Why Does 1 Samuel 1 Say Twice That THE LORD Had Shut Up Hannah’s Womb?

This question is impossible to answer conclusively because the Bible does not tell us why the Lord shut up Hannah’s womb!  This was considered a curse and a reproach among the Israelites.  We know that the Lord closed the wombs of the people in Abimelech’s house as judgment for Sarah being with him.  See Genesis 20:18 (“For the LORD had fast closed up all the wombs of the house of Abimelech, because of Sarah Abraham’s wife”).  But we don’t know of any specific thing Hannah might have done that would incur such a judgment.  That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anything; it just isn’t stated.

Can we understand this twice-written phrase to be merely permissive?  In other words, did the Lord merely “permit” this situation rather than cause it?  Maybe, though “permit” would be too mild a word; it would be more a case of “causing by allowing.”  I once did an in-depth study of one of the Hebrew words in this kind of case to see whether it was conjugated in the permissive form or the causative form, only to find that both forms used exactly the same letters, so there was no way to prove which form was the intended one.

Can we attribute this statement to an erroneous assumption back in that day that if anything bad happened, God Himself did it?  One teacher has explained it that way, but I don’t think we can go there.  Most people back then had no revelation that there even was a devil.  It would cast doubt on almost everything else in the Old Testament if we start claiming that the writer of 1 Samuel made his statement out of ignorance.  Some Scriptures truly report untrue statements made by certain people.  However, for the writer of the book to assert that God did something without it being a direct quote or at least the mindset of another person seems to leave us no choice but to accept the statement at face value.  Otherwise, we are throwing away our belief in the inerrancy of Scripture and making the same mistake for which we criticize liberal theologians when they claim that Paul’s writing against homosexuality simply reflected the bias of his day.

The Bible does not explain everything for us.  It never tells us why the tribe of Dan is not represented in the 144,000 in the book of Revelation.  Why isn’t Dan included?  I don’t know and neither do you, because God didn’t state the reason.  You don’t know where demons came from, either, and neither do I.  You only know the facts, but not the background, in Hannah’s case.  Paul even wrote some things that are not surrounded by enough context to figure out.  Why did Paul say that should women have a symbol of authority on their heads “because of the angels” and why were people “baptized for the dead” in Corinth?  I don’t know, but being baptized for the dead certainly can’t mean what the Mormons think it does, namely that you can get someone saved after they die by being baptized in proxy for them in a Mormon temple.  Even God Himself states that there are some difficult passages in Paul’s letters – Peter made this comment as part of Scripture in 2 Peter 3:16: “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they which are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  The secret things belong to the Lord (Deuteronomy 29:29).  We’ll just have to wait until we’re in heaven to find out some things, but such things aren’t the important things that we need to know in this life.  You can life a great life without knowing why Dan isn’t in the 144,000 or why people were baptized for the dead in Corinth.  When God doesn’t tell us why something is, you have no sure way to know why it is.  So I can’t tell you for sure what happened with Hannah.

Whatever you believe, you certainly can’t use this phrase to prove that God wants some people to stay infertile (even if He has permitted it, as sin on the earth has been permitted to louse up plenty of other things), because Hannah asked for a son and God gave her Samuel!  This passage should build your faith in healing for infertility, not take it away!  See the section on InfertilityINFERTILITY for proof that God wants to heal women who can’t have children.  I know couples who couldn’t have children according to their doctors and have children today because God intervened as He did for Hannah when they asked Him for children.