Verse 1
Chronological Details Of Saul’s Reign (1 Samuel 13:1 ).
‘ Saul was one year old when he began to reign, he reigned two years over Israel.’
There can be no real doubt that the above is how the Hebrew should be translated, for all other suggestions are bad Hebrew and are with a view to avoiding the obvious difficulty of the verse. And furthermore it is consistent with the later pattern used for introducing the reigns of Israel’s kings. But if we take into account the ancient use of numbers it actually presents us with no difficulty at all. It would appear that the original source did not have any reliable information about Saul’s statistics and thus used a convention which all would have recognised at the time. Life was regularly seen as being in three stages, initially the growth to maturity which was stage one, then the period of maturity which was stage two, and finally the period of old age which was stage three, and this was especially so when no note was being kept by a recorder of the passage of time. In the first period a person would be described as being ‘one year old’. In the second period he would be described as being ‘two years old’. In the third period he would be described as being ‘three years old’. This may seem strange to us but many examples of this very practise have been discovered by anthropologists among primitive tribes today (as witness the case of the Malaccan above). Thus here the writer is simply saying that Saul was not yet twenty (see Leviticus 27:3) when he began to reign, and that he reigned into middle age but did not reach either sixty (Leviticus 27:3) or possibly fifty (Numbers 4:3 ff). Twenty years old was the age at which a man in Israel became of age to be drafted into the army. Alternatives may be that maturity commenced at twenty five (Numbers 8:24-26) or even thirty (Numbers 4:3 ff).
But what was important to the writer was that he indicate that he died before he reached ‘the third age’ because that demonstrated that God had cut short his life prematurely, thus demonstrating His displeasure.
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