Priestly Blessing

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Michael Lotker on 18 June 2014

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Shared on 2018-09-04 – 25 Elul 5778.
Public Domain (17 U.S. Code §105 - Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works)

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 18 June 2014. . . .

Adventures in Ancient Jewish Liturgy: the Birkat Kohanim

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Shared on 2013-01-21 – 11 Shevat 5773.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

The earliest artifacts recording Jewish liturgy (or for that matter any Hebrew formulation found in the Torah) are two small silver amulets, discovered in 1979 by Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay. He discovered the amulets in a burial chamber while excavating in Ketef Hinnom, a section of the Hinnom Valley south of Jerusalem’s Old City. The inscriptions on these amulets conclude with parts of the Birkat Kohanim (Priestly Blessing), the three-part blessing in which the Kohanim are instructed to bless the people of Israel in Numbers 6:22-27. The script in the amulets dates them approximately to the reign of King Yoshiyahu (late 7th or early 6th century BCE) predating the Nash papyrus, and the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls by four centuries. . . .


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