Kish

Kish was a Benjaminite, the son of Abiel and father of Saul—thus the paternal grandfather of Israel's first king. He is described as a man of wealth and standing in his tribe (1 Samuel 9:1). The providential occasion of Saul's introduction to Samuel arose from the search for Kish's lost donkeys: Saul and a servant went looking for them throughout the hill country of Ephraim and Benjamin, and when they could not find them, the servant suggested consulting the nearby man of God (Samuel). The lost donkeys became the occasion of Saul's anointing.

Kish himself plays no further narrative role after establishing the lineage of Saul. The name Kish appears several other times in the Old Testament for unrelated individuals: a Levite of the family of Merari (1 Chronicles 23:21; 24:29), a Levite among the temple purifiers in Hezekiah's time (2 Chronicles 29:12), and most significantly in the book of Esther as the ancestor of Mordecai (Esther 2:5)—a Benjaminite lineage that deliberately parallels Saul's descent from Kish, setting up the thematic contrast between Mordecai's faithfulness and Saul's earlier failure with the Amalekites.