Why Did Hannah Ask for "Seed of Men"?

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) What was Hannah praying for? More specifically, how are we to explain the phrase ... in 1 Sam 1:11? In plain terms, we of course understand that Hannah was praying to have child. Our text has set this up as the basic point on which the plot of the story turns. As soon as the main characters-Elkanah and his two wives, Hannah and Peninnah-are identified, we are informed (v. 2), Peninnah had children, but Hannah did not. The setting of the story is the family's visit to Shiloh for worship and sacrifice. There is no reason to assume that the trip was made on the occasion of yearly pilgrimage festival. The phrase ..., annual (v. 21), simply refers to the sacrifice made annually by Elkanah and his family, which provided the setting of the events of vv. 3-19. Indeed, the course of the story would seem to argue against public festival. There is no one on the scene but Elkanah's family and the high priest, Eli, and the latter seems to have plenty of time on his hands. All we are told about him is that he is sitting on his priestly throne at the entrance to the shrine watching Hannah mutter to herself. This is not what we would expect the chief priest to be doing on the busiest weekend of the year. If the festival was indeed public occasion, our chapter's narrow focus is all the more evident. For our story is about one thing and one thing only: Hannah wants child. But the phrase with which she makes her request falls into little-discussed category of biblical texts: those in which the process of exegesis runs in reverse. We ordinarily must understand writer's words in order to interpret his meaning, but we sometimes find ourselves with sense of what the writer must mean, though it has not been clearly expressed. In such cases our task is to explain how the writer's unusual choice of words was indeed meant to convey the meaning that we somehow intuit. My instincts say that this category is larger than we would like to admit, and that by the nature of the beast there must be examples where what we all know it means is actually wrong. I intend to suggest here that Hannah's request is one such case. The difficulty arises because-if I may step for moment into my role as professor of Biblical Hebrew-the phrase ..., and can only mean, human offspring.1 Indeed, the medieval interpreter David Kimhi does offer as one of his comments on this phrase the suggestion that Hannah was praying for who would not resemble monkey or eunuch. But the story has provided no reason that Hannah should fear an outcome of this kind. Others of the medievals join Kimhi in further suggestion that what Hannah wanted was who would be real man-righteous (as ... are called in 1 Kgs 2:32), prominent (1 Sam 17:12), and wise (Deut 1:13). The common understanding of the phrase among modern interpreters-from Henry Preserved Smith in the ICC century ago to Jan P. Fokkelman in 1993-is that Hannah wants son.2 Bible translations too, from a man child of the KJV to seed of Robert Alter3 make the same assumption. Certainly neither this nor the hope that her would be worthy man is an absurd request, but according to the logic of the story neither of these is the request that Hannah is making. This is not to say, of course, that Hannah did not want who would grow up to be righteous, prominent, and wise. She might even, if pressed, have expressed preference for male child. Elkanah's rhetorical question, Am I not better to you than ten sons? (v. 8), could be interpreted as support for this (though it need not be).4 But this says nothing about what Hannah herself wants, and the narrator (in vv. 2 and 4) has carefully avoided framing the child's sex as the focus of the story. What Hannah wants is child, plain and simple. The careful interweaving of two chains of consecutive verbs-one describing what happened every year when Elkanah and his brood went to Shiloh, and one describing what happened on one particular occasion5-demonstrates that the action of our story begins where it does because Hannah has reached the end of her rope. …