Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

Prayer and Poetry

Prayer was a significant part of the individual piety of a fair number of Is-

raelites in First Temple times. Individual prayer was accompanied appar-

ently by poems written for the collective people of Israel. Such prayers

seem definitely to have attained a place in the psalmody of the Temple by

the Second Temple period. In various Second Temple texts there are indi-

vidual and collective prayers, and toward the end of the Second Temple pe-

riod, prayer was becoming institutionalized increasingly, at least as ap-

pears from the tannaitic evidence. From the set liturgical texts preserved at

Qumran, it seems that daily statutory ritual had become part of the life of

the sectarians, who had separated from the Temple, which they regarded as

impure and improperly conducted. These texts appear not to be of sectar-

ian origin and may typify wider trends in the Jewish community. Further,

the Dead Sea Scrolls give evidence of the twice-daily recital of the Shema

and the use of mezuzot and phylacteries, some of which were prepared in a

manner similar to that required by Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition.

Some tannaitic practices may have derived from those in evidence in

Qumran liturgical texts. Both corpora require that a benediction of lights

be part of the service each morning and afternoon-evening. This seems to

be the only required benediction in the daily prayer texts preserved at

Qumran. However, it seems to be equivalent to one of the two blessings

before Shema required by the rabbis.

Qumran liturgical texts include also supplication texts similar to later

rabbinic propitiatory prayers, and festival prayers seem to share similar

motifs. However, not a single prayer preserved in the Scrolls is part of the

rabbinic liturgy, and no text of rabbinic prayer was found in the sectarian

collection. Again, the parallels in practice seem to derive from the com-

mon Judaism of Second Temple times, not from any literary or other di-

rect connection.

Second Temple literature also seems to have played a major role in the

development of the Jewish religious poetry known as piyyut. Before the

discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, theevidence for Hebrew poetry in the

postbiblical period was ignored. The poems in 1 Maccabees, for example,

and even in the New Testament, not to mention early Jewish liturgy pre-

served in rabbinic texts or capable of being reconstructed from the later

prayer texts, went largely overlooked. It was assumed that biblical psalm-

ody was a dead-end tradition to be continued only later by a new form of

Hebrew liturgical poetry that developed virtuallyex nihilo.When the first

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lawrence h. schiffman

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:20 PM