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THE BEST-KNOWN PHRASE ABOUT Jewish religious worship is: “If you serve the LORD your GOD with all your heart (Deuteronomy 11:13) – what is [the sacrificial] service of the heart [avodah she-belev]? This is prayer.” (Ta’anit 2a). Behind these simple words, lies a remarkable story.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, we find two quite different forms of religious worship. One is prayer. Outside the Book of Psalms there are some 140 references to people praying; in 97 cases we are told the words they said. Abraham prays for the cities of the plain. Jacob prays for deliverance before confronting Esau. Hannah prays for a child. These prayers are direct, simple and spontaneous. They have no fixed formula, no set text. Some are very brief, like Moses’ five-word prayer for his sister Miriam: “Please, GOD, heal her now”. Others are long, like Moses’ forty-day prayer for forgiveness of the people after the sin of the Golden Calf. There are no general rules: these prayers have no fixed time, place or liturgy. They are improvised as circumstance demands.

The other form – generally known as avodah, “service” – is sacrifice. Sacrifice could not be less like prayer. As set out from Exodus to Deuteronomy, the sacrificial service is minutely specified. It has its prescribed order: which offerings should be made, when, and by whom. It has a designated place: the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and later, the Temple in Jerusalem. There is no room for spontaneity. When two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, make a spontaneous offering of incense, they die (Leviticus 10:1–2). The Mosaic books contain two set texts associated with the Sanctuary, the Priestly Blessing (Numbers 6:24–26) and the declaration made when bringing the first fruits (Deuteronomy 26:5–10). Certain sacrifices, such as sin-offerings, involved verbal confession. Psalms were sung in the Temple, and the Mishnah details the prayers said there. But the sacrificial act itself was wordless. It took place in silence.

So we have two quite different traditions, prayer and sacrifice: one spontaneous, the other rigorously legislated; one that could take place anywhere, at any time, by anyone; the other which could only happen in a set place and time in accordance with detailed and inflexible procedures. How did these two forms of worship become one?

The answer lies in the national crisis and renewal that occurred after the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. Psalm 137 has preserved a vivid record of the mood of near-despair among the exiles: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion … How can we sing the LORD’S songs in a strange land?” In exile in Babylon, Jews began to gather to expound the Torah, articulate a collective hope of return, and recall the Temple and its service. These assemblies (kinishtu in Babylonian, Knesset in Hebrew) were not substitutes for the Temple, rather they were reminders of it. The book of Daniel, set in Babylon, speaks of threefold daily prayer facing Jerusalem (Daniel 6:10). The loss of the Temple and the experience of exile led to the emergence of regular gatherings for study and prayer.

The next chapter in this story was written by Ezra (fifth century BCE) who, together with the statesman Nehemiah, reorganised Jewish life in Israel after the return from Babylon. Ezra (“the scribe”) was a new type in history: the educator as hero. The Book of Nehemiah (8:1–9) contains a detailed description of the national assembly Ezra convened in Jerusalem, where he read the Torah aloud, with the help of the Levites who explained it to the people.

Ezra and Nehemiah were disturbed by the high degree of assimilation among the Jews who had remained in Israel. They knew that without a strong religious identity, the people would eventually disappear through intermingling with other nations and cultures. To guard against this, they set in motion far-reaching initiatives, including a national reaffirmation of the nation’s covenant with GOD (Nehemiah 10). One of the most important developments was the first formulation of prayers, attributed by the Sages to Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly. Maimonides suggests that one of their motives for so doing was to re-establish Hebrew as the national language: at that time, “Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah” (Nehemiah 13:24; Laws of Prayer 1:4).

One of the results of this religious renewal was the birth, or growth, of the synagogue. During the Second Temple period, priests were divided into 24 groups, mishmarot, each of which served in the Temple for a week in a rota. They were accompanied by groups of local lay-people, ma’amadot, some of whom accompanied them to the Temple, others of whom stayed in their towns but said prayers to coincide with the sacrifices. Whether the synagogue developed from these ma’amadot, or whether its origins were earlier, by the time the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, it was a well-established institution.

The synagogue was “one of the greatest revolutions in the history of religion and society.” (M. Stern). It was the first place of worship made holy, not because of any historic association, nor because sacrifices were offered, but simply because people gathered there to study and pray. It embodied one of the great truths of monotheism: that the GOD of everywhere could be worshipped anywhere. After the loss of the Second Temple it became the home-in-exile of a scattered people. Every synagogue was a fragment of Jerusalem. And though the destruction of the Temple meant that sacrifices could no longer be offered, in their place came an offering of words, namely prayer.

The transition from sacrifice to prayer was not a sudden development. A thousand years earlier, in his speech at the dedication of the Temple, King Solomon had emphasised prayer rather than sacrifice (I Kings 8:12–53). Through Isaiah, GOD had said “My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 56:7). The prophet Hosea had said: “Take words with you and return to the LORD … Instead of bulls we will pay [the offering of] our lips.” (Hosea 14:3). Sacrifice was the external accompaniment of an inner act of heart and mind: thanksgiving, atonement, and so on. Therefore, though the outer act was no longer possible, the inner act remained. That is how sacrifice turned into prayer.

What had once been two quite different forms of worship now became one. Prayer took on the highly structured character of the sacrificial service, with fixed texts and times. The silence that had accompanied the sacrifice was transmuted into speech. Two traditions – prophetic prayer on the one hand, priestly sacrificial service on the other – merged and became one. That is the remarkable story behind the words, “What is the [sacrificial] service of the heart? This is prayer.”

There is a series of arguments, spanning the centuries, about the nature of prayer. According to Maimonides, prayer is a biblical commandment; according to Nachmanides it is merely rabbinic. Two third-century teachers, Rabbi Jose, son of Rabbi Chanina, and Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, disagreed as to the origin of the prayers, the former holding that they were instituted by the patriarchs – Abraham initiating the morning prayer, Isaac the afternoon, and Jacob the evening service – while the latter held that they corresponded to the sacrifices. Centuries earlier, Rabban Gamliel and the Sages differed as to which was primary, the silent Amidah or the Reader’s repetition. Each of these debates ultimately hinges on the question as to which of the two sources of prayer – the improvised prayers of the figures of the Bible or the sacrificial service of the Tabernacle and Temple – is the more fundamental.

In truth, there is no answer: prayer as we have known it for two millennia draws on both traditions. More remarkably, we honour both, because each Amidah is said twice, once silently by individuals, a second time aloud and publicly by the Leader. The silent Amidah recalls the prayers of individuals in the Bible, while the Leader’s repetition recalls the sacrifice: hence there is no repetition of the evening Amidah, since there was no sacrifice in the evening. In prayer, two great streams of Jewish spirituality met and became one.