Hakim-hakim 13:17-20

13:17 Manoah said to the Lord’s messenger, “Tell us your name, so we can honor you when your announcement comes true.” ¹  13:18 The Lord’s messenger said to him, “You should not ask me my name, because you cannot comprehend it.” ²  13:19 Manoah took a young goat and a grain offering and offered them on a rock to the Lord. The Lord’s messenger did an amazing thing as Manoah and his wife watched. ³  13:20 As the flame went up from the altar toward the sky, the Lord’s messenger went up in it ⁴  while Manoah and his wife watched. They fell facedown ⁵  to the ground.

[13:17]  ¹ tn Heb “Who your name? For [when] your word comes [to pass], we will honor you.” Manoah apparently gets tongue-tied and uses the wrong pronoun (“who” instead of “what”). He starts to say, “Who are you?” But then he switches to “your name” as if he began the sentence with “what.” See R. G. Boling, Judges (AB), 222.

[13:18]  ² tn Heb “Why do you ask for my name, for it is incomprehensible?” The Hebrew adjective פִּלְאִי (pile’iy, “wonderful, incomprehensible”) refers to what is in a category of its own and is beyond full human understanding. Note the use of this word in Ps 139:6, where God’s knowledge is described as incomprehensible and unattainable.

[13:19]  ³ tc Heb “Doing an extraordinary deed while Manoah and his wife were watching.” The subject of the participle is missing. The translation assumes that the phrase “the Lord’s messenger” was lost by homoioteleuton. If the text originally read לַיהוָה מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה (layhavah mal’akh yÿhvah), the scribe’s eye could have jumped from the first יְהוָה to the second, accidentally omitting two of the three words. Later the conjunction וּ (shureq) would have been added to the following מַפְלִא (mafli’) for syntactical reasons. Another possibility is that a pronominal subject (הוּא, hu’) has been lost in the MT due to haplography.

[13:20]  ⁴ tn Heb “in the flame from the altar.”

[13:20]  ⁵ tn Heb “on their faces.”