Guide
Personal Penitential Prayers
By Carol Bakhos
Penitential prayers are a subset of petitionary prayers characterized by their extreme rhetoric of self-abasement. The petitioners view themselves as deeply flawed and without merit, and God’s punishments and trials are acknowledged as just and fully justified. The petitioners therefore throw themselves completely on God’s mercy. The rhetorical style is already found in late biblical prayers as a response to the national catastrophe of exile. It predominates in Second Temple–period prayers. Confessional prayers (“I/we have sinned”) belong to this genre.
Related Primary Sources
Primary Source
Manasseh’s Prayer for Forgiveness
O Lord Almighty,
God of our ancestors,
of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
and of their righteous offspring…
Primary Source
Tobit’s Prayer of Confession
Then with much grief and anguish of heart I wept, and with groaning began to pray:
“You are righteous, O Lord,and all your deeds are just;all your ways are mercy and truth;you judge the world.And…