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By Root 2345 0

Shmoneh ‘Esre was formulated by R. Shimon the Flaxworker at Yavneh in the presence of Rabban Gamaliel. That would date the prayer in our form at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, since Rabban Gamaliel succeeded Rab Yohanan ben Zakkai, who received permission to leave the siege at Jerusalem with his scholars just before 70 CE. More likely, that tradition reflects not its original composition but an attempt by the Rabbinic movement to lay claim to the already traditional prayer, on the grounds that they corrected and standardized the liturgy. An earlier form of the prayer seems assured by the newly published writings from Qumran, which demonstrates that they too believed in resurrection and used a very closely related liturgical text to affirm it. So the Rabbinic enterprise was an attempt to impose a canonical form on the prayer.

In both the Rabbinic and Qumranic form, Gevuroth is largely a gloss on Psalm 146:5-8, which, however, has no reference to resurrection, concentrating as we would expect, given the topic, on theodicy and God’s care of the poor, downtrodden and unfortunate. To this are added the phrases that God brings the dead to life and will keep faith with those who sleep in the dust. The first praises God for resurrecting the dead; the second for remembering the plight of those who have died and are buried. It is but one of innumerable references to the resurrection which dot the prayerbook.

In the preparatory service for morning prayers, The Birkhot Hashahar, the liturgy also contains explicit discussions of the immortality of the soul. Taken from the text in b. Talmud Berakhot 60b, the prayer begins with the Biblical notion of soul but quickly dresses it in a more Greek garb:

The soul which you, my God, have given me is pure. You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me; You keep body and soul together. One day You will take my soul from me, to restore it to me in life eternal. So long as this soul is within me I acknowledge You, Lord my God, my ancestors’ God, Master of all creation, sovereign of all souls. Praised are You, Lord who restores the soul to the lifeless, exhausted body. (Siddur Sim Shalom 9-10)

The prayer begins with a reference to the soul. The first line might be just a traditional Biblical understanding of soul. The last suggests that it means only to explain how a tired body is refreshed by a night of sleep. But in the middle is a statement that life consists of body and soul together. God takes the soul at death and will restore it in life eternal. The last phrase seems to suggest immortality of the soul, though there is a peculiar variation on it. The source of the identity and the soul are different. The paragraph actually seems to describe immortality of the soul returned to a recreated body (the “me”), very much what Augustine affirmed as well. But the phrasing leaves a lot of ambiguity unexplained.

The term neshamah , translated as “soul” above, occurs in Scripture some dozen times. Probably the prayer is making direct reference to the creation story in Genesis 2: “And He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.”

The Gevuroth prayer is reflecting on the verbs of creation used in Genesis-“created” it, “formed” it, “breathed” it into me. However, in Genesis 2:7, neshamah means more literally “the breath of life” which effects Adam’s change from dust of the earth to a “living being,” nefesh. It is interesting that the prayer does not use nefesh itself to stand for “soul.” But by the Rabbinic period, neshamah was probably a better translation for soul because nefesh can mean “a person,” whereas neshamah is more technical in that it refers to a spiritually inbreathed presence. Perhaps, too, when this prayer was composed, neshamah had already received one of the several mystic meanings of “over-soul,” which became an object of great speculation in later Jewish mysticism. This is a soul that can be separated from the body and which will return to God at death. It is one that goes back into a body, which must be reconstituted