A favourite!
While you nicely presented the alternative translations, and your point on rabim is very interesting, I'm not sure you clearly explained the syntactic ambiguity. When I studied this in 2003, we were using Kogut's "המקרא בין טעמים לפרשנות" which looks at how much the parshanim cared about the punctuation suggested by the cantillation.
Important to note in this verse is that the phrasing provided by the teamim suggest (option a) that "acharei rabim" is a complement to "lintot" and "lehatot" is then an adjunct to that same verb (see diagram). The talmudic offering (option b) leaves "lintot" without a complement, and "acharei rabim lehatot" as a separate clause (see diagram).
Another factor that enters here is the parallelism between "לא תהיה אחרי רבים לרעות" and "לא תענה על ריב לנטות אחרי רבים להטות" which, according to poetics at least, would again signify the primacy of option a.
In the end only really Onkelos, Chazal, Saadya and Chizkuni of the major interpreters (used loosely) take option b.
The other lexical or morphological feature of this sentence that makes it interesting is the comparison between the use of the word נטה in qal and in hif'il. Some of the parshanim seem to read the one flexibly as meaning approximately the same as the other usually would (ie להטות as "follow after", and לנטות as "pervert"). See what Saadya does with the verse for instance. It is not clear whether he is playing with it syntactically or lexically when he says "ולא תענה בריב כדי להטותו אלא אחרי רבים נטה."
Finally, it might be worth noting that although there is clearly a syntactic ambiguity here, it is not one of the five mentioned by Chazal on Yoma 52a: והתניא איסי בן יהודה אומר חמש מקראות בתורה אין להן הכרע: שאת משוקדים מחר ארור וקם. They too are fascinating material...
Sorry, while I said that in option a, להטות is adjunctive to לנטות, the teamim actually suggest it as relating to תענה.
Joel -
Thanks so much for the comments! This was a post I really wanted to write, but I was having trouble explaining some of the points. I was hoping some more scholarly reader would come along and help - and you even had more clear diagrams!
very nice. I posted, pointing to this blogpost. And added my own characteristic trup charts to illustrate.
check it out here
Josh -
Thanks for the link, and also great charts! I guess if one thing came out of this post is a proliferation of trope charts...
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