“Saul was ---- years old when he began to reign; and two years he reigned over
Israel.”
How old was Saul when his reign began? Samuel 13 enigmatically answers with, well, a “blank”
or dash- dash-dash. Of course, an evasive response or a non-answer beggars the imagination.
Why isn’t the verse forthcoming, especially since it brought up the subject in the first place?
Indeed, beguiled Bible commentators expended enormous effort to uncover the “King Saul”
conundrum – his age and duration of kingship. In unraveling that knotty problem surrounding
Saul, Abravanel forges a Biblical timeline of events before, during, and beyond the first Hebrew
king. To be clear, we’re talking about a full accounting and chronology of the events recorded in
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
At root, chronology in the Bible touches on a larger theme: Bible as history. How might we
approach the subject, meaning what assumptions shall we adopt? How will we untangle thorny
difficulties inherent in the endeavor? Consider a sampling of the gusty headwinds a historian
faces, as Abravanel writes.
- In Joshua, how long did our eponymous protagonist (Joshua) judge his brethren?
- In Judges how do we calculate the years of any of the fourteen Hebrew judges, vis-à-vis
the greater context and background of the years when foreigners had subjugated the
nation? - Also, in Judges, the Bible does not peg any of the judges to a concrete historical marker.
That is, we don’t find that Othniel judged, say, 100 years after the Exodus or that
Samson judged 2900 years after the creation of the world etc.
Conspicuous omissions come to roost when a chronicler attempts to figure out these matters,
and so many more basics, like Samuel’s age when he passed away. Or to bring in Saul here in
Samuel 13, how will we synthesize data and distil biographical information about King Saul’s
age when he began to reign?
For Abravanel, these issues are not picayune. To the contrary, getting to the bottom of Jewish
history rates as an imperative. As for Abravanel’s methodology, a start point is the inviolability
of the Jewish sages’ tradition. More of his assumptions will become evident as we delve into
the following three verses, culled from different books in the Bible.
1) Our lead verse relays the duration of King Saul’s tenure. “And two years he reigned over
Israel.”
2) A verse in Kings provides a reliable, workable baseline: “And it came to pass in the four
hundred and eightieth year after the Children of Israel were come out of the land of
Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month Ziv, which is the
second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD.” (I Kings 6)
3) Lastly, Abravanel looks to Judges for guidance: “And Jephthah sent messengers unto the
king of the children of Ammon, saying: What have you to do with me, that you are come
unto me to fight against my land…While Israel dwelt in Heshbon and its towns, and in
Aroer and its towns, and in all the cities that are along by the side of the Arnon, three
hundred years. Wherefore did you not recover them within that time?” (Judges 11)
Seeing how Abravanel addresses those three verses in Samuel, Kings, and Judges is key to
putting his timeline into focus. To begin, when our chapter writes that King Saul reigned for 2
years, that’s not to say that the first king’s rule was of short duration – two years. Instead, it
means that in the second year of his reign, the newly-minted king consolidated power.
Specifically, King Saul mustered the troops in establishing a national army. Well, then, how long
was his kingship? Abravanel puts forth it lasted seventeen years. He also believes that Saul was
about forty when Samuel anointed him.
Next, Abravanel tackles the task of proving the accuracy of the verse in Kings: “And it came to
pass in the four hundred and eightieth year….” Naturally enough, in order to show how to
account for nearly five centuries of Jewish history, Abravanel must do a deep dive into the
books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. For brevity, we only share the outline of
Abravanel’s worksheet, per se.
To begin with, he learns that Joshua (together with his colleagues) judged for twenty years. And
idyllic years they were. Successes in conquering the Holy Land led to divvying up the territory to
the twelve tribes. Six years subsequent to the apportionment of Israel, the Hebrews professed
and observed the commandments to a T, as per a verse: “And Israel served the LORD all the
days of Joshua…” (Joshua 24).
After Joshua and the elders passed away, things got sticky. Religious observance fell dismally by
the wayside, periodically, throughout the years when the fourteen Hebrew judges led the
nation. We have written about this well-worn model in Judges. Suffice it to say here, that
Abravanel goes judge-by-judge and shows how long each one ruled. Noteworthy is this. The
tenures included not only the actual time that they judged. It also includes the “run-up” years
when foreigners ran roughshod over the land and its people.
At that juncture in his discourse, Abravanel transitions from Judges to Samuel insofar as Eli and
Samuel are counted as the fifteenth and sixteenth judges respectively. Again, to keep this
chronicling/history moving swiftly, let us simply assert that we are after Samson (14 th judge) just
about three hundred sixty years post Exodus. We arrive at that figure when we consider Eli’s,
Samuel’s, King Saul’s, plus King David’s successive reigns (Eli 40 years, Samuel 20 years, Saul 17
years, and David 40 years, and year four of Solomon).
Lastly, we conclude with the judgeship of Jephthah, a judge we read about midway in the book
of Judges. In his missive to the king of Ammon, the Hebrew judge asks the king why it took
three hundred years to lodge a complaint! Is three hundred years literal, he asks? In fact, it
isn’t. Jephthah “rounded up”, seeing that the actual number of years from Moses’ victory over
Ammon until the time of Jephthah was closer to two hundred seventy years.
In this way, Abravanel spells out the math and demonstrates how Biblical history is calculated.