The Invention of Prayer

Prayer seems like one of the most natural things someone can do. The Bible is full of people praying – Abraham praying for Sodom, Hannah weeping at Shiloh, the Israelites singing after crossing the Red Sea. Despite this, though, the Bible never defines what prayer actually is. There is no general commandment to pray, no fixed liturgy, and little instruction on when or how one should commune with God. Centuries later, that changed completely. Prayer in Judaism received rules, a structure, a posture, even a relationship to the human body, while at the same time the same thing was happening in early Christianity.

This invention of prayer is the subject of a lecture series at Beit Avi Chai by Dr. Shraga Bick, a senior lecturer in the Department of Comparative Religion and the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He explains that prayer, as we now understand it, did not always exist as a religious category at all.

No instructions

“In the Biblical tradition, people prayed as individuals, but there was no normative commandment or order to pray, or instructions of how to pray, when to pray, what to pray for, no prayer formulas,” Bick says. “It existed as a phenomenon, but not in a normative, legal sense.” For Judaism, he argues, that distinction matters enormously: in the rabbinic world, categories acquire religious significance when they become commandments with defined boundaries rather than impromptu human impulses.

Biblical prayer, by contrast, is occasional and unregulated. “It’s more spontaneous,” Bick says. “It’s not what we call liturgy; it’s more personal, but it can also be communal.” He gives the example of the prayers of Ezra and Nehemiah, and the Song of the Sea, sung collectively by the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea, but without any prescribed text behind it. “There’s no wrong way to pray in the Bible,” Bick says. “There’s no prescribed good and bad prayer.” The one exception, he notes, is moral rather than liturgical: the prophet Isaiah’s condemnation of hands “full of blood” lifted in prayer. This is a warning about the gap between a person’s conduct and their words, though, not about the form of the words themselves.

From spontaneous prayer to religious obligation

By the end of the Second Temple period, however, this picture begins to change dramatically. “We start to see a greater presence of prayer – the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament (if we view that as a late Second Temple Jewish source), and then in rabbinic sources from the Mishnah onwards,” Bick says. “Suddenly prayer becomes one of the most important religious activities, and it starts to be regulated.”

One obvious candidate for catalysing this change is the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, which removed the sacrificial cult that had anchored Israelite worship for centuries. Rabbinic literature itself frames prayer partly as a replacement for sacrifice. But Bick is careful not to let that explanation do all the work. “It may also be a broader shift in religiosity that’s reflected more widely,” he says, describing prayer’s rise as part of a larger transformation in how people across the Roman world were trying to reach the divine.

Judaism and Christianity in parallel

What makes the timing especially striking for Bick is that Christianity was undergoing an almost parallel transformation at the same moment, with the two traditions being far harder to disentangle on this issue than on most other subjects. “As opposed to other things, in prayer it’s even harder to see a parting of the ways,” he says. “Even up to the fourth century the similarities are extraordinary – both in liturgy and how you’re supposed to pray.” The fact that the New Testament predates the bulk of rabbinic literature chronologically does not, he insists, mean that Christian prayer came first. “These ideas are negotiated while they’re trying to define themselves, including the definition of prayer itself.”

Bick’s course puts rabbinic discussions of prayer – concentrated in Tractate Berakhot of the Babylonian Talmud – directly alongside Second Temple literature, the New Testament, and early Christian writings, treating them less as separate developments influencing one another than as two communities responding to the same historical moment. “It’s a major change in the way religion is understood during that period,” he says, “and they respond to it with their own tools – biblical language and biblical tradition.”

Teaching the body to pray

One surprising part of Bick’s research is how far this invention of prayer addressed the human body itself. “Prayer is defined as the contact of the human being with God,” Bick says, and this contact raises several very physical questions. The fifth chapter of Tractate Berakhot opens with the requirement that one stand to pray only out of “gravity of mind” (koved rosh), a halachic demand for physical stillness and inner composure before beginning the Amidah.

This bodily attentiveness extends to areas that might seem strange out of context but are treated in the Talmud with genuine seriousness. “Cleaning the body before prayer. Going to the restroom before praying – how long should one hold it in while praying,” Bick says. “This is a drama in the Bavli – very lengthy discussions about whether someone who needs the toilet can pray.” Even the mouth becomes a site of regulation: should people pray out loud or silently? None of this, Bick notes, has any real precedent in biblical prayer, which simply did not need to legislate the praying body because prayer itself was not yet legislated as a religious commandment.

Regarding the reasons for these changes, Bick resists the monocausal explanation of the destruction of the Temple. Greco-Roman religious culture, he points out, was independently moving in a similar direction. “When the Temple is destroyed, in the Greco-Roman world temples also become less popular, even before the rise of Christianity, and especially among elites – there’s a greater emphasis on prayer as a substitute for sacrificial worship,” he says. “There’s prayer in classical Greek culture,” Bick notes, “but it’s less significant,” until the wider imperial culture begins to favor the soul’s direct conversation with the divine over animal sacrifice. Viewed this way, the Temple’s destruction looks less like the sole trigger and more like one local aspect of a much broader Mediterranean shift – one in which, Bick adds, prayer stops being centered solely on personal need, as it largely was in the Bible, and becomes its own religious category. “This is an odd innovation,” he says.

How we pray today

Does any of this still shape how Jews pray today? Bick’s answer is a qualified yes. “Certain things definitely change – from the Gaonic period we have a standardized liturgy,” he says. “In Talmudic times it was much more fluid. So during this period it was still open, whereas today’s liturgy is far more fixed and less flexible.”

Over the centuries, that process produced the siddur and the fixed liturgy familiar today. What began in late antiquity as an attempt to define prayer ultimately transformed it into one of Judaism’s central religious practices.

For more, see Dr. Shraga Bick’s online series at BAC, “How does one pray? The emergence of prayer as a new religious category in late antiquity” (in Hebrew).

Main Photo: 1803 Sephardic prayer book, in the Jewish Museum of Switzerland’s collection\ Wikipedia