Judges 13:19
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. 1
Judges 14:6
14:6 The Lord’s spirit empowered 2 him and he tore the lion 3 in two with his bare hands 4 as easily as one would tear a young goat. But he did not tell his father or mother what he had done.
1 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.
2 tn Heb “rushed on.”
3 tn Heb “him” or “it”; the referent (the lion) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
4 tn Heb “and there was nothing in his hand.”