What would you do if God answered your most desperate prayer?
The miracle baby has been born: Samuel, the prophet who would unite the scattered tribes of Israel under their first king—but at a cost.
In this story, though, Samuel is just a little boy whose mother never gave up hope that somehow, eventually, he would be born. In the last episode, near the end of hope, she made a promise, and in our story today, she fulfills that promise.
This is Part 2 in the animated Bible series, The Saga of Samuel, telling the story of the Last Judge of Israel.
In this animated Bible story from 1 Samuel 1:21–2:11, discover a mother’s faith, a fulfilled promise, and a prayer that echoes through history.
Watch as young Samuel is brought to the Tabernacle in Shiloh, setting the stage for his life of prophetic service — and listen as Hannah leads the congregation in a celebration of God’s power, justice, and grace.
*AI Disclosure: This video uses AI-generated visuals, animations, and background music to enhance storytelling. Hannah’s Song uses AI generated music performed by an AI-generated voice. The lyrics are drawn from the KJV translation of Bible and modernized by a human scholar trained in biblical Hebrew and Greek. All theological content and creative direction are human. All scripts, narration (apart from the song), and biblical teaching are fully written, voiced, and theologically guided by a human author with advanced degrees in Christian education and early Christian theology. AI tools were used solely to assist in visual and audio production.
The miracle baby has been born!
Samuel, Hannah’s long awaited son, is one of many such babies in the Old Testament. Their miraculous births highlight, again and again, the vital role played by women in the history of God’s chosen people.
Behind almost every male “hero” in the bible, we first encounter story of a woman who tried, prayed, argued, and fought for her child. Over and over again the biblical witness is clear: there is no hero without the mother.
The First-Born Son In the Bible
Among the many rules set forth for the Hebrew people to follow, we find this fascinating demand, stated not once, but twice, in two different books in the Law of Moses:
Consecrate to Me all the firstborn, whatever opens the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and beast; it is Mine.
~ Exodus 13:2 NKJV (also Numbers 3:12, 18:15)
This was not some strange, fringe custom, but a fundamental practice in ancient Israel so important it was apparently still common, required practice in Jewish families two thousand years after Moses, when Jesus’s parents from him to the temple to be “consecrated to the Lord.”
In his description of Jesus’s dedication, the Gospel of Luke clarifies the custom for non-Jewish readers, stating:
Every male who opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.
This was likely always the case, through the Old Testament does not specify gender… exactly. Likely the custom always meant that every first-born male child was specially dedicated to God
The phrasing of these passages, though, intrigues me. Not the part about only male children counting as “first born…” That’s just how the ancient world was, and to study history, you have to get over it.
(I, by the way, am a “first-born” daughter…)
What intrigues me is the specific mention of “the womb.”
The phrasing suggests that one of the most important ancient Hebrew rituals referred specifically to the first-born male child of every woman, and not necessarily of any man. It highlights not just the special place occupied in ancient families by the “first-born” son, but also the significance of the mother’s role in ancient Israel.
The Mother’s Son
In Hannah’s story, we see the mother placed center stage, while the father is hardly present at all. He’s not an absentee father, or anything like that. The original storyteller just doesn’t seem to consider Elkanah all that… important.
Not to the story’s plot, anyway.
Here, as in so many other Old Testament stories, we see that women were neither relegated to the sidelines, nor held under a husband’s totalitarian control in ancient Israel. Women had great influence in their families, and acted on their own free will, according to what they deemed best.
Let’s just review, shall we?
In the first two chapters of Samuel:
- Hannah alone makes her covenant with God at Shiloh.
- Hannah’s husband considers himself just as bound to her oath as she is.
- Hannah decides what is best for her son.
- Hannah determines how and when she will fulfill her promise.
- Discussing Samuel’s future, Hannah asks no permission, but tells her husband: “This is what I am going to do,” (1 Samuel 1:22).
Elkanah, Hannah’s husband, has other children with his other wife, Peninnah (Find my brief thoughts on the reality of biblical polygamy here). But Hannah’s first-born son is still “consecrated,” dedicated, set aside as especially sacred to God – like other first-born sons of their mothers.
Samuel, though, is not just dedicated to God like other first-born sons. His is an even more special dedication. Samuel is actually left in the Tabernacle with the priests.
Lingering Shadows
In horrid reality, the ritual of dedicating the first-born son to God probably came from an actual, more ancient practice of human sacrifice. Once upon a time, women in some culture not so far removed from ancient Israel probably did literally sacrifice their firstborn sons to some god…
The very phrasing used to describe the practice of dedication in Exodus and, especially, Numbers suggests this.
Israel’s reinvention of this more ancient sacrifice ritual, though, highlights what we already know from Genesis 22. In this story, Abraham almost—but does NOT—sacrifice his own miracle baby, Isaac.
(Isaac who, by the way, was not Abraham’s first-born son. Isaac’s significance—like Samuel’s—came from him being the first-born son of his mother, Sarah, not of his father.)
To God and to the ancient Hebrew people, children were precious. And all human sacrifice was absolutely forbidden.
The shadow, though, of actual human sacrifice lurking behind the ritual of first-born dedication, brings the ritual’s true significance into focus. The ritual of dedication was more than a cute naming ceremony or party thrown to celebrate the birth of a child. Numbers 18:15 speaks of parents “redeeming” their first-born sons by offering a special dedication sacrifice. The language suggests an imprint of real human sacrifice lingered in the ancient Hebrew mind—perhaps because the reasoning behind it does ring true.
The reasoning is this: All things belong first to God, anyway.
The Redeemed
In ancient Hebrew law, the first crops produced by the farmer’s field, and the first animals born in the shepherd’s flock, were also to be offered as a sacrifice to God, unused by humans. The first-born human son was also supposed to be sacrificed to God.
The human child, though, could not be literally sacrificed. That concept was as abhorrent in ancient Israel as it is to us today.
The first-born son, therefore, had to be redeemed.
I think this ritual “need” to redeem the first-born sons, to rather literally buy them back from the sacrificial altar, intensified the material point of all first-fruit ritual sacrifices:
All things belong first to God, anyway.
Humans do not control fate—not even our own. This ancient ritual of redeeming the first-born son out of literal fire serves as a reminder and example that we should all still take seriously. As human beings, we have freewill and must exercise it. Our lives, though, and the lives of our children, belong not only to us, but to so many great and powerful forces beyond us—the greatest of which is God.
In a manner of speaking, we are all the “redeemed sons,” at the mercy of fate, our lives already dedicated by time and chance to this, that, or the other events of history. With God’s help, every day, we awake to reclaim our own freewill, our very selves, once more. With God’s help, every day, we buy our lives back from the altar, to do what good we can in this world.
Samuel, of course, was a literal first-born son, literally redeemed by his mother in a ritual of dedication. But Samuel’s dedication went beyond the ritual. Samuel was left in the Tabernacle, with the priests, according to a deal his mother had made with God.
What’s Really Going on Here?
Is this child abandonment? The question has to be asked.
The answer is simply and definitively: No.
Hopefully, you now have some understanding of the ancient Hebrew attitude toward children—especially toward the first-born male child. By symbolic law, such first-born sons all belonged to God anyway. Their parents saw themselves as buying their own children back in the dedication ritual. Whatever time they had together was a gift, not a right. Nothing was guaranteed.
What I’m describing is a fundamentally different perception of belonging, possession, and parenthood. Such a time and place that would have found no fault in a mother letting her child be raised by priests instead of raising him herself. I doubt it was ever a “normal” thing to do, but Hannah’s friends, family, and neighbors would have seen it as an honorable, righteous thing to do.
And as for the life Hannah was dedicating Samuel to…
Growing up in the temple did not mean that Samuel was training to become a priest. Only a certain bloodline, the Levites, could be priests. Samuel was an Ephraimite, not a Levite.
Instead, Samuel would have been trained as a “temple servant” and scribe. He would likely have received the best education available to his community, becoming one of the privileged few who could read and write and have direct accesses to whatever holy texts existed at that time. His days likely included a bit a of hard work, cleaning and maintaining the Tabernacle grounds. But his life at home with his family would have included the same, if not more.
In other words, dedicated to the temple at a young age, Samuel was entering a life of responsibility, yes… But also of privilege and—to be frank—wealth.
The sacrifice was all Hannah’s. She gave up her child, not to give him up, but to dedicate him to a meaningful and comfortable life in fulfilment of a promise she had made before his birth. She did not know what he would become—the last great leader of Israel before the kings. But she did know he would be cared for, that he would be highly educated, that he would come out of it all as a person of authority, and that he would likely want for nothing.
Cue the Closing Music!
In closing, a word or two must be spent on Hannah’s song, found at the beginning of 1 Samuel 2. I use the words “song” and “prayer” interchangeably when speaking of this passage because it is a prayer that would, in all likelihood, have been sung. Prayers in the ancient world were usually sung or chanted.
AI now allows me to reset these prayers to music, restoring some shadow of what they may once have been. Without AI, this task would be too time consuming to be practical.
Here you can find a music video set to Hannah’s song, using more realistic looked animated images (still AI generated, to be clear). I find it perfect for listening and subliminal memorizing.
In editing Saga of Samuel pt.2, I considered including an abbreviated version of Hannah’s prayer. I found I could not do it. The words and message are just too beautiful.
Hannah’s prayer is, simply put, remarkable for numerous reasons. I’ve written a whole post about it here.
For now…
Hannah’s prayer, it’s full text inclusion in the story, and the fact that it is unapologetically attributed to her shows, once again, the true character and value of women in ancient Israel.
Read the full Hannah’s Song post for details, and know that women in the bible were strong, courageous, leading characters in their own stories, champions of their families, and poignant witnesses to the power and glory of God.
🕊️ Stay tuned to follow my ambition scheme to Reanimate the Bible — one episode at a time!
<== Saga of Samuel: Episode 1 <==
==> Saga of Samuel: Episode 3 ==>
