I'm going to jump straight to chapter 4 today. The first verse says Israel went to camp at Ebenezer. It is helpful to know that it has not been named "Ebenezer" yet. It will not receive that name until chapter seven, so why is it called Ebenezer in chapters four and five? The answer is quite simple; by the time the book of Samuel was being compiled, the place had already been named "Ebenezer." It doesn't matter what its former name was if people already knew it as Ebenezer. The same thing happens in Genesis. Bethel is a famous city mentioned several times prior to Genesis 28 but isn't named Bethel until chapter 28. How can this be? Again, Moses, who is considered the author of Genesis, was giving the history of the Hebrews with names they were familiar with. My grandmother used to own some land in Canada right along the Red Deer River. She named the property Pourquoi, meaning "why." But prior to my grandmother and her siblings' ownership, the land was a logging camp complete with an old dilapidated logger's cabin. If I were to write a book about the land for my family, I would call the land Pourquoi even when telling stories about the land hundreds of years before it received that moniker. I would do this so they could know immediately what place I was talking about. These things happen often in the Bible and shouldn't unseat us. But perhaps it's not even something that really matters to us at all, and now I've droned on about minor details. Let's revisit God's curse on Eli...