Conversing with God

The Conversational Prayers in the Hebrew Bible

Terry Giles

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781725286870, 9781725286863
• eBook ISBN: 9781725286887
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Talk is essential to human social life. Through conversation we form friendships, share dreams and hopes, and develop a common outlook on the world around us. Talk with God can achieve the same thing. This book examines the conversational prayers in the Hebrew Bible, their structure and content, to understand how talk with God forms friendship, shares dreams and hopes, and develops a Divine-human outlook on the world. Conversation forces the petitioner to surrender control of the encounter and become susceptible to unscripted give and take with the Divine. Conversation with God is always a risk, but the rewards can be great. Through conversation Abraham and Moses became friends with God. The same can be true for us.

1

Introduction

“Talk is at the heart of human social life.”1

Is talk also at the heart of the Divine human life together? Is the human relationship to the Divine built on talk? Is it truly possible to engage in conversation with God, to participate in give and take, to listen and be listened to? If so, it’s only sensible to understand and be intentional about engaging in these Divine human talks. This book is an investigation into the conversational prayers contained in the Hebrew Bible to see if help can be found for conversing with God.

In 1983, Moshe Greenburg published a small book presenting a series of lectures on non-psalmic prayer he delivered at the University of California during the 1981–82 academic year.2 In these lectures, Greenburg concluded, “the biblical narrators all portrayed speech between man and God on the analogy of speech between humans.” To be sure, Greenburg recognized the “literary shaping” of speech that occurs when embedded in prose, but nevertheless asserted that direct speech patterns are still present among these prayers.3 In Greenburg’s view, human conversation with God is patterned after typical human to human conversation. How we talk with each other provides the structures for how we talk with God.

Greenburg’s observation serves as the impetus for this book. If conversational prayers appearing in a prose literary context are structured according to the same speech patterns found in human to human conversation, can Conversation Analysis (CA), the social scientific methodology for the analysis of conversation, assist in understanding the discourse of conversational prayer in the Hebrew Bible, even if those prayers are shaped by the literary concerns of their prose context? It follows that just as the presentation of inter-human dialogue in literary prose retains some of the characteristics of normal conversation, so, too, conversational prayer (prayer in the form of a dialogue with God), even when appearing in prose, retains some of the characteristics of conversational activity and analysis of those characteristics can help us to understand the human Divine interaction. But this formation of the problem guiding our study has in it two embedded assumptions that must be addressed before we progress any further.

Does the Literary Context of Conversational Prayer Preclude Conversation Analysis?

First, does the prose setting of the prayers invalidate a conversational structural analysis?4 Has the prose writer altered conversation structure in order to achieve his or her own designs in a manner that makes those conversations hopelessly lost? Others have asked the same question and concluded yes. Samuel Balentine notes, “Whatever the original, spontaneous utterings were, one no longer has the luxury of hearing them directly.”5 And on this point, surely Balentine is correct—the conversational prayers are preserved in texts. That means some of the characteristics we seek most—spontaneity and immediacy, the unfiltered dynamics shared by the conversationalists, have been shrouded in the formalization of prose construction. But does this mean that we are at a methodological impasse? Perhaps not.6 The conversational prayers embedded in narrative are literary constructions. We are examining literary constructions in conversational form. But does this mean that CA, which has to do with “normal” or naturally occurring conversation,7 has no contribution to make when applied to the analysis of conversation in texts or other more “institutionalized” settings? No. While differences do exist between conversation appearing in texts and normal conversation, the evidence points to a closer connection rather than a disconnection between the two forms of communication.8 Even while appearing in texts, conversation is still recognizable as conversation, even if now functioning for a purpose determined by a narrator and not the conversationalists. CA will allow us to compare the literary conversation constructs to normal, direct conversation and allow us to make observations. Those resulting observations can then be used to analyze the prayers as the heart of the Divine human interaction.

Are Conversation Structures Culture Specific?

The second preliminary question we must ask is: Are speech patterns culturally specific so that transference of analysis from one culture to another is misleading if not unattainable altogether? Can modern CA be applied to ancient texts with an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Conversation Analysis
• Chapter 3: Abraham Cycle
• Chapter 4: Jacob Cycle
• Chapter 5: Moses
• Chapter 6: Balaam, Joshua, and the Judges
• Chapter 7: Parallel Prayers
• Chapter 8: Elijah/Elisha Cycle
• Chapter 9: Conversational Prayers Only in Chronicles
• Chapter 10: Prophets
• Chapter 11: General Observations
• Postscript: The Last Word
• Appendix 1: Genesis 3:9–19: Adam and Eve
• Appendix 2: Non-Conversational Prosaic Prayers
• Bibliography