Early Jewish Penitential Prayers

Penitential and Confessional Prayer

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. Confessional prayers, which often include the line “I/we have sinned,” belong to this genre.

This rhetorical style is already found in late biblical prayers as a response to the national catastrophe of exile, such as Nehemiah’s prayer, the prayer of the people of Judah after hearing the Teaching, and Daniel’s prayer for Judean restoration. It predominates in Second Temple–period prayers, including prayers in narrative contexts, such as Tobit’s prayer of confession, and prayers attributed to biblical characters, such as Aseneth and Manasseh. Rabbinic literature offers several examples of penitential prayers offered by individuals on a regular basis, such as those of Rava and Rav Sheshet.

Communal Penitential Prayers

Penitential prayers could be offered by individuals on their own behalf, or they could be offered by or on behalf of a community. Like personal penitential prayers, communal penitential prayers are characterized by self-abasement and pleas for God’s mercy, and they share a theme of collective guilt and punishment. The Psalms of Solomon and the liturgy of the Qumran community include examples of this genre. In early rabbinic literature, drought was the most common occasion on which communal penitential prayers would be recited, together with the act of fasting as a form of self-mortification. Both personal and communal penitential prayer also formed a key part of the rabbinic liturgy for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.