How to “bless the Lord” in prayer (Exodus 18.10)

What does it mean to bless God? What kind of prayer does this? Join Mark McDowell as he explores this prayer from Exodus.

---

“Blessed be the LORD, who has delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh.”

Exodus 18.10

Background to this prayer

This passage contains a brief mention of a prayer of praise. You might read it and not even consider it to be a prayer. It does not begin “Dear God.” It does not have any formal prayer structure. It does not ask for anything. It contains no titles for God, and it does not close with “amen.” It is one sentence containing two phrases: “Blessed be the LORD, who has delivered you from the Egyptians and Pharaoh.”

Yet, it is no less a prayer than those which show more complexity or poetry. It is directed at God, it asks him to be “blessed,” and it tells why God should be blessed. We might call this a “declaratory” prayer, or an “exclamatory” prayer. The word used here is translated as “blessed,” but it does not have the same sense as when someone asks God to bless someone else. Otherwise, we would be asking God to bless Himself. Instead, the word here means “praise be to” or “may all people bless” God.

Meaning of this prayer which “blesses the Lord”

Many prayers in the Bible use this word: it appears over four hundred times in the Old Testament alone. You might have heard this concept employed in modern ways. The most common is a response to a sneeze: “bless you!”¹ Perhaps you have heard it in the southern American phrase which usually denotes sympathy, “bless your heart!” But in ancient Hebrew, many nouns and verbs derive from the root of the word “blessing” (brk): words for praising or kneeling and praying. In the Bible, it is a word having to do with relationship between people or between people and God. The use of brk implies a favorable relationship, and is used to thank or praise someone for a material benefit or power that has been bestowed.