Was Kish, Saul’s father, the son of Abiel or of Ner?

The passages

1 Samuel 9:1

Kish, a Benjamite, was “the son of Abiel, the son of Zeror, the son of Bechorath, the son of Aphiah”.

Now there was a man of Benjamin, whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel, the son of Zeror, the son of Bechorath, the son of Aphiah, a Benjamite, a mighty man of power.

1 Samuel 14:50–51

Abner, Saul’s commander, was the son of Ner, Saul’s uncle; “Ner the father of Abner was the son of Abiel”.

And the name of Saul’s wife was Ahinoam, the daughter of Ahimaaz: and the name of the captain of his host was Abner, the son of Ner, Saul’s uncle. And Kish was the father of Saul; and Ner the father of Abner was the son of Abiel.

1 Chronicles 8:33

“And Ner begat Kish, and Kish begat Saul”.

And Ner begat Kish, and Kish begat Saul, and Saul begat Jonathan, and Malchi–shua, and Abinadab, and Esh–baal.

1 Chronicles 9:35–39

Jehiel, the father of Gibeon, had sons including Kish and Ner; and “Ner begat Kish; and Kish begat Saul”.

And in Gibeon dwelt the father of Gibeon, Jehiel, whose wife’s name was Maachah: And his firstborn son Abdon, then Zur, and Kish, and Baal, and Ner, and Nadab, And Gedor, and Ahio, and Zechariah, and Mikloth. And Mikloth begat Shimeam. And they also dwelt with their brethren at Jerusalem, over against their brethren. And Ner begat Kish; and Kish begat Saul; and Saul begat Jonathan, and Malchi–shua, and Abinadab, and Esh–baal.

The objection

1 Samuel 9:1 says that Kish, Saul’s father, was “the son of Abiel”, and 1 Samuel 14:51 makes Ner, the father of Abner, another son of Abiel, so that Ner was Kish’s brother. But 1 Chronicles 8:33 and 9:39 say “Ner begat Kish”. Critics ask whether Kish’s father was Abiel or Ner, and whether Ner was Kish’s father or his brother.

The answer

The family used the name Ner more than once, and the passages fit when the two men called Ner are kept apart. Samuel gives the immediate family: Abiel had two sons, Kish, Saul’s father, and Ner, Abner’s father (1 Samuel 9:1; 14:51). So Abner was Saul’s cousin and Ner was Saul’s uncle, as Josephus also says: ‘Ner, and Kish the father of Saul, were brothers’. The Ner of Chronicles, who “begat Kish”, is an older man of the same name, and Chronicles names him as the head of the line. 1 Chronicles 9:36 shows that Ner, like Kish, was already a family name among the sons of Jehiel, the founder of Gibeon, and boys were often named after their grandfathers.

Two explanations of the older Ner are given. Keil and Delitzsch take him to be a forefather of Kish, with Abiel and perhaps others passed over, since in Hebrew ‘begat’ can link a man to a grandson or a later descendant, as Matthew’s ‘Joram begat Ozias’ skips three kings (Matthew 1:8). The Aramaic Targum on Chronicles, and other Jewish writers cited by John Gill, say instead that Kish’s father had two names, Abiel and Ner. On either view Kish was the son of Abiel, as Samuel says, and descended from Ner, as Chronicles says, and the younger Ner was his brother.

‘Saul’s uncle’ as Abner

The Hebrew of 1 Samuel 14:50, ‘Abner the son of Ner, the uncle of Saul’, can be read as calling Abner, not Ner, Saul’s uncle. If so, Ner was Saul’s grandfather, the same as Abiel, and Kish and Abner were brothers. Most commentators prefer the reading above, which verse 51 supports.

Still open

The Benjamite registers in 1 Chronicles 8–9 are compressed, and how Jehiel, the older Ner and Abiel are related is not certain. Some scholars think the text of Chronicles may have suffered in copying at this point.

From the classic commentators

this statement, on account of which Bertheau proposes to make alterations in the text, may be reconciled with that in our verses, by the simple supposition that in our verse intermediate names mentioned in 1 Samuel 9:1, and probably others besides, are passed overC. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on 1 Chronicles 8:33 (1866–1891)