Abstract
New light can be cast on Jesus’ grief-stricken prayer by contextualizing it within the growing scholarship on prayers and ritual mourning practices in the Second Temple period. The emotional prayer that Jesus prays in Gethsemane can be understood as a reenactment of a recognizable Second Temple ritual that joined emotional prayers of supplication and confession to mourning practices. This article proposes that a Second Temple ritual context is an overlooked but potentially fruitful way of understanding the ancient controversies that embroiled Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane. The cultural specificity of the emotions associated with this prayer can help to account for why ancient Greek and Roman readers experienced such sharp and divergent responses to Jesus’ prayer.
The scene of a grief-stricken Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane was one that generated controversy and questions for ancient readers, both Christian and pagan. The divergent accounts of this prayer in the Synoptic tradition, as well as John’s allusion to the scene (Jn 12.27), suggest that this unease was felt as early as the NT period. Jesus’ excessive display of pathe in Gethsemane raised significant questions about his self-understanding, his motivations and, according to some ancient readers, even his masculinity (Sandnes 2016). For these ancient readers of Mk 14.32-42, Jesus’ behavior was unseemly and expressed cowardice and self-interest; his excessive emotional display was seen to be effeminate. 2 Some pagan readers were extremely critical of Jesus’ grief in scenes like the prayer at Gethsemane and polemicized against a divine male figure who engaged in such unseemly displays of emotion. 3 Not only did Jesus’ emotional prayer raise questions about his divinity, it also challenged cultural expectations about gender in the Greek and Roman world (Ward 2009; Corley 2010; Wilson 2015). 4 Jesus’ emotional prayer and the image of his fallen body on the ground would have defied ancient pagan gendered expectations of a hero according to the noble death tradition (Wilson 2016: 207-11). Ancient pagan readers were not the only ones who did not understand such Second Temple rituals and emotional prayers. Modern biblical scholars have also not fully appreciated the Second Temple ritual context for Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane. 5 In his commentary on Mark’s gospel, M. Eugene Boring says that ‘falling on the ground is not the normal posture for prayer’ (2006: 397). Yet, remarkably, the practice of falling on the ground in prayer (Moses in Deut. 9.18, 25), and doing so in the vicinity of the Temple (Ezra 10.1) or in synchronicity with the Temple sacrifices (Jdt. 9.1), was indeed well-attested and performed by significant figures during pivotal moments in Second Temple works.
This study proposes that the Second Temple ritual context is an overlooked but potentially fruitful one for understanding the ancient controversies concerning Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane. I will argue that the cultural specificity of emotions can help to account for why later Greek and Roman readers experienced such sharp and divergent responses to Jesus’ prayer and ritual practices. The first part of this study discusses Second Temple penitential prayers and the crucial role of grief in these rituals. These prayers reenact foundational events, including those of covenant making and remaking, and the performative ritual emotions allow for the experiencing of these events with a first-hand vividness. These Second Temple prayers are widely attested and highly stylized theological accounts that emphasize the reliability of the prayer and its tangible effects from God and from the people. The second section analyzes Mark’s account of Jesus’ grief-stricken prayer at Gethsemane, with special attention to those features that it shares with Second Temple penitential prayers, especially Second Temple versions of Ezra’s prayer which reenact the paradigmatic covenant remaking ceremony performed by Moses. This discussion of Mark assumes Markan priority and will also engage briefly how Matthew can be said to make improvements to Mark. The third and final section of the article discusses the cultural specificity of emotions, especially divergent gender expectations of the ritual performance of grief. It is here where I suggest that Jesus’ grief-stricken prayer was the most controversial to early readers who would have held a clear gender expectation for these emotions. While Second Temple penitential prayer rituals were routinely performed by male leaders (Ezra, Daniel), such ritual expressions of public mourning would have been enacted by women in a Greek and Roman cultural context. This study concludes that Jesus’ emotional prayer at Gethsemane can be contextualized within a larger Second Temple ritual context that would have been unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers, and that the diverse gendered expectations of grief would have made this scene controversial to early readers of this text.
1. Second Temple Penitential Prayers and Rituals
The close of the twentieth century decisively acknowledged the Second Temple period as a critical one for understanding early Judaism and the Jewishness of early Christianity, but studies of Second Temple ritual and prayer have not yet made a significant impact on how scholars understand the NT. New attention to the postexilic period is due in large part to the manuscript discoveries in the Judean Desert in 1947, which shed greater light on Judaism during the period just prior to Christianity’s emergence. This discovery also postdates many classic historical-critical studies that had already been formulated during the early twentieth century (Gunkel 1928). The renewed attention to the Second Temple period during the last quarter of the twentieth century has become the occasion for a fresh examination of prayer texts that had until then been largely overlooked by biblical scholars. 6 The category known generally as ‘penitential prayer’ is one way of referring to an identifiable group of emotional prayers that is well-attested among Second Temple writings, but largely ignored in many classification systems designed by early form-critical scholars for multiple reasons. These early historical-critical scholars and those who had relied upon their work sought first and foremost to understand the origins of ancient Israel, and so were disinterested in the Second Temple period. This was not, however, without ideological motivation to emphasize Christianity’s dramatic and unique emergence from its Jewish context. 7 Such factors resulted in the neglect of Second Temple ritual and the omission of these prayers in many classic form-critical classifications, which were focused almost exclusively on the psalter (Harkins 2015a: 298-99). Even to this day, Second Temple prayers found in certain canonical texts (MT) are regularly prioritized over other literary contexts that are outside the Tanakh, such as the deuterocanon/apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. It is also the case that prayers remain a significant portion of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and that these are seldom incorporated into discussions of Second Temple prayer.
The methodological approach of form criticism routinely severed penitential prayers from their larger narrative context. In the aim of studying them like the psalms, this approach stripped away important narrative details of the body’s preparatory performance of funerary practices. 8 Astonishingly, scholars to this day, relying upon the scholarly categories that predate the 1940s and subsequent ones that were strongly influenced by those early twentieth-century models, continue to raise questions about the validity of ‘penitential prayer’ as an actual formal category of prayer. NT scholars following the religionsgeschichtliche Schule also bypassed Second Temple Jewish contexts in favor of drawing comparisons to pagan Greek and Roman religions. While the history of religions school’s emphasis on a broad examination of the diverse cultural contexts of the NT has certainly enriched the understanding of these texts, Second Temple Judaism has not historically been recognized as a significant cultural framework – an oversight that this study seeks to address (Coblentz Bautch 2015: 30-50). 9
The ritual performance of falling on the ground is only one of a wide-ranging constellation of practices of self-diminishment that are associated with these prayers: crying out, fasting, ashes, weeping, torn clothing, sleep deprivation, pulling hair. 10 Second Temple prayers that are associated with these mourning practices fall under the category of ‘penitential prayer’ and include supplicatory prayers, petitions and confessions of both sinfulness and praise of God. These narrative-embedded emotional prayers were variously referred to in the literature as ‘prayers of repentance’ and ‘prayers of confession’. 11 All of these practices and prayer elements, while wide-ranging, can be understood phenomenologically to cultivate a state of liminality and self-diminishment. This ritual functioned purposefully as part of a social mechanism in Second Temple Judaism to achieve important theological and sociopolitical ends by allowing for the emotional reexperiencing of divine presence and foundational events in Israel’s history with first-hand vividness, which served to deepen covenant commitment after the exile. 12
The ritual experiencing of emotion was a strategy by which communities after the rupture of the Babylonian exile were able to access with first-hand vividness an experience of continuity with foundational events, either real or imagined, from a long ago past. Key emotions of grief and desolation cultivated self-diminishment and the decentering effects of liminality, thereby creating a heightened receptivity to the ritual moment. While the effects of the penitential prayer ritual are diverse, they share a desire to bridge the Second Temple period to the foundational narratives of the past and the experience of God. The performative emotions that are strategically aroused by the retelling of Israel’s history of past failings are key in the ritual’s effectiveness because they allow individuals to access key foundational narratives from a distant past with the vividness of first-hand experience (Ezra 9.1–10.8; Neh. 9.1-37; Jdt. 9). 13 Second Temple texts depict these rituals as having a certain and reliable pro-social effect. For example, the ritual appears regularly as a feature of a much larger social mechanism that compels the people to reaffirm their commitment to the covenant (Exod. 33–34; Deut. 9; 1 Kgs 8 // 2 Chron. 6–7; Ezra 9; Neh. 9–10; 1 Esd. 8; Bar. 1.15–3.8). These texts often describe the strong pro-social effects of the ritual by including detailed descriptions of the people’s reaffirmation of the covenant, an effect that is most clearly seen in Shechaniah’s declaration that he will support Ezra (Ezra 10.2-5) and in the roster of names that appear at the conclusion of this book (10.9-44; also Neh. 9.38–12.47; cf. 2 Chron. 7.3, 9-10). 14
For our purposes, it is significant that these highly stylized theological texts depict these rituals as being largely successful in achieving some certain sign of divine or angelic presence. For example, in the Second Temple retelling of Solomon’s penitential prayer in the Temple (2 Chron. 6.1–7.22), the ritual achieves the sudden and sure sign of fire that blazes down from the heavens to consume the offering on the altar as the glory of the LORD fills the Temple (7.1-3). In Daniel, the emotional prayer and ritual mourning succeeds in generating an experience of encounter with the angel Gabriel, who then brings a prophetic interpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecy (Dan. 9.1-27). 15 Another late Second Temple apocalypse known as 4 Ezra also layers funerary practices and prayers. Here the figure of Ezra engages in multiple self-diminishing practices of fasting, weeping, sleeping in a field, abstaining from meat and wine, and praying throughout his visionary experiences. Ezra offers a prayer ‘just before he was taken up into the heavens’ in 4 Ezra 8.19b-36, which includes a lengthy series of petitions and detailed confession of sin (vv. 24-36). Penitential prayers may have diverse effects such as the remaking of the covenant or visionary and prophetic experiences. Their use of grief-stricken emotions speaks to a common desire to reexperience foundational events with the first-hand vividness during the Second Temple period, and the way in which emotions related to mourning were instrumental in bringing about other possible experiences.
Although these texts describe cases where Second Temple penitential prayers successfully produce reliable and measurable effects (e.g., visions, roster of names), individuals are not predetermined to have religious experiences; at best, we might say that religious prayers and practices cultivate the necessary predispositions that allow for the possibility of experiences (Furey 2012: 7-33; Harkins 2012a: 60-68; Mahmood 2001: 202-17; 2005: 140-47). Second Temple texts, however, should not be read as we would read modern clinical reports of a ritual’s efficacy; rather, they are highly stylized theological accounts. In other words, Second Temple ritual texts aim to persuade or to compel readers. What is notable and important for us to keep in mind as we begin our discussion of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane is the way in which these Second Temple texts overwhelmingly speak to the reliable effects of the penitential prayer. When performed by a highly esteemed figure, often there is a clear and positive response by both God and the people. It is this expectation of the ritual event that Mark exploits and overturns in his account of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane.
2. The Literary Context of Gethsemane (Mark 14.32-42)
By expanding our scholarly approach from an examination of the strictly formal components of prayer to include the larger phenomenological practices associated with these texts, we can recognize how Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane resembles the well-attested Second Temple penitential prayer ritual. Recognizing Jesus’ prayer as a ritual reenactment also means that the expression of grief in this prayer has the quality of performed emotion, but this is not to say that the ritual performance of prayer precludes any individually felt experience. The ritual features of Mk 14.32-42 have not been adequately examined because little attention was given to Jewish prayer and ritual, and there is a long-standing view that Jesus is displaying a spontaneous expression of emotion. 16 What I wish to highlight is this: the disturbing silence that Jesus receives from both God and the people in answer to his prayer in Mk 14.32-42 breaks the strong expectation of the Second Temple ritual’s efficacy. Mark understands the power of this prayer and uses it to his purposes in his Passion Narrative (PN). The absence of a response successfully highlights the theme of abandonment during a key moment of desperate need. If we assume Markan priority, we can see that each gospel writer shows some awareness of the controversial nature of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane (Mt. 26.36-46; Lk. 22.39-46), including the author of the Fourth Gospel (Jn 12.27-29).
Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane occupies a critical position in the PN found in the Gospel of Mark. In Mark, the scene follows immediately after Jesus’ Passover meal at which he speaks prophetically of his abandonment. The Gethsemane event fulfills this prophetic expectation by depicting the failure of his closest disciples (Peter, James and John) to stay awake and God’s deafening silence vis-à-vis Jesus’ prayer. These details draw us powerfully into the dramatic irony of Mark’s PN and the key role of prophetic fulfillment. While Mark does not explicitly cite scripture, he scripturalizes the PN by recasting recognizable words of scripture so that the events at Gethsemane speak powerfully to the prophetic expectations of Zech. 13.7 that are alluded to in the preceding passage (Mk 14.26-31). 17 Mark’s account draws on the well-attested Second Temple ritual which is known for its reliable results, thereby allowing God’s silence to speak to the events that have been foretold by the prophecy, namely Jesus’ seeming abandonment by both God and his friends. 18 Mark’s account uses the strong expectation of the ritual’s efficacy and turns it on its head. This fits well the gospel’s performative qualities and its heightened sense of ironic drama. 19 Matthew accentuates the ritual features of the event to make the effect of Mark’s account even more explicit. In this way, Matthew makes improvements by helping his readers to recognize more easily the ritualized features of the scene. Luke, on the other hand, recasts the prayer in a completely different set of circumstances. Some say that Luke had a special concern to distance Jesus from any display of grief (λύπη), since this would have been negatively viewed in the Hellenistic world (Green 1986; Neyrey 1980: 155-59). 20 While it is not possible to speak precisely about the demographics of Luke’s readers, his version of Jesus’ prayer at the Mount of Olives speaks well to the expected effects of this Second Temple ritual since it also ties the prayer to prophetic and visionary experiences. 21 While some manuscripts of Luke omit this detail, one of the effects of Jesus’ prayer is an encounter with an angel (Lk. 22.43-44).
Other echoes of Mark’s Gethsemane event have been recognized by scholars beyond the Synoptic parallels. It is possible that the Fourth Gospel is aware of the controversy generated by Jesus’ prayer and that it voices an objection to a misunderstanding of Jesus’ prayer at Jn 12.27-29. 22 Nevertheless, because the actual details of the prayer are not provided, it is not possible to know this with certainty (Thompson 2015: 269-70). What is notable for our purposes is how the brief scene in this gospel makes it clear that Jesus’ prayer was efficacious, for it is met with a response from God and is also heard by the crowd. This is, in fact, the only passage in John where God breaks through and speaks: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’ (Jn 12.28). Many in the crowd are said to also hear this sound which is likened to thunder (12.29). 23 In addition to John, an even more distant echo may be acknowledged in Heb. 5.7. There the author states that Jesus ‘offered up prayers and supplications to the one who was able to save him from death, with loud cries and tears, and he was heard because of his submission’ (ὃς ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ δεήσεις τε καὶ ἱκετηρίας πρὸς τὸν δυνάμενον σῴζειν αὐτὸν ἐκ θανάτου μετὰ κραυγῆς ἰσχυρᾶς καὶ δακρύων προσενέγκας καὶ εἰσακουσθεὶς ἀπὸ τῆς εὐλαβείας). Commentators on this passage have long observed that the Gethsemane scene was the most likely source for this reference. 24 The insistence that Jesus’ prayer was heard flies in the face of the account given in Mark and Matthew, yet comports with Jn 12.27-28, which speaks to the efficacious effects of the prayer against the reading of abandonment that is crucial for Mark’s Passion.
Second Temple penitential rituals are well attested and speak to the reliability of the ritual in producing two effects: a response from God and a pro-social effect among the people, both of which are not achieved in Mk 14.32-42. The silence from God and the disappointing behavior of the disciples underscore the ironic way in which Mark’s PN understands Jesus’ Passion as a necessary fulfillment of the total abandonment prophesied in Zech. 13.7 (Mk 14.27-30).
2.1 Jesus’ Prayer as a Second Temple Penitential Prayer (Mark 14.32-42)
Discussion of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane (Mk 14.32-42) must begin with the observation that the image of Jesus presented by Mark, both here and throughout the PN, departs in a striking way from the image of Jesus as a powerful healer and exorcist that prevails in the earlier chapters of Mark’s gospel (Yarbro Collins 2007: 676). In the PN, Jesus is thoroughly humbled and completely stripped of the extraordinary power he displayed during his ministry. Without engaging in the significant source-critical questions behind the strikingly different portraits of Jesus in the ministry portions of the gospel and the PN, it is sufficient to say that the strong image of Jesus that appears prior to the PN fits well the ritual requirements that the prayer should be enacted by a highly esteemed religious leader.
According to Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ prayer takes place at night in a garden called Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives very near the Temple. Jesus is with the same three disciples who were present with him at the Transfiguration scene in Mk 9.2-8. 25 His prayer is introduced by the prophetic words that the disciples who are with him will all become deserters (14.27-30). Here the author of the second gospel places in Jesus’ mouth the prophecy that the shepherd will be struck down and the sheep lost. 26 While readers of Mark’s gospel have been well prepared for the inevitable death and resurrection of Christ with the three predictions in 8.31–9.1, 9.30-32 and 10.32-34, the Zechariah passage underscores the fact that the events that follow should be understood as fulfillment of prophecy. Jesus adds yet another reference to his being raised up and his plan to go before them to Galilee (14.28), thus directing the reader’s attention to the future events of the cross and resurrection. At this point, Peter passionately insists that he will not desert Jesus, to which Jesus foretells Peter’s threefold denial, a response that is met with Peter’s further pledge of loyalty (14.31). These events which introduce the Gethsemane scene set the stage for the total abandonment of Jesus in the PN writ large. In a sense, Zechariah’s prophetic words of total desertion find their immediate fulfillment in the disciples’ threefold failure to stay awake at Gethsemane; indeed, they will also completely desert him at the arrest (14.50), and Peter will also deny him three times. It is also the case that Jesus’ prayer in Mk 14.32-42 receives no immediate response from God, thus mirroring Jesus’ abandonment by his friends. The scripted words of the psalmist are placed on Jesus’ lips in the crucifixion scene: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (15.34; cf. Ps. 22.2; LXX Ps. 21.2) and express the depths of Jesus’ suffering. 27 While the tearing of the temple curtain or the empty tomb can be seen as God’s immediate response to Jesus’ cry on the cross (15.38), there is no clear immediate response to Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer from God. 28 For the reader of the gospel, Gethsemane is understood through the lens of the three Passion predictions; the suffering and death of Jesus is necessary to fulfill the prophetic expectation.
Gethsemane is notable for the dramatic display of emotions expressed and the petitionary language used. The scene begins with a clear statement of Jesus’ emotional distress (Mk 14.33-34). He separates from these three companions after urging them to stay awake and falls to the ground (ἔπιπτεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, 14.35). His prayer consists of three petitions asking God – ‘for whom all things are possible’ – to spare him the suffering that is to come (14.35-36, 39). The words in these petitions have been studied in light of the petitionary language in the Lord’s Prayer known from Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark. 29 Each of Jesus’ petitions is followed by the report that the disciples were sleeping. They had all failed miserably to keep Jesus’ command to them to keep watch. The orchestration of events indicates that the Markan author wants us to see the disciples’ threefold failure as part of the ironic and notable fulfillment of the foretelling of desertion in 14.27, which is realized at Jesus’ arrest (Mk 14.50) and, of course, in Peter’s three denials (14.68, 70, 71), all of which reinforce the understanding that Mark’s PN is programmatically a story of prophecy fulfilled.
Most commentaries understand Jesus’ grief-stricken emotions as the spontaneous eruption of his interior weakness and evidence of his human fear (Donahue and Harrington 2002: 411; Boring 2006: 398). The following sections present Jesus’ bodily experiences, including his emotions, and words as evidence that Mark understands Gethsemane as the scripted reenactment of a penitential prayer. This is not to say that ritual reenactment of grief precludes any first-hand experience of anguish, nor is it the case that Jesus did not experience any actual suffering in the Passion, but rather to note that Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane has many scripted elements, including the scripting of emotion. We have previously discussed (Section 1) how a phenomenological and integrative understanding of the experience of prayer is preferable over a strictly form-critical understanding of prayer which only considers words apart from bodily practices. Thus, in contrast to most studies of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane that focus almost exclusively on the petitions or the words of Jesus, we begin first with the details that are given about Jesus’ bodily posture before turning to the words of Jesus’ prayer in Mk 14.32-42.
2.2 Ritualizing Jesus’ Body at Gethsemane
Modern assumptions about prayer often understand it as an authentic eruption of interior thoughts, desires and feelings. This is especially true in the case of expressions of mourning in which the body’s display is taken to be the outpouring of the interior grief that is felt. In the past 20 years, scholars have noted well that the body’s practices are not produced by interior thoughts, but rather religious practices are the very mechanism by which interiority is generated. The move to recognize the importance of religious practices has become a marker of the scholarly discussions of religion since the early 2000s, largely resulting from the increased globalization of the academy to include contemporary forms of religion that are heavily practice based (Mahmood 2005). 30 Ultimately, such practice-based models of religion are more useful for thinking about the study of prayer and ritual during the late Second Temple period. With respect to the body and its display of emotions, this section will consider Mk 14.32-42 first and foremost as a ritual performance of a significant Second Temple prayer for covenant remaking.
Both Mark and Matthew depict Jesus as having ‘fallen on the ground’ (καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπιπτεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ προσηύχετο, Mk 14.35 // καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ προσευχόμενος, Mt. 26.39), a prayer posture that is ritually important in Second Temple prayers. According to Ezra 10.1, ‘Ezra prayed, and confessed, weeping, and collapsing before the house of God’ (i.e., the Temple). The word that appears here and translated as ‘collapsing’ (וּמִתְנַפֵּ֔ל) is the same word that is used for Moses’ intercessory prayer of remaking the covenant after the golden calf (Exod. 32–34), an event that is retold in Deut. 9.18, 25 (Harkins 2016: 486-90). 31 It is also noteworthy that the verb for ‘collapsing’ in prayer (here, the hitpael form of the verb נפל) appears only in these two contexts in the entirety of the Tanakh, the same two passages that speak about the emotional covenant remaking ritual that Ezra and Moses perform at Deut. 9.18, 25 (×2) and Ezra 10.1. Matthew routinely revises several Markan references to ‘falling’ as ‘prostration’, 32 an improvement that results in a more ceremonial retelling of the Markan versions. It is notable that Matthew chooses to preserve Mark’s language of ‘falling’ here at Gethsemane 33 because falling is the distinctive feature of this ritual reenactment.
The characteristic feature of Mark’s account of Jesus’ bodily posture at Gethsemane, namely that Jesus fell to the ground in prayer, can be compared with this Second Temple scene of Ezra’s prayer, itself a reenactment of Moses’ paradigmatic prayer after the golden calf incident. Notably, the LXX of Deut. 9 and Ezra 10 do not preserve a word for ‘falling’ or ‘collapsing’. Moses’ prayer uses a word for imploring (δέομαι) at LXX Deut. 9.18, 25, while the LXX Ezra 10.1 has the word προσευχόμενος, the same word that is used for praying in Mk 14.35 // Mt. 26.39. Nevertheless, the image of Ezra falling or collapsing during his prayer is preserved in a Second Temple text known as 1 Esdras, a Greek work that revises various events that took place after the return to Judea. 34 In that text, the figure of Ezra is elevated even higher than his already esteemed rank in the familiar accounts of his deeds known from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Readers of 1 Esdras are given the additional detail that the garments that he tears in preparation for his prayer (Ezra 9.3) were ‘holy garments’ (διέρρηξα τὰ ἱμάτια καὶ τὴν ἱερὰν ἐσθῆτα), a detail that is mentioned twice in 1 Esd. 8.68 and 70. This term can be understood as an equivalent to the ‘holy garments’ reserved for the high priest Aaron and his sons according to Exod. 28.4 (Japhet 2011: 219-20). Thus, it is noteworthy that 1 Esdras elevates the figure of Ezra beyond the status he enjoyed as a skilled scribe (Ezra 7.6, 11; cf. Neh. 8.1, 4, 13; 12.36) and priest (Ezra 10.10, 16; cf. Neh. 8.2) in the Tanakh to the status of high priest (ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς) in 1 Esd. 9.40. For our discussion of Jesus’ prayer posture, this account of Ezra’s prayer according to 1 Esd. 8 preserves a reference to him collapsing in prayer, a curious detail that we have already noted as absent in LXX Ezra 10.1, but present in MT Ezra 10.1. According to NRSV 1 Esd. 8.91 (= LXX 1 Esd. 8.88; VUL 3 Esd. 8.92], Ezra is said to be praying (προσευχόμενος) whilst having fallen down on the ground (χαμαιπετής) in front of the temple.
While Ezra was praying and making his confession, weeping and having fallen on the ground before the temple [LXX 1 Esd. 8.88; VUL 3 Esd. 8.92] (καὶ ὅτε προσευχόμενος Εσδρας ἀνθωμολογεῖτο κλαίων χαμαιπετὴς ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ ἱεροῦ)
The word that is used here to describe Ezra’s bodily posture is based on the same root, πίπτω, that appears in both Mark (καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπιπτεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ προσηύχετο, 14.35) and Matthew (καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ προσευχόμενος, 26.39). The version of Ezra’s prayer in 1 Esdras preserves the verbal link to Moses’ prayer after the calf, in which he was also said to have collapsed to the ground, a detail found in MT Ezra 10.1 but not in LXX Ezra 10.1. How a reader might visualize Mark’s account of Jesus’ nighttime anguished prayer in the vicinity of the Temple is not dissimilar to the way one would imagine Ezra’s prayer in 1 Esdras, an event that was ultimately a Second Temple reenactment of Moses’ foundational covenant remaking prayer. Jesus’ bodily posture, the nighttime setting of his prayer and the location of the scene near the Jerusalem Temple are all details from the Gethsemane scene that point to a Second Temple ritual context. Modern scholars, strongly shaped by a strictly canonical perspective, may not have been familiar with the strong links that Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane has to Second Temple texts like 1 Esdras.
2.3 Jesus’ Words at Gethsemane
According to Mk 14.33-34, Jesus ‘began to be greatly disturbed and distressed’ (καὶ ἤρξατο ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν, 14.33b). After this opening detail about Jesus’ emotional state, Jesus says: ‘My soul is deeply grieved unto death’ (περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου, 14.34 // Mt. 26.38). The Markan author does not offer this as a quotation of Jesus’ own words which erupt from within him; instead, they are the scripted words of the psalmist. This is a well-recognized reference to the refrain of the individual lament LXX Ps. 41.6, 12; 42.5 (MT Ps. 42.6, 12; 43.5) (Hays 2005: 101-18; Goodacre 2006: 33-47; Allison 2010: 387-433). Notably, Mark’s account of Jesus’ words on the cross is also enscripted by the psalmist’s words from Ps. 22.2 – repeated also in Matthew’s crucifixion scene (LXX Ps. 21.1). The use of the psalmist’s words speaks to the evangelist’s understanding that this scene was scripted by prophetic expectation and that the events of the PN are a fulfillment of scripture (Mk. 14.49b). So too, the threefold repetition of commanding the three disciples to remain awake (Mk 14.34, 38, 39) and finding that they have fallen short of this command each time (vv. 37, 40, 41) contribute to the quality of this scene as a ritual performance.
The psalmist’s word for ‘deeply grieved’ (περίλυπός, LXX Ps. 41.6, 12; 42.5) is a relatively uncommon word, appearing only eight times in the entirety of the LXX, and only four times in the NT.
35
Two of those instances appear in the version of Ezra’s penitential prayer found in the Second Temple text known as 1 Esdras which is a retelling of Ezra’s prayer described in Ezra 9–10. In 1 Esdras, Ezra is said twice to be overcome with ‘excessive grief’ (περίλυπος): [NRSV 1 Esdras 8.71] As soon as I heard these things I tore my garments and my holy mantle, and pulled out hair from my head and beard, and sat down in anxiety and grief. [8.72] And all who were ever moved at the word of the Lord of Israel gathered around me, as I mourned over this iniquity, and I sat grief-stricken until the evening sacrifice. [LXX 1 Esdras 8.68 = VUL 3 Esdras 8.72] καὶ ἅμα τῷ ἀκοῦσαί με ταῦτα διέρρηξα τὰ ἱμάτια καὶ τὴν ἱερὰν ἐσθῆτα καὶ κατέτιλα τοῦ τριχώματος τῆς κεφαλῆς καὶ τοῦ πώγωνος καὶ ἐκάθισα σύννους καὶ περίλυπος [LXX 8.69; Vul 8.73] καὶ ἐπισυνήχθησαν πρός με ὅσοι ποτὲ ἐπεκινοῦντο τῷ ῥήματι κυρίου τοῦ Ισραηλ ἐμοῦ πενθοῦντος ἐπὶ τῇ ἀνομίᾳ καὶ ἐκαθήμην περίλυπος ἕως τῆς δειλινῆς θυσίας.
Matthew can be said to improve Mark’s account of Jesus’ prayer when he accentuates the connection to Ezra’s Second Temple ritual performance by emphasizing Jesus’ emotional state. He revises Mark’s words ‘distressed and dismayed’ (ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν) to ‘grieved and troubled’ (λυπεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν), effectively doubling the language of grief in this passage and reminding readers of the twofold reference to Ezra’s excessive grief (περίλυπος) in 1 Esdras. While modern scholars have strong disciplinary biases in favor of the MT and LXX versions of books that are preserved in the Tanakh today, it is reasonable to think that the ancient evangelist was familiar with broader Second Temple traditions, such as the one preserved in 1 Esdras.
Gethsemane was controversial for early readers because Jesus’ emotional display and petitionary language was seen to be unseemly for a divine man. Assuming Markan priority, it appears that Matthew has further emphasized Jesus’ grief-stricken emotional state – something that was problematic for early Greek and Roman readers who had a strong social expectation that the display of grief was women’s work. I propose that Matthew’s change is best understood as an improvement because it accentuated the scene’s scripted ritual features. For Mark’s and Matthew’s readers, Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane could have been understood as a reenactment of an important ritual act that was well attested in Second Temple literature.
3. Engendering Ritual Grief
Ritual grief was widely practiced in the Second Temple period (Anderson 1991; Olyan 2004) in ways that would have been distinct from the classical expectations held by the ancient Christians. Prayers and practices in early Judaism strategically layered the emotions associated with grief with prayers that further cultivate the experience of self-diminishment. The stock features of these Second Temple prayers (viz., lament, petitions, confession of sin/confession of God’s greatness, retellings of past failings from foundational narratives) all cultivate the experience of self-diminishment and liminality. They appear alongside funerary practices that also contribute to the experience of liminality (viz., weeping, ashes, lowering the self onto the knees, prostration, falling on the ground). These prayers and practices were performed by high-status individuals. 36 Worthy figures such as Moses, Ezra and Daniel offer prayers and perform ritual acts that reenact the desolation and anguish of the foundational experiences of loss that accompanied the initial breaking and remaking of the covenant in the wilderness and the sixth-century experience of exile and loss of the Temple. Their prayers were scripted to cultivate self-diminishment, but they were not autobiographical because these individuals were not confessing their own personal sins. Rather, they were confessing the people’s failure to obey the covenant (e.g., Moses in Exod. 34.9; Ezra 9.6-15 // 1 Esd. 8.74-90; Dan. 9.4-19). 37
Second Temple references to ritual mourning practices and prayers differed strikingly from other classical expressions of grief, which overwhelmingly associated such practices with women. Plato looked with disdain upon practices of public mourning and consigned these roles to women and to low-status men so that viewers would not be encouraged to imitate them (Republic, Book III.387a-388c). Plutarch expresses similar views in his Letter of Condolence to Apollonius (§ 113): They say that the lawgiver of the Lycians ordered his citizens, whenever they mourned, to clothe themselves first in women’s garments and then to mourn, wishing to make it clear that mourning is womanish and unbecoming to decorous men who lay claim to the education of the free-born. Yes, mourning is verily feminine, and weak, and ignoble, since women are more given to it than men, and barbarians more than Greeks, and inferior men more than better men. (trans. Babbitt 1928: 165, 167)
Classical antiquity disdainfully regarded these ritual practices when they were performed by noble men because high-status men were expected to express their grief in more fitting ways – through measured and eloquent forms of speech. It was unseemly for a noble man to display unrestrained grief because it was associated strongly with the public mourning behaviors of women. 38 Embodied displays of grief and anguish that were enacted by important male leaders in late Second Temple texts (e.g., weeping, wailing, fasting, tearing clothes, positioning the body in a humbled state) were, by and large, behaviors that the classical world would have closely identified with women’s work of ritual mourning (Holst-Warhaft 1995: 98-126; Corley 2010: 21-64). 39
In the ancient world, emotions ‘looked more to agency and effect on social standing than to one’s inner state’ (Konstan 2006: 258). Studies of emotion in recent years have demonstrated how the English language masks the complexity that these embodied and cognitive experiences had in the premodern world (Dixon 2011: 298-312). Modern understandings of emotion do not align with premodern notions of the passions and the affections. Looking at emotions from a historical perspective is, therefore, a significant way of considering them, although such historical studies do not claim to diagnose actual individuals and their bodily experiences of emotions, but only how select people chose to disclose and represent how they felt in the texts and other media that have survived. 40 So too modern discussions of grief consider the ways in which grief is and is not an emotion. In the classical world, grief (λύπη) was ambiguous. It was not classified by Aristotle as a passion; instead, it was understood to resemble a physical pain in so far as it was experienced by all, irrespective of social standing (Konstan 2006: 244-58). It is significant to note that, even among the Greeks, grief had the capacity to cause other physical conditions and cognitive states; in other words, grief itself was a generative state insofar as it could bring a person from one experience to another. 41 David Konstan writes, ‘The Greeks and Romans recognized the power of grief, and devised ways of assuaging it, from philosophical advice to official limits on the period of mourning’ (2006: 257). For the purposes of our discussion, it is clear that grief in the ancient world was engendered differently by Greeks and Romans than by Jews. Significantly, all groups in the ancient world acknowledge mourning as a performance, thus highlighting how ancient attitudes differed from modern expectations, which tend to regard expressions of mourning strictly as eruptions of an interior state.
In both Second Temple Judaism and classical Greek culture, mourning rituals were heavily regulated by social conventions and public policy. Rituals of mourning frequently employed acts of self-diminishment in which the mourner’s own body was made to express the liminality of death and to demonstrate the loss of power in this world (e.g., covering oneself in ashes, tearing the hair, being brought physically lower than full upright posture; see Olyan 2004; Lambert 2015). Performing funerary practices along with discursive penitential prayer traditions (e.g., confession of sins and petitions) are two different strategies for layering experiences of grief, understood here to be desolation marked intensely by loss. Such an experiential effect may account for the references to covenant experiences that often accompany penitential prayers in the Second Temple period, because the phenomenal experience of diminishment assists in reconstituting the moment of covenantal encounter as one finds him/herself in the presence of a terrifying sovereign deity (Harkins 2015a: 303-304, 310-12). By expanding our scholarly attention to the phenomenal experience of these Second Temple prayer forms, we can more profitably examine the relationship between ritual practices and their meaningful function within larger social mechanisms. Scholars have already observed that penitential prayers were frequently associated with covenant renewal experiences that reenacted the encounter between Moses and
4. Conclusion
While classical historical-critical scholars often examined biblical prayers with methods like form criticism, they seldom studied Second Temple prayers at any length due to a scholarly bias that favored the study of ancient Israel’s origins over later periods. The narrative details that surrounded these Second Temple prayers often contained references to funerary practices that included weeping, fasting and collapsing on the ground, all of which aimed to cultivate a strong emotional state within the pray-er. And so, while it is valuable to recognize the formal literary features of penitential prayer, recent scholarship on prayer literature from the Second Temple period suggests that prayers and their performance were not fixed in a rigid way, but were creatively redeployed during this time. For example, the prayer in Ezra 9 lacks a petitionary element. 43 It is more helpful to think of Second Temple penitential prayer as a recognizable set of phenomenal experiences which included prayer elements like the confession of sins and petitions along with various bodily practices that cultivate liminality and self-diminishment. As a set of recognizable acts, mourning rites and penitential prayers could be creatively redeployed and adapted to changing circumstances during the Second Temple period. Just as these components come together in something that is more than just the sum of its parts, 44 the enactment of mourning rites and penitential prayer speaks to a larger phenomenal ritual experience that served diverse purposes in the Second Temple period, including covenant remaking, prophetic and visionary experiences, and experiences of transformation.
The culturally specific emotions associated with Second Temple rituals did not easily translate from one cultural context to another. The increased scholarly attention to the Second Temple prayers and rituals during the past 15 years makes this present inquiry into Jesus’ emotional prayer at Gethsemane a timely one. Various features in Mark’s Gethsemane account align with the Second Temple penitential prayer recorded in 1 Esd. 8.68-96, but this association may have been overlooked because of a scholarly predisposition to turn first to the texts in the Tanakh or to the LXX texts that overlap with them. Mark’s ritual details are further accentuated in Matthew’s version, which effectively doubles the grief that Jesus experiences at Gethsemane, thereby highlighting a ritually significant emotion for his readers. Recognizing the ritual elements of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane casts light on how the author of Mark’s gospel could be said to present the entirety of the PN as a carefully scripted story of prophecy-fulfilled which was focused on the cross, ultimately understanding the remaking of the covenant in the crucifixion.
Footnotes
1.
This study has benefited from many thoughtful and generous conversations that I have had with several scholars over a period of several years. While I cannot name each and every person, I do want to thank in a special way Chris Keith for his insightful comments on this topic. Even though I have not always followed their suggestions, I am grateful for the ways in which they have engaged my ideas and I appreciate their helpful suggestions. Any remaining errors are solely my own.
2.
Sandnes’s recent study of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane examines the controversial ways that Jesus’ emotions were received by readers of this text (2016). Other studies of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane include Feuillet 1977; Cha 1996; 
: 335-49.
3.
Origen tells us that Celsus found Jesus’ mourning, lamenting and praying at Gethsemane to be inconsistent with him being a God (Contra Celsum 2.23-24). Celsus survives only through the references that Origen has made in Contra Celsum (248 ce).
5.
6.
As many as thirty volumes of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert have been published since the late 1990s, thus flooding the scholarly world with texts and effectively creating the specialization of Second Temple studies. Significant studies of prayer include Falk 1998; Werline 1998; Boda 1999; Newman 1999; Duggan 2001; Chazon 2003; Kugel 2006; McDowell 2006; Boda, Falk and Werline 2006, 2007, 2008; Harkins 2012a; Matlock 2012; Penner, Penner and Wassen 2012, Penner 2012; Lambert 2015; Reif and Egger-Wenzel 2015; .
7.
That the study of biblical prayer forms has been profoundly influenced by the ideological biases of the modern interpreter has been well noted in the literature; see Ballentine 1993: 1-32. Hempel lamented the fact that prayers had been held in disdain in a post-Enlightenment milieu, especially among scholars who preferred rational intellectualism over piety; see Hempel 1922: 3. Others have noted the ideological bias against religious practices in the academy; e.g., Smith 1978: 172-89; 1994. Greenberg had also critiqued the scholarly bias in favor of ‘simple spontaneous heartfelt prayer’ and against formal prayers (1983: 39). Recently, the discipline’s longstanding prioritization of religious thought (teachings, doctrines, texts) over religious practices (rituals, rites, liturgy) has continued to be critiqued in the past 20 years, in part due to the increased globalization of the study of religion which has increasingly incorporated scholarly perspectives from practice-based religious traditions like Islam; e.g., Mahmood 2001 and 2005. Phenomenological understandings of religion from an embodied and integrative perspective have emerged to balance a longstanding preoccupation with texts alone; see Geertz 2000 and .
8.
The severing of the prayer from any literary context and with no regard for the non-verbal performative or ritual aspects of prayer were typical. Form criticism’s emphasis on form and setting in life has dominated the study of prayers (Gunkel 1928). Mowinckel (repr. 1962: I, 12-22) critiqued Gunkel for overemphasizing interiority and disregarding the significance of ritual contexts. Even so, the analysis of form without content is still the prevailing way of thinking about biblical prayers. These biases about the study of prayer extended beyond the biblical literature to the study of ancient Jewish prayer. discusses how the preoccupation with the verbal with no regard for the performative has also characterized the study of rabbinic prayers in the nineteenth century.
9.
The long-lasting influence of scholars like Bousset (1921) of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule can be seen in the recent republication of his influential work, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus (2013). The early Christian recognition of Jesus’ divinity was viewed by Bousset as being a second-century development, while others hold that this was a feature of the earliest Christian ritual practices (see ).
10.
Olyan 2004; Penner 2014: 234-46; : 351-66.
11.
Schuller speaks about a lack of coherence in the formal scholarly descriptions of these prayers and is reluctant to identify an actual literary category of penitential prayer (2007: 1-15). On this point about classification, see : 298-99.
12.
While the Sitz im Leben of penitential prayers has not been conclusively identified, these prayers were frequently associated with covenant renewal experiences during the Second Temple period; see Steck 1967: 134-35 and : 37-38. Thus, the ritual appears in religio-political contexts in 2 Chron. 6–7; Ezra 9–10; Neh. 9–10, but also in contexts that speak of the generation of prophetic and visionary experiences (Dan. 9; Bar. 1.15–3.8), and in the ritual reexperiencing of foundational narratives for the sake of emboldening readers during times of distress (Jdt. 9).
13.
Performative emotions are ritually scripted emotions; see Ebersole 2000: 211-46. For example, Ezra’s prayer (Ezra 9) is an emotional look at the foundational experience of wilderness rebellion and the Deuteronomic teaching concerning intermarriage; Neh. 9–10 refers back to the foundational experiences in the wilderness when Israel first entered into covenant relationship with : 230-37.
14.
15.
The reenactment of mourning rituals can be understood as precipitating the visionary experience. Merkur compared this process to the naturally occurring experience of bi-polar episodes (1989: 134). In contrast, I have proposed that the ritually induced state of mourning can bring about the naturally occurring cognitive state of rumination which includes as one of its effects the vivid experiencing of presence from absence (: 14-32; 2017: 80-101).
17.
This may also be an allusion to 2 Sam. 15.16-30, when David’s friend Ahithophel betrays him by joining Absalom, David goes up barefoot to the Mount of Olives to weep and pray to God. Boring notes this scene in his discussion of Mk 14.27 (2006: 393). David’s prayer appears to have the same aim as the penitential prayers, namely a desire for some sign of recommitment, which David does receive in part in the form of Hushai’s allegiance (2 Sam. 15.32-33).
18.
19.
Sweat describes well the significant role that God’s omnipotence plays in how this scene should be understood (2013: 13-27, 115-32); on abandonment in Mk 15.34, see Campbell 2006 and .
20.
For a discussion of the negative connotations of λύπη in Stoic philosophy, see Gavin 2010: 427-29; for a discussion of the diverse cultural understanding of λύπη among pagans in the Roman Empire, see : 109-40; both essays speak about λύπη in the context of 2 Cor. 7.
21.
While some manuscripts of Luke omit this detail, one of the effects of Jesus’ prayer is an encounter with an angel (Lk. 22.43-44). Green understands Jesus’ prayer largely through the lens of martyrology; the assistance from an angel appears in 3 Macc. 6.18-29; Dan. 3.25 (: 40-41); we maintain, however, that the association between prayer and visionary experiences is an expectation that is stronger in the Second Temple penitential rituals, e.g., Dan. 9.20-23; 10.2-9.
22.
‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour’ (Jn 12.27).
23.
We will not engage with the details in Jn 12 as they might relate to Mark’s Gethsemane, but only note that these verses speak to the controversial reception of this prayer even during the time of the NT writers.
24.
Attridge (1989: 148-49) discusses the possible understandings of this passage, including that this alludes to a ‘divergent Gethsemane tradition’ (148), preferring to see these verses in light of ‘a traditional Jewish ideal of a righteous person’s prayer’ (148-49). While we cannot decisively determine that the Hebrews passage (5.7-10) refers to Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane, it is fitting to include this passage as an echo of Gethsemane. Another possibility is to understand Heb. 5.7-10 as influenced by the prayer in Ps. 94.6 LXX (δεῦτε προσκυνήσωμεν καὶ προσπέσωμεν αὐτῷ καὶ κλαύσωμεν ἐναντίον κυρίου τοῦ ποιήσαντος ἡμᾶς), which includes penitential elements like ‘weeping’ that are absent in MT Ps. 95. This is relevant since the LXX Ps. 94 is given extensive discussion in the immediate context of Heb. 5.7-10 (at chs. 3–4). Several scholars have noted positively the connection between Heb. 5.7-10 and Gethsemane, including Jeremias 1950–53: 107-11; Omark 1958: 39-51; Feuillet 1976: 49-53; : 200-201.
25.
There are some intertextual links between the Transfiguration and Jesus’ prayer at the Mount of Olives in Luke’s gospel.
26.
27.
There are diverging views about how to understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross, which is itself a reference to MT Ps. 22.2 (LXX Ps. 21.2). Various scenes from Mk 15 draw upon the language and imagery in this lament psalm: dividing Jesus’ clothing (LXX Ps. 21.19 and Mk 15.24), wagging heads (LXX Ps. 21.8 and Mk 15.29), cruel taunts that Jesus should save himself (LXX Ps. 21.9 and Mk 15.30; LXX Ps. 21.9 and Mk 15.31b), reproach (LXX Ps. 21.7 and Mk 15.32b); see : 140-43 for a full discussion. Some of the debates about reading Mark’s PN through the lens of total abandonment go back to early studies that puzzled over the implications of seeing the gospels as a fulfillment of scripture: does this mean that the gospels are solely and simply mythical (non-historical) stories based on the prophetic traditions, or do they speak to some historical event; see Goguel 1926: 156-78. That Jesus’ cry on the cross expressed his deeply felt human experience of abandonment by God and his friends is a common understanding; see, e.g., Crossan 1978; Brown 1994. Some have strongly resisted seeing Mark’s crucifixion scene as a story of total abandonment by God. For Hays, Jesus’ crucifixion does not have to be read as a total abandonment if we assume that Mark understood Jesus and God to be one and the same (2016: 79-86, esp. 84). Donahue and Harrington take the view that the citation of this verse from Ps. 22 (LXX Ps. 21) speaks of total abandonment, but the intent is to draw upon the culmination of the psalm which speaks of ‘confidence in God’s power to act and to vindicate the suffering righteous speaker’ (2002: 451). These topics are well navigated by Carey 2009.
28.
It is possible to imagine the illocutionary force of Jesus’ words in Mk 14.41-42 as expressing the effect of a renewed resolve to face what is about to happen. Jesus says: ‘Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up! Let’s go! See my betrayer is at hand!’ (14.41-42). Perhaps the effect would resemble that of Judith’s prayer which emboldened her to face the difficult events that followed (10.1-5; 19, 23); I wish to thank Chris Keith for this suggestion.
29.
Elements from Jesus’ petitions in Mark’s Gethsemane have been seen in the petitionary language found in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke; calling God ‘father’ (αββα ὁ πατήρ in Mk 14.36), God’s will, and the reference to temptation. See Goulder 1963: 32-45; Smith 1970: 54-55; Van Tilborg 1972: 94-105; : 237-56.
30.
Critiques of the modern west have come from non-western scholars and voiced in postcolonial studies, the most influential of which is Said 1979; for a summary, see .
31.
Deut. 9.25 reads: ‘I collapsed before the : 306-307.
32.
E.g., προσεκύνει αὐτῷ in Mt. 8.2 revises γονυπετῶν αὐτόν in Mk 1.40; προσεκύνει αὐτῷ in Mt. 9.18 revises πίπτει πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ in Mk 5.22; προσεκύνει αὐτῷ in Mt. 15.25 revises προσέπεσεν πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ in Mk 7.25.
33.
Some form of προσκυνέω appears 13 times in Mt. 2.2, 8, 11; 4.9, 10; 8.2; 9.18; 14.33; 15.25; 18.26; 20.20; 28.9, 17; in contrast to the two appearances at Mk 5.6; 15.19.
34.
35.
Gen. 4.6; 1 Esd. 8.68, 69; G1 Tob. 3.1; Pss. 41.6, 12; 42.5; LXX Dan. 2.12; Mt. 26.38; Mk 6.26; 14.34; Lk. 18.23.
36.
‘Mourning’ refers to the social practices attached to grief; ‘grief’ is the emotion of desolation and feeling of loss. The modern period frequently pairs bereavement and loss with the impairment of agency and normal functioning.
37.
Moses draws himself into the events, even though he is not guilty of any crime, by saying: ‘If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon ).
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kgs 8.22-53 and 2 Chron. 6–7 is not always included in penitential lists, but it does contain many features. See Boda 1999: 209-13; : 24-52.