The Origins of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism. The Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism. The Impact of Penitential Prayer beyond Second Temple Judaism.

• Author: Schwiebert, Jonathan
• Position: Book review

Seeking the Favor of God, volume 1: The Origins of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism. Edited by MARK J. BODA, DANIEL K. FALK, AND RODNEY A. WERLINE. Early Judaism and its Literature, vol. 21. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2006. Pp. xvii + 249. $35.95 (paper).

Seeking the Favor of God, volume 2: The Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism. Edited by MARK J. BODA, DANIEL K. FALK, AND RODNEY A. WERLINE. Early Judaism and its Literature, vol. 22. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2007. Pp. xv + 281. $39.95 (paper).

Seeking the Favor of God, volume 3: The Impact of Penitential Prayer beyond Second Temple Judaism. Edited by MARK J. BODA, DANIEL K. FALK, AND RODNEY A. WERLINE. Early Judaism and its Literature, vol. 23. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2008. Pp. xiii + 306. $39.95 (paper).

With the publication of its third volume, this series is now complete. The aim of the series was to publish essays exploring the origins, development, and impact of the Second Temple penitential prayer tradition, the subject of important recent scholarly work. Most but not all of these essays originated as papers presented at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meetings (2003-05), although not in the order or always with the same titles as they appear in these volumes. The essays come from both established and junior scholars in a variety of intersecting disciplines. As a rule, the essays engage a complex set of questions with considerable expertise, sophistication, and erudition. The reader should expect to be thrown into a field in motion, rather than introduced to an established discourse. Perhaps to assist with the inevitable disorientation this produces, the series editors invited a senior scholar to open and close each volume. This feature obviously provides some continuity to each collection; more importantly, it offers readers an opportunity to observe experts interacting with, sometimes evaluating, and always highlighting important trends in each collection of essays. Given the wide range of topics addressed and methods employed in these three volumes, this review will only attempt to highlight and reflect briefly on key conversations that span these volumes.

Implicit in the threefold division of this work is a chronological scheme that might imply distinct types of questions or methodologies. This, however, is not the case. Contributors to volume one may be more interested in the rhetorical function of a prayer text within a biblical document than any question of the origins of that prayer text. Likewise, several contributors to volume three address the origins of specific prayer texts or penitential practices. Instead, then, the chronological scheme means, roughly, that the first volume addresses a variety of scholarly questions about the earliest known exemplars of penitential prayer (e.g., Neh. 9; Ezra 9; Isa. 63:7-64:11), the second volume moves toward "later" Jewish texts (e.g., "apocryphal" texts...