Friday, June 19, 2026

Robert Alter on Micah 5:14 (Heb. v. 13)

  

I will destroy your icons. The Masoretic Text reads “I will destroy your towns [ʿareykha].” This looks rather odd in a catalogue of destruction of pagan cultic objects and may well be an inadvertent scribal replication of the destruction of “towns” in verse 10. This translation assumes the original text reads ʿatsabeykha, “your icons.” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:1312)

 

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