1 Samuel at Qumran
4QSamᵃ — The most important DSS biblical scroll after the Great Isaiah Scroll
About These Scrolls
1 Samuel is one of the most text-critically rich books at Qumran. 4QSamᵃ (4Q51) — copied in the late 3rd century BCE, among the oldest biblical scrolls — preserves substantial portions of 1 Samuel and frequently agrees with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. Many of these agreements involve material that is plausibly original and lost from the proto-Masoretic tradition through scribal errors of haplography.
The most celebrated DSS reading in any biblical book appears in this corpus: the four-sentence Nahash paragraph at the boundary of chapters 10 and 11, explaining the Ammonite king's policy of gouging out the right eyes of Israelites east of the Jordan. The paragraph is absent from MT and LXX but known to Josephus; the NRSV (1989) was the first major modern English translation to restore it. Other notable readings: Hannah's explicit Nazirite vow for Samuel (1:11, 22), the additional bicolon in the Song of Hannah (2:8-9), and the cross-reference to Pharaoh Shishak's plundering of David's gold shields (cf. 2 Sam 8:7).
What you see below is a chapter-by-chapter survey: which Cave 4 (and ancillary) manuscripts attest each chapter, what variants they document, and where the theological significance lies. Every preserved variant is recorded. Nothing is hidden.