The notion that the effects of prayer, if they exist, should be statistically measurable is as old as the 19th century at least. In 1872 Francis Galton wrote “Statistical Inquiries into the
Effectiveness of Prayer,” in which in partial satire he argued that the British royal family received more prayer than anyone on earth (daily prayers for them in every church of England) and so ought to be healthier and more long-lived than the general population. But statistical analysis of the death ages of the royal family did not bear out that hypothesis. Maybe the long and vigorous life of Queen Elizabeth II would change the results somewhat today.
More recently, a serious, careful modern statistical experiment was done by Harvard professor Herbert Benson in 2006, “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP).” STEP proceeded with three groups of cardiac patients, two of them prayed for by local churches under carefully controlled, double-blind, experimental methods. The results showed no measurable positive increase in surgical outcomes for those who received prayer over those who did not. That and other studies have inclined skeptics like Richard Dawkins to conclude that prayer is useless.
Yet the biblical picture of effective and answered prayer is entirely different from the necessarily impersonal and carefully controlled regimen of valid scientific studies (the STEP program required certain words to be part of each prayer and those who prayed knew only the prayer recipients’ initials). But in our text for this Sunday from the beginning of I Samuel, Hannah prays for herself in a deep, intensely personal relationship with God, asking for a child. Her prayer is answered, first in the boy Samuel who is the focus of what follows, and then in several children born to her after she dedicates Samuel to the service of the Lord.
How could any scientific study capture the circumstances of Israel in decline at the beginning of I Samuel or the emotional agony of Hannah’s domestic situation? As verse 5 indicates, she was likely the more-loved of her husband’s two wives, but she was constantly tormented by her co-wife’s baby-making success and taunts in that regard. The Hebrew of verse 5 is unclear about whether Hannah received a double portion (NRSV, NIV) or only a single portion (NLT) of sacrificial meat, but either way it would have been a source of tension and contention between her and her fecund rival.
Hannah accepted the announcement of God’s intervention into her misery seemingly without question when told by Eli that God had heard her. When a son is born to Hannah, his name Samuel could mean “God’s Name,” but an alternative is clearly understood in verse 20, “God has heard.”
One of the conditions of answered prayer in the Bible and in the lives of God’s people seems to be that clear sense expressed in the boy’s name. God hears and God has heard us when we pray. However prayer fares in statistical analyses, we may keep praying in the sort of confidence Hannah possessed, that our God does in fact hear us.