Dageish in bin Nun

Question

The Minchat Shai (by R Yedidya Norzi) at the beginning of Shlach says:

נון: במקצת ספרי' הנו"ן בדגש, וכן כולם. וא"ת כתב הנו"ן רפה, וכן חביריו

In some editions the nun has a dageish, and similarly the rest. And Or Torah writes that it doesn't, and similarly for the others.

Footnote 31 on Bar Ilan:

נורצי העיר על 'נון' רק בשתיים מהיקרויותיה, כאן ובבמ' לב כח, ובשתיהן שם דגש בדיבור־המתחיל. ונראה שנורצי מכריע שיש לדגש את הנו"ן.‏

Norzi only comments on נון two of the times where it appears, here and in Bamidbar 32:28, and in both places he puts a dageish in his דבור המתחיל. It seems that he's ruling that you should put a dageish in the nun.

I'm not sure which nun he's talking about, there are 3 of them in בן נון, but my guess is it's the middle one.

Based on the footnote the Minchat Shai preferred it with the dageish; every person that I've heard and recent chumash that I've seen goes with the Or Torah and doesn't put a dageish. For the editions that do have a dageish, why is it there? I've never seen one after a consonant besides for בגדכפת. How does this affect the word's pronunciation? Would you run the nun at the end of בן together with the one at the beginning of נון, as an exception to the general rule that we don't run words together (Brachot 15b)?

Answer 1

The masoretic treatise Kitāb al-Khilaf (ספר החילופים) by Misha'el ben `Uzziel records the differences (and similarities) between the famous masoretes Ben Asher and Ben Naftali. The book records that the dagesh in בן-נּון is the opinion of Ben Naftali, against that of Ben Asher, whose opinions formed the Biblical textus receptus following Rambam. Thus the dagesh in בן-נּון is a well-founded, but non-standard, bona fide masoretic phenomenon. See p. 20 of Lipschütz's Kitāb al-Khilaf, The Book of the Ḥillufim.

On the word-initial dagesh following a consonant, see my comments here.

Answer 2

The Masorete בן נפתלי, who we don’t follow, added the dagesh, likely as an easier way to separate the נ from the preceding ן.

בן אשר, who we do follow, was usually more conservative than בן נפתלי, and he didn’t add this dagesh to his codices.

So our מנהג—which, in this case, is almost certainly the older one—is not to have a Dagesh in this נ. Instead, we make a small but clear separation between the two words, as you mentioned in the last sentence of your question.

However, if a בעל קורא were to find this difficult for some reason, and were better able to pronounce the phrase according to the dagesh of בן נפתלי, it seems that he shouldn’t be corrected for it, as long as he makes the dagesh very clear on the second נ, and the LACK of dagesh very clear on the first ן.