The received Hebrew text of Samuel in its Masoretic dress (MT) is in poor repair. It is a short text, but its shortness is not the wholesome shortness of a text free of expansion and interpolation; rather it is the result of countless copying errors and omissions, some of them extensive, scattered throughout the book. This unfortunate situation was recognized centuries ago,3 but the first systematic attempt to correct it did not come until 1842 in Otto Thenius’ commentary in