BYU Women’s Studies Conference | “I Will Sing to the Lord”: Women’s Songs in the Scriptures

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Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below.

The scriptures include many references to creative women. Han nah and Dorcas created treasured textiles (1 Samuel 2:19; Acts 9:39), but we don’t know what those garments looked like. Sarah created memorable meals for her guests (Genesis 18:6), but we don’t know her recipes. The daughters of the Lamanites danced in delight (Mosiah 20:1), but no technology could capture their creative whirl. So most of the results of women’s creative efforts have been lost to history. But one form of women’s ingenuity has survived: contained within the canon itself are several examples of women’s sacred songs. This paper will explore some of these songs; we’ll see that sacred songs have been a central venue for women’s theological activity. 

We begin with Miriam. After crossing the Red Sea, Miriam the prophettook a small drum, danced, and sang: “Singye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:21). That’s not a long song.But it is enormously significant. The story of the Exodus begins with Miriam’s actions beside the waters that hold her helpless baby brother,and the story ends with Miriam again beside the waters, this time celebrating Moses’ victory over the waters. Rescue from the waters and the centrality of Miriam’s words are 

key elements in both stories.So Miriam bookends the Exodus story. This brief song is also theologically provocative: it was typical for women to greet their men with praises when they returned victorious from battle (e.g., 1 Samuel 18:7), but in this case it is not a human army but the Lord of Hosts whom Miriam praises. By subverting expectations, Miriam makes a profound and profoundly theological statement. 

It is significant in another way as well, which gets to the heart of the matter of women’s involvement with sacred song. The biblical tradition suggests that there was something along the lines of tripartite leadership during the Exodus, with three people called “prophet”: Moses, Miriam, and Aaron; they are remembered later in the Bible as a leadership unit (Micah 6:4). A distinction can be made between early worship led by Aaron, resulting in the unfortunate incident with the golden calf (see Exodus 32), and the worship led by Miriam, who set the precedent for worshipful song and dance. J. Gerald Janzen writes, 

If Miriam and Aaron are the first two cultic leaders in Israel’s celebrations of the Exodus, then Israel’s centuries-long tendency to accommodate cultic idolatry is given its exemplar in Aaron the priest, while the countervailing impulse for true worship of the God of the Exodus is given its exemplar and prototype in Miriam, who in such a context is, significantly, identified as “the prophetess.” 

With both Aaron’s calf and Miriam’s song, there is a festive, worshipful atmosphere of dancing, but Aaron’s includes idolatry while Miriam’s focuses on words of praise to the Lord. 

Central to Miriam’s song is that she, a mere slave woman, is celebrating the fact that she has done something Pharoah’s army could not do: cross the Red Sea on dry ground. And she did it because the Lord is on the side of the oppressed. Most importantly, the meaning and purpose of the Exodus—a focal point in all of Israel’s history—is explained through the words of a woman. She is given the position of chief interpreter of the Exodus; in the text, it is her words that explain the ultimate meaning of that key event. 

We now turn our attention to Deborah. A prophet and the leaderof Israel during terrible times, she is responsible for orchestrating an important military victory (Judges 4). Afterward, she sings a hymn of praise.Much like the pattern found in Exodus 15, here is a military victory followed by a song of praise offered by a woman. The woman’s song explains the event’s theological significance and provides closure to the incident.The songs also create a space where readers are invited to join in the celebration.Another resonance between Deborah’s song and Miriam’s is found in the theme of idolatry; Judges 5 implies that idolatry was the root of Israel’s problems, but the rise of Deborah was the key to overcoming it. 

The most compelling aspect of Deborah’s praise song is its ruminations on motherhood. While Deborah is identified as the wife of Lapidoth,she is not identified as a mother. Militarism, not maternity, is the major focus of her story. Nonetheless, in her hymn, she describes herself as a “mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7). It may be that she is using that term since both prophets (e.g., 2 Kings 2:12; 13:14) and military leaders (e.g., Isaiah 22:21) were sometimes described as fathers. But it may also be because her hymn complicates what it means to “mother” in fascinating ways. The song presents the military victory as ultimately belonging to Jael who, in effect, mothers the enemy leader Sisera to death. Jael shelters him in her tent, tucks him into bed (Judges 4:18), gives him milk, and then ruins this picture of maternal care by beheading him. Jael is called “blessed above women” (Judges 5:24) not in spite of, but because of, her violent act. And then the hymn references Sisera’s actual mother (Judges 5:28), who wonders why her son has not returned to her. This song explores what it means to “mother”—for Deborah, for Jael, and for Sisera’s mother—in very unexpected and compelling ways. In Deborah’s vision of motherhood, acting as a prophet and a leader is mothering, killing an enemy using the tools of a mother’s trade is mothering, while the hopes of a mother who is opposed to Israel are thwarted. Certainly Deborah’s role in theologizing this significant military victory is not what the average Israelite might have expected; while it follows the pattern of Exodus, it focuses a military victory song on the meaning of mothering and ties the practice of mothering to the success of a nation. 

This leads us to Hannah, whose song is also linked to her experience of motherhood. Tormented by her infertility and by a vengeful—and fertile!—sister wife, and living in a time of increasing wickedness, Hannah weeps uncontrollably in the shadow of the temple (1 Samuel 1). She vows that if the Lord will give her a child, she will consecrate him to the Lord to serve in the temple. Despite the hostility, arrogance, and wickedness of the temple leadership in her day, she fulfills her promise. At that point, she sings a song of praise (1 Samuel 2:1). Note that the song does not come after the confirmation of the pregnancy or the birth of the child, but rather when the child is sent to the temple. Her victory is obviously not a military one, but neither is it physical birth; it is in the consecration of the child to the temple and the keeping of her covenant to do so. Hannah’s song would have had a deeply personal significance, but for Hannah, the personal was also political. She wanted the child not for companionship, but so that he could serve the Lord and help Israel depart from its horrid path. 

Perhaps the most significant aspect of her hymn is the use of the word “anointed” in 1 Samuel 2:10. This is generally regarded as the first reference to the concept of an anointed leader in the Old Testament (note that the Hebrew word for “anointed” comes into English as “messiah” and the Greek word as “Christ”). It is also one of the few references to God raising up an anointed king ever made by a rank-and-file Israelite. It is perhaps not coincidental that her own son would have the role of anointing Israel’s first king (1 Samuel 10:1); we can only wonder whether he understood this doctrine and practice because of his mother. When, at the conclusion of the books of Samuel, David sings a psalm that mentions the horn, the anointed, the rock, and salvation, we hear him echoing Hannah from the beginning of the story (2 Samuel 22). And when Jesus is anointed in the New Testament, it will be by a woman (Mark 14:3-9). 

The anointed at the end of Hannah’s poem is more specifically “the horn of his anointed” (1 Samuel 2:10) and it is bracketed by a reference at the very beginning of the hymn to Hannah’s own horn (1 Samuel 2:1). Because animals used their horns for defense, the horn became a symbol of strength. So we can read this hymn as Hannah celebrating the link between her own strength and the strength of the anointed leader that the Lord would provide to Israel. Hannah refers to a variety of body parts—heart, horn, and mouth—but not breast or womb, as would be more traditional for the celebration of bearing a child (e.g., Luke 11:27– 28). Hannah has seen the link between her own circumstances and those of her nation: 

The prayer opens with Hannah and closes with the King. It opens with her own personal praise and closes with a confident assertion of God’s victory over every adversary and of his sovereign rule. It opens in Shiloh; it closes at the ends of the earth. It opens with a local reversal; it closes with a cosmic reversal. It opens in the present age; it closes with the age to come. 

And the story of the kingdom of Israel begins with the story of a barren woman, one who creates the theological meaning of her motherhood through song, with reference to God’s anointed. Hannah tweaks the expected song that follows a battle victory to one where it follows the birth of a long-anticipated child. A woman’s theologizing leads us to find victory not just in military success but in the birth of a child. It also, of course, sets the stage for Mary in the New Testament. 

Mary’s song (Luke 1:46–55), commonly known as the Magnificat,is uttered to Elisabethafter Elisabeth praises Mary. While custom would have called for Mary to praise Elisabeth in return, Mary instead praises the Lord.A major theme of Mary’s song is reversals. While Deborah and Hannah also speak of reversals, the concept reaches its full flowering here as Mary reflects on her change in status from the low position of God’s slave to someone who will be called blessed by all generations (Luke 1:48). Mary then extends her personal experience to a universal one, much as Hannah did, and reflects on the reversals that affect the hungry and low. Because the hymn uses some past tense verbs, there are various theories for understanding it. Some scholars have understood Mary to be speaking prophetically of future events as if they had already occurred.Others see Mary reviewing the history of Israel, and still others see her interweaving past and future. In any case, she is emphasizing God’s ability to trans form not only her personal life but also the broader social, cultural, and political realities into a new creation (Luke 1:51–54). 

While the image of Mary has historically been focused on the pliant and maternal, this hymn is also one of judgment, with harsh condemnation of the proud, mighty, and rich. When, a few chapters later, Jesus pronounces woes on the rich (Luke 6:24–26), he is echoing his mother’s words. Mary’s song also changes her story from one of passive acceptance of God’s will to the active creation of theological reflection. Mary’s song incorporates themes and language from its Old Testament predecessors, including the songs of Deborah and Hannah.Raymond Brown describes the Magnificat as almost a mosaicdue to its abundance of Old Testament references; by some counts, more than a dozen different texts are quoted. We see Mary as someone familiar with the Old Testament and capable of applying it to her own situation: she creates a new scriptural text from relevant passages.She finds in her own experience both resonance with and departure from the experiences of her predecessors. 

Similarly, Mary is offering a praise song—not, as Miriam and Deborah did, after a military victory, but in celebration of the impending birth of a child. Mary’s song celebrates not battlefield success but faithfulness and obedience, as Hannah’s song did, and while Mary’s song does include judgment on some groups, it is missing the condemnation of political enemies found in some of the earlier songs.Jael was blessed above women for killing an enemy, but Mary is blessed above women for faithfully mothering Jesus. 

So Mary both conforms to and subverts expectations as she incorporates previous scriptural texts into her own song. Mary gathers and shapes the tradition available to her in order to emphasize what is theologically significant. 

Transitioning from the biblical world to the Restoration, we find another woman associated with religious song—Emma Smith. While Emma herself did not write hymns, she was tasked by revelation (D&C 25:11) with selecting hymns for the church. According to Carol Cornwall Madsen, 

It took two years for Emma to complete the hymn selection, and another three passed before the hymns were printed in a single volume. From July 1830 to April 1832, when the selection process was completed and W. W. Phelps was instructed to correct and publish the hymns, Emma worked despite a growing antagonism toward the Church in Kirtland and a series of personal tragedies. 

The hymnal was eventually printed, with editorial assistance from W.W. Phelps,in 1836.Just under half of its hymns were written by Latter-day Saints,and several hymns written by non-Latter-day Saints were altered, which was an accepted practice at the time.The hymnal was pocket-sized and therefore frequently carried about, and such hymnals were sometimes used to teach children to read. It was common for the lyrics to be read aloud before the hymn was sung in a meeting, which, according to Mary Poulter, “stressed the importance of the textual content.”In this context, the importance of hymn selection as a tool for shaping the doctrine and culture of a church is maximized, so it is very significant that this task was given to a woman. As Poulter writes, “Often, long sermons are forgotten and only small portions of great discourses are remembered, but texts expressed in the rhythms of poetry and music are easily memorized and can become an integral part of a belief system.”Much as the biblical women we have encountered shaped theology through their individual hymns, Emma Smith had a different task but with much the same result: her work in selecting hymns formed the early Saints’ understanding of their doctrine and beliefs to a great extent.The early church even interpreted Emma’s task as an exclusive one; Carol Cornwall Madsen writes, 

The idea that Emma Smith should be the sole compiler of the Church’s hymnal emerged in 1839 when the high council authorized an expanded hymnbook. David Rogers, a New York convert, had previously published for the New York Saints a hymnal that had drawn heavily on Emma’s 1835 selection, and Brigham Young had taken a collection of hymns to England with the intent of publishing a hymnal there. But the Nauvoo high council voted to destroy all copies of Rogers’s hymnbook and to forbid Brigham Young to publish a British edition. 

While discussions of the revelation commanding Emma Smith to select hymns tend to focus on publication, Michael Hicks is surely right to point out that “the revelation said nothing about publication. Indeed, as it was first delivered to Emma Smith, the revelation appeared to be principally a command to decide what hymns already known to church members were proper to be sung.”This is significant because it (along with W.W. Phelps’ editorial role for the hymns that Emma had previously selected) emphasizes that Emma and the early church understood her task not as a practical nor an editorial one, but rather as a spiritual and creative one: selecting which hymns—and, therefore, doctrines— would be the backbone of the Restoration. Mary Poulter’s article “Doctrines of Faith and Hope Found in Emma Smith’s 1835 [sic] Hymnbook” does an excellent job of tracing the ways in which Emma’s songs promulgated distinctive doctrines of the Restoration, particularly regarding the Second Coming. Much as faithfulness and a hopeful attitude were found in the other women’s songs we have discussed, these also were themes in the hymns that Emma selected. 

Emma’s commission to select songs is rare in that a reason is given for the commandment: Doctrine and Covenants 25:12 reads, “For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads.” Three reasons are given here for Emma’s task: that the Lord likes hymns, that hymns are a prayer, and that singing hymns results in blessings. Because Emma is the one selecting the hymns, and because hymns are prayers and conduits for blessings, this meant that the revelation gave Emma a role in shaping prayers, perhaps somewhat analogous to what Jesus did when he taught, “after this manner therefore pray ye” (Matthew 6:9; 3 Nephi 13:9). The prefaceto Emma Smith’s hymnal echoes the language of Doctrine and Covenants 25 nearly verbatim when it states that “the song of the righteous is a prayer unto God,”suggesting the role that the revelation played in Emma’s work on the hymns. So Emma’s work should not be viewed as merely secretarial but rather as an executive role, assigned to her by revelation, in crystallizing the doctrines of the Restoration. 

The distinctive role women have played in sacred music in general and in the Restoration in particular reaches a crescendo with Eliza R. Snow’s“O My Father.”This hymn is best known as the earliest and clearest expression of the Restoration belief in a Mother in Heaven; Eliza wrote that, through reason and through revelation, one could know of the reality of a divine female. Less frequently explored are the roles that the hymn assigns to Heavenly Mother. Note that the final stanza uses the plural forms ‘you’ and ‘your’ as opposed to the first stanza’s singular ‘thou’ and ‘thy.’Where the plural pronouns refer to deity, we can mine the text for the doctrine Eliza was teaching about a Mother in Heaven. In the final stanza, the hymn envisions a reunion with Mother and Father after death, but only with permission from both of them. The line “Then, at length, when I’ve completed/all you [which is plural] sent me forth to do” implies that mortal assignments came from both the Father and Mother. Finally, dwelling with them again will require the “mutual approbation” (or joint approval) of both. So Mother in Heaven is given two specific roles in this hymn: issuing mortal assignments and participating in the judgment. In this hymn, no division of tasks or status between the Father and Mother is implied—when they act, they act in unity. While Gordon B. Hinckley counseled that prayers addressed solely to Mother in Heaven are not appropriate,this hymn features what we might call a “tandem prayer,” since the hymn itself is, in effect, a prayer to both Mother and Father in Heaven. 

Perhaps because of the focus on the hymn’s reference to a Mother in Heaven, other aspects of its theology have received less attention. One noteworthy exception is President Spencer W. Kimball’s comment that this hymn “speaks to the whole gospel program.”And it is true that the entire plan of salvation, as Latter-day Saints would later come to call it, from pre-existence to post-mortal life, can be found within Eliza’s four famous stanzas. As Jill Mulvay Derr notes, “‘O My Father’ is primarily a hymn of orientation. It speaks of place, habitation, sphere, wandering, residing, and dwelling”and thus describes the soul’s journey through the eternities. From our vantage point, we can see how Eliza Snow, through her creative writing, has shaped the doctrine and culture of the church. 

Given that so many of the sacred songs attributed by name to a specific person in the scripturesare associated with women, we might speak of sacred songs as, to borrow a phrase from yet another example of the genre, part of “the errand of angels . . . given to women.”In the examples that we have considered, the woman’s song was crucial in constructing the theological meaning of a key event in sacred history. Taken as a whole, women’s songs define and delineate theological themes including the central role of God, the importance of faithfulness, expected reversals of fortune as the Lord makes his will felt, the importance of rejoicing, and the concept of motherhood both on earth and in heaven.Sacred songs appear to be one of the primary venues in the scriptures open to women not only for the exercise of their creative gifts, but also for the definition and promulgation of doctrine.