The first chapters of 1 Samuel take us to familiar territory and precious stories we have heard from the cradle. In particular, we hear Hannah, anguished prayer for a son. Even more vivid in our memories is the timid voice of a boy as he finally awakes to the possibility that God wants to speak to him yes, to him. One could scarcely find more familiar words in Scripture than those put in the mouth of Samuel by the old man Eli: "Speak, L0RD; for thy servant heareth" (1 Sam. 3:9, KJ1).
Like a giant zoom lens, 1 Samuel 1 to 3 closes in on three dominant personalities: Hannah, Eli, and Samuel. The story is fleshed out with the appearance of faithful Elkanah, haughty Peninnah, and Eli outrageously wicked sons, Hophni and Phinehas. But as fascinating as the personalities may be in themselves, they are only the carriers of a much more important story: Gods' plan for His people. So we will ask them not only how things are between themselves and God but also how things stand between Israel and God. For the books of Samuel belong to the story of a holy nation, a reluctant people led by a patient God. Though His purpose for them is glorious, they struggle to see His vision for them. Did they ever grasp it?
These first chapters move us from a time of near-total chaos in the era of the judges toward the establishment of the monarchy. Samuel becomes a key figure in the story as Israel casts jealous eyes on the surrounding culture and yearns to be like the nations around them. The first three chapters of 1 Samuel tell us about the early years of this promised child and the community into which he is born. The day of that other promised child, Baby Jesus, is still some one thousand years away.

After noting the five points listed below, read through 1 Samuel 1 to 3 to get a feel for the overall story and the relationship between its parts. Then take each of the five points separately, working through the relevant portions of the three chapters and making note of particular verses and special insights that have a bearing on the point. You may want to use a separate sheet of paper for each of the points.
1. Personalities. Characterize in a paragraph or two the key personalities that appear in these chapters. In addition to Hannah, Eli, and Samuel, sketch a profile of the lesser characters too: Elkanah, Peninnah, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas. Make a list of character and personality traits as well as the role played by each in Scripture.
2. Religion. Both for individuals and for nations, religion is often a key factor in times of transition. Describe the status of public and private religion in these chapters. Compare the status of the official religion with the practice of individuals.
3. Providence. Read through 1 Samuel 1 to 3 with an eye open to the record of divine activity. Divide a page in your Samuel notebook into three columns. In the first two columns, make note of those passages that point to these two extremes: (A) those that suggest God's active presence and intervention in human affairs and (B) those that suggest His absence or at least His silence. In the third column, note whether the perceptions given are those of the key personalities themselves, of the author who is telling the story, or both.
4. Puzzles. Make a list of words, phrases, customs, or other aspects that you find puzzling or troubling. Keep an eye on your list as you continue your study.

Blessings. Underline or copy into your notebook those passages or special insights suggested by Scripture that you find particularly inspiring or helpful in these three chapters.

The People at Worship
With the notable exception of Samuel himself, the first three verses of 1 Samuel introduce all the leading personalities of the first seven chapters in the book: Elkanah and his two wives, Hannah and Peninnah; Eli and his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas. At the outset, it is worship that bonds these remarkably diverse people together m a common narrative. Year after year, Elkanah takes his family to the Shuloh sanctuary for worship and sacrifice. Eli's sons are priests there. We are not yet told that they are wicked priests. That will come. But from the first, we do know that the things of God loom large in the author's mind. In contrast with the story of Ruth, which plays itself out in barley field, threshing floor, and at the city gate; and in contrast with the story of Esther, which takes us to the palace of a pagan king and never mentions God or prayer, 1 Samuel takes us immediately to the dwelling place of God on earth, the sacred sanctuary of Israel's God. That is where His people go to meet Him. By focusing on what Scripture tells us about each of these people in their search for God or in their resistance to Him we listen for I God's message for us today.

Elkanah
Elkanah was a man of consistent and persistent godly habits. "Year after year" he took his family to Shiloh for worship and sacrifice, even though the sons of Eli were priests there (1 :3) wicked priests, as the narrative informs us later (2:12). But godly Elkanah was not so focused on the things of God that he neglected his family. He always shared the sacrificial meal with his whole family and recognized the special needs of the childless Hannah by giving her a double portion (1:5) But he could not grasp Hannah's agony. Indeed, the words he spoke to comfort her were also a mild rebuke and hinted at his own hurt feelings: "Don't I mean more to you than ten sons?" (vs. 8). No, Elkanah did not understand Hannah's pain.
Nevertheless, he was always a loyal worshiper and a faithful husband, the father of the promised child (vs. 19) and, later, of yet more children by Hannah through the blessing of the LORD (2:20, 21). He graciously granted Hannah's request to miss the annual trek to Shiloh but also took the occasion to remind her of God's special plan for the boy (1:23). While Hannah clearly dominates the narrative, Elkanah is there too, always faithful, always supportive.
From Scripture it is clear that he was a deeply religious man in a virtually godless age. Jewish tradition pushed the contrast even further, declaring him a second Abraham, the only pious man of his generation. From the evidence in Scripture, we would call him a nice man, a godly man though he paid a dear price for taking more than one wife.

Hannah and Peninnah
The first reference to Elkanah's two wives lists Hannah before Peninnah, implying that she was his first wife. But where Scripture is silent, Jewish tradition fleshes out the narrative, declaring, for example, that just as Abram and Sarai lived childless for ten years in Canaan before Sarai told Abram to father children through Hagar (Gen. 16:1-3), so Elkanah and Hannah lived childless for ten years before Hannah insisted that Elkanah take Peninnah.
While Jewish tradition certainly moved beyond the biblical account to embellish the story, Scripture itself reveals that the tensions between Hannah and Peninnah were very real, paralleling those between Sarai and Hagar (1:6; Gen. 16:4-6). Abram solved his problem by sending Hagar away. Elkanah apparently had no such option. His second wife stayed by, making Hannah's life one of perpetual torment. Yet it was that very anguish that allows us to catch a glimpse of her search for the LORD.
After enduring a communal meal in which she could not share because of her distress, Hannah went to the sanctuary to pray, apparently within sight of Eli the priest. She was in a mood for bargains, promising that if the LORD would give her a son, she would give him right back again forever (1:11). Eli, the priest with the flawed family, first accused, then blessed her (vss. 14, 17). But his word of blessing does not indicate that he knew the essence of her request.
Deep irony marks the conversation between Eli and Hannah. To
this man of God, who could not distinguish prayer from drunkenness, Hannah protested that she was not a wicked woman (vs. 16; literally, a "daughter of Belial"). As Scripture will inform us in 2:12, it was not Hannah who belonged to Belial, but Hophni and Phinehas.
Eli's own offspring were "sons of Belial" who did not "know" the Lord. Still, Eli was God's chosen instrument to communicate the
word of blessing to Hannah.
A new buoyancy now marked Hannah's life. She ate and worshiped. After they returned home, "the LORD remembered her" (1:19), and her husband, Elkanah, fathered a child. When she and Elkanah came before Eli to dedicate little Samuel to the LORD, I Elkanah may have offered the sacrifices, but it was Hannah who spoke up, not in the first person plural, but in the singular (vss. 24-28): "I prayed. . . ," "I asked... ," "I give him to the LORD" (1:27, 28). She was also the one who brought a new little robe each year on the family's annual visit to Shiloh (2:19). The last we hear of her is the record of divine response to Eli's wish that the LORD grant them more children to take the place of the child they had given to the LORD: "The LORD was gracious to Hannah; she conceived and gave birth to three sons and two daughters" (vs. 21).
The only trace of bitterness in this otherwise lovely picture of a gentle and gracious Hannah crops up in the psalm recorded as her prayer in 2:1-10. Although stories for children and devotional commentaries often omit or refine the troublesome phrase, "my mouth boasts over my enemies" (vs. 1), it preserves a striking note of realism about human nature. That realism reminds us that the psalms in Scripture do not reflect the ideal experience but constitute an ideal collection of prayers, illuminating every stage of spiritual growth.
The gloating over one's enemies as expressed here and in other psalms and prayers in Scripture (e.g., 2 Sam. 22:35-43; Ps. 17:13-15; 18:34-42) is a reminder that sin stains even the lives of those whom the Lord has greatly blessed.
It is worth noting, however, that when this prayer/psalm is seen apart from its present context, it assumes a much more militaristic and national garb. The concluding reference to the king and the Lord's anointed (2:10) explains why it has been seen as a prophecy of David and of the ultimate anointed One, Jesus Christ. Furthermore, 2:1 does not speak of a single feminine enemy (Peninnah), but of plural masculine "enemies"; and when 2:3 talks against proud and arrogant speech, it is addressing a male plural audience. Even the reference to the "barren who has borne seven children" (vs.5) is an idealization that does not match Hannah's situation, for her children numbered six: Samuel and five more (vs. 21).
Yet however one might interpret the psalm apart from the context, here it is natural to apply it to Hannah's immediate situation, thus accentuating the personal animosity between Hannah and her rival. Interestingly enough, Jewish tradition reveals some uneasiness both with Peninnah's jeers and with Hannah's boasts, even suggesting that Peninnah's intentions may have been laudable, an attempt to bring Hannah to the point of asking God for children. More typical, however, is the heightening of the rivalry, as in the tale based on the line "she who has had many sons pines away" (vs. 5).
According to Jewish legend, every time Hannah bore a child, Peninnah lost two of hers, until eight of her ten children had died.
Only Hannah's intercessory prayer on her behalf saved the last two. Christians can recognize the taint of sin in Hannah's prayer without claiming it as God's ideal. We who accept Jesus as our Teacher and Example hear His words in the Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt. 5:44). And we hear Him practice what He preached in His prayer for His enemies from the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 2 3:34). But when we fall short of that mark, we can take courage from the fact that Hannah, too, had not yet arrived. The evidence is recorded in Scripture for all to see. Still, she was a powerful and effective instrument in the hand of God. She and Elkanah, in spite of all the turmoil in their home, brought into the world one of God's great men. She dedicated him to the LORD, and he was faithful to that dedication as long as he lived.

Eli
Scripture portrays Eli the priest in tragic and pathetic terms, bracketing every piece of good news about the man with reminders of the evil that dogged his life. His whole story is thus framed, from his first appearance as the father of Hophni and Phinehas (1:3) until his death at the news of the ark's capture by the Philistines (4:18).
Later generations, viewing these stories through the lens of a destroyed Jerusalem and a collapsed monarchy, might even be tempted to see the fate of Eli's house as an early enacted parable, symbolizing the fate of the monarchy itself. In 1:9, where Eli first appears in the narrative itself, the ambiguity of the Hebrew words for "chair" and "temple" could suggest just such a comparison with the monarchy, for those are also the words for "throne" and "palace." Thus while Scripture says that "Eli the priest was sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the LORD'S temple," the Hebrew reader at the time of Jerusalem's fall would hear echoes of a royal throne and palace, now just as defunct as the house of Eli itself.
The aged priest suffered from poor eyesight, both spiritual and physical. He saw Hannah praying, but his eyes were blind, for he saw her piety as wicked drunkenness (vss. 12, 13). In effect, his eyes were also closed to the blatant wickedness of his sons (2:22-24). He had it all backward, rebuking a devout woman so that she felt like a "daughter of Belial" but failing to restrain the real "sons of Belial," his own boys. This was Eli, "whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see" (3:2); and just before he died, his "eyes were so set that he could not see" at all (4:15).
In chapter 2, where the critique against Eli's sons is sharpest, he is a man who has lost control of his sacred responsibilities and his future. His sons were making a mockery of the sacred service and abusing those who came to worship (vss. 12-17; 22-25). They would not listen to their father's rebukes (vs. 25). Finally, "a man of God" (vs.27) announced to Eli that the priesthood would be taken from his family. God intended to appoint "a faithful priest" who would reflect the divine heart and mind (vs. 35). In the well-known temple conversation, first between Samuel and Eli, then finally between Samuel and the LORD, the point of it all was judgment against the house of Eli: I swore to the house of Eli, "The guilt of Eli's house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering"(3:14).
But in spite of Eli's monumental failures, in spite of the Lord's sharp rebuke for his failure to discipline his sons (3:13), Scripture imparts a certain gentleness and warmth to the man. Several incidents contribute to the picture. When Hannah pleaded her case against drunkenness, Eli quickly softened and blessed her request. The fact that Hannah and Elkanah were willing to leave their child with Eli also leaves a positive impression. And surely the man must get some credit for the fact that Samuel "continued to grow in stature and in favor with the Lord and with men" (2:26). But probably the most telling element in the positive portrayal of Eli is the scene in the temple, with little Samuel running again and again through the darkened chambers to the old, nearly sightless man. And in spite of the firmness of Eli's command for Samuel to tell him everything that the Lo1 D had said (3:17), his handling of the boy still suggests a gentle grandparent, a gentleness reinforced by his simple resignation to God's will: "He is the Lord; let him do what is good in his eyes" (vs. 18).
On balance, Eli is indeed a tragic figure. We ask, "How could someone so gentle and caring toward the little boy Samuel go so hopelessly wrong with his own boys" Yet that is the same question that haunts all the devout parents in the world whose children have gone astray. The question goes back as far as Adam and Eve and the tragic conflict between their sons, Cain and Abel. Indeed, it reaches back further yet to God Himself, the Father and Creator of Adam and Eve, and of Lucifer. And so we wonder about cause and effect, about discipline and freedom. At the end of the monarchy, a similar dilemma faced those who knew King Josiah, the godly reformer. After all the good he had done, he died a senseless death in battle against Pharaoh Neco (2 Kings 23:29, 30). Eli's house as a tragic parable of the monarchy is not far from the mark after all.

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