Nahash, the Kingdom Renewed, and the Sacrifice Saul Should Not Have Made

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Samuel, Books of” (including the text-critical section), “Saul,” “Samuel (person),” “Nahash,” “Ammon, Ammonites,” “Jabesh-gilead,” “Gilgal,” “Michmash,” “Philistines,” “Nagid,” “Anointing,” “Kingship (Israelite),” “Textual Criticism (OT).”
• Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books (IVP) — “Samuel, Books of,” “Saul and Saul’s Family,” “Kingship,” “Prophets and Prophecy,” “Ammon, Ammonites,” “Philistines,” “Sacrifice and Offerings,” “Text and Textual Criticism.”
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — יָשַׁע (yāšaʿ, save) and תְּשׁוּעָה (təšûʿāh); שָׁאַל (šāʾal, ask); צָלַח (ṣālaḥ, rush upon); נָתַח (nāṯaḥ, cut in pieces); נָגִיד (nāgîd); עֹלָה (ʿōlāh); כֹּפֶר (kōper, ransom); סָכַל (sāḵal, act foolishly).
• On the text of this book specifically — Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (3rd ed.), which uses Samuel repeatedly as its worked example; Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus (1978), the study that first laid out how often Josephus agrees with the scroll and the Greek against the Masoretic Text; and the critical edition itself, DJD XVII (F. M. Cross, D. W. Parry, R. J. Saley, E. Ulrich, Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel, 2005). Read the codex note above with one of these open.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the standard text-critical commentary on this book in English; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (Word Biblical Commentary); David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT), which argues consistently for the Masoretic Text where McCarter emends.
• Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (New American Commentary); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIV Application Commentary); V. Philips Long, The Reign and Rejection of King Saul; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation).
• Robert Alter, The David Story — a translation and commentary on Samuel, and the place to go for the narrative craft (he reads these texts as literature and does not share the church’s confession; we take the tools, not the metaphysics).

Ammon was a real kingdom with real kings, and we can hear them named by their enemies. The Assyrian royal annals list Ammon among the tribute-paying states of the Levant, alongside Moab, Edom, Judah, Ashkelon and Tyre: Sanipu of Bit-Ammon in the tribute list of Tiglath-pileser III (ANET 282), Buduili of Beth-Ammon under Sennacherib (ANET 287–288), Puduil, king of Beth-Ammon under Esarhaddon (ANET 291), and a battle fought in Beth-Ammon in Ashurbanipal’s Arabian campaign (ANET 298). Those are centuries after Nahash, and that is the point: the Bible is not writing about a legend. Ammon sat on the Transjordanian plateau around modern Amman, on the same side of the river as Gad and Reuben — which is exactly the territory the Qumran paragraph says Nahash had been working through.

“Make a treaty with us” is a technical request, and Nahash’s answer is a technical reply. The Hebrew of 11:1 is כְּרׇת־לָנוּ בְרִית, “cut a covenant for us” — the men of Jabesh are offering to become a vassal state, which was an ordinary and survivable arrangement. What is not ordinary is the stipulation. Ancient treaties carry conditions; this one carries a mutilation, and the text says why: “and thus bring disgrace on all Israel” (11:2). It is a political act aimed past Jabesh at everyone watching. Mutilation as a contractual penalty is attested in the ordinary legal documents of the period — a Nuzi contract printed in ANET 220 provides that if a servant defaults, her master “shall pluck out the eyes” of her and sell her. The world of these chapters is one in which that sentence could be written into a document by a scribe on a normal afternoon.

Chapter 12 is not a sermon; it is a legal form. Samuel stands the nation up before two witnesses (“the Lord is witness against you, and his anointed is witness,” 12:5), rehearses the history from Jacob down to Nahash (12:6–12), states the stipulations (12:14), and names the blessing and the curse (12:14–15, 25). That is the shape of a suzerainty treaty, the same form that stands under the Sinai covenant and under Deuteronomy — preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, witnesses, blessings and curses. The Hittite treaties printed in ANET 199–206 are the standard comparison. So chapter 12 is a covenant renewal at the installation of a king, conducted by the prophet, and the king is inside the covenant, not above it — which is precisely what Deuteronomy 17:14–20 had legislated.

• Assyrian royal annals naming Ammon (royal inscriptions — witnesses, not Scripture) — Tiglath-pileser III (ANET 282); Sennacherib (ANET 287–288); Esarhaddon (ANET 291); Ashurbanipal (ANET 298). Ammon appears as Bit-Ammon, “the house of Ammon,” with named kings paying tribute.
• Nuzi family-law tablet, the “Hebrew Slave Document” (ANET 220) (a legal document — a witness, not Scripture) — blinding written into a contract as the penalty for default. Cited here only to show that Nahash’s clause belongs to a real legal world, not to a storyteller’s imagination.
• Hittite suzerainty treaties (ANET 199–206) (treaty texts — witnesses, not Scripture) — the form behind 1 Samuel 12: preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, deposit, witnesses, blessings and curses.
• Josephus, Antiquities 6.68–71, 6.78, 6.378 (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — three things worth having. At 6.68–71 he supplies Nahash’s prior campaign east of the Jordan and the blinding of prisoners, with a tactical explanation the Bible never gives: the shield covers the left eye, so a man without a right eye cannot fight. That is the material the Qumran paragraph has and our Bibles do not, and it is the strongest single reason to take the scroll seriously. At 6.78 his muster figures are 700,000 and 70,000, agreeing with the Greek against the Hebrew on Judah and with neither on Israel. At 6.378 he closes Saul’s life with “eighteen years while Samuel was alive, and after his death two [and twenty]” — forty in total, as Acts 13:21 also says, though elsewhere (Ant. 10.143) he says twenty. Josephus is evidence about the text he was reading, not a court of appeal above it.
• Ben Sira (Sirach) 46:13–20 (Second-Temple, c. 180 BC; non-canonical — the Apocrypha and Deuterocanon are read here as witnesses, never as Scripture) — and it is a real find for this page. Ben Sira’s praise of Samuel ends: καὶ πρὸ καιροῦ κοιμήσεως αἰῶνος ἐπεμαρτύρατο ἔναντι Κυρίου καὶ χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ· χρήματα καὶ ἕως ὑποδημάτων ἀπὸ πάσης σαρκὸς οὐκ εἴληφα — “before his everlasting sleep he testified before the Lord and his anointed: money, and even sandals, I have taken from no one.” That is 1 Samuel 12:3–5 quoted, with the Septuagint’s “sandal” and not the Masoretic Text’s “and I hid my eyes” — which means the Greek reading of 12:3 was already the reading somebody knew in the second century BC. This is what evidence for a variant looks like when you can actually see it.
• b. Yoma 22b (rabbinic-era — a witness, not Scripture) — one folio, three things. On 11:8 the rabbis debate whether bezek is the town of Judges 1:5 or the word for potsherds, i.e. that Saul counted the army with broken pottery. On 13:1 Rav Huna reads “a son of a year” morally: Saul came to the throne “like a one-year-old, in that he had never tasted the taste of sin.” And then something few readers know: Rav Naḥman bar Yiṣḥak mocked that reading — a one-year-old is also filthy — was troubled by dreams that night, and apologised: “I humbly submit myself to you, O bones of Saul, son of Kish.” The Talmud is not soft on Saul, but it will not let him be a joke. Neither will this page.

• The ketiv and qere at 11:6 and 13:8. At 11:6 the consonants written are בשמעו (“when he heard” with a bet); the Masoretic reading tradition says כְּשׇׁמְעוֹ (with a kaph). The sense is barely affected and the Greek ὡς ἤκουσεν agrees with the reading tradition. At 13:8 the written form is וייחל and the read form וַיּוֹחֶל, “and he waited.” These are printed above rather than silently normalised, because a reader is entitled to know that the Hebrew Bible itself preserves two forms and tells you so in the margin.
• An elliptical clause at 13:8 and a genuinely obscure one at 13:21. 13:8 reads, word for word, “to the appointed time which Samuel” — the verb is simply missing, which is why every translation supplies something (“appointed by Samuel”), and why the Greek went a different way entirely (“for the testimony, as Samuel said”). And 13:21 contains פִים, pîm, a word nobody could translate with confidence until excavation turned up small stone weights inscribed pym — about two-thirds of a shekel. That is a genuine case where archaeology solved a lexical puzzle, and it is worth telling: the verse is about what the Philistines charged Israelite farmers to sharpen their tools.

• Judges 19–21 — read this before you read 1 Samuel 11. The verbal echo at 11:7 is exact: a body cut in pieces (נתח) and sent through all the territory of Israel (וישלח בכל גבול ישראל). And the target of Saul’s rescue is Jabesh-gilead — the town Israel massacred in Judges 21:8–12 for failing to muster, and from which four hundred young women were taken to repopulate the tribe of Benjamin. Saul is a Benjaminite. His first act as a working king is to save the city his own tribe was rebuilt from. The narrator never says any of this out loud.
• Deuteronomy 17:14–20 — the law of the king. Israel may have a king; he must be one the Lord chooses; he must not multiply horses, wives or silver; and he must write out a copy of the law and read it all his life, “that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers.” Chapter 12 is the public reading of those terms at the installation, and chapter 13 is the first test of whether the king is under them. Read 12:14–15 and 13:13 with Deuteronomy 17 open.
• 1 Samuel 8–10 — the request, the warning and the private command. Three things carry directly into this passage: the verdict “they have rejected me from being king over them” (8:7), which chapter 12 restates without withdrawing the king; the sneer of 10:27, which chapter 11 answers; and above all 10:8 — “go down before me to Gilgal… seven days you shall wait” — which is the command Samuel says Saul broke at 13:13.
• Joshua 3–4 and Joshua 5 — what Gilgal was before it was this. The twelve stones out of the Jordan, the circumcision of the new generation, the first Passover in the land, and “today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.” Gilgal is the place where Israel began. Setting the renewal and the ruin of the first monarchy there is not an accident of geography.
• Judges 6–8, Judges 4–5 and Judges 10–12 — Samuel’s own list. In 12:9–11 Samuel names Sisera (Judges 4), the Philistines, the king of Moab (Judges 3), then Jerubbaal (Gideon), Bedan/Barak, Jephthah and himself. Two things follow. First, Judges is being read as a single argument by a character inside 1 Samuel. Second, Gideon is on the list — the man who said, “I will not rule over you… the Lord will rule over you” (Judg 8:23), which is exactly Samuel’s point at 12:12.
• Jabesh-gilead, forward. The men Saul rescued here are the men who, at the very end, take his body and his sons’ bodies down from the wall of Beth-shan, carry them home, burn them, bury the bones under a tamarisk and fast seven days (1 Samuel 31:11–13). The last act of loyalty in Saul’s story is done by the town he saved in his first. It is one of the quietest and best things in the book.
• The burnt offering, and what the issue actually was. 13:9–12 has been used for centuries to argue that Saul’s sin was performing a priestly act. Handle that carefully: Samuel’s own charge in 13:13 is not “you are not a priest” but “you have not kept the command of the Lord your God, with which he commanded you” — the seven days of 10:8. David and Solomon both offer sacrifice without rebuke (2 Sam 6:17–18; 1 Kgs 3:4). The text names disobedience, not liturgical trespass, and a study should name what the text names. Compare Leviticus 10 for what an actual priestly trespass looks like when Scripture wants to say so.
• “A man after his own heart,” forward. 2 Samuel 7 is where the kingdom that will continue is promised: “your throne shall be established forever.” Set 13:13–14 beside it — the same vocabulary of a kingdom established (הֵכִין) and standing (קוּם), granted to one house and refused to another. And Acts 13:21–22 quotes this very verse in a sermon: “he gave them Saul… for forty years… and he raised up David to be their king… ‘a man after my heart.’”
• Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 — where the office ends up. The word for Samuel’s witness in 12:3, 5 is מְשִׁיחוֹ, “his anointed” (Greek χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ). This is the first stretch of Scripture in which an Israelite king can be called that, and the psalms of the anointed king are where the vocabulary is developed.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible, 1980) — the standard text-critical commentary; he works constantly with the Greek, Josephus and 4QSam^a, and he prints and discusses the Nahash paragraph. Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC), similar in method and more compact.
• David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT) — the best counterweight, arguing case by case that the Masoretic Text can stand where others emend. Read McCarter and Tsumura together; between them you will see the whole method rather than one side of it.
• Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); V. Philips Long, The Reign and Rejection of King Saul, which is the monograph to read on 13:7–15; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation), for the theological reading of chapter 12.
• Robert Alter, The David Story — for the narrative craft: the reticence, the type-scene, the way a character’s speech does the characterising. (Read as literature by a scholar who does not share the church’s confession; we take the tools, not the metaphysics.)
• On the text: DJD XVII, Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel (Cross, Parry, Saley, Ulrich, 2005) — the edition; Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus (1978); Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible; Alexander Rofé, “The Acts of Nahash according to 4QSam^a,” IEJ 32 (1982) and “4QMidrash Samuel? Observations Concerning the Character of 4QSam^a,” Textus 19 (1998).

• The Nahash paragraph: the case on both sides, and why we do not decide. For originality: the paragraph explains what the received text leaves unexplained (why these terms, why this city); it accounts for Josephus, who otherwise invented the same material independently; the Greek and the scroll agree on “about a month later” against the Masoretic Text’s odd kəmaḥărîš, which looks like a corruption of the same consonants; and loss by a scribe’s eye slipping between similar words is an ordinary, documented accident. Frank Moore Cross argued this, the NRSV committee printed it, and Emanuel Tov and others have treated it as a serious candidate for the original text. Against originality: the paragraph reads exactly like the kind of thing later scribes add — it answers the reader’s questions, and it is built largely out of words already in the chapter, which is the fingerprint of an expansion rather than of an original; and 4QSam^a shows other expansionist features. Dominique Barthélemy argued against it, and Alexander Rofé has made the fullest case that this scroll has midrashic traits. The honest position is that this is unresolved, and that is not a weakness in the evidence but a description of it. What is not in doubt is that the paragraph exists and that most Bibles do not tell their readers so. See the texts we print.
• 13:1, and how to talk about a damaged verse in church. The regnal formula is incomplete in the Hebrew; the Greek of Rahlfs has no such verse; some later Greek manuscripts write “thirty”; Acts 13:21 gives Saul forty years. Translations handle it four different ways and every one of them footnotes what it has done. The pastoral point is worth making plainly: this is what a genuinely uncertain text looks like, and it is a regnal note. Nothing anyone believes is at stake. Readers who have been taught that admitting a textual problem is the first step to losing everything deserve to be shown a real one and to see for themselves how small the ground is that actually shifts — and how faithfully the translations tell them about it in the margin.
• What exactly was Saul’s sin at Gilgal? Genuinely debated. (1) He usurped a priestly function. The oldest and most common reading, and it has the weight of the scene behind it. (2) He disobeyed a specific command — 10:8, the seven days — which is what Samuel actually says in 13:13. (3) He failed a test of faith, acting to hold the army together instead of trusting the word he had been given. (4) A minority reading notes that the Hebrew of 13:8 says he waited seven days and Samuel came “as soon as he had finished” (13:10), and asks whether the seven days had in fact expired — on which the text is not as clear as sermons usually assume. These are not equally strong, and reading (2) is what the verse says; but the others are real readings held by serious people, and the page names them rather than pretending the question was never asked.
• “A man after his own heart” — two readings, both defensible. Either “a man of his own choosing” (the contrast being with the king the people chose, 12:13; this is the plainest sense of the Hebrew and is widely held), or “a man whose heart is like God’s” (the traditional reading, and the direction Acts 13:22 leans, adding “who will do all my will”). Two things are worth saying either way. The phrase is spoken before David has done anything at all, so it cannot be a report card on his behaviour. And the book that says it will, in due course, tell you about Uriah — so whatever it means, it does not mean “a better man.”
• 12:11 — Bedan or Barak, and what your Bible did about it. The Masoretic Text has Bedan, a name found nowhere else. The Septuagint and the Syriac have Barak, who fits Samuel’s list of deliverers perfectly. Some have connected Bedan with a name in 1 Chronicles 7:17, or read it as “son of Dan,” i.e. Samson. The ESV, NIV, NRSV and most modern versions print Barak and footnote the Hebrew. Notice what that means: on this page your English Bible follows the Greek in two places (12:3 and 12:11) and the Hebrew everywhere else, and it tells you so both times. That is the ordinary, honest practice of translation, and it is exactly what this library tries to make visible instead of leaving in six-point type.
• The muster figures at 11:8, and large numbers generally. 300,000 / 30,000 (Hebrew), 600,000 / 70,000 (Rahlfs), 700,000 / 70,000 (Josephus), and 4QSam^a reported as siding with the Greek on Judah only. Proposals about the Hebrew אֶלֶף (ʾelep) meaning “unit” or “contingent” rather than “thousand” have been made for a century and are neither established nor refuted. We report the figures and do not harmonise them, and we note that the point the narrator is making — all Israel came out as one man — is not affected by which figure is right.

• The manuscripts are a gift, not a threat. A scroll from a cave near the Dead Sea carries a paragraph our Bibles do not print; Josephus seems to have known it; scholars are divided about it; and after all of that, nothing you believe has moved an inch. That is the actual shape of the evidence, and it is worth knowing before somebody tries to frighten you with it. Every difference on this page is printed in the footnotes of ordinary study Bibles. The church has always had these witnesses and has always known.
• Saul’s best moment is his mercy, and he gets to keep it. “Not a man shall be put to death this day, for today the Lord has worked salvation in Israel.” He had the men, the victory and the grievance, and he refused all three. Read that without hurrying on to what he becomes.
• “Whose ox have I taken?” is a question every leader should be able to ask out loud. Samuel stands in front of the whole nation, invites accusation, names the specific categories — theft, extortion, oppression, bribery — and offers restitution before anyone has complained. Nobody accuses him. That is what integrity looks like when it is auditable rather than asserted.
• It is a sin to stop praying for people who have wronged you. That is not a devotional flourish; it is 12:23, spoken by a man these people had just publicly rejected, about those same people. Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you. If you are still keeping a list of people you have quietly stopped praying for, this verse is about that list.
• God’s faithfulness is not a reward for asking rightly. Israel asked for a king and was told it was a rejection of God. Then, in the same speech: “the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself” (12:22). The reason given is his name, not their record.
• And there is a verse here we do not have whole. 13:1 is broken, and every honest Bible says so in the margin. A faith that cannot survive a damaged regnal note was never resting on the note. Let it teach you where your confidence actually sits.

A word about violence, said plainly. These chapters contain a mutilation, a slaughter, and a proposed execution. Two of them are reported and one is refused. Nothing here licenses any violence, coercion or hostility toward any people today — not toward Ammonites’ descendants, not toward anyone. The New Testament is explicit that the church’s weapons are not of this kind (2 Corinthians 10:4; Ephesians 6:12), that Jesus rebuked his own disciples for wanting to call down fire (Luke 9:54–55), and that those who take the sword perish by it (Matthew 26:52). Texts like these have been misused; we say so, and we do not linger over the killing. The line this page carries away is Saul’s refusal, not the battle.

A word about typology, clearly labelled. Samuel’s “far be it from me… by ceasing to pray for you” has been heard by Christians alongside the New Testament’s own statements that Christ “always lives to make intercession” for those who come to God through him (Hebrews 7:25; cf. Romans 8:34). Hold that as a labelled devotional analogy, not as an argument from the text. The New Testament nowhere calls Samuel a figure of Christ, and 1 Samuel 12 is not making that claim. What it is doing is showing you what an intercessor looks like when he has every human reason to walk away — and that is enough to sit with on its own.

Step in response: two things this week. First, take the list of people you have stopped praying for — you know whether you have one — and put one name back on it. Second, find a study Bible with textual footnotes and read the notes on 1 Samuel 12:3, 12:11 and 13:1 for yourself. Not to be unsettled; to see that somebody has been telling you the truth in small type all along.