Fewer Broken Pieces

The Old Greek version of the story of David and Goliath has a rather interesting addition (in bold below):

And Dauid stretched out his hand into the bag and took out from there one stone and slung it and struck the allophyle on his forehead, and the stone penetrated through the helmet into his forehead, and he fell on his face on the ground. (NETS)

Now that is one hard slung rock!

“Short Goliath” is the working title for my thesis. Here is the opening:

The story of David and Goliath is among the most loved of all Bible stories. It is ubiquitous in our culture, from being a staple of children’s Sunday school curricula to being employed as a popular and poignant metaphor for the struggle of the disadvantaged against a seemingly invincible foe. It is a prime example of a passage which is valued much more for its affective qualities than for its scholarly nuances.

Yet very few readers would be aware that there is underlying the beloved story a fascinating textual situation which defies any easy explanation. The Old Greek text of the David and Goliath pericope, which is comprised of 1 Samuel 16-18, is dramatically shorter than the version found in the Hebrew Masoretic text, which is the basis for most translations of the Hebrew scriptures. This variance is made quite stark by the absence of any Greek text corresponding to the Hebrew of verses 12-31 of the seventeenth chapter. So the differences in this section are not a consequence of translation style or the occasional, accidental omission. Rather significant portions of the story are missing in the Old Greek.

The missing text omits nothing which most readers would consider central to the story. Two different readers could approach the text, one in Hebrew and one in Greek, and still come away with the same basic impression of the story. Yet there are quite a few details which are lost in the Greek version.

Beyond the purely inquisitive desire to know how these texts came to be so different, this case has text critical implications. Typically, when a translation is strikingly different than its vorlage, the variation is written off as the result of poor translation practices and is not given much (if any) weight in textual criticism. However, as with the whole of textual criticism of the Hebrew scriptures, the oldest extant copies of the Old Greek are centuries older than the oldest extant copies of the Masoretic text. Additionally, thanks to historical sources, we can ascertain the general time period in which the books of the Old Greek were translated. All of them were apparently finished before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore we know that the Old Greek represents a much older snapshot of the Hebrew text than does the Masoretic text. So textual differences in the Old Greek are quite important for the textual criticism of the Hebrew scriptures.

The implications for Hebrew textual criticism are interesting, because it could be that the Masoretic text of 1 Samuel 16-18 is longer than the Hebrew vorlage from which the Old Greek was translated. If that were the case, it would stand to reason that the Masoretic text represents some editorial addition to the David and Goliath story, or perhaps a conflation of two (or more) different versions of the pericope, only one of which is represented in the Old Greek. So a solution to this problem must be found if the original text of the story is sought.

Another important aspect of this problem is that the dramatic differences between the Old Greek and Masoretic text are localized in only three chapters of the book of 1 Samuel. In other books of the Old Greek, there are significant divergences from extant Hebrew copies. However, these tend to be pervasive throughout an entire book (e.g. Jeremiah) rather than localized in a single pericope. So it is not clear why 1 Samuel has such a stark, sudden variance while the rest of the book follows the Hebrew closely enough.

So the issue of the differences between 1 Samuel 16-18 is both multifaceted and significant is several regards. The purpose of this inquiry is to pursue the answer to the following question: Why is the Old Greek of 1 Samuel 16-18 45% shorter than the Masoretic text? A several-step process will be employed to find the answer to that question.