Anna the Prophetess

Anna (Hebrew Hannah, the same name as the mother of Samuel and the traditional name of the Virgin Mary's own mother) appears in Luke 2:36–38 immediately after the Simeon episode at the Presentation in the Temple. Luke provides her ancestry with unusual precision: "Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser." The mention of the tribe of Asher — one of the ten northern tribes, supposedly lost to Israelite identity after the Assyrian conquest of 722 BC — is theologically significant. The tribes had not, in fact, been lost. Anna is a witness to the continuing existence of all twelve tribes of Israel at the time of Christ.

Luke describes her as an extraordinarily ancient widow: she had been married seven years and then a widow for either eighty-four years or to the age of eighty-four (the Greek is grammatically ambiguous on this point). She lived continuously in the Temple precincts, "departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day." When Simeon was holding the child Jesus and speaking the Nunc Dimittis, Anna arrived "at that instant" and gave thanks to God. She then "spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem."

The pairing of Simeon and Anna at the Presentation has been read since the patristic period as a deliberate double witness: a righteous Israelite man and a righteous Israelite woman, both elderly, both waiting all their lives for the consolation of Israel, both granted to see the consolation in this one infant. The Old Testament had required "the testimony of two or three witnesses" to establish a matter (Deuteronomy 19:15). At the Presentation, the Old Covenant itself, in its two most reverent representatives, bears witness to the New. Anna's response is the prototype of the Christian witness: having seen the Christ, she went and spoke of him to others. Her name is preserved in the liturgical tradition of both East and West.