Description
It is commonplace in scholarship on early Jewish liturgy to consider prayer and Torah study as replacements of sacrifice after the 70 CE destruction of the Temple. Authoritative accounts even hold that pre-70 synagogue services were exclusively dedicated to Torah reading without prayer, despite the common diasporic designation of “prayer houses” (proseuche), and despite the abundance of liturgical texts discovered in the caves of Qumran. This paper offers an alternative angle. I will discuss various texts from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek-speaking Jewish communities in the Greco-Roman period that present prayer and the glorification of the deity as offerings that are considered pleasing as sacrifice. Such efficacious prayer is performed within a congregation and is mediated by and manifested in wisdom and knowledge, access to which requires preparation and purification of the human self. These sources reveal aspects of both change and continuity beyond the 70 CE divide.| Period | 20-Jul-2023 |
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| Event title | 12th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies : Branching Out: Diversity of Jewish Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Frankfurt , GermanyShow on map |