Exploring The Lord's Prayer

I was asked on FB by a young cantillation researcher, Just where does the LP come from?

Where does 'The Lord's Prayer' come from? I have found bits and pieces of it across the Hebrew bible, perhaps favourite passages that Jesus used to build his own prayer. But at its base is an old Jewish prayer that 'hallows God's name', and prays for his 'Kingdom' to come swiftly, in our generation. The Mourner's Qaddish ('Holy') is an Aramaic funeral prayer, the Qaddish being still one of the most important prayers in Jewish liturgy.

I have known of Jeffrey B. Gibson's work on the LP for several years, so I first referred the researcher to the online podcast here and a sketch of his approach here. 

To see if a search of Tanakh would help find allusions, I reproduced the LP in SimHebrew derived from a translation I inherited from John Sandys-Wunsch some years ago. You can probably figure out the English.

Matthew 6:9-13 (34 words)

't abinu wbwmim
itqdw wmç
i tba mlcutç
iywh rxonç barx
cawr nywh bwmim
ia tn-lnu hiom lkm kqnu
ib uslk-lnu at-awmtnu cawr slkim anknu lawr awmu lnu
ig val-tbianu lidi msh
ci am-hxilnu mnhry

Luke 11:2-4 (27 words)

b abinu
itqdw wmç
tba mlcutç
g tn-lnu lkm kqnu iom biomo
d uslk lnu at-awmotinu ci gm-anknu slkim lcl-awr awm lnu
val-tbianu lidi nsion 

These pairs of words should give us some sense of where in Tanakh we could look for the Hebrew antecedents. For abinu, we don't need anything but the word form. In the concordance for ab, it is found 19 times, but with God as the subject, it is only in Isaiah, and is never paired with wmim.  For wm preceded by qdw (search for qdw in the lag column), only 5 times, twice in Isaiah, and three times in Kings and Chronicles with respect to the temple as the place for the sanctification of the name. For bva and mlc, I would pick only the one in Zechariah. And so on. The root lkm has several possible senses - including both bread and battle and even one intestine. Just what is kqnu rendering from the Greek, I wonder. In the page for kq, I find one hint in Proverbs 30:8 (search for lkm in the lag column). 

Gibson emphasizes the here and now aspect of the Lord's prayer, so that we not become like 'this generation' as Gibson reads. I would note that ...dvr hzh occurs only once in the Tanakh and is a positive thing. In the Gospels the phrase this generation is frequent and is used in relationship to faithlessness in the present. You can see the reference to Massah (msh) in the Matthew version (nsion in Luke). nsh is the stem used in Genesis 22:1.

The LP does seem to me to have many similarities with the Qaddish as Gibson says in his 4th reason for rejecting an apocalyptic approach. All this brings prayer into the present.

So it would seem that if the LP is indeed somehow grounded in these prayers and derives its focus and concern from that which they possess, then the focus and concern of the LP is not the future coming of God's Kingdom, but preservation in faithfulness and avoidance of apostasy, especially as this was exemplified by the Wilderness generation.

I asked my colleague, Jonathan Orr-Stav, about lkm qknu. I thought it might be connected to Proverbs 30:8. k wva udbr-czb hrkq mmni riw vyowr al-titn-li, h'tripni lkm kuqi, a phrase I rendered as bread prescribed. He responded:

In the Hebrew Bible, lkm-koq meant 'basic livelihood'. In modern Hebrew, it's extended to mean as fundamental principle, or cornerstone, of a given practice.