The Missing Nun Verse in Ashrei
The Missing Nun Verse in Ashrei[1]
Ben Zion Katz
Northwestern University
There are several alphabetic acrostics in the book of Psalms. These acrostics are found in Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145. Only three of these are complete acrostics – i.e., acrostics in which every letter of the alphabet is represented. Psalms 111 and 112 begin each half verse with the succeeding letter of the Hebrew alphabet following the psalm’s first word (Halleluyah). Psalm 119 is an eight-fold alphabetic acrostic with 176 verses. Psalm 34 is portrayed as a complete alphabetic acrostic in the ArtScroll siddur[2]; however, that is a misrepresentation as there is no verse that begins with the letter vav; the letter vav appears in the last half of verse 6, as it does in the last half of verses 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20 and 23, and is therefore not part of the acrostic. Psalms 25, 37 and 145 are also defective acrostics, in that they are missing at least one letter each (and may also have other irregularities). For example, Psalm 25 begins each verse with a succeeding letter of the Hebrew alphabet except for the letters bet (although the second word of verse 2 starts with a bet), vav and kuf (possessing a second resh verse instead). Psalm 37 begins every other verse with a succeeding letter of the alphabet, except that the daled and heh verses immediately follow each other, there are two vav and chet verses, there is no ayin verse, the peh verse follows immediately after what should have been the ayin verse (instead of skipping a verse), and the tav verse begins with a vav. Finally, Psalm 145 is famously missing a nun verse.
Psalm 145 is better known as Ashrei, because of the way it appears in the siddur. Ashrei is said thrice daily (twice in shacharit, the morning service, and once at minchah, the evening service) and is always preceded by two verses from Psalms (84:5 [whose first word, Ashrei, gives the prayer its popular name] and the last verse of the preceding Psalm [144:15]) and concludes with another verse from Psalms (115:18).
Probably because of its popularity and the prominent absence of a verse with the letter nun, the Talmud has the following discussion (Berachot 4b; my loose translation):
Rabbi Eliezer said in the name of Rabbi Avina: Whoever says Psalm 145 thrice daily is assured of a place in the world to come. Why? Is it because it is an alphabetic acrostic? But Psalm 119 is an eight-fold alphabetic acrostic. Perhaps it is because of the verse (verse 16) “You open Your hands and provide sustenance for all life as they require?” But Psalm 136:25 states “He gives food to all flesh” (expressing a similar sentiment)? [The reason is because Psalm 145] has both qualities (an alphabetic acrostic and the notion of God sustaining all life).
Rabbi Yochanan asked: Why does Psalm 145 lack a verse with a nun? Because that verse alludes to the downfall of (lit., the enemies of)[3] Israel, as it says: “Fallen, she will rise no more, the virgin of Israel” (Amos 5:2; the verse continues “She is cast out over her land, none can raise her up”). In the West (i.e., Israel, by placing the comma differently)[4] they read the verse thus: “Fallen, (and) she will not (continue to) fall any more, rise O virgin of Israel”. Said Rabbi Nachman the son of Isaac: Even so, David prophetically alluded to this [missing] verse with the next verse [following]: “God supports all of the fallen”.
The preceding Talmudic discussion raises at least two related questions: Does the Talmud really mean that a verse in Amos should have been part of Psalm 145? And isn’t that verse (Amos 5:2) completely out of character with the rest of the Psalm, which praises God throughout? In the remainder of this paper I will propose a rationale for the approach of the rabbis of the Talmud in this case (which will have implications for other similar rabbinic speculations as well), and then proceed with a historical discussion of the missing nun verse.
It appears that the rabbis, in realizing that the nun verse is missing from Psalm 145, took a cue from the verse immediately following, as Rabbi Nachman alluded to in the Talmudic discussion above. The verse following where the nun verse should be begins: Somech Adonai lekhol ha-noflim – God supports all of the fallen. The rabbis couldn’t help but notice that the word fallen, noflim, begins with a nun, and if the verse following the missing nun verse states that God helps the fallen, the preceding may very well have started with the verb nafal. The rabbis likely then searched the Bible for such a verse, and found that there are only two verses in the entire Hebrew Bible that begin with the verb nafal – Amos 5:2 (above) and Lamentations 5:16 (“The crown of our heads is fallen, woe unto us for we have sinned”).[5] While neither are great choices from a literary perspective to precede the verse of God supporting the fallen, the verse from Amos, especially as it was reinterpreted in Israel, is less objectionable. It is possible that the rabbis meant that the verse from Psalms was somehow moved to Amos, but more likely the rabbis meant that David (prophetically) knew the verse was destined to be prophesied by Amos, did not wish to include it in Psalm 145 and instead merely alluded to it with the verse immediately following about God supporting the fallen.
There are two historical witnesses as to the text of the missing nun verse of Ashrei. The first is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Scripture that was begun in the mid-third century BCE, in which there is an extra line in Psalm 145 where the nun verse should be, that reads: “Faithful is the Lord in his words, and holy in all his works”.[6] Scholars have long recognized that the Hebrew word “Ne-eman” means faithful or trustworthy, and could have been the Hebrew word beginning the verse from which the Septuagint translators worked. The reconstructed Hebrew verse then might have read: Ne-eman elohim bechol devarav, ve-kadosh bechol ma-asav.
The second witness is the Dead Sea scrolls, among which is a large Psalms scroll that contains parts of Psalm 145 with a refrain after each verse. See Fig. 1A, where Psalm 145 begins after the break in the column. Note that this text is written in modern, square Hebrew script, except for the Tetragrammaton, which is written using the ancient paleo-Hebrew script, perhaps as a sign of added reverence.
There are minor differences between the psalm as it appears here and in current (Masoretic) Bibles. For example, the first words in line 1 are Tefilah Le-David, a prayer of David, instead of our text, which reads Tehilah Le-David, a psalm of David[7] The first verse (line 1) also contains two names of God (although the first, the Tetragrammaton, missing in current texts, is dotted, perhaps signifying an uncertain reading).[8] A characteristic of the Dead Sea texts are that many words are spelled more fully (i.e., with more vowel letters such as aleph, heh, vav and yud) than is even seen in late Biblical Hebrew,[9] to the extent that the final heh in many instances appears awkward).[10] Notice the scribal corrective technique of adding missing words above the line[11] and the garbled line beginning with the letter kuf, where the scribe appears to have misread a few words.[12] Most noticeable is that each verse is followed by a refrain: Baruch adonay uvaruch shemo leolam vaed – Blessed is God and blessed is His name forever. Finally, there is a nun verse, (beginning the last word of line 9) similar to what it was postulated to be from the Septuagint: Ne-eman Elohim bedvarav ve-chasid bechol ma-asav – Faithful is the Lord in His words and gracious in all His works.
Now that we have seen the two ancient witnesses of the nun verse in Ashrei, several questions arise. First, why does this extra verse use Elohim (Lord) instead of God (the Tetragrammaton), which is the name of God used almost uniformly throughout the psalm? Second, the Greek text implied the word “holy” (kadosh), not “gracious” (chasid)? And finally, if this verse is authentic, why did it drop out?
The first two questions are less difficult than the third. Psalm 145, even in the current Masoretic version, has the word Elohy in the first verse, so it is not as if the form Elohim for God is absent entirely from Psalm 145 as it has come down to us. Also, the fact that the Dead Sea psalm has both names of God in verse 1 (even though one is dotted) provides a possible second usage for the form Elohim for God’s name in this psalm in antiquity. The second question is a matter of near synonyms. The third question is more profound. Perhaps because the last half of the nun verse in the Dead Sea text was exactly the same as the last half of the current verse that begins with the letter tazdi allowed it to be less memorable and more likely to be skipped or forgotten by a scribe. Recall how most of the verse beginning with the letter kuf is missing in Figure 1B (lines 17-18); if the next copyist who saw that manuscript did not know this psalm by heart, the few remaining, extraneous words from the kuf verse might very well have been deleted in the next manuscript version and the kuf verse could have been lost from the psalm as well.
One cannot prove that the nun verse(s) uncovered are original to the Hebrew Psalm 145. What can be said is that the ancient translators of the Greek Bible used a text very similar to that found in Qumran in making their translation. The rabbis, of course, did not have the Dead Sea scrolls available to them; while they did have the Septuagint and were aware of some differences between the Septuagint translations and their Hebrew text(s), the rabbis attributed most of the differences to tendentious translations performed purposefully by the Greek translators.[13]
Regarding the missing nun verse, the rabbis very cleverly tried to deduce, based on the evidence available to them, how the missing verse may have read. Whether the rabbis would have made use of the Dead Sea Scrolls had they been known in antiquity is uncertain. Whether that should prevent us from doing so is a question of hashkafah. For the more traditionally minded, any source not used by previous generations is questionable at best. For the more modern, any valid source (such as using knowledge of the ancient near East to understand the Bible) is not only useful but desirable.
Figure 1A. Psalm 145, verses 1-5. From Scrolls From the Dead Sea: An Exhibition of Scrolls and Archeological Artifacts from the Collections of the Israel Antiquities Authority, A Sussman and R Peled, Library of Congress Washington, 1993 in association with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Field Museum, 2000, cover and second inner flyleaf, © the Field Museum. Used with permission.
Figure 1B. Psalm 145, verses 13-19. From Scrolls From the Dead Sea: An Exhibition of Scrolls and Archeological Artifacts from the Collections of the Israel Antiquities Authority, A Sussman and R Peled, Library of Congress Washington, 1993 in association with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Field Museum, 2000, cover and second inner flyleaf, © the Field Museum. Used with permission.
Transcription of Fig. 1A, beginning after the paragraph break, the 1st 7 lines that are completely legible:
תפלה לדויד ארוממכה יקוק אלוקי המלך 1.
ואכרכה שמכה לעלם ועד ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו 2.
לעולם ועד ברוך יום אברככה ואהללה שמכה לעלם ועד 3.
ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד גדול יקוק ומהולל מאדה 4.
לגדולתו אין חקר ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד 5.
דור לדור ישבחו מעשיכה וגבורתיכה יגידו ברוך יקוק 6.
וברוך שמו לעלם ועד הדר כבוד הודכה ודברי נפלאותיכה 7.
Transcription of Fig. 1B, beginning at the top of the column, the 1st 13 lines that are completely legible:
וברוך שמו לעלם ועד מלכותכה מלכות כל עולמים וממשלתכה 8.
בכל דור ודור ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד נאמן 9.
אלוקים בדבריו וחסיד בכול מעשיו ברוך יקוק וברוך 10.
שמו לעלם ועד סומך יקוק לכל הנופלים וזוקף לכול 11.
הכפופים ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד עיני 12.
כל אליכה ישברו ואתה נותן להמה את אוכלמה בעתו 13.
פותח אתה את ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד 14.
ידכה ומשביע לכל חי רצון ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו 15.
לעלם ועד צדיק יקוק בכל דרכיו וחסיד בכול 16.
מעשיו ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד קרוב יקוק 17.
וברוך שמו לעלם ועד יקראוהו באמת ברוך יקוק 18.
וברוך שמו לעלם ועד רצון יראיו יעשה ואת שועתמה 19.
ישמע ויושעם ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד 20.
Key: italics = dotted word
Underlined = letter or word above the line
Notes: The Tetragrammaton is spelled יקוק, and every heh in other names of God is replaced with a kuf.
[1] I thank my brother, Edward N. Katz, MD, for inspiring me to write this paper.
[2] Sherman N. The Complete ArtScroll Siddur: Weekday/Sabbath/Festival. Mesorah Publications, Ltd. Brooklyn, NY. First edition. 1984. P. 376.
[3] Literally the Talmud states that the verse deals with the downfall of the enemies of Israel, but this is a euphemism; the Talmud does not wish to actually say the downfall of Israel. See for example, M Simon. Berakoth. The Babylonian Talmud. Seder Zeraim. The Soncino Press. London. 1948. P. 15. N. 7 and A Ehrman. Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud. Tractate Berakhoth. El-Am. Israel. 1965. P. 66.
[4] Ibid.
[5] A Even-Shoshan. A New Concordance of the Bible. Kiryat Sefer Publishing House, Ltd. Jerusalem. 1990. Pp. 769-770 (Hebrew).
[6] Slightly modified from SCL Brenton. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English. Samuel Bagster & Sons, Ltd. London. 1851. Reprinted Hendricksen Publishers. Peabody, MA. 1987. P. 785; this is not a scholarly edition of the Septuagint, but is popular and readily available. There is also not one single authoritative text of the Septuagint, so the expression “the Septuagint” is somewhat of a misnomer.
[7] Psalms 17 and 86 also begin with the words Tefilah Le-David, while Psalms 90 and 102 also begin with the word Tefilah.
[8] See Katz BZ. A Journey Through Torah: A critique of the documentary hypothesis. Urim. Jerusalem and N.Y. 2101. Pp. 54-55.
[9] David is spelled daled vav daled in Samuel but daled vav yud daled in Chronicles, for example.
[10] E.g., At the end of lines 4 and 19 and towards the end of line 13.
[11] Indicated by a word or letters that is/are underscored in (the transcriptions in) Fig. 1.
[12] The words אשר לכל קוראיו לכל should be in place of the first four words of line 18. It is not clear exactly how the scribe might have made this error. This is in contrast to the use of ברוך instead of בכל at the beginning of the bet verse in line 3 which could easily be explained as a scribal error due to the psalm’s constant refrain of ברוך יקוק וברוך שמו לעלם ועד; as the verse now stands (beginning with the word ברוך in line 3) it makes little sense. A scribal error might also be the cause of the repetitious את אתה in the peh verse at the end of line 14. There is one more small difference between this psalm and the received text: the absence of a vav at the beginning of line 5.
[13] E.g., Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Megillah 9a-b.