my wanton enemies. The
Masoretic Text reads ʾoyvay ḥayim, literally, “my enemies of life,”
which some construe as “my mortal enemies,” though it is not a biblical idiom
as it is worded here. A scroll of Psalms found at Qumran reads ʾoyvay ḥinam,
“my wanton enemies” (that is, “enemies for no good reason”), which is nicely
idiomatic and makes the parallelism in the two versets here exactly that of
35:19 (where sheqer, “unprovoked,” appears in the first verset and ḥinam
in the second, rather than the other way around as here). (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:105)
The BHS of this verse reads:
וְאֹיְבַי חַיִּים עָצֵמוּ וְרַבּוּ שֹׂנְאַי שָׁקֶר
The verse in 4Q83 Psalms a (fragment 9, column ii, line 3),
the text from Qumran Alter references, reads:
וֿאיב̇י ח֯נ̇ם
