worship 67
such a case, ‘another must take his place ... Where does he begin? At the
beginning of the Benediction in which the other fell into error.’ On the
other hand, most early rabbinic rules apply more to private prayer.
There were debates in the first century ce about posture in the saying of
the Shema – is it right to recline in the evening, reflecting the biblical
injunction to talk of the commandments ‘when you lie down and when
you rise up’? The Shemoneh Esreh was to be said standing up unless
circumstances, such as when riding an ass and unable to dismount,
make this physically impossible. Hence these blessings were sometimes
known as the Amidah, or ‘standing’. Such prayer required concentra-
tion, according to the Mishnah: ‘None may stand up to say the prayer
save in a sober mood ... Even if the king salutes a man he may not
return the greeting; and even if a snake was twisted around his heel he
may not interrupt his prayer.’ Prostration in prayer, with both feet and
hands outstretched, is said in the Mishnah to have been practised in the
Temple when the High Priest pronounced the divine name during the
service on the Day of Atonement, but neither the Mishnah nor earlier
Jewish texts have anything to say about this form of reverence, or about
kneeling or bowing, during normal prayer elsewhere.^43
Notwithstanding the assumed power of private prayers, and (as we
shall see in Chapter 8) the possibility of pious individuals living as soli-
tary ascetics, Jews, like others in the ancient world, took for granted
that worship should usually be communal. Inscriptions from the coun-
tryside in Egypt refer to the prayer house as the main institution of these
diaspora Jewish communities.^ For all Jews, the eve of Pesach, when, as
Philo put it in Alexandria in the first century ce, ‘the whole nation per-
forms the sacred rites and acts as priest with pure hands and complete
immunity’ to eat the roast lamb which marked the feast, so that ‘on this
day every dwelling house is invested with the outward semblance and
dignity of a temple’, involved a ceremony at which ‘the guests assem-
bled for the banquet have been cleansed by purificatory lustrations ...
to fulfil with prayers and hymns the custom handed down by their
fathers’. The purpose was to give thanks for the miracle of deliverance
from Egypt at the time of the exodus, both by telling the story and (in
part) by re- enacting it. Unleavened bread was eaten ceremoniously to
recall the hurry with which the Israelites had been required to leave
Egypt after the tenth plague brought upon Egypt had involved the death
of the first- born sons of the Egyptians. It is not now possible to know
how much the wording of the narration of the exodus resembled in
Temple times the Seder service, a domestic banquet accompanied by the