Anna the Prophetess

The witness of the Gospel

Anna, like Symeon, is known wholly from the single scene of Luke's Gospel, and the Evangelist draws her portrait in three verses of unusual detail:

And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; and she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. (Luke 2:36–38)

Every phrase is weighed. She is named a prophetess (prophētis) — one of the very few women so styled in the whole of Scripture, standing in the line of Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah — and the title is the Church's warrant for reckoning her among the prophets. She is given her father's name, Phanuel ("the face of God"), and her tribe, Asher — a tribe of the northern kingdom, so that the last prophetic witness of Israel gathers into itself the scattered tribes as well as Judah. She had been married seven years and was widowed thereafter; "a widow of about fourscore and four years" is read either as her age — eighty-four — or, in an ancient and common reading, as the length of her widowhood, so that she had kept her long vigil in the Temple perhaps into her hundredth year and beyond. And she "departed not from the temple," serving God "with fastings and prayers night and day" — the very type of the consecrated widow whom the apostolic Church would honour, "she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day" (1 Timothy 5:5).

The thanksgiving and the proclamation

Anna's part in the Meeting complements Symeon's and completes it. Where Symeon receives the Child and sings his release, Anna, "coming in that instant" — at the very moment of Symeon's song — does two things. First, she "gave thanks likewise unto the Lord": her response to the sight of the Salvation of God is the eucharist of praise, the aged watcher's Gloria answering the elder's Nunc Dimittis. Second, and this is her particular office, she "spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem" — she became the herald, carrying the news of the Redeemer's coming from the Temple out to the faithful remnant, to all who, like herself, were "waiting for the consolation of Israel." The Church reads in this the first evangelisation: before ever the Child had spoken, an aged prophetess of the Temple was already proclaiming him to those with ears to hear. For this the tradition calls her not only prophetess but the herald and evangelist of the Meeting, the woman who, having fasted and prayed night and day through a long widowhood, was found watching at the hour of the Lord's coming and sent to tell of it.

Repose and memory

Of Anna's death the Scriptures and the tradition say nothing certain; having borne her witness she passes out of the record, and the Church keeps her memory in the office of the Meeting and its afterfeast. She stands in Christian tradition as the pattern of the holy widow and the watchful elder — old age consecrated to prayer and fasting, and rewarded with the sight of the Salvation of God — and, with Symeon, as one of the two hinges on which the Old Covenant turns into the New: the whole expectation of Israel, in these two aged saints, receiving at last the One for whom it had waited.

Not to be confused

Several holy women of the tradition bear the name Anna (Hebrew Hannah), and they are readily confused:

• Anna the Prophetess of this entry — the widow of the tribe of Asher, of the Gospel of Luke, kept February 3.

• Anna the mother of the Theotokos — wife of Joachim, grandmother of Christ, "Ancestor of God," kept with Joachim on September 9, with her Dormition on July 25 and her Conception of the Theotokos on December 9. A different person, of the generation before the Nativity.

• Hannah the mother of Samuel — the barren wife of Elkanah in the First Book of Kingdoms (1 Samuel 1–2), whose song of thanksgiving prefigures the Magnificat. An Old-Testament figure, not the same as the Gospel prophetess, though the shared name and the shared motif of thankful song invite the confusion.

• Anna of Novgorod — the eleventh-century princess (Ingegerd of Sweden), wife of Yaroslav the Wise, kept February 10. A medieval saint of Rus', not a figure of the Gospel.

The Gospel prophetess belongs to the moment of the Meeting alone.