New Books in Christian Studies Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline, "Prayer in the Ancient World Vol.1" (Brill, 2027)
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Dec 17, 2025 Daniel K. Falk, Professor of Classics and Jewish Studies at Penn State, co-editor of Prayer in the Ancient World. He discusses puzzling absences of prayer laws in early Jewish texts, Dead Sea Scrolls evidence for communal liturgy, surprising finds like graffiti prayers and church inscriptions, a broad working definition of prayer, and the project’s cross-cultural metadata and searchable digital features.
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Dead Sea Scrolls Shifted Falk's Focus
- Falk's doctoral work pivoted when he found claims that early Jewish prayer was understudied, leading him to Dead Sea Scrolls liturgical texts.
- The Scrolls provided community liturgies showing prayer as obligation and daily sacrificial-like practice.
Broad Functional Definition Of Prayer
- Prayer is defined broadly as any human act intending to communicate with or solicit benefit from a superhuman agent.
- This inclusive definition covers nonverbal acts, third-person references, and appeals to nature or ancestors, avoiding narrow literary-only boundaries.
Write Entries For Non Specialists
- Write for non-specialists to make cross-disciplinary prayer research usable, avoiding narrowly technical genre labels.
- Daniel K. Falk targeted accessible entries so scholars in one area can quickly learn other traditions' practices and functions.
