Hannah prays for a son (1 Sam 1:1-11)

While COVID is raging around the world, so many of us feel powerless to shake the fears, the health concerns, the blues that come from being limited in our social interactions. We may also be powerless to keep our job or find a job, to find a relationship or mend one, to have a child or raise the ones we have well. The book of 1 Samuel that has so much to say about power starts with a powerless woman, who, as a woman and a barren one at that, is very much on the margins. In ancient societies children were seen as a blessing from the gods or God, so a barren woman was twice cursed living as she did with the emotional ache of childlessness and the public stigma of disapproval. Moreover, if her husband died and she had no son, she would become a social pariah without male support.

Hannah knew the bitterness of such a situation. She was probably Elkanah’s first wife (mentioned first in the introduction – 1 Sam 1:2), but her husband may have married a second woman precisely because she was barren. Peninnah took every opportunity to rub salt into her rival’s wound though Hannah had her husband’s love (1 Sam 1:6-7). Still, she was very much alone in her grief, not only because she bore the brunt of childlessness but also because he had children – with another wife – while she had no similar option. His clumsy efforts to console her only showed how little he understood her pain (1 Sam 1:8).

Nevertheless, Elkanah was a devout man who took his family to worship at Shiloh, the shrine where the ark of the covenant was kept (1 Sam 3:3) before the Jerusalem Temple was built. Weekly churchgoers today may not think much of his devotion (church once a year?), but in comparison, the law required males to worship at the later Temple only three times a year (Deut 16:16). Travel was much more cumbersome in those days and people depended on the hospitality of either family in the region or strangers, rather than on paid accommodation. In the degenerate age of the judges, when idolatry was rampant (e.g. Judg 2:11-12; 17:4-5), Elkanah’s commitment to worship the Lord was noteworthy.

However, worshipping God when our heart aches may not be the solace some expect it to be. In everyday life we can bury ourselves in activity to forget our pain, but when we are meant to meet God, we are reminded of the question: what is He doing in our lives? For Hannah, the yearly pilgrimage to Shiloh must have been excruciating pain stirring up all her grief, like Mother’s Day can do for many women. Her response year after year was the same: distress, bitterness, tears and not eating. Then one day a change came, where customary worship and going through the motions was transformed into genuine, heartfelt prayer and wrestling with God. There’s worship that makes things worse, and worship where we seek the Lord and truly engage with Him.

God sometimes places challenges in our lives and puts us into situations of powerlessness. How will we respond? As readers, we know what Hannah could only assume, that the Lord had closed her womb (1 Sam 1:5-6). However, her answer when finally roused out of lethargy is not acquiescence but earnest prayer for a child. I wonder sometimes if we are too quick, at the first sign of difficulty, to assume that something is not God’s will for us, that He does not want to give what our heart longs for. How many single women feel that God does not want them to marry because they do not seem to meet the right man? How many give up on cherished hopes for a calling that seem too hard to contemplate? Yet, God rewards perseverance.[1] The Syrophoenician woman was declined help by Jesus Himself, yet she would not be deterred, and the Lord praised her faith (Matt 15:21-28). He also encouraged persistence in prayer (Matt 7:7-11; Luke 18:1-8). Hannah in her powerlessness turned to the One who had all power to change her life.

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[1] To the question of when perseverance transforms into grasping, I shall return in my next post.

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