Recovered: a lost portion of the book of Samuel

For the student of the Bible, the story of Saul's first victory has always been problematic. A Dead Sea scroll of Samuel, released in the past decade, clears up the problem—and shows that at least some of the textual emendations of the critical scholars are correct.

According to the received Hebrew text, which almost all English Bibles follow in translating this passage, 1 Samuel 10:24-11:2 reads: "And Saul also went to his house in Giva, and the mighty whom God had touched in their hearts went with him. But the sons of no account said, 'How will this one deliver us?' And they despised him and didn't bring him a present. And he was as one dumb. And Nachash the Ammonite went up and encamped against Yavesh Gilad. And all the men of Yavesh said to Nachash, 'Cut a covenant with us and we will serve you.' But Nachash the Ammonite said to them, 'By this I will cut with you, by gouging every right eye, and I will make it shame on all Israel.'" ¹

The first problem with this passage is the way it introduces Nachash. When a biblical writer first makes reference to a king, the convention is that the writer introduces him by his name, his title, and the name of his territory or subjects. Subsequently, the writer can refer to him by his name alone or by his title alone or by a pronoun. The books of Samuel and Kings contain 20 examples of this practice. ²

Since this passage introduces Nachash, we would expect it to say some thing like "And Nachash, king of the children of Ammon, went up," instead of "And Nachash the Ammonite went up." The Targum, the ancient Aramaic translation, does in fact say "And Nachash, king of the children of Ammon, went up," but almost certainly this is owing to the translator's familiarity with the conventions of biblical storytelling and not to his familiarity with a Hebrew text that differs from ours.

Unprecedented severity

The second problem with this passage involves the situation described by the plot: Nachash suddenly goes up and lays siege to a town outside his domain. (Yavesh-Gilad was in Israelite territory.) The men of Yavesh offer to cut a covenant with Nachash and to serve him. But instead of accepting their surrender and lifting the siege, Nachash imposes additional terms: "By this I will cut with you, by gouging every right eye."

Here's where the problem lies. The severity of the terms of surrender that Nachash imposes on the newly conquered town is unprecedented. Bodily mutilation was a common enough practice in the ancient Middle East, but this punishment was reserved for covenant breakers and rebels. (Nebuchadnezzar, for instance, had King Zedekiah's eyes put out when Zedekiah's rebellion failed and he was apprehended.) Nachash is apparently so barbaric that even before making the covenant he wishes to inflict the punishment for breaking it. Such an action goes beyond all norms of behavior in the ancient world.

But as the biblical story continues, we find the writer depicting Nachash as having a sense of propriety after all. "The elders of Yavesh said to him, 'Leave us seven days that we may send messengers throughout all the border of Israel, and if there is no one delivering us, we will come out to you' " (1 Sam. 11:3).

Nachash allows the elders of Yavesh this reprieve. Later, in 2 Samuel 10, we find that King David had diplomatic relations with King Nachash—so the man was capable of playing by the rules.

The missing paragraph

The solution to these problems in style and content is that a paragraph of 53 Hebrew words was omitted from an early copy of the book of Samuel. Unfortunately, this copy was an ancestor of our Hebrew Bible. The omission occurred early enough to affect the copies from which the ancient translations were made. The Bible Flavius Josephus used was an exception, but until recently scholars attributed the account of Saul's victory over Nachash that Josephus gave in Antiquities to an overactive imagination.

We would not have known of the omission at the end of 1 Samuel 10:27 were it not for one of the Dead Sea scrolls found in Qumran cave number four. A portion of the text of this scroll (4QSama) quotes 1 Samuel 10:27; F. M. Cross divulged that portion in a scholarly article published in I960. ³

At this point I present an English translation of the words omitted from the received Hebrew Bible in 1 Samuel 10:27. Where 4QSam^a is physically damaged a likely reconstruction is offered within square brackets. The line numbers refer to the lines of the original fragment as published by Cross: Line 6 "[And Na]chash, king of the children of Ammon, was oppressing the children of Gad and the children of Reuben by force. And he gouged out a[ll] their Line 7 right [ey]es and put ter[ror and fear] upon [I]srael. And there was not left a man among the children of Israel bey[ond] Line 8 [the Jordan wh]o Nacha[sh, king] of the children of A[mm]on, did n[ot gou]ge every right eye. Only seven thou sand men Line 9 [fled from] the children of Ammon and they came to [Ya]vesh-Gilad. And it came to pass after about a month . . . [the received Hebrew text resumes here, so despite the fragmentary condition of 4QSam^a, it can be reconstructed with little likelihood of error from this point on]. . . that Nachash the Ammonite went up and encamped against Yavesh [Gilad]. And all the men of Yavesh said to Nachash Line 10 [the Ammonite, 'Cut] with [us a covenant and we shall be your servants.'] Nachash [the Ammonite said t]o [the]m, '[By this] I will c[ut with you.]' "

The problems solved

The text of 4QSam^a neatly solves the problems I have pointed out in our Bible's account of Saul's deliverance of Yavesh-Gilad. The first problem I mentioned was that Nachash is not introduced according to the usual manner of storytelling. In the scroll, though, we see that Nachash is accorded the full introduction: "And Nachash, king of the children of Ammon, ..."

The part of the scroll that parallels chapter 11:1 in our Bible reads, as does our Bible, "Nachash the Ammonite." But by this point in 4QSam^a he has already been introduced and has been referred to by name a second time. Consequently, the use here of the abbreviated form is only to be expected.

The second problem I pointed out in the text of our Bible was that the surrender terms Nachash demanded violated the international law of the time as we know it. But the scroll reveals that King Nachash did not pounce on Yavesh-Gilad out of the blue. He had ruled the tribes of Gad and Reuben, which resided in Ammonite territory. They had rebelled, and when he subdued them, he had the right eyes of the rebels put out. He had laid siege to Yavesh-Gilad be cause this town was harboring 7,000 of his rebellious subjects.

Admittedly, Yavesh-Gilad was out side Nachash's territorial boundaries—but he was chasing down runaways. Nachash insists on mutilating the citizens of Yavesh-Gilad because they have abetted the rebels. As accessories to the crime they deserve equal punishment. So, while gouging out the right eye seems to us excessive punishment, under the circumstances described in the omission, Nachash's surrender terms make sense. They were well within the legal frame work of his time.

In addition to clearing up the above problems in the received text of the Bible, 4QSam^a offers an improvement where most readers did not suspect a problem. The scroll shows that our Bible's expression "as one dumb" is the product of a couple of errors. The first was the confusion of the letter dalet for the letter resh, and the second, the running together of what originally were two words. Instead of the received text's kmhrys, 4QSam^a reads kmw hds—"after about a month."

As a matter of fact, the Greek translation of the Bible (the Septuagint) also says "after about a month" (hos meta mena), as does Josephus's paraphrase (meni d' husteron).⁴

On the basis of these Greek texts certain nineteenth-century critics correctly deduced that the Hebrew Bible the ancient Greek translator used must have read kmw hds, "after about a month." ⁵ But, without 4QSam^a to confirm their intuition about kmhrys and to supply the subsequent omission (of which they were not aware), their claim to have reconstructed the original reading was rejected by some as a contrivance of corrupt reason. They were told to take the Bible's "as one dumb" just as it reads.

So once again the Dead Sea scrolls have contributed to our understanding of what the original text of the Old Testament of our Bible must have read. And, incidentally, they have made it clear that in at least this instance, the critics' conjectural emendation was correct after all.