Judges 18:30

Jonathan. This is the first time the name is given of the Levite who served first Micah and then the tribe of Dan.

Manasseh. Some of the LXX manuscripts and the Vulgate give “Moses” instead of “Manasseh.” It is true that Gershom, unless another is referred to, was the son of Moses, not of Manasseh (Ex. 2:22; 18:3). In the Hebrew (not taking into account the vowel points) the only difference between the words for Moses and Manasseh is that the word for Moses does not have the letter n. It is an interesting observation that in the Hebrew manuscripts and Bibles, edited by the Masoretic scholars, the letter n is inserted in the name in a very odd way, being “suspended” above the line, strongly indicating that it was probably added later. The Hebrew Bible shows other instances of the “suspended” letters (Ps. 80:14; Job 38:13, 15). Ancient Hebrew rabbis and scholars, as well as modern scholars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, assert that this letter was inserted into the name Moses by rabbis or scribes to change it to Manasseh and thus spare the reputation of Moses by covering up the fact that his grandson was a renegade priest of the famed idol in the sanctuary at Dan. The Talmud says that Jonathan was the grandson of Moses, but because he did the deeds of Manasseh, the later king of Judah, the Scripture assigns him to the family of Manasseh.

Incidentally, if, as seems obvious, Jonathan was the grandson of Moses, the great antiquity of the event of ch. 18 is borne out by the fact that the Levite who served Micah was separated from Moses by only one generation.

Captivity. This probably refers to an unrecorded carrying away of the northern tribes by some foreign power, such as the Aramaean states of adjoining Syria. It could hardly refer to the captivity of the northern tribes by Assyria in the days of Tiglath-pileser, for the following verse in describing the same period says that the period was “all the time that the house of God was in Shiloh” (see 1 Sam. 1:24).