Abstract
It is easy to understand that at an early stage in investigations into the issues raised by the findings of the Genizah and Qumran, scholars were hardly attracted to hymnography. Pre-classical examples of piyyutim which were composed from the second to the fifth centuries CE were at first sight so close to the masoretic standard that they did not generate special attention. The same can be said of the first Qumran psalm manuscripts which resembled the biblical psalms in both content and arrangement.1 However, the Qumran findings of non-masoretic psalms marked a definite step forward in the investigations into their literary and liturgical status. Their language still depends much on biblical material to such an extent that some scholars firstly dismissed these psalms as mechanical imitations of their biblical predecessors. Early studies of the Thanksgiving Scroll qualify this collection of hymns as ‘a mosaic of Old Testament quotations’, ‘a patchwork of phrases from the masoretic psalter’, #x2018;expansions from the canonical Hebrew psalter’, and the like.2
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Footnotes
P.W. Flint, The Dead Sea Psalm Scrolls and the Book of Psalms (Leiden 1997) 7–9.
E.M. Schuller, Non-Canonical Psalms from Qumran: A Pseudepigraphic Collection. Harvard Semitic Studies 28 (Atlanta 1986) 10.
Cf. F. Garcia Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (Leiden 1994) column XIX, line 15.
I. Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry I (New York 1970) 372 no. 8215.
J.L. Kugel, ‘Some Medieval and Renaissance Hebrew Writings on the Poetry of the Bible’, in I. Twersky, ed., Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature (Cambridge etc. 1979) 57–81.
U. Simon, Four Approaches to the Book of Psalms. From Saadiah Gaon to Abraham ihn Ezra (Albany 1991) 24–44.
This tendency is even stronger in the writings of the Karaite Salmon ben Yeruham who also tried to refute the accusation that the Karaite approach towards biblical exegesis could be defined as derekh bne Tzadok — ‘the manner of the sons of Zadok’; an interesting parallel with the Qumran Jews, who occasionally called themselves bne Tzadok, cf. J.C. Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment (Leiden 1998-1999) 499–500, 600.
B. Nitzan, Qumran Prayer and Religious Poetry. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 12 (Leiden 1994) 18–19.
D.K. Falk, Daily, Sabbath, and Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden 1998) 212; idem., ‘Qumran Prayer Texts and the Temple’, Sapiential, Liturgical and Poetical Texts from Qumran: Proceedings of the Third Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies. Published in Memory of Maurice Baillet (Leiden 2000) 106-125.
J. Yahalom, Poetic Language in the Early Piyyut (Jerusalem 1985) 20–30.
Cf. my article ‘Hearing and Understanding Piyyut in the Liturgy of the Synagogue’, Zutot 2001 (Dordrecht etc. 2002), 58–63.
M.Z. Segal, Sefer ben Sira ha-Shalem (Jerusalem 1972) 287–288, 302-306; A.A. di Leila, ‘The Poetry of Ben Sira’, Erez-Yisrael, Sefer H. Orlinsky 16 (1982) 26*-33*.
Jerusalem 1999.
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van Bekkum, W.J. (2003). Qumran Poetry and Piyyut: Some Observations on Hebrew Poetic Traditions in Biblical and Post-Biblical Times. In: Berger, S., Brocke, M., Zwiep, I., Fontaine, R., Munk, R. (eds) Zutot 2002. Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0199-1_3
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