A.J. Berkovitz: A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023; pp. x + 263.

Abstract

In preparing this review, I chanced upon a short somewhat autobiographical essay by A. J. Berkovitz in Ancient Jew Review, October 24, 2023. There he reflected on the memories and the questions that animated the research behind this book. He recalled how his mother read the complete book of Psalms cover-to-cover in English or in Yiddish every single week and his puzzlement at why she found this practice meaningful and important. As an academic scholar he was trained in the rabbinic tradition and specifically in reading texts in terms of midrashic exegesis so as to dissect and interpret verse-by-verse. Yet he came to realize that the book of Psalms had a much broader and richer “life” both in the past and in the present.

In this book, instead of asking the more usual question “What meaning did the Jews produce from the Psalms?”, a question that focuses on interpretative methods and their results, Berkovitz reformulates the question to ask “How did the Jews encounter the Psalms?” (p. 11). He proposes that there are four major ways of engagement with the Psalter: as a material object, specifically a scroll; as songs to be sung in communal settings in the synagogue; as a book to be read for edification and consolation; and as an apotropaic defence against demonic powers. These modes of encounter are explored consecutively in the four chapters of the book.

The Introduction carefully sets out the parameters for the study, with special attention to what is included and what is omitted. The book does not attempt to treat the psalms as they were used and experienced in their earliest life within the Jerusalem temple cult. Nor does it tackle the formation of the book of the Psalter during the Second Temple period in what Berkovitz describes as “the pre-canonical chaos” (p. 7). For the period under study, there is a “single, distinguishable, concretely canonical entity” (p. 7), a text called Sefer Tehillim, the book of Psalms or the Psalter. The label “Late Antiquity” covers the late second century to mid-seventh century, that is, between the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of Islam, though the boundaries are porous on both ends. The geographical boundaries are Greco-Roman Palestine, Sassanian Persia and their environs; the linguistic focus is the Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews. The written sources are the classical literature of the rabbis. (Mishnah, Tosefta, tannaitic and amoraic midrash, Palestinian Talmud and Babylonian Talmud). Although occasional reference is made to Targum Psalms (the Aramaic translation) and to Midrash Psalms (a verse-by-verse commentary), these are not the focus since they probably are to be dated somewhat later than the period under consideration. A limited number of early Christian sources that touch on the use of the Psalter are introduced, especially in chapter four.

The first two chapters collect and examine almost every instance in which rabbinic literature refers to a “book of Psalms.” In fact, of course, the “book” was not a codex but a scroll, written on leather in black ink by a trained scribe, perhaps on as many as five scrolls (the five “books” of the Psalter). Given the fact that scrolls have not been preserved from the centuries under consideration, Berkovitz looks back to Psalm manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls (first century bc and first century ce) and to later manuscripts (e.g. the Aleppo Codex of the tenth-century) to reconstruct the realia of material production: length of the scroll, scripts, line spacing, word spacing, layouts and erasure.

Chapter 2 explores how the actual material artefact — or the object as recalled in memory — influenced the ways in which the rabbis read and interpreted the Psalms. Anecdotes in rabbinic literature depict a wide variety of activities: reading as a leisure activity, affective reading that stirs one to action, scholastic elite reading in a communal study session, reading for education and ethical instruction. Berkovitz quotes a number of texts that illustrate how the scroll format itself promoted a linear reading across a column and down a page (it is difficult to jump around in a scroll!) and how this in turn shaped features of the exegesis (pp. 65–68).

Chapter 3 takes up oral modes of engagement with the Psalter, specifically in the liturgy, that is, with the formal and mandated recitation of psalms in a synagogue setting. Some scholars (for names see p. 194, n. 30) have claimed that the singing of psalms transitioned from the temple to the synagogue already in the Second Temple period or soon thereafter and hence that early Christian communities adopted the practice of daily psalmody from the synagogue. Berkovitz argues instead that there was only a gradual and “fitful rise” (p. 80) of daily psalmody in the amoraic period (200–650 ce) that did not stabilize until the geonic period. As to the reason why the psalms were introduced, Berkovitz proposes a number of complementary factors that may have influenced the embedment of psalms into the liturgy; for example, the rabbinic use of verses from the Psalms to justify revolutions in the liturgy (e.g. the eighteen mentions of God's name in Ps 29 to undergird the eighteen blessings of the Amidah) and the reframing of the synagogue, even architecturally, from a place of community gathering and instruction in the Law to a place of prayer. He even raises the question — as deserving further study — of whether the popularity of Psalms in Christian worship from the fourth century onwards may have influenced the rise of daily psalmody in rabbinic worship.

Chapter 4 moves from the public to the personal, the behaviour that Berkovitz labels as “Psalm piety.” Here he examines such practices as the recitation of psalms at midnight, the use of psalms on the death bed, the voluntary recitation of psalms in the synagogue apart from the liturgy, and “Bedtime Psalm piety” (p. 137) that offered protection from demons. A short section (pp. 110–18) gives some tantalizing examples of a similar “Early Christian Psalm Piety.”

This book was a delight to read. Although it began as a doctoral dissertation (with Martha Himmelfarb at Princeton University), it is thoroughly accessible to the non-specialist. Berkovitz has a gift for contextualizing complex rabbinic texts and guiding the novice reader through them. He writes with a gracious humility, explaining that this is not “the” Life of Psalms, but “a” Life of Psalms. Throughout the book he suggests many areas for further study, especially in terms of Jewish and Christian interaction, and we can only hope that he will continue this work.