Lives of Scripture

Kish was a Benjamite of standing -- Scripture calls him "a mighty man of valor" (1 Samuel 9:1) -- and the father of Saul, Israel's first king. His one recorded action drives one of Scripture's more surprising providences: when Kish's donkeys wandered off, he sent Saul, along with a servant, to search for them (9:3). The search ranged over several regions without success, until the servant suggested consulting a seer in a nearby town -- Samuel, whom God had already told to expect "a man from the land of Benjamin" the very next day, the man he was to anoint as Israel's first king (9:15-17). An ordinary errand about missing livestock became the occasion of Saul's anointing. Kish is also named repeatedly afterward as a genealogical marker of Saul's identity -- "the son of Kish" becomes practically Saul's other name (1 Samuel 10:11; 14:51; Acts 13:21) -- and when Saul and Jonathan finally died at the Philistines' hands, their bones were laid to rest "in the grave of Kish his father" (2 Samuel 21:14), closing the story where it began. Kish himself never seeks a throne for his household; God works through an unremarkable domestic errand to set in motion Israel's entire monarchy.