Paul Heger, Institutionalized Routine Prayers at Qumran: Fact or Assumption? Posthumously edited by Bernard M. Levinson. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.
The question of when and how obligatory prayer arose in Judaism remains fraught with gaps in the historical record and scholarly disagreements over how to assess the evidence that we do possess. In the midst of this entanglement of issues are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain not only some of our oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, but also our earliest manuscripts of Jewish prayers and hymns. Perhaps precisely because of their “originary function” in writing a history of the development of Jewish prayer and liturgy, the Dead Sea Scrolls prayer texts have attracted a great deal of attention (as well as contention) regarding their form and genre, their provenances and contexts, and their relationships to later Jewish prayers.
The late Paul Heger’s Institutionalized Routine Prayers at Qumran: Fact or Assumption? enters this arena to assess the value of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the history of the development of obligatory prayer in early Judaism. This is not Heger’s first foray into ancient Jewish prayer, having addressed some aspects of this subject in earlier publications.[1] In this study, Heger’s thesis is that “[t]here is not explicit evidence of obligatory public prayer in Qumran writings, although some scholars claim to find some evidence for it” (9). Heger formulates this thesis a few times throughout the study, as he reflects on his methodology more than once. With each iteration, it is clear that for Heger the fixed and compulsory nature of prayer that developed in post-70 Judaism is not characteristic of the prayers preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls (see pp. 11, 105-109, 279). Since his methodology is guided by responding directly to the work of scholars of Qumran prayer, it is notable that he takes the terminology “institutionalized,” “obligatory,” and “communal” to be interchangeable for the purposes of his investigation. In other words, Heger assumes that any descriptions of Qumran prayer using these terms presupposes the obligation to pray, and it is this obligatory nature of prayer that he judges to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls prayer texts. This methodological starting point leads into his first chapter, where he draws a sharp distinction between prayer (as supplication or petition) and praise (as glorification, blessing, or thanksgiving).
Chapter 1 establishes that “[t]here is no obligation of תפלה [tefillah], ‘prayer,’ in Scripture [because] one cannot reasonably command someone to supplicate…On the other hand, there is one obligation to bless God in Deut. 8:10” (p. 25). As Heger goes on to suggest, biblical supplication prayers are distinguished from other acts of praise, such as “glorification,” “praise,” “thanksgiving,” and “blessing.” Turning to the Dead Sea Scrolls, he asserts that “we must consider the intrinsic distinction between the various approaches to God without generalizing” (p. 41)—using his understanding of this biblical distinction as a guidepost. Heger’s approach to distinguishing the types of communication with the divine responds to the classificatory work conducted by scholars like Esther Chazon, Bilhah Nitzan, and Daniel Falk over the last several decades. The categorization of Qumran prayers by type has often relied on studying the rubrics, headings, and contents of individual prayers in order to distinguish between their respective genres and functions. For Heger, the root of the problem lies here: “This unwarranted mixing of two distinct types of approaches to God [i.e., prayer and praise] in institutionalized public worship is, in my opinion, the root of the flawed deductions from one type of evocation to the other” (p. 47).
Heger turns to specific texts in chapter 2, namely 4Q503 (Daily Prayers), 4Q504 (Words of the Luminaries), and 4Q400-407 (Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice), to contest their classification as “institutionalized communal prayer.” Heger maintains that for these texts, the distinction between prayer (as supplication or petition) and praise (as glorification, blessing, or thanksgiving) is native to their conceptual world, and so raises doubts about their status as prayer based on content. This distinction is carried to its logical conclusion in his analysis of 4Q503: “At most, even if we ignore the array of questions that refute it, 4Q503 might point to an institutionalized public type of ‘blessings and appreciation’ to the Deity with a fixed text, recited at fixed times, or a priestly liturgy… Be that as it may, nothing indicates the existence of communal, fixed supplicatory prayers” (p. 66). In other words, 4Q503 may look like a fixed, institutionalized, routine “prayer,” but can never be classified as “prayer,” on Heger’s account, because it lacks supplication or petition. Heger also raises doubts about the public performance of these texts because they all lack enough substantial instructions governing their recital. For Heger, “institutionalized communal prayers of any kind must occur at fixed times of the day, week, or month,” and any lack of such indication forfeits a text’s status as an obligatory communal prayer (p. 70). Heger’s conceptual distinctions (prayer vs. praise; and private vs. public) are crucial to his argument. While he does not doubt the Qumran movement’s use (particularly individual use) of these texts containing divine praise, he does doubt their status as obligatory, fixed, routine prayers within a system of communal prayer at Qumran.
Chapter 3 picks up the question of whether prayer was prescribed among the Qumran movement. Given the strict definition of obligatory (“commanded”) prayer used in the study, Heger addresses whether the language about praise of God in 1QS 10 should be interpreted as containing a stipulation to pray. He observes that among the language of “bless” and “praise” and “sing” in lines 6, 8, and 9 “[n]owhere is there any mention of supplication prayer” (p. 126). Again, Heger’s distinctions draw lines between what can and cannot count as prayer. In the second half of the chapter, Heger questions the reliability of m. Tamid 5:1 and other rabbinic sources that he judges to be the “hinge” for “the entire thesis of communal prayer at Qumran” (p. 164). He concludes that without the framework for Second Temple communal prayer suggested by rabbinic sources, the Qumran evidence instead reflects “poems and songs” composed by individuals “to express their own pietistic thoughts and emotions” (p. 167).
Heger contests the argument that Qumran prayers served as substitutions for sacrifices in chapter 4. He begins by establishing that the tamid sacrifice, the twice-daily public sacrifice in the temple, is not obligatory for individuals; rather only some individual sacrifices (although not all) are obligatory, under certain circumstances. On this basis, he argues that those Dead Sea Scrolls that appear to allude to sacrificial substitutions refer only to individual offerings, not the daily tamid. Thus, for instance, the comparison between an individual’s virtuous deeds and a sacrificial offering in 1QS 9:4-5 “reflects a concern to achieve the ends of individual offerings, specifically the obligatory sin and guilt offerings and voluntary fellowship offerings,” rather than achieve the ends of the tamid offering (p. 173).
Chapter 5 looks ahead to rabbinic literature in the post-70 period, where Heger finds the distinction between prayer and praise still maintained (pp. 193-195). He argues, however, that the rabbis introduced the innovation of obligating supplicatory prayer in the form of the fixed recital of the Amidah, which, after all, revolves around its core blessings of God. Returning to the pre-70 period in chapter 6, Heger theorizes what the landscape of prayer was like during this time by comparing the Qumran prayer texts to Samaritan prayer traditions. Heger notes that what evidence we have for the standardization of the Samaritan liturgy displays a tradition of public readings of Torah passages and the chanting of hymns (pp. 234-238). He observes that both the Samaritan and Qumran evidence lack instructions for performance, necessary quorums, and sites for public prayers, and so concludes that in the late Second Temple period, public prayers were not a common manner of entreating God.
Chapter 7 ties together Heger’s concluding thoughts about prayer. He offers his understanding of the history of the development of prayer from Qumran to the rabbinic period, emphasizing the slow adaptation of individual, oral prayers, eventually adopted by larger numbers of individuals and even groups, before any codification of prayer practices in the post-70 period. He ultimately sees no strong (textual or thematic) links between the Dead Sea Scrolls prayer texts and rabbinic prayer traditions, but rather thinks they each arrived at their practices independently from their respective understandings of biblical sources. Heger’s conclusion reiterates his thesis that obligatory public prayer did not exist among the Qumran movement. He admits that this thesis cannot logically be proven, insofar as one cannot prove a negative statement, but emphasizes that his challenges to scholarly opinions regarding the use and performance of Qumran prayers are an invitation to reassess and reevaluate.
At the heart of Heger’s study is a problem of terminology and classification. This problem is not new to the study of early Jewish prayer and in fact has already preoccupied scholars for some time. But Heger’s study brings some fresh appreciation to the problem. Indeed, not only are scholars inconsistent in how they classify and label the disparate and varied prayers preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, as Heger observes, but, we can add, the prayer texts themselves seem to elude native classification. Heger’s study attempts to systematically hold each text to its word, so to speak. If it claims to be a “prayer” (תפלה), it must be a “prayer” as defined by the biblical text, at least according to Heger. But I wonder how productive this strict insistence on terminology is, and whether ancient Jews actually perceived such rigid boundaries between prayer types. In her introduction to the 2017 volume Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, Schuller pointedly asks us to think about the stakes of calling a collection like the Hodayot either psalms, hymns, or prayers.[2] Heger would seem to suggest that there is something fundamental at stake, something essential to each of these categories. Whether or not that is the case, his project does bring to the fore the question of what these terms—as classificatory labels—might have meant to the ancient authors who used them, and, perhaps more within our control, what they mean for scholars today. If our evidence seems to resist our current attempts at classification, perhaps we need to rethink how we are classifying.[3]
Additionally, on the side of the ancient texts, we continue to be seriously disadvantaged by having to assess often fragmentary evidence ranging in origin across space and time, frequently separated by hundreds of miles and multiple centuries. For instance, Heger does not incorporate Aramaic texts or the Septuagint into his study, and one wonders how these sources, and especially their translations and uses of key terms (most prominently תפלה), might change our understanding of the ways ancient Jews conceived of their different modes of communicating with the divine. Perhaps we have yet to fully realize the diversity of, and potential fluidity across, the many types of prayer (broadly conceived) that existed in ancient Judaism. In other words, perhaps the “intrinsic distinction between the various approaches to God” (p. 41) that Heger insists is necessary to understanding ancient Jewish prayer on its own terms is not so intrinsic, after all. It therefore remains to be seen whether we can produce a functional “grammar” or uncover a “native theory” of prayer in ancient Judaism, but Heger’s study, by pushing to apply strict definitions to the terms we employ in describing ancient Jewish prayer, invites us to think about what consensuses we should revisit in order to achieve such a goal, while also displaying for us the potential shortcomings in any scholarly attempt to taxonomize ancient literature.
Patrick Angiolillo is a PhD candidate in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and the Content Editor of Second Temple Judaism at Ancient Jew Review.
[1] See, e.g., Paul Heger, “Did Prayer Replace Sacrifice at Qumran?,” RevQ 22.2 (2005): 213-233.
[2] Eileen Schuller, “Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period,” in Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, ed. M. Pajunen and J. Penner, BZAW 486 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 12. Schuller raises the question of terminology in an earlier article, where she proposes using native terminology (such as tefillah, tehillah, mizmor, and shir) more consistently in scholarship. As she notes in her 2017 article, this is a proposal that has gained little traction in the last 20 years. (“The Use of Biblical Terms as Designation for Non-Biblical Hymnic and Prayer Compositions,” in Biblical Perspectives: Proceedings of the First Orion Center Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. M. Stone and E. Chazon, STDJ 15 [Leiden: Brill, 1997], 125–144.)
[3] An analogy might be found in Molly Zahn’s recent research into the genre of “Rewritten Bible” wherein she generates a boarder set of terms and models for thinking about rewriting as a literary strategy in ancient Judaism (Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism: Scribal Composition and Transmission [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020]). As Ariel Feldman and Timothy Sandoval put it in the introduction to their recent edited volume on prayer in the Second Temple period: “No longer need (ought?) ‘canonical’ prayer—its genre, motifs, agents, ideologies, and so forth—be placed in the middle of the map of ancient Jewish prayer so that the Second Temple texts are explicitly or implicitly analyzed in terms of their relationship to categories established from the study of (often) earlier biblical works whose social, ritual, ideological, and literary functions are distinct from subsequent texts” (Petitioners, Penitents, and Poets: On Prayer and Praying in Second Temple Judaism, BZAW 524 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020], 15). A similar impulse to rethink traditional scholarly classifications and attempts at uncovering native patterns of thought in ancient textual traditions can be found in the work of biblical scholars Naphtali Meshel (The “Grammar” of Sacrifice: A Generativist Study of the Israelite Sacrificial System in the Priestly Writings [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014]) and Jacqueline Vayntrub (Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms [London: Routledge, 2019]), as well.