A Larger Vocabulary

“Yet have regard to the prayer of Your servant and to his supplication, O LORD my God, to listen to the cry and to the prayer which Your servant prays before You;” 2 Chronicles 6:19 (NASB)

Prayer/ Pray – English has one word.  So does Greek.  But Hebrew has more than a dozen different words for prayer.  Perhaps that helps us realize how crucial the concept is to the Hebrews.  Praying covers a range of emotions, expression and praises.  In this verse, Solomon uses the standard cultic verb and its derived noun to express himself before YHWH.  We can learn something important from Solomon’s choice.

The first word is tefillah, one of the two formal words for prayer.  It is derived from the root pll (the verb palal).  Tefillah is always used of ritual formal prayers, particularly prayers mediated through the sacrifices.  It’s worth noting that the word never appears in the Pentateuch where men speak with God directly.  Gerstenberger points out that the central element in palal is liturgical pleas for favorable hearing from YHWH.  This is communal, religious prayer, the kind of prayer you often hear in worship assemblies uttered by the leaders.  Greek equivalents are proseuchesthai (the most common Greek term for all kinds of prayer) and euchesthai (used in connection with thanksgiving).

But the verb, palal, shows some variation from this formal scheme.  It is used when Hannah pleads with God for a son.  It’s used when Abraham intercedes for Abimelech.  Moses, Samuel, David, Elisha and Jeremiah all use this verb.  From the range, what can we gather about this kind of prayer?  First, it always involves personal interaction with YHWH.  There is not a single case where this kind of prayer is offered to a person, a representative of YHWH or any other holy figure.  Secondly, it is an intensely personal act, even if it is accomplished in the context of the ritual community.  Prayer is essentially “God’s song,” affirmed by the believer.  “It is not collectivized even when it is uttered by the congregation.”[1] “Our prayer” is simply a way of describing the community as one, not as a collective of individuals.  Finally, this form of prayer is particularly concerned with supplication, begging the favor of the Lord with regard to issues that concern the worshipper.

You may say, “So, I already knew all this (except the Hebrew words, maybe).”  But here’s the real impact.  We often attend worship services where someone prays on behalf of the assembly.  Far too often the prayer is anything but a statement of unity.  It might sound noble and be sprinkled with appropriate theological language, but it does not concentrate the concern of the congregation.  It provides a laundry list of individual and corporate requests without really becoming God’s song in unison from His people.  It is prayer with heart, spoken for the audience, not the Master.

Prayer that is intensely personal creates social dilemmas for those of us who live in the contemporary world of individual privacy.  But prayer in the Hebrew world never departed from its sense of awe and grandeur, mercy and wrath.  Prayer was the lifeblood of worship and it was always about how I felt now, standing in front of my Maker.  Perhaps our hesitancy to experience this intensity comes from the culture and not from the Creator.  Perhaps it’s time to break the mold and speak with God from the depths of our being in the midst of being together.

Topical Index:  prayer, pray, 2 Chronicles 6:19, palal, tephilla