the voice of her whoring,” miqol zenutah. Many scholars emend this to miqal zenutah, claiming it means “from her casual [or easy] whoring,” but qal is an adjective that does not make syntactical sense as a construct form with zenutah. This translation reads instead mikol zenutah. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:864)

 

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