Did Uzzah die at the threshing floor of Nachon or of Chidon?

The two books agree on where it happened and differ only in the name they give the spot. Places in Israel often had more than one name, and this one certainly did: both books add that it was afterwards called Perez-uzzah, ‘the breach of Uzzah’ (2 Samuel 6:8; 1 Chronicles 13:11). So in the writers’ own day it was known by at least two names.

Nachon and Chidon may be two names of the same owner or of the same place. Gill and Poole take it this way, and Gill reports a Jewish tradition that the place had two names. Keil and Delitzsch suggest that neither is the owner’s name. They take Nachon from the verb nakah, ‘to strike’, giving ‘the threshing floor of the stroke’, and Chidon from kid, ‘ruin’ or ‘destruction’ (the word in Job 21:20), giving ‘the threshing floor of disaster’. On that reading the floor was named after what happened there, Chronicles gives a word of the same meaning, and the name Perez-uzzah later replaced both. Either way the accounts describe one place and one event.

‘The prepared floor’

The Aramaic Targum and the Greek translator Aquila took nachon as an ordinary word, ‘prepared’ or ‘fixed’, so that Uzzah died at ‘the prepared threshing floor’. On this view only Chronicles gives a proper name.

A copyist’s slip

Some, as the Pulpit Commentary allows and Tektonics argues, think that one form arose from the other in copying, since the ancient translations vary here. The Greek Septuagint of Samuel has ‘Nachor’, and its main text of Chronicles gives no name at all, only ‘the threshing floor’.

Nothing outside these verses tells us who Nachon or Chidon was, or where the threshing floor lay, and the classic commentators explain the names in different ways.