bound or shut up in the right hand: the Hebrew way of marking a man out as a left-handed fighter
This word shows up only twice, and both times in exactly the same fixed phrase about a man's right hand. Taken literally it says that hand is shut, closed off, or tied up. The same root turns up as a verb (אָטַר) in Psalm 69:16, where a man in trouble asks that a pit not shut its mouth over him. So Hebrew is not saying here that the man's left hand was strong. It says his right hand was out of action, and lets the reader draw the obvious conclusion. Hebrew does have a plain, ordinary word for the left hand (שְׂמֹאל), and this is not it.
Both men described this way belong to the tribe of Benjamin, whose name means "son of the right hand," and the phrase itself pairs this word with the ordinary word for the right hand (יָמִין). The irony is surely deliberate. In Judges 3:15 it is Ehud, who straps his short sword on his right thigh, precisely where the Moabite king's guards never think to search a man, so the entire assassination turns on this one detail of his body. In Judges 20:16 it is seven hundred picked Benjaminite slingers who can hit a hair and never miss. Whatever the word means, it does not mean these men were harmless.
What exactly it claims, though, is genuinely unsettled, and has been since antiquity. Three readings compete:
- plain left-handedness, where a shut right hand is simply the Hebrew way of saying the left hand leads;
- deliberate training that produced fighters equally deadly with either hand, which is how the ancient Greek and Latin translators took it;
- a real injury or deformity that put the right hand out of use, which is how the old Aramaic translation took it.
The strongest objection to the injury reading is that seven hundred crack marksmen are hardly a company of maimed men. The strongest support for it is the shape of the word, which Hebrew normally reserves for bodily impairments like blindness, deafness, or muteness. Reading these men as functionally left-handed is safe; anything beyond that is a judgment call the text leaves open.
Disputed
What the phrase אִטֵּר יַד־יְמִינוֹ actually predicates of the man: ordinary left-handedness, trained ambidexterity, or a genuine impairment of the right hand.
- majorityThe phrase is simply the Hebrew idiom for left-handedness; the "bound" right hand is an idiomatic way of saying the left hand is dominant, and "left-handed" is the correct functional rendering.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. אִטֵּר ("a man bound, restricted, as to his right hand, i.e. left-handed"); HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. אטר / אִטֵּר; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. אִטֵּר
- minorityThe phrase describes trained skill with both hands, a martial specialty of an elite corps rather than a defect; the identical wording applied to seven hundred picked slingers in Judges 20:16 is held to exclude physical deformity. This is already the reading of the Septuagint (A and B both render ἀμφοτεροδέξιος, "two-right-handed"), the Vulgate, and Josephus.; Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (Harper & Row, 1988), 40-43, 55-59; K. Lawson Younger Jr., Judges and Ruth (NIV Application Commentary; Zondervan, 2002); Boyd Seevers and Joanna Klein, "Biblical Views: Left-Handed Sons of Right-Handers," Biblical Archaeology Review 39, no. 3 (May/June 2013): 26, 69
- minorityThe word keeps its literal force: the right hand was contracted, withered, or otherwise unusable, which is dramatically loaded in the Ehud narrative, since an apparently harmless man is exactly the one no one thinks to search. The Aramaic Targum tradition and the medieval Jewish commentators already read the Hebrew as "crippled."; J. Alberto Soggin, Judges: A Commentary (Old Testament Library; Westminster, 1981), ad Judges 3:15; George Foote Moore, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Judges (ICC; T&T Clark, 1895), ad 3:15; Jeremy Schipper, Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible (T&T Clark, 2006)