Reading the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

Abstract

Reading is a social mode of reception of a script-bearing artifact. Whereas by no means all writing was and is meant to be read,1 the scribal production and reproduction of literary compositions—in a broad sense—aimed and aim at being read. Dealing with ancient manuscripts that show literary compositions, two dimensions of reading come to mind: first, reading ancient manuscripts in a present-day scholarly perspective, and second, asking about the reading practices of the ancient readers. In the first context, one could evaluate the state of preservation of the manuscripts, the possibilities for reconstruction, the variances (“readings”) between different manuscripts, et cetera. In the second direction of research, one is asking about the modes of reception in the historical and social contexts from which the documents were produced. The first dimension is mainly the concern of editions of ancient manuscripts. Since the manuscripts of interest in this paper are all published in several editions from the last thirty years,2 I can focus on the second question, the ancient reading practices. But since reading—as most practices of reception—is a momentary act, that only rarely leaves marks in the manuscripts themselves, it is almost impossible to explore ancient modes of reading from the manuscripts that have been or can be assumed to have been read. What is accessible for research, however, are hints about intended modes of reading and reception in the documents themselves. Such hints might be found in the texts. However, codicological features of the manuscripts, for example, the choice of material, its preparation for the act of writing, and the design and the layout of the script can perhaps better shed light on the intended reading of the concrete document than the text itself.3 Along these lines, the present paper analyzes the manuscripts of the early Jewish Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice that were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls by considering not only the scholarly editions of the texts, but