Abstract
Intercessory prayer – the fact of praying or intervening verbally in favor of another – such as it is presented in the Bible, is a phenomenon which has been scarcely studies up till now. That is probably due in part to the fact that the few substantial monographs dedicated to this subject have to some extent disqualified biblical intercession, seeking to demonstrate that this concept should be considered as the expression of a vestige of primitive religious practices arising out of superstition or magic. This present study postulates a different origin for intercession. If the human person in the Bible beseeches God in favor of another, he/she is using in his/her relationship with God a practice that is neither superstitious nor magical, but, put simply, anthropological and social.
Intervention in favor of a third person, recourse to a third person to obtain such and such a favor, is clearly of great effectiveness in human society because it brings into play relational and interpersonal values of the highest importance; therefore human intercession was deemed worthy of expressing a part of the relationship between God and the human person. Intercession as it practiced by human beings among themselves is the source in which we should seek the origins of intercession addressed to God. Thus the Hebrew Bible – the original nucleus of the Scriptures – contains precisely a remarkable series of intercessions among human beings. In the canonical order of the biblical books, we have the intercessions of Juda (Gen. 44; 18-34), Rahab (Josh. 2: 12-13), Jonathan (1Sam. 19: 4-5), Abigail (1Sam. 25: 24-31), Joab (2Sam. 14: 2-20), Bathsheba (1Kings 2: 20-21), the King of Aram (2Kings 5,6), Ebedmelek (Jer. 38: 9), and Esther (Esth. 7:3-4.6). With the aid of a definition of intercession of a narrative type (genre), detailed research on these texts enables us to establish a kind of phenomenology of intercession among human beings as it appears in the Hebrew Bible, shedding light on its mode of functioning, and, in particular, on the reasons for its success and/or its effectiveness. Besides, many indications appear in the carious examples of intercession practiced among human beings, which invite us to read these examples as models for intercession directed towards God. The study of an example of biblical intercessions addressed to God, whose of Amos (Am. 7: 1-6), demonstrates that intercession before God can be analyzed by use for the same methodological instruments as intercession among human beings, and confirms the fact that intercession before God follows the same procedure as intercession among human beings. The phenomenon is fundamentally the same because the latter is found at the origin of the former.