One Book Split in Two, and the Sources Behind It

The Hebrew Bible has always treated Samuel as a single continuous book; its division into 1 and 2 Samuel originates with the Greek Septuagint translation, which split it, along with Kings, into four books for length, a division later Latin and vernacular Bibles carried forward and that even modern Hebrew printed editions now often reproduce for convenience while still describing it as one work. Critical scholarship has identified within Samuel some of the oldest continuous prose narrative in the Hebrew Bible, particularly the account of David's rise and the Succession Narrative covering his final years, material many historians regard as unusually close in time to the events it describes and unusually willing to depict its central royal figure in a morally compromising light, a frankness later Chronicles will notably remove when it retells much of the same history.

The manuscript evidence from Qumran has added a genuine complication to the text's history: a Hebrew fragment known as 4QSamuel-a preserves readings that agree with the Greek Septuagint against the standard Masoretic Hebrew text used in most modern Bibles, showing that the Masoretic Text, though authoritative in later Judaism, was not the only Hebrew form of Samuel circulating in the Second Temple period.