A Little Robe Each Year

Every year the family went up to Shiloh, and every year the meat was handed out the same way.

Elkanah had two wives. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none. When the sacrifice was made, he would give portions to Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. Then he turned to Hannah. But to Hannah he would give a double portion, for he loved her even though the LORD had closed her womb.

Two plates for Hannah. One for each of the others. Everybody at that meal could count.

The text doesn’t pretend the house was peaceful. Because the LORD had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival would provoke her viciously to taunt her. And this went on year after year. The worst of it came on the trip itself. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the LORD, her rival taunted her until she wept and would not eat.

The book calls Peninnah her rival and leaves it there. It doesn’t give her side, and it’s worth noticing what her side might have been. She was the wife with the children, watching her husband hand the double portion to someone else, year after year. The text doesn’t say that’s why. It’s only fair to remember she lived in that house too.

Elkanah tried. “Hannah, why are you crying?” her husband Elkanah asked. “Why won’t you eat? Why is your heart so grieved? Am I not better to you than ten sons?” He meant it kindly. He just couldn’t be the thing she was waiting for, and nobody could talk her out of waiting for it.

So after the meal, Hannah stood up.

In her bitter distress, Hannah prayed to the LORD and wept with many tears. She made a vow. If she were given a son, she would give him back. Then I will dedicate him to the LORD all the days of his life.

Eli the priest was sitting by the doorpost, and he watched her. Hannah was praying in her heart, and though her lips were moving, her voice could not be heard. So Eli thought she was drunk.

He told her to put away her wine. It’s an awful thing to say to a woman in the middle of the worst prayer of her life, and she answered him plainly. No, my lord. I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have not had any wine or strong drink, but I have poured out my soul before the LORD.

Eli got it wrong, and then he did something to his credit. He heard her, and he changed his answer on the spot. Go in peace, he said, and may the God of Israel grant the petition you have asked of Him.

Centuries later the rabbis took this scene as the pattern for how a person ought to pray: in the heart, lips moving, voice not heard. A woman a priest mistook for drunk became the model.

And then the text says something small. Then she went on her way, and she began to eat, and her face was no longer downcast. Nothing had changed yet. She had no child. She had a priest’s blessing and a prayer she’d finally said out loud, or almost out loud. She ate anyway.

In time she had a son. She named him Samuel, saying, “Because I have asked for him from the LORD.”

The next year, when the family went up to Shiloh, Hannah stayed home. After the boy is weaned, she said, I will take him to appear before the LORD and to stay there permanently. Elkanah told her to do what she thought best. So Hannah stayed and nursed her son until she had weaned him.

The text doesn’t say how long that was, or what those years were like for her. It only says she stayed. Every day of them she knew how they would end, because she had promised it herself.

Then she took him. A bull, flour, a skin of wine, and the boy. Though the boy was still young, she brought him to the house of the LORD at Shiloh. She found Eli and reminded him who she was. I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the LORD. I prayed for this boy, and since the LORD has granted me what I asked of Him, I now dedicate the boy to the LORD.

The King James has a word for it there that the newer translations don’t keep. I have lent him to the LORD. Lent. Not lost, not given away for good. The Hebrew word is the same one in his name, the asking word. She asked for him, and she gave him back on the same terms.

Then Elkanah went home to Ramah, but the boy began ministering to the LORD before Eli the priest.

She went home without him.

Most people stop there. The vow kept, the boy in the temple, the song she sang. The book keeps going, and a few verses later it gives one sentence about what she did with the rest of her love.

Now Samuel was ministering before the LORD, a boy wearing a linen ephod. Each year his mother would make him a little robe and bring it to him when she went with her husband to offer the annual sacrifice.

Each year. She made it. She brought it.

She didn’t come up to Shiloh to take him back. She didn’t come to tell him how to do his work or remind him what he owed her. She came once a year, on the trip the family was making anyway, and she brought something she’d made with her own hands to keep him covered.

Here the chapter reads between the lines, and you can decide if it holds. She made that robe at home, in Ramah, without him there. She had to guess how much he’d grown. Every year she cut it a little bigger than the last one, for a boy she hadn’t seen since the year before. The text doesn’t say any of that. It only says a little robe, every year. But anybody who has ever bought clothes for a child who lives somewhere else knows what that guessing is like.

That was the whole of it. A robe, once a year, no conditions. It went to a boy who belonged to somebody else’s work now, in a house she didn’t run.

Then the text gives her the rest of her life. And Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife, saying, “May the LORD give you children by this woman in place of the one she dedicated to the LORD.” The old priest who had once called her drunk was now blessing her every year. So the LORD attended to Hannah, and she conceived and gave birth to three sons and two daughters. Meanwhile, the boy Samuel grew up in the presence of the LORD.

Meanwhile. Two lives going on at once, in two towns, with a robe going back and forth between them once a year.

Letting go and keeping on loving turn out to be the same act. She didn’t stop being his mother when she left him at Shiloh. She just stopped being the one who decided what happened next. The robe was how she kept on.

Where this meets your week

When the gatherings are the hard part. For Hannah it was the trip to Shiloh, the same meal every year, the portions handed out where everyone could count. Holidays can be like that, a table where somebody’s chair is empty and everyone’s careful not to look at it. She went anyway, and one year she got up from the table and said the true thing in private. If a gathering is coming, plan five minutes alone in it: a walk to the car, a back porch. Say the honest sentence there, so you can sit back down and eat.

When someone gets you wrong. Eli looked at her pain and saw something else. Maybe someone has looked at the way you’re waiting and called it something it isn’t: too much, too little, foolish. Hannah didn’t argue for long. She said what was true in two plain sentences and let it stand. Write your two sentences down this week, so you have them ready if it happens again.

When you’ve already let go, and it still hurts. Hannah walked back to Ramah with her husband and without her son. She had chosen it, and choosing didn’t make the road shorter. If the one you’re waiting for is living a life you didn’t pick for them, in a place you don’t run, you’re allowed to grieve and still mean the letting go. Mark a day on the calendar, months from now, as your day to send something. Then go home and live the meanwhile.

When you don’t know what they need anymore. She had to guess his size. You may not know what the one you’re waiting for likes now, what they wear, what they’d want. Guess anyway. A little big is fine. The point of the robe was never the fit.

Make the year’s small robe.

One gift. Something you make, or pick out with care, for the one you’re waiting for. Something that keeps them covered in some small way: a scarf, a pair of good socks, a book you think they’d like. No card that says what you hope for them. No message tucked inside. Nothing in it they’d have to answer.

Send it, or bring it if you’re welcome to, and then go home. Do it again next year.

The verse doesn’t end with the robe. It ends with the trip home, every year, the same way.

Then they would go home.