Prayers of Jewish Women: Studies of Patterns of Prayer in the Second Temple Period (review)

This book is an elaborated Ph.D. dissertation submitted at Fuller Theological Seminary, and its main focus is clear from its title. It discusses some dozens of prayers that appear in a vast literature from non-Rabbinic Judaism from the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the writings of Josephus and Philo. The common denominator of these prayers is that they are all attributed to women, either as reflecting a “real” history or a literary one. The purpose of the book is twofold; neither is less important than the other: liturgy on the one hand and feminine perspectives in Antiquity on the other. McDowell studies prayers and not full books, but he is highly aware of modern study on those books in which the prayers he analyzes are incorporated. The study is a literary criticism combined with theology and feminine studies. Its literary criticism is derived from the German biblical scholarship on the one hand and Israeli scholars on the other.

The five chapters are organized very systematically. The first chapter is devoted to methodology, and it discusses prayers according to the following patterns: location, content, form, occasion, and perspective. Though “perspective” sounds highly relative, McDowell explains that he means: 1) “gynocentric perspective”; 2) “feminine imagery and vocabulary” and 3) “gender-specific language.” In other words, this “perspective” is none other than a sub-issue of content, and the main problem is to what extent words such as “handmaid” or female body parts disclose the gender of the text, if there is such, or even reveal the gender of the author.

McDowell presents his findings, as well as former scholarship in this subject, in a very balanced way. After discussing methodology he writes on prayers attributed to females according to the books divided in time and origin: Palestinian or Diaspora origin. The analyzed prayers come from additions to Esther, Judith, Jubilees, Susanna, Tobit, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Testament of Job, Joseph and Asenath, Third Maccabees, the works of Philo of Alexandria, Fourth Maccabees, Second Baruch, Fourth Ezra, Sibylline Oracles, and the Writings of Josephus. After discussing each and every prayer in a very systematic way, including all sorts of statistical data that add to the findings, McDowell comes to “Chapter 5: Summaries and Conclusions.”

It is true that almost all the texts analyzed by McDowell have already been subject to study, and what is even more frustrating is that almost none of his conclusions might be characterized as “new.” Moreover, McDowell is very cautious in his conclusions, and he is reluctant to say if any of the documents analyzed by him had been written by a woman. McDowell focuses on prayers from a specific era and thus he almost ignores biblical predecessors (see M. Bar-Ilan, Some Jewish Women in Antiquity, 1998), nor is he interested in more modern Jewish women’s prayers (to which the term “Rabbinic” might be applied very loosely) (see Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 1998, and Aliza Lavie, Tefilat Nashim [Jewish Women’s Prayers Throughout the Ages], 2005 [Hebrew]), as if all that data might not help in his analysis. From such a scholar, and his background, one expects to hear also some words on theology as an issue by itself and not only as a subject that appears in the index. In such a study one looks in vain for new voices concerning the relationships between normative and popular religion, for example (see Lester L. Grabbe, Judaic Religion in the Second Temple Period, 2000, pp. 175–178). When McDowell writes (p. 164): “The text depicts women at prayer on the traditional issue of giving birth,” one may reconsider his ideas about “tradition” and rightly ask if a prayer is “traditional” when millions of barren mothers pray for a child (or only when priests in the Temple pray for a barren empress). However, these lacunae are probably...