Samuel Matthis

A Jewish Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer is a Jewish prayer. A Jewish teacher gave it to Jewish disciples, and Christians have prayed it ever since. That is the plain view my book takes. Here is why I hold it, and where I have to be careful.

Words that were already there

The first two petitions ask that God’s name be hallowed and that his kingdom come. The synagogue has a prayer that asks for the same two things in the same order. It is the Kaddish, composed mostly in Aramaic, and in a modern English version it begins: “Exalted and sanctified be His great Name in the world which He created according to His will and may He rule His kingdom.”1 One form of it, said after the study of Talmud or Midrash, asks for peace and long life “from their Father Who is in heaven and on earth.”2

The great prayer of the synagogue, the Amidah, was to be prayed three times a day.3 In the form it has in the prayer book today, one of its blessings asks: “Cause us to return, our Father, to Your Torah and bring us near, our King, to Your service.” The next one says: “Pardon us, our Father, for we have sinned, forgive us, our King, for we have transgressed.”4 Anyone who prays “Our Father … forgive us” will hear family in those lines.

There is also a short prayer for danger. The rabbis asked what a person should pray when traveling through a place of wild beasts or robbers, with no time for the full prayer. Rabbi Eliezer answered: “Do Thy will in Heaven above; grant tranquility of spirit to those who fear Thee below, and do that which is good in Thy sight. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who hearkenest unto prayer.”5 The Tosefta gives the same prayer in the name of Rabbi Elazar.6 Rabbi Eliezer also left a warning: “If one makes his prayer a fixed task, his prayer is not supplication.”7 Jesus warns against empty repetition just before he teaches his own prayer.8

And there is a story about rain. On a fast day Rabbi Eliezer led the prayers and was not answered. Then Rabbi Akiva stepped down before the ark and said, “Our Father, our King, we have no king except You. Our Father, our King, for Your sake have mercy on us,” and rain fell.9 A voice from heaven explained: it was not that one was greater than the other, but that, in my own rendering, “this one lets go of what is owed him, and that one does not.”10 It is a story about prayer, and its point is forgiveness. The prayer book traces the litany Avinu Malkeinu, “Our Father, our King”, back to Akiva. It is said in the Ten Days of Penitence, and by some congregations on public fast days, and among its many lines it asks God to “forgive and pardon all our iniquities” and to “erase in Your abundant mercy all records of our liabilities.”11

How old are these words?

The prayer books I am quoting are modern. We do not have the synagogue’s wording from the time of Jesus. James Charlesworth, who directed Princeton Theological Seminary’s Dead Sea Scrolls Project, wrote: “We have no clear evidence of the Amidah or 18 Benedictions before A.D. 70. None of the early Jewish writings cites it.”12 The broad consensus is that Rabban Gamaliel and the rabbis at Yavneh edited and organized it late in the first century; how much of it was already old is the open question.13 Of the Kaddish, the German scholar Hans Klein writes that it “does not reach back with certainty into the time of Jesus, but prayers have a long life, so that we may assume Jesus knew this prayer or one like it.”14

So I will not claim that Jesus borrowed from the Kaddish, or that the rabbis borrowed from Jesus. These prayers took shape in the same world at about the same time, and we cannot always tell which words came first. What we can say is that the Lord’s Prayer is at home among them.

An old mistake

Christians have not always told this story well. Augustine, in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount from the 390s, wrote that “nowhere is there found a precept for the people of Israel, that they should say Our Father, or that they should pray to God as a Father; but as Lord He was made known to them, as being yet servants.”15 Origen before him had searched the Old Testament for a prayer that addressed God as Father and said he had not found one.16 The historian Karlfried Froehlich calls the argument that grew from this “ubiquitous”: it fed the claim that the church had replaced Israel.17

I owe these men a great deal. On this point they were wrong, and it is no disrespect to say so. The prophet prays, “You, Yahweh, are our Father. Our Redeemer from everlasting is your name,” and again, “But now, Yahweh, you are our Father. We are the clay and you our potter.”18 The idea that the Jews of Jesus’s day prayed to a distant God, and that Jesus was the first to bring him near, does not survive a reading of their prayers. “Despite some misinformed publications,” Charlesworth wrote, “the Jews of Jesus’ time did not project God out of this world and time.” He added: “God was near to one who prayed.”19

What is new

Then is anything new in the Lord’s Prayer? I think so, and it can be said without saying anything false about Judaism. The word “Father” is old. What is new is who gives it to us. Donald Juel, who taught New Testament at Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, pointed out that in Matthew and Luke only Jesus calls God “Father,” and only Jesus invites his followers to address God that way in prayer. “Others may use the language by invitation, not imitation.”20 When I say “Our Father,” I say it because a Jew, praying as a Jew, said it first and asked me to say it with him.

I love the traditions of Judaism, and I think Christians can learn much from them, beginning with the reverence for the Name that stands at the head of the Kaddish. I write about these prayers as a Christian, from the outside, and I would be glad to be corrected by Jewish readers wherever I have misunderstood them.

An AI model helped me draft this note. The sources were checked one by one, and the convictions are mine.

Footnotes

  1. Kaddish de-Rabbanan, opening lines, in Avrohom Davis, trans., The Metsudah Siddur (1981), via Sefaria, CC-BY. The same words open the Half Kaddish and the Mourner’s Kaddish. Davis’s note says the prayer was “composed primarily in Aramaic, the language spoken and understood by most Jews in the Second Temple period.” ↩

  2. Kaddish de-Rabbanan, trans. Davis, as above. Davis notes that this Kaddish “is recited following the study of Talmud or Midrash.” ↩

  3. David Andrew Clark, “From Jewish Prayer to Christian Ritual: Early Interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer” (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2014), p. 50, where it is called by its other name, the Tefillah, repository.nottingham.ac.uk. ↩

  4. Weekday Amidah, the fifth and sixth blessings, trans. Davis, The Metsudah Siddur, via Sefaria, CC-BY. This is the modern Ashkenazi text. ↩

  5. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 29b, trans. A. Cohen, The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Berakot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), via Sefaria. The setting (“he who journeys in a place of herds of wild beasts or bands of robbers should offer a short prayer”) is on the same page. ↩

  6. Tosefta Berakhot 3:11 in Sefaria’s numbering, Hebrew text from Mechon Mamre, Sefaria. Charlesworth cites the passage as t. Ber. 3.7. ↩

  7. Berakhot 29b, trans. Cohen, as above. ↩

  8. Matthew 6:7. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

  9. Davis’s introduction to Avinu Malkeinu, The Metsudah Siddur, via Sefaria, CC-BY, retelling Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 25b. ↩

  10. Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 25b, Hebrew text from Wikisource via Sefaria, CC-BY-SA; the translation is mine. The phrase I render “lets go of what is owed him” is literally “passes over his measures,” that is, he does not insist on what is due to him. I would especially welcome correction here. ↩

  11. Avinu Malkeinu, trans. Davis, as above. In the Hebrew each line begins Avinu malkeinu, “Our Father, our King.” Davis notes that the number of petitions varies with custom; his rite has forty-four. ↩

  12. James H. Charlesworth, “Jewish Prayers in the Time of Jesus,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992): 36–55, at 40 n. 13, archive.org. In the same note he reports David Flusser’s view that the Dead Sea Thanksgiving Hymns already show knowledge of the Eighteen Benedictions. ↩

  13. Clark, “From Jewish Prayer,” p. 55 n. 67. ↩

  14. Hans Klein, “Vaterunser,” in Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex, 2011), p. 3, bibelwissenschaft.de; our translation from the German. ↩

  15. Augustine, Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 2.4.15, trans. William Findlay, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 6 (1888), newadvent.org. Froehlich (p. 72) dates the work to 392–396. ↩

  16. Origen, On Prayer 22.1; Greek in Paul Koetschau, ed., Origenes Werke 2 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1899), p. 346, archive.org. Origen grants that God is called Father in the Old Testament; what he says he did not find is a prayer that addresses him so. ↩

  17. Karlfried Froehlich, “The Lord’s Prayer in Patristic Literature,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992): 71–87, at 81, archive.org. ↩

  18. Isaiah 63:16; 64:8. ↩

  19. Charlesworth, “Jewish Prayers,” p. 38. ↩

  20. Donald Juel, “The Lord’s Prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992): 56–70, at 59–60, archive.org. ↩

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