Texts in Conversation
1 Samuel 2 describes God as a storm deity who thunders from heaven. The Greek Septuagint removes some of this and replaces it with a passage taken from the Greek version of Jeremiah, focusing instead on divine holiness and the failure of human strength.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
1 Samuel 2:10
Hebrew Bible
9 He watches over his holy ones, but the wicked are made speechless in the darkness, for it is not by one’s own strength that one prevails. 10 The Lord shatters his adversaries; he thunders against them from the heavens. The Lord executes judgment to the ends of the earth. He will strengthen his king and exalt the power of his anointed one.” 11 Then Elkanah went back home to Ramah. The boy Samuel was serving the Lord with the favor of Eli the priest.
Date: 600–501 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX 1 Samuel 2:10
Septuagint
8 He lifts up the poor from the earth, and raises the needy from the dunghill; to seat him with the princes of the people, and causing them to inherit the throne of glory: 9 granting his petition to him that prays; and he blesses the years of the righteous, for by strength man cannot prevail. 10 The Lord will weaken his adversary; the Lord is holy. Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, nor let the mighty man boast in his strength, and let not the rich man boast in his wealth; but let him that boasts boast in this, to understand and know the Lord, and to execute judgment and justice in the midst of the earth. The Lord has gone up to the heavens, and has thundered: he will judge the extremities of the earth, and he gives strength to our kings, and will exalt the horn of his Christ. 11 And they left him there before the Lord, and departed to Ramathaim: and the child ministered in the presence of the Lord before Eli the priest.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The Septuagint contains a long plus derived from Jeremiah 9:22–23; 4Q has a poorly preserved plus, though it is not identical with the LXX. McCarter, who considers the (broken) longer text of 4Q original, records the Qumran readings ... Since the LXX here differs from the LXX of Jeremiah at a number of points, especially in line 7, we must conclude that the Hebrew copy of Samuel used by the LXX translator had already been glossed. Both this gloss in LXX and the gloss in 4Q, begin with references to the holiness of Yahweh ..."
Ralph W. Klein, Word Biblical Commentary: 1 Samuel (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 121.
* 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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