In an work
giving an introductory overview of the relationship between the Ugaritic texts
and the Old Testament, Jerry Neal offered the following comments about 1 Sam
13:1 which might help solve a long-standing issue about this verse:
Saul was
[thirty] years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel [forty]
years.
Hardly anyone is unaware that the text of 1
Samuel 13:1, as it is, presents what is probably the most serious kind of
problem for the interpreter.
To explain the text as it is, he can only
assume that a word or two has dropped out of the text at this point. Yet precisely
because there are no variants at all in the textual apparatus at this point, he
is forced to resort to a conjectural emendation for which there is no evidence
whatsoever.
Ugaritic scholars come to the rescue here as
well:
“Ugaritic has also widened our perspectives
on the semantic functions of prepositions. C.H. Gordon opens his treatment of
prepositions in the Ugaritic textbook with the assertion that the most
interesting feature of Ugaritic prepositions in the meaning of ‘from’ from both
b בְּ (be) and l לְ (le) . .
.Hebrew מִּין miyn ‘from’ frequently bears a comparative sense, and it was to be
expected that the examples of comparative b
בְּ (be)
would also be found. In fact this connotation of b בְּ (be) is now widely recognized. We suggest that it is
present in 1 Samuel 13:1:
“More than a year had Saul been reigning,
even two years had he been reigning over Israel” . . .
even two years had he been reigning over Israel” . . .
Our proposal discloses a parallel between the
numbers ‘one’ and ‘two,’ numerical parallelism being so frequent in Ugaritic
and Hebrew that M. Dahood writes, ‘The Canaanite scribes and poets apparently
thought in binomials (Althann, 1981, pp. 243, 244) . . .If our interpretation
of 1 Samuel 13:1 as a poetic couplet is correct, there is no mention of Saul’s
age at his accession, nor is there any indication of the length of his reign.
The reader is merely being told that Saul early in his reign performed certain
actions detailed in the following verse. And so the Hebrew text is not corrupt,
but rather harmonizes well with its context” (Robert Althann, “1 Samuel 13, 1:
A Poetic Couplet” Biblica 62 no. 2
[1981], 241-46, here, pp. 245-246).
Welcome needs indeed, for the book of Acts
(13:21) describes the length of Saul’s reign as forty years, and he is
described as taller than all the people when chosen to be king (1 Samuel
10:33).
The Hebrew text, without this interpretation,
would simply say that Saul began his two-reign at one year of age—an obvious impossibility
that must be accounted for!
This interpretation not only accounts for it
but has the added advantage that it changes nothing and adds no new problems of
its own. (Jerry Neal, The Ugaritic Texts
and the Bible [2012], 88-91)