Samuel the Prophet

The vow of Hannah

Samuel's history begins not with him but with his mother. Elkanah, a man of Ramathaim-Zophim in the hill country of Ephraim, had two wives: Peninnah, who bore children, and Hannah, who was barren. The genealogies of Chronicles trace Elkanah's descent through Kohath to Levi, so that the tradition followed by the synaxaria makes Samuel a Levite dwelling among the Ephraimites — which is why he could minister at the sanctuary and offer sacrifice without usurpation.

Year by year the household went up to the sanctuary at Shiloh, where the ark of the covenant then rested and where Eli was priest. There Hannah, taunted by her rival and unconsoled by her husband's affection — "am not I better to thee than ten sons?" — prayed in the bitterness of her soul, moving her lips without sound, so that Eli took her for a drunken woman and rebuked her. Her answer, that she had poured out her soul before the Lord, drew from him instead a blessing. She had vowed that if God gave her a man-child she would give him back to the Lord for all the days of his life, and that no razor should come upon his head — the vow of a Nazirite, made not by the man himself but for him before his conception.

The child was born and she called him Samuel, Shemu'el, "because I have asked him of the Lord": the name is read both as "asked of God" and as "heard of God," and both readings are used in the hymns. When he was weaned — at three years old, in the tradition the Church received — she brought him up to Shiloh with a bullock, an ephah of flour and a skin of wine, and gave him to Eli with the words that name the whole of his life: "For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him: therefore also I have lent him to the Lord."

Hannah's song and the third ode

Hannah's prayer of thanksgiving (1 Samuel 2:1–10) is one of the great canticles of the Old Testament and has a permanent place in the Church's worship. "My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, mine horn is exalted in the Lord… The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength… The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up." It is the model and the ancestor of the Magnificat of the Theotokos, whose structure and whose reversals it supplies, and in the Byzantine rite it is the third of the nine biblical odes: every canon at Matins, of every saint and every feast, builds its third ode on Hannah's words, so that the barren woman's thanksgiving is sung in Orthodox churches daily. Samuel is therefore present in the office far beyond his own feast, at one remove, through his mother.

The child at Shiloh and the call by night

The boy remained at the sanctuary and "ministered before the Lord, being a child, girded with a linen ephod" — the vestment of the priesthood, worn by an infant — while his mother made him a little robe and brought it up to him year by year when she came for the yearly sacrifice. Against his growth the narrative sets the corruption of Eli's own sons, Hophni and Phinehas, "sons of Belial," who took the sacrifices by force and defiled the women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle, and whom their father rebuked too late and too gently.

"And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision." Into that silence came the call. The lamp of God had not yet gone out and Samuel was lying down in the temple where the ark of God was, when a voice called him by name. Three times he ran to Eli, and three times the old priest sent him back; at the third, Eli perceived what was happening and taught the child the answer that has become the pattern of every vocation: "Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth." What was then revealed to him was the judgment upon the house of Eli, and Samuel, afraid, was made to tell it to Eli himself, who received it with the resignation of a man who had long expected it: "It is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good."

From that night the word was not silent again. "And all Israel from Dan even to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet of the Lord." The Church reads the passage as the first calling of a prophet in Israel after Moses, and as the model of the obedience of the young — a boy of twelve, in the received reckoning, standing between an old priest's failure and the beginning of a new order.

The loss of the ark and the judgeship

The word came to pass. Israel went out against the Philistines and was beaten at Aphek; the elders sent to Shiloh for the ark of the covenant, thinking to compel God to save them, and Hophni and Phinehas carried it into the camp. The Philistines, terrified at first, fought the harder; Israel was routed, the two priests were killed, and the ark was captured. When the runner brought the news to Shiloh, Eli — old, heavy and blind — fell backward from his seat by the gate and broke his neck; and the wife of Phinehas, dying in labour, named her son Ichabod, "the glory is departed from Israel," not for her husband or her father-in-law but because the ark of God was taken.

The ark's own history was brief and terrible: Dagon fell twice before it in his temple at Ashdod and was broken; plagues followed it from city to city; and the Philistines sent it back on a new cart drawn by two milch kine, with a trespass offering of gold. It came to rest at Kiriath-jearim, where it stayed twenty years, and the sanctuary of Shiloh never recovered — a desolation Jeremiah would still be citing four centuries later.

Through those twenty years Samuel grew into the office of judge, the fifteenth and last of them. He gathered the people to Mizpah with the summons that is the sum of his preaching: "If ye do return unto the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you." They put away the Baalim, fasted, drew water and poured it out before the Lord, and confessed their sin. The Philistines came up against the assembly; Samuel offered a sucking lamb for a whole burnt offering and cried unto the Lord, "and the Lord thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomfited them." Samuel set up a stone between Mizpah and Shen and called it Ebenezer, "the stone of help," saying, "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us."

He judged Israel all the days of his life, going on a yearly circuit — Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah — and returning always to Ramah, where his house was and where he built an altar to the Lord. He is the only one of the Judges whose authority was prophetic and priestly rather than military; he delivered Israel by prayer and by the reformation of its worship, and the Philistine pressure was held back all his days.

"Give us a king"

Samuel grew old, and made his sons Joel and Abiah judges in Beersheba; but they "walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment." On this the elders of Israel came to him at Ramah and demanded a king to judge them "like all the nations."

The thing displeased Samuel, and he prayed; and the answer he received is one of the gravest sentences in the Old Testament: "They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them." He was told to grant the request and to protest solemnly first — and the protest he made (1 Samuel 8:11–18) is the earliest sustained critique of monarchy in literature: the king will take your sons for his chariots and your daughters for his kitchens, your fields and your vineyards and the tenth of your seed, your servants and your asses and your sheep; "and ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day." The people refused to hear, and Samuel — who had every human reason to resent the demand — bowed to it without bitterness and set himself to make the new institution work.

The anointing of Saul

The choice fell on Saul the son of Kish, a Benjamite, taller than any of the people from the shoulders upward, who came to Ramah looking for his father's strayed asses and was directed to "the seer." Samuel had been forewarned; he received Saul at the high place, seated him at the head of the guests, kept the reserved portion for him, and the next morning at the edge of the city took a vial of oil, poured it on his head and kissed him: "Is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?" He gave him three signs, and the last of them was that Saul would meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with psaltery, tabret, pipe and harp, and would prophesy among them and "be turned into another man" — whence the proverb, "Is Saul also among the prophets?"

The private anointing was ratified publicly: at Mizpah the lot fell upon Saul, who had hidden himself among the baggage, and the people shouted "God save the king." After Saul's relief of Jabesh-gilead the kingdom was renewed at Gilgal, and there Samuel delivered his farewell address (1 Samuel 12) — the audit of a lifetime's office: "Whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded?" The people acquitted him. He called for thunder and rain in the wheat harvest as a sign, and closed with the promise no successor improved upon: "God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you."

The rejection of Saul

Twice the prophet had to pronounce against the king he had made. At Gilgal, with the Philistines massed and his levies melting away, Saul would not wait the appointed seven days and offered the burnt offering himself; Samuel arrived as he finished and told him his kingdom should not continue, for "the Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart."

The second and final breach came over Amalek. Saul was commanded to devote the Amalekites utterly and spared Agag their king and the best of the sheep and oxen, pleading that the people had kept them to sacrifice. Samuel's reply is the prophetic principle in its purest form, quoted ever after against every attempt to buy God with religion: "Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." When Saul caught at his mantle and tore it, Samuel made the tearing a sign: "The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day." Then he called for Agag — who came "delicately," saying "surely the bitterness of death is past" — and hewed him in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal, an act the Fathers read as the judge executing a sentence Saul had refused to execute, not as private vengeance.

"And Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death: nevertheless Samuel mourned for Saul." The two sentences together are the measure of the man.

The anointing of David

He was mourning still when God rebuked the mourning and sent him to Bethlehem, to the house of Jesse, with a horn of oil and a heifer for sacrifice. There the sons were brought before him one by one. Of Eliab, tall and impressive, Samuel thought, "Surely the Lord's anointed is before him"; and he was answered with the sentence that governs all Christian discernment of persons: "Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." Seven passed and none was chosen; the youngest was keeping the sheep. David was fetched — ruddy, of a beautiful countenance and goodly to look to — and Samuel anointed him in the midst of his brethren, "and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward."

Later, when Saul's persecution began, David fled to Samuel at Ramah and the two of them went to dwell at Naioth, among the company of the prophets. Saul sent messengers to take him and each party in turn was caught up in prophecy; at last Saul came himself, and the Spirit of God came upon him also, and he stripped off his clothes and lay down naked all that day and night before Samuel. The prophetic communities gathered about Samuel at Naioth and elsewhere are the beginning of what the later books call the sons of the prophets — the schools that would produce Elijah's and Elisha's disciples — and it is on this account that Acts calls him the first of the prophetic succession: "all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days" (Acts 3:24).

Repose

"And Samuel died; and all the Israelites were gathered together, and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah" (1 Samuel 25:1). He had judged Israel from his childhood, outlived the order he was born into, and given the nation both its first king and its second. Ben Sira's praise of the fathers gives him a long paragraph — "beloved of his Lord… he called upon the mighty Lord, when his enemies pressed upon him on every side, with the offering of a sucking lamb" — and the Epistle to the Hebrews numbers him among the cloud of witnesses who "through faith subdued kingdoms" (Hebrews 11:32).

The witch of Endor

The last scene in which Samuel appears takes place after his death, and it is the one that has caused the Church most trouble. The Philistines were encamped at Shunem and Saul at Gilboa; "and when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets." Saul, who had himself purged the mediums out of the land, went by night in disguise to a woman at Endor who had a familiar spirit — in the Greek, an engastrimythos, a "belly-speaker" — and asked her to bring up Samuel. The woman cried out when she saw what she had raised, and described "an old man… covered with a mantle"; and Saul heard a voice reproaching him for disquieting it, repeating the sentence of the kingdom's rending, and adding the sentence that was fulfilled the next day: "the Lord will also deliver Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines: and to morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me."

Whether that apparition was in truth the prophet is discussed under Disputed questions below.

Relics and the shrine at Ramah

The tomb "in his house at Ramah" was venerated through antiquity. In 406, under the emperor Arcadius, the relics of Samuel were taken up in Palestine and carried to Constantinople. Saint Jerome, writing against Vigilantius within a few years of the event and with evident satisfaction, describes the translation: the ashes borne in a vessel of gold and wrapped in silk, bishops carrying them, the provinces turning out along the whole road, and the emperor himself going forth to meet them — a chain of rejoicing peoples from Palestine to Chalcedon. They were deposited in a church built for them at the Hebdomon outside the walls. The Chronicon Paschale records the same translation under the same year, and it is one of the best-attested relic translations of the early fifth century.

The traditional site of the tomb is the height north-west of Jerusalem still called Nebi Samwil, "the prophet Samuel," honoured by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike; the Crusaders, who first saw Jerusalem from its summit, called it Mons Gaudii, the Mount of Joy.