On watch for the camel-rider

The set a watchman verses Isaiah 21:5-9 are, as too-often, contested in Hebrew tradition. This watchman is to beware of rkb: of horses, asses, camels in succession.

By qere/ktib, the Masoretes want rkb to be chariotry. That would force Isaiah to be talking about chariots as remembered from the Bronze Age and still occasionally used on the plains (as the Persians at Gaugamela). However before the Masoretes got their hooks in, many Jews were reading rwkb. That's a participle: riders, not chariots. So this was translated in Vulgate, Peshitta, and Greek; all mutually independently. This full reading is also in QIsa^a. As a result John Reeves in Trajectories (2005) sides with the majority against the MT. For my part, elsewhere I think Isaiah himself wanted gml read out gmwl.

We Christians... don't really care, despite preserving the plene in all our translations. The New Testament well-aware of the camel (and of Arabs) does not implicate the beast in Palm Sunday; horse and donkey are from Zechariah 9:9. The problem has appeared as the Arabs have laid claim to a Biblical inheritance. For them, Jesus was indeed the man with the donkey. What happened to the man with the camel? [insert goose chase meme] If this other man did not enter Zion on Palm Sunday, then he must have been waiting outside.

Was Odenaethus / 'Udayna aware of the camel prophecy? I wonder. How about old Ghassan, or the Tha'labids claiming descent from them?

Anyway I don't think the other man would make sense as Muhammad. He would make better sense as 'Umar, the Farûq. That presents a problem for the 'Alid Shî'ism, and honestly for the 'Abbâsids; but perhaps less a problem for Imam Malik and his low-key support for 'Umar's line.

BACKDATE 2/21