When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bulls, and one ephah of meal, and a bottle of wine, and brought him to the house of Yahweh in Shiloh: and the child was young.
Samuel may have been as old as three years before Hannah weaned him and brought him to the sanctuary (1 Samuel 1:23; cf. 2 Maccabees 7:27). The three-year-old bull and the flour (1 Samuel 1:24) were evidently for a burnt offering (an offering that represented the worshipper’s total dedication to God, Leviticus 1) and for food respectively. The Hebrew word for flour used here, qemah, never occurs in a sacrificial context except once, where it is unaccompanied by an animal sacrifice (Numbers 5:15). Hannah could have offered a less expensive animal sacrifice (Leviticus 12:6), but she was very grateful.