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 Zechariah 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” — the convention by which the Western church names its canticles. It should not be confused with the Benedictus qui venit of the Mass, a separate acclamation drawn from the crowd’s cry at the entry into Jerusalem.

In Luke’s narrative the song belongs to a particular silence breaking. Struck mute for doubting the angel who promised him a son in old age, Zechariah recovers his speech at the child’s circumcision and, the text says, is filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesies. The canticle falls in two movements. The first blesses God for raising up “a horn of salvation” in the house of David, keeping the oath sworn to Abraham — language steeped in the Psalms and the prophets, a thanksgiving for a deliverance spoken of as already accomplished. The second turns directly to the infant: “And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest,” the forerunner who will go before the Lord to prepare his ways. It ends on the image of a dayspring, a dawn visiting those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

Scholarship reads the Benedictus, with the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, as one of the three canticles Luke set into his infancy narrative — hymns whose diction is so saturated with the Greek Old Testament that many regard them as older Jewish-Christian compositions the evangelist took up and placed, rather than free composition at the points where they stand. The question of their origin is unsettled and likely to remain so; what is clear is that Luke uses them to give his opening chapters the cadence of scripture fulfilling itself.

In Christian practice the canticle left the page early. By the time of the medieval office it had become the Gospel canticle of Lauds, the climax of morning prayer, as the Magnificat crowns Vespers and the Nunc Dimittis closes the day at Compline — a placement the Roman, Benedictine, and Anglican rites have kept. Sung daily at the breaking of light, it carries its own dawn image into the hour it marks. The same words serve at the graveside in some burial rites, set there for the line about the dayspring reaching those in the shadow of death. 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