Daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of ASHER — one of the northern tribes deported by Assyria in 722 BC and, in the standard account, never heard from again. Luke names a woman of Asher standing in the Jerusalem temple seven centuries later, with a genealogy she evidently knew, and offers no explanation. ⚠ He calls her a prophētis, the feminine of prophet, flatly and in the middle of a sentence — the same title the Greek Old Testament gives Miriam, Deborah and Huldah. ⚠ Her age is genuinely ambiguous: 'a widow heōs of eighty-four years' can mean she is NOW eighty-four, or that she has been a widow FOR eighty-four years, which would put her past a hundred. Heōs ordinarily means 'until', which favours the first. Her Greek name is the same as Hannah, Samuel's mother, who also prayed in a sanctuary and also sang.