1 Samuel 4:3

4:3 When the army ¹  came back to the camp, the elders of Israel said, “Why did the Lord let us be defeated today by ²  the Philistines? Let’s take with us the ark of the covenant of the Lord from Shiloh. When it is with us, it will save us ³  from the hand of our enemies.

1 Samuel 4:17

4:17 The messenger replied, “Israel has fled from ⁴  the Philistines! The army has suffered a great defeat! Your two sons, Hophni and Phineas, are dead! The ark of God has been captured!”

1 Samuel 9:24

9:24 So the cook picked up the leg and brought it and set it in front of Saul. Samuel ⁵  said, “What was kept is now set before you! Eat, for it has been kept for you for this meeting time, from the time I said, ‘I have invited the people.’” So Saul ate with Samuel that day.

1 Samuel 11:9

11:9 They said to the messengers who had come, “Here’s what you should say to the men of Jabesh Gilead: ‘Tomorrow deliverance will come to you when the sun is fully up.’” When the messengers went and told the men of Jabesh Gilead, they were happy.

1 Samuel 14:6

14:6 Jonathan said to his armor bearer, “Come on, let’s go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised men. Perhaps the Lord will intervene ⁶  for us. Nothing can prevent the Lord from delivering, whether by many or by a few.”

1 Samuel 16:2

16:2 Samuel replied, “How can I go? Saul will hear about it and kill me!” But the Lord said, “Take a heifer with you ⁷  and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.’

1 Samuel 17:46

17:46 This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand! I will strike you down and cut off your head. This day I will give the corpses of the Philistine army to the birds of the sky and the wild animals of the land. Then all the land will realize that Israel has a God

1 Samuel 18:17

18:17 ⁸ Then Saul said to David, “Here’s my oldest daughter, Merab. I want to give her to you in marriage. Only be a brave warrior ⁹  for me and fight the battles of the Lord.” For Saul thought, “There’s no need for me to raise my hand against him. Let it be the hand of the Philistines!”

1 Samuel 18:21

18:21 Saul said, “I will give her to him so that she may become a snare to him and the hand of the Philistines may be against him.” So Saul said to David, “Today is the second time for you to become my son-in-law.” ¹⁰ 

1 Samuel 18:27

18:27 when David, along with his men, went out ¹¹  and struck down two hundred Philistine men. David brought their foreskins and presented all of them to the king so he could become the king’s son-in-law. Saul then gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.

1 Samuel 19:11

19:11 Saul sent messengers to David’s house to guard it and to kill him in the morning. Then David’s wife Michal told him, “If you do not save yourself ¹²  tonight, tomorrow you will be dead!”

1 Samuel 21:2

21:2 David replied to Ahimelech the priest, “The king instructed me to do something, but he said to me, ‘Don’t let anyone know the reason I am sending you or the instructions I have given you.’ ¹³  I have told my soldiers ¹⁴  to wait at a certain place. ¹⁵ 

1 Samuel 21:6

21:6 So the priest gave him holy bread, for there was no bread there other than the bread of the Presence. It had been removed from before the Lord in order to replace it with hot bread on the day it had been taken away.

1 Samuel 22:7

22:7 Saul said to his servants who were stationed around him, “Listen up, you Benjaminites! Is Jesse’s son giving fields and vineyards to all of you? Or is he making all of you ¹⁶  commanders and officers? ¹⁷ 

1 Samuel 23:14

23:14 David stayed in the strongholds that were in the desert and in the hill country of the desert of Ziph. Saul looked for him all the time, ¹⁸  but God did not deliver David ¹⁹  into his hand.

1 Samuel 25:8

25:8 Ask your own servants; they can tell you! May my servants find favor in your sight, for we have come ²⁰  at the time of a holiday. Please provide us – your servants ²¹  and your son David – with whatever you can spare.” ²² 

1 Samuel 25:17

25:17 Now be aware of this, and see what you can do. For disaster has been planned for our lord and his entire household. ²³  He is such a wicked person ²⁴  that no one tells him anything!”

1 Samuel 25:26

25:26 “Now, my lord, as surely as the Lord lives and as surely as you live, it is the Lord who has kept you from shedding blood and taking matters into your own hands. Now may your enemies and those who seek to harm my lord be like Nabal.

1 Samuel 27:5

27:5 David said to Achish, “If I have found favor with you, let me be given a place in one of the country towns so that I can live there. Why should your servant settle in the royal city with you?”

1 Samuel 28:1

The Witch of Endor

28:1 In those days the Philistines gathered their troops ²⁵  for war in order to fight Israel. Achish said to David, “You should fully understand that you and your men must go with me into the battle.” ²⁶ 

1 Samuel 30:1

David Defeats the Amalekites

30:1 On the third day David and his men came to Ziklag. Now the Amalekites had raided the Negev and Ziklag. They attacked Ziklag and burned it. ²⁷ 

1 Samuel 30:13

30:13 David said to him, “To whom do you belong, and where are you from?” The young man said, “I am an Egyptian, the servant of an Amalekite man. My master abandoned me when I was ill for three days.

1 Samuel 30:17

30:17 But David struck them down from twilight until the following evening. None of them escaped, with the exception of four hundred young men who got away on camels. ²⁸ 

1 Samuel 31:7

31:7 When the men of Israel who were in the valley and across the Jordan saw that the men of Israel had fled and that Saul and his sons were dead, they abandoned the cities and fled. The Philistines came and occupied them.

[4:3]  ¹ tn Or “people.”

[4:3]  ² tn Heb “before.”

[4:3]  ³ tn Heb “and it will come in our midst and it will save.” After the cohortative (see “let’s take”), the prefixed verbal forms with the prefixed conjunction indicate purpose or result. The translation understands the ark to be the subject of the third masculine singular verbs, although it is possible to understand the Lord as the subject. In the latter case, one should translate, “when he is with us, he will save us.”

[4:17]  ⁴ tn Heb “before.”

[9:24]  ⁵ tn Heb “he” (also in v. 25); the referent (Samuel) has been specified in both places in the translation for clarity.

[14:6]  ⁶ tn Heb “act.”

[16:2]  ⁷ tn Heb “in your hand.”

[18:17]  ⁸ tc Much of the ms evidence for the LXX lacks vv. 17-19.

[18:17]  ⁹ tn Heb “son of valor.”

[18:21]  ¹⁰ tc The final sentence of v. 21 is absent in most LXX mss.

[18:27]  ¹¹ tn Heb “arose and went.”

[19:11]  ¹² tn Heb “your life.”

[21:2]  ¹³ tn Heb “let not a man know anything about the matter [for] which I am sending you and [about] which I commanded you.”

[21:2]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “servants.”

[21:2]  ¹⁵ tn The Hebrew expression here refers to a particular, but unnamed, place. It occurs in the OT only here, in 2 Kgs 6:8, and in Ruth 4:1, where Boaz uses it to refer to Naomi’s unnamed kinsman-redeemer. A contracted form of the expression appears in Dan 8:13.

[22:7]  ¹⁶ tc The MT has “to all of you.” If this reading is correct, we have here an example of a prepositional phrase functioning as the equivalent of a dative of advantage, which is not impossible from a grammatical point of view. However, the LXX, the Syriac Peshitta, and Vulgate all have “and.” A conjunction rather than a preposition should probably be read on the front of this phrase.

[22:7]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “officers of a thousand and officers of a hundred.”

[23:14]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “all the days.”

[23:14]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “him”; the referent (David) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[25:8]  ²⁰ tc The translation follows many medieval Hebrew mss in reading בָּאנוּ (ba’nu, “we have come”) rather than the MT’s בָּנוּ (banu, “we have built”).

[25:8]  ²¹ tn This refers to the ten servants sent by David.

[25:8]  ²² tn Heb “whatever your hand will find.”

[25:17]  ²³ tn Heb “all his house” (so ASV, NRSV); NAB, NLT “his whole family.”

[25:17]  ²⁴ tn Heb “he is a son of worthlessness.”

[28:1]  ²⁵ tn Heb “their camps.”

[28:1]  ²⁶ tc The translation follows the LXX (εἰς πόλεμον, eis polemon) and a Qumran ms מלחמה במלחמה ([m]lkhmh) bammilkhamah (“in the battle”) rather than the MT’s בַמַּחֲנֶה (bammakhaneh, “in the camp”; cf. NASB). While the MT reading is not impossible here, and although admittedly it is the harder reading, the variant fits the context better. The MT can be explained as a scribal error caused in part by the earlier occurrence of “camp” in this verse.

[30:1]  ²⁷ tn The Hebrew text adds “with fire.”

[30:17]  ²⁸ tn Heb “who rode on camels and fled.”