may my right hand wither.
The Masoretic Text reads “may my right hand forget [tishkaḥ].” This is
problematic because there is no evidence elsewhere for an intransitive use of
the verb “to forget”—hence the strategy of desperation of the King James
Version in adding, in italics, an object to the verb, “her cunning.” But a
simple reversal of consonants yields tikhḥash, “wither.” The loss of
capacity of hand and tongue is linked with the refusal of song, for the right
hand is needed to pluck the lyre and the tongue to sing the song. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 3:314)
