HOW OLD WAS SAUL WHEN HE BECAME KING? (I SAMUEL 13:1)

This would seem to be a rather easy question to answer. If you happened to use the NIV translation, you could find the answer there:

    “Saul was 30 years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel 42 years.”

But if you consulted the NEB instead, you would get a quite different answer:

    “Saul was 50 years old when he became king, and he reigned 22 years.” And you would see an explanatory note included that stated this was “a probable reading.”

So why are they so different from one another, and what does a “probable reading” mean? This gets us into the dual subjects of textual criticism and redundancy. But before going into that, let's first consider some additional translations and paraphrases for this cryptic verse:

    KJV: “Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel,”

    The Message: “Saul was a young man when he began as king. He was king over Israel for many years.”

    Living Bible: “By this time Saul had reigned for one year. In the second year of his reign,”

    If you happen to rely on The Jerusalem Bible or Today's English Version, you would be hard pressed to even find I Samuel 13:1 at all since it has been omitted entirely in those translations.

At this point, many of the more astute of you might ask the logical question: “How does a literal translation of the original Hebrew read? To get the answer for that query, you need only turn to the RSV, NRSV, or Anchor Bible translations, all of which read as follows:

    “Saul was...years old when he began to reign; and he reigned...and two years over Israel.”

One would expect numbers to be present where the above periods indicate that something is probably missing. As Baldwin says, “It seems likely that that information was missing from the start, or that it was misunderstood and therefore omitted by later scribes who thought the numbers given could not be right.” The assessment of this verse has been similarly described by others:

    Porter: “The account of Saul's active kinship begins with a sentence so corrupt in the extant Hebrew text so as to have little meaning.”

    “Clearly the original numerals have been lost in transmission.” (Payne)

    Hulst is a little more blunt when he states, “One can do little with this verse.”

So with that problem, is it possible to recover the missing information? This brings up the subject of redundancy. It is best explained with a hypothetical example. Assume for a moment that the NIV rendering is correct but all we have is a manuscript that is a copy of a copy of the original and it reads something like this: “Saul 30 years wen be come king, and he he rained over Israel 42.” Even though that copy contains a number of missing words (an error technically called haplography), a grammatical error in verb tense, a misspelling, a mistake in word divisions (the original Hebrew text had no divisions between letters), an example of dittography (accidentally repeating the same word twice), and a mistake of hearing (rain for reign). But with all these mistakes in copying, it is still very easy for us to figure out the original wording. That is because words in whatever language have a lot of built in redundancy that allows us to fill in the blanks and correct errors.

However, what if the only copy we had to go by read, “Saul was years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel 42 years.” Even though there is only one apparent error in this copy, it is impossible to restore the missing number without relying on information found in other sources since numbers have virtually no redundancy. So how did NIV and NEB come up with the numbers they used to fill in the blanks? Let us consider those two translations one at a time as well as some other possibilities:

    1. NIV: “Saul was 30 years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel 42 years.”

There is good justification for both of the numbers “restored” here. Saul's age as 30 comes from two manuscripts of the Septuagint. As for the cryptic “...and two” found in the Hebrew text, both Acts 13:21 and Josephus say that Saul reigned for 40 years, which is likely a round figure rather than the exact number of 42. The major problem with this solution is pointed out by Baldwin, namely that Saul's son Jonathan is already known as a warrior by this time and so Saul must have been much older than 30.

    2. NEB: “Saul was 50 years old when he became king, and he reigned 22 years.”

Since the Hebrew idiom for “one year” was “son of a year” (bet nun) and bet nun stands for 52 years on an ancient tabular list, Robertson proposed that Saul was that old when he became king. Although that is a more reasonable age than 30 years, it still doesn't quite explain why NEB rounded it off to 50 years instead. And as to the 22-year reign, it appears, according to Baldwin, that Josephus later recalculated it from 40 years to 20 years.

    3. Then there are those English versions such as JB and TEV which omit the whole verse. Is there any justification for that drastic move? It turns out that most early manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint do omit I Samuel 13:1 entirely, but this is slim justification for following their lead.

    4. Eugene Petersen's The Message paraphrase appears to take the easy way out in settling for the vague statement that Saul was very young when he assumed office and reigned many years. But it turns out that its basis may come from some fanciful reasoning by rabbis who understood “son of a year” to mean a young and innocent person.

    5. Then there is the solution of KJV and The Living Bible. Since the number “two” is definitely present in the existing Hebrew text, they interpret the whole verse as not summarizing all of Saul's reign, but instead as a prelude to the timing of the specific events referred to in the following verses (thus ending verse 1 with a comma instead of a period). Is there any justification for that translation?

In Hulst's judgment, “this rendering is very uncertain in both parts. If it were the meaning, one would expect a different sentence construction with a more natural Hebr[ew] idiom.”

    6. But even the above does not exhaust the possible explanations. Hulst mentions another proposed solution to the problem, namely to break up the word for “year,” sanah, into two different words: (a) s as an abbreviation for “year” and (b) nh standing for Saul's age, expressed as letters and totaling 55. As Hulst says, explanations such as this one “at best, are merely curious.”

    7. In Tsumura's commentary on I Samuel, he translates the verse in yet another way: “A certain year of age was Saul when he became king, and just for two years he ruled over Israel.”

His reasoning behind this translation is that all other attempts to supply an actual number for Saul's age are based on very slim evidence. However, the phrase ben-sanah can mean either “a year old” (impossible in this particular case) or a certain age. As to the length of Saul's reign, Tsumura simply goes with the only number actually present in the text, two years. He then expends three pages of text commenting on the alternative explanations given above as well as others not even included.

While it may disturb some believers that information in the Bible may have actually gone missing, keep in mind that (a) this is a very rare occasion and (b) it in no way affects any teaching or doctrine.