Saul Becomes Israel’s First King

When Samuel was old and his sons took bribes as judges, the elders of Israel came to him at Ramah and asked for “a king to judge us like all the nations”. Samuel was displeased. The Lord, the account says, told him to grant the request, since the people had rejected not Samuel but the Lord as their king, and to warn them first. Samuel told them what a king would take: their sons for his chariots and army, their daughters, their best fields, a tenth of their grain and flocks. The people insisted (1 Samuel 8).

Saul, son of Kish, a Benjaminite who stood a head taller than anyone else, came to Samuel while looking for his father’s lost donkeys. Samuel had been told the day before to anoint him as prince over Israel, and next morning he poured oil on Saul’s head in private (1 Samuel 9:1–3, 15–17, 26–27; 10:1). Samuel then called the people to Mizpah, where Saul was chosen by lot and found hiding among the baggage. The people shouted, “Long live the king!”, though some refused to accept him (1 Samuel 10:17–27).

When Nahash the Ammonite besieged Jabesh-gilead, Saul summoned the tribes and broke the siege (1 Samuel 11:1–11). Samuel then led the people to Gilgal, and “there they made Saul king before Yahweh” (1 Samuel 11:14–15). In a farewell speech Samuel told them that king and people alike would stand or fall by their obedience to the Lord (1 Samuel 12:13–15, 24–25).

Saul fought the Philistines throughout his reign, and Moab, Ammon, Edom and Amalek as well (1 Samuel 14:47–52). But at Gilgal he offered the sacrifice himself instead of waiting for Samuel, and Samuel told him that his kingdom would not last (1 Samuel 13:8–14). After he spared the Amalekite king Agag and the best of the livestock against the command he had been given, Samuel said, “to obey is better than sacrifice”, and declared that the Lord had rejected him as king (1 Samuel 15:3, 7–9, 22–28).

The account holds two judgments of kingship side by side. Asking for a king is called a rejection of the Lord’s own rule (1 Samuel 8:7; 12:17–19), and yet the king is the Lord’s choice and his “anointed” (1 Samuel 10:24; 12:3). Deuteronomy’s law of the king allows for a ruler whom God chooses and whom the law binds (Deuteronomy 17:14–20). The king whom Samuel anoints next is David (David and Goliath).

How this is dated

Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.

No record outside the Bible mentions Saul, and the sources do not agree on how long he reigned. The Hebrew text of (1 Samuel 13:1) is generally thought to have lost its figures: as it stands it makes him one year old at his accession and gives him a reign of two years. Translations deal with the gap in different ways. Some leave it open; the World English Bible, from which this wiki quotes, prints thirty years for his age and forty-two for his reign. Paul’s speech in Acts gives him forty years (Acts 13:21). Josephus, about AD 93, gives eighteen years in Samuel’s lifetime and twenty-two after it, where the translator brackets “and twenty” as doubtful (Josephus, Antiquities 6.378); in another place he gives twenty years in all (Josephus, Antiquities 10.143).

David’s accession is put at about 1010 BC by counting back, through the regnal figures of Kings, from later reigns that Assyrian records fix; the count starts from the chronology of Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3rd ed., 1983), and is set out under David Becomes King. Forty years before that gives the traditional date of about 1050 BC shown here. Josephus’s twenty years would give about 1030 BC. On any reckoning the year is an estimate from the Bible’s own figures and from later tradition.

Saul Becomes Israel’s First King

How this is dated

Primary sources

Scripture

Jewish Antiquities

In context

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