Eli

Eli (Hebrew: עֵלִי, Standard ʻEli Tiberian ʻĒlî ; "Ascent") was, according to the Books of Samuel, the name of a priest of Shiloh, and one of the last Israelite Judges before the rule of kings in ancient Israel.

Biblical narrative

Eli first appears in the biblical narrative at the beginning of the first Book of Samuel. Here, we are told of a man name Elkanah, whose wife Hannah is barren. Year after year Elkanah travels to Shiloh to offer sacrifice God. Eli is apparently retired from his priestly office by this time, for his son, the corrupt Hophni and Phinehas, are the chief priests at Shiloh's Tabernacle.

Hannah prays fervently to God for a child. Eli, who is sitting at the foot of the doorpost in the sanctuary, hears her prayer, and thinks Hannah is drunk. After he is assured by her of her true motivation and sobriety, he blesses her and her prayer for a child. "May the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him," Eli tells her.

Subsequently Hannah has sex with her husband, and she becomes pregnantm giving birth to Samuel. She determined to offer the child to God's service, and when the child weaned, she leaves him in the care of Eli..

The sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, meanwhile, were behaving wickedly. They took for themselves all the prime cuts of meat from the sacrifices offered through them, but worse, they were having sex with the women who served at the sanctuary entrance. Despite Eli's castigation of their behavior, the sons continued in their sin, and so. Meanwhile Samuel was developing nicely: he "continued to grow in stature and in favor with the Lord and with men." (1 Sam. 2:25)

At this point an unidentified "man of God" prophecies confronts Eli and informs him that that he and his family will be punished for the sins of Hopnhi and Phinehas, with most of the men dying by the sword in youth, and only a few surviving to work at the temple. In addition, although Eli had previously been promised by God that his family would be priests of Yahweh forever, the man of God, states that this will no longer be the case. As a sign of the accuracy of this future, Eli is told by the prophet that his sons will both die on the same day.

Eli goes on to train up Samuel, and when Samuel hears Yahweh speaking to him, he at first thinks it is Eli, but Eli, who doesn't himself hear Yahweh calling Samuel, eventually realizes the truth, and instructs Samuel on how to respond. Samuel is told that Yahweh's threat (which isn't elaborated further) will be carried out on Eli and his family, and that there is nothing that can be done to prevent it. Eli asks Samuel what he had been told, insisting that he be told the whole truth, and so Samuel does; Eli reacts by saying that Yahweh will do what he judges best.

The text then skips to some years later, when Samuel has grown up, at which point the Philistines attack at Ebenezer, eventually capturing the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites. Eli, who is 98 and blind, is unaware of the event until he asks about all the commotion; a man from the battlefield had run to Shiloh to report on events. When Eli is told what had happened, he dies from a broken neck, having fallen over backwards, and been frail; he had judged Israel for a total of 40 years.

Era

According to the Book of Judges, the Philistine incursions spanned a period of 40 years, and that Samson, who fought the Philistine incursions, judged Israel for 20 years. Therefore some scholars, like Kessler and Nowack, have argued that there is likely to have been some overlap between the time of Samson and that of Eli. However, the Book of Judges always mentions the years of oppression, in contrast to the period of a judge's dispensation; and hence since the early parts of Eli's rule do not seem to have external oppression this appears to rule out overlap with the Philistine oppression that Samson, a previous judge, lived under.

Identity

Though his own genealogy is not given by the text, a number of scholars who trust the bible at face value have determined a genealogy for Eli, based on that given to his sons in other passages. Abiathar is described by the Book of Chronicles as being a direct (paternal) descendant of Ithamar; the Books of Samuel state that Abiathar was a son of Ahimelek and that Ahimelek was a son of Ahitub, who is the brother of Ichabod. Consequently since the narrative states that Ichabod was the son of Phinehas, and that Phinehas was the son of Eli, a number of scholars have drawn the conclusion that Eli must be a descendant of Ithamar.

It is the opinion of most textual scholars that the continued misbehaviour of Eli's sons and the castigation Eli receives as a result from the man of God (1 Samuel 2:27-36) is a later redaction, more in line with the views of the religious establishment at the time of Josiah. Without the passage, the Israelites's defeat, and the deaths of Phinehas and Hophni, appear as quite ordinary events, and suggest that there is no automatic divinely given protection over Israel, while with the passage the defeat is explained away as punishment for not following correct religion closely enough .

Since Eli appears in the narrative abruptly and without introduction, some biblical scholars have argued that there may have originally been further, narratively earlier, accounts of Eli and of Shiloh that were excised by the compiler of the Books of Samuel. An alternate theory is that the story is more than it appears at face value, with Eli actually a cipher for El, and Samuel as a cipher for Yahweh, and the Eli-Samuel narrative as one which refers to the change from El being seen as head of the pantheon to Yahweh being seen as chief deity. Eli is simply an alternative spelling of El, while Samuel literally means name of god - in Jewish tradition the tetragrammaton was often not used directly but only a reference to it would be mentioned.

Eli, for example, is present when Hannah prays, responds to her prayer, and when he wishes for her to have children she becomes pregnant; when the child and weaned is born she takes him to Eli, having promised to give him to God. He is introduced as an old man, and though the text describes his eyes as becoming weak, it immediately says that the lamp of God (or lamp of El) is not quite extinguished; as time progresses Samuel gradually becomes more prominent, with the people starting to listen to him, while Eli becomes blind and eventually dies when the Ark of the Covenant is captured. Notably, it is the sons of Eli that are described as performing the actual priestly role, and Eli does nothing more than sit in the sanctuary; the term sons of Eli could simply be a priestly title, much like son of God (more literally son of El) was used . Thus, in this theory, the narrative describes how the priests of El were seen as corrupt, Yahweh-worship then came to power, while that of El faded away, his chief priests were killed, the Ark was taken by the Philistines, and the priesthood of El in general became looked down upon.

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