1 Samuel 3:1-21
Speak, for your servant hears
The word of the LORD is rare in those days. A boy who does not yet know the LORD is called four times, and the first thing he is asked to do is tell Eli everything.
People of the Bible
Samuel
The last judge and the first kingmaker, who told the nation exactly what a king would cost and then gave them one.
Samuel grows up in the house at Shiloh wearing a little coat his mother makes for him a size larger every year. He is called in the night before he knows what the voice is, and the first message he is given is a judgment on the man who raised him. He judges Israel on a circuit for the rest of his life. When the elders ask for a king like the other nations, he takes it personally and is told it is not him they have rejected. So he warns them in detail, and then anoints Saul, and later anoints a boy nobody had bothered to call in from the sheep.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Samuel
- 01
- 02
1 Samuel 7:3-17
Hitherto the LORD has helped us
He gathers the nation at Mizpah, they pour out water and fast, and the Philistines attack during the sacrifice. He sets up a stone afterwards and names it for how far they have come.
- 03
1 Samuel 8:1-22
Give us a king
His own sons take bribes, and the elders use it as the reason. He lays out what a king will take: sons, daughters, fields, a tenth, and yourselves. They say they want one anyway.
- 04
1 Samuel 15:10-35
To obey is better than sacrifice
Saul spares the best of the livestock and says it was for sacrifice. Samuel tears him off at the torn hem of a robe and never sees him again, and mourns for him.
- 05
1 Samuel 16:1-13
The LORD looks on the heart
Seven sons pass in front of him and he is wrong about the first one out loud. The eighth has to be sent for, and nobody sits down until he arrives.
Why it matters
Samuel stands at the hinge of the Old Testament. Everything before him is judges, everything after is kings, and he is the one who is asked to dismantle his own office and does it. He is also the first of the prophets in the sense the rest of the book means: a man whose words are said not to fall to the ground. His two great sentences shape what follows. To obey is better than sacrifice. And, man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.
20 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
