Jacopo Tintoretto - The Annunciation to Manoah's Wife - WGA22660

Manoah's wife (also referred to as Samson's mother) is an unnamed figure in the

Book of Judges The Book of Judges (, ') is the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. In the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, it covers the time between the conquest described in the Book of Joshua and the establishment of a kingdom ...

, the wife of

Manoah Manoah ( ''Mānoaḥ'') is a figure from the Book of Judges 13:1-23 and 14:2-4 of the Hebrew Bible. His name means "rest". Family According to the Bible, Manoah was of the tribe of Dan and lived in the city of Zorah. He married one woman, who ...

. She is introduced in Judges 13:2 as a barren woman. The

angel of the Lord The (or an) angel of the ( he, מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה '' mal’āḵ YHWH'' "messenger of Yahweh") is an entity appearing repeatedly in the Tanakh (Old Testament) on behalf of the God of Israel. The guessed term ''YHWH'', which occurs ...

appears to her and tells her she will have a son. She later gives birth to

Samson Samson (; , '' he, Šīmšōn, label= none'', "man of the sun") was the last of the judges of the ancient Israelites mentioned in the Book of Judges (chapters 13 to 16) and one of the last leaders who "judged" Israel before the institution o ...

. J. Cheryl Exum argues that Manoah's wife is more perceptive than her husband, in that she "senses at once something otherworldly" about the

man of God A man is an adult male human. Prior to adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy (a male child or adolescent). Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromo ...

who visits her, and "recognizes a divine purpose behind the revelation."

Bruce Waltke Bruce K. Waltke (born August 30, 1930) is an American Reformed evangelical professor of Old Testament and Hebrew. He has held professorships in the Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wes ...

regards her as cynical, noting that, unlike Hannah, she neither prays for a child nor praises God afterwards. Ancient Rabbinic tradition identifies this woman as the

Hazzelelponi Hazzelelponi ( he, הַצְּלֶלְפּוֹנִי ''Haṣṣəlelpōnī'', "the shade-facing") is a biblical woman mentioned in 1 Chronicles 4:3. Tzelafon was named after her. Hazzelelponi was a daughter of a man named Etam and thus a descenda ...

mentioned in 1 Chronicles 4:3, and the Talmud gives her a variant of this name, Zelelponith ( he, צללפונית).

References

{{authority control Book of Judges Samson Angelic visionaries Unnamed people of the Bible Women in the Hebrew Bible

See also

References