A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity

By A. J. Berkovitz

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one’s last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible.

A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter. It asks a simple set of questions: Where did late ancient Jews encounter the Psalms? How did they engage with the work? And what meanings did they produce? A. J. Berkovitz answers these queries by reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of religious practices performed with and on the Psalter, such as handling a physical copy, reading from it, interpreting it exegetically, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic and reciting it as an act of piety. His book draws from and contributes to the fields of ancient Judaism, biblical reception, book history and the history of reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824193

Book preview

Cover: A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity by A. J. Berkovitz

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors:

Shaul Magid,

Francesca Trivellato,

Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

A LIFE OF PSALMS IN JEWISH LATE ANTIQUITY

A. J. Berkovitz

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

https://www.pennpress.org/

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2418-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2419-3

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

This book is dedicated to two individuals who passed before it could appear in print:

To Maya Berkovitch, my mother, the pious Psalmist. She completed the book of Psalms every week and passed with a Psalter at her bedside.

To Ben Berkovitz, our firstborn son. No lament recorded in the Psalter truly captures our heartache. May the angels who sing the joyful words of David serenade you in the world to come.

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Holding the Scrolls of Psalms

Chapter 2. Reading a Material Psalter

Chapter 3. Singing Psalms

Chapter 4. Reciting Psalms in Piety and Magic

Conclusions and Prospects. The Other Lives of Psalms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

I cite Psalms throughout the book using the Masoretic chapter numbers. In line with NJPS and against NRSV, I treat Psalm superscriptions as verse 1, as opposed to verse 0. Additionally, a capital Psalms typically refers to the book of Psalms or a specifically designated Psalm, such as Psalm 1. The lowercase psalms refer in a general manner to poems called psalms.

In citation and abbreviation, I have generally followed the rules set forth in the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. I do not represent aleph and ayin at the beginning or end of a transliteration unless doing so is required for clarity and the letters were historically part of the Hebrew root.

Below, I render in full the abbreviations that are not easily intuited by a nonspecialist reader.

Introduction

In Jewish collective memory, the golden age of the Psalter lies firmly in the distant past, when the First and Second Temples dominated the architecture of Jerusalem and Jewish life. The Levites would stand atop a podium and chant David’s lyrical poems. They would drown out the bleats and screams of sacrificial animals with the sounds of sacred music composed by Israel’s sweet singer (2 Sam. 23:1).¹ The Babylonians, and then Romans, not only exiled Israel when they razed the temple; they silenced the sound of music. They transmuted the book of Psalms from the temple’s acoustic backdrop into a collection of edifying poems. With messianic redemption comes the promise that the Psalms will once again claim its rightful place as the temple’s songbook.

S. Y. Agnon (1887–1970), Israel’s sweet writer, expressed a version of this memory during his Nobel Laureate acceptance speech on December 10, 1966:

As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. In a dream, in a vision of the night, I saw myself standing with my brother-Levites in the Holy Temple, singing with them the songs of David, King of Israel, melodies such as no ear has heard since the day our city was destroyed and its people went into exile. I suspect that the angels in charge of the Shrine of Music, fearful lest I sing in wakefulness what I had sung in dream, made me forget by day what I had sung at night; for if my brethren, the sons of my people, were to hear, they would be unable to bear their grief over the happiness they have lost. To console me for having prevented me from singing with my mouth, they enable me to compose songs in writing.²

Agnon, whom we will meet again, envisions the Psalms at both its apex and nadir. During a fleeting and forgotten dream, a vision of the night, he finds himself transported to Jerusalem to sing psalms with his fellow Levites. He does not tell us whether he sings in the Jerusalem of the Third Temple or in the city of one of the previous two. In mythological terms, it does not matter. As he awakes to the present, however, he mercifully forgets. Exile makes psalmody impossible. The lasting memory of David’s melodies would lead to unbearable grief. Instead, Agnon completely elides the Psalms. In place of singing David’s compositions in exile—perhaps actualizing, at his current historical moment, the Psalmist’s lament in Ps. 137:4, How can we sing the Lord’s song on foreign soil?—he finds comfort by writing songs of his own, that is, his stories and novels.

As with most instances of collective memory, this representation of the Psalms is only partially true.³ The sound of psalms, for example, reverberated loudly within the halls of the synagogue during Agnon’s day.⁴ At the same time, the memory points to one slice of the complex history and networks of meaning that accompanied the Psalms as it passed from the hands of one generation to the next.

By tethering the glory of the Psalter to the Jerusalem Temple, this memory raises a broader question, which animates each page that follows: What did the Psalms come to mean, and what roles did it play in Jewish intellectual, religious, cultural, and social life in the aftermath of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land?

This book offers a partial answer, for a complete and systematic analysis requires the seas to transform into ink and the skies into rolls of parchment. It limits itself to reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of practices performed with and on the Hebrew book of Psalms by the Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews who lived in Greco-Roman Palestine, Sassanian Persia, and their environs between the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of Islam. Specifically, it explores activities such as handling a physical copy of the Psalter, reading from it, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic, and reciting it as an act of piety. These topics provide a rough legend by which to explore the complicated map of the Psalter’s early history. But, ultimately, my readers should understand the book open in front of them as an invitation to further study. For this reason, its title begins with an indefinite article, a (A Life of Psalms), instead of the definite article, the.

A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity

Let us further unpack this book’s title. Why Psalms? In addition to its place in Jewish collective memory, the Psalter occupies a large space within the scriptural universe of late ancient Judaism.⁵ The rabbis, whose literary legacy shines as the brightest constellation of evidence for the Judaism of Late Antiquity, cite from it more often than from other biblical books, including those that are larger in size, such as Kings, Chronicles, Samuel, Jeremiah, and Genesis.⁶ They, along with Jews outside or at the margins of rabbinic Judaism, also accorded the Psalms pride of place within the practices of liturgy, piety, and magic. Because of its popularity, the Psalms provides a distinctive vista from which to examine a set of activities that characterized the religious life of ancient Jews.

Sometimes, the Psalter’s distinction blurs into uniqueness. The story of the development of Jewish liturgy is entwined with Psalms in such a manner that we could not replace the Psalter with another biblical book and tell a substantially similar tale.

More often, however, the Psalms shares its space with other sacred texts of late ancient Jews. The pages that follow also explore the web of connections that tie the Psalms to the physical material of Scripture, reading habits, piety, and magic. While prominent within this network of meaning, the Psalter does not monopolize every node. Jews exorcised demons with the aid of verses from across the Hebrew Bible, and they piously recited and etched into stone other verses from Scripture, even if at a less frequent rate. They certainly produced and read from physical copies of other biblical texts. With respect to these cases, we explore but one area of the complicated encounter between late ancient Jews and their Scripture.

At the same time, because the Psalter lies as a highly visible landmark within the religious landscape of late ancient Judaism, we can look toward it in orienting future scholarly inquiry. It is my hope, therefore, that the studies below not only explain the place of the Psalter in late antique Judaism but also provide direction for similar analyses of other parts of Scripture. In short, this book focuses on the Psalms because, a bit like each member of the Trinity, it is simultaneously unique, distinctive, and representative.

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Why Jewish Late Antiquity? The life of Psalms, of course, begins in ancient Israel, when various Hebrew authors and songwriters composed the poetry that eventually coalesced into the present-day book of Psalms.⁷ It continues during the Second Temple era, when these poems were organized and reorganized into various collections, translated into Greek, quoted by Paul, and meditated upon by the Jews who wrote and read the Dead Sea Scrolls.⁸ Each of these periods, in its own right, contributes to the Psalter’s rich and complex history.

Yet our narrative focuses specifically on Late Antiquity and particularly upon Judaism, mostly in its various rabbinic inflections. It takes as its central body of evidence the classical literature produced by the rabbis, which include the Mishnah, Tosefta, tannaitic midrash, amoraic midrash, Palestinian Talmud, and Babylonian Talmud. The distance between the near-final editing of the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud places us firmly within the setting of Late Antiquity (late second century–mid-seventh century).⁹ Of course, these boundaries are somewhat porous. Late ancient rabbinic literature preserves traditions that may date to the end of the Second Temple period and, on occasion, contains traditions composed after the Arab conquest of Jerusalem (638 CE).¹⁰ Following in the footsteps of these redacted literatures, I will occasionally, when they are relevant to the discussion at hand, make use of texts that antedate the destruction of the Second Temple and postdate the Islamic siege of Jerusalem.

The list of sources above, neither exhaustive nor complete, includes rabbinic compositions from both Roman Palestine and Sassanian Persia. A growing methodological trend in the study of rabbinic Judaism views Jewish life in each region on its own terms and in relation to its proximate religious-civic cultures. This scholarly intervention is salutary, especially with respect to the Babylonian Talmud, which combines Palestinian traditions, Babylonian sources, and an editorial voice that fits most obviously in a Persian setting.¹¹ At the same time, the Jews of Palestine and Babylonia did not inhabit worlds hermetically sealed off from each other. The rabbis of these two regions do not present us with distinct and fundamentally incompatible Judaisms. They, along with their traditions, traveled from one place to the other.¹²

A fair analysis of rabbinic texts that deal with Psalms from both centers of Jewish life will show that the story of the late ancient Hebrew Psalter does not differ from one region to the next, at least in broad strokes. Of course, each zone of rabbinic Judaism contains its nuances, and this narrative will attend to them and to their larger contexts when important. But, at the very least, in order to best appreciate how Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis differed from each other in how they encountered the Psalms, we ought first to develop a narrative that understands what they have in common. This book tells that story.

The pages that follow examine sources that deal with Psalms from both locations of Jewish life, usually analyzing Palestinian texts prior to Babylonian ones. At times, the narrative intentionally places Palestinian and Babylonian traditions side by side, in order to highlight key similarities and differences between the texts and the regions from which they originate.

As mentioned above, rabbinic texts dominate our extant pool of evidence for Jewish Late Antiquity in Palestine and Babylonia. They do not, however, monopolize it entirely. A wide variety of Jews lived in the ancient world.¹³ And the material evidence they left behind—such as physical scrolls, synagogue edifices, mosaic art, magical amulets, and inscriptions—provides us with clues about the life of Psalms for those Jews outside of, or marginal to, the study circles of the rabbis.¹⁴ They also shed light on the conversations, tensions, and patterns within rabbinic society.¹⁵ To the degree that these physical artifacts exist and add nuance to the larger discussion, this narrative will attend to them and what they teach us about rabbinic and not-necessarily-rabbinic encounters with Psalms.

This narrative will also place rabbinic literature into conversation with non-Jewish late antique bodies of evidence. Within the ancient world, the Psalter belonged equally—if not more—to the nascent Jesus movement and the varieties of early Christianity that followed. One could write many books and articles about the various features of the late ancient Psalter on the basis of the texts and material artifacts that these groups produced. This book, although primarily focused on late ancient Judaism, does not entirely ignore early Christians. While Jewish voices take center stage, the set design and the remaining ensemble hail from the rest of Late Antiquity. Therefore, we will employ Christian sources selectively, citing or analyzing them when doing so sheds clarifying light upon a specific rabbinic source or upon the larger context in which Judaism operates.

At particular moments, these other cast members also enter the spotlight. Especially during the final chapter, the narrative will, on occasion, compare and contrast the various ways that Jews and Christians used Psalms, placing both religious traditions on near-equal analytical footing—a sort of duet. These attempts should be viewed as tentative and exploratory, the beginnings of another drama. The story of the life of Psalms in early Christianity and its comparative relationship to late ancient Judaism deserves to be told and retold. We may better do so, I contend, after mapping out the contours of the life of the Psalms within late antique Judaism.

Placing rabbinic literature into conversation with non-Jewish bodies of evidence also helps supply the cultural and regional contexts in which rabbinic Judaism flourished. Greek and Latin sources, for example, provide the setting for the world of Palestinian rabbinic literature, and Syriac texts furnish the backdrop of Babylonian Judaism.¹⁶ On a limited number of occasions, however, a Greco-Roman context best explains a tradition or story about the Psalms that the Babylonian Talmud attributes to a Palestinian sage. The editors of the Babylonian Talmud, while skillful, did not always flatten and reforge their source material in a manner that effaced its origins. Nor did they affix a false regional attribution to every tradition.¹⁷ Sometimes, a source in the Babylonian Talmud attributed to a Palestinian sage is just that—a tradition from Palestine.¹⁸ For the moment, I cannot reduce these matters to a sweeping methodological statement. This narrative, therefore, will set Palestinian voices embedded within the Babylonian Talmud into a Greco-Roman setting on a limited case-by-case basis, doing so only when that voice appears to fit a larger cultural pattern independently and prominently attested to in Palestinian rabbinic or in Greco-Roman literary sources. It will not take traditions within the Babylonian Talmud as the sole or primary evidence for a feature of the life of Psalms in Palestine.¹⁹

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So much for Jewish. But why Late Antiquity? Why not begin with or include substantial discussions of the Psalter during the periods of ancient Israel and the Second Temple? In addition to my goal of integrating nuance into a piece of collective memory, I focus on Late Antiquity because it witnesses the rise of two conditions that make reconstructing the life of the Psalms distinctive and more readily accomplishable.

The first pertains to the words Psalms and Psalter. Along with the rest of what would eventually become the Hebrew Bible, the now-canonical Hebrew book of Psalms existed in a state of flux during and prior to the Second Temple period.²⁰ Like other sacred texts, it contained words and lines that do not appear in its canonical version.²¹ More strikingly, its poems were arranged in various orders, many of which only partially match the sequence of the canonical book of Psalms.²² Further still, it contained poems now absent from the Hebrew Psalter.²³ Some of this missing poetry appears in various translations of the Psalms. In Greek, for example, the Psalter contains Psalm 151, a poem attributed to David.²⁴ Various Syriac versions include several more.²⁵ The exact nature and cause of this variability are the subjects of serious debate. Some scholars see this variation as the growing pains of the canonical Psalter. In their view, we may talk about an entity known as the book of Psalms, but we must acknowledge that during this early period, the Psalter was a work in progress.²⁶ Other scholars argue that the Psalms in the Second Temple period never existed as a single book or conceptual unit but, rather, as a series of open anthologies consisting of various poetic works.²⁷ This book will not weigh in on this dispute.

As the Second Temple era blurs into the late antique period of Jewish history, a canonical Hebrew Psalter indisputably emerges. For late ancient Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews, the Psalter existed as a particular book, or, better yet, a specific set of scrolls.²⁸ The Psalms no longer contained major textual variations. Minor ones, of course, would pester its copyists through the rise of print, and beyond.²⁹ Additionally, only the poems found within this book held authoritative sway for the rabbis and their followers.³⁰ Rabbinic literature never cites as Scripture texts that could be considered psalms but exist outside the Hebrew Psalter, works like Psalms 151–55 or other poems attributed to David.³¹ Settled as well was the order in which these poetic compositions appear. Various rabbinic homilies, for example, depend upon and thus provide evidence for the canonical sequence of the Psalms.³² One feature of the Hebrew Psalter, however, remained in flux. The number of psalms ranged between 143 and 154, until print stabilized them at 150.³³ For example, some rabbis, and possibly other early interpreters, understood Psalms 1 and 2 as a single composition.³⁴

Jewish Late Antiquity, therefore, attests to the Psalms in a manner distinct from its attestation in the Second Temple period and earlier. If we adopt the perspective of those who view psalms in the Second Temple as an open anthology, then a life of the Psalms—as a single, distinguishable, concretely canonical entity—can begin only in Late Antiquity. Even those who view the Second Temple Psalter as a canonical work in progress would agree that the contours of the late ancient Hebrew Psalms are better defined. By beginning with Late Antiquity, therefore, we avoid some of the pre-canonical chaos. We can say with certainty that the primary voices within our narrative shared a fundamentally similar text that they called Sefer Tehillim, the book of Psalms.

The second distinctive feature of Late Antiquity pertains to the preponderance of evidence and the types of arguments for which these data allow. With some fragmentary exceptions, most of what we may learn about the Jewish encounter with the Hebrew Psalms prior to Late Antiquity comes from the Psalter itself (or, psalms themselves)—either from an analysis of the poems contained therein or through an examination of the ways in which scribes copied, arranged, and translated them.³⁵ These are not trifling matters. This book pays attention to those late ancient Jewish scribes who put quill to parchment.³⁶ But a richer life of the Psalter awaits those who also incorporate the many hands that touched, and mouths that uttered, the Psalms, yet did not leave a mark directly on its pages.

Prior to the rise of the rabbinic movement, our best and most abundant evidence comes from those who encountered the Psalter in Greek. Composers of the texts that circulated within the early Jesus movement cite from the Psalms frequently.³⁷ Philo, the first-century Jewish Alexandrian philosopher, quotes from it a handful of times.³⁸ But from the perspective of the Hebrew Psalter and the Jews who engaged with it primarily in Hebrew and Aramaic, we must wait until Late Antiquity. Only then do we find a pool of evidence both wide and deep, a reservoir that includes sources that describe novel strategies for encountering and using the Psalms.

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Why the word life? Why not, instead, use the word reception, the expected term for the study of a biblical text in the periods after it was written and redacted?³⁹ While this book might sit comfortably on a shelf next to other works that self-describe as operating within the framework of reception history, I shun reception because I dislike the methodological inferences that underpin the word. In addition to biasing research toward a history of interpretation, a tendency of reception history I will critique below, the word reception does not fully capture the vitality of the Psalter.⁴⁰ It places the theoretical weight upon the shoulders of those who receive a text and transform it in the process of transmission; hence, reception. In doing so, it privileges the impact that a reader or reciter has upon a text without fully considering how a text—including its words, physical substance, and embedded cues—shapes those who engage with it.

In seeking an appropriate word to describe the mutually influencing paths that connect ancient Jews with the Hebrew Psalms, I sought inspiration from the German near-equivalent of reception: Nachleben, which literally translates as afterlife.⁴¹ Afterlife, however, does not suffice. While it focuses more intently on a literary work than does reception, it assumes a fixed point in time, after which a text merely reverberates. It loses its initial vitality and haunts those in the present from a defined moment in the past.⁴² This book does not examine the ways that Jews recast themes and motifs found in the Psalms—ideas that would merely echo throughout Jewish history and literature. Rather, it explores how they engaged with the Psalter—its material casing and the words housed inside—with constantly renewed vigor, building on older traditions while crafting new ones. There is no after. I thus settle on the word life, a term that captures the continued vitality of the Psalter and does not frame its history as one of mere survival.

The life of formula also connects this book to biography, a word that etymologically breaks down as: a life (bios) told in writing (graphē). Works in this genre describe the fortunes and circumstances of a particular person, place, or thing. Biographies of great literary works, as a subgenre of biography, face many limitations. They cannot trace the steady year-by-year development of a narrowly defined subject. They also rarely can claim completeness or even strive toward it. Nonetheless, literary biographies articulate loudly something that the labels reception and "Nachleben" voice in a muted tone: They proclaim the fact that texts and those who engage with them constantly mold and remold each other.⁴³ A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity adopts this feature of the literary biography. It tells the story of how the Hebrew Psalter shaped the Judaism of Late Antiquity and was, in turn, shaped by its Jewish users.

Broader Methodological Intersections and Interventions

Several fields of inquiry that originally developed outside the study of Judaism or the ancient world aid our task of exploring the late ancient Jewish encounter with the Psalter. The first two chapters, for example, conceptually rely upon two closely related disciplines: book history;⁴⁴ and the history of reading.⁴⁵ In the simplest terms, historians of the book begin their task by detailing the physical material that houses the written word. They then explore the complicated triangular relationship between the words of a text, its material container, and the readers who hold it. Material and meaning, they posit, exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship; we cannot artificially segregate one from the other.

Our study adopts the methodological tools of the book historian and begins with an analysis of the late ancient material Psalter, both real and imagined. It then highlights how the physical dimensions of the Psalm’s container—a scroll—shape its interpretation and use. In doing so, this book contributes to a developing body of literature that seeks to understand the role of the material Bible in interpretation and imagination.⁴⁶

By focusing on the material Psalter and its users as a case study, I also hope that this book contributes in a small way to a larger methodological intervention, a position that would require a large-scale study to fully articulate and defend. Scholars of rabbinic Judaism often understand and analyze rabbinic culture as one dominated by orality—the act of creating and transmitting thoughts and ideas primarily (if not exclusively) through speech. This approach is largely correct and useful.⁴⁷ The liturgical, pietistic, and magical encounters with the Psalter detailed below, for example, almost always took place in the world of the spoken and memorized word. At the same time, some features of the rabbinic engagement with the Psalms are clearly indebted to the material reality of the Psalter. Even the rabbis themselves acknowledge the centrality of writing regarding their Written Torah. How might a theory of scriptural encounter that balanced orality and writing change or reorient our perceptions of the rabbis and their social, cultural, and intellectual environments?⁴⁸

The pages that follow also draw upon scholarship that conceptualizes the act of reading as a process situated at the intersection of specific historical, material, social, and cultural conditions. Adopting this methodological stance allows us to separate the many strands tied together in the simple word read and to examine the process and results of each strand on its own terms. As we will see below, Jews read the Psalter in multiple modalities—as interpretation, as leisure, and as an act of piety—each shaped by its own internal logic, as well as the external environment.

This theory of reading also helps us provide nuance to a certain deeply entrenched orientation. Scholarship on the rabbinic—or even Jewish—encounter with Scripture almost naturally describes both the process and results of reading Scripture with the catch-all term midrash, a primarily interpretation-focused manner of engaging with Scripture.⁴⁹ To be sure, such scholarship then introduces nuances and categorizes midrash into various different types.⁵⁰ Midrash, however, in whatever format, remains the archetype for Jewish reading. It is not my goal in these pages to critique the current use of the word midrash. What attention to the history of reading teaches us, however, is that midrash was but one of many types of ways that (rabbinic) Jews read Scripture in Late Antiquity. The rabbis themselves appear to offer an internal distinction between at least two different styles of reading Scripture: to expound (lidrosh), a word that derives from the same Hebrew root as the word midrash; and to read (liqro).⁵¹ This book, therefore, casts its net wide and draws together the multiplicity of ways that late ancient Jews read the Psalter, which includes, but is not limited to, midrash.

The attempt to move beyond midrash is evident in each chapter of this book, but especially in its final two, which exit the realm of the physical Psalter and its reading. They focus instead on the Psalms as a vehicle for liturgy, piety, and magic. In doing so, they call attention to the fact that the field of reception history in general—and the reception of Psalms in particular—also favors examining biblical interpretation over other forms of interacting with Scripture.⁵² As an analytical tendency, scholars of biblical reception often view the Bible as an object of learned discourse, a text that interpreters read, decode, and then set within a particular ideology. Scholars then collect these interpretations and organize them into a history of exegesis. This activity produces well-founded studies, and it is much aided by our extant pool of historical evidence. The most readily available sources for reconstructing the reception of a biblical text are themselves framed as biblical interpretation. At the same time, such a focus on interpretation yields access to just a small fraction of the conversations that surround and constitute the Bible.

What makes the Psalter so compelling to study is that evidence exists for exploring its role in more than just interpretation. This book attempts to get at these other dimensions by reframing reception history and by changing the basic question that we pose to our late antique evidence. Instead of asking, What meaning did Jews produce from the Psalms?—which privileges interpretation—it asks, How did Jews encounter the Psalms? The latter encourages one to reconstruct types of scriptural engagement that lie outside the realm of exegesis. By setting up our primary question in this manner, we can examine the Psalter as a physical artifact, as a book to read for personal edification, as a collection of songs to sing, as an armory against demonic incursion, and as a storehouse of words that inculcate hope and joy. We might also catch a coveted glimpse at the daily lives of rabbinic Jews; and possibly even at routines of non-rabbinic Jews, who interacted with the Psalter more often as an object of liturgy and piety than as a text to be picked apart using the tools of midrashic interpretation.

Evidence, albeit less of it, also exists for reconstructing the non-interpretive life of other sacred texts. Jews (and Christians) encountered more than just the Psalter in ways other than exegesis. Future studies could, and should, replace the word Psalms in the questions above with other books of Scripture and see what additional new light might be shed on the Bible and those who engaged with it. Ultimately, this study constitutes but one piece in a much larger mosaic, which depicts a biblical reception history that accords near-equal weight, where possible, to exegetical and non-exegetical modes of encountering Scripture.

This book also reshapes the reception history of the Psalter in Jewish Late Antiquity by operating with a vastly different source base than previous studies, which often focus intensively on Targum Psalms and Midrash Psalms.⁵³ I intentionally accord neither of these texts a central role in this narrative. The language of Targum Psalms, the Jewish Aramaic translation of the Psalter, suggests that it was composed toward the close of Late Antiquity, if not after.⁵⁴ The translator also seems to be aware of the Hungarians, an anachronism from the vantage point of Jewish Late Antiquity.⁵⁵

Midrash Psalms, a verse-by-verse rabbinic commentary on the Psalter, likely hails from after our period, probably as late as the eleventh century. It contains traditions from Palestine and Babylonia; it even cites material from the editorial layer of the Babylonian Talmud.⁵⁶ While Midrash Psalms undoubtedly represents the work of centuries of collecting and editing,⁵⁷ in the absence of a proper critical edition⁵⁸ or decades of detailed textual studies, it is difficult to confidently say that any tradition located in its pages accurately reflects the Judaism of Late Antiquity. This book, therefore, does not use Midrash Psalms as an intellectual shortcut into the life of the late ancient Psalter. Instead, it searches through the vast collections of late antique rabbinic literature for evidence. It occasionally uses Midrash Psalms, but only in an ancillary manner, and only where Midrash Psalms confirms a trend already extant in a definitively late antique source. I look forward to the day when Midrash Psalms receives a full and systematic study. The text likely has much to teach us about the late ancient Hebrew Psalter and the rabbis who found it meaningful.

Outline of Chapters

This book tells a story about the late ancient Jewish encounter with the Psalter in four chapters. It begins by examining the Hebrew Psalter as a series of scrolls, the ancient physical container that held its numerous poems. It then explores four ways in which (mostly rabbinic) Jews engaged with the words from the Psalms: by reading them from a physical copy; by singing them in daily liturgy; by reciting them as an act of piety; and by invoking them in magic.

Chapter 1 surveys the extant physical remnants of the Hebrew Psalter from Qumran through the High Middle Ages. This evidence allows us to triangulate the material condition of Psalm scrolls during Late Antiquity. The chapter then locates these physical sources alongside literary ones. It adopts the imperative of the book historian, the necessity of examining in tandem a material artifact and those who use it. By exploring four specific conversations, it examines how physical Psalm scrolls shaped the manners in which rabbis represent and envision the Psalter. Questions regarding the macro issues of the Psalter’s length and divisibility constitute the first two. The final two focus on writing the Psalter and erasing its contents. Altogether, this chapter demonstrates the historical and interpretive value of placing rabbinic culture within the context of the quotidian reality of the material condition.

Chapter 2 bridges the gap between thinking about a material Psalter and reading a physical copy of it. The first part of the chapter focuses on the place of Psalms in scenes of reading, narratives that depict a subject actively holding a physical scroll and reading from it. It draws upon the methodology of historians of reading and examines the variety of sociological transcripts that accompany acts of reading. In doing so, the chapter begins the process of understanding midrash as but one of the many important ways that rabbis—and other Jews—engaged with the Psalter. Other types of reading include leisure reading, affective reading, and pietistic reading. The second part of the chapter centers midrash as a style of reading and explores the impact that the tactile Psalm scroll had on rabbinic interpretation. In particular, it shows how the act of reading linearly across a physical text undergirded certain