All the princess’s treasure is
pearls. The Masoretic Text reads literally “all the princess’s treasure is
inward,” which Jewish tradition has taken as a slogan for the virtuous wife’s
conjugal modesty. But the immediately following word has a superfluous mem
at the beginning. If one moves it back to the end of the previous word and
inserts a second nun for the mem in the middle of the word, instead of penimah,
“inward,” the consonantal text would read peninim, “pearls,” which makes
more sense and a much better parallelism. There is also a syntactic problem
here, because “princess” would have to be a vocative (“All the treasure,
princess”), but because the royal bride is spoken of in the third person in the
last half of the verse, the translation does not represent the vocative. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 3:120)
