Such is one of the versions of the history of the foundation of the Israelitish monarchy. Saul is anointed secretly by Samuel, and at once enrols himself in one of the ‘prophesying’ bands of which Samuel was the spiritual director. According to another version, his election as king took place in public at a great assembly convened by Samuel at Mizpeh. Here the lot fell upon Saul, who had hidden himself ‘among the stuff,’ and Samuel thereupon presented him to the people, who shouted ‘Long live the king!’ Then the seer ‘wrote in a book’ such regulations regarding the election and duties of a. king as we find in the book of Deuteronomy (xvii. 14-20), ‘and laid it up before the Lord.’ As soon as the assembly was dismissed Saul returned ‘to his house at Gibeah.’[413] His election, however, was not accepted unanimously, consecrated though it had been by Yahveh. There were some who failed to see in the tall enthusiast anything more than the son of a yeoman at Gibeah. But a sufficient number of his own tribesmen were ready to gather around him as soon as he should summon them to battle. And the occasion was not long in coming. Jabesh-Gilead, the old ally of Benjamin, was beleaguered by Nahash, the Ammonite king. The city was too weak to resist, and its inhabitants, offered to surrender. But with Semitic ferocity Nahash answered that he would spare their lives only on condition that the right eye of each should be torn out. Seven days were granted them in which to determine whether they should accept his terms or fight to the death, and during the period of respite the elders of the city sent to Benjamin to beg for help. Saul was ploughing when the messengers arrived, and, fired with indignation, he cut his oxen into pieces, which he sent throughout Israel with the words: ‘Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen.’[414] The summons still ran in the name of the old seer. Men came in from all sides, and Saul found himself at the head of a small army. It is said that when he numbered his troops at Bezek, ‘the children of Israel were three hundred thousand, and the men of Judah thirty thousand.’ Such may have been the full fighting force of Israel before Saul’s reign was ended; it cannot have represented the number of those who were able to flock to his standard during the few days that still remained for the relief of Jabesh. As elsewhere in the Old Testament, the ciphers are largely exaggerated. Indeed when we consider the size of the Assyrian army, as recorded in the inscriptions, at a time when it was the most formidable engine of destruction in Western Asia, it becomes clear that the number of fighting men in the Hebrew army can never have been very great. The three hundred and thirty thousand men in Saul’s army are but an instance of that Oriental exaggeration of numbers and inability to realise what they actually mean, which is as common in the East to-day as it was in the age of Samuel.[415]