For Teaching

1 Samuel 3: What the Passage Says

62 claims across 21 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What 1 Samuel 3 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Samuel is a boy serving the LORD under Eli at Shiloh, at a time when messages and visions from the LORD were rare. Three times a voice calls him in the night and he runs to Eli, until Eli realizes it is the LORD and tells him how to answer. The LORD tells Samuel that the judgment already spoken against Eli's family will be carried out in full, and that no sacrifice or offering will ever remove their guilt. Samuel repeats it all to Eli, and as he grows, all Israel comes to recognize him as a prophet of the LORD.

Claim by Claim

3:1
- The boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD in Eli's presence.
- In those days the word of the LORD was rare.
- In those days vision was not breaking forth widely.
3:2
- At that time Eli was lying down in his place.
- Eli's eyes had begun to grow dim.
- Eli was unable to see.
3:3
- The lamp of God had not yet gone out.
- Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD.
- The ark of God was in that place.
3:4
- The LORD called to Samuel.
- Samuel answered, 'Here am I.'
3:5
- Samuel ran to Eli.
- Samuel said, 'Here am I, for you called me.'
- Eli said, 'I did not call.'
- Eli told him to go back and lie down.
- Samuel went and lay down.
3:6
- The LORD called Samuel again.
- Samuel got up and went to Eli.
- Samuel said, 'Here am I, for you called me.'
- Eli said, 'I did not call, my son.'
- Eli told him to go back and lie down.
3:7
- Samuel did not yet know the LORD.
- The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to Samuel.
3:8
- The LORD called Samuel a third time.
- Samuel got up and went to Eli.
- Samuel said, 'Here am I, for you called me.'
- Eli understood that it was the LORD who was calling the boy.
3:9
- Eli told Samuel to go and lie down.
- Eli said that if he calls you, you are to say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant hears.'
- Samuel went and lay down in his place.
3:10
- The LORD came and stood there.
- The LORD called as at the previous times, 'Samuel, Samuel.'
- Samuel said, 'Speak, for your servant hears.'
3:11
- The LORD said to Samuel that he was about to do a thing in Israel.
- The LORD said that both ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.
3:12
- The LORD said that on that day he will carry out against Eli everything he spoke concerning Eli's house.
- The LORD said he will do it from beginning to end.
3:13
- The LORD said he had told Eli that he would judge Eli's house forever.
- The judgment is for the iniquity that Eli knew about.
- Eli's sons were bringing a curse upon themselves.
- Eli did not restrain his sons.
3:14
- The LORD said he had sworn concerning the house of Eli.
- The LORD swore that the iniquity of Eli's house would never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.
3:15
- Samuel lay down until the morning.
- Samuel opened the doors of the house of the LORD.
- Samuel was afraid to tell Eli the vision.
3:16
- Eli called Samuel.
- Eli said, 'Samuel, my son.'
- Samuel answered, 'Here am I.'
3:17
- Eli asked what the LORD had said to Samuel.
- Eli asked Samuel not to hide it from him.
- Eli said, 'May God do so to you and more also, if you hide anything from me of all that he said to you.'
3:18
- Samuel told Eli all the words.
- Samuel hid nothing from Eli.
- Eli said, 'It is the LORD.'
- Eli said, 'Let him do what is good in his eyes.'
3:19
- Samuel grew up.
- The LORD was with Samuel.
- The LORD let none of Samuel's words fall to the ground.
3:20
- All Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was confirmed as a prophet of the LORD.
3:21
- The LORD appeared again in Shiloh.
- The LORD revealed himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the LORD.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

3:1: Eli was the priest in charge of Israel's sanctuary at Shiloh, and Samuel was a boy left there to serve after his mother Hannah dedicated him (chapters 1–2). "Vision" here does not mean eyesight but the recognized way a message from God reached a prophet, something seen or heard in a waking or sleeping state and then reported. The King James "precious" carries its older sense of scarce and costly, not treasured.
3:2: "Wax" is an old English verb meaning to grow or become, so "wax dim" means his eyesight was steadily getting worse. Eli is a very old man at this point.
3:3: The "lamp of God" was the lampstand inside the sanctuary, kept burning through the night; its still being lit places the scene in the small hours before dawn. The "temple" at this date was not Solomon's stone building, which was centuries away, but the tent shrine and its associated structures at Shiloh. The ark was the gold-covered wooden chest holding the tablets of the covenant, the most sacred object Israel possessed, kept in the innermost room; sleeping near it means Samuel slept within the sanctuary precinct.
3:4: "Here am I" is not information about where Samuel is standing. It is the ordinary Hebrew way of answering when someone calls your name, meaning roughly "yes, I'm listening, ready when you are."
3:7: "Did not yet know the LORD" is not a comment on Samuel's piety: he had served at the sanctuary since childhood. In this idiom, to "know" someone is to have direct personal dealings with them; Samuel had not yet had God speak to him, so he did not recognize the voice.
3:9: "Your servant is listening" uses the ordinary word for a household slave or attendant answering a master. In Hebrew, hearing and obeying are the same verb: the reply offers not just attention but compliance.
3:11: Ears tingling, or ringing, was a stock Hebrew expression for news so shocking it stuns the hearer. It recurs at 2 Kings 21:12 and Jeremiah 19:3, each time introducing a disaster.
3:12: This points back to chapter 2, where an unnamed prophet warned Eli that his family would lose the priesthood. "His house" means his household and his descendants, the family line, not a building.
3:13: The Hebrew of this line is disputed. The traditional written text says Eli's sons "brought a curse on themselves" or "made themselves contemptible," but an ancient Jewish tradition records that scribes altered an original "cursed God" here out of reverence, and the oldest Greek translation supports that reading. Modern versions therefore differ: some say the sons blasphemed God, others that they disgraced themselves. Their offenses are described in chapter 2: seizing meat from worshipers' sacrifices and sleeping with women serving at the sanctuary.
3:14: Under Israel's sacrificial system, guilt could normally be dealt with by bringing an animal or a grain offering to the sanctuary. The force of this oath is that the usual remedy is closed off to Eli's family, the offense stands outside what the ritual system can settle.
3:15: Opening the sanctuary doors at daybreak was one of the routine duties of those attached to the shrine; the detail marks Samuel going about an ordinary morning task while carrying the message.
3:17: "May God do so to you, and more also" was a standard oath formula. The speaker deliberately left the punishment unnamed (the vagueness was part of its force) while calling down on the other person whatever God saw fit if they broke the demand.
3:18: "Every whit" means every bit, every last detail.
3:19: "Did let none of his words fall to the ground" is an image of something dropped and lost, or of an arrow falling short of its target. Nothing Samuel said failed to come true, and in Israel that was the accepted test of a genuine prophet.
3:20: "From Dan to Beersheba" was the set phrase for the whole of Israel, naming the northernmost and southernmost settlements much as an English speaker might say "from coast to coast."
3:21: Shiloh was a town in the hill country of Ephraim, about twenty miles north of Jerusalem. In this period it held the tent sanctuary and the ark, making it the central place of worship for the tribes before Jerusalem took that role.

Read 1 Samuel 3