Gen 49:6 — KJV has Jacob's sons 'digged down a wall' in their anger, while NRSVUE and NIV both have them 'hamstrung oxen,' a substantial factual discrepancy between the KJV and two independent modern translations.

Concede this is a genuine, long-recognized lexical crux, not a careless error on either side. The disputed word relates to שׁוֹר/שׁוּר, which can be read as 'ox' (favored by most modern versions, yielding 'hamstrung an ox/oxen,' tying the line to the violent aftermath of the Shechem massacre in Genesis 34, where disabling livestock would fit a vengeful raid) or as a root meaning 'wall' (the tradition the KJV follows, tracking the LXX's τεῖχος and the Vulgate's murum). Gordon Wenham (Genesis 16-50, WBC) and E. A. Speiser (Genesis, Anchor Bible) both treat this as a recognized crux involving a rare form and divergent ancient versional evidence — the ambiguity existed in antiquity itself, visible in the LXX and Vulgate's 'wall' reading versus the Masoretic vocalization modern translators favor as 'oxen,' partly on the grounds that it better parallels 'they killed men' in the preceding clause. This is exactly the kind of case where post-1611 advances in comparative Semitic philology and closer attention to Hebrew parallelism have shifted the scholarly consensus — it is not evidence of textual corruption, since the alternate readings are themselves ancient, not modern fabrications.

That multiple ancient versions preserve alternate construals of one difficult hapax-adjacent phrase is unremarkable for any ancient Near Eastern text of this age, and does not disturb the verse's unambiguous overall meaning — a condemnation of Simeon and Levi's violent, self-willed vengeance — which is identical under either reading.