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 tradition holds about her is drawn from a single sustained passage.

Luke introduces her as the wife of Zechariah, a priest of the division of Abijah, and identifies her as herself a descendant of Aaron — a daughter of the priestly line on both sides of the marriage. The text calls the couple righteous and blameless before God, and then states the difficulty around which the story turns: they had no child, and both were advanced in years. The pattern is an old one in the Hebrew scriptures, where Sarah, Rebekah, and Hannah conceive against the odds of age or barrenness; Luke writes Elizabeth deliberately into that lineage of late and unexpected mothers. When Zechariah is told at the altar that she will bear a son, he doubts, and is struck mute until the child is born.

The scene for which she is best remembered is the Visitation. Mary, herself newly pregnant, travels to the hill country to stay with Elizabeth, whom Luke names as her kinswoman, and at Mary’s greeting the child in Elizabeth’s womb is said to leap. Elizabeth then speaks the words — “blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” — that Luke presents as the first voice in the Gospel to recognise what Mary carries, and that Christian devotion would later fold into the Hail Mary. After the birth she insists, against the expectation of her neighbours, that the boy be called John rather than named for his father, and the dispute is settled when Zechariah, his speech restored, confirms the name.

What scholarship can establish about Elizabeth as a historical person is slight: the figure is known only from Luke, whose infancy narrative is widely read as a carefully composed theological prologue rather than a documentary record, and her characterisation leans heavily on the matriarchs of the older scriptures. Christian tradition went on to treat her with far greater detail than the Gospel supplies. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Orthodox, and other churches; later apocryphal writings expanded her story, giving her a role in protecting the infant John during Herod’s massacre, and medieval piety paired her image with Mary’s in the Visitation as one of the recurring subjects of Christian art.

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: Zechariah · Priest · Deborah