Entity
Anna the Prophetess
The aged widow and prophetess who, in the Gospel of Luke, recognized the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple and spoke of him to those awaiting Israel's redemption.
Anna is the aged prophetess who, in the Gospel of Luke, recognized the infant Jesus when his parents brought him to the Temple in Jerusalem. She appears in a single passage — Luke 2:36–38 — and nowhere else in the New Testament, yet the scene gives her a fixed place in the Christian story of the Nativity.
The text supplies an unusually exact frame. Luke names her a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher; says she had lived seven years with a husband after her marriage and then as a widow into deep old age — to eighty-four, by the most common reading of a phrase that can also be taken to mean she had been widowed eighty-four years. She did not depart from the Temple, the Gospel says, but served God night and day with fasting and prayer. Coming upon the scene at the moment the old man Simeon was blessing the child, she gave thanks and spoke of the infant to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. The two figures, Simeon and Anna, function as a matched pair: an old man and an old woman, the last of the long-waiting, who see in the newborn the fulfillment of what they had hoped for and are now free to die.
What can be established beyond the text is little. Anna belongs to Luke’s infancy narrative, a body of material with no independent attestation, and historians treat her as a literary and theological figure rather than a documented person; her tribe, Asher, was one of the ten counted lost centuries before, which has been read as Luke’s deliberate signal that the whole of Israel is gathered to witness. Within Christian tradition she became something more settled. The Eastern churches honor her as a saint; she stands in iconography of the Presentation, often with a scroll, and was taken up by later writers as the type of the devout widow whose vigil is rewarded — the watcher who waited in the Temple and was there when the waiting ended.
Her name, in Greek Anna, renders the Hebrew Hannah, and the echo is not accidental: the Hannah of the first book of Samuel is the praying woman whose long-sought child is brought to the sanctuary and given to God, and Luke’s infancy chapters draw steadily on that older book. Anna the prophetess carries the name forward into a new account of a child presented in the Temple. She speaks no recorded words. The Gospel reports only that she gave thanks and told others what she had seen.