Prayer, Politics, and Power in the Hebrew Bible

This essay applies current anthropological methods to selected texts in the Hebrew Bible in order to investigate the place of prayer within relationships of power. 1 Power does not simply exist as an ideal, but in the ability of humans to influence the actions of other humans. Ritual theorists have recently argued that, in part, ritual functions as a way that people negotiate, mediate and enact power within these relationships. A reading of prayer texts from the Hebrew Bible from this perspective casts new light on the role of prayer in the micro-politics of everyday life and reveals the way in which biblical authors attempted to tie this to Israel's larger story.