1. Judges 16:2 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

How does the verse begin?

Judges 16:2 (ESV)

2 The Gazites were told, “Samson has come here.” And they surrounded the place and set an ambush for him all night at the gate of the city. They kept quiet all night, saying, “Let us wait till the light of the morning; then we will kill him.”

The start of verse two reads awkwardly in the Hebrew: to the Gazites saying. The Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) tries to fix the problem by adding two words that presuppose an original Hebrew word that could be translated as either and it was reported or and it was made known. It is possible that the verb was dropped accidentally in transmission.