Thursday, September 15, 2016

What do we make of that?

Two speech act categories are absent from the corpus [of intercessory prayers in the HB]: commissives and declaratives, both hallmarks of transformative ritual speech. By omitting all declaratives, the biblical writers appear to be representing apotropaic intercession as something other than ritual—emphasizing, rather, the spontaneous, personal exchange between the intercessors and their God, fitting Moshe Greenberg’s definition of “prose prayer.”—Forestalling Doom page 202

<idle musing>
Interesting insight, once again illustrating that YHWH isn't a tame deity that we can put on a leash. Something we all need to remember when we try to bend God's will to our own.
</idle musing>

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