tephillah

The standard lexica treat this as a single noun built on the root פלל, "to pray, intercede," and gloss it "prayer." BDB, HALOT, and DCH subdivide it along the same lines used here: the general appeal to God, prayer as intercession for others, the noun as a genre designation in psalm headings, and the idiom בֵּית תְּפִלָּה, "house of prayer," at Isaiah 56:7. The distribution is concentrated in the Psalms, in Solomon's temple prayer (1 Kings 8 and its parallel in 2 Chronicles 6), in the Hezekiah narratives (2 Kings 19 to 20 and Isaiah 37 to 38), and in Daniel 9. Psalm 72:20 is a colophon that closes a Davidic collection, and its plural is the only plural in the corpus.

Three textual matters are worth recording. First, the resemblance between this noun and תִּפְלָה, "unsavoriness, senselessness" (a separate word from a separate root), is graphic only, most visible in unpointed text; all the standard lexica keep the two entries entirely apart, and the later rabbinic pun on בֵּית תְּפִלָּה against בֵּית תִּפְלָה trades on exactly that accident. The later evidence runs the same way: at Qumran every occurrence of the consonants תפלה stands for this noun and none for the rare noun of senselessness, which DCH records as unattested outside its three biblical verses, and this noun goes on to become the standard word for prayer in rabbinic and modern Hebrew. Second, at Job 24:12 two Hebrew manuscripts and the Peshitta (ܨܠܘܬܗܘܢ, "their prayer") presuppose a text reading this noun, which would give it a further occurrence; the majority of recent commentators retain the traditional Hebrew reading, and the entry-level dispute below records both sides. Third, at Nehemiah 11:17 the noun itself is secure but the word beside it is not: the traditional text reads הַתְּחִלָּה, "the beginning," while many editors read הַתְּהִלָּה, "the praise," and English renderings of Mattaniah's office diverge accordingly.

The monograph literature on biblical prayer (Greenberg on prose prayer, Balentine, Miller) works from the prayers themselves and from the verb פלל rather than from this noun's distribution, so the sense divisions used here rest on the lexica.