Samuel

Samuel stood between two eras of Israel's life and handed one to the other. Behind him are the judges. In front of him is the monarchy. He is the man who closes the one and opens the other, and he never holds a throne himself. His life starts with somebody else's grief. Hannah could not have children, and she prayed at the sanctuary at Shiloh until the old priest there thought she was drunk. She promised God that a son would be given back to Him for life, with the razor clause of the Nazirite vow attached. That promise was the first thing anybody ever decided about Samuel, and he had no say in it. He grew up inside a scandal. The priest he served was old, and his two sons were the disgrace of the country. Samuel ministered in a linen ephod, and his mother brought him a bigger robe every year when the family came up to sacrifice. He did not join the scandal, and the narrator keeps saying so. Then God called his name in the night. The word of the LORD was rare in those days and visions were scarce, and the boy did not recognise the voice. What he was given to carry was a sentence on the house that had raised him. He lay awake until morning and was afraid to open the doors. Hearing God, in the Bible's own founding account of it, begins with a message the hearer does not want. After that the country listens to him for the rest of his life. He gathers Israel at Mizpah, prays for them, and sets up a stone on the ground of an old defeat with the name Ebenezer on it. He judges from a circuit of four towns and goes home to Ramah, where he builds an altar. When the people ask for a king he warns them in detail what a king will take, and then pours the oil on the man God names. He is also the man who told a king he was finished. Saul spared what God had told him to destroy and called the spared animals sacrifice, and Samuel answered that obedience is better than sacrifice. He killed Agag himself at Gilgal. Then he went to Bethlehem, telling God plainly that Saul would kill him for it, and anointed the youngest son of a farmer who had been left outside with the sheep. The text does not tidy him up. His own sons took bribes and perverted justice. He took the demand for a king personally, and God had to tell him the rejection was not of him. He picked the tall brother at Bethlehem and God told him to stop looking at height. He died at Ramah, and the whole country came to mourn him.

The New Testament names Samuel three times and does three different things with him. Peter, preaching in Solomon's Colonnade two verses after quoting Deuteronomy 18 on the prophet like Moses, puts him at the head of the line: "Indeed, all the prophets from Samuel on, as many as have spoken, have proclaimed these days" (Acts 3:24). Paul, preaching at Antioch of Pisidia, puts him at the end of the era that closed with him, "God gave them judges until the time of Samuel the prophet" (Acts 13:20), and his next two sentences are Saul and then David. Hebrews 11:32 sets him in the roll of faith with Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah and David, the last name before "and the prophets." That is the whole New Testament use of him. Samuel is nowhere presented there as a type of Christ, and this page does not invent one. One man in this book prophesies, judges and sacrifices. Albert Barnes states the concentration at 7:3, that Samuel appears in the threefold character of prophet, judge and the acknowledged leader of the whole people. The text carries it. He is confirmed as a prophet from Dan to Beersheba (3:20). He judges Israel all the days of his life (7:15). He offers a whole burnt offering with his own hands and builds an altar at Ramah (7:9, 7:17). Two limits belong beside that. The Chronicler traces his line through Kohath to Levi (1 Chronicles 6:33 to 6:38), so he is a Levite rather than a priest of Aaron's line, and John Wesley reads the altar at Ramah as raised by prophetic direction, with God's acceptance of what was offered on it as the evidence. What a reader can then see is a pattern rather than a claim the text makes. The three offices Israel afterwards kept apart, and that Uzziah was struck for confusing (2 Chronicles 26:16 to 26:21), sit together in one man at the hinge of the nation's history, and they sit together again and finally in Christ, who is prophet, priest and king. Samuel poured oil on two kings, and the covenant runs through the second. The Chronicler traces the whole Davidic monarchy back through him: the elders anointed David at Hebron "according to the word of the LORD through Samuel" (1 Chronicles 11:3). Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century, drew the line from that oil to the title itself. The sacred oil conferred the power of a king, and the Greek verb for anointing is where the word Christ comes from, which in Hebrew is Messiah. So the son of David is the Anointed One, and Samuel is the man who first poured the oil on that house. Scripture's own anointing word for Jesus falls at Acts 10:38, where God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and at the Jordan John baptised Him. 1 Samuel 2:26 says the boy Samuel continued to grow in stature and in favor with the LORD and with man. Luke 2:52 says Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man, and Luke sets the sentence in a sanctuary. Barnes puts the two side by side and calls the accounts very similar. The claim worth making is about Luke's language. A first-century reader who knew 1 Samuel would hear the older sentence under the newer one. Reading it as an echo Luke is making keeps both sentences doing their own work. Luke makes the same move earlier in his Gospel, and it runs through Samuel's mother. Hannah's song at 1 Samuel 2 turns the world over on its way to its last line: the LORD brings down and raises up, He lifts the needy from the ash heap and seats them among princes, and He will "exalt the horn of His anointed." There is no king in Israel yet when she sings it, and her son is the man who will pour the oil. Mary's song at Luke 1:46 to 1:55 runs the same lines. The proud are scattered, rulers are brought down from their thrones, the humble are lifted up, the hungry are filled, and both songs end on God's mercy to Israel. Two women given a son they had no natural claim to sing almost the same song about a thousand years apart. Hannah's own page carries her prayer in full. Samuel's densest sentence is at 12:23. The nation had told him he was old and his sons were crooked, had asked for a king instead of him, and then asked him to pray for them. He answered that giving up praying for them would itself be a sin against the LORD. Jeremiah 15:1 pairs him with Moses as the two whose prayers carried the most weight in Israel's memory. Gregory the Great, preaching in the late sixth century, noticed what those two have in common: both prayed for the people who had turned on them. John Chrysostom, in the early fifth century, presses the other way and asks what Samuel's prayers actually secured for Saul or for Israel, and answers that prayer helps where the one praying and the one prayed for both act. This site does not settle their difference. It names the intercession that never stops, which is Christ's, and Matthew Henry reaches for that at 7:3: our great intercessor above never ceases and always appears in the presence of God for us. Two early writers take the stone at 7:12 to Christ, and both are readings rather than the meaning of the verse. Jerome, in a homily on the Psalms written about 420, says that the stone the builders rejected is the stone called Ebenezer in the book of Samuel, and that the stone is Christ. Augustine, in City of God 17.7, reads the stone of the helper as the mediation of the Saviour. The book itself puts the weight somewhere else. Samuel's last recorded act while alive is filling a horn with oil, walking to Bethlehem, pouring it on the one son nobody had bothered to call in from the sheep, and then going home to Ramah. A thousand years later the line from that horn runs back to the same town.