1 Samuel opens on a barren woman. The book that will give Israel its first kings begins, as the old stories so often do, at a closed womb. Hannah joins Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and the mother of Samson — the wombs God shuts and then opens are the hinges of Israel’s history, and here the child will be the prophet who anoints the kings. “Jehovah had closed her womb” (v5) — the narrator says it twice (vv5, 6), plainly; it is God’s doing, and it is grief.

The pain is domestic and sharp. Elkanah loves Hannah and gives her a double portion, but love does not fill a cradle; and Peninnah, her rival (literally “her adversary,” tsarah), “provoked her grievously,” year after year, until Hannah wept and would not eat. Elkanah’s tender, clumsy question — “am I not better to you than ten sons?” — is kind, and misses the point entirely.

⚠ «Jehovah of hosts» (v3). This is the FIRST appearance in the Bible of the title YHWH Tzeva’ot — “Jehovah of armies/hosts” — the Name that will ring through the prophets and the Psalms. It enters, fittingly, at Shiloh, the sanctuary that housed the ark before Jerusalem, on the lips of a family come to worship. The KJV prints the title in small capitals; the ASV reads “Jehovah of hosts.”

Hannah rises “bitter in soul” (marat nefesh — the same bitterness Naomi named over herself, Ruth 1:20) and prays. Her vow (neder, v11) is a Nazirite dedication: if God gives her a son, she will give him back “all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head” — the lifelong vow of Samson, and now of Samuel (Numbers 6). She asks God to “look on the affliction of your servant and remember me” — the language of the covenant God who “remembered” Rachel and would “remember” his people in Egypt. KJV “if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid.”

She prays at Shiloh, where Eli the priest sits “by the doorpost of the temple of Jehovah” — the Shiloh sanctuary that stood in Ephraim through the whole period of the Judges (Joshua 18:1), before it fell and the ark was captured (ch 4).

One of the tenderest and most quietly damning scenes in the Old Testament. Hannah prays as few in the Bible do — silently, “in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard” — a model of prayer that is between the soul and God alone. And Eli, the priest, the man whose whole office is to discern before God, looks at a praying woman and sees a drunk. It is the first hint of what the next chapters will make plain: the priesthood at Shiloh has grown blind.

Hannah’s dignified answer — “I have poured out my soul before Jehovah… do not regard your servant as a worthless woman” (bat-beliya’al, a ‘daughter of worthlessness’) — corrects the priest without insulting him; and Eli, to his credit, blesses her. She goes away and eats, and “her face was no longer sad” — she has left the grief at the altar before the child is even conceived. Faith, here, is a change of face before it is an answered prayer.

«Jehovah remembered her» (v19) — the covenant verb zakar, the same word that turns the story at Rachel (Genesis 30:22) and at the Exodus (2:24); when God “remembers,” a rescue follows. Hannah conceives and bears a son, and names him Samuel (Shmuel), “because I have asked him of Jehovah.”

⚠ The explanation is a wordplay on sha’al, “to ask” — though the name “Samuel” more likely means “name of God” or “God has heard”; the narrator gives the folk-etymology that fits the story. And the play runs deeper than one name: sha’al (“asked, lent”) is the very root of SAUL (Sha’ul, “the asked-for one”) — so the woman who “asked” for Samuel names, in the same breath, the theme of the whole book: a people who will “ask” for a king. ASV “she called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of Jehovah.”

Hannah keeps the boy until he is weaned (a few years, in that world), then makes the hardest journey of her life: she brings her only, longed-for son to Shiloh and gives him away. The chapter ends on the sha’al wordplay pressed to its limit: “I have LENT him (hishiltihu) to Jehovah; as long as he lives, he is LENT (sha’ul) to Jehovah” — the asked-for child is the given-back child. Her faith is not that she keeps what she prayed for, but that she returns it.

⚠ A textual note (v24): “three bulls” follows the Masoretic Hebrew; the Greek Septuagint and a Dead Sea Scroll read “a three-year-old bull” — one letter’s difference (the singular bull of v25 fits the latter). It is a small first taste of the fact that Samuel’s Hebrew text is one of the most damaged in the Old Testament, where the Scrolls and the Greek often preserve a better reading.

And the song comes next. The chapter that gives Israel a prophet ends with a mother’s empty arms — and the hymn Hannah sings over them (2:1-10), of the God who “raises the poor from the dust” and “brings low and lifts up,” becomes centuries later the template for Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). The barren woman’s answered prayer turns into the Bible’s great song of reversal.