Ep. 73. 1 Samuel 3-4 | Samuel and The Philistines
EPISODE 73
SAMUEL AND THE PHILISTINES: 1 SAMUEL 3-4
I'm going to jump straight to chapter 4 today. The first verse says Israel went to camp at Ebenezer. It is helpful to know that it has not been named "Ebenezer" yet. It will not receive that name until chapter seven, so why is it called Ebenezer in chapters four and five? The answer is quite simple; by the time the book of Samuel was being compiled, the place had already been named "Ebenezer." It doesn't matter what its former name was if people already knew it as Ebenezer. The same thing happens in Genesis. Bethel is a famous city mentioned several times prior to Genesis 28 but isn't named Bethel until chapter 28. How can this be? Again, Moses, who is considered the author of Genesis, was giving the history of the Hebrews with names they were familiar with. My grandmother used to own some land in Canada right along the Red Deer River. She named the property Pourquoi, meaning "why." But prior to my grandmother and her siblings' ownership, the land was a logging camp complete with an old dilapidated logger's cabin. If I were to write a book about the land for my family, I would call the land Pourquoi even when telling stories about the land hundreds of years before it received that moniker. I would do this so they could know immediately what place I was talking about. These things happen often in the Bible and shouldn't unseat us. But perhaps it's not even something that really matters to us at all, and now I've droned on about minor details. Let's revisit God's curse on Eli.
Yesterday, we saw that God had declared the end of the line of Eli, and today, it appears we have seen that, with the exception of his grandson, Ichabod, who was born after his father's death and whose birth caused the death of his mother. This Ichabod appears to be the one "spared to weep his eyes out." But again, details matter.
Though the text does not mention it here, Ichabod had an older brother. We meet Ichabod's older brother in 1 Samuel 14. Of course, we know that the brother has to be older because both of Ichabod's parents died on the day he was born. In fact, the line of Eli served as priests through the reigns of Saul and David and will finally be brought to an end during the reign of King Solomon.
King Saul will kill all but one of the priests, but I'll save that story for a few days from now. The remaining priest will escape to David, the sole survivor of his family. Solomon will remove him from being a priest and thus fulfill the words God spoke to Eli some 80 to 100 years earlier. The difficulty we have as readers is we move from page to page and chapter to chapter without asking questions. We bury Eli and his sons in 1 Samuel 4, having completely forgotten about Ichabod ten chapters later, completely missing the connection. By the time we get to Saul's slaughter of the priests another eight chapters later, we are so engrossed in the story of Saul and David that Eli doesn't even figure in at all. When we finally get to 1 Kings 2, we read over the line about God fulfilling his word against Eli, and it doesn't even stir up a memory from 52 chapters earlier. After all, for most of us, that was weeks ago in our daily reading, and it really was just three or four random verses scattered throughout a thousand verses or so.
I can't overstate the importance of the details. Remember how Moses' story becomes clearer when we find him in Acts and Hebrews? Please don't feel you have to dig for all the details on your own. You don't have to show your work. But at least find some resources: books, podcasts, videos, and people who can help bring some of the details to focus. It is our hope that Simpler Bible is doing that for you, and we still have a lot to go.
ADDITIONAL READING: 1 Samuel 22:16-23; 2 Samuel 17; 2 Samuel 20:25; 1 Kings 1:7,19; 1 Kings 2:26-27; Exodus 9:16; 2 Kings 21:12; Jeremiah 19:3; Habakkuk 1:5
