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Staging the Sacred
Theatricality and Performance in Late
Ancient Liturgical Poetry
L AU R A S . L I E B E R
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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lieber, Laura S, author.
Title: Staging the sacred : Theatricality and performance in late ancient
liturgical poetry / Laura S. Lieber.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022060577 (print) | LCCN 2022060578 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190065478 | ISBN 9780190065461 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190065492 | ISBN 9780190065485 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Religious poetry—History and criticism. |
Catholic Church—Hymns—History and criticism. | Theater—History—To 500.
Classification: LCC PN1077.L L53 2023 (print) | LCC PN1077.L (ebook) |
DDC 809.1/9382—dc23/eng/20230111
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060577
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060578
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190065461.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
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For Liz
Past Perfect
and for Scott
Past Imperfect & Future Most Vivid
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Contents
Acknowledgments Abbreviations ix
xv
Prologue: Choosing a Script and Learning Lines 1
1Setting the Stage: Community Theater and the
Translation of Tales 23
2Take Your Places: Authors, Actors, and Audiences 99
3Imagine, If You Will: Ekphrasis and the Senses in
the Sanctuary 162
4Method Acting: Ethopoeia and the Creation of Character 230
5Sounds, Sightlines, and Senses: Bodies and
Nonverbal Literacy 289
6The Stage is a World, the Body an Instrument: Hymns
in Sacred Space 346
Epilogue:Curtain Call: Afterlives of Liturgical Theater 384
Index 397
Appendix: Ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata 224
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Abbreviations
CAL
CIG
DJBA
Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (online resource): cal.huc.edu
Corpus inscriptionum graecarum. 4 vols. Berlin 1828–​1877
Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of
the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University
Press, 2002)
DJPA
Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of
the Byzantine Period, 2nd ed. (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University
Press, 2002)
DSA
Avraham Tal, A Dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic, 2 vol.
(Leiden: Brill, 2000)
H-​R
The Mekhilta, ed. Shaul Horovitz and Israel Avraham Rabin
(Jerusalem: Bamberger and Ṿahrman, 1960)
JPA
Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (dialect of Aramaic language)
JPA Poem # Text from: Shirat Bene Ma’arava (Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry
from Late Antiquity), ed. Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff
(Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999
LCL
Loeb Classical Library
LOT
Ze’ev Ben-​Hayyim, The Literary and Oral Tradition of Hebrew and
Aramaic amongst the Samaritans, 3 vol. (Jerusalem: The Academy of
the Hebrew Language, 1957–​1977)
LSJ
Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones,
and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-​English Lexicon, 9th ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)
Ma’agarim Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (online
resource): https://​maaga​rim.heb​rew-​acad​emy.org.il/​Pages/​
PMain.aspx
O
P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancii Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica
Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)
PG
Patrologia Graeca
PL
Patrologia Latina
T-​A
Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, ed. Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck,
3 vols. (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965)
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Prologue
Choosing a Script and Learning Lines
But in an orator we must demand the subtlety of the logician,
the mind of the philosopher, a diction almost poetic, a lawyer’s memory,
the voice of a tragedian, and bearing like that of the consummate actor.
Accordingly, no rarer thing than a finished orator
can be discovered among the sons of men . . .
—​Cicero, De Oratore 1.128
In the summer of 2015, archaeologist Jodi Magness and her team uncovered
a number of remarkable mosaics adorning the floor of the fifth-​century ce
synagogue at Huqoq, in the lower Galilee. Among the many images clustered
in one panel were figures identified as winged putti (cupids) and what appear
to be theatrical masks, both elements of iconography associated with the cult
of Bacchus, patron of wine and theater.1 Putti and masks were common decorative motifs in the ancient world, and yet previously unattested—​and to
a modern mind, wholly unexpected and even jarringly incongruous—​in a
synagogue.2 What could theatrical imagery, especially elements associated
1 This portion of the dig has not yet been formally published but is discussed in an official press
release of the University of North Carolina: https://​coll​ege.unc.edu/​2015/​07/​2015-​mosa​ics-​find/​
(accessed June 10, 2022). This article describes a scene that has strong links to theater and performance: “New digging reveals that the inscription is in the center of a large square panel with human
figures, animals and mythological creatures arranged symmetrically around it, Magness said. These
include winged putti (cupids) holding roundels (circular discs) with theater masks, muscular male
figures wearing trousers who support a garland, a rooster, and male and female faces in a wreath
encircling the inscription. Putti and masks are associated with Dionysos (Bacchus), who was the
Greco-​Roman god of wine and theater performances, she said.”
2 It bears remembering that the identification of images is hardly a simple matter, let alone
understanding the significance such visuals may or may not have had for the community. See
Steven Fine’s analysis of the interpretation of symbols in Art and Judaism in the Greco-​Roman
World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
esp. pp. 198–​207.
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2
Prologue
with “pagan” religious practices, have to do with the sacred rites and rituals
of the most quintessentially Jewish of buildings? Or does our surprise at
these figures in such a context reveal more about our own preconceptions
and prejudices about categories of “sacred” and “profane”—​biases rooted in a
deep cultural suspicion of theater as deceptive and its denizens as licentious?
Could it be that putti and theater masks would seem conventional, unremarkable if aesthetically pleasing decorations to the Jews whose bodies and
voices filled this space in antiquity? Perhaps theater and related spectacles
were so ubiquitous that imagery from that milieu had become commonplace,
simply part of a larger culture that could be incorporated into synagogue
decorations, an indication—​whether intentional or unconscious—​that the
Jews were thoroughly at home in and at ease with late antique culture, including its culture of performance.
The Huqoq mosaics offer a visual suggestion of how theater may have
permeated sacred spaces; likewise, literary works also bear witness to this
synthesis. A liturgical poem by the great hymnographer of Constantinople,
Romanos the Melodist, brings the world of the theater into the Christian
sanctuary, through words rather than images:
It is good to sing psalms and hymns to God,
and to wound the demons with reproaches;
they are our enemies forever.
What do we mean by this “wounding”?
Whenever we make a comedy of [χωμῳδοῦμεν, “we ridicule”]
their fall, rejoicing.
Truly the devil bewails whenever in our assemblies we represent in tragedy
[τραγῳδῶμεν]
the “triumph” of the demons.3
The poet here explicitly evokes the paired icons that even today constitute
a visual shorthand for theater and entertainment—​the twinned masks of
comedy and tragedy, the two major modes of performance—​and he does so
3 Text from P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, eds., Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 81 (henceforth “O”); this text is O #11, strophe 2. On the language of comedy and tragedy, see Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos Le Melode: Hymnes, 5 vols
(Paris: Cerf, 1967–​1981), 3:57, and the discussion in Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The
Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2011), 167–​168.
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Prologue
3
in an explicitly, emphatically religious context. Of the theater-​based imagery
in this poem, Derek Krueger observes:
While the invocation of comedy and tragedy in this stanza are not evidence
of presentation in the form of a play, the language of the theater reveals
an explicit understanding of liturgy as performance, as reenactment with
the power to reproduce the results of the original. By singing the fall of the
devil, the devil falls once again; the service itself parries the enemy.4
Romanos assumes, without preamble or expression of self-​consciousness,
that his listeners are well acquainted with the world of theater: its plots,
conventions, and dynamics; and, furthermore, its power. Song, theater, acting,
performative re-​enactment: the lines distinguishing liturgical performance
from the world of popular (“secular”) entertainment seem blurry indeed.
Images such as the actors’ masks uncovered at Huqoq visually demonstrate
the interpenetration of theatricality and monotheistic religious ritual in late
antiquity, even as liturgical texts articulate the connection or take it for granted.
Indeed, while these two examples are unusually explicit in merging sanctuary
and stage, affinities between various forms of public entertainments and worship can be easily teased out, in large part because performance as a mode
of engaging in the public realm was, itself, omnipresent. Theater and public
oratory (particularly declamation), in all the diversity of their styles and performative settings, constituted and shaped baseline elements of the common
culture of the ancient world: tragic plots drew on the canon of great literature, while orators alluded to famous and infamous figures and scenes; actors and orators attracted celebrity and scandal, both fame and infamy; actors’
techniques informed the most skilled of public orators, the politicians. And
religious performers—​including homilists and hymnographers—​absorbed
both a sense of effective techniques and performative convention. Preachers
and liturgical poets in antiquity were well aware of the commonalities connecting their work to other forms of performance, even if they were not uniformly at ease with the comparisons. As Basil of Seleucia, writing in the fifth
century, observed in the opening of his homily on Lazarus:
Were someone to say that the Church is a theater (θέατρον) common
to both angels and men, he would not be mistaken. It is a theater in
4 Krueger, Writing and Holiness, 168.
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4
Prologue
which Christ is praised both by invisible and visible nature, a theater in
which the Lord’s miracles are woven together for our ears as delightful
hymns . . . 5
In a world saturated with performance, the church—​or, by extension, the
synagogue—​triumphs over theater by excelling at theatrical arts, hymns
among them.
All performances were not equivalent, however, either in the details of delivery or (perhaps even more significantly) in their social location and cultural esteem; in particular, the popularity of theater did not signify universal
respectability. Orators, reflecting the biases of cultural elites, expressed ambivalence when reminded of how much their profession resembled that of actors and how greatly their craft benefited from a study of the stage. Religious
authorities, for their part, railed against attendance at popular, public entertainment, seeing its performances as seductive, impious falsehood—​literal
hypocrisy, as the Greek term for actor was hypokrite. Orators and preachers
wished to borrow the effectiveness and popular appeal of theater but to evade
its associated whiff of disrepute. And yet, the sheer popularity of theater
manifests not only in literature but also in infrastructure. The appearance
of theatrical images within a synagogue and mention of them in a Christian
hymn simply underscore the pervasive presence of spectacle in late antiquity
and manifest in visual form the very real synergy among different forms of
performance. In the ancient world, as today, audience appeal was essential;
like actors in the theater and orators at the rostrum, homilists at the pulpit
could only succeed if people came to hear them. And if actors and orators
knew how to attract an audience, hold their attention, and energize their
participation, even as that made them rivals to religious forms of spectacle,
it meant that they had tools worth using. Theater and other forms of performance in late antiquity were ubiquitous, both too commonplace and too
popular, for anyone—​least of all anyone in the business of persuasion—​to ignore. Liturgists and their communities may well have taken the performative
elements of prayer and ritual in their houses of worship for granted, both because they reflected a way of connecting speakers and audiences that would
have seemed natural and because the absence of such things would have been
conspicuous (and possibly off-​putting). But those same elements of live,
5 Basil of Seleucia, “Homily on Lazarus, 1,” in Mary B. Cunningham, “Basil of Seleucia's Homily on
Lazarus: A New Edition BHG 2225,” Analecta Bollandiana 104 (1986), 178. I am indebted to Georgia
Frank for this reference. See discussion in Chapter 1, (p. 43).
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Prologue
5
in-​the-​moment drama, re-​enactment, and ritual can be among the hardest
for us to recover from the written traces that have survived the centuries and
come to us. This study attempts to recover and reconstruct the atmosphere
that the people of late antiquity did not even necessarily notice, the air they
rarely realized they breathed.
For the purposes of the present study, I define “late antiquity” in the
Levant and Eastern Mediterranean world as the late third through early
seventh centuries ce: a period loosely bounded by Constantine on one
side and the Caliph on the other. Christian emperors in Constantinople
held political authority, but in the far southern and eastern provinces, late
Roman Hellenistic culture continued to provide a common cultural baseline. Indeed, while phrases such as “the Christianization of the Empire” and
“the period of Muslim rule” suggests epoch-​shifting breaks and clear chronological delineations—​moments with clean and legible “before” and “after”
significance—​from the perspective of daily life lived and popular culture
produced and consumed, the experience would have been largely one of
continuity.6 As such, the approach to the history of this period must be one
that accounts for continuity across religious identities and commonality over
time as well as space.
Theatrical performances and declamation were crucial components of this
late antique culture. Social elites were trained to deliver speeches in competitive settings, and theatrical performances were ubiquitous. Both orators
and actors relied on the classical canon as sources of plots and characters,
whether in detail or as cultural shorthand, but by late antiquity, the
performances were not those of “classical” Greco-​Roman theater; the most
popular theatrical performances were mime and pantomime. In pantomime,
especially, the classical corpus was streamlined, distilled, perhaps distorted
excerpts from the classical canon, while the set pieces associated with mime
constituted a comedic canon of their own. Such performances were, in the
eyes of many of the literati, vulgar and base, or at the very least faint shadows
and pale imitations of the originals. The plays these performances offered
consisted of excerpts from canonical works—​racy, bloody, dramatic, or
funny highlights—​performed by actors (masked or unmasked) and dancers,
6 Among the works addressing the subtleties of such “epochal shifts,” see Michael Penn, Envisioning
Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015), a work itself shaped by important re-​examinations of the narrative of “the parting of
the ways” between Judaism and Christianity (e.g., Adam H. Becker and Annette Y. Reed, eds., The
Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages [Tübingen,
Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2003]).
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often with scandalous props and striking physical mannerisms. So distinctive
were the conventions of these performances that mythic scenes in mosaics
can often, upon closer examination, reveal themselves to be images of the
stage. Orators and homilists, for their part, understood and acknowledged
that their audiences knew this informal “canon” as mediated by public performance. Theaters shaped and taught traditions even as those who spoke to
the people about sacred traditions drew upon ideas and techniques learned
in the performative world.
Of course, much of what we know about theater in late antiquity comes
from sources critical of it: professional orators (politicians and lawyers)
and religious authorities. Each party had its own reasons for denigrating
theater. Orators resisted the comparison of their profession to theater, for
what might be described as issues of class distinction: the former possessed
family connections, formal education, aspirations to power, and pretenses
of refinement, all of which the latter was presumed to lack. Actors, speaking
broadly, were dismissed as mastering artificial “techniques” in service of frivolity while orators possessed “skill” and “talent,” employed for public good.
And yet, as we will see, famous actors and dancers were lauded for their
gifts, and elite public speakers certainly were keenly aware of how effective
theatrical techniques could enhance their own performance. Not only did
public speakers acknowledge their own appreciation for actors’ methods for
getting and holding attention but they also advised their students to study
the same.
Religious authorities regarded public entertainments (including theater
and games) and their denizens as leading virtuous communities astray, as
luring them away from sacred service to debased entertainment and even
idolatry; at the very least, such spectacles encouraged the pious to associate
with the impious and seduced them to their frivolous and insidious ways. By
late antiquity, opposition to theater, and public entertainments more broadly,
gave prominent authorities in Jewish, Christian, and civic circles a common
antagonist. Entertainers responded in kind, adding elements to their works
that mocked their opponents, thus confirming for the orators, preachers, and
politicians the correctness of their opposition. When political and ecclesial
authority converged, with the promulgation of the Council of Trullo in 691–​
692, conventional theater was (at least in theory) banned.
We may think of theater as a literary form—​we read the plays of Sophocles
and the comedies of Plautus, and we study the writings of Aristotle and Cicero
about theater—​but monumental structures bear witness perhaps even more
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Prologue
7
eloquently, and more evocatively, than texts. In Roman towns, throughout
the Empire, theaters, often still visible today, were ubiquitous, emblems and
necessary elements of culture. These structures—​surprisingly capacious
venues suggestive of significant attendance—​can be found in cities large and
small, no matter what the majority population of the area was. The seating
capacity of these venues bear mute but eloquent witness to the popularity of
these entertainments: they could accommodate significant percentages of an
entire population. Furthermore, beyond the tangible infrastructure of performance, we know that both theater and religious ritual often spilled out
into the streets, in the form of spontaneous or orchestrated processions.7 The
ubiquity of theater means that it shaped—​consciously or unconsciously—​
not only the writings that would become the popular bedrock of the liturgical worlds of Judaism, Samaritanism, and Christianity but also the spaces
in which they were performed: theaters, or technologies developed to improve purpose-​built performance sites, influenced the architecture of some
religious spaces.8 If theater was liturgy’s rival, then one way for prayer to succeed was to borrow a page from the orators and co-​opt theater’s most successful strategies and tools.
7 Both Tertullian (De Spec. 7; LCL 250, pp. 248–​250) and The Life of Pelagia describe the processions
associated with spectacles. Tertullian writes, “The pomp (procession) comes first and shows in itself to whom it belongs, with the long line of images, the succession of statues, the cars, chariots,
carriages, the thrones, garlands, robes. What sacred rites, what sacrifices, come at the beginning,
in the middle, at the end; what guilds, what priesthoods, what offices are astir—​everybody knows
in that city (i.e., Rome) where the demons sit in conclave (see Rev. 18:2).” The Life of Pelagia offers
an even more detailed description: “Now while we were marveling at his holy teaching, lo, suddenly
there came among us the chief actress of Antioch, the first in the chorus in the theatre, sitting on
a donkey. She was dressed in the height of fantasy, wearing nothing but gold, pearls and precious
stones, even her bare feet were covered with gold and pearls. With her went a great throng of boys
and girls all dressed in cloth of gold with collars of gold on their necks, going before and following
her. So great was her beauty that all the ages of mankind could never come to the end of it. So they
passed through our company, filling all the air with traces of music and the most sweet smell of perfume. When the bishops saw her bare-​headed and with all her limbs shamelessly exposed with such
lavish display, there was not one who did not hide his face in his veil or his scapular, averting their
eyes as if from a very great sin” (PL 73, 664b–​665a; translation from Benedicta Ward, “Pelagia, Beauty
Riding By,” in Harlots of the Desert, a Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources [Kalamazoo,
MI: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1986], 67).
8 Epiphanius, the Bishop of Salamis, wrote in the fourth century, “There is also a place of prayer
at Shechem, the town now called Neapolis, about two miles out of town on the plain. It has been
set up theater-​fashion, outdoors in the open air, by the Samaritans who mimic all the customs of
the Jews” (Panarion 80.1.5; Reinhard Pummer, trans., Early Christian Authors on Samaritans and
Samaritanism [Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2002], 132–​133). The steps outside the synagogue at Chorazin (built in the third century ce, destroyed in the fourth, and rebuilt in the sixth) are
themselves suggestive of theater and may indicate an exterior communal space; see Z. Yeivin, The
Synagogue at Korazim; The 1962–​1964, 1980–​1987 Excavations, Israel Antiquities Authority Reports
(Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2000), and discussion in Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the
Greco-​Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 92. This structure is discussed in Chapter 5.
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If the comparison of hymnody to theater and other forms of entertainment seems jarring—​even today, comparing a religious ritual to a theater
performance can be taken as offensive, indicating superficiality or a lack of
commitment9—​it may be in part because of the success of the anti-​theater
polemic by religious authorities in late antiquity. To be sure, theater, oratory, and liturgical poetry served different purposes and appealed to distinctive constituencies by means of particular conventions. Differences in
function and setting granted, approaching hymnody—​here understood
as the communal performance of song in religious settings and as part of
statutory liturgies and rituals—​through the lens of engaging performance
helps modern readers recover and appreciate subtle elements of these
works that no doubt contributed to the development and popularity of
these publicly performed and communally engaging works.10 By viewing
hymns, from their composition to their delivery, through the lens of “religious theater,” I intend to evoke neither the ancient Greek origins of theater in the Dionysian cult nor the medieval productions of religiously
themed mystery plays; rather, I wish to focus on the looser but still useful
idea of “theatricality” as a way of understanding the performer–​audience
dynamic that is so essential to liturgical ritual broadly conceived. Indeed,
the need to capture and hold an audience’s attention, to engage and entertain, creates a common ground among all the diverse modes of performance
considered here: theater, oratory, and hymns. The concept of “theatricality”
also provides a deep contextual basis for discussing religious works that
differ significantly in terms of structure, theological orientation, and even
language. The content of the vessels may differ substantially, but the vessels
themselves—​constructed from societal norms of what constitutes appealing
9 See the discussion, with significant resonances for late antiquity, in Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When
Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-​
Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
10 The term “hymn” is used in this volume in a fairly expansive sense, in order to accommodate the range of poetic genres in multiple languages; other authors use the term in a more limited
sense, and the challenges of nomenclature reflect larger trends in studies of the history of liturgy
and an increasing appreciation among Christian and Jewish historians for the fluidity of religious
ritual, scripting, setting, and so forth. For an overview of the challenges of nomenclature and life
setting, written with regard to a single poet but easily applicable beyond, see Gerard Rouwhorst,
“The Original Setting of the Madrashe of Ephrem of Nisibis,” in Let Us Be Attentive! Proceedings of the
Seventh International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy (Prešov, Slovakia), 9–​14 July 2018, ed.
Harald Buchinger, Tinatin Chronz, Mary Farag, and Thomas Pott (Münster, Germany: Aschendorff,
2020), 207–​223. Robert Taft notes the popularity of psalmody and singing, observing that “the laity
were more enthusiastic for the psalmody than the clergy” (Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the
Byzantines Saw It [Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press, 2006], 57).
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Prologue
9
entertainment and efficacious ritual—​come from the same workshop and
can bear the weight of significant comparison.11
For the purposes of this study, religious performance—​specifically
hymnody, although homilies, too—​constitutes a third mode of “theatrical” public entertainment, alongside oratory and theater. Composers
of homilies and hymns employed techniques held in common with
“civic” orators, and public actors may reflect highly intentional and
conscious compositional and performative decisions by the poets as
skilled, professional artisans in their own right. It is possible that some
of the poets examined in this study possessed formal education in the
techniques of performance and oratory—​schooling in the wisdom of the
progymnasmata, handbooks of oratorical training composed in antiquity
and used long after. But key to my inquiry is the idea that the ubiquity of
performance and its conventions rendered it legible to all, whether formally educated or not.
Indeed, we must recognize that we have no explicit evidence of
hymnographers possessing “professional training”—​that is, education specifically in the composition and performance of hymns—​and it is possible
that liturgical poets benefited from the hymnographic equivalent of “a good
ear”—​that is, their compositions may reflect less formal and more intuitive
understandings of modes of communication—​one acquired through careful
attention to the exemplars in daily life and an instinct for what was effective
rather than a specific curriculum and exercises practiced in the classroom.
Then as now, ideas about effective ways of speaking can be gleaned informally,
through attentiveness to the kinds of communication in one’s midst and an instinctive understanding of what techniques work. The progymnasmata themselves can be understood to emerge from a dynamic between practitioners
and theorists: the handbooks distill insightful observations about effective
rhetorical techniques into discrete, practicable exercises that serve to train
public speakers to impress their audiences. Audiences, in turn, learn from
witnessing these examples (and perhaps practicing themselves, if they received some education) how they are best entertained and engaged; similarly, orators studied actors and actors critiqued orators, all as professionals
consciously refining their craft and as practitioners moving between the
11 Wout J. van Bekkum addresses the early stages of Jewish poetic idiom and its social context,
with astute awareness of early Christian parallels, in his short, elegant article, “Qumran Poetry and
Piyyut: Some Observations on Hebrew Poetic Traditions in Biblical and Post-​Biblical Times,” Zutot 2
(2002): 26–​33.
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Prologue
roles of performer and audience.12 Through these organic “feedback loops”
of practice and experience, aesthetics were continually refined, and a kind
of performative literacy, by which tones, postures, and gestures were understood, was acquired. While less systematic and perhaps more haphazard,
self-​or lesser-​trained writers and speakers could achieve the same insights
and refinements and bring them to bear when they were, themselves, in the
audience. In short, we need not argue that every writer in late antiquity, every
composer of hymns and poems, experienced formal rhetorical schooling in
order to have a broad sense and sound intuition for how to make use of the
techniques codified in the handbooks and conveyed through formal education. Informal education was everywhere.
A word on nomenclature is important here: the present study uses the
term “theatrical” to refer to an author’s evident awareness of audience engagement in a public venue. In many cases, the analysis teases apart three
distinct threads integral to performance, examining them individually even
as they entwine with each other: the author, who created the work (who may,
in practical terms, be more than a single individual, particularly if scribes
updated written texts to reflect later conventions); the performer, who
translated the text into a living experience for listeners; and the audience,
who not only witnessed the delivery but explicitly or implicitly offers feedback on its success or failure.13 This definition brings the rhetorical worlds
of oratory and declamation into the discussion along with theater proper,
and it encompasses both performative and receptive elements of a work—​
that is, the perspective of both actors and audiences, the persuasiveness of
12 Scholars in the field of Greek tragedy have broken important ground recently in the area of
“choral mediation” in Greek tragedy. See, for example, the essays assembled in Marianne Govers
Hopman and Renaud Gagné, eds., Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); and in Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh, eds.,
Choruses, Ancient and Modern (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See, too,
Felix Budelmann, The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication and Involvement
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 5, “The Chorus: Shared Survival”
(195–​272); Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), esp. Chapter 7, “Generalizing about the Chorus (166–​200); and Claude Calame, La tragédie
chorale: poésie grecque et rituel musical (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017).
13 Every author has an audience in mind before he or she begins to write, and every work, when
it is received, can be understood to undergo a kind of performance. What distinguishes “theatricality” from these related ideas is, in particular, the staged nature of the assumed performance—​
the significance of the gaze. On the importance of “the gaze” in religion, David Morgan, The
Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005), esp. pp. 25–​115, is an essential starting point. Also note Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the
Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994). This definition of “theatrical” distinguishes the theatricality of liturgical and para-​
liturgical works, which were in some sense “staged” from other forms of writing in antiquity.
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Prologue
11
role playing and a common repertoire of characters, the language of the body
and importance of acoustics, and the reciprocity of voice and gaze.14 Viewed
through this lens, the concept of theatricality offers a way of approaching religious performance with an eye toward successfully engaging the listeners.
Performance constituted a common, “nonpartisan” element of late ancient
culture—​neither high nor low, neither pagan nor Christian nor Jewish.
A consideration of late ancient theatricality in general terms sheds light on
the performative elements of specifically religious poetry and situates them
not only within a specific religious context but more broadly as well. This
study examines religious integration and internalization of widespread late
ancient cultural practices and aesthetics.
The liturgical context of the hymns makes them especially compelling
to examine from the perspective of theatricality. Theatricality, as used here,
refers to the dynamic of self-​consciousness between a performer and his audience, particularly an author or performer’s awareness of his audience’s gaze.15
In the context of ancient exegesis, it is useful to think of a continuum of
performativity and theatricality: while liturgical poetry may be especially
theatrical, homilies and sermons also display a concern for audience, as do
prose prayers and antiphonal litanies. Every text does.16 Even a text read silently is, implicitly, performed, as readers encountering a written work in
solitude imaginatively and unconsciously make decisions about how they
see and hear voices and actions, becoming audiences to their own intuitive
productions.17
14 Among recent works on the subject of theatricality, see esp. the volume Tracy C. Davis and
Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Davis and
Postlewait resist offering any fixed definition of the term—​“the domain of theatricality cannot be
located within any single definition, period or practice” (3)—​but in the introductory chapter (pp. 1–​
39) provide a fine, concise history of various meanings of the term.
15 For an initial consideration of the performative elements of early piyyut, see Laura S. Lieber, “The
Rhetoric of Participation: The Experiential Elements of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” Journal of
Religion 90.2 (2010): 119–​147. More recently, see Laura S. Lieber, “The Play’s the Thing: The Theatricality
of Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 537–​572.
16 The idea that every text should be read as having an audience applies even if the only audience is
an imagined one—​an ideal reader or listener in the mind of the author. Foundational in this regard is
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Also see
Robert deMaria Jr.’s essay, “The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction,” PMLA 93.3 (1978): 463–​474, which
offers a useful history and overview of the concept and a presentation of how it manifests in the works
of theorists including Frye, Culler, Fish, and others.
17 Modern readers have likely experienced the phenomenon of seeing a written work adapted
for the screen, and the common response of judging that the adaptation looks or sounds “wrong,”
even in cases where the original work does not indicate appearance or tone with any precision. The
filmmaker or television director’s imagination—​visual, acoustic, and emotional—​has brought the
text to life in a way that does not align with another individual’s unspoken, interior “staging.” See
Timothy L. Hubbard, “Some Anticipatory, Kinesthetic, and Dynamic Aspects of Auditory Imagery,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination (2 vols.), ed. Mark Grimshaw-​Aagaard, Mads
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Prologue
Throughout this volume, one particular facet of a common late antique
culture is fundamental: the pervasiveness of performance. The present
study builds upon and expands the recognition that Jews, Christians, and
Samaritans in late antiquity lived alongside and among each other, with
common public spaces and diverse sites of interchange—​a shared civic infrastructure.18 Within these shared spaces emerged common aesthetics
and practices, including those of performance. Indeed, so ubiquitous was
performance—​all the world truly was a stage—​that it can be considered a
defining aspect of late antique culture. Reading liturgical works through the
lens of performativity integrates religious experiences into the wider society
and its norms while providing additional data for cultural historians, by
demonstrating that yet another matrix of spaces provided venues for energetic and creative theatricality.
A cultural foundation of performance awareness constitutes a deep substrate of communal assumption and commonality that unifies not only the
literary traditions of late antiquity but also the routine, lived experience of
being Jewish, Samaritan, or Christian in this pivotal time period when all
three traditions were developing striking and enduring new forms of creative
self-​expression. It is at this moment—​specifically, the period beginning in
the fourth century ce—​that we witness the sudden flowering of rich literary
traditions across all three communities: the Hebrew poetry of Yose ben Yose,
the Samaritan Aramaic poetry of Marqa, and the Syriac Aramaic poetry of
Ephrem. And it is, likewise, in late antiquity—​in the sixth century ce—​that
major poets including Romanos, Yannai, Eleazar ha-​Qallir, Narsai,19 and
Jacob of Sarug flourished. By and large, poets have been studied within the
confines of their religious affiliations: Romanos has been studied through the
lens of Ephrem and the Church Fathers, and Yannai in light of Yose ben Yose
Walther-​Hansen, and Martin Knakkergaard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019),
149–​173. In the same volume, also note the essay by Marco Pellitteri, “The Aural Dimension in
Comic Art,” 511–​548.
18 Raimo Hakola provides an excellent survey of recent treatments of this topic, from both literary
and material perspectives, in “Galilean Jews and Christians in Context: Spaces Shared and Contested
in the Eastern Galilee in Late Antiquity,” in Spaces in Late Antiquity: Cultural, Theological and
Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Juliette Day, Maijastina Kahlos, Raimo Hakola, and Ulla Tervahauta
(London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 141–​165.
19 Narsai, a figure increasingly understood as important but whose works (primarily metrical
homilies [memre]) remain understudied, compared with Ephrem and Jacob of Sarug. See, however,
the recent volume Aaron M. Butts, Kristian S. Heal, and Robert A. Kitchen, eds., Narsai: Rethinking
His Work and His World (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). For those who wish to explore
his works in translation, see R. H. Connolly, The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1909).
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Prologue
13
and rabbinic writings. Rarely have these poets been studied as culturally specific instantiations of a widespread hymnographic phenomenon that crosses
confessional and linguistic boundaries.20 And yet, the endeavor to link the
poets and their writing to each other in a deeply comparative way—​to discern points of contact, connection, influence, or inspiration—​must be done
cautiously, and with awareness of the cultural dynamism that works such as
these texts manifest. Any attempt to pull out distinct threads of influence that
yoke one poet or type of poetry to another suggests that one could unravel
the poems back to a point, or points, of origin. To presume “an origin” would,
however, obscure or even suppress the breathtaking complexity of each body
of writing as approached within its own tradition, on the one hand, and
deny the importance of the shared cultural background common to all these
bodies of writing, on the other. Rather than looking to establish a common
vorlage or prototype of hymn—​thereby implicitly crediting a single poet, tradition, location, or community with ownership of the entire enterprise—​this
project seeks to understand the common soil from which these distinctive
blooms emerged, into a riotous garden filled with wildflowers of song.
Poets writing within Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan traditions produced
remarkable bodies of poetry in a range of languages, including Hebrew,
Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Samaritan Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek. The
forms of composition ranged from the simple alphabetical acrostic to extended verse homilies to symphonic, multi-​movement cycles. They wrote
for major holidays and weekly Sabbaths, on the lectionary and on thematic
topics. We know less than we would like of how these works were performed
in the churches of late antiquity, and even less of Jewish and Samaritan
synagogues, but we have no doubt that they were tremendously popular
across the board. This project seeks to explore from a broad cultural perspective what techniques the poets used, or could have used, to help popularize
and publicize their compositions.
The expansive scope of this volume speaks to the ubiquity of performance in late antiquity. In this volume, I draw liturgical poetry by
20 Previous generations of scholars often sought to discern directions of influence, either arguing
that Jews adopted the aesthetic conventions of the majority Christian population, or that Christians
borrowed from Jewish models. See the discussion in Hayyim (Jefim) Schirmann, “Hebrew Liturgical
Poetry and Christian Hymnology,” Jewish Quarterly Review 44.2 (1953): 123–​161. A recent exception would be Ophir Münz-​Manor, “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East: A Comparative
Approach,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1.3 (2010): 336–​361. Also note the discussion of comparative work in the important review essay by Wout J. van Bekkum, “The Hebrew Liturgical Poetry of
Byzantine Palestine: Recent Research and New Perspectives,” Prooftexts 28.2 (2008): 232–​246.
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Prologue
poets of the three monotheistic traditions of the late antique Eastern
Mediterranean—​Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, writing in Hebrew,
Greek, Syriac, and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic—​together and analyze
them, at times quite speculatively, through the lens of theatricality and
in terms of audience engagement and participation.21 This study takes
seriously the importance of the performer to the experience and meaningfulness of hymnody. We may identify the performer initially as the
poet who composed the work, even as we recognize that the role would
later be filled by a liturgist or cantor—​meaning that we must be careful
not to conflate author and actor. Indeed, while the liturgical performer
functioned in a fashion akin to other public performers, all of whom
strove to conjure imaginative experiences—​meaningful, entertaining, edifying, or transformative—​in the minds of their audiences, the interpretation of the religious performer, who generally did not author his words,
may arguably more closely resemble the performance of the actor than the
skilled extemporaneity of the orator, although all forms of performance
no doubt relied on elements of improvisation. Hymnists, like orators and
actors, were keenly attuned to those whose eyes and ears they sought to
attract; similarly, all three kinds of performers addressed crowds accustomed to constituting an audience. Viewing the performed experience of
hymnody through this lens allows us, in turn, to appreciate the task of the
poet-​performer as both a vector for conveyance of sacred tradition and
its values to a congregational audience whose attention he seeks to hold,
views he hopes to shape, and sympathies he strives to elicit.
The concept of theatricality draws our attention to a range of subjects,
from how biblical stories were adapted to the liturgical stage, much in
the way that the classical works of Greco-​Roman antiquity were themselves popularized in this late antique period, to the adaptation of physical
techniques and material structures to augment the ability of performers to
engage their audiences. Specific techniques associated with both oratory
and acting in antiquity will offer concrete means for elucidating the affinities
of liturgical presentations and other modes of performance: indications of
21 I would note that despite the breadth of this volume, it nonetheless does not extend into the
realms of Latin poetry or into the hymnic traditions of Manichaeism—​both arenas that promise
to be fruitful areas of further study. With regard to the latter, from an analytical perspective that
suggests the affinities of that poetry for the works studied here, see Jae Hee Han, “Once Again He
Speaks: Performance and the Anthological Habit in the Manichaean Kephalaia,” in the Journal of
Ancient Judaism 14.2 (2021): 435–​470.
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Prologue
15
direct address, for example, and apostrophe, as well as the creation of character through speech (ethopoeia); and appeals to the audience’s senses, including vivid descriptions (ekphrasis), a technique especially popular in
antiquity. A serious consideration of performance also demands that we
make the difficult leap to imagining the world beyond the page. While late
antique hymnody has come down to the present primarily in textual form,
the written word constitutes something quite remote from the actual experience these scripts reflect. We will thus attempt to consider more speculative but recognizably essential elements of these works’ reception, including
ways in which liturgical poetry could have borrowed from the gestures and
body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime, and how poets may have
used the physical spaces of performance and accelerated changes visible in
the archaeological record.
Given this volume’s emphasis on techniques of delivery and experience,
the narrative, exegetical, and theological content of the poems—​precisely
those places where poets most frequently stress the distinctiveness of their
community, its traditions, and beliefs—​receives less emphasis. The stress
on performance should not be understood as negating or obscuring the
particularity and particularism of these works; indeed, the differences
among poems are often easier to discern than commonalities, whether we
consider the specific liturgy in which a work was embedded, distinctive
motifs and images of significance to a community, or the language of composition. It is precisely because the differences—​linguistic, confessional,
and ritual—​among these works are so readily apparent that the deep, structural, societal commonalities are so easily overlooked. By reading late antique hymnody in the matrix of the wider culture—​by teasing out these
subtle, deep points of contact among varieties of performance—​we not
only appreciate overlooked aspects of these poems, facets that barely leave
traces in the written record, but also begin to understand performance-​
oriented culture itself. While this volume is about hymnody, it is also about
much more than hymns.22
22 Eva von Contzen, writing about Middle English mystery plays, notes, “In the anonymous
Wycliffite Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge [ca. 1400—​the oldest work of theater criticism in English], the
author admits—​his profound criticism of miracle plays notwithstanding—​that these plays are highly
effective because they are so interactive and immediate; in his terms, they are ‘quick’ in contrast to
‘dead’ books, which can merely be read but lack the experiential dimension of theatre” (“Embodiment
and Joint Attention: An Enactive Reading of the Middle English Cycle Plays,” in Enacting the Bible
in Medieval and Early Modern Drama, ed. Eva von Contzen and Chanita Goodblatt [Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2020], 43).
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Prologue
Choreography: Movement through the Volume
Every topic studied in this volume is treated in two parts: the first section
establishes the relevant cultural matrix, as recoverable from literary and
material sources, which shaped particular elements of performance, and
then sketches out the broad context in which a particular aspect of hymnody emerged and flourished; the second reads examples of liturgical poetry
through that cultural lens, using specific works to illustrate how liturgical
poetry can be more fully understood when examined as a facet of that larger
societal matrix. Multiple poems from diverse backgrounds provide the case
studies and generally share thematic or exegetical affinities that lend the
analysis additional coherence.
The study of each topic begins with a presentation of classical and late antique materials intended to provide more than casual background; literary
works and material artifacts, read together, serve to establish the significance
and pervasiveness of ideas and practices, or the depth of thought given to implementation of otherwise theoretical elements of performance, pedagogy,
and aesthetics. A grounded cultural reading of religious poetry requires
careful articulation of culture, and so I present the treatments of these
selected phenomena in some depth, in an effort to contextualize not only the
liturgical poems but the broader aspects of their performance—​conceptual,
rhetorical, performative, and experiential—​as well. The treatments do not
constitute complete micro-​histories of oratory and theater in their literary,
material, and monumental manifestations but establish a sufficiently robust
sense of context that enables specific aspects of the religious poems to be
teased out and clearly discerned.
The poems presented in the second part of each topic’s treatment derive from multiple linguistic and religious sources. While they often share
a common theme or biblical passage as an anchor for comparison, they primarily serve to illustrate the diversity of poetic manifestations of broader
aesthetic and performative possibilities. These specific works are chosen
both to demonstrate a range of poetic crystallizations of the broader cultural phenomena with which poets and their congregants would have been
familiar and to display the breadth and diversity of the poetic corpora themselves. In almost every case, poems from all the corpora (Jewish, Samaritan,
and Christian) provide examples of phenomena. This survey of hymnody highlights specific ways in which poets and their audiences related to
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Prologue
17
communal conventions, but without obscuring the distinctive elements—​
formal, linguistic, and theological—​of each work. In some cases, the poems
present fairly direct “translations” or applications of ideas and concepts
from the worlds of oratory and theater, albeit in distinctly religious or ethnic
settings and languages; in other cases, the connections to general concepts
may be more subtle—​rhetorical techniques that align with what we know
of performance and delivery, but at the level of resonance or affinity. In such
instances, late antique culture may help us understand how a given work
“made sense” in terms of societal proclivities; in some cases, what we can reconstruct of the common culture of the period may simply help us imagine
a range of plausible, but not required, performative techniques. The analysis
articulates deep structural commonalities of the type often obscured by the
overt differences—​chronological, linguistic, contextual, and confessional—​
that often serve to compartmentalize these compositions.
This study does not intend to minimize or diminish the intriguing questions
that emerge from examining these poems against each other, in their own individual contexts, nor does it seek to obscure the distinctive elements of the religious traditions and communities, or the tremendous variety of literary styles in
which they wrote. It does, however, stress positive affinities across genres, languages, and communities in order to illustrate the arguments in favor of some
kind of broad, common late antique culture in which Christians, Jews, and
Samaritans all lived, largely unselfconsciously; in doing so, this study expands
the way these poems can be understood, and helps modern readers, so far from
the embodied energy of these works as performed, discern subtle but critical
features of these works that may have been at least in part responsible for their
widespread popularity. It does not cast shade on other modes of analysis but
simply highlights a common substrate of concerns and techniques that unifies
the distinctive modes of writing. This holistic approach allows us to appreciate
distinctive elements as tesserae—​sparkling, individual gemstones—​that, when
read together, coalesce into a textured but coherent mosaic of culture.
Given the sweep of this volume and its inclusive ambition, I have limited
the specific bodies of poetry studied to those that are most accessible to the
widest audience, although I have also striven for as much diversity as possible within those limits. The poems examined here by no means exhaust the
corpora even on a single topic; instead, they illustrate ranges of possibilities
and modalities. By and large, the chosen texts reflect “major” composers or
bodies of work within the traditions, as discerned by prominence in liturgical
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18
Prologue
rites and surviving manuscript records.23 The increased availability of liturgical poetry in translation has facilitated the integration of poetry into a variety of studies, including comparative analyses that cut across linguistic,
stylistic, and confessional boundaries in order to focus on thematics, aesthetics, and—​as in the present study—​performance.
The poets studied in this volume constitute a roster of the most illustrious writers in the genre during the pivotal centuries of their emergence
and development. They are, to use Saadia Gaon’s term, “the fathers of liturgical poetry” (‫)אבות הפיוט‬, regardless of religious affinity.24 The authors
whose works provide the exemplars in this study include the major poets of
the “early” period (roughly the third–​fourth centuries ce), specifically the
Jewish liturgical poet (‫ )פייטן‬Yose ben Yose; the Samaritan poets Amram
Dare, his son, Marqe, and his grandson, Ninna ben Marqe; and the Christian
hymnist Ephrem the Syrian, who composed both hymns and metrical
homilies. We will also attend to works by poets from the “later” portion of
this formative period (the fifth–​early seventh centuries ce), including the
Jewish poets Yannai and Eleazar ha-​Qallir (also known simply as “Qallir”);
the great poet of Constantinople, Romanos the Melodist; and major Syriac-​
language hymnographers Narsai and Jacob of Sarug.25 Not every work can
be attributed to a named author, of course, and we thus also will examine
anonymous works, including the body of Jewish Aramaic poetry and ancient
poems for Yom Kippur, as well as pseudonymous works, such as Syriac works
on the Binding of Isaac (the Akedah) attributed to Ephrem. The dating of
anonymous works can, of course, be particularly challenging—​and I would
not disagree that the dates ascribed to the Jewish and Samaritan poets are
themselves not fixed with certainty. We can, however, be confident that
these works represent formative voices within their traditions in this pivotal
23 From the perspective of literary history, this decision reflects the influence of these poets within
their respective traditions; from a practical perspective, it enables the study to draw on works available in English translation and thus lowers the barriers of entry for readers into the body of material
studied here.
24 Saadia ben Joseph ha-​
Gaon, Sefer ha-​Egron, ed. N. Allony (Jerusalem: Ha-​Akademyah ha-​
le'umit ha-​yisra'elit le-​mada'im, 1969), 154. The Egron is Saadia’s rhyming lexicon for use in
composing piyyutim.
25 It bears noting that Jacob of Sarug and Narsai are best known for their memre, metrical
homilies that are far more exegetical than the madrashe for which Ephrem is most famous (although
Ephrem composed memre as well). Memre were likely recited or chanted rather than sung, but as
performatively delivered homilies, composed in isosyllabic couplets, they still shed light on the topic
of this study, although they were possibly less directly participatory than the madrashe, which included refrains.
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Prologue
19
period of literary history, and most of them constitute works of enduring significance, some down to the present day.
The genres in which these poets wrote differ greatly from each other,
but certain commonalities can be discerned. Yose ben Yose’s poems for the
High Holy Days (the shofar service and the rehearsal of the Temple sacrifice known as the Avodah), written in elegant, rhythmic, unrhymed Hebrew,
bear a passing similarity to the memre by Ephrem (and, later, Narsai and
Jacob), written in Syriac, and some of the longer works in Samaritan Aramaic
and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. At the same time, the brevity of many JPA
poems, Samaritan hymns, and the Syriac genre known as madrashe highlight
ways that shorter compositions, often governed by alphabetical acrostics,
can resemble each other in at least broad compositional ways. The qerovot
of Yannai and Qallir reflect a significantly more complicated aesthetic: units
composed in different forms, often with end rhyme and intricate acrostics;
these works do not resemble Romanos’ kontakia in any direct way, but
they share with the melodist a general increased formal intricacy, one that
makes more demands on the congregation in terms of elaborate refrains and
opportunities to participate.
For all their formal diversity, which spans qualities from prose-​like simplicity and regularity to ornate and intricate rhymes, meter, and acrostics,
these works existed for a practical purpose: to draw congregations into liturgical rituals.26 As a consequence, throughout this study, we will attend
to not only those elements of composition that reflect an author’s creativity
and insightfulness but also those techniques that specifically engage the congregation, in both psychologically manifest (intellectual and imaginative)
and physically expressive (vocal and gestural) ways. Individuals in late antiquity possessed what we might term a “participatory,” “performative,” or
even “kinesthetic” kind of literacy—​Jonathan Culler’s idea of competence
will prove useful.27 This deeply ingrained and finely tuned awareness by the
26 This expectation that congregations would participate in hymnic performance is not only reflected in the use of elements such as refrain but also explicitly acknowledged in places, notably in
Niceta of Remesiana’s sermon known as De utilitate hymnorum (sometimes called De psalmodiae
bono), in which the author gives advice for how to avoid common pitfalls, such as singing out of
tune, out of sync, or in a rote manner. This text is available in C. H. Turner, “Niceta of Remesiana
II,” Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1923): 225–​252; for an English translation, see “Niceta of
Remesiana: Writings,” in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 7, trans. Gerald G. Walsh
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1949), 65–​76, and I am grateful to Georgia Frank
for drawing my attention to the work.
27 See Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature
(London: Routledge, 1975), esp. Chapter 6, “Literary Competence” (131–​152).
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20
Prologue
audience of their own role to play within any performance can be subtle but
often not difficult to tease out, at least as a possibility. The dynamic between
poet-​cantor and congregation may, in some cases, have also been mediated
by choirs, who would have stood in for or alongside the wider community.
An awareness of and appreciation for the full participatory richness of the
hymnic experience in late antiquity—​intellectual and emotional, but also
spatial and sensory—​permeates the present inquiry, even as we recognize the
challenges in reconstructing such intangible, often somewhat hypothetical,
elements.
The challenge of recovering the rich experience of performance from
the traces they leave behind is hardly unique to late antiquity. Medievalists
face similar obstacles, although they possess additional resources, such as
illuminated prayer books and practical handbooks of liturgical customs that
delineate norms and ideals.28 Speaking of his contemporary reconstructions
of an eighteenth century Italian dance, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky
described his work as “finding the little bits in the dust, and then placing
them together to create a picture,” an effort the New York Times dance critic
Marina Harss observes, “is not a science, after all, but an act of the imagination.”29 This language evokes the fragmentary composition of a mosaic: small
bits assembled into a new whole, held together in part by the mortar of imagination, and at times the wish to see something that, by its very nature,
is ephemeral. Even today, despite remarkable advances in technology, it remains a profoundly different, and vastly richer, experience to attend a performance in person. Any recording, audio or visual, cannot help but be a pale
shadow of the transient wonder of being in the same space as performers,
alongside other viewers, in a specific space, where the lights dim, scents waft,
and sounds resound. What this study attempts to do is to recreate some sense
of the possibilities—​to gather and experiment playfully with some of the
little stones we do have from antiquity—​in order to discern what pictures our
imaginations can bring into focus. And this effort matters precisely because
theater and performance were so commonplace in late antiquity.
28 I owe my appreciation for the detailed descriptions of Ashkenazi liturgical customs, which
specify the pauses to be made between stanzas, the volume, tone, rhythm, and the emphasis on certain words, to discussions by Meyrav Levy, as delineated in her forthcoming dissertation, “Ashkenazi
Mahzorim as Generators of an Affective Experience” (University of Münster, Germany).
29 Marina Harss, “In ‘Harlequinade,’ Gestures Dance, and Dances Tell Stories,” The New York Times
(May 30, 2018); https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2018/​05/​29/​arts/​dance/​harle​quin​ade-​ale​xei-​ratman​sky-​
ameri​can-​bal​let-​thea​ter.html?searc​hRes​ultP​osit​ion=​1, accessed June 9, 2022.
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Prologue
21
This volume moves from the concrete to the abstract, the relatively certain
to the frankly speculative. It begins by examining the broad cultural context
in which liturgical poetry emerged: a world of theater and oratory, but also
homily, exegesis, and prayer. Once the stage is set and our sense of performance space established, we turn to those who bring the liturgical-​poetic
experience to life: the authors who craft the words, and who orchestrate
the experience; the performers who brought them to life; and the congregational audiences who received these words, joined in their performance,
and preserved them as beloved rituals. We then move and consider the most
“external” and among the more recoverable elements of the poems, the way
they engage with the senses. From there, we turn to subtle, but essential,
techniques of character creation, particularly the theatrical use of voice and
speech-​in-​character. And finally, we turn to the least recoverable, but most
tantalizing, aspects of performance, body language and physical staging: not
only vivid imagery and appeals to senses, but also a sense of what could have
been seen and how it might have been heard. Just as the poets invited their
listeners to imagine a world they had never seen, this volume asks its readers
to consider the dynamism of a world now silent but not inaudible, ephemeral
but not beyond our reach.
The mosaics in the synagogue at Huqoq, like Romanos’ references to
comedy and tragedy, indicate with startling directness the affinities connecting theater and liturgy. The synagogue masks and Greek poems depict
in explicit if distinctive ways the interpenetration of ritual and rhetoric in
late antiquity, a resonance that lurks surprisingly near the surface of liturgical
poems once we cast light upon the texts from the proper angles. We cannot
recover what inspired the Huqoq artisans to select those images for the synagogue: Were the images in some sense so commonplace as to lack any forcefulness? Or do they suggest a particularly “entertaining” style of liturgy, a
religious instantiation of an aesthetic of delight?30 Or were some members of
the community affiliated with the theater as professionals? Nor can we state
with confidence whether Romanos attended theater shows or held opinions
about public declaimers of his day. Any hypotheses or explanations we may
proffer—​many of them overlapping, none mutually exclusive—​remind us
30 Of particular importance with regard to the interplay between sacred space and aesthetics is
the recent book by Sean Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading and Seeing
(London: Routledge, 2019), and the online resource maintained by the Baron Thyssen Centre for
the Study of Ancient Material Religion, housed in the Department of Classical Studies of the Open
University in Milton Keyes, UK: https://​www.openm​ater​ialr​elig​ion.org/​resour​ces-​1/​2019/​7/​15/​
mosa​ics. The discussions in Chapter 5 will develop these ideas further.
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22
Prologue
how then, as now, people imbibe fundamental ideas about what is “normal”
from the cultural ether in which they live and breathe.
In late antiquity, theater was in the air, and performers—​actors and
orators, high class and low, famous and infamous—​were ubiquitous, as were
their audiences. And as a consequence, the techniques of other performers,
particularly techniques affirmed by crowds as effective or appealing, crossed
from the stage and the rostrum into the sanctuary. The implausible claim
would be that liturgy did not reflect the widespread culture of performance
and entertainment, not that it did.
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1
Setting the Stage: Community Theater
and the Translation of Tales
Some dramatists write for the common people, and others for the elites,
but it is not easy to say which of any of them
succeeds in making his work suitable to both classes.
Now, Aristophanes is neither pleasing to the masses
nor tolerable for the thoughtful; rather his poetry is like
a harlot who, passed her prime, takes up the role of a wife . . .
For what reason, in fact, is it truly worthwhile
for an educated man to go to the theater, except to enjoy Menander?
And when else are theaters filled with men of learning,
if a comic character has been brought upon the stage?
—​Plutarch, Moralia: Aristophanes and Menander, §3
While he wintered in Antioch in 363, en route to Persia, the Emperor Julian
composed a remarkably bitter satirical essay called Misopogon (“the beard-​
hater”).1 Although he claims that he has written the work in a spirit of self-​
mockery, the piece in fact blends imperial self-​justification with scathing
critique of his host city. Julian describes the populace of Antioch as frivolous and irreverent, and disappointingly uninterested in his imperial agenda
of classical restoration. While the emperor anticipated returning to the city
after the Persian campaign—​he failed to anticipate his premature death—​the
essay reads like a parting shot, and the city’s reputation as the capital of entertainment presents a primary target for Julian’s dyspeptic critique. Indicative
1 The text was composed in 363, the year of Julian’s death. On this text, see Joshua Hartman,
“Invective Oratory and Julian’s Misopogon,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 57.4 (2017): 1032–​
1057. Hartman offers an important rhetorical analysis of the piece as well as a concise summary
of its major modern treatments. The title “beard-​hater” refers to the Antiochene’s dislike of the
“philosopher’s beard” that Julian wore—​as commemorated by his visage on the coins from his reign—​
in a time when the fashion was clean shaven; throughout the essay, the beard represents Julian’s contempt for what he deems the superficiality of life in Antioch.
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24
Staging the Sacred
of the city’s licentious character, Antioch was (in Julian’s telling), “a prosperous and gay and crowded city, in which there are dancers and flute players,
and more mimes than ordinary citizens”; a few lines later, he remarks how in
“the market-​places and theaters, the mass of the people [show their pleasure]
by their clapping and shouting.”2 Despite the exaggerations inherent in
such a polemical treatise, the caricature works (or so Julian hoped) because
it is rooted in something plausible. The people of Antioch reciprocated the
emperor’s displeasure and expressed resentment for his judgmental austerity
and his failure to appreciate their city’s charms: “By ignoring the stage and
mimes and dancers,” Julian has the people say, “you have ruined our city, so
that we get no good out of you except your harshness.” Julian harbored no
illusions about their mutual dislike, but while his essay constitutes an extended scolding of the city, Julian nonetheless sketches a revealing portrait
of Antioch. Julian’s Antioch is vibrant, noisy with performances and filled
with performers; like modern New York or Los Angeles, it is populated by
entertainers hungering for their big break and media critics offering unsolicited opinions. Performance could be spontaneous and unrehearsed; speaking
to the people of Antioch, Julian recounts how “you abused me in the market-​
place, in the presence of the whole populace, and with the help of citizens
who were capable of composing such pleasant witticisms as yours.” Julian’s
antagonists came not from a professional class of performers but from a well-​
trained populace, a public quick to pick up on verbal play at their emperor’s
expense. For all Julian’s expressed displeasure, his invective against Antioch
and its citizens suggests something of daily life in late antiquity. Performers
were everywhere, and every crowd was a nascent audience.
As Julian notes, in a context in which everyone anticipates performance
and any individual has the skill to perform, any location could become the
set of a show. In antiquity, performers found their audiences in any number
of places: theaters and markets, forums and private homes, temporary stages
and purpose-​built structures, and functional clearings and magnificent
edifices, some so thoroughly constructed that they can be visited today. To
this list of “secular” or “civic” public performance places, we should also add
temples, churches, and synagogues. Indeed, sacred spaces and civic spaces
were typically thoroughly entangled: temples were regular features in theaters
and public squares, and much religious ritual took place in public streets and
venues rather than being restricted to consecrated spaces or domiciles. Any
2 Julian, Misopogon §342B–​C (LCL 29, pp. 442–​445).
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Setting the Stage
25
space where people (i.e., an audience, a default community) gathered had the
potential to morph into a site of theatrical performance, whether the performer was an actor, orator, poet, or ritual performer; if the occasion were
a sacred liturgy, then the stakes and command for attention could be that
much increased. All any performer needed was something to perform, something that would appeal to listeners, gaining and holding their attention.
Performers in the ancient world understood what the British stage director
Peter Brook stated with regard to twentieth-​century theater: “I can take any
empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space
whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act
of theatre to be engaged.”3 A performer, through intent and action, can transform any space—​a street, a market square, a subway car, a sidewalk—​into a
stage. And as soon as that transformation occurs, those in the performer’s
vicinity find themselves changed from individuals going about their business
into an audience. This was as true in antiquity as it is today.
All this underscores a key point: potential performance spaces—​and thus
the potential for performance—​could be found anywhere and everywhere.
Most obviously, purpose-​built infrastructure for housing spectacles was
ubiquitous in antiquity.4 In towns throughout the Roman Empire—​from
England, the Balkans, and Spain to North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant—​the
monumental remnants of theaters, amphitheaters, and racetracks constitute
a commonplace. Such structures were not limited to major urban areas but
can be found throughout the Romanized world, key elements of basic civic
infrastructure. Nor did firm boundaries divide civic, religious, and domestic
spaces, whether public or private. Theatrical performances could take place
in private residences as well as in theaters, in marketplaces, town squares,
and the streets; colorful mosaics not only captured the names and images
of champion charioteers and their horses but also brought them into homes
and civic spaces; household items including lamps and combs commemorate
the dances of mimes, while funerary monuments recall the lives of famous
pantomimes.5 Public oratory, likewise, could occur in a range of venues: it
3 Peter Brook, The Empty Space—​
A Book about the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate
(1968), 9
4 On spectacle in antiquity, see Christine Kondoleon and Bettina Bergmann, eds., The Art of
Ancient Spectacle (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1999).
5 The most comprehensive study of the visual representations of performance in antiquity is
Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire (Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 2016). Of particular note are the images from Noheda villa (in
Turkey) that Dunbabin uses throughout the volume. Dunbabin notes that in the eastern region of
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26
Staging the Sacred
could enliven an intimate gathering of educated and wealthy elites, draw a
diverse crowd on the steps of a temple, or engage a transient audience from
an elevated platform. Declamation could be forensic in service of a client,
or staged for its own sake in the context of an oratorical competition. In
both cases, speech resulted in “winners” and “losers.” Like theater and oratory, religious rituals emerged from and built upon the substrate of public
display, with processions and conflicts spilling from sanctuaries into the
streets and drawing the public into sacred spaces. The ubiquity of purpose-​
built structures, constituting visible traces of a performance-​
saturated
culture, merely hints at the far vaster range of spaces and occasions when
performances took place.
Space constitutes the exoskeleton of performance, the structure that
supports human bodies as instruments of storytelling, exhortation, and
persuasion. Just as performance spaces (purpose-​built or improvised) were
ubiquitous, diffuse repertoires of narrative traditions and performative
practices provided a ready repository of plots, characters, and tropes, all
translated into dynamic, ever-​changing contexts and conventions. These familiar narratives were, in turn, animated by performers and audiences who
shared an understanding of how to respond to their prompts, how to bring
them to life, and respond to their actions, even as each performer inflected
his telling with distinctive shades and nuances, meanings and mannerisms.6
If we are able to understand this vibrant and lively aspect of late antique society, we will be able to appreciate how a societal milieu saturated with theater
the empire, domestic depictions of spectacle shift from images of theater in the second and third
centuries ce to circus races (including images accompanied by acclamations of victory) and mythological motifs that blend games and narrative (236–​239). For a thorough study of visual art in religious contexts in late antiquity, Sean Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading
and Seeing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), offers a sophisticated and detailed analysis.
6 Writing of Greek antiquity but in a way that applies far more broadly, Sarah Iles Johnston observes
that “Greek audiences almost always consumed mythic narratives in an episodic way. . . . Most Greek
listeners brought to these experiences a knowledge of the gods’ and heroes’ larger histories . . . the
episodes that audiences heard were not so much out of order as they were focused on a discrete,
gleaming moment in a larger divine or heroic career” (“How Myth and Other Stories Help to Create
and Sustain Beliefs,” in Narrating Religion, ed. S. I. Johnston [New York: Wiley, 2017], 149). A useful
work on the relationship between antiquity and its past is Tim Whitmarsh, Beyond the Second
Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2020). While Whitmarsh focuses on the reception of Greek culture in the wake of the Second
Sophistic, his insights can easily be extended to a variety of other contexts and textual corpora. The
work of Gregory Nagy also proves useful here; see his volume Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession
of an Epic Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), and also, Nagy, Poetry as
Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
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Setting the Stage
27
and spectacle colored religious oratory, rhetoric, and ritual, and even scriptural interpretation.
In this chapter, we will begin with an examination of the everyday presence of world of theater and theatricality in late antiquity, including its physical infrastructure, its productions, its entanglement with officialdom, and
its material traces. Once a sense of the ubiquity and diversity of performative modes of display is established, we will then turn our attention to how
traces of such practices can be discerned within the specific contexts of the
three religious traditions under scrutiny in this study, in the writings of Jews,
Samaritans, and Christians. The material world of performance in late antiquity constitutes a key part of the backdrop against which we must see the
emergence of liturgical poetry across religious traditions; it shaped not only
what was performed but also how it was seen, heard, and engaged. At the
same time, each tradition came to modes of performance bearing its own distinctive literary traditions: stories, themes, motifs, and tradition of exegesis
that emerged within religious communities at this time and often permeated
beyond the bounds of any one tradition. These tradition-​specific elements
help us to discern and understand novel narrative and dramatic elements
of hymns, and to understand why the shared affinity for theater may at first
be difficult to discern. Scholarly efforts to trace and record literary connectivity within and among literary works constitutes the bulk of footnotes in
printed editions of antique hymns. Researchers have painstakingly traced
vast networks of allusions, quotations, and echoes, both aesthetic and utilitarian, among these liturgical poems and the larger body of sacred texts and
traditions coalescing in late antiquity, and thus they articulated the affinities
between hymns and scriptural readings, homilies, exegetical writings, and
other literatures. Such analysis reveals how poetry is grounded in specific religious traditions and communities and suggests influences across traditions,
as well; but the focus is largely concrete—​words, phrases, specific motifs—​
and literary. The ability of liturgical compositions to generate so much data
simply in the course of articulating their content had a consequence of
diverting attention from more amorphous concerns, including the dynamic
energy of how they were actually experienced, and how those experiences
may have reflected common aspects of culture, despite significant and meaningful differences among communities.
These two elements of performance—​space and content, or more precisely, venue and canon—​must be approached together in order to understand how and why hymnody emerged when it did and how it acquired
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28
Staging the Sacred
the forms it took. Performance, including both declamation and theatrical
shows, constituted a prominent feature of late antique culture; audiences, as
part of this culture, understood the conventions of delivery—​including their
own role—​and were familiar with the contours of the stories that structured
any given piece. Modern scholars need to recover an awareness of physical staging possibilities and, even when little can be reconstructed, remain
attuned to its significance in order to understand how audiences responded
to performers, and how performers interacted with audiences. An awareness of the physical aspects of staging and delivery complements literary
analysis, which often focuses on what was performed. Both the concrete (literary and structural) and the dynamic (active, embodied) aspects of performance are crucial to the phenomenon, but the ephemeral, kinetic, sensory
elements—​precisely because they leave so few traces behind—​are far harder
to reconstruct.
Finally, the ways in which actors and orators adapted and deployed motifs
from classical dramas and comedies offers a new way of understanding how liturgical poets related to their own “antiquities”: scriptural materials and exegetical traditions. If we view liturgical poetry as a form of late antique theater, we
can see how canons of sacred scripture and interpretation could easily play the
role in religious services played by classical works of Greek and Roman theater
in late antique stagecraft. Religious performance, including liturgical poetry—​
the new form of expression that appeared suddenly the third century ce across
religious traditions—​was one facet of the dynamic world of theatrical, performative creativity in late antiquity.
A Heritage of Theater
A love of spectacle and creativity in its execution long predates late antiquity. The Hellenistic origins of drama and theater are consummately entertaining but also religious, as they emerged out of religious rituals of Athens
in the fifth century bce.7 But the appetite for entertainment was both durable and omnivorous, so while Greek theater—​its conventions and plots—​
persisted, it thrived alongside and in various ways blended with other styles
7 For a recent, thorough, and multivalent account of the history of Greek theater, see the essays
collected in Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller, eds., The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and
Beyond: From Ritual to Drama (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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Setting the Stage
29
of performance, such as Etruscan theater, Persian dance, and Roman mime.8
The Roman Republic saw the development of spectacular entertainments,
including gladiatorial battles, hunting spectacles, and chariot races; it
witnessed a renaissance of comedic creativity, as demonstrated by the works
of Plautus and Terence; and it raised the skills of legal and political oratory
to a competitive art form. Greek theater (especially tragedy) remained a cultural touchstone and provided a library of canonical plots and figures, but it
was thoroughly assimilated to Roman and provincial tastes, and in the provinces temporary stages provided venues before permanent structures were
built—​indeed, even Rome lacked a permanent theater until the theater of
Pompey was built in 55 bce, modeled on structures Pompey saw in Greece.9
The Roman Empire continued this legacy of performance and augmented
it with new (or newly popularized) forms of theater, particularly mime and
pantomime.10
Actors, orators, and their audiences, for all their heterogeneity in terms of
formal education, shared a common facility with and fluency in the classical
canon, particularly the plots of Greek tragedy and Roman comedy. Despite
very real differences in education, opportunities, experience, and skill determined by economic and class position, members of late antique society
shared a common cultural foundation, a “curriculum” of mythological
tropes, literary set piece scenarios, and typological characters. Performers of
any social class, and regardless of objectives or specific setting, shared the
pressure and energy of delivering their performance before a critically engaged and sophisticated audience, of role playing with a keen awareness of
8 See the discussion of Etruscan theater and its connection to mime and pantomime in
Robert L. Maxwell, “Quia Ister Tusco Verho Ludio Vocahatur: The Etruscan Contribution to the
Development of Roman Theater,” in Etruscan Italy: Etruscan Influences on the Civilizations of Italy
from Antiquity to the Modern Era, ed. John Franklin Hall (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University,
1996), 267–​286. Also note the discussion in Catherine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in
Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98–​
136, Chapter 3, “Playing
Romans: Representations of Actors and Theatre.” Edwards offers a particularly fascinating discussion
of the role that perceived foreignness played in Roman ambivalence toward theater. On Persian dance
and spectacle, see Barbara Kaim, “Women, Dance and the Hunt: Splendour and Pleasures of Court
Life in Arsacid and Early Sasanian Art,” in The Parthian and Early Sasanian Empires: Adaptation
and Expansion, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Michael Alram, Touraj Daryaee, and Elizabeth Pendleton
(Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow, 2016), 90–​105.
9 In addition to providing stability of venue, permanent structures also served functions such as
formalizing and concretizing social hierarchy. For a discussion of the significance of Pompey’s theater
and the complex significance of Roman infrastructure in this period more broadly, see Amy Russell,
The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
10 See Margaret Bieber, The History of Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1961), 227–​253. With regard to late antiquity, note Ruth Webb, Demons and
Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
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30
Staging the Sacred
the audience’s gaze and their expectations of skillful delivery. This dynamic,
reciprocal, and knowing sense of “role playing” between performer and audience constitutes what we can, as a shorthand, label theatricality.11 An appreciation for the techniques of effective performance, for self-​conscious and
self-​aware participation in “theater” (of stage, street, or sanctuary), could
be considered one of the essential elements of a broad, diffuse late ancient
culture.
A “theatrical” performance requires two key elements: (1) a stage (formal
or improvised, physical and tangible or simply conceptual), which in turn
creates an awareness of, and distinct spaces for, performer and audience,
and (2) some form of script or performative scaffolding. Works staged in
theaters—​including purpose-​built structures, temporary stages, the private
homes of the wealthy, and improvised spaces in the streets and markets12—​
were presumably quite diverse in both the nature of their “production” and
their content and would have varied depending on occasion, venue, capability, and taste. The same diversity holds true for oratory, which could take
place in a range of venues, for the benefit of diverse constituencies, and serve
a variety of purposes.
Public performance as a general social practice, rooted in the classical
canon, was so pervasive and such an important element of common culture
in antiquity that Augustine (in his own homiletical performance) could refer
to a motif from the Aeneid and gloss it with a reference to the stage: “Almost
11 This is not to imply that other forms of literature lack performative elements, particularly when
their original orality is considered. Recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the rhetorical elements of rabbinic texts (see, for example, Martin Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and
Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE to 400 CE [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]).
Serious interest in this approach to rabbinic writing dates back to the mid-​twentieth century and
the works of such scholars as Saul Lieberman (Greek in Jewish Palestine/​Hellenism in Jewish Palestine
[New York: JTSA, 1994, a single-​volume reprint of works originally printed in 1965 and 1962, respectively]) and David Daube (author of, e.g., “Rabbinic Methods of Interpretation and Hellenistic
Rhetoric,” Hebrew Union College Annual 22 [1949]: 239–​264). These works responded to nascent
interest on the part of New Testament scholars in the Hellenistic nature of certain rhetorical elements
of Christian writings. Where the present study innovates is in its attention to liturgical poetry, a
genre that retains a strong affinity for its lived, performative setting. Liturgical poems, while also
presenting issues pertaining to life setting, permit a more direct assumption of an audience’s presence
(their “gaze”). That said, the work done here anticipates the reconstruction of a kind of “rhetorical-​
performative continuum” connecting works of different genres that nonetheless share essential rhetorical techniques.
12 See Shaun Tougher, “Having Fun in Byzantium,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 135–​145. While Tougher focuses on the Christian context, we can certainly imagine that wealthy Jews (e.g., those in Sepphoris) and Samaritans would have had the capability to host events similar to those of their Gentile neighbors, should they have had the desire;
the appreciation of Jewish elites for the visual culture of their larger environs suggests other shared
aesthetic sensibilities.
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Setting the Stage
31
all of you know this story . . . but few of you know it from books, many from
the theater.”13 Imperial authority recognized that theater, in particular, was
essential to the creation and diffusion of a common culture throughout the
empire. As Dunbabin notes:
There seems to have been an entire imperial system, at least by the early third
century, dedicated to training imperial slaves and freedmen as pantomimes
and sending them out to the provinces. The emperors were concerned of
course about the entertainment of the populace. . . . But it may be suggested
also that they recognized the contribution that such performances could
serve in knitting together the multifarious and multilingual peoples who
composed the Roman Empire.14
Theater, both a reflection of and mechanism for transmitting culture and
creating a sense of common identity, was not only ubiquitous, but also
recognized as such. The conventions of theater, in turn, colored other kinds
of performance, even those that disavowed actors and their trade.
The common schematic history of theater in late antiquity follows a simple
outline that focuses on the two popular genres of performance, mime and
pantomime. Classical comedies, according to this simplified sketch, were
supplanted by mime, performed by men and (scandalously) women who
were unmasked but employed props (clubs, leather phalloi), often with risqué
or even violent plots derived from daily life and quotidian figures, such as
the enduring and ubiquitous “adultery mime.”15 Tragedy, in turn, gave way
to pantomime, performed by a single performer (called a “pantomime” because he or she played “all the roles”); this individual dancer changed masks
as he changed roles, and while rhythm would have been important, he spoke
no lines; instead, the performer relied upon gesture and body language to
create character, while a chorus or narrator voiced the content of the story
and provided musical accompaniment.16 As tidy and roughly useful as this
13 Augustine Serm. 241.5.5 =​PL 38.1135–​1136.
14 Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle, 109–​110. This anecdote also indicates the complex relationship between education and performance, as slaves would hardly have had the rhetorical education
assumed by elites, and yet received very targeted, “vocational” instruction in some manner.
15 On the popular genre of adultery mime, see esp. R. W. Reynolds, “The Adultery Mime,” Christian
Quarterly 40.3–​4 (1946): 77–​84; and the remarkable mosaic that seems to depict a scene discussed in
Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle, 120–​123.
16 Of interest here is the essay by Helen Slaney, “Seneca’s Chorus of One,” in Choruses, Ancient and
Modern, ed. Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 99–​116. In her analysis of the political significance of a shift from the collective to the individual (as echoing and aestheticizing the consolidation of imperial power), Slaney
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32
Staging the Sacred
scheme is, reality was more complex, even if the historical picture, as is so
often the case for this period, must be reconstructed out of scanty evidence,
literary and material, that bring with them their own challenges as sources
for reconstructing a culture.17 Scholars have nonetheless been able to assemble a picture that encompasses the range of roles (from daily life and the
classical canon, comedic and dramatic) common to theater and to articulate the importance of body language (stance and gesture) in delivery. We
will see how these elements, in turn, translate easily to the realm of liturgical
performance.
Although we cannot escape the challenges posed by our sources, both literary and material, in terms of reconstructing the details of performance in
antiquity, thanks to the recovery of new artifacts and to sophisticated modes
of reading texts, objects, and visual evidence together, we are able to discern
a general picture more clearly. It has long been known that mime constitutes
one of the oldest forms of performance in classical theater, with its origins in
ancient Greece, and that it remained popular throughout antiquity. In antiquity, it bears remembering, this nomenclature lacked precision; the term
“mime,” in practice, described a variety of entertainers rather than a single,
specific kind of performance.18 But despite its imprecision, the use of the
term in diverse sources indicates the prevalence of performance styles that
earned the label. As Benjamin Hunningher notes:
The Roman stage was ruled by the mime, who presented an extremely varied
art, both in the time of the emperors and before it. In the Greek theater, too,
his domination had been virtually unlimited, for the Golden Age of tragedy
and comedy had not, after all, lasted long. All over the ancient world these
comedians, cittern-​players, clowns, dancers, and prestidigitators grouped
under the name of mimes had made an increasing claim upon the theater.19
notes, “[M]‌any of Seneca’s choral lyrics lend themselves to pantomime” (115), an indication of the
slippage and fluidity of appeal among genres and modes of performance. Seneca’s choruses could be
performed by a group but were just as effective as solos.
17 See Webb, Demons and Dancers, for an extensive discussion of the performance of mime and
pantomime.
18 The term “mime” comes from the Greek μιμέομαι (“to imitate”), where the term “actor” derives
from the Latin agere (“to do, make”). Both acknowledge the idea of artifice essential to performance. A similar evolution, in reverse, occurs with a Greek term for actor, “hypocrite”—​ὑποκριτής
(hupokritēs), “one who responds,” viz., a chorus member or orator (as in Aristophanes, The Wasps,
1279; Plato, Symposium, 194b; or Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.2.9—​that comes to mean “fraud, phony.”
19 From Benjamin Hunningher’s classic study, The Origins of the Theater (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1955), 64.
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Setting the Stage
33
Pantomimes, in turn, were so popular, and so influential, that they were
credited with inspiring political instability; their social power and sway
rivaled more explicitly competitive and overtly politicized entertainments
such as chariot races.20
The popularity of mime, pantomime, and related forms of performance
in late antiquity did not constitute an innovation of form or practice but,
rather, a recalibration of public preference. Their prominence may also reflect the endurance of popular forms of performance over the centuries, albeit varieties that rose and fell in the consciousness of those who recorded its
presence. The renown (fame or infamy) of these performers, attested through
the controversy they generated and adoration they received, is incontrovertible; actors and athletes were even the subjects of elaborate mosaic tributes
and expansive epitaphs.21 Performers coming from or aspiring to the upper
echelons of society—​orators and, to some extent, homilists, who employed
the tools of rhetoric in part to indicate their own learning and to signal respectability to their listeners—​had no choice but to engage with their popular counterparts and the trends they set. In practical terms, the combination
of respect for skill and the appeal of fame often blurred, or threatened to blur,
the boundaries of social hierarchies.22
20 See W. J. Slater, “Pantomime Riots,” Classical Antiquity 13.1 (1994): 120–​144. Also of central importance are the studies by Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), and Charlotte Roueché, Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the
Roman and Late Roman Periods (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1993).
21 Lavish mosaics commemorating theatrical and athletic performances and specific performers
can be found throughout the empire, from Spain, to North Africa, and Antioch, as well as locations
such as Pompeii. See Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle, and Dunbabin, “Athletes, Acclamations, and
Imagery from the End of Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 30 (2017): 151–​174. The language
of epitaphs also offers important testimony to the fame of performers; see the discussion in Edith
Hall, “The Tragedians of Heraclea and Comedians of Sinope,” in Ancient Theatre and Performance
Culture around the Black Sea, ed. David Braund, Edith Hall, and Rosie Wyles (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), 45–​58 and Webb, Demons and Dancers, 146–​147. See also discussion in this
chapter.
22 While the upper echelons of society received far more extensive formal education than their
actor/​dancer counterparts, we should note that the popularity of entertainers enabled movement up
the social ladder (the biography of Empress Theodora offers the most dramatic example). Legal history reinforces the impression of a long, complex entanglement among the political and entertaining
classes. The Lex Roscia Theatralis of 67 bce reserved the first fourteen rows of seats for members of
the equestrian class, provided the individuals had not themselves appeared in the arena or on the
stage—​itself a telling indicator of fluidity between the “theatrical” class and the “oratorical” class,
underscored by Augustus’ prohibition against the sons and grandsons of senators and equites from
the stage. See Elizabeth Rawson, “Discrimina ordinum: The Lex Julia Theatralis,” Papers of the British
School at Rome 55 (1987): 83–​114, and D. H. Berry, “Equester ordo tuus est: Did Cicero Win His
Cases because of His Support for the Equites?,” Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 222–​234. Also note the
scene depicted in Quintilian (first c. ce): “A man who had performed before the praetor in his private garden, but had never appeared on the public stage, took a seat in the first fourteen front rows.
The accusation is: ‘You exercised the profession of actor!’ The rebuttal is: ‘No, I did not.’ The question
is: ‘What is meant by “exercising the profession of actor”?’ If he is accused under the theatre law, the
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34
Staging the Sacred
A popular preference for “new” (some—​including the Emperor Julian—​
might say, “diminished” or even “degenerate”) styles of performance led
to the updating of the classical corpus in its presentation while preserving
its content. Classical mythology, often filtered through sources such as
Aristophanes and Menander, furnished many popular mime plots over
the centuries; pantomime, as a tradition rooted in tragedy, drew even
more heavily on the mythic canon. Lucian (second century ce), in his
remarkable—​and complex—​defense of pantomime, urges those wishing to
become actors to know the whole of Homer, Hesiod, the classical poets, and
above all, the Greek tragedians;23 after all, he asserts, “the plots (hypotheseis)
are the same for both.”24 Indeed, classical tragedies were still staged in late
antiquity, just not necessarily in their entirety; as Bieber writes: “While
[new] historical plays were seldom written [after the first century ce] and
tragedies often declaimed only in detached scenes or detached roles lacking
in continuity, the pantomime with its continuous plot became the real heir of
tragedy.”25 Just as today one may refer to a pair of doomed lovers as “Romeo
and Juliet” while possessing only a vague familiarity with the Shakespeare
play, the scripts of classical tragedy may have become less familiar, but the
characters and plots persisted.
Simply put, we would be mistaken to assume that the ascendency of one
form of entertainment (e.g., mime and pantomime) necessitated the abandonment of another (classical comedy and tragedy), or that boundaries distinguishing genres were rigidly defined or policed. As C. P. Jones observes:
If there was in any sense rivalry between legitimate theater and such forms
as mime and pantomime, it led to no clear-​cut victories, no clean sweep
of the less popular forms from the stage; and if the other forms were more
popular, it does not follow that they were necessarily vulgar or uneducated.
A social historian of the year 4000 would be unwise to infer that Kiss Me
rebuttal will come from the defendant; if he has been thrown out of the theatre and brings an action
for injuries, the rebuttal will come from the accuser” (Inst. Or. 3.6.20 [LCL 125, pp. 56–​57]).
23 On Dancing §61 (LCL 302, pp. 261–​265); this treatise in general offers a wealth of insight into
pantomime. On Lucian’s treaties, see Karen Schlapbach, “Lucian’s on Dancing and the Models for a
Discourse on Pantomime,” in New Directions in Ancient Pantomime, ed. Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 314–​337.
24 On Dancing §31 (LCL 302, pp. 242–​243).
25 Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1961), 227. But note Clifford Ashby’s critique of Bieber’s legacy in his Classical Greek
Theatre: New Views on an Old Subject (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 139–​146.
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Setting the Stage
35
Kate had driven The Taming of the Shrew from the stage; that Verdi’s Otello
and Falstaff represented an unmistakable decline in taste; or that only “the
small circle of the educated” watched Shakespeare in the Park.26
In short, in late antiquity, the most famous, dramatic, and sensationalist individual scenes from classical dramas were performed as freestanding pieces.
This selective adaptation aesthetic reflects not a narrowing of performance
styles but a greater diversity of occasions when performances were staged, in
a wider array of settings and for expanded and more varied audiences.27 The
popularization of theater may have meant a greater quantity and variety of
theater rather than a debasement of cultural treasure.
Lucian, in his treatise On Dancing, valorizes pantomime precisely because
it can be understood as demanding facility in all the other forms of art one
might encounter:
Dance is not one of the facile arts that can be plied without pains, but
reaches to the very summit of all culture, not only in music but in rhythm
and metre, and especially in your own favourite, philosophy, both physics
and ethics. To be sure, Dance accounts philosophy’s inordinate interest in
dialectics inappropriate to herself. From rhetoric, however, she has not held
aloof, but has her part in that too, inasmuch as she is given to depicting
character and emotion, of which the orators also are fond. And she has not
kept away from painting and sculpture, but manifestly copies above all else
the rhythm that is in them.28
The task of actors is not lesser than that of an orator or indeed any other
artist: dance, according to Lucian, embodies the strengths and eloquence
of all the other artforms, including painting, sculpture, and music. It is a
synthesis of visual eloquence as well as literary erudition, and the complex
richness of dance reveals the interdependence of these various kinds of
performances upon each other. Accomplished dancers displayed mastery of
a demanding, if not conventionally elite, curriculum.
26 C. P. Jones, “Greek Drama in the Roman Empire,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World,
ed. Ruth Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 48.
27 See Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual
Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 20–​31.
28 On Dancing §35 (LCL 302, pp. 246–​247).
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36
Staging the Sacred
The common cultural touchstone implicit in the idea of canon was essential to public performance, whether highbrow or low, and regardless of
communal affiliation. As Martin Jaffee writes with regard to the place of the
“classical” canon in the practice of oratory, in his study of its influence on
prose rabbinic writings:
What made an oral presentation elegant was its ability to cite or allude to
well-​known classical texts in the process of the speaker’s development of his
own thought. The orator’s persuasive power was in part bound up with the
weight of classical diction he could support without apparent effort . . . 29
Classical education emphasized the rote memorization of texts in order to
equip speakers with the raw material for crafting innovative speeches, just
as today a speaker will deploy Shakespeare, Frost, or (indeed) the Bible in
order to imbue remarks with substance and gravitas or quote the Simpsons
or Seinfeld as a kind of shortcut to a knowing laugh. In this regard, orators
shared much of their curriculum with actors, and both kinds of performers
relied on widespread communal familiarity with canonical characters and
motifs as an integral component to their success—​a familiarity taught by
the theater and orators as well as assumed by them. A shared literary canon
constitutes part of the raw material for creativity within the culture, whether
that creative expression takes place on the stage, before a jury, or in a homily.
Writing of a period when public theaters were still thriving, despite official disapproval, George Kennedy reminds us that declamation was still
practiced in Gaza in the sixth century, and probably in Constantinople as
well.30 The oratorical traditions of the Greco-​Roman world persisted even
as they adapted to the new realities, tastes, and aesthetics of late antiquity.31
Liturgical poetry, so deeply invested in techniques of composition and delivery that arose in the context of theater and oratory, can be seen as one essential vector for the continuation of these art forms.32
29 Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 129.
30 See discussion in George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 271.
31 The understanding of genre in the study of theater in antiquity can be akin to that of modern
literary studies of prose, in which the label “novel” has proven useful in analyzing classical literature,
despite the absence of that term from ancient literary theory. See Joseph Farrell, “Classical Genre in
Theory and Practice,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 383–​408.
32 Indeed, the oral nature of written scriptures—​what the rabbis refer to as “the Written Torah”—​
has recently been a topic of renewed appreciation. See esp. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, The
People of the Book without the Book: Jewish Ambivalence Towards Biblical Text after the Rise of
Christianity (PhD diss.: University of Chicago, 2015), and Wollenberg, “The Dangers of Reading
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Setting the Stage
37
Infrastructure and Obstruction
In order to appreciate why “theater” constitutes an appropriate, even essential, lens for examining late antique hymnody, we must understand how
thoroughly theater and related modes of performance permeated society
in this period. It was not only the idea of theater and spectacle that was so
prominent in late antiquity; a robust infrastructure existed to support such
performances. Indeed, the widespread presence of theaters, and by extension theatricality and performance, in the ancient world constitutes a major
component of the physical legacy of antiquity. As Mary T. Boatwright notes,
“Theaters were considered essential to any self-​respecting city in the Roman
empire.”33 She underscores the point, writing:
The assembled evidence strikingly indicates that theaters were much more
important in the Roman world than they are in our own. Theaters were religious structures yet they were also secular buildings built precisely to showcase a range of public spectacles that quickly expanded from tragedy and
comedy to include scenic plays and ballets, musical and athletic festivals,
gladiatorial and wild beast fights, and aquatic displays.34
We have material remains of theaters from throughout the Roman Empire,
including in those areas of the empire where Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan
communities predominated; the first Roman-​style theaters and odeums
(music halls) appeared in the Near East in the first century bce, and so far
thirty-​nine have been excavated in the area spanning from Petra in the south
to Cyrrhus (modern Syria) in the north.35 Theaters at Sepphoris and Tiberias
could seat roughly 4,500 spectators, while those in Caesarea and Scythopolis
could seat at least 6,000 and perhaps as many as 10,000, a number exceeding
the population of most cities.36 The theater excavated in Neapolis (modern
as We Know It: Sight Reading as a Source of Heresy in Early Rabbinic Traditions,” Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 85.3 (2017): 709–​745. Also note William Graham, Beyond
the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
33 Mary T. Boatwright, “Theaters in the Roman Empire,” Biblical Archaeologist 53 (1990): 185.
34 Boatwright, “Theaters in the Roman Empire,” 184–​185.
35 Alexandra Retzleff, “Near Eastern Theatres in Late Antiquity,” Phoenix 57, no. 1/​2 (2003): 115–​138.
36 Boatwright, “Theaters in the Roman Empire,” 191, estimates that the theater in Caesarea could
seat 10,000. The more conservative numbers appear in Mark Chancey, Greco-​Roman Culture in the
Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112–​113. These theaters are small in
comparison with some Roman venues, such as the hippodrome of Antioch, which could seat 80,000,
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38
Staging the Sacred
Nablus), a Samaritan population center, dates to the second century ce; it
could seat 6,000–​7,000, making it one of the largest theaters in Palestine, and
it remained in active use until the seventh century.37 New construction of
theaters flourished through the second century ce, and the fifth and sixth
centuries witnessed the restoration and refurbishment of existing theaters.38
The prominence of theaters helps contextualize the pervasive influence
of theatricality far beyond the confines of the literal stage. As Peter Brown
notes, pondering the size and ubiquity of these performance spaces:
These gigantic meeting places would not always have been full. Those at
major provincial capitals had room for visitors from neighboring cities
and, even, for the villagers of the region. Yet seated row upon row in
this manner, the theater crowd was the city. It was at the theater that the
Antiochenes made their wishes known to the governors by means of carefully orchestrated acclamations. Their occasional stony silence was enough
to cause an unpopular governor to turn pale with anger and anxiety.39
Theaters were key elements of civic infrastructure; as Brown expresses it,
such spaces were essential to the city and, broadly speaking, expressive of
the idea of “citizenship” within the culture. The public assemblies enabled by
these structures and the performative dynamics among the audiences and
performers defined communal culture in many ways.
As popular as purpose-​built theaters were, performances took place in a
terrific variety of venues, any place where performers could gain public attention. And just as performance penetrated a variety of public spaces,
its content lent color and interest to a variety of domestic spaces. The use
of imagery from the worlds of theater and athletics in artwork decorating
homes, baths, and other locations signifies the ubiquity, pervasiveness, and
the theater of Epheseus, which seated 24,000, and a stadium by the city walls of Aphrodisias in Caria,
which seated 30,000.
37 See I. Magen, “The Roman Theatre in Shechem,” in Zev Vilnay’s Jubilee Volume, ed. E. Schiller
(Jerusalem: Ariel, 1984), 269–​277 [Hebrew].
38 This renaissance of theater in late antiquity coincides with a period when the imperial
authorities were taking increasingly aggressive measures to purge traditional civic festivals of polytheistic elements; as Retzleff notes, “Public festivals continued to be produced in the fourth and fifth
centuries, but an effort was made to remove cultic elements and to make theatre a desacralized event”
(Retzleff, “Near Eastern Theatres in Late Antiquity,” 133). These “secularized” theaters would have
been that much more attractive to a Jewish audience.
39 Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 84–​85.
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Setting the Stage
39
importance of these pursuits, far beyond “diversions” or “entertainments.”
We find images from the classical canon—​quite possibly scenes of theater
performances of canonical myths and dramas—​decorating the homes of
the wealthy, as well as depictions of athletic games, combat spectacles, and
champion charioteers. Both a love of theater and specific spectacles are thus
recorded in elaborate, expensive, and permanent detail.40 Plays and games
were also commemorated in artifacts available to the masses, allowing them
to travel into their homes with them, in portable form. Cheap souvenirs
sold at festivals and shrines near theaters (dating to the third to fourth c.)
depict scenes from tragedies and attest to the popularity of these storylines,
and similarly, domestic objects—​not only vases but also combs and dainty
pyxides, some presumably intended to appeal to women—​drew adornment
from these popular theatrical motifs.41 It is worth noting that images from
mythology, scripture, and entertainments are often intermixed; indeed, a
mosaic, sculpture, or fresco depicting a scene from mythology, the Iliad, or
Greek tragedy (at times integrated with explicitly Christian or Jewish iconography) is as much a scene of theater as an allusion to a literary corpus.42
Material and visual arts, theatrical performances, and literary works drew on
the same common canon.43
For all its popularity, authorities in antiquity often viewed theater and related performative phenomena with a jaundiced eye; a dislike of contemporary theater may be one of the few things rabbis shared with Christian clergy,
40 The bibliography on mosaics, including those depicting games and entertainments, in late antiquity is vast. Of particular relevance to the present study, see Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, Mosaics
of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and her more recent
volume, Theater and Spectacle; Christine Kondoleon, Domestic and Divine: Roman Mosaics in the
House of Dionysos (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); Stine Birk, Troels Myrup
Kristensen, and Birte Poulsen, eds., Using Images in Late Antiquity (Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow,
2014); Lisa Nevett, Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010); Sebastiana Nervegna, “Greek Culture as Images: Menander’s Comedies and Their Patrons in
the Roman West and the Greek East,” in Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey
Henderson, ed. S. Douglas Olson (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 346–​365; and Luke Lavan, “Social Space
in Late Antiquity, “ in Objects in Context, Objects in Use: Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity, ed.
Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift, and Toon Putzeys (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 129–​158.
41 See Pat Easterling and Richard Miles, “Dramatic Identities: Tragedy in Late Antiquity,” in
Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard Miles (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107.
42 In addition to the works cited earlier, see Stine Birk, Troels Myrup Kristensen, and Birte
Poulsen, eds., Using Images in Late Antiquity (London: Oxbow Books, 2014); Rachel Hachlili, Ancient
Mosaic Pavements: Themes, Issues, and Trends (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Lee Levine, Visual Judaism in
Late Antiquity: Historical Contexts of Jewish Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012);
and Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-​Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
43 For a discussion of the tensions between the urge to accommodate majority cultures and to resist them, see also Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society: Reciprocity and Solidarity in
Ancient Judaism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
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40
Staging the Sacred
and Church leaders held in common with Emperor Julian, although for
vastly different reasons. Julian lamented what he perceived as the loss or debasement of the high classical traditions of Hellenism, and he regarded the
popularity of mime and pantomime as reflecting this devaluing of serious
culture. Popular entertainment was, in short, not pagan enough for Julian.
Among Christian and Jewish leaders theater was equally frowned upon, but
for different reasons. They viewed public entertainments as too tethered
to paganism, too gleefully violent, and too impious, particularly given actors’ proclivity for pointed mockery of Christians and Jews. Audiences’
reputations for hooliganism and rioting (often with a political tinge) only
intensified both clerical and imperial anxiety.44
Although Theodosius I (347–​395 ce) was a patron of the theater and the
Empress Theodora (500–​548 ce) performed as an actress before her imperial
marriage, as early as the fifth century ce, the Church—​influenced by anti-​
theatrical rhetoric from Church Fathers—​had excommunicated all mimes.
In 692 ce, the Council of Trullo (Canon 51) banned (at least in theory) all
forms of theatrical entertainment, including mimes, pantomimes, hunting
games, and dancing on stage. While, to quote Richard Beacham, even after
the Trullan Council “it seems likely that in some form ‘the dance went
on,’ ”45 this ruling makes a significant public statement. The official stages
of Constantinople, Rome, and beyond were, if not darkened, substantially
dimmed. Yet synagogues and churches, with their rituals, homilies, and
liturgies, became—​despite the articulated tensions with the theater—​the primary heirs of much of the ancient performative world.46
44 On the complex relationship between the Church and theater, in addition to Leyerle and Webb,
see Christine C. Schnusenberg, The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama: The Eucharist as
Theatre (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2010), as well as her sourcebook, The Relationship between the
Church and the Theatre (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1988), and Donnalee Dox, The Idea of the
Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2004). Rabbinic opinions are conveniently synthesized and summarized in Ze’ev
Weiss, Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014), and Loren Spielman, Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient World (Tübingen,
Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2020).
45 Richard C. Beacham, The Roman Theater and Its Audience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 153. The eleventh-​century cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev depicts the hippodrome
in Constantinople and includes figures of clowns or jesters as well as musicians and acrobats; the
twelfth-​century canonists John Zonaras and Theodore Balsamon refer to the continued existence
of mimes.
46 For a study of the tensions between ritual and drama as categories in late antiquity, see Leyerle,
Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives. Also useful is the second chapter of Andrew Walker White, “The
Artifice of Eternity: A Study of Liturgical and Theatrical Practices in Byzantium” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2006), pp. 46–​91, as well as White’s monograph, Performing Orthodox
Ritual in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). My thanks to Kevin Kalish for
introducing me to White’s work.
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Setting the Stage
41
Community Theater
Speaking of late antique liturgy as a kind of “theater” makes conceptual sense,
because of both the performative affinities under examination here and the
fact that religious theater was, in fact, a commonplace: it was preceded by
Greek and Roman theater, which integrated religious ritual, and succeeded
by religious dramas such as medieval mystery plays. Less commonly
considered is the fact that the physical spaces in which religious ritual took
place were, themselves, constructed as performance spaces.47 The synagogue
bimah and its counterpart, the Byzantine Christian ambo (in Syriac, bema),
was a raised platform that served as the primary focal point in the sanctuary.
These spaces resemble in every practical way a stage: their function was to
facilitate both visual and acoustic perception, and thereby to support successful delivery of the performer’s material, whether a spoken homily or a
sung hymn. Some synagogues seem to have employed “theater-​style” (i.e.,
amphitheater) seating, a resemblance noted by Epiphanius, who described
a Samaritan synagogue as built “theater-​fashion outdoors in the open air, by
the Samaritans who mimic all the customs of the Jews,” a style referenced in
two inscriptions from Berenice that describe Jewish communal buildings as
“amphitheaters.”48 In Christian churches, specific architectural features reflect the use of choirs and various forms of antiphonal performance.
Of particular importance is the general impression that Jewish, Christian,
and Samaritan spaces, both civic and religious, served a variety of communal functions in late antique society, functions commonly associated
with theaters in other contexts. Just as markets could be sites for religious
performances and forums for theater as well as oratory, churches and
synagogues functioned as communal spaces appropriate to host a variety
of gatherings, including public meetings and communal meals.49 In smaller
47 See discussion in Chapter 5.
48 Discussed in Spielman, Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient World, 90. Also note the exterior step structures outside the synagogue at Chorazin; while analysis of synagogue use in antiquity has focused on synagogue interiors, exterior spaces such as courtyards and amphitheater-​like
steps suggest other possible activity venues. (On the Chorazin synagogue generally, see Z. Yeivin,
The Synagogue at Korazim; The 1962–​1964, 1980–​1987 Excavations, Israel Antiquities Authority
Reports [Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2000] and Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and
Archaeology in the Land of Israel [Leiden: Brill, 1988].)
49 Indeed, the use of both synagogues and theaters for hosting large gatherings lies behind a passage in the rabbinic text Avot de-​Rabbi Natan 21 (Schechter, ed., 37, 43) in which synagogue (one not
following rabbinic practices) is glossed as “theater,” based on the fact that both are meeting places
(‫)כנסיות‬. See discussion of this passage in Spielman, Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient World,
230–​232.
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42
Staging the Sacred
communities, or less-​wealthy locales, it seems particularly plausible that a
single structure would have served multiple purposes, constituencies, and
audiences. In this sense, synagogues and churches may reflect a flexibility of
use similar to that of “civic” venues—​streets, markets, and public squares—​
which themselves often integrated religious elements but became hospitable
locations for planned or spontaneous performances. Indeed, as official opposition to theater strengthened, activities previously located in those venues
would naturally have moved to religiously sanctioned sites.50 This blurring
of boundaries and constituencies reflects the ubiquity of performance as
well as the importance of intent, and a population attentive to the numerous
occasions when the need to constitute an audience—​a specific kind of audience, for a precise function—​might arise. The audiences, like the spaces,
were multifunctional: able to enjoy theater, respond to a speech, and affirm
a liturgy, as the occasion and their role required. We find evidence for the
vibrancy of synagogue life in Chrysostom’s (no doubt exaggerated but nonetheless revealing) accusation:
But these Jews are gathering choruses of effeminates and a great rubbish
heap of harlots; they drag into the synagogue the whole theater, actors and
all. For there is no difference between the theater and the synagogue. I know
that some suspect me of rashness because I said there is no difference between the theater and the synagogue; but I suspect them of rashness if they
do not think that this is so.51
In a location as energized by performance and theater as Antioch, it is
hardly surprising that even a reputation for putting on a good show would
attract Christians as well as Jews to a synagogue. For Chrysostom, the external “show” of synagogue activities, religious or otherwise, posed an existential danger to superficial Antiochenes: synagogue spectacles would lure
outsiders in and then seduce them to Judaizing behavior.
In late antiquity, individuals undertook every action with an awareness of
the fact that it would be viewed; Chrysostom accused the Jews of profaning
50 Spielman notes in regard to the Jewish context, “As the church came to eclipse the theater as the
central urban institution in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, the importance of the synagogue as
a communal meeting place for Jews must also have increased” (Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient
World, 235).
51 John Chrysostom, Adv. Jud. 1.7; translation from John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing
Christians, The Fathers of the Church 68, trans. Paul W. Harkins. (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1979), 9.
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Setting the Stage
43
the Torah with theater, but he, too, sought to draw listeners to his speeches
and keep them for his message.52 Whether the assumed audience was worldly
or (in the case of the deity) otherworldly, those speaking within the sanctuary
felt the eyes of those who watched them. Ambrose’s praise of Pammachius, a
senator turned monk who was eventually canonized, acknowledges this resemblance: “You give spectacles for the church; you are a candidate not for
vainglory in the arena [i.e., the amphitheater] but rather for eternal praise.”53
The tools Pammachius acquired as a senator—​his sense of spectacle and
performance—​he now puts to use in the service of God; nevertheless, the
tools are the same.
Basil of Seleucia acknowledges this affinity explicitly in the opening line of
his homily on Lazarus:
If someone said that the Church is a theater common to both angels and
men, he would not be mistaken. It is a theater in which Christ is praised
both by invisible and visible nature, a theater in which the Lord’s miracles
are woven together for our ears as delightful hymns, for the bride of Christ
rejoices, both singing and hearing of the works of Christ.”54
In this passage, Basil explicitly links hymnody—​the singing of religious
songs—​with theater. His opening intends to shock listeners with the comparison between sacred worship and theatrical entertainment, but (the homilist
argues) what distinguishes the two is not form but content. Church services
are theatrical performances with Christ at center stage. The community—​
“the bride of Christ”—​is granted explicit permission to enjoy both hearing
and actively participating.
52 For an analysis of the late ancient aesthetic of splendor in a religious context, including a discussion of the Ambrose quotation, see Lucy Grig, “Poverty and Splendour in the Late Antique Church,”
in Poverty in the Roman World, ed. Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 145–​161. More broadly, see Jaś Elsner, “Late Antique Art: The Problem
of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic,” in Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation
from Early to Late Empire, ed. Simon Swain and Mark Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 271–​309. On the effects of intense self-​awareness in a social context highly invested in performance and spectatorship, John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), remains a seminal classic.
53 Ambrose, Ep. 13.16; this passage is discussed in Lucy Grig, “Throwing Parties for the
Poor: Poverty and Splendour in the Late Antique Church,” in Poverty in the Ancient World, ed.
Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 145–​161.
54 Basil of Seleucia, “Homily on Lazarus, 1,” in Mary B. Cunningham, “Basil of Seleucia’s Homily on
Lazarus: A New Edition BHG 2225,” Analecta Bollandiana 104 (1986), 178.
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Staging the Sacred
Similarly, Tertullian admonished his congregation to seek religious
alternatives to secular amusements in his remarkable treatise, “On the
Spectacles”:
These are the pleasures, the spectacles of Christians, holy, eternal, and free.
Here find your games of the circus—​watch the race of time, the seasons
slipping by, count the circuits, look for the goal of the great consummation, battle for the companies of the churches, rouse up at the signal of God,
stand erect at the angel’s trump, triumph in the palms of martyrdom. If the
literature of the stage delights you, we have sufficiency of books, of poems,
of aphorisms, sufficiency of songs and voices, not fable, those of ours, but
truth; not artifice but simplicity. Would you have fightings and wrestlings?
Here they are—​things of no small account and plenty of them. See impurity
overthrown by chastity, perfidy slain by faith, cruelty crushed by pity, impudence thrown into the shade by modesty; and such are the contests among
us, and in them we are crowned, Have you a mind for blood? You have the
blood of Christ.55
Tertullian constructs a piety that is equal to as well as an alternative to the
popular games and spectacles. And he conveys his message by means of the
vivid speech associated with skilled oratory.56
Nor was Tertullian the only early Christian author to draw on imagery from entertainment in his discussion of superior religious analogs.
Chrysostom, in move resembling that of Tertullian, appeals to the spectacle
of wrestling to convey the preparations for baptism and the efficacy of such
training for the newly baptized in a homily delivered in 388 ce:
Blunders in this wrestling school are not fraught with danger for the
athletes. The wrestling is with men from the same school, and they practice
all their exercises with their own teachers. But when the day of the games
arrives, when the stadium is open, when the spectators are seated above
the arena, and the judge of the contest is on hand, then must those who are
55 Tertullian, On the Spectacles §29 (LCL 250, p. 297).
56 It bears mentioning that Tertullian lived in North Africa (Carthage), and his work thus
underscores the ubiquity of spectacle and performance and its usefulness as a rhetorical and cultural touchstone. For a compelling recent study of this figure, see David E. Wilhite, Tertullian the
African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2007).
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Setting the Stage
45
slothful fall and leave the arena in deep disgrace, or be energetic and win
the crowns and prizes.
So also for you, these thirty days are like the practice and bodily exercises
in some wrestling school. Let us learn during these days how we may gain the
advantage over that wicked demon. After baptism we are going to strip for
the combat against him; he will be our opponent in the boxing bout and the
fight. Let us learn, during this time of training, the grips he uses, the source of
his wickedness, and how he can easily hurt us. Then, when the contest comes,
we will not be caught unaware nor be frightened, as we would be if we were to
see new wrestling tricks; because we have practiced among ourselves and have
learned all his artifices, we will confidently join grips with him in the combat.57
Chrysostom compares the newly baptized Christian men to wrestlers—​
describing how they strip and grapple, in robustly physical terms. When he
speaks to the women, he similarly evokes the language of theater:
The same analogy holds good not only in the case of the wars of this world,
but also in the case of the games. Those who are going to be brought into the
arena do not go down to the contests until the herald takes them and leads
them around before the eyes of all, as he lifts his voice and says: “Does anyone accuse this man?” And yet this is no contest involving the soul, but a
wrestling match of men’s bodies. Why, then, do you demand an accounting
of the contestants’ free birth?58
The newly baptized perform for an audience of the heavenly hosts, who gaze
upon them, angelic spectators marveling at the contest.59 Chrysostom invites
his listeners, those on the cusp of joining the Christian community, to imagine themselves as performers attracting the most spectacular gaze.60 God,
57 Chrysostom, Instructions to Catechumens I.9.28–​29, trans. Paul W. Harkins (New York: Paulist
Press, 1963), 140–​141.
58 Chrysostom, Instructions to Catechumens, II.12.33, trans. Harkins, 182–​183.
59 In GenR 77:3 (T-​A, 912), Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel by the Jabbok ford (Gen. 32:22–​
33) is compared to an athlete wrestling in the arena, with the implication that the angels there, too,
are witnesses. Similarly, angels watch the binding of Isaac and respond in horror in both prose midrashim and liturgical poems.
60 It bears mentioning that songs are associated with the heavens—​e.g., angelic choirs—​as attested
already in Isa. 6, the passage that provides key liturgical phrases (the qedushah/​sanctus). We also find
human singing associated with ascents to heaven in early Jewish mystical traditions, including the
Apocalypse of Abraham 17. The sounds of singing, along with reciprocal gazing—​and, when offerings
were made, the aroma of sacrifice—​all function as sensory links between terrestrial and supernal
realms.
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Staging the Sacred
far superior to the cruel civic officials who oversee mortal games, is here
called “the Judge of the games of piety.”61
Neither religiously justified opposition to theater nor the argument that
piety can be a legitimate alternative to entertainment was an exclusively
Christian endeavor. Jewish sources preserve an array of traditions opposed to
the participation of faithful Jews in theater and games.62 Among these works,
we find the peculiarly ambivalent tradition that abstaining from theatrical
amusements and games will be rewarded in the World-​to-​Come with a spectacle that surpasses them all: the battle of Leviathan and Behemoth. This tradition, which appears most expansively in midrash Leviticus Rabbah, states:
Rabbi Yudah ben Rabbi Shimon said: Behemoth and the Leviathan are
[destined] to engage in a wild-​beast contest before the righteous in the
Time-​to-​Come, and whoever has not seen the wild-​beast contests (‫)קניגין‬
of the nations of the world in This World will be granted the gift of seeing
one in the World-​to-​Come. How will they be slaughtered? Behemoth will,
with its horns, pull Leviathan down and rend it, and Leviathan will, with
its fins, pull Behemoth down and pierce it through. The Sages asked: How
is this a valid method of slaughter?! Have we not learnt the following in a
Mishnah (i.e., m. Hul. 1:2): “All may slaughter, and one may slaughter at
all times [of the day], and with any instrument except with a scythe, a saw,
or teeth (i.e., a jaw cut out of a dead animal), because they cause pain as if
by choking, or with a fingernail”? Rabbi Abin ben Kahana said: The Holy
Blessed One said: Instruction (Torah) shall go forth from Me (Isa. 56:4), i.e.
an exceptional temporary ruling will go forth from Me.63
61 Chrysostom, Instructions to Catechumens, II.12.35, trans. Harkins, 183.
62 For example, GenR 67:3 (T-​A, 756–​757) sees the creation of humanity with two feet as reflecting
a pious–​impious binary: “With his feet he can go to the theaters and circuses (‫לבתי טרטסיאות‬
‫)ולבתי קרקסיאות‬, while if he wishes he can go to houses of prayer and houses of study (‫לבתי כנסיות‬
‫)ובתי מדרשות‬.” The impious structures (theaters and circuses) are presented as “houses” that compete with pious structures (i.e., synagogues and study halls). For a comprehensive treatment, see
Spielman, Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient World.
63 LevR 13.3 (Vilna ed. 18b), translated by the author; see Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical
Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),
41–​55. In a similar vein, note the tradition in the same midrash (LevR 11:9; Vilna ed. 17a) that
compares God to the primary performer—​the pantomime dancer—​leading this Israelite chorus: “In
the time to come, the Holy Blessed One will lead the chorus (ḥolah/​‫חולה‬, circle dance) of the righteous, as it is written: ‘Keep her ramparts (ḥelah/​‫ )חילה‬in mind’ (Psa 48:14). It is written ḥolah (the
exegete here lengthens the yod to a vav), (meaning) they will dance around Him like young maidens
and point to Him, as it were, with a finger, saying, ‘This is God, our God, forever and ever; He will lead
us ‘alamut’ (‘forever,’ or ‘maiden-​like’; Psa 48:15).” See discussion in Martin Jacobs, “Theatres and
Performances as Reflected in the Talmud Yerushalmi,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-​Roman
Culture, vol. 1, ed. Peter Schaefer (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr, 1998), 344.
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47
This midrash depicts not an alternative to the animal fights of the ancient
amphitheater, but its ultimate instantiation. The rabbis express discomfort
with the violence, insofar as they have God issue an exception to the conventional rules of kosher slaughter to render the primordial animals fit for the
sages’ dining. Even divine oversight (‫ )השגחה‬of kashrut is suspect. And yet,
this spectacle is God’s (discomfiting?) gift to the pious.64
Theater’s foes and partisans shared common ideas of what audiences favored, and both understood the common tools of effective performance.
Given that every performance and performer desires and even expects an audience, the rivalry among entertainers, orators, and liturgists was fruitful as
well as impassioned; the competition for eyes, ears, and attention invited all
parties to refine and improve their craft.65 Despite that Ambrose, Tertullian,
Chrysostom, and the rabbis expressed unease with public amusements, they
freely drew on the techniques of actors and orators as they competed for popular attention.66
An example of how religious authors recognized, however uneasily, the
awareness that they needed to compete for audiences just as other performers
did can be found in the liturgical treatment of the battle of Leviathan and
Behemoth. This mythic trope from prose rabbinic writings became a subject
for a dramatic piyyut by the great poet Eleazar ha-​Qallir: this specific vision of
the World-​to-​Come, a pious displacement of the violent amusements of antiquity, rewarded those who attended the synagogue on the fast of the Ninth
64 Spielman brings together a variety of prose traditions on this theme in his discussion of the eschatological banquet (Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient World, 251–​255).
65 As Beacham states, “Christian polemicists saw both in the attitude of the rulers that at all costs
the shows must go one, and in the veritable obsession with such diversions by the general population,
irrefutable evidence of the moral collapse of paganism and its approaching destruction. Yet even in
the Christian community, when the games were on the churches were deserted. Later, with barbarians
literally at their gates, the public still mobbed the spectacles. In its resentment the Church conceived
a hatred and horror of the theatre which endured for centuries, was reactivated in the Renaissance,
and indeed, in some circles is still evident today” (The Roman Theater and Its Audience, 194). To be
sure, religious institutions benefited from the understanding that certain forms of participation were
necessary, as sacraments or commandments. And yet, persuasion to accept and adhere to such beliefs
was itself important, whether keeping community members engaged or drawing in new believers,
and appeals to hearts and minds prevented rituals from becoming hollow, rote performances. On
the competitiveness of performers, see Ruth Webb, “The Nature and Representation of Competition
in Pantomime and Mime,” in L’organisation des spectacles dans le monde romain. Entretiens sur
l’Antiquité classique, 58, ed. Kathleen Coleman and Jocelyne Nelis-​Clément (Vandœuvres and
Genève, Switzerland: Fondation Hardt, 2012), 221–​256.
66 Blake Leyerle describes Chrysostom’s popularity as a storyteller and orator in The Narrative
Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2020).
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48
Staging the Sacred
of Av, on the stage of their imaginations.67 Through the performance of this
composition—​a far lengthier and more detailed description of the event than
what was offered in the prose midrash quoted earlier—​Qallir imaginatively
transformed the synagogue into an amphitheater. He called on his community to envision, in extensive and vivid detail, the violent, gory conflict between the mighty but docile partisan of the earth (horned Behemoth) and
the fierce, feisty representative of the sea (razor-​finned Leviathan), who battle
as the epitome of air (the Roc-​like Ziz) looks on. The poem offers dramatic
scene (what we see, in Chapter 3, is an example of ekphrasis) that synthesizes
animal combat with gladiatorial sport.
After expansively introducing the two creatures who are about to battle—​akin
to the introduction of two boxers or wrestlers as they enter the ring—​the poet
actively narrates how the two mythic monsters circle each other menacingly:
And he [Behemoth] encircles him [Leviathan] with his horns,
an expert fighter
And the fish, facing him, is ready68
And he sharpens his fins again and again
And he goes straight for the kill against him
The one curves his horns towards the other
The other lifts his fins in response (ll. 256–​261)
The poetic version of the battle ends in a somewhat different fashion from the
version in Leviticus Rabbah. In the piyyut, the beasts described as “the three
consolations” (l. 139) do not slaughter themselves; the poet avoids the anxiety of the cruel and bloodied arena, even if divinely sanctioned. Instead, in
this poem God intercedes:
And into their midst, He makes peace between them
So that He may slaughter, prepare, and consecrate them
And serve them as a meal to the faithful nation,
And they will understand that they are not bereft,
And they shall say, “Blessed is the Faithful One,
For everything which He planned from of old,
He has fulfilled it, at the end of time!” (ll. 262–​268)
67 A translation of the piece appears in Laura S. Lieber, “Theater of the Holy: Performative Elements
of Late Ancient Hymnography,” Harvard Theological Review 108.3 (2015): 327–​355. The translations
here are adapted from this essay, p. 355.
68 Or: “wheels to the right.”
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Setting the Stage
49
The King halts the combat, slaughters the creatures Himself (rather than
letting them slay each other), and then prepares the meal for His faithful
ones Himself, in a scene that is both a display of divine power and generosity, and a softening of the brutality of the games rather than its accommodation. The final lines of the poem praise God for having woven this
“counter-​spectacle”—​the divinely orchestrated games—​into the fabric of
history. These texts promise a spectacle that will console the righteous, who
have abstained from consuming spectacles; they do so by vividly describing
the drama and violence of the scene. The poem, in particular, takes listeners
“into the moment” with a vivid, you-​are-​there sense of the conflict, like a
sportscaster narrating a fight.
One key assumption of this study is that religious poetry from late antiquity was influenced, directly and indirectly, by ideas of what constituted effective and appealing performance in the larger society.69 These poems did
not emerge spontaneously from the ether, nor did they evolve in some linear
way from biblical traditions; poets composed these works to be performed
in some kind of public venue, whether in a liturgical, para-​liturgical, or non-​
liturgical setting, and they did so in a manner that reflected cultural norms
and values of the world in which they and their audiences lived.70 This is true
despite the fact that rabbinic and patristic works are fairly uniform in their
disapproval of theater and games.71 The idea that elements of the aesthetics
and techniques of Roman spectacle would have penetrated into Christian,
69 On the importance of oratory, see Anthony Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in
Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Maud Gleason, Making
Men: Sophists and Self-​Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
70 Some poems, such as the qedushta’ot, which embellish the first three benedictions of the Amidah,
undoubtedly reflect a liturgical setting. Other works, such as the Aramaic poems presented later, may
have originated outside of a liturgical setting (as Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff argue vigorously; see Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity [Jerusalem: Israel Academy of the
Sciences and Humanities, 1999], 42) but were later adapted to a liturgical setting. It is also possible
to imagine some of these works performed in a totally nonreligious environment, enjoyed by anyone
for whom JPA was a vernacular language, while a para-​liturgical setting offers a hybrid model. At
present, while specific life setting would influence details of the interpretation of these poems, the
theatrical elements do not depend significantly on context, given the basic similarities of performance technique across venues.
71 For Christian ambivalence toward theater, which was complicated with the Christianization
of imperial power and the need of the empire to maintain public entertainments, see Webb,
Demons and Dancers; Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives; Dunbabin, Art and Spectacle
in the Roman Empire; and Jaclyn L. Maxwell, Christianization and Communication in Late
Antiquity: John Chrysostom and His Congregation in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
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50
Staging the Sacred
Samaritan, and Jewish consciousness is, however, hardly radical.72 Liturgical
poetry may have been one mechanism by which rabbis appropriated elements
of popular culture in order to bring Jews, enthusiastically, to the synagogue.
Chrysostom and Tertullian, among others, would have sympathized with the
rabbis’ dilemma, and Christian liturgy certainly suggests a similar strategy.
We need not imagine that such decisions were even undertaken consciously
but, rather, reflected the embeddedness of religious leaders in the same culture and norms as their congregants.
Even communities sympathetic to the moral and aesthetic critiques of theater and “vulgar” entertainment valued homilists’ oratorical skills and found
in sermons and hymns licit alternatives to otherwise appealing, but frowned-​
upon, diversions.73 Religious performance provided critics of theater a
mechanism for engaging with elite culture and its values, including learned
speech and graceful delivery, and it afforded their audiences an opportunity
to appreciate skillful display and content without spiritual or cognitive dissonance.74 To some extent, religious authorities’ critiques of theater reflect
an intensification of what we see among civic orators: they regard actors and
spectacles not merely as vulgar but existentially dangerous, and where orators
could find utility in actors’ techniques, we find no such self-​reflective (if perhaps grudging) appreciation in sermons, because such concessions would be
entirely at odds with their own understanding of their craft. Nevertheless,
those authorities most vociferously opposed to attendance at theaters (like
orators) reveal familiarity with its activities and techniques: knowledge
perhaps acquired directly, during wayward, youthful years, or indirectly,
through second-​hand or peripheral encounters with spectacles or filtered
through rhetorical education or experience.75
72 As Joshua Levinson notes, “Heinemann (in Public Sermons in the Talmudic Period) states categorically that the Jewish population preferred the synagogues to the theaters; I believe that internal
and external evidence points in the opposite direction” (“An-​Other Woman: Joseph and Potiphar’s
Wife, Staging the Body Politic,” Jewish Quarterly Review 87 [1997]: 276n24).
73 To make an analogy, the “cup” of entertainment was here filled with “kosher” wine.
74 In addition to the material cited in n. 41 of this chapter, see M. D. Herr, “Synagogues and Theaters
(Sermons and Satiric Plays),” in Knesset Ezra: Studies Presented to Ezra Fleischer, ed. Shulamit Elizur
(Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1994), 105–​119 [Hebrew]; Jacobs, “Theatres and Performances as Reflected
in the Talmud Yerushalmi,” 327–​347; Gideon Bohak, “The Hellenization of Biblical History in
Rabbinic Literature,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-​Roman Culture, vol. 3, ed. Peter Schaefer
(Tübingen, Germany: Mohr, 2002), 3–​16. With an eye specifically toward liturgical poetry, see Jefim
Schirmann in “The Battle between Behemoth and Leviathan According to an Ancient Hebrew
Piyyut,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 13 (1970): 327–​369, and Joseph
Yahalom, Poetry and Society in the Jewish Galilee of Late Antiquity (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad,
1999), 245 [Hebrew].
75 Literacies of different kinds—​including performative skills and cultural knowledge, as well as
the words of specific texts in oral tradition rather than in writing—​can be acquired without formal
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Setting the Stage
51
In sum, experience with theater—​both its content and its performative
practices—​was inescapable, a part of being socialized into late antique culture, and for many professions, such knowledge was essential. While religious authorities articulated discomfort with and even disapproval of
theater, they were themselves nonetheless expected to be good speakers and
performers; it is no accident that we still possess the eloquent sermons of
John Chrysostom (i.e., “golden tongue”), and rabbinic sources specify that
a prayer leader should be “skilled in chanting” and have “a pleasant voice”
(b. Taan. 16a).76 To pass up on the utility of effective techniques of delivery
and declamation, particularly when aspirationally elite models of public oratory resolved any potential dissonance or anxiety arising from a recognition
of any explicitly theatrical frames of reference, would have been foolhardy.
Religious performers did not need to acknowledge, or even recognize, the
affinity of their craft for theater, not because they were hypocrites (the Greek
term for actors!) but because its ubiquity rendered it invisible.
While religious elites, like orators, distinguished between their edifying
practices and the seductions of theater, accusations of theatricality were
useful against one’s opponents. We see this proclivity in the writings of the
Church Fathers, who condemn rabbis for behaving theatrically and who liken
the synagogue to theaters, even as they critique their own congregations for a
love of theater and shy away from discussions of their own performativity.77
In polemical discourse, “the theater becomes a marker of difference, of the
other and competing culture”78—​pagan, Christian, Samaritan, or Jewish.
The rhetorical deployment of theater by religious authorities against the
education narrowly understood. Rosalind Thomas has coined the term “multiliteracies” to describe
the variety of skills that can be assembled within the capacious idea of “literacy” itself; see her essay
“Writing, Reading, Public and Private ‘Literacies’: Functional Literacy and Democratic Literacy in
Greece,” in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. Johnson
and Holt N. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13–​45. For a useful analysis of early
Jewish literacy, see Aaron Demsky, Literacy in Ancient Israel (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012)
[Hebrew], and William Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: Textualization of Ancient Israel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
76 In addition to the Talmudic source, also note that the biblical phrase “your voice is sweet” (Song
of Sol. 2:14) is glossed with “. . . in prayer” (e.g., Mekh. Besh. 2) or reference to singing in a liturgical
context (e.g., SongR on Song of Sol. 2:14) or prayer (GenR 45:4).
77 For example, Jerome on Ezek. 34:31, as quoted in S. Krauss, “The Jews in the Works of the
Church Fathers,” Jewish Quarterly Review o.s. 6 (1894): 234; and Chrysostom in Contra Iudaeos 1.2.7
(both these passages are cited and discussed by Levinson, “An-​Other Woman,” 276–​277). Note, too,
that Jacob of Sarug (late fifth/​early sixth century) wrote five metrical homilies, On the Spectacles of the
Theater (ed. and trans. C. A. Moss, Le Muséon 48 [1935]: 87–​112); these indicate that theater was an
ongoing concern in the Syriac-​speaking world, as well.
78 Levinson, “An-​Other Woman,” 277.
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Staging the Sacred
institution, however, obscures the importance of theatrical techniques and
rhetoric in the composition of works that were perhaps conceived of as
rivals of or complements to “secular” entertainment.79 When Tertullian,
Chrysostom, Ambrose, or the rabbis critique theater, they both display at
least a passing familiarity with the world of spectacle and, even more importantly (if more subtly) reveal their own deep steeping in the performative
world in which they lived. They created rival spectacles of their own. Only
when others did it was it theater.
Upon first read, early Christian writers—​
including Tertullian,
Chrysostom, Jacob of Sarug, and others—​present themselves fairly uniformly as fierce critics of theater; they position themselves as rivals to the
stage and speak of actors and theater as having the power to undermine
piety and the Christian self.80 They regard the mimesis of mime and pantomime as a deceptive, even demonic illusion, a seductive path to dangerous
falsehoods; this suspicion of theater represented in the way that one Greek
term for actor—​ὑποκριτής (hupokritēs), “one who responds,” viz., a chorus
member—​came by the Hellenistic period to mean “fraud, phony,” or (as the
Greek came into English) “hypocrite” (and in some cases, a Jew).81 And yet,
not only in homilies but also through hymnody, early Christian writers reveal
how deeply they learned from theater and, more acceptably, from oratory,
if not directly then indirectly, because of the inescapable ubiquity of such
entertainments. If the impious, irreverent, even pagan stage was the competition, the church needed to beat entertainers at their own game. Harangues
alone would not suffice to attract a sophisticated and skilled audience.
From within the body of rabbinic writings, as in early Christian writings,
we have tantalizing, if diffuse, references to elements of performance and,
more broadly speaking, indications of ritual self-​awareness.82 Lee Levine
79 On the possible use of biblical motifs outside of what we might call “confessional theater,” see
Charlotte Roueché, “A World Full of Stories,” in Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter
Brown, ed. Manolis Papoutsakis and Philip Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2016), 177–​185. Where
Levinson argues for the appropriateness of the Joseph cycle for such a vehicle, Roueché has identified
a grafitto from the theater at Ephesus, which she argues represents Tobit, another story that could
easily have translated appealingly (with a combination of humor and gentle moralizing) to the stage.
80 Webb, Demons and Dancers, 197–​216, and Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 42–​74.
81 See LSJ s.v. ὑποκριτής, and note 18, above. The bibliography on the term “hypocrite,” given its
importance in the New Testament, is voluminous. Among other works, see Margaret M. Mitchell,
“Peter’s ‘Hypocrisy’ and Paul’s: Two ‘Hypocrites’ at the Foundation of Earliest Christianity?” New
Testament Studies 58.2 (2012): 213–​234; Daniel Schwartz, “ ‘Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites’: Who
Were the Scribes?” Zion 50 (1985): 121–​132 [Hebrew]; and Ellis Rivkin, “Scribes, Pharisees, Lawyers,
Hypocrites: A Study in Synonymity,” Hebrew Union College Annual 49 (1978): 135–​142.
82 One of the most interesting and relevant recent articles on ritual theory in recent years is
Michael Swartz, “Judaism and the Idea of Ancient Ritual Theory,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads
of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra‘anan Boustan, Oren Kosansky,
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provides us with a succinct synopsis of the variety of strategies attested in late
antique Jewish sources, primarily in regard to the techniques of preachers,
but applicable to hymnographers as well:
Since a synagogue audience may have been heterogeneous, including the
more learned along with the less sophisticated, preachers were well advised
to employ whatever rhetorical talents and techniques were at their disposal
in order to gain and hold the entire audience’s attention. These might include humor, the use of anecdotes, and other ploys. Rabbi Judah I, for example, is said to have always waited for the audience to assemble before he
made his entrance. Another way of engaging the congregation was to ask
less important figures, often students, to deliver prefatory remarks; having
been given a warm-​up, the audience was assumed to be primed for the keynote speaker. . . . We are told that audiences fell asleep at times, requiring
the preacher to display ingenuity in regaining their attention.83
External sources underscore the affinity of the synagogue for theatricality.
Jerome, writing polemically and echoing the critiques of Chrysostom
in the East, implicitly reinforces the picture that emerges from rabbinic
writings: “The [Jewish] preachers make the people believe that the fictions
which they invent are true; and after they have, in theatrical fashion, called
forth applause . . . they arrogantly step forward, speak proudly, and usurp the
authority of rulers.”84 While he offered this observation as a sharp criticism
of Jews and those seduced by their style of preaching, he recognized rabbinic
sermons as a kind of performance, and an appealing one, at that. Similarly,
by late antiquity, we find rabbinic authors unselfconsciously appealing to
theatrical visuals in their presentations of biblical characters: David dances
before the ark like a pantomimus; Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel is
and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 294–​317. In this essay,
Swartz comparatively analyzes Mishnah Yoma and the Avodah piyyutim, noting that the piyyutim—​
due to their performance in the ritual context of the synagogue—​“create in the listener a kind of dramatic empathy with the high priest” (315).
83 Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue The First Thousand Years, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2005), 581–582.
84 Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, Liber 11, on Ezek. 34: qui cum populo persuaserint uera esse
quae fingunt, et in theatralem modum plausus concitauerint, et clamores immemores fiunt imperitiae
suae, et, adducto supercilio libratis que sermonibus atque trutinatis, magistrorum sibi assumunt
auctoritatem (trans. from Samuel Krauss, “Jews in the Works of the Church Fathers,” Jewish Quarterly
Review 5 [1893], 234).
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Staging the Sacred
compared to an athlete competing against the son of the king; and God acts
the chorus leader of the righteous in the World-​to-​Come.85 Finally, rabbinic
writings display a familiarity with the world of theater directly, as we see in
the account of a scathing homily delivered by Yose of Ma’on in the synagogue
of his Galilean village against Rabbi Judah the Patriarch—​a polemical, political use of oratory well attested in antiquity. In his defense of Yose of Ma’on,
Resh Laqish drew out the subtext:
Rabbi! We ought to be thankful to the heathens who bring mimes (‫)מומסין‬
into their theatres and circuses (‫ )לבתי טרטייאות ולבתי קרקסאות‬and amuse
themselves with them, so that they should not converse with each other; yet
Yose of Maon spoke words of Torah, and you become angry with him!86
The Patriarch objected to being the target of performative satire—​satire
performed in a synagogue—​but Resh Laqish defends him by saying that
while his technique was that of entertainers, Yose’s words were from Torah.
The patriarch, Resh Laqish suggests, should display the same forbearance as
a governor or emperor. The analogies here—​homilist and mime, synagogue
and theater, patriarch and political power—​underline the argument in this
volume, even as Resh Laqish suggests that the use of Torah renders what
might otherwise be inappropriate practices and targets acceptable.
We should not assume that use of theatrical skills and rhetorical
techniques by homilists and hymnographers indicates that they possessed
formal training in such arts. Some, like Augustine, may have had firsthand
experience as spectators; a Babylonian tradition describes the sage Rabbi
Shimon ben Laqish (the same Resh Laqish who defended Yose of Ma’on)
as having been a performer of feats of strength or a gladiator.87 Others may
85 On David, see y. Sukkah 5:4 (24a) and y. San. 2:4 (20b); for Jacob as a competitor in the games,
see GenR 77:3 (T-​A, 912); and on God as the lead dancer, see LevR 11:9 (Vilna ed., 17a), a passage
quoted in n. 63 of this chapter.
86 GenR 80:1 (T-​A, 950–​953). For a discussion of the tradition, see, most recently, Weiss’ treatment of mime in Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Ancient Palestine, 120–​128. On GenR 80:1,
Weiss writes, “Familiar with the nature of mime and the sociopolitical satire, Resh Laqish solicits
the Patriarch, asking him to behave as the nations of the world would and forgive Yose of Ma’on, despite the criticism he aired in his sermon” (128). See also Herr, “Synagogues and Theaters (Sermons
and Satiric Plays),” as well as the review and critique of Herr’s analysis in Spielman, Jews and
Entertainment in the Ancient World, 237–​245.
87 See b. Git. 47a. The Hebrew term “‫( ”לודים‬Aramaic: “‫ )”לודאה‬is usually derived from the geographical designation, “Lydian/​Laodicean,” but it may be related to the Latin ludi, “games.” The
term is generally taken to mean performer of some kind, or the support staff (trainers of gladiators,
circus attendants, etc.), but it also could mean “bandit,” which suggests the suspicion with which such
professions were viewed. See Sokoloff, DJPA, 278b, and Sokoloff, DJBA, 619b, and the discussion of
this passage in Spielman, Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient World, 203–​209.
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well have benefited from at least some formal rhetorical education and
been trained in the skills associated with oratory. But good observers of the
culture—​as anyone capable of making a career in a performative discipline
would be—​could certainly have picked up the most important skills informally. Eli Rozick notes, “Dramatization and theatrical performance of a
trope . . . requires neither professional actors nor an infrastructure of partnership between mimes and clergy”88—​meaning that we need not imagine a
direct, explicit, or even conscious importation of techniques from the world
of theater into the world of religious ritual. Instead, the world of theater
and performance so thoroughly permeated late antique society, at all levels,
that even in offering alternatives to its charms, religious figures reached for
models of entertainment not as theater, per se, but as effective ways of engaging audiences for whom such entertainments were the norm. The sheer
ubiquity of performance created within late antique society, including Jews,
Christians, and Samaritans, an approach to religious canon and ritual that
even those who rejected licentious theater and its pagan ways could not
evade—​not if they wished to succeed.
From Scripture to Script
Story is essential to theatricality. I use the term “story” here to describe a
narrative’s plot, the interactions among characters (including, at times, the
listeners) who populate the real or imagined stage. A lawyer arguing a case
seeks to convince the jury of the truth of her story, just as an actor brings
a traditional plot to life upon the stage. Story is in some sense the raw material of performance: never static, and a starting point rather than a conclusion. Stories are revised and reworked, over and over, made new with
every retelling, every revision, every delivery. And implicit in the idea of
“storytelling” are two parties, the storyteller and, to coin a phrase, the story
told: performer and audience. To be sure, not every performance is narrative,
but many are, and this is particularly true of liturgical works that themselves
riff on stories familiar from scripture.
While every form of writing can be mined for indications of its implied
performance (actual or imaginary) and its audience reception, not every
88 Eli Rozick, The Roots of Theater: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 100.
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Staging the Sacred
performance is theatrical; theatricality requires a distinctive awareness of
performativity.89 Liturgical poetry—​regardless of the religious affiliation
of its author—​provides a particularly overt location in which to find self-​
conscious theatricality in the context of Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan
ritual.90 Not only do these texts reflect an author and presume an audience,
but they also bear traces of the dynamics of active engagement that was essential to their appeal “in the moment,” the aesthetic of experiential delight.
For all their diversity, liturgical poems—​particularly those that relate
to scriptural narratives—​most directly translate the ideas of “canon” and
“performance” that typified the late antique stage into the sacred spaces of
Christians, Samaritans, and Jews. In particular, these poems frequently employ storylines from biblical tradition (often as dictated by the liturgical
schedule of readings), embellish their versions with dramatic elements
of exegetical or homiletical expansions, make frequent use of dialogue as
well as choruses and choral responses, and suggest a physicality associated
with performative delivery.91 Even the physical staging seems to have been
influenced by theater, with buildings enhanced during renovation in ways
that support performance, such as improved acoustics and sight lines.92
Whether presented as solo performances by an individual cantor or more
elaborate choreographies involving multiple choirs, these works possess tremendous theatrical potential. In those cases where the physical structure of
89 For example, homilies, exegesis, and biblical translation (targum) also offered “performative”
opportunities, as would the liturgy. A theatricality-​oriented approach to late ancient Jewish poetry
brings these works into conversation with important contemporary trends in religious studies at a
broad level (e.g., Morgan, The Sacred Gaze) as well as Christian hymnography. This further-​ranging
conversation has already begun: Yahalom and Sokoloff note the similarities between the Aramaic
poems and Syriac verse homilies and dialogue poems (Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry, 20–​45), and
Ophir Münz-​Manor offers a nuanced discussion of comparative hymnography (with a concise review
of earlier work done in this area) in “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East: A Comparative
Approach,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1 (2010): 336–​361. See, too, his earlier piece, “All about
Sarah: Questions of Gender in Yannai’s Poems on Sarah’s (and Abraham’s) Barrenness,” Prooftexts
26 (2006): 344–​374. Also important are Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic
Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
and Eden HaCohen’s essay on dialogue poems, “Studies in the Dialogue-​Format of Early Palestinian
Piyyutim and Their Sources, in Light of Purim Expansions,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature
20 (2006): 97–​171 [Hebrew].
90 As Spielman concludes, or even concedes, “In light of these observations about the performance
value of piyyutim, Chrysostom’s claims about dragging ‘actors and the whole stage’ into the synagogue, though exaggerated, seem much less far-​fetched” (Jews and Entertainment in the Ancient
World, 245).
91 On these aspects of classical piyyut, see Laura Lieber, “The Rhetoric of Participation: The
Experiential Elements of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” The Journal of Religion 90.2 (2010): 119–​
147. Specifically on dialogue as a feature, see Hacohen, “Studies in the Dialogue-​Format of Early
Palestinian Piyyutim.”
92 See Chapter 5.
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some synagogues (Samaritan and Jewish) had available “amphitheater”-​type
seating (in the courtyard if not in the sanctuary), infrastructure materially
reinforced the similarities between liturgy and theater; but, as we will see
later in this volume, other religious structures, including synagogues and
churches, also accounted for performer–​audience dynamics in their design.93 The affinities between space and text go beyond seating formations
and into the very nature of delivery and the dynamics between performer
and audience.
Ancient exegetes (like their modern counterparts) were responsible to
two primary constituencies: the text to be interpreted and the audience to
be engaged. Beyond this baseline, we find tremendous variety; an author’s
choice of text, his genre of self-​expression, and the compositions of his audience varied greatly. The focal text of the interpretation could be determined
by lectionary or calendar, or freely chosen in response to a theme; genre
possibilities ranged from popular homily to scholarly lesson to translation
or liturgical performance. Audiences, for their part, could be congregations,
real and physically present in the church or synagogue; an invisible deity,
addressed with conviction in the reality of the divine presence; biblical figures, including ancestors or characters developed in later interpretations of
scripture; a remote party, addressed as if in an epistle; or an ideal listener
(individual or communal) who would only ever exist in the exegete’s mind.
But the interpreter’s responsibilities to his two constituencies, to that which
is taught and to those he is teaching—​reflections of his role as mediator between scripture and community—​define the exegetical task at its broadest
level. Specific texts and audiences inflect any and every interpretation, but
the overarching commitments of the exegete provide common ground for
broad comparative analysis. By focusing on the ways in which various poetic
exegetes addressed the challenges of and responsibilities to both texts and
audiences, modern readers are able to discern significant points of commonality and distinctiveness across religious traditions on a deep, structural level.
93 On the physical similarities between amphitheaters and synagogues, see Levine, The Ancient
Synagogue, 100, who notes that some synagogues may have been called “amphitheaters” due to the
shape of the building and thus the seating arrangements employed; see, too, Reinhard Pummer,
“Samaritan Synagogues and Jewish Synagogues: Similarities and Differences,” in Jews, Christians, and
Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction in the Greco-​Roman Period, ed. Steven Fine
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 118–​160, esp. pp. 110 and 134, where he discusses Eusebius’ statement
that Samaritans imitated the Jews by building a synagogue “shaped like a theater and is thus open to
the sky” (Panarion 80.1.5; trans. from Reinhard Pummer, Early Christian Authors on Samaritans and
Samaritanism [Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2002], 132–​133).
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Staging the Sacred
Pantomime performances of antiquity typically featured excerpts from
longer tragedies while mimes performed set scenes and stock characters
from the repertoire of comedy. Given these orientations toward canon, pantomime actors-​dancers translated high literary plots and characters into a
new aesthetic, but both mimes and pantomimes relied on the legibility of
familiar elements, deployed in new or simply very effective ways, to engage their audiences. Similarly, orators—​including homilists—​frequently
populated their speech with allusions to figures and episodes from the cultural canon (whether Homer, Sophocles, Ovid, or the Bible) in the course of
their oral delivery.94 So, too, liturgical poets often present highlights from canonical narratives—​not the canon that would be “classical” in broader social
discourse, however, but the canon that was held sacred in the specific location
in which the compositions were performed, and familiar to the audiences
for which these works were composed. Liturgical poems retell, relate to, or
rely on biblical stories and characters, and the way these works translate the
canon into a public-​performative venue helps us understand both how their
listeners related to the original text and how, in very practical and concrete
ways, liturgical poet-​performers knew and made use of the aesthetic and
communicative conventions of the period, not out of an intentional desire to
adopt “external” styles of composition but because such conventions simply
seemed appropriately elegant and suitable, respectable and up to date.
When viewed from up close, the liturgical poems composed by Samaritans,
Christians, and Jews in late antiquity differ greatly from each other, in terms
of not only theology and language, but also aesthetics, ritual setting, and even
scriptural canon. Nor are the poems within traditions remotely uniform.
There is no distinctive “Jewish” style of poetry versus “Christian” style, although the languages (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac), liturgical context,
and literary references (the presence of the New Testament, reverence for
Mount Gerizim, etc.) make the author’s affiliation clear. The diversity of these
poems and their constituencies does not constitute a barrier to comparative
study, however, because if we pull back to a more distant perspective, one
that recognizes the composite image that emerges from the many distinctive and discrete fragments, we become able to appreciate how each work
94 These “classical” instantiations of stories, for all their antiquity even in antiquity, themselves reflect riffs on motifs, characters, and plots familiar to the authors and readers. While some versions
of stories may seem “definitive,” there is no tidy original version of the stories of the Trojan War,
or Medea, or the biblical Flood. See Johnston, “How Myths and Other Stories Help to Create and
Sustain Beliefs.” Every example of the story should be understood to be a “version” crafted for a specific rhetorical purpose and/​or audience.
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represents a specific manifestation of the dynamic between specific community and larger culture. There is no single way in which liturgical poems relate to their own classical traditions or the conventions of their society, but
broader commonalities of technique and tactic can be discerned. From many
stones, a lovely mosaic.
In the remainder of this chapter, we will consider four strategies by
which poets navigated their responsibilities to both canonical texts and
congregational audiences: (1) compression of story, in which entire narrative arcs are “staged”; (2) expansion of story, in which the gaps in narratives
are expansively filled in; (3) invention of story, in which entire episodes are
presented; and (4) elliptical narration, which may even be non-​narrative,
but nonetheless powerful in terms of audience experience. The selection of
poems examined here reflects the breadth of late antique hymnody; I have
chosen specific Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan works in order to illustrate
techniques that poets ultimately employ in distinctive ways but in service of
common goals: engaging listeners, conjuring vivid imaginary experiences,
speaking in memorable voices, and delighting audiences. In each section,
the analysis juxtaposes pairs of poems (or pairs of collections of poems in
some cases) in order to highlight different manifestations of similar compositional techniques, serving common performative ambitions. The strategies
delineated here can be seen as the outlines of a picture, with the individual
compositions discussed understood as tesserae within it. Each work is different but contributes to our understanding of the whole.
Compression of Story: Liturgical poets approached scriptural tradition in
a variety of ways. Most often, hymnists focus on specific episodes or images
related to a lectionary or holiday, but they could also dramatize grand sweeps
of history, fashioning vast narrative arcs into coherent, comprehensible
“overtures” of theology and history. In such compositions, poets—​and those
who performed their works—​select and amplify recurrent themes from the
welter of tradition and in doing so craft scripts that deliver legible meaning.
These works imbue what might otherwise seem a vast and eclectic body of
traditions, characters, episodes, and moods with clean and comprehensible
significance. When properly delivered, such works would not only resonate
with listeners but also convey a message of unity and consistency, both vivid
and memorable, and powerful for its clarity, with the length and variety of
episodes and figures functioning not as clutter, but as evidence of a deeper
truth. Congregations, through their vocal or emotional participation, affirm
and internalize these thematically streamlined narratives.
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Staging the Sacred
To understand how liturgical poets distilled biblical traditions into vibrant hymnic performances, we must first pause to appreciate the centrality
of scripture (as a text as well as a narrative) to liturgical works and, more
broadly, religious ritual. The Torah—​the first five books of the Hebrew Bible,
and the corpus that constitutes the complete scripture of the Samaritans,
the first part of the Jewish Tanakh, and the initial portion of the Christian
Old Testament—​narrates a sacred history that begins with the creation of
the world and ends with the Israelites concluding their wanderings in the
wilderness, standing on the border of the Promised Land. Subsequent
books of the Jewish Bible—​Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—​continue
the historical narrative of conquest and settlement, state-​building, statecraft, and, at the end, catastrophic state-​collapse, as the Kingdom of Judah
and its royal capital, Jerusalem, are destroyed by the Babylonians. The books
of 1–​2 Chronicles conclude the Masoretic text but follow 1–​2 Kings in the
standard Christian canon; these books rehearse much of this history in abbreviated form, while also extending the account into the Persian period and
anticipating the restoration of Jerusalem and its Temple. Ezra and Nehemiah
describe the challenges and promise of the return. In many cases, passages
in prophetic works underscore, harmonize, and nuance the pictures in the
historical books. The Bible’s narrative scope is cosmic, spanning the entire
history of the world and humanity as its authors understood it; it is also a voluminous and detailed body of writings that often argues with itself over both
what happened and why.
None of the religious communities examined here read their complete sacred canon in order in the context of liturgy: the Samaritans read clusters of
verses (called qatafim) as abbreviations of entire books; Jews in the Galilee
read the complete Torah over the course of three to three-​and-​a-​half years,
along with portions from the Prophets (haftarot) and selections from the
Writings (including the five scrolls, or megillot); and Christian churches employed a lectionary that stressed continuity across scriptures but struggled
in antiquity with their relationship to the Old Testament—​and thus Jews—​
as most dramatically evidenced by Marcion and the ultimate rejection of
Marcionism as heresy.95 The unabridged historical narrative, from creation
to restoration, exceeded capacity of the liturgical year, let alone a single ritual
occasion. And yet, it is clear that the broad contours of the history and many
95 The vehemence of this rejection, and complexity of the challenge Marcion presented, are both
evidenced by Tertullian’s five-​volume polemic, Contra Marcion.
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of its key players—​including extra-​biblical figures and episodes whose roots
lie in parabiblical traditions and exegesis—​were familiar to the listeners. The
ease with which poets and homilists allude to events and figures indicates
that such knowledge could be assumed.
Despite the obvious impracticality of ritually reading the entirety of
scripture, the desire for symbolic completion was an enduring impulse.
Just as importantly, scripture offered liturgists irresistibly compelling
source material: a dramatic sweep of history, rich with vivid episodes
and figures against a backdrop of intrinsic meaningfulness. Singling out
key moments, characters, and voices allowed poets to highlight the inherent drama of the sacred text, with its vivid appeals to eye, ear, and
mind. The desire to convey the whole, but in brief, distilled stories to a
dramatic essence and, in some ways, amplified their dramatic potential by
compressing the actions and actors in rapid sequence across the stage of
sacred history.
Religious communities developed various strategies for reading synopses
or précis of the whole, paraphrases that drew forth particularly illustrative
and illuminating contours of magisterial texts and highlighted both theological and dramatic content. The Samaritan qatafim reflect one version of this
desire for totality: the abridgment of the whole Torah, through a book-​by-​
book digest. In the Jewish and Christian Bibles, we find a tradition in the
book of Nehemiah that on the first day of the seventh month—​that is, what
would come to be known as Rosh Hashanah—​Ezra the scribe, a second lawgiver, read “the scroll of the Teaching of Moses” (‫ספר תורת משה‬, Neh. 8:1) to
the people. The pivotal scene, a communal rededication to Torah, suggests
that Ezra read “the scroll” in its entirety—​often understood to be the Torah
as a whole, but more plausibly a digest of some sort, or a version of the book
of Deuteronomy, understood (as its Greek name indicates) to be a retelling of
the Torah. Within the book of Psalms, Psalms 104–​106 can be read together
as a kind of poetic synopsis of Israelite history, from the creation to the restoration.96 Finally, the apocryphal book of Ben Sirach (Sir. 42:15–​50) likewise recounts the majesty of creation and then (starting in Sir. 44) recounts
the glorious ancestors of Israel, culminating in praise of the High Priest of
Sirach’s time, Simon ben Yochanan (Onias in Greek) and, liturgically significant, a final benediction.
96 Aharon Mirsky constructs a lineage of the Qedushta that originates with these psalms; see
Aharon Mirsky, HaPiyyut (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990), 86–​92.
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Staging the Sacred
These last two examples, from Psalms and Sirach, may be regarded as the
prototype for one of the earliest and most dramatic genres of synagogue poetry, the Avodah piyyutim composed for recitation on Yom Kippur afternoon.
These poems rehearse the history of the world, beginning with the story of
creation, and culminating in the priestly rituals of the Day of Atonement as
liturgically reimagined in a Temple-​less world.97 At the same time, the Book
of Chronicles offers another model for rehearsing sacred history, and that
book itself became the subject of a Jewish Palestinian Aramaic poem. The
texts will offer two different models by which poets could integrate the sweep
of history into liturgical performances, each with the goal of constructing a
specific kind of experience for the congregation.
Avodah piyyutim, composed for recitation in the afternoon Avodah liturgy of Yom Kippur, are among the oldest forms of Jewish liturgical poetry.
The earliest examples of the genre most likely date to the fourth or even third
century ce and include works by the great preclassical poet, the first payyetan
whose name we know, Yose ben Yose.98 These works take as their starting
point the sacrificial worship (avodah) described in the Torah (Lev. 16): the
ritual, which cannot be completed in the absence of the Temple, is conceptually fulfilled through its retelling, with embellishments taken from the rabbinic text of Mishnah Yoma.99 The poets prefaced their rehearsal of priestly
ritual with a historical synopsis, spanning the creation of the world to the
erection of the tabernacle. Within the poem, the poets embed the ritual of
confession that, according the rabbis, the High Priest offered in the sanctuary. Upon the recitation of this confession—​the priest’s words voiced by
the prayer leader—​the assembled community would both prostrate themselves and recite a doxology to be uttered upon hearing the divine name.
A brief examination of two Avodah poems gives a sense of the ambitious scale of these poems and illustrates how content aligns with performance, especially in terms of setting: the first is an anonymous, very early
97 This hypothesis is first articulated by Cecil Roth in “Ecclesiasticus in the Synagogue Service,”
Journal of Biblical Literature 71 (1952): 171–​78; see also Aharon Mirsky, Yosse ben Yosse: Poems, 29–​30.
98 Michael D. Swartz and Joseph Yahalom, Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 2005). Of special interest is the poem “Emet Mah Nehedar,” which
takes as its models Ben Sirach’s praise of High Priest Simeon ben Yochanan/​Onias in Sirach 50
(343–​347). Also see Michael D. Swartz, “Rhetorical Indications of the Poet’s Craft in the Ancient
Synagogue,” in Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, ed.
Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, and Jörg Rüpke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 231–​251.
99 On the topic of Mishnah and the construction of ritual imagination, see Naftali S. Cohn, “The
Complex Ritual Dynamics of Individual and Group Experience in the Temple, as Imagined in the
Mishnah,” AJS Review 43.2 (2019): 293–​318.
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proto-​Avodah poem (ca. third c. ce); the next is the earliest true Avodah
piyyut (ca. fourth c. ce). The theatricality of these poems is implicit in the way
they distill biblical narratives such that they highlight the priestly threads of
narrative tradition, which they amplify through resonances with the visual
choreography of their liturgical settings. In the first poem, the composition
sets the stage for a liturgical rite that it does not script. In the second work,
biblical depictions of theologically charged but enigmatic rituals and ornate,
elaborate priestly vestments become the raw material for poetic imaginings.
The pivot to the performative is most obvious in the latter portion of poems,
where the Mishnaic rituals of the High Priest and liturgical words of atonement are embedded, but this explicit climax builds upon the cues and clues
laid out from the beginning.
The anonymous poem, “Atah Barata,” is an early work (ca. third c.), and
it appears to have functioned as a preface to an Avodah ritual rather than a
complete Avodah itself; it does not include the script for the priestly ritual
but presents a history that spans creation of the world to the institution of the
Aaronide priesthood. It begins, “You created /​the entire world /​with great
intelligence You established it /​in love and mercy” (Stanza 1); it ends, “As a
substitute for atonement /​You informed [Aaron’s] sons /​so that they might
serve before You /​following his example” (Stanza 22).100 In the intervening
nineteen stanzas (the poem is an alphabetical acrostic), the poet summarizes
the story of creation of the world and the people Israel: the generations of
Adam, the Flood, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Levi, and Aaron. The movement of the poem is thus from the universal to the highly particular: from the
nations to Israel, and within Israel to the line of the High Priest. The stated
audience of the poem is not the congregation but the deity (“You”), and the
second person address positions the poet at the interface where God and
people meet. The creation narrative thus situates the people and the deity
within the story, establishing a relationship, and orients them intellectually and conceptually—​imaginatively—​toward the powerful ritual moment
at which words substitute for sacrifice and each individual acts as his own
high priest. The poem sets the stage and brings the community—​now active
participants—​into the drama.
Where “Atah Barata” concludes just prior to the narration of the
Avodah ritual, the early anonymous work “Atah Konanta ‘Olam Me-​
Rosh” presents the priestly ritual as well and is thus likely the earliest
100 Translations from Swartz and Yahalom, Avodah, 44, 50.
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Staging the Sacred
example of a true Avodah piyyut.101 It is also significantly longer than
“Atah Barata”: the earlier work consists of a single alphabetical acrostic
and thus had twenty-​two stanzas; this poem consists of a far more elaborate triple acrostic: it runs alef to tav, then tav to alef, and then alef to
tav again. The opening stanzas, addressing the deity directly as did the
previous work, rehearse the creation narrative in Genesis 1: “You established /​the world from the beginning /​You founded the earth /​and
formed the creatures” (Stanza 1). The work then moves relatively quickly
through the creation of Adam and the expulsion from Eden, the generation of the Flood and Noah, the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob);
Jacob, in turn, is recalled as the father of the twelve tribes, but only the
tribe of Levi is described in detail—​indeed, while he mentions Amram,
he does not mention Moses, only Aaron. All this historical recapitulation
takes place within the first sixteen stanzas of the poem; the remainder of
the poem—​by far the majority of its length—​focuses on the priesthood
and its rituals, and the Avodah rite of Yom Kippur in particular. The impression of the poem overall is best described as “imagistic.” Its concise,
detailed, episodic rhetoric, reinforced by the use of energetic eponyms
(e.g., Abraham is “the slaughterer of the lamb” in l. 93, and Miriam is “the
drumming maiden” in l. 115), and its deployment of the strongly visual
imagery of the priestly vestments from the biblical source material all appeal strongly to the visual imagination. The Avodah piyyutim construct
what might be called “theater in the mind.”
Each of these poems exemplifies how poets create within conventions, and
while they vary in scale, they belong unmistakably to the same genre in which
sweeping historical arcs are composed out of energetic, vivid phrases evoking
precise figures, moments, and scenes. Similarly, as works composed for performance in the context of a liturgy that remembers—​and imaginatively re-​
enacts—​the High Priest’s actions on the Day of Atonement, the episodes and
eponymns all revolve around priestly themes and motifs. The language of
sacrifice colors scenes of sacrificial drama, whether it is Noah after the Flood,
Abraham on Mount Moriah, or the priest in the Holy of Holies. Each composition selectively emphasizes themes and motifs to stress this latent potential
of the biblical text, drawing out and dramatizing those threads of tradition
that most vividly align with the performative moment.102 Given the clear and
101 Ibid., 69–​93.
102 We should note that three Avodah piyyutim are attributed to Yose b. Yose, each one distinctive
in its treatment of the topic.
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Setting the Stage
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straightforward linear narrativity of these works, listeners were free to attend
to each poem’s details, able to appreciate and envision the clarity of its dramaturgy, seeing the Temple cult not in reality but as a thrumming baseline of
sacred history, still ongoing in their minds if not before their eyes.
Indeed, for all the richness of the content of these poems and the distinctive ways in which they shape biblical traditions, we can only understand how
these poems work as liturgy, and how liturgy constitutes a kind of sacred theater that appeals to the senses and amplifies delight, if we consider the dynamic
relationship between performer and congregation than animates these works.
The poet moves the people from being audience to actors, easing them onto the
stage, as it were, such that they are together, part of a single chorus, when they
bow and utter the doxology. From a narrative perspective, the Avodah poems
offered poets a fascinating challenge: the formula of rehearsing history, from
the creation to the establishment of the tabernacle and, ultimately, the present
moment. In many cases, the poet had four lines, or eight, or twelve to convey
all the drama of key narrative moments from the sacred history of the community. Furthermore, the genre offers a flexible framework through which the
boundaries between past and present are collapsed. Following a truly cosmic
opening—​the creation of the cosmos—​the poet constricts his focus to be ever
narrower, and as spatial scale magnifies, the temporal framework slows, and
visual details become ever denser, until the listeners find themselves standing
in the past, or the past embedded in the present. Contextualized by this hymn,
when the congregation prostrates together with the prayer leader, they step into
the shoes of their own ancestors and pray alongside them, in a tabernacle and
Temple long gone. They stand alongside the High Priest, abled by the poetry to
visualize themselves as part of the awe-​inspiring biblical-​rabbinic scene. Where
a homily might exhort such an approach to ritual, midrashic ritual—​with its
self-​conscious exegesis and distance from ritual—​cannot close the gap between
past and present in the same way as liturgical poetry. In hymnography, the author crafts an immersive experience; he does not merely describe ritual but
navigates his listeners into its midst.
We find a different web of relationships among narrative, ritual, and audience in the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic poem that elaborates upon the conclusion of Chronicles. Chronicles, a lengthy rehearsal of Israel’s history from
creation of the world to the edict of Cyrus permitting the exiles’ return to the
Promised Land, is conventionally the last book in the Jewish Bible, but this
canonical ordering seems to be Babylonian in origin, and given this poem’s
Palestinian dialect, we cannot assume that the poem marked the conclusion
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Staging the Sacred
of the Tanakh as a whole.103 Chronicles’ language is often liturgical, but
it is rarely a text that takes a star turn in exegesis; a tradition in LevR 1:3
attributes to Rav the statement, “The book of Chronicles was given only to be
expounded midrashically.”104 The book’s narrative compression aligns with
the topic at hand, but it is an unlikely text for poetic embellishment.
We do not know with any certainty what inspired the composition of a
poem that celebrates Chronicles (and, by extension, the Bible in toto); it is
not associated with any particular liturgy or rite. While we cannot posit any
specific ritual context, it stands to reason that it marked an occasion when
the book itself was read, for an idiosyncratic reason or to mark the conclusion of the Bible as a whole. The JPA poem is a Qillus (praise poem), and it
is simple in form, like many JPA poems: rhymed bicola built on a basic alphabetical acrostic frame.105 Unlike the Avodah poems, this work does not
depict any identifiable ritual, let alone draw the community into ritual practice. Instead, it offers a digest of the biblical text that is, itself, a distinctly ideological synopsis of Israel’s history.106 This poem’s connection to Chronicles
is unmistakable; it is not simply a retelling of the people’s sacred history: it
begins not with the creation story of Genesis 1 but with the lineage of Adam,
just as 1 Chronicles 1 does, and it concludes by quoting the final verse of the
final book of the Jewish Bible (2 Chron. 26:23), Cyrus’ decree of restoration.
The composition’s overall structural scheme is clear, although the pacing
of its execution is uneven: it lists Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mehalalel,
103 See b. Baba Batra 14b–​
15a, in which the position of Chronicles at the end of scripture is
mentioned in a baraita. Notably, however, in the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, Chronicles begins
the Writings, the third section of the Tanakh, rather than concluding it. An obscure medieval text
by Joseph ha-​Qostandini, Adat Devorim (“A Swarm of Bees,” copied by a certain Judah b. Jacob in
1207 ce), explains the difference in order in terms of geography: Palestinian communities placed
Chronicles at the beginning of the Writings, while Babylonian Jews (in the Diaspora) located it at the
end. On Adat Devorim, see Steven Bowman, Jews of Byzantium, 1204–​1453 (Birmingham: University
of Alabama Press, 1985), 217–​218, and Nicholas de Lange, “Hebrew Scholarship in Byzantium,”
in Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World, ed. Nicholas de Lange (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 31.
104 LevR 1:3 (Vilna ed. 2a). The poem can be found in Yahalom and Sokoloff, Shirat Bene Ma’arava
(Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity), ed. Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff
(Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999) #44; English translation available
in Laura S. Lieber, Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity. Translations and Commentaries.
Cambridge Genizah Studies Series, vol. 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 154–​157. For background on
Chronicles, see the comprehensive overview in Sara Japhet, I and II Chronicles: A Commentary, Old
Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993).
105 The letters shin and tav are doubled; the full poem has 52 lines. It is also worth noting the similar, slightly less comprehensive JPA poem (JPA Poem #26), for Purim, which retells the history of
Israel from the time of Abraham to the present.
106 The JPA poem that retells the Book of Ruth (JPA Poem #10) exemplifies the same phenomenon
on a smaller scale—​although the poems are of approximately the same length.
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Jered, and Enoch and then skips to the “seed of Abraham” (l. 14); after a brief
reference to “sages and levites” (l. 16), it quickly moves on to David, then
backtracks to Saul, and then returns to David and Solomon—​with a particular focus on the founding of the Temple. The poet then rapidly chronicles
the divided monarchy, moving from Rechaboam, Abijah, and Asa, then to
Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, and finally to the destruction of Jerusalem. The
final stanza leaps to the present and petitions God to “raise up now (another) Cyrus” (‫)תלה כורש כדון בעלמה‬, culminating in the quotation of 2
Chronicles 36:23 (in its original Hebrew). What makes this erratic pacing
charming rather than amateurish is the sense of performative patter that the
text creates. In the fourth stanza, the poet writes, “For each of them was a
scholar and a sage /​(but) I am (already) on the fourth letter! //​And who can
recite the praise /​ of Enoch, who is seventh?” (ll. 8–​9). He continues, “Lo,
I began by arranging /​the deeds of every single generation!” (l. 10). It is as if
the poet belatedly realizes he has lingered too long on the opening lines of the
poem—​the initial generations of humanity, which occupy only the first seven
words of 1 Chronicles—​and abruptly quickens the pace. He excuses himself
by noting the marvelous accomplishments and attributes of the ancestors—​
he mentions, as an aside in lines 12–​13, that the genealogies of Chronicles
are famously opaque and thus fruitful for interpretation—​and then proceeds
to skip over the actual patriarchs.107 Likewise, after describing Solomon’s
dedication of the Temple, our poet writes, “The histories of the rest of the
kings /​ let me bring forth in short order” (l. 36). Again, the poet breaks the
fourth wall, confessing to the listeners that he has gotten caught up in the
delights of remembering the Temple—​and the joy it brought the people—​
and now, noticing the time, must hustle to get back on schedule. The poet’s
tone is knowing and intimate, with a first-​person voice that is maintained
throughout, and he draws his listeners in not so much to the performance as
to his own charming interiority.
Where the Avodah poems, responding to their liturgical station, stressed
priestly ritual, this composition displays a keen awareness of textual and
ritual performance, which may suggest something of its own performative context: it links “priests and wise men /​in abundant interpretation” (l.
107 Line 13 reads, “They had to bring forth /​four hundred (camel) loads (of interpretation to make
sense of it),” with “it” being Chronicles. This line depends on b. Pes. 62b, “Rami the son of Rav Judah
said: Since the day that the Book of Lineages was hidden, the strength of the Sages has been impaired
and the light of their eyes has been dimmed. Mar Zutra said, Between ‘Azel’ (1 Chr 8:38) and ‘Azel’ (1
Chr 9:34) they were laden with four hundred camels’ worth of exegetical interpretations!”
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Staging the Sacred
17) and credits “prophets and sages of old” with adding the cantillation marks
to the text, which they “recited according to their order /​without interruption” (ll. 18–​19). David’s skill as a singer is highlighted, and the Levites are
likewise singled out for their music; the dedication of Solomon’s temple was
celebrated by “all Jerusalem assembled” (l. 35). The destruction of Jerusalem
is remembered by song, as well: “Singers, male and female /​began to lament
/​pronouncing eulogies /​dirges and lamentations” (ll. 46–​47). For all its
brevity, the poem displays a liveliness and sense of its own place in a long line
of Jewish performances. Its techniques, however—​particularly the narrator’s
intrusions into his narration—​reflect an awareness of Greco-​Roman theatricality that goes back to Greek New Comedy and the Roman comedies of
Plautus, and Terence.108
Each of the poems addressed here “theatricalizes” the sacred canon, both
through narrative and presentation. The Avodah poems distill cosmic history to essential points that are depicted with dynamism and in visually
evocative detail. Their vividness amplifies the resonant setting of the Yom
Kippur liturgy: the occasion encourages participants to fill the ritual moment with intentionality (kavvanah) and significance; the poems suggest a
mechanism by which such imagination could be constructed. This liturgical
imperative accounts for its heightened stress on rituals of sacrifice and atonement, and the centrality of the priesthood, even in its functional absence. At
the same time, Avodah poems shift their frames toward the end, so that the
community becomes part of the performance: theater becomes liturgy, and
spectators become participants. The JPA poem, by contrast, theatricalizes
history by engaging the listeners into the challenges of condensing history
to its essentials. The pretense of the poem is that the poet struggles to review
the entire span of history from Adam to Cyrus (to the present); he winkingly
engages his listeners as he navigates, not entirely successfully, the challenge
he has set out for himself. Where the Avodah poems are rich with participatory drama, the JPA poem tempers its earnest hopes for restoration—​for a
new Cyrus—​with knowing humor.
Expansion of Story: Some hymns, like the Avodah poems, derive their
performative energy and drive by distilling sweeping dramas that spanned
108 See Mathias Hanses, The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020); the second chapter, “Roman Comedy in Ciceronian
Oratory” (pp. 123–​200), is of particular interest to the present study. See also Peter Brown, “Terence
and Greek New Comedy,” in A Companion to Terence, ed. Antony Augoustakis, Ariana Traill, and
John E. Thorburn (West Sussex, UK: Wiley and Sons, 2013), 17–​32.
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Setting the Stage
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centuries of history into vividly compressed, pixilated stories. These
compositions offer listeners narrative arcs that culminate in the integration
of the community into the historical drama, through the construction of
embodied ritual or the articulation of inward expressions of yearning. The
momentum of such works carries the listeners into the story, with the vivid
imagery lending the experience a concrete vitality that is amplified by the
power of ritual. On other occasions, however, hymnographers take precisely
the opposite tack: they slow down the pace of biblical narrative and dwell in
the imaginatively amplified details of an expanded story. They invite their
listeners to join them as they bring a scene to life, to join them as they pause
the rush of narrative and linger within a scene that the poet puts on vivid display for their consideration.
As a compositional technique, this poetic “filling of gaps” is more common
than the sweeping historical overviews. In part, the popularity of the style
highlights a point of contact between liturgical poetry and other forms of
exegesis and interpretation, from works such as the retold Bible of Jubilees
to the expansive insertions in the Aramaic translations and homiletical and
exegetical writings ranging from sermons to literary midrash. But it also
aligns with the importance of performativity unique to liturgical poetry. It
resembles the way orators were taught to declaim, particularly through its
use of the technique of “speech-​in-​character.”109 Similarly, the creation of
dramatic “scenes” rooted in sacred source material recalls set pieces familiar
from theater. Hymns that expand upon biblical tradition infuse traditions of
exegesis with those of theater. We also will see how techniques from theater—​
particularly discourses in which characters in the hymns narrate events and
let the community see the scene through their eyes—​can be understood as
models for the spectators, indicating for members of the congregation how
they should respond to and understand the scene that has unfolded before
their eyes.
I have selected three works to exemplify the potential of this compositional technique: one by the Syriac Christian poet, Jacob of Sarug; another
by the Christian poet Romanos, who wrote in Greek; and a final example a
Hebrew poem by the Jewish hymnographer, Yannai. The three texts not only
expand upon biblical narratives but also do so by focusing on women, a category of character often relatively marginalized within the scriptural corpus
but important as a vehicle for conveying emotion and the human perspective
109 “Speech-​in-​character”—​ethopoeia—​is the topic of Chapter 4.
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Staging the Sacred
in the context of performance. Women, so much less likely to speak in sacred
scripture, are often given magnificent voices in the liturgical poems, where
they speak not only for tradition, but for the community. Women provided
a lens through which the community—​male and female—​could see themselves: weaker than God and awaiting enlightenment, but gifted with powerful voices. And because women so often occupy the margin of the story,
they provide an easy point of identification for the listeners, who can imagine
themselves as standing alongside these other figures, seeing what they see as
the performer’s mediating voice brings the entire scene to life. Finally, the
presence of women in these poems reminds us that women were present in
the congregations, as well.
Jacob of Sarug’s memra (Homily 46) elaborating on the account of Jesus’
encounter with the Samaritan woman (John 4:1–​42) is lengthy (over 650
lines) but not formally complex.110 In the biblical episode on which this
memra is based, Jesus has left Jerusalem and, on his way back to the Galilee,
he pauses by Jacob’s Well in the city of Sychar in Samaria. While he lingers by
the well, a Samaritan woman comes to draw water, but when Jesus asks her
for a drink, rather than comply, she interrogates him: “You are a Jew and I am
a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (John 4:9); the text
goes on to gloss her question by noting the antipathy of Jews for Samaritans.
In the verses that follow, Jesus and the Samaritan woman converse, and
he offers her the gift of “living waters”—​religious truths—​which quench
thirst far more lastingly than physical water from any literal well. Jesus then
demonstrates knowledge of the woman which she recognizes as prophetic,
and he, in turn, reveals himself—​for the first time—​to be the Messiah. The
disciples return to Jesus while the woman goes to bring news of the Messiah’s
arrival to her town. The unit ends with the Samaritan community affirming
their belief in Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, as they tell the woman, “We no
longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves,
and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).
Based on their recognition of Jesus’ divinity by the Samaritan woman and
her community, this story comes to presage the concept of “the church of the
110 For the text and translation of this composition, see Jacob of Sarug, Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies
on Women Whom Jesus Met, ed. and trans. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Sebastian P. Brock, Reyhan
Durmaz, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Michael Payne, and Daniel Picus (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press, 2016), 51–​123. This text resembles, and perhaps builds upon, Ephrem’s Hymns on Virginity
#22–​23. Jacob’s memre are composed in isosyllabic couplets of 12 +​12 syllables and were likely
recited—​perhaps with dramatic flair—​rather than sung.
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Setting the Stage
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Gentiles”—​a church distinct from Judaism emerged from the wisdom of a
double outsider, a Samaritan woman.
Jacob’s metrical homily follows the contours of the biblical source closely. It
expands on the passage but frequently integrates quotations from John 4 directly, and his expansive use of dialogue in the poem reflects the prominence
of discourse within the gospel narrative. What Jacob adds is literary and theological framing, and elaborate detail. In a fashion reminiscent of what we
saw in the JPA poem on Chronicles, earlier, Jacob’s self-​aware treatment of
his genre is particularly striking. In lines 23–​56, he explicitly acknowledges
that he is composing a memra (even personifying it: “the memra is moved to
speak with great love” [l. 56]) as a means for conveying divine teachings. He
thus expands the biblical account in order to draw out and articulate larger
truths, which he teaches through hymnody. Jacob even interrupts his own
narrative to marvel at the woman and the story he recounts: “Who showed
you? . . . Who revealed to you? . . . Who announced to you? . . . Tell me, O
woman, who told you that the messiah is coming?” (ll. 344–​349). The poet
speaks on behalf of, or in the place of, his listeners. Perhaps more startling is
the fact that the woman then answers him:
The scriptures announced to me about His revelation
And by His heralds His coming was made known to me;
The great Moses depicted His image in prophecy,
And He clearly taught us that “the Messiah is coming”
(John 4:25)” (ll. 351–​354).
The poet here integrates the woman’s speech from the biblical text into his
own dialogue. Whereas in the biblical text, she speaks to Jesus, now those
same words address Jacob, and are “overheard” by the community that is
privy to his musing. The poet has intruded into the biblical story, and the
woman has broken through the fourth wall and spoken back to him. The
poet is the instrument not only of theology but also performance.111
In this homily, the poet plays on metaphors of water for life, truth, salvation, and learning throughout. As in the biblical text, the poem draws a
consistent contrast between the physical water the woman can offer with
the spiritual succor Jesus can give. The historical framing embeds the narrative in the sweep of biblical prehistory, with the Samaritans representing
111 See discussion in Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women whom Jesus Met, 52.
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Staging the Sacred
the children of Adam; the woman—​her voice, significant in the biblical text,
is augmented even further—​is presented as articulate, intelligent, and savvy.
Jacob describes her as “wise,” “perceptive,” “learned,” “rational,” “discerning,”
and “blessed” (among other attributes). She asks productive questions and
seeks true understanding. In the memra, Jesus speaks at great length and with
pedagogical sophistication: he moves from the bodily to the spiritual, from
assertion to discernment, and from prophecy to fulfillment.112 Jacob even
calls her “a perceptive woman disciple” (l. 278) and depicts her as a woman
both bold and eager for truth.
Throughout the memra, the poet carefully integrates quotations from
the biblical source, as already indicated in the previous example, where the
woman’s words in John 4:25 are recontextualized to speak to the poet. While
the poet expands greatly on the biblical text, he does not significantly change
the plot or any features of his source material. The woman in John displays
intelligence and interest and speaks with a respected voice among her people;
so, too, in this poem, only even more so, and at greater length. The biblical
passage suggests a familiarity with Hebrew scriptures and biblical traditions,
so Jacob develops what is latent within the text when he characterizes her as a
scholar, displaying knowledge of Jacob, Moses, the prophets, and the Torah.
Similarly, John 4 presents her as a compelling voice among her people, persuasive and respected; Jacob expands but does not invent her role as a teacher
and preacher among her community.
Only in the poem’s conclusion (ll. 611–​652) does Jacob of Sarug depart
from the obvious sense of the text and its conventional lines of interpretation,
in that he hears in John 4:42 a rebuke of the woman and a dismissal of her as
arrogant and self-​important. They do not need her, as Jesus has revealed himself to them directly. Anticipating this conclusion, Jacob’s depiction of the
woman changes in the final sections, and he paints her as pompous and pretentious. This sudden re-​evaluation of the previously lauded woman comes
as something of a shock; modern scholars wonder if the pivot toward negativity represents Jacob’s own discomfort with such a strikingly empowered,
articulate, and independent female figure whose freedom from patriarchal
restraint may have alarmed the male authority figure. It is worth noting that
in his treatments of this same pericope, Ephrem did not see the need to offer
112 For a reading of this dialogue as a form of classroom disputation, rooted in Platonic models and
Neoplatonism, see Adam Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and
Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006), 22–​40.
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such a line of interpretation, perhaps because he wrote for a choir of women.
For Jacob, however, it seems that the Samaritan woman was a woman with
just a bit too much voice.
Our next liturgical poem comes to us from Constantinople. This work,
“On the Nativity: Mary and the Magi,” ranks among Romanos’ best-​known
kontakia, one that brought him to fame in antiquity. The poem is based
on the text of Matthew 2:1–​14, in which the wise men from the East—​the
Magi—​seek out “he who has been born king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2, RSV).
The relevant verses (Matt. 2:11–​12; RSV) state:
And going into the house they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and
they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they
offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in
a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.
Notably, the biblical text does not recount any conversation that may have
transpired between the Magi and the mother of God. That absence of content proves an inviting gap for Romanos to fill. His kontakion of twenty-​four
strophes imagines a rich conversation that took place, quite literally, between
the lines of scripture.
Romanos delights in creating a sense of immediacy. In the first strophe, he
invites the community to join him in imagining the scene; it is not merely a
fancy, but something he will show them, and they will see:
Bethlehem has opened Eden, come, let us see;
We have found delight in secret, come, let us receive
The joys of Paradise within the cave.
There the unwatered root whose blossom is forgiveness has appeared.
There has been found the undug well
From which David once longed to drink.
There a virgin has borne a babe
And has quenched at once Adam’s and David’s thirst.
For this, let us hasten to the place where there has been born
A little Child, God before the ages.113
113 The text is O #1 (1–​
9); a translation is available in Ephrem Lash, On the Life of
Christ: Kontakia (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 3–​12. See also Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in
Song (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 120–​163.
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Staging the Sacred
The lines are ambiguous; do we imagine here that the poet speaks in the
voice of the Magi, as they converse with one another? Does he speak for the
Magi, addressing the congregation as witnesses? Or does he speak in his own
voice, as a contemporary of his community, inviting them to step back in
time with him, as it were, to witness a pivotal episode in a treasured sacred
story? In the end, a meaningful distinction may not exist among these possible perspectives; the Magi, occupying a place of both wonder and intimacy,
both model audience behavior and stand at the threshold of the fourth wall,
integrating the listeners into the moment. Regardless of the speaker’s voice,
the congregation transitions from audience to witnesses and participants.114
The poet’s language beckons to the people, twice repeating “come, let
us . . .” (δεῦτε +​first-​person plural aorist subjunctives) at the beginning
of the strophe and again at the end, with an appeal addressed to them: “let
us hasten” (ἐπειχθῶμεν). He then describes in vividly visual detail the tableau they should envision in their minds: the new mother talking to her
infant, pondering the miracle of his conception and birth. The Magi interrupt this tender and intimate moment, expressing their own, far more theological and scholarly wonder at the sight they behold. Mary, rather than
responding to their intrusion directly, continues to speak to her baby in
Strophe 6, exclaiming to him in wonder, “The kings of the East /​seek your
face!” She continues to speak to the infant of her pride despite humiliating
circumstances, saying, “I hold you as a treasure” (Strophe 7)—​a critique
of the gifts brought by the foreign kings. Jesus, speaking into his mother’s
mind, instructs Mary to let the Magi enter (Strophes 8 and 9). The Magi
enter and upon seeing Joseph there, engage Mary in a dialogue about Jesus’
conception and Joseph’s role in the family (Strophes 10–​12), after which the
Magi narrate their own journey, physical and theological (Strophes 13–​15).
Mary then asks the Magi how they avoided Herod, and they respond, “we
did not avoid him, we mocked him” (Strophe 16); they then elaborate on
114 A similar and perhaps even more striking modeling of behavior by biblical characters occurs in
Romanos’ second poem, “On the Nativity: Adam and Eve and the Nativity” (O. #2), in which Adam
and Eve are roused from eternal sleep by the sound of Mary’s lullaby for Jesus. The sound of Mary’s
singing summons the ancestors, much as the sound of hymn singing would have compelled the attention of listeners. The poet uses language that specifically evokes liturgical singing in describing
Mary’s lullabies: he says she “sang hymns” (ύμνολογούσης; Strophe 3) and calls her voice “a (musical) instrument” (ὂργανον; Strophe 5). For the text in English, see J. H. Barkuizen, “Romanos
the Melodist: ‘On Adam and Eve and the Nativity’: Introduction with Annotated Translation,”
Acta Patristica et Byzantina 19 (2008): 1–​22; as well as Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine
Melodist, translated and annotated by Marjorie Carpenter, 2 vols. (Columbia, MO: University of
Missouri Press, 1970), I:15–​21.
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Setting the Stage
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their exchanges with Herod and the Pharisees and their desire to behold
the baby rather than return to Persia—​expanding on the terse exchanges
in Matthew 2:3–​9 (Strophes 17–​19115). After a brief narrative interlude, the
Magi present gifts to Mary (Strophe 21), who then presents them to Jesus,
along with her own expressions of piety (Strophe 22–​23). The poet gives
Mary the final words of the poem, a prayer for redemption and of thanksgiving for the gifts of the Magi, which will sustain the Holy Family in their
flight to Egypt (Strophe 24).
There is much one could say about this hymn from the perspective of delivery, character creation, techniques of ekphrasis, use of dialogue, staging,
and rhetoric. It is a sparkling gem of a composition, with something to attract every eye. But read through the lens of how theater in antiquity related
to its canon, what stands out here is the inventiveness of the scene in toto.
The hymn is a singular, carefully imagined, and crafted episode, with speech,
action, emotion, humor, and gravitas; the poet sets a stage for his listeners
and leads them onto it, and then they bear witness to the exchange that is
not recorded in scripture, but for which there is room between the words
and verses for it to have taken place. Where the biblical text moved rapidly
through events, the poet slows down and creates a rich, tenderly imagined
moment.
A sense of the theatrical lingers over both exemplars of “expansionary”
hymns examined so far. Romanos’ Magi seem ready to be scandalized
by Joseph’s presence in the manger, but his Mary is more than capable of
responding to their concerns. Where Romanos found Mary a compelling figure precisely because she was a silent, if not blank, slate for his creativity, Jacob of Sarug took not only inspiration but precise language from
the New Testament’s account of the Samaritan woman. Similarly, the idea of
a woman’s voice was compelling to the Jewish poet Yannai, in our last “expanded narrative” text. Yannai found a productively provocative muse in the
figure of Sarah from Genesis 16 (one of Mary’s models of motherhood in
the Romanos hymn). While Romanos’ Mary in “On the Nativity” articulates
fairly orthodox theology, and the Samaritan woman of Jacob’s homily
115 Readers relying on Lash’s translation should note that Strophe 19 is absent from his edition; the
Greek text is available in P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 7. In the missing strophe, the Magi describe how the star
guided their way, and the hope of seeing God satisfied and nourished them. The strophe concludes
with the Magi saying, “For we yearn to behold, to worship and praise /​A little Child, God before
the ages.”
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Staging the Sacred
exemplifies philosophical sophistication and spiritual intuition, Yannai’s
Sarai expresses a simmering, grieving, frustrated rage.116
Yannai takes his inspiration for this qedushta from Genesis 16:1–​2, in
which Sarai, resigned to barrenness, instructs Abram to have intercourse
with her handmaiden, Hagar. Unlike the voluble Samaritan woman, or the
nearly silent Mary of Matthew 2, Sarai speaks to Abram in Genesis 16:2, if
only briefly; the text offers no sense of her interiority, emotions, or tone, or
her thought process before or after her vastly consequential decision. Any
reader, implicitly and unconsciously, or self-​consciously and intentionally,
colors her delivery and hears it as inflected with some kind of emotion. It is
Sarai’s unspoken inner life that Yannai wishes to explore in this poem.
This poem, in keeping with the genre conventions of the Qedushta, consists
of nine distinctive units that follow a predictable pattern; it interweaves the
week’s Torah portion with the first three blessings of the Amidah, the main
statutory prayer of the synagogue service. In Unit 1, Yannai narrates Sarai’s
experience from an external perspective, as an observer: evoking the Song
of Songs, he compares Sarai to a trapped dove and a locked garden. He tells
us she is wise, prayerful, and righteous—​but unheard. In Unit 2, the poet
grants the matriarch a voice (in anticipation of her speech in Genesis 16:2,
the intertext that concludes the unit): Sarai expresses disappointment in herself, anger at Abram (with whom she will not be intimate until after this experiment concludes), and wrenching grief—​even as the poet anticipates her
eventual joy. Yannai reminds his listeners that he, and they, share a perspective and knowledge that Sarai lacks. In Unit 3, Yannai pivots and expands
not the plot of the text but its significance through a figurative reading: Sarai
should be seen not simply as an ancestor, but as a symbol of Zion. She is a
woman forlorn and grieving but, despite appearances to the contrary, she is
nonetheless destined for renewal and rebirth. The first verse of the haftarah,
Isaiah 54:1, quoted as the intertext for the unit, underscores his reading.
Yannai, like a midrashic exegete, fills the lacuna in Genesis 16 through the
use of a text from afar, and by doing so, he underscores that like Sarai, Zion
will yet be a joyful mother. The past encrypts a message to the present. With
Unit 4, the poet returns to Sarai’s voice, and he gives full expression to her
116 See Ophir Münz-​
Manor, “All about Sarah: Questions of Gender in Yannai’s Poems on
Sarah’s (and Abraham’s) Barrenness,” Prooftexts 26.3 (2006): 344–​374, and Laura S. Lieber, “Stage
Mothers: Performing the Matriarchs in Genesis Rabbah and Yannai,” in Genesis Rabbah in Text and
Context, ed. Sarit Kattan Gribetz, David M. Grossman, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schaefer
(Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter, 2016), 156–​173.
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bewilderment and frustration. He frames her recourse to Hagar as a concubine as a form of medical diagnostic: Which member of the couple, Sarai
or Abram, is infertile? The unit ends with her plea to God that she may, herself, yet bear a child, for Hagar’s fertility will implicitly indict the matriarch.
Unit 5 approaches Sarai and Abram as partners and makes clear that their
childlessness is God’s will: God has made her barren, temporarily, lest she
grow haughty (perhaps thinking herself Abram’s equal?). Yannai here subtly
indicts God for what can only be seen as divine callousness: Sarai is kept from
motherhood until that moment when God decides to relent; her grief colored with justified anger and dignified pride, she remains unbent.
In Unit 6—​the most expansively narrative unit of a qedushta—​the poet
returns to exposition, underscoring the suitability of Abram and Sarai for
each other (they were meant for each other before their births) but also
giving the clearest voice yet to her distress. Sarai is “despondent” and “shattered” even as she is “righteous” and “honored”; she is a “princess” and “wise,”
but her emotions are turbulent:
She suppressed her wrath and restrained her anger
She cast no evil eye upon her maid
Her jealousy consumed her heart, in her sorrow,
Though she would have a reward for her labor
Her spirit ached in her anguish
Until at ninety she was granted relief
She heard her maid’s taunt but kept silent.
Yannai’s Sarai feels an anger deepened precisely because she cannot express
it. In Genesis 16:1–​2, when Sarai arranges Abram’s liaison with Hagar, Sarai’s
mental state is unstated, but Yannai takes us into her mind and heart: jealousy eats her from within; her spirit aches with longing; she tolerates Hagar’s
haughtiness in crushing silence. Indeed, Yannai does not here address Sarai’s
eruption of anger at Abram (Gen. 16:5), but only the internal experiences
that preceded it, a shift in focus that increases his listeners’ sympathy for the
matriarch and her actions. Throughout this unit the poet acknowledges that
Sarai will be vindicated and granted her heart’s dearest wish, the child Isaac.
But the poet’s foreknowledge cannot bring the matriarch comfort. The centrality of Sarai is underscored by the phrase “And Sarai” (‫)ושרי‬, which opens
every stanza. The final extant poem, Unit 7, returns to Sarai’s voice, offering
a litany of Sarai’s grief, although it cuts off halfway through, after twelve lines
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Staging the Sacred
(it is built as an acrostic, extant from alef to lamed). The community likely
added their voices to Sarai’s through the recitation of the fixed phrase “lo,
please” (‫​—)הנה נא‬repeated at the opening of every stich. A petition, repeated
twenty-​two times, becomes a heartfelt, communal plea to be remembered.
The remainder of Unit 7, as well as Units 8–​9, are not extant.
The genre of the qedushta works against the more straightforward, linear
storytelling we encountered in Romanos. Qedushta’ot are composed out of
diverse formal units, in patterns that interweave intertexts and liturgical
phrases, and often loop back to revisit and reinforce key images, ideas,
themes, and phrases. We thus hear of Sarai’s anger, but only later hear her express it in her own voice. We are privy to her grief but also to God’s decision
to relent. Yannai’s response to the biblical text reminds us that Sarai’s silence
in Genesis, and the biblical narrator’s silence about her emotional life, creates
room for later interpreters, including our poet, to explore the scene imaginatively. Yannai has space to wonder what she said, how she said it, and what
she chose to leave unsaid, and he shares that vision with his community in a
form akin to a miniature drama that gains energy from the pathos of the narrative, the human desires motivating celebrated ancestors, and the desire to
have their own prayers heard as Sarai’s were—​even as the complex emotions
of living are recognized and voiced. The scriptural canon provided the poet
a powerful, compelling scenario: a woman asking her husband to have
sexual intercourse with her own handmaid, a decision made in response to
deep frustration born of years of childlessness and grief. The poet took that
opening as an opportunity and crafted a powerful and unexpectedly complicated, real voice for his congregation to hear and, through the brief allegory
of Unit 3, understand was acceptable for them to own.
Looking at these three poems as a group, several observations stand out.
We can see how Jacob essentially expanded, unit by unit, an already dramatic
and dialogue-​filled biblical passage. Every added element built on material latent within the scriptural source, but the poet played knowingly with his own
literary artifice and wrote himself into the drama. Romanos, in turn, created
a consciously theatrical moment for his congregation: he established a scene,
populated it with characters, orchestrated their encounter, and reproduced
their dialogue. He invites the listeners in, like a welcoming personified
Prologue.117 Finally, Yannai obeys the structural constraints of his genre but
117 Greek and Roman theater featured robust prologues. The explanatory opening that gives
listeners a backstory and context is credited to Euripides; it was widely adopted and appeared in
Roman theater, as well, as in Plautus’ comedy, Rudens. It remained a feature of medieval mystery plays
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nonetheless finds within the space afforded by his predetermined lection and
the themes and voices of the liturgy a new and powerful—​and feminine—​
voice. Her voice, furthermore, enables the congregation to express a welter
of complex emotions indirectly, insofar as her grief and anger is also Zion’s—​
and thus theirs. What these three works, memra, kontakion, and qedushta,
share is their recognition that something the source text has left unsaid offers
the poet an opportunity to use his imagination and craft a scene to share with
his listeners. Between the words of scripture, within the white spaces, lies not
only an empty canvas but also a vacant stage. The poet steps onto it, but he is
not alone, for he brings the congregation along with him.
Invention of Story: “Compressed stories” distill sweeping histories to their
essential narrative arcs, yielding works of vast scope that locate the congregation and their ritual experience within a vividly conjured cosmic history.
“Expanded stories” exploit openings in extant sacred writings and insert
within familiar stories now details and depth, inviting listeners to slow down
and consider what sacred texts have left unsaid and unimagined. “Invented
stories” go further than “expanded stories,” in that they present listeners with
imaginative new scenes that are legibly anchored in more familiar elements
but go beyond what any canon might contain. This category is comprised of
works that are narrative, insofar as they tell a story, and while they may draw
their inspiration and even their characters from scripture—​not simply theological lessons in poetic form, for example, or hymns composed to celebrate
life cycle events—​they go well beyond the canon in terms of inventiveness.
These works can be understood as the “jazz riffs” on biblical themes and ideas
in the loosest but perhaps most evocative sense, with additional coloring
contributed by prose traditions of exegesis and homiletical interpretations.
These poems would appeal to listeners not for how they relate to tradition,
but for their inventiveness, and for the way these poems could touch on other
aspects of listeners’ experiences, helping them to think not only about the
distant past, but also about times and experiences closer to their present.
Examples of this form of hymnographic inventiveness can be found in the
poetry of any of the traditions examined here and, like the prose traditions of
and was particularly revived in Elizabethan times. See Michael Ingham, “‘Admit Me Chorus to This
History’: Shakespeare’s M.C.s and Choric Commentators—​How Medieval, How Early Modern?,”
Neophilologus 103 (2019): 255–​271, and also David John Palmer’s essay, published as a monograph,
We Shall Know by This Fellow: Prologue and Chorus in Shakespeare (Manchester, UK: John Rhylands
Library, 1982). In medieval mystery plays, the prologue was often a homily, while in other cases
it was a wordless pantomime or “dumb show.” See Jeremy Lopez, “Dumb Show,” in Early Modern
Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 291–​305.
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Staging the Sacred
the retold Bible, narrative exegesis as we find it in midrash and targum, and
fanciful extensions of homiletical musing, the boundary between “filling a
gap” and “creating a gap to fill” can seem willfully blurred. A good conceit
demands a telling, and the distinction between exegesis (“reading out”) and
eisegesis (“reading in”) is often arbitrary and depends on the reader’s evaluation of the interpreter. Furthermore, some works—​for example, the JPA
poem on the Fall of Betar (JPA Poem #17)—​narrate post-​biblical traditions
that are well attested and fully developed in prose sources.118 Two examples
will highlight how late antique liturgical poets invented occasions to embellish poetically: the first, Ephrem’s paean in praise of Shechem (Hymns de
Virg. 17119), takes the perspective of a city; the second, a lament by Eleazar
ha-​Qallir (“Then Jeremiah Went to the Graves of the Ancestors”), depicts the
historical experience of displacement and exile as a familial quarrel between
God and the ancestors of Israel.
Just as the Samaritan woman and her compatriots anticipated the “church
of the Gentiles” in Jacob of Sarug’s memra, Ephrem’s hymn praises the city
of Shechem as a symbol or “type” that anticipates a non-​Jewish church, a
community of outsiders incorporated into the covenant. In the initial line
of this hymn, Ephrem blurs any distinction between the biblical character
named Shechem, son of Hamor, from Genesis 34, with the city that bears
his name. By the Hellenistic period, Shechem—​proximate to the Samaritan
holy site of Mount Gerizim—​was a population center of the Samaritans; the
city of Sychar, the site of Jesus’ encounter with the woman of Samaria in John
4:1–​42 (treated earlier, in the context of a memra by Jacob of Sarug), is often
identified with Samaria’s major city. In this poetic treatment of Shechem,
Ephrem draws an analogy between the destruction of the city, laid waste
by Jacob’s sons in revenge for Shechem’s rape of Dinah, and the ruination of
creation, brought to catastrophe by the sin of Eve; such violence, distressing
as it may be, is the nature of justice, Ephrem posits—​but it is not the final
word. The Samaritan woman of John 4 restores the city to grace (just as, by
extension, Mary undoes the sin of Eve). In the concluding lines of the poem,
Ephrem singles out Shechem for its church, a built structure that bears the
inscription of Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman. Shechem constitutes a
microcosm of redemption, tangible in the present tense. It is a truth one can
touch, sacred history to which one can make pilgrimage.
118 See Lieber, Jewish Aramaic Poetry, 61–​64.
119 Kathleen McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 334–​336.
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The entire hymn speaks directly to the city; its conceit is that the city itself
is a “character,” and the human congregation overhears and affirms his praise
of the site. Twenty-​one times in its ten stanzas the poet addresses Shechem
as “blessed,” although not in a regular or predictable structure. The poem is
not organized chronologically—​it is not a “microhistory” to complement the
“compressed histories” studied earlier. That said, it does move forward from
Eve to Joshua and the other righteous who are buried there, and it speaks of
Jesus, who is depicted as making pilgrimage there (a beautiful retrojection of
late antique piety into the New Testament). The work is not invented out of
whole cloth: the poet carefully explores the range of references to Shechem in
the biblical and extra-​biblical context, a city of importance in the time of the
patriarchs and of enduring significance as the burial place of Joshua, Joseph,
and Eleazar, understood as “chiefs and prophets and priests” (Stanza 5; see
Josh. 24:29–​33). Jesus’ visit confirms its sanctity, forever memorialized by the
church that marks the occasion of his visit—​itself likely a place of potential
pilgrimage in antiquity. The poem’s arc thus spans creation (represented by
Eve) to the present. The focus, however, is consistently on the city—​a real and
tangible location—​both for its symbolism and the historical events it evokes.
As Ephrem writes, “Blessed are you, O Shechem, in whom is planted /​even
the pure tree of symbols” (Stanza 4). The church erected on the site of Jesus’
encounter with the woman at the well constitutes a matrix of interwoven
symbols. The poet leads his listeners on a pilgrimage of the imagination.
Nowhere in the Christian scriptural canon is the city of Shechem singled
out for praise of the kind Ephrem offers. In this composition, the poet weaves
together a range of the fleeting mentions of the city, scattered throughout the
Old and New Testaments, into a comprehensive totality, a singular vision that
speaks to the wholeness and importance of this site—​hardly a neutral position, since, while the poet does not address the tension, the city of Shechem
(known also as Neapolis, i.e., Nablus) remains to this day a place of central
importance to the non-​Christian community of Samaritans. Ephrem’s intense focus on the city, and his insistent direct address to the city personified
and Christianized, unifies the poem, even as it stakes a very real claim on it.
The cataloging of symbols and episodes, however—​the specific techniques
employed by the poet—​reflect techniques familiar from classical rhetoric
and argumentation. The hymn invents a coherent “story” of Shechem across
the Hebrew Bible and New Testament; that story lies behind the reason the
poet composes this ode to begin with and argued in way a skilled rhetor
would recognize.
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Staging the Sacred
In the Qallir poem “The Jeremiah Went to the Graves of the Ancestors,”
the poet constructs a multi-​person drama.120 Ephrem addressed the city of
Shechem, and while the city was both important and real, it was not necessarily of practical urgency or primary importance. Shechem was a symbol of
a non-​territorial concept, the Gentile church. Qallir, by contrast, here focuses
on a specific location—​the cave of Machpelah in Hebron—​but his topic is
actually displacement, the landlessness of exile and disempowerment.121 He
crafts his drama as an elaborate dispute between God and Israel’s ancestors,
who intercede on behalf of their children. The children, listeners would have
understood, constitute not only imagined figures but also the individuals in
the audience.
Qallir’s composition is a lament (qinah) for the Ninth of Av, and it is written
as a series of dialogues between God and the patriarchs and matriarchs of
Israel, whom Jeremiah has roused from their sleep in the grave. It opens in medias res:122
Then Jeremiah went to the ancestor’s graves /​And said: “Beloved bones! /​
How can you just lie there?
“Your children have been exiled and ‘pierced by swords’ (Ezek. 16:40) /​. . . .
And where is the ancestors’ merit ‘in the land of thirst’?” (Hosea 13:5)
[Refrain A]
“If they, like Adam, transgressed the covenant (Hosea 6:7) /​Where is
the merit of the covenant-​makers?”
They wailed, all of them, in lamentation /​Over the loss of (their) children
They murmured in a voice of entreaty /​Before the One who dwells in the
heavens
And where is the promise of, “And I will remember to your benefit the
covenant of the first ones?” (Lev. 26:45)
120 For the Qallir text, see The Order of Laments for Tisha b’Av, ed. Daniel Goldschmidt
(Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1968), 98–​100; the Hebrew is also readily available via the Maagarim
database: https://​maaga​rim.heb​rew-​acad​emy.org.il/​Pages/​PMain.aspx?mishib​bur=​600​018&mm15=​
00304​6051​010%2000&mismi​lla=​[2,3]; the present translation is the author’s. Narratively, this poem
follows the events in Qallir’s lament, “When Her Quota of Grief Is Filled,” discussed in Chapter 4.
121 The technique of personification, specifically prosopopoeia (“speech-​
in-​
character” when
the subject is an inanimate object) is discussed at length in Chapter 4, where we study Qallir’s
poem, “When Her Quota of Grief Is Filled”—​a companion to this lament, and one in which he
personifies Zion.
122 For alternative translations, see Tzvi Novick, “Between First-​
Century Apocalyptic and
Seventh-​Century Liturgy: On 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Qillir,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 44
(2013): 373–​
78; and https://​ope​nsid​dur.org/​pray​ers/​lunar-​cycle/​commem​orat​ive-​days/​fast-​days/​
tisha-​bav/​az-​bahalo​khyi​rmiy​ahu-​kalir-​c-​7th-​cent (Hebrew and English).
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[Refrain B]
“What can I do for you, My children? /​The decree has gone forth
from Me.”
“They exchanged My honor for nothingness /​with neither fear nor
trembling
“And when I turned My gaze from them, they were diminished /​but they
neither repented nor ceased.”123
And how shall I overlook, “He is nothing” (Jer. 5:12)?
“If they, like Adam, transgressed the covenant /​Where is the merit of
the covenant-​makers?”
The father-​of-​the-​multitude124 cried out on their account /​entreating the
presence of God Most High
“For naught was I tested with ten tests, for their sake? /​For lo, I see them
shattered!
And where is the promise of “Fear not, Abram” (Gen. 17:5)?
“What can I do for you, My children? /​The decree has gone forth
from Me.”
“They strayed into estrangement, /​into idolatry
“They plotted to hew out cisterns /​broken cisterns (Jer. 5:12)
And how can I overlook the nullification of the Ten Commandments?
“If they, like Adam, transgressed the covenant /​Where is the merit of
the covenant-​makers?”
Thus shouted Isaac /​before the One who dwells in the clouds:
“Was it in vain that slaughter was decreed against me? /​That thus my seed
is crushed and erased?
And where is the promise of “And I will sustain My covenant with
Isaac” (Gen. 17:21)?
“What can I do for you, My children? /​The decree has gone forth
from Me.”
“They rebelled against Jeremiah /​and defiled Mount Moriah
“I am weary of enduring their groans /​that accost Me from (the land of)
oblivion.125
123 This line follows the version in Goldschmidt, who uses the text from the Worms machzor. The
MS employed in the Ma’agarim online lexicon is much shorter: ‫ולא שהו‬, “and they did not pause.”
124 That is, Abraham.
125 See Ps. 88:13, where “land of oblivion (‫ ”)ארץ נשיה‬refers to the underworld.
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84
Staging the Sacred
And how can I overlook the murder of Zechariah?126
“If they, like Adam, transgressed the covenant /​Where is the merit of
the covenant-​makers?”
The one born for learning127 spoke up /​tears flowing as though from a
crocodile
“My babes, whom I kept close in swaddling cloths /​alas, they were taken
from me, scattered—​
And alas! How many myriad are torn from me, blood for blood?”
“What can I do for you, My children? /​The decree has gone forth
from Me.”
The faithful shepherd128 spoke up /​begrimed with dust and dung
“The flock that was nurtured at my bosom /​alas, they passed away, so
suddenly!”
And where is the promise of “but he is not bereft” (Jer. 51:5)?
“If they, like Adam, transgressed the covenant /​Where is the merit of
the covenant-​makers?”
The sound of Leah’s weeping /​and her beating upon her chest
Rachel, her sister, bewailing her children /​and Zilpah slapping her face
Bilhah grieving with both her hands
“What can I do for you, My children? /​The decree has gone forth
from Me.”
Return, O pure ones, to your rest /​I will surely fulfill your requests
“I send Myself to Babylon, for your sake; /​Here I am, restoring your children from exile!”
The poem begins with Jeremiah shouting to the sleeping ancestors to awake,
to rise (quite literally) to the defense of their wayward children. Each pair of
stanzas, indicated by the alternating refrains, consists of a speech by an ancestor, in which he or she cites a divine promise from scripture, followed by
God’s insistence that He cannot undo His divine decree; the sins of Israel,
cataloged in their own scriptures, condemn them. The impression of divine
126 Alludes to 2 Chron. 24:20–​22, and the development of this tradition in LamR Pet. 5 (Vilna
ed., 2a).
127 That is, Jacob; see GenR 63:9 (T-​A, 692–​693).
128 Moses.
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fixity creates a tension that builds, as it raises the question of whether God
will ever relent and whether Israel—​the congregation—​will ever be forgiven
and rescued.
Qallir continues to employ this format, with Isaac speaking next, then
Jacob, and Moses. In the penultimate stanza, the four wives of Jacob perform a classical display of gendered mourning: Leah weeps and beats her
chest, Rachel cries aloud, Zilpah strikes her face, and Bilhah “laments
with both her hands” (ll. 28–​30). God’s participation in the dialogue
contracts, until He only speaks by means of Refrain B; the compression
of the initial structure suggests that God is, in some sense, being worn
down. After the wordless display by the mothers of the twelve tribes, God
relents:
“Return, My pure ones, to your rest /​I will surely fulfill your requests
“I have sent Myself to Babylon, for their sake /​Here I am, restoring your
children from exile (ll. 31–​32).
In the end, God is depicted as persuaded not of Israel’s innocence—​they are
not innocent—​but of the need to end their exile.
The poem echoes a tradition found in Lamentations Rabbah. The midrash
concludes an extended explication of Isaiah 22:12, “My Lord God of Hosts
summoned on that day to weeping and lamenting, to tonsuring and girding
with sackcloth.” This lengthy prose text focuses on the emotional experience
of the deity. It depicts a God shocked by the sight of the Temple’s ruins, overcome with grief at His people’s suffering, and angered by the angels’ attempt
to prevent Him from mourning. God tasks Jeremiah, who has been part of
His retinue, with a task:
The Holy Blessed One said to Jeremiah, “I am now like a man who had an
only son, for whom he prepared a marriage-​canopy, but (the son) died
under it. Do you feel no anguish for Me and My children? Go, summon
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Moses from their graves, for they know how
to weep!”
In the passage’s continuation, Jeremiah raises the ancestors, including
summoning Moses from his unknown burial place, and all the ancestors, as
well as the twenty-​two letters of the alphabet, petition God on Israel’s behalf even as they express horror at the cruelties their descendants have
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Staging the Sacred
experienced. Eventually, Rachel is the one who moves God to pity, by means
of shaming Him:
Rachel broke forth into speech before the Holy Blessed One and said,
“Sovereign of the Universe! It is revealed before You that Your servant
Jacob loved me exceedingly and toiled for my father on my behalf seven
years. When those seven years were completed and the time arrived for
my marriage with my husband, my father planned to substitute another
for me to wed my husband for the sake of my sister. It was very painful
for me, because the plot was known to me and I disclosed it to my husband; and I gave him a sign whereby he could distinguish between me and
my sister, so that my father should not be able to make the substitution.
But then I relented, suppressed my desire, and had pity upon my sister
that she should not be exposed to shame. In the evening they substituted
my sister for me with my husband, and I shared with my sister all the
signs which I had arranged with my husband, so that he should think that
she was Rachel. More than that, I went beneath the bed upon which he
lay with my sister; and when he spoke to her, she remained silent and
I made all the replies in order that he should not recognize my sister’s
voice. I treated her kindly, was not jealous of her, and did not expose her
to shame. Now if I, a creature of flesh and blood, formed of dust and ashes,
was not envious of my rival and did not expose her to shame and contempt, why should You, a sovereign who lives eternally and is merciful, be
jealous of idolatry—​something which isn’t real!—​and exile my children
and let them be slain by the sword, and their enemies have done with
them as they wished!?”
At once, the mercy of the Holy Blessed One was aroused, and He said,
“For your sake, Rachel, I will restore Israel to their place.”
And thus it is written, “Thus says the Eternal: A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she
refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not” (Jer. 31:15).
This is followed by, “Thus says the Eternal: Cease your voice from weeping,
and your eyes from tears; for your effort shall be rewarded . . . and there is
hope for your future, says the Eternal; and your children shall return to their
own territory” (Jer. 31:16–​17).129
129 LamR, Proem 24; translation is the author’s.
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The midrash here gives Rachel a lengthy speech, and moved by her persuasive testimony, God finally relents. The proem moves from grief and divine
self-​pity to divine self-​recognition and redemption.
Qallir’s qinah seems, at first glance, simply to be a poetic variant of this
aggadic tradition, but it differs in important ways. The poem is notably
shorter, with each speaker given terse lines that stress the importance of divine promises. God’s declamations become ever briefer; God responds to
Isaac with a full stanza, decrying the desecration of Mount Moriah, the site
of Isaac’s binding, but following Jacob’s petition, God responds simply with a
reference to the martyrdom of Zechariah; Moses’ words are followed immediately by the stanza describing the mourning of the women. Furthermore,
where the midrash presents an entire monologue in the voice of Rachel—​a
marvelous example of what late antique rhetoricians would have recognized
as ethopoeia130—​in Qallir’s poem, she and her fellow wives do not speak at all
but perform; they appear in the poem not through words but actions. It is not
a lengthy, well-​argued, persuasive speech that moves God, but the actions—​
violent behaviors of bereavement—​of mourning women. In the midrashic
text, the authors dwell on the horrible suffering of the Israelites, and figures
speak at great length, citing scripture and arguing with passion. The poetry
distills the argument to its essence, with increasing precision and incisiveness, but in the end suggests that words alone cannot suffice. In this lament, it
is the act of lamentation the moves the deity to compassion. These women, in
their mourning, model effective lamentation for the human community that
hears the piyyut. This hymn’s lesson may well be that rituals are as effective
as words.
The differences between Lamentations Rabbah and this Qallir piyyut—​
texts roughly contemporary with each other131—​reveal the important role
of performative context in exegetical and liturgical composition. Midrash
and piyyut share clear affinities.132 But where the midrash explores topics of
theological daring and displays exegetical inventiveness, both achieved by
means of bold displays of rhetorical sophistication and expansiveness, the
poet writes with terse clarity and uses the tightening gyre of his form and the
130 See Chapter 4.
131 Lamentations Rabbah likely dates to the early fifth century ce; see Hermann Strack and Günter
Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
1996), 286.
132 Qallir’s affinity for the traditions in LamR Pet. 24 (Vilna ed. 5a–​6a) is evident when this qinah
is read alongside his qinah in which Jerusalem is personified as a widow. These two compositions can
be seen as companion pieces; see the discussion in Chapter 4 (pp. 274–278).
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88
Staging the Sacred
power of repetition to increase the sense of forward momentum in the composition. He focuses narrowly on the dramatic exchanges between ancestors
and deity, serial conversations perhaps inflected with intensifying passion or
increasing despair, as impassioned words give way to desperately wordless
action. Finally, the poet encodes a subtly self-​referential lesson: God is moved
not by artful rhetoric, but by the physical performance of lamentation—​in
the context of a lament being uttered in the synagogue.
Images and phrases from scripture texture this work, and yet the scene
imagined by the poet—​with Abraham and Isaac in the same scene as Moses
and Jeremiah—​exceeds anything the Bible imagines. The language of the
poem is not obscure; some coinages are new, but even they feel traditional.
The poem is a compelling and unexpected dramatic scene, and one that
draws the congregation into its conceit, even as it willfully violates any conventional sense of chronology; that, too, is part of its power. The poem exists
in liturgical time: in the context of lamentation, Abraham can weep with
Jeremiah, and Moses with Rachel and Leah, and the congregation can join
them in their pleas, and in their hopefulness. Qallir has invented his poem’s
narrative, but not from whole cloth; he has woven together many subtle
threads from throughout the tradition, biblical and post-​biblical, and crafted
a composition uniquely suited to his task: to engage his listeners, to draw
them into the scene he imagines, and to reveal ancestors who model effective
penitential behavior. The mothers of Israel instruct their children on how to
compel God’s mercy.
Elliptical Narration: Most of the “storytelling” in poems presented thus
far in this chapter has shared with more conventional late antique performance a fairly clear-​cut relationship with narrative traditions from the
classical (here, scriptural) canon, even as they also make use of theatrical
delivery techniques such as the creative use of voice, dynamic engagement
with audiences, and the modeling of reactions—​performative elements developed at length later in this study. It is important to note, however, that the
biblical canon contains much that is not narrative: the Torah contains much
legal material and substantial poetic sections; the Prophets and Writings,
sacred in Judaism, in turn, contain prophetic poetry, laments, psalms of
praise, memoires, and wisdom literature; and the New Testament contains
apocalypses and epistles, among other genres. And this brief rehearsal offers
only an eclectic sample, not an exhaustive accounting of genre and style. We
should not, therefore, be surprised that liturgical poems, taking these various
sacred anthologies as starting points, touchstones, and libraries of references,
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themselves reflect a diversity of structures. Poets sought to imbue the tradition with the aesthetic delight and imaginative appeal of theatrical performance, and they did not limit themselves to narrative poetry when so much
of their source material was in genres other than narration. The theatrical
techniques and effective modes of delivery could enliven hymns even when
they lacked explicit storytelling.
In this final section, then, we should turn our attention to several examples
of “elliptical” hymnody, poems in which “story” is not the primary structural
device in the composition at all.133 Specifically, we will examine three works
in Aramaic: two Samaritan piyyutim and one Jewish Aramaic work. We
have already seen the impulse toward nonlinear composition manifesting in
the storytelling poetry of Yannai and Ephrem, examined earlier; here, that
formal feature becomes dominant.
Compared with the majority of Jewish and Christian hymns from late antiquity, classical Samaritan poetry is, as whole, far less narrative—​less linear
and less oriented toward storytelling, more evocative of ritual and experience
(including the rituals and experiences that Marqe imagines for the ancestors
and wishes to recreate for his congregation). It reflects a distinctive aesthetic, one that aligns in its gestural way with the Samaritan use of scriptural
florilegia in the liturgy. Samaritan authors wove together images, motifs,
phrases, and themes in their compositions and trusted in their communities
to perceive the whole. But despite this apparent lack of emphasis on narration, Samaritan piyyutim engage robustly with the classical tradition of the
Torah. Indeed, the poetry of Amram Dare, Marqe, and Ninna—​the lineage
of father, son, and grandson who are the authors of almost the entire classical Samaritan corpus of poetry—​is remarkably Torah-​centric. Two poems
by Marqe illustrate this fascination: one about the revelation of the Torah
(Marqe #23) and another addressed directly to the Torah (Marqe #20).134
The text of poem #23 is attributed to Marqe; while that authorship is not
unquestioned, its Aramaic argues strongly that we retain its conventional
date to Marqe’s period.135 The composition is brief, so I present its text in full;
133 The concept of the jeweled style is important here but has proven fruitful in the study of late
antique poetry in general. Michael Roberts’ monograph, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late
Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
134 The latter poem is treated and presented in full, annotated translation, in Laura S. Lieber,
“Scripture Personified: Torah as Character in the Hymns of Marqah,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24.2
(2017), 195–​217. It is also discussed in Chapter 4.
135 For the original text of this poem, see Ben-​Hayyim, LOT III/​2, 254–​255; it also appears in
the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon. Translation in Laura S. Lieber, Classical Samaritan Poetry
(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), 211.
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Staging the Sacred
in current practice, it is recited on the sixth Sabbath between Passover and
Shavuot:
Continue to bless the Name136:
The honored and awesome One!
For it is good for us to bless
Our God, may He be blessed!
All of us hasten to say:
“May the Writing be praised with peace137!”
For forty days the prophet stood, fasting,
Upon the mountain; he ate no bread,
No water did he drink138
In order to learn and to teach
The children (of Israel) the words of the covenant,
The Ten Utterances.
“And the Writing was the Writing of God,”139
His words of life and blessing.
From the highest of heavens did God descend
Upon Mount Sinai, to proclaim in the presence of
His prophet, the Ten Utterances
Happy are we on account of what we heard,
For it is our lives!
This poem begins with an invocation to praise God but segues quickly and
for the remainder of the poem to praise of the Torah. In the second stanza,
the poet lauds the Writing (‫ ;)כתבה‬in the next stanza, he alludes to Moses’
time on Sinai, where after a period of extended fasting he acquired the Torah
for the purpose (we are told in Stanza 3) of teaching his people the words
of the covenant, specifically the Decalogue. The poet then quotes Exodus
32:16 (in Hebrew), highlighting the divine authorship of the Torah, and then
returns to the image of God descending from heaven to Sinai to proclaim His
136 “Hashem” (in Hebrew [‫ ]השם‬rather than in Aramaic [‫)]שמא‬.
137 BH suggests reading ‫“( משלם‬fully, perfectly”) instead of ‫בשלם‬.
138 Hebrew; from Exod. 34:28.
139 Hebrew, from Exod. 32:16.
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word to His prophet. The poem concludes with an affirmation of the appropriateness of human joy as a response to this marvelous gift—​an expression
of gratitude that is, we should note, written in the present tense, as if the congregation itself just witnessed the drama of revelation. The enduring presence of the sacred scroll signifies the ongoing experience of Sinai.
The poem assumes substantial familiarity with the events of Exodus 19–​20,
which describes the revelation of Torah to Moses atop Sinai. Furthermore,
it weaves into that episode quotations from Exodus 32 and 34, but without
mentioning the intervening episode of the golden calf. The poem relies on
the canon, but its content is more imagistic—​snapshots rather than stories,
visuals instead of narration. Despite this work’s nonlinearity, or perhaps because of it, the hymn conveys the powerful drama of the moment: the people
and the Torah occupy center stage, while Moses’ ascent and God’s descent
frame that pivotal event with a sense of physical dynamism and motion.
The final lines bring the congregation into the drama, much like the Avodah
poems do—​the people are part of the story.
Marqe’s poem #20, by contrast, speaks not of the Torah but to it. This
poem is longer than poem #23—​it a full alphabetical acrostic of twenty-​two
strophes—​but still lyrical. In a way reminiscent of how Ephrem personified
the city of Shechem, a version of the technique known in the training of
orators as prosopopoeia, Marqe here speaks to the Torah.140 The congregation, through the refrain, addresses the Torah directly at the end of every
stanza: “And there is no Writing as great as you!” The power of the Torah,
significant in its own right, leads the poet to conclude his hymn with an exclamation that, as in the other hymn, draws the community into the composition: “Praises and hymns /​Let us utter with devotion to the One who gave
you!” The community and performer engage in a dialogue—​the poet’s exposition alternating with the communal refrain—​but the final stanza reframes
the entire the poem as a preface to the more general act of prayer, one that
views the deity through the lens of revelation. In a hymn speaking to the
Torah, God is continually present as the Torah-​Giver. Speaking to the Torah,
the congregation speaks about God.
While this poem is not a narrative, insofar as it tells no linear story, it
draws heavily on the language of scripture—​it uses the Torah to praise the
Torah. This poem is rich with allusions: it draws on the Torah’s language to
describe the Writing’s origin (written by God’s own finger, as in Exod. 31:18),
140 This technique is discussed in depth in Chapter 4.
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Staging the Sacred
its revelation from within fire (Exod. 19:18), and its manifestation, accompanied
by the sound of shofars (Exod. 19:16). Torah also provides images such as Moses’
shining face (Exod. 34:29), motifs including God’s desire to heal those who are
faithful to his teaching (Exod. 15:26), and emotion, such as the fear experienced
by those who heard of the theophany (Exod. 15:14–​16). The poet does not
overtly signal his reliance on scripture, but he weaves his hymn together out of
its phrases, a tapestry of allusions.
This poem does not directly “dramatize” any single event from the Torah,
nor does it create a theatrical version of a familiar story, either compressed
or expanded. And yet, it is dramatic, and its content cannot be separated
from the sacred canon. Indeed, this poem constitutes a drama staged for the
Torah: it seems to presume that it is performed in the presence of the Torah
scroll, and the refrain functions like an acclamation that one might utter to
the emperor or local authority in the context of some other form of spectacle
or game.141 It asks its listeners to draw upon their knowledge of tradition
even as it displays an easy, organic affinity for the more general repertoire of
its era.
As noted earlier, Samaritan poems are not unique in their nonlinear narration; in some ways, these works resemble units of the qedushta in classical
Jewish poetry—​particularly those later in the composition that stress formal
141 The subject of congregational participation in the performance of synagogue poetry has long
been a topic of scholarly interest, with foundational work done by Ezra Fleischer in Hebrew Liturgical
Poetry in the Middle Ages (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 133–​136 [Hebrew], and, Fleischer, “Studies on
the Influence of Choral Elements on the Configuration and Development of Types of Piyyut,” Yuval
3 (1974): 18–​48 (esp. pp. 25–​26) [Hebrew]. Relying largely on internal Jewish sources, he asserts
that Jewish congregations were largely passive until the sixth century, when professional choirs were
possibly added to assist the cantor in liturgical transitions. While Fleischer credits Andalusian poets
with the innovative desire fully to involve the congregation in piyyuṭ, scholarship since the 1970s has
taken a more contextual approach to the study of early hymnography, and these contextual sources
argue strongly in favor of some form of participation. Note the discussion in Amnon Shiloah, Jewish
Musical Traditions (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992) 111–​129. As these studies delineate, professional choirs, lay choirs, and full congregational participation were all known models
available in this period, and in addition to aesthetics, factors such as finances and population size
likely influenced norms of liturgical performance in every setting. However, the urban–​rural divide remains significantly understudied. For an innovative initial analysis of this basic element of
synagogue worship, see Chad Spigel, Ancient Synagogue Seating Capacities: Methodology, Analysis
and Limits (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). Even scholars who minimize congregational
activity recognize that the Holy Days—​Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the month of Elul that
precedes these holy days—​differed in terms of inviting more community involvement. The penitential litanies of the seliḥot prayers, for example, obviously invite congregational participation through
their highly repetitive formulations. See Laura S. Lieber, “Confessing from A–​Z: Penitential Forms in
Early Synagogue Poetry,” in Penitential Prayer: Origins, Development, and Impact, ed. Mark J. Boda,
Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney Werline, 3 vols. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), vol. 3: 99–​
125. The texts I examined in that article are often litanies rather than poetry but could easily serve as
examples of (non-​poetic) acclamations.
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Setting the Stage
93
elements rather than storytelling, even as they rely on elements of the story
narrated earlier in the poem. Similarly, Ephrem (and, less often, Romanos)
can take an “imagistic” approach to a topic. Finally, the resemblance between
these poems and some of the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic poems far exceeds
their linguistic affinities; some of the JPA poems are the closest formal
analogs to the Samaritan works. One example from the JPA corpus, a lament for the Ninth of Av, will illustrate this resemblance, even as it indicates
how qinot—​liturgical laments over the destruction of Jerusalem—​vary, as
this work differs from the two laments by Qallir already addressed in this
chapter.142
This poem—​JPA Poem #21, a lament for the Ninth of Av143—​exemplifies
a highly structured aesthetic of poems that we find attested in Hebrew as
well as Aramaic. The poem’s form is fairly intricate: it is an alphabetical
acrostic with a refrain that is a biblical quotation (Lam. 1:16); as in a Yannai-​
style rahit, each stanza also begins with a fixed word, “over (‫ )על‬. . .” Like
the second poem of Marqe’s examined earlier (Marqe #20), it can be understood as a dialogue between a narrator-​performer (who speaks the verses)
and the congregation (which recites the refrain). The stanzas do not offer
a linear narration of the destruction of Jerusalem (as we see in JPA Poem
#18), but, in a fashion akin to the biblical book of Lamentations itself, each
stanza offers an image of bereavement: “Over | my sanctuary laid waste /​
and my priests slain by the sword” (ll. 8–​9); “Over | children at their books
/​ as fire burned them” (ll. 20–​21); “Over | my tranquil place, now fallen /​
the innocent one144 driven from it into exile” (ll. 32–​33). The voice of the
speaker is ambiguous: Is it Zion personified, the community envisioning
the scene, the bereft deity, or perhaps even the prophet Jeremiah, had he
been a payyetan?
In some ways, this poem could be classified as a version of the “expanded
story” variety of poem, in that it constitutes a kind of hymnographic extension of Lamentations adapted to the more intricate aesthetics of late antiquity. The sense of stasis in the poem, however—​the knowledge that but for
142 The two qinot already analyzed here—​both by Qallir—​do not necessarily typify the laments
by Qallir, who composed numerous hymns for the Ninth of Av. Some of Qallir’s poems, such as his
lament structured on the twenty-​four lay and priestly watches (Seder ha-​Qinot #11 [pp. 47–​52]) and
other highly patterned works (e.g., Seder ha-​Qinot #18 [pp. 75–​77] and #20 [pp.79–​80]), strongly
resemble the non-​narrative works considered in this section. The patterning in such works likely
helped facilitate participation and communal engagement.
143 See Lieber, Jewish Aramaic Poetry, 73–​74.
144 That is, daughter Zion.
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Staging the Sacred
the acrostic, the poem could have continued offering endless variations on
its tragic theme, the lack of a sense of time beyond an ever-​present “now”—​
suggests that this work even more strongly exemplifies the “elliptical” style
of composition. Circling around and around its main ideas and images, it is
not a poem with a plot; it lacks any forward motion or momentum. Instead,
it creates an opportunity for the community to dwell at length in specific a
moment, to revisit repeatedly, and actively, a single episode of enduring pathos and power. The poem’s redolent meaningfulness derives from its rootedness in scripture—​in Lamentations, a text of communal grieving—​and in
the essential component of Israel’s sacred history, the experience of exile and
destruction. This poem does not dramatize the narrative of the destruction
of Jerusalem, however; rather, it offers vivid images that allow the community to imagine the experience of loss in great detail, in a frozen “then” that
becomes “now,” and thus experience for themselves the emotional experience of communal devastation. Each stanza constitutes a brief, dramatic
scene to which the community, chorus-​like, responds. The poet here scripts
his own lamentation.
As these three examples show, liturgical poems can dramatize scripture without necessarily retelling its stories. Marqe #23 offers a kind
of emotional response to the existence of Torah, while Marqe #20 uses
words from Torah to praise it; and JPA Poem #21 meditates on images
from scripture and recreates a sense of “being there” in the moment of the
composition of Lamentations. These works share a reliance on knowledge
of scripture, from which they derive their richness and resonance, and at
a basic level their meaningfulness. But as poems, these hymns model a
different form of exposition: a rhetoric that is imagistic rather than narrative, visual as much as intellectual, invested in a moment in time rather
than in the sweep of time, kaleidoscopic rather than conventionally clear.
This analysis, because of its stress on the relationship of hymnic storytelling to scriptural narratives, risks overemphasizing the narrative qualities of liturgical poetry. In many cases, the poet’s focus is not on a story, but
a figure or an idea: the incarnation, the nature of Torah, the importance of
the Land of Israel, or the nature of God. Poems of these varied types and
approaches—​examples of which will be treated in the chapters that follow—​
are, in a fashion akin to the lament studied here, “scriptural,” not just because
of their topic or plot, but because their words and worldviews are formed
out of sacred text. In these poems, we hear lasting echoes of timely ideas articulated through timeless words, mediated by the poets’ own aesthetics,
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for the purpose of engaging the listeners not only emotionally but, in some
instances, physically, as well.
Conclusions
Charlotte Roueché has discerned that despite legal and literary sources
suggesting a diminished or suppressed presence of theater in late antiquity,
evidence from material culture—​the infrastructure of theaters and the scrawl
of epigraphic traces—​indicates a continued, vigorous theatrical culture well
into the period.145 Not only did works that related to the classical Greco-​
Roman canon of drama and comedy continue to be performed, she argues,
but new storylines were also actively sought out. In places where the population was mixed—​Jews, Christians, pagans, and others—​Roueché argues,
the plots for public shows could easily have come from any local traditions.
As an example, she presents evidence that general audiences enjoyed the
plot of the Hellenistic novella Tobit. Given the sheer quantity of theatrical
performances staged on a regular basis throughout the ancient world—​all
the actors on all the stages throughout the vast empire, from Spain to Syria—​
she argues that audiences would have been hungry for new stories, and the
biblical canon could easily have been a resource, particularly in areas with
significant Jewish, Christian, or Samaritan presence, where the population
(or performers) would likely have known the story outlines and characters.
In such locations, among such communities, sacred stories constituted the
indigenous “classical canon”—​plotlines familiar and readily available to local
performers, poets, and playwrights as fodder for their audience-​engaging
creativity.
Alongside the argument made by Roueché, in which stories flow from
scripture into the theater, another current runs just as smoothly in the
reverse direction: from theater into sanctuaries. Attunement to and experience with theatricality would have colored how Jews, Samaritans,
and Christians viewed (and judged) their liturgy and ritual, and especially hymnody—​was it appealing and engaging? Or dull and uninspiring?
Religious performers adapted stories from scripture in the same way that
public entertainers adapted the traditions of public theater. We need not
posit that religious communities borrowed directly from the conventions
145 Roueché, “World Full of Stories.”
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Staging the Sacred
of the theaters and other forms of entertainment. Rather, these were
venues and modes of performance that community members would have
known of, that they likely attended and enjoyed, even if critically; the official attitude toward such establishments was, as noted earlier, at best
deeply ambivalent. As a result, this study posits that both civic and religious performance related to their traditions and shared common norms
of how canons related to contemporary performance. Each community—​
Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian—​possessed its own canon, but they all
shared a sense of how the stories grounded in sacred scripture should and
could be “translated” to the liturgical stage effectively and, in some sense,
entertainingly.
Performance—​and the related experiences of and pleasure in seeing and
being seen, hearing and being heard—​saturated daily life in late antiquity,
and the written evidence touching on the experience of theater is abundant. Closely aligned with theater is the world of oratory, and indeed, given
that orators made a careful study of theatrical performance—​both to learn
from its effectiveness and avoid its excesses—​much of our knowledge of theater comes filtered through writings by those who studied civic speech and
practiced declamation. We have Aristotle’s thoughts on rhetoric, Cicero’s
observations of actors, Quintilian’s curriculum for oratory, and Libanius’ defense of pantomime, to name just a few. We do not, by contrast, have much direct evidence for the performance of liturgical poetry. We have in hand today
a tremendous quantity of written liturgical poems, but little sense of how
they were performed; what evidence we do have varies not only from tradition to tradition, but also from community to community, over centuries
of lived use and adaptation. By reading the texts we possess in abundance in
light of the evidence we have throughout the ancient Mediterranean world,
for all that they represent in different social and cultural realms, we can
begin to build in from the margins and reconstruct some sense of late antique society as a whole. The lens of theatricality lets us perceive the place of
emerging religious communities and their practices—​whether as imperial
powers, subject populations, or marginal and insular communities—​within
the larger picture.
The repertoire of ancient performance, theatrical and oratorical, drew
on a common repository of plots, characters, and gestures, enlivened by
shared ideas of what a performer and audience were to do with them. In
the next chapters, we will consider how specific performative and interpretive techniques from the worlds of theater and oratory could be fruitfully
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borrowed for the liturgical sphere.146 We will consider features of traditional
texts—​biblical and post-​biblical, as defined by each community—​that lent
themselves to theatricality while retaining the imprimatur of communal
approval. Internal traditions that aligned with external conventions of performance glossed the performance of hymns, which might have seemed
transgressive had they overtly resembled theater or even oratory, with an aura
of appropriateness. However lively a hymn’s conception or delivery, it could
be regarded as organic and native to the religious traditions of a community
rather than alien or illicit. Features of works that resonate with performative
conventions from the larger culture reveal that performance as it was commonly understood and experienced in late antiquity could be reframed as
not foreign and dangerous, but traditional and legitimate, and as sanctified,
not sanctioned.
In addition to a study of rhetorical composition, we will also piece together aspects of performance, and performers, in late antiquity. Actors
and orators studied each other and shared not only common goals, but also
a sense of what was effective. Similarly, those responsible for liturgical performance, homiletical as well as hymnic, seem to have internalized, if not
explicitly recognized, the power of sophisticated modes of performance,
declamation as well as mime and pantomime, as a means for effectively engaging their audiences. These techniques enabled performers to draw people
to a venue and keep them there for the lesson.147 Jewish, Christian, and
Samaritan writers—​liturgical and otherwise—​faced common challenges,
and they shared a similar breadth of traditional resources. Homilists and
hymnographers alike wished for their audiences to pay attention and needed
to translate their canon into something worth attending to; poets, in particular, worked in a theatrical genre, one in which they performed roles and
146 Even at the level of rhetoric, it seems plausible that many basic elements of liturgical performance,
such as the use of antiphony, litany, chorus, and dialogue, are connected to theatrical performance. See
Walter Puchner, “Acting in the Byzantine Theater,” in Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient
Profession, eds. P. Easterling and E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 310.
147 I do not here conflate drama and ritual (or drama and liturgy) but, rather, note that both draw
on a shared body of techniques for effectively engaging listeners. As Andrew Walker White notes in
his important study of early Byzantine Christian liturgical delivery, “The Church Fathers responsible for creating the Divine Liturgy during the early Byzantine period were all trained as rhetors
under the most distinguished pagan orators of their day. And because the overwhelming majority of
Christians waited until adulthood to convert. . . nearly all Orthodox clergy came to the Church and
their ministry after years enjoying the delights of Roman urban life. . . . Given their lifelong exposure
to both literary and popular theater, the Fathers could easily have chosen to adopt a dramatic mode of
performance during the Liturgy. . . . But their training in rhetoric gave them access to a more sophisticated set of performance tools” (Performing Orthodox Ritual in Byzantium [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015], 53).
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Staging the Sacred
spoke in character, while audiences were actively engaged, through participatory elements such as refrains and liturgical formulas.
Is a spectacle still a spectacle if no one beholds it? Can a blessing be complete without a second party to say “amen”? In theory, perhaps, but in practice, in late antiquity, performers wanted audiences, and audiences sought
a show.
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