I SAMUEL 11:1-2

During a recent Sunday school class the question came up concerning what would happen if a missing letter of Paul were discovered. How much proof would we need to accept it as genuine? Also, wouldn't it bring up the question as to why God allowed it to be lost for so many years? The closest analogy to that situation I could think of involved the above passage where it appears that indeed a whole verse of the Bible may have been missing until recently. Granted that omission did not involve any great theological issues, but the incident is still enough to make one think.

There are two main problems with this I Samuel 11 passage: Who is Nahash and why did he attack Jabesh and want to blind the people? The first presents a problem since in all other cases when a foreign ruler is introduced (in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel or Kings), that person's full title is given. The second question arises since the opening of I Samuel 11 seems to come out of the clear blue with no historical context behind it. And then one of the Dead Sea scrolls was deciphered which seems to solve both questions. (The story is summarized in Bible Review I (3), pp. 28-29.)

The scroll in question was an early Hebrew copy of I Samuel in which the passage in question read:

“Nahash, king of the children of Ammon, sorely oppressed the children of Gad and the children of Reuben, and he gouged out all their right eyes and struck terror...in Israel. There was not one left among the children of Israel be[yond the Jordan who]se right eye was not put out by Nahash king of the children of Ammon; except that 7,000 entered Jabesh-Gilead. About a month later – [followed by the start of I Samuel 11:1].”

This version not only explains who Nahash was but also why he was attacking the city. It was because the 7,000 refugees from the trans-Jordan tribes were hiding there. By the way, that title “king of the children of Ammon” is a rather unusual one. But a four-inch bronze jar from ca. 600 BC was uncovered in recent years from Ammonite territory. The inscription on it gives the title of the Ammonite ruler as “king of the children of Ammon.”

This addition has all the marks of authenticity, and so NRSV for example has added this long passage from the Dead Sea scrolls at the end of II Samuel 10:27 to serve as a prologue to II Samuel 11.