Some Notes on the Old Testament Attitude to Prayer

Extract

The aim of the following paragraphs is to say something which, without exhausting the topic or even examining anything like every instance of prayer recorded in the OT, will yet permit us to form some opinion of what the Hebrew thought he was doing when he turned to God in prayer. I had better make clear at the outset that I am confining myself almost exclusively to prayer as between man and God, for until I started looking around I had no idea how indefinite are the boundaries of prayer; one writer even includes remarks on the musical instruments of the Bible! Inclusions more easily justified are the ascriptions of praise to Yahweh; but I have thought it better on the whole to confine myself to the field of petition and intercession, i.e. where the pray-er asks for something; since, on the whole, prayer—at least on the more primitive level—might be defined without being too wide of the mark, as man's attempt to get God to meet a particular need—a need very often, according to the ancient view, brought about and inflicted upon him as a punishment for some dereliction of duty.

It was the constant assumption of the Israelite that happiness was the condition intended by Yahweh to be the normal state of the good man:

Blessed [i.e. happy] is the nation whose God is Yahweh. (Ps. 33.12)