3. It is instructive to follow the history of this term. In Scripture God is represented as speaking to David, “I will be to him for a father, and he shall be to Me for a son,”(814) or “He shall call unto Me: Thou art my Father, ... I also will appoint him first-born.”(815) So in the apocryphal writings God speaks both to Israel and to individual saints: “I shall be to them a Father, and they shall be My children.”(816) Elsewhere it is said of the righteous, “He calls God his Father,” and “he shall be counted among the sons of God.”(817) We read concerning the Messiah: “When all wrongdoing will be removed from the midst of the people, he shall know that all are sons of God.”(818) Obviously only righteousness or personal merit entitles a man to be called a son of God. In fact, we are expressly told of Onias, the great Essene saint, that his intimate relation with God emboldened him to converse with the Master of the Universe as a son would speak with his father.(819) According to the Mishnah the older generation of “pious ones” used to spend “an hour in silent devotion before offering their daily prayer, in order to concentrate heart and soul upon their communion with their Father in heaven.”(820) Thus it is said of congregational prayer that through it “Israel lifts his eyes to his Father in heaven.”(821) In this way prayer took the place of the altar, of which R. Johanan ben Zakkai said that it established peace between Israel and his Father in heaven.(822) Afterwards the question was discussed by Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Jehuda whether even sin-laden Israel had a right to be called “children of God.” Rabbi Meir pointed to Hosea as proof that the backsliders also remain “children of the living God.”(823)