By Laura S. Lieber

 

We know very little of the lived experiences of the majority of Jews in late antiquity. To be sure, we possess precious traces left to us by individuals, such as inscriptions, epitaphs, and even graffiti—all tantalizing, but often enigmatic, ambiguous, and highly localized. Domestic and religious spaces have also been recovered, and offer insight into aspects of the lived experience of elements of the population in some areas.

We can potentially reconstruct a great deal about daily life from the narratives found in rabbinic writings, such as the two Talmuds and the midrashic compendia, and perhaps even more from the implicit reality that constitutes the subtext of the legal material. But we cannot know with confidence how well the Jews of this period would have recognized their own lives in our tentative portraits.

But insights into Jewish life during late antiquity (third through the seventh century CE) can be teased from the literary traces of the early synagogue: the piyyutim, the exquisite Hebrew liturgical poems; and the targums, translations of Scripture into Aramaic, the language of everyday life.

 

T-S H10.169. Piyyuṭ in Aramaic; Šemaʿ and poetic benedictions for the Šabbat evening service; instructions for Erev Šabbat and weekday services.  Ca. 6th century CE. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University. (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-H-00010-00169/1)

 

Targums are translations of a sacred text into the vernacular and embody a fidelity to Scripture, while reflecting the needs and demands of Jewish communities; they clarify what is unclear, supply what seems lacking, and smooth what might ruffle popular mores. But translators focused on the biblical text, and meaningfulness rather than cleverness and artistry.

Hebrew text (right) and Aramaic Onkelos (left) in a Hebrew Bible dating from 1299 CE held by the Bodleian Library. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Kennicott_Bible_fol_21r.jpg)

 

The piyyutim, by contrast, display a good deal of individual creativity, diverging frequently from Scripture into the world of constructive theology, while providing clues to the synagogue’s world of participatory ritual. Nevertheless, they are still subject to the rigid framework of the liturgy in which they are embedded, and they speak in an elevated, literary register and focus on the sacred. These sources constitute vital evidence, crucial stones in the mosaic of everyday experience, but they highlight what we lack as much as what we possess.

Beyond the Hebrew piyyutim, however, other literary works offer a partial glimpse into Jewish lived experience in this formative period in the Land of Israel. These are writings in the Jewish vernacular, Aramaic, composed by unknown authors for use and subsequent reuse in an array of settings. It is worth pausing to note how pivotal a period late antiquity was for Jews and their neighbors in the Roman East: these centuries witnessed the consolidation of Jewish textual traditions, the renewal of Samaritan tradition, the rise of imperial Christianity, and the birth of Islam.

T-S NS 123.90. Piyyuṭ in Aramaic; catena of biblical verses. Ca. 6th century CE. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University. (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-NS-00123-00090/1)

 

They also saw the birth of a literary tradition that crossed many boundaries of the period: religious, if not necessarily liturgical, poetry. Jewish poets, like those of other communities, deeply engage theological traditions, sacred texts, and nuanced exegesis. But while the majority of extant Jewish poetry is both in Hebrew and liturgical, not every poem was in the sacred tongue, nor was every work incorporated within a liturgical framework in any clear, fixed, or defined way.

Foremost among this body of nonliturgical, non-Hebrew Jewish poetry is a small body of poems in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA). These poems, written to embellish the observance of holidays and life-cycle events, do not reflect a rebellion against institutions—they do not exist in tension with the Hebrew poems and the liturgy of the synagogue—but rather offer a window through which a bit more of Jewish life, as lived Jewishly, can yet be perceived.

In a modest yet revelatory volume, Shirat Bene Ma‘arava published 20 years ago, Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff compiled seventy-eight texts in a rigorously prepared and annotated critical edition, accompanied by translations of the poems into modern Hebrew as well as an expansive introduction that paid particular attention to the distinctive language of the poems.

My book, Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity, explores this body of religious poems to reconstruct something of the world in which the ancient poets lived. And it does so in light of developments in linguistic, ritual, and performative studies that have transformed the study of Jewish liturgical poetry, and hymnography in late antiquity more generally, in the past two decades. The translations not only reflect the needs of an English-language audience, but also draw on the wealth of text-critical tools and a secondary literature that has transformed how these poems can be read.

The works presented constitute a portion of a much larger mosaic of late ancient hymnography that crosses religious and geographic boundaries. This period, spanning roughly from the reign of Constantine until the Muslim conquest of Palestine, saw the sudden appearance of sophisticated poetry among Jews, Christians, and Samaritans. Certain elements distinguish a JPA poem from a Hebrew qedushta, a Syriac memra, a Greek kontakion, or a Samaritan piyyut. My analysis highlights the insights the JPA poems offer into ideas about piety, entertainment, and aesthetics among Palestinian Jews in this period.

It is a truism that form follows function, but in the case of the JPA poetry readers must accept uncertainty in terms of the function of these poems. Their content may strike modern readers as “religious,” insofar as they rely on biblical stories and embellish life-cycle events such as weddings and funerals. A bifurcation of poetry into “religious” and “secular,” however, fails to recognize the multiple ways in which many of these poems were likely used. Several poems indeed appear in the manuscripts under headings or rubrics that suggest integration into liturgical settings. But their use was likely flexible from the beginning and became ever more flexible over the centuries.

The nature of religious ritual itself may be more complicated than is often assumed: a wedding liturgy does not necessarily imply a synagogue setting, for example, and the scroll of Esther might have been read in locations other than a sanctuary. Other works specifically introduce biblical readings suggest some relationship between the poem and a lectionary, or list of scriptural readings. Wedding and funeral poems, in turn, often specifically reference ritual acts and phrases.

The poems contained in the JPA corpus reflect a relatively narrow yet not entirely intuitive range of settings: festivals and holy days, namely Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost), Tisha b’Av (the Ninth of Av), Purim, and Rosh Hodesh (the New Moon); life-cycle rituals, namely marriages and funerals; and the conclusion of scriptural units—the Torah, the book of Psalms, and Chronicles. Some occasions—the festival of Sukkot, the penitential season of Elul, and the High Holy Days, in particular—do not appear in this corpus, although they would not be out of place.

Or.1080 1.17. Piyyuṭ starting ארים עיני לשמי מרומא for the 9th of Av (on the destruction of the temple). Ca. 6th century CE. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University.(https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-01080-00001-00017/1)

 

MS_8972_0121-r. Illustrated page from a prayer book, ca. 1294 CE. Image provided by The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

 

The surviving poems do not explicitly embellish the statutory prayers of the liturgy as the Hebrew piyyutim do, but they do not preclude a synagogue setting. Some are more humorous and (by modern standards) irreverent than conventional liturgical poems, but even those are too closely aligned to religious settings, even rituals, to dismiss as irreligious. In the end, these works raise numerous questions about the nature of Jewish rituals, where they took place, and what functions they served.

The coexistence of a voluminous tradition of Hebrew poetry next to this smaller, distinctive body of Aramaic poetry raises a myriad of questions about social class, education, geography, and function. Were Hebrew poems preferred by one kind of synagogue or community (the more learned and elite), while the Aramaic works reflect a more plebian or lowbrow audience? Was one body of work “urban” and another “rural”? Was Hebrew sacred and Aramaic profane? Or, perhaps most plausibly, was Hebrew appropriate for poetry embedded in the Hebrew-language statutory liturgy, while Aramaic was more suited for “paraliturgical” use—occupying a ritual but nonliturgical space on the periphery of prayer and not attached to any specific location, synagogue or otherwise?

In the end, it is reasonable to conclude that these were popular works in the most encompassing sense: they enjoyed wide appeal and ultimately flourished in a variety of settings, including public settings that may have ranged from synagogues to civic spaces (such as theaters), particularly in communities with largely Jewish populations. No single presumed context can contain the varied uses of these poems over time and the heterogeneity of their audiences. Different genres—midrash, targum, Hebrew piyyut, and JPA poetry—do not necessarily indicate different audiences any more than different languages do, in a multilingual society such as late ancient Palestine.

Nor does “accessible”—that is, vernacular—poetry need be equated with “vulgar” or lowbrow verse. Rather, these differences may be interpreted as traces of the varied settings in which these poems were performed. The analysis offered in Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity focuses on the functions these JPA poems may have served and what they reveal about the Jews who wrote, enjoyed, and preserved them.

 

Laura S. Lieber is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University.