Prayer Book of Priests

Some of the church fathers wrote different prayers for the blessing of meals, fruits, fields, crops, homes, children and the sick. They also wrote prayers for reconciliation, for the driving away of harm, pestilences and calamities and for confined women, etc. Of these prayers, forty-five are extant in the Service Book of Ordinations in the handwriting of Bishop Joseph the Iberian.[1] They were compiled in a small book entitled “The Priest’s Prayer Book.” The books of the Beth Gazo also contain a group of these prayers.

[1] Za’faran Library MS. 220.

Source: Barsoum, Ignatius Aphram. The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences. Translated by Matti Moosa. 2nd revised. Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2003, 96-97.