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.”

⁵ tn Heb “on him.”

⁶ tn Heb “the seven days [during] which they held the party.” This does not mean she cried for the entire seven days; v. 15 indicates otherwise. She cried for the remainder of the seven day period, beginning on the fourth day.

⁷ tn Heb “because she forced him.”

⁸ tn Heb “she told the riddle to the sons of her people.”

⁹ tn Or “When they were near.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “voice.” This probably means that “his speech was Judahite [i.e., southern] like their own, not Israelite [i.e., northern]” (R. G. Boling, Judges [AB], 263).

¹¹ tn Heb “turned aside.”

¹² tn Heb “What [is there] to you here?”

¹³ tn By calling his concubine the old man’s “female servant,” the Levite emphasizes their dependence on him for shelter.

¹⁴ tc Some Hebrew mss and ancient witnesses read the singular, “your servant,” which would refer to the Levite. If one retains the plural, then both the Levite and his wife are in view. In either case the pronominal suffix emphasizes their dependence on the old man for shelter.

¹⁵ tn Heb “who had not known a man with respect to the bed of a male.”