Saul Was Chosen as King Because His Grandfather Lit the Streets

Israel asked for a king and God gave them one. But who chose Saul, and why?

The surface answer is familiar: Saul was tall, handsome, from the tribe of Benjamin, and proved himself a warrior. The first book of Samuel introduces him looking for his father's lost donkeys and stumbling into destiny. But Legends of the Jews, compiled by Rabbi Louis Ginzberg between 1909 and 1938, refuses to let the selection be accidental. Behind Saul's appointment lay a long account of his personal qualities and, more surprisingly, a debt God owed to Saul's grandfather.

What Could Street Lamps Have to Do With a King?

Saul's grandfather was Abiel. He appears in First Samuel only as a name in a genealogy. The rabbinic tradition, preserved in Midrash Rabbah, fifth-century Palestine, and developed further in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century midrashic collection, gives him a single defining act: Abiel lit the streets at night so that people could travel safely to the houses of study after dark.

This is not a miracle. It is not a sacrifice or a legal ruling or a prophetic vision. It is a practical decision made by a man who noticed that students and scholars were walking home in the dark after evening study sessions and that the roads were dangerous. He lit them. He maintained the lights. He did this, according to the tradition, not because he was commanded to but because he saw a need and filled it.

The legend connects this directly to Saul's election: the merit of Abiel's lamps was credited to his descendants. Saul was selected as king partly because his grandfather made it safer to study Torah at night. The tradition's logic is precise. God does not forget civic generosity. Abiel gave something to the community's spiritual life, and the return on that investment was a king descended from his line.

The Man Saul Was Before He Was King

Before the anointing, Saul's personal qualities were extraordinary. Ginzberg's anthology lists them in sequence: he was so free from sin that the tradition compared him to a one-year-old child, whose slate is entirely clean. This purity made him capable of prophecy. His visions, when they came, concerned the war of Gog and Magog and the events of the final judgment, the most extreme eschatological content the prophetic tradition recognized. An entirely clean vessel received entirely ultimate revelations.

He was also modest to a degree that reads almost as liability. When he and his servant were searching for the lost donkeys, he worried aloud that his father would be anxious about them. Not about himself, not about his dignity, about his father's worry. The Talmud Bavli, redacted in sixth-century Babylonia, notes this as one of the signs that marked Saul as the chosen: a man who thinks about his father's feelings while lost in the hill country is a man with the right kind of relationship to those above him.

The Feats Before the Crown

The most remarkable story in the pre-coronation account concerns the Ark of the Covenant. The Philistines had captured it in the battle where Eli's sons died. They held it, and with it they held the tablets of the law. Goliath of Gath was, according to this tradition, personally guarding the captured Ark when Saul heard about it. He was still an unknown man from Benjamin, not yet anointed, not yet named by Samuel. He walked sixty miles to the Philistine camp, wrestled the tablets back from Goliath, and returned to Eli the same day.

This is the same Goliath who would later be killed by David. The tradition says Saul faced him first, before the famous encounter, and won. The rabbis understood this as establishing a hierarchy of merit: Saul's claim on Goliath preceded David's. What David completed publicly, Saul had already done privately, without witness, without reward.

What the Urim Confirmed

Even after Samuel anointed him, Saul asked to consult the Urim and Thummim, the oracular stones carried by the high priest in the breastplate, before accepting the crown fully. The tradition in Midrash Tanchuma, fifth-century homiletical midrash, reads this not as doubt but as scrupulousness. He wanted divine confirmation independent of Samuel's authority. He wanted the institutional mechanism to agree with the prophetic word. It did.

The young women who directed him to Samuel had been so eager to speak with him that the tradition noticed their eagerness and explained it. He was, by every account, strikingly handsome. But that is a small detail in a large portrait. The man the tradition preserves is distinguished primarily by his modesty and his purity, by a grandfather who lit streets for Torah students, and by a private rescue of the Ark that nobody celebrated.

The Debt the Election Repaid

The selection of Saul, in this reading, is not arbitrary and not purely about military need. It is the closing of an account. Abiel lit streets so that people could reach houses of study safely. God, who keeps careful record of generosity toward Torah, returned the investment with a king. Saul's personal qualities made him worthy of the role. His grandfather's lamps made him eligible for it.

The Zohar, first published around 1280 CE in Castile, Spain, develops at length the principle that the merits of ancestors descend to their children and grandchildren as protective and enabling forces. Abiel's lamps did not just make the streets safer. They generated a form of spiritual capital that was still paying interest two generations later, when a tall young man was walking through Ephraim looking for his father's donkeys and destiny was looking for him.