What is an ancient Jewish liturgy? Given the frequency of the word “liturgy” in scholarship on ancient Jewish prayer and worship, one might assume its meaning is somewhat settled. It is often included appositionally with such terms as ritual, rite, performance, prayer, hymns/psalms, and usually, but not exclusively, with some recognition of its public setting. The relationship of these words—I am sure we could add others—forms a constellation around the idea that a liturgy is a type of formal public prayer. Russell Arnold, for example, defines liturgy as “a type of behavior that combines ritual, performative speech, and often also prayer,” which “is inherently multivalent and multivocal.”[1] Daniel Falk adds to this definition to suggest that a liturgy is a specific type or subcategory of religious ritual.[2] The strength of Arnold’s definition lies in its ambiguity: a liturgy could in theory be any sort of ritualized performative action. The problem for the historian of Judaism, however, is that this behavior tends to be most easily recognizable and treated in scholarship via discussions about prayer. And while we have a plethora of prayer texts in our sources, there is a consistent paucity of data concerning the full range of their use. A prayer without performance is not a liturgy.[3]
What, then, is an ancient liturgy, and can we approach the question with greater precision? The word liturgy, or leitourgia as it is found in Greek, is a compound (laos + ergos) denoting “work for the people,” and is most often employed in Classical Greek literature in reference to public or civic service. Greek lexicons tend to describe the etymology and evolution of this word in much the same way. In its earliest usage a liturgy referred to the financing of the Greek state by wealthy individuals, either voluntarily or by law. We find, for example, liturgies for public irrigation works and infrastructure repairs, political events and festivals, the military, gymnasium, theatre, and the cult, just to list a few examples.[4] Over time, its meaning was expanded to include any type of service, including the work of a peasant for one’s master or the work employed by another, or for the work provided by dancers, actors, and even prostitutes.
When looking at the literature produced in Greek speaking Jewish cultures, we see a continuation of some of this semantic range, although different Jewish corpora highlight different dynamics of the word’s meaning. In the Septuagint (LXX), for example, the word leitourgia is used primarily to translate such Hebrew words as sheret and avodah, and is employed primarily in cultic contexts, all in reference to the duties of the priests and Levites (i.e., sacrifice, the recitation of blessings, and the movement of temple furniture[5]). In Wisdom 18:21 we find an intriguing reference in which Aaron’s prayers and incense provide a “shield” for his leitourgia to protect Israel as they traversed the Egyptian desert. In other words, prayers and incense are not the liturgy, but only one component of it that serves to provide protective benefits.
Leitourgia occurs less frequently in the New Testament. In only two books do we find it in reference to temple activity (e.g., Lk 1:23; Heb 1:7, 10:11). In all other places, it is employed to refer to services that benefit Christ-believing communities outside the temple arena. In 2 Cor 9:12, for instance, Paul writes that the performance of the service (leitourgias) not only meets the physical necessities of the church, but also provides the impetus for thanksgiving (cf. Phil 2:25). Here again, thanksgiving is not the liturgy, but rather the response to experiencing the benefits of the liturgy. Perhaps the most striking use of the word is found in Rom 15:16, where Paul regards himself as a leitourgon, literally a liturgist, to the Gentiles. (The word is usually translated into English as “minister”.) Acts 13:2 also presents an interesting case in which prayer and fasting were part of a liturgical service (as in 6:6) to determine who would undertake the mission to the Antiochene church.
The issue of liturgy is a little more complicated in Hebrew corpora. A comparison between Greek and Hebrew sources demonstrates that while the word avodah includes the connotation of public service, as is the case with leitourgia in Greek, it also includes a much broader, more basic semantic range denoting the basic idea of work, either compulsory or otherwise.[6] It must be stated, though, that avodah and leitourgia overlap most readily in cultic contexts, particularly the service of the tent of meeting in Numbers (e.g., 4:33, 35, 39, 43; 4:47; 8:11; 18:4, 33, etc.). In the Dead Sea Scrolls we find employment of the phrase “service of the congregation” (עבודה העדה) in reference to the duties of the community’s full members (e.g., 1QSa 1:13, 19; 1:22, 2:1; CD 11:23; 14:16). And in 4Q408 3/3a 9 in particular, the recitation of blessings is included in the idea of avodah.
What has become clear from our short discussion thus far is that a liturgy ought not to be reduced to some type of verbal worship or praying activity directed toward the divine. This is how the word is often employed today, but from our short review above, it is clear that liturgical activity could certainly include prayer, but was not limited to it. What is more important to recognize is that a leitourgia accomplishes some type of public service or beneficial good that was not limited to a prayer or a cultic setting. Through this lens, then, it is appropriate to regard a liturgy first and foremost as a formal public mode of engagement between the members of a group for the purposes of promoting public service and/or the public good, which may or may not contain prayer and may or may not be expressed through, or be limited to, prayerful words.
Moreover, because liturgy is public and formal, it necessarily requires communal participation to some extent in its development, organization, content, and performance. In other words, participation in liturgy depends on a general agreement regarding the language used, at least some understanding of its importance and/or purpose shared within a group, and adherence to a calendar or event (if regularity is a feature). This type of learning and assent is most often reified through repetition, which brings us to the last point of this short review.[7] Regarding the relationship between liturgy and ritual, it is important to recognize that liturgy is not a specific type or subset of ritual (pace Falk, cf. above). Rather, as anthropologist Roy Rappaport has eloquently argued in his tour de force Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), it is more appropriate to think of a liturgy as far more encompassing, as the organization of all other rituals. In fact, because of our modern predispositions, Rappaport suggests that it may be rhetorically beneficial to dispense with the word “liturgy” altogether, and instead use the more descriptive handle “liturgical order.”
With these issues in mind, I would suggest that a liturgy can be defined as a publicly accepted ordering of rituals, which are, in turn, “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances”[8] for the public good, that may or may not include communication with the divine. I have not yet had the opportunity to fully explore the potential payoff of this definition, but I suspect it may shift the focus to thinking about ancient Jewish liturgy more as a way of life rather than prayerful acts. This may be helpful for thinking about groups that promote a heightened sense of community, such as the one associated with the site of Qumran. Or in the Mishnah, for example, when we read the words of Simon the Righteous in m. Avot 1.2 (“By three things the world exists: On the Torah, on worship [avodah] and on acts of loving kindness”), one may be inclined to regard only avodah as denoting the leitourgia of Jewish life. Based on the discussion above, however, it may be more appropriate to understand all three—Torah, worship, and charity—as contiguous liturgical acts.
Jeremy Penner is a Senior Library Assistant in the Near and Middle East Department at Cambridge University Library
[1] Russell C. D. Arnold, The Social Role of Liturgy in the Religion of the Qumran Community (STDJ 60; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 16.
[2] Cf. e.g., Daniel Falk, “Liturgical Texts,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. George J. Brooke and Charlotte Hempel (London: T&T Clark 2019), 423.
[3] Cf. also the similar point made by Stefan Reif in, “Prayer in Early Judaism,” in Prayer from Tobit to Qumran, ed. Renate Egger-Wenzel and Jeremy Corley (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 442. Many thanks to Patrick Angiolillo for the reference.
[4] Cf., Lept. 21 where Demosthenes estimates that “sixty or slightly more” recurrent (i.e. ritualised) liturgies were performed every year in Athens. See J. K. Davies, “Demosthenes on Liturgies: a Note,” JHS 87 (1967): 33-40.
[5] Cf. e.g. Exod 28-39 passim; Num 3:33, 37; 7:5, 7; 8:22; 16:9; 18:21, 23; Deut 10:8; 2 Kgs 25:14; Jer 52:18; 1-2 Chron passim, and Ezek 40-46 passim; Jdth 4:14.
[6] Cf. TDOT X: 376-405; Stefan Reif, “How did Early Judaism Understand the Concept of ‘Avodah?” in Various Aspects of Worship in Deuterocanonical Cognate Literature, ed. G. Xeravits et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017): 1-15.
[7] On this point, see Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Cognitive Science of Religion Series; Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), esp. his discussion in ch. 5: “Ritual and Meaning in the Doctrinal Mode.”
[8] Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24.