Early Medieval Discussions of Prayer

The Place of Liturgical Poetry in the Prayer Service

One of the most significant changes in the evolution of the liturgy involved the place of liturgical poetry within the prayer service. Historically, prose prayers almost certainly preceded poetic prayers, but at a certain point, verse prayers, called piyyutim (liturgical poems), replaced significant portions of the existing prose texts. Some authorities, especially the Babylonian geonim, saw this as problematic and sought to suppress the use of piyyutim. But piyyutim were popular, and many Jewish communities, in particular the Palestinian ones, resisted efforts to eradicate them. Later geonim eventually accepted the inclusion of piyyutim, but, in a complicated process that took hundreds of years, the poems became additions to, rather than replacements for, the prose liturgy.

Karaite Prayers

The Karaites had their own strong views about the forms in which the liturgy should appear, and their opinions differed radically from those of the Rabbanites. Early Karaites ruled that prayer should be exclusively in the form of passages drawn from the biblical book of Psalms, although later Karaites came also to advocate for the use of piyyutim, which meant that Karaites began to compose their own.

The Development of the Prayer Service

This period saw struggles over the proper shape of the prayer service—and some of the rationalizations and justifications those struggles elicited from Jewish scholars, along with some of the legal norms surrounding prayer that developed. The prayer service, in fact, was the recurring object of self-reflective discussions on issues ranging from the purpose of prayer to how one balances normative law and local custom. As part of this process, Jews occasionally composed discussions of the proper times and appropriate languages for prayer, including instructions on how to prostrate oneself during prayer.