There and Back Again? - Understanding the Position of the Miscellanies
(2025) SBL Annual Meeting — Location: Boston (22.November.2025)
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- Abstract
- The Miscellanies are one of the strangest text-critical problems of Samuel–Kings. Found in the Septuagint after 1 Kings 2:35 and 2:46, they consist of two large pluses of 14 and 11 verses respectively. The pluses consist of loosely connected elements, seemingly gathered from the main story of Solomon (1 Kings 3-11), structured around his wisdom, building activities and extensive wealth. Due to their unique nature the Miscellanies have baffled scholars. Proposed solutions range from editing done in Greek after the translation was done (Montgomery, Gooding, Van Keulen), to a different Hebrew Vorlage, translating a text which either developed from the one reflected by the MT (Tov, Polak, Talshir) or one that developed into the MT (Trebolle-Barrera, Schenker, Darshan, Piquer-Otero). Most current scholars tend to agree with the idea of a Hebrew origin for the Miscellanies, but other than that no consensus on the Miscellanies has been reached. In an attempt to find a solution for understanding the Miscellanies, this paper wants to propose a new and unique perspective. All previous scholars have attempted to relate the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint (LXX) and the proto-Masoretic Text (MT) to each other, proposing that the Miscellanies were either added at a late stage to the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX or deleted from the proto-MT. In this paper I will defend the hypothesis that neither happened. Instead, I will argue that the Miscellanies were a part of the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX, but never of the proto-MT, proposing that these two textual forms existed parallel to each other. Using several examples from the Miscellanies, I will attempt to show that the proto-MT borrowed from the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX and integrated the Miscellanies almost completely into its own narrative about Solomon. At the same time, the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX did the same thing and partially integrated the Miscellanies. However, in their integration they changed much more than the MT did. At the same time, I will argue that the integration of the Miscellanies into the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX had an impact on their integration into the proto-MT, at least on one doublet in the MT.
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Beukenhorst, M. (2025). There and Back Again? - Understanding the Position of the Miscellanies. SBL Annual Meeting, Boston.