Samuel, Saul and David

This record contains three related documents presenting an English translation and textual comparison of the biblical books traditionally known as First Samuel, Second Samuel, and part of First Kings. The project is titled Samuel, Saul and David and provides a modern English rendering of a textual tradition sometimes referred to as the “Palestinian” family of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, together with tools for comparing this tradition with the standard Masoretic Text tradition. The materials included in this release are: Samuel, Saul and David – an English translation based primarily on the Palestinian textual tradition, drawing on evidence from sources such as the Lucianic recension of the Greek Septuagint and the Samuel manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., 4QSama). This edition now includes a concordance at the end that readers of print copies can use to find passages based on their content. Samuel, Saul and David Parallel Edition – a parallel presentation aligning the above translation with the World English Bible translation (which is largely based on the Masoretic Text). This layout allows readers to compare differences between the textual traditions verse by verse. Samuel, Saul and David Parallel Edition (British English) – a parallel comparison using the World English Bible British English edition, allowing comparison with a modernised orthographic form used in Commonwealth contexts. The translation underlying this work is loosely based on the American Standard Version (1901) but has been extensively revised to reflect readings supported by the Palestinian textual tradition and to reduce archaisms in the English language. The aim is to provide a readable English text while preserving linguistic features of the underlying Hebrew and Greek where these may be relevant for study. The parallel editions are designed to assist readers and researchers interested in the textual plurality of the books of Samuel and Kings, where the Masoretic Text tradition and the Septuagint / Palestinian tradition frequently diverge. By presenting the texts side-by-side, the edition enables comparison without requiring direct access to the original Hebrew and Greek. The project is maintained as an open scholarly edition. Source files, build scripts, and version history are available in the accompanying GitHub repository: https://github.com/GlenPrideaux/SSD This repository contains the LaTeX source, conversion scripts, and workflow used to generate the published PDFs. All documents are released under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC-BY-NC 4.0).