Samuel was clad in the linen ephod, the sacred vestment and symbol of the priest, and ‘ministered unto Yahveh before Eli.’ One night, before ‘the lamp of God’ had gone out which burned before the ark of the covenant,[380] ‘the word of the Lord’ came to the boy in his sleep. Three times did it call to him, and then came the revelation of the punishment which Yahveh was about to bring on the house of the high priest.[381] His sons had been unfaithful to their office; not only had they lain ‘with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation,’ they had made men abhor the offering of the Lord, and the weak old man had restrained them not. The law had ordained that the fat of the sacrifice belonged to Yahveh, and that before it was burned upon the altar neither priest nor offerer could receive anything of the victim. Unless the law was complied with, the sacrifice was useless; Yahveh had been robbed of His portion, and no blessing could follow upon the offering. But the sons of Eli persistently set at naught the strict injunctions of the law. Before the fat was burned, their servant came and struck his three-pronged fork into the flesh that had been placed in the caldron, demanding that it should be given to him raw. God’s priests thus mutilated the sacrifices that were made to Him, and compelled His worshippers to defraud Him of His due. The Israelites began to shrink from bringing their yearly offerings to Shiloh, and the downward course of the religion of Israel was hastened by the cynical greed of its priests.[382] Eli had already been warned by ‘a man of God’ of the coming vengeance of Yahveh. The prophet destined to play so important a part in the history of Israel now appears almost for the first time upon the scene. Deborah, indeed, had been a prophetess, and a prophet had denounced the idolatry of his countrymen during the period of Midianitish oppression; but the spirit of Yahveh, which, in later days, revealed itself in the form of prophecy, had hitherto rather inspired those upon whom it had fallen to become leaders in war and ‘judges’ of their people. Now it assumed a new shape. Out of the misery and confusion produced by the Philistine raids sprang the first great outburst of Hebrew prophecy. Those who still believed Israel was the chosen people of Yahveh, and that He alone was God over all the earth, were profoundly stirred by the triumph of the uncircumcised. There was an outbreak of that religious enthusiasm, degenerating at times into fanaticism, which has occurred again and again in the East. The ‘seer’ took the place of the ‘judge.’ The waking visions which he beheld revealed the future, and declared to him and the people the will of Yahveh. The arms of flesh had failed; all that was left was the ‘open vision,’ where the events of the future were pictured beforehand, and men learned how to escape disaster.