Samuel Anoints Saul
Samuel was old, and his sons walked not in his ways but turned aside after lucre and took bribes and perverted judgment. The elders of Israel gathered themselves together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said, Behold,…
Biblical Narrative
Samuel was old, and his sons walked not in his ways but turned aside after lucre and took bribes and perverted judgment. The elders of Israel gathered themselves together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. The thing displeased Samuel; he prayed to the Lord, who answered: Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. Show them the manner of the king that shall reign over them: he will take your sons for his chariots, your daughters for his cooks, the tenth of your fields and your flocks; and ye shall cry out in that day because of your king whom ye shall have chosen, but the Lord will not hear you in that day.
Saul son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin, was a young man and goodly — from his shoulders upward higher than any of the people. The asses of Kish were lost; Saul went out to find them, and after three days came with his servant to the city of the seer. Samuel had been told the day before by the Lord: Tomorrow about this time I will send thee a man out of the land of Benjamin, and thou shalt anoint him to be captain over my people Israel. Samuel poured a vial of oil on Saul's head and kissed him, saying: Is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?
Samuel called Israel together to Mizpah and cast the lot: it fell first on the tribe of Benjamin, then on the family of Matri, then on Saul son of Kish. They sought him; he had hidden himself among the baggage. They brought him forth, and he stood among the people, taller than any. Samuel said, See ye him whom the Lord hath chosen? And all the people shouted, God save the king! Samuel wrote the manner of the kingdom in a book and laid it up before the Lord. But the children of Belial said, How shall this man save us? And they despised him, and brought him no presents.
They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.1 Samuel 8:7
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Saul's traditional capital, Gibeah of Benjamin, was identified by William Foxwell Albright with Tell el-Ful, a small mound on the northern edge of modern Jerusalem; he excavated it in 1922 and again in 1933. Albright found a fortified citadel of Iron Age I date — modest in size, with massive boulders at the corners — which he named Saul's Fortress and dated to the late eleventh century BCE. Subsequent reanalysis by Patrick Arnold and Israel Finkelstein has questioned whether the structure is really an early-monarchic citadel or simply an ordinary fortified farmhouse of the period. The site is now buried under King Hussein of Jordan's unfinished palace, severely limiting any reexcavation.
The transition from chiefdom to monarchy in the eleventh-century highlands has been a major focus of social-scientific archaeology. Israel Finkelstein's low-chronology has argued that the highland villages of Iron I show no evidence of state-level administration before the late tenth century — no monumental architecture, no royal seals, no taxation infrastructure — making any tenth-century or earlier monarchy a chiefdom at most. Amihai Mazar and the conventional chronology counter that incipient state-formation can be visible in the gradual centralization of storage, fortification, and elite housing already in the eleventh century, and that the textual memory of Saul fits the archaeology of a small, contested chiefdom rather than a developed state.
Lawrence Stager's classic essay The Archaeology of the Family (1985) reconstructed the Iron Age I bet av — the patriarchal household — as the basic socio-economic unit out of which both tribal confederation and proto-monarchy emerged. The four-room house, the village granary, the seasonal terrace agriculture, the absence of pig — all converge on a small-scale agrarian society in which a charismatic war-leader like Saul would have been a recognizable category before he was a king. The biblical account of Saul taking his oxen home from the field when called to lead Israel against Nahash the Ammonite (1 Samuel 11) is, in Stager's reading, an entirely realistic Iron I scene.
Saul's kingdom, if it existed at all, was a chiefdom — and even that judgment is generous to the archaeological record.Finkelstein, paraphrased from The Forgotten Kingdom (2013)