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The Afternoon Prayer That Kept the Name

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The Afternoon Prayer That Kept the Name

The afternoon prayer service of Judaism is called Minchah, and it is named for this offering. The link is not decorative. When the daily offerings ceased, the fixed prayers were arranged on their pattern and their hours, and the afternoon service occupies the slot held by the afternoon grain offering that accompanied the second daily lamb. The morning service keeps a related name from the same source. A visitor who meets the word first as the name of a short weekday service is meeting the tail of the sacrificial system, and the atlas holds both entries for that reason.

The offering also supplies the sharpest example of a difficulty that runs through the whole subject. Almost everything known about how the grain offerings were actually prepared at the Second Temple, the sifting of the flour, the number of motions, the vessels used, the exact handful, comes from Mishnah tractate Menachot, which was redacted around the year 200, more than a century after the last of them was burned. Whether that tractate records a remembered procedure or reconstructs an idealised one is a real question, and the answer probably differs from detail to detail.

What is not in doubt is that the class was central enough to be given a tractate of its own within the order of holy things, alongside the tractate covering every animal offering there was. A system that assigned a whole book to flour, oil and frankincense was not treating the grain offering as the poor relation of the bull.

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