The Development of Institutionalized Prayer in Early Christianity in Light of Developments in Jewish Prayer at Yavneh (original) (raw)
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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.
The Persistence and Trajectories of Penitential Prayer in Rabbinic Judaism
Seeking the Favor of God, vol.3: The Impact of Penitential Prayer beyond Second Temple Judaism, 2008
My invited task in this chapter is lo provide an analytical overview of the trajectories of the penitential prayer tradition in rabbinic Judaism, as an introduction to this third and final volume of papers generated by the three-year Consultation on Penitential Prayer held at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature between 2003 and 2005. 1 The papers in this volume all deal with the impact of this tradition, which began in the early Second Commonwealth period, on the development of prayer and worship in Judaism and Christianity after 70 C.E. An additional goal of this chapter is to bring together some of the methodological and thematic threads from the previous rnlumes' papers and indicate their bearing on the materials in the present rnlume. That, in fact, is where I wish to begin. Many of the papers in the previous volumes have, appropriately to my mind, problematized the concept of genre in reierence to the notion of "penitential" prayers. Genre, to begin with, is an ideal type, and genre analysis (form criticism) too often reifies abstracts. In analyzing the actual, concrete prayers, it focuses somewhat obsessively on departures from what is, after all, a theoretical norm, constructed in this case on the basis of four instances in the Hebrew Bible (the so-called basic four:
This is not an academic paper. It is meant as one chapter in a popular book examining the role of the Oral Tradition in Judaism across the millennia.