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Hittite Prayers, by Itamar Singer. SBLWAW 11. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002. Pp. xv + 141. $24.95 (paper).
In keeping with the series mandate to provide up-to-date English translations of texts from the ancient Near East, Itamar Singer has prepared a volume on Hittite prayers for the Writings of the Ancient World series. The work contains some twenty-four prayers covering the history of the Late Bronze Age Anatolian kingdom (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.E.), and includes an introduction to the corpus as a whole as well as to each chapter and individual prayer.
The introduction is useful to the specialist and nonspecialist alike. Singer begins by defining the corpus of texts to be covered in his survey. He takes pains to clarify his criteria for the distinctions between prayers, hymns, oracles, and rituals, explaining why the latter three have been excluded from this volume. While Singer admits that the distinction between hymns and prayers is ambiguous, he excludes hymns primarily because they served a pedagogical rather than cultic function. Oracles and rituals, while often stimulating and accompanying prayers respectively, are excluded because the genre needs a volume all to itself.
Singer defines the Hittite terms used in prayers and notes that they represent specifie formal elements in the compositions rather than independent prayer types. Hittite prayers may include an invocation, hymn of praise, confession, and petition, though few prayers contain all these elements. These prayers often take the form of a court case, with the author (or, more precisely, the patron) as the detendant, the offended god(s) us prosecutor, and various other gods as witnesses for the defense. Several strategies are used to entreat the offended god(s), including protestation of the accusation, minimization of the offense, pragmatics (i.e., Who will worship...