1 Samuel 2 is a story of contrasts. It describes Hannah’s joy in the Lord’s gifts and how she was supporting her son Samuel’s faithful worship of the Lord. On the other hand, Eli did nothing to stop his sons from doing evil. So Hannah and Elkanah were blessed with more sons and daughters while Eli’s sons died and the priestly duties were taken away from his family.

The chapter begins with Hannah’s prayer of joy and praise of God after Samuel was born. What a difference this is from her sad and desperate prayer for a son! Hannah’s prayer might remind us of another mother’s prayer of praise for a son many years later. Remember Mary’s song of praise in Luke 1:46-55 when the angel Gabriel told her that she was to be the mother of the Lord.

Eli, the High Priest, had grown so old that his sons Hophni and Phinehas were doing his priestly duties. However, Hophni and Phinehas didn’t love God and disobeyed His laws. They took the best part of the meat offerings for themselves before the meat had been properly sacrificed, and took advantage of the woman who worked at the gate of the sanctuary.

Their corrupt behavior is contrasted with the wholesome ministry of the young boy Samuel who followed the Lord and did right to those who came to worship. He wore a simple tunic (called an ephod) that Hannah brought to care for him each year as he grew.

Eli heard about his sons’ wrongdoings, and he pleaded with them to stop. But they did not change their ways and he did nothing to punish them. Then, a messenger from God came with a message of doom for not only Eli’s two sons, but for his whole family.

As Anita Dole describes the situation, in her "Bible Study Notes":

"This is a picture of a state in which worship is degraded by being used for self-interest and self-exaltation,… In 1 Samuel 2:17 quoted above, there is the suggestion of the harm which such a state does to others as well as to ourselves. Many people are turned against the church by the self-seeking and hypocrisy they see in some of its members. Our duty to keep our worship sincere and to live according to the teachings of the church is not for our own salvation alone. The Lord's service requires of us constant watchfulness and ever-renewed devotion." (Anita Dole, Bible Study Notes, "The Birth of Samuel", © 2001 by The Swedenborg Foundation.)

Let’s look at the contrasts again. On one side are Hannah and Samuel who are faithful to the Lord. Hannah praises Him for the wonderful gifts that He provides, especially the gift of her son. This story reminds us that all children are gifts from God. Our children don’t belong to us. Instead, they are always God’s children, and we have been blessed to care for them for a time and help them grow.

On the other side are the sons of Eli, who profaned what was holy because they loved themselves and didn’t love and follow God.

This story is a message about true worship. True worship comes from humbly loving God with all our hearts. (See Arcana Coelestia 1153:2.)

4692. 'And they hated him all the more for his dreams and for his words' means still greater contempt and aversion on account of that declaration of truth, namely concerning the Lord's Divine Human. This is clear from the meaning of 'adding' as making still greater; from the meaning of 'hating' as holding in contempt and turning away in aversion, dealt with above in 4681; from the meaning of 'a dream' as a declaration, also dealt with above, in 4682, 4685; and from the meaning of 'words' as truths. The reason 'words' means truths is that every word in heaven is received from the Lord, and therefore 'words' in the internal sense means truths, while 'the Word' in general means all Divine Truth.

[2] The subject in particular is that the Church which has separated faith from charity holds in utter contempt and turns away in utter aversion from the highest truth of all - the truth that the Lord's Human is Divine. All who belonged to the Ancient Church and did not separate charity from faith believed that the God of the whole world was a Divine Man, and that He was the Divine Being (Esse), which also was why they called Him Jehovah. They knew of Him as such from the most ancient people, and also because He had appeared to many of their brethren as Man. They also knew that all the ritual and external practices of their Church represented Him. But those who adhered to faith separated from charity were unable to share that belief of those who did not separate faith from charity because they could not grasp how the Human could ever be Divine, or that Divine love could make it such. For anything they did not grasp with some idea acquired through their bodily senses they considered to be worthless. This is what faith separated from charity is like; for with those people the internal degree of perception is closed because nothing intermediate exists to enable one to flow into the other.

[3] The Jewish Church which came next did in fact believe that Jehovah was Man as well as God, because He had appeared to Moses and the Prophets as a human being, on account of which they called every angel who appeared Jehovah. Yet their idea of Him was no different from ideas the gentiles had of their gods, though they preferred Jehovah God because He could work miracles, 4299. They were unaware of the fact that this Jehovah was the Lord in the Word, 2921, 3035, and that His Divine Human was represented in all their religious observances. They had no other idea of the Messiah or Christ than one who would be a very great prophet, greater than Moses, and a very great king, greater than David, who would lead them into the land of Canaan to the accompaniment of amazing miracles. Of His heavenly kingdom they did not wish to hear anything at all, for the reason that they grasped none but worldly ideas since they were people separated from charity.

[4] The Christian Church, it is true, does in its religious services adore the Lord's Human as one that is Divine. It does so in particular in the Holy Supper, because He has said that the bread there is His body, and the wine His blood. But they do not in their doctrine make His Human Divine, for they make a distinction between His Divine nature and His human nature. Also, they make this distinction because the Church has turned aside from charity to faith, and at length to faith separated from charity. And failing to acknowledge that the Lord's Human is Divine, many go wrong and in their heart deny Him, 4689. Yet the truth of the matter is that the Lord's Divine Human is the Divine Manifestation of the Divine Being, dealt with above in 4687, and that He Himself is the Divine Being; for Divine Being and Divine Manifestation make one, as the Lord also plainly teaches in John,

Jesus said to Philip, Have I been so long a time with you and you do not know Me? He who has seen Me has seen the Father. Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me. John 14:9-11.

The same teaching occurs elsewhere. The Divine Manifestation is the Divine itself proceeding from the Divine Being and in image is Man, since heaven, of which He is its all, represents the Grand Man, as stated above in 4687 and shown at the ends of chapters where the correspondence with heaven of everything in the human being is dealt with. The Lord, it is true, was born as any human being is born, and received an infirm human from His mother; but the Lord cast out this human completely, to the point of His being no longer Mary's son, and made the Human within Himself Divine, which is what is meant by His being glorified. He also showed Peter, James, and John that He was a Divine Man, when He was transfigured.