Texts in Conversation
1 Samuel 13 says that Saul called the people by saying, “Let the Hebrews hear,” using a name that refers to the Israelites. The Greek Septuagint translation instead calls them “the slaves,” showing it was likely confused between two similar Hebrew words.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
1 Samuel 13:3
Hebrew Bible
1 Saul was [thirty] years old when he began to reign; he ruled over Israel for [forty] years. 2 Saul selected for himself 3,000 men from Israel. Of these 2,000 were with Saul at Micmash and in the hill country of Bethel; the remaining 1,000 were with Jonathan at Gibeah in the territory of Benjamin. He sent all the rest of the people back home. 3 Jonathan attacked the Philistine outpost that was at Geba and the Philistines heard about it. Then Saul alerted all the land saying, “Let the Hebrews pay attention!” 4 All Israel heard this message, “Saul has attacked the Philistine outpost, and now Israel is repulsive to the Philistines!” So the people were summoned to join Saul at Gilgal. 5 Meanwhile the Philistines gathered to battle with Israel. Then they went up against Israel with 3,000 chariots, 6,000 horsemen, and an army as numerous as the sand on the seashore. They went up and camped at Micmash, east of Beth Aven.
Date: 600–501 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX 1 Samuel 13:3
Septuagint
1 2 And Saul chooses for himself three thousand men of the men of Israel: and there were with Saul two thousand who were in Michmash, and in mount Bethel, and a thousand were with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin: and he sent the rest of the people every man to his tent. 3 And Jonathan struck Nasib the Philistine that lived in the hill; and the Philistines hear of it, and Saul sounds the trumpet through all the land, saying, The slaves have despised us. 4 And all Israel heard it said, Saul has struck Nasib the Philistine; now Israel had been put to shame before the Philistines; and the people cried out after Saul in Gilgal.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The text-critical analysis of the LXX starts with an attempt to establish a relationship between all words in the LXX and MT. For this purpose all elements in the LXX that seem to reflect MT are first isolated (compare pp. 44–48 above). At that point we may recognize a few elements that could reflect a different Hebrew Vorlage ... The next step involves isolating the elements in the LXX that could reflect Hebrew readings different from the Masoretic text (step two). After that, one attempts to identify which Hebrew words the translator had in front of him or had in mind (step three). In practice, these last two steps often coincide, because the scholar’s intuition may lead to the assumption that a specific Greek word reflects a certain variant, especially when a textual error is assumed either in the LXX or in MT. It is not difficult to recognize in the following example that οἱ δοῦλοι does not reflect “the Hebrews” of the Masoretic (העברים), but rather העבדים (“the slaves”; compare the equivalence עבד—δοῦλος passim in the LXX), which is graphically very close ... (1 Samuel 13:3) ... This applies also to a reverse example in the same biblical book ..."
Emanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research, 3rd ed. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), 63–64.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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