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Old Testament Reading - A child lent to the Lord

^19-20The entire family was up early the next morning and went to the Tabernacle to worship the Lord once more. Then they returned home to Ramah, and when Elkanah slept with Hannah, the Lord remembered her petition; in the process of time, a baby boy was born to her. She named him Samuel (meaning “asked of God”)^a because, as she said, “I asked the Lord for him.”

^21-22The next year Elkanah and Peninnah and her children went on the annual trip to the Tabernacle without Hannah, for she told her husband, “Wait until the baby is weaned, and then I will take him to the Tabernacle and leave him there.”

²³“Well, whatever you think best,” Elkanah agreed. “May the Lord’s will be done.”

So she stayed home until the baby was weaned. ²⁴Then, though he was still so small, they took him to the Tabernacle in Shiloh, along with a three-year-old bull for the sacrifice, and a bushel of flour and some wine. ²⁵ After the sacrifice they took the child to Eli.

²⁶“Sir, do you remember me?” Hannah asked him. “I am the woman who stood here that time praying to the Lord! ²⁷I asked him to give me this child, and he has given me my request; ²⁸and now I am giving him to the Lord for as long as he lives.” So she left him there at the Tabernacle for the Lord to use.

1. This was a play on words. The word Samuel in Hebrew sounds like the word “to ask.”