Prayer and Liturgy in Antiquity

The surviving Jewish prayers from the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods, like their canonized biblical counterparts, are mostly fictive. That is to say, they are found in narrative contexts in which they have been put into the mouths of the stories’ characters. Many of these occur in expansions of biblical stories. Others occur throughout the Apocrypha and in the New Testament. Only in the fragmentary texts from Qumran and, later, in rabbinic literature do we find actual scripts and directives, however idealized, for regular communal prayer.

Virtually all prayers from the Second Temple period, from the return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile in the last third of the sixth century BCE to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, are characterized by a heavily penitential rhetoric and stance. This rhetoric is particularly evident in intercessory prayers on behalf of the community, which represents itself as unworthy, throwing itself (often quite literally, in full prostration) on the mercy of God. The origin and prevalence of this rhetoric in the postexilic period is often ascribed to the crushed messianic expectations of the returnees from Babylonian exile, who remained in political submission in the semiautonomous Persian state of Yehud, since the realities of the restoration to Zion did not live up to what they had hoped for (see Ezra 9:9; Nehemiah 9:36–37).

The vast majority of the other prayer genres known from Psalms and other biblical literature have parallels in the literature of the Second Temple period: hymns, laments (with a stronger penitential inflection), petitionary prayer, litanies, confessional and intercessory prayers, and blessings and curses. There is nothing surprising about this, as the literary prayers and psalms in the canonical biblical texts served as models for their later noncanonical counterparts.

These observations also pertain to the literature unearthed at Qumran. But here we additionally find hymns and prayer texts outside narrative contexts. The Hodayot scroll is a lengthy collection of hymns, many of which reflect the religious concerns and distinctive sectarian views of the Qumran community. The fragments of daily blessings, daily prayers, and festival prayers are our earliest extant communal liturgies. They reflect the sectarian calendar at Qumran (broadly congruent with those in Enochic literature and Jubilees) and may also reflect sectarian concerns. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice detail the celestial angelic Sabbath liturgy and indicate a strong mystical interest. We also have blessing and curse texts from Qumran, which seem to have functioned as part of the sect’s liturgy. Although not all the literature found at Qumran originated there, there is no evidence that any of the Qumran communal prayer texts proper originated in broader, nonsectarian social and religious contexts. Similarly, there is no evidence of communal prayer as a regular activity before 70 CE in synagogues in the land of Israel.

Regular, prescribed communal prayer appears to have originated among the rabbis in the period following the destruction of the Temple and the Judean commonwealth between 70 and 73 CE. The earliest rabbinic text, the Mishnah, which in its edited form dates from the turn of the third century CE, and its companion texts, the Tosefta and the halakhic (tannaitic) midrashim, which date from the third century CE, supply the earliest literary evidence about rabbinic prayer, liturgy, and ritual practice. They detail the structure, form, and thematic content of the core rabbinic liturgies and some of their verbal phrases, but not their full wordings. Those do not appear in writing until the second half of the ninth century CE.

The first known rabbinic “prayer book” or “order of prayer” was compiled as a responsum, or halakhic letter, sent from Amram, the putative head of the rabbinic academy of Sura in Babylonia, to a Jewish community in Spain, probably Barcelona, sometime before his death in 875 CE. To represent earlier liturgical traditions, we give wordings of the prayers from talmudic literature whenever possible. Otherwise, we rely cautiously on the evidence of the fragmentary prayer books preserved in the Cairo Geniza that follow the old rite of the land of Israel.

Among the prerabbinic prayer genres, the biblical-style hymn virtually disappears in rabbinic liturgy, although biblical psalms are recited. The hymn genre, as an expression of praise, is superseded by the extended blessing form beginning with the phrase Barukh ’atah ’Adonai [’elohenu melekh ha-‘olam]. Although the first part of this phrase occurs twice in biblical literature (Psalm 119:12; 1 Chronicles 29:10), its usage became standard and formulaic only among the rabbis. It is used in one-line occasional blessings recited over the performance of commandments, the enjoyment of food and drink, and the experience of some natural wonder or divine beneficence. It is also used to begin and conclude paragraph-length expressions of praise.

The rabbis mandated a communal prayer of eighteen blessings to be recited three times a day by every individual, preferably in community in a synagogue. While there is some late biblical precedent for the custom of praying three times a day (Psalm 55:18; Daniel 6:11), the rabbis attribute the requirement for thrice-daily prayer to the daily sacrificial cycle in the Temple, where regular offerings were made on behalf of the community twice daily, at sunrise (shaḥarit) and in the late afternoon (minḥah). A rabbinically mandated third prayer, in the evening, was held, somewhat awkwardly, to correspond to the burning on the altar overnight of any leftover sacrificial parts (b. Berakhot 26b). The thrice-daily prayer thus came to be viewed as a replacement for the Temple sacrifices and as vicariously fulfilling their function of helping to maintain the cosmic order. Rabbinic prayer etiquette mandated that the series of blessings begin with praise of God and only then proceed to petitions. The series concludes with an expression of gratitude and a final prayer for peace and well-being. On Sabbaths and festivals, the intermediate petitionary blessings are omitted as inappropriate for the holy day and are replaced with a single blessing sanctifying the day (t. Berakhot 3:12–13).

The other major early rabbinic liturgical innovation is the recitation of the Shema‘: three scriptural paragraphs—Deuteronomy 6:4–9, Deuteronomy 11:13–21, and Numbers 15:37–41—preceded and followed by blessings. This series is recited twice daily, a literal fulfillment of the command to “recite them [ . . . ] when you lie down and when you arise” (Deuteronomy 6:7, 11:19).

In the early Byzantine period (fourth–fifth century CE), the poetic hymn form was taken up again in rabbinic liturgy and elaborately transmuted, in accordance with prevailing cultural tastes, into liturgical poetry called piyyut (from the Greek poietes, “poet”). While drawing on such biblical poetic devices as alphabetical acrostics and parallelism, prayer leaders in the land of Israel with literary and rhetorical skill embellished the statutory communal prayers with new linguistic forms and styles. A similar liturgical phenomenon was taking place at roughly the same time among Samaritans and eastern Christians in both Aramaic- and Greek-speaking churches. Among the Jews, the first synagogue poets remain anonymous. Yosi ben Yosi, who wrote many poems for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah in the fourth or fifth century, is the earliest poet known to us by name. The poets Yannai and Eleazar be-Rabbi Kallir (or Qillir), writing in the sixth and seventh centuries, respectively, developed and perfected the classical style of piyyut, including rhyme as well as meter in their works, inventing (or refining) elaborate poetic structures, and inscribing their names as acrostics into the lines of their poems. The single overarching theme of these works is the intense desire for God’s speedy deliverance and redemption of the Jewish people from the Byzantine Christian yoke.