These beliefs were underscored by the yearly visits of his mother, Hannah, who made sure that his robes always fit and were well cleaned. She had seen the filthy rags worn by Eli and his priests and did not wish for her son to emulate such disgusting models. Also, the priestly garment, the ephod, was tiny, barely covering their manhood. Cold winters in Shiloh made those strips of cloth around the waist absurd, however holy they were purported to be. So each year she herself would sew him a new garment, each year taking careful measurements to be certain of the right fit. When she came to deliver the new robe, she and Samuel would talk late into the night about YHWH and divine things. She would remind him over and over that his very existence was due to her fervent prayers and to YHWH’s joyful answer. There was little doubt in Hannah’s mind that her son was destined for greatness. The manner of his conception and birth, the prayer that she had spoken in the temple the day she left him there, the ways in which he had grown in knowledge and diligence during his years at Shiloh, convinced her that Samuel would soon enough burst the tiny bonds of the poor village and would be known throughout the land. Each year she would assure him of his destiny and each year both of them would pray to YHWH to bring it about.
Hannah had come with the spring, but Samuel began to see that her hair was no longer dark, her gait no longer easy, her back no longer straight. She always asked him first, “Are you eating well enough, my son?” He imagined mothers had asked such a question of their departed children since children first were born to them. And he, as others before him, always replied with a small chuckle, “Well enough, mother, well enough,” though she looked askance at his too small frame, his spindly arms, his greasy hair, uncut to fulfill the vow, the hair of a priest too long near the sacrificial pyre. Finally, in the final year of her coming, he saw she could barely walk, her eyes dim, her face deeply lined. And her first question that last time had been, “Will you bury my withered self when the time comes, my son, in the hallowed way?” His throat had closed however briefly, but he knew that priests were not expected to weep in the face of death, no matter how unwelcome it was. Besides the vow of the Nazirite, made by Hannah herself, forbade Samuel from touching her dead body himself. But he said, “I will be certain that your body is well treated, mother. Do not be afraid.” He added this last, since he had learned from the older priests that such words were to be said to the dying, and Samuel knew that his mother was dying. And not long after her final visit to Shiloh she did. And Samuel made certain that she was well and rightly buried near her home, but not too near her long-time rival Peninnah. He was sure she would be glad of that.
He did wonder about where his mother was now that she no longer saw the light of the rising sun. The usual answer, of course, was Sheol, that shadowy place far below the surface of the soil, somewhere deep in the earth, far away from any living thing. The priests regularly warned the people about Sheol, picturing it as a great maw, ever ready to swallow down the unsuspecting fool who failed to follow the ways of the great YHWH. Yet, every dead one went to Sheol, they said, whether wise or foolish, whether fat or thin or short or tall, whether known for goodness, like his mother, or known for wickedness, like numerous greedy and grasping people living around Shiloh. There was no shortage of greedy fools, so far as Samuel could tell. Did they too go to Sheol? Were they also there with his lovely mother? What did they do there? The priests said they did nothing, that they were shadows, wraiths, ghosts, floating and moving in the place of darkness, darker than the caves of Ein Gedi, more silent than the Salt Sea. Yes, all went to Sheol; the goal was to delay the trip for as long as possible, and Samuel felt no desire to join his mother there. He planned to live a long time, because he knew that YHWH had plans for him that were still to be revealed.
Yet, Samuel, who had imbibed the religious language of Eli and his priests for all this time, and had listened carefully to the words of his mother, had not yet had any personal experience of YHWH to prove to him finally that the God was in fact his God. His need for such an experience was great, because the terrible sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas, had proven as bad as they had been rumored to be. It had long been known that they were not fit to be priests of any kind, let alone high priests in the land, so when Eli reported to Samuel that a messenger from YHWH had come to him to warn him about the appalling actions of his sons, their bribe-taking and sexual immorality, and how he, Eli, had not done enough to restrain them from their foul behaviors, Samuel began to realize when Eli died, he would need to take the role that Eli’s sons were not equipped to take. But he wanted a sign. The stories of Israel were important and exciting and regularly filled his mind, but he needed an experience of his own. He needed his own story with YHWH.
But with the aging and increasingly incompetent Eli, experiences of YHWH were very rare, if they existed at all. His two nauseating sons and his own now complete blindness had led the priest to despair and profound depression. He sat day after day on his seat by the doorpost of the temple, sometimes failing to move for hours at a time, forgetting to eat, lost in a trance of prayer or confusion; it was hard to tell which. Each evening Samuel would lead the pathetic man to his room behind the temple and help him get into his filthy bed. However often Samuel cleaned the room and the bed, both remained unspeakably rank, with small white insects scurrying in and under the bedclothes and the acrid smells of rotting flesh permeating the fetid air. Eli saw and felt and smelled none of it; he just collapsed into the bed and stared unseeing into a place only he seemed to know.
After getting him settled one night, which was just like so many other nights, Samuel went out to tend the temple light that by custom was never to be allowed to go out. The people were convinced that the light somehow represented the presence of God, and if it ever were extinguished God would disappear with it. So Samuel’s job, one of many, was to be certain that the light was always seen. As he approached the lamp, a small poorly made clay vessel, with an uneven point on one end and a loop at the other, by which it was hung on the wall with a peg, he noticed that the light was sputtering more than usual, threatening to go out. He hurried to the vat of olive oil that rested under the lamp and quickly dipped out a ladle of the oil and poured it carefully into the bowl of the lamp. The flame sputtered a bit more and then caught strongly; the light briefly illuminated one of the corners of the dark temple. But after that surge of light, the flame settled back down to its usual dimness, being less the source of light than a source of comfort for the few worshippers who were wandering through the place.
Samuel shooed out the few desperate souls still in the place of God and locked the large wooden door, placing the bar into the slots on either side of the doorframe. At last, he thought, I can finally go to my own bed. Though the room was smaller than Eli’s, at least it was clean and neat, devoid of the nasty bugs and upwind of the rotten animal smells. The room opened right out into the larger temple room. From his bed, Samuel could look directly into that room at the mysterious box of YHWH, the holy Ark of the Covenant. Samuel thought how strange it was that such a fabled object had ended up in this dank and rather pathetic room in a miniscule village in the highlands of Ephraim. Given what was believed about this wooden chest, Samuel thought that it deserved a more splendid context, a brighter, larger temple, with gold curtains, ornate lampstands, huge images of power and splendor all around. It was nothing less than embarrassing to see the holy thing sitting on the dirt floor, shoved without any real ceremony against the back wall of this miserable room, nearly forgotten, usually avoided by worshippers intent on bloody sacrifice at the altar.
The Ark of the Covenant had a colorful, supernatural history. When the people of Israel had escaped from Egypt, led by the hero Moses, they had moved toward the sacred mountain of Sinai where God was said especially to live. At the mountain God had given to Moses the Ten Commandments, incised on two tablets of stone by God’s own fingers. While that gift was being given, at the base of the mountain, Aaron, Moses’ priestly brother, was creating with his own fingers a splendid golden calf as a way to calm the terrified Israelites who had become certain that Moses had abandoned them to the horrors of wilderness. Moses carried the precious tablets down the mountain to offer them to his people, but instead of seeing people anxious to receive the law of God, he witnessed scenes of complete wanton debauchery, as they worshipped their little bull with unspeakable acts. Aaron was nowhere to be seen. When Moses finally found Aaron, and had demanded he explain the monstrous things his eyes beheld, Aaron calmly lied that he had not made the calf at all, but had merely tossed the gold brought to him by the people into the fire, and the calf had magically popped out! Moses was so enraged that he shattered