Kavanot: Just a Matter of Time

It seems like a straightforward pasuk, but what does ימים וארבעה חדשים mean? ימים has a very specific meaning in תנ״ך:

So David lives in Ziklag 16 months, right? That makes sense; it’s enough time for the events that we will read, and Achish himself says (שמואל א כט:ג)‎ הלוא זה דוד עבד שאול מלך ישראל אשר היה אתי זה ימים או זה שנים, is this not David who was with me for one or two years? But Rashi doesn’t read it this way:

So why does Rashi and Malbim abandon the apparent פשט to go with the משמעות, the literal meaning? It is because of the dating of the סדר עולם, which starts from a very strange pasuk:

There are two halves of this pasuk, neither of which make sense. Ralbag spells out the problem:

Dealing with the second problem first, the סדר עולם and thus Rashi take it literally: Saul’s entire reign was only 2 years long:

This compresses all the events (multiple battles against the Philistines, war against Amalek, his love for David turning into hate, chasing after David over and over again) into an implausibly short time, but so says the סדר עולם. But if David’s stay in Ziklag is 16 months, that leaves only 8 months for all of Saul’s reign, and no one claims that.

The commentators who disagree take the שתי שנים מלך על ישראל as meaning “he was king for two years before the incident that is about to be related”:

Why does that matter? What is so important about this particular incident? It the first time Saul makes a mistake that Samuel says will lead to the end of his kingdom (the incident with Agag king of Amalek sealed his fate):

So effectively, Saul did only reign for two years. After that, he was still king, but a lame-duck king. The rest of ספר שמואל happened after those two years, but Saul was already left on the ash heap of history.

And what about the first half, that Saul was בן שנה? The scholarly approach would be to say there is a word missing, an “editorial mishap” in Meir Sternberg’s words. It should read בן [חמישים] שנה שאול במלכו or something. But we take the Masoretic text at face value, and assume that what is written, was written intentionally. We do not allow for (in Sternberg’s words again) a “nodding redactor”. But no one can take this literally! Ralbag interprets it as another time period:

But most commentators follow the gemara and take the phrase as a metaphor:

I would propose that in fact, there is a missing number here, but it is elided intentionally. The form בן … שנה … במלכו; ו… שנים מלך is a common idiom in תנ״ך:

So I imagine in the official history of Israel, called in תנ״ך‎ ספר דברי הימים למלכי יהודה, there was a line about Saul with the correct numbers. But ספר שמואל is not a book of history, it is a book of נבאים, with a lesson. I suspect the נביא made this change so that it would be striking, to us and even more so to contemporary readers who knew what it was “supposed” to say, to make a point: Saul was as innocent and naive as a one-year-old and therefore his kingdom lasted only two years—again, not literally but effectively. The Gemara in יומא continues:

We will have to see how that plays out in David’s kingdom as well.

If Saul’s reign was not just 2 years long, how long was it? The text does not say explicitly anywhere else, but there are clues:

So the time from the return of the Aron after the destruction of Shiloh and the death of Eli until David moves it to Jerusalem was 20 years, of which 7 were part of David’s reign. So Samuel’s judgeship and Saul’s kingship combined were 13 years. If Saul’s years were the bulk of that, there’s enough time for all his stories. But that leaves very little time for Samuel to be judge. Abarbanel points out another difficulty:

Eli was judge for 40 years (שמואל א ד:יח). Even if Chana came to him at the beginning of his term, Samuel is at most 39 years old when Eli dies and he becomes judge. If his term is only a few years (and even according to סדר עולם, he is judge for 12 years). It’s hard for me to admit that 40 to 52 years old is “old and grayheaded”! So the Abarbanel concludes that the 20 years of פרק ז is before Samuel’s war of independence, and he is judge for a long time after that, and Saul’s reign is of unknown length.

That approach has its own problems, fitting it into the rest of the chronology of תנ״ך,‎ ואכמ״ל. Other commentators follow the gemara in saying that Samuel was prematurely aged, from the stress of leading בני ישראל:

I think it’s what Rabbi Shulman calls “an optical illusion”. Our problem is that Eli was שופט for only 40 years. But Chana comes to him when he is כהן גדול; it says nothing about שופט. Samuel may have been born decades before Eli becomes שופט. And all of Samuel acting as judge, and appointing his sons as judges, may well have been during the tenure of Eli. Samuel was a judge in the judicial sense, while Eli was שופט in the sense of quasi-king. Only on Eli’s death does Samuel lead Israel, in the battle that wins them independence from the Philistines. And immediately after that, they look around and see that they are an independent nation—they need a king like all the other nations. And so Saul is anointed and rules for some 13 years until his death.

On the other hand, reading the story like Abarbanel has its attractions. If Samuel’s term as שופט lasts for more than 20 years, the only way to fit all the years of ספר שופטים in with the 480 years from the Exodus to the building of the בית המקדש is to have Shimshon’s 20 years overlap with Eli’s 40. If so, then Shimshon’s life ends on a more positive note. If we read the stories of שופטים and שמואל sequentially, then Shimshon dies on a dramatic note:

But then for 40 years the people are judged by Eli but still under the control of the Philistines. For all Shimshon’s efforts, nothing happens until Samuel leads the final war of independence.

But if the two periods overlap, then it is possible that the battle in פרק ד:

Which happens at the end of Eli’s life, was inspired by Shimshon’s actions. He gives up his life, but starts the process that will end (after much more tragedy) with the liberation of ארץ ישראל. As the איש האלקים says to his parents before he is born, (שופטים יג:ה)‎ והוא יחל להושיע את ישראל מיד פלשתים. And that is, I think, a much more poetic and just way of looking at Shimshon.