1. my horn is raised high. This archaic Hebrew animal imagery is worth preserving literally in English, as did Tyndale and the King James Version. The idea seems to be that the animal’s horn is its glory and power, held high, perhaps in triumph after goring an enemy into submission. There is a sequence of body parts at the beginning of the first three versets of the poem, two literal and the middle one metaphorical: “my heart,” “my horn,” “my mouth.” The raising high of the horn is crucial to the thematic unfolding of the poem, which reiterates a pattern of vertical movement, elevation and descent, that manifests God’s power to reverse the fortunes of humankind. The upraised horn at the beginning returns in the envelope structure of the last line, a prayer that the LORD “raise high His anointed’s horn.” That final image, in turn, involves a hidden pun, because the Hebrew “horn” (qeren, actually one of the rare Semitic terms cognate with Indo-European—cornu/horn) is also the receptacle containing the oil with which the king is anointed.

My mouth is wide to bolt down my foes. The Hebrew does not express but implies “bolt down.” The conventional rendering of this idiom as “gloated” is an evasion of its intimation of predatory violence.

4. shattered. The verb used is restricted to poetry; a noun derived from it means “rubble” or “tiny broken fragments,” hence the sense seems to be more extreme than the standard term “to break.”

5. the hungry cease evermore. The Masoretic Text is rather cryptic. This translation revocalizes the last Hebrew word of the line ʿad (“until,” or, by a long conjectural stretch, “prey”) as ʿod, an adverb indicating persistence through time. The Masoretes attached the word to the beginning of the next clause, where, however, its semantic function is equally unclear.

8. to seat among princes. The language here might anticipate the monarchic flourish at the end of the poem. “Throne” (kisʾei) in the next line can mean either throne or chair. Robert Polzin has made an elaborate argument for seeing not only Hannah’s prayer but all the early chapters of 1 Samuel as a grand foreshadowing of the fate of the monarchy with the old and failing Eli, who will die falling off his chair or throne, as a stand-in for the Davidic kings.

9. the wicked in darkness turn dumb. The verb obviously refers to death—the underworld in other psalms is sometimes called dumah, the realm of silence or speechlessness, a noun cognate with the verb yidamu used here. Those who talked high and mighty, their mouths spewing arrogance (verse 3), are now forever silenced.

10. The LORD shatters His adversaries. The Masoretic Text reads, “LORD, Your adversaries are shattered.” But the Samuel fragment from Qumran has God as the subject of a verb in the singular (a difference of only one letter) with the adversaries as the object. This makes better syntactic sense, especially since it is God who is thundering against the enemies in the second half of the line. The verb “shatter” is the same one used for the warriors’ bow in verse 4.

14. the cauldron or the pot or the vat or the kettle. This catalogue of implements is quite untypical of biblical narrative (and in fact the precise identification of the sundry cooking receptacles is unsure). The unusual specification serves a satiric purpose: Eli’s sons are represented in a kind of frenzy of gluttony poking their three-pronged forks into every imaginable sort of pot and pan. This sense is then heightened in the aggressiveness of the dialogue that follows, in which Eli’s sons insist on snatching the meat uncooked from the worshippers, not allowing them, as was customary, first to burn away the fat.

18. ephod. A short garment, chiefly of linen, worn by priests. The Hebrew term has a second meaning, a device for divination manipulated by the officiating priests, and that is the evident sense of ephod when it recurs in verse 28.

19. And a little cloak would his mother make him. This is a poignant instance of the expressive reticence of biblical narrative. We have been told nothing about Hannah’s feelings as a mother after her separation from the child for whom she so fervently prayed. This minimal notation of Hannah’s annual gesture of making a little cloak for the son she has “lent” to the LORD beautifully intimates the love she preserves for him. The garment, fashioned as a gift of maternal love, stands in contrast to the ephod, the acolyte’s official garb for his cultic office. Moreover, the robe (meʿil) will continue to figure importantly in Samuel’s life, and even in his afterlife, as we shall have occasion to see.

year after year. The phrase takes us back to the iterative tense of the beginning of the story.

22. and that they lay with the women. This whole clause is missing in the Qumran scroll and in one version of the Septuagint; in fact, sexual exploitation was not mentioned in the initial narrative report of the sons’ misdeeds. There is, however, a consonance between their appetitive impulse in snatching the meat and grabbing the women, perhaps reinforced by the satiric, and phallic, image of thrusting forks into bubbling pots.

flocked. The Hebrew verb might also mean “ministered.”

27. a man of God came to Eli. This enunciation of a curse on the house of Eli, at the very beginning of the Samuel story, is introduced at precisely the corresponding place in the narrative as the denunciation and admonition of the divine messenger at the beginning of Judges (chapter 2). An analogous curse will be pronounced by Nathan the prophet on the house of David (2 Samuel 12) and will be enacted in the subsequent narrative.

slaves to Pharaoh’s house. The Masoretic Text lacks “slaves to” but it is attested in the Qumran Samuel scroll, in the Septuagint, and in the Targum of Yonatan ben Uziel.

29. My sacrifice and My offering which I have commanded. The Masoretic Text reads “which I commanded [as a?] habitation [maʿon].” Since that makes no sense, and all attempts to rescue a meaning seem forced, I have assumed that ma‘on is an excrescence, perhaps inadvertently transposed by a scribe from verse 32, where it also occurs rather enigmatically. Several points in the curse pronounced by the man of God look textually defective.

30. will walk before Me. The biblical idiom suggests dedicated service of a deity.

honor . . . dishonored. The Hebrew terms mean, etymologically, “heavy” and “light” (that is, “weighty” and “worthless”). These antonyms will recur at strategic moments in the Ark Narrative and in the story of David.

32. look with a jaundiced eye. The received text at this point is very doubtful, yielding, literally, a nonsense chain: “you will look narrow habitation.” This translation adopts an emendation that has considerable scholarly currency: ʿayin instead of maʿon (a difference of one consonant in the Hebrew). That yields the idiom tsar-ʿayin, “jealously” or “with a jaundiced eye.” But the Qumran text and one version of the Septuagint lack the entire clause.

33. no man of you will I cut off. The usual understanding of these words is that God will leave them alive to witness in pain the destruction of the family. This interpretation seems a bit strained because in the next verse God promises to destroy both of Eli’s sons on a single day. Perhaps the clause originally read, “every man of you will I cut off,” though this phrasing is not reflected in any of the ancient versions.

fall by the sword of men. Again, both the Qumran fragment and Version B of the Septuagint confirm this reading, which seems much likelier than the Masoretic Text’s cryptic “shall die [as?] men.”

35. a stalwart priest . . . a stalwart house. The Hebrew neʾeman in the first instance means “faithful” or “trustworthy,” in the second instance, “well-founded,” “enduring.” The present translation draws on an older sense of “stalwart,” which can be applied to structures and inanimate objects as well as to people. The probable referent of the prophecy is the house of Zadok, which was to become the priestly line in the Davidic monarchy.

before My anointed. Like Hannah’s psalm, this whole passage of prophecy appears to presuppose a historical context in which the monarchy was an established fact.