PREFACE TO THE BOOK OF 1ST SAMUEL.
For a more comprehensive understanding of the background to this fourth book of biblical Israeli history, the reader should first read the Epilogue review of the preceding three books at the end of this article. It is paramount that the sequence of the chronological saga be grasped by the reader to understand the divine sovereign election of:-
1. Abram the father of faith;
2. The lineage of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel)
3. The saga of Israel after the Exodus
4. The vicissitudes of success and failure by Joshua settling the Promised Land
5. The repetitive cycle of deviance by God’s chosen people responding to their patriarchs, prophets, priests, judges, and kings;
6. The propensity of each succeeding generation to more grave godlessness, despite the divine system of Israel’s theocracy, or monarchy centred around the tabernacle/temple worship of God’s manifest presence;
7. God’s covenant, then later breach of covenant, with Israel and His afflictive chastisement on its people for its apostasy, rebellion, and idolatry;
8. God’s wrathful vengeance upon Israelite impenitence tempered by God’s merciful overtures;
9. God’s irrevocable promises, of which He was oft reminded by the godly prophet, priest or king who dared intercede or mediate on their people’s behalf;
10. God’s final limit of mercy upon the Land of Promise, David’s tribe, and Jerusalem’s eternal city of David. As if the reign of Ahaz wasn’t bad enough, King Manasseh crossed the red line and the fate of Judah became that of the earlier elimination of Israel in Samaria besieged by Assyria over a hundred years before Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and its hinterland of Judah;
11. God’s dispersing the Jews of the scattered Diaspora as testimony to His wrath upon them for their marring the Land He had given them;
12. God’s everlasting promise that when everything else had failed He would send a Saviour to stand in the gap to rescue His people and those outside the ‘wall of partition’ under the legacy of Abraham: the Gentiles. Thus in the books of history, the Psalms and the Prophets the unabated divine overtures of promise and mercy intermittently continued. In the thirty-nine books of Old Testament sacred canon this gave His people one remaining hope of return, restoration, and salvation. This was catalogued by:
a. The election of David as ‘a man after God’s own heart;’
b. God’s tryst and covenant with David to eternally preserve, his tribe of Judah and Jerusalem with its temple which had superseded the tabernacle in Solomon’s time;
c. The irrevocability of God’s promise to David, despite:-
i. The splitting of the kingdom into Israel in Samaria and Judah in Jerusalem;
ii. Assyria’s siege of Samaria and the imprisonment, abduction, and deportation of Jewish citizenry,
iii. Similarly, one hundred and twenty years later, the Chaldean captivity of Judah wherein the city of Jerusalem was razed to the ground, a burning heap.
For background, readers can review the previous books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth.
PROLOGUE TO THE BOOK OF 1ST SAMUEL.
CHARACTERS: (not including Saul)
1. ELI
the priest who is described by the text as apostate and cold like so many of the clergy today in the church:-
a. He misunderstood the travail of true prayer and treated the saint suspiciously as an aberration or non-conformist among the status quo.
b. He ostracizes Hannah and condemns her for her burden of prayer because it is beyond his life’s experience. This too is typical of the modern preacher who would write such as charismatic psychosis.
c. Eli was highly judgmental of any resurgence of new life in the congregation, in which he had wounded the sheep or driven them away (Ezekiel 13 & 34).
d. Eli was compromisingly ‘blind’ to his sons’ grievous infidelity and protected them and himself from the embarrassment of exposure.
e. Eli protected his family name, rather than the name of the Lord God Almighty, and was more an obstacle to worship than a help.
f. Eli had access to the testament and testimony of God’s Word, within the Ark, but he kept it hidden from the people and there was no ‘open vision’ because, by his indolence, the Word of God was precious but scarce.
g. Eli was more concerned about perpetuating the family name than the testimony of God’s Word;
h. Eli set up his own dynasty based on tradition instead of seeking God’s sovereign will.
2. ELKANAH
a. He was a dedicated god-fearing Jew from the tribe of Ephraim, a descendant of the tribe of Joseph, who spared no expense for his family to be faithful to the annual gathering at Shiloh, wherein lay the tent of the tabernacle (called ‘temple’ in the text).
b. He took notice of his wife’s sacrificial tendencies and yielded to them, though he himself was equally committed to the tenet of Matthew 6: 33.
3. HANNAH.
a. Though barren, she dared to believe for the impossible conception of a son, whom, when born would be loaned to the Lord at the Tabernacle, despite the priesthood’s wayward ways.
b. Hannah was consumed with a passion for the will of the Spirit in the dark days that ensued the anarchy of the Judges.
c. Hannah wholeheartedly loved the Lord with her mind, soul, strength and might and she contritely trembled at God’s Word as precious despite it being in common neglect.
d. She was burdened to ‘strengthen that which remained,’ rather than censoriously advocate reformation or a boycott of the Tabernacle. (Revelation 3:2a) This too has application to today’s congregations suffering from the predicted ‘falling away’.
e. She was neither pragmatically judgmental, nor a feministic protestor, but subservient to her husband and her minister, while at the same time resigned to prioritize the Lord’s will at His behest.
f. She was a woman of God.
4. SAMUEL THE PROPHET-PRIEST
appeared concurrently at the time of the Spirit’s awakening and restoration of a broken theocracy.
a. Though very young he had been taught to ‘worship God in spirit and truth’ before he arrived to serve Eli in Shiloh.
b. Like Joshua, Moses’ servant, Samuel would spend much time in the Tabernacle.
c. In adulthood, Samuel moved in a circuit as a judge, priest, and prophet until his old age.
d. Sadly, in his senior years, he began to compromise. Unlike the preceding period of Judges in which the Holy Spirit raised up the successor to judge Israel, Samuel set up a dynasty appointing his two sons: Joel and Abiah judges.
e. As both sons succumbed to offers of bribery their priestly office became debased and untenable.
f. This had been preceded by the earlier loss of the Ark to the Philistines.
g. But, whether Tabernacle or church, when an assembly reaches the stage of being ‘Ichabod’, God forsakes it, as the Psalmist would later describe Shiloh. (Psalm 78:60) Whereas the Tabernacle had been at Shiloh for 400 years.
h. Nonetheless, the aged Samuel fell into the same trap as Eli and inadvertently followed his precedent by appointing his own sons to continue his legacy.
i. It was this misjudgment that led to the end of the theocracy and made the people clamour for a monarchy instead.
j. Once Saul was anointed as the first king Samuel went to Gilgal, not Shiloh, to renew the kingdom. This was nearby to the Jordan, and Jericho and had been Joshua’s first encampment after crossing the flooded Jordan River. It had been the place where the manna ceased and the Exodus minors were circumcised.
k. Samuel was devastated that Israel had rejected the theocracy and this was compounded by the failure of Saul to act within the boundaries of his remit as a king and was soon marked as God’s reject for his stubbornness and impetuous disobedience, refusing to submit to Samuel or God.
TO BE CONTINUED: Part 2.
1st BOOK OF SAMUEL (1)