I’ve been reading through 1 Samuel for a class I’m taking this Summer. I came across 1 Samuel 6.19, and to be honest I was somewhat amused by it. The phrase I’m interested in is reproduced below:
ויך בעם שבעים איש המשים אלף איש
Roughly translated the text says “and he struck among the people seventy men fifty thousand men.” The English translations deal with this in one of two ways, they either take it as fifty thousand seventy men (50,070) or they leave out the second number all together translating simply as “seventy men.” The textual evidence doesn’t really support removing the second number since the Hebrew text as well as any major versions contain the number.1 The few medieval manuscripts which lack it are probably best explained as a case of haplography. Of course, the first option doesn’t make sense either since if that were what the passage was attempting to say the thousands would come before the smaller units.2
I have no conclusions as to how best to translate this, though it seems that leaving out the higher number may well be the preferable method in this case. The other option is to translate the passage as-is, something akin to: “He [YHVH] struck among the people seventy men–fifty thousand men.” It hardly creates a smooth translation, but it does–more or less–represent the Hebrew. Mandy suggests that one might translate it “seventy men of fifty thousand men” (ie, 70 of the 50,000 living in Beth Shemesh). I suppose such a translation is possible, though I haven’t come across it.
As for why I found the whole thing amusing, after reading it I had the mental image of a scribe copying the text and deciding that seventy wasn’t nearly a large enough number for God to have slain, and so, in my mind’s eye, he increased it by a rather sizable amount.
Be careful, though, when you use Josephus as ‘evidence’ of a ‘better’ Hebrew text. If you read Edwin Thiele’s Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, he shows that sometimes Josephus (and the LXX) ‘corrects’ what appear to be ‘obvious’ mistakes in the Hebrew text, yet Thiele proves that the Hebrew is correct after all!
I don’t think Calvin was suggesting the Josephus provides evidence of a better Hebrew text. I think he was simply saying that the best evidence for the removal is Josephus, but not that this is neccessarily evidence is convincing enough to break with the MT and other major witnesses.
Jill is correct. The only reason I mention Josephus in this instant is because of the English translations in the tradition of the RSV which remove/ignore the larger number.