The Line of the King

I was studying Esther this morning and found an interesting verse that I hadn’t caught before. In chapter two, verse five, it says:

Now there was in the citadel of Susa a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, named Mordecai son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish. (NIV)

This verse caught my attention because the former king Saul was a Benjamite and the son of Kish. I did some looking around on Wikipedia and found that the Talmud, a translated text from Aramiac of the Hebrew Bible, lists Saul in Mordecai’s list. Now portions of the Talmud are noted to be embellished or apocryphal, so I’m not going to outright say that Mordecai is a direct descendant of Saul. I’ll let the scholars answer that for me, but at the very least Mordecai is a distant relation to Saul. I do believe that the Bible is purposeful of everything it has written in it and therefore I believe what the Talmud says and that Mordecai was a direct descendant of King Saul.

The interesting note to all of this is that most of Saul’s family was destroyed after his death. They were basically cursed, and yet here is a man, hundreds of years later, who is related to Saul and quite possibly in his line, that was used by God to save His people in a foreign land. How graceful is our God to not turn his back on Saul’s descendants forever, but to use them and bring them hope and a future? As a result, God brings about a measure of redemption for Saul’s line, maybe even for the sake of Jonathan. Who knows?

(Reference to Mordecai on Wikipedia.)