When Kings Rewrite God: The Hidden Corruption of 1 Kings in the Septuagint

The Greek 3 Kingdoms, the Septuagint version of 1 Kings in the Masoretic Text, reveals how divine revelation was reshaped long before the Torah reached its final form. As Emanuel Tov explains, the Septuagint does not translate the Hebrew text literally but reflects a rewritten Hebrew edition that rearranged and expanded the story of Solomon. Entire sections were moved, duplicated, and whitewashed to magnify his wisdom and conceal his failures. What the Masoretic text presents as history, the Greek recasts as theology, the result of human editors polishing divine speech to fit their narrative.

The Qur’an exposes this very process: “They distort the words from their places and forget a portion of what they were reminded of” (5:13). The shifting verses of 3 Kingdoms show that the Torah’s transmission was not preservation but manipulation. When the story of Solomon changes between manuscripts, revelation itself stands accused. The Qur’an emerges not as a rival text but as the correction, the restoration of divine speech after centuries of human revision.