Is the meaning of the Masora that כּארי, in the passage before us, is equivalent to כּארים? If so the form would be doubly Aramaic: both the participial form כּאר (which only occurs in Hebrew in verbs med. E) and the apocopated plural, the occurrence of which in Hebrew is certainly, with Gesenius and Ewald, to be acknowledged in rare instances (vid., Psa 45:9, and compare on the other hand 2Sa 22:44), but which would here be a capricious form of expression most liable to be misapprehended. If כארי is to be understood as a verb, then it ought to be read כּארי. Tradition is here manifestly unreliable. Even in MSS the readings כּארוּ and כּארי are found. The former is attested both by the Masora on Num 24:9 and by Jacob ben Chajim in the Masora finalis as the MS Chethîb.[1]
Even the Targum, which renders mordent sicut leo manus et pedes meos, bears witness to the ancient hesitancy between the substantival and verbal rendering of the כארי. The other ancient versions have, without any doubt, read כארו. Aquila in the 1st edition of his translation rendered it ᾔσχυαν (from the Aramaic and Talmudic כּאר = כּער to soil, part. כּאוּר, dirty, nasty); but this is not applicable to hands and feet, and therefore has nothing to stand upon. In the 2nd edition of his translation the same Aquila had instead of
- ↑ The authenticity of this statement of the Masora כארי ידי ורגלי כארו כתיב may be disputed, especially since Jacob ben Chajim became a convert to Christianity, and other Masoretic testimonies do not mention a קרי וכתיב to כארי; nevertheless, in this instance, it would be premature to say that this statement is interpolated. Ant. Hulsius in his edition of the Psalter (1650) has written כארו in the margin according to the text of the Complutensis.
