Imagining Hannah

One of the things I look forward to during Rosh Hashanah is the communal reading of the story of Hannah, the mother of the founder of the Israelite monarchy, which begins First Samuel.  Hannah’s tale was matched with the tale of Sarah’s divinely-assisted conception of Isaac; in both tales God answers the hopes of long-childless, and in Hannah’s case, depressed women, and is also celebrated as the beginning of silent prayer. The tale raises, however, another theme that receives far less attention—yet in our day is equally essential—faithful leadership.  As we prepare for our days in audience with the Almighty, let’s explore the lasting import of Hannah’s struggle.

I was fortunate to conceive and bear children easily. I was jolted into sharp awareness of my luck when a long-childless co-worker confronted me angrily when I was backed into announcing my first pregnancy at an office party. Since that long-ago afternoon, I’ve encountered many women who have struggled through difficulties conceiving, carrying and bearing healthy children. Each time, I am reminded of the human realism of this tale, which may well have been first recorded by Hannah’s famous eldest son. Some years ago, as I struggled to heal from the early death of my first husband from cancer, I sank myself into the preparation of an illuminated manuscript of Hannah’s story, published in my book,  Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah.   Hannah’s tale is personal, yet it embodies essential national values and behavior for the nascent Israel, not only sensitivity to childlessness, not only the value of personal prayer, but also the importance of honest national leadership. The Hellenistic and Byzantine era midrash on the story promotes these moral and religious qualities as models for the community of Israel for ever after.  Jewish tradition has thus granted Hannah’s story a prominent niche in Jewish liturgy as the haftarah for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, paralleling the prescribed Torah reading that recounts the birth of Isaac. In Hannah’s story, personal emotion takes on national significance.

Hannah’s tale begins in abject depression.  Deeply loved by her husband, mocked by the second wife he took in the face of her childlessness, Hannah has withdrawn into an impenetrable bubble of grief and humiliation. Why was Hannah’s childlessness so noteworthy that it begins the story of the man who established the Israelite monarchy?  Why must this great leader be born of a long-childless woman? Samuel is hardly the first of Israel’s leaders born to a woman who bore children with difficulty; as we read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Sarah bore Isaac at the laughable age of ninety only after angelic prophecy, Rachel was long barren before giving birth to Elkanah’s ancestor Joseph and died giving birth to her younger son, Benjamin.  Moses’ mother, Jochebed, was one of the Israelite women in Egypt who had to coax her husband into marital relations so that she might conceive a child, contrary to that enslaved and husband’s reluctance.  In each of these cases Israel’s providential God needed to tweak normal human affairs to create the necessary leader.

As first wife, Hannah had a role to fill within her family even without children. As archeologist  Carol Meyers, in her Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context, observes, iron-age Israelite tribal communities consisted of households that combined complex mixes of generations and familial relationships.  Within these households a spectrum of economic and familial activities took place— including farming, live-stock management, household crafts and management and of course, child-raising— bent on achieving self-sufficiency for the extended family. We cannot know exactly what tasks were specifically apportioned to women, but scholarship suggests that women were integrated into every aspect of household life. Yet childbearing was essential to producing the sons necessary for the proper inheritance and care for the family’s all-important land portion. In Israel, as in the ancient Mesopotamia of Hammurabi’s Code, if his wife did not produce an heir, a man might take concubines or additional wives. Not only might the childless wife suffer the emotional pain and humiliation described for Hannah, but she could well face sudden impoverishment upon the death of her husband.

The early rabbis responsible for much of were fully sensitive to the plight of the childless woman. Exploring Sarah’s gift of Hagar to Abraham, in Genesis Rabbah the rabbis note that children often only appear after “pain and toil,” and ask “why were the matriarchs barren?” The answer, they suggest, is that “the Holy One, Blessed be He, yearns for their prayers and supplications.” And, as we know, it was through that yearned-for prayer —by the very invention of silent prayer in Israelite history—that Hannah’s own yearning found fulfillment.

Hannah, Illumination 4, from Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah.

Unusually in the Hebrew Bible, the storyteller shares with us with not only Hannah’s actions, but also her emotions, in fact, her husband’s as well. Already in the fifth verse we learn that Elkanah’s second wife is her “rival,” with the power to “make her miserable” about her lack of children.  Far from neglecting his beautiful, graceful but evidently barren wife, Elkanah fully senses Hannah’s pain and does all he can to comfort her, playfully nudging her – we can almost see him chucking her under the chin – “don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” The storyteller shares with us the romantic love that draws Hannah and Elkanah together despite the pain of her childlessness.

Hannah accompanies Elkanah on his seasonal pilgrimage to the Israelite shrine at Shiloh. The sources praise Elkanah and his whole family for setting a model of observance and devotion to God for their whole farming community. Yet, beyond the family pilgrimage, this despairing wife unknowingly, spontaneously, revolutionizes Jewish life.

Hannah Illumination 6, from Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah, by Debra Band.

She enters the shrine, sinks down onto a bench, and starts to plead. “O, Lord of Hosts, if you will look upon the suffering of Your maidservant and will remember me, and not forget your maidservant, and if You will grant Your maidservant a male child, I will dedicate him to the Lord for all the days of his life…” The High Priest, Eli, who has never seen such a spectacle, first assumes the woman is drunk, and orders her out of the shrine….until she explains. Just as her husband offers the fruits of their lands in the altar, Hannah offers her silent prayer. Hannah has offered the Almighty the prayer for which God yearns.

Hannah, Illumination 9, from Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah

God quickly answers Hannah’s prayer and  grants her a completed pregnancy, a first son, whom she joyfully names Samuel, “I asked the Lord for him.”

Hannah voices her emotion in a wild shout of victory after battle, of uplift from obscurity.   As any woman who has borne children (or any man who has accompanied her) knows, childbirth is battle—the moment when she rests with her long-desired baby in her arms, triumph. I present Hannah’s victory song with a birth canal of sorts, its muscular walls lined with cervical cells, pulsating and twisting with birth contractions, imagery of crowning infants and symbolic plants and animals emerging from her tissues…and an eagle, alluding to God’s parenting of Israel, flies over the scene.

Hannah, Illumination 13, from Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah

But Hannah’s emotional trials have not ended.  The new mother has pledged this first, most remarkable son to the priests at Shiloh to raise for divine service—knowing that upon weaning they must part.  Can you imagine her emotional stress at giving up the joy of raising this child? It’s hardly a stretch to imagine her apprehension about Eli’s parental competence when she beheld his own sons thievery and dishonesty in their priestly duties. Later, when we read of her five later children, we intuit her joy and fulfillment at finally being able to raise her own children and watch them flourish.  Private emotion—indeed that of a woman in a patriarchal society — the author tells us, can take on national significance.

Hannah, Illumination 15, from Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah

Determined to mother her son despite the separation, Hannah “would make a little robe for him and bring it up to him every year when she made the pilgrimage with her husband.” Now, clothing does more than simply cover flesh in biblical tales; especially in a priestly context, clothing and the passing on of clothing conveys authority.  For instance, Numbers 20:26 tells how, after forfeiting the right to entering the Land of Israel by disobeying God’s orders concerning the waters of Meribah, Aaron’s priestly garb was stripped from him and placed on his son Eleazar—the son literally “assumed the mantle” of his father’s authority.   I Samuel tells of how Hannah brought a “little robe” for her young son immediately after recounting the corruption of Eli’s sons, who stole families’ sacrificial meals right from the cooking forks. This contrast of Hannah’s devoted nurturing with Eli’s failed parenting—which in my book I compare to Shakespeare’s contrast of the valiant Harry Hotspur with the dissolute young Henry V—throws Hannah’s and Elkanah’s admirable behavior, a model for all Israel into high relief. It would be their values of leadership of their community, of devoted parenting, even from afar, that would produce the great prophet, Samuel, the leader who would establish the Davidic kingdom.  Private emotion—indeed that of a woman in a patriarchal society, the author tells us, can take on national significance. And we relive Hannah’s trials and fulfillment—and her family’s leadership values—each Rosh Hashanah.

L’shana tova u’metuka!

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This discussion is based on my 2012 book, Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah, and includes my illuminated paintings and commentary on each of these three biblical women’s tales, along with literary commentaries by the renowned scholar of Hebrew literature, Arnold Band. The book may be purchased across the world wherever books are sold.   You can find out more about my Hebrew illuminated manuscripts (including my new book, All the World Praises You! an illuminated Aleph-Bet book) and book-talks at www.dbandart.com.  Publication of Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah was made possible by a generous gift of Sharon and Steven Lieberman.  All materials herein copyright © Debra Band 2018