Song of Hannah

The story

The Song of Hannah is a poem set within the prose story of the Books of Samuel. According to the surrounding narrative, the poem (1 Samuel 2:1–10) was a prayer that Hannah spoke to give thanks to God for the birth of her son, Samuel. Hannah praises Yahweh, reflects on the reversals he brings about and looks forward to his king. The song moves from the particular to the general, opening with her own gratitude for a reversal in her own life and closing with God's defeat of his enemies, a cosmic reversal; through this theme of reversal it serves as an introduction to the whole book. The commentators Keil and Delitzsch saw Hannah's experience as a pledge of how God would also lift up his whole nation, then bowed down and oppressed by its foes, and Walter Brueggemann sees in it the major theme of the Books of Samuel, the power and willingness of Yahweh to intrude, intervene and invert.

The mention of a king in its last verse has provoked much discussion. The biblical commentator A. F. Kirkpatrick argued that it does not imply a late date for the song, since the idea of a king was not new to the Israelite mind, and amid the anarchy and the attacks of the time the desire for a king was probably taking shape among the people. The blessing of the king and "the anointed" closely parallels 2 Samuel 22, which ends with God as a tower of salvation to his chosen king. Some contributors to the classical rabbinic literature read the first half of the poem as a prophecy: of Samuel's later role as a prophet, of a great-grandson of Hannah who would be a musician in the Jerusalem Temple, of Sennacherib's destruction of the Kingdom of Israel, of the fall of Nebuchadnezzar and of the end of the Babylonian Captivity. Its attribution to Hannah sets her apart among biblical figures; her hymn of praise takes up many themes of Israel's national culture, and treats fertility and childbirth as equal in importance to the others and worthy of Israel's singers.

In Judaism the Song of Hannah is regarded as the model of reverent, personal prayer, and it is read in the synagogue as the haftarah on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It has much in common with the Magnificat, the song of Mary in the Gospel of Luke, which was sung in early Christian circles and is still sung or recited in many churches, in its themes and in the order in which they appear; a number of Christian scholars believe that Luke used the Song of Hannah as the basis of the Magnificat, and some see Hannah as a "type" of Mary, both of them handmaids of God who bore sons dedicated to him. In the Catholic Church it is known as the Canticle of Anna, one of the seven Old Testament canticles of the breviary, used at Lauds on Wednesdays, and in the Revised Common Lectionary of most mainline Protestant churches it is sung or recited as the congregation's response to one of the year's readings.

What it says

A song of thanksgiving in which a woman whose prayer for a child has been answered rejoices in God and then widens her praise to the whole world: God breaks the proud and strengthens the weak, feeds the hungry, gives children to the childless, raises the poor from the dust to sit with princes, and will judge the earth and give strength to his king. The mood is exultant and confident.

The words