This page was originally written in July 2017, and last edited 2023-9-6
Recently, I discussed the similarities in the Shammah/Shamgar/Samson/Jonathan stories. I won’t retread that ground. What I didn’t do is offer much in the way of a hypothesis for why the name “Jonathan” appears more than once. To recap, one version of the folktale has Jonathan attacking the Philistines, and the Samuel list has Jonathan listed immediately before Shammah. In the Chronicler’s version, Jonathan virtually “absorbs” Shammah, as the names Jonathan + Shammah son of Agee, the Hararite, become “Jonathan son of Shagee the Hararite.”
Maybe it’s all just a copying thing, and there’s no real connection between the Jonathan-vs-Philistines story and the Chronicler’s move where Jonathan displaces Shammah. Or maybe — and I’m stepping way, way out on a limb here — maybe Jonathan displaces Shammah in two different places: in Chronicles and in 1 Samuel 14.
Notice, if you will, that Jonathan kills Philistines alongside an unnamed subordinate. Then, in Samuel’s list, a Jonathan is listed next to Shammah. In the Chronicles list, Shammah disappears and Jonathan is left.
Another tradition also connects a Jonathan and a Shammah. Normally, we think of Jonathan the member of Saul’s royal family. But David has an older brother in Samuel, called either Shammah (2 Samuel 16:9; 17:13) or Shimea(h) (2 Samuel 13:3, 32; 1 Chronicles 2:13) or Shimei (2 Samuel 21:21). According to that last passage, Jonathan son of Shimei kills a Philistine giant. This “Jonathan son of Shimei” is listed as killing a giant immediately after Elhanan kills Goliath.
Interestingly, in 2 Samuel 23:25, in another list of David’s heroes, a Shammah (“the Harodite”) is immediately listed after an Elhanan, and then in 23:33 a Shammah with almost the same name (“the Hararite”) is listed after Jonathan.
So to recap, the names Jonathan and Elhanan are paired twice, with different identifying details, among David’s Heroes, in connection with fighting Philistines. Jonathan and Shammah are paired in the hero-lists, with their names mixing strangely in Chronicles, and the the name Jonathan is given as the son of a Shimei elsewhere known as Shammah in a giant-killing anti-Philistine narrative.
Just as the Shamgar/Shamshon/Shammah story appears in several variants, a Shammah/Shimei is paired with Jonathan in several ways, and the Jonathan version of the Shamgar story has an unnamed subordinate helping.
In fact, in 1 Samuel 14:13, we are told that the unnamed figure was killing Philistines “after him” (aharav). Where else do we find that word? In Judges 3:31 Shamgar’s story is introduced with “And after him (we aharav) was Shamgar son of Anath”, while in 2 Samuel 23:11 reads, “And after him (we aharav) was Shammah son of Agee the Hararite.”
What if, in some early version(s) of the story, there are two named protagonists, Jonathan and Shamwhoever, who are relatives who together kill a bunch of Philistines. In the Jonathan-centered version of the narrative, the Sham-figure drops out and is replaced by a nameless subordinate. Then, in the Shamgar/Samson/Shammah versions, Jonathan drops out, disappearing except for the a literary trace of him that continues to appear in the “And after him” of Shamgar and Shammah and the “after him” of the unnamed subordinate. The relationship also lives on in the proximity of the names in the Samuel list, in the Chronicles list where the Jonathan character has primacy but the Sham-character drops out, and in the encounter of Jonathan son of Shimei with a Philistine giant.
I can’t prove it, but it would provide an explanation for an interesting set of otherwise unexplained relationships. The primary downsides are that it proposes an entirely hypothetical version of a story, and one which manages not to appear despite anywhere in the Bible despite the four different versions of the man vs. Philistines narrative we’ve been looking at.