The Fallible · Synthetic · Study Bible
Jabesh-gilead’s Tribute to Saul
1 Samuel 31:11–13 — Jabesh-gilead’s Tribute to Saul. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
11When the people of Jabesh-gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul,
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
yō·šə·ḇê yā·ḇêš gil·‘āḏ ’êṯ way·yiš·mə·‘ū ’ê·lāw ’ă·šer- p̄ə·liš·tîm ‘ā·śū lə·šā·’ūl
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-they-heard concerning-him, the-dwellers-of Jabesh Gilead, [the thing] which had-done the-Philistines to-Saul.
Where the English smooths the original
This is a touching and rare example of national gratitude.
It was singular how that first deed of splendid patriotism, done in the early fervour of his consecration, bore fruit after so many long years.Ellicott is reading back to 1 Samuel 11, where Saul's first public act as king was the rescue of this very town. The observation is historical, not textual: nothing in v. 11 says why they came.
Jabesh-gilead, which was beyond Jordan; for the people on this side Jordan were fled from their cities, as was now said.
The distance over the hills, down into the Jordan valley, and up the Wady Jâlûd is not much under twenty miles.The sources in this brief do not agree on the distance: Gill says about eight miles, JFB about ten, Pulpit twelve to fourteen, Ellicott about fourteen, Cambridge nearly twenty. The larger the figure, the more remarkable the single night of v. 12. We record the disagreement rather than choose.
12all their men of valor set out, journeyed all night, and retrieved the bodies of Saul and his sons from the wall of Beth-shan. When they arrived at Jabesh, they burned the bodies there.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
kāl- ’îš ḥa·yil way·yā·qū·mū way·yê·lə·ḵū ḵāl hal·lay·lāh way·yiq·ḥū ’eṯ- gə·wî·yaṯ šā·’ūl wə·’êṯ gə·wî·yōṯ bā·nāw mê·ḥō·w·maṯ bêṯ šān way·yā·ḇō·’ū yā·ḇê·šāh way·yiś·rə·p̄ū ’ō·ṯām šām
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-they-arose, every man-of-valor, and-they-walked all the-night, and-they-took the-body of-Saul and the-bodies of-his-sons from-the-wall-of Beth-shan; and-they-came Jabesh-ward, and-they-burned them there.
Where the English smooths the original
Considering that Beth-shan is an hour and a half's distance, and by a narrow upland passage, to the west of the Jordan (the whole being a journey from Jabesh-gilead of about ten miles), they must have made all haste to travel thither to carry off the headless bodies and return to their own side of the Jordan in the course of a single night.
Cremation, though highly honourable among classical nations, is here mentioned for the first time in Holy Scripture,
The flesh here only was burned. The bones (see next verse) were reverently and lovingly preserved, and laid to rest beneath the friendly shade of the great tamarisk tree of Jabesh.
But even this was not a complete burning to ashes, but merely a burning of the skin and flesh; so that the bones still remained, and they were buried in the ground under a shady tree.K&D reaches this by argument, not by report: the text says only that they burned them and buried the bones. The reconstruction is a harmonisation, and a reasonable one, but it is inference.
13Then they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh, and they fasted seven days.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·yiq·ḥū ’eṯ- ‘aṣ·mō·ṯê·hem way·yiq·bə·rū ṯa·ḥaṯ- hā·’e·šel bə·yā·ḇê·šāh way·yā·ṣu·mū šiḇ·‘aṯ yā·mîm
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-they-took their-bones and-they-buried [them] under the-tamarisk in-Jabesh; and-they-fasted seven of-days.
Where the English smooths the original
pleased perchance with the parallel, as he expresses it, that as these plants, seemingly dead in winter, have every spring an annual resurrection, so men's dry bones shall have new sap put into them at the day of judgmentGill is relaying Thomas Fuller's fancy about oaks, and the tree of the Chronicles parallel, not the tamarisk of this verse. We keep it because it is the one place in this brief where a commentator hears resurrection in the bones.
But we must not understand this word of fasting strictly, as if they ate nothing for seven whole days; but in a more large sense, as it is used both in sacred and profane writers; that they did eat but little, and that but mean food, and drank only water for that time.Benson's qualification reproduces Poole's almost word for word; Poole (1685) is the earlier of the two. Read them as one opinion, not two independent witnesses.
While pompous funerals, grand monuments, and he praises of men, honour the memory of the deceased, the soul may be suffering in the regions of darkness and despair! Let us seek that honour which cometh from God only."and he praises of men" is a typographical corruption in the public-domain text for "the praises of men"; we quote it as printed rather than silently mend it. Henry's application cuts against the grain of every other voice here, which praise the men of Jabesh; he weighs what their honours could and could not do for Saul.
{f} fasted seven days. (f) According to the custom of mourners.The Geneva gloss reads the fast as ordinary funeral custom, which quietly declines the argument that the seven days carry special significance.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
The chapter has just emptied Israel out: the men of the valley abandoned their cities and the Philistines moved in. Then one verb, וַיִּשְׁמְע֣וּ (shâmaʻ, H8085), and one participle, יֹשְׁבֵ֖י (yâshab, H3427, "the ones seated"), and the narrative finds people who have not moved. Poole puts the contrast in a single line: "Jabesh-gilead, which was beyond Jordan; for the people on this side Jordan were fled from their cities." Barnes calls what follows "a touching and rare example of national gratitude." Every voice in this brief supplies the same reason, and none of them get it from verse 11, which does not give one: Ellicott, Gill, Geneva, Cambridge, JFB, Pulpit and K&D all reach back forty-odd years to 1 Samuel 11, where Saul's first act as king was to lift Nahash's siege off this town. ⚙ The reason is almost certainly right, and it is still supplied. What the Hebrew actually supplies is smaller and stranger: אֵלָ֔יו, "concerning him," the untranslated preposition that makes the news personal before it makes it political.
Verse 12 is a single breath of consecutive verbs: they arose, they walked, they took, they came, they burned. חַיִל֮ (chayil, H2428) is glossed by the lexicon as "a force, whether of men, means or other resources", and that is what is being spent here, on a body. JFB does the arithmetic and finds the night barely sufficient: they "must have made all haste to travel thither to carry off the headless bodies and return to their own side of the Jordan in the course of a single night" (Cambridge's twenty miles would make it harder still; the brief's sources range from eight miles to twenty, and we do not adjudicate). They take the bodies מֵחוֹמַ֖ת, from the chôwmâh (H2346), which the lexicon defines as "a wall of protection": Beth-shan's defensive wall had been turned into a display rack, and this is the verse that takes the display down. Then the hard word, וַיִּשְׂרְפ֥וּ (sâraph, H8313). Pulpit observes that cremation "is here mentioned for the first time in Holy Scripture." K&D states the law that makes it shocking, that burning in Israel was "restricted to the worst criminals," and then argues the fire down to something survivable: "not a complete burning to ashes, but merely a burning of the skin and flesh." Ellicott reaches the same place from the physical evidence, that "the flesh here only was burned." Gill preserves the Targum's escape route, that they burned spices over them as for kings; K&D and Ellicott both refuse it on grammatical grounds, since Hebrew has a different idiom for that and does not use it here. ⚙ Our own reading sides with K&D and Ellicott, on the plain evidence of the next verse: there were bones left to bury.
עַצְמֹ֣תֵיהֶ֔ם (ʻetsem, H6106, "a bone, as strong") is what is left, and it is enough. The burial is under הָאֶ֖שֶׁל, the tamarisk (H815), a word the Hebrew canon uses in only three verses. Pulpit hears the echo the concordance confirms: "It was under one tamarisk that Saul commanded the massacre of the priests (1 Samuel 22:6), and now his bones are placed in rest beneath another." Barnes and Cambridge agree the article points to a landmark tree still standing when the account was written; K&D records that Chronicles has êlah instead and does not pretend to resolve it. Then וַיָּצֻ֖מוּ (tsûwm, H6684, "to cover over the mouth") for a שִׁבְעַ֥ת, a sacred full seven, of days. Ellicott, Barnes and Pulpit read the seven against the mourning for Jacob beyond Jordan; Gill preserves Kimchi's sharper reading, that it answers "the seven days Nahash the Ammonite gave them for their relief, in which time Saul came and saved them." Benson and Poole both caution that the fast was not total abstinence. Geneva will allow it no more than "the custom of mourners." Over the top of all of it K&D sets the theological frame the narrator never states: in Saul's end "there was manifested the righteous judgment of God," and yet the love of Jabesh "had reference not to the king as rejected by God, but to the king as anointed with the Spirit of Jehovah." Henry alone turns away from the funeral to ask what it was worth to the man in it: "Let us seek that honour which cometh from God only."
⚙ This is the tool's own fallible reading, offered to be tested. The book of 1 Samuel ends without a single word from the LORD. There is no oracle, no prophet, no sacrifice, no verdict: only a town walking all night, a fire, bones, a tree, and seven days with the mouth covered. The narrator refuses to tell us what to feel about it, and that refusal is the point. Saul has been rejected, has consulted a medium, and has died on his own sword; every judgment the story needed to pass on him has already been passed. What is left is the question of what the living owe to a man God has finished with. Jabesh answers with חַיִל, with everything they have, and they answer for a debt incurred in chapter 11 that no one could have compelled them to honour. K&D's distinction seems to us exactly right and worth pressing further: they are not reversing God's verdict, they are refusing the Philistines' verdict, which is a different thing. The uncircumcised had hung a body on a wall to say that Israel's anointing was a joke. The men of Jabesh walked twenty miles in the dark to say it was not. ⚙ And we would add what none of these commentators quite says: the covering of the mouth for seven days is the truest thing in the chapter. There is nothing to say. Gratitude that has outlived its object, and grief that has no theology yet, are still acts of faith, and this book has the honesty to end on one rather than on an explanation. The line below is ours, not Scripture, and should be read as commentary and nothing more.
They could not undo God's verdict on Saul, and they did not try; they undid the Philistines'.
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
אֶ֖שֶׁל (ʼêshel, H815) is one of the rarest nouns in the Hebrew Bible, standing in only three verses, and two of them belong to Saul. At 1 Samuel 22:6 he sits under the tamarisk at Gibeah, spear in hand, and from that seat orders the massacre of the priests of Nob; at 1 Samuel 31:13 his bones are laid under the tamarisk at Jabesh. Pulpit draws the line explicitly: "It was under one tamarisk that Saul commanded the massacre of the priests (1 Samuel 22:6), and now his bones are placed in rest beneath another." ⚙ The third occurrence is not mentioned by any voice in this brief, and we add it as our own observation from the Verifier's lexical basis: at Genesis 21:33 Abraham plants a tamarisk at Beersheba and there calls on the name of the everlasting God. The same rare tree thus marks a covenant beginning, a king's worst day, and a king's burial. We claim the verbal link, which the concordance establishes; we do not claim the pattern is authorial design.
1 Samuel 22:6 · Genesis 21:33
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H815 ʼêshel (tamarisk), which occurs in only 3 verses of the canon; 1 Samuel 22:6 additionally shares H7586 Shâʼûwl (in 335 vv). The rarity of H815 is what carries the verbal tier, not the proper name.
Every commentator in this brief sends the reader to 1 Samuel 11, and the Verifier's shared lexemes confirm that Jabesh-gilead of that chapter and Jabesh-gilead of this one are the same town named by the same words. There, Nahash the Ammonite offered the town terms that meant mutilation, granted them seven days to seek a rescuer, and Saul, newly anointed and still ploughing, mustered Israel and broke the siege. Gill: they remembered "with gratitude the kindness he had shown to them, in delivering them out of the hands of Nahash the Ammonite." JFB calls the services "important and timely"; the Geneva gloss reduces the whole verse to the words "Whom he had delivered from their enemies." Ellicott makes the most of it, that the deed "bore fruit after so many long years." ⚙ Note what the link does to the seven days of v. 13, if Gill's report of Kimchi is followed: the town fasts for exactly the span it was once given to wait.
1 Samuel 11:1 · 1 Samuel 11:5 · 1 Samuel 11:9
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H3003 Yâbêsh (in 21 vv) and H1568 Gilʻâd (in 123 vv) across 1 Sam 11:1, 11:5 and 11:9; 11:5 also shares H7586 Shâʼûwl. The shared words are proper names of the same place and person, so the link is one of narrative reference, not of quotation; tiered structural for that reason.
The Verifier returns five verses of Judges 21 as candidates on the strength of the same place-name. That chapter is the last and darkest in Judges: after Israel has nearly annihilated the tribe of Benjamin and sworn not to give it wives, Jabesh-gilead alone fails to appear at the muster, is destroyed, and its four hundred surviving virgins are given to the remnant of Benjamin so the tribe will not be blotted out. ⚙ The inference we draw, and it is ours and not any commentator's in this brief, is that Benjamin and Jabesh-gilead are bound by blood before they are bound by Saul's rescue: the mothers of Benjamin came from this town, and Saul is a Benjaminite. If that is right, the night march is kinship as much as gratitude. We flag it as inference. What the text and the Verifier establish is only the recurrence of the town, not the genealogy.
Judges 21:8 · Judges 21:10 · Judges 21:12 · Judges 21:14
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H3003 Yâbêsh (in 21 vv) and H1568 Gilʻâd (in 123 vv) across Judges 21:8, 21:9, 21:10, 21:12 and 21:14. The confirmed element is the recurrence of the same town; the Benjamin kinship reading built on it is machine inference and is marked as such in the body.
The act of Jabesh does not stay buried. At 2 Samuel 2:4 David is told that the men of Jabesh-gilead buried Saul, and in 2:5 he sends messengers to bless them for the kindness shown to their lord; it is his first recorded act as king of Judah, and he performs it toward men who had honoured his rival. Later, at 2 Samuel 21:12, David fetches the bones of Saul and Jonathan from the citizens of Jabesh-gilead and buries them in Kish's tomb at Zela. Ellicott, Cambridge and K&D all record that final transfer, K&D noting it took place "in the land of Benjamin." ⚙ The bones travel three times in this thread: wall, tamarisk, family grave. The Jabesh burial was never the last word, and the text seems content to let a temporary grave be a faithful one.
2 Samuel 2:4 · 2 Samuel 2:5 · 2 Samuel 21:12
basis: Verifier: 2 Sam 2:4 and 2:5 share H3003 Yâbêsh (in 21 vv), H7586 Shâʼûwl (in 335 vv) and H1568 Gilʻâd (in 123 vv); 2 Sam 21:12 shares H3003 Yâbêsh, H6430 Pᵉlishtîy (in 244 vv) and H7586 Shâʼûwl. Shared proper names establish continuous narrative reference, not quotation.
1 Chronicles 10:11-12 retells this unit in compressed form. K&D lists exactly what drops out: "they went the whole night," the removal of the bodies from the town wall, and the burning. He rejects the explanation that the Chronicler found burning ignominious under Leviticus 20:14, arguing instead that "he did not see how to reconcile the burning of the bodies with the burial of the bones." Cambridge records the same omission more briefly. Chronicles also reads êlah, terebinth or strong tree, where Samuel has êshel, tamarisk (K&D and Cambridge both note it). ⚙ We record the divergence and decline to harmonise it. Chronicles is literarily dependent on this passage, which is as close to inner-canonical quotation as the Old Testament gets, but the Verifier's computed basis here consists only of proper names, so we do not tier this verbal.
1 Chronicles 10:11 · 1 Chronicles 10:12 · 1 Samuel 31:10
basis: Verifier: 1 Chr 10:11 shares H3003 Yâbêsh (in 21 vv), H6430 Pᵉlishtîy (in 244 vv), H7586 Shâʼûwl (in 335 vv); 1 Chr 10:12 shares H3003 Yâbêsh (twice) and H7586 Shâʼûwl; 1 Sam 31:10 shares H2346 chôwmâh (in 123 vv), H1052 Bêyth Shᵉʼân (in 8 vv) and H1472 gᵉvîyâh (in 11 vv). Deliberately under-claimed: the shared lexemes are names and setting nouns, so parallel narration is recorded rather than quotation.
Ellicott, Barnes and Pulpit all read the seven days' fast against the mourning for Jacob at the threshing floor of Atad, also beyond Jordan, and Ellicott adds that the Talmudic rule of seven days' strict mourning may rest on these two precedents. ⚙ Two cautions. First, both Ellicott and Pulpit print the reference as "Genesis 1:10", which cannot be right; the mourning for Jacob at Atad is Genesis 50:10, and Barnes simply says "the marginal reference." We give the corrected reference but record the misprint. Second, the Verifier supplied no computed lexical basis for this link, because Genesis 50:10 was not among the candidates returned; the connection here is the commentators', resting on the number and the setting, not on shared vocabulary we can demonstrate. Gill's alternative from Kimchi, that the seven days answer Nahash's seven days in 1 Samuel 11:3, is a different explanation of the same number, and we cannot decide between them.
Genesis 50:10 · 1 Samuel 11:3
basis: No Verifier-computed shared-lexeme basis: Genesis 50:10 was not among the supplied candidates. The link is asserted by Ellicott, Barnes and Pulpit, but Ellicott and Pulpit both print the reference as 'Genesis 1:10' (an evident misprint for 50:10), so the citation's provenance in these sources is defective and the tier is flagged pending verification.
Gill reports the Targum's rendering: "they burnt over them, as they burn over their kings there," that is, a burning of spices or of the king's furnishings above the bodies, as at the burials of certain kings of Judah (2 Chronicles 16:14; Jeremiah 34:5). Ellicott reports the same Chaldee interpretation, and both he and K&D reject it: K&D on the grammatical ground that such a burning is expressed by a distinct idiom, "to make a burning for him," "whereas here it is stated distinctly that 'they burnt them.'" ⚙ We flag this rather than settle it. The cross-references to 2 Chronicles 16:14 and Jeremiah 34:5 arrive through the commentators' argument, not through any Verifier-computed lexical basis, and the reading they support is disputed within this very brief.
2 Chronicles 16:14 · Jeremiah 34:5 · Leviticus 20:14
basis: No Verifier-computed shared lexemes for these refs; they are supplied by Gill, Ellicott and K&D in discussing the Chaldee/Targum rendering of H8313 sâraph. The reading is expressly contested (Gill preserves it, Ellicott and K&D reject it on idiom), so the basis is disputed and the tier is flagged.
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
⚙ The shape of verse 12 is unmistakable once it is laid out plainly: a body displayed by an occupying power as proof that its claim to kingship was empty; a small group with no political standing who owe the dead man a debt; a journey undertaken under cover of night; the body taken down from the place of exposure; a burial in a borrowed spot under a tree. The Law itself hated such exposure and required that a body hanged not remain overnight (Deuteronomy 21:22-23), and John records Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking Jesus down and burying him in haste before the sabbath. K&D's sentence about Jabesh reads with uncanny aptness across the gap: their act "had reference not to the king as rejected by God, but to the king as anointed with the Spirit of Jehovah." The two cases are not equivalent and we will not pretend otherwise. Saul was justly rejected and the men of Jabesh honoured a failed king; Christ was unjustly condemned and those who buried him honoured the true one. But the pattern of loyalty to a dishonoured anointed, acted out at personal risk when the cause looks finished, is the same pattern, and Scripture keeps returning to it. We mark this reading novel: no voice in this brief draws the connection, and we offer it as ours to be tested.
John 19:38-40 · Deuteronomy 21:22-23 · 1 Samuel 31:12
The unit's central physical fact is that עַצְמֹ֣תֵיהֶ֔ם (ʻetsem, H6106, "a bone, as strong") survived. Barnes is explicit that the men of Jabesh burned the bodies "yet so as to preserve the bones," and K&D that this was "not a complete burning to ashes." Gill, relaying Fuller's conceit about burial under trees, is the one voice here who names what that survival points to: "as these plants, seemingly dead in winter, have every spring an annual resurrection, so men's dry bones shall have new sap put into them at the day of judgment." Henry, refusing to be consoled by a good funeral, insists on the same horizon from the other side: "If our souls are saved, our bodies will be raised incorruptible and glorious." Ezekiel will be shown a valley of dry bones and asked whether they can live; Paul will say that what is sown in dishonour is raised in glory. ⚙ Our reading: the men of Jabesh could rescue a body from shame but could not raise it, and the book ends with the limit of human loyalty plainly marked. The resurrection hope read out of preserved bones is ancient and widely held, and it is attested within this very brief by Gill and Henry.
Ezekiel 37:1-6 · 1 Corinthians 15:42-43 · 2 Samuel 21:12-14
⚙ There is a second movement to this story that lies just outside the unit. In 2 Samuel 2:5 David sends to the men of Jabesh-gilead and blesses them for the kindness they showed to Saul, and later he takes the bones into the royal grave himself. The men of Jabesh never sought a reward, never knew David would hear of it, and acted toward a corpse that could not thank them. The king they had not yet met counted the service as done to him. That is the exact shape of the Lord's word that what was done to the least was done to himself, and of the promise that God is not unjust so as to forget work done for his name. We tier this as a figural reading and mark it novel: it is our own, drawn from the narrative sequence rather than from any voice in this brief, and it is a pattern-level resemblance, not a verbal or prophetic link. Nothing in Hebrew connects these texts; the languages differ and the connection is one of shape.
2 Samuel 2:5 · Matthew 25:40 · Hebrews 6:10
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
Text. BSB (CC0) with the Berean interlinear and Strong's numbering. Note that the interlinear word indices for 31:11 follow the English alignment, not Hebrew word order: the Hebrew clause runs wayyišməʻū ’êlāw yōšəḇê yāḇêš gilʻāḏ, verb first, and our literal rendering follows the Hebrew order while the note keys follow the supplied indices. At 31:12 the compound place-name Beth-shan is split across indices 15 and 16, with index 15 carrying a placeholder gloss and a parse of "Preposition"; that is an artifact of the interlinear data, not a feature of the Hebrew.
What the text does not say. Verse 11 gives no motive. The gratitude reading is unanimous among the commentators and almost certainly correct, but it is supplied from 1 Samuel 11 and not stated here. Likewise the reason for the burning is nowhere given; four explanations are canvassed in the notes to 31:12 and the text adjudicates none of them.
Distances disagree. Gill gives about eight miles from Beth-shan to Jabesh, JFB about ten, Pulpit twelve to fourteen, Ellicott about fourteen, Cambridge "not much under twenty." We report the range and pick no figure; the plausibility of a single night's round trip varies considerably across it.
Source defects quoted as printed. Ellicott and Pulpit both cite the mourning for Jacob as "Genesis 1:10"; the passage is Genesis 50:10. The Henry excerpt reads "and he praises of men" where the sense requires "the praises of men"; we quote the public-domain text as it stands rather than emend it. Ellicott's entry on 31:13 also carries long extracts from the Babylonian Talmud and from Browning's Saul; these are Ellicott's own material and carry no scriptural authority.
Dependence between voices. Benson's note on the fast reproduces Poole's nearly verbatim, and Benson's note on the burning follows Poole and the common tradition; treat them as one witness. K&D's long entry is reproduced identically at all three verses in the source, which is why it is quoted once here.
Contested. Whether the bodies were truly burned or spices burned over them (the Targum's reading, preserved by Gill, rejected by Ellicott and K&D); whether Chronicles' êlah or Samuel's êshel names the tree; whether the seven days imitate the mourning for Jacob or answer Nahash's seven days (Kimchi, via Gill). These are flagged in the threads and left open.
Machine inference, marked. The Benjamin kinship reading of the Judges 21 thread, the Genesis 21:33 tamarisk observation, and all three ⚙ christological readings are ours, not our sources'. Two of the three are marked novel. Nothing in this apparatus should be read as evidence from the commentators for those claims.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)