1 Samuel 1:9-18
How long will you be drunk
He watches her mouth move without sound and reaches the wrong conclusion out loud. When she answers he does not defend himself, he blesses her, and she goes away and her face is no longer sad.
People of the Bible
Eli
Judged Israel for forty years, mistook a praying woman for a drunk, and could not restrain his own sons.
Eli is priest at Shiloh, where the tabernacle stands, and the first thing he does in the book is misread someone. A woman is praying with her lips moving and no sound, and he accuses her of being drunk. When she explains, he blesses her, and the boy she is given grows up sleeping in the same house. His own two sons are taking the meat before it is offered and sleeping with the women at the door, and Eli speaks to them but does not stop them. He is ninety-eight and blind when a runner comes from the battlefield.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Eli
- 01
- 02
1 Samuel 2:12-17, 22-25
Why do you do such things
His sons take the flesh raw and by force. He hears it from everyone and confronts them with a real question, and the text says they did not listen to their father.
- 03
1 Samuel 3:1-18
Speak, for your servant hears
Three times the boy runs to him in the night and three times he sends him back. On the third he works out what is happening and tells him what to say, then makes him repeat the whole message.
- 04
1 Samuel 4:12-18
The seat by the gate
He is sitting watching the road because his heart trembles for the ark. Four pieces of news arrive in one sentence and it is the fourth, the ark taken, that kills him.
Why it matters
Eli is the failure the book opens with, and it is a failure of restraint rather than of belief. He knows what his sons are doing and says so, and the word that comes back is that he honoured them above God. His last act is the best thing about him: told that the ark is captured, he falls backwards and dies, and his daughter in law names her child Ichabod, the glory is departed. What replaces him is a boy who did know how to listen.
5 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
