Saul, spelled "Shaul" in English for three of its four bearers: a man's name meaning "asked for", carried above all by Israel's first king.
The name is an ordinary Hebrew word turned into a name. It is built on the verb "to ask" (שָׁאַל) and means roughly "asked for" or "requested", the kind of name given to a child a parent had prayed for. Four men in the Bible carry it, and nothing links them except the name itself:
- Israel's first king, the son of Kish, who accounts for all but nine of the occurrences
- a king of Edom from Rehoboth by the River, listed among the rulers who reigned before Israel had a king
- a son of Simeon born to a Canaanite woman, whose descendants became the clan of the Shaulites
- a Levite in the family line of Kohath, named once in a genealogy and nowhere else
Nearly the whole word belongs to the king. He is the tall young man sent out to find lost donkeys who comes home anointed, the leader who rallies Israel against the Ammonites and the Philistines, and then the king God rejects for disobedience. From 1 Samuel 16 on, the story is a slow unravelling: the tormenting spirit, the long pursuit of David through the wilderness, the night visit to the medium at Endor, and the death on Mount Gilboa. The name keeps working after he dies, because "the house of Saul" becomes the standing term for his surviving family and the short-lived rival kingdom that David eventually absorbs.
A play on words runs under the king's name that English cannot show. In 1 Samuel the people ask for a king, and the king they are given is named "Asked For". The same play clings to the birth story of Samuel (שְׁמוּאֵל), where Hannah says she asked the LORD for the boy and that he is given back to the LORD as one asked for, which is why scholars have argued for a century over which of the two men that naming speech was first written about.