1 Samuel 10:1-2

Samuel Anoints Saul

10:1 Then Samuel took a small container of olive oil and poured it on Saul’s ¹  head. Samuel ²  kissed him and said, “The Lord has chosen you ³  to lead his people Israel! You will rule over the Lord’s people and you will deliver them from the power of the enemies who surround them. This will be your sign that the Lord has chosen ⁴  you as leader over his inheritance. ⁵  10:2 When you leave me today, you will find two men near Rachel’s tomb at Zelzah on Benjamin’s border. They will say to you, ‘The donkeys you have gone looking for have been found. Your father is no longer concerned about the donkeys but has become anxious about you two! ⁶  He is asking, “What should I do about my son?”’

1 Samuel 9:6

9:6 But the servant said to him, “Look, there is a man of God in this town. He is highly respected. Everything that he says really happens. ⁷  Now let’s go there. Perhaps he will tell us where we should go from here.” ⁸ 

[10:1]  ¹ tn Heb “his”; the referent (Saul) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[10:1]  ² tn Heb “he”; the referent (Samuel) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[10:1]  ³ tn Heb “Is it not that the Lord has anointed you?” The question draws attention to the fact and is a rhetorical way of affirming the Lord’s choice of Saul. The translation reflects the rhetorical force of the question.

[10:1]  ⁴ tn That is, “anointed.”

[10:1]  ⁵ tc The MT reads simply “Is it not that the Lord has anointed you over his inheritance for a leader?” The translation follows the LXX. The MT apparently suffers from parablepsis, whereby a scribe’s eye jumped from the first occurrence of the expression “the Lord has anointed you” to the second occurrence of this expression at the end of v. 1. This mistake caused the accidental omission of the intervening material in the LXX, which appears to preserve the original Hebrew text here.

[10:2]  ⁶ sn In the Hebrew text the pronoun you is plural, suggesting that Saul’s father was concerned about his son and the servant who accompanied him.

[9:6]  ⁷ tn The infinitive absolute precedes the verb for emphasis.

[9:6]  ⁸ tn Heb “our way on which we have gone.”