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I can't believe that I'm weighing in on something as silly as how many children Michal had, but I guess I just can't help myself.

As many times as I have read the books of Samuel, I can't say I had ever noticed this discrepancy.

So, I pulled out my books this evening and did some research.

The first thing that is crystal clear to me is that the Hebrew version is unquestionably confused. Why? Because the husband listed in II Sam 21:8 for Michal is the same man given in I Sam 18:19 as being the husband of the other daughter of Saul, Merab -- Adriel the Meholathite.

There are some very convoluted explanations that could theoretically account the discrepancies in the Hebrew account, but I won't bother going through the ones that spring to my mind. They really would be grasping at straws.

So, the next question is, what does the LXX say? At superficial glance, it would appear that the LXX has the same discrepancy, if one looks at the text used in Brenton's translation, the version most readily available on-line. The problem with Brenton, though, is that it relies almost exclusively on Codex Vaticanus, with a little input from the other major uncials. This is in line with 19th c. liberal Protestant textual scholarship of the Greek Old and New Testaments alike, about which I have written very critically in other posts.

But when you examine the critical apparatus of the LXX manuscripts available, a very different picture appears. Codex Vaticanus does indeed say in II Sam 21:8 that Michal bore 5 children, but it (and perhaps a single miniscule -- the apparatus is ambiguous on this point) is the *only* LXX manuscript that says this.

Origen's rescension also reputedly says the same, but this can be discounted because Origen's general approach was to assume that the Hebrew text available to him in his day was authoritative, and that where the LXX of his day differed from it, that the LXX was corrupt. (Origen was, it seems, motivated in no small part because he thought it would strengthen Christianity's polemics with 3rd c. Judaism, which too often boiled down to whether one followed the LXX or the Hebrew texts of the rabbinical tradition of the day. Origen also apparently thought the traditional LXX readings should be used in Christian worship, but that his "corrected" rescension should be used in disputation with the rabbis.)

I would also point out that it is curious that Codex Vaticanus spells Michal differently in II Sam 21:8 (Michal) than it does in I Sam 18 or II Sam 6 (Melchol.) Origen spells it "Melchol," incidentally.

Now, the real story of the LXX is with the miniscules. The vast majority of the miniscules say in II Sam 21:8 that it was Merab, the other daughter of Saul, who had 5 children, not Michal.

This is important because it is in the miniscules that the Orthodox textual tradition of the LXX (that of the Lucianic Byzantine rescension) is carried. The Orthodox Church never accepted Origen's idea that where the Hebrew and LXX texts differed, that the Hebrew carried the correct reading and that the Greek was wrong. The old Roman Latin veresions followed the LXX, and only with Jerome did the Roman church take a shift to following the Hebrew text. So the Douay Rheims has the same contradiction that the KJV does on this point, since both follow a post-Christian Hebrew textual tradition (although the KJV follows a later Massoretic textual tradition.)

Bottom line: the Byzantine textual tradition is one that tells a story that is internally consistent, and more to the point, makes sense at every level without resorting to gymnastics:

Saul marries Merab off to Adriel the Meholathite to snub David. David and Michal fall in love, and Saul lets him marry her only after sending David to a seemingly sure death against the Philistines, only to have David succeed, allowing David to marry her. (I Sam 18) David goes into exile not long afterwards when Saul turns on him in jealousy. Saul apparently gives Michal to another man, out of spite, (Phaltiel), but when David is in the ascendency after the death of Saul, he demands to have his wife Michal back, and Saul's son gives her back to him, over the wailing laments of Phaltiel (she was apparently worth fighting and crying over.) (II Sam 3)

Michal later scolds David for his impropriety in dancing before the Lord in the sight of the daughters of Israel, and David basically says "I'll dance before the Lord when I want to dance before the Lord." It is here that it says that Michal then bore no children until the day of her death. (II Sam 6) The traditional explanation is that she was being punished with childlessness for scolding her husband -- never mind the fact that there is no mention of her and David or of her and Phaltiel having had any children up until that point, either.

Mrs. Agrarian's explanation, on the other hand, is that Michal may have had other children, but from that point on, she said to David, "fine, you want to go around dancing and exposing yourself to other women, go ahead -- but you ain't gettin' nothin' at home no more." And so she had no more children.

I don't contradict Mrs. Agrarian.

Finally, in II Sam 21:8, a recounting goes on of the Gibeonites, who hated Saul and wanted revenge on him. They won't accept money from David. They want blood, and specifically the blood of 7 of Saul's descendents. So David gives them Saul's two remaining sons, and the five sons of Saul's other daughter, Merab, and the Gibeonites kill them. This would only make sense, since it is unlikely that David would offer up the sons of his own wife, even if she had any (which according to II Sam 6, she didn't.)

In short, the supposedly "redacted and doctored versions of the Bible in which these inconsistencies have been removed by men" are none other than the LXX textual tradition of the Orthodox Church, witnessed to by a myriad of manuscripts throughout the world. The supposedly "undoctored" version of the LXX is witnessed to by a single manuscript, a manuscript which is preferred by modern scholars because it tends to cast doubt on key Orhtodox (and orthodox) texts in the NT. According to the LXX tradition, the reading in II Sam 21:8 is indeed that Merab had five children.

I do find it interesting that in this case, some Protestants have decided to follow the Byzantine LXX textual tradition, since they otherwise hold that the medieval Hebrew manuscripts are what are authoritative. Apparently the Hebrew is more authoritative than the LXX only when it doesn't contradict itself.

And again, my little excursion into textual scholarship should point out the superficiality of many appeals to "what the Greek says."

Now that I've wasted another perfectly good evening, I will wish you all a good night. :-)