A WRITTEN/READ SPLIT as real as any marked ketiv/qere on these pages, though Mechon-Mamre does not label it one. The consonants run together as one word; the traditional vowelling reads them as two, esh dat, ‘fire, a decree’ — the reading this translation follows, with KJV, ASV, Douay-Rheims and Geneva 1599 all in agreement. But dat, ‘decree, law’, is elsewhere a LATE word, at home in Esther and Ezra's Persian-court vocabulary — which is why some readers propose the consonants hide an older word for a mountainside or a company of warriors instead. The NWT 1984 reads the clause completely differently, ‘at his right hand warriors belonging to them’; the NIV rewrites the verse around the problem rather than choosing, dropping the clause outright. → first discussed at Deut 33:2