What does "here I raise my Ebenezer" mean? It comes from 1 Samuel 7:12, where the prophet Samuel sets up a stone after a battle and names it Ebenezer, Hebrew for "stone of help", saying "thus far the LORD has helped us." To raise your Ebenezer is to mark a place and say: God got me this far. The line is opaque in English because almost no English Bible translates the word; they nearly all leave it as a name.
That is the first thing hidden in this hymn. There is a second, one stanza later, and it is the one that surprised me.
I have sung "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" for most of my life without looking either of them up. Both repay it.
Who wrote "Come, Thou Fount", and when?
Robert Robinson, an English Baptist minister, wrote it in 1758 when he was twenty-three, some sources date it to 1757, which would make him twenty-two. He had first heard George Whitefield preach on 24 May 1752 and dated his own conversion to December 1755, so the hymn came about two and a half years after it and at the very start of his ministry.
He went on to pastor the same Cambridge congregation for nearly thirty years, and died in 1790 at fifty-four. Whether he kept the faith he wrote about is genuinely disputed, and I set the argument out below rather than settling it.
What does "here I raise my Ebenezer" mean?
Here is 1 Samuel 7:12 in six translations, so you can see the problem rather than take my word for it.
| Version | 1 Samuel 7:12 |
|---|---|
| NIV Anglicised | "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, 'Thus far the LORD has helped us.'" |
| ESV | "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, 'Till now the LORD has helped us.'" |
| KJV | "Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us." |
| CSB | "Afterward, Samuel took a stone and set it upright between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, explaining, 'The LORD has helped us to this point.'" |
| NRSV | "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, 'Thus far the LORD has helped us.'" |
| NLT | "He named it Ebenezer (which means 'the stone of help'), for he said, 'Up to this point the LORD has helped us!'" |
Only the New Living Translation puts the meaning in the running text. Four of the other five (NIV, ESV, CSB and NRSV) do carry a footnote saying "Ebenezer means stone of help"; the KJV, in modern printings, gives nothing. So the information is mostly there, and it is mostly in the place nobody looks while singing.
The Hebrew is אֶ֣בֶן הָעָ֑זֶר, ʾeḇen hā-ʿāzer, literally "the stone of the help". ʾEben is stone. The second word, in its dictionary form ʿezer, is help, and it is not a small word: it is the same one used of the woman in Genesis 2 and of God himself all through the Psalms. The verb in the second half of the verse, "he has helped us", shares the root, so Samuel names the stone with the same word he uses to explain it. That pun is invisible in every English version above.
You may also have noticed the versions disagreeing about the second place name. Shen is the Hebrew reading; Jeshanah follows the Greek and Syriac. That is a genuine textual variant rather than a translator's preference, and it matters below.
What Samuel had just been through
The context matters more than the etymology, and it is not what most people assume.
Israel had lost the ark twenty years earlier. Samuel calls the nation to Mizpah, and before any battle they fast, pour out water before the Lord, and say plainly: we have sinned against the Lord. It is while they are assembled and confessing that the Philistines attack. Samuel offers a lamb; the Lord thunders; the Philistines scatter.
Then the stone.
So the Ebenezer is not a trophy raised after a good run. It is raised by people who have just admitted they were the problem. That is the emotional grammar of the whole hymn, and it is why the third verse is not a contradiction of the second.
And "thus far" is doing careful work. Every version keeps it: hitherto, till now, up to this point. The old commentators are consistent that it is provisional rather than triumphant: Benson glosses it "he hath begun to help us", Gill reads Israel as recognising only "the beginning of their deliverance". Samuel is not saying the story is over. He is saying it has got this far.
One complication worth knowing
Ebenezer already appears as a place name in 1 Samuel 4:1 and 5:1, describing where Israel camped before the catastrophe in which the ark was captured, before Samuel names the stone in chapter 7.
The traditional reading is that these are the same place and the earlier chapters use the name proleptically, so that Samuel plants the stone of help on the exact ground of the old defeat. It is a wonderful image. It is also an inference, and geographically doubtful: the chapter 4 Ebenezer sits opposite Aphek in the coastal plain, while chapter 7's stone is between Mizpah and Shen in the hill country. No site has modern consensus. I would sing it and not preach it.
Where the word ended up
It travelled further than the hymn. Nonconformist Britain, and Wales especially, is full of Ebenezer chapels; the name sits alongside Bethel, Bethesda, Salem and Carmel on chapel gables from Aberavon to Trecynon, all of them quietly citing 1 Samuel 7:12.
It is also a tune. EBENEZER, sometimes called Ton-y-Botel, is by the Welsh composer Thomas John Williams (dated 1890 by Hymnary and first published, on Wikipedia's account, in 1897), and it carries "O the deep, deep love of Jesus" and "Once to every man and nation". So a British congregation may sing the word without ever singing Robinson.
And there is Ebenezer Scrooge. Philip Allingham, writing in Dickens Quarterly in 1987, traces the name to Samuel's stone, notes its adoption by Methodist and Baptist chapels, and quotes Robinson's line directly. He reads the choice as deliberate irony, a man called "stone of help" who has hardened into stone, with "Eben" also sounding like ebony. That is Allingham's reading of Dickens's intention rather than anything Dickens said, but it is a scholar's reading and a good one.
The wandering line is not biography
The last verse is the one people remember:
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.
There is a famous story attached to it. Robert Robinson, years later, having drifted from the faith, shares a coach with a woman who is reading his own hymn. She asks what he thinks of it. He answers: "Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."
It is a marvellous story and nobody can show that it happened.
The source usually given for it is Samuel Woolcock Christophers' Hymn-writers and Their Hymns, a Victorian devotional anthology published in the mid-1860s, some seventy-five years after Robinson died. I have not been able to open a copy and confirm the page, so I will put it no higher than that: the earliest attribution anyone offers is to a book written three generations after the event.
What can be checked is where it is absent. It does not appear in Alexander Gordon's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, which is worth something, because Gordon lists the contemporary memoirs and funeral sermons among his sources and was himself building a case that Robinson had gone heterodox. The anecdote would have suited his argument. He does not use it. The tellings in circulation also disagree with one another: some drop the coach entirely and have a young woman use the hymn to call him back.
So: widely told, and unverifiable. That is as far as the evidence goes, and further than most articles admit.
Now the part that actually matters.
Robinson wrote that verse in 1758, in his early twenties. Hymnology Archive and the United Methodist Discipleship history both put him at twenty-three; some sources date the hymn to 1757, which would make him twenty-two. Either way he was a young man, about two and a half years past his own conversion and just begun in ministry. "Prone to wander" is not the confession of a broken old man looking back. It is a young man at the start of everything, writing down what he already knows about himself.
I am not claiming that reverses the usual telling; the usual telling already has him writing it young and drifting later. The point is narrower and, I think, more useful. Because the coach story is so vivid, the line gets read as biography: a fact about Robert Robinson that happened to be set to music. It is not. It is a self-description written at the start of a ministry by someone who had noticed something about himself and put it in a song other people would sing about themselves. Reading it as a fact about him mislocates it.
Did Robert Robinson lose his faith?
Genuinely disputed, and worth setting out rather than settling. Alexander Gordon's Dictionary of National Biography entry of 1897 says Robinson published a defence of the divinity of Christ in 1776, later modified that position, and by 1788 was privately dismissive of the Trinity: while adding that "in his own pulpit he did not introduce controversial topics." Len Addicott's 1991 introduction to the St Andrew's Street Baptist Church history refutes the Unitarian claim, and Ian Randall, in the Journal of European Baptist Studies in 2022, states flatly that it "has been refuted".
Gordon was himself a Unitarian historian, which does not make him wrong but is worth knowing. Robinson did travel to Birmingham in 1790, and Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian, preached a funeral sermon for him.
Two details often cited in this argument deserve to be given as the DNB gives them rather than as they usually circulate. Gordon says Robinson left for Birmingham on 2 June 1790 to preach charity sermons, not to seek out Priestley, and that after his death funeral sermons were preached by Priestley at Birmingham, Abraham Rees at Cambridge and Joshua Toulmin at Taunton. Preaching a funeral sermon is not the same as conducting a burial, and the popular version of both details runs ahead of the source.
What is clear is that the argument began at once, among people who knew him, and that both of his memoirists, George Dyer and Benjamin Flower, were themselves on the Unitarian side of Dissent. It has never closed.
What is not in doubt: he pastored the same Cambridge congregation for nearly thirty years, until he died in 1790 at fifty-four.
I have no view on his soul and neither does anyone else living. What I notice is that a hymn about being prone to wander has spent two centuries being illustrated with an unverifiable story about its author wandering, and the illustration has quietly replaced the point. The line is not about Robinson. It is about the person singing it.
Do modern worship songs still confess?
Less than the old hymns did, and it can be counted rather than asserted. Lester Ruth compared the seventy most-printed evangelical hymns between 1737 and 1860 with the 112 songs that reached CCLI's top twenty-five between 1989 and 2015, counting the verbs the singer performs. Where the old hymns had congregations sinning, fearing and dying, the modern ones have them praising, worshipping and lifting.
That is what "prone to wander" is actually doing: a congregation, out loud, together, saying something unflattering about itself: not about the world, not about the past, but about its present standing tendency to leave. Here are Ruth's counts.
| What the singer does | Historic hymns | Contemporary songs |
|---|---|---|
| Sin | 27 | 16 |
| Fear | 19 | 5 |
| Die | 18 | 5 |
| Praise | 11 | 27 |
| Worship | 3 | 15 |
| Lift | 2 | 15 |
And the detail that carries the argument is one Ruth makes in his own words: in the contemporary songs, "sin is never used as a verb per se… only as a noun." That is why the sixteen occurrences in the right-hand column are not really comparable to the twenty-seven on the left. In the old hymns the congregation sins. In the modern ones sin is a condition in the world, and what the congregation does instead is sing, praise, worship and lift.
Daniel Jesse's analysis of 133 songs from CCLI top-25 lists between 1988 and 2018 found 983 words conveying happiness against 81 conveying sadness, and the word sad and its derivatives never occurring at all, nor sorrow.
Two honest qualifications, because the easy version of this argument is wrong.
First, hymnals are not the golden age people imagine. Glenn Pemberton found that around 40% of the Psalms are lament, against 13–19% in the traditional hymnals he sampled. The old books were also short on this. "Come, Thou Fount" is unusual full stop, not a specimen of something we have lost, but a rarity in its own century too.
Second, a distinction the studies keep and most articles blur. Most of the research above measures lament, complaint and protest addressed to God out of suffering. "Prone to wander" is not lament. It is confession: an admission of a standing weakness. Ruth's verb data is the evidence that matches; the lament studies are context. Christine Longhurst's analysis of 509 contemporary songs is worth naming here too, because she tested six common criticisms of modern worship lyrics and pointedly did not measure confession, she lists it as an open question rather than a settled complaint.
So: not "they don't write them like they used to." More precisely, songs in which the congregation says something costly about itself have always been scarce, and are scarcer now. I have written elsewhere about where the repertoire came from in the first place, and every argument the church is having about this it has had before.
Which brings me to my own songs
I write worship music, so this is not a neutral observation for me, and I would rather say where I stand than pretend to referee.
The one of mine that belongs in this conversation is HERE, from February 2022. It came out of a conversational prayer on a walk, and the line that arrived in the middle of it was a correction rather than an encouragement: worship is not a weapon.
I had been doing what I think most of us do without noticing. Praising in order to move something. Worshipping at a situation. Using the language of adoration as leverage: if I get this right, if I mean it enough, then. HERE is the argument that came out of that, and it lands on asking to stay rather than asking to receive: worship for who God is, not for what he can do for you. The second half leans on Romans 8 and the list of things that cannot separate us, which is the only answer I had to my own question.
I should be precise about what that line is, because the distinction this article has been making cuts against me. Worship is not a weapon is a corrective: a proposition, addressed to the singer, about what worship is for. It is not the thing Robinson wrote. His line is a congregation saying an unflattering thing about itself, in the first person, while singing. Mine is not that. The confession in HERE was mine and it happened before the song, on the walk, admitting I had been using worship as leverage. What reached the lyric is the conclusion. The admission stayed behind it.
That gap is why I have brought it in at all. Writing HERE is what made the Robinson question interesting to me; I had found out something uncomfortable about myself and then written the tidy version of it. Robinson did the harder thing and left the uncomfortable part in, in his early twenties, for other people to sing about themselves.
That is what I think we need more of, and it is harder to write than the other kind. A declaration is easy: everyone agrees with it, nobody is exposed, and the room lifts. A correction is not much harder; it still leaves the singer in the right, as long as they take the point. A confession has to be true about the people singing it while they are singing it, which means the writer has to have gone and found out something uncomfortable first, and then resisted the urge to tidy it.
You cannot manufacture that. You can only be honest when it turns up, and then be brave enough to leave it in the song. I have written up how one of mine actually got written, start to finish, if the mechanics are of any use to you.
What to do with the line
If you lead worship and your hymnal has kept the Ebenezer verse, keep it and spend twenty seconds explaining it. It is a stone, it means "God got me this far", and the people who first raised one had just finished admitting they had gone wrong. That is a sentence, and it changes what the next four minutes mean.
Some hymnals have replaced the line with something plainer; Hymnology Archive gives "here I raise my grateful tribute" as an example of the kind of substitution made. I understand why, and I would not do it. The strangeness of the word is the reason anybody asks, and the asking is how they find 1 Samuel 7.
And note what the United Methodist Hymnal revision committee did in 1989. C. Michael Hawn records that they received requests to omit the term and kept the original language: his account gives the reason as their not finding a suitable replacement rather than a defence of difficulty, which is a smaller thing than I would like it to be, but the word survived either way.
What holds
Almost everything above is contested. The date of the hymn moves between 1757 and 1758 depending on who you ask, which is also why the hymn's age can only honestly be given as about two and a half centuries. Whether the man who wrote it kept the faith is an argument that started while his friends were still alive and has not finished. The coach story is told everywhere and nobody has sourced it earlier than a devotional anthology of the 1860s. The location of the stone is unknown.
None of that is load-bearing, which is rather the point of the hymn.
What Samuel did was mark a place and refuse to explain it away. Not "we won", not "we deserved it", not "we have arrived"; only that God had brought them as far as this spot, which was more than they could account for, given what they had just confessed about themselves.
That is all an Ebenezer is. A place where you stop and say: this far.
Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far the LORD has helped us."
1 Samuel 7:12
Thus far. Not further than that, and not less.
Scripture quotations marked NIV taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised, Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. 'NIV' is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790.
Sources
- Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing · Hymnology Archive and Robert Robinson · Hymnology Archive
- C. Michael Hawn, "History of Hymns: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" · UMC Discipleship Ministries
- Alexander Gordon, "Robinson, Robert (1735–1790)", Dictionary of National Biography (1897); Len Addicott's refutation is summarised in Ian Randall, Journal of European Baptist Studies 22:1 (2022)
- "Did Robert Robinson Wander As He Feared?" · Christianity.com, which labels the coach story "widely-told but unverifiable"
- Translation comparison via Bible Gateway and Bible Hub; Hebrew from the Bible Hub interlinear; commentary from Benson, Gill and Matthew Henry on 1 Samuel 7:12
- Eben-Ezer, the site problem
- Philip V. Allingham, "The Naming of Names in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol", Dickens Quarterly 4:1 (1987) · The Victorian Web
- Lester Ruth, "Some Similarities and Differences between Historic Evangelical Hymns and Contemporary Worship Songs", Artistic Theologian 3 (2015)
- Daniel Jesse, "Over-Generalizing, Under-Promising, and Over-Promising: Singing Sadness and Joy in the Church", Religions 13:12 (2022)
- Glenn Pemberton's lament counts, reported in Soong-Chan Rah, "The American Church's Absence of Lament", Sojourners; Matt Lynch, "A Time for Minor Chords" · WTC Theology
- Christine Longhurst, "The Words We Sing", Direction 44:2 (2015)
- EBENEZER (Ton-y-Botel), hymn tune