Benedictus

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The Benedictus is the canticle of Zechariah, the hymn of praise placed at Luke 1:68–79 in the mouth of the priest at the birth and naming of his son, John the Baptist. Its name is simply its first word in the Latin of the Vulgate — Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel” — by the convention through which the Western church names its canticles after the syllable on which they open. By the same rule the song of Mary is the Magnificat, from Magnificat anima mea Dominum, and the song of Simeon the Nunc Dimittis. The Benedictus should not be confused with the Benedictus qui venit, “Blessed is he who comes,” the acclamation of the Mass drawn from the crowd’s cry at the entry into Jerusalem (Psalm 118) and joined to the Sanctus. The two share an opening word in translation and nothing else: one blesses God for a deliverance, the other blesses the one who arrives to bring it.

The silence and its breaking

In the architecture of Luke’s opening, the canticle is the sound of a long silence ending. The priest had been serving his course in the Temple when the angel Gabriel announced that his aged wife Elizabeth would bear a son; he asked for a sign, doubting, and the sign given was the withdrawal of his own speech. He came out unable to bless the people, and stayed mute through the months of the pregnancy. On the eighth day, at the circumcision, the neighbors moved to name the child after his father; the mother insisted on John, the name the angel had given, and the father, asked for his judgment, wrote it on a tablet — His name is John — and in that instant his tongue was loosed. The first use he makes of recovered speech is this hymn. The text says he was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, so that the canticle is presented not as private thanksgiving but as oracle: the speech that doubt had closed reopens as prophecy.

The placement is deliberate. The Benedictus answers, across a few columns of text, the muteness Gabriel imposed — the same mouth that could not bless now blesses God at length — and it answers, across the wider narrative, the silence of the whole opening sequence, in which a barren woman and a virgin both conceive and the events of the deliverance are set in motion before anyone has explained what they mean. The priest’s song is the first sustained interpretation the narrative offers of itself.

It is also the priest’s first act of priesthood made whole. He had gone into the sanctuary to offer incense and had come out unable to give the blessing the people waited for; the office of blessing was precisely what the silence took from him. The Benedictus is that withheld blessing finally spoken — no longer the formula owed to the assembly at the close of the offering, but a blessing of God that runs past liturgy into prophecy. The structure of Luke’s opening pairs his voice with two others: the Magnificat of Mary, sung when the two pregnant women meet, and the Nunc Dimittis of the old man Simeon, sung when the child is brought to the Temple. Three songs, an old priest, a young mother, and a waiting elder, carry the whole weight of interpretation in Luke’s first two chapters, and the Benedictus is the one set in the mouth of the institution itself, the priesthood of the old covenant blessing the dawn of what comes after it.

The two movements

The canticle falls cleanly into two parts, and the seam between them is one of direction. The first movement, verses 68 to 75, faces God and the past. It blesses the Lord for having visited and redeemed his people — the Greek verb, episkeptomai, is the same one the Septuagint uses when God “visits” the barren Sarah and ends her childlessness, so that the language of an old deliverance is folded into a new one. God has raised up a horn of salvation in the house of David: the horn is the Old Testament image of an animal’s strength, a king’s power lifted up, and the house of David is the dynasty from which the deliverer is awaited. This redemption is described as the keeping of the oath sworn to Abraham — the covenant promise that Israel’s enemies would not hold it, that the people would serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness. Every clause is woven from the diction of the Psalms and the prophets; the song speaks of the deliverance as already accomplished, a thanksgiving in the perfect tense for something the narrative has only begun.

The second movement, verses 76 to 79, turns and faces the child. And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways. Here the canticle names John’s office: he is the forerunner, the one who goes ahead to make ready, and his work is to give the people knowledge of salvation by the remission of their sins. The hymn ends on its most concentrated image — the dayspring from on high, the dawn that visits them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. The Greek word behind “dayspring,” anatole, holds two senses at once: the rising of the sun, and the springing up of a shoot or branch. The Septuagint uses anatole to render the messianic “Branch” of the prophets, the shoot from David’s stump, so that the closing image is at once a sunrise and a sprouting — a light that breaks and a green thing that grows out of an old root. The forerunner’s last word about the one he precedes is a word for first light.

Between the two movements runs a single argument about time. The first names a deliverance promised long ago — the oath to Abraham, the horn raised in David’s house — and speaks of it as done; the second names the child who will go ahead of it, and speaks of it as not yet arrived. The hinge is the covenant: what God swore to the fathers is the same thing the dayspring brings, so that the song binds the deepest past to the nearest future and leaves the present, the eighth day in a hill town of Judea, standing at the join. The whole hymn is an act of reading the immediate against the ancient, the newborn against the patriarchs, the loosened tongue against the long muteness. It is why Luke can place a song so crowded with old language at the start of something he means as new: the Benedictus claims that the new is the old keeping its word.

The question of origin

Read alongside the Magnificat, the song of Mary at the Visitation, and the Nunc Dimittis, the song of Simeon at the presentation in the Temple, the Benedictus forms a set of three canticles Luke threaded through his infancy narrative — the New Testament’s only sustained outbreak of hymnody at the start of a Gospel. Their diction is the first thing scholarship notices: it is so saturated with the Greek Old Testament, so dense with phrases lifted or adapted from the Psalms, the prophets, and the songs of Hannah and the patriarchs, that the canticles read less like fresh composition at the points where they stand than like existing hymns the evangelist took up and set in place. The Psalms of Solomon, a collection of Jewish psalms from the century before, voice the same sharp hope for a Davidic deliverer in much the same idiom, and stand as evidence that hymnody of exactly this temper was being written in the period; the Prayer of Manasseh, another late Jewish psalm preserved outside the canon, shows the same Septuagintal manner of building new devotion from the phrasing of the old scriptures.

From this several positions follow. One holds that the Benedictus is the composition of Luke himself, writing in a deliberately archaic, Septuagintal register to give his opening the timbre of scripture. Another holds it a pre-Lukan Jewish-Christian hymn — a piece of early community worship the evangelist inherited and fitted to Zechariah’s mouth, which would explain why its first movement, the thanksgiving for messianic deliverance, makes no mention of John at all and reads as a self-contained psalm to which the second movement about the child was joined. A third notes that the celebration of John as prophet of the Highest could have circulated among the Baptist’s own followers before it was set within a narrative that subordinates him to the one he announces. The threefold pattern — Zechariah, Luke, or the Baptist’s circle — recurs in the commentaries because the evidence underdetermines the choice. What the saturation does establish is the effect Luke wanted: his first two chapters move to the cadence of scripture fulfilling itself, the new events narrated in the very words of the old promises, so that the reader meets the deliverance already clothed in the language that had been waiting for it.

The canticle in the hours

In Christian practice the canticle left the page early and lodged in the daily office. By the time of the medieval Liturgy of the Hours the Benedictus had become the Gospel canticle of Lauds, the climax of morning prayer — its place fixed by its own dawn image, the song of first light sung at the hour the day begins. The arrangement is symmetrical across the office: as the Benedictus crowns the morning at Lauds, the Magnificat crowns the evening at Vespers, and the Nunc Dimittis closes the night at Compline, so that Luke’s three infancy canticles mark the three hinges of the day. Within the morning office the canticle stands at a structural peak: after the psalmody, a short reading, and a responsory, the assembly rises for the Benedictus — Gospel words received standing, with the sign of the cross at the first verse — and from it the office turns to its intercessions, the Lord’s Prayer, and the closing blessing.

The Rule of Benedict of Nursia, written in the sixth century to fix the shape of monastic prayer in the West, appoints the Gospel canticle at the morning office, and the witness of the Rule shows the placement already settled in his day rather than invented by it; the eastern office had long given the three Lukan songs a like prominence, and the western breviary inherited the canticle of Lauds as a fixture it did not need to argue for. The Benedictine, Roman, and Anglican rites have all kept it there. When Thomas Cranmer compressed the eight monastic hours into the two services of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549, he carried the Benedictus into the new English Morning Prayer, where it stands as a canticle beside the Te Deum — proof of how firmly the song had fastened to the morning, surviving even the dismantling of the office that had held it. The Roman reform after the Second Vatican Council, which redistributed much of the psalter across a longer cycle, left the gospel canticles untouched at their hinges: the Benedictus remained the daily summit of Lauds, recited or sung in full every morning, without exception, the one fixed text in an office that otherwise turns. Sung every day at the breaking of light, it carries its own sunrise into the hour it marks — the anatole of the text arriving with the literal dawn. The same words serve at the graveside in some burial rites, the Episcopal Burial of the Dead among them, set there for the verse about the dayspring reaching those who sit in the shadow of death: the song of one dawn lent to another, the morning canticle spoken over a body in the expectation of a rising.

Text and scholarship

The Latin text the West inherited is that of the Vulgate of Jerome, whose opening Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel gave the canticle its name; the underlying Greek is Luke’s, and behind both stands the Septuagint vocabulary the hymn quarries throughout, a layered genealogy of the language readable in any parallel edition of the Bible. The standard scholarly treatment of the infancy canticles is Raymond E. Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah, which assembles the arguments for a pre-Lukan origin and sets the Benedictus in its place among the canticles; Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s Anchor Bible commentary on Luke gives the verse-by-verse philology, including the double sense of anatole and the Septuagintal reach of the diction; and Stephen Farris’s The Hymns of Luke’s Infancy Narratives weighs the case for pre-Lukan Semitic sources against the case for Lukan composition. The text itself, with its Greek and Latin parallels, is available in the public-domain critical and translation editions at Bible Hub’s Luke 1 interlinear and in the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Benedictus, which preserves the older liturgical and exegetical synthesis; a modern magisterial reading of the anatole image is set out in the Vatican catechesis on the canticle.

A text composed to announce one birth thus became, in use, a fixed point in the rhythm of the Christian day, spoken by people who never meet the priest whose voice it first records.

→ Related: Psalms Of Solomon · Prayer Of Manasseh · John The Baptist · Liturgy Of The Hours · Vespers · New Testament · Psalms · Mary