Edinost in Dialog (Dec 2022)
Tobit’s Penitential Prayer
Abstract
The penitential prayer, first found in The Book of Ezra, belongs to a tradition that goes back to Deuteronomy, which describes how Israel found itself in the exile because of its sins and how salvation can come only through the repentance of the nation. The key element for understanding the development of the tradition of penitential prayer is found in the text 1 Kings 8 in which the author, by re-interpreting Deuteronomy, develops the idea that a penitential prayer is the answer to the given demand for repentance. This answer, which is especially focused on the absence of the temple, is adapted to and created for the exile circumstances, in which the temple gets a different role, namely, it becomes a place of prayer and not of sacrifice. Penitential prayer becomes a new, ≫institutional≪ form of penitence, which the nation has to undergo for their sins. The major stumbling block to this logic is the suffering of the righteous, for the righteous should receive God’s blessing and not suffering. Tobit, who was a righteous man even according to Deuteronomistic notions, presents a serious challenge to the theory of the retribution or retributive justice. Despite his distress he claimed that God is righteous and through this act he proved to be a righteous man himself. The writer of the book does not consider righteousness as a state of being without sin, which is in fact an illusion, but sees the greatest virtue of the righteous in repentance and recognition of their sins. Repentance and recognition of sins, which have a crucial role in penitential prayers, enable the individual and the nation, which the righteous identifies with and represents, to receive God’s mercy and thereby find a way out of suffering. The survey on the development of the literary genre of penitential prayer is a summary of the theory presented by Werline in his book Penitential prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution (1998).
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