66 A History of Judaism
those patterns should be traced back centuries to long before the end of
Temple worship in Jerusalem, but it is worth noting that none of the
Qumran prayer texts is obviously related to the liturgy underlying the
Mishnah. The basic structure of the communal prayers in the early rab-
binic texts is the blessing formula: ‘Blessed are you, O Lord our God,
King of the universe, who .. .’. The very first section of the Mishnah
discusses the rules for reciting the relevant blessings before and after the
Shema, the first of a group of three passages from the Pentateuch recited
in the morning and the evening, beginning ‘Shema Yisrael ’: ‘ Hear O
Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one ... You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your
strength.’ The Nash Papyrus, from the second century bce, containing
on a single sheet a Hebrew text of the Shema along with the Ten Com-
mandments, suggests that the Decalogue was also recited liturgically by
some Jews. The Mishnah records such recitation, before the Shema, by
the priests in the Temple during the procedures for the daily sacrifices,
but liturgical recitation of the Ten Commandments by other Jews is not
assumed in the Mishnah, and later rabbinic tradition recorded specific
prohibition of such recitation in case it encouraged the heretical notion
that only these commandments were divinely ordained.
The Mishnah does, however, assume regular recitation alongside the
Shema of a standard form of prayer which by the end of the first century
ce was known to Rabban Gamaliel II and R. Joshua as ‘the Eighteen’
(Shemoneh Esreh), which survived in various recensions to become the
standard form of Jewish prayer. Already in the versions known to the
rabbis in the second century ce, the Shemoneh Esreh actually includes
not eighteen but nineteen benedictions, suggesting either an earlier use
of eighteen specified blessings before the addition of the nineteenth
blessing at some time after 70 ce or a compromise between conflicting
versions of what the eighteen blessings should be. In any case, although
the division of the Shemoneh Esreh, to be recited three times a day, into
three sections (praise, petition and thanksgiving) probably reflects the
structure of general communal prayer in late Second Temple times, the
eventual acceptance that there should be nineteen blessings in itself pro-
vides evidence of a certain fluidity in the liturgical tradition, as do
references to the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce in the versions of
the blessings found in the Mishnah.^42
Both the Shema and the Shemoneh Esreh could be recited either pri-
vately or communally. Communal prayer is assumed by rules for dealing
with, for instance, one who ‘went before the Ark and fell into error’; in