Sponsor
Center for Jewish Studies
Prayer, Ritual, and Silence: The Psalms as Worship in Biblical Scholarship and the Study of Religion
Wednesday, February 25,
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Speaker(s): Benjamin Sommer
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT TAKES PLACE UNC CHAPEL-HILL:
The Duke Center for Jewish Studies is pleased to cosponsor the annual McLester Lecture at the Department of Religious Studies at UNC - Chapel Hill.
Benjamin Sommer (Jewish Theological Seminary) will be giving a talk on "Prayer, Ritual, and Silence: The Psalms as Worship in Biblical Scholarship and the Study of Religion." This lecture examines the ways modern scholars understand the use of psalms in ancient Israel. Some scholars maintain that the psalms are religious poetry. Essentially individual, intellectual, and spiritual in nature, the psalms were largely removed from the rituals that took place in the Jerusalem Temple. Other scholars argue that psalms are ritual scripts. The recitation of psalms in the Temple was a communal, embodied activity closely related to the rituals carried out there. A third approach acknowledges that both sacrificial ritual and psalmody were at home in the Temple, but they occupied distinct spheres within that ritual space. These approaches to the psalms among biblical scholars recall three ways modern theologians and theoreticians of religion understand prayer. For some, prayer is separate from and superior to ritual. For others prayer is one type of ritual. For a third group, formulaic or liturgical prayer is more specifically a sacrificial form of ritual. The lecture will demonstrate how different religious and scholarly communities conceptualize prayer in strikingly divergent ways. Insights gained from comparing these approaches demythologize problematic assumptions about the nature of true prayer that are deeply embedded in contemporary Western culture and in a great deal of religious-studies scholarship. Only upon freeing ourselves from these assumptions can we begin to understand how psalms have functioned in ancient Israel, in rabbinic Judaism, and many forms of Christianity. This paper sits at the intersection of the historical-critical study of the Hebrew Bible and the phenomenological study of religion.
The Duke Center for Jewish Studies is pleased to cosponsor the annual McLester Lecture at the Department of Religious Studies at UNC - Chapel Hill.
Benjamin Sommer (Jewish Theological Seminary) will be giving a talk on "Prayer, Ritual, and Silence: The Psalms as Worship in Biblical Scholarship and the Study of Religion." This lecture examines the ways modern scholars understand the use of psalms in ancient Israel. Some scholars maintain that the psalms are religious poetry. Essentially individual, intellectual, and spiritual in nature, the psalms were largely removed from the rituals that took place in the Jerusalem Temple. Other scholars argue that psalms are ritual scripts. The recitation of psalms in the Temple was a communal, embodied activity closely related to the rituals carried out there. A third approach acknowledges that both sacrificial ritual and psalmody were at home in the Temple, but they occupied distinct spheres within that ritual space. These approaches to the psalms among biblical scholars recall three ways modern theologians and theoreticians of religion understand prayer. For some, prayer is separate from and superior to ritual. For others prayer is one type of ritual. For a third group, formulaic or liturgical prayer is more specifically a sacrificial form of ritual. The lecture will demonstrate how different religious and scholarly communities conceptualize prayer in strikingly divergent ways. Insights gained from comparing these approaches demythologize problematic assumptions about the nature of true prayer that are deeply embedded in contemporary Western culture and in a great deal of religious-studies scholarship. Only upon freeing ourselves from these assumptions can we begin to understand how psalms have functioned in ancient Israel, in rabbinic Judaism, and many forms of Christianity. This paper sits at the intersection of the historical-critical study of the Hebrew Bible and the phenomenological study of religion.
