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Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue. By SAMUEL E. BALENTINE. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: FORTRESS PRESS, 1993. Pp. xvi + 311. $14 (paper).
True to the title of this series, Balentine, professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, in North Carolina, is interested in the Hebrew prayers of the Bible chiefly for what they tell about God and the proper and improper relation between God and humanity. He makes no methodic distinction between what the ancient authors say and theological truth. He is an academic believer, and, utilizing modern critical methods, he seeks in the Hebrew Bible what can be religiously renovative for his faith community. Not a phenomenology of Hebrew prayer, this book climaxes in an argument for change in Christian prayer based on doctrines drawn from the body of Hebrew prose prayers analyzed in the book (ch. 9).
Balentine locates his study among recent investigations of prayers embedded in narrative contexts, rather than of...