Song of Hannah

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The Song of Hannah is a poem interrupting the prose text of the Books of Samuel. According to the surrounding narrative, the poem (1 Samuel 2:1-10) was a prayer delivered by Hannah, to give thanks to Yahweh for the birth of her son, Samuel. According to some contributors to the Classical Rabbinical literature, the first half of the poem was a prophecy, predicting Samuel's later role as a prophet, that her great grandson would be a musician in the Jerusalem Temple, that Sennacherib would destroy the Kingdom of Israel, that Nebuchadrezzar would fall from power, and that the Babylonian Captivity would come to an end ^[1].

According to most textual scholars it actually refers to the birth of Saul, with Samuel's name having been substituted awkwardly for Saul in the preceding narrative; the text is generally considered by biblical scholars to be more likely to have originally been a song of praise directed at a king than a prayer referring to the birth of a prophet. Its seemingly non-prayer-like nature was noticed by classical scholars, who believed that Hannah's prayer was silent and unrecorded, and that the Song of Hannah was what was said afterwards ^[2].

In Judaism the song of Hannah is regarded as the prime role model for how to pray, and is read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah as the haftarah. The poem has several features in common with the Magnificat, which was sang in early Christian circles (and continues to be regularly sung/said in most Christian denominations). These common features include the themes, and the order in which they appear; many textual scholars believe that the Magnificat is essentially just a copy of the Song of Hannah, together with part of a previous prayer of Hannah referring to herself as a handmaiden (1 Samuel 11a), which have been paraphrased to be more succinct.