4QSamuel-a

A Scroll That Sided With the Greek

Bedouin found Cave 4 in 1952, and it turned out to hold the remains of hundreds of manuscripts, most of them in very small pieces. Among them were three copies of the book of Samuel, and the fullest is this one. Frank Moore Cross published a first fragment of it in 1953 under a title that stated its significance directly: a Qumran biblical fragment related to the original Hebrew underlying the Septuagint. The full edition took another half-century and appeared in 2005, edited by Cross with Donald W. Parry and Richard J. Saley, as the seventeenth volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.

The point Cross had seen in 1953 held up. The Greek Old Testament translates a text of Samuel noticeably different from the Hebrew that later became standard, and for centuries the obvious explanation was that the Greek translators had been loose or careless. This scroll shows otherwise. Time and again, where the Greek differs from the Masoretic Text, this Hebrew manuscript reads with the Greek — which means the Greek translators were faithfully rendering a Hebrew text that really existed, and that the book of Samuel circulated in more than one Hebrew form. The same scroll also agrees with Chronicles against the Masoretic text of Samuel in places where the Chronicler was retelling it, which points the same way.

Nahash the Ammonite

The most-discussed single feature of the scroll comes just before 1 Samuel 11:1. The Masoretic Text moves straight from Saul's detractors at the end of chapter 10 to "Then Nahash the Ammonite came up, and encamped against Jabesh Gilead." This manuscript has a paragraph in between: Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been oppressing the Gadites and Reubenites, gouging out the right eye of every man among them, and a body of men who escaped him had gone to Jabesh-gilead. That supplies something the Masoretic Text does not. In the next verse Nahash offers Jabesh terms — he will make a covenant with them on condition that he puts out every right eye — and in the Hebrew as it stands the demand arrives from nowhere. With the extra paragraph it is a practice he is already known for, and the men of Jabesh know it.

The editors of the official edition explain the difference as loss rather than addition: a scribe's eye skipped from one occurrence of a word or phrase to a similar one further on and dropped what lay between. There is independent support, because Josephus tells the story in the first century with the same material in it. On this reading a Hebrew Bible has been missing a paragraph for two thousand years and a cave gave it back — which is why the New Revised Standard Version prints it, as an unnumbered paragraph between 10:27 and 11:1, under a note that names both witnesses: "Q Ms Compare Josephus, Antiquities VI.v.1 (68–71): MT lacks Now Nahash . . . entered Jabesh-gilead."

Or a Later Hand Filling a Gap

Not everyone agrees, and the dissent is serious. Alexander Rofé has argued that the paragraph is not older material recovered but younger material added — a midrashic expansion of the kind a later scribe writes to smooth a rough narrative, exactly what a reader would expect somebody to compose in order to explain why Nahash was at Jabesh in the first place. He put the case for treating the manuscript as a whole this way in an article whose title asks the question outright, "4QMidrash Samuel?", and has restated it since. On his account the scroll is not a better text of the book but a livelier one, and its agreements with the Greek show a shared tendency to expand rather than a shared ancient source.

That the question is open matters more than which way it falls, and it cuts against a habit on both sides. A reader who assumes the Masoretic Text must be right because it is the received Hebrew is assuming what needs showing; so is a reader who assumes the older manuscript must be right because it is older. Both are arguments from a prior commitment rather than from the evidence. What the scroll establishes beyond argument is that the text of Samuel was not uniform in the last century BC, and that the translators of the Septuagint were more careful than they were long given credit for. It is worth adding that the differences between these witnesses are unusually large by the standards of the Hebrew Bible, and not a sample of how the Old Testament generally behaves. Samuel is one of the books where the problem is at its sharpest; The book of Jeremiah, which the caves preserve in two editions of markedly different length, is another.

Scripture references

• 1 Samuel 10:27 — Where the Masoretic Text ends the chapter, and where this scroll adds a paragraph
• 1 Samuel 11:1-3 — Nahash at Jabesh Gilead, and the terms he offers
• 1 Samuel 11:2 — The demand for every right eye, which the extra paragraph makes intelligible
• 1 Chronicles 21:14-17 — The Chronicler retelling 2 Samuel 24 — a third witness this scroll sometimes sides with

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 4Q51 — Israel Antiquities Authority · The authority's own record: site "Qumran, Cave 4", material parchment, period Herodian, and the official publications given as "Cross, Parry, Saley 2005. DJD 17". The authority's discovery-sites page records that Cave 4 was "Discovered by Bedouin treasure hunters in 1952, who were exploring right under the noses of archaeologists excavating the site of Qumran"Supports: The cave, period, find circumstances and publication record
• ScholarshipF. M. Cross, D. W. Parry and R. J. Saley, Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1-2 Samuel — Frank Moore Cross, Donald W. Parry and Richard J. Saley; the volume also contains 4QSamᵇ and 4QSamᶜ, the last edited by Eugene Ulrich · Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 17 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 1-217 and plates I-XXII for 4QSamᵃ — the official edition, which explains the Masoretic Text's shorter reading at 1 Samuel 11 as scribal loss by parablepsis. Reviewed by Charlotte Hempel, Journal of Theological Studies 59:1 (2008), 244-246, DOI 10.1093/jts/flm111. Print onlySupports: The editio princeps, the date, and the editors' explanation of the missing paragraph
• ScholarshipF. M. Cross, "A New Qumran Biblical Fragment Related to the Original Hebrew Underlying the Septuagint" — Frank Moore Cross, Harvard University · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 132 (1953), 15-26 — the first publication of a fragment of this scroll, and the argument that it witnesses the Hebrew behind the Greek. Cross set out the Nahash paragraph separately in "The Ammonite Oppression of the Tribes of Gad and Reuben: Missing Verses from 1 Samuel 11 Found in 4QSamuel-a", in H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld (eds.), History, Historiography and Interpretation (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983). Print onlySupports: The Septuagint relationship and Cross's own case for the paragraph
• ScholarshipAlexander Rofé, "Midrashic Traits in 4Q51 (so-called 4QSamᵃ)" — Alexander Rofé, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · In P. Hugo and A. Schenker (eds.), Archaeology of the Books of Samuel, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 132 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 75-89. The case that the scroll's distinctive readings are later midrashic expansion rather than recovered older text, restating the argument he first made in "4QMidrash Samuel? Observations Concerning the Character of 4QSamᵃ", Textus 19 (1998), 63-74 · paywalledSupports: The dissenting position in section three, in the scholar's own publication

Further reading

• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 4Q51
• Israel Antiquities Authority: Discovery Sites

Reflect

A scribe's eye slipped, and a paragraph was gone for two thousand years — or somebody added one, and it looked like it belonged. How would you tell the difference?