The Genre of the Lord's Prayer

Let me revisit something I said about the Lord's Prayer, in that series above, which deserves more attention. The genre of the prayer is lament. Here's how you get there. (1) By the time the disciples ask Jesus to "teach them to pray", they have hundreds of years of world-literature-level devotional tradition and practice behind and around them, which they've imbibed from infancy. (2) So, "teach us to pray" is more like asking a martial arts master to "sum up the essence of your take on the tradition." (3) The context of the Prayer is absolutely that devotional tradition--and chiefly the psalms. (4) Therefore, to understand the prayer, one must look to the psalms. (5) Psalms come in several genres. (6) The Prayer is without doubt functioning in the genre of lament. (7) The genre's of the psalms, from royal victory to the deepest despair, fall along the spokes of a cycle, where each genre is aware of the others. So, (8) lament psalms are on-the-way to psalms of absolute praise, even as absolute praise is aware that human life is going to include despair eventually as well. But the whole of the five books of psalms does, nevertheless, slowly lift as a whole into priestly adoration of Yahweh. (9) Back to #2, the Prayer defines the Messianic call in the context of the psalmic devotional tradition. (Anyone who wants to know more about this praise -> lament and repeat cycle should consult the work of OT scholar W. Bruggemann.)

Grammatical analysis and exegesis drives you to the larger interpretive work (hermeneutics), and hermeneutics drives you to exegesis and grammatical analysis.