2 Samuel 5 and 1 Chronicles 14

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD) Besoekende Professor, Departement van Liberale Kunste Opvoeding, Kyungpook Nasionale Universiteit, Sangju-Kampus, Suid-Korea, Medeaangehegde lektor vir Avondale Kollege, Australië

           It was difficult times when the scribe of 1 Chronicles wished to copy the history of David. He had no access to the book of Samuel which was probably kept by a priest of the temple after 586 BCE. The only access he had was a copy made by a scribe on the basis of memory dictating to another scribe to write down. He read the original archive notes at the priest's house and then walked out and dictated it to another scribe who wrote it down. There was maybe a time-limit so that they could not properly edit the document. Our assumption is that the scribe from the time of Solomon lived in a more relaxed atmosphere and thus copied very careful the archive notes as they were kept with the history of Israel and the history of David. The two scribes, one from Solomon's day, probably just after David died, thus post 970 BCE and the scribe after the Exile in 586 BCE for Chronicles.

           It appears for us, especially from this pericope, that the misreading occurred as a result of misreading Phoenician orthography of the Siloam Tunnel (705 BCE) format. In 2 Samuel 5:24 the Masoretic Text consonantal text format have zayin but 1 Chronicles 14:16 read taw. It is clear that in the Classical Hebrew square script format, a slip of the eye was not possible. However, if the same letters are cast in the Siloam Tunnel orthography (see E. Tov 1993: 409 plate 29; or J. Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet - An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Paleography [2nd ed., Jerusalem 1987], fig. 70), one can see the correlations very strongly. Also in the Mesha Stele one can see that both letters are made with straight lines, one vertical and for the tav, one horizontal in the middle but for the zayin two horizontal lines, one above and one below. Writing with speed, the differences can easily be misleading.

           There are a number of examples where the reader of 2 Samuel 5’s archival note or copies thereof, misread the Phoenician letters:

2 Samuel 5:24 za became in 1 Chronicles 14:16 xa. It is easier to see how this could be mistaken in Phoenician orthography than to see how square script Hebrew could have been mistaken in the forms z misread as t.

Further examples of slips of the eye can be listed:

In 1 Chronicles 14:3 mlSwryb was read instead of mlSwrym as in 2 Samuel 5:13. The way this happened is that it was missed from 2 Samuel 5:12 in the word wxklmm which subsequently was placed supralinear by the copyist of the archive notebook as wxklm  ^m  that the 1 Chronicles 14:2 reader used. In subsequent copies it became a floating letter that was misread as a b by the reader to the scribe of Chronicles and it ended up in the following verse as a substitution for the mem in that verse (see supra 2 Samuel 5:13).

           There is also the substitution of an Israelite name as a Phoenician name from El-yada in 2 Samuel 5:16 to Baal-yada in 1 Chronicles 14:7. The way this substitution occurred, we suggest, is that the copyists left the names of people and the divine names open to come back later and fill it in. It will explain why there is a substitution of Yahweh in 2 Samuel 5 with Elohim in 1 Chronicles 14. The culture and courts of the environment in the Exile in Niniveh and Babylon would function better with Elohim than with Yahweh. Elohim was easily understood by Akkadian structured cultures than Yahweh, especially in the Eastern Semitic cultures. The method of leaving the names out and filling it in later was common in the Byzantine period copying of manuscripts. At Qumran we have it with the divine name in Paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician like script. Double-naming was a common practice in ancient times. People had an Israelite name like Gideon but it is Jerubaal for the Canaanites. This is one of the reasons why scholars in Archaeology are frustrated not to find names of Israelites in the cuneiform texts, like the Palestinian Amarna texts. A number of names in the Amarna texts appears sometimes as metathesis forms in the Bible in the history of the same biblical calculated period.

           A number of problems can be listed for the scribes of the exile: dictation problems, memory problems, editorial problems (no control or double checking for accuracy), source checking problems, access to the sources again problems.

           Why did the Holy Spirit allow these problems to enter the Bible or Word of God? To illustrate to us that even the Word of God suffers when people go into exile. The severity of sin is demonstrated. Divinely protected was the older version of the doublet in Samuel, so that the deviations in the second and later leg of the doublet can be cross-checked. It is possible that Psalm 105 is the Older Psalm collected by David but that the difficulty experienced scribe of the Exile cited the Psalm in full in 1 Chronicles 17 with slips. Again no problem since the Holy Spirit already provided us with the perfect original. The lesson, sin is detrimental on all levels. The Word of God written or spoken suffers as Daniel and his friends had to.

           There is reverse order in the roots sometimes so that instead of 2 Samuel 6:6 as myltltbw  MyonoNmbw it was written in 1 Chronicles 13:9 as xwrttHbw  myxltmbw.

           There is reverse order (metathesis) in the letters sometimes as we see in 2 Samuel 5:18 and 22 in the word STN the form by the later scribe of 1 Chronicles 14:9 and 13 as TSp. To repeat the slip twice is a case of deficiency on the hearing ability of the scribe and his proneness to hear that word that way or a slip of the tongue of the reader to the exilic scribe to hear that particular word that way, acoustic misperception so that his mental lexicon switch on the other root instead of the correct root of the Samuel form.

           A case of the slip of the memory is in 2 Samuel 6:2 where klyw became  loyw and larSy became moh. There is no hint in the orthography that they are related. It is rather synonyms that were placed in since it was copied with speed and there was no time for a second checking or control checking of the exactness of the form. We have no idea how difficult the situations were in the exile for scribes so that scribal practices in the exile should be looked at under this situation. Slip of the memory is a normal event that occurred regularly in any normal copying practice in ancient times but even in our day.

           A case of slip of the ear is in 2 Samuel 6:3 where la is read as lo in 1 Chronicles 13:7, a very common error in comparative Semitic languages. The closeness of the phonology of aleph and ayin lends itself to this acoustic misperception.

           Slips of the eye can be seen in the omission of Yahweh or hwhy in 1 Chronicles 14:16 but which shows maybe up attached to later words as extras

h rzg dow  nw obgm compared to 2 Samuel 5:25, which put together gives us hwnw and written in superscript very badly could resulted in a choice to spread the letters over other words later in the sentence as we find it in Chronicles. The scribe of the Vorlage of the exile scribe in 580 BCE, may have also missed the word hwhy and placed it in superscript in bad handwriting, slip of the hand and that resulted in the misreading (slip of the eye) of the exilic dictating scribe to the copyist and the decision to spread the letters over words.

           We know that the Exilic scribe wrote with Paleo-Hebrew script or Phoenician like orthography, since the Babylonian and Persian Period cuneiform texts from Warka near Babylon, sometimes had Aramaic orthography and Cuneiform together on the texts. There are many examples and they are dating from the last years of Nabonidus to the last years of Cambyses. This is the time of the origin of 1 Chronicles.

           We do not understand enough about permutations in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform sounds. The Chronicler in 586 BCE lived in the environment of cuneiform as script, with neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian as well as Sumerian scripts popular in the schools. To see the spelling of Hadad-ezer in 2 Samuel appearing in 1 Chronicles as Hadar-ezer is at first, for us in the modern age, a shock. However, if we understand permutations better, it is not that much of a problem. In Akkadian his name would be in cuneiform script for Samuel as ha-da-du e-ze-ru while for Chronicles it would be ha-da-ru e-ze-ru. The question is, is there any evidence in cuneiform studies that du was read as ru? In an article by C. Fossey, “Les Permutations des Consonnes en Sumérien” in Hilprecht Anniversary Volume 4 (1909), 105-120, especially page 117, he discussed the cases of interchange between RU and DU meaning “build”; and RU and DU meaning “melt”; RA and GIN which is given as DIN and DI “to go”. So this is what could have happened with the scribe of the book of Chronicles. He may have been schooled also in Assyrian and Babylonian languages and in the cuneiform texts, he was familiar with the Assyrian or Babylonian form of Hadad-ezer and he knew of two spellings for the name and thus he spelled it as Hadar-ezer, according to the permutation study of C. Fossey, a very legitimate interchange for the two sounds. There is thus no error here.