Now it fell on a day, that Jonathan the son of Saul said to the young man who bore his armor, Come, and let us go over to the Philistines' garrison, that is on yonder side. But he didn't tell his father.
"Abijah ...  Abimelech"  (1 Samuel 14:3).  "Both of these names apply to the same person, namely, the great-grandson of Eli";[4] and, as Barnes noted, "This fragment of a genealogy is a very valuable help in the chronology."[5]  However, nothing very exciting is the result of it.  Barnes made the deduction from it that, "about fifty years had elapsed"[6] since the capture of the ark of the covenant by the Philistines; and Willis from the same passage made the deduction that only "about thirty years"[7] had passed, and from this concluding that Saul's reign was "about twenty years."  To this writer, it appears that the estimate of "fifty years" is more likely to be correct, because it fits the tradition of Saul's forty-year reign.