There are 3 thoughts on “Hannah’s Adversity and Peninnah’s Redemption”.

  1. I find your analysis of 1 Samuel 1:6 and its exegesis history, as well as your clear exposition of the translation principles used by Jerome very well argued and interesting. But, beside tsarah I meaning “distress, anguish”, the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament as well as the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew offer an entry tsarah II with “concubine” and “rival wife” respectively as meaning, with the only occurrences in 1 Samuel 1:6 and Sirach 37:11. Although both texts could indeed be understood to refer to tsarah I (since all other pairs in Sirach 37:11 consist of a human versus a principle and not another human), HALOT indicates that other Semitic languages all had cognate words meaning “second wife”, e.g. tserretu (akkadian), dharrat (Arabian), tsrry (Ugaritic). Even so, translating 1 Samuel 1:6 literally “Her concubine provoked her sore…” would not really fit either, since it seems awkward to call Peninnah Hannah’s concubine. This still makes your solution the more simple one, backed up by the Septuagint and Josephus.

  2. Pingback: Ten Hidden Gems from the Interpreter Journal | Meridian Magazine

  3. I wonder though – should we consider this narrative in 1 Samuel as part of a genre of related stories, where an infertile wife is humiliated by the co-wife who has a lower status – there are several narratives that fit this genre. If this is so, then I think you might have it backwards. That is, Peninnah is written into the text with this role – and not elevated to it by later readers.

    The second issue (at least for me) comes from my reading of Christopher Jero’s article “Mother-Child Narratives and the Kingdom of God: Authorial Use of Typology as an Interpretive Device in Samuel–Kings” (BBR 25/2, 2015). Jero’s work extends the idea that the story of Hannah’s desire for a child is intended as a parallel to Israel’s desire for a king: neither has what they want, Hannah’s rival has several children while the Philistines have 5 kings, and so on. If Peninnah is being cast as a type for the Philistines and the relationship between Peninnah and Hannah is a type of the relationship between Israel and Philistia, it becomes more difficult to redeem Peninnah.

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