Every December the internet turns into one long gym membership commercial. New year, new you. A planner color coded within an inch of its life. A word for the year, picked out like a spirit animal. I have bought that planner. More than once. The printed one and the digital one. I have also lost interest in it by February.
Rosh Hashanah opens somewhere else entirely: both on our calendar and with a woman standing by a doorpost, praying so hard and so silently that the priest on duty assumes she is drunk. Just Hannah, moving her lips with no sound, pouring years of grief out.
I have grown to love that as Rosh Hashanah’s real opening scene: a new year, it turns out, asks for a lot less planner and a lot more nerve to keep showing up to a God who has not answered you yet.
Word Study: Pakad (פָּקַד)
Genesis 21 opens with the Hebrew verb pakad (פָּקַד).The TLV translates it “visited”:
“Then Adonai visited Sarah just as He had said, and Adonai did for Sarah just as He had spoken” (Genesis 21:1, TLV)
Pakad is a wide word. The BDB Lexicon lists a range for it: to attend to, to visit, to appoint, to muster or number troops, even to reckon or punish, depending entirely on context. In this context, in Genesis 21:1, pakad means that GOD attends to Sarah, or visits her, in order to act on what He had already promised. The word itself doesn’t mean “give a baby.” Genesis tells us what that visitation produces. The birth is what the narrative does with the word, not what the word does on its own.
The same verbal pattern shows up again in 1 Samuel 2:21. Adonai pakad Hannah:
“So Adonai visited Hannah, and she conceived and gave birth to three sons and two daughters” (1 Samuel 2:21, TLV)
A different woman, centuries later, connected to Sarah’s story by the sages on the strength of that shared verb.
The rabbis noticed this too, and used it on purpose. The Talmud builds a formal argument, a gezeirah shavah (a verbal analogy that lets one verse interpret another based on a shared word), linking Sarah’s pakad in Genesis 21:1 to Hannah’s pakad in 1 Samuel 2:21, and separately linking Hannah’s zachar (“remembered,” 1 Samuel 1:19) to Rachel’s zachar in Genesis 30:22.
The conclusion the sages drew from this word-linking is that Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were each “visited” on Rosh Hashanah itself. I cannot verify a date claim like that the way I can verify a Hebrew root. It’s a homiletical conclusion, not a plain reading of any single verse. But the word pattern underneath it is real, and the rabbinic connection helps explain why these two readings belong so naturally together on Rosh Hashanah.
Torah Section: Genesis 21:1–34
Isaac finally arrives in verse 2, but Sarah gets the first line of dialogue, and it is a laugh line.
“GOD has made laughter for me! Everyone who hears will laugh with me” (Genesis 21:6, TLV)
Her son’s name, Yitzchak, is built on the Hebrew root tzachak, to laugh. She laughed in doubt back in chapter 18, eavesdropping on a promise she couldn’t quite believe (Genesis 18:12). Now she laughs again, and this time it costs her nothing to admit it out loud.
That joy doesn’t last long. By verse 9 there’s tension in the household. By verse 14, Hagar and the boy are walking into the wilderness of Beersheba with nothing but bread and a skin of water, and the water runs out.
“Then she went and sat herself down opposite, about a bowshot away, for she had said, “I can’t bear to see the child dying!”” (Genesis 21:16, TLV)
It is one of the bleakest single verses in Genesis, and I do not think anyone’s comfort with this text should ever smooth that over. This is a woman who has run out of water and out of hope. And then, verse 17:
“Then GOD heard the boy’s voice” (Genesis 21:17, TLV)
His name is Yishmael, built from shama, to hear, plus El, GOD. The name means nothing more or less than GOD hears, and here, in the wilderness, at the worst possible moment, it becomes true in real time. Ishmael is not the covenant heir. Genesis is pretty honest about that. But he is not abandoned either.
The chapter closes with a slower scene, a treaty between Abraham and Abimelech over a well at Beersheba, sealed with seven ewe lambs as witnesses (Genesis 21:22–32). Then one last image:
“Then he planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba and called there on the Name of Adonai, the Everlasting GOD” (Genesis 21:33, TLV)
A man planting a tree he will likely not live to sit under the full shade of.
Haftarah: 1 Samuel 1:1–2:10
Hannah’s story runs on a parallel track to Sarah’s, close enough that the sages paired them on purpose, as we just saw. Elkanah has two wives. Peninnah has children. Hannah does not, and the text is blunt about the reason:
“for Adonai had closed her womb” (1 Samuel 1:5, TLV)
Closed. By GOD. No prettied up explanation offered. Hannah’s own prayer a few verses later doesn’t flinch from it either.
Her vow in verse 11 deserves a close look, phrase by phrase:
“Adonai-Tzva’ot, if You will indeed look upon the affliction of Your handmaid, remember me and not forget Your handmaid, but grant Your handmaid a son, then I will give him to Adonai all the days of his life” (1 Samuel 1:11, TLV)
Remember. Do not forget. Hannah chooses two verbs here, zachar (remember) and shakhach (forget), not pakad. Then later, in 1 Samuel 2:21, the narrator picks our other word back up: pakad. GOD visits Hannah, just as He visited Sarah. Her prayer and her answer end up using two different Hebrew words for GOD’s attention, and the readings need both of them.
Eli, watching her lips move without sound, assumes she is drunk (verse 14). Hannah’s answer is one of the more dignified lines in the Hebrew Bible:
“No, my lord, I am a woman with an oppressed spirit! I haven’t been drinking wine or beer. Instead I’ve been pouring out my soul before Adonai” (1 Samuel 1:15, TLV)
She makes zero apologies for the intensity. She corrects the misread and keeps praying.
“So it came to pass at the turn of the year that Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She called his name Samuel, “because I have asked Adonai for him.”” (1 Samuel 1:20, TLV)
The narrator builds a deliberate wordplay around Samuel’s name, tying it to sha’al, to ask, across the whole passage (1 Samuel 1:20, 27–28), even though the name’s actual historical etymology remains genuinely debated among scholars. Whatever Shmuel’s origin, the narrator’s own move here is clear. Hannah asked for this child, and now she gives back the child she asked for.
Then Hannah does something almost nobody in the Bible does with a long-awaited child. She keeps her vow. She brings Samuel to Shiloh, weaned, and hands him to Eli permanently:
“So I in turn dedicate him to Adonai — as long as he lives he is dedicated to Adonai” (1 Samuel 1:28, TLV)
And then she sings.
You would expect a lullaby here. Instead you get a coronation psalm in the form of a mother’s prayer, full of reversal:
“Even the barren gives birth to seven, but she with many sons languishes” (1 Samuel 2:5, TLV)
“He raises the helpless from the dust. He lifts the needy from the dunghill, to make them sit with nobles” (1 Samuel 2:8, TLV)
A woman who spent years living with barrenness and humiliation is now singing about GOD overturning the entire social order. She just watched it happen in her own life.
Besorah: Romans 8:31–39
A quick word on how this section works: the traditional Rosh Hashanah lectionary is Torah and Haftarah only. Pairing a passage from the New Covenant writings alongside them is a Messianic Jewish teaching practice, not a first-century or rabbinic one, and I want to state that rather than let it pass as if it were always part of the reading cycle.
Given everything Sarah and Hannah just modeled, waiting, praying, being told no by circumstance while GOD kept working underneath it, Romans 8 reads like the New Covenant’s own version of the same confidence.
“What then shall we say in view of these things? If GOD is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31, TLV)
Paul isn’t asking a rhetorical throwaway question. He’s just spent an entire chapter describing groaning creation, the Ruach interceding with groans too deep for words, and a hope that has to be waited for precisely because it cannot yet be seen (Romans 8:22–25). Hannah waited through years like that at Shiloh. So did Sarah, through decades of it.
Paul’s answer to his own question ends the chapter on a note Sarah and Hannah would both recognize:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of GOD that is in Messiah Yeshua our Lord”
(Romans 8:38–39, TLV)
If you are reading this and you are not Jewish, this promise is extended to you as a Gentile brought near to GOD’s covenant faithfulness through Yeshua. Israel’s story doesn’t become your autobiography. The same GOD who kept showing up for Sarah and Hannah still keeps His word to you.
Thematic Threads
Rosh Hashanah’s Musaf service is traditionally built around three blocks of blessing: Malchuyot (Kingship), Zichronot (Remembrances), and Shofarot (Shofar verses). You can hear all three sounding through today’s readings with little effort. Numbers 29 gives us Yom Teruah, a day built around a sacred assembly and a sound of blasting (teruah); Jewish tradition identifies that sound specifically with the shofar.
Genesis 21 and 1 Samuel 1–2 give you the remembrance, two women whose stories turn when GOD’s remembered faithfulness becomes visible in action. Kingship shows up underneath both, in Abimelech’s treaty with Abraham and in Hannah’s own closing line, “He gives strength to His king, exalting the horn of His anointed one” (1 Samuel 2:10, TLV), a verse that will not find its full answer for another thousand years.
Hannah’s song deserves one more note before we move on. Its structure, a woman’s prayer of exultation over GOD’s reversal of the proud and the powerless, is close enough to Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1 that most scholars treat the connection as intentional on Luke’s part, not coincidental. I am not going to get into that here since our Besorah this week is Romans, not Luke, but if you have never read the two songs side by side, put it on your to-do list. Two women, roughly a millennium apart, singing nearly the same song at the announcement of a son neither of them expected to have.
And then there is the letter waiting for us at the end of this study, tet, which is entirely about good that has not become visible yet. And no… I didn’t plan that. The aleph-bet cycle just happened to fall there this week. But I’ll definitely take it!
My Final Thoughts
A new year that opens with two women who had to wait, and wait, and keep showing up anyway is honestly a more useful place to start than January 1 ever was.
If you are heading into this year still waiting on something, still praying the same prayer you prayed at this exact same doorway last year, I am not going to tell you GOD is definitely about to answer it this week. I don’t know that. Neither did Sarah, after decades of barrenness. Neither did Hannah, for however many years it took before Elkanah even thought to ask her, again, why she was crying.
What I can tell you is this: the GOD who pakad Sarah and pakad Hannah did not do it because either woman finally figured out the correct spiritual formula. He did it because He is the kind of GOD who sees the person standing at the doorpost even when His answer has not yet become visible. I don’t know what that means for your timeline this year. I know what it means about who He is, and that is the one I would rather build my hope on.
Hebrew Letter Lesson: Tet (ט)
ט
Shape. Tet is the ninth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, numerical value nine. Visually it curves inward and closes at the top, more like a vessel with a lid than fully open. In later Jewish interpretation, that closed shape became a visual picture of goodness that stays hidden until it is ready to be seen. That is a devotional reading of the letter’s form, not a fact about Hebrew grammar or linguistics.
Name. Jewish tradition strongly associates tet with tov, good, because tov is the first word in the Torah that begins with the letter. The Talmud notices this and makes something of it. It observes that the letter tet does not occur anywhere in the Torah from the very beginning of Bereshit until Genesis 1:4, where it finally appears in the word tov itself: “GOD saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:4, TLV). Scripture’s first tet, in other words, shows up inside a sentence about goodness.
In This Portion. Tet fits this week beautifully. Sarah’s good news was hidden inside decades of barrenness. Hannah’s good news was hidden inside a womb Adonai had shut, and inside a prayer nobody in the room could even hear. Read devotionally, tet’s own shape tells the same story: good that is real before anyone can see it.
A LITTLE NUGGET
Jewish tradition takes the tet-and-tov connection further, picturing the letter’s closed shape as good that exists before anyone can see it, the way a seed holds its shape before it ever breaks the surface. Jewish tradition also places Rosh Hashanah on the sixth day of creation, the day humanity was formed, five days after creation itself began. A letter traditionally associated with good that stays hidden until it is ready fits naturally into a week that marks the day something hidden first became visible.
Application
Name one thing in your own life right now that feels more like Genesis 21:15 (the water is gone) than Genesis 21:6 (GOD has made laughter for me). You do not have to resolve it. Just name it.
Write down one piece of good in your life that you can now see, in hindsight, was already forming during a season when you could not see it at all.
Before you ask GOD for anything new this Rosh Hashanah, thank Him for at least one pakad moment, one time His attentive care became visible in a way you did not expect.
Weekly Practice
Rosh Hashanah opens the Ten Days of Awe, the stretch between this holiday and Yom Kippur traditionally set aside for honest self-examination. This week, keep a small page, in your Bible margin or your own notebook, headed Still Waiting. Write down whatever you are currently waiting on GOD for, in plain language, no polishing it into something that sounds more spiritual than it feels. Underneath it, write one sentence about what it would look like to keep showing up at the doorpost the way Hannah did, whether or not this is the year the waiting ends.
Download This Portion
Download a printable version of this Torah portion along with the study and reflection questions for your study binder!
Bible Study Questions
1. Genesis 21:1 says Adonai “visited” Sarah “just as He had said.” What is the difference between GOD’s silence and GOD’s absence? Have you ever confused the two?
2. Sarah names her joy laughter. Hannah names hers a boy she immediately gives away. What does each woman’s response tell you about how differently people carry long-delayed answers to prayer?
3. Hagar and Ishmael’s story runs inside Sarah’s. Why do you think the text includes both, rather than only following the covenant line?
4. Read Hannah’s vow in 1 Samuel 1:11 closely. What does she actually ask for, and what does she promise in return? What does that tell you about the kind of relationship she has with GOD?
Reflection Questions
5. Where in your life right now do you relate more to Sarah’s long years of barrenness, or to Hannah’s repeated disappointment at Shiloh?
6. Romans 8:31 asks, “If GOD is for us, who can be against us?” Answer that question honestly, in your own words, based on how you actually feel about your current circumstances, not how you think you are supposed to feel.
7. What would it look like for you to keep a Hannah-style vow, showing up and keeping your word to GOD, in a year where you do not yet know how your own story ends?
Action Challenges
8. This week, write out one prayer you have been praying for so long that you have stopped expecting an answer. Read it out loud once, the way Hannah’s lips moved even when no sound came out.
9. Choose one person in your life who is in a Genesis 21:15 season, the water gone, the hope thin. Reach out to them this week, not with advice, just with your presence.
10. Before Rosh Hashanah ends, write down one piece of hidden good, tet-shaped, that you can now see was forming in your life during a season that did not feel good at all.
Before You Go
If this study stirred something in you, share it with a friend who is still standing at her own doorpost this year, still praying the prayer nobody else in the room can hear.
And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I have got you. Paid subscribers get access to live Sunday and Tuesday Zoom Bible studies, extended Torah portion studies, audio lessons, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of women who want depth without pressure or performance. If you are ready to step further into the Word, you are welcome inside. 👉🏻 Join The Chavurah. If a paid subscription is not feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕
And if something in Hannah’s story feels especially familiar to you, you might enjoy my book The Hannah Cry, where I spend more time with her story and what it means to bring the deepest cries of our hearts before GOD. You can find it wherever books are sold or here on Amazon. On Amazon you can get it on Kindle, in hardcover or paperback and on Audiobook!
About the Author
Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, seminary student, wife, proud mom, and a stroke survivor. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.
She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.
When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.
Notes
BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon), entry for פקד (paqad), covering its range: to attend to, visit, appoint, muster or number, reckon.
Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 11a, on the verbal analogy (gezeirah shavah) linking pakad in Genesis 21:1 and 1 Samuel 2:21, and zachar in 1 Samuel 1:19 and Genesis 30:22, concluding that Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were each visited on Rosh Hashanah. See sefaria.org/Rosh_Hashanah.11a
BDB/HALOT, root צחק (tzachak), “to laugh”; cf. Genesis 21:6, 17:17, 18:12.
BDB/HALOT, name ישמעאל (Yishmael), from שמע (shama, “to hear”) plus אל (El, “God”).
BDB, roots זכר (zachar, “to remember”) and שכח (shakhach, “to forget”); cf. 1 Samuel 1:11, זכרתני (zekhartani, “remember me”) and וְלֹא־תִשְׁכַּח (lo-tishkach, “do not forget”).
On the etymology of שמואל (Shmuel), scholars are divided between a derivation tied to sha’al (”to ask”) and one closer to shama (”to hear”) or “name of God.” The text’s own wordplay in 1 Samuel 1:20 and 1:27–28 favors sha’al; this is presented as the narrative’s own reading, not a settled linguistic derivation.
This Besorah pairing is a feature of contemporary Messianic Jewish teaching and study resources, not part of the historic rabbinic lectionary cycle.
Mishnah, Rosh Hashanah 4:5–6, on the three blessings (Malchuyot, Zichronot, Shofarot) of the Musaf Amidah.
The literary relationship between Hannah’s song (1 Samuel 2:1–10) and Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) is widely noted in New Testament scholarship; see standard commentaries on Luke 1 for further discussion.
Standard Hebrew alphabet numerology; tet = 9.
Jewish tradition’s association of tet with tov rests on tov being the first tet-initial word in the Torah, not on a shared linguistic root; the historical etymology of the letter-name tet is itself uncertain. See e.g. Jewish Encyclopedia, entry on the Hebrew alphabet.
Talmud, Bava Kamma 55a: discussing the letter tet as a favorable dream-omen, the Gemara notes that from the start of Bereshit until “God saw the light, that it was good” (Genesis 1:4), the letter tet is not written. See sefaria.org/Bava_Kamma.55a
Jewish tradition places Rosh Hashanah on the sixth day of creation, the day Adam and Eve were formed, with the creation of the world itself traditionally dated five days earlier, to 25 Elul. See e.g. Chabad.org, on the Rosh Hashanah Musaf liturgy “This day is the beginning of Your works.”
The Aseret Yemei Teshuvah (Ten Days of Repentance/Awe), the traditional period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.
The Bible is full of hidden gems that doesn’t come clear in the English language .
Shanah Tovah!
Thank you for explaining the source of the Besorah portion. This study hits home. The “homework “ will be emotional but I know it will be faith building. Thank you.