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Reversed Nun in the BHS

Joan Wardell, Peter Constable and Christopher Samuel, 2003-11-05; 11857 reads

Reversed Nun (also called "inverted nun", "nun hafukha" or "nun menuzerret") is a character found in Biblical Hebrew texts. Depending on the particular manuscript or printed edition, it is found in nine places: twice in Nu 10:34-36, and seven times in Psalm 107.

The reversed nun appears to have been used by scribes / editors as some type of annotation or text-critical mark, though it is uncertain what it was intended to signify. For text-processing purposes, it is more like punctuation than a consonant and is displayed surrounded by space, similar to setuma and petuha. It occurs with or without a dot above and the shape varies from a reversed nun, to a mark similar to a roman ‘z’ or zed.

The printed Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) includes all nine occurrences of the reversed nun, and it is encoded in Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) (Michigan-Claremont encoding) as the sequence N]8.

The SIL Ezra Standard Encoding encodes the character as inverted-nun at d78.

Unicode 4.1 defines U+05C6 HEBREW PUNCTUATION NUN HAFUKHA for reversed nun. In version 2.5 of the Ezra SIL fonts, the recommended dot is U+0307.

Previous versions of the Ezra SIL fonts accessed reversed nun with dot by typing nun + CGJ (U+034F) + dot (U+0307) and, before that used the PUA. These should no longer be used and CGJ is no longer necessary.

Position	Reference	Example in CCAT	Example in Hebrew	Occurrence
in isolation	Nu 10:34:6	MIN-HA75M.AX:ANE75H00 N]8 S		rare

Example of Reversed Nun in Biblical Hebrew

Page History

2008-02-29 JW: reviewed
2007-06-15 LP: updated for Ezra SIL ver. 2.5

2003-11-05 JW: page creation

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