A Closer Look at This Week’s Text
In those days, things were rough: at the end of the book of Judges, we hear that “there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (21:25). This is not a good situation, but it does sound familiar to us in our own culture, when many of us are old enough to remember the motto of the 1960’s: “Do your own thing.” As the fabric of our society loosened and frayed, more and more of us went it alone, doing what we wanted and focusing on our own needs and desires. Perhaps “authority” had earned the distrust and disdain in both settings, and ancient Hebrews and modern Americans alike reacted against bad leadership. Still, it seems to be human nature to gravitate, especially in chaos or on the edge of chaos, toward having someone strong in charge, so it’s understandable that the people of ancient Israel decided that they needed a king to rule over them.
Telling the story later, the Scripture establishes the significance of this development, so the blessing and guidance of God are important to its success. And God often blesses and guides – and works – through human agents. Not just human agents, but rather humble ones. True, Elkanah seems prosperous and important enough to have two wives, many children, and the means to travel with them. Still, there’s nothing particularly charismatic, nothing special about him that we might expect of the father of the great prophet Samuel, who would end the period of the Judges and begin the story of the monarchy. John C. Holbert points out that the “nondescript” Elkanah was even the great-grandson of “Tohu (Hebrew for ‘waste’).” Elkanah’s words in the story illustrate the ordinariness of his own preoccupations while his wife dreams of a son whose whole life would be dedicated to God.
The son of Hannah and Elkanah, Samuel, is one of those “change agents” that God uses, in this stage of the long story between exodus and exile, to initiate the monarchy that would produce the great king, David. In the two books that bear Samuel’s name, we learn more about the prophet as we read the entire story, but not in our text this week, where we hear that Samuel’s birth, indeed his conception, is remarkable because of a woman, his mother Hannah. After two weeks of hearing the story of Ruth and Naomi, we spend another week seeking – and finding – God at work on the margins of society, where the women of the Bible lived. Like Sarah before her and Elizabeth much later, Hannah is “barren,” putting her, in a patriarchal society, even more at the mercy of a man. However, like Rachel before her, Hannah also seems to be the better-loved wife. She has husband’s Elkanah’s love in spite of her inability to produce a child, which is her primary function and means to honor in that culture. (We certainly have heard this story before, about the barren wife in a patriarchal society who longs to produce an heir.)
Elkanah’s profession of love for Hannah just for her own self sounds remarkably modern, and is perhaps a glimpse of what marriage is, at its best, in any culture or time. Or could it be, as several writers observe, that his response to Hannah’s suffering exhibits insensitivity, or worse, self-absorption? Does Elkanah’s question about his being worth more than ten sons sound, as Martin Copenhaver suggests, like the well-intentioned but often hurtful advice to “count your blessings” when someone is suffering from loss and grief? Presumably, we don’t need to say very much about “sons,” rather than “sons and daughters,” as a standard of happiness, but in any case Elkanah’s self-esteem is in great shape, if he thinks he’s worth more than ten sons to his wife. Jo Ann Hackett points out the “easy-for-you-to-say” nature of Elkanah’s words of comfort, since he already had plenty of sons and daughters by Peninnah “to remember and honor him.” It makes his response sound as if the world is organized around him; we wouldn’t be likely to call Elkanah…