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Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline, "Prayer in the Ancient World Vol.1" (Brill, 2027)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor to the New Books Network. And if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:58]
B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, Editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Daniel K. Falk, professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Chaikin Family Chair in Jewish Studies at Penn State. He's the co editor of the multi volume work Prayer in the Ancient World. This comprehensive set explores the various forms of prayer found in the near east and Mediterranean. The essays explore prayer in Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, and more encyclopedic work. Prayer in the Ancient World is an incredible scholarly accomplishment. Daniel, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:32]
C
Glad to join you.
- [02:33]
B
This is just an unbelievable project. And, you know, prayer as a topic is such a fascinating subject. You know, it's something that feels in many ways like, you know, just transcends culture, time, space. And the way that this, that this study drills down on prayer in various locations in the ancient world is really incredible, especially 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 2,000 years ago. But before even jumping into the work, I was wondering if you just tell listeners a little about yourself and how you even got into this world of studying prayer.
- [03:16]
A
Sure.
- [03:17]
C
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 along 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 something, 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 across the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and New Testament Josephus and Philo, and then more recently, the De 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 laws 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. When something good happens, give thanks. When something is threatening, pray for help. But there's no laws for prayer. And yet, 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 Shema? 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 a 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 liturgical prayers of the community. So this is something that we were lacking. Otherwise we had prayers embedded in literary texts, you know, descriptions of people praying, et cetera, but no clear evidence for the community gathering together to pray together at certain times, you know, regularly, whether you have any feeling that you've committed a sin and you need to repent. You know, where does this idea come that every day you should ask for forgiveness, even if you have no sense that you've done anything that day? Right. So this really quite a remarkable development, and we see it very clearly in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This community had a 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 how 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.
- [07:18]
B
Right. So, you know, 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, you know, 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. You know, is meditation, prayer. Is prayer something that you can. You do by yourself, you know, hidden from everyone else? Is it a communal activity? How do you actually define prayer?
- [07:54]
C
Excellent, Excellent question. And this really gets to the heart of. Of the project. Typically, in. 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. You know, 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 speech directed from a human to God in the second person, you know, and initiated by the human, these kinds of things. And then within biblical studies and early studies of early Judaism, Christianity, there's a great deal of discussion about forms of prayer and so on. So 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 definitional 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 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. 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.
- [11:43]
B
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 could get specific and use it as a resource and. But there's over 350 entries. So you were working with quite, quite a number of scholars. Can you talk about the actual, like, logistics of putting this collection together? What was that like? Because it must have been an incredible undertaking.
- [12:13]
C
Yeah. So it started with a conversation between two of us, me and my co general editor, Rodney Werline. He's now emeritus at Barton College. We had done our PhDs at the same time. We didn't know each other then, but our dissertations were we added our dissertations as monographs, which were 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 on penitential prayer. And that was a fantastic project. And coming out of that, though, and that was published as three volumes called Seeking the Favor of God. But 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, it 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 Werlein coming out of that is, you know, we need to greatly broaden things and have a deeper discussion about what constitutes prayer in the 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, I think, 2014, maybe. 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 a hundred 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 in time periods. We cover about 4,000, just about 4,000 years, I guess, and well over a dozen languages.
- [15:38]
B
So for you, it must have been quite exciting to get to learn about prayer beyond just your own specialization. Was there anything for you in particular that was just a novel discovery, something that someone wrote about, about a form of prayer, you know, maybe outside of your specialty, that that really struck you as fascinating.
- [16:04]
C
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 was really very excited to get people who are experts on these. So 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 contexts. But then there you're getting artificial prayers written by elites, which may have some relation to ideas of prayer, but probably not very representative of what ordinary people would. Would pray. But there is a lot of graffiti prayer that most people are entirely unaware of. So far, the project is only just launched, and we have only 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 we'll 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. People will scratch prayers for their loved one or summon divine help to protect the grave against grave robbers or someone who would desecrate the grave. 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 related to graffiti. And this was new. I hadn't realized this. In many ancient churches, the walls would be covered with graffiti of 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, there are medieval structures or whatever, 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 apparently trying to not only express their own connection with saints that are depicted on the walls, et cetera, 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.
- [19:45]
B
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. Is one of the. The sections to oaths, you know, particular objects that might have some kind of a significance in prayer. Is there. Was there any sort of, you know, artifact or type of prayer that you Just found really unusual or, 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?
- [20:28]
C
I mean, there's lots of stuff that, that that's bizarre, but, 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 fascinate 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, like a monumental inscription. Now if you analyze that just in terms of the text, you're looking at minor differences between them. But those different contexts surely have 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 lot in Egyptian context, but other places as well is inscribed prayers that are completely inaccessible. So someone has 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 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.
- [22:35]
B
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, how many artifacts have been lost? It's probably 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, that you focused on?
- [23:11]
C
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 et CETERA it is. These are all written by experts in their field. So the scholarship is first rate. But we've asked people to write for people who are not experts in that area. So I see probably the main users of this will be people who study prayer. 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, et cetera. So in my section, which is I'm area editor for Jewish prayer in the second Temple period, and also most of the prayers I'm going to be looking at are sort of from the Hellenistic period to the early Roman period. And I am conscious that I'm writing not for my other experts who know this material, but trying to represent this to, let's say, experts in the classics. And they want to know what's going on in Jewish prayer or people who work in the ancient near east or Egyptian literature, et cetera. So for each of the areas, we try to avoid technical language that's particular to that discipline and try to get people to write with more broad terms and talking about the general functions of prayer.
- [25:19]
B
How do you hope or see this project impacting the study of prayer? 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? What is your hope for how this will change your discipline?
- [25:37]
C
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 certainly for cross cultural studies, I think that's very important. This type of project makes it much easier 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 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, broad metadata 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 addressee, gestures, objects and so on. And by clicking on those, then one could find all the other prayers across all of the areas that have that sort of feature 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 certainly see that 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 on one level. 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.
- [28:25]
B
Right. And even for the extensiveness of this project, it's still focused on, you know, a relatively narrow ish period of time, particular obviously a rich region, but a very, but, but a narrow, a narrow region as well. So, you know, I could imagine, yeah, you could easily imagine 30 other projects of this looking at different eras and different locations and you know, a really incredible, you know, load all of those into, into a, a chatbot and you could probably learn a lot about, about prayer and, and its various forms for you having, you know, worked on this project, conducted this 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 what's your kind of pitch of why someone today should be interested in prayer even if they themselves don't pray?
- [29:33]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. I'd say a lot of the practices 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 so on are pretty, they're pretty spongy. And the other thing to note is that prayer is based on interhuman communication. Right. So the appeal 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 of these sorts of practices ancients do with regards to superhuman entities as well. 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 at various points. And again, one of the things that motivated us in this study was a dissatisfaction with a lot of the biases that are reflected certainly in scholarship, but also popularly that somehow Jewish and Christian prayer is unique. And one could say more broadly that monotheistic prayer is somehow unique. It's not like pagan prayer which is trying to bribe the gods, et cetera. 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 the biblical texts as well. It's 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 protecting the people. The Egyptians are going to hear, if you don't protect your people and they end up killed, the Egyptians will realize you were not able to protect your people and how will that look for your reputation? So I think it 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.
- [33:02]
B
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 do you have any upcoming projects that you're working on, things that you're excited for in addition to this?
- [33:21]
C
Yeah, in the first instance, want to get this one done. And this will occupy a ton of most of my time for the next several years yet. I'm also co general editor of a 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 more so that I'm very interested in. But I would like to come back to reflect on write a more accessible and maybe not 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 maybe a whole book just devoted to how does one define and understand prayer in the ancient world? Be one possibility.
- [34:20]
B
I think that's a fantastic idea. Obviously there's just so much information in a work like this. 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. Yeah, I think that that's a wonderful idea. Well, Daniel thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network. It was really, you know, it's just wonderful to get the chance to talk to you about prayer in the ancient world. We'll have a link to it in the, in the show notes, so if anyone wants to go and actually explore it, you know, they can 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 a guest. It was really wonderful to have you on.
- [35:09]
C
My pleasure. It was great to meet you.