1 Samuel 9:12

he is before you Before thee, addressing the speaker. It is a direction to go straight forward.

he came to day to the city If "the city" was Ramah, Samuel may have been absent from home on one of his official circuits.

a sacrifice of the people Possibly at the New Moon (Numbers 28:11-15) or upon some special occasion of thanksgiving.

in the high place Here probably was the altar which Samuel had built (1 Samuel 7:17). A natural instinct among all nations chooses hill-tops as fitting places of worship. Such "high places" were frequently consecrated to the worship of Jehovah in spite of the prohibition implied in the command that there should be only one sanctuary (Deuteronomy 12:11-14). That this was the case in the unsettled period of the Judges is not surprising, but even after the building of the temple the high-place worship continued, though it is condemned in the books of Kings as a blot on the character of otherwise good monarchs.