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1 Samuel 13:3 reports that Jonathan 'smote the garrison of the Philistines that was in Geba' early in Saul's reign. 1 Samuel 14:14 then refers to a later attack on a Philistine outpost at Michmash as 'that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armorbearer made.' If the Geba attack was first, the Michmash attack can't also be 'first.'
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
And Jonathan smote the garrison of the Philistines that was in Geba. 1 Samuel 13:3
Cited passages
Jonathan struck the garrison of the Philistines that was in Geba, and the Philistines heard of it. Saul blew the trumpet throughout all the land, saying, “Let the Hebrews hear!”
Cited passages
That first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armor bearer made, was about twenty men, within as it were half a furrow’s length in an acre of land.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The apparent contradiction is generated almost entirely by a translation choice. 1 Samuel 13:3 reports that Jonathan "smote the garrison (or prefect/outpost, *netsib*) of the Philistines that was in Geba," an action early in Saul's reign that triggers full-scale war. Later, after Jonathan and his armor-bearer's daring raid on the Michmash pass, 1 Samuel 14:14 says (KJV) "that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armourbearer made, was about twenty men." If the Geba strike came first, a subsequent Michmash strike cannot also be "first."
The crux is the Hebrew word *rishonah*. The clause reads *ha-makkah ha-rishonah ʾasher hikkah yonatan we-noseʾ kelaw* — "the first/initial blow which Jonathan and his armor-bearer struck." *Rishonah* can carry an absolute temporal sense ("the first ever") or a relative, episode-internal sense ("the opening/initial" stroke of this particular engagement). Hebrew uses *rishon/rishonah* in both ways elsewhere — for the literal first in a sequence and for the initial phase of an event. Nothing in the morphology forces the career-spanning reading; context governs, and the context here is the Michmash battle, not a survey of Jonathan's life.
The harmonization, defended in Tsumura's NICOT and earlier in Keil, takes the episode-internal sense: "that first slaughter" denotes the opening casualties of the Michmash rout — the roughly twenty men felled in the initial assault before the larger panic and Israelite counterattack (14:15-23) — not the first killing of Jonathan's career. This is grammatically sound, and it is precisely the reading adopted by modern critical translations: the NRSV ("In that first slaughter"), the NIV ("In that first attack"), and the ESV ("In that first strike") all render *rishonah* as marking the opening phase of the engagement. On this construal the Geba and Michmash actions sit in untroubled sequence, and the "first slaughter" simply heads the Michmash episode.
The KJV's wording is not arbitrary, however, and the friction was felt in antiquity. McCarter's Anchor Bible *1 Samuel* notes that the verse is textually messy. The Septuagint preserves a divergent form that does not carry the "first slaughter" formula in the same way, which raises the possibility that the Masoretic clause reflects an interpretive expansion or gloss not original to the narrative. S. R. Driver's classic *Notes on the Hebrew Text... of the Books of Samuel* flags the textual difficulties throughout 1 Samuel 13-14, including the awkwardness of this clause. The instability of the witnesses is itself the tell: scribes and translators were already negotiating the phrase. So there are two convergent routes to dissolving the tension. The translation route reads *rishonah* as "opening" rather than "first-ever" — a legitimate and now-standard rendering. The text-critical route observes that MT and LXX disagree on the clause's shape, so the difficulty partly arises from an unstable transmission rather than from a coherent claim that Michmash preceded Geba.
Neither route requires special pleading, and they reinforce each other. The contradiction is real in the KJV's English but does not reflect a substantive disagreement in the underlying narrative, which plainly places Geba first (chapter 13) and Michmash after (chapter 14). This is among the softer Samuel "contradictions" — a function of the King James translation tradition and a knotty verse rather than a doctrinal or historical conflict in the source. That the contradiction evaporates under the readings adopted by virtually every modern critical translation is the strongest evidence that it was a translation artifact to begin with.
Where the critical reading lands: overstated — a translation/text-critical artifact, harmonizable on standard philological grounds.
Sources for this reading