Prayer in the Hebrew Bible

Overtures to Biblical Theology

by Samuel E. Balentine

Balentine has forged new categories of analysis beyond our old critical pigeonholes. In the end, he has shown that prayer is neither a marginal activity undertaken after intellectual analysis nor an act of piety to fend off critical study . . . These prayer texts have required and permitted much hard, disciplined work in the long traditioning process. Now they offer to us an act of communication and a special world that refuses the voicelessness of technical society. In this world of Israel's faithful prayer and prayerful faith, the heavens are not empty, and the earth need not be mute.

Genres: Prayer, Biblical Studies

328 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

Reviews

[Daniel Supimpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Balentine's study was very helpful in terms of developing a specifically literary-theological reading of Old Testament narrative prayers. As the author himself points out, there has been little work to apply the literary approaches of Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg or Adele Berlin to explore biblical narratives of prayer. To my knowledge, the books on biblical spirituality or, even more specifically, on the biblical theology of prayer up to 2017 do not count up to more than 30. Among those, Balentine is one of the best for anyone interested in theological interpretation.

Balentine's strong points are his perceptive character in noticing the characterization of both the pray-er and God, and his final theological reflections on the theology behind, in and produced by the prayers of the OT (the last chapter is, for me, one of the best treatments of biblical theology of prayer I've read so far).