Book review: “Biblical Prose Prayer: As A Window to the Popular Religion of Ancient Israel” by Moshe Greenberg

Moshe Greenberg was a Philadelphia-born rabbi and Bible scholar who, in mid-career, had a bee in his bonnet.

Excuse the homey metaphor, but it seems fit for a homey insight that Greenberg had about the way average people prayed in ancient Israel. Indeed, the short book, just 66 pages, that resulted from this insight is titled Biblical Prose Prayer: As A Window to the Popular Religion of Ancient Israel, published in 1983.

What the long-ago Israelites believed and how they prayed is important, Greenberg writes, because of the role that the Hebrew Bible still has today in the modern world.  The Hebrew Bible contains 24 books, the core of the Christian Old Testament, and these form “a spiritual and cultural patrimony” of all modern people, whether believers or not, since the ethics, morals and understandings of the transcendent ripple through all of human civilization.  Greenberg writes:

The reader of the Scriptures soon finds himself diverted from ephemeral [present-day] concerns to a consideration of fundamental, lasting issues, and these are dealt with in a plain and simple way that somehow bypasses our subtleties, complexities, and sophistication.

By reducing issues to essentials, and thus making it impossible for the reader to escape them, the Scriptures work an effect like that of a child’s blunt question or uninhibited comment on grown-up conduct.

As a child’s remark is capable of exposing a disturbing truth hidden under rationalization and self-deception, so the ancient writings invite us constantly to consider that beneath the glorious achievements of civilization stands the human being, a frail needy creature whose happiness still depends on discovering what it is, and why — without having had any say in the matter — it has been called into being.

 

“Single and all embracing”

Greenberg, who died in 2010, was emeritus professor of the Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he’d taught since 1970. Earlier, he had taught the Bible and Judaica at the University of Pennsylvania as well as Swarthmore College, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the University of California at Berkeley and the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies.

In Biblical Prose Prayer, he writes that essential questions cannot be answered without reference to the transcendental realm, i.e., to God:

Single and all embracing, the concept of God integrates the cosmos, lending it coherence, consistency and thus intelligibility.

As depicted in the scriptures, this God, like a human being, has a character, a personality, has thoughts, feelings, makes decisions, is present deep in the human experience of every moment.

God is someone, in other words, to whom people can talk, with whom people can communicate. And Greenberg details three methods.

 

“Baring one’s insides to God”

One is formal prayer in the psalms and other poetic works that were created by writers and used the Temple and synagogues.

And, while these are literature, they aren’t distant from the emotions in the breast of the least educated believer.

References to the involvement of the heart in prayer occur even more frequently in the “higher” literature of the Bible — the prophetic, poetic and wisdom books.

Lamentations 2:19 calls on Fair Zion to “pour out her heart like water before YHWH” — a simile that has been plausibly invoked to explain the peculiar rite performed at the revival meeting convoked by Samuel for the repentant Israelites: “they drew water and poured it out before YHWH” (1 Samuel 7:6); if this is a correct combination, it shows how commonplace the notion was that prayer meant baring one’s insides to God.

Another type of prayer is unconventional and artless — simply a kind of explosion of feeling:

It might be little more than an exclamation, such as David’s “O frustrate Ahithophel’s counsel, YHWH!” (2 Samuel 15-31), or it might be phrased like an expostulation with a familiar, such as Samson’s: “You have granted this great victory by the hand of your servant; now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hands of these uncircumcised?!” (Judges 15:18)

 

“The personal conception of God”

Yet, a third form of prayer — biblical prose prayer — has been overlooked by Bible scholars, Greenberg argues, and the bulk of his small book details this version in which the one who is praying engages in something of a conversation with God.

Unlike psalms which are prayers written for use in many settings, the prose prayer is specific to a moment in time and a particular situation. Unlike exclamations, it isn’t simply expressing an emotion. Instead, it is reaching out to communicate with at least the expectation of a give-and-take.

These prose prayers follow the pattern of communication between humans, such as a king and a subject, or a son and a father, and they have to do with petitioning for something, or confessing some sin, or offering thanks.  Greenberg writes that

the biblical narrators all portrayed speech between men and God on the analogy of speech between humans. Such a procedure accords perfectly with the personal conception of God in the Scriptures; the only analogy available for intercourse with him was the human-personal.

 

“Please, YHWH!”

Here, for instance, is an example of a prayer of petition as broken into sections by Greenberg.  It is enunciated by the sailors who, in a storm caused by Jonah’s attempt to flee from his God-given mission, are about to throw him overboard:

(address) Please, YHWH!

(petition) Pary let us not perish on account of the life of this man, and do not lay upon us the death of an innocent.

(motivation) For you, YHWH, have done as you pleased. (Jonah 1:14)

And here is an example of a prose prayer of confession, this one from David to God after realizing that he had sinned by taking a census:

(confession) I sinned gravely in what I did,

(petition) and now, YHWH, pray remove the offense of your servant,

(acknowledgement of folly) for I have been very foolish. (2 Samuel 24:10)

An example of the prayer of thanksgiving that Greenberg cites involves Abraham’s servant at the well in Haran.

He had just prayed for a suitable wife for his master’s son when up walked Rebeccah — who turned out to be of Abraham’s own family. The joyful servant bowed and prostrated himself before YHWH and said:

Blessed be YHWH, God of my lord Abraham, who has not relinquished his constancy and his fidelity toward my lord; as I was on the way, YHWH led me to the house of my lord’s kin. (Gensis 24:27)

 

“I will look away from you”

The key element in all of these prayers was the sincerity of those who were praying.

Whereas other belief systems of the time required the use of very specific formulas of words and phrases to bring about a desired effect through magic, the Israelite approach was through communication of innermost feelings.

Indeed, when Israel was faulted by the prophets, it usually had to do with the insincerity of the religious practices of the people, such as when Isaiah fumes:

What do your many sacrifices mean to me, says YHWH?

I am sated with offerings of rams;

Suet of fattened bulls, and blood of oxes, and sheep and goats I do not desire…

Your new moons and sabbaths I thoroughly hate;

They are a burden to me; I cannot bear it.

And when you spread your hands I will look away from you;

Even if you pray much, I will not listen to you;

Your hands are full of blood! (Isaiah 1:11, 14-15)

 

“A holy nation”

When done right — that is, when done with the fullness of the heart — prose prayers as well as poetic prayers and exclamations are the expression of the sacredness of each member of the community.  As Greenberg writes:

The express purpose of God in offering to make Israel his covenanted people is to convert them into his “kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) — that is, a holy commonwealth in which all members enjoy priestlike intimacy with God.

Each and every Israelite could pray to God — could engage in a conversation with God — because each had a priestly role and did not need an official religious functionary to serve as a go-between.  This goes to the heart of Judaism.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.17.26