Who was King Saul?

A king nobody expected

Before Saul, Israel had no king. Judges rose in a crisis, and in old age Samuel led as prophet and judge. Then the elders came to him: “Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). Samuel warned them that a king would take their sons for his chariots and their daughters for his kitchens. They insisted. The man God pointed out was off looking for his father’s lost donkeys.

He had a son whose name was Saul, an impressive young man; and there was not among the children of Israel a more handsome person than he. From his shoulders and upward he was taller than any of the people.

He came from Benjamin, which he called the smallest tribe in Israel (9:21). Samuel anointed him privately with a vial of oil (10:1). When lots were cast before the people at Mizpah and fell on Saul, nobody could find him. He was hiding among the baggage (10:21–22).

A warrior king

His first test came from across the Jordan. Nahash the Ammonite besieged Jabesh Gilead and offered terms: every man’s right eye gouged out (11:2). Saul cut a yoke of oxen in pieces, sent them through Israel as a summons and fell on the Ammonite camp at dawn (11:7–11). For the rest of his life he fought the Philistines, with his son Jonathan as his boldest commander. His home base was “Gibeah of Saul” (11:4), usually placed at Tell el-Ful, just north of Jerusalem.

How long he reigned is a puzzle. The Hebrew of 1 Samuel 13:1 is damaged: read literally, Saul is one year old when he becomes king and reigns two years. The World English Bible fills the gaps with thirty and forty-two; Acts 13:21 says forty years.

Where it went wrong

At Gilgal, with the Philistines massing and his army slipping away, Saul waited seven days for Samuel, then offered the sacrifice himself. Samuel arrived as he finished and told him his kingdom would not last (13:8–14). Later, ordered to destroy the Amalekites, Saul spared King Agag and the best of the livestock (15:9). Samuel’s verdict became a proverb:

to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.

From then on Yahweh’s Spirit left him and a dark spirit troubled him (16:14), and the young harpist brought in to soothe him was David. Saul’s jealousy turned the court into a manhunt: spears thrown, eighty-five priests of Nob killed for helping David (22:18), years of pursuit in the wilderness, and the two times David spared him.

Endor and Gilboa

Before his last battle, Samuel was dead and God gave Saul no answer. He had driven the mediums out of the land (28:3), yet he went in disguise to a woman at Endor and asked her to call up Samuel. The figure she saw told him, “tomorrow you and your sons will be with me” (28:19).

On Mount Gilboa, above the Jezreel valley, the Philistines broke Israel. Jonathan and two of his brothers fell. Wounded by archers, Saul begged his armor bearer to kill him, and when the man refused, he fell on his own sword (31:3–6). The Philistines hung his body on the wall of Beth Shan. The men of Jabesh Gilead, the town he had saved, walked all night, took the bodies down and buried the bones under a tamarisk (31:11–13). David later moved them to the tomb of Saul’s father, Kish (2 Samuel 21:12–14).

David’s lament called Saul and Jonathan “swifter than eagles” and “stronger than lions” (2 Samuel 1:23). A thousand years later another Benjamite named Saul became better known as Paul (why he changed his name). And Handel gave the king an oratorio, Saul (1739), whose Dead March is still played at funerals.