GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
1 Samuel 10:11-12 gives the origin of the proverb "Is Saul also among the prophets?" when Saul prophesies among Samuel's prophet band shortly after his anointing. 1 Samuel 19:24 gives a second, independent origin story for the same proverb — Saul stripping naked and prophesying before Samuel while pursuing David. Two different etiologies for the same saying.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Cited passages
When all who knew him before saw that, behold, he prophesied with the prophets, then the people said to one another, “What is this that has come to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?” One of the same place answered, “Who is their father?” Therefore it became a proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?”
Cited passages
He also stripped off his clothes, and he also prophesied before Samuel, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Therefore they say, “Is Saul also among the prophets?”
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
These are textbook etiological doublets — narratives whose function is to explain the origin of a proverb. Both passages deploy the explicit etiological formula. 1 Samuel 10:12 closes, "Therefore it became a proverb (lemāšāl), Is Saul also among the prophets?" 1 Samuel 19:24 closes, "Wherefore they say ('al-kēn yō'merû), Is Saul also among the prophets?" In Hebrew narrative this formula ('al-kēn, "therefore/for this reason") is the standard device for anchoring an existing saying, place-name, or custom to a particular originating event. The difficulty is that the same saying is anchored to two different and incompatible events.
In 1 Samuel 10 Saul is freshly anointed by Samuel, meets a band of prophets coming down from the high place, is seized by the spirit of God, and prophesies among them; the bystanders who knew him are astonished, and the saying captures public surprise that the new ruler shows a prophetic streak. The mood is legitimating and positive. In 1 Samuel 19 the situation is inverted: Saul, now David's relentless pursuer, sends three sets of messengers to Naioth in Ramah, each of whom is overcome by prophetic ecstasy; finally Saul himself comes, strips off his clothes, and lies naked prophesying "all that day and all that night." Here the same saying marks Saul's humiliation, his prophetic frenzy presented as pathetic and out of control.
The apologetic response (Archer, Kaiser) is that both episodes contributed to the proverb's currency — it arose in chapter 10 and was reinforced in chapter 19. This is not absurd; proverbs do accrete occasions of use. But it does not square with the grammar. The 'al-kēn formula does not mean "this is one of several occasions on which people said"; it means "this is the reason people say." Deploying that origin-formula twice for one saying is precisely the redactional fingerprint critics identify as a source-doublet, comparable to the twin etiologies of Beersheba in Genesis 21 and 26 or the double naming of Bethel.
The critical reading, shared by McCarter, Hertzberg, and Auld, is that 1 Samuel preserves two independent traditions about Saul and ecstatic prophecy — one early and favorable, one late and degrading — and that the redactor incorporated both with their separate etiologies intact. Diana Edelman, in her study of the Saul historiography, reads the two scenes as serving opposite ideological ends within the larger pro-Davidic shaping of the material: chapter 10 establishes Saul's charismatic legitimacy, while chapter 19 dismantles it, the once-empowering spirit now an instrument of his undoing in Samuel's very presence. The Deuteronomistic compiler had both traditions in front of him and retained both, untroubled by the fact that an origin-formula can only literally apply once.
The "both events contributed" defense, examined closely, is itself a concession: it admits that at least one of the two narrators is not in fact reporting the origin, since a single saying can have only one origin. Either chapter 10 originated it and chapter 19 reapplies it anachronistically, or chapter 19 originated it and chapter 10 places it too early, or both narrators independently claim originating status and at least one is mistaken. The text supplies no mechanism for choosing, because none was intended — the duplication is the natural result of compiling parallel source material rather than composing a single unified account.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine doublet, two etiologies for one proverb, the signature of compiled tradition.
Sources for this reading