1 Samuel 1:1-11 – Hannah’s Prayer

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ The Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 7 June 2020

Introduction: New study on the book of First Samuel

• The division of Samuel into two books was because it took two scrolls of Greek writing to contain all that text, but it’s really one book.

• Samuel’s name is on the book title, not as its author but as the foundation of its subject-matter. First and Second Samuel record the history of the transition in Israel from local judges to a unified monarchy, and Samuel is the foundation of the kings because he was the first king-maker, the one who anointed Saul and David as the first two kings of Israel. Therefore the story starts with the miraculous conception of Samuel following the prayers of his mother.

• Here’s my translation of the first half of chapter 1. Please follow along in your Bibles. “Now there was a certain man from Tsophim Heights of the hill-country of Ephraim, and his name was Elqanah, son of Jerocham, son of Elihu, son of Tochu, son of Tsuph, an Ephraimite, and two women were [married] to him: the name of the first was Hannah, and the name of the second was Peninnah, and it happened that children were [born] to Peninnah but there were no children [born] to Hannah. And this man went up from his town [of The Heights] holiday-season after holiday-season to worship and to sacrifice to Yahweh of Hosts at Shiloh, for there the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, [served as] priests to Yahweh. When the holiday would happen and Elqanah would slaughter [a sacrificial-animal], then he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and her daughters, but to Hannah he would give one apayim portion [since she didn’t have a child because the Lord had not given a child to her, and also] because it was Hannah whom he loved, even though Yahweh had closed her womb. Now, her rival would provoke her even to provocation in order to get her to groan because Yahweh had closed her womb instead. And thus it played out year by year, as often as she went up to the house of Yahweh she would cause provocation to her like this, and she would weep and wouldn’t eat. Now Elqanah her husband said to her, “Hannah, why are you weeping and why are you not eating? And why is your heart breaking? Am I not better to you than ten children?” Then, after eating in Shiloh and after drinking, Hannah got up. Now, Eli the priest was sitting on his seat at the entrance of the temple of Yahweh. Meanwhile, she was bitter of soul and prayed to Yahweh and wept intensely. Then she vowed a vow and said, “Yahweh of Hosts, if you will really look into the deprivation of your maid and remember me and not forget your maid and give to your maid a male descendant, then I will give him to You until the day of his death, [and he shall not drink either wine or beer,] and shears will never be put to his head.”

vs.1-2 (&6) The Main Characters and Place

• ^{Elqanah was a Levite whose ancestry is traced to one of Kohath’s sons.}

  • ^{Apparently from the tribe of Benjamin (as David and Jesus later would be), but somewhere along the line, his family had relocated a few miles North into Ephraim and developed a town on two hills (which is why Rama “High place” is pluralized Ramathaim or “Heights”) and named the town after their ancestor Tsoph.}

  • ^{This town is called “Ramah of Benjamin” elsewhere in the Old Testament, and some scholars believe it is the same as “Aramathea” in the New Testament.}

  • ^{Elqanah means “God obtained” which indicates that His parents had faith in God. He also had faith, calling God the LORD of Hosts and teaching his wife to do the same (the first time in the Bible we run into this name for God which speaks of His authority over everything in the heavens and the earth in contrast with mere earthly army commanders).}

• He married Hannah, his first wife. “Hannah” means “Grace.” Jewish tradition says that they were married 10 years without children before Elkanah decided that he needed another wife.

  • He should have remembered from Abraham and Jacob and others that having more than one wife would create more problems than it solved.

  • God, from the beginning, ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman.

  • Polygamy is a sin, even if there isn’t an explicit law in the Bible prohibiting it, because it is opposed to what God revealed positively of His will concerning marriage.

  • But, as Matthew Henry so aptly put it in his commentary: The rods we are beaten with are often of our own making!

• So he married Peninnah. (“Peninnah” means “gem-stone” - or something like that.)

  • A man had to be relatively wealthy to support more than one wife – usually a second home would have to be acquired for her, so Elqanah was probably well-off.

  • At the opening of the story, in v.4, Peninnah has had multiple sons and multiple daugh­ters, so I would guess Hannah has been putting up with Peninnah as a rival for 10-15 years.

  • Peninnah is portrayed as being a hard person to get along with:

    • Verse 6 uses a word instead of Peninna’s name that means “one who puts pressure/stress” - She constantly pushed on Hannah

    • Furthermore it says that Peninna provoked Hannah on purpose, in an aggrivated manner with the specific goal of getting Hannah so irritated that she would literally go “aaagh.” (That Hebrew word רעם is translated “rumble like thunder” or “roar” pretty much everywhere else it appears in the Bible.)

    • There are words in the Greek and Hebrew text which are not translated into the standard English texts, but I think they add a nuance which gives further insight into Peninnah’s disagreeableness. It says in Hebrew literally, “because the LORD had closed instead [בעד] her womb.” In other words, Peninnah would say, “Isn’t it ironic that you are so devout and I do whatever I please, and yet it is you who is barren and me who gets all the kids! Your God is unjust; he closed your womb instead of mine! What do you have to say about that? Ha!”

• So, as the book of 1 Samuel opens, Hannah is probably around her 25^th wedding anniversary without having had any child, and the end of any physical possibility of childbearing is just around the corner due to her age.

vs. 3-5 Time and Spiritual context

• There are only 4 other times this Hebrew phrase in v.3 miyamim yamimah – literally “from days to days” occurs.

  • The first is in Ex. 13:10, the institution of the Passover, that was to be observed annually.

  • Judges 21:19 mentions this same annual Passover holiday in Shiloh: "...there is a yearly feast of the LORD in Shiloh, which is north of Bethel, on the east side of the highway that goes up from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Lebonah." (NKJV)

• The tabernacle built during the Exodus under Moses’ instruction, had been pitched in Shiloh after Joshua had led Israel into the Promised Land. (Over the years, the tent had been added to with wood and stone here and there.)

  • Shiloh was about 15 miles north of Ramah up the mountain ridge road. (The Jordan River valley went down on the East side, and the Mediterranean Ocean was down on the West side where the Philistines lived.)

• The tabernacle at Shiloh had been tended by a succession of priests for about 300 years during the time of the Judges, and it appears that 1 Samuel picks up right at the end of the book of Judges.

  • This puts us around 1000 BC, in the Iron Age of Archaeology. Iron had become so popular that nobody used Bronze for tools anymore, so the manmade metal things that archaeologists dig up from that time period are mostly made of Iron. So this is a little over 3,000 years ago. This is real history.

  • As the story begins, Eli was High Priest & Judge of Israel, and he sat at the entrance of the tabernacle, making himself available to judge any matter brought to him by people, but Eli was too old to wrangle sheep and calves for the sacrifices anymore, so his two sons, Hophni & Phinehas, officiated as priests over the people’s sacrifices, but, as we’ll see in chapters to come, Hophni and Phinehas were corrupt.

• It had been over three centuries since Moses had given the law and the tabernacle had been built and the Jordan River had parted and the miraculous defeats of Canaanite kings had been wrought by God, and things had slipped spiritually.

  • Think about how much the USA had changed and gotten worse in the last 300 years since the original Puritan colonies.

  • Are the spiritual foundations you are setting in your household strong enough to sustain 10 generations of faith in your descendants?

• Sure, over the time of the Judges, there were godly folks like Boaz and Ruth and Deborah, but they were apparently pretty rare:

  • most of the leaders were guys whose only strong point seemed to be that they could win a fight, judges like Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, and Abimelek.

  • Then there’s Gideon whose profligate lifestyle led to having 70 sons and who also made the golden vest that led the Jews away from worshipping God.

  • And there’s the outlaw Jepthah, the son of a prostitute, who thought it would please God to offer a human sacrifice of his daughter.

  • And, of course, Samson, another outlaw who ruined himself chasing after pagan women. (Some scholars place Samson at the same time as Samuel, others say he lived as much as 100 years earlier.)

  • And the priests weren’t any better.

    • Remember Micah in Judges 17, who made a silver idol as the centerpiece of his worship center – either near or at Shiloh.

    • Furthermore, from Eli’s indulgence of the unholy and unBiblical practices of his priestly sons, it appears that not even the priests were trying to uphold true religion and teach God’s word anymore.

    • Ramah in Benjamin, in fact, was the very place where the Levite’s concubine (and you have to wonder what on earth a Levite was doing with a concubine instead of a legitimate wife!) was brutally abused all night long by the men of that town after the mean had first tried to do degraded acts with the Levite himself!

• That kind of sexual immorality was par for the course in Canaanite religion. Instead of wiping out those evil religions and establishing Biblical worship of the one true God, most Israelites converted to the local Canaanite religions, particularly the worship of Baal, the storm-god and Ashtoreth the fertility goddess.

  • This kind of laziness with the things of God and compromise with sin was what was all around Elqanah and Hannah, and it would define the life-mission of their son Samuel. But I’m getting ahead of the story!

• Jewish tradition has it that Elqanah and his family were devout, and on the holidays they would be like a church bus, driving around the hills, picking up people and taking them to Shiloh for a week of worship and feasting and camping. I can’t help but wonder, however, why it was that Elqanah only went once a year, when the law of Moses required three times a year.

  • Perhaps he went to the tabernacle for Pentecost and Succoth in addition to Passover, but the other times weren’t mentioned just to keep the story simple, or

  • perhaps even this comparatively-devout family was nevertheless spiritually compromised.

• At any rate, when they went to observe the Passover, they brought the tithe and offerings and sacrifices that they were supposed to.

  • Since this was a thousand years before Jesus died on the cross, they were still sacrificing animals which pointed them to the future sacrifice of the Messiah, and, after the lamb or goat or bull had been slaughtered and burned up on the altar to atone for the worshippers’ sins, one last animal would be slaughtered as a peace offering and cooked as a BBQ dinner and served with bread and wine or beer to the worshippers and the priests in the presence of God to celebrate the forgiveness of sin and renewal of a good relationship with God.

  • The family didn’t always have to come along with the head of household to these festivals, but when they did, as Elqanah’s family did every spring, Elqanah would split up the meat to give his wives and children each a portion.

• The two Hebrew words describing the portion of meat that Elqanah gave Hannah at these feasts are, אַחַת אַפָּיִם, literally translated as “one nostrils.” So Bible teachers have advanced quite a number of ideas as to how it should be interpreted:

  • A very astute modern scholar said that calf’s nose was a delicacy.

  • The ancient Septuagint Greek translation took it to be from a different Hebrew root spelled with the same two letters meaning “except/nevertheless.”

  • The Vulgate Latin translation made around 400AD renders the word as “with sorrow.”

  • Midieval Jewish rabbi’s translated it: “a portion which could be accepted joyfully” or “to appease her anger”

  • The King James goes for “a worthy portion,” and contemporary English versions render it “double” - basically recognizing that the word is plural, but giving it a different meaning than is given everywhere else it occurs in the Bible.

  • Because of these uncertainties, I decided to just render the letter sounds of the Hebrew word into English and leave it at that; whatever it was, it was called an “apayim.”

• I should mention one other thing at this point, and that is that the oldest-known manuscripts of 1 Samuel have additional details in them not found in modern Hebrew Old Testaments.

  • You see, the Jews had a different way of handling scripture. They destroyed copies that got old, so there is no preserved copy of the original 1 Samuel document, and, until recently, if you had a copy of the Hebrew Bible, it stood by itself and there weren’t many other copies to compare it to.

  • Meanwhile, when the Old Testament was translated into Greek around 200-300BC, many of its copies were preserved, the oldest-known being from the 300’sAD, so, unlike the Hebrew Old Testament it is possible to compare Greek manuscripts of the Old Testmant from one century to the next almost back to the time of Christ.

  • Furthermore, Christians by-and-large took to using the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament instead of the Hebrew because it connected better with the growing numbers of Gentile Christians, it was probably easier to obtain, and, for some, there was a suspicion that the Hebrew text was a relic of Judaism that needed to be abandoned for Christianity, so, when Jerome translated the Bible into Latin around the year 400AD, he translated mostly from the Greek Septuagint. And the first English Bibles were translations of the Latin Vulgate, not from Hebrew.

  • So, for about 1,500 years, the only Bibles Christians had were based on the Septuagint, which has these additional details in 1 Samuel.

  • During the Rennaisance, however, Hebrew scholarship and European Christian scholarship were exposed to each other, old Hebrew manuscripts began to be preserved in libraries, and the study of Greek and Hebrew was revived.

  • Furthermore, Protestant Bible translators became eager to throw off the chains of Roman Catholicism, so, beginning with the Geneva Bible and the King James, they switched from translating the Bible from the Latin Vulgate to translating the Old Testament from stand-alone Hebrew manuscripts that had no known historical succession, the oldest of which dates only to the 900’s AD.

    • Protestant scholars assumed that the Hebrew manuscripts were accurate copies and therefore scoffed at the Septuagint for having so many differences.

    • The classic Keil & Delitzsch commentary poked fun at the Septuagint of 1 Samuel chapter 1 by saying that the translators ran away with their imaginations.

  • But then in the mid-1900’s, in caves near the Dead Sea, a library of scrolls was found, containing, among other things, the Old Testament written in Hebrew from between 300BC to 100BC.

    • For the first time, the 10^th century Hebrew copies of the Bible could be compared with other Hebrew Bibles dating over a thousand years older!

    • The Dead Sea Scrolls of 1 Samuel weren’t published until the 1990’s, and lo and behold, these scrolls by-and-large support the Septuagint, showing that before the time of Christ, there were Hebrew scriptures which contained these extra notes in 1 Sam.

    • Now, all of our standard English versions are based on translations made before the 1990’s, so they don’t have the extra information contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so I will try to share with you what I’m discovering as I compare the DSS and LXX with the MT.

  • But let me give a few caviats about this extra information that’s not in the traditional Hebrew Old Testament:

1. Don’t expect any of this material to give you any new theology; it’s all things that could have been inferred from the more terse narrative of the Masoretic Hebrew text.

2. Don’t forget that this material is currently controversial. I expect it could take another century or so for Bible publishers to establish consensus.

3. There’s still about a thousand years between the time of Samuel and the oldest-known manuscript, so we have no way of knowing scientifically which is more original.

• That leaves us having to rely on God’s sovereignty in preserving His word, which is ultimately what we have to do. I believe that God has so worked over the millennia that, although there are slight differences in Bible texts that have survived, God has prevented any important errors from being introduced, such that if you are an honest person reading an honestly-translated version of the Bible you’ve got all you need for life and godliness.

  • (I’m ruling out dishonest translations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses New World Translation which was purposefully edited to remove the deity of Jesus.)

  • I’m sorry for such a long explanation, but I think these issues about God’s word need to be carefully framed.

• So, what is this new information which was preserved in the oldest-known and longest-used Bible texts? Basically nothing more than this: it says of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:5-6, “...she didn’t have a child... because the Lord had not given a child to her...”

• Could you have figured that out without reading that in the Septuagint? Of course. God hadn’t held anything important from modern Christians who don’t know Greek.

• But this extra text highlights some important applications:

  • First, that that Hannah’s barrenness was no cosmic accident, nor was the blame to be laid at the feet of Satan – or anybody else, for that matter. It was the result of a decision God had made; God had not decided to give her a child, so she didn’t have a child. It was God’s decision.

  • The same is true in your life. The fact that you aren’t married or you don’t have a million dollars in the bank or you don’t have so-and-so’s looks is because God decided not to give that to you. It’s His decision.

  • You can turn that around.

    • If you have a child, it was God’s decision to give you that child; that baby was a gift from Him, and we should welcome them as such.

    • If you are married, your spouse was a gracious gift to you and you have no business being spiteful.

    • If you have money in the bank, it was God who provided it for you, so it is God’s to decide how it should be spent.

• I want to conclude with four lessons from...

vs. 7-11 Hannah’s Prayer

1. Going to church triggered intense grief for her because it reminded her of her barrenness, and Peninnah was the most cruel in her words during those worship times for some reason. For that reason, most of us would choose never to go to church again, but not Hannah. Even though she didn’t have perfect control over her emotions and she knew she would embarras herself by making a scene and crying, she went anyway with her husband and Peninnah and her children to worship the Lord because she believed there was no greater God than the Lord of Hosts. As Peter the Apostle said many years later, “Where else would we go? You alone have the words of life!” So, when you are depressed or worried about what people will think of you, don’t let it stop you from worshipping with God’s people.

2. Also, don’t let the immaturity and pettiness and misunderstandings of other Christians stop you from connecting with the Lord of Hosts. Eli was a negligent pastor. The priests Hophni and Phinehas were creeps. Hannah’s husband could have taught a course on how to offend women in 15 words or less: “Why are you crying? Am I not better to you than 10 sons?” But despite all the shortcomings of the believers around her, Hannah still worshipped the Lord with them. Your pastor may be a dud, and your family may be a mess, and the other Christians at church may be inconsiderate, but don’t let the thought of them hinder you from coming to worship Jesus.

3. Hannah went to the LORD and prayed about her problems. She didn’t get catty with Peninah; she didn’t go whining to Elqanah; she didn’t isolate herself; she didn’t call her friend on the phone, she took her problems to God. When Elqanah called her down for falling to pieces at Peninah’s jeering, she got ahold of herself and ate her holiday meal, then she crept past the imperious-looking high priest in the doorway and let it all hang out with God. Jesus likewise, “when he was in agony prayed more earnestly” (Luke 22:44). Will you take your problems to God rather than keep on trying to solve them yourself or complain about them to other people? Remind yourself with the hymn, “I must tell Jesus! I must tell Jesus! I cannot bear these burdens alone… Jesus can help me, Jesus alone!” And Jesus answered Hannah’s prayer.

4. The last thing I want to point out is Hannah’s example of asking for God to give her something that she can give back to God. She asked for a son that she could dedicate to God’s service. In the law, Levites only had to serve in the temple for 25 years, from age 25 to 50, and that only when they were on-call (Num. 8:24ff), but Hannah goes beyond that to give her son to God from the time he was weaned at around 3 years old until the day he died – all the days of his life. He would never be able to mow the grass for her or visit her on Mother’s Day or move back into town with the grandkids, he was a gift from God and so he was dedicated for God to use as God wanted rather than as Hannah wanted. When you ask God for things, are you thinking about what He wants or just what you want? When you ask God for that relationship or that car or that healing or that job or whatever, it needs to be because we want to do His will with it. Hannah saw herself as God’s servant; and that’s what you are too.

1 Samuel 1 - Side-by side comparison of versions^A