Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
This week millions of Christians will be giving special study to Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel. She knew exquisite sorrow; a first wife of Elkanah and truly loved by him, she was childless and deeply pained by his taking a second wife, Peninnah, in order for him to have children. It was a solemn duty for every Israelite man to have some male progeny, otherwise there was an idea that his name would somehow be blotted out of the book of life.
Hannah was the "fall guy" in this drama. For a wife not to be able to get pregnant was tantamount to a slap in the face from God. Hannah bore this disgrace humbly, which was sorrow enough for any woman to endure; but now with fecund Peninnah mocking her and strutting over her even at the dinner table with taunts and ridicule, it became more than Hannah could bear.
Husband Elkanah tried to comfort her with his love, but did not know how to comfort her with God's love; so Hannah took a desperate step. She challenged God with a vow: if He would give her what every Israelite wife yearns for, a male child, she would give him back to the Lord. For any mother this was a prodigious, life-long sacrifice to make!
It happened; and in her joy she wrote her magnificent poem of triumph over Peninah who to her represented the taunts of Satan (1 Sam. 2:1-10).
Another woman in the Bible story later appropriated Hannah's poem of gratitude over humiliation reversed, and re-wrote it as her "Magnificat" in Luke 1:46-55, expressing her burst of joy over the reversal of what had been her particular "low estate" (tapeinosin, Greek). The human mother of our Savior was herself already "acquainted with grief." Jesus is the divine Son of God; but He is also in a very intimate sense "the Son of man." Close to you.
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: August 24, 2007.Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
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