The Missing 500

These are the names of the mighty men whom David had: Josheb-basshebeth, a Tahchemonite, chief of the captains; he was called Adino the Eznite because of eight hundred who were killed by him at one time.  2 Samuel 23:8 NASB

Eight hundred – Compare this account with a similar one in Chronicles.  It reads: “These constitute the list of David’s mighty men: Jashobeam, the son of a Hachmonite, the chief of the thirty; he wielded his spear against three hundred whom he killed at one time” (1 Chronicles 11:11).  Ah, a small problem.  Which of these accounts is true?  Was it 800 killed or 300 killed?  Or maybe it wasn’t the same man.  Maybe one man killed 300 and another man killed 800.  Or maybe neither.  What are we to do with this?

Robert Alter has a suggestion about the verse in Samuel:

This list of military heroes and their exploits is perhaps the strongest candidate of any passage in the Book of Samuel to be considered a text actually written in David’s lifetime.  The language is crabbed, and the very abundance of textual difficulties, uncharacteristic for prose, reflects the great antiquity of the list.  These fragmentary recollections of particular heroic exploits do not sound like the invention of any later writer but, on the contrary, like memories of remarkable martial acts familiar to the audience (for example, ‘he . . . killed the lion in the pit on the day of the snow’ [verse 20] and requiring only the act of epic listing, not of narrative elaboration. It should also be noted that the list invokes the early phase of David’s career . . .  Josheb-Basshebetha Tachemonite.  So reads the Masoretic Text.  But this looks quite dubious as a Hebrew name.  One version of the Septuagint has Ish-Baal (alternately, Jeshbaal), which by scribal euphemism also appears as Ish-Bosheth and hence may be produced the confusion in the Masoretic Test.  Many authorities prefer the gentilic ‘Hachmoni,’ in accordance with the parallel verse in Chronicles.[1]

As for Chronicles, he writes:

This list, with some brief narrative fragments embedded in it, duplicates 2 Samuel 23:8-39. . . It appears to be a very old document, registering memories of the military exploits of David’s warriors that have anecdotal specificity (the gigantic Egyptian with a huge spear, the fighting on the day of the snow—a rare event in this climate).  In this instance, there are quite a few differences from the text in Samuel, and many of the names of the warriors are different.  These differences do not appear to reflect any ideological purpose, and they probably are the result of the Chronicler’s using different manuscript versions of the archaic material.[2]

What should we conclude?  We could try to avoid the obvious textual transmission issue by claiming that these are two lists of two different sets of warriors, but that has the disadvantage of clear interpretive agenda, that is, concocting an explanation whose purpose is simply to erase the obvious discrepancy.  Or we could recognize that Chronicles, written centuries after the Davidic monarchy, has a tendency to modify prior stories in an effort to make David and his descendants more acceptable (consider the retelling of the Bathsheba affair).  Or we could follow the leading of such experts as Yehezkel Kaufmann who suggested that the imaginative thought of the prophets was included in the Tanakh despite contradictions with other passages precisely because no one would dare alter communication from the divine.  I suggest we have something akin to this happening in these texts.  The story, as Alter notes, is very old.  It is much more like fable than history, and as fable it contains something very important to the Davidic legacy, so important that minor discrepancies in name and number are overlooked.  What matters is the legend of David’s mighty men.  The details aren’t quite so significant—until we, as Western, non-Jewish, plenary inspiration doctrine aficionados encounter the two texts.  Suddenly the details become more important than the legend, and we suffer inspiration apoplexy.  It’s our doctrinal paradigm that is at stake, not the role of David’s mighty-men legend.

I offer this solution.  Alter is probably right.  The Chronicler used different versions to compile his account.  And he didn’t care.  Even if he had reference to Samuel, his agenda was very different.  He was writing political history.  The author of Samuel was recalling ancient legends.  When we see this, the problem disappears—along with our fundamentalist doctrine of textual inerrancy.

Such is the lesson of the missing 500.  Consider the remarks of Shawn Aster regarding the exodus:

Do these events correspond to the biblical narrative? In my opinion, the question itself is problematic. Events cannot be compared to a story. Events are the building blocks with which a narrator builds his story.  Therefore, the question ought to be: Are these the historical events that the Torah adapted in its presentation of the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt (Exod. 1–15)?[3]

Could we not say the same about these verses?  Happy All Saints’ Day.

Topical Index:  textual inerrancy, mighty men, legend, fable, 1 Chronicles 11:11, 2 Samuel 23:8

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 2 Prophets, pp. 416-417 fns.

[2] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3 Writings, p. 889, fn. 10.

[3] Shawn Zelig Aster, “A Personal Perspective on Biblical History, the Authorship of the Torah, and Belief in its Divine Origin,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (2019), p. 195.