Hannah was barren for years. Her husband loved her and her rival taunted her and the priest Eli misread her prayer as drunkenness. The whole story is about a woman whose deepest longing was invisible to everyone around her except God. "The Lord had closed her womb" (1 Samuel 1:5) — and the rabbis did not soften this. They took it straight: God was the one who had done this.
Isaiah's strange verse becomes the key: "Shall I bring to the point of birth and not cause to bring forth? Or shall I, who cause to give birth, close the womb?" (Isaiah 66:9). God is the one who opens and closes. Not fate. Not biology. Not the cruelty of circumstance. The same divine hand that opened Sarah's womb closed Hannah's — and would open it again in its own time. The rabbis found this terrifying and comforting in equal measure. Terrifying because suffering is not accidental. Comforting because suffering that has an author also has an end.
Hannah's prayer at Shiloh is one of the most quoted prayers in the rabbinic tradition — not because of its eloquence but because of its method. She did not just ask. She bargained. She vowed. She named the son she was asking for and what she would do with him. The rabbis said she threw God's own words back at Him: You said You give birth to Israel. You said You remember the barren. So remember me. The boldness of her prayer is matched only by the precision of its answer: Samuel, the greatest prophet since Moses, born from the womb God had closed.