Hello Robert,
To correct a typo, the verse in question is 1 Sam
13:1.
You apparently give a
lot of credence to the ESV’s margin notes! I certainly would not. But when you say in your post “ALL the Hebrew manuscripts” it is unscholarly hyperbole (a bad habit probably picked up from CT margin notes!), for the major Hebrew text of the past four centuries – used by the Jewish community as well as the Christian – was the Ben Chayyim text, which does not read as you allege. From Dr. D.A. Waite:
What about the Hebrew text used by the KJV translators? Here is some background on it. The Daniel Bomberg edition, 1516-17, was called the First Rabbinic Bible. Then in 1524-25, Bomberg published a second edition edited by Abraham Ben Chayyim (or Ben Hayyim) iben Adonijah. This is called the Ben Chayyim edition of the Hebrew text. Daniel Bomberg's edition, on which the KJV is based, was the Ben Chayyim Masoretic Text. This was called the Second Great Rabbinic Bible. This became the standard Masoretic text for the next 400 years.
The Ben Chayyim Masoretic Text was used even in the first two editions of Biblia Hebraica by Rudolf Kittel. The dates on those first two editions were 1906 and 1912. He used the same Hebrew text as the KJV translators.
The edition we used when I was a student of Dr. Merrill F. Unger at Dallas Theological Seminary (1948-53), was the 1937 edition of the Biblia Hebraica by Kittel. All of a sudden, in 1937, Kittel changed his Hebrew edition and followed what they called the Ben Asher Masoretic Text instead of the Ben Chayyim. They followed, in that text, the Leningrad manuscript. The date on it was 1008 A.D. This was not the traditional Masoretic Text that was used for 400 years and was the basis of the King James Bible. They changed it and used this Leningrad manuscript. So even the main text used by the NKJV, NASV, and NIV in the Hebrew is different from that used for the King James Bible. The footnotes in Kittel's Biblia Hebraica suggest from 20,000 to 30,000 changes throughout the whole Old Testament.
The reason that most of the Hebrew departments, in colleges, universities, and seminaries who teach Hebrew, use the Ben Asher Hebrew Text instead of the Ben Chayyim Text is the same reason they use the critical Greek text in the N.T. They believe the "oldest" texts, either in Hebrew or in Greek, must always be the best. Not necessarily. (from, Defending The King James Bible, p.27)
To look at the verse in question in the Kittel 1912 or Ben Chayyim 1524-5 Hebrew text, it reads,
BEN SHANAH SHAUL BeMAHLeCO – “Saul was a son of A YEAR in his reigning.” [Don’t any of you good civilized Reformed folks flip out at my citing flaming Peter Ruckman, as I don’t flip out at your citing liberal Bruce Metzger!] Ruckman points out that,
This is the exact Hebrew idiom found in 1 Kings 22:42 and 2 Kings 8:26.…Did…the Lockman Foundation (New ASV) have any trouble with the “missing numbers” from the “Hebrew text” when they got to 1 Kings 22:42 and 2 Kings 8:26?....They translated the numbers there exactly as they appear in 1 Samuel 13:1 in the Hebrew idiom. They just pretended that the number was not in 1 Samuel 13:1. It was (Heb.—“Shanah,” meaning “A YEAR”). (from, Problem Texts, pp. 174-5.)
Ruckman goes on to point out that in the margin of the 1611 King James Bible, the translators wrote, “
Hebr. the sonne of one yeere in his reigning”. They knew what the Hebrew said.
You allege,
If you will restrict your remarks to the OT and NT
you have, and the words “we gentiles” to the CT camp
you are in, and not make either of these statements refer to my camp, then you might come out of your bomb shelter and relax. But if you want to lay these allegations to
my OT & NT, and the camp
I live in, you might as well remain in the shelter and keep your hardhat on. If there’s a TV and a cot in there, you might even think of calling it home.
You’ve been talking of inferior texts which lurk in the shadows of the Reformation’s light, and were afraid to come out then, but now have more boldness due to the darkness of the times.
Steve
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