Yes, all of Saul's family died with him.
Cited passages
So Saul died with his three sons; and all his house died together.
Did Saul's family die with him?
- History & narrative events
- Historical detail
- Within the Old Testament
- 2 Samuel
- 1 Chronicles
The tension
1 Chronicles 10:6 says "Saul died, and his three sons, and all his house died together." 2 Samuel 2:1-7 then has Ishbosheth — Saul's son — made king of Israel after Saul's death. 2 Samuel 21 has David later handing over seven of Saul's descendants to be hanged. The "all his house died together" claim is contradicted by surviving family members appearing throughout 2 Samuel.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
No, one of Saul's sons (Ishbosheth) became king of Israel after Saul died.
Your master Saul is dead .... But Abner ... took Ishbosheth the son of Saul, and brought him over to Mahanaim and made him king. 2 Samuel 2:1-7
Cited passages
After this, David inquired of Yahweh, saying, “Shall I go up into any of the cities of Judah?” Yahweh said to him, “Go up.” David said, “Where shall I go up?” He said, “To Hebron.” So David went up there with his two wives, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess, and Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite. David brought up his men who were with him, every man with his household. They lived in the cities of Hebron. The men of Judah came, and there they anointed David king over the house of Judah. They told David, “The men of Jabesh Gilead were those who buried Saul.” David sent messengers to the men of Jabesh Gilead, and said to them, “Blessed are you by Yahweh, that you have shown this kindness to your lord, even to Saul, and have buried him. Now may Yahweh show loving kindness and truth to you. I also will reward you for this kindness, because you have done this thing. Now therefore let your hands be strong, and be valiant; for Saul your lord is dead, and also the house of Judah have anointed me king over them.”
No, David sacrificed two of Saul's sons and five of his grandsons to God to stop him from starving people to death.
Cited passages
There was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David sought the face of Yahweh. Yahweh said, “It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.” The king called the Gibeonites, and said to them (now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites, and the children of Israel had sworn to them; and Saul sought to kill them in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah); and David said to the Gibeonites, “What should I do for you? And with what should I make atonement, that you may bless Yahweh’s inheritance?” The Gibeonites said to him, “It is no matter of silver or gold between us and Saul, or his house; neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.” He said, “I will do for you whatever you say.” They said to the king, “The man who consumed us, and who devised against us, that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the borders of Israel, let seven men of his sons be delivered to us, and we will hang them up to Yahweh in Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of Yahweh.” The king said, “I will give them.” But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan the son of Saul, because of Yahweh’s oath that was between them, between David and Jonathan the son of Saul. But the king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite. He delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the mountain before Yahweh, and all seven of them fell together. They were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days, at the beginning of barley harvest. Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for herself on the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water poured on them from the sky. She allowed neither the birds of the sky to rest on them by day, nor the animals of the field by night. David was told what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, the concubine of Saul, had done. So David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from the men of Jabesh Gilead, who had stolen them from the street of Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hanged them, in the day that the Philistines killed Saul in Gilboa;
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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.
1 Chronicles 10:6 is sweeping: "So Saul died, and his three sons, and all his house died together." Its source, 1 Samuel 31:6, is narrower: "so Saul died, and his three sons, and his armourbearer, and all his men, that same day together." The Chronicler has replaced the Samuel text's "all his men" (kol-anashav) with "all his house" (kol-beto), globalizing a statement about Saul's troops at Gilboa into a statement about his entire household.
The rest of Samuel — the very narrative the Chronicler is abridging — contradicts the globalized version. Abner takes Ishbosheth, Saul's son, and makes him king over Israel in 2 Samuel 2:8-11; he reigns two years before being assassinated. Mephibosheth, Jonathan's lame son and Saul's grandson, survives and eats at David's table (2 Samuel 9). Rizpah, Saul's concubine, is alive in 2 Samuel 3:7 and again in 2 Samuel 21. And 2 Samuel 21:1-14 has David hand over seven male descendants of Saul to the Gibeonites for execution to end a three-year famine: Rizpah's two sons Armoni and Mephibosheth, plus the five sons of Saul's daughter (the MT reads Michal, but they are Merab's sons by Adriel — itself a textual crux). That is at minimum nine living members of Saul's house after Gilboa.
The apologetic harmonization is the Chronicler-summary defense. "All his house died together" means the household that was with Saul at the battle — his sons present at Gilboa and his fighting retinue — not every blood relative. Eugene Merrill and Andrew Hill read bayit here as the military household or the immediate fighting unit rather than the dynastic line, and Archer takes the same line. This has lexical support: Hebrew bayit is genuinely elastic, denoting a physical house, a dynasty ("the house of David"), an extended family, or a retinue, depending on context.
But the apologist's lexical move does not fully cover the Chronicler's editorial move. The point is not merely what bayit could mean but why the Chronicler changed "all his men" to "all his house" in the first place. The Chronicler compresses Saul's entire reign and death into a single chapter whose function is to terminate the house of Saul cleanly so that David's kingship has no genealogical competition; the very next material moves to David. Japhet, Klein, and Knoppers all argue the Chronicler deliberately heightens the totality of Saul's end to underscore the theological discontinuity between the rejected house and the chosen one. The Chronicler unquestionably knew the Samuel traditions about Ishbosheth and the surviving Saulides — he was working from that scroll — and chose to omit the two-year rival reign because it complicated his clean transfer of "the kingdom unto David" (10:14). On this reading the wording is not an innocent summary but a tendentious one.
So the contradiction is real at the canonical surface — 1 Chronicles 10:6 says the whole house died at Gilboa; 2 Samuel narrates a house that conspicuously did not — but it is a product of deliberate Chronistic theology rather than a naive factual blunder. The apologetic harmonization survives only by reading bayit as "battle retinue," which is possible lexically but runs against the Chronicler's evident purpose in making the statement total.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine surface contradiction arising from intentional Chronistic compression; the lexical harmonization is available but reads against the grain of the redaction.
Sources for this reading