The Book of Judges chronicles one of the most chaotic and morally ambiguous periods in the Hebrew Bible, characterized by its haunting refrain: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
Among the book’s darker narratives is the story of the tribe of Dan. While migrating to find new territory, an armed Danite militia encounters a man named Micah who has built a private shrine complete with stolen silver, a carved idol, and a young, opportunistic Levite whom he has hired as his personal priest. The Danites steal the idol and offer the young Levite a promotion: rather than being a priest for one man, he can be the priest for an entire tribe. He happily accepts.
For two chapters, this rogue, idol-worshipping priest remains entirely anonymous. It is not until Judges 18:30, after the Danites have conquered a city and set up the stolen idol, that the narrator finally reveals the priest’s identity: “Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of…”
And it is here, at the grandfather’s name, that we encounter one of the most glaring and deliberate text-critical interventions in the Hebrew Bible.

The Consonantal Intrusion: The Suspended Nun

To understand the problem, we must look at the physical letters of the Masoretic Text (MT).
In Biblical Hebrew, the name of Israel’s greatest prophet, Moses, is spelled with three consonants: משה (m-sh-h).
The name of Manasseh, one of Israel’s tribes and later the name of Judah’s most notoriously wicked, idol-worshipping king, is spelled with four consonants: מנשה (m-n-sh-h).
The only difference between the two names is a single consonant: the letter nun (נ).
When we look at the oldest surviving Hebrew manuscripts for Judges 18:30, the word written in the text is Manasseh. However, scribes did not write the word normally. Instead, they wrote the three letters for Moses on the standard baseline, and physically elevated the nun, squeezing it half-above the line between the first two letters: מ^נשה.
This typographical anomaly is known as a nun suspensum (a suspended nun). It is a literal, physical mark of scribal discomfort—an indication in the ancient manuscript that the text has been intentionally altered.

The Witness of Textual Plurality

When we expand our view beyond the Masoretic Text to other ancient witnesses, a divided tradition emerges.
The Greek Septuagint (LXX) reflects this historical hesitation. The manuscript tradition of the Greek text is split down the middle. Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest and most valuable Greek manuscripts, translates the name as Manasses (Manasseh). However, Codex Alexandrinus, another primary Greek witness, explicitly reads Mouses (Moses).
Similarly, the Latin Vulgate, translated by Jerome in the late 4th century CE directly from Hebrew texts available at the time, unapologetically reads Moses. Several Old Latin manuscripts agree.
This plurality reveals that well into late antiquity, a powerful textual tradition identified the rogue priest’s grandfather not as Manasseh, but as Moses himself.

Evaluating the Variants: Internal Evidence and Rabbinic Memory

For modern textual critics, deciding between “Moses” and “Manasseh” is largely straightforward. The consensus overwhelmingly favors Moses as the original reading (Urtext).
The strongest internal evidence for this conclusion is the established biblical genealogy itself. The text explicitly identifies Jonathan as the son of Gershom. Elsewhere in the Torah, Gershom is unequivocally named as the firstborn son of Moses (Exodus 2:22; Exodus 18:3). The name “Moses” thus fits perfectly and naturally into an already established family tree, whereas “Manasseh” introduces a genealogical anomaly.
This literary reality is supported by the foundational text-critical principle of lectio difficilior probatior—the more difficult reading is the more probable one. It is easy to understand why a scribe would want to change “Moses” to “Manasseh” to shield the great lawgiver from the embarrassment of an idol-worshipping grandson. It is nearly impossible to imagine why a scribe would take an unproblematic text about a man named Manasseh and intentionally change it to frame Moses’s family.
Furthermore, the Talmud preserves an early Jewish tradition that understood the original reading to have been “Moses” and explained the suspended nun as a deliberate attempt to distance the prophet from his descendant’s actions. In tractate Bava Batra (109b), the Talmud asks: “Was he the son of Manasseh? Was he not the son of Moses?” The rabbis concluded that because Jonathan “did the deeds of Manasseh” (by worshipping idols), the text suspended a nun to assign him to Manasseh’s family. While this rabbinic explanation is itself an interpretation compiled centuries after the fact, it demonstrates that ancient readers were well aware of the textual tension and the theological motivations behind the scribal intervention.

The Translator’s Dilemma: Navigating the Variants Today

When modern translation committees reach Judges 18:30, they cannot simply translate what is on the page—they must decide which textual tradition to follow. The presence of the suspended nun forces them to make an editorial decision. As a result, modern English Bibles are sharply divided into two translational camps, reflecting competing judgments about whether a translation should reproduce the received Hebrew text or reconstruct an earlier form of the text.

Camp 1: Reconstructing the Text

Many modern critical translations—including the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), English Standard Version (ESV), New International Version (NIV), and Christian Standard Bible (CSB)—drop the suspended nun and give their audience the name Moses.
The governing philosophy behind these translations is to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible to what the author initially wrote. Relying on the genealogical context, lectio difficilior, and the Greek and Latin witnesses, these committees bypass the Masoretic alteration.

Camp 2: Reproducing the Received Text

Conversely, several major translations retain the scribal insertion and translate the name as Manasseh. This includes historical translations like the King James Version (KJV), but also modern ones like the New King James Version (NKJV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), and the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) Tanakh.
The decision here is born out of a fundamentally different translational philosophy: a strict prioritization of the received Hebrew text. For Jewish translations like the JPS, the Masoretic Text is the definitive, canonical form of the Hebrew Bible; the goal is to reflect the historical tradition of the synagogue. For the NKJV and NASB, conservative methodology strongly favors the preserved Hebrew consonantal text over ancient translations or academic reconstructions. To these committees, removing a letter that has existed in the Hebrew manuscript tradition for over two millennia oversteps the bounds of translation.

Conclusion: The Power of the Footnote

Regardless of which translation philosophy a committee adopts, almost every modern Bible resolves this tension in the exact same place: the margins.
If you open an ESV or NIV, you will find “Moses” in the text, accompanied by a footnote reading: Many Hebrew manuscripts… Manasseh. Conversely, if you open a NASB or a JPS Tanakh, you will find “Manasseh” in the text, with a footnote explaining: Hebrew has a suspended nun, indicating an earlier reading ‘Moses’.
When translators choose between these readings, they must weigh manuscript evidence, literary context, and the long history of transmission. By utilizing footnotes, committees acknowledge that biblical translation requires navigating an ancient tradition that preserves multiple legitimate possibilities, inviting the reader to see the text not just as a final product, but as a living history of interpretation.