The Song Before the King

Israel had no king when Hannah sang. And yet her song ends on a king. "He will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed" (1 Samuel 2:10) — the first time a human voice in Scripture speaks of the LORD's anointed king, spoken before Israel has one. And it comes not from a prophet or a priest, but from a woman standing in a country sanctuary with nothing in her arms.

Hannah is childless in a world where that meant a woman with no future. When she finally prays, she prays so hard and so silently — "only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard" — that Eli the priest takes her for a drunk (1 Samuel 1:13–14). That is the mouth this song comes out of, and the reversal it describes has already begun in her body: the barren woman has borne a son. And she sings at the moment of surrender, not acquisition — the boy is being handed back, her gift now rather than her salvation.

But Hannah does not sing a lullaby of private thanks. She sings a map of how God runs his world, and it runs backward from ours. "The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength" (1 Samuel 2:4). He "raises up the poor from the dust" and seats them "with princes" (1 Samuel 2:8). Grace, in Hannah's mouth, runs downhill — all the way to the ash heap, where the needy sit. It is good news only for those willing to be counted among the low, which can sound like the bottom dreaming the top down.

A thousand years later another nobody — an unmarried girl from a village no one expected anything from — opens her mouth, and out comes Hannah's song, the same tune in a new key. "He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things" (Luke 1:52–53). Mary sang the reversal Hannah had only sketched, over the child Hannah could name only from afar. Hannah meant Israel's coming king; the canon presses the word further — the LORD's anointed, the Christ. Tim Keller calls the Magnificat the song of a great reversal.¹

But the song is not the bottom dreaming. God did not stay at a safe height, lifting the low from above; in Christ the Most High took the long way down himself. The one who was in the form of God "emptied himself," and went lower than any ash heap, down to a cross, in public, under Pontius Pilate (Philippians 2:6–8) — then on the third day was raised. Resentment never invented that.

Hannah had a rival at home — Peninnah, who had children and used them against her (1 Samuel 1:6–7). Peninnah is nowhere in the song. A vindicated heart stops counting the rival and starts saying the LORD. So the song is for all of us who take our measure from the lower places — the overlooked, the empty-handed, the ones who lie awake asking whether any of it matters — and the same cross that lifts the ash heap pulls the chair from under our self-made standing. Not every barren woman got a Samuel, which is why the song ends on the anointed king: our reversal is sealed at an empty tomb, not in our circumstances. The God who "remembered her" (1 Samuel 1:19) has not misplaced us.

Hannah came to that sanctuary unable to make a sound anyone could hear, and went home having begun a song the church would still be singing in Mary's mouth, and in ours. That is what the Anointed does with silenced people: he hands them the tune. We sing it from the ash heap where he has already come to sit. Read 1 Samuel 2:1–10 slowly, listening for how often she says the LORD rather than I.