The Wisdom of Hannah

So…

I wrote this for a ward RS board meeting, just after finishing my third semester of Hebrew. And I was sooooo proud of what I could do! Now, it looks naive and sentimental to me.

On one level I cringe as I read it, but on another I smile as I remember what it was like in those wonderful, happy, first days of being able to actually deal with scripture. I was free of the constraints of English and of the enforced interpretation of another’s translation — free forever.

Read and smile with me, won’t you?

–Dissy-writing Mogget

The Wisdom of Hannah

Like many of the Bible’s great stories, the tale of the childless Hannah’s petition for her son Samuel is very short. Hannah’s husband is Elkanah. He has a second wife named Peninnah, by whom he has a number of children. The family makes a yearly pilgrimage to Shiloh. Shiloh is under the care of the over-tolerant Eli and his two thuggish sons, Hophni and Phineas. Each year during their stay at Shiloh, Peninnah torments Hannah over her barren condition, causing her to weep and to refuse participation in the ritual meal. Finally, Hannah takes the matter to the Lord and Samuel is born – Elkanah being something of an afterthought in the whole process.

Readings of this story traditionally focus on Hannah’s distress, seeing it solely in terms of a lack of fulfillment of her maternal instincts and perhaps a desire for relief from her co-wife Peninnah’s provocations. But this is too simple an analysis. It seems to me that there is a difference between Rachel’s lament to Jacob: “Give me children or I’ll die,” (Gen 30:1) and Hannah’s petition: “Lord of Host, if you really will look on your servants’ woe…and give your servant male seed, I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life…” (1Sam 1:11) Rachel’s lament is focused strictly inward, on herself. But Hannah’s petition has both an inward and an outward component. Hannah seems to think that the boy baby she’s asking for might also be something the Lord could use as well. In fact, she’s so sure of it that she makes it the centerpiece of her petition!

Now if this is the case, and I think it may be, then it has some significant consequences for our understanding of Hannah. Among other things, Hannah goes from being a simple country girl sunk in her own misery and waiting in a sort of mindless faith and humility to an alert, intelligent woman with the initiative to attempt a partnership with the Lord. So as we read the story together, I am going to point out more reasons why I think these things to be the case and to suggest a broader appraisal both of Hannah’s virtues and of how an appreciation for them might influence us.

The Demonic Holy Ghost

When did the Holy Ghost become a demon (aka, daimon, daemon)? By “demon” I don’t mean to refer to the malignant spirits that tempt or haunt human beings in Christian mythology. Rather, I mean to refer to the Greek and Roman meaning of the term, a mythical creature that could be either good or evil, but who whispered to the mind of its patron what they should or shouldn’t do. Our term ‘demon’ dervies from this Greek word, though Christians argued that these pagan creatures were by nature wicked since they did not come from God. The most famous daimon belonged to Socrates and told him what he should do. He claimed in his Apology that he only followed what this divine creature had told him to do.

It strikes me that for Mormons at least, the Holy Ghost functions as a sort of daimon. Testimony meetings are replete with accounts of the Holy Ghost telling someone not to go somewhere or to give someone a call. The basis of these testimonies is that they don’t know why they are doing these things other than that they heeded the call of the still small voice. Sometimes they find out why, sometimes they don’t.

But this is not the only way that the Holy Ghost has been depicted in the history of Christianity, nor is it the uniform picture of the Holy Ghost in Mormonism. Most famously, the Lectures on Faith say that the Holy Ghost is the communal mind of God and Jesus Christ. Moroni 10:5 says that the Holy Ghost bears truth to all things, but this seems a bit weightier than whether I should go to a sleepover or where my keys are. Many New Testament books don’t even mention the Holy Ghost and others speak of the Spirit as a more abstract principle. So, where does this idea that the Holy Ghost is a daimon who whispers into our ears what we should do come from?