The Anointing of Saul—Israel's First King

The elders came to Samuel at Ramah demanding, "Appoint a king to judge us, like all the nations." It grieved him, but God's answer was unexpected: "They have not rejected you, they have rejected Me." Samuel laid out "the law of the king": he will take your sons for his chariots and your daughters for his kitchens, a tenth of your fields, your best servants and cattle, and one day you will cry out because of the king you chose. The people repeated: let there be a king over us.

At that moment the future king was out looking for his father's lost donkeys. Saul son of Kish, of Benjamin, stood a head taller than anyone; he stopped to ask the local seer about the animals and was told the donkeys were found and he himself was called to something else. Samuel poured oil from a flask on his head. Later, when lots fell on him at Mizpah, Saul could not be found: he had hidden among the baggage.

Recognition came through action. When Nahash the Ammonite besieged Jabesh-gilead, Saul cut his plough team in pieces and sent them through the tribes as a summons. A huge levy assembled, Jabesh was saved, and at Gilgal the people confirmed him as king. Seder Olam counts thirteen years from Eli's death (2871) to David's accession—the years of Samuel and Saul together, of which Samuel judged alone for some eleven; Saul's own reign fills the last two.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.