#1samuel1

This is worth your read...This is the story of a giant of theScriptures hidden away in the beautiful, true and paradigmatic narrative of 1 Samuel.  Eugene Peterson is a gift in helping us understand the specifics of and the larger beauty and reality of it...It is definitely worth spending time reading this...I will share it in four parts.

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Part 1

Read 1 Samuel 1:1-8

Hannah’s story opens with a strong assertion of place and person.  Nine proper names dominate the opening sentence, three referring to places and six to persons.  This is no ‘once upon a time’ story; this is no timeless moral lesson; we are firmly set down in a particular place in the presence of a man with four generations of history backing him up.  The place Ephraim, is fertile and beautiful, blessed with

The choice gifts of heaven above,

and of the deep that lies beneath;

With the choice fruits of the sun,

And the rich yield of the months.

(Deut. 33:13-14)

  And Elkanah, with four generations of backing, is clearly from a respected family—no Johnny-come-lately.

  The prosperous, ‘solid citizen’ picture of Elkanah is rounded out with the detail that will provide internal emotional dynamics to the plot as it unfolds:  There are two wives in Elkanah’s household, and they don’t get along, for the reason that one, Peninnah, has children and the other, Hannah, does not.  Hannah’s barren condition is the negative note around which the story forms.

  And so our attention immediately shifts from the fertility of place and family to Hannah’s bereftness.  The barren wife is an established biblical motif:  Hannah’s childlessness is framed by Sara in Genesis (Gen. 16:1 and 18:9-15) and Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:7).  The stark phrase, ‘but Hannah had no children pulls us into the story in a way that descriptions of fertile landscape and solid family, no matter how extravagant, could never do.  Even in our culture, where women are no longer defined and valued by their ability to bear children, the pain and sometimes bitterness of those who want to bear children and cannot is familiar.  We read ‘no children’ and are immediately in a world of longings and frustrations, tears and prayers.  This story is no longer outside us; it is beginning to get inside us—or we inside it.  And the way in, as in so much of life is through pain and prayer. 

  The scene shifts to the place of prayer and worship, to Shiloh, where Elkanah made a devout annual pilgrimage.  Shiloh, in the rolling hill country of central Palestine, was less than twenty miles from Elkanah’s hometown of Ramah.  It was the most important site for worship during the approximately two-hundred-year period from the completion of the conquest under Joshua to the establishment of the monarchy under David.  The tabernacle and the ark of the covenant were there.  All Israel assembled there annually for worship (Judg. 21:19).  In the 1920’s Danish archaeologists identified and excavated the site, so modern visitors to the Holy Land can now view the famous place of worship.

  In the normal course of things, a place of worship does not makes us into something we are not, but rather, intensifies whatever we bring to it.  And so we see it here:  Elkanah’s basic generosity is heightened.  Instead of blaming or shunning Hannah because she did not bear him children, he went out of his way to compensate for her loss, doubling her gifts from the altar.  At the same time and in the same place, Peninnah’s mean-spirited cruelty is given scope, using the occasion to lord it over her rival wife.  Smug with her own children, she would teasingly and relentlessly (‘provoke’ occurs twice in the passage) mock Hannah’s empty womb, reducing Hannah to tears.  It is an odd thing, but amply verified in any place of worship and among any gathering of worshipers, that religion brings out the best in some people and the worst in others.  Shiloh evoked generosity in Elkanah but meanness in Peninnah, with Hannah whipsawed between the two of them. 

  Elkanah tries to help, tries to alleviate her sorrow.  By asking four rhetorical questions (1 Sam. 1:8), he attempts to shift her attention from what she does not have, a child, to what she does have, namely, a loving husband.  Going against the grain of all cultural assumptions of that patriarchal society, Elkanah valued Hannah simply for who she was, her intrinsic personhood, and not for what she could produce. (italics mine)  Against the stream of the age, which viewed woman as instrument, Elkanah cried out to Hannah, ‘With or without sons, you are precious to me simply for who you are!’  It was a charged moment, woman not as instrument but person in her own right.  All these centuries later we are still trying to translate Elkanah’s ethical passion into normative living, rescuing women from imposed societal assumptions. (italics mine)