What Does the Hebrew Bible Tell Us About Prayer?
Deconstructing Christianity: Hebrew scriptures are important for many reasons, but they don't really tell us much about prayer, contemplative or otherwise.
There is a scriptural basis for understanding prayer as ‘asking God for things’, though it depends on an interpretation based on that presupposition. There is a significant difference between this typical understanding of prayer, and what is often seen as ‘prayer’ in the Hebrew Bible. What constitutes prayer has developed over time, and it needs to change again to meet the needs of increasing numbers of people for whom merely begging an anthropomorphized deity for things makes little sense.
When we use heard, thought, whispered, spoken, chanted, or sung language to pray, we do not expect to perceive or hear a response from God in the language we have used to pray. There are traditions involving ecstatic practices where one person speaks in tongues and another ‘interprets’ it into intelligible language as a supposed prophetic message from God. Some evangelicals speak of an inwardly perceived ‘word from the Lord’. However, in either case, these are obvious projections of participants’ thoughts, wishes, beliefs, or hopes. In general, prayer is typically understood as verbally asking God for something, and God ‘answering’ by granting or not granting it.
When Christians identify ‘prayer’ in the Hebrew Bible, it often involves reading into the text the assumption of voluntarily asking God for things, when something rather different is being portrayed. Abraham never asks YHVH for anything at his discretion. Unlike our typical concept of prayer, in every case, YHVH comes to Abraham first and initiates a spoken dialogue, to which Abraham responds with questions and requests. This is not prayer as we understand it. There are ‘prayers’ depicted in Genesis as spontaneous cries to YHVH at some point of crisis; there are complaints to YHVH, incantations to produce signs, and solemn vows, but the majority of patriarchal ‘prayers’ involve a spoken dialogue with YHVH initiated by one party or the other, with follow-up questions or requests from the mortal of the two.
The same pattern holds with Moses. Often when Moses is the one initiating dialogue with YHVH, it is because someone has asked Moses to ask YHVH for something. Moses is depicted as YHVH’s sole designated interlocutor. In the case of the Priestly Benediction in Numbers 6 that begins, “YHVH bless you and keep you...,” YHVH tells Moses, to tell Aaron and his sons, to pronounce the benediction upon the people of Israel. The pattern of depicting spoken dialogue between YHVH and another party continues in Joshua and Judges.
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Two significant shifts occur beginning with the ‘palace history’ portion of scripture in Samuel, Kings, and the historical revision of Chronicles. Both Saul and David are depicted as having “inquired of YHVH, ‘Shall I...?’” To which YHVH responds to their yes/no question by saying to do the thing that was inquired about.
The Hebrew grammatical form of “inquired of YHVH” implies something performed by manipulating objects. This becomes clear in First Samuel 30. In preparing to ‘inquire of YHVH’, David tells a priest to bring him the ephod, a linen priestly garment sometimes used for oracular purposes in conjunction with the Urim and Thummim, elements of a jeweled breastplate attached to the ephod that was used for cleromancy—a form of casting lots to determine the will of a deity. Essentially, Saul’s and David’s ‘prayers’ involved the rolling of dice, with YHVH magically determining the outcome. This is not prayer as we know it.
In Second Samuel 7/First Chronicles 17, we have a lengthy reflection pronounced by David to YHVH after the prophet Nathan tells him that he is not to build a house for YHVH, but that one of his sons would. In First Chronicles 29, David pronounces a liturgy of blessing over offerings given to build the temple. At the dedication of the temple in First Kings 8/Second Chronicles 6 Solomon delivers a lengthy liturgical prayer before the assembly. None of these are dialogues with YHVH, nor would they necessarily serve as models for an ongoing practice of prayer.
The other shift in dialogues with YHVH involves the response of prophets speaking on behalf of YHVH, instead of YHVH speaking directly. In Second Kings 19/Isaiah 37 Hezekiah goes to the temple and prays for YHVH to deliver Jerusalem from the Neo-Assyrian empire. Isaiah responds in classic thus-says-YHVH style: Sennacherib will not lay siege to Jerusalem. The heavy tribute Hezekiah paid helped that prophecy come true, while the rest of Judah was laid waste. The same pattern appears in the following parallel chapters when Hezekiah prays not to die from his illness but to recover and live longer.
There is Asa’s prayer in a moment of military crisis in Second Chronicles 14. In Chapter 20 Jehoshaphat prays for military deliverance. Jahaziel responds with a thus-says-YHVH speech. The next day the armies arrayed against them all turn on one another and slaughter each other.
Ezra tells of the return to and restoration of Jerusalem and the temple under the Persian empire. In Chapter 7 it shifts into the first person. After a transcribed letter of support from Artaxerxes, the author gives written blessing and credit to YHVH for putting this into Artaxerxes’ heart. In Chapter 9 Ezra is depicted pronouncing a long public liturgy of remorse for Israel’s past sins and punishment by the Babylonians, and resolve not to anger YHVH further by intermarrying with the ‘people of the land’. The great assembly mourns and resolves to comply.
In Nehemiah’s contemporaneous first-person account, the author depicts no dialogue with YHVH. All of the ‘prayers’ written into it are one-way addresses to YHVH expressing the wishes of the author. This shift away from dialog is a significant development in the context of the post-exilic Persian period of Jewish history.
Some authors identify ‘prayers’ prayed by Job, but this mischaracterizes the text. Job consists of nearly forty chapters of beautifully written Hebrew poetry depicting a conversation between friends, and dealing with some of the deepest questions of human suffering. It is bracketed at the beginning with prose setting the context, and at the end describing the outcome.
The same is true for Psalms. They are poetry and song lyrics. While any art can be understood as a kind of prayer, the content of the Psalms does not reflect a practice of prayer per se. They are songs expressing the hopes, fears, regrets, and wishes of their authors, some quite dark and violent.
Jeremiah and Lamentations both feature much back-and-forth with YHVH, mostly in poetic form. Lamentations is all poetry. There are three depictions of Ezekiel addressing YHVH, protesting what YHVH is doing, or what YHVH has commanded him to do.
The text of Daniel 9 begins in the first person, where the author recounts a lengthy appeal to YHVH confessing the collective sin of Israel resulting in the Babylonian exile, asking for an end to YHVH’s anger with an appeal to his mercy. This reinforces the setting of the story during the Babylonian exile. As ‘Daniel’ prays the man Gabriel returns to him in another vision, predicting war and the abomination that desolates. Though the setting is Babylon, the text is contemporaneous with the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes 350 years later, and it refers to him.
The beginning of Amos 7 depicts some visions of Amos in which he has a dialogue with YHVH, much of it poetic. Except for its first and last verses, Jonah 2—Jonah’s ‘prayer’ from the belly of the fish—is a straight-up Hebrew psalm. There are appeals to YHVH and responses from him in the oracle of Habakkuk, which is almost entirely poetry.
In summary, much of what is commonly understood as ‘prayer’ in the Hebrew Bible are depictions of dialogue with YHVH, the casting of lots, liturgical declamations before an assembly, or prophetic dialogues with YHVH in poetic form. These instances do not have a lot to tell us about an ongoing practice of prayer and meditation.