Samuel

Samuel, also spelled Shemuel (the shorter English form comes through Greek and Latin), is the prophet and judge of 1 Samuel who anoints Israel's first two kings and whom later Scripture remembers as one of the great intercessors before God. The text introduces him as the child of Hannah, and her prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1–10 sets the tone for his whole career: "My heart exults in Yahweh… I rejoice in your salvation" (1 Samuel 2:1), the God who "makes poor and makes rich… raises up the poor out of the dust" (1 Samuel 2:7–8) and who "will give strength to his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed" (1 Samuel 2:10). That closing line about a king and an anointed one is read by many interpreters as a deliberate framing of the monarchy Samuel will later establish.

As a figure in the narrative, Samuel is above all the one through whom Yahweh speaks and acts. He calls the whole house of Israel to repentance — "If you are returning to Yahweh with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you" (1 Samuel 7:3) — and the narrative ties deliverance from the Philistines to that return. His rebuke of Saul in 1 Samuel 15:22 gives the book one of its most quoted lines: "to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams." He is then sent by God to Bethlehem to anoint a replacement king (1 Samuel 16:1), is corrected in his assessment of Jesse's sons — "man looks at the outward appearance, but Yahweh looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7) — and anoints David, after which "Yahweh's Spirit came mightily on David from that day forward" (1 Samuel 16:13). He returns to Ramah, which the narrative treats as his home base.

His later reputation is captured in Jeremiah 15:1, where God says, "Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind would not turn toward this people." Historically, this shows that by the time of Jeremiah, Samuel was remembered alongside Moses as a paradigmatic intercessor whose standing before God was exceptional — and the point of the verse is that even such standing would not avert the judgment announced.

The traditions read him somewhat differently. Jewish tradition remembers Samuel chiefly as a prophet and reads Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel 2 as a liturgical text appointed for Rosh Hashanah. Christian tradition has often treated him as a prophet who prefigures Christ in his anointing of kings and as a model of intercession, and many Christian readers have long heard Hannah's prayer echoed in Mary's Magnificat; within Christianity, some traditions stress his priestly and sacrificial activity (as at 1 Samuel 15:22), while others stress his prophetic and judicial role. Interpreters also differ over whether his anointing of kings is best read as cooperation with God's plan or as a concession to Israel's demand; the text supports elements of both readings, and no single tradition's reading should be treated as the plainly obvious one.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.