Saul, Son of a Year

1 Samuel 13 KJV   "Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel,"

The note in my Bible says "one year in his reigning."

You can read many translations that change "one" to "thirty" or "forty," and some translations leave a blank. Some change "two" to "forty-two." If you go to Bible Hub and read several commentaries, you can find several explanations for this, including some really bad ones, such as "errors in the original manuscripts," so they start speculating on what numbers really belong there. Or they'll say that "son of a year" means he was like a child, while others say it means he was an adult. (?!)

But you really don't have to go to great lengths to understand this verse. You can simply read David Kimchi. Or if you don't read Hebrew, you can trust the Authorized Version. The language in Hebrew is very simple -- "son of a year in his reigning." Either he was one year old, OR, as is obviously the case here, he had reigned one year.  The expression is commonly used today to say a person has been in office or in a position for one year. A good commentary gives good explanations as to why these first two years are listed separately from his total reign.

So I got curious and checked several other translations to see which ones changed "one" to "thirty" or "forty." The New American Standard, Revised Standard, NIV, ESV, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Hungarian Bibles and many others say "thirty" (sometimes in italics), or "forty" or leave a blank. 

The Reina-Valera, Statenvertaling, Authorized Version, Geneva, Young's Literal, New King James, Russian Synodal and Ukrainian Bibles have it correct.