Hannah wasn’t the first woman in the Old Testament whom the Lord had made infertile. He had done the same thing to the wives of the three great patriarchs – Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel – as well as to the mother of Samson and the great-grandmother of David.5 In fact, a straight reading of the Old Testament so far suggests that anguish and infertility are often part of the training program God devises to create the kind of women he can use.
You see, unlike Peninnah or Elkanah, Hannah was delivered from her backslidden culture through the abject misery that she endured. It turned her into one of the great praying women of the Old Testament, as she poured out her soul to the Lord in verse 15.
She came to know God in verse 11 as Yahweh Tsabâôth – the Lord of Armies or Lord Almighty – despite the fact that Israel had been overrun by the Philistines and the rest of her fellow Hebrews disregarded him as the weak and outdated deity of yesteryear. It caused her to pray such gritty, persistent, anguished prayers of faith that she became the perfect filament God could use to display his glory to the whole of Israel.
The chronology of the book of Judges suggests that the events described in this chapter took place at roughly the same time that Samson died as a prisoner of the Philistines. The writer wants us to notice the deliberate parallels between the baby Hannah was to conceive and the judge who had just failed.
Samson had been born to a barren woman, had been called to be a Nazarite from his mother’s womb,6 and had been called to lead Israel to freedom from the Philistines but had failed. Samuel would be born to another barren woman, would be a true Nazarite, and would succeed in delivering Israel from the Philistines in chapter 7.
Even their names sounded similar, except that Samuel meant Heard by God and spoke of gratitude for prayers answered in the past and prophesied more answers to prayer in the future.7 If Hannah had not graduated from the Lord’s school of humility by learning lessons through her suffering, she would never have handed her little boy over to Eli to grow up in the Tabernacle without her.8
Because she did so, she became the kind of person God could use.9
