Even the remaining tenth will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak that leaves a maṣṣeḇet, a stump, when it is felled. Then the last line: zeraʿ qōḏeš maṣṣaḇtāh, “the holy seed is its stump.” Out of the cut-down tree, something will grow. The word for stump comes from the same root as maṣṣēḇâ, the standing stone of the old shrines that Deuteronomy pairs with the asherim (Deuteronomy 7:5, 12:3).

The Greek Bible ends the verse a sentence early, with the acorn falling from its husk: ὡς βάλανος ὅταν ἐκπέσῃ ἐκ τῆς θήκης αὐτῆς. The promise of the holy seed is not in it. A later hand noticed: in the margin of Codex Marchalianus, a sixth-century manuscript, someone wrote it in from Theodotion’s Greek version, under the asterisk Origen used for words the Hebrew has and the Septuagint lacks: σπέρμα ἅγιον τὸ στήλωμα αὐτῆς. Whether the first translators’ Hebrew lacked the line, or they dropped it, is not known.

The Greek Bible (Septuagint, Swete 1894): ὡς τερέβινθος καὶ ὡς βάλανος ὅταν ἐκπέσῃ ἐκ τῆς θήκης αὐτῆς, “like a terebinth and like an acorn when it falls from its husk”. the printed page, p. 111