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There seems to be some similarity between events before the births of Samson and Samuel.
In the case of Samson, the unnamed wife of Manoah was childless, her womb barren. One day an angel appeared to her and Manoah, telling her she would have a child. Prenatally, she was to abstain from strong drink and unclean food.
The angel would not divulge its name and ascended in the flame it had likely lit at the altar on which Manoah and his wife made a sacrifice.
Perhaps this was the same angel that later lit the fire that consumed the sacrifice on the altar of Elijah in his confrontation with hundreds of prophets of Baal and of Asherah on Mount Carmel. That fire generated such intense heat everything was incinerated, even the 12 stones of Elijah’s altar.
The fire of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, at a later time, was so hot it killed the men who transported the 3 Hebrew worthies thereto, but it may not have been sufficiently hot to vaporize stone.
Incidentally, one thing has always puzzled me: how did Nebuchadnezzar know what the son of God looked like (such that he commented on it)? Might it have been the still small voice whispering in the Babylonian king’s ear?
In the case of Samuel, his mother, Hannah, was troubled by the fact that she, too, was barren. The pain of lacking offspring was only accentuated by…
