Pray Like This

Understanding Prayer in the Bible

Rodney A. Werline

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780567026330
• eBook ISBN: 9780567598806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Werline encourages us to look at prayer in the following way: to attempt to understand how prayers are tied to particular cultural and social settings. Prayers are part of and expressions of a collection of cultural ideas that have been arranged within a system that seems coherent and obvious to those writings the biblical texts. Prayers participate in and express a person's worldview. Werline shows the ways that--though many biblical prayers are familiar to us--biblical texts and contemporary readers come from different worlds.
The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament contain many prayers. Large volumes have been written on prayer within a single book, or within the writings of one author, like Paul, or an individual prayer, such as the Lord's Prayer.Werline does not examine every prayer in the Bible or even write exhaustively on a single prayer. He has highlighted a few significant features of each prayer, and some of the prayers vividly exhibit the influence of a particular society's vision. For example, he examines the prayers of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles because of the ways they are tightly tied to the authors' views of history. The writers' interpretation of history profoundly influenced significant portions of the Bible as well as the literature of early Judaism.

Prayer and the
Family’s Future

The Prayers of Abraham’s Servant and Hannah

That families in the Hebrew Bible inhabited a world very different from ours strikes every reader of the text. My grandmother Clark, a woman who laid in bed late at night listening to preachers on her small transistor radio, occasionally mused about that world, especially the families in the narratives from Adam to Solomon. Sometimes in conversation, she would bring up those stories that she had read in her Bible, well worn from use. As an elementary school boy, I remember her speaking about the stories to my mother and her sisters in a sort of code—at least a code to a small boy. They conversed in an encryption just beyond my ability to understand. No community scandal completely surprised my grandmother since the Bible says that Laban gave Jacob the wrong daughter, taking advantage of a veil, darkness, and perhaps drunkenness. Did Jacob awake to a surprise the next morning! They raised eyebrows about children by handmaidens. “How do you think those handmaidens had their children?” they inquired of one another. For my grandmother, that was a world that she could never fully explain or comprehend, nor could she speak openly about it, except to say it displayed how low human behavior could go before the gospel came, an idea to which I can no longer hold.

Even those who cry for family values “based on the Bible” do not appeal to the patriarchs as models. Wives giving concubines to husbands to have sex with them to produce children inhibits the usefulness of this portion of the Bible, as does polygamy. While proponents of family values typically espouse a kind of patriarchy—the husband is over the wife and the children, and the men are over the women at church—they cannot model their patriarchy on the biblical patriarchs. Whoever comes to this portion of the Bible for instruction about family life runs into a brick wall.

Sometimes I held my students’ interest, or tried to regain their attention, in class by offering “commercial breaks” (as they called them) from my droning lectures. The breaks often included explanations of the sordid tales from Genesis through 2 Kings. As if the stories as they appear in English are not vivid enough, I would reveal the meaning of Hebrew words and phrases that moved various stories from a PG-13 rating to an R.

I remember preaching a sermon on Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 to my small and patient congregation in Urbana, Iowa, where I ministered while writing my dissertation. The sermon attempted to unmask how our view of the Bible had been “Puritanized” both in its translation and interpretation. By using that term, I meant that the “crude” parts of the Bible had been cleaned up for the conservative English and American church cultures. Why they needed to know this seemed so pressing at the time. In that worship setting—unlike in the classroom—when it came time to explain Onan’s behavior, I balked for embarrassment. I could only tell the congregation to go home and read the story in Genesis for themselves.

Thus, the stories of behavior within families from Genesis to 2 Kings provide a splendid starting point for recognizing that biblical prayers take place within a world different from our own. So many socially acceptable behaviors back then would be shocking if they happened in an American congregation. I want to emphasize that wherever prayers appear within these texts, the prayers are tied to those worlds and fully participate in them; they reflect them and form attitudes at the same time. Far from being timeless spiritual nuggets that can be lifted straight from biblical worlds to our lives, biblical prayers reflect the cultural and social arrangements and the assumptions of those who produced the texts and their intended audiences. The authors have appropriated prayer into their own worlds. Such features of the phenomenon of prayer, we must remember, should not be minimized or ignored. Rather, we must examine these characteristics in order to understand biblical prayers and our own prayers.

The Prayer of Abraham’s Servant

Among the stories of the patriarchs, we encounter a prayer that Abraham’s servant offers as he attempts to find and secure a wife for Isaac (Gen 24:1-67). Abraham had sent the servant to his relatives back in Haran. The servant had to find a young woman—Abraham’s relative!—meet the family, arrange the marriage, and bring the teenager back to Isaac to be his bride—an almost impossible commission and situation. In the process of completing his task, the servant prays. This is completely understandable given the nature of the commission that he had received!

The Problem of Servitude

Several features of the story are quite striking and startling. These features complicate our interpretation and thus the role of the prayer in the story. One of the most immediate problems relates to the family and household structures present in the text, and the servant’s prayer cannot escape connection with these. The prayer comes from a servant of Abraham. It is highly likely that the servant is simply Abraham’s slave. This element of the basic social, familial, and economic characteristics of the texts differs greatly from our own world and the ethics by which we act.

Slavery was widespread in the ancient Near East. Slaves’ roles, status, and rights varied widely from kingdom to kingdom, and their treatment differed from individual to individual. Nevertheless, they were slaves, and like sheep and cattle, they were movable property. Primarily, they performed functions for the household.¹ Little evidence exists that indicates that they served as artisans or farm laborers. The supply of slaves came from, among other sources, indebtedness, prisoners of war, selling children, and abduction.² A slave might even own slaves.³ Ancient Israel practiced slavery as well. While some slaves in Israel had been prisoners of war, indebtedness was a primary source. Those who owed more than they could repay would sell themselves, or perhaps a child, into servitude. Deuteronomy requires that this class of slave should be freed after six years of service (Deut 15:12-17; cf. Lev 25:39-41). Whether this practiced was actually carried out in real life is another difficult question.

This presence of servitude in the text complicates it, including the prayer, with an ethical problem: to own another human is immoral. Besides this, the economic, political, and cultural systems that support the institution of slavery are immoral. Even Deuteronomy’s legislative attempt to limit the term of servitude is obviously problematic, for it permitted servitude even if it attempted to limit the number of years that a person served.⁴

As we read, we must not forget that the servant’s prayer is part of that world, a world the text simply assumes and never corrects. Nothing in the story suggests that the author sought to subvert the institution. In fact, the servant addresses God as “O Lord, God of my master” (Gen 24:12). Consequently, we must be cautious in thinking about the prayer and should remain suspicious about the prayer’s role within such a system. Because the prayer is eventually answered exactly as the servant prays it, the author seems to assume that God is quite willing to work within these social arrangements. Does the prayer intend to make God take part in, if not sanction, the social system? Are those who read the text quietly or unconsciously confirmed in their beliefs about social ethics and their vision for a community? These are disturbing, troubling questions. Along with these questions, we must ask how the presence of slavery in the text influences us as we read it, and we must remember that such texts have been used by Christians in the past to uphold various forms of the institution of slavery, including that of America’s past. Of course, reading the text will not cause us to go out and reinstitute slavery. However, texts such as this may subtly begin to form our understanding of power so that we wrongly assume that the powerful should naturally possess rights over others in society, especially those who live near the bottom, the poor and marginalized. Further, such misconceptions of power, we have learned, may also contribute to the formation of our attitudes toward our global politics and economic practices. As a result, we may fail to wrestle with the manner in which the West has politically and economically dominated the world and has exploited some populations. People living in abject poverty in third world countries continue to make cheap goods for us to consume, which they could never buy for themselves. For these reasons, we must be careful and thoughtful as we approach any biblical text related to power, lest we somehow employ the text, either intentionally or unconsciously, to confirm and perpetuate injustices in our own social systems.

The full reason for depicting Abraham as a slave owner is ultimately beyond our knowledge, as are so many aspects of the patriarchal narratives. The tradition in Genesis 14 describes Abraham as owning 318 slaves. Much recent critical scholarship on the patriarchal narratives has proposed that we cannot begin to believe that what we have in the text is an historical account of Abraham’s life.⁵ The stories come from a much later time.⁶ Instead of history as we think of history, we have a culture’s foundational stories about its origins. Such stories do not tell us much about the actual historical figures themselves—the facts about their lives and what they did. Rather, they reveal what a society understood as important and how it understood itself, its institutions, its place in the world, its destiny, and its reason for existing. That kind of knowledge was contained and transmitted within the story about the past and the people’s origins. As John Van Seters states: “What is more important for the author (of the Genesis story) is the principle that origin discloses character and destiny.”⁷

In light of this understanding of the patriarchal narratives, we can make a few observations and suggestions about the author depicting Abraham as owning servants. Those who told and recorded the stories about Abraham probably used servants in the stories to make the patriarch appear powerful and wealthy. The storytellers could not make Abraham an owner of large tracts of land. While the historical origins of the people had disappeared into the mists of stories and legends, enough historical memory existed that told Israel that it did not originally possess the land. That knowledge excluded the possibility of depicting Abraham’s wealth by land ownership. Besides the accumulation of possessions, owning slaves signified his power. Indeed, other aspects of the story of sending the servant align with depicting Abraham as powerful. As Van Seters has argued, the servant’s title is an exalted one: “the oldest [i.e., servant] of his house, who had charge of all that he had” (Gen 24:2). The servant himself conveys to Laban the extent of Abraham’s wealth. He also notes that Abraham sends a caravan of ten camels loaded with gifts. Further, elements of the commissioning and sending of the servant parallel scenes in which kings send messengers, ambassadors, or emissaries (2 Kgs 18:19-35; 1 Sam 18:17-27).⁸

The storytellers believed that Abraham’s power was the result of divine blessing. The story as a whole intends to confirm God’s continued faithfulness to the covenant made with Abraham, as the promise of Gen12:1-2 and 17:4-8 is repeated: “The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my birth, and who spoke to me and swore to me, ‘To your offspring I will give this land” (24:7). Thus, as a foundational story, Abraham’s status, prestige, power, and divine confirmation as the father of Israel extends to the generations that followed. They are heirs to the promise.

The Issue of Endogamy

In addition to the issue of servitude, another feature of the story proves problematic. Abraham makes the servant swear that he will not take a wife for Isaac from among the Canaanite women (vv. 2-4). Instead, the servant must return to Abraham’s family “home” for a wife for Isaac. This request represents the practice of endogamy—marrying within one’s own clan, tribe, or family. The servant prays so he can meet Abraham’s request in this matter, even though Abraham has stated that the servant will be released from his oath if the young woman refuses to leave her family and go with Abraham’s servant to live in Canaan.

In contrast to our present story, several other biblical traditions do not seem to perceive marrying outside the group to be an issue. For example, Joseph marries an Egyptian priest’s daughter, Asenath (Gen 41:45). The final form of the book of Ruth asserts that King David’s great-grandmother was a Moabitess (Ruth 4:17). Moses does not marry a full-blooded Hebrew, but a Midianite priest’s daughter (Exod 2:21; cf. Gen 25:2). In another tradition, when Miriam and Aaron criticize Moses for this, God becomes angry with them (Num 12:1-16). Deuteronomy 21:10-14 allows an Israelite male to marry a woman who has been captured in war. Presumably, she would be a foreigner. These texts seem unconcerned about such marriages.

However, concerns about proper marriage partners like this in the story about finding a wife for Isaac arise several times in the writings of the Hebrew Bible. The stories of Jacob and Esau, for example, which of course follow Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah, touch on this topic. For Rebekah, just the thought of Jacob marrying a Hittite woman robs life of all meaning (Gen 27:46). Because she favored Jacob, she appeals to Isaac to send him back to Haran once again to acquire a wife. First Kings, part of a history connected to the ideas that appear in Deuteronomy, and whose final form is at least exilic, but more likely postexilic, criticizes Solomon because he married many foreign wives, who led him into idolatry (1 Kgs 11:1-13). Deuteronomy 7:1-6 also warns Israel not to marry the people who occupy the land of Canaan. Such marriages, the author worries, might also lead to idolatry (v. 4). Thus, except for the text about marrying a woman captured in war, endogamy seems to be very much on the mind of those who transmitted the texts and traditions in Deuteronomy and those related to them like 1 Kings.

Evidence clearly from the postexilic period indicates that intermarriage was a serious concern for some groups. In Ezra 9-10, the scribe Ezra falls into deep despair and penitence when he learns that the people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have taken wives from “the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites” (Ezra 9:1). According to Ezra, the “holy seed” has been mixed with the “peoples of the land” (9:2). The author of Ezra has clearly woven together commands from Exod 34:11-17, Deut 7:1-3, and 23:4-9 and combined them with statements from Leviticus 18.⁹ Because Ezra 9-10 demonstrates strong influence from the priestly circles, worry about endogamy may have been on the minds of the postexilic priests.¹⁰ In the Ezra narrative, Ezra responds to the situation with a long penitential prayer because the author believed that the continued existence of the community was at stake. The author held that the crossing of these ethnic lines constituted a sin.

The worry about endogamy reaches comic proportions in the book of Tobit, a book probably written in the late Persian period. The work is included in the Apocrypha. In this entertaining story, Tobit sends his son to his relatives in order to marry within the clan. Humor arises in the story as Tobit rejoices because he believes that he has met a man who is a relative who will serve as his son’s traveling companion. Actually, the man is an angel in human disguise.¹¹ As a text from the Diaspora, Tobit reflects the concerns of some postexilic Jews living in foreign lands.

A heighten sense of regulations related to marriage would fit well in the exilic and postexilic periods. Fearful that they might no longer exist as a group, some people probably championed endogamy as a way to preserve ethnic and religious identity and purity. Mary Douglas, an anthropologist, argues that as some groups worry about their survival, they will create rules that draw sharp boundaries between themselves and outsiders.¹² Such rules attempt to prevent members of a group from being assimilated into the larger society. Among the human behaviors that may be regulated are sex and marriage. Groups will clearly tie these activities into their religious conception of the structure of the universe. Such a view appears to be expressed in Ezra’s phrase “the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the land” (Ezra 9:2). Some people living in this era believed that without ethnic and religious purity, continuation as a people was in jeopardy. Recent studies on Ezra have proposed that the problem in that text may also be tied to the politics of the postexilic period. When some exiles returned, they quickly married into the powerful families who had been living in Judah in order to establish their own claims to power.¹³

How does Genesis 24 fit within these traditions on the subject of endogamy? Genesis 24 does not express the arguments of Deuteronomy and 1 Kings that inter-marriage leads to idolatry. However, the “purity of the line”—at least the purity of its origin—is obviously at issue. This same matter arises ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Prayers From Different Worlds
• Chapter 1 Prayer And The Family's Future: The Prayers of Abraham's Servant and Hannah
• Chapter 2 Prayer And History: 1 and 2 Kings and I and 2 Chronicles
• Chapter 3 Prayer And The Rejected Prophet: Jeremiah
• Chapter 4 Prayer And Wisdom: Daniel
• Chapter 5 Pray Like This: Matthew
• Chapter 6 Prayer And Demonic Powers: Mark
• Chapter 7 Prayer And Gods Continuing WORK: Luke-Acts
• Chapter 8 Prayer And Unity: John
• Chapter 9 Prayer, Transformation, And Moral Advancement: Paul
• Conclusion