Avinu

Avinu is the plural-possessive form of Av, the Hebrew word for father. It means "our Father" and is the corporate, covenantal address to YHWH that runs from the Tanakh prophets through the Second Temple Jewish liturgy into Yeshua's model prayer in Matthew 6:9. The plural is not incidental. It signals that the address is made by the people of the covenant as a body, not by an individual in isolation, even when the prayer is prayed in the inner room with the door shut.

The prophetic anchor is Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 63:16 and 64:8. "For You are our Father, though Avraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; You, YHWH, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is Your name" (Yeshayahu 63:16). And again: "Yet, YHWH, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand" (Yeshayahu 64:8). The address establishes the paternal frame as the covenantal relational grammar that precedes any sacrificial system or priestly intermediation. The people address the Father directly.

By the Second Temple period, the address had been formalized in the Avinu Malkenu liturgy ("Our Father, our King"), recited on the Yamim Noraim. When Yeshua taught His talmidim to pray "Avinu sh'b'shamayim, yitkadash shemekha", "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name" (Matthew 6:9), He was not inventing a novel address but inheriting and intensifying the prophetic-liturgical pattern. The radical move was not the word Avinu, which Jewish prayer had always used. The radical move was the invitation to use it without a priestly mediator at the moment of address. The paternal frame, available to every covenant individual, directly.