Prayer in the Work of Flavius Josephus

Tessel M. Jonquière
University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. In progress; Expected date of completion: 2003.
Advisor: Prof. Dr. P.W. van der Horst

Abstract:

In progress (planned date of completion: March 2005).

In recent years, much has been published about Flavius Josephus; prayer has also become a popular subject for research. However, despite this popularity of studies both on Josephus and on prayer, up to now no-one had combined the two subjects to carry out a study on prayer in Josephus’ work. So it is time that this omission was rectified. The main purpose of my project will be to examine the prayers and see what they tell us about Josephus' own ideas, about his theological framework, about God and his relation to the world, and how he sees the stories he relates and the characters who feature in them.

Josephus' work contains more than 130 prayers, spoken by the characters in the story, most of them paraphrased, some directly quoted. In my thesis 32 of these prayers will be treated extensively by discussing their relation to the context and to a possible source text, and the terminology that has been used. Beside this, I will also focus on the literary function of the prayers and discuss in what way they often have been used by Josephus to manipulate the narrative.

Moreover, besides the actual prayers themselves, there are a couple of passages about prayer, which will be discussed as well. The most important of these passages is Contra Apionem 2:195-197, in which he tells people how to behave during the sacrifice, what to pray for and what not to pray for. The prayer texts will be compared to especially this passage in order to find out whether Josephus, when writing a prayer, sticks to the general directives he is giving elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if there is a relationship between the way Josephus talks about prayer, and the way he writes the prayers.

Finally, the terminology will be discussed that Josephus used in the prayers, to come to an outline of the theological and philosophical ideas Josephus expresses in the prayers. By way of these three approaches (the literary function, the comparison between theory and practice and the theology), I hope to give a general view of Josephus' conception of prayer.