One of my favorite parts of my thesis was the section on Hannah. Hannah’s prayer was one of the last places I would have expected to find insight on the use of dust and ashes in scripture, but it turned out that her story held one of the most personally meaningful bits of truth for me.
Hannah’s story is perhaps one of the most well known among women in the Bible. She is often compared to Mary, and her song in 1 Samuel to Mary’s, the Magnificat. When the author of 1 Samuel introduces us to Hannah, she is the beloved but barren wife second wife, suffering at the hand of her husband’s other wife. She cried to God at the temple, desperate with sorrow and grief and unmet desire, promising to give her son wholly to God if God would just allow her to bear one. Her infertility was a window into the weakness of human bodies. Eventually, God answered her prayer, and she was given conception, and a son full of life and health. And then we see that the suffering was not over—in fact she has signed herself up for a sort of life-long suffering by promising to give her son up as a gift to the God who gives and takes life.
What is amazing to me about Hannah is not just that she faithfully acted on her promise to God, but that her song after leaving her young son at the temple is a song of praise. Her song is full of images of dust and rocks, which is how I got there, but in it she does not focus on man’s frailty as a detriment, but flips the script. Instead of being sad and intimidated by the frailty of man, she uses human weakness as a launching point to remind her of man’s creation from dust. The result of her meditation on man’s frailty is not further despair, but praise.
This praise came in the face of not just leaving her only, much sought-after son, but leaving him in what could have been an unsafe place. The author of 1 Samuel calls Samuel’s new companions, Eli’s sons, “worthless men.” (1 Sam 3:1). It seems likely that Hannah would have known the character of the men she was leaving Samuel with, which makes her prayer striking. She sang a song of praise. This sets her apart—my instinct as a mother would, short of a miracle of faith, notbe praise at that point. But Hannah had faith, and she sang a song of joy. And the reason for her joy, surprisingly, is closely tied to man’s dusty origin.
“He raises the poor from the dust;” she says, “he lifts the needy from the ash heap.” Her words are reminiscent of both Abraham, who states that he was “but dust and ashes” (Gen 18:27), and Job, who said, by one translation, that he was “comforted in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). Both of these men, in their acknowledgement of their relation to dust, turned to God and were comforted.
These examples make Hannah’s choices of imagery in her song stand out. She praises God as the one who “raises up the poor from the dust,” and “lifts the needy from the ash heap” (1 Sam 2:8). She knows that she is dust, drawn up and formed by her Creator. And just as she did in her years of infertility, she runs toward God, trusting him to “guard the feet of his faithful ones.” Not only did she trust God to protect her and her son, but because of his history of protecting and raising up the weak, but the same image gave her comfort that the wicked would be powerless over her son. The worthless men who had power over her son are also dust.
And there is one more reason why she can praise God as she is separated from her precious son. Her God is not like man. He is not dust! He is a Rock. Firm. Unmovable. Infinitely stronger than the wicked men who are made of dust.
Not only is he not dust, he is the Creator. Hannah praises God because of his power over the life of his creation: “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up…” Hannah reminds herself that even though the men with whom she has left her son are not good men, it is not they who are in control. The God who created them is. In the midst of what I can only guess must have been incredible grief at leaving her son behind, she joyfully turns to God—“for the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.” Her rest is in the fact that the Creator God has power over life and death, that he “will guard the feet of his faithful ones”—including her son.
What a good lesson that is for us! Are our hearts and minds bent toward praise when we’re experiencing loss, or being confronted with the frailty of our bodies? Have we trained our minds to look to him with praise when we our bodies, or our loved ones bodies are returned to dust? I’m not, usually. But Hannah sets a good example for us. Maybe we should teach ourselves to sing with her when we are reminded of our own frailty as dust-made and dust-bound creatures. Maybe, like Hannah, we should gladly remember that yes, we are dust, because it reminds us that our God is not. We can praise God that even though we are weak, we are hidden, protected in the cleft of the Rock—the one to whom belong the foundations of the world.
