Rabbi Dr Noah Bickart – The “Lord’s Prayer” in Context: Ancient Jewish Prayer in The Dead Sea Scroll, the New Testament and Rabbinic Literature

In this lecture, we will explore the Lord’s Prayer as a distinctively Jewish prayer, and show how comparisons of this type are also instructive for Jewish audiences, both in the realm of theology as well as a potential model for inter-religious dialogue.

I recently developed and taught a course on “Ancient Jewish Prayer” for the Theology department in the Catholic University where I teach. Perhaps the most interesting segment of the course (at least for the students) was the section in which we sought to contextualize the so-called “Lord’s Prayer,” (sometimes called the “Our Father”) into its 1st century Judean Context. Most of my students were deeply familiar with this text as a statement of their own theologies, but were shocked not only by the variation in the text of this prayer in the Gospels, by also by the many features this prayer shares with roughly contemporaneous texts from both Dead Sea Scroll fragments found at Qumran and a variety of prayers in Talmudic literature.

Noah Benjamin Bickart holds the Jack, Joseph & Morton Mandel Chair in Jewish Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland. Born and raised in Washington DC, he first developed a serious connection to Jewish life and learning at Adas Israel. He holds degrees from the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, he began teaching at John Carroll in 2018. He lives in Beachwood, Ohio with his wife Nadia Kahn and his two children, Meir Zeev and Rina Hana.