Question XXI. (marg.) What [was] the third of those same sayings of the Lord?

I have just touched [on it]: “For I will blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” In the Hebrew and Greek [it is] more vehement: “Blotting out I will blot out” — just as [in] Genesis 2, “dying thou shalt die,” or, as our [Latin], “thou shalt die by death.” The Rabbis relate in the Talmud (tractate Baba Bathra, and the book of Precepts, affirmative precept 189; and likewise Ramba [Maimonides], last book, last Halacah, ch. 1 and 5) [that] Joab had a teacher, who here, and [in] Deuteronomy 25, v. 19, wished to read not memory [zecher], but male [zachar]. For indeed, if the points which were added afterward are taken away, the same letters [זכר] can signify both this and that: since zecher is “memory,” [and] zachar [is] “male.” And therefore R. Elias also disputes about a certain similar variety of reading and understanding, in the Mishnah (oration 3, foundation 4, no. 3). But the Septuagint, our [Latin], and absolutely all the other Rabbis read memory — so much so that they say [that] that teacher of his [Joab’s] (as [one] who, as it were, perverted Scripture) was killed by Joab himself; just as [one was] mocked or struck by Alcibiades, who was correcting Homer, as Plutarch relates. It may be read [in] book 3 of Capnio’s [Reuchlin’s] Cabala, fol. 527. St. Jerome (on Isaiah 26, v. 24): “It ought to frighten us why the Seventy and the other interpreters rendered ‘male’ by ‘memory,’ since with the same three letters both are written among the Hebrews.” Yet it seems difficult to explain how it could have come to pass that the memory of the Amalekite should be blotted out. For since history is the life of memory, and a little before this war was commanded by God, that all its later ages might remember [it], [and that it be] recorded in the monuments of histories — how could there be an oblivion of the Amalekites? [The answer] is given below, question 27.