I SAMUEL 10:25-11:15

Four years ago, I posted the following new information concerning the above passage:

“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 does not involve any great theological issues, but the incident is still enough to make one think.

There are two main questions concerning this I Samuel 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 and slightly damaged Hebrew copy of I Samuel in which the passage directly preceding 11:1 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.”

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

Now the fact that only one modern translation of which I am aware has deemed it proper to add those words to the standard Hebrew text is sure to raise some eyebrows and cause people to be rightly suspicious of this NRSV decision. But beyond the reasons listed above for feeling that it may indeed be the original form of the Hebrew text which was accidentally lost at some point in the process of repeated copying over the centuries, I have the following additional information to offer which may help to authenticate it.

This confirmation comes in the form of a consideration of the structure of the whole passage in which the words appear. In numerous posts I have shown that symmetrical literary patterns appear over and over again throughout the Old and New Testament, and can almost be seen as the hallmark of biblical writings. When that sort of analysis is performed on the passage in question, an amazing pattern is revealed.

                                    Figure 1: Literary Structure of I Samuel 10:27-11:15

A. Samuel tells people the rights and duties of kingship and sends them home (10:25-26)

        B. Book laid “before the LORD” (10:26)

                C. Worthless people despise Saul (10:27a) 

                        D. Ammonites gouge out Israelites' eyes (10:27b)

                                E. 7,000 Israelites escape to Jabesh-Gilead (10:27c)

                        D'. Israelites cut down Ammonite troops (11:11a)

                                E'. A few Ammonites escape separately (11:11b)

                C'. Worthless people are spared by Saul (12-13)

A'. Samuel sends people to go to Gilead to renew Saul's kingship (11:14)

        B'. Sacrifice made “before the LORD” (11:15)

Without the bolded words in the text, the symmetry would be flawed.

A much weaker piece of evidence comes from a consideration of the larger literary unit in which I Samuel 10-11 is placed. From a prior analysis of Samuel-Kings, I developed the symmetrical organization shown below.

                                 Figure 2: Literary Structure of I Samuel (11:1-18:30)

1. God's spirit in Saul (11:1-13:22)

    a. Saul is angry

    b. Saul's successes in battle

            2. Jonathan in battle (13:23-14:23)

                a. Jonathan and his armor bearer

                b. single combat with Philistines

                c. Philistines flee before the army

                                3. Jonathan chosen by God for death (14:24-52)

                                        4. Command to kill all Amelekites (15:1-21)

                                                5. “Obedience is better than sacrifice” (15:22-23)

                                        4'. Samuel kills king of Amelekites (15:24-35)

                                3'. David chosen by God as king (16:1-13)

            2'. David in battle (16:14-17:58)

                a. Saul and his armor bearer

                b. single combat with Philistine

                c. Philistines flee before army

1'. God’s spirit in David (ch. 18)

    a. Saul is angry

    b. David’s successes in battle

In terms of overall themes of the passages, Sections 1 and 1' above both show Saul as angry, but there is a major contrast also in that David has supplanted Saul in popularity with the people and God's Spirit begins to move progressively away from Saul and to David. The only possible point here that might impact on the subject of this short essay comes from the fact that the noun “eye” (ayin) is prominent in I Samuel 11 in appearing twice in the dubious introduction to this story and once in 11:2. Perhaps coincidentally, the corresponding verb (ayan) translated “to eye”appears in the OT only once, at I Samuel 18:9.

So how did it come about that these words were lost in the first place, other than to the Dead Sea community? That is the missing piece of this story.

The textual notes in the NRSV are of great help here. As well as indicating that the words from “Now Nahash” to “entered Jabesh-gilead” in 10:27 are missing in the standard Hebrew text (which scholars refer to as MT), they also reveal that the beginning words “About a month later” were also missing in 11:1 in the MT. From that you can see that what probably happened was that a scribe looked at the scroll in front of him which he was copying and recorded in his new copy the words ending with “But he held his peace” in our 10:27a (keeping in mind that chapter and verse divisions were not invented until over a 1,000 years later) while noting to himself that he was to continue the next section beginning with “Nahash, king of the Ammonites.” After carefully copying the words ending with “peace,” he turned his eyes back to the original scroll to find his place again and came across “Nahash the Ammonite” (in our 11:1) and resumed from there, inadvertently omitting all the words in bold found in Figure 1 above. This sort of copying error is actually so common when it comes to manuscripts of the Bible that it even has a technical name – haplography. The opposite error of repeating the same words twice is called dittography.

At this point, one might rightly ask, “Wasn't the Old Testament complete long before the Dead Sea community was active (very roughly 100 BC to 100 AD)? We must have much older Hebrew manuscripts to consult so that we could find out easily which version was the original, or at least much closer in time to the period of the actual writings.” But flying in the face of that common assumption is the following:

If we consider the time frame during which the OT was originally written, the order would be from earliest to latest: standard Hebrew text (MT) – Greek Septuagint – Dead Sea scrolls. But if instead we are looking at the relative dates of the physical manuscripts we actually possess, then the reversed order ensues: Dead Sea scrolls – Greek Septuagint – MT.

Thus, textual scholar Wurthwein states: “We may note that Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible from the tenth and eleventh centuries [AD!] are very rare. The overwhelming majority are from a later period.”

By contrast, our earliest fairly complete copies of the Greek translation come from the 4^th century AD while the Dead Sea scrolls date back to to approximately the time of Jesus or a little earlier.

In conclusion, there is a very powerful case for considering the words present in NRSV but not in other modern translations as reflecting the original Hebrew wording. The accumulated evidence behind that statement includes factors from the fields of archaeology, textual criticism, and literary analysis as well as just simple logic.