Yahweh Gears Up for Battle: Habakkuk 3,9a 79 appealing to Barberini’s th'" farevtra" aujtou' (“his quiver”) (27). But this word agrees with rma only with respect to the first consonant and thus is hardly a plausible restoration. I propose that the solution to this crux interpretum is to postulate that the MT’s reading rma derives from an original rmt (i.e., rmeT;), the Hiphil 2nd masculine singular yiqtol form of the verb rrm, “to be bitter”. The Hiphil of this verb occurs in only four OT passages, in all of which it denotes “bitterness” in an emotional sense, either anger (Exod 23,21) or depression (Zech 12,10 [2x]; Job 27,2; Ruth 1,20). But in this one text, and in this particular context, I believe it bears a more literal sense which can plausibly be argued on the basis of evidence I shall present below. I suggest that here it means to make one’s arrows “bitter” in the sense of smearing them with bitter serpent’s gall, a substance regarded as poisonous in the ancient world. Note that the motif of God shooting poisoned arrows at his enemies is attested in Job 6,4: “For the arrows of the Almighty are in me // my spirit drinks their poison [µt;m;j}]” (RSV). The scribal error that led to the MT’s rma was a confusion between the letters ÷alep and taw at a certain stage of Hebrew paleography. S. Talmon was the first to draw attention to this phenomenon (28), pointing out a number of examples in the pre-Aramaic script. Thus the MT’s rma resulted from the miscopying of an original rmt. Vg may provide indirect evidence for the latter reading, with its translation of the word in question as locutus es (“you have spoken”) (29). The credibility of the proposal that rmt means “to (smear with) gall/poison” rests on the plausibility of translating the Hiphil of rrm in this way, a meaning not listed in any of the lexica of biblical or post-biblical Hebrew. In what follows I shall present evidence from biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian, and Syriac that this root refers in some texts to a poisonous substance and that this substance was widely used to poison projectiles used in battle. 4. The Root rrm and Gall/Venom In Job 20,14 Zophar mentions that one of the divine punishments of the wicked man is that “though evil tastes sweet in his mouth” (v. 12), “yet his food turns in his stomach // changing to asps’ venom [µynIt;P] tr"/rm]] within him” (NEB). In an important treatment of this passage, D. Pardee observes that although a number of translations had rendered the Hebrew idiom in this way, none explained how hr:/rm], a nominal derivation from the root rrm with the (27) Most recently HIEBERT, God of My Victory, 28. (28) S. TALMON, “The Ancient Hebrew Alphabet and Biblical Text Criticism”, Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études offerts à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire (ed. P. CASETTI et al.) (OBO 38; Göttingen 1981) 497-530. See also E. TOV, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis 22001) 244-45. (29) On the one hand, Jerome may have had rmt in his Vorlage, which he interpreted as an idiosyncratic writing of rmat. A similar idiosyncratic writing of a 2nd masculine form of this root appears in 2 Sam 19,14, where the MT has Wrm]to for Wrm]aot (“you shall say”). On the other hand, in Jerome’s Vorlage there may have been little or no space between the last two words in this colon (rmatwfm), which he mistakenly read as rmat twfm.