Hannah’s Prayers in 1 Samuel 1–2

From a redaction-critical point of view, it can be stated that in what is commonly called late postexilic times, there was a tendency to insert prayers into important passages of the growing scrolls of what later would become biblical books. This holds true for the prophetic literature of the Latter Prophets, a topic that has been given its proper attention with the recent monograph by Alexa Wilke.1 This likewise holds true for the narrative books, whether within the context of the later Former Prophets or the Writings: Dan 9; Ezra 9; Neh 1; 9–10; and 1 Chr 16, often called “psalms outside the psalter.”2 One of the best-known specimens of prayers within the corpus of the Former Prophets is, of course, Hannah’s psalm in 1 Sam 2. In the following, I will briefly consider the diachronic development of the prayer(s) in 1 Sam 1–2 before examining their reception in the pseudepigraphic document commonly referred to as Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum.3