“Human beings, although created in the image of God, are animals with animal instincts. There is, despite our divine dignity, nothing singular about our wanting to eat, drink, and sleep, nor anything distinctive about the forces that incite us to learn, play, and reproduce. It is not otherwise with ceremonial head-bowing. Konrad Lorenz, the eminent modern naturalist, left a vivid record of a fight between two timber wolves, one enormous and old, the other smaller and young.
The wolves began by moving in circles around each other, fangs bared. Snaps too fast for the eye eventually followed: jaw met jaw; lips started to bleed. Gradually the older wolf slowly maneuvered the younger up against a wire fence, where he stumbled in the metal netting. The old one instantly leaped upon him. But then the unexpected and incredible happened. The tumult of the two gray furies suddenly ceased even though both continued to growl angrily, the elder in a deep bass, the younger in a higher tone suggestive of fear. Standing shoulder to shoulder, pressed against each other in a stiff, strained attitude, the two animals faced the same direction. But while the muzzle of the older wolf was up against the neck of the younger, the latter turned his teeth aside and instead offered to his enemy the unprotected bend of his neck, the most vulnerable part of his body. Within an inch of the tensed muscles that covered the jugular vein, the fangs of the stronger threatened the life of the weaker. Whereas during the initial frenzy both opposed each other with their impervious teeth to the fore, at the end the defeated beast exposed its defenseless throat to a lethal bite. Rarely does a battle between two wolves come to death, this because, when one wolf begins to dominate, the other is always able, without fleeing, to arrest the violence. This is done by suspending attack and offering the neck. With jugular exposed, field of vision restricted, and jaws turned aside and so useless, the weaker wolf surrenders; and the stronger, instead of taking advantage of a defenseless opponent, is stayed, its aggression inhibited. The encounter, after some minutes of tense stillness, with death a muscle contraction away, soon ends: the victor strides off, the loser slinks away. The act of bowing the head, of offering the neck in dire straits, is somehow programmed into a wolf's genes, as is the merciful response to it…
…We can understand why people bow their heads in prayer. It is because, before the divine, they know themselves to be defeated animals. Despite the story of Jacob at Bethel, there is no wresting with God, if by that is meant a real contest of power. “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:4, NRSV). Omnipotence has no opposition. The human beast can accordingly do nothing but surrender, that is, incline neck and ask for clemency – and then hope that God will respond not as Achilles but as the wolf, with compassion.”
– Dale Allison, The Luminous Dusk