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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zachron, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking of Daniel K. Falk, professor of classics in ancient Mediterranean studies and shaken family chair in Jew Studies at Penn State.
He's the co-editor of the Multivolum work, Prayer in the Ancient World. This conference upset explores the various forms of prayer found in the Near East and Mediterranean. The essays explore prayer, the Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, and more. In cyclopaedic work, Prayer in the Ancient World is an incredible scholarly accomplishment.
Daniel, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network. Glad to join you. This is just an unbelievable project and prayer as a topic is such a fascinating subject. It's something that feels in many ways like, you know, just transcends culture, time, space, and the way that this study drills down on prayer in various locations in the ancient world is really incredible, especially that the comparative work that comes out of it, seeing the different types of prayer practice that people were going about in different places, you know, over 2000 years ago.
But before even jumping into the work, I was wondering if you could just tell listeners a little about yourself and how you, you know, even kind of this world of studying prayer. Sure. I'm originally from Canada. We probably got that a little bit from my accent.
My first two degrees were in Biblical Studies and that was more of general interest. I wasn't planning on being a scholar when I started my undergraduate or even when I finished my undergraduate. I was on the way, decided I wanted to drill down much more and enrolled in a PhD program at Cambridge University. And for that, of course, you need some new data.
And so I was hunting around for topics that I thought that there was sufficient data that hadn't been covered and came across an article that made the case that prayer and early Judaism had been insufficiently studied and most of the texts are embedded in literary works, cross-apocrypha, pseudopigrapha, New Testament, Josephus and Philo. And then more recently the Dead Sea Scrolls. So initially my idea was to do a study of early Jewish prayer broadly and address a particular historical problem which can be expressed fairly simply by the fact that in the Hebrew Bible there's no law's about prayer. Nobody tells you you have to pray or when to pray or what to pray.
People pray when they feel they need to. Something good happens, give thanks when something is threatening, pray for help. But there's no law's for prayer. And if you jump forward to the Mishnah, the earliest compilation of rabbinic Jewish interpretation of Torah, it begins with a law about prayer.
Begins abruptly from what time in the evening must one recite the Shama. So all of a sudden you've changed greatly. So those are some of the issues that I was interested in exploring. So somewhere in between there, there had been a massive development in the nature of prayer, the sense of community obligation to pray and so on.
And then once I got into the project at Cambridge, I realized that the most important source would be the Dead Sea Scrolls because there we actually have what we can call the surgical prayers of the community. So this is something that we were lacking otherwise we had prayers embedded in literary texts, descriptions of people praying, et cetera, but no clear evidence for the community gathering together to pray together at certain times regularly whether you have any feeling that you've committed a sin and you need to repent. So there is this idea come that every day you should ask for forgiveness even if you have no sense that you've done anything that day. So this really quite a remarkable development and we see it very clearly in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This community had a very rich prayer life and certainly the sense that this was an obligation and that prayer was like a sacrifice to God and the communities to do it. So that's why I got into Dead Sea Scrolls and really addressing that initial problem. How I got onto this project is a separate question but I'll jump back to just my career after Cambridge I did a postdoc at Oxford and then taught at the University of Oregon for 14 years and then at Penn State since 2014. So this book obviously there is a section on Jewish prayer and I want to get back to that but in a more general sense I was wondering if you could maybe venture to define prayer for us.
I think it's a deceptively simple or deceptively hard question in a way because prayer manifests in so many different ways in different cultures. Is meditation prayer is prayer something that you do by yourself, hidden from everyone else as a communal activity. How do you actually define prayer? Excellent question and this really gets to the heart of the project.
Typically in the kinds of studies that I was dealing with which are studying ancient Jewish prayers you do get definitions people come up with some sort of definition in their work and then they go after it and quite often what became clear to me as a problem is that those definitions focused on literary prayer. How do you isolate a prayer what you're going to study as a prayer in literary texts and so you'll find stuff in the definitions like a prayer is a speech directed from a human to God in the second person initiated by the human these kinds of things and then within biblical studies and early studies of early Judaism and Christianity there's a great deal of discussion about forms of prayer and so on. The problem with that though is that those are really literary studies. You're not really studying prayer what you're studying is texts that you're defining as prayer.
The phenomenon of prayer is much broader and much more difficult to define and if what one wants to study is the phenomenon of prayer you need to include a great deal more. So that definition problem was one of the big factors that led to this project where we wanted to completely open up the boundaries of what qualifies as prayer and perhaps making the boundaries a bit too broad and that's fine. We'd rather have people be able to make up their own mind. But for the purpose of this project we're regarding prayer as any act human act of communication with intent to solicit benefit from or connection with a superhuman agent and this is intentionally very ambiguous right.
It allows that prayer is not necessarily a text or even verbal you know so can one with meditation intend to communicate with the divine yes of course and so one needs to have a definition that would include acts which don't even involve words at all and doesn't have to have any essential features. Does it have to be directed in the second person? Well no quite clearly not there's lots of examples of things that are prayer which refer to God in the third person etc. Does prayer even need to be addressed to a deity?
No prayer broadly in the ancient world can be addressed to nature you know the mountains the seas, trees, the sun, heavenly bodies, ancestors. So very difficult if one comes up with a definition to know how to come up with a definition that would include all the right stuff and then not become everything. For the purposes of this we've kept a pretty broad definition that allows us to include a lot of things. Right and I think that's important I think as you say you know being broad is good for the sake of this sort of project where a person can then go and you know delineate different types of prayer you know they can get specific and use it as a resource and there's over 350 entries so you're working with quite a number of scholars.
Can you talk about the actual like logistics of putting this collection together? What was that like? Is it must have been an incredible undertaking? Yeah so it started with a conversation between two of us, me and my co-general editor Rodney Wurline he's now a meritistic at Barton College.
We had done our PhDs at the same time we didn't know each other then but our dissertations were we know we added our dissertations as monographs which we then published around the same time and then there were several other scholars who were also doing their dissertations on prayer about the same time and we all got together at some point and did a series of meetings at the Society of Biblical Literature which is the Big Annual Meeting and on Penitential Prayer and that was a fantastic project and coming out of that so and that was published as three volumes called Seeking the Favor of God. What was interesting there is that although that only entailed people dealing with Jewish and Christian prayer from the Hebrew Bible through early Jewish texts through the rabbinic period including early Christian prayer so a fairly narrow scope in terms of prayer which was getting more and more frustrating that we realized even among us we're not speaking the same language we're not making the same assumptions about what prayer is or how to study it or anything and so conversations between myself and Rodney Wurline coming out of that is you know we need to greatly broaden things and have a deeper discussion about what constitutes prayer in ancient world and particularly to try to find better ways to do comparison across traditions and then the two of us hosted a conference in Amsterdam way back in 2014 maybe no it wasn't that early 2017 I think and invited a group of scholars about a dozen scholars to focus on the issues of defining prayer I think we called it the definitional boundaries or something like that the problems of defining prayer something like that and so that was really the start and coming out of that a number of those who participated became either area editors or contributors so now the project has 15 area editors the two of us general editors are also editors of an area but we have 13 other area editors and well over 100 contributors again nobody is expert in all of this stuff absolutely nobody and so it's been really helpful to get together experts from a vast range of languages and cultures and time periods we cover you know about 4000 not just about 4000 years I guess and well over a dozen languages so for you it must have been quite exciting to get to learn about prayer and beyond just your own specialization was there anything for you in particular that was just a novel discovery something that someone wrote about a form of prayer you know maybe outside of your specialty that that really struck you as fascinating many things are really fascinating with this and there's a number of things that I knew somewhat about but didn't know very much at all and so it was really very excited to get people who were experts on on these it's the one phenomenon I find really fascinating is graffiti prayers so most studies of prayer in the ancient world have focused on as I said prayers in literary context you know but then there you're getting you know artificial prayers written by elites which may have some relation to ideas of prayer but probably not very representative of what ordinary people would pray but there's a lot of graffiti prayer that most people are entirely unaware of so far the project has only just launched and we have only you know really a few dozen entries up there so far so this will continue going for probably another three years before the project is complete but will continue to upload new information but we do have one section on there right now on graffiti prayers in Judaism in late antiquity and these are prayers in funerary context primarily you know people will scratch prayers you know for their loved one or some in divine help to protect the grave against grave robbers or someone who would desecrate the grave and that sort of thing but one that hasn't even been written yet that I'm very interested about is we will have an entry on these inscriptions found in the Arabian desert there's thousands of them on rocks just in the middle of the desert little prayers there's other things written as well but thousands of them are just prayers written on rocks out in the desert that sort of thing I find really fascinating how people interact with their environment and then you know related to graffiti and this was new I hadn't realized this in many ancient churches the walls would be covered with graffiti people writing so this I hadn't realized this but most of this is invisible to us because when we visit medieval churches which have been around for hundreds of years or their medieval structures or whatever they all that's been cleaned or it's been covered up over the years but in ancient churches the walls would have been just covered with graffiti and these are you know apparently trying to not only express their own connection with saints that are depicted on the walls etc but also to invite the other visitors so you would have this sort of ongoing conversation over the centuries really of other people visiting and engaging in the prayers of people before them and I think the assumption is that people would read these out loud and engage in fresh acts of prayer. In the various sections obviously it's broken down by region or by tradition and then you also break it down even further different types of prayers so vows, curses, hymns, graffiti is one of the sections to oaths you know particular objects that might have some kind of a significance in prayer was there any sort of a artifact or type of prayer that you just found really unusual or strange you know someone praying to a particular deity or entity for a particular thing that seemed unusual that somehow has been preserved anything bizarre. I mean there's lots of stuff that's bizarre but some that might be kind of surprising are prayers that are in inaccessible places and so one of the things that we really wanted to pay attention to here is not just the disembodied text of the prayer again one of my beefs about a lot of studies of prayer they rip them out of their context and don't pay any attention to that similarity.
So just a couple examples, I'm not an expert on Egyptian prayer but there's a few examples that fascinated me there. One where there's basically the same prayer that occurs in three completely different material contexts on a papyrus painted on a funerary bed and inscribed in a monumental inscription. Now if you analyze that just in terms of the text you're not you're looking at minor differences between them but those different contexts surely have very significant, very great significance for the meaning and the function of the prayer and that sort of thing I think needs a great deal of attention. And the other thing we'll find this a lot in Egyptian context but other places as well is inscribed prayers that are completely inaccessible.
So someone's obviously gone through a great deal of effort to inscribe a prayer like high up on a monument nobody else is ever going to be there. The only way we see them now is you know take a drone up there and fly around and look at it or you have to get some means a very long ladder or something to be able to get up there. So clearly there it's not intended for the reading of other people so presumably intended to be a continual prayer before the deity but many of these things we have to just interpret they don't interpret themselves. Right yeah that's really interesting and interesting to think about how these various prayers got to where they were because obviously for every I don't know if there's even some way to determine this for every prayer that you have located from the ancient world you know how many artifacts have been lost it's probably less than you know far less than 1% has been preserved.
For your own specialty what were you hoping to achieve and display for someone that reads your particular area that you focus on? So for each of the areas really our goal is to aim at non-specialists so this is meant not to be you know the entries are not meant to be the cutting edge of scholarship on this you know the very latest edition etc it is these are all written by experts in their field so the scholarship is first rate but we've asked people to write four people who are not experts in that area so I see probably the main users of this will be people who study prayer I mean they may be experts in one area but don't know another area and so for them to quickly get a sense of what's going on what's the diversity of practice but particularly to help facilitate cross-cultural comparison so focusing on functions of prayer etc so in my section which is I'm area editor for Jewish prayer in the second temple period also most of the prayers I can be looking at are from the Hellenistic period to the Roman period and I am conscious that I'm writing not for my other experts in you know to know this material but trying to represent this to let's say experts in the classics you know and they want to know what's going on in Jewish prayer or people who work in the ancient area or Egyptian literature etc so for each of the areas we try to avoid technical language that's particular to that you know discipline and try to get people to write with with more broad terms and talking about the general functions of prayer how do you hope or see this project impacting the study of prayer do you do you see a future where there's more of this kind of cross-cultural study where people are branching out a bit more into different disciplines do you know what is your hope for how this will change your discipline yes I think it will have a huge impact it's the type of project I wish there was when I started my PhD so you know certainly for cross-cultural studies I think that's very important this type of project makes it much easier to to find stuff so the two features that we were able to do in this which are dependent on the online platform is that we embed a bunch of metadata under many many different topics including not only typical kinds of things that one might expect like you know the the physical region and the type of prayer but even that we're trying to avoid technical genre language but describe general types and functions of prayer but also materiality space the performer gestures objects and so on and all of that can be not only searched for but these are all standardized terms so one can go across all of the areas very quickly so there's two types of metadata to broad data categories and there's like over a hundred different options there and then also prayer codes which are embedded within the translation you know focusing on different features of the prayer the address see gestures objects and so on and by clicking on those then one can find all the other prayers across all of the areas that have that sort of feature with within the prayer so should help greatly people working cross-culturally and I hope in a better way than has been in the past but I think this could be built on quite a bit I would love to see the project or similar projects to this develop and I could certainly see that with with AI that might be possible to do something much more sophisticated than what we're doing with this so far we haven't gone there this on one level it's the tagging is pretty basic at one level but on the other hand much more complex than anything that's been done before with this material right and even for the extensiveness of this project it's still focused on you know a relatively narrow-ish period of time a particular obviously a rich region but a very narrow region as well so you know I could easily imagine 30 other projects of this looking at different areas in different locations and you know really incredible you know load all those into into a chapat and you probably learn a lot about about about prayer and and its various forms for you having you know worked on this project conduct this conducted a study spent a lot of your career studying prayer you know how do you think about it just you know in terms of today you know prayer is a part of a lot of people's lives but I also think a lot of people you know don't engage in any form of prayer and you know how do you think about the role of prayer in the world today and you know what's your kind of pitch of why you know why someone today should be interested in prayer even if they themselves don't pray God that's a great question I'd say a lot of the practices that that we're including in prayer a lot of people do even if they do not regard themselves as religious the boundaries between you know prayer and wish and hopes and and so on are pretty they're pretty spongy and the other thing to note is that prayer is based on inter-human communication right so the appeal to to others the way that one tries to manipulate others or try to get people to help you or to you know butter someone up so that they're well disposed towards you all these sorts of practices people, the ancient stew with regards to super human entities as well and and you see people do that today again who are not religious but who just sort of send out a wish for something right but also just to understand the human experience I mean it's very natural for humans to seek some sort of outside help but at various points and again one of the things that's motivated us in this study was a dissatisfaction with a lot of the biases that are reflected in certainly in scholarship but also popularly that somehow Jewish and Christian prayer is unique and what to say brought more broadly that monotheistic prayer somehow unique it's not like pagan prayer which is you know trying to bribe the gods etc every form of practice that one can find in so-called pagan prayer one finds within Jewish and Christian prayer practices this idea that you know one is not trying to manipulate a deity within Judaism and Christianity is simply not true certainly when one considers popular practices but even within you know the biblical text as well a great example where Moses in Numbers 14 is trying to get God to not destroy the Israelites and he appeals to God's honor and shames him into in protecting the people you know the Egyptians are ready here if you don't if you don't protect your people and they end up killed the Egyptians will realize you are not able to to protect your people and how will that look for your reputation so I think it can can help a sense of humility inter religiously which I think is a very good thing too often religious traditions will tend to think of themselves as somehow more unique than they are but I think that's a great point and I'm wondering for you having worked on this project obviously you're still working in your specialty but you know do you have any upcoming projects that you're working on things that you're you're excited for in addition to this yeah in the first instance want to get this one done in this will occupy a ton of you know most of my time for the next several years yet I'm also a co-general editor of the series of editions on the Dead Sea Scrolls so that will also occupy a lot of my time over the next five years probably or or more so that I'm very interested in but I would like to come back to reflect on write a more accessible and maybe a popular book but reflecting on some of the things that we've learned from this study on the nature of prayer in the ancient world and defining it so you know maybe a whole book just devoted to you know how does one define and understand prayer in the ancient world we want possibility I think that's a fantastic idea obviously there's just so much information in a work like this you know there are nuggets of gold that anyone can go in and find and read about various forms of prayer and different types of prayer in different regions but yeah I think that that's a wonderful idea well Daniel thank you so much for being guest on the new book star because really you know it's just wonderful to get the chance to talk to you about prayer in the ancient world well we'll have a link to it in the in the show notes if anyone wants to go and actually explore it you know they can go go there so I think it'll be a little while till it's officially out but but the link will be live so thanks so much for being guest it was really wonderful to have you on my pleasure it was great to meet you