Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

I often have trouble deciding what to write about in this passage because there are so many things worthy of a blog entry.  However, today I was struck by the Messianic prophecy by the man of God who condemned Eli for his failure to control his sons.  In Chapter 2 verse 35, the man of God tells Eli that God will raise up a faithful priest who will walk before His anointed always.  Reading the NIV it is easy to miss how much this refers to Jesus because the NIV translates the reference to who will walk before God’s anointed in the plural, implying that God will give that faithful priest descendants who will walk before Him.  That is not a bad translation, as many of those who read the original Hebrew would have interpreted it that way because of the context. However, most other translations translate that in the singular, as in “he will walk before my anointed always.”  Now, there are some interesting aspects of this.  If that “faithful priest” is Jesus (as I believe it does), who is the anointed before whom He will walk?  My answer to that question is that the anointed is also Jesus.  I want to say that I suspect that this prophecy was also partially fulfilled by another priest as well, but I am unsure about that.  I am not completely satisfied with my interpretation of this prophecy, in part because I have never really thought about it before.  Since I am convinced that the “anointed” referenced here is Jesus (although I suspect at the time this prophecy was recorded those who recorded it thought it referred to King David and his descendants who sat on the throne after him), it may be that the “faithful priest” refers to someone else (or some group).  The other question which I have, at this point, no understanding is in what way do Eli’s descendants ask of that priest for priestly duties to perform?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.