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In the Hebrew version of 2 Kings, Hoshea sends for help to an Egyptian king named So, a king no historical records can identify. The Greek Septuagint translation reads the obscure word not as a person but as a place and calls it Zoar.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Kings 17:4
Hebrew Bible
3 King Shalmaneser of Assyria marched up to attack him; so Hoshea became his subject and paid him tribute. 4 The king of Assyria discovered that Hoshea was planning a revolt. Hoshea had sent messengers to King So of Egypt and had not sent his annual tribute to the king of Assyria. So the king of Assyria arrested him and imprisoned him. 5 The king of Assyria marched through the whole land. He attacked Samaria and besieged it for three years.
LXX 2 Kings 17:4
Septuagint
3 Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, came up against him. Hoshea became a slave to him and returned manach to him. 4 The king of Assyria found wrongdoing in Hoshea because he sent messengers to Zoar, king of Egypt, and he did not offer tribute to the king of Assyria in each year. The king of Assyria besieged him and bound him in prison. 5 The king of Assyria went up against all the land. He went up to Samaria and laid siege against it for three years.
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Notes and References
... to Sais the king of Egypt. According to the Masoretic Text ʾl swʾ mlk mṣrym, “to So, king of Egypt,” So is a proper name, but Egyptian sources provide no candidate with this name who can be identified as the collaborator of Hoshea. The old identification of So with Sibe, an Egyptian commander who fought against Sargon, is ruled out by the new reading of the name as Reʾe. ... The emended text adopted here follows the suggestions of H. Goedicke and W. F. Albright, to identify So as the Hebrew transcription of the city Sais (transcribed in Akkadian texts as Sa), which would make its ruler, Tefnakht, Hoshea’s ostensive ally. ...
Cogan, Mordechai and Hayim Tadmor
II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
(p. 196) Doubleday, 1988
* 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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