No Place for Worship: Rhetorical Function and Historical Significance of a Prayer Theme in Deuterocanonical Literature

Reflections on the religious experience of Israel and early Judaism share one underlying assumption, that calamity results from disobedience. In prayers, this assumption is mostly expressed in confessions-in penitential prayers or in communal confessions of sin included in other prayers. Penitential elements thus are very common-so much so that it is impossible to trace the lineage or intertextual dependencies of such elements, and impossible to use them as indicators of the date(s) of origin of these texts. One of the rarer elements or motifs of this kind occurs in LXX Dan 3:38 (Pr Azar 15): “In this day there is … no place to bring an offering before you and to find mercy” (… οὐδὲ τόπος τοῦ καρπῶσαι ἐνώπιόν σου…). Focusing on this phrase, the present paper addresses some questions about the approaches and assumptions with which scholars investigate the origins and the semantics of deuterocanonical texts.