Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Kevin W. Woodruff" <cierpke AT utc.campuscw.net>]

Robert:
The Massoretic Text usually considered most reliable has 50,070 but some
Hebrew manuscripts have 70. 
Josephus in his _Antiquities (6.1.4) says it was only 70 men. The readng
50,070 is at least as old as the Vorlage of the LXX. All commentators point
out that grammatically the wording is unusual.Literally it is "70 men, 50
thousand men,"  Other suggest that the word for "thousand" ('elef) is
spelled the same way as the word for "cattle" ('elef) and it was 70 men and
50 cattle that were slain. It might be possible that a Massoretic note
referring to 2 Samuel 24 might have accidently been copied into the text.
Almost all scholar agree that the book of Samuel is one of the most
textually faulty books in the Hebrew Scriptures

Kevin

At 01:54 PM 07/27/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>Two questions- According to the best rendering of the most reliable
>Hebrew text,  did the Lord kill 70 or  50,070  BethShemishites?   Did
>the author deliberately choose the impossible number, 50,070 to signal
>the mythical character of the story? per, Samuel Hooke,  "Middle Easter
>Mythology",  p.154
>
>Robert Vining, Owen Sound, Ontario         rvining AT log.on.ca
>
>
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 Kevin W. Woodruff, M.Div.
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Professor of New Testament Greek
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