As the days of the Judges in Israel were about to cease, there is a man named Eli. He is the High Priest. We don’t really know how he came to be the High Priest. Perhaps it was simply just as many other things during those days of “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” He wasn’t of the lineage of Eleazar but of Aaron’s youngest son, Ithamar. Some things immediately stand out when reading his story in I Samuel.

  1. He was a failure in his parenting. A contrast is constantly seen between little Samuel, not his son, and his two grown boys, Hophni and Phinehas. Samuel is one of the greatest examples in the Bible of a godly life. He had some hiccups but mostly we see him doing right with the right motives. He just loved God. Compare his life with Hophni and Phinehas. They were constantly living immoral lives. The girls that lived around the tabernacle and those that arrived to attend holy days were not safe around these two. Eli, their father, wouldn’t confront them. The families attending these holy days would make sacrifice of an animal. A portion would be for the Tabernacle but then the remainder of the animal could be used for a nice dinner for the family. These boys would walk up to a family who is about to eat, take a hook and remove the meat from the pot claiming it for themselves because they were the priests. If anyone objected, they were threatened with violence. We never see a rebuke from Eli.
  2. He was a failure as a priest. As if being a lousy parent wasn’t enough, he wouldn’t remove them from the priesthood. As these boys robbed God of His offering and robbed the people of a special meal with their family, Eli just sits by and does nothing. His judgment and his discernment left much to be desired. If you think about his discernment, he couldn’t tell the difference between a woman carrying great sorrow and a drunk woman. The woman was Hannah. As a priest, he was to inspire the people to walk with God and worship Him. Most often we find him sitting around, getting older and fatter, seemingly without ever conceiving a spiritual thought or goal for Israel.

No matter who it is, tinker, tailor or a candle-stick maker, there comes a time when God says enough. I Samuel 2:31, the Lord tells Eli “…behold the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father’s house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house.” That is exactly what happened. No, it wasn’t a literal losing of the arm of Eli, but the lineage of his family. Both of his sons, Hophni and Phinehas were killed in a battle. When the news reached Eli, he was sitting down. He fell backwards and broke his neck. In one day, his lineage was gone.

As much of a failure as Eli was in most of his life, he did have one bright spot. That bright spot was a little boy named Samuel. Just after Hannah, the woman Eli thought was drunk, brought her little boy to the Tabernacle, he began learning the priesthood. He taught little Samuel to hear the voice of God. This training helped lead Samuel into the great Old Testament character we love and revere. Unlike Eli, we find Samuel always serving and traveling a circuit delivering the words of God to those in the land of Israel. This prophet of God is the only bright spot, in my opinion, concerning old Eli. Let’s learn from his mistakes and emulate his success.