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century AD reference; 4) the Lucian Greek recension, a third century AD witness; and 5)
other early codices such as Alexandrinus.
What is the evidence for the variant which reads six cubits and a span (9'9")? All
of the manuscripts of the Masoretic Text have this reading. However, keep in mind that
the earliest Masoretic Text manuscript evidence that we have for 1 Samuel is the Aleppo
Codex, produced in AD 935. Likewise, the Leningrad Codex, the Hebrew manuscript on
which BHK and BHS are based, and thus the major Hebrew text on which most of our
English Old Testaments are based, was completed in AD 1010. So there is no extant
Hebrew text any earlier than AD 935 that puts Goliath at six cubits and a span.
However, the variant reading "six cubits and a span" is probably much older than
these MT manuscripts. Symmachus, for example, reflects the six cubits and a span
height in his translation. Symmachus was a Jew who around AD 200 made a Greek
translation of the Old Testament for the Jewish community in Caesarea of Palestine. His
goal was to produce a Greek translation that was an accurate translation of the Hebrew.
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The fact that he gives Goliath's height as six cubits and a span is strong evidence that this
variant reading was already present in the proto-MT or vorlage to the MT, i.e. the
Hebrew text tradition that had by this time become the standardized text of the Jews.
Likewise, Origin, in his Greek translation found in the fifth column of his
Hexapla, includes the longer version of 1-2 Samuel found in the MT and also lists
Goliath's height as six cubits and a span. Origin, writing in the first half of the third
century AD, includes Symmachus' translation as the fourth column of the Hexapla. In
cases where Origin found earlier translations such as Symmachus' to align closely with
the Hebrew manuscripts that he had access to, he included these readings in his fifth
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Jobes and Silva, 40-41.