Commentaria in I Regum (I Samuelis)
21. AND ELCANA HER HUSBAND WENT UP, AND ALL HIS HOUSE (family), TO OFFER TO THE LORD THE SOLEMN SACRIFICE (which on the three solemnities of the year, namely the Pasch, Pentecost and Tabernacles, he was wont to offer; whence the Hebrew has: the sacrifice of the days, that is, the yearly) AND HIS VOW.—Hence it is plain that when his wife Anna made the vow, Elcana her husband also vowed a vow.
—should have uttered his own vow to God for Anna’s fruitfulness and for Samuel about to be born, which he now, the son being obtained and born, wished to pay. For a mother, her husband opposing, cannot vow a son to God, because the son depends more on the father than on the mother, and the husband is the head of the wife and of the whole family. So teach Abulensis here, Question 22, and Sylvester, under the word Religion 10, Question 13. So St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his poem On His Own Life, asserts that he was born by a vow, and given by God to his mother, and that the appearance and name of the son to be born were presented to her when she was with child, and that therefore, being now born, he was at once offered to God by his mother. So St. Nicholas of Tolentino was born by the vow of his parents, made to St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, and from him received the name of Nicholas. So St. Francis of Assisi, by the vows of his parents, obtained a son, St. Francis of Paula, founder of the Order of Minims, and many others like them.
22. I WILL NOT GO TILL THE CHILD BE WEANED.—You will say: Anna here seems not to have kept the law of purification of a woman after childbirth, to be fulfilled on the fortieth day after the birth, Leviticus 12, when parents offered the firstborn to God and redeemed him with five shekels, Exodus 13.
Abulensis answers, Question 37 and following, that the Levites (such as Anna and Elcana were) were not bound by this law, because they were themselves already dedicated and consecrated to God, and because those sacrifices of purification redounded to their benefit; whence they did not redeem their firstborn with five shekels, nor offer the victims prescribed for the rest.
23. AND I BESEECH GOD THAT HE MAY ACCOMPLISH HIS WORD.—Hence it seems that some revelation had been made concerning Samuel, which is not expressed here, as I said of Elcana’s vow. For Scripture is wont to pass over many things which it afterwards suggests and supplies. So Cajetan. R. Nehemias asserts that a voice was heard in Silo: “A boy shall be born, named Samuel, who shall deliver Israel from the hands of the Philistines”; wherefore all mothers then called their sons Samuels; and when Anna also had named her son Samuel, Elcana said: “May the Lord fulfil His word,” namely that by my Samuel He may free Israel from the Philistines. But this smells of a Rabbinical fable, as Abulensis shows at length here. For Anna did not call her son Samuel from the oracle of a voice, but because she had asked him by vow and tears and obtained him from God.
AND GAVE HER SON SUCK,—St. Chrysostom, homily On Samuel: “From that time,” he says, “she regarded the boy not only as a mother but as a thing consecrated to God, and reverenced him. For if those who are about to dedicate to God bowls and cups of gold, after they have received them finished and laid them up at home, by no means look on them as profane vessels, but as sacred to God, and do not dare to touch them rashly and without cause as they do other things; much more this woman,” etc. Especially because Samuel was a type of Christ, and is even called by some Fathers “the New Moses of Israel.” Moreover that mothers ought to nurse their children not with a nurse’s milk but with their own is taught by the example of Sara and Anna by St. Ambrose, book 1 On Abraham, chapter 8; St. Chrysostom, homily 14 on Psalm 20; Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus book 3, chapter 4; for so children become stronger, more like their mothers, and drink in their gifts and virtues by sucking.
24. AND SHE BROUGHT HIM,—now weaned, taken from the milk, which among the Hebrews was done in the third year of age, as is gathered from 2 Machabees 7, 27. So St. Gregory, Chrysostom, Procopius, Theodoret, Abulensis, Cajetan, Hugh, Dionysius. Moreover that the space of three years is suitable for nursing children Galen teaches, and from him Francis Valesius, Sacred Philosophy, chapter 83.
Then, therefore, the infant Samuel, as he is called in verse 24, was offered to God in the temple. Wrongly therefore Lyranus judges that Samuel was offered to God in his tenth year, others in the seventh, others in the twelfth. So the Blessed Virgin, at three years old, was presented to God in the temple, as the Fathers teach whom our Canisius cites, book 1 On Mary, chapter 12, and Christopher de Castro in the History of the Mother of God, chapter 3. Hear St. Chrysostom, homily On Samuel: “Torn from the breast,” he says. And below: “From earliest boyhood he came straight from his mother’s breast to the spiritual breast.” And St. Jerome to Ruth: “What is so pious as to guard a holy son for a holy mother? Anna bore Samuel not for herself but for the tabernacle.” St. Augustine on Psalm 98: “Samuel was born and was with his mother in the time of milk; as soon as she weaned him, she gave him to the temple, that there he might grow, there be strengthened in the Spirit, there serve God.”
Hence St. Gregory Nazianzen, oration 40, teaches by the example of Anna that mothers ought to consecrate their children to God from infancy. Hear St. Jerome, epistle 7 to Laeta, On the Education of a Daughter: “Samuel is nourished in the temple, John is prepared in the wilderness; the one is venerable with sacred hair, drinks not wine and strong drink; while yet a little child he converses with the Lord. The other flees the cities; he is girt with a leathern belt, is fed on locusts and wild honey, and, as a type of the penance to be preached, is clothed in the spoils of a most twisting animal. So is to be trained the soul which is to be the temple of God. Let her learn to hear nothing else, to speak nothing, but what pertains to the fear of God. Let her not understand foul words, let her be ignorant of the songs of the world, let her still tender tongue be steeped in sweet psalms.” And, many things coming between: “Let her be brought up in a monastery, let her be among the choirs of Virgins; let her not learn to swear, let her think lying a sacrilege; let her not know the world, let her live angelically, let her be in the flesh without the flesh; let her think every kind of men like herself.”
So St. Maurus, St. Placid, and other sons of Senators and Princes were handed over by their parents to St. Benedict, that they might be brought up by him in piety and the fear of God. In the monastery of St. Pachomius (as his Life has it) boys were reared so simple that they did not even know their right hand from their left. St. Thomas Aquinas was educated by the monks on Monte Cassino, and so were very many other sons of princes.
Finally St. Paulinus, epistle 10, compares Melania to Anna. Dorotheus more aptly compares to her St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin, who bore not Samuel, but Christ Himself.
AND SHE BROUGHT HIM, etc., WITH THREE CALVES.—So the Hebrew, Chaldee and others. It is strange, therefore, that the Septuagint rendered it in the singular, with a calf of three years. Now “in” means “with,” that is, with three calves, which she would offer to God with her Samuel.
AND THREE BUSHELS OF FLOUR,—in Hebrew, in Epha flour, that is, three in bushels of flour. For the Epha, three-fold, was the tenth part of a gomer or cor, which contained thirty bushels. The Epha was therefore a great bushel, containing three lesser bushels. Let this be the answer to the author of the Questions on the Books of Kings in St. Jerome and Angelomus, who think this place corrupt, and read, with one bushel; the cause of this oblation is given by Blessed Peter Damian, book 6, epistle 31, which in the order of all is 105: “Samuel,” he says, “a little boy, like a tender lamb, with three bushels of flour and a jar of wine, is set, so to speak, on the Lord’s table, when he is dedicated by his parents to the priest Heli and to the temple of God.”
AND THE CHILD WAS YET VERY YOUNG.—In Hebrew, and the child was yet a child, that is, he was a little infant, namely of three years.—... their own, as it were disowning him from their house, to dedicate him to God, that he might serve Him continually in the tabernacle. Hear St. Chrysostom, homily 4 On Anna, doubting whether he ought to admire more the virtue of Anna or of Samuel: “Though boys,” he says, “are wont to be indignant whenever they are driven from the breast, the boy himself did not take it ill to be torn from his mother, but looked to the Lord, who had created his mother; nor did the mother grieve at being parted from the boy, because intervening grace overcame natural affection, and each thought he was living together with the other.”
The same he then illustrates by an apt likeness: “As,” he says, “a vine fixed in one place spreads out its tendrils at length, and the grape hanging at a great distance has commerce with the root; so it befell this woman, who, remaining in the city, stretched out her tendril as far as the temple, and there hung a ripe grape; nor did that distance bring any hindrance, since the charity which is according to God joined the boy to his mother.”
Chrysostom adds, chapter 2, that Anna offered herself also with Samuel to God: for where Samuel was, there was Anna; for Samuel drew with him a mother’s bowels: “While she speaks such things,” he says, “she dedicated herself too with the boy, binding herself to the temple, as it were, by a solid affection of nature. For if where a man’s treasure is, there is his heart also; much more where a woman’s boy is, there will her mind be.”