in the animal pits, there were the near constant screams of frightened creatures having their unwilling throats slit for offering to YHWH—birds for the poor and destitute, sheep for the less poor and especially desperate, and for the rich and the nearly hopeless even a cow, though cattle were rare and hard to keep alive in the lean years of bad pasturage.
All these beasts shed their blood for the God, day after day and week after week, until the ground was red with it, and the pits for slaughter were full of rotting corpses with flesh-picked bones sticking out of the ashes. One of Samuel’s earliest tasks in the temple compound was to shoo away the multitudes of carrion birds that gathered thick as flies around that pit, all too ready to gorge on carcasses either before sacrifice or after. The birds were not picky. Their bloody beaks were not attuned to the technicalities of divine sacrifice; they swooped and cried and dove on the pit despite the five-year-old boy’s valiant attempts to scare them off into the sky. Some always managed to get through Samuel’s cries and screams, accompanied by wild wavings of a stick, said by Eli to have been the very rod of Moses that he used to part the waters of the Sea of Reeds. What would the great lawgiver have thought to see his wondrous rod reduced to a defense against birds, not to mention to witness its wooden sides marked increasingly with bird leavings and sacrificial ashes?
As Samuel grew older, his work in the temple changed as his understanding of the workings of YHWH matured under the teaching of the priests assigned to the task. He learned primarily the stories of Israel’s past; how the world was created by the mighty YHWH; how humanity was made and given a garden, but how they had disobeyed the command against eating the fruit of a certain tree and had been expelled from the garden; how the first murder in history was committed by a brother against his own brother; how the flood had come to wash the evil away, but how that evil persisted even after the waters had dried up; how Abram became Abraham and Sarai, his wife, became Sarah; how they had given birth to a boy called “laughter” (Isaac) when they were far too old; how Laughter had had twin sons, one foolish and the other clever; how the clever one (Jacob) had had many children, one of whom (Joseph) had through marvelous adventures become a powerful man in Egypt and had led Israel there; how they had been enslaved by cruel pharaohs for a very long time; how the great Moses had led them forth from there with the power of YHWH, had given to them the law by which they would live, had led them to the very edge of the land of promise; how he had died before entering the land, after handing the leadership of the people to Joshua; how they had now lived in that land for many years, close to the former owners of the land in uneasy alliances and tentative neighborliness; how the sea-faring Philistines had appeared from the west to populate the coastlands and to threaten again and again those living in the central mountains of the promised land.
The priests were an insulated group of men, little familiar with the world outside of the temple and its restricted compound, but they knew of the Philistines, of their iron chariots and swords, of their designs on the fertile pasturelands of the central highlands. The priests taught that vigilance was always needed to guard against Philistine raids and Philistine deceptions and especially Philistine religious beliefs in the god, Dagon, a god of grain who was of course no god at all in the eyes of the priests. Samuel heard daily that the only God was YHWH, the mountain monarch who had chosen and saved Israel time and again, and who would deal with these blasphemous heathen in YHWH’s good time. By the time of his adulthood, when he had seen fourteen summers, Samuel had no doubt that YHWH was the only God in the universe, and that other gods were useless, mute, powerless, and finally did not exist at all.
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
