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In this volume Michael D. Matlock analyses five lengthy biblical prose prayers from the exilic and post-exilic period: Solomon's prayer (1 Kings 8.14-61), Ezra's prayer (Ezra 9.5-15), Nehemiah's prayer (Nehemiah 1.4-11), the Levites' prayer (Nehemiah 9.4-37), and the prayer of Daniel (Daniel 9:3-19). He also examines prayers from Second Temple literature including texts from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the writings of Philo and Josephus and texts from Qumran, and discusses the Septuagintal versions of the five biblical prayers and Targum Jonathan's treatment of Solomon's prayer. He offers a new English translation of each prayer, examines the prayers' rhetorical characteristics, and demonstrates how each prayer draws upon and reinterprets traditional images and materials. Matlock describes how each prayer relates to its larger narrative context and examines its functions within that context. Finally, he appraises the various similarities and differences in these prayers in terms of their different contexts in the Second Commonwealth period noting particular theologies and ideologies.
What is the post-exilic Israelites’ destiny? What should they have hoped for? How could they actualize their desired community? This book discusses the identity of the post-exilic Israelite community by focusing on the unique rhetorical impetus in the book of Chronicles. Chronicles suggests a picture of the desired future Israel. Yet, the Chronicler does not call for a new identity, creation ex nihilo, from the community but calls for the restoration of the Israelites’ past identity by reporting the history of Israel and Judah. The restoration of their past identity can be actualized when members of the community fulfill portrayed roles and characteristics in Chronicles: worshiping, monotheistic believing, and praying, and Davidic citizenship. Further, recorded prayer plays a crucial role as Chronicles persuades its readers to render or exhibit those roles and characteristics. Prayer invites the community members to participate so that they transform past prayers into their own prayers. By doing so, the prayer participants perceive portrayed roles and characteristics and change their attitude. By rendering and exhibiting desired roles and characteristics, they eventually hope for and actualize a better community, the liturgical community.
Some degree of spiritual enlightenment must be supposed to account for the overall tolerance, even receptivity, of the people; though they refused to comply with the prophets' uncompromising demands, and occasionally persecuted one or another of them, as a rule they allowed them to preach, and even spawned devotees who reverently preserved their speeches until canonization. Unsupported by power and wealth, the classical prophets can have persisted for centuries only because they were rooted in loamy spiritual soil. The populace constituting that soil deserves to be appreciated no less than the exotic flowers that towered above it. What was the spiritual loam that prepared Israel's soil so that prophecy could thrive in it? Any answer to this question must give due consideration to the popular life of prayer. For it was in extemporized praying that the Israelites experienced a nonmagical approach to God in which form was subordinate to content; here, in immediate contact with a God who searched the conscience and the heart, they were sensitized to sincerity in self-disclosure to God; and, finally, it was in prayer that they had constantly to face the issue of adjusting their ways to God's in order to obtain his favor. Greenberg finds in this rich life of private prayer a setting for the high religious ideas--and the scathing critique of worship--which characterized the genius of the prophets of the eighth and ninth centuries BC. This masterful evaluation of biblical prose prayer, a tradition independent of experts and special places, suggests an explanation for the unprecedented democratization of worship in postbiblical Judaism.
This volume contributes to the growing interest in understanding the phenomenon of prayer and praying in the Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism, and nascent Christianity. Papers by the leading scholars in these fields revisit long-standing questions and chart new paths of inquiry into the nature, form, and practice of addressing the divine in the ancient world. The essays in this volume deal with particular texts of and about prayer, practices of prayer, as well as figures and locations (historical and literary) that are associated with prayer and praying. These studies apply a range of methods and theoretical approaches to prayer and the language of prayer in literatures of Early Judaism and Christianity. Some studies apply the classical methods of biblical studies to Second Temple texts of prayer, including form critical and text critical approaches; others engage in literary and narrative analysis of ancient works that recount discourse directed to the divine. Still other studies draw on anthropological and sociological analyses of prayer or marshal particular theories of discourse, ethics, and moral agency to offer fresh interpretations of address to God in the literature of Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity.
An essential resource for scholars and students Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.
Substantial insights into various identity discourses reflected in the biblical prayers This collection of essays from an international group of scholars focuses on how biblical prayers of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods shaped identity, evoked a sense of belonging to specific groups, and added emotional significance to this affiliation. Contributors draw examples from different biblical texts, including Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Psalms, Jonah, and Daniel. Features Thorough study of prayers that play a key role for a biblical book’s (re)construction of the people’s history and identity An examination of ways biblical figures are remodeled by their prayers by introducing other, sometimes even contradictory, discourses on identity An exploration of different ways in which psalms from postexilic times shaped, reflected, and modified identity discourses
The volume contains papers read at the International Conference of the ISDCL, held in Budapest in 2015. The contributors explore various aspects of worship as reflected in the literature of Judaism from the Second Temple period to Late Antiquity. The volume provides a fresh reading of various crucial issues especially within Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Rabbinic literature, Gnostic traditions, and the emerging synagogue. The papers analyse texts and artefacts that reveal how various groups of Judaism understood the concept of worship—a pre-eminent form of expressing religious identity and interpreting fundamental traditions.
This book examines the development of institutionalized prayer in ancient Israel at a crucial time in the history of Western civilization: from the period of the Qumran writings, in the last three centuries BCE, through to the rabbinic period, after 70 CE. It explores the shift from sacrificial worship by priests to abstract, unmediated, direct approaches to the deity by laypeople. It demonstrates the transition from voluntary, freely composed prayers to obligatory prayers with fixed texts. The study shows how Qumran and Samaritan prayer contrast with rabbinic prayer, shedding light on Jewish customs before the rabbinic reform. Posthumously edited by Bernard M. Levinson.
This volume explores the fundamentals of intertextual methodology and summarizes recent scholarship on studies of intertextuality in the deuterocanonical books. The essays engage in comparison and analysis of text groups and motifs between canonical, deuterocanonical and non-biblical texts. Moreover, the book pays close attention to non-literary relationships between different traditions, a new feature of research in intertextuality.
Before the New Testament or the creeds of the church were written—the devotional practices of the earliest Christians indicate that they worshipped Jesus alongside the Father. Larry W. Hurtado has been one of the leading scholars on early Christology for decades. In Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice, Hurtado helps readers understand early Christology by examining not just what early Christians believed or wrote about Jesus, but what their devotional practices tell us about the place of Jesus in early Christian worship. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early Christian origins and scholarship on New Testament Christology, Hurtado examines the distinctiveness of early Christian worship by comparing it to both Jewish worship patterns and worship practices within the broader Roman--era religious environment. He argues that the inclusion of the risen Jesus alongside the Father in early Christian devotional practices was a distinct and unique religious phenomenon within its ancient context. Additionally, Hurtado demonstrates that this remarkable development was not invented decades after the resurrection of Christ as some scholars once claimed. Instead, the New Testament suggests that Jesus--followers, very quickly after the resurrection of Christ, began to worship the Son alongside the Father. Honoring the Son offers a look into the worship habits of the earliest Christians to understand the place of Jesus in early Christian devotion.