The Call to Prayer

Seven times a day I praise You because of Your righteous judgments.  Psalm 119:164  NASB

Seven times a day – Travel nearly anywhere in the region once the home of the psalmist and you will hear the call of the minaret.  Five times a day the wailing of the muezzin emanates from those tall towers dotting the landscape.  Christians use a  different procedure, now almost totally forgotten, for the same purpose—the tolling of the bells.  Have you even wondered where those rituals started?  No, I’m not going to give you that answer—but I think it’s quite interesting that nearly 1500 years before Islam started calling from the towers, and 1200 years before Christianity started ringing those bells, the Hebrews were already conscious of the need for routine, daily prayers.

Of course, the psalmist might not be specifying exactly seven times.  That number, šebaʿ, is really a symbolic representation of a perfect, complete action.  Seven days of creation.  Seven weeks after the matzot.  Seven days of Sukkot.  And a lot of “sevens.”  You can see some of the list here.  Of course, Islam couldn’t have the same number as Judaism, and Christianity couldn’t use the same apparatus as the Jewish shofar, so a few alterations found their way into these new religions, but you have to wonder if the new ways weren’t simply rejections of the Jewish history.

And the psalmist isn’t calling us to prayer.  He uses the verb hālal, which, of course, means “praise.”  “This root connotes being sincerely and deeply thankful for and/or satisfied in lauding a superior quality(ies) or great, great act(s) of the object,”^[1] so it is a kind of “prayer,” but certainly not requests.  It’s important to note that there is an obligation here.  “The most frequent use of our root relates to praising the God of Israel. Nearly a third of such passages occur in the Psalms. The largest number of these are imperative summons to praise. The frequency and mood emphasizes the vital necessity of this action.”^[2]  Perhaps this is our lesson today.  We need to consider the differences between the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish versions of “prayer-praise.”  Remember that Islamic prayer is not supplication.    It is repetition.  The one who prays only repeats what God told the prophet.  There is no room for personal expression, requests, or conversation.  This is why it is possible to pray (only in Arabic) without actually understanding what the words mean.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand.  The requirement is recitation, not communication.

Of course, praise and prayer in Christianity is both communal and personal.  While there are standard prayers (e.g. the Book of Common Prayer), modern Christianity tends toward individualism (as the culture also floats in this direction) so that “praise and worship” becomes unique to the community or the person.  Perhaps this free-spirited expression has value but it moves away from the orthodox history of both Christianity and Judaism.  And speaking of orthodoxy, it is interesting to note that while rabbinic Judaism has the Siddur to provide conformity for the praying community, the psalms are not uniform at all.  One must wonder how the Hebraic congregation transitioned from the variety of personal expression in the Tanakh to the conformity of the Siddur.  The psalmist doesn’t give us an answer.  He just says that many times a day, so many times that it feels like a completed effort, he consciously acknowledges the superiority and righteousness of God’s mišpāṭ.  Governance.  The stability of any true human civilization.  The hand of the Creator in human affairs.  The final measuring stick.  Yes, that’s worthy of praise, no matter how it is delivered.

Topical Index:  praise, hālal, seven, mišpāṭ, Psalm 119:164

^[1] Coppes, L. J. (1999). 500 הָלַל. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 217). Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.