Lecture 3

In the preceding lectures I have argued (1) that the prose prayers of the Bible, represented as extemporized by the laity, follow patterns, whose components arise naturally from the circumstances; and (2) that these patterns are similar to the representation of interhuman speech patterns in analogous circumstances, and that there is no reason to suspect the veridicality of the principle that the laity extemporized prayer on the analogy of social speech.

Granting the validity of these arguments, it may be concluded that in ancient Israel, in principle, anyone could pray. By this I mean that anyone capable of conventional interhuman discourse was capable of praying; equally, that the prayer of anyone was deemed acceptable to God. This conclusion would not seem to justify the trouble taken to arrive at it; it would be impolite, but perhaps not inexcusable, to greet it with, "So what?"

Before the attempt is made to say "what," current scholarly positions on this topic must be aired as the first step in explaining the length at which I have expounded it.

Scholarly appreciation of the embedded prayers in the Hebrew Scriptures has been bedeviled by disabling preconceptions. The arch-devil is the dichotomizing of prayer into spontaneous, free invention on the one hand, and preformulated, prescribed prayers on the other. Y. Kaufmann, easily first among modern Jewish Bible scholars, assessed biblical prose prayers as follows:

We do not know whether in pre-exilic times fixed prayers were current—prayers whose wording was set. Almost all the prayers found in the Scriptures belong to specific pray-ers and to specific occasions; they spring from the special circumstances in which they were composed, hence they have no set wording. A set prayer is a composition that has been detached from its author and the situation in which it was uttered—detached from an individual and his particular need to become a public vehicle of expression to serve those who speak not what they think but what it is conventional to say. Set prayer is public property, but all the prayers of biblical characters are individual and tailored for the occasion. (Toldot ha-^'e muna ha-yisr^e' elit^[*] II [Tel-Aviv, 1946], p. 502)

The scholarly attitude toward the two members of this dichotomy has changed in the course of time. At the beginning of this century, the study of prayer was dominated by the magisterial and still indispensable survey of F. Heiler, Das Gebet (5th ed., München/Basel, 1969 [1st ed. 1918], published in English as Prayer , trans. by S. McComb and J. E. Park [London, 1932]). Heiler did not suppress his romantic Protestant predilection for the free spirit of the individual. True prayer, he asserted, is the "original, simple prayer of the heart"; "formal literary prayers are merely [their] weak reflection" (Prayer , p. xviii); set prayer is the impersonal, spiritually desiccated, final stage of prayer. As the "link" between true prayer of the heart and the mechanical set prayer, Heiler mentions "the flexible, elastic outline, which in a free way was adapted to the concrete needs of the moment" (p. 66). But he does not dwell on this transitional or "intermediate" (Prayer , pp. 10 f.) form—of such interest to us! The degeneration was caused by the "growing feeling of uncertainty in regard to the divinity . . . which is set to rest only by fixed formulas," and by "the inability for independent expression" (p. 66).

The modern study of society, followed by the even

more modern study of simple cultures brought about a change of opinion reflected in the treatment of biblical prayer after the Second World War. The community came to be appreciated as the matrix of creativity and values. The origin of prayer was now sought in the formal, liturgical prayers of the community; solo praying was performed by an expert who served as the communal spokesman. His creations were subsequently adopted by the individual. Here are three formulations of the modern position. I quote first from S. Mowinckel, Religion und Kultus (Göttingen, 1953), p. 121:

In the development of religion, the liturgical or ritual prayer has played a greater role than "free prayer." In Israel we see remarkably little free prayer outside of cultic occasions and unconnected with a cult place even with the prophets; basically it occurs to a marked extent only with Jeremiah, and to some extent with Amos. But it can be present and lie hidden even under a rigidly prescribed life of prayer, as is the case with the fixed times of prayer and the prescribed formulas of Islam. Precisely Islam shows how the believer can add his own private prayers to the prescribed confession and the laudative salat^[*] ! We see the same in Judaism, from Samuel's mother Hannah, who made use of the worship of the festival service to "pour out her heart before the Lord," to the publican in the parable [Luke 18:13], who, when the time for prayer came, could produce nothing other than his "God, be merciful to me a sinner."

The fixed forms constitute no barrier—indeed they are often of help. Even a spontaneous or private prayer can find expression in the prescribed forms of prayer in the service; it has often proved true that what the individual feels in his heart can be better expressed in that than in his own words. Many in the course of time have become increasingly thankful for the help of a life of prayer, which goes to show that one can elicit private and personal prayers from the very order of the service.

Mowinckel not only asserts the priority of set prayer, he apologizes for it—evidently reacting to its denigration

by such as Heiler. Because he does not bestow any attention on the Scriptural "free prayers," he can lump extemporized prayers of individuals (Jeremiah, Amos, and Hannah) with private meanings that one who recites set prayers can find in them. He declares free prayer to be a negligible phenomenon. The evidential value of Hannah's prayer is discounted by representing it as adjunct to the festival service, as gratuitous an assertion as that the publican's extemporized prayer was adjunct to the daily service: the location of both prayers in the temple is of no consequence for their essentially spontaneous character. Ignoring the data on the free prayers, Mowinckel adduces the Scriptures to support his generality that liturgical prayer was a greater factor in shaping religion.

E. Gerstenberger's Der bittende Mensch , which I have already gratefully mentioned, examines the petitions and complaints of the individual in the Hebrew Scriptures in the light of the Babylonian incantation prayers. Not surprisingly, Gerstenberger arrives by this route at the conclusion that the Hebrew petitions and complaints, like the Babylonian incantations, were composed and recited by experts to whom members of the community resorted to mediate their transactions with God. The Scriptural texts that Gerstenberger so searchingly examines and interprets are all psalms; Gerstenberger's contribution is a new theory of their life-setting, since, as is notorious, the psalms lack explicit data on their life-settings. Curiously, while Gerstenberger includes in his study a close analysis of interhuman petitions, he not only fails to examine the petitionary prayers embedded in narratives, he explicitly discounts them:

It emerges with perfect clarity that, alongside the cultic-ceremonial petitions, spontaneous, direct [ = unmediated] prayer to

YHWH existed; cf. Gen. 19:17 ff., 20:14 ff.; Judges 15:18, 16:28; 1 Sam. 1:10 ff. Only this "free lay-prayer (A. Wendel, Das freie Laiengebet im vorexilischen Israel , Leipzig, 1931) is rather a reflex (ein Reflex ) of cultic custom than the other way around." [P. 135, n. 87]

Unlike Mowinckel, Gerstenberger admits that spontaneous and culticly mediated prayer were coeval; he does not brush aside the evidence of the former's antiquity. But his theory that the community's expert prayer-mediator is primary makes him discount the spontaneous phenomenon as a mere reflex of him; he does not argue this position.

The most thoroughgoing advocate of the priority of ritual, set prayer is M. Haran, an expert on the institutions of Israelite worship. In a recent article entitled "Priest, Temple and Worship" (Tarbiz 48 [1978], p. 184), Haran evaluates prayer as follows: Prayer was the poor man's version of temple-worship; since he could not afford the only proper tender of homage to God—animal sacrifice—he offered a prayer in its stead. "He equipped himself with a ready-made form of prayer, with set wording, composed by the temple poets; examples of these were later collected in the book of Psalms. It appears that it was neither appropriate nor respectable to utter before the Lord in his temple such spontaneous thoughts as occurred to the pray-er."

Haran has qualified his statement by limiting it to the temple context; in a footnote to it, however (n. 14), he gives it general validity:

Similarly for most times and most places, prayer (whose origin is magical formulas) was a matter of stereotypic phraseology, and not private thoughts. Such was the case, in any event, in the history of Israel. I think that the prose prayers that the biblical authors occasionally put into the mouths of characters, are sus-

ceptible for the most part to the explanation that they are a prose transcription [m^e sira, lit. transmission] of an idea content that, in reality, should more appropriately have been uttered in formulaic language and best in the high language of poetry. (Transcription [m^e sira] of the gist of the prayer in prose sentences was perhaps easier for the author, and also does not extrude him from the frame of the narrative.) In any event, the biblical data must be adjusted to the general course of the history of prayer, which moves from the fixed stereotype to free prose, and from the formulaic to the spontaneous. Prayer as unmediated thought appears to be a modern phenomenon, whose place is at the end of the process, not at its beginning.

In Mowinckel, Gerstenberger, and Haran we see a reversal of Heiler's position; yet the latter-day scholars share with their predecessor two questionable assumptions. Both Haran and Heiler imagine a linear development of prayer from one stage to another (Heiler speaks of a transition stage, linking the extremes); they differ only on the termini. This runs counter to the biblical evidence for the contemporaneity of all stages of prayer. All four scholars take seriously only two types of prayer: on the one hand, the spontaneous "outpouring of the heart," and, on the other hand, the studied composition of the expert, which might be appropriated for individual, private use. This dichotomy simply does not do justice to the evidence as we have seen it.

It deserves to be noted in passing that such a dichotomy does not adequately account even for the form of early Jewish prayer—which was a far cry from the rigidity it manifests in modern times as a result of the tyranny of the printing press. Here is J. Heinemann's description of the early form:

When the sages ordained the obligatory fixed prayers, they did not prescribe their exact wording—contrary to what is usually

thought and written in popular books on prayer. They prescribed a framework: the number of benedictions comprising each prayer—such as the eighteen of the week-day 'amida , the seven of the sabbath and festival, and so forth. They also prescribed the topic of each benediction; for example, in a given benediction one must ask for the rebuilding of Jerusalem; in another, for the ingathering of the exiles. But they did not, nor did they ever seek to, prescribe the wording of any benediction or any prayer. That was left as a rule to the pray-er—to be exact, to the prayer-leader [a layman]. ("Fixity and renewal in Jewish prayer" [Hebrew], in G. Cohen, ed., Ha-tefilla hayehudit, hemsek^[*]ve-hiddus^[*] [Ramat-Gan: 1978], pp. 79 f.; for further detail, see J. Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud [Berlin, New York, 1977], pp. 37–69)

At bottom, this dichotomy fails to appreciate the mixture of spontaneity and prescription in all social behavior (and prayer, as we have argued, is social behavior)—particularly in a traditional society. From our own observations we can attest to the wide extent of patterning in our verbal behavior in sensitive situations: formulas of greeting and taking leave; polite yet noncommittal personal inquiry and the prescribed retorts thereto; a hortatory address to a bar-mitzvah boy; conducting patter at a reception. Conventions govern openings and closings, and the proper contents. Such conventions are what enable every cultured person to play his momentary role by filling the empty lines of the pattern with substance tailored to the situation. They make spontaneity possible precisely because they free the individual from the burden of sizing up the varied situations that come his way and deciding on the spot what appropriate components of discourse, what topics, are dictated by them. The components are supplied by the conventions attached to the situation; it falls to the individual to infuse the specific content into them according to

circumstances. The extemporized prayers of the Bible require little more capacity than we can observe in ourselves; and this little more is accounted for easily by the traditionality of biblical society. Rural American Protestants at grace can equal in inventiveness most biblical characters at prayer; and the average Arab peasant is probably as adept as David was in extemporizing blessings (and curses). There is something between set ritual prayers and free invention; it is the patterned prayer-speech that we have been describing.

"Between" does not mean a point on an evolutionary line between two temporal termini, but a level of speech between others that any speaker might choose at a given time. A visit to a temple—not an everyday occurrence—called for care, thoughtfulness, and perfection in expression that a commoner could supply only by recourse to a temple-poet's prepared text. Such were the psalms; the devout commoner could reach for such tender and profound religious sentiments under the impact of a visit to the temple, but he could never adequately articulate them on his own, and so happily adopted another's expert formulation of them. That is the solid kernel of truth in Haran's position. But sometimes even at a temple, and regularly outside it, our data show that any Israelite might pray on impulse without recourse to prepared texts. Such praying is spontaneous in that it springs from an occasion and its content is freely tailored to circumstances. At the same time it conforms to a conventional pattern of more or less fixed components (topics) appearing in a more or less fixed order. Beside these, a third level of prayer is attested—the totally unconventional and artless. It might be little more than an exclamation, such as David's "O frustrate Ahitophel's

counsel, YHWH!" (2 Sam. 15:31), or it might be phrased like an expostulation with a familiar, such as Samson's: "You have granted this great victory by the hand of your servant; now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hands of these uncircumcised?!" (Judg. 15:18). These answer to Heiler's "original outpourings of the heart," though they are not particularly inspired or inspiring.

These three levels of praying were coeval, and one and the same biblical character is attested as praying on more than one of them. Hannah is said to have extemporized a long prayer on one occasion (1 Sam. 1:12), and on another, she recites a thanksgiving psalm (1 Sam. 2:1–10). Samson expostulates formlessly on one occasion (Judg. 15:18), but later he carefully follows a conventional petitionary pattern (Judg. 16:28). One of David's prayers is a one-line exclamation (2 Sam. 15:31), but he also extemporizes patterned petitions, confessions, and benedictions; furthermore, he is famous for composing highly stylized poems and psalms. King Hezekiah, fallen sick, extemporizes a brief prose prayer of petition; healed, he dedicates a written psalm (miktab ) of thanksgiving to God (Isa. 38:2 f., 9–20). Nothing warrants setting up an evolution, starting at either end of this ladder of prayer. All three levels were available throughout the period of biblical literature, and narrators might choose to place their characters on any level according to circumstances. Not only can anyone pray in the Bible, but anyone may pray on any level of prayer—though to be sure, only experts can compose prayers of the highest technical and ideational level (psalms).

Study of the narrative art of the Scriptures has something to gain from attention to the embedded prose prayers. Because the embedded prayers are tailored to

their circumstances, they can serve to delineate character—as in reality we may believe that, since extemporized prayer gave scope to individuality, a person was revealed by his prayers. The transcendent background of events may be brought to the fore by the presence of prayer, as the absence of prayer may suppress it: the adventures of Joseph and of Esther and Mordechai give ample occasion for prayer and benediction; their total absence in both narratives helps lend each its secular quality—all mundane foreground with action motivated by human passions. To the contrary, the story of David's career, filled with intrigue and a full range of worldly passions, is touched with sublimity, owing to its hero's constant resort to prayer, by which he attributes to God all his fortunes, good and bad. (Not for nothing is David so frequently called—by God as well as the narrators—"the servant of YHWH" [24 times, second only to Moses who is so denoted 31 times], and considered author of many psalms.)

Reference has already been made to the difference between the high level of artistry and technical finish of professionally composed prayers (the psalms) and the simplicity of commoners' extemporizations. The patterns of psalm-composition, thoroughly examined and described in H. Gunkel and J. Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen (Göttingen, 1933) must be compared with those of the prose prayers; similarly the language, style, and phraseology must be examined, to determine both the differences and the possible influences of the one on the other.^[1]

What are the religious implications of the fact that in principle anyone can pray and be heard by God? Perhaps the most obvious implication is to mark off biblical

prayer decisively from the rigid formulas of magic and incantation (from which scholars regularly derive it). When, as we have seen, the lawmaker prescribes that the reparation-sacrifice must be preceded by confession, but omits fixing its wording, he implies that effective prayer is not a matter of a particular verbal formula. In order to appreciate the significance and singularity of this omission, one needs to be familiar with, say, Babylonian exorcism rituals, whose offerings are accompanied by verbally fixed incantation prayers, or the Roman requirement that prayer be punctiliously performed, since a single mistake would invalidate it.^[2] Taken together with the abundant evidence for extemporized popular praying, we conclude that the lawmaker only reflects popular religion in holding the essence of prayer to be its message content, not its wording; the patterns we have discerned merely facilitated extemporization, they did not dictate verbal content. Like interhuman speech, the effectiveness of prayer was not primarily conditioned by wording, but on the total configuration of interpersonal factors. Among these, the moral status of the speaker in the estimate of the one addressed, and his sincerity, play a crucial role.

Biblical Hebrew uses leb , "heart," and nepes^[*] , "self," (often translated as "soul") to express sincerity (compare with English "wholehearted, whole-souled"). Delilah complains that Samson has been toying with her in repeatedly misleading her about the true source of his strength: "How can you say 'I love you' when your heart is not with me"—that is, your speech has been insincere (Judg. 16:15). Prov. 23:7 describes the miserly host thus: "'Eat and drink' he will say, but his heart is not with you"—his profession is insincere.

Sincerity is a condition of worshiping the biblical God. Samuel lays it down as a requirement of true repentance: "If with all your hearts you are returning to YHWH, remove the alien gods from your midst, and the Ashtoreths, and direct your hearts toward [hakinu . . . 'el ] YHWH and serve him alone. . . ." (1 Sam. 7:3). Hannah explained herself to the priest Eli, who took the voiceless motion of her lips for a sign of drunkenness, as follows: "Nay, sir, I am an unfortunate woman; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have been pouring out my soul [napsi^[*] ] before YHWH. . . ." (1 (Sam. 1:15). We speak of pouring out our guts to someone and mean the same: to expose one's innermost being, revealing its secret concerns without reservation, without withholding anything—to speak all that is in one's mind with utter sincerity and candor.

References to the involvement of the heart in prayer occur even more frequently in the "higher" literature of the Bible—the prophetic, poetic and wisdom books. Lamentations 2:19 calls on Fair Zion to "pour out her heart like water before YHWH"—a simile that has been plausibly invoked to explain the peculiar rite performed at the revival meeting convoked by Samuel for the repentant Israelites: "they drew water and poured it out before YHWH" (1 Sam. 7:6); if this is a correct combination, it shows how commonplace the notion was that prayer meant baring one's insides to God. Here are two of many Psalm allusions to sincerity as the essence of true prayer: "YHWH is near to all who call on him—to all who call on him sincerely" (be^'e met, lit. "in genuineness"; Ps. 145:18). Condemning the Israelites' hypocritical prayer during the Wilderness wandering, another psalm puts it thus:

When he killed them, they besought him;
They again entreated God.
They recalled that God was their rock,
That God Most High was their redeemer.
They blandished him with their mouths,
With their tongues they lied to him,
But their hearts were not directed toward him [ nakon 'immo ],
They were not faithful to his covenant. (78:34-37)

One of Job's friends, Zophar, commends righteous conduct to him; among its elements is a sincere disposition of the heart before prayer: "If you have directed your heart [h^a kinota libbeka], then outspread your hands to him [in prayer]. . . ." (Job 11:13). The prophet Hosea blames the wicked for insincere prayer, "They did not shout to me with their hearts when they wailed on their beds" (7:14). Isaiah expressed God's contempt for hollow prayer (29:13):

For this people approaches me with its mouth;
With their lips they reverence me,
But their hearts are far from me;
Thus their religion [lit. fear of me]
Is a duty learned by rote [lit. a learned commandment of men].

The requirement of sincerity in prayer derives from its social nature as a transaction between persons. One affects another person not so much by a form of words as by the spirit that is perceived to animate them. No wording of an appeal can persuade, when the one to be persuaded mistrusts the appellant. Since extemporized prayer puts no store by a prescribed wording, the basis of its acceptance by God—of God's being touched by it—must be the sincerity of the professions made by the pray-er.

Now it is true that most of the allusions to sincerity as

a condition of prayer are to be found in the "high" literature of the Scriptures. The idea that the essence of prayer is the conformity of speech with thought surely reflects a refined spirituality. Yet I venture to suggest that the natural origin of this conception was not in the professional liturgical poet, or the prophet or sage with their literary cultivation and sophistication; not in these whose culture would lead them to prize formal, artistic, and stylistic values—what we would call "the magic of words"—but rather in the popular experience of extemporized prayer, the spontaneous, heartfelt reponse to God's presence or action. It was from the realm of popular values, where the social ideal of sincerity in interpersonal transactions was applied naturally to relations with God, that prophets, psalmists, and sages, the refiners of religious sentiment, adopted this virtue into their repertoire of demand and critique.^[3]

We have arrived at what is perhaps the most significant consequence of the fact that in ancient Israel anyone could pray and be heard.

If indeed the Israelite Everyman resorted freely to prayer whenever need, gratitude or admiration moved him—as our sources attest—we must surmise that, given his religious outlook and the abundance of occasions, he prayed repeatedly. That, in turn, sustained in his consciousness the vivid reality of God's presence. Without extemporized prayer as his habit, the commoner's realization of the transcendent must have faded (bear in mind that obligatory prayer was unknown in biblical times, and the temple worship was a daily affair only of the priesthood). We have only to look at the secular, prayerless scene about us to see how, in the absence of an orientation toward the transcendent,

mundane concerns take sole possession of the field of consciousness. Only the accessibility of God through prayer everywhere and at all times and to all persons, ensured the permanent link of the commoner to the transcendent realm. Not only a Rachel, a Leah, or a Hannah, but any distressed wife could "direct her heart" to God and "pour out her soul to him." Not only David, but any father could pray for his sick baby. Not only Jacob could pray to be delivered from a personal enemy, not only Hezekiah could pray to be healed from his disease, but every man and woman. As Solomon puts it with respect to extemporized prayer in the temple, God accepts "any prayer, any supplication which any man of all your people Israel shall have, each of whom knows his own personal affliction" [lit. the affliction of his heart] (1 Kings 8:38).

Constant familiar intercourse with God, unmediated by priest or other ritual expert could only have strengthened the egalitarian tendency (a tendency verging on anarchy) that was rooted in Israel's self-conception. The express purpose of God in offering to make Israel his covenanted people is to convert them into his "kingdom of priests, a holy nation" (Exod. 19:6)—that is, a holy commonwealth in which all members enjoy priestlike intimacy with God. One practical effect of this ideal is to apply to the commoner a standard of conduct proper in the first instance to priests only: the prohibition of eating carrion in Exodus 22:30 is grounded on the admonition to be "people holy to YHWH," the general ground repeatedly given for the special restrictions of the priesthood (e.g., Lev. 21:6); the mutilations associated with mourning are banned to priests, on the ground of their holiness (v. 5)—the same are banned to Israelites at

large, and on the same express ground, "for you are a people holy to YHWH your God" (Deut. 14:1 f.). Moses declined young Joshua's urging to imprison Eldad and Medad for having prophesied apart from contact with Moses's spirit, with the generous wish, "Would that all the people of YHWH were prophets, that YHWH set his spirit [not mine!] on them!" (Num. 11:29). In the tale of Korah's rebellion, this ideal is transmuted into an anarchic slogan that may well have threatened more than one leader's authority: "Enough of you! for all the community are holy, every one of them, since YHWH is in their midst; why then do you exalt yourselves above YHWH's congregation?" (Num. 16:3). Exemplary punishment was dealt out to Korah and his followers. But the germ of anarchy never died in Israel. Moses' generous wish is echoed in a prediction of the prophet Joel concerning the last days (3:1 f.):

It shall come to pass afterward,
That I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy;
Your old men shall dream dreams,
And your young men shall see visions.
On servants and maids too I will pour out my spirit,
In those days.

Coming down to earth, the unique institution of the synagogue in early Judaism—whose leaders were laymen and whose rich life of prayer lay wholly outside the realm of temple and priesthood—was the consummation of the egalitarian tendency of the Scriptures in spiritual matters. Can there be a doubt that extemporized lay prayer in biblical times played a crucial role in preparing the way for it?^[4]

I should like, finally to consider the role that popular prayer may have played in preparing the ground for a major doctrine of classical prophecy—the primacy of morality over forms of worship in God's assessment of Israel.^[5] For a praying people, who understood nearness to God in terms of nearness to man, the prophetic teaching, that in order to enjoy God's favor one must identify with him in conduct harmonious with his attributes, cannot have been altogether surprising. In social relations like appeals to like; can it be other in relation to God?

Since it was "the way of YHWH to do what is right and just" (Gen. 18:19), the wisdom writers had already concluded that an evil person had no prospect of gaining a hearing for his prayers. Says the sage of Proverbs 15:29: "YHWH is far from the wicked, but he accepts the prayer of the righteous." The point is repeated by Job's friends:

If you seek God zealously,
And make supplication to the Almighty—
If you are pure and honest,
Then he will protect you
And keep your righteous home intact. (8:5 f.)

Again, the conditions of prayer are listed thus:

If you have directed your heart,
Then outspread your hands to him;
If evil is in your hand—remove it,
And let no iniquity dwell in your tent. . . . (11:13 f.)

The prophets carried this doctrine to an extreme in their denunciation of Israel's entire worship as hateful to God. Amos thundered in God's name (5:21 ff.):

I hate, I despise your feasts,
I will not accept your assemblies;
If you give me whole offerings,
And your meal offerings I will not accept,
Nor will I look at your fattened peace-offerings.
Take away from me the din of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your lyres.
But let justice flow like water
And righteousness like a powerful stream.

Isaiah fulminated (1:11 ff.):

What do your many sacrifices mean to me, says YHWH?
I am sated with offerings of rams;
Suet of fattened bulls, and blood of oxes, and sheep and goats I do not desire . . .
Your new moons and sabbaths I thoroughly hate;
They are a burden to me; I cannot bear it.
And when you spread your hands I will look away from you;
Even if you pray much, I will not listen to you;
Your hands are full of blood!

This vehement, unconditional repudiation of the whole of Israel's established worship has several premises: first, that in all its forms, worship is, like prayer, a social transaction between persons, with no magical virtue or intrinsic efficacy. It is rather a gesture of submission and like all gestures a formality whose meaning depends ultimately on the total moral evaluation the recipient makes of the one who gestures; for the recipient to esteem the gesturer there must be some moral identification between them. (I should regard a gesture of good will made to me by my sworn enemy as a trick.) For worship to find favor in God's eyes, the worshiper must identify himself with ("know" in the biblical idiom; e.g., Jer. 22:15 f.) God in the one way possible for man—by imitating his moral conduct (compare also Hos.

4:1 f. and Jer. 9:23). Gestures of submission made by villains are an abomination to God. This prophetic evaluation of worship as a gesture, and as such contingent for its value on moral conduct, which is true identification with God, has justly won general admiration; but it also should excite wonder at and about the spirituality of the society that served as its matrix.

For classical prophecy was as much a social as an individual phenomenon; it cannot be conceived apart from the populace to which it was addressed and which it was designed to affect. The classical prophets were not a creative elite patronized by nobles and oligarchs; on the contrary, they were political and cultural dissenters, who bypassed the aristocracy in order to address the people. The little evidence that we can muster indicates that they did carry their message to the people, and the people, sometimes in crowds, listened. (Only their popularity can explain why an Amos or a Jeremiah were suppressed by the state as public menaces.) Prophetic rhetoric of admonition presupposes common ground on which prophet and audience stand, not only regarding historical traditions but religious demands as well. The prophets seem to appeal to their audience's better nature, confronting them with demands of God that they know (or knew) but wish to ignore or forget; as though by thundering they could awaken their slumbering consciences. There is more than a little optimism underlying the generations-long succession of reforming prophets; it reflects the prophets' confidence that, in the final analysis, they had advocates in the hearts of their audience.

Religious and spiritual primitives could not have understood their message, much less have furnished a

seedbed in which it could grow. Some degree of spiritual enlightenment must be supposed to account for the overall tolerance, even receptivity, of the people; though they refused to comply with the prophets' uncompromising demands, and occasionally persecuted one or another of them, as a rule they allowed them to preach, and even spawned devotees who reverently preserved their speeches until canonization. Unsupported by power and wealth, the classical prophets can have persisted for centuries only because they were rooted in loamy spiritual soil. The populace constituting that soil deserves to be appreciated no less than the exotic flowers that towered above them.

What was the spiritual loam that prepared Israel's soil so that prophecy could thrive in it? Any answer to this question must give due consideration to the popular life of prayer. For it was in extemporized praying that the Israelites experienced a nonmagical approach to God in which form was subordinate to content; here, in immediate contact with a God who "searched the conscience and the heart" (Jer. 11:20; cf. Ps. 7:10), they were sensitized to sincerity in self-disclosure to God; and, finally, it was in prayer that they had constantly to face the issue of adjusting their ways to God's in order to obtain his favor.^[6]

If the implications I have drawn from the conclusions of these lectures are true even only in some measure, it is enough to justify pursuing further study of this many-sided topic of endless fascination. For, to a student of the Hebrew Scriptures, what can match the excitement of following a clue that promises to shed new light on the cause of ancient Israel's spiritual distinction and the vitality of its Scriptures down to our time?