1 Enoch 84:1
1 And I lifted up my hands in righteousness and blessed the Holy and Great One, and spake with the breath of my mouth, and with the tongue of flesh, which God has made for the children of the flesh of men, that they should speak therewith, and He gave them breath and a tongue and a mouth that they should speak therewith: 2 'Blessed be Thou, O Lord, King, Great and mighty in Thy greatness, Lord of the whole creation of the heaven, King of kings and God of the whole world. And Thy power and kingship and greatness abide for ever and ever, And throughout all generations Thy dominion; And all the heavens are Thy throne for ever, And the whole earth Thy footstool for ever and ever.
1 Timothy 2:8
3 Such prayer for all is good and welcomed before God our Savior, 4 since he wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one intermediary between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, himself human, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, revealing God’s purpose at his appointed time. 7 For this I was appointed a preacher and apostle—I am telling the truth; I am not lying—and a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. 8 So I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or dispute.
Notes and References
"... Lifting both hands in prayer is perhaps the best-attested ritual gesture of antiquity. The gesture is found both in iconography and in texts from the Holy Land, starting in the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1500 BC) and continuing throughout late antiquity. The Hebrew Bible contains twenty-two occurrences of the gesture, denoted by six different Hebrew idioms, the most common of which are pāraś kappayim “spread the hands” and nāśāʾ yādayim “lift up the hands ... The gesture of lifting both hands in prayer is also found in the Apocrypha (2 Maccabees 3:20; 14:34; 15:12, 21; 3 Maccabees 2:1; 5:25; Tobit 3:11; Sirach 48:20), as well as in many ancient pseudepigraphic texts. One instance found in 1 Enoch 84:1 is particularly comparable to the one in 1 Timothy: “Then I lifted up my hands in righteousness and blessed the Holy and Great One.” There are references to this gesture in 1 Clement 2:3; 29:1, attesting to the practice of prayer with uplifted hands in the early Christian church. John Tvedtnes has assembled further sources on this gesture, although even this represents only a fraction of the textual and iconographic sources bearing witness to this gesture ..."
Calabro, David M. "Nonverbal Communication in the New Testament" in Blumell, Lincoln H. (ed.) New Testament History, Culture, and Society: A Background to the Texts of the New Testament (pp. 555-572) Deseret Books, 2019