And procured wives for them:
The mt says “and asked for many wives” (wayyishe’al
hamon nashim in Hebrew). All of the ancient versions except the Syriac
agree with the mt here. The Syriac seems to understand the text to mean that
Rehoboam wanted many wives for himself. ctat gives an {A} rating to the mt, but
states that the mt probably contains an error. Unfortunately, any attempt to
correct the mt is only a guess at what the text originally read. Some
interpreters think that the Hebrew words translated “and asked for many wives”
originally read “and took for them wives” (wayyissa’
lahem nashim; so rsv, reb, bp). According to this interpretation, the
reading in the mt is the result of a scribe’s having divided the Hebrew words wayyissa’ lahem incorrectly and then
mistakenly copying the letter for “n” twice.
The mt may mean that Rehoboam
took many wives for himself, in which case this statement is simply a summary
of verse 21. But without correcting the mt, it is more likely that the intended
sense is either that he got one wife for each son or that he got several wives
for each son. rsv and gnt are ambiguous, as is the Hebrew, but most likely the
intended meaning is that each son had several wives. Compare nlt (1996), which
says “and arranged for each of them to have several wives.” (Roger
L. Omanson and John E. Ellington, A
Handbook on 1-2 Chronicles, 2 vols. [United Bible Societies’ Handbooks; Miami:
United Bible Societies, 2014], 2:927-28)
