Elizabeth

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Elizabeth is the woman who, in the opening chapter of the Gospel of Luke, becomes the mother of John the Baptist in old age. She appears in no other book of the New Testament, and outside Luke she has no narrative at all; almost everything later tradition holds about her is drawn from a single sustained passage. The whole of her on the page is one episode and a few verses on either side of it — an annunciation she does not witness, a meeting in the hill country, a birth, a quarrel over a name. The Gospel builds a great deal on that little, and so, after it, does the Church.

A daughter of Aaron on both sides

Luke sets her down with a precision that is itself a statement. Her husband is Zechariah, a priest of the division of Abijah — the eighth of the twenty-four rotations into which the descendants of Aaron were ordered for service in the Temple, each course serving its appointed turns through the year. Elizabeth herself is named a daughter of Aaron. The marriage therefore joins priestly blood to priestly blood; the child to come is of the old altar-lineage on his mother’s side as well as his father’s, born of the Temple before he is ever set against it. Luke is careful to root the new thing he is announcing in the most ancient and legitimate ground Israel possessed.

Her name carries the same freight. The Greek the Gospel uses, Elisabet, is the form the Septuagint had already given to Elisheba — and Elisheba, in the book of Exodus, is the wife of Aaron himself, the matriarch from whom the whole priestly house descends. Elizabeth thus bears, at the close of the scriptural story, the name borne at its priestly beginning by the first high priest’s wife. The repetition is unlikely to be accidental in a writer as deliberate as Luke. He is placing the mother of the forerunner inside the founding genealogy of the priesthood, the last of the line standing where the first had stood.

The couple are introduced as righteous before God, walking in the commandments blameless — and then comes the difficulty around which everything turns: they have no child, and both are advanced in years. The barrenness is not a moral fault; the text insists on their blamelessness precisely so that the childless years cannot be read as judgment. It is, rather, the condition that the story exists to reverse.

Written into the line of the matriarchs

The pattern is one of the oldest in the Hebrew scriptures. The righteous wife who cannot conceive, who carries her barrenness as a grief through long years, and to whom a son is at last given against the odds of age or the closed womb — Sarah laughing at the tent door, Rebekah, Rachel, the unnamed mother of Samson, and, most pointedly for Luke, Hannah, who weeps at the sanctuary and is given Samuel. Each of these sons arrives marked, set apart for a work larger than an ordinary life. By writing Elizabeth into that lineage of late and unexpected mothers, Luke tells the reader before John is born what kind of child he is: one of the divinely promised sons, in the succession of Isaac and Samuel and Samson, the last and the threshold-keeper of the line.

The debt to Hannah runs deeper than the situation. When her cousin’s child is named and the silence breaks, it is the songs of this household — and the song Mary sings under Elizabeth’s roof — that take their cadence from Hannah’s thanksgiving in the first book of Samuel. The barren woman’s reproach lifted, the mighty pulled from their seats, the hungry filled: Luke writes the new births in the voice of the old.

When Zechariah, serving his course at the altar, is told by the angel Gabriel that Elizabeth will bear a son to be called John, he asks how he can know it, given their age — and for the doubt he is struck mute, unable to speak until the child is born and named. The muteness is the counter-figure to Elizabeth’s fullness. While her husband is silenced for his unbelief, she conceives, hides herself five months, and speaks of the conception as the Lord’s act, taking away her reproach among the people. The man of the Temple is dumb; the woman the Temple produced is the one given words.

The Visitation

The scene for which she is best remembered is the Visitation. In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Gabriel comes to Mary in Nazareth with the second and greater annunciation — and tells her, as a sign, that her aged kinswoman has herself conceived. Mary travels in haste to the hill country of Judea, enters the house of Zechariah, and greets Elizabeth. At the sound of the greeting the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaps, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out the words the Gospel makes her famous for — blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb — and asks how it is that the mother of her Lord should come to her, for the babe leaped in her womb for joy.

This is the hinge of Luke’s whole infancy account. Elizabeth is the first human voice in the Gospel to recognize what Mary carries; before any shepherd, any Magi, any preaching, an old woman in a hill town names the unborn Jesus as her Lord, and her own unborn son, leaping, makes his first act of witness from inside the womb. The forerunner runs ahead even of his birth. And it is Elizabeth’s greeting that Christian devotion would later lift, almost word for word, into the second half of the Hail Mary, set beside Gabriel’s salutation; the sentence she speaks in the hill country is recited, centuries on, by millions who never hear her name. In answer to her, Mary sings the Magnificat. Then Mary stays with her about three months — long enough, the chronology implies, to be present near the birth — and returns home.

The naming

When Elizabeth’s time comes she bears a son, and her neighbors and kin rejoice that the Lord has shown her great mercy. On the eighth day, at the circumcision, they move to name the child Zechariah after his father, as custom expects. His mother refuses: he shall be called John. The name belongs to no one in the family, and they object, and they turn to the father — still mute — to settle it. Zechariah asks for a writing tablet and writes that the child’s name is John, and in the same moment his mouth is opened and his tongue loosed, and he speaks, blessing God in the canticle the Church calls the Benedictus. The whole hill country marvels, and the question passes from mouth to mouth: what then shall this child be? It is the last note Luke gives Elizabeth. The story has reached the son, and from here it follows him.

In the small economy of the chapter she has done a great deal. She has been written into the matriarchs; she has spoken the first confession of the Gospel; she has held firm on the name against a household’s expectation and been vindicated. And then the narrative, having used her to launch two lives, lets her go without a death-notice or an afterword.

What the record holds, and what piety supplied

What can be established about Elizabeth as a figure in the documentary record is slight. She is known from Luke alone, and Luke’s infancy narrative is read by a broad range of scholarship as a carefully composed theological prologue rather than a chronicle — a diptych in which the conception, birth, and naming of John are set in deliberate parallel to those of Jesus, panel answering panel, so that the lesser annunciation precedes and is surpassed by the greater. Raymond Brown’s study of the infancy narratives treats Elizabeth’s characterization as built from the matriarchs of the older scriptures and judges the very kinship between John’s family and Jesus’ to be of uncertain historical footing, a theological tie as much as a genealogical one. Within the frame of the text, none of this dims her; the diptych is the form in which Luke’s truth is told, and she stands at its first panel as the one who names the second.

Tradition, as it always does, gave her far more than the Gospel supplies. She is venerated as a saint across the Christian world — kept in the Roman calendar on the fifth of November, and in the Byzantine, Lutheran, and Anglican reckonings on the fifth of September, often honored together with Zechariah. The apocryphal Gospel of James, the second-century infancy book that supplied so much of later Marian devotion, carries her story past the point where Luke abandons it: when Herod’s men come killing the infants, Elizabeth flees with the child into the hills, and finding no hiding place cries out for the mountain of God to receive mother and son — and the mountain is cleft and takes them in, a light shining about them, an angel keeping watch, while Zechariah is killed in the Temple for refusing to give the boy up. The episode has no warrant in Luke; it is piety filling a silence, supplying the rescue the canonical text never mentions and binding John’s survival to the slaughter of the innocents that the Gospel of Matthew records of Jesus.

In Christian art she became one half of a recurring image. The Visitation — two pregnant women meeting, the older and the younger, often clasping hands or embracing on a threshold — was painted again and again from the medieval period through the Renaissance, and in it Elizabeth is the aged figure who bends toward or reaches for the girl from Nazareth, the recognition of the scene rendered as a gesture between bodies. She is rarely shown alone. Where she appears, Mary is almost always beside her, and the picture is of the moment Luke gave her: the first greeting, the two unborn sons, the old woman speaking the blessing.

Sources and scholarship

The single text is the first chapter of Luke, which can be read in full in the New American Bible translation hosted by the United States bishops; the Visitation greeting and the naming dispute are verses 39–45 and 57–66. The foundational modern study of the passage is Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (Doubleday / Anchor Bible Reference Library, 1977; updated edition 1993), catalogued here, which reads the Lukan birth stories as a structured prologue and weighs the matriarch typology behind Elizabeth’s portrait. The name’s tie to Aaron’s wife runs through the Septuagint form Elisabet, discussed in the entry on Elisheba. The apocryphal continuation — Elizabeth and the mountain — is in the Gospel of James, chapter 22, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation. For the wider net of John-traditions that grew around the family, G. R. S. Mead’s The Gnostic John the Baptizer (1924) is held in the Library here.

She stands, in the text, at the hinge between two announcements — the older priestly world of the Temple, into which her son is born, and the new thing Luke means to introduce through Mary. The Gospel gives her the recognition and then moves on; John’s story, and not hers, is what it follows.

→ In the library: Mead — The Gnostic John the Baptizer (1924)

→ Related: John The Baptist · New Testament · Aaron · Hail Mary · Mary · Deborah · Priest · Gabriel · Gospel · Gospel Of James · Jesus Christ · Assumption Of Mary