The existence from early times among the Jews of an order of women who renounced the usual joys and privileges of the family state, to devote themselves to religious and charitable duties, is often asserted. Walter Scott, a learned authority as to antiquities, and one who seldom made a representation without examination, makes Rebecca, in Ivanhoe, declare to Rowena that from earliest times such an order of women had existed among her people, and to them she purposes to belong.
We cannot leave the subject without pausing to wonder at the exquisite manner in which the historian, whoever he was, has set before us a high and lovely ideal of womanhood in this Judæan girl. There is but a sentence, yet what calmness, what high-mindedness, what unselfish patriotism, are in the words! "My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth to the Lord, do to me according to thy promise, forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance on thine enemies, the children of Ammon."
Whatever it was to which she so calmly acceded, it was to her the death of all earthly hope, calmly accepted in the very flush and morning tide of victory. How heroic the soul that could meet so sudden a reverse with so unmoved a spirit!
[HANNAH THE PRAYING MOTHER.]
The story of Hannah is a purely domestic one, and is most valuable in unveiling the intimate and trustful life of faith that existed between the Jehovah revealed in the Old Testament and each separate soul, however retired and humble. It is not God the Lawgiver and King, but, if we may so speak, God in his private and confidential relations to the individual. The story opens briefly, after the fashion of the Bible, whose brevity in words is such a contrast to the tediousness of most professed sacred books.
"There was a man," says the record, "named Elkanah, and he had two wives; and the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah, and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none." Hannah, from the story, appears to have had one of those intense natures, all nerve and sensibility, on which every trouble lies with double weight. The lack of children in an age when motherhood was considered the essential glory of woman, was to her the climax of anguish and mortification. Nor was there wanting the added burden of an unfriendly party to notice and to inflame the hidden wound by stinging commentaries; for we are told that "her adversary provoked her sore, to make her fret." And thus, year by year, as the family went up to the sacred feast at Shiloh, and other exultant mothers displayed their fair sons and daughters, the sacred feast was turned into gall for the unblest one, and we are told that Hannah "wept and did not eat." "Then said Elkanah unto her, Hannah, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? Am I not better to thee than ten sons?"
Hannah was one of a class of women in whom genius and a poetic nature are struggling with a vague intensity, giving the keenest edge to desire and to disappointment. All Judæan women desire children, but Hannah had that vivid sense of nationality, that identification of self with the sublime future of her people, that made it bitter to be excluded from all share in those hopes and joys of motherhood from which the earth's deliverer was to spring. She desired a son, as poets desire song, as an expression of all that was heroic and unexpressed in herself, and as a tribute to the future glories of her people. A poet stricken with paralysis might suffer as she suffered. But it was a kind and degree of sorrow, the result of an exceptional nature, which few could comprehend. To some it would afford occasion only for vulgar jests. Even her husband, devoted as he was, wondered at rather than sympathised with it.