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I was using the siddur (prayerbook) “Mizkeret Yerushalayim” for a change this morning, and came across the following line in Psalm 100:

דְּעוּ– כִּי יי, הוּא אֱלֹהִים: הוּא עָשָׂנוּ, ולא (וְלוֹ ק’) אֲנַחְנוּ– עַמּוֹ, וְצֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ.

Know that the LORD, He is God; He made us and not (as written; read instead: His) [are] we, His people, and the flock of His pasture.

A phenomenon present here is that of the qeri (קרי) and ketib (כתיב). Throughout the Hebrew Bible are words that are read differently to how they are written (or even words that are written but not read at all, or read although not written!). Often they are marked by having the written word unpunctuated and the read word elsewhere with punctuation. The siddurim I usually use don’t show them at all, just giving the read form.

These pairs of variants between the consonantal text and its Masoretic reading presumably occur for a number of reasons. Some cases are spelling variants, often what seem to be dialectal differences between those who wrote the text and those who later punctuated it. In some cases the written text has—for whatever reason—a problem in its meaning and implications, and a qeri seems to fix this problem, or provide euphemism for a taboo expression. Further cases still are less explicable, and are on occasion considered the result of scribal errors which are emended by the Masoretes only in reading but not in the consonantal text itself. A lot of light is being shed on this issue by some of the textual variants found in the Dead Sea Scrolls (I don’t have any to hand for our present text), where sometimes biblical stories are rewritten with synonyms and other variants. The idea that two traditions are thus preserved, one written in a text with only consonants, and one on the correct pronunciation of the text, will not be addressed here and there is plenty of material on it; I instead intend to focus on some of the implications for our verse of interest.

In the present situation we have a pair of homophones, lo, written as meaning “not” (לא) and read as “his / for him / to him” (לו), and of this particular qeri / ketib the minor tractate of Soferim writres that there are three in the Pentateuch (Ex. 21:8, Lev. 11:21, Lev. 25:30), and another 14 elsewhere in the bible, including our verse (but the Minhat Shai suggests there are only 15 altogether).

In many of these verses it is necessary to read the word as “his” by the context of the verse and it is curious that another spelling was used. But in our case, why shouldn’t we read it as a negation, as is written? Before we attempt to do so, let us try to get a reading of the verse in the Masoretic reading with the word לו (”his”). It may be worth noting that the targum agrees with this substitution:

אודיעו ארום יי הוא אלהים הוא עבד יתנא ודיליה אנחנא עמיה ועאן רעייתיה׃

According to the cantillation attached to the verse, it should be phrased with the following bracketing:

[[[דְּעוּ] [[כִּי יי] [הוּא אֱלֹהִים]]] [[הוּא עָשָׂנוּ] [וְלוֹ אֲנַחְנוּ]]] [[עַמּוֹ] [וְצֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ]]

[[[Know] [[that the LORD] [He is God]]] [[He made us] [and His are we]]] [[His people] [and the flock of His pasture.]]

Here, “His people and the flock of His pasture” is treated as an appositional phrase, being equated to “we” as what is His. But this is not entirely satisfactory: the word “His” seems strangely placed within the sentence (”we are His”—”אנחנו לו”—may be preferable to “His are we”), and it seems syntactically more appealing to begin a clause with “אנחנו/we” to get: “אֲנַחְנוּ עַמּוֹ וְצֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ” (”we are His people and the flock of His pasture”), and thus if we drop our problematic word altogether, we get almost the same meaning: “Know that the LORD He is God: He made us; we are His people and the flock of His pasture.”

For this reason, possibly, the Metsudat David seems to make explicit why “His” needs to be specified (but not why it is placed unusually):

מיוחדים אנחנו לו להיות נקראים עמו וצאן מרעיתו

We are special to Him to be called His people and the flock of His pasture.

A different emendation (also retaining a clause beginning “we”) that yields nice meaning is to remove the conjunction (”and”; or replace “ולו” with “לו”), resulting in:

הוּא עָשָׂנוּ לוֹ— אֲנַחְנוּ עַמּוֹ וְצֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ

He made us for Himself; we are His people and the flock of His pasture.

Another alternative that is appealing, as noted above, is that of maintaining the written version of the text where “not” is used, primarily because this word makes more sense before “we” than “His.” The entire clause “He made us and not we [ourselves]” makes a lot of sense (theologically). For this reason, a number of commentators comment on the written text, in addition to or instead of the read version. (Rashi comments only on the written; Radaq, Ibn Ezra, Malbim and Minhat Shai comment on both.) The Minhat Shai suggests that the two opinions brought in Genesis Rabbah (chapter 100) refer to the two traditions regarding the verse:

רבי יהודה בר סימון אמר: דעו כי ה’ הוא האלהים, הוא עשנו ולא אנחנו בראנו את נפשנו, לא כפרעה שאמר (יחזקאל כט:ג): לי יאורי ואני עשיתני. ורבי אחא אמר: דעו כי ה’ הוא האלהים, הוא עשנו ולא [ולו?] אנו משלימים את נפשותינו.

R. Judah b. Simon said: Know that the LORD, He is God; He made us and it was not we that created our souls, unlike Pharaoh who said, “the Nile is mine and I made it.” And R. Aha said: Know that the LORD, He is God, he made us and to Him we submit our souls / it is not us who complete our souls.

These two opinions are of much earlier attribution and even compilation (5th century) than the earliest Masoretic manuscripts available to us (10th century).

Taking, though, the opinion that the word is “not” rather than “his,” we still have to deal with the second half of the sentence. We basically have, “Know that the LORD, He is God; He made us and not we [ourselves]; His people, and the flock of His pasture.” What exactly does the loose phrase “His people…” refer back to? Is it appositional to one of the uses of “us”? Ibn Ezra seems to suggest in the name of “the Gaon” (Saadya?) that this phrase refers to “know ye” (דעו), so as to say “Know, His people and the flock of His pasture, that the LORD, He is God; He made us and not us [ourselves].” Why he gives this option is not clear, but neither of these solutions seem sufficiently natural to me.

A further problem with this text is that, as long as there is no punctuation to phrase the verse, it may also be read as “Know that the LORD, He is God; He made us and we are not His people and the flock of his pasture!” This is precisely the sort of problematic meaning that the Masorah sometimes comes to fix, often through punctuation, but occasionally also through qeri / ketib variations.

As I said above, it seems as if “אנחנו/we” should begin a clause. The verse as whole would therefore would make most sense to me if “we” was doubled:

דְּעוּ– כִּי יי, הוּא אֱלֹהִים: הוּא עָשָׂנוּ, וְלֹא אֲנַחְנוּ– אֲנַחְנוּ עַמּוֹ, וְצֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ.

Know that the LORD, He is God; He made us and not we [ourselves]; we are His people, and the flock of His pasture.

Interestingly, after coming up with this option, I found almost precisely the same expressed in the early Greek translation of the verse:

γνώτε ότι κύριος εστιν ο θεός ημών αυτός εποίησεν ημάς και ουχ ημείς, ημείς δε λαός αυτού και πρόβατα της νομής αυτού.

While I can’t read the Greek, an interlinear translation is given here, with essentially the same as I have just suggested. By comparison we see that ουχ means “not”, αυτού is “he”, and ημείς “we” is repeated twice. It is not entirely clear, though, that the Vorlage (the Hebrew text from which the Greek was translated) necessarily had “אנחנו/we” written twice; it could have been an emendation by the translator to make the sentence easier to understand.

I would like to suggest, although with some hesitation, that our present text may well reflect a scribal error. Purported scribal errors often involve a scribe having misread a letter as a similar one, or having missed a line because of seeing a similar word or passage twice, or having inserted a line for the same reason. It would not be surprising for a scribe to see a word written twice, and—just as your average word processor would mark the second instance as an error—strike out one either intentionally or by accident. Under this theory, the original consonantal text would be, “דעו כי יי הוא אלהים הוא עשנו ולא אנחנו אנחנו עמו וצאן מרעיתו,” as we have found is rendered faithfully into the Greek. By a scribal error, one instance of “אנחנו/we” was dropped, leaving us with a verse that is at best syntactically confusing (what does “His people” link back to?) and at worst theologically problematic (”we are not His people”). For this reason, a sensible solution was to use a homophonic equivalent that was less difficult syntactically and gave no theological challenge. But the traces of other meaning are still there, giving greater depth to the verse, and once again the versatility of the biblical text proves itself in its history and the volumes of derived works. It is indeed a great pity that most siddurim leave that depth of meaning uncharted.