Publication Preview | A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity

I was a teenager before I noticed my mother participate in a strange medieval custom. Every day, without fail, she would read from the Psalms, completing the book cover-to-cover every single week. She read the book in English, her adopted language, or in Yiddish, her native tongue. Never Hebrew—she had no formal Jewish education. She never did articulate to me exactly why she read the Psalms weekly. Only that doing so was important to her.

I was intrigued. The Psalms anthologize some of the poetry that circulated in ancient Israel and the Second Temple period. They are not fun to read—let alone straight through. No narrative arc or compelling character draws one into their pages. And the poems are often repetitive, sometimes boring and nonsensical. So why did my mother—and countless others like her—find reading the Psalter as part of their life’s routine meaningful? This question animated the research that resulted in my book, A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity.

Unlike my mother, I grew up in settings that championed intellectualism, that viewed texts as objects to be interpreted; and my academic training veered in a similar direction. During my days as an undergraduate and as early graduate student, I was captivated by the dominant strain of scholarship that explained the long history of the Hebrew Bible in terms of abstracted exegesis. This scholarship tends to revel in questions of citation, allusion, referentiality, intertextuality, and literary art. Art and artifacts, too—but largely in service of how these material objects read the Bible or may be used to interpret it. This style of scholarship also generally conceived of the rabbis’ relationship to scripture (and that of ancient Jews in general) in terms of midrash, a finely sharpened rabbinic tool for dissecting verses. I was convinced by the questions asked and answered by this brand of scholarship. They paved my academic path. And ultimately, I aspired to produce something akin to James Kugel’s magisterial Traditions of the Bible.[1]

I grew disillusioned, especially after wading through a rising tide of scholarship that sought to make fertile the study of lived religion in the ancient world: the dimensions of life that sole attention to biblical interpretation does not cultivate. Surely, exegesis is not the sum of ancient religion; even if, admittedly, most sources available for reconstructing the (late ancient) past frame themselves as interpretation of one sort or another. My mother’s modern example certainly had ancient analogs. So I used her cherished book, the book of Psalms, to contextualize some not-necessarily-exegetical dimensions of life in late ancient Judaism, to understand sacred texts as objects of practice, to illuminate ancient religion as something intellectual—but also as something tactile, oral, aural, and affective.

My book offers four related portraits in four chapters of the late ancient “life of Psalms”—the modalities in which the biblical book existed (a life of the book of Psalms) as well as various ways that Psalms shaped the experiences of those who inhabited the past (human lives filled with Psalms).

The first chapter (“Holding the Scrolls of Psalms”) contributes to the growing discourse on ancient materiality—and especially to the intersections between ancient Judaism and the history of the book. It surveys the extant physical remnants of the Hebrew Psalter from Qumran until the High Middle Ages (ca. 175 BCE–ca. 1000 CE) and triangulates the material condition of Psalm scrolls during Late Antiquity. The chapter 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.[2] 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.

The second chapter (“Reading a Material Psalter”) bridges the gap between thinking about a material Psalter and reading a physical copy of it. It contributes to a burgeoning conversation that attends to the very act with which you are currently engaged: reading. The chapter analyzes ancient Jewish texts in terms of reading practices—a mode of scholarship that draws upon the history of reading to advance the idea that a variety of sociological transcripts accompany the complicated and layered process known as reading. The chapter begins by destabilizing and decentering midrash as a catchall term to describe how rabbis (and possibly other Jews) encountered Scripture. It examines the place of Psalms in “scenes of reading,” narratives that depict a subject actively holding a physical scroll and reading from it, and outlines other types of reading practices, such as: leisure reading, affective reading, and pietistic reading. The chapter then turns to midrash, but as a style of reading sometimes contingent on the material dimensions of a scroll. It concludes by exploring the social and symbolic wealth attached to the physical Psalter.

The third chapter (“Singing Psalms”) moves beyond the material dimensions of the Psalter and focuses instead on the most obvious non-interpretive and oral way in which Jews encountered the Psalms: by singing portions from it as liturgy. The chapter contributes to the history of Jewish liturgy and to the story of the dynamic tension between tradition and innovation in late antiquity. It asks and answers a group of related historical questions: When, how, and why did the Psalter become part of daily rabbinic liturgy? It begins by highlighting the limited nature of daily psalmody outside the Second Temple and its absence in the liturgy of the rabbis prior to the third century. It then traces the history of daily psalmody in the liturgy of third-to-seventh-century Palestinian and Babylonian Jews, arguing that singing the Psalms as a liturgical act did not occur in one meteoric historical moment but, rather, developed in fits and starts. The chapter then sets this process into the context of several other historical developments: the justification of liturgical innovation by appealing to the Psalter—focusing specifically on the reception of Psalm 29; the use of Psalms in rabbinic sermons; the reconceptualization of synagogue space; the increased analogizing between synagogue and temple; the use of Psalms in liturgy by non-rabbinic Jews; and the rise of liturgical psalmody in early Christianity.

If chapters are children produced by the labor of love, then one ought not have a favorite. But admittedly, I enjoyed researching and writing chapter four (“Reciting Psalms in Piety and Magic”) the most. It articulates the historical value of attending to the lived, non-exegetical dimensions of ancient religion—to a landscape dominated by those who inscribed, touched, chanted, and uttered Psalms. The chapter surveys the pious and magical use of Psalms in early Christian material and literary sources, and then slowly analyzes the activities and artifacts that constituted Psalm piety and magic in late ancient Judaism. It argues that both Jews and Christians regularly engaged in activities such as midnight piety, bedtime piety, death piety, the mantra-like repetition of psalms, and communal piety. They did so with distinctive performative nuances, but in a generally non-polemical manner. It also shows that ancient Jews and early Christians, whether clerical leader or lay practitioner, did not neatly divide piety, liturgy, and magic into independent and isolated categories of thought. Modernity, with its attempt to judge some forms of scriptural practice as salutary and others as satanical, enclosed borders around these concepts and foreclosed otherwise fruitful paths of historical analysis.

Ultimately, I hope this book encourages others to continue to develop a history of religion that includes its lived dimensions, one that tells the story of the Bible as an object both practiced and preached. But as per its title, A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity limited itself to the Psalms and to the period of late ancient Judaism. Perhaps future studies will develop, extend, and challenge the arguments therein. Other books of the Bible—and of course various scriptural verses—circulated in text and by word of mouth in late antiquity, and perhaps even more so, the amalgam of sacred literature produced and sometimes preserved before the destruction of the Second Temple. What might their use say about a world in which “scripture” also functioned as piety? And as the fourth chapter begins to show, early Christians, too, belong to the story. What history might a more fully comparative project unveil?

      My mother’s unflagging dedication to reading the Psalms over the course of the week makes a bit more sense to me now that I have written this book. Her pious practice continues a tradition that grew from seeds planted in late ancient soil—seeds that sprouted in an environment suffused with psalmody and were tended to by a population that lived in, with, and through their sacred literature. The real lives and the very human habits of these ancient men and women bequeathed to my mother and those like her a daily tempo, a rhythm of life separated from the past only by a matter of time.

AJ Berkowitz is assistant professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.

[1] James L Kugel, Traditions of the Bible:  A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

[2] In particular, I have been much influenced by the scholarship of Antony Grafton, Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, D. F. McKenzie, Lisa Jardine, and David Stern, among many others.