Emotions and Expressions of Emotion as a Didactic Guide for How to Pray: Berakhot in Aramaic Prayers of Qumran, in St. Reif / R. Egger-Wenzel (eds.), Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions associated with Jewish prayer in and around the Second Temple period, De Gruyter 2015, 273-196. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Motivation for Communal Prayer in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism
the same volume, 2000
I e purpose of this essay is to evaluate the in uence of scriptural motifs on the development of institutionalized penitential prayer in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I am not interested here in the development of the tradition culminating in the scriptural penitential prayers; Mark Boda has provided an excellent survey of both the primary data and the recent scholarship on the subject in his chapter in the rst volume of this penitential prayer series. 1 As source material for the study of Jewish prayer, the Dead Sea Scrolls di er from earlier sources in two important regards. First, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide the earliest attested certain examples of liturgical texts of penitential prayers in concrete liturgical settings, including daily prayers, festivals, an annual covenant ceremony, and puri cation rituals. By contrast, all the other evidence in the Second Temple period and earlier must be derived from literary texts, and concrete settings must be hypothesized. 2 Moreover, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide the earliest evidence for a practice of daily communal penitential prayer. is is a very signi cant development toward what will become standard in Jewish liturgy, and without any precedent or anticipation in scriptural tradition. at development still requires adequate explanation.
Emotions in the Prayer of Sir 22:27–23:6 Ben Sira is more interested in prayer than any other wisdom writer. In his book of wisdom, we find several instances of advice on how to pray and some real prayers too, both individual and communal. Sir 22:27–23:6 is a good example of individual prayer. The person who recites the prayer (a disciple, or perhaps Ben Sira himself) asks God for help in avoiding sins of the tongue and unruly passions. After giving a short survey of research and an annotated translation of the Greek text, we will focus on the close relationship between the language of the prayer and the emotions it reveals. We intend to show that Ben Sira uses the emotions expressed in 23:4–6 with a pedagogical intent. In other words, emotions in prayer may also lead to wisdom. 1
2017
Performative expressions of grief are enacted and reenacted in all of the world's major religions. This essay will discuss how we might understand a different function of the ritualized mourning practices that accompany the prayers from the Second Temple period. We propose that prayers from this time strategically arouse grief in order to generate first-hand perceptions of foundational events and in effect, to create presence from absence. This type of study falls under a larger category of embodied cognition which understands experiential frames to assist in the imaginative enactment of new experiences.1 Second Temple prayers are often situated in a narrative context that describes practices of self-diminish-ment: fasting, sackcloth, ashes, depilatory acts, anguished weeping, collapsing, and hands opened in supplication. The prayers themselves also contribute to the diminishment of the prayer through the enactment of petitions, confession of sinfulness, and confession of God's greatness. The effects of these practices and prayers can predispose one to experientially reenact grief, which can in turn, lead to rumination, a cognitive state in which presence is made from absence. Such experiences, while they are not predetermined to happen, can help us to imagine how prayers and mourning practices functioned in the generation of apocalyptic visions in the Second Temple period. The first topic that I will explore is how the cultivation of the emotional state of grief and rumination are natural cognitive processes that are designed to produce experiences of presence from absence. By this I mean a sensory perception of the presence of otherworldly beings, either as a perception of alterity, or as an experience of a vision or voice. Secondly we will consider how such ritual experiences might be understood as social mechanisms that assisted in generating an awareness of God's presence during a period in which the deity's absence was especially felt during times of political uncertainty.
Modern Judaism, 2005
An overview essay for this handbook on modern Jewish prayer and worship.
Biblical Theology of prayer in the Old Testament
Reformed theology in Africa series, 2022
Peer-review declaration The publisher (AOSIS) endorses the South African 'National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum Best Practice for Peer-Review of Scholarly Books'. The book proposal form was evaluated by our Theological and Religious Studies editorial board. The manuscript underwent an evaluation to compare the level of originality with other published works and was subjected to rigorous two-step peer-review before publication by two technical expert reviewers who did not include the volume editor and were independent of the volume editor, with the identities of the reviewers not revealed to the editor(s) or author(s). The reviewers were independent of the publisher, editor(s) and author(s). The publisher shared feedback on the similarity report and the reviewers' inputs with the manuscript's editor(s) or author(s) to improve the manuscript. Where the reviewers recommended revision and improvements, the editor(s) or author(s) responded adequately to such recommendations. The reviewers commented positively on the scholarly merits of the manuscript and recommended that the book be published. v Research justification Prayer is a major topic within Christian theology. The biblical text has various references to various recorded and reported prayers. In fact, references to prayer are found within the rich diversity of the various books, corpora and genres of Scripture. As can be expected, much has been written about prayer in the biblical text. However, a comprehensive Biblical Theology dealing with the concept of prayer in Scripture has not been published before. The current volume intends to fill this gap, assuming that such an approach can provide a valuable contribution to the theological discourse on prayer and related concepts. The current volume aims to investigate prayer and its related elementsincluding worship, praise, thanksgiving, adoration, petition, intercession, lament and confession-in the Old Testament on a book-by-book or corpus-by-corpus basis. A subsequent volume investigates prayer in the New Testament in a similar fashion. It concludes with a chapter that provides Biblical-Theological perspectives on prayer in Scripture as a whole based on the chapters' findings in these volumes. The investigation follows a Biblical-Theological approach, reading the Old Testament on a book-by-book basis in its final form to uncover the Old Testament's overarching theology of prayer, understanding the parts in relation to the whole. By doing this, the discrete nuances of the prayer of the different Old Testament books and corpora can be uncovered, letting the books and corpora speak for themselves. In addition, the advantage of this approach is that it provides findings that can benefit the modern Christian community and contributes to the practice of Reformed Theology in Africa. The various chapters of this volume are written by biblical scholars who are experts in their fields. As such, this volume represents scholarly discourse for scholars. The chapters of the volume follow the order of Old Testament books according to the Hebrew canon, with some of the biblical books investigated together as literary units. Apart from three chapters on the concept of prayer in the Psalms and one chapter covering prayer in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, one chapter each is devoted to prayer in the Pentateuch, the Former Prophets, the Major Prophets, Minor Prophets, Job, Lamentations, Daniel and Chronicles. All chapters are original investigations with original results and were cleared of possible plagiarism by using iThenticate.