an unidentified word for whatever Simeon and Levi turned to violence, most likely a cutting weapon such as a blade or sword
This word appears exactly once in the whole Hebrew Bible, in the dying Jacob's bitter verdict on two of his sons: "Simeon and Levi are brothers; instruments of violence are their ..." And there the sentence runs into a word nobody can identify. It is one of a handful of places in the Bible where even a fluent reader has to say plainly that the meaning is lost.
The setting points to something violent. Jacob is almost certainly recalling the slaughter at Shechem, where the two brothers used the offer of intermarriage, sealed by circumcision, as a trap, then killed the men of the city while they were still recovering. So "swords" or "weapons", the rendering in nearly every modern Bible, fits the scene. What it lacks is proof: it rests on old Jewish and Christian tradition and on the surrounding words, not on a demonstrated meaning.
The strongest explanation scholars offer today builds the word out of the ordinary Hebrew verb "to cut" (כָּרַת), giving something like "cutting blades". That reading carries a cruel point, since the brothers had turned the covenant sign cut into the flesh into the very weapon of their ambush, and the oldest Greek and Samaritan translations do seem to have read the letters this way.
Several other readings have real support behind them and will not go away:
- Some hear "plans" or "schemes" here, comparing words for plotting in Arabic and Ethiopic, which suits Jacob's very next line about refusing to join their counsel.
- Some derive it from the common Hebrew verb "to sell" (מָכַר), giving "their wares", or, in an older Jewish line of interpretation, the marriage bargain the brothers offered the men of Shechem in bad faith.
- The oldest surviving Jewish translation heard instead "the land where they lived", reading the letters as though they belonged to a different Hebrew word, the one for a person's place of origin (מְכוֹרָה); the King James Version keeps this with "in their habitations".
- A few scholars have judged the text damaged and proposed rewriting the letters altogether.
None of these has won the argument. The honest summary is that the shape of the word is still visible while its meaning stays out of reach.
How the clause in Genesis 49:5 should be read, since the word immediately before מכרתיהם is itself textually uncertain and the choice changes the grammar of the disputed word. Emanuel Tov, who argues for the Masoretic reading, concedes that it is virtually impossible to determine the correct reading of the consonantal מכרתיהם.
- majorityThe Masoretic Text's כְּלֵי חָמָס מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם, "instruments of violence are their מכרת", taking the disputed word as a plural noun with a possessive suffix. Preferred on contextual grounds, since the parallel curse in verse 6 requires a negative noun.; Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 4th ed. (Fortress, 2022); Raymond de Hoop, Genesis 49 in Its Literary and Historical Context (OTS 39; Brill, 1999), 89-95
- minorityThe Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint read the same consonants as כִּלּוּ, "they finished, perpetrated", yielding "they perpetrated violence by their מכרת" and treating the initial mem of the disputed word as the preposition "from". The Greek translator's ἐξαιρέω is the standard Septuagint equivalent of כרת, so the noun was derived from that root.; John William Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis (SBLSCS 35; Scholars Press, 1993), 820-38; Abraham Tal, Genesis (Biblia Hebraica Quinta 1; Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2015), 195*-196*
Disputed
What מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם in Genesis 49:5 actually means. The form is a hapax legomenon whose consonants can be plausibly attached to at least four different roots, and no proposal has won consensus. E. A. Speiser called it an old and stubborn puzzle, and the tentativeness of the standard lexica is deliberate: BDB glosses it only as "probably the name of a weapon", HALOT lists competing options for its מְכֵרָה II, and DCH records it as a hapax of uncertain meaning.
- majorityA cutting instrument: a blade, sword, or knife. This is what nearly every modern version and Genesis commentary prints, though always tentatively, and its traditional support is the Palestinian Targumim, Rashi, and the Second Temple retellings that assume Simeon and Levi wielded swords. Its strongest modern defense derives the form as a maqtil noun of instrument from כרת "to cut", giving "cutting blades" or even "circumcision knives" in bitter allusion to the ambush of Genesis 34, a derivation supported by the Septuagint's ἐξαιρέω and by the Samaritan reading tradition's בקיומיון "by their covenant-making".; BDB, p. 468, s.v. מְכֵרָה; Mitchell J. Dahood, "MKRTYHM in Genesis 49,5," CBQ 23 (1961): 54-56; Aaron Koller, The Semantic Field of Cutting Tools in Biblical Hebrew (CBQMS 49; Catholic Biblical Association, 2012), ch. 7; Stefan Schorch, "Lexicon of Samaritan Hebrew," in Biblical Lexicology: Hebrew and Greek (De Gruyter, 2015), 341-355 at 347-48; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (WBC 2; Word, 1994); Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary; JPS, 1989)
- minorityThe word is a loanword from Greek μάχαιρα, "sword". This is the tradition Rashi reports, that Jacob cursed their sword in the Greek language, revived in the nineteenth century. It has largely collapsed under modern philology: Beekes classes μάχαιρα as Pre-Greek substrate rather than Indo-European, no phonological pathway for the loan has been demonstrated, and the internal Hebrew derivation from כרת is available at low cost. No specialist working today accepts a direct loan in either direction.; S. D. Luzzatto, Il Pentateuco (1871); Louis H. Feldman, "Hellenism," Encyclopaedia Judaica (1972)
- minority"Plans, counsels, schemes", on the strength of Ethiopic makara "to counsel, devise stratagems" and Arabic makara "to deceive, plot", giving "instruments of violence are their fraudulent purposes". This fits the parallelism with סוֹד "counsel" in verse 6 and is adopted by the REB and the Jerusalem Bible. Its weakness is that the Arabic "deceive" sense is arguably a late specialization of the commercial root rather than an independent root.; Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, on Genesis 49:5; James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Clarendon, 1968), 57; UBS Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, vol. 1
- minority"Wares, merchandise", or in an older line "marriage-compacts", derived from the ordinary commercial root מכר "to sell, trade". Speiser rendered the line "their wares are the tools of lawlessness"; the marriage-compact reading rests on the Aramaic and Syriac development where מכר came to mean "to marry", that is, to acquire a wife by bride-price, and alludes to the fraudulent betrothal offered the Shechemites. Against it stands the fact that no ancient version read the word from "sell": the rabbinic link to the sale of Joseph is a Hebrew pun rather than an etymology.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (AB 1; Doubleday, 1964), 363-65; Pulpit Commentary on Genesis 49:5, citing Dathius, Le Clerc, Michaelis, Knobel, and Fürst
- minority"Habitations, place of sojourning, nature", reading the form as if for מְגוּרֹתֵיהֶם from גור "to dwell", or from מְכֹרָה "origin" as at Ezekiel 16:3. This is the oldest surviving Jewish rendering, Targum Onkelos's "mighty men in the land of their sojourn", which shields Levi the priestly ancestor from the harshest reading; the Peshitta's "their nature" belongs to the same stream, and the King James Version canonized it in English. It has been essentially abandoned in critical scholarship, where the resemblance to מְכֹרָה is judged superficial.; Bernard Grossfeld, The Targum Onqelos to Genesis (Aramaic Bible 6; Michael Glazier, 1988); Michael P. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament (UCOP 56; Cambridge, 1999)
- minorityThe consonantal text is corrupt and must be emended. Gunkel entertained emendation; the NEB conjectured a word for "spades"; Gevirtz redivided and repointed the consonants to yield bird imagery, "spent owls and cashiered hawks"; Young proposed a scribal ghost word connected to Egyptian and Amarna evidence for a wedding-feast term. None of these reconstructions has won any following.; Stanley Gevirtz, "Simeon and Levi in 'The Blessing of Jacob' (Gen. 49:5-7)," HUCA 52 (1981): 93-128; D. W. Young, "A Ghost Word in the Testament of Jacob (Gen 49:5)?" JBL 100 (1981): 335-42; Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (HKAT; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 5th ed. 1922)