R. Abusch

Abstract: "Seven-fold Praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Hekhalot Literature: Literary Context and Historical Continuity in Early Hebrew Hymnic Poetry"

Ra'anan Abusch

Since the first partial publication forty years ago of the Qumran Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (henceforth, the Songs), their syntactic and grammatical anomalies have consistently been explained as the mere by-products of their "numinous" poetic style. Most scholars have viewed their repetitious and sonorous language as a functional mechanism intended to create an emotional and experiential effect rather than to communicate content or meaning. Consequently, they have treated its broken syntax, its seemingly ad hoc vacillations between singular and plural forms, its participial clusters and, most importantly, its attribution of active verbs of praise to inanimate objects as expressions of intensified states of "religious" feeling or consciousness. Thus, although certain scholars have tried to distinguish the Songs from later mystical practice and textual tradition by emphasizing the cycle's specific origin and history within the Judaism of the Second Temple period, they consistently described the function of its peculiar poetics in experiential and emotive terms. The assumptions are persistent: religious poetry evokes feelings; it is not "to think with." Yet, by reducing the distinctive features of the cycle's syntax and semantics to epiphenomena of its religious function, scholars have overlooked the intimate connection between the cycle's idiosyncratic depiction of heavenly architecture and the formal poetic features with which the author(s) achieve this effect. I believe that it is precisely through this characteristic confluence of architectural language and "numinous" style that the text assumes its distinctive function and meaning.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the cycle's amalgamation of the conventional liturgical form of the "invitation to praise God" with its unique depiction of the animated celestial structures participating in that praise. The intimate connection between the poetics of the Songs and their systematic multiplication and animation of celestial architectural structures indicates convincingly that the cycle's distinctive syntax represents more than just the excesses of religious ecstasy. As the narrative trajectory of the cycle moves from conventional angelological material to the cycle's distinctive descriptions of animate architecture singing the praises of God, the multiplication and animation of celestial structures challenges the conventions of describing an ordered and stable celestial sphere. More importantly, the cycle's progressively broken syntax mirrors the collapse of the boundaries between the angelic hosts and the architectural elements themselves. The angelic creatures are described in the Songs as images inscribed, carved or woven into the Temple's walls, furnishings, and tapestries. These descriptive passages are drawn from the traditional verbal and artistic iconography of the Jerusalem cult. In these descriptive songs, the Songs fuse the mutually dependent domains of myth, art and language. This dynamic relationship between representational art and discursive tradition generates something akin to a verbal iconography.

Beyond emphasizing the interdependence of the cycle's formal and descriptive features, this paper will demonstrate how the form, content and context of the Songs represents a strategy to encompass the very specific historical situation of the community. Most importantly, a reading that situates the structure, language, and ritual function of the Songs within the production, performance and transmission of liturgical material at Qumran complicates efforts to make use of the text for stylistic and thematic comparison within the history of early Hebrew religious poetry. Because of the tension between context and continuity, this paper argues that this comparative project must begin from an analysis of the relationship between poetics and function and between language and experience within a specific literary domain. In light of the absence of direct dependence of the Hekhalot corpus on the Songs, analysis of the scattered parallels in theme, motifs, language and form must be tempered by contextual literary analysis. I compare a series of seven-fold hymns in the Songs and in the Hekhalot corpus to demonstrate the gap between formal similarity and the production of textual meaning.

(c) 2001
Reproduction beyond fair use only on permission of the author.