And he dealt wisely, and dispersed
all of his children throughout all the countries of Judah and Benjamin, unto
every fenced city: and he gave them victual in abundance. And he desired
many wives. (2 Chron 11:13 |
KJV)
And he wisely spread all his sons through all
the regions of Judah and Benjamin to all the fortified towns, and he married
them off with wives (וַיִּשְׁאַל הֲמוֹן נָשִׁים). (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:943)
and he married them off with
wives. The Hebrew text here looks corrupt. It reads wayishʾal
hamon nashim, literally, “and he asked many wives.” The verb shaʾal
is not ordinarily used for seeking wives, and the word for “many,” hamon,
also looks idiomatically suspect. This translation adopts one proposed
emendation, reading waysiʾa lahem nashim. This involves a
respacing of the consonants (the kind of error a scribe might easily make) and
it assumes that the consonant nun at the end of hamon was introduced
by dittography because the next word begins with nun and that the vowel
before it was then inserted in order to turn h-m-n into a known word. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 3:943)
