Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period

Mika S. Pajunen, Jeremy Penner

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110448535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When thinking about psalms and prayers in the Second Temple period, the Masoretic Psalter and its reception is often given priority because of modern academic or theological interests. This emphasis tends to skew our understanding of the corpus we call psalms and prayers and often dampens or mutes the lived context within which these texts were composed and used. This volume is comprised of a collection of articles that explore the diverse settings in which psalms and prayers were used and circulated in the late Second Temple period.

The book includes essays by experts in the Hebrew bible, the Dead Sea scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament, in which a wide variety of topics, approaches, and methods both old and new are utilized to explore the many functions of psalms and prayers in the late Second Temple period. Included in this volume are essays examining how psalms were read as prophecy, as history, as liturgy, and as literature. A variety methodologies are employed, and include the use of cognitive sciences and poetics, linguistic theory, psychology, redaction criticism, and literary theory.

Part 1:Psalms, Prayers, and Embodied Religion

The first section of this volume, “Psalms, Prayers, and Embodied Religion,” is comprised of articles in which the authors are especially interested in questions related to human experiences in the ancient world. While philology and form-critical questions are of course necessary and related, they are not the end goal. In these articles there is an attempt to move beyond the form-critical priorities of previous scholarship to highlight the fact that the words of psalms and prayers are meant to leave the page and affect the worshipping community. In some cases psalms and prayers form parts of rituals that confirm one’s present status or create a new one; in other cases, psalms and prayers take up older traditions and are imbued with new meaning. In her article “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Blessing: The Dead Sea Scrolls as a Test Case” Jutta Jokiranta, asks the question of how the cognitive sciences might help us understand the power of blessing. The basic premise that allows her to read ancient literature with some of the insights gained in the cognitive sciences is that the neurological architecture of the human brain has not changed significantly in the interim, certainly not in the last two thousand years. There are certain human phenomena that are spread across cultural boundaries and resist cultural relativity. Rodney Werline, while not overtly relying on the natural sciences like Jokiranta to guide his question, nonetheless has a similar aim in mind when he examines “The Imprecatory Features of Psalms of Solomon 4 and 12.” Like the act of blessing, performing imprecatory curses can function to shape group dynamics and imbue them with a sense of identity. Carol Newsom, too, weaves together work done by such thinkers as Charles Taylor, and includes a number of studies in psychology and neuroscience to gain a better understanding of the introspective self (“Toward a Genealogy of the Introspective Self in Second Temple Judaism”) and how the poetic literature of the time contributed to this development. In Angela Kim Harkins’ article, “The Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period,” she discusses the possible function of ritualized mourning practices and unpacks some of the social complexities associated with revelatory experiences and prayer.

Jutta Jokiranta

Towards a Cognitive Theory of Blessing: The Dead Sea Scrolls as a Test Case

1Introduction

Blessings consist of words that carry power. The Hebrew root brk (ברך) is especially intriguing for the study of blessing because it denotes two different yet related actions: it is used for both praising God and for mediating God’s favor to humans. What does this mean for the cognitive perception of the blessing? How does the human mind employ, process, and use the idea of blessing? What intuitions does the mind rely on, and what cultural variables can be identified? The act of blessing also involves more than words. What kind of power does the human mind attach to blessing?

This contribution focuses on some of the insights gained from the cognitive sciences to advance our understanding of blessing as behavior. Cognition is basically anything in the human body and nervous system that helps us get along in the world – to process the perceptual information around us, to move purposefully, to predict and anticipate events, to communicate with fellow humans, and to select relevant information from an infinite amount of data around us. The study of blessings is often about semantics and linguistic use, and this is especially true of historical study where the only major sources are textual and the preserved words and phrases lend themselves to analysis. But here I am interested in the underlying belief structures that these concepts are based on and might trigger, and in blessings as ritual acts in ritual contexts, even though any in-depth description of ritual acts through the extant textual sources is not possible.

For any historical study of blessings to be useful and structured, it is important to be clear about the levels of analysis in which blessings can be discussed. Since at least some types of blessing can be categorized as prayer, Armin Geertz’s more general theory of prayer as communication and as behavior might help us as a starting point to specify the different levels of blessing.78 Geertz first distinguishes three levels of analysis when prayer is considered as an act of communication. In terms of his taxonomy, blessing can be analyzed in terms of: (1) the words of blessings themselves; (2) the act of blessing and its performance; and (3) blessing as a subject of discussion with a specific tradition (that is, how blessing is spoken of, instructed, and prescribed). Geertz then continues with prayer as behavior. From this perspective, blessing can be analyzed as: (1) social behavior – bodily movements within time and space, and other contextual conditions; institutional and power relations are also important to consider; (2) psychological behavior – the mental and psychological states and effects the act of blessing produces on these faculties; and (3) neurobiological behavior – neural activity and stimulation in connection to blessing behaviors.79 An analysis of these different levels does not mean that the levels could not be connected with each other and shown to influence each other. Rather, having analytical tools that provide answers to distinct questions is the precondition for comparative work, and analytical comparison is a way to understanding. I will first briefly discuss blessing in terms of communication and then introduce a discussion on the cognitive perspectives of magic that are needed to study blessing in terms of behavior, especially at the social and psychological (cognitive) level. In the final section, I will compare some blessing texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls in light of these perspectives.

2Blessing is Communication: Semantics and Speech Acts

In a religious studies context, three basic components of blessing are often discussed: consecration (understanding something or someone as empowered to bring benefits), benediction (bestowing good will or favor on someone), and eulogy (glorifying, approving, granting of favor, and aspiring towards good).80 To unpack the phenomenon of blessing further, the uses of the Hebrew root brk are primarily divided into three categories when we consider to whom the blessing is addressed and by whom: humans blessing other humans (or pronouncing objects as blessed), God blessing humans and things, and humans (and/or angels and natural objects) blessing God. According to James Aitken, when both the subject and object are humans, brk denotes “the expressing of the favour conferred on the person by God.” When God is the subject, brk denotes “[a declaration] (and thereby) making the object as specially favoured and prosperous.” When the subject is human and the object is God, brk means “to praise.”81 Whether the meaning of the Hebrew root brk “to praise” is a later derivation from “to bless” or not is debated.82

The translation of brk into “to praise” instead of “to bless,” is especially influential in theologically laden discussions that attempt to distinguish blessings directed towards God from blessings directed towards humans. But is this distinction justified: is praising God a unique activity, strictly different from other blessing acts? It will be demonstrated in this article that some of the ancient sources do not seem to appreciate such a division, at least not in a way similar to what the English assumes. Intriguingly, there are also contemporary theological voices that emphasize a close connection between praising and blessing: blessings bestowed upon creation meet their final destiny in the blessings offered to God.83 This view is in line with the suggestion that whatever the blessing activity performed in everyday life – whether praising God, asking for God’s blessing, or performing blessing – it is an act that fosters a realization of the divine-human relationship and thus brings the divine sphere into the mundane. Another explanation of the connectedness between “praising” and “blessing” is that they are corresponding parts of a reciprocal act: a human being presents a gift (sacrifice, praise) to the divine and the divine accepts the gift by granting favor to the human being. The parties are deemed worthy of the exchange.84

This does not mean that significant differences do not exist. A question that emerges from the uses of the root brk is whether God is always involved in blessings and in which ways. For example, the formulaic use of blessing in greetings or farewells may denote merely good aspirations and wishes rather than invoking the divine agent.85 But also when humans bless God, it can be asked if such praise-blessing is perceived as including two or three parties: does the speech act take place only between the human and the divine, or is a human/ angelic audience necessary for the praise-blessing to be effective?86 In any case, both forms of blessing – that is, the act where humans wish each other well and the act where humans bless God – actually represent a eulogy type blessing (i.e., “blessed are you” or “I bless you”). This type of speech act is realized at the moment of its pronouncing: persons are spoken well of when they are blessed. Blessing in this sense is similar to vows or promises that have accomplished their complete action at the moment of their saying.87 At the same time, when humans such as priests bless other humans in the form of a benediction (“May the Lord bless you […]”), the blessing is only partially fulfilled: something is expected to be realized in the future that is not yet evident or has not yet taken place, although uttering the plea for blessing is an important step in being blessed.

These sorts of differences have been sought and identified through speech-act theory, especially the various types of illocutionary acts that speech utterances are seen to do: humans do various things by speaking words, such as assert, promise, express, declare, commit, and direct.88 The utterance of the words involves performing the act.89 Words do what they say in so far as they are deemed to be well suited to the situation. For a speech-act to be effective, it must be uttered by the appropriate person in an appropriate situation and with the appropriate intent by the person.90 The famous example of the “I do” wedding vow illustrates this point: the vow completes the act of marrying only in certain circumstances, by a certain person, and when certain conventions are accepted. Similarly, for utterances like “blessed are you” or “may he bless you,” the social conventions of each cultural setting determine if/when the speech acts accomplish what they state (who can pronounce this, in what situations, and with what intentions).91

According to Aitken, the application of speech-act theory in the study of biblical blessings and curses has diminished earlier tendencies to identify magical ideas in the act of blessing and cursing.92 While speech-act theory teaches us that words have power, this power is not thought of as magical or intrinsic to the words, but is explained as effective speech acts. As a result, blessings have been increasingly understood as prayers and petitions, rather than spells or invocations. Earlier scholarship typically created models of evolution whereby early or “primitive” forms of religion were imbued with a much greater sense of magic. In one model, for example, the Hebrew Bible was thought to reflect three stages of evolution: first, a magical stage, where blessings and curses are self-fulfilling and contagious; second, a cultic stage, where certain ceremonies are required to evoke God to action; and in the final stage, blessings or curses come directly from God, and they are dependent on the ethical values proclaimed by the prophets.93 Earlier scholarship is noteworthy for its resistance to applying the concept of “magic” to anything that was deemed to be a “genuine” act of blessing.94

This rejection of magic is, however, based on an outdated dichotomy between magic and religion, where one was seen as more developed (religion) than the other (magic), one as representing “our” religion, and the other “their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Psalms, Hymns, and Prayers in Late Second Temple Judaism
• Part 1: Psalms, Prayers, and Embodied Religion
• Part 2: Psalms, Prayers, and Penitential Themes
• Part 3: Material Issues and the Ordering of Psalms and Prayers in Collections
• Part 4: Psalms, Prayers, and Prophecy
• Part 5: Psalms, Prayers, History and Identity
• Part 6: The Composition and Use of Psalms and Prayers
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors