Bible Commentaries

The Birth of Samuel

1 Samuel 1:20

HANNAH, the wife of Elkanah, besought the Lord for a man child. This draws our attention to the scope of human prayer. Men cannot pray by rule. We do but mock men when we say, You must pray for this and not for that. Such an exhortation may do for a man when his heart is not inflamed by the passion of godly desire; it may do for him in his coldest and most indifferent mental states. But when he is in his most vehement and determined moods, he cannot be fettered and limited by such exhortations. We need something more for our guidance than mere maxims. A maxim is too narrow for life. We need principles which can shrink into maxims and can expand into revelations as the exigencies of life may require. Sometimes we are cold and dull,—then a maxim will do: sometimes our strength rises to full flood,—then we need inspiration. You cannot conduct life in its highest phases and its intensest desires by any set of maxims. You can only control and elevate life by having principles which can shrink and expand,—adapt themselves when man's moral temperature rises, when his strength rises, and suit themselves to all the varying phases and wants of his life. Tell Hannah that she ought not to pray for what God has not seen fit to give her, and she scorns your formal piety and your tabulated counsels. Why? She is not in a mood to receive that kind of instruction; there is a hunger in her heart; through her own love she sees far into the love of God; and by the eagerness of her desire she goes far away, with bleeding weary feet, from beaten paths and accepted roads, that she may bind God by the very importunateness of her love. That is not the kind of woman into whose ear you can drop a little formal maxim with any effect Your religion will be to her profanity, if you cannot address her in a higher tone—meet her just where her soul is. She is borne away by the passion of her desire; there is one dominating force in her nature that transfigures everything, that defies difficulties, that surmounts obstacles, and that waits with trembling nervous patience till God come. What is love if it be not fiery? What is prayer if it be not the heart on a blaze? Prayer is not mere articulation; prayer is not mere words. Prayers are battles; prayers are the thunders which call for God when he seems to be far away!

Yonder is a wild goat, living on stony hills and desert places. He has wandered a long way from pasture, from food of any kind. In the madness of his hunger he sees on farther edge, five hundred fathoms above the level, just one little tuft of grass—the only green thing within a circuit of miles. It is a dangerous place, but then he is in a dangerous condition. He climbs to it,—the rock almost trembles under him. A moment more, and, hundreds of fathoms below, he lies a bleeding mass. But impelled by hunger, he does what only the fierce courage of despair dare do. So it is with that keener hunger of human souls. We do sometimes pray for things that lie away from the line of ordinary devotion; we would not pray for them but for that over-mastering, irresistible, spiritual force that holds us in its mighty hand. If we were in coolness and sobriety of spirit and temper, we should be able to reason about it and to put things together and to draw inferences. Man is not fully man when he stands upon his feet; he touches the highest point of his manhood when he lifts the pinions of faith and hope, and goes off into the Unknown if haply he may find God! If you do not know what the hunger is you do not know what the prayer is. You cannot feel as Hannah did without you have been in great straits, and when for the time you have been the willing" victim of a glowing and grand desire. But is there not a limit? Yes, there is a limit, and it is sometimes well not to look at it in the light of a limit. It is true that we are shut up like the sea and watched like the whale, but that is no reason why we should shrivel into a pool or dwindle into a minnow. What is the limit of our prayer? This: "Not my will, but thine, be done!" Is that a limit?—it is glorious liberty! Not my will, but thine,—not a little will, but a great will,—not my thought, but thine,—not my love, but thine! Is that a limit? It is the lark rising from its field-nest into the boundless liberty of the firmament! Truly we do not limit ourselves when we exchange the creature for the Creator. When we take up our little thought and say, "Lord, this is what we want,—but not our will but thine be done," do we then throw away the greater for the less? It is a contrast, and only such a contrast as you find in the earth and heaven, in the blazing sun and the misty night.

Need we say that there are some things which are not fit subjects for prayer? that there are some things which do not lie directly in the devotional line? For example, no man is at liberty to pray for wealth, merely as such. "Lord, give me riches," would not be prayer; it would be profanity, it would be covetousness carried to the point of blasphemy. Wealth, as such, does not lie in the line of devotion, but far away from it, and can only be made incidental to it by certain moral considerations which the possessor of wealth may possibly know nothing at all about. Looked at in itself, Hannah's prayer was selfish and poor in its spiritual tone; but the woman did not know what she was praying for altogether. It is so with us in our highest devotions. God inspires the prayer, and then answers it; dictates the language, and then satisfies the petition. So that persons who are asking for what may be called a little ordinary daily blessing, may, in reality, be asking for a gift the influence of which shall reach through ages, shall palpitate through eternity. Hannah says, Give me a man child! She knows not the destinies that are involved in that prayer. And that prayer is not her own. Her petition is but the echo of a higher voice. Herein is the mystery of prayer. There be cold, formal, rudimentary prayers; there be labial prayers—prayers that come from the lips only; and there be words which are revelations of Christ—subdued sighings of the soul, which God prompts and regulates, and which are sent for the trial of our patience and strength, that God may bring in upon our little petition a greater answer than our fancy ever dreamed, than our love ever dared expect!

We shall see in what an extraordinary mental and spiritual state Hannah was, as we read from the twelfth to the sixteenth verses:—

"And it came to pass, as she continued praying before the Lord, that Eli marked her mouth. Now Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard: therefore Eli thought she had been drunken. And Eli said unto her, How long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine from thee. And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord. Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto."

There are three remarkable things in this case. First: Here is a religious household disquieted by one unhappy element. Hannah's life was lived under the harrow of Peninnah's reproach. The household was a religious one. Elkanah went out of the city to worship and to sacrifice unto the Lord of hosts in Shiloh. Hannah was a praying woman. We have every reason to suppose that, speaking in general terms, the household was markedly religious; yet there was shot through it one unhappy, disquieting, poisoning element. Let us get away from all that is merely local in the incident, and dwell upon the principle that one sinner destroyeth much good. The head of the house is a worshipping 1 Samuel 2:1-2, 1 Samuel 2:7-8, 1 Samuel 2:9).

It was thus with one man. He was very ill; a great strong man in his day; yet disease touched him, shrivelled him up, laid him upon a lowly bed, made him pray to the humblest creature in his house for favours hour after hour. As he lay there, in his lowliness and weakness, he said, "If God would raise me up I would be a new 1 Samuel 1:15) and a prophetess in her gifts ( 1 Samuel 2:1), she sought from God the gift of the child for which she longed with a passionate devotion of silent prayer, of which there is no other example in the Old Testament, and when the son was granted, the name which he bore, and thus first introduced into the world, expressed her sense of the urgency of her entreaty—Samuel, "the asked or heard of God."

Living in the great age of vows, she had before his birth dedicated him to the office of a Nazarite. As soon as he was weaned, she herself, with her husband, brought him to the tabernacle at Shiloh, where she had received the first intimation of his birth, and there solemnly consecrated him. The form of consecration was similar to that with which the irregular priesthood of Jeroboam was set apart in later times ( 2 Chronicles 13:9)—a bullock of three years old (LXX.), loaves (LXX.), an ephah of flour, and a skin of wine ( 1 Samuel 1:24). First took place the usual sacrifices (LXX.) by Elkanah himself, then, after the introduction of the child, the special sacrifice of the bullock. Then his mother made him over to Eli ( 1 Samuel 1:25, 1 Samuel 1:28), and (according to the Hebrew text, but not the LXX.) the child himself performed an act of worship.

The hymn which followed on this consecration is the first of the kind in the sacred volume. It is possible that, like many of the 1 Samuel 1:5 specially applies to this event, and 1 Samuel 1:7 and 1 Samuel 1:8 may well express the sense entertained by the prophetess of the coming revolution in the fortunes of her son and of her country.

Prayer

Almighty God, we are all thine; we are twice thine. Thou didst make us, and not we ourselves, and thou didst redeem us with the precious blood of Christ, and bring us out of a worse than Egyptian bondage. We wrestle not with flesh and blood—against these there is an answer, sure and unchangeable—but with principalities and powers, with spiritual temptations, with difficulties of the soul, with nameless forces and malignest mysteries of darkness. These are our foes; we cannot see them; we cannot touch them or name them; they are here, there, on the right hand, on the left hand, around us, above us, never sleeping, always watching. Against these thou dost call us to do battle; but thou dost call us to put on the armour which thou hast thyself provided, and being clothed in that steel of heaven, we may go on from conquering to conquer, slaying mightily and completely all evil forces and winning the Lord's battles in the Lord's great strength. Thine eye is upon us; it melts with compassion, it gleams with complacency, and if now and again it is bright with anger, we know the justice of the indignation, for we have sinned and done evil in the Lord's sight. We come to thee to find pardon, and through pardon to enjoy peace—yea, to begin the eternal Sabbath of the heavens, the calm of eternity, the peace which passeth all understanding. Thou wilt not disappoint us; if we have made any effort to come to thine house, thou wilt doubly reward us. No man can serve God for nought. If we have put ourselves to any inconvenience, thou wilt surely magnify thy grace towards us, and send a plentiful rain of blessing upon thirsty hearts. Pity us in all our littleness and weakness. Remember that our days when they are all counted are but a handful which a child might carry; and remember that we are made out of the dust of the ground, and that the dust still claims much of us. Remember the difficulty of life: its daily burden, its certain care, its sorrows, so heavy and bitter. Remember the deaths which have bereaved us, the losses which have made us poor the disappointments which have torn and stung our hearts; and then let thy mercy come to us in no few, scanty drops of pity, but in great rains of compassion, and let thy heart be moved towards us in all tenderness and grace. But why should we argue with thee, or plead with thee as if thou wert reluctant? The willingness is upon thy side; thou dost wait to be gracious. Again and again, amid all our peevish reasoning, thou dost remind us that if thou didst not spare thine only 1 Samuel 1:13.

Yet it was possible to form some opinion of the agitation of Hannah's mind.—It was known that she was not in a jovial mood, but that her soul was cast down within her.—The power of the soul to write itself on the face is indicative of its still larger power to write itself on all the circumstances and events through which it passes, and upon the society with which it comes in contact.—Now and again we see vivid instances of mind triumphing over matter; never perhaps is this so signally seen as when grief enters into the heart, and writes its grim signature on the whole countenance.—These indications of mental action may of course be misunderstood, as in the case of Hannah.—Though Eli was a priest, he was not sufficiently penetrating to understand what Hannah was doing.—He who ought to have been a prophet, a very seer of God, looking at the heart and reading all its woe, said in tones of harshness, "How long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine from thee."—When sorrow is misunderstood it is doubled.—When men understand our grief, and speak to us in its own tone, they go far towards removing the heartache which makes us groan. When priests misunderstand their age, either in its totality or its individuality, they make the most profound mistakes, and throw insult where they ought to offer benediction.—We can conduct a silent ministry in life.—We can be known as men of prayer without causing our voice to be heard in the streets: we can express our joy without blatancy; we can show how truly wise we are without trumpeting our own greatness.—Sometimes all we can do is to move the lips; the voice will not come through the choked throat, or if it did come we should not know it, it would not be our voice, but another, tortured by the spirit of grief.—Let us yield to our emotions up to a given point, but always seek to have some measure of control over them; otherwise we may by exaggeration or wantonness allow our character to be honestly misunderstood, and vilified with some show of reason.