Originally, 1 & 2 Samuel were one unified literary work. The division into two books derives from the Greek and Latin traditions of the text, not the Hebrew. Like all the books of Hebrew Scripture, 1 & 2 Samuel were written on scrolls of more or less fixed length, and because the story is too long to fit on one scroll, the narrative was split roughly at midpoint, at the death of Saul, the major character in the story’s first half.
In the Greek Septuagint 1 Samuel is titled basileion a’, or 1 Kingdoms, since the Books of Samuel and Kings are grouped together in the Greek tradition as 1-4 Kingdoms, a grouping preserved in St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and transmitted into English through the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims translation. The title “Samuel” doubtless arose from the fact that Samuel is the leading character at the beginning of the story,...
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Introduction, Outline, Bibliography