Reflections of a Canadian Churchman

Prayer and Worship in the Dead Sea Scrolls The discovery of so many prayers and liturgies at Qumran is significant.   It fills in a huge gap in our understanding of prayer in Second Temple Judaism.   Eileen Schuller has noted: “One thing that is distinctive is that the community of Qumran put their prayers into written from. This was in marked contrast to the practice of subsequent centuries in rabbinic Judaism which discouraged the setting down of prayer in writing ( t. Shabb. 13.4).   One of the difficulties in studying Jewish prayer (particularly as it developed after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70) is that although there are scattered reference, and occasionally even the actual words of blessings in the Mishnah and in the Talmuds, prayer was basically oral. As mentioned earlier, the earliest preserved copies of the Siddur [the Jewish Prayer Book] are dated only to the ninth century [AD/CE]. The scrolls fill in a stage in the development of Jewish prayer-fo...

The  Hodayot  (Thanksgiving Hymn s)   Hartmut Stegemann, one of the modern editors of the text of the Thanksgiving Hymns comments, “This collection of hymns is usually called the  Hodayot , ‘Songs of Praise,’ since many of the hymns begin with ‘ odekah  ‘ adonai , ‘I praise you, O Lord.’”  Stegemann notes that “Actually, this lengthy manuscript is composed of a number of smaller hymn-collections, which also existed individually.” (Stegemann,  The Library of Qumran , 107)   Our most significant manuscript is a  lengthy manuscript  from Cave 1. The beginning and ending of the scroll are damaged, but some of that can be pieced together from fra gments  of other copies  found in Cave 4. The  Cave 1  scrol l appears to  have  contained  twenty-eight columns and  thirty-five  hymns.    The question of  authorship  is contested, but Stegemann claims that “the seventeen h...