A NOTE ON THIS RENDERING

THE WITNESS

This is the First Book of Kings as the Greek keeps it, and the Greek keeps it differently. In the Hebrew Bible the book is Melachim Alef; in the Septuagint it is the Third of the Kingdoms — for the Greek counts Shemu'el and Melachim together as four Books of the Kingdoms, and this is the third of them. But the difference runs deeper than the name. The Greek of Kings rests in many places on a Hebrew text older than the one the Masoretes would later fix, and it tells its story with its own order, its own additions, and its own silences. The House renders that Greek witness as it stands — Brenton's public- domain Septuagint — and does not quietly conform it to the familiar Hebrew. Where the two traditions part, the note says so, and the page follows the Greek. The witness-line reads Rendered from the Septuagint.

THE MISCELLANIES OF THE SECOND CHAPTER

After the death-charge of David and the settling of Shelomoh upon his throne, the Greek does a thing the Hebrew never does: it gathers two supplements of collected sayings and deeds — scholars call them the Miscellanies — and sets them into the second chapter, at verses 35a–35o and 46a–46l. They rehearse Shelomoh's wisdom and building, his marriage to Par'oh's daughter, his officers and his provisions, ahead of their proper telling and out of order. The House prints them in their Greek place and keeps their lettered numbering exactly, every letter and every gap.

THE OTHER YAROV'AM

The Greek carries a second and wholly different account of Yarov'am's rise — a long supplement at 12:24a–24z — telling of his mother, his flight into Mitzrayim, his return, the sickness of his child, and the torn garment of the navi, in an order and with details the Hebrew does not share. Because this material already stands here, the Greek has no need of the Hebrew's fourteenth chapter; and so, in this book, chapter fourteen opens not with Yarov'am at all but at verse twenty- one, with Rechav'am in Yehudah. The House keeps both the supplement and the silence, and does not import the missing Hebrew verses to mend the seam.

THE VINEYARD AND THE WARS

In the Hebrew, Ach'av fights his wars against the son of Hadad in the twentieth chapter and murders Navot for his vineyard in the twenty-first. The Greek reverses them: here the twentieth chapter is Navot's vineyard, and the twenty- first is the wars of the son of Hadad. The House follows the Greek order, and the reader who knows the Hebrew should not be surprised to meet the vineyard first.

THE MISSING AND THE MOVED

Throughout the book the Greek keeps its own reckoning of the verses. Passages the Hebrew holds in one place the Greek sets in another or leaves out altogether: the account of Shelomoh's forced levy and his building works is largely gone from the ninth chapter, whose verses fifteen to twenty-five are simply not there; the third chapter opens at its second verse; the fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth and sixteenth chapters each carry supplements and gaps of their own. Every gap and every lettered addition is printed as the witness gives it. No verse is renumbered to smooth the counting, by the rule that governs every broken numbering on this shelf.

THE NAME, AND THE LORD WHO IS NOT DIVINE

YAHUAH stands wherever the Greek says Kyrios, and is never glossed. The human lord — my lord the king, the servant before his master — is left in lower case, exactly as the Greek keeps it distinct from the Name. Elohim stands for Theos. Kyrios Pantokrator, the Lord Almighty, becomes YAHUAH Shaddai (19:10, 14); the Lord of hosts, YAHUAH Tzeva'ot. And where the oath rings out through this book of oaths — As YAHUAH lives — it is the Name that carries it.

THE LAND THE GREEK CALLS SYRIA

Where the Hebrew says Aram, the Greek says Syria and Syrians — the name the Greek-speaking world knew. The House restores the older name: the kingdom of Dammesek and the son of Hadad are kings of Aram, and this note records that the Greek had dressed them otherwise. It is the same restoration by which the Greek's Egypt is set back to Mitzrayim.

THE NAMES RESTORED

This is a book of names — kings and prophets, priests and places by the hundred — and the House restores them to their House forms as it does across the whole shelf: Shelomoh and David, Rechav'am and Yarov'am, Eliyahu the Tishbi and Elisha, Ach'av and Izevel, Yehoshafat and Asa and Omri; Yerushalayim and Shomron, Mitzrayim and Levanon, the Yarden, Karmel, and Chorev. Each is set in Hebrew and glossed once at its first appearance.

THE GREEK'S OWN NAMES

But the Greek also carries names the Hebrew does not, and names the Greek itself has worn out of shape — above all in the Miscellanies and the Yarov'am supplement, where the copyists have left us forms like Ano and Genubath, Achithalam and Enlami, together with a scatter of Shelomoh's district-officers whose names survive only in their Greek dress. The House does not invent a Hebrew that never stood behind these; it leaves them as the witness gives them, and restores a name only where a true Hebrew form is known. To do otherwise would be to bend the text toward a conclusion, which the rule forbids.

THE HOUSE, AND THE VESSELS OF WORSHIP

Around the building and dedication of the house in chapters five through eight, the House restores the holy things in their own tongue: the aron, the ark of the brit; the mizbeach, the altar; the kohanim who serve and the neviim who speak. But the house itself is kept a house, not forced into a title the Greek does not raise; and the sacrifices and offerings are left in plain English, that the narrative may carry its own weight without a gloss on every line.

THE TONGUE

The vocabulary as applied in this book, each term glossed at its first appearance and bare thereafter: YAHUAH — never glossed — with Elohim, Shaddai, and Tzeva'ot; brit (covenant) and aron (the ark); Torah (law), mitzvot (commandments), chukim (statutes), mishpatim (ordinances); kohen and kohanim, navi and neviim; mizbeach (altar), Mishkan (tabernacle), Ruach (spirit); Aram for the Greek's Syria; and the long roll of restored names — kings, prophets, and places — each in its House form. The Greek's own peculiar names, and the two Miscellanies, are kept as the witness gives them.

RULE X.4

The text is rendered as it stands. The translation is never adjusted to fit a conclusion. Interpretation belongs to the introductions and the notes — never to the verse.