David Bosworth’s book aims to “illustrate how profoundly social we are, and how prayer and weeping reveal our social nature” (p. x). This social nature is both horizontal and vertical as Bosworth draws close attention to the relationship between tears and divine wrath. In the present monograph, he combs through textual references to weeping in more than 1,000 Akkadian prayers and 148 Hebrew psalms, as part of a larger project on weeping in ancient literature. In addition to the present work, Bosworth has published a number of articles related to this field, as well as a monograph, Infant Weeping in Akkadian, Hebrew, and Greek Literature (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016).
The first chapter employs psychological research on human emotion regulation to understand prayer and weeping. Bosworth argues that both prayer and weeping can be understood through attachment theory. Originally used to describe how children interact with caregivers, attachment theory spans...
