{"id":59882,"date":"2019-07-21T16:42:03","date_gmt":"2019-07-21T13:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=59882"},"modified":"2023-02-14T13:37:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T11:37:48","slug":"the-curse-of-the-blind-and-the-lame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-curse-of-the-blind-and-the-lame\/","title":{"rendered":"The Curse Of The Blind And The Lame"},"content":{"rendered":"
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5:6 \u201cAnd the king went, and his men with him, to Jerusalem, to the Jebusite, the inhabitants of the land, and he said to David, saying \u2018You shall not enter here unless you can remove the blind and the lame,\u2019 which is to say \u2018David shall not enter here!\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Commentary: This puzzling phrase, together with its even more enigmatic occurence in verse 8, is a notorious crux. The most disparate theories have been proposed for how to read the words of the text and how to reconstruct what is said to go on in the conquest of the city. The Qumran Samuel scroll for this verse reads: \u201cYou shall not enter here, for the blind and the lame have incited [<\/span>hesitu<\/span><\/i> for Masoretic <\/span>hesirkha<\/span><\/i>], saying \u2018David shall not enter here.\u2019\u201d This variant has the advantage of fluency, but one suspects it may have been invented to make a difficult traditional text more intelligible. The explanation proposed by Yigal Yadin is probably the most plausible: he points to a Hittite text for the swearing in of troops in which a blind woman and a lame man are set before the men with the monitory imprecation that their fate will be like that of those wretches if they fail in their duty. The Jebusites, then, might have displayed the lame and the blind on the ramparts with an analogous curse against those who would presume to attack the city. This taunting curse would explain why these maimed figures are \u201cdespised by David.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

From: Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible<\/em>, vol. 2: Prophets, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, ad loc. 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