116 Michael L. Barré to arrive at the translation he proposes. It is plausible that the LXX translator had before him vyvrt tbra, which he interpreted as a casus pendens or nominative absolute (5) — perhaps because he did not know what else to make of it — taking the line to mean: “for as regards the boats of Tarshish there is no longer a harbor”. The Vorlage restored by Flint, with its reading of zjm, i.e., zjom;, “harbor”, for the MT’s jz"me eliminates the only problem in the latter part of our passage. The only plausible translation of the hapax legomenon jz"me is “belt, sash”, taking it as a loanword from Akkadian mˇ˙e/azu (6). But this clearly does not fit the context (7). The proposal to assume that a metathesis occurred here at some point and the word was earlier zjom; was made over a century ago by B. Duhm (8) and has been adopted by many if not the majority of commentators since then. As we shall see presently, his emendation — and this part of the LXX Vorlage — is absolutely correct. The most important part of Flint’s restoration, I submit, is his reading tbra, which he takes to be tbor:a}, a plural form, the name of a type of boat attested in rabbinic Hebrew/Aramaic and which may occur in Isa 25,11 (a difficult passage). This is an inspired suggestion, since it requires no changes to the lettering of the MT and is eminently plausible as the term underlying ploi'a. It seems that the Hebrew word denotes some kind of small boat ( ). 9 Flint notes that in modern Hebrew it is the name of a type of flat-bottomed vessel (10). If this is correct, the LXX Vorlage does not present a pristine reading here, since the large sea-going merchant vessels of Phoenician trade, elsewhere in this poem called vyvrt twyna, “Tarshish ships” (vv. 1, 14, and so in the rest of the OT), were certainly not small or flat-bottomed boats, which are completely unsuited for sailing on the high seas. Still, the LXX Vorlage does take us back to a pre-Masoretic stage of this text. In particular, vyvrt tbra yk is a more accurate division of words than the MT’s vyvrt tb rayk. It is not the original reading, but at this point only two textual errors separate us from what I would claim to be the original text of this verse, and both occur in the word tbra. The first of these is another metathesis: trba. The second is the common confusion of dalet and resh. The word earlier read tdba, to be pointed td"b]a;— an archaic 3d fem. sg. Qal (11). (5) On this construction, see B.K. WALTKE – M. O’CONNOR, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN 1990) §4.7a-c. (6) AHw, 650; CAD M/2, 46. W.L. HOLLADAY (A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament [Grand Rapids, MI 1988] 189) gives the meaning “wharf” as does (apparently) O. KAISER (Isaiah 13-39. A Commentary [OTL; Philadelphia 1974] 161), but neither provides evidence for such a translation. (7) A. VAN DER KOOIJ defends the reading jzm but I do not find his argument convincing (The Oracle of Tyre. The Septuagint of Isaiah XXIII as Version and Vision [VTS 71; Leiden 1998] 139). (8) B. DUHM, Das Buch Jesaja (HKAT; Göttingen 1892) 169. The term in question is attested otherwise in the Hebrew Bible only in Ps 107,30. In proposing this emendation Duhm did not refer to the reading of the LXX or to its putative Vorlage. (9) J. LEVY, Wörterbuch über die Talmudim und Midraschim (Berlin 1924) I, 157 defines this vessel as a “Skiff [or] Kahn,” which designates some kind of rowboat or river barge. (10) “The Septuagint Version of Isaiah 23:1-14”, 42, n. 39. (11) See GKC §44f. Theoretically one might go further here and suggest another emendation in this word. Since t and h were at times confused in the script (see F.