Simeon the God-Receiver

Eleven verses in Luke, and the church has said his words at nightfall ever since. He was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, with the Holy Spirit upon him and a promise that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. He took the child in his arms in the Temple and spoke, and then said the harder thing to Mary: that a sword would pierce her own soul.

**His eight lines are the third and last of the three great canticles of the New Testament**, after the *Magnificat* and the *Benedictus*, and the only one whose speaker the archive can name as a private individual rather than a mother or a priest. The three are distributed across the daily office: the *Benedictus* is the Gospel canticle of Lauds, the *Magnificat* of Vespers, and the **Nunc dimittis** of Compline.

**Its use is attested inside this archive’s own period, which is the strongest thing on this page.** The *Apostolic Constitutions* — a Syrian compilation of the late fourth or early fifth century, held in this library — gives the canticle **in full**, set in a short evening prayer. That is liturgical use within four centuries of the event and before the archive’s attestation horizon of AD 500. It is not a later devotion read back.

The subsequent history is unusually well documented. **Benedict’s Rule of about AD 530 gave Compline its shape but did not include the canticle**; it entered later, in the fuller Roman form of the hour. **Amalarius of Metz**, early in the ninth century, refers to it as in use in his own day. In the Greek use it has stayed at **Vespers**, the older position; the West moved it to Compline. In the Roman office it is preceded by the responsory *In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum* and followed by the antiphon *Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes, custodi nos dormientes*.

**It also gave a feast its name.** Pope Sergius, who died in 701, introduced at Rome a procession with candles at the Presentation, sung to the *Nunc dimittis* — and the day became **Candlemas**. Its last verse, *Lumen ad revelationem gentium*, is the antiphon of that feast, repeated before and after the canticle and after every verse; when 2 February falls after Septuagesima the whole canticle forms the Tract of the Mass.

In English it survives in versions as old as the fourteenth century. **The Book of Common Prayer of 1549 set it after the second lesson at Evensong, and it has stood in every subsequent Prayer Book but that of 1789.** The 1979 American book has it at Evening Prayer and near the close of Compline, and permits it as an anthem at the Burial of the Dead, sung as the body is borne from the church — which returns the words to the man who first said them while holding a child and expecting to die.

Greek Christians call him Συμεὼν ὁ Θεοδόχος, Simeon the God-Receiver; the Slavonic is Симеон Богоприимец. His feast is **3 February**, kept with Anna the Prophetess the day after the Meeting of the Lord — the fortieth day from the Nativity.

**A tradition recorded and not adopted.** In Eastern and Oriental Orthodox usage he is one of the seventy-two translators of the Septuagint under Ptolemy II, who baulked at rendering Isaiah 7:14 “a virgin shall conceive” and was told he would not die until he had seen it fulfilled — which would make him more than two hundred years old. A 2024 study of the legend’s sources finds it thinly attested: the **Menologion of Basil II** of about AD 1000 has only that Simeon “had heard from the angel that he would not die until he had seen the Lord Christ”, with **no translation and no Isaiah**, and the same study notes the legend is “almost, if not wholly, unknown in Western Christianity”. It is well outside the AD 500 horizon and is filed as later tradition.